NewsScan Daily, 4 Aug 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 4 Aug 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        New Life for Cray's Supercomputing Vision
        Six Degrees of Separation on the Net
        Mimail Worm Masquerades as Note from Net Administrator
        New Online Futures Market Bets on Next White House Scandal
        'Nano' Enjoys Mega-Popularity

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Montgomery Ward
        The Hackers Have Become Boring

NEW LIFE FOR CRAY'S SUPERCOMPUTING VISION
Vector supercomputing is coming back. Seymour Cray's philosophy of 
supercomputing, relying on one super-fast machine for large-scale 
scientific number-crunching, was pushed aside in recent in recent years by 
designs using thousands or tens-of-thousands of inexpensive, off-the-shelf 
microprocessors connected to form so-called "massively parallel computers" 
-- a design shift encouraged when the government reduced supercomputing 
funding in the post-Cold War years. But the Cray approach is being given 
new life by Burton J. Smith of Tera Computing, which bought the original 
Cray Research company in 2000. "The pendulum swung way too far," he says. A 
number of scientific projects have been a disappointment because the 
massively parallel computers they used proved inefficient and difficult to 
program. The Cray approach is now seen as a natural alternative. (New York 
Times 4 Aug 2003)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2003/08/04/technology/04SUPE.html

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION ON THE NET
The parlor game "Six Degrees of Separation" (based on the idea that you're 
only six friends distant by telephone call to anyone in the world) is the 
idea behind new companies like Visible Path and Spoke, which examine social 
networks on the Internet to see who-knows-whom. By scanning information in 
electronic calendars and address book to find networks of friends or 
correspondents, the software is able to answer questions such as "Is there 
anyone I know who knows someone who could get me through to Arnold 
Schwarzenegger?" Jay Ziskrout, the chief operating officer of a music 
publishing company, enthuses: "I was actually blown away. Instead of 
sending a mass e-mail to my whole office -- or walking around to everyone 
saying, 'Do you know this person? Do you know so-and-so?' -- this is really 
a great way of doing it." David Gilmour, founder of Tacit Knowledge 
Systems, agrees: "I think something really big is about to unfold here. 
Within five years, software that chases around and picks up the bread 
crumbs you leave behind, and does so for the benefit of you as an 
individual, will be ubiquitous." Hewlett-Packard is already exploring 
whether cell phones could perform similar information-sharing for 
networking or dating applications, and many privacy advocates are wondering 
about unintended consequences. One of them says: "So far there hasn't been 
the Chernobyl of social network analysis. But believe me, it's out there... 
Like crooks keep two sets of books, I think people are going to keep two 
sets of Outlook files. One for Visible Path, one for themselves." (AP/USA 
Today 4 Aug 2003)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2003-08-03-connected_x.htm

MIMAIL WORM MASQUERADES AS NOTE FROM NET ADMINISTRATOR
A new worm, dubbed "mimail," began infecting systems Friday, disguising 
itself as an e-mail message from a corporate or ISP network administrator. 
The subject line reads "Your Account" and the body reads, "Hello there, I 
would like to inform you about important information regarding your e-mail 
address. This e-mail address will be expiring. Please read attachment for 
details. Best regards, Administrator." Of course, if the unwary recipient 
clicks on the attachment labeled "message.zip," a script is executed, with 
the malicious worm using that script to mass e-mail itself, clogging 
networks and causing e-traffic gridlock. Symantec Security Response senior 
director Sharon Ruckman says the mimail virus is similar to other 
mass-mailing worms, but is unusually ingenious in its disguise. "The social 
engineering aspect is a lot more serious. You believe it was the 
administrator from your own domain, whether that is your company or your 
ISP." Also unusual is that the mass-mailing code is contained in an HTML 
file, a type not normally associated with executing programs, says Ruckman. 
(CNet News.com 1 Aug 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-5059087.html

