NewsScan Daily, 5 April 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 5 April 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Privacy Advocates Target Google's Gmail Storage Policy
        TSA Eyes RFID Boarding Passes
        'Flash Mob Supercomputer' Fizzles
        Porn Image Sparks Kids' Football CD Recall
        Agatha Christie Sleuths Featured on PC Games

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Robert Hutchings Goddard

PRIVACY ADVOCATES TARGET GOOGLE'S GMAIL STORAGE POLICY
      Privacy advocates are voicing concern over Google's data retention 
plans, following the search company's splashy launch of its free Gmail 
service last week. Google's Gmail privacy policy tells users: "The contents 
of your Gmail account are also stored and maintained on Google servers in 
order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of e-mail may remain 
on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after 
the termination of your account." The fact that e-mail records potentially 
could be combined with Google search cookies, designed to index users' 
searches through 2038, and an Orkut cookie that contains personal 
identification information, is what has privacy watchdogs worried. "Once 
users register for Gmail, Google would be able to make that connection, if 
it chose to," says Pam Dixon, head of the World Privacy Forum. "And if 
Google ever compared the two sets of data, there are some people who would 
be chilled and embarrassed." Archivist Daniel Brandt adds: "While Google 
brags that no humans will read your e-mails, the entire Gmail program will 
involve extensive automated profiling of you as an individual. Google will 
be sharing non-identifiable portions of your profile with anyone they 
choose. If the ownership of Google changes, or there is a merger, the 
entire personally-identifiable profile will be available to the new owners 
or partners." (The Register 3 Apr 2004)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/36778.html

TSA EYES RFID BOARDING PASSES
      The Transportation Security Administration is looking into the 
possibility of using RFID-tagged airline boarding passes that would enable 
passenger tracking in airports -- a proposal that has raised the hackles of 
some privacy advocates. TSA says it would use the special boarding passes 
in conjunction with its "registered traveler" program, which would permit 
frequent fliers to provide detailed personal information, corroborated by a 
background check. The RFID passes would allow these registered travelers to 
speed through "special lanes" during the boarding process. The TSA has 
already started work to deploy RFID boarding passes in some countries in 
Africa under the Federal Aviation Administration's Safe Skies for Africa 
Initiative. But Katherine Albrecht, who worked against the use of RFID tags 
on retail goods, says this new proposal is a "nightmare scenario," which 
uses technology to invade people's privacy. "Are they going to track how 
long I spend in the ladies room?" she asks. (Computerworld 1 Apr 2004)
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/privacy/story/0,10801,91830,00.html

'FLASH MOB SUPERCOMPUTER' FIZZLES
      An ambitious plan to assemble an instant supercomputer by asking more 
than 600 students, faculty and volunteers to converge on a University of 
San Francisco gymnasium with their laptops in hand fell short of 
expectations Saturday when a handful of computers refused to cooperate. 
Organizers planned to load each machine with software that would enable 
them to take part in a single large set of calculations, known and the 
Linpack benchmark. The result was intended to be similar to massively 
parallel supercomputers used by corporate researchers and scientific labs, 
but the USF effort succeeded in producing only a partial result -- 180 
billion mathematical operations per second -- short of the 500 billion 
operations per second they needed to snag a place in the Top 500 
supercomputer list. "If we had twice as many machines and another two days, 
I think we would have been successful," says USF computer science professor 
Gregory D. Benson. (New York Times 5 Apr 2004)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/05/technology/05super.html

