NewsScan Daily, 22 August 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 22 August 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        New Telecom Rules
        Advertisers Bid Up Keywords on Paid-Search Sites
        Online Publishers Eye Context-Based Ads
        China Search Engine Challenges Google's Top Spot
        Online Music Swappers in Fear of Lawsuits
        Listening in the Dark: 'Jane Doe' Wants to Remain Anonymous

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Safe & Sound in the Cyber Age
        Worth Thinking About: Our Changing Cities

NEW TELECOM RULES
The Federal Communications Commission has issued new rules that preserve 
the right of long-distance companies to gain access to the regional phone 
companies' voice networks at wholesale prices, but leave it to the states 
to decide how and in what places that should happen. Chairman Michael 
Powell, though, believes that long-distance companies such as AT&T should 
build their own networks rather than rely on the Baby Bells, and dissented 
from the rules, which he described as "bad policy and bad law." (San Jose 
Mercury News 22 Aug 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/6592058.htm

ADVERTISERS BID UP KEYWORDS ON PAID-SEARCH SITES
Bidding activity on the two most popular paid-search services -- Google's 
AdWords program and Overture (soon to be acquired by Yahoo) -- has boosted 
the cost of keywords that trigger ad placement along with search results. 
"There are a lot of newbies coming on board, some of whom are seriously 
inflating the bid market," says Dana Todd, a partner at SiteLab 
International. According to Overture ad marketing director Craig Wax, it's 
not uncommon for small businesses to have active bids on anywhere from 50 
to 500 keywords, while some large companies maintain bids on more than 
5,000. If prices continue rise, some search-engine experts say the love 
affair with keyword advertising will soon fizzle. "Right now, it's hot. But 
eventually, it's going to get too expensive for people," says Grantastic 
Designs marketing director Shari Thurow, who notes that keywords that sold 
for as little as $1 per click two years ago are now selling for $10 and up. 
She suggests a return to so-called "organic listings" -- industry-speak for 
search results that aren't paid for. Of course, even organic listings 
aren't exactly free -- in order to assure a top-level ranking, Web site 
owners commonly spend thousands of dollars to "search engine optimization" 
services, which examine code, site structure, linking, content and other 
design aspects to improve the chances of a prominent position in the 
results. (Wired.com 22 Aug 2003)
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60121,00.html

ONLINE PUBLISHERS EYE CONTEXT-BASED ADS
Taking a cue from the search engine market, big online publishers are 
signing up for so-called contextual advertising -- short text ads placed 
alongside published articles with a similar theme, such as an antivirus ad 
linked to a piece on the latest computer virus outbreak. So far, the 
Washington Post Co., Knight Ridder, MSNBC.com and MarketWatch.com are 
testing the waters, and other publishers, such as the New York Times' 
digital unit and the Wall Street Journal Online are in active negotiations. 
The way it works is this: advertisers enter bids for keywords or categories 
on ad networks such as Google or Overture. The publishers cede control of 
some of the space on their pages to the ad networks, which place ads next 
to like-themed stories. The advertiser then pays a certain amount whenever 
a reader clicks on its ad, and the money is split between the ad networks 
and the publishers. Few sites will release figures on contextual-ad 
revenue, but Overture CEO Ted Meisel optimistically predicts that 
contextual ads "will rapidly become a billion-dollar market." Meanwhile, 
some publishers are experiencing the pitfalls of off-the-wall placements. 
An article in the New York Post last month titled "Headless Body Was Packed 
to Go," about human remains found in a suitcase, was paired with ads for 
luggage. A Google official says the company has since added filters to 
ensure that it doesn't serve ads on pages that would be "inappropriate to 
monetize," such as articles about murders or natural disasters. (Wall 
Street Journal 22 Aug 2003)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105975068486749200,00.html (sub req'd)

CHINA SEARCH ENGINE CHALLENGES GOOGLE'S TOP SPOT
Huicong International Software is launching a campaign to unseat search 
engine giant Google from its dominant position in the market. "Huicong will 
devote itself to the research and development of Chinese search engines to 
realize the dream of China's own Google," says CEO Chen Pei. The Huicong 
search tool covers 200 million Chinese-language Web pages, and incorporates 
topic categorization, content analysis and China-region recognition. It 
also is capable of suggesting correct spellings of misspelled "pinyin" 
words -- a method of using Western letters for Chinese script. In addition, 
the tool can search MP3 files, pictures and Flash animations. (CNet 
News.com 22 Aug 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5067017.html?tag=fd_top