NEW ONLINE FUTURES MARKET BETS ON NEXT WHITE HOUSE SCANDAL
In response to the Pentagon's now-discarded plans for a terrorism futures 
market, academics from half a dozen U.S. universities have created an 
American Action Market, which will offer traders the opportunity to wager 
on the likelihood of various Washington political events, such as: Which 
country will the White House threaten next? Who will be the next foreign 
leader to move off the CIA payroll and onto the White House's "most wanted" 
list? Which corporation with close ties to the White House will be the next 
cloaked in scandal? The AAM will begin registering traders in September and 
will open for business October 1. "It's quite amazing, the Pentagon and the 
White House are very fertile imaginative fields these days," says one of 
the AAM founders. "(The AAM project) sounds humorous, but that just shows 
how far things have gone. We've entered the realm of fiction. Things are 
really Dr. Strangelove." Bob Forsythe, a University of Iowa professor who 
helped set up the Iowa Electronic Markets that speculate on election 
results, says such futures markets can deliver fairly accurate predictions, 
but the traders have to be knowledgeable. "You have to have informed 
traders or they don't work very well. Who are the informed traders in an 
assassination market, for example? The same's true for predicting the White 
House." (Wired.com 4 Aug 2003)
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59879,00.html

'NANO' ENJOYS MEGA-POPULARITY
Nano is hot, and if you don't think so, just check Google. More than a 
million entries containing the word "nano" pop up, according to Reuters. 
"It's kind of a fad word people use now to give the appearance of being 
high-tech," says Jim Lowe, senior editor for Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 
which defines nanotechnology as "the art of manipulating materials on an 
atomic or molecular scale, especially to build microscopic devices." The 
term -- derived from nanometer, which is a unit of measure equal to a 
billionth of a meter -- is popping up all over the place, and has become a 
special favorite of startups in search of venture capital. "This is in the 
great tradition of picking up on the latest buzz prefix or suffix and 
attaching it to your company's name to make it sound cool. And that can 
translate into more investment and better chance in the marketplace," says 
Wired Magazine senior editor Mark Robinson. Meanwhile, there are Nanotex 
trousers and a Nano Bag for cradling sleeping babies, and even a 
nano-reef.com site that instructs users on setting up and maintaining coral 
reef ecosystems in home aquariums. Enthusiasts of the latter are called… 
what else? Nano reefers. (Reuters 1 Aug 2003)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&ncid=581&e=4&u=/nm/20030803/tc_nm/biztech_nano_dc

*****

FLASH CARD
      "It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear." 
(Dick Cavett)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: MONTGOMERY WARD
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the American retailer Aaron Montgomery 
Ward (1844-1913), who in 1872 established the world's first mail-order 
business. He had previously worked for Marshall Field as a clerk and later 
a traveling salesman. As he did business with his rural customers, he came 
up with the novel concept that he could offer them better prices by selling 
to them directly, via mail-order. His idea paid off and he soon had a 
thriving business, with headquarters in Chicago.
      The first catalog of Montgomery Ward & Company was a one-page list of 
162 items attached to an order form.
      Eleven years later the catalog had grown to 240 pages with ten 
thousand items. By 1890 a thriving Montgomery Ward & Company moved into a 
new building at Michigan and Madison in the heart of Chicago's "Loop."
      In 1899 the building became a Chicago landmark when the "Spirit of 
Progress", a seventeen-foot statue of a girl, was added to the building. 
Ward's Chicago location is probably best memorialized by the city's 
lakefront that owes so much of its eye-catching beauty to his personal 
efforts. Originally, the area east of Michigan Avenue was little more than 
a dump -- piles of debris, squatters' shacks, and railroad tracks. Ward 
began a movement to clean up the lakefront, and fought for years in the 
courts until in 1897, he won, and the area became Grant Park -- an open 
area, free of all buildings except museums -- "Chicago's Front Yard."
      Ward was born in New Jersey in 1844 and moved to Michigan as a boy. 
He went to school up to the age of 14, then apprenticed to learn 
barrel-stave-making.
      He also worked as a laborer and as a shoemaker before going to work 
for Marshall Field and then starting his own mail order business. Ward made 
mail order into a primary shopping source for rural America. The company 
didn't open its first retail store until 1926, 13 years after Ward himself 
had died. After WWII, in an urbanized America, the company began its long 
slow trek toward extinction. Ward's merged with other companies, and, in 
1985, it discontinued its catalog. An attempt to resurrect the catalog in 
1991 failed. As a pure retail outlet, the company faded and finally went 
bankrupt in December of 2000. Montgomery Ward & Company or "Monkey Ward's," 
as it was affectionately dubbed by its loyal customers, was really never 
meant to be a store. The company picked up where itinerant peddlers had 
left off, making shopping available with the promise of "satisfaction 
guaranteed" to anyone living in the remote corners of a raw land.

