NewsScan Daily, 15 August 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 15 August 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Internet Stays Light During Blackout
        PC Sales Could Reach New High in 2003
        Microsoft Teams With UK Firm on European Music Service
        Review of Electronic Voting Machines Decision in Maryland
        Metcalfe on Spam
        Wealth of Corporate Secrets on the Web

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Honorary Subscriber: Jimmy Bland
        Safe & Sound in the Cyber Age

INTERNET STAYS LIGHT DURING BLACKOUT
During yesterday's blackout in northeast U.S. states and several major 
Canadian cities, wireless networks and Internet connections allowed people 
to keep communicating. The chief business officer of Equinix, which 
operates Internet Business Exchange centers that serve more than 90% of the 
world's Internet routes, explains: "We lost all utility power out there, 
but we immediately went to battery power for a few seconds, at which point 
all of our major generators kicked in" to allow normal operations that were 
"totally seamless to customers." Internet customers therefore suffered "no 
disruptions whatsoever" to their Internet service resulting from the 
electrical system failures. (AP/San Jose Mercury News 15 Aug 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/6540489.htm

PC SALES COULD REACH NEW HIGH IN 2003
Gartner has adjusted its estimate of worldwide PC shipments upward to 161 
million this year, hitting a new benchmark for the industry, says Gartner 
analyst Kiyomi Yamada. Gartner recently rejiggered its method of accounting 
for unit shipments to include units previously overlooked, says Yamada. The 
error was revealed when Gartner noticed a discrepancy between the number of 
components, such as processors, and the number of finished PCs. The 
difference pointed to a previously unrecognized market for so-called 
white-box PCs -- machines that are usually assembled and sold by small 
companies. Gartner has since gone back and revised its PC unit shipment 
numbers for at least the past six years, boosting those figures 
accordingly. Meanwhile, IDC has predicted a 2003 unit shipment increase of 
6.3% to 145 million, but analyst Roger Kay says the firm may revise those 
numbers upward, based on hot sales of notebook computers. (CNet News.com 14 
Aug 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1003_3-5063927.html?tag=lh

MICROSOFT TEAMS WITH UK FIRM ON EUROPEAN MUSIC SERVICE
Microsoft and London-based On Demand Distribution (OD2) have teamed up to 
offer a pay-per-song pan-European Internet music service modeled after 
Apple's popular U.S. iTunes service. OD2 possesses the largest catalog of 
legal digital music in Europe, listing more than 200,000 tracks by 8,500 
artists on all five record labels, plus a healthy representation of 
independents. The downloads will be priced at 99 euro cents ($1.12) apiece 
and can be accessed through the MSN Music Club or Tiscali Music Club using 
Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 software. The bold move has caught the 
attention of European Union regulators who are still pursuing an antitrust 
case against the software giant and have specifically targeted the Windows 
Media Player software in their investigation. "We like that the European 
consumer now has access to songs for 99 cents," says an EU spokesman, but 
the new deal "reinforces the impression" that businesses are designing 
services for Media Player because of its dominance. "This shows how 
important it is to have your particular media player software linked to the 
dominant desktop." (AP 14 Aug 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030814/D7STU4880.html

REVIEW OF ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES DECISION IN MARYLAND
A Johns Hopkins University study finding security flaws in Diebold Systems 
electronic voting machines has led the state of Maryland to seek a thorough 
review of the software before going further with the $55.6 contract. 
Hopkins professor Avi Rubin characterizes the code used in the voting 
systems as not even meriting "a C-minus grade in an undergraduate 
computer-programming course." Maryland is one of the first states to adopt 
a unified electronic voting system statewide. Diebold has said that the 
code viewed by the Johns Hopkins report was "less than 5 percent" of the 
whole application, but Hopkins researcher Rubin insists: "We have claimed 
that, in the Diebold code we examined, 'cryptography, when used at all, is 
used incorrectly.' We stand by this claim. Every use of cryptography in the 
Diebold code is flawed." (Wired News 12 Aug 2003)
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59976,00.html

