NewsScan Daily, 19 January 2005 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 19 January 2005 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        FBI Axes Carnivore, Eats Investment
        Online Music Stores Swim into the Mainstream
        Road Map Lays Out the Route to Digital Health Records
        Consumer Electronics Giants Unite Against Piracy
        Google Moves to Outsmart Search Manipulators

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Federico Fellini

FBI AXES CARNIVORE, EATS INVESTMENT
      The FBI has abandoned its custom-built Internet surveillance 
technology, dubbed Carnivore, and is now using commercial software to 
eavesdrop on computer network traffic during investigations of suspected 
criminals, terrorists and spies. In addition, it's asking Internet service 
providers to conducting wiretaps on targeted customers, when necessary. 
Carnivore initially was developed because commercial tools available in 
2000 were inadequate, but FBI spokesman Paul Bresson says the Bureau moved 
a while ago to using popular commercial wiretap software because it's less 
expensive and has improved in its ability to copy e-mails to and from a 
specific Internet account without affecting other subscribers. "We see the 
value in the commercially available software; we're using it more now and 
we're asking the Internet service providers that have the capabilities to 
collect data in compliance with court orders," says Bresson. The FBI didn't 
disclose how much it had spent on Carnivore, but outside experts estimate 
expenditures at somewhere between $6 million and $15 million. (AP 18 Jan 2005)
<http://apnews.excite.com/article/20050119/D87MS3CO0.html>

ONLINE MUSIC STORES SWIM INTO THE MAINSTREAM
      The number of online music stores quadrupled to more than 230 in 
2004, according to a report from the International Federation of the 
Phonographic Industry. More than 200 million tracks were sold in the U.S. 
and Europe in 2004, a tenfold increase over the previous year, and IFPI 
says research firm Jupiter is predicting the $330 million online music 
market to double in 2005. "The biggest challenge for the digital music 
business has always been to make music easier to buy than to steal. At the 
start of 2005, as the legitimate digital music business movies into the 
mainstream of consumer life, that ambition is turning into reality," says 
IFPI chairman and CEO John Kennedy. (Reuters/Washington Post 19 Jan 2005)
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20043-2005Jan19.html>

ROAD MAP LAYS OUT THE ROUTE TO DIGITAL HEALTH RECORDS
      A group of 13 health and information technology organizations have 
presented the Bush administration with recommendations for a "national road 
map" for development of a national health information network. The 54-page 
document borrows heavily from the technical and policy approach of the 
Internet, suggesting that the federal government limit its involvement to 
initial financing and endorsement of basic technical standards. A separate 
"standards and policy entity" would then take over management of the 
proposed system. The report concluded that a national health network should 
not include a central database of patient records, nor should it require 
people to carry "health ID cards." Patients would control their own 
records, and the optimal design of the network would use open, standard 
technology for maximum interoperability of disparate systems. Many medical 
groups have begun investing in creating local networks that connect 
electronic patient records and the study warns that failure to move swiftly 
to establish open communications standards between these networks may 
result in a large savings opportunity lost. "If we're not careful, we'll 
have little islands of excellence that don't talk to each other," says Jan 
Walker, lead author of a separate article on the subject recently published 
in Health Affairs. (New York Times 19 Jan 2005)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/technology/19health.html>

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS GIANTS UNITE AGAINST PIRACY
      Some of the biggest names in consumer electronics, including Sony, 
Samsung Electronics, Philips Electronics and Matsushita Electric 
Industrial, have teamed up with Intertrust Technologies to form the Marlin 
Joint Development Association, which will coordinate their efforts to 
develop standard specifications for antipiracy software. The motivation 
behind the united effort is to impose some kind of uniformity on the 
consumer electronics industry, thereby avoiding the confusing array of 
digital rights management software options currently being used by computer 
hardware and software makers. "The CE industry has been pretty quiet," says 
Intertrust CEO Talal Shamoon. Now, they're "detonating their DRM." 
Intertrust was jointly purchased in 2003 by Sony, Philips and other 
investors. The Marlin effort comes on the heels of an earlier venture 
called the Coral Consortium, which was designed to ensure that different 
DRM programs were interoperable. (Wall Street Journal 19 Jan 2005)
<http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110609171910929502,00.html> (sub req'd)

