NewsScan Daily, 27 August 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 27 August 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Global Crackdown on Identity Theft
        Custom Design Online
        'Exam Theft' Virus Hits China
        Microsoft Ordered to Yank Linux Comparison Ad
        Distributed Computing Targets Drug Design

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Robert Frost

GLOBAL CRACKDOWN ON IDENTITY THEFT
      More than 100 people have been arrested and 53 convicted in a global 
ID theft crackdown dubbed "Operation Web Snare" coordinated by the U.S. 
Justice Department. The operation involved some 150,000 victims who lost 
more than $215 million, according to Attorney General John Ashcroft -- a 
number he acknowledged represents only a small fraction of the crimes being 
committed on the Internet. Identity theft costs U.S. businesses more than 
$50 billion a year. "The Internet is stimulating the development of 
innovative products and services that were barely imaginable only a few 
years ago," says Deborah Majoras, chairwoman of the FTC which also took 
part in the operation. "There is a risk, however, that these benefits will 
not be fully realized if consumers associate the Internet with fraudulent 
operators." (Reuters/CNet 26 Aug 2004)
<http://news.com.com/2100-7348-5325947.html>

CUSTOM DESIGN ONLINE
      eMachineShop.com is giving tinkerers a new tool for designing and 
making their own creations -- its free design software not only tells 
customers whether a design can be made, but also provides a cost estimate. 
If the customer decides he or she wants to go ahead with the project, the 
design goes to a real-world machine shop for manufacturing. eMachineShop is 
the brainchild of Jim Lewis, a programmer and self-professed "tinkerer." 
(One claim to fame -- "the world's hardest sliding block puzzle.") 
Do-it-yourself types have used the eMachineShop process to manufacture more 
than 1,000 orders for things like door signs, motorcycle seats, robot 
frames, car engine covers, guitar plates and camera parts. "Being able to 
sit at your home computer, draw up some parts, submit them and 30 days 
later they are on your doorstep, all without human contact, is 
mind-blowing," says hobbyist Dennis Vegh. Lewis's next project? An 
application called Pad2Pad that focuses on electronics components. Lewis 
plans to take the design process beyond machine parts to the custom 
manufacture of printed circuit boards, including components like resistors, 
capacitors and chips. "My dream is essentially to become the Amazon in the 
manufacturing segment," says Lewis. (AP/CNN.com 26 Aug 2004)
<http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/08/26/online.manufacturing.ap/index.html>

'EXAM THEFT' VIRUS HITS CHINA
      A Beijing technology firm, Jiangmin Science Technology, is reporting 
the discovery of a computer virus specifically designed to steal files 
labeled "exam" or "test questions." The "exam theft" virus targets 
Microsoft Word and Excel files, and some observers speculate the virus 
creators may have been motivated by the thriving trade in black-market exam 
papers in that region. (The Register 26 Aug 2004)
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/26/exam_virus/>

MICROSOFT ORDERED TO YANK LINUX COMPARISON AD
      Britain's Advertising Standards Authority has ordered Microsoft to 
pull a print ad that includes a comparison of the total cost of Linux and 
Windows. In the ad, Microsoft claims Linux is 10 times more expensive than 
Windows Server 2003, but ASA has questioned Microsoft's math, noting that 
the tests on which it was based involved running the two operating systems 
on different hardware. While Microsoft ran Linux on an IBM z900 mainframe 
(which is more expensive and underperforms the rest of its line), it ran 
its own software on cheaper, faster 900MHz Xeon machines. The ASA concluded 
that the ad was misleading because it implied that the comparison was 
between the two operating systems only. (InternetNews.com 26 Aug 2004)
<http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3400131>

DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING TARGETS DRUG DESIGN
      A global network of more than 150,000 home PCs called Folding@Home is 
helping Stanford University professor Vijay Pande identify potential drug 
compounds. The computers donate their spare computing power to run Pande's 
algorithms, which are designed to accurately predict how well molecules 
will bind to a given protein. "For almost 20 years, people have been 
talking about doing drug design computationally, but the real challenge has 
been getting sufficient accuracy. Our main goal was to come up with methods 
to really push that accuracy to the point at which our methods are 
pharmaceutically useful." Pande predicts his methodology may be used to 
design new classes of antibiotics or speed up treatments for Alzheimer's 
disease. "One way to think of Folding@Home is as a time machine where we 
can do the sort of computational work now that would be very easy for any 
researcher to do in perhaps 10 years. And we can develop these methods and 
test them now," says Pande. (Science News Daily 26 Aug 2004)
<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/08/040826090745.htm>

*****

FLASH CARD
      "I'm not a teacher, but an awakener." (Robert Frost)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: ROBERT FROST
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the American poet Robert Frost 
(1874-1963), who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1924, 1931, 1937, and 
1943. Frost wrote movingly of the people and landscape of New England, but 
his lyrical, dramatic, and often deeply symbolic verse gave him a poetic 
voice that transcended the merely regional.
      Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874, where his father had moved 
from New England to work as a newspaper reporter. When his father died in 
1885, Frost's mother took the family back to New England to live with 
Frost's grandfather. Frost finished grammar school in Salem, New Hampshire, 
and went on to high school at Lawrence, where he graduated in 1892 and was 
co-valedictorian with classmate Elinor Miriam White, his future wife. 
Frost's grandfather wanted him to become a lawyer and, sent him to 
Dartmouth College, but Frost lost interest half-way through the first term 
and returned home to write poetry and earn a living working intermittently 
as a schoolteacher, mill hand, and newspaper reporter.
      In 1897 Frost entered Harvard College to prepare himself for teaching 
Latin and Greek at the high school level, but quit after less than two 
years because of illness. He moved to a farm at Derry, New Hampshire, 
purchased by his grandfather. Frost was not much of a farmer and spent most 
of time writing poetry, living on a small annuity left him by his 
grandfather, who died in 1901. In 1911 Frost sold the farm and moved with 
his family to England where he intended to write poetry full-time.
      In England he met with Ezra Pound and other prominent poets of the 
time, who showed genuine appreciation for his poems. Encouraged, he put 
together a collection of the lyric verses he had written on the farm at 
Derry. Published as "A Boy's Will" in 1913, the collection was 
enthusiastically reviewed in the British press and Frost's future as a 
publishable poet was assured.
      When World War I broke out the Frost family returned to the United 
States, where they bought and lived on a small farm at Franconia, New 
Hampshire. Frost became a gentleman farmer and botanist. Over the years he 
took on a series of academic assignments at Amherst College, the University 
of Michigan, Harvard College, and Dartmouth College.
      His two most famous poems are probably, first, "The Road Not Taken, 
which has the lines:
                            Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
                            I took the one less traveled by,
                           And that has made all the difference.
.. and "The Mending Wall,"  in which the farmer/poet says:
                           Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
                           What I was walling in or walling out,
                           And to whom I was like to give offence.
                           Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
                           That wants it down.

See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/188301106X/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for "Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Prose and Plays" -- or look for it 
in your favorite library. [Note: We donate all revenue from our book 
recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

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