Clips March 29 and April 1

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips March 29, 2002 and April 1

ARTICLES

Technology: Librarian testifies on behalf of Web filtering
Dutch Court Backs Software Maker KaZaA
State tech plan gets OK 
ITAA lists nine ways to counter terrorism using IT 
Europe falters on Echelon spy network
VR in courtroom lets jury ?be there?
Technology Company creates Web portal for federal job listings
High-Tech Firms Vie to Fight Terrorism 
The Long and Winding Road to Security Clearance 
Telecom's Fiber Pipe Dream
State Spam Laws Rarely Enforced
Business Cards Going Digital
DoubleClick settles Web privacy suits
Smart cards eyed as solution to long airport lines
Emergency wireless system a step closer
Computer memory prices inching up
Video bootlegger pleads guilty of violating DMCA
Bail denied for former Global Crossing worker
Animation software to be available to all
DISA seeks detection system
Arizona test-drives PKI
DOD details IT wish list
Army test drives transformation
Do metrics measure up?
Plan to Change Internet Group Is Criticized as Inadequate
Game-Design Courses Gain Favor
A Power Shift in Technology
February Computer Chip Sales Off 35%
W3C group to tackle Web services standards
Q&A: Java creator Gosling says .Net falls short of expectations
Yahoo unveils new privacy, marketing policies
Deaf Kazakh pupils go online
Net calls set to attract Indians
E-mail in haste, repent at leisure
Bust in Bangalore - Sept. 11 dealt a cruel blow to India's version of Silicon
Valley
Navy sets up a network command
Groups push for cable Web competition

****************
Associated Press 
Technology: Librarian testifies on behalf of Web filtering

PHILADELPHIA (March 28, 2002 7:45 p.m. EST) - Libraries that use vigilance,
communication and technology can successfully keep pornography off their
computer terminals and fulfill the requirements of a federal law without
stepping on the First Amendment, a librarian testified Thursday.

David Biek, main library manager of the Tacoma, Wash., Public Library, said
Internet filtering software keeps pornography from his patrons. The library
also has established policies and procedures to remedy cases in which the
software blocks something it shouldn't, he said.

Filters have "made it possible for us to continue to deliver services
effectively, including the Internet," said Biek, the first witness called by
the government in a case challenging the Children's Internet Protection Act.
The law requires libraries to install filtering software on computers by July
or lose federal technology grants.

The trial, which is being heard in U.S. District Court by three judges, stems
from two challenges filed by the American Library Association and a group of
public libraries and library patrons. The American Civil Liberties Union is
arguing the case on their behalf.

The government contends that the law wouldn't force libraries to do anything -
if they don't want filters, they can just turn down the federal subsidies. They
also argue that libraries spend lots of time and effort in selecting what's in
their print collections, so they should be able to use the same selection
criteria in judging what people can see online.

Biek contested arguments from librarians who testified for the plaintiffs
earlier in the week that filters are inexact.

He told the judges that a review of his patrons' Web habits found that 95
percent of the denied sites were blocked correctly and in accordance to the
library's policy prohibiting online pornographic images. The library also can
easily override the software's decision when a visitor or staff has discovered
a site was wrongly blocked, he said.

The Tacoma library also gives any patron whose site has been blocked the option
of looking at a text-only version - even if it's a pornography site. That would
be allowed under the Children's Internet Protection Act, which calls for
protection against "visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or
harmful to minors," he said.

Opponents of the legislation contend the filtering software often makes bad
decisions, blocking sites with information on breast cancer and safe sex, for
example. They also say filters make the same material off-limits to everyone,
regardless of whether the viewer is a child or an adult.

"You allow children access to all print materials ... so a 10-year-old boy can
view Playboy ... but if a 45-year-old female physician goes online and wants to
see Miss September, she couldn't, could she?" asked ACLU attorney Chris Hansen.

"No," Biek replied.

Also testifying Thursday was an analyst for a technology testing firm who said
filtering software performs much better than the plaintiffs claimed.

Chris Lemmon of eTesting Labs said tests of four filtering systems found they
correctly blocked from nearly 83 percent to 98 percent of pornographic sites
and incorrectly blocked from none to 7 percent of unobjectionable sites.

He acknowledged to the judges, however, that when trying to "fool" the filters
to tag inoffensive Web sites as pornography, testers "stayed away from the gray
areas" and used straightforward sites that contained not a hint of racy
content.

"Well, then how good is the test?" said U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III.
"It may be a real easy test, depending on what you pick." 

****************
Los Angeles Times
Dutch Court Backs Software Maker KaZaA
Reuters

A Dutch appeals court ruled that the maker of computer software that lets
people download music, movies and other copyright-protected material isn't
liable for copyright infringement.

