NewsScan Daily, 30 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 30 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
       Browser War Ends in Truce
       Phone Giants Reach Accord on Fiber Networks
       European Broadband Growth Fueled by P*RN, Music
       Apple is the New MTV
       Tiny Devices Offer Law Enforcement Challenge
       Cyberspace Helps Home Schooling Flourish

FEATURES
       Flash Card
       Honorary Subscriber: Joseph Henry
       Safe & Sound in the Cyber Age: "Of Terrorists and Lingerie"

BROWSER WAR ENDS IN TRUCE
After years of mutual animosity and legal wrangling, Microsoft has agreed to
pay AOL Time Warner $750 million in a settlement that lays a foundation for
further cooperation between the two companies. As part of the agreement, AOL
will receive a seven-year royalty-free license of Microsoft's Internet
Explorer browser, as well as a long-term nonexclusive license to use
Microsoft's Windows Media 9 software. The companies will also work toward
making AOL and MSN Messenger interoperable, and will explore ways to boost
the adoption and distribution of digital media. Finally, Microsoft will
distribute AOL CD-ROMs to PC manufacturers along with Windows operating
software and will expand its support contract with AOL. The settlement is
being described by both companies as a win-win -- it enables AOL to reduce
some of its $23 billion debt burden and relieves Microsoft of one of its
nagging legal problems. "Microsoft has been very pragmatic in putting its
antitrust issues behind it," says one antitrust attorney. "What will be
interesting to see is if they settle with Sun. That's a bit more of a grudge
match." (CNet News.com 29 May 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1032-1011296.html?tag=nl

PHONE GIANTS REACH ACCORD ON FIBER NETWORKS
Telecom heavyweights BellSouth, SBC and Verizon have reached agreement on
technical standards that will speed construction of residential fiber-optic
networks, in an effort to jumpstart home-based broadband connections across
the country. "This is something you see in all technology industries. When
they get serious about deploying a system, they say, 'We need to have one
standard,'" said an SBC spokesman. By consolidating their buying power for
fiber networking gear, the three companies will be better able to compete
against the cable companies, which already dominate the home broadband
market and are aggressively moving into telephone service as well. (AP 29
May 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030529/D7RB6JC01.html

EUROPEAN BROADBAND GROWTH FUELED BY P*RN, MUSIC
High-speed Internet access growth is booming in Europe, boosted by consumer
demand for music and p*rnography downloads, according to a new study by
Nielsen/NetRatings. "The adult entertainment sector has increased its reach
year-on-year in all European markets except Italy, where, not
coincidentally, broadband access is the relative lowest in Europe," says the
report. The biggest gains were in the UK, where broadband penetration has
more than tripled to 3.7 million users. With only one in five Internet users
opting for a broadband connection, however, the UK still remains second from
the bottom in terms of percentages. France, Spain and the Netherlands head
the top of the list, with 39%, 37% and 36% broadband penetration rates. In
comparison, 35% of U.S. users connect via broadband, but the total number --
38 million -- makes it No. 1 in the world in terms of sheer volume. (Reuters
29 May 2003)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&ncid=581&e=7&u=/nm/20030
529/tc_nm/tech_internet_broadband_dc

APPLE IS THE NEW MTV
Numair Faraz, who has started several online service companies, says of the
current music scene: "Apple is the new MTV. It is the new funnel for music.
When things moved from radio to video, MTV was the sole source of music. Now
Apple is going to control the distribution and promotion of music. The
entire ecosystem they are using is theirs." (New York Times 29 May 2003)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/arts/music/29POPL.html

TINY DEVICES OFFER LAW ENFORCEMENT CHALLENGE
Portable storage drives continue to gain popularity among child pornography
collectors. The typical drive is as small as a cigarette lighter yet holds
128 megabytes of data and costs only $100 or less; it device plugs directly
into most PCs, and can store entire movies or hundreds of digital photos.
Sgt. Art Martinez of the San Mateo County Sheriff's Department in California
explains that the devices offer a completely new challenge to law
enforcement officers: "A lot of officers will look at them and don't know
what they are. It's just another thing that we need to be looking for." (San
Jose Mercury News 29 May 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5968311.htm