GOOGLE MOVES TO OUTSMART SEARCH MANIPULATORS
      Google is implementing a new tactic for blocking "link spammers" -- 
people who use the comment form on Web forums or blogs to place a link 
pointing back to their own Web site. The strategy is used to trick Google's 
PageRank technology into boosting a Web site's ranking in its results. The 
problem has become particularly rampant in the age of blogging, when 
publishers have little recourse to stop outsiders from littering their 
comment forms with bogus links. Google's answer, says search expert Danny 
Sullivan, is to give publishers a "no follow" tag that they can insert on a 
Web page to indicate that comments or links are not their own and signal 
Google as it indexes the Web that the pages are to be overlooked. "The tag 
provides you a way to flag links that are basically not yours," says 
Sullivan. "The reason why that's helpful is because they won't count those 
links. It makes the idea of spamming less attractive." Blog publisher Six 
Apart says it will adopt the tagging standard for its roughly 6.5 million 
blogs. "We're interested in deploying this tool so that all the search 
engines, whether it's Google, Yahoo or MSN, can properly distinguish 
content published by the author from content from commentors," says Six 
Apart VP Anil Dash. (CNet News.com 18 Jan 2005)
<http://news.com.com/Google+aims+to+outsmart+search+tricksters/2100-1024_3-5540740.html>

*****

FLASH CARD
      "It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive." 
(Federico Fellini)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: FEDERICO FELLINI
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Oscar-winning Italian filmmaker 
Federico Fellini (1920-1993), best known for his flamboyant, sometimes 
grotesque film fantasies. His 1960 film "La Dolce Vita," a stinging 
indictment of contemporary Roman decadence, made him an international media 
star.
      Starting out as a journalist and gag writer, Fellini drifted into 
films as a scriptwriter, first in collaboration with Roberto Rossellini on 
the neorealist films "Open City" and "Paisan." He debuted as a director 
with the satirical comedies "The White Sheik" and "I Vitelloni." With "La 
Strada," the powerful 1954 fable, Fellini won the Oscar for best foreign 
film. A second Oscar came two years later for "Nights of Cabiria." 
Fellini's third Oscar winner, the 1963 film "8 1/2," used 
stream-of-consciousness techniques to depict the inner filmmaking struggles 
experienced by a director.
      Fellini's next films --"Juliet of the Spirits," "Satyricon," and 
"Roma" -- were less critically acclaimed, but in 1974 Fellini won a fourth 
Oscar for "Amarcord," a stirring depiction of adolescence under fascism set 
in his hometown of Rimini. After the mid-1970s none of Fellini's films 
attained the celebrity of his earlier productions, but he retained his fame 
as a director with a filmmaking style original enough to be called 
"Felliniesque."
      Fellini was born in Rimini on the Adriatic coast of Italy, where his 
father was a food-products salesman. After schooling at Bologna, Fellini 
went in 1938 to Florence, where his talent for drawing got him work on a 
humorous weekly and on science fiction serials. In 1939 he went to Rome in 
the hope of becoming a journalist and sold caricatures in restaurants. He 
was able to avoid military service during World War II, and in 1940 he 
became an editor of Marc'Aurelio, a popular satirical weekly magazine. In 
1943 he wrote a radio serial in which the actress Giulietta Masina 
appeared. They married that same year. When Allied forces took Rome in 
1944, Fellini opened a shop, in which he drew caricatures and made voice 
recordings for Allied soldiers.
      Fellini became a friend and associate of the director Roberto 
Rossellini, who put him to work as a scriptwriter and assistant director. 
Fellini fell in love with the movie business and with the help of 
Rossellini (and later the prominent Italian director, Alberto Lattuada), 
gradually gained the experience he needed to become a director in his own 
right.
      Critics have hailed his best films, which were all partially written 
by him, as artistic blends of realism and social satire, with an uniquely 
Fellini touch of fantasy. So much were his films the product of his own 
inner being, that it was not unusual for Fellini to have the story unfold 
as the film was being made.

      [To find a library copy of a profile of Fellini edited by Lietta 
Tornabuoni, visit RLG's RedLightGreen service at <http://tinyurl.com/5po9q> 
-- or to purchase the DVD of "La Dolce Vita" go to 
<http://tinyurl.com/6cq94>. Note: We donate all revenue from our book 
recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

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