The court overturned a judgment against KaZaA, which was convicted in November
of violating copyright law. Because the shared files contain
copyright-protected material, KaZaA was ordered to block users from downloading
songs.

But the Amsterdam appellate court quashed the ruling, saying that the users of
KaZaA's Media Desktop software were responsible for the copyright infringement,
and not the maker or distributor of the computer program. It also said that the
KaZaA program wasn't exclusively designed to download copyright protected
works.

Court officials were not immediately available to comment on the report.

KaZaA called the ruling "an important victory" over music copyright
organizations that lodged the case in the Netherlands.
****************
Prince George?s County Journal
State tech plan gets OK 
By MARGO ABADJIAN 
Journal staff writer 
     The Maryland State Board of Education this week approved a three-year plan
aimed at fully integrating technology as a teaching and learning tool in
Maryland public schools. 
    ``The Maryland Plan for Technology in Education 2002-2005" was prepared by
the Maryland Business Roundtable for Education and MSDE. 
    Just over two weeks ago, MBRT issued a report on access in Maryland public
schools to technology-based resources, including computers. That study, done in
cooperation with MSDE, found that Maryland has reached its goal of having one
modern computer for every five students. 
    Prince George's County now has a ratio of seven students for each modern
computer. 
    ``Once that promise has been delivered ... the next step is making sure
that the technology that is available is being used for its best and greatest
use, which we think is learning," said June Streckfus, MBRT executive director.

    The new plan calls on the state to shift its emphasis from improving
technology infrastructure to expanding the use of technology as a learning
tool. 
    The plan recommends specific actions, including the development of online
tools to be used to assess teachers' technology skills; alignment of teacher
preparation curricula with Maryland Teacher Technology Standards; and online
access to technology-infused lesson plans. 
    ``The real purpose of public education has never been to prepare students
for the classroom, but for the world beyond it," State Schools Superintendent
Nancy Grasmick said in a written statement. 
    Although infrastructure improvements do not receive as much attention in
the new plan as they did in previous technology plans for the state, they still
account for about half its $196 million annual budget. 
    The plan allocates more than $44 million annually to the purchase of
computers, upgraded file servers, network gear and software. Another $55
million would be allocated to connectivity fees and improved technical support.

    The plan also calls for more than $40 million annually to be allocated for
professional development in the use of technology over the next three years.
Another $24.9 million annually is recommended for integrating digital content
into classroom instruction. 
    MBRT notes that much of the funding recommended for the plan is not ``new
money," but funds already being expended by the federal government, state funds
and matching local funds. Streckfus said the plan will require roughly $60 to
$70 million in new money. 
    While Maryland has made a lot of progress in incorporating basic technology
skills in teaching and learning in its public schools, Streckfus said,
significant professional development is still needed to bring about the
integration of technology in ``day-in, day-out teaching." 
    Streckfus said the MBRT board will take the plan to gubernatorial
candidates in hopes they will endorse it. As for this budget year, MBRT will be
closely watching state legislation that would adopt recommendations made by the
Thornton Commission. That commission recommended increased funding for
technology, among other programs. 
    Judith D. Finch, chief of learning technology support group for county
public schools, in a recent interview called MBRT's recent technology access
study a ``very important tool." 
    She said the study ``allows school buildings to look more closely at what
they're doing to ensure that technology is interwoven in the [teaching
process]." 
    Finch said Prince George's County schools are intimately involved in
several grant projects and collaborative initiatives aimed at training teachers
to better use technology as a teaching tool. 
    MBRT is a statewide coalition of more than 100 major Maryland employers
committed to improving student achievement in the state. 
    The full technology plan is available at www.msde.state.md.us/technology in
the News Center.
****************
Government Computer News
ITAA lists nine ways to counter terrorism using IT 

The Immigration and Naturalization Service recently sent to the Office of
Homeland Security recommendations from the private-sector on how to conduct
counterterrorism operations through the use of integrated IT. 

Information Technology Association of America officials and member companies
met with the INS and came up with nine suggestions during a meeting late last
year. 

INS Commissioner James Ziglar said the recommendations would help provide
businesses with investment advice and a better understanding of law enforcement
and intelligence operations. 

ITAA recommendations are: 


Use federal enterprise planning to define agencies? business needs for
countering terrorist threats. 


Appoint a partner that would have authority to manage the enterprise. 


Delineate the parts of the federal government that participate in the fight
against terrorism. 


Develop and record the business objectives that would result from this
initiative. 


Assemble the data required to support these processes. 


