NewsScan Daily, 9 February 2005 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 9 February 2005 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        HP Board Ousts Fiorina
        Online Banking Boost
        Companies Band Together to Promote VoIP Security
        New Study Warns of Car Viruses
        A Modern Valentine's Day Fable


FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: The Land We Love


HP BOARD OUSTS FIORINA
      Carly Fiorina, CEO and chairman of Hewlett-Packard, has been fired by 
the company's board of directors over "differences about how to execute 
HP's strategy." Fiorina's best-known achievement was the company's 
controversial takeover of Compaq, which led to clashes with board members 
and lackluster response on Wall Street. Industry analyst Rob Enderle said 
the current dispute most likely stems from what the board perceived as 
Fiorina's inattention to day-to-day operations. "The next CEO will 
undoubtedly be much more operationally focused; there is a strong 
possibility that the office of the CEO will be more shared, but in the end, 
the company will also be a lot stronger depending on how well the selection 
is done." Computerworld editor-in-chief Don Tennant had this take: "Carly 
deserves a lot of credit for making the Compaq acquisition happen simply 
because it demonstrated her fortitude. But what she apparently forgot is 
that in an increasingly services-oriented economy, pushing more boxes than 
the next guy is going to get you less and less glory." (Washington Post 9 
Feb 2005)
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10295-2005Feb9.html>


ONLINE BANKING BOOST
      About a fourth of all U.S. adults -- 53 million -- are now using 
online banking services offered by their financial institutions. That's up 
58% from late 2002, and coincides with a jump in high-speed broadband 
connections and the increasing maturation of the online population. GenXers 
(age 28 to 39) are the most likely age group to use online banking services 
(60%), followed by GenY (38%). Only 25% of the over-60 crowd use online 
banking. Men are more likely to bank online than women (49% vs. 39%) -- a 
change from two years ago when the two groups were more equal. The boost in 
numbers stems from two major trends. The first is that as online users gain 
experience, they're more likely in general to conduct financial 
transactions, whether it be book-buying on travel reservations, on the Web. 
And the second is that banks have discovered that online customers tend to 
be more profitable than offline and banks are therefore marketing their 
electronic services more aggressively. (Pew Internet & American Life 
Project 9 Feb 2005)
<http://www.pewinternet.org>


COMPANIES BAND TOGETHER TO PROMOTE VoIP SECURITY
      A group of more than 20 companies, including 3Com, Alcatel, Avaya, 
Siemens, Symantec and Ernst & Young, have formed a VoIP Security Alliance 
to tackle voice-over-IP security problems and strive toward making VoIP as 
reliable as traditional telephony. Alliance chairman David Endler warns 
that as businesses embrace VoIP as a cheap alternative to their current 
phone system, many network operators are unaware that they need to alter 
their security strategies when they add the service. For instance, 
traditional firewalls cannot police VoIP traffic, he notes. "VoIP networks 
really inherit the same cyber-security threats that data networks are today 
prone to, but those threats take greater severity in some cases," says 
Endler. (Wall Street Journal 9 Feb 2005)
<http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110790485798349353,00.html>


NEW STUDY WARNS OF CAR VIRUSES
      A report by IBM Security Intelligence Services predicts that viruses 
spreading to mobile phones, PDAs and wireless networks could infect the 
embedded computers that increasingly are used to run basic automobile 
functions. The average new car runs 20 computer processors and about 60 
megabytes of software code, raising more opportunities for malfunctions. In 
addition to the threat facing vehicles, the report noted the fastest 
growing threat last year was phishing -- a method of deceiving computer 
users into revealing personal information -- and predicted that activity 
would grow more serious in 2005. (Reuters/CNet.com 8 Feb 2005)
<http://news.com.com/A+virus+may+be+in+your+cars+future/2100-7349_3-5568633.html>


A MODERN VALENTINE'S DAY FABLE
      A budding romance between a Jordanian man and woman turned into an 
ugly public divorce when the couple found out that they were in fact man 
and wife, state media reported on Sunday. Separated for several months, 
boredom and chance briefly reunited Bakr Melhem and his wife Sanaa in an 
internet chat room, the official Petra news agency said. Bakr, who passed 
himself off as Adnan, fell head over heels for Sanaa, who signed off as 
Jamila (beautiful) and described herself as a cultured, unmarried woman -- 
a devout Muslim whose hobby was reading, Petra said. Cyber-love blossomed 
between the pair for three months and soon they were making wedding plans. 
To pledge their troth in person, they agreed to meet in the flesh near a 
bus depot in the town of Zarqa, northeast of Amman. The shock of finding 
out their true identities was too much for the pair. Upon seeing 
Sanaa-alias-Jamila, Bakr-alias-Adnan turned white and screamed at the top 
of his lungs: "You are divorced, divorced, divorced" -- the traditional 
manner of officially ending a marriage in Islam. "You are a liar," Sanaa 
retorted before fainting, the agency said. (The Age 7 Feb 2005) rec'd from 
John Lamp, Deakin U.
<http://theage.com.au/articles/2005/02/07/1107625114716.html>


*****


FLASH CARD
      "Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit." 
(Edward Abbey)


WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE LAND WE LOVE
      Historian John Steele Gordon, columnist at American Heritage 
magazine, notes that our differences with Europe begin with the land itself:
      "The land that would become the United States presented a world that 
was at once hauntingly familiar and quite unlike the one in which the first 
European explorers and settlers had grown up. Western Europe was a world of 
dense population, concentrated in cities, towns, and villages; intense 
cultivation of arable areas; limited wildlife; and limited and carefully 
husbanded forests.
      "America was located in the same temperate zone and featured often 
familiar trees, plants, and animals, along with some exotic new ones, such 
as raccoons, skunks, maize, and rattlesnakes. But beyond the rocky shore of 
what is now the state of Maine and the vast sandy beach that stretches 
nearly unbroken from New Hampshire to Mexico and far beyond, lay a 
wilderness, upon which the hand of its human inhabitants had lain very 
lightly indeed.
      "This wilderness was a forest larger than all of western Europe, 
broken only by the occasional beaver meadow, bog, swamp, rock outcropping, 
mountain bald, and the slash-and-burn fields of Indians. It stretched from 
the water's edge to well past the Mississippi. From there it extended 
fingerlike along river and creek bottoms into the great plains that covered 
the center of the continent.
      "The climate of North America that the first settlers encountered 
was, like the land, both familiar and exotic. It is temperate rather than 
arctic or tropical, and with abundant rain. But, being on the eastern edge 
of a great continent, the climate is continental in nature, whereas western 
Europe's is maritime, and greatly tempered by the warmth of the Gulf 
Stream. American winters are much colder than western Europe's while the 
summers are hotter. The high and low temperature records for London, 
located north of the fifty-first parallel of latitude, are 99 degrees and 2 
degrees and only rarely approach either extreme. The records for New York, 
just north of the forty-first, are 106 degrees and -15 degrees, and the 
extremes are approached with disconcerting frequency. By European 
standards, New England winters and southern summers were long and brutal."
                          ***
[Source: John Steele Gordon, "An Empire Of Wealth: The Epic History of 
American Economic Power." To purchase a copy go 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060093625/newsscancom/ref=nosim>, 
or to find a library copy of his "Business of America" visit RLG's 
RedLightGreen service at 
<http://www.redlightgreen.com/ucwprod/servlet/ucw.servlets.UCWController?ACTION=EDITION&WORKID=13684117>. 
Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy 
programs.]


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