ONLINE MUSIC SWAPPERS IN FEAR OF LAWSUITS
A new report from NPD Group, a market research firm, suggests that threats 
of copyright infringement suits by the Recording Industry Association of 
America (RIAA) seem to be having a chilling effect on individuals who swap 
online music. The report indicates that the number of households acquiring 
music files dropped from 14.5 million in April 2003 to 12.7 million 
households in May and to only 10.4 million households in June. NPD VP Russ 
Crupnick says, "Today, file sharing is the most popular method of digital 
music acquisition. While we can't say categorically that the RIAA's legal 
efforts are the sole cause for the reduction in file acquisition, it 
appears to be more than just a natural seasonal decline." (AtNewYork.com 21 
Aug 2003)
http://www.atnewyork.com/news/article.php/3066851

LISTENING IN THE DARK: 'JANE DOE' WANTS TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS
Lawyers for an anonymous Verizon Communications customer known as "Jane 
Doe," who's accused of illegal music downloading from the Internet, have 
filed a motion in federal court in Washington, D.C., to assert her privacy 
and other constitutional rights. So far, the Recording Industry Association 
of America (RIAA) has issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to Internet service 
providers demanding the names and addresses of people it intends to sue for 
illegal use of copyrighted music found online. An RIAA official said the 
woman's arguments "have already been addressed by a federal judge -- and 
they have been rejected. Courts have already ruled that you are not 
anonymous when you publicly distribute music online." (Reuters/USA Today 21 
Aug 2003)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2003-08-21-jane-doe_x.htm

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Once we admit that there is room for newness -- that there are 
vastly more conceivable possibilities than realized outcomes -- we must 
confront the fact that there is no special logic behind the world we 
inhabit, no particular justification for why things are the way they are. 
Any number of arbitrary small perturbations along the way could have made 
the world as we know it turn out very differently." (Paul Romer)

SAFE & SOUND IN THE CYBER AGE
      This week our computer security experts Chey and Stephen Cobb write 
"Of Potatoes and Worms":
                          ****
      We interrupt our series of columns on encrypting data to bring you 
news from the agricultural front, sort of. During the last two weeks the 
world has witnessed hundreds of thousands of computer systems falling prey 
to worms. As we write this, the Sobig-F worm is reaching epidemic 
proportions, threatening to rival the 2001 Love Bug virus outbreak in terms 
of disruption wrought. We give you just one example, a good friend of ours 
who headed to France this week for a vacation. After the flight from L.A. 
to Paris he turned on his handheld computer to check e-mail and found 500 
infected messages waiting.
      A lot has been written on this topic, but we haven't seen many 
references lately to the "potato famine theory" of information system 
insecurity. This theory is a favorite of ours and it holds that a lack of 
diversity in software can be a dangerous thing, at either the enterprise or 
the national level. This might ring some bells right now if you are a CIO 
responsible for tens of thousands of Microsoft Windows or Outlook users.
      The theory gets its name from a tragic chain of events that struck 
the island of Ireland in 1845, killing, by some estimates, more than a 
million people. At that time, potatoes were the primary source of food for 
most people living there, due to the fact that potatoes produce more 
calories per acre than another other crop you can grow in that climate 
(back then, most people did not have a lot of land to work with because 
land use was controlled by English landlords, many of whom were, to say the 
very least, selfish). In fact, almost all the potatoes grown in Ireland at 
that time were of one particular strain, a strain that had been found to 
produce the most calories per acre. So when a potato fungus arrived in 
Ireland -- ironically from somewhere in the Americas -- its impact on the 
crop was exacerbated by the lack of diversity among potato strains. While 
some potato strains are more resistant to the fungus than others, the 
dominant strain in Ireland at that time was not one of them.
      The information system security analogy is this: reliance by an 
information system on one application or operating system, to the exclusion 
of others, reduces the ability of that system to survive a vulnerability in 
that operating system or application. Consider an organization that is 
using nothing but Microsoft products versus one that uses a mix of 
applications and operating systems. The Microsoft-only shop is more likely 
to have experienced widespread negative effects due to last week's Blaster 
worm (which exploited a security hole in the Windows operating system) and 
this week's Sobig-F worm (which exploits a Microsoft Outlook vulnerability)
      We're not sure how many people today are familiar with the Irish 
potato famine, so "fossil fuel dependence theory" might be a better term. 
The implications are the same: Dependence on a single source of energy, or 
software, has inherent risks. What we particularly like about both 
analogies is that they encompass economics and politics as well as strategy 
and logistics. The Irish were not growing that single dominant strain of 
potato because it tasted better than others -- apparently it did not -- 
they were growing it because the politics and economics of the time made 
maximum yield appear to be the highest good. America's dependence on fossil 
fuel and a single source of software also has economic and political 
elements (prices have been relatively low, producers politically powerful, 
and so on).
      Obviously, the dominance of Microsoft products in operating system 
and application areas has its own economic and political angles. However, 
while the reasons for Microsoft's dominance, and the extent of the negative 
impact of that dominance on other companies, have been hotly debated, very 
few people have voiced the following argument: Regardless of how secure or 
insecure Microsoft software is -- or has been, or becomes -- we think that 
using it, or any other single source, to the virtual exclusion of all 
others, will never be good security.
      In other words, even if Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative 
succeeds in making the company's products more secure than they are right 
now, it would still be foolhardy for any organization to adopt them as a 
universal standard. Unfortunately, our opinion is not shared by the 
Department of Homeland Security and other 3LAs that had best remain nameless.
      And just to show how fair and balanced our coverage is, we will say 
the same of Adobe's Acrobat format. This grows more powerful with each 
version. We use it. We love its convenience and the fact that most people 
with whom we communicate can read Acrobat documents. But the extent to 
which some government agencies are relying on it is now approaching scary.
      [Note: portions of this column first appeared in a lecture we 
delivered as part of the Master of Science program in Information Assurance 
at Norwich University, Vermont, www3.norwich.edu/msia].
       [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 can keep spam out of really big networks. He can be emailed as "scobb 
at eprivacygroup dot com."]