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486223779/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Montgomery Ward's catalog for Spring and Summer of 1895 -- or look for 
it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book 
recommendations to adult literacy programs.)

THE HACKERS HAVE BECOME BORING
      A good friend of ours, who sometimes uses the pseudonym "mailstrom," 
writes to us about the trivialization of the Defcon hacker conferences :
      "It's August in Las Vegas and the weather is acting decidedly strange 
-- there's a strong cool breeze, the skies are overcast, and it's been 
spitting rain all day. It's the 11th annual Defcon Hacker Conference at the 
Alexis Park Resort, and I'm amazed to see that the hackers are actually 
queuing up and standing in orderly lines to get into the registration area 
and the conference rooms. The Goths, the punks, the longhairs, and the 
hacker babes in scanty clothing are all here, but something is terribly 
wrong. The hackers have gotten predictable and <gasp> even boring.
      "I am one of the ancients of Defcon -- I’ve been attending these 
conventions for eight years now. I've been coming to Defcon for a chance to 
meet people I've met via email, connect with friends, and to absorb the 
latest information on computer vulnerabilities. Of course the games and the 
parties were always fun, too: Spot the Fed, Hack the Flag, and Hacker 
Jeopardy. I've been grateful for the opportunity to learn, share, and 
engage in intellectually challenging conversations. But much of that has 
melted like sugar in the rain. The only thing good about Defcon this year 
are the t-shirts.
      "The first Defcon I attended was a small, intimate gathering of about 
500 people. This year the rough count appears to be in the neighborhood of 
7500. Where my first "Con" had an atmosphere of a grass roots organization 
and people were anxious to share their knowledge and form bonds of 
friendship, Defcon 11 is full of vacuous hangers-on and tired clichés of 
green hair, improbable body piercings, black clothing, and lots of chains. 
I had a difficult time even finding a hacker who was willing to share some 
of his skill with the son of a friend of mine. My request for assistance 
was met by jeers and snubs. This was not the attitude I expected from comrades.
      "And where are the famous hackers who helped create Defcon? They 
scuttle through the hotel using side doors and the protection of their 
bodyguard "goons" to avoid coming in contact with the scores of fans. You 
can't talk to them. They won't even acknowledge you in a crowd if you are 
not one of their "elite" members. They have taken on large egos normally 
associated with histrionic movie stars and I’m not even certain they still 
engage in hacking. They have become celebrities -- roll out the red carpet 
but no pictures, please. But, bring out the boom mikes and TV cameras and 
they magically reappear.
      "The lectures and training sessions are recycled versions of the same 
old stuff. I haven't heard a truly new idea at Defcon for about three years 
now. I kept coming in the hope that it would get better, but the material 
is too entry-level and mainstream to be of any interest to us old farts. 
Apparently the plethora of automatic, 
"you-don’t-have-to-know-what-you're-doing" type of hacker tools has stifled 
the creativity of hackers to find new and interesting methods of cracking 
network systems. Instead of challenging conversations, all I hear is advice 
on how to chuck twelve beers and not barf.
      "I won’t stand in another line. I refuse to pay $5 for a bottle of 
water. I have no respect for the posers and even less for the celebrity 
hackers who snub young boys who want to learn at the hands of the masters. 
Maybe I’ll start my own hacker conference and tell everyone to leave their 
egos and automated hacking tools at the door.

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