METCALFE ON SPAM
Internet pioneer Bob Metcalfe, perhaps best known as the creator of 
Ethernet, told an interviewer seeking solutions for the spam problem: 
"Bringing the government in to try to solve the spam problem is a seriously 
bad idea. There are two solutions. One -- the legal route -- is to start 
regulating speech, which is a slippery slope. The other solution, the right 
one, is some form of postage, to introduce the novel (for the Internet) 
idea of costs -- other than the costs in time to all of us who have to 
clean the stuff out of our boxes each day. Not postage paid to the 
government -- to the carriers, the Internet service providers; they're the 
ones that have to pay for all the infrastructure to actually carry the 
stuff. You want to dump a ton of mail on me and my customers? That will 
cost you twelve cents or thirteen cents or a penny or a tenth of a penny 
each -- as soon as you have a billing mechanism for mail, spam ceases to be 
economic. The problem right now is that e-mail is free, and free is really 
cheap... Unfortunately, the people who built the Internet were not 
concerned with spam. They weren't concerned with economics. They weren't 
concerned with security. So as a result the Internet has economic problems 
and security problems. We were hippie graduate students -- we didn't think 
anyone should be charging for anything. Our food was free; the government 
was paying our salary." (American Spectator Aug/Sep 2003 not yet posted)

WEALTH OF CORPORATE SECRETS ON THE WEB
Many documents posted online may contain sensitive corporate or personal 
information, according to AT&T researcher Simon Byers, who was able to 
unearth hidden information from thousands of Microsoft Word documents 
posted on the Web using an ordinary search engine and a random selection of 
keywords. Byers targeted Word documents because they're so common, but he 
stressed that other document formats, such as Adobe PDF, may contain 
similar hidden information. After downloading the Word files, Byer used the 
free software tools "antiword" and "catdoc" to convert them to plain text. 
Then, using a simple script he wrote, Byers was able to locate text that 
had been deleted from the original Word files, including people's names and 
other personal identifiers, e-mail headers, network paths and text from 
related documents. "The worst is erased text. This has bitten people 
surprisingly often," says Bruce Schneier, a security expert with 
Counterpane. Microsoft Office UK marketing manager Neil Laver says the 
company is working on ways to better ensure sensitive information is not 
inadvertently leaked in files. The next version of Office 2003 will include 
tools that will allow users to remove personal information from documents 
as well as new "information rights management" software that will enable an 
author to determine who can read or forward a document. Meanwhile, Schneier 
recommends converting documents to plain ASCII before publishing online: "I 
don't know of any programs that effectively clean out the extra text." (New 
Scientist 15 Aug 2003)
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994057

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you 
don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a 
boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art." 
(Charlie Parker)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: JIMMY BLAND
      Today's Honorary Subscriber is the musician and composer James A. 
"Jimmy" Bland (1854-1911), who is considered the greatest black writer of 
American folk songs. He composed over 700 songs, including such well-known 
tunes as "In the Evening by the Moonlight" and "Oh, Dem Golden Slippers." 
In 1878, he published "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny," which, with 
"Virginny" changed to "Virginia" was the state song of Virginia from 1940 
to 1997. He also became a popular banjo player with star billing as a 
minstrel man in black-owned minstrel companies. His talent was such that he 
was often called, "The World's Greatest Minstrel Man."
      One of eight children, Bland was born a free American in Flushing, 
Long Island, N.Y. His father, Allan Bland, one of the first college-trained 
African Americans, earned a law degree from Howard University and became 
the first black man to be appointed an examiner in the United States Patent 
Office.
      With an eight-dollar banjo his father bought him when the family 
moved to Washington, D.C., young Bland at age 12 taught himself to play 
well enough to earn spending money by playing and singing in the streets. 
By the time he was 14, he had become professional and was entertaining in 
hotels, restaurants and for private parties. At 15, he started composing 
some short pieces of his own.
      After finishing high school, he strummed and sang his way partly 
through Howard University but at 17, he was banned from the school for 
trying to put on a musical. While at Howard University, he met a Professor 
White, who taught him how to write songs and music. Encouraged by White, he 
composed "Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny," and on the basis of this one song 
at age 19 he was hired by the Primrose and West Minstrel Company for their 
new show in Baltimore.
      As a young man in his 20s, he worked the minstrel shows and 
eventually joined Colonel Jack Harvey's minstrel troupe and toured the 
United States. In 1881, Bland's salary was $10,000 a year; the highest ever 
paid a minstrel man. Then Bland and Harvey's minstrel group went to Europe 
where they gave a command performance at Buckingham Palace before Queen 
Victoria and her husband. When Harvey's show came back to the States, Bland 
stayed in London. During the twenty years he lived abroad, he toured the 
continent earning good money. The European music community, especially the 
Germans, put him on a par with John Philip Sousa and Stephen Foster.
      Living high and carelessly with his money, however, Bland finally 
went broke and was forced to return penniless to Washington. He found 
little work for poor pay. His health gave out and he moved to Philadelphia 
where he succumbed to tuberculosis on May 6, 1911. Buried as a pauper in 
Merion Cemetery near Philadelphia, no notice was taken of his death until 
1939, when the Lions of Virginia found his unmarked grave and erected a 
monument at the site.

