NewsScan Daily, 22 June 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 22 June 2004 ("Above The Fold")
***********************************************************
NewsScan Daily is underwritten by RLG, a world-class organization making
significant and sustained contributions to the effective management and
appropriate use of information technology. NSD is written by John Gehl and
Suzanne Douglas, [email protected].
***********************************************************

"ABOVE THE FOLD"  
       Voice Memos Sent As E-Mail
       Reunion Website in Australia a Big Success
       Gypsy Holocaust Survivors Suing IBM In Swiss Court
       Investment Advice From Google: Be Careful
       Hacker Hits South Korean Defense
       Hotspots For Texas Drivers

FEATURES        
       Flash Card
       Worth Thinking About: History Lesson for a Global Power

VOICE MEMOS SENT AS E-MAIL
     A new service from Nextel will allow Nextel subscribers to record voice
messages and send them to anyone with an e-mail address. The $7.50-a-month
service requires that a subscriber first enter e-mail addresses via Nextel's
Web site, after which a cell phone can be used to send a voice message as an
MP3 file to as many as 50 recipients at a time. Nextel is the first to offer
this kind of service. (Washington Post 21 Jun 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58967-2004Jun21.html

REUNION WEBSITE IN AUSTRALIA A BIG SUCCESS
     Two Australian twenty-somethings cashed in on curiosity over the
weekend when their school reunion website sold to a British company for
several million dollars. Rob Barron, 27, and sister Vicki Dawson, a
29-year-old mother of two, sold their www.schoolfriends.com.au to British
competitor Friends Reunited for what industry experts estimate was at least
£1 million ($AU2.7 million). Established in 2000 as "pretty much a hobby,"
schoolfriends now has more than 1 million members in Australia and New
Zealand. (The Australian 21 Jun 2004) Rec'd from John Lamp
http://tinyurl.com/2nplw

GYPSY HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS SUING IBM IN SWISS COURT
     Gypsies are suing IBM in Swiss court, alleging that IBM's expertise
helped the Nazis commit mass murder more efficiently. A Gypsy group chose
Geneva to file the lawsuit because IBM's wartime European headquarters were
in that city. A Swiss appellate court has ruled: "IBM's complicity through
material or intellectual assistance to the criminal acts of the Nazis during
World War II via its Geneva office cannot be ruled out," and pointed to "a
significant body of evidence indicating that the Geneva office could have
been aware that it was assisting these acts." (AP/San Jose Mercury News 22
Jun 2004) http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/8983143.htm

INVESTMENT ADVICE FROM GOOGLE: 'BE CAREFUL'
     In a revision of the document written for prospective investors, Google
makes it very clear that the auction process that will be used in its
initial stock sale could cause its shares to fall after the offering: "If
your objective is to make a short-term profit by selling the shares you
purchase in the offering shortly after trading begins, you should not submit
a bid in the auction." The revision may have been made in response to
comments from the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission. (New York
Times 22 Jun 2004) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/business/22google.html

HACKER HITS SOUTH KOREAN DEFENSE
     A network vandal has broken into computers at sensitive South Korean
research institutes and government agencies, infecting more than 60 PCs with
a variation of the Peep Trojan program. The National Cyber Security Center
(NCSC) said the hacker had broken into computers at the Agency for Defense
Development, which develops weapons, the Korea Atomic Energy Research
Institute, the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis and three other
government agencies. (The Australian 21 Jun 2004) Rec'd from John Lamp
http://tinyurl.com/24wyw

HOTSPOTS FOR TEXAS DRIVERS
     The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) hopes to reduce
fatigue-related accidents by enticing drivers with Wi-Fi hotspots so they'll
stop more often and check their mail. The company selected to provide the
free service won't be reimbursed by the state, but there are also plans to
install special kiosks where motorists can access Internet-enabled computers
with the swipe of a credit card. A TxDOT spokesman says: "The feedback we've
received so far has been very positive. Texas' highways are seeing an
increasing number of business travelers, truckers and RVers and access to
e-mail is important to them." (AP/Los Angeles Times 21 Jun 2004)
http://tinyurl.com/2yan3

