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

NewsScan Daily, 5 May 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        DSL Internet Access Outstrips Cable for the First Time
        Sony Aims to Connect with  New Music Service
        New Cisco Switch Blends Wi-Fi with Hardwire Networks
        Web Worm Wreaks Havoc Down Under
        Authorities Team Up on Hunt for Sasser Creator
        'Dear John' Notifications Shift to Text Messaging

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Gerty Cori

DSL INTERNET ACCESS OUTSTRIPS CABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME
      For the first time, U.S. local phone companies have signed up more 
high-speed Internet customers than cable companies have -- a sign of the 
increasingly important role that broadband will play in telephone 
companies' future profits. As many younger phone customers abandon their 
wireline phones for wireless handsets, the phone companies say DSL has 
become the hook that they can use to lure local service customers. "If you 
can get DSL into the bundle, the customer will not leave you," says Verizon 
CFO Doreen Toben. Cable companies had started the broadband access race 
with a huge lead, outselling DSL 2 to 1, but with average rates hovering 
around $40 a month versus DSL's cheaper $26, many customers are making the 
switch. However, with broadband subscribers providing as much as 20% of 
cable revenues, cable companies seem disinclined to compete with the telcos 
on price -- a strategy that may spell trouble in the future, says a 
Deutsche Bank analyst, who warns they must respond "in reasonably short 
order." (Reuters/Los Angeles Times 5 May 2004)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-dsl5may05,1,3289458.story?coll=la-headlines-technology

SONY AIMS TO CONNECT WITH NEW MUSIC SERVICE
      Sony has launched its Connect online music download service, offering 
users a choice of more than 500,000 songs from major and independent record 
labels. Like Apple's iTunes, the songs are priced at 99 cents per track, 
with entire albums going for $9.99. The songs are sold in ATRAC3 format, 
which will play on Sony's audio devices but are incompatible with iPods and 
other some other digital players. By tailoring its music service to its own 
brand of players, the electronics giant hopes that Connect will do for its 
audio players what iTunes did for Apple's iPod. "Apple did an excellent job 
in cultivating this new market," says a Sony spokesman. "We believe we can 
expand the market to a much broader audience with a broader line of devices 
and an easy-to-use service." (BBC News 5 May 2004)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3685907.stm

NEW CISCO SWITCH BLENDS WI-FI WITH HARDWIRE NETWORKS
      Cisco Systems has designed a switch, code-named "Screaming Eagle," 
that will enable corporate network managers to blend Wi-Fi communications 
with existing wired networks. In jumping on the Wi-Fi bandwagon, Cisco is 
following the lead of several small competitors, including Aruba Wireless 
Networks, Airespace and Trapeze Networks. While Cisco was an early provider 
of Wi-Fi equipment, it had lagged in integrating Wi-Fi technology into its 
routers and switches that direct computer communications across most 
corporate networks. "The startups are clearly pointing the way that the 
industry is going to go," says one wireless consultant. (Wall Street 
Journal 5 May 2004)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108372035166302360,00.html (sub req'd)

WEB WORM WREAKS HAVOC DOWN UNDER
      Staff at Australian banking giant Westpac were forced to revert to 
pen and paper yesterday as the Sasser computer worm hit Australia and 
threatened to cause more chaos in the U.S. and Europe overnight. Sydney 
rail authorities also refused to rule out the Sasser worm as the cause of 
turmoil for commuters as trains were stopped by a mystery virus shutting 
down its computer network. Unlike many other viruses, Sasser does not 
travel by e-mail or attachments and can spread to any unprotected computer 
linked to the Net. It attacks through a flaw in recent versions of 
Microsoft's Windows -- Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP -- 
and causes the computer to shut down, before rebooting it and repeating the 
process several times. (The Australian 4 May 2004)
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,9463928%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html