Develop and maintain an inventory of interagency projects available for
agencies to use while the management and administrative structures of the
federal enterprise are constructed. 


Work with the administration to examine budget mechanisms that will support
federal enterprise projects. 


Establish and maintain common project management structures and reporting to
standardize interagency IT processes. 


Identify a legal review and policy group to support federal enterprise
projects. 


****************
ZDNet
Europe falters on Echelon spy network

Nearly seven months after the European Parliament adopted a report recognizing
the existence of Echelon, an international spy system designed to listen in on
private and commercial communications, experts say that little has been
accomplished in dealing with the network. 
Privacy experts want to see limits placed on systems like Echelon or at least
have them made accountable--a need only strengthened by the terrorist attacks
of Sept. 11 and the advent of the international "war on terror." But those
experts say taking action is made difficult partly by the public becoming
accustomed to a world where everyone, including the government, is assumed to
be listening in. 

"The real issue is the maturing of public perception," said Simon Davies,
director of U.K.-based Privacy International. "Now it's conventional wisdom,
people know they're being spied on. Two years ago it was stunning news. But
because people haven't heard personal horror stories...to some extent the issue
has passed into legend." 

The Echelon investigation was originally sparked by a 1997 European Union
report on the Appraisal of the Technology of Political Control, written by
Steve Wright of the Omega Foundation. In the U.K. the story was picked up by
The Daily Telegraph, which ran an article by Davies on Wright's paper and
conveyed to the British public the notion that their telephone, e-mail and
wireless communications were being routinely intercepted and scanned by a
U.S.-controlled intelligence network. 

By the time the EU's investigation was completed last year, however, the public
had become somewhat used to such stories, according to Davies. 

Indeed, the Echelon report--accepted on Sept. 5, just days before the terrorist
attacks--refuted many of the media speculations on the extent of the system by
explaining its limitations. For example, the report found that Echelon relies
heavily on satellite interceptions, even though only a small proportion of
communications use satellite links. Limitations of manpower and the huge volume
of traffic intercepted mean that Echelon cannot boast exhaustive coverage, the
report said. 

Echelon has "access to only a very limited proportion of cable and radio
communications and can analyze an even more limited proportion of those
communications," the report stated. 

However, the report also hinted at the likely existence of other communications
systems. 

"You can't overestimate the potential for those systems to create comprehensive
surveillance over the entire communications perspective," said Davies. 

However, Davies and other experts say that now that Echelon's existence is
officially recognized, it may be possible to turn the debate toward making
national security systems more accountable. Many have pointed out, for example,
that for all its surveillance capabilities, the U.S. National Security Agency
failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks from taking place. 

"Once (intelligence organizations such as) MI5 or the NSA become a closed shop,
and unaccountable, they become increasingly less efficient," Davies said. "That
simply is unacceptable when dealing with the security of a nation." 

At the same time, privacy experts warn that the urge to combat terrorism could
lead to the erosion of personal liberties. 

Cybercrime on the agenda
The Council of Europe, which includes nearly all European nations and counts
the U.S., Japan and Canada as non-voting members, is discussing changes to the
so-called "cybercrime treaty," which will address monitoring and decoding
terrorist communications. Some fear the changes could place limits on
encryption and increase electronic surveillance. 

"It's not the solution to take American law and try to apply it to all the
European countries," said David Nataf, a French lawyer who consulted on the
Echelon report. "What's inside this cybercrime treaty is inspired by American
laws, and I deplore it deeply." 

Nataf argues the only real way to limit surveillance, which will take years to
catch on, is the widespread use of encrypted communications--that and continued
awareness of how governments are exercising their powers. 

"The answer is to be vigilant and be aware that the government can be your
enemy," Nataf said.
****************
USA Today
Online gamble pays off for Internet sports books

As March Madness climaxes in this weekend's Final Four frenzy, gambling action
in cyberspace will be even wilder than the men's college basketball
championship at the Georgia Dome.

The Internet version of the pick and roll is illegal, but that hasn't stopped
the annual tournament from becoming a top moneymaker for Internet bookmakers.
When the new champion is crowned Monday night, one top operator projects his
Web site will have rung up as much as $2 million in bets  for each day of the
tourney.

Even the Super Bowl, another major draw for sports gamblers, "is sort of a
non-event in comparison," adds Steve Schillinger, a co-founder of World Sports
Exchange.

In less than a decade, the online gambling industry has morphed from unheralded
walk-on to a multibillion-dollar-a-year powerhouse. Interactive Web sites
instantly accommodate gamblers betting on sports teams or playing such casino
games as poker and roulette.