*****  

FLASH CARD
     "We are decent 99 percent of the time, when we could easily be vile."
(R.W. Riis)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: HISTORY LESSON FOR A GLOBAL POWER
     You want empire or chaos? If you prefer empire, then take your choice
-- because that's what you'll have to do. Historian Niall Ferguson explains:
     "In the last decade of the Victorian era, an obscure public schoolboy
made a prophecy about the British Empire's fate in the coming century:
     "'I can see vast changes coming over a now peaceful world; great
upheavals, terrible struggles; wars such as one cannot imagine; and I tell
you London will be in danger -- London will be attacked and I shall be very
prominent in the defence of London. I see farther ahead than you do. I see
into the Future. The country will be subjected somehow to a tremendous
invasion, but I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London and
I shall save London and the Empire from disaster.'
     "Winston Churchill was just sixteen when he spoke those words to a
fellow Harrovian, Murland Evans. They were astonishingly prescient.
Churchill did save London, and indeed Britain. But, in the end, not even he
could save the British Empire.
     "Within a single lifetime, that Empire -- which had not yet reached its
furthest extent when Churchill made his prophecy in 1892 -- unraveled. By
the time Churchill died in 1965, all its most important parts had gone. Why?
Traditional accounts of 'decolonization' tend to give the credit (or the
blame) to the nationalist movements within the colonies, from Sinn Fein in
Ireland to Congress in India. The end of Empire is portrayed as a victory
for 'freedom fighters', who took up arms from Dublin to Delhi to rid their
peoples of the yoke of colonial rule. This is misleading. Throughout the
twentieth century, the principal threats -- and the most plausible
alternatives to -- British rule were not national independence movements,
but other empires. 
     "By the time Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, the most likely
alternatives to British rule were Hirohito's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere, Hitler's Thousand Year Reich and Mussolini's New Rome. Nor could the
threat posed by Stalin's Soviet Union be discounted, though until after the
Second World War most of his energies were devoted to terrorizing his own
subjects. It was the staggering cost of fighting these imperial rivals that
ultimately ruined the British Empire. In other words, the Empire was
dismantled not because it had oppressed subject peoples for centuries, but
because it took up arms for just a few years against far more oppressive
Empires. It did the right thing, regardless of the cost. And that was why
the ultimate, if reluctant, heir of Britain's global power was not one of
the evil empires of the East, but Britain's most successful former colony."
     [See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465023290/newsscancom/ref=nosim
for Niall Ferguson's "Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order
and the Lessons for Global Power" -- or look for it in your favorite
library. Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult
literacy program.]

SUBSCRIPTION INFO FOR NEWSSCAN DAILY:
      To subscribe or unsubscribe to the text, html, or handheld versions of
NewsScan Daily, send the appropriate subscribe or unsubscribe messages
(i.e., with the word 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line) to
the addresses shown below:
      Text version: Send message to [email protected]
      HTML version: Send mail to [email protected]
      NewsScan-To-Go: http://www.newsscan.com/handheld/current.html

TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT NEWSSCAN DAILY! Send them our little frog:
http://www.newsscan.com/newsscan/newscup.html

***********************************************************
Please visit the site of RLG, the great organization that makes NewsScan
Daily possible. (RLG has no influence over, nor any responsibility for, our
editorial content.) Created in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group, RLG is
a not-for-profit membership corporation of more than 160 universities,
national libraries, archives, museums -- and other institutions with
remarkable collections for research and learning. Its major initiatives are
long-term retention of digital materials, resource sharing among member
institutions, and improvement of researcher access to primary source
material. RLG supplies online research resources worldwide. Visit RLG at
http://www.rlg.org.

*********

To subscribe or unsubscribe to the TEXT version of NewsScan Daily, send an
e-mail message to [email protected] with 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe'
in the subject line. To subscribe or unsubscribe to the HTML version of
NewsScan Daily, send mail to [email protected], with the word
'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' as the subject. (Subscribing to the HTML
version won't automatically unsubscribe you from the text version; please
unsubscribe yourself as explained above.) PLEASE NOTE: To unsubscribe from
an account to which you no longer have
access, send mail to at [email protected].

*********

We call our news section "Above The Fold" to honor the tradition of the
great "broadsheet" newspapers in which editors must decide which news
stories are of such importance that they should be placed "above the fold"
on the front page. The NewsScan Credo: Be informative, have fun, and get to
the point! See http://www.newsscan.com/, and send us mail: John Gehl
<[email protected]> and Suzanne Douglas <[email protected]>, or call
770-704-7517.

*********

Get a free 6-week trial subscription to Innovation Weekly, an executive
summary of trends, strategies and innovations in business and technology.
Send mail to [email protected] with the word 'subscribe' in the
subject line.

What customized news and information services do you need for your company?
Get in touch with us at [email protected] or call 770-704-7517 to talk
over the possibilities.

Copyright 2004. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
***********************************************************