NewsScan Daily, 24 June 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 24 June 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"  
       AOL Employee Busted for Stealing E-Mail Addresses
       Frist and Daschle Unite Against Illegal File-Swapping
       Creator of ASCII Code System Dies at 84
       No Comdex This Year
       Mobile Wireless Used in Sting Operation

FEATURES        
       Flash Card
       Has e-Learning Reached the 'Tipping Point'?
       Worth Thinking About: Utopianism and Alchemy

AOL EMPLOYEE BUSTED FOR STEALING E-MAIL ADDRESSES
     Jason Smathers, a 24-year-old employee of America Online, has been
charged with stealing the e-mail addresses of 92 million AOL customers and
selling them to spammers. Under a new federal anti-spam law, he faces the
prospect of as many as five years in prison plus a fine of $250,000. The
stolen information includes not only e-mail addresses but also telephone
numbers, ZIP codes and the type of credit card the customers use (though not
the actual credit card numbers, which are kept by AOL in a separate
database). The company says: "We deeply regret what has taken place and are
thoroughly reviewing and strengthening our internal procedures as a result
of this investigation and arrest."(New York Times 24 Jun 2004)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/technology/24spam.html

FRIST AND DASCHLE UNITE AGAINST ILLEGAL FILE-SWAPPING
     Senate majority leader Bill Frist and minority leader Tom Daschle have
joined up in attack against online music and video file-sharing services and
have co-introduced legislation to make anyone who "induces" illegal copying
just as liable for breaking copyright law as the person who makes the
copies. Wayne State University law professor Jessica D. Litman says she
finds the bill "sort of scary" because it's "worded so broadly" and could be
used against devices and technologies that have non-infringing as well as
infringing uses, and Gary Shapiro of the Consumer Electronics Association
says: "The VCR would not be a legal product; TiVo would not be a legal
product. I'm surprised the leadership would jump on this bill without
hearing from the other side." But Emery Simon of the Business Software
Alliance argues that such legislation is needed: "We have a huge piracy
problem. Current law makes it difficult" to go after all the infractions."
(Washington Post 23 Jun 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A801-2004Jun23.html

CREATOR OF ASCII CODE SYSTEM DIES AT 84
     Bob Bemer, who helped invent the widely used ASCII (pronounced
"AS-kee") coding system for representing text in a computer has died from
complications related to cancer. Bemer's long career, which began in 1949,
included positions at RAND Corporation, IBM, Univac, and Honeywell. His
death came at age 84. His stepson noted, "He never got the coding out of his
system. He was a coder until he couldn't code any more. He lived it and
breathed it." Both his interest in coding and his interest in a better world
are shown in his personal motto: ((((DO SOMETHING!) SMALL) USEFUL) NOW!).
(AP/USA Today 23 Jun 2004)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-06-23-bemer_x.htm

NO COMDEX THIS YEAR
     The organizers of the popular Comdex computer shows, which have been
presented each November for almost a quarter of a century, are canceling (or
"postponing") this year's conference. MediaLive International, which runs
the show, says the next Comdex will take place in Las Vegas in November
2005. For many years Comdex was an event pitched to the general
computer-buying public, but since the bursting of the technology bubble it's
been focused on corporate buyers and sellers. (AP/San Jose Mercury News 23
Jun 2004) http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/8995205.htm

MOBILE WIRELESS USED IN STING OPERATION
     Law enforcement authorities in Texas have begun using a van equipped
with high-speed wireless satellite devices to catch Internet surfers using
chat rooms to set up illegal liaisons with underage girls. In the first
sting operation in which the van has been used, seven men were apprehended
and charged with various felonious acts. A chief investigator in the Texas
attorney general's office says, "In many of our rural areas, they lack the
infrastructure we need to support this kind of investigation. So we now have
the technology and ability to bring it with us. It's self-contained and
we're ready to go." (AP/USA Today 23 Jun 2004)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-06-23-cybercrime-van_x.htm

*****  

FLASH CARD
     "Terrorists and totalitarians have always been two sides of one coin; a
totalitarian out of office is a terrorist." (David Gelernter)

HAS E-LEARNING REACHED THE 'TIPPING POINT'?
     Our friend Lisa Neal, editor-in-chief of eLearn magazine, wonders in
her latest column whether the growth of e-learning may have reached a
"tipping point" in finding acceptance and adoption: "Certainly e-learning
has been more prominent in the media recently, both through the increasingly
common spam and banner ads announcing online programs and recent news items.
There are currently well-publicized scandals where U.S. government workers
earned higher salaries after acquiring higher degrees from so-called diploma
mills... Will the impact of this publicity be to raise people¹s awareness of
e-learning, even if the context is negative, or will it smear people¹s
impressions of e-learning and decrease their acceptance?" She asked Malcolm
Gladwell (author of the book "The Tipping Point"), who suggested that the
ultimate question is how the industry responds: the existence of these
non-accredited diploma mills isn¹t the problem, it¹s the seemingly common
inability of many people have to distinguish program quality. With that in
mind, Lisa predicts that "employers will be more conscious of accreditation
both in hiring and in reimbursing educational expenses. This increased
awareness of accreditation could lead to a better understanding of quality
as well as more promotion of their accreditation status by schools. Perhaps
these are the changes that are needed to bring e-learning to the tipping
point." See http://www.eLearnMag.org/

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: UTOPIANISM AND ALCHEMY
     Author Robert Kaplan explores the subtle but crucial difference between
idealism and wishful thinking:
     "A long period of peace in an advanced technological society like ours
could lead to great evils, and the ideal of a world permanently at peace and
governed benignly by a world organization is not an optimistic view of the
future but a dark one.
     "Until World War I, war was a respectable endeavor, even a noble one,
for war as well as peace often meant progress. What would humanity become
without rebellions! World War I delegitimized war. Its horror was too vast
to be justified by any result, especially one so meager. Because a closed
elite of generals and diplomats had led humanity into such depths, the
result was the popularization of international studies: the birth of modern
political science.
     "Equating early political science with utopianism, the late English
historian E.H. Carr in 'The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939' (1939) explains
how utopianism was akin to alchemy. When the supply of gold became
inadequate for the economic conditions of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, alchemists assumed that there must be a way to make it from
traditional metals -- a problem had arisen for which there must be a
solution. In the same way, early political scientists assumed that because
war had become so horrible, it must be possible to prevent it: perhaps to
outlaw it. But just as you couldn't produce gold from lead, you couldn't
declare the end of war either. If you tried, the world was immediately at
the mercy of those who disagreed, such as the Nazis and the Japanese
military. The appeasement of Hitler had at its roots the absurd notion,
propagated by early political science, that war was preventable without
results that were even worse. Idealism had gone so far astray that it
required an Edwardian-era reactionary who truly respected war, Winston
Churchill, to rescue civilization from the brink."
     [See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/037570759X/newsscancom/ref=nosim for
Robert D. Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the
Post Cold War" -- or look for it in your favorite library. Note: We donate
all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy program.]

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