Authorities have tried to crack down with targeted prosecutions. But technology
has all but trumped federal and state law. And congressional efforts to enact a
tougher anti-gambling law have been bogged down in disagreement.

The result? Millions of gamblers trading flesh-and-blood bookies for Internet
replacements.

"Online sports gambling is clearly illegal today," says Sebastian Sinclair, CFO
of Christiansen Capital Advisors, a New York consulting firm that studies the
gaming industry. "But how effective has that prohibition been so far? Not
very."

Clearly, pornography isn't the only industry that's figured out how to make
money from mouse clicks.

Roughly 1,400 Web sites run by about 300 companies have launched since 1995,
according to Christiansen Capital. The firm projects that gross online sports
wagering for 2003 will reach $63.5 billion.

Last year, gamblers worldwide lost about $3 billion at online sites. By
comparison, gamblers at Nevada and New Jersey casinos lost $13.8 billion.

During February, SportingbetUSA.com registered more than 14.4 million
impressions  potential viewings of the firm's Internet ads  according to an
analysis conducted for USA TODAY by Jupiter Media Metrix.

"You're seeing some hugely profitable businesses," Sinclair says. The
fast-growing industry has tapped "a deep and latent demand" for sports betting,
he says.

That's precisely what worries gambling critics, including the National
Collegiate Athletic Association, sponsors of the Final Four.

In congressional testimony last summer, William Saum, the NCAA's director of
agent, gambling and amateurism activities, warned that online betting could
lead to a resurgence of the point-shaving scandals that tarnished basketball
programs at Northwestern University and Arizona State University during the
1990s.

"When people place wagers on college games, there is always the potential that
the integrity of the contest may be jeopardized and the welfare of
student-athletes may be threatened," Saum said.

So why haven't government regulators and law enforcement authorities shut down
the industry? Location, location, location. Technically, the Interstate Wire
Act bans companies from using U.S. phone lines to take wagers. But the statute
was enacted in 1961, decades before Internet use exploded.

"One of the things that frustrates government is that the medium transcends
borders," says Anthony Cabot, a Nevada attorney and co-editor of the legal
journal Gaming Law Review.

Traditional bookies usually operate in fixed geographic areas and risk arrest
by local police. Internet bookies may often advertise on sports-radio shows and
other local media, but they are typically headquartered offshore, outside the
reach of U.S. law enforcement.

Betting is a breeze

Antigua  a Caribbean island where online gambling is legal,
government-regulated and the employer of thousands  is home to more than 100
online wagering sites. Costa Rica, boasting far looser restrictions, also has
welcomed more than 100 operations.

Sports fans eager to bet on their favorite team simply establish a personal
account with one of the offshore companies. About 30,000 people, almost all
from the USA, have become regular bettors with Antigua-based World Sports
Exchange, Schillinger says.

Each customer sends the company $300, payable by credit card or bank check. In
return, the company assigns account holders a password used to place bets,
check account balances and review transactions. Winning bets are deposited in
the accounts.

"If you want to withdraw money, we'll FedEx you a check overnight," Schillinger
says.

There's usually no problem collecting on winners, says one online gambler.
Mike, a Virginia insurance agent who asked that his last name not be disclosed,
says he regularly bets $500 to $1,000 on basketball and football games. He
places the wagers online through one or more of the 10 to 12 offshore sports
books where he has accounts.

"I like it because you can just go online  it's 24/7," he says.

The industry has even spawned Web sites whose operators say they monitor
Internet sports books and intervene for bettors who complain of non-payment.
Among them is theprescription.com, launched in 1995 by former Virginia
psychiatrist Kenneth Weitzner. "We visit with all of these operations several
times a year and check them out," Weitzner says. "I'd say 95% of them are
reputable."

However, Weitzner acknowledges, it's tough for him to be totally objective
because he relies on sports book ads.

Enforcement obstacles

The federal government isn't about to issue any seals of approval of its own.
But efforts to tighten enforcement  by specifically outlawing acceptance of
Internet bets, banning transmission of wagers to foreign locales where betting
is legal and imposing tougher penalties on violators  have been approved in the
Senate, but not by the House.

Rep. Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., hopes to break the regulatory impasse with a
proposed law that recently was sent to the House Judiciary Committee. Sen. Jon
Kyl, R-Ariz., sponsors a companion measure in the Senate.

In the meantime, federal prosecutors have "huge concerns about online gambling"
and ads that help expand the industry, says Justice Department spokeswoman Jill
Stillman. But investigators say they don't have the financial resources or
personnel to target online gambling in a comprehensive manner.