AUTHORITIES TEAM UP ON HUNT FOR SASSER CREATOR
      Security experts in the U.K. are teaming up with U.S. law enforcement 
officials to track down the author or authors of the Sasser worm and are 
investigating the theory that the creator is part of a Russian group 
calling itself the "Skynet antivirus group," which also was responsible for 
the Netsky e-mail virus outbreak. A message found in the code of a recent 
Netsky variant claimed responsibility for Sasser, but the reasoning behind 
this latest Internet assault is still murky. "With Sasser, the author seems 
to be showing off his coding capabilities, but otherwise I have no idea 
what the motive is," says Raimund Genes, European president of antivirus 
group Trend Micro. And while Microsoft has yet to decide whether to offer a 
reward for information leading to culprit, most experts agree if the 
originators are linked to criminal groups, a bounty offer will have little 
effect. "If the person doesn't disclose his identity, we will never know 
the author of this worm or the author of those worms that have caused 
global epidemics in the past," says Eugene Kaspersky, co-founder of 
Moscow's Kaspersky Labs. Over the past six months, Microsoft has offered 
three separate $250,000 rewards for previous outbreaks, but with no 
results. (Reuters/Washington Post 5 May 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3086-2004May5.html?nav=headlines

'DEAR JOHN' NOTIFICATIONS SHIFT TO TEXT MESSAGING
      Nine percent of Britons say they've broken up a relationship by 
sending their partner a "Dear John" text message, and among the younger 
crowd (ages 15-24) the figure rises to 20%. One 15-year-old said using text 
to dump a boy- or girlfriend is common among teenagers because it's "easier 
to talk by text." Meanwhile, about one in three British adults said they'd 
sent a love note via text and 44% used the medium to flirt with a love 
interest. For the suspicious-minded, cell phones have proven a new source 
of potentially incriminating evidence, with 45% of women admitting they'd 
secretly checked the messages on their partners' phones compared to 31% of 
men. The numbers come from MORI, which conducted the poll on behalf of 
Sicap, a messaging services provider based in Bern, Switzerland. (AP 4 May 
2004)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040504/D82BQ1P80.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers 
his enemies; for the hardest victory is the victory over self." (Aristotle)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: GERTY CORI
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Czech-American biochemist Gerty 
Theresa Cori (1896-1957), who shared the 1947 Nobel Prize for 
Physiology/Medicine with her husband and research partner Carl Cori along 
with Bernardo A. Houssay of Argentina.
      Gerty Cori was the first American woman to receive a Nobel Prize in 
the sciences. The threesome was honored for their studies of carbohydrate 
metabolism, the process by which the body changes such foods as sugars and 
starches into energy. The Coris had worked as a husband-and-wife team in 
the discovery of the biochemical steps through which glycogen, or stored 
sugar, is converted into the glucose that cells use in producing energy. 
The cyclical pathways followed in this process are now known as the Cori cycle.
      Gerty Cori was born Gerty Radnitz in Prague, then part of 
Austria-Hungary and now the Czech Republic. She attended a girls' school 
and after that the Realgymnasium of Tetschen before entering the German 
University of Prague in 1914. Graduating in 1920 with a medical degree, she 
married fellow student Carl F. Cori. They had one son. For the next two 
years she worked as an assistant in the Karolinen Children's Hospital in 
Vienna. Then in 1922 she immigrated with her husband to the United States, 
where they both joined the staff of the New York State Institute for the 
Study of Malignant Disease in Buffalo, New York. In 1931 the couple joined 
the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
      Beginning with studies on metabolism in tumor cells, the Coris 
investigated the process of carbohydrate metabolism, and after years of 
research they achieved the test-tube synthesis of glycogen. They formulated 
the "Cori cycle," postulating that liver glycogen is converted to blood 
glucose that is then reconverted to glycogen in muscle, where its breakdown 
to lactic acid provides the energy utilized in muscle contraction. They 
also demonstrated that epinephrine induces the formation of a type of 
phosphorylase enzyme favoring conversion of glycogen to activated glucose 
and that insulin causes the removal of sugar from the blood by promoting 
the addition of phosphate to glucose.
      Following the Nobel Prize award in 1947 Gerty Cori was named 
professor of biochemistry at Washington University, a post she held for the 
rest of her life. She and her husband received numerous academic honors.

See 
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for "Women, Science & Technology" - or look for it in your favorite 
library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult 
literacy programs.)

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