CYBERSPACE HELPS HOME SCHOOLING FLOURISH
Internet high school? The nonprofit Christa McAuliffe Academy in Yakima,
Washington, has 15 certified teachers guiding 400 students. The students
typically take two courses at a time for 50 weeks a year. Students work at
their own pace, and each student is assigned a teacher-mentor. Ian Blomgren,
the academy's founder, says of his former experience teaching in a
traditional school: "I thought there had to be a better way of teaching
individual students. We were doing a good job with the lower students and a
good job with gifted students, but the vast majority were just sliding
through the cracks." The only problem seems to be a social one. One new
graduate, who completed his studies by age 15 and is now entering
Millersville University, says: "I'm getting tired of being home all the
time. I'm looking forward to being in a classroom again at Millersville."
(AP/USA Today 30 May 2003)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2003-05-29-homeschool_x.ht
m

*****

FLASH CARD
     "The art of creation is older than the art of killing." (Ed Koch)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: JOSEPH HENRY
     Today's Honorary Subscriber is the innovative American scientist Joseph
Henry (1797-1878)M who has been called the Father of American Electronics
for his work on Electromagnetic Induction, and is also celebrated for his
contributions to American science as the first head of the Smithsonian
Institution. 
     Henry discovered electromagnetic induction-the process of converting
magnetism into electricity -- a year before Michael Faraday, but history
credits Faraday as the discoverer because he was the first to publish the
phenomenon. Henry was also the first to develop the electromagnetic
telegraph, demonstrating that by using his electromagnetic relays magnetic
action could be transmitted over long distances.
     Believing that scientific discoveries were for the benefit of everyone,
Henry never patented any of his devices, and credit for inventing the
telegraph went to the non-scientist Samuel F.B. Morse who only worked on the
technical implementation of the device. Henry was always pleased to see
others put his inventions to use, but he was saddenedwhen his contributions
were not acknowledged (as in the case of Morse). Happily, the scientific
community did finally give him his due by naming the unit of inductive
resistance the "henry."
     The son of a day laborer, Henry was born in Albany, New York. Seeking a
career in medicine he studied at the Albany Academy, where he was appointed
professor of mathematics and natural philosophy in 1926. His early research
on the relation of electrical currents to magnetism led to the development
of strong electromagnets that used layers of insulated coils around an iron
core. In 1932 he joined the faculty at the College of New Jersey (now
Princeton University), where he continued the research that led to such
discoveries as the laws for operating electrical transformers and inducing
currents at a distance. In one experiment he magnetized a needle by
utilizing a lightning flash eight miles away, which marked the first use of
radio waves across a distance. By using a thermogalvanometer he showed that
sunspots radiate less heat than the general solar surface.
     In 1846 he became the first head of the newly organized Smithsonian
Institution. There he established a continuing tradition of original
research, resisting pressures to use Smithsonian funds for a museum, art
gallery, and library. Instead he offered aid and encouragement to scientists
engaged in a wide range of enterprises from western exploration to the
building of new astronomical observatories. He also encouraged the growth of
scientific bureaus in the government and saw the Smithsonian as a
clearinghouse for all manner of scientific endeavors. He helped organize the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), serving as its
first president. The U.S. Weather Bureau (later Service) grew out of a corps
of volunteer weather observers that he recruited. As one of Lincoln's chief
technical advisers during the U.S. Civil War, he was a primary organizer of
the National Academy of Science and its second president.

See http://www.si.edu/archives/ihd/jhp/ for the Joseph Henry Papers Project
of the Smithsonian Institution.

