NewsScan Daily, 14 Jul 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 14 Jul 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Wi-Fi Inside
        Internet Voting in 2004
        Business/Technology Disconnect on Data Disaster
        Industry Consolidation
        Privacy Appliances to Guide TIA Pattern-Recognition Searches

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Audie Murphy

WI-FI INSIDE
Intel's two top executives, Craig Barrett and Andy Grove, see Wi-Fi 
wireless communications as a powerfully disruptive force in the 
telecommunications industry, and Intel has put its full support behind the 
Wi-Fi wireless networking standard (802.11), which developed as a 
grass-roots, bottom-up movement. The company is now putting Wi-Fi circuitry 
in all of its chip sets for portable computers, investing widely in Wi-Fi 
industry start-ups, and conducting a $300 million advertising campaign 
promoting its wireless Centrino brand. Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Networking 
News says: "Intel has raised the level of the water and is floating all the 
boats." Intel intends to test the a combination of wireless technologies, 
including Wi-Fi, to bring broadband Internet connections directly to homes. 
(New York Times 14 Jul 2003)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/technology/14WIFI.html

INTERNET VOTING IN 2004
The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, which involved 
only 84 voters in 2000, is set to balloon next year when as many as 100,000 
citizens in the military and living abroad will have the option of casting 
their votes via the Internet. The Pentagon-run SERVE program will be 
limited to eligible voters from South Carolina and Hawaii, as well as 
residents from selected counties in Arkansas, Florida, Minnesota, North 
Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington. If the test proves 
successful, the $22-million program could be expanded to include 6 million 
voters in the military and their dependents, as well as nonmilitary 
citizens living abroad. Some observers have voiced security concerns over 
electronic voting, however. "It wouldn't take much for some smart hacker to 
send around a virus that lays in wait for someone to issue a vote," says a 
project manager for the Center for Public Integrity. Meanwhile, Polli 
Brunelli, director of the Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program, 
says her office is taking unprecedented security measures to ensure system 
integrity. "With this population, we have made the casting of the Internet 
ballot as safe, if not safer, than with the mail-in ballots. If we reach a 
point where things are vulnerable and we can't guard against that, we won't 
go forward." (AP 12 Jul 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030712/D7S7VLEG1.html

BUSINESS/TECHNOLOGY DISCONNECT ON DATA DISASTER
U.S. business executives may be a bit overly optimistic in their estimates 
of the impact a major data disaster would have on their operations. A 
survey sponsored by data storage firm EMC indicates that only 14% of senior 
business executives regard their company's data as very vulnerable, 
compared to 52% of senior IT executives. And only 9% of business execs said 
it would take three days or more to get back to normal following a data 
disaster, compared with 23% of tech executives. "Our customers tell us that 
their greatest challenge isn't backing up their information -- it's 
recovering and resuming operations in a timely manner. We don't believe 
U.S. business leaders are being misled by their IT teams. Instead, it is 
likely a misperception that, if the data is backed up, there is no issue," 
says an executive VP for EMC. Meanwhile, European executives were more in 
synch with their IT counterparts regarding the likely vulnerability of 
their data -- 40% of business executives and 44% of technology executives 
regarded their data as very vulnerable. (CNet News.com 11 Jul 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1009_3-1025121.html?tag=fd_top

INDUSTRY CONSOLIDATION
Computer Associates (CA) chairman and CEO Sanjay Kumar says that the global 
technology industry is going through a period of "substantial vendor 
consolidation" that will continue as customers move to work with fewer 
vendors in a more strategic way. "There are too many players. Large 
companies will survive, small companies will continue to pop up and a few 
will innovate their way to success. But companies without sufficient scale 
will be most vulnerable." He explained: "Real progress isn't going to be 
measured in just finding new ways to use technology; it's going to be 
measured by making complex tasks simple... I believe that partnerships 
between technology vendors and customers are the future of this business, 
not a fad or a temporary measure to see us all through a period of tight IT 
budgets." (VNUNet 14 Jul 2003)
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1142272

PRIVACY APPLIANCES TO GUIDE TIA PATTERN-RECOGNITION SEARCHES
Data security expert Teresa Lunt, working at PARC (Palo Alto Research 
Center), has developed a "privacy appliance" intended to help prevent the 
Pentagon's Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) project from inadvertently 
violating individual rights. Privacy appliances (which filter out personal 
identifying information) include such built-in protections as an 
unalterable log of what information is returned and to whom -- and the 
software in such devices would be smart enough to adjust results based on 
what has previously been released and whether individuals can be identified 
through inference. Lunt says people have the mistaken idea that TIA would 
remove data sources from private hands and include them in a government 
database. But that's not the way it works, and in fact there's nothing new 
about it; the fact is, marketing companies routinely use data mining 
techniques to look for customer patterns that would support corporate sales 
programs, and under TIA those existing techniques would merely be applied 
to the relatively new problem of identifying and monitoring potential 
terrorist operations. (AP/San Jose Mercury News 14 Jul 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/6300152.htm

*****

FLASH CARD
      "When you wish to instruct be brief -- so that people's minds can 
quickly grasp what you have to say, understand your point, and retain it 
accurately. Unnecessary words just spill over the side of a mind already 
crammed to the full." (Cicero)

AUDIE MURPHY
      Today's honorary subscriber is the most decorated U.S. combat soldier 
of World War II, Audie Murphy (1924-1971), who received every decoration 
for valor that this country had to offer, plus five decorations presented 
to him by France and Belgium.
      Beginning his service as an Army Private, he quickly rose to the rank 
of Staff Sergeant, and later was given a "battlefield" commission as a 2nd 
Lieutenant. He was wounded three times and fought in nine major European 
Theater campaigns.
      Murphy, one of 12 children, grew up poor as the son of sharecroppers 
in Texas. To help feed the family, he hunted small game, becoming very 
skilled with a rifle. When the United States declared war in December of 
1941, Audie attempted to enlist in the Marines but was turned away for 
being too small (5' 5"). He enlisted in the regular Army as an infantryman, 
and was soon fighting in Europe and distinguishing himself with valor in 
numerous battles with enemy forces.
      Upon his release from the Army in September 1945, Murphy went to 
Hollywood and spent the next few years playing bit parts in low-budget 
movies. Then in 1949 he landed a starring role in a film "Bad Boy" and 
pursued an acting career in which he starred in 26 films, 23 of them 
Westerns. In 1955 he starred as himself in "To Hell and Back," a film 
biography based on his 1949 best selling autobiography with the same title. 
When he retired from acting in 1965 he had a total of 44 feature films to 
his credit. One of his more notable roles was as the young soldier in 
director John Huston's version of Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage."
      Murphy's combat experiences did not leave him unscarred.  For years 
he suffered from insomnia and other emotional problems commonly referred to 
as "Battle Fatigue." At one point he became addicted to prescription drugs 
taken to relieve these symptoms, but had the good fortune to recognize his 
addiction and stop all such medication. Citing his own experience, he spoke 
openly on the government's obligation to deal with the emotional impact war 
has on veterans and to extend health care benefits to cover the mental 
health problems of returning war veterans.
     In 1971 at age 46, Murphy died during a business trip in a private 
plane that crashed into a mountainside near Roanoke, Virginia. He was 
buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery where his 
gravesite, near the Amphitheater, is visited annually in numbers second 
only to those of President Kennedy's grave.

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00007G1ZO/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for  the DVD of director John Huston's version of Stephen Crane's "The Red 
Badge of Courage" -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate 
all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.)

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