IRS spokesman Tim Harms similarly acknowledges his agency is "not doing
anything specifically about Internet gambling." He does note that while it "may
sound Pollyanna-ish," gamblers are still required to report winnings on tax
returns.

Not surprising, then, that entrepreneurs of the online sports wagering world
say they operate legitimate businesses that fill a market need. The industry's
unofficial poster boy is Jay Cohen, 34, who in 1995 gave up a mid-six-figure
salary on the Pacific Stock Exchange to co-found World Sports Exchange.

Cohen, a nuclear engineering graduate of the University of California at
Berkeley, did his homework. Before starting, he had several law firms and
consulting giant KPMG explore the legality of online gambling. The conclusion?
World Sports Exchange would not violate federal law because the bets would take
place not within the USA, but instead within the company's Antigua-based Web
server.

"I wanted to operate a legal business, totally aboveboard," Cohen says. "I
believe I did."

Federal prosecutors disagreed.

Prodded by a law firm whose clients included the National Football League,
Major League Baseball, National Hockey League and National Basketball
Association, prosecutors launched one of the few major online betting
investigations.

The result was a case that further highlighted the gulf between federal law and
gambling reality.

A grand jury in New York handed up Wire Act indictments against Cohen,
Schillinger and 19 others in March 1998. Thirteen pleaded guilty. Seven are
fugitives.

Not Cohen. While Schillinger stayed in Antigua to run the business, he decided
to return to the USA and challenge the government directly at trial in summer
2000.

A jury rejected his legal roll of the dice. After the guilty verdict, U.S.
District Judge Thomas Griesa sentenced Cohen to 21 months in federal prison and
a $5,000 fine. A federal appeals court upheld the decision. Free on bail, Cohen
is awaiting an expected ruling this spring on whether the Supreme Court will
hear the case. The odds aren't good. The high court hears arguments in only a
fraction of the thousands of cases submitted for possible review.

So last weekend, Cohen's vantage point for NCAA tournament Elite Eight action
was a big-screen TV at San Francisco's Bayside Sports Bar & Grill, almost 4,000
miles away from the online business in Antigua.

"I miss it every day," he says with a sigh. "I created it, and now I'm banned
from it."

At the time of Cohen's indictment, then-U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno said
the case proved gambling operators couldn't hide online or offshore. But as
Cohen waits for word from the Supreme Court, the betting action rolls on in
cyberspace.

"We haven't had any drop-off whatsoever," Schillinger says. "If anything, our
business has only grown."
****************
MSNBC
VR in courtroom lets jury ?be there?

March 28  There?s nothing like being there. Just ask a lawyer who?s found an
eyewitness that will testify. But what if technology could turn each juror into
an eyewitness? The use of virtual reality to present evidence at trial will
face its first test next week in a mock Maryland courtroom. During a federal
manslaughter prosecution, a witness will don VR glasses and gloves, enter a
virtual operating room, and recreate a surgery gone bad while jurors look on.
?This is not science fiction anymore, at least not as of April 6,? claims
director of the high-tech courtroom where the trial will take place.

       THE TRIAL IS A drama, concocted by the William & Mary law school to test
the equipment. But the case details, and the technology being used, are quite
real.

       ?This is a first baby step in the use of immerse virtual reality,? said
Lederer, who runs the school?s Courtroom 21 project. It?s often the first to
attempt real-world tests of courtroom technology. ?Until recently, use of VR
was viewed as highly improbable ... we think there will be significant interest
in this as we prove it is possible.? 

       The case, derived from a real manslaughter case, involves a biotech firm
that had recently received Food and Drug Administration approval for a stent
that would cleanse cholesterol from arteries after insertion. But after
approval, the firm altered the materials used to make the stent to cut costs.
The first patient who received the implant died soon after, allegedly the
result of the now-faulty stent. 

       Jurors will have to decide if the stent itself caused the death, or some
other factor was involved. A key witness observer from the surgery will testify
that he saw the precise location of the stent when inserted. But during cross
examination, the defense will ask the witness to enter the virtual operating
room, with the entire courtroom watching. Once there, the defense will attempt
to show that from where the witness was standing, he couldn?t have seen where
the doctor inserted the stent.

       Virtual reality, which conjures up images of Star Trek and its amazing
Holodeck, has gotten a bad rap during the past five years. Early attempts to
launch virtual reality onto the Internet were disappointingly clumsy; and even
the best arcade games hardly allowed computers to imitate life.

        But Lederer thinks virtual reality evidence can offer lawyers one more
method for telling their stories to jurors. And while the William & Mary mock
trails claims to be the first demonstration of VR use in a criminal
prosecution, it?s not the first high-profile legal proceeding to employ the
technology. That distinction belongs to the Bloody Sunday inquiry, an ongoing
proceeding in Northern Ireland that?s attempting to uncover what happened
during a 1972 protest march in Londonderry that turned into a riot which left
13 marchers dead, allegedly killed by British soldiers.