SAFE & SOUND IN THE CYBERAGE: "OF TERRORISTS AND LINGERIE"
     In this week's column, our security experts Chey and Stephen Cobb
explain that the government will be looking for suspicious people using the
same techniques used by banks to identify people who use stolen credit
cards.
                             ***
A few days ago, Chey presented her bank debit card to pay for some purchases
at Victoria¹s Secret, only to be told the transaction was declined. This was
not only inconvenient but confusing, since Chey knew she had enough money in
the account to pay for the items she was purchasing. As regular readers of
this column will know, we believe in redundancy and backups as a hedge
against problems with computers and telecommunication systems, so Chey paid
with a different card. Then she came home and put in a call to her bank.
     The bank¹s customer service representative confirmed that her account
had been Œblocked.¹ The reason? Suspicious activity. However, he assured
her, this was nothing personal. No human being was involved in making the
decision to stop Chey shopping at Victoria¹s Secret. In other words, ³A hold
was placed on your account by the bank¹s fraud detection system, a huge
cluster of servers humming away in a distant data center, mining vast
terabytes of data for patterns that might mean something.²
     And that is when we started to worry, not about the bank and the minor
embarrassment and inconvenience, but about our government and our major
rights. Specifically, we are worried about the right to privacy and the
Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) program (see NewsScan, May 21, 2003).
This is a program to ³revolutionize the ability of the United States to
detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists‹and decipher their
plans‹and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully
preempt and defeat terrorist acts.²
     That is a quote from the military web site where the public face of TIA
resides, within the DARPA Information Awareness Office (IAO). Having spent
the last twenty years studying the all too often wayward ways of computers
and humans, we are not comforted to learn that our government has asked the
military to ³imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate, and transition
information technologies, components, and prototype closed-loop information
systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information
awareness that is useful for preemption, national security warning, and
national security decision making.² (www.darpa.mil/iao)
     A recent edition of The National Law Journal described TIA more
directly as ³a five-year project to develop and integrate computer
technologies that will sift through public and private databases to find
patterns and associations that suggest terrorist activity. The databases
would include financial, medical, communications and biometric
(fingerprints, gait, iris) data. The technologies would be used by
intelligence, counterintelligence, law enforcement and homeland security
agencies.²
     In other words, the government is going to be looking for suspicious
people the same way that Chey¹s bank looks for suspicious account activity.
Over the past ten years Chey¹s bank, and many other institutions, including
the cell phone companies, have collectively spent billions of dollars
refining automated fraud detection systems. These systems are constantly
improved because competing vendors want to outscore each other on accuracy
of prediction, rejection of false positives, response times and so on. We¹re
confident Chey¹s bank uses something very close to state-of-the-art.
     Hence our concern when we learned that the suspicious activity detected
by this state-of-the-art system was, and we kid you not: buying clothes
after buying gas. The bank representative explained that when people steal
credit cards they often test them at a gas station to see if they still work
(pay-at-the-pump stations offer a relatively risk-free way to do this). A
successful test is often followed by a shopping spree in up-market stores.
While he apologized for the inconvenience, the bank rep¹ seemed surprised
that anyone would find the bank¹s action at all strange, even though Chey
was using her own debit card, to put gas in her own car, in the town where
she has lived for several years, and she just wanted to buy some clothes at
a store where she has shopped several times before.
     Now the government is going to spend hundreds of millions of your tax
dollars to develop a data mining system. We predict that the system they
create, if it ever gets to the deployment stage, will not predict terrorist
acts with any more accuracy than Chey¹s bank predicted she was a thief. What
the system almost certainly will do is negatively impact the lives of many
innocent people, in ways much more disturbing than not being able to buy
your first choice in lingerie. At the same time, the privacy of everyone
will be invaded, particularly those of us accustomed to paying for things
with plastic.
     Since 9/11, airport security has been frisking people who buy one-way
tickets with cash, despite the fact that today¹s terrorist is highly
unlikely, for that very reason, to buy one-way tickets with cash, just as
tomorrow¹s credit card thief will probably avoid shopping right after he or
she fills gas. Just because computers can beat humans at chess doesn¹t mean
they can reliably predict what humans will do in life, which is not a game.
Terrorists are humans. Fighting terrorism requires human solutions that
address human motives. Until the Beltway technocrats wake up to these facts,
we suggest you use cash when you shop at Victoria¹s Secret, or at least gas
your car the day before you go shopping.
     [Chey Cobb, CISSP, the author of ³Network Security for Dummies,² is an
independent consultant (www.cheycobb.com) and a former senior technical
security advisor to the NRO. She can be emailed as ³chey at patriot dot
net.² Stephen Cobb, CISSP, developed computer programs to audit oil
companies in the early eighties. Recently, he helped develop SpamSquelcher
and the Trusted Email Open Standard. He can be emailed as ³scobb at
eprivacygroup dot com.²]

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