NewsScan Daily, 28 May 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 28 May 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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NewsScan Daily is underwritten by RLG, a world-class organization making
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"  
       NEC Pleads Guilty in E-Rate Fraud Investigation
       Bush Supports Medical Information Systems Development
       California Versus Offshoring
       Developers Building in Protection
       AMD, HP: The 64-Bit Question
       It's Love! It's Electronics! It's Patented!

FEATURES        
       Flash Card
       Publishing Schedule
       Honorary Subscribers: Nelson Eddy & Jeannette MacDonald
       Safe & Sound in the Cyber Age: Networks That Don't Network

NEC PLEADS GUILTY IN E-RATE FRAUD INVESTIGATION
     NEC Business Network Solutions is pleading guilty to wire fraud and
antitrust violation, and the company has agreed to $20.7 million in fines
and restitution for its part in the E-Rate program, the federal program
designed to help schools participate in the information age. Gerald P.
Kenney, general counsel of NEC America, said: "We made mistakes with E-Rate.
We've acknowledged and accepted responsibility for those mistakes,
cooperated fully with the government and taken action to ensure that these
problems can't happen again." The investigation of misconduct in the E-Rate
program is on-going, and is expected to uncover additional cases of fraud by
other large information technology vendors. Policy analyst John Dunbar of
the Center for Public Integrity says: "Schools are being promised
million-dollar systems when a system costing $10,000 would make more sense.
That's one of the flaws of the system. If the schools had vested interest in
making sure that the money was being spent wisely, then it wouldn't be so
easy to defraud the program." (New York Times 28 May 2004)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/28/technology/28net.html

BUSH SUPPORTS MEDICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT
     President Bush yesterday told an audience at the Vanderbilt University
Medical Center: "Within 10 years, we want most Americans to have electronic
health care records -- that means your records. You not only save money, you
improve the quality of care through the spread of good information. It lets
these docs do their jobs; it eases the minds of the patients... We're at
Vanderbilt for a reason: it's because this hospital is, and system is,
innovative and different. And it's on the leading edge of
change."(Washington Post 27 May 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61772-2004May27.html

CALIFORNIA VERSUS OFFSHORING
     The California Assembly has approved a bill that would ban state
contractors from offshoring jobs and require all contractors and
subcontractors to certify that the "contract work will be performed by
people in the state of California." The bill applies only to contracts paid
for with state tax money. Assemblyman John Campbell, a Republican, expressed
his opposition for the bill defended outsourcing jobs as a way of keeping
contracts cheaper: "What you call outsourcing is capital going to its most
efficient place, and when capital goes to its most efficient place, we all
benefit." (AP/San Jose Mercury News 27 May 2004)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/8777193.htm

DEVELOPERS BUILDING IN PROTECTION
     While vulnerability testing of the network has been around for a decade
or more, testing of web and business-critical applications is just beginning
to come to the fore. Attracting attention now are a number of small
companies developing products to help programmers test source code
throughout the process of business application development -- companies such
as Fortify Software, Parasoft, Once Labs and @Stake. Fortify's software
checks code for common flaws exploited by hackers and its run-time analysis
component is designed to simulate attacks before software is in full use.
PayPal, eBay's online payment service, is a customer, and Sun Microsystems
cofounder Bill Joy is also a fan. (The Australian 25 May 2004) Rec'd from
John Lamp, Deakin U. http://tinyurl.com/362x8

AMD, HP: THE 64-BIT QUESTION
     Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is hoping that computer manufacturers will
use its Athlon 64-bit microchips to develop media-center style personal
computers that can play and distribute audio and video through the home.
Microsoft is expected to release a 64-bit version of Windows XP on which
most 64-bit desktop computer software would run. In contrast to AMD's
strategy, Hewlett-Packard has downplayed the importance of 64-bit computing
to today's home computer users, saying that until such time as an ecosystem
of software has been developed, such users will not find 64-bit computing
useful. In contrast, an AMD executive says: "Our intent would be to get
those 64-bit versions preloaded on there so when the consumer takes it home,
it's as seamless and effortless as possible for them to realize the benefits
of AMD 64-bit technology." (Reuters/USA Today 28 May 2004)
http://tinyurl.com/2mf93