       The ?Bloody Sunday Virtual Reality Assistant,? developed by multimedia
specialists at the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment has
been used to transport witnesses back to the scene of the march, imitating
building structures, streets, and other landmarks that have since disappeared.

       Anita Ramasastry, associate director of the University of Washington?s
Shidler Center for Law, Commerce, and Technology, said use VR in the Bloody
Sunday inquiry offers interesting possibilities.

       ?Because it it?s an inquiry but doesn?t have as much of a consequence
as, say, a criminal proceeding, that should be applauded,? she said.

       High-tech methods are already storming legal proceedings around the
country. Video conferencing is common in some jurisdictions, because it saves
money and time. It can even be a security measure  some arraignments are now
done without having to transport prisoners from holding cells to court and back
again, eliminating one of a prisoner?s best chances for escape.

       Later this year, the state of Michigan will go one giant step farther
when it opens the country?s first cybercourt. Gov. John Engler signed a bill in
January that will allow corporations to argue cases entirely online in the
state, a move designed to attract more high-tech business to the state.
        But the use of virtual reality to present evidence is an even bolder
step into courtroom technology, one Ramasastry eyes with caution.

       ?Everyone wants to be the first, saying ?Gee, isn?t this nifty,? as
opposed to ?What really are the benefits?? ? she said. 

       The jury?s is still out on how useful or fair the technology would be in
a court-room trial that had more severe consequences for a defendant who might
face jail time. For example, there is no available research on the affect
virtual reality demonstrations have on juror perceptions of reality.

       ?The use of this technology is really new,? she said. ?Before you start
using some technologies in the courtroom that have real significant
consequences, it?s important to try them in alternative forums, to see how they
change perceptions.?

       Lederer concedes there might be problems with use of VR in a courtroom.

       ?There are any number of probable pitfalls. As they say, the map is not
the territory. Any of these (demonstrations) are someone else?s recreation of
reality. It?s not clear our perception is the same as it would be for real
reality.?

       Still, the benefits outweigh the costs, he says  which are now
reasonable. Only $30,000 worth of equipment is needed for the April 6
demonstration case, Lederer said. 

       And with lawyers constantly in search of even the slightest advantage,
Lederer believes use of VR in the courtroom is inevitable.

       ?Because of the adversarial nature of the legal system, it?s rare for
lawyers of one side to give up a tool they may use. I?m quite sure someone?s
going to try to do it,? he said.
****************
Government Executive
March 28, 2002 
Navy turns to newcomers for new technology ideas 

By Molly M. Peterson, National Journal's Technology Daily 


The Navy must embrace a type of "young-think" with regards to information
technology, to modernize its administrative capabilities and maintain its
cutting-edge advantage on the battlefield, according to top-ranking information
officers who spoke at a Navy League conference Wednesday. 

"There are people out there who still feel like they have to have a piece of
paper between their fingers," Rear Adm. Kenneth Slaght, commander of the Navy's
Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, told a large crowd of Defense
officials and industry representatives. "We've got to make that go away." 

Although the private sector is "bringing lots of solutions to the table,"
Slaght said figuring out how to dovetail some of those technologies and
integrate them with the military's existing "legacy" systems has been a
challenge for Navy officials. 

But as high-ranking officials wrestle with those high-tech puzzles on dry land,
Slaght said plenty of innovative technological thinking is occurring hundreds
of miles out at sea. "The incredibly smart young sailors and officers out there
are coming up with ideas faster than we could ever lock ourselves in a room and
think of them," Slaght said. "Once we give them the tools, they make the
paperwork go away themselves." 

Encouraging that type of ingenuity has become a top Navy priority, according to
Vice Adm. Richard Mayo, director of Space, Information Warfare, and Command and
Control. Last October, for example, the Navy created a new classification for
officers with a background in information technology, as part of its ongoing
transformation efforts. 

The newly designated "information professional community," which includes about
330 officers, oversees the Navy's network centric operations at sea and is
helping to develop the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet. 

"We want to re-tour these folks, ashore and afloat, in continuous kinds of jobs
that relate to information technology, information operations, or space," Mayo
said. "We want to continually refresh and update these people." 

The Navy also is enhancing professional development opportunities for
information systems technicians, as part of its Task Force for Excellence
Through Commitment to Education and Learning (Task Force EXCEL) program. The
task force, launched last year, aims to train sailors in a variety of fields,
in a manner that is comparable to private sector training opportunities. 