PORN IMAGE SPARKS KIDS' FOOTBALL CD RECALL
      The Australian Football league has been forced to recall 40,000 
CD-ROMs given to young children to promote Australian football (soccer) 
because it secretly included a picture of a topless woman. Officials became 
aware of the image when a child stumbled across it among myriad 
football-related files on the disc, distributed to 5 to 12-year-olds in NSW 
and South Australia. AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou said an 
investigation had been launched to establish whether the inclusion of the 
picture was mischievous or accidental. However, he said the AFL had dumped 
the CD-ROM's producer -- a subsidiary of advertising agency George 
Patterson Bates. The advertising giant has accepted responsibility for the 
embarrassing addition and agreed to pay for the recall, estimated at more 
than $AU250,000, which the AFL hopes will be completed this weekend. (The 
Australian 2 Apr 2004 -- rec'd from John Lamp, Deakin University)
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,9160998%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html

AGATHA CHRISTIE SLEUTHS FEATURED ON PC GAMES
      Fans of Agatha Christie's mystery novels can relive the thrill of 
solving crimes with detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple via a 
series of five different computer games to be developed by Chorion over the 
next six years. "My grandmother was always very keen on using new ways to 
reach people who wanted to enjoy her work," says Christie's grandson, 
Matthew Prichard. Christie's work has been translated into 45 languages and 
is outsold by only the Bible and Shakespeare. (AP 5 Apr 2004)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040405/D81OL8800.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars; let me see what 
spring is like on Jupiter and Mars. (Bart Howard, song lyrics)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: ROBERT HUTCHINGS GODDARD (1882-1945)
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the pioneer rocket scientist Robert 
Hutchings Goddard (1882-1945), whose experiments with solid- and 
liquid-propellant rockets between 1909 and 1945 paved the way for America's 
successful post World War II entry into space rocketry.
      Prior to the war the United States government took little interest in 
Goddard's work, and even during the war years confined its interest to 
support for the booster rockets he developed for the Navy's seaplanes and 
carrier aircraft. After the war, however, American interest in rocket 
science (motivated by the success of the German V-2 rocket bombs) became a 
military priority. Ironically, the importance of Goddard's work, previously 
ignored by the U.S. government, was now given its due recognition, 
partially prompted by the esteem in which it was held by the German rocket 
experts brought over to work in the American space program.
      Goddard, the son of a machine shop owner, was born in Worcester, 
Massachusetts, but raised in Boston. When he was 16, the family returned to 
Worcester, where he attended the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. After 
graduating in 1908, he went on to earn a Ph.D. degree from Clark University 
in 1911. He then taught at Princeton until 1914 when he joined the physics 
faculty at Clark, remaining at Clark for the next 30 years. There he 
pursued his dream of space flight, first ignited by the science fiction of 
H.G. Wells.
      With small grants from the Smithsonian Institution, he investigated 
the rocketry it would take to reach the moon, publishing in 1919 his 
classic report, "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes." This early work 
was met with skepticism in the press, but in 1926 he fired the world's 
first successful liquid-propellant rocket.
      In the 1930s Goddard successfully launched larger liquid-fueled 
rockets. He also made fundamental contributions to developments in 
propellant pumps, gyroscopic controls, and gimbal systems. With moral 
support from Charles Lindberg and financial help from Harry F. Guggenheim 
and the Guggenheim Foundation, he was able to conduct his experimentation 
in the more suitable surroundings of Roswell, New Mexico. During World War 
II, Goddard offered his work to the military, but lack of interest in 
rocket development led to his closing down the Roswell establishment, and 
confining himself to small-scale work on rocket assisted aircraft takeoff 
boosters. One World War II spin-off from Goddard's work was the anti-tank 
bazooka.
      Goddard died of throat cancer in 1945, so he did not live to see the 
realization of his dreams of jet age travel and rocket-powered space 
exploration. Recognition of what he had almost single-handedly accomplished 
came years later, when the United States government paid a $1,000,000 
settlement for having infringed the use of more than 200 of his patents 
covering "basic inventions in the field of rockets, guided missiles and 
space exploration." Goddard was also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal 
and the Langley Gold Medal, and NASA's Space Flight Center was renamed in 
his honor.

See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0786868171/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for a biography of Goddard by David A. Clary -- or look for it in your 
favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to 
adult literacy programs.)

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