IT'S LOVE! IT'S ELECTRONICS! IT'S PATENTED!
     The Internet matchmaking service eHarmony.com has received a U.S.
Patent for a "method and system for identifying people who are likely to
have a successful relationship." That process includes having mate-seekers
answer more than 430 questions, such as "Do you smoke?"; "How much does the
word 'dominant' describe you on a list of 1 through 7?"; and "How often do
you feel depressed?" Compatible pairs are then identified using a "marital
satisfaction index" based on rankings in 29 categories, and eHarmony only
pairs people when it is 95% confident that their compatibility rating falls
in the index's top 25 percent. Happy customer Melinda Miller, a 32-year-old
middle school teacher in Celebration, Fla., met her future husband through
eHarmony and says: "The chemistry between us was amazing right from the
start -- and I know that sounds funny because how can you have chemistry
over the Internet? But we had complete compatibility between our
personalities." EHarmony costs $50 per month or $250 per year and rejects
one in five people who complete the free questionnaire if they are judged to
be "not the marrying type." A company executive says: "We try to be nice. We
tell them our services probably won't be useful." (AP/Los Angeles Times 27
may 2004)
http://tinyurl.com/3dd4z

*****  

FLASH CARD
     "Genius is childhood recaptured at will." (Charles Baudelaire)

PUBLISHING SCHEDULE
     We're taking Monday off in honor of Memorial Day, a U.S. national
holiday. We'll resume publication on Tuesday, 1 June 2004.

HONORARY SUBSCRIBERS: NELSON EDDY AND JEANETTE MACDONALD
     Today's Honorary Subscribers are Hollywood's Golden Age singing duo,
Nelson Eddy (1901-1967) and Jeanette MacDonald (1901-1965), who starred in
film musicals that enchanted millions in the darkest years of the Great
Depression. 
     Eddy was a classically trained baritone and MacDonald a Broadway
musical comedy star, who co-starred in a series of eight hit film musicals
that has inextricably linked their names together as "America's Singing
Sweethearts." Today their better films, such as "Naughty Marietta," "Rose
Marie," and "Maytime," are regarded as classics, shown on television and in
theatre revivals, as well as sold commercially in videocassettes.
    Despite remaining in popular memory as a single item, both MacDonald and
Eddy enjoyed separate careers. Even during the years they performed
together, they each had contracts stipulating that they would have three
months off each year to make concert tours and other appearances. Besides
concert tours, they each had their own radio show, and in the early days of
television they made separate pilots for proposed TV sitcoms. They also went
on the road separately to sell War Bonds during World War II.
     MacDonald was born and named Jeanette Anna, the youngest of three
sisters in her family's Philadelphia home. In 1920 she began appearing in
Broadway musicals and was a musical comedy star by the time she made her
first film in 1929, the Ernst Lubitsch film The "Love Parade," with Maurice
Chevalier. She went on to star in a total of 28 films over the next 18
years, working principally at Paramount, Fox, and MGM. In 1937, with Ginger
Rogers and Fay Wray as her bridesmaids, she married film star Gene Raymond
in a marriage that lasted until her death in 1965, while awaiting a heart
transplant in a Houston, Texas hospital.
     Nelson Ackerman Eddy was also born in 1901. An only child, he was
raised in, Rhode Island. He studied opera in the U.S. and Europe and then
enjoyed a successful career in opera and on the concert stage. In 1933, he
began to work in films, but with little success until in 1935 MGM teamed him
with MacDonald in the operetta, "Naughty Marietta." Eventually he would make
fourteen of his nineteen films with MGM.
     In 1939 he married his first and only wife, Ann Denitz Franklin, in Las
Vegas where they had eloped to avoid publicity. In 1953, Nelson began a
surprising new career, forming a fifteen-year long nightclub act with singer
Gale Sherwood and his longtime accompanist, Ted Paxson.
     Eddy died in 1967 of a cerebral hemorrhage that occurred while he was
performing on stage in Palm Beach, Florida. He is buried at Hollywood
Cemetery, next to his wife, Anne, who survived him by twenty years.
     Movie buffs who remember Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy as an
unrivaled romantic screen entity are often surprised to learn that they did
not particularly like each other. And no one denies that their films
together were never masterpieces of cinematic art.
     [See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/6301978315/newsscancom/ref=nos
im for the movie "Rose Marie" -- or look for it in the multimedia section of
your favorite library. We donate all revenue from our book recommendations
to adult literacy programs.]