"This is about new delivery methods for training and education for our officers
and enlisted folks, as well as [civilian employees]," Mayo said. "We are really
looking at this seriously to see if we're doing it the right way. We suspect
we're not." 

The Navy is working with information technology experts from a variety of
industries to determine the best ways to enhance its IT workforce through Task
Force EXCEL. For example, Mayo said, Navy officials are considering whether to
send system technicians to "a commercial school, to get a Microsoft designation
or a Cisco credential or something else, so the Navy doesn't do all of [the
training], but only part of it." 

****************
Government Executive
Technology company creates Web portal for federal job listings 

People interested in working for the federal government can find job listings
at a new Web portal created by Avue Technologies, a public sector workforce
management company.


Avue?s Web site will allow federal employees and other people interested in
government employment to view job listings and apply for jobs. They?ll also be
able to establish preferences to receive announcements of future job listings.


?They can go in and develop a profile of their employment history and their
education, and create an online resume that can be used to apply for multiple
positions,? said Linda Rix, co-CEO of Avue. ?We also have a resume-builder for
agencies that do not accept online processing, and the applicant can send hard
copy information to the agency.?


The site also allows agencies to automate their job posting processes. The
Forest Service, which has used Avue?s personnel services for more than a year,
is testing the new system in one of its regions to determine whether to
implement it agency-wide.


Steve Nelson, the Forest Service?s director of human resources, said his agency
is pleased with how easy the system is to use. The system allows managers to
create a job posting in less than 20 minutes.


?You can say ?I?d like a secretary for grade 7,? and it will give you the
position description for that,? he says. ?If you make modifications, it will
let you know if you are making changes to the grade or not, and when it
finishes the classification, you then have the performance standards, appraisal
package and your interview questions and plan,? Nelson said. ?It generates an
announcement and from there you can post the announcement on [the Office of
Personnel Management?s] USAJOBS [Web site] or whatever.?


The Avue site allows applicants to compare their job qualifications to the
minimum qualifications required by OPM for specific jobs and uses
questionnaires to ascertain the knowledge, skills and abilities of applicants,
rather than requiring written statements. Applicants who don?t want to apply
online can get a paper form and send it to the agency, which will then scan the
form into the system.


Once the closing date for a position arrives, managers can download a list of
applicants who fit the pre-screened criteria and start checking references and
setting up interviews. 


Avue plans to add information to the site on federal pay and benefits, the
application process and other subjects.


?We?re trying very hard to make sure that everyone who is interested in federal
employment can get good, quality information from one site,? Rix said.

****************
Washington Post
High-Tech Firms Vie to Fight Terrorism 
Government Deluged by Security Ideas That Are More Practical Than Innovative 

Tim Wright had an idea about how to help fight terrorism and he wanted to tell
someone about it. So he called the Office of Homeland Security and asked for an
appointment.

The chief technology officer at Terra Lycos SA met with government staffers and
proposed a next-generation emergency broadcast system. It would take advantage
of Web sites, e-mail and instant messaging, including his company's technology,
to get warnings out.

"The objective of terrorism is to create terror. The objective of the
government is to instill confidence in the public that they have things under
control," Wright remembered saying. "And one of the most effective ways they
can do that is to communicate as quickly and as broadly as possible."

Shortly after his allotted hour was up, the staffers thanked him and said they
would get back to him. That was five weeks ago.

The subtext of the government's non-response response: Take a number.

Federal offices at all levels have been inundated in recent months with phone
calls and visits from company executives, scientists and private citizens whose
messages can be summarized as, "We have the security answer for you." 

Suddenly, the government that was largely ignored during the dot-com boom has
become the most important potential customer and financier, one that is being
courted with an aggressiveness seldom matched. 

The Office of Homeland Security has had such a crush of inquiries that it
assigned four staffers to be industry liaisons. The Pentagon is still trying to
work through more than 12,000 proposals it has received from the public about
how the country can better fight terrorism. In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence
Agency-backed venture fund, reports about 150 business proposals a month, four
times the usual number.

Howard Schmidt, vice chairman of the President's Critical Infrastructure
Protection Board, said it is a challenge to balance his other responsibilities
with reviewing proposals from high-tech companies. 

"We want to be very careful not to pass over a helpful proposal," Schmidt said.
"But we don't want to spend 100 percent of our time vetting ideas either."

Schmidt, a former Microsoft Corp. techie who also is a member of the Office of
Cybersecurity, said that about a third of the plans he has seen appear to have
potential. He referred the companies that submitted them to agencies that might
be able to use the technologies.