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: OUR CHANGING CITIES
      Cheryl Mendelson starts off her new novel, "Morningside Heights," 
with this succinct history of New York City housing that reads like a case 
history of what happened in many large urban neighborhoods throughout the 
nation.
      "This neighborhood was always middle-class and urban. The advent of 
the subway at the start of the twentieth century transformed the 
countryside so rapidly that less than a decade after the stations opened, 
the fields were gone and the massive, sedate apartment buildings that you 
see today already lined the streets. They were grand places, designed to 
persuade prosperous New York families that their bourgeois dignities could 
be preserved as well in an apartment as in a brownstone row house with a 
stoop. The building at 635 West 117th Street was similar to scores of 
others built around the same time, and, like them, it filled with tenants 
as soon as it was completed, in 1906. It had twelve stories, with four 
ample apartments per floor, each divided into a living and dining room, 
several bedrooms, two bathrooms, all large and airy, plus a small library, 
and, behind the kitchen, a miniature bedroom and bathroom for the live-in 
maid. During the Depression, the landlords carved most of the apartments 
into two or three, creating the ten to twelve on a floor that you find now. 
The cut-up layouts made no architectural sense, but in those hard times the 
new tenants could not afford to be choosy. Only a few apartments in the 
building retain the original floor plan, with the cramped kitchen and tiny 
sleeping nook where a lonely girl spent her days and nights in service to 
the family living in comfort in the other rooms.
      "In the waning years of the twentieth century, prosperity returned to 
the neighborhood, if not to the cash-strapped middle-class and poor people 
who had lived there for many decades. Lobbies were spiffed up, exteriors 
scrubbed down. One rental building after another transformed itself into an 
ownership cooperative -- 'went co-op' in New York City parlance; and rents 
and prices began climbing out of reach. The elderly residents who had come 
during the Depression and World War Two barely managed to hang on to the 
dilapidated studios and one-bedrooms where they had hoped to live out the 
few years they had left. Except for the lucky ones who were protected by 
municipal rent-control laws, everyone, old and young, scrambled to meet the 
higher monthly payments, and when they failed and were forced to move, 
their apartments were immediately sold or rented for astonishing profits to 
high-paid business people and professionals. These mobile newcomers formed 
a growing group of the well-off: working single renters and couples 
investing in 'starter homes' they planned to sell for a profit in order to 
finance bigger and better ones someplace else -- moneyed transients who 
stayed only two or three years and disappeared, leaving behind not so much 
as a forwarding address and creating a stock of near-temporary housing that 
served them much as boardinghouses and residence hotels had served their 
impoverished counterparts a hundred years earlier. The residential 
buildings became home to ever more numerous strangers, people who worked 
long hours, dressed and dined out expensively, and whose names, faces, and 
circumstances no one knew, except, perhaps, the night doorman. They didn't 
say 'good morning' or 'good night' or hold the elevator for a straggler."
                                                       ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375508368/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Cheryl Mendelson's novel "Morningside Heights" -- or look for it in 
your favorite library. [We donate all revenue from our book recommendations 
to adult literacy programs.]

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