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0939479214/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for "A History of the Minstrel Show" by Frank W. Sweet -- or look for it in 
your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations 
to adult literacy programs.)

SAFE & SOUND IN THE CYBER AGE
      In their column today, Chey and Stephen Cobb suggest: "Spreading the 
Secret Word."
              ***
      Imagine you're a spy, the kind depicted in novels, comic books, and 
TV shows. You're deep in enemy territory, sand in places you didn't know 
you had places, and you have to get an important message out to your 
support team who are thousands of miles away. The very unfriendly local 
government is watching your every move and they are very interested in your 
phone calls and e-mail messages. What do you do? You climb to the top of 
the nearest dune, pull out your latest high tech toy and bounce your 
encrypted transmissions off a "secret" satellite.
      That's the way it happens in the movies, but here are some scenarios 
a little closer to reality. Instead of a spy you're part of a people's 
underground secretly documenting the atrocities of your local dictatorship. 
Or, you're a relief worker trying to send a message from a country whose 
leaders are telling the world that nobody there is going hungry, even 
though you have proof they are lying. Maybe you need to tell the outside 
world what is happening inside your highly repressive country. This list 
could go on and on, but we'll spare the gory details.
      One possible answer to getting these important messages out is to 
encrypt them. You could embed a file in a graphic, you could store an 
encrypted file on an accessible FTP server, or you could even send 
encrypted e-mails. Maybe you could even video-record human rights abuses 
and send it out as an encrypted multimedia file. This is both cool and 
scary at the same time. If things go wrong, lives could be at stake. But 
even though all of this is possible today, with off-the-shelf tools, where 
in the world do you turn for answers on how to put it all together and 
actually deploy it? It's not as if encryption is something the average aid 
worker or office worker knows a lot about.
      Recently we've discovered a surprising organization that was started 
to help those in need of encryption -- the repressed, the downtrodden, aid 
workers, and concerned citizen groups -- to set up cipher systems and teach 
how to use them, so they can safely document problems and get important 
messages to the outside world. The organization is called the CryptoRights 
Foundation (www.cryptorights.org). What surprised us first was the fact 
that the organization was started, and run, by one of the original 
cypherpunks, Dave del Torto. You may recognize some of the other 
cypherpunks by name: Eric Hughes, Tim May, Ian Goldberg, "patron saint" 
Phil Zimmerman, and so on.
      These are amazingly intelligent cryptographers and they could all 
have high-paying, prestigious corporate positions if they chose that path. 
But Dave's organization is basically run from his dining room in a big 
house in San Francisco. "Shoestring budget" doesn't even begin to describe 
their funding situation. Yet we're amazed at the countries Dave has been to 
and the new technologies he and his volunteers are developing to help 
people in some of the situations we have just described. All with literally 
no money -- we expect them to hold crypto-car washes and hash-bake sales soon.
      Now we all know how easy it is to set up and use encryption software 
(cue laugh track). We've all probably installed PGP at one point to send 
encrypted e-mails. We created our public and private keys, and then 
wondered, "Now, what?" A week later we had forgotten our pass phrase 
because we didn't use it much because nobody was actually sending us any 
encrypted messages. The week after that we lost our keys in a hard drive 
crash or Microsoft Windows-instigated system rebuild.
      Given that PGP is not exactly intuitive, CryptoRights is developing 
what is basically "PGP-in-a-Box" that human rights workers can have set up 
and running in no time. They are also developing -- and here we get back to 
the "agent of change in a desert of danger" scenario -- a wearable computer 
in which the video capture is set into a sort of contact lens. Imagine a 
woman (or a man, for that matter) wearing a burka and digitally taping 
nefarious deeds that the government du jour would rather go unseen. The 
footage is compressed, encrypted, and cellphoned across the border. Now 
that is information technology to get excited about.
      For more information on the CryptoRights projects, go to 
http://www.cryptorights.org/research. And remember that this organization 
is running on nickels and dimes out of a large, but increasingly crowded, 
dining room. Maybe you'll feel like helping. They'll accept anything you 
can spare -- even if it's just time and energy, or passing the word to your 
friends, bosses, employees, and so forth. At least order a T-shirt and show 
that geeks can have compassion as well as attitude.
      [Chey Cobb, CISSP, the author of "Network Security for Dummies," is 
an independent consultant (www.cheycobb.com) and a former senior technical 
security advisor to the NRO. She can be emailed as "chey at patriot dot 
net." Stephen Cobb, CISSP, helped develop SpamSquelcher, the first product 
that actually stops spam. He can be emailed as "scobb at eprivacygroup dot 
com."]

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