SAFE & SOUND IN THE CYBER AGE: NETWORKS THAT DON'T NETWORK
            [by Stephen Cobb and Chey Cobb]
                          ***
     As some Newsscan readers may have noticed, we haven't filed a column
for about a month. Alert readers will recall that our last few columns
talked about Wi-Fi security and protecting data while traveling on business.
So it's fitting that our absence from these pages was due, in part, to a
bunch of business travel. The other excuse we're offering is that Stephen
started a new job, with a company that provides broadband Internet access to
business travelers. The company is Utah-based STSN, a name you may have
noticed on those little network boxes you find in guest rooms at hotels with
names like Marriott and Hilton.
     We promise not to turn this column into a plug for STSN, but we know
NewsScan readers may find some of the facts about the company quite
interesting. Started in 1998, STSN now serves broadband connections to more
than half a million travelers per month and delivers both wired and wireless
network and Internet services to over 1,250 conferences a month. Close to
2,000 hotels in North America and Europe are currently serviced by STSN and
about 690 of them offer Wi-Fi service.
     Stephen is now STSN's Chief Security Executive. His job is to raise
awareness of security issues surrounding mobile business connectivity and
help STSN advance the security of its patented end-to-end network
architecture. What attracted him to the job, apart from the opportunity to
travel around the world talking to people and raising their security
awareness, was STSN's longstanding commitment to security, which has already
resulted in a very robust system for delivering secure connections in a
hostile environment.
     By hostile we're not implying that rocks and other missiles are flying
through the air at your average business hotel, but a hotel does present
some unique problems for computer connectivity. First of all, when you think
about networking, you tend to think about sharing. After all, that's why you
installed a network at your home or office, to share files, printers, and
maybe other resources like a high speed connection to the Internet. But when
you fire up your laptop in a hotel room you probably don¹t want to share
your computer with the other guests.
     What most business travelers want to do is get onto the Internet, often
because that is the fastest route back to the company network, which is
where their e-mail messages and work data reside. A few years ago, those
travelers used the laptop modem to dial up a remote access server (RAS) back
at head office. While it was splendidly isolated from other computers, this
type of direct laptop-to-server connection was often costly and always
limited in terms of bandwidth, so the preferred option today is a broadband
network connection to the Internet, within which you establish a temporary
virtual private network (VPN) back to the company servers. However, you
don¹t want this connection exposed to the malicious people and code that
lurk on networks, particularly on that network-of-networks, the Internet.
     So you could say that what today's hotel needs to provide to the
business traveler is a network that doesn't network, or rather, that only
networks in a highly controllable way. This is not your typical,
off-the-shelf network. In fact, if you stay at a hotel that has installed a
typical, off-the-shelf network, you will probably be able to see other
guests' laptops and, unless you have your own laptop tightly configured and
individually firewalled, they will able to see yours (believe us, we have
seen other guests' computers at some pretty fancy hotels, and without using
sophisticated hacking tools).
     Needless to say, this is not how STSN does hotel Internet access. The
network architecture used by STSN ensures that each hotel guest who uses the
system gets a separate connection, one that is protected, by STSN hardware
and software, all the way to the Internet via an STSN-controlled "Point of
Presence." 
     To make it easier for business travelers to keep their data safe while
they are on the road, the stsn.com web site has a handy locator that helps
you find a suitable hotel. The site also gives some security suggestions for
laptops that are being used on the road:
     * Disable file-sharing to prevent strangers accessing your hard drive.
     * Disable the peer-to-peer and ad-hoc capabilities of the Wi-Fi system.
     * Install and use a personal firewall.
This last item need not be expensive. If your company hasn¹t already
installed a firewall on your laptop there are two that we can recommend,
Zone Alarm and Sygate Personal Firewall, both of which are free (for
personal use) in their basic versions. There is also a free firewall
included in Windows XP called Internet Connection Firewall of ICF. You can
turn ICF on and off via the Advanced tab in the Properties setting of
whatever network connection you are using (the next major update to Windows
XP is rumored to turn ICF on by default but if you use your laptop to VPN to
your company¹s network, you may want to ask support before you use ICF, or
any other firewall, in case it interferes with the VPN).
     One Stephen and Chey tip is to test your laptop before you travel. You
can do this at either of these web sites: scan.sygatetech.com or ww.grc.com
(click on "Shields Up"). Both sites are safe and will tell you how exposed
your system might be.
     In the next few weeks we will address some of the pending issues from
previous columns, like Wi-Fi security, and some more security lessons from
life on the road (such as what not to pack in your checked baggage if you
don¹t want the TSA opening it up).
     [Chey Cobb, CISSP, the author of "Cryptography for Dummies" and
"Network Security for Dummies," is a former senior technical security
advisor to the NRO. She can be e-mailed as chey at aug dot com. Stephen
Cobb, CISSP, is the author of "Privacy for Business" and can be emailed as
scobb at cobb dot com.]

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