President Bush's proposed 2003 federal budget includes all sorts of money that
corporations are eyeing: $52 billion for government information technology,
$2.4 billion for anti-bioterrorism research and development, $4.8 billion for
airport security.

The amount allocated for homeland defense is $37.7 billion, almost double the
amount for this fiscal year.

The money will not be controlled by the Office of Homeland Security, but will
be split among various government agencies such as the Defense Department, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency
and the Federal Aviation Administration.

Few contracts have been awarded. Part of the delay has been the time it takes
government officials to meticulously review the mountain of proposals. The
process also has been complicated by a philosophical debate over how to balance
the country's need for security with the right to privacy.

"I think all new ideas deserve public debate," said Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.),
who represents parts of Silicon Valley. He acknowledged that many security
technologies have privacy implications and said, "There's no community
consensus yet, no decision either way."

Companies say their campaigns are not just about the money, but also about
letting people know they are good corporate citizens.

Many companies, start-ups and major corporations alike, are forming
homeland-defense task forces or shifting resources to their government service
units. More than a few are putting their No. 1 and No. 2 executives on jets to
meet with key government officials.

The private sector's ideas are as mundane as better wireless-communications
systems and as wacky as a plan for unleashing swarms of killer bees in the
network of Afghan caves occupied by al Qaeda.

As a whole, though, the tech companies' approach has been more practical than
innovative, with proposals to tweak existing technologies for use against
terrorism. The increased federal budget is not larded with money for basic
research to create the next dazzling technology, as it was in the space race or
the Defense Department's funding of the predecessor to the Internet. 

Could the wireless messaging services that were marketed to teenagers be used
to help soldiers coordinate military strikes? Could voice-recognition software
be used to detect lies? Could a global-positioning gadget be used to prevent
someone from hijacking a chemical truck and crashing it into a building?

Some liken today's high-tech mobilization to the building of the interstate
highway system. "Many of the technologies we need already exist. We just have
to figure out how to put them together," said John W. Thompson, chief executive
of security software giant Symantec Corp.

The most popular idea being promoted by companies centers on better analyzing
and using data already being collected piecemeal.

Tom Siebel, founder and chief executive of Siebel Systems Inc. of San Mateo,
Calif., is among a growing group of newcomers to the government business. He
arrived in Washington recently with the pitch that the company's
customer-relationship management system could be used to track terrorists. 

In a slick presentation that includes computer-generated charts with mug shots
of the Sept. 11 hijackers and event timelines, Siebel has tried to convince
people at "every three-letter agency" that his software could have helped them
spot patterns in the hijackers' movements by tracking their residences, credit
card purchases and communications.

The recent arrivals in Washington face competition from long-time government
technology contractors. 

Silicon Graphics Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., known for its work with
Hollywood movies such as "Toy Story" and "Jurassic Park," is reemphasizing its
computer hardware's use for government applications.

SGI plans to increase its 350-person government unit by 10 percent and is
putting more resources into "image processing," which analyzes the details in
such things as terrain maps and photographs of eyes and noses. The company is
pitching the military on a proposal to create simulations of Middle East cities
to train soldiers before they are dropped on the ground.

"There are massive amounts of data that need to be acted on, processed,
exploited for learning and understanding and then pushed to the right people
who might need that information," said Anthony Robbins, SGI senior vice
president.

Database giant Oracle Corp. chief executive Larry Ellison imagines the creation
of a "risk management system" that would calculate the odds of someone being a
terrorist based on his or her history. 

The government could plug the names of suspects into a system that could
analyze data, much of which is stored in Oracle databases managed by several
government agencies and commercial credit services, to look for troubling
patterns and other warnings. He believes it could catch terrorists before they
commit crimes. Oracle software, originally designed as a government technology
product, is already used by many agencies, including the departments of energy,
transportation and education, and three branches of the armed services.

Anne K. Altman, managing director of International Business Machines Corp.'s
federal government unit that has systems in use at many agencies, has been
making sales pitches similar to Ellison's but emphasizing that this linking
could be done with IBM technologies such as WebSphere, DiscoveryLink and
Project WF.

Lockheed Martin Corp., one of the government's oldest and largest contractors,
has been relatively quiet about its technologies. The company demonstrated to
government officials a few weeks ago a "biomail" system -- a set of biochemical
sensors and computers that it developed after Sept. 11 that could alert U.S.
Postal Service personnel to the presence of any dangerous agents.

"We've taken our approach a little more high-profile," said Arthur Johnson,
senior vice president for strategic development. "But this is not the kind of
environment where you want to appear opportunistic. We have worked hard not to
do that."

Not everyone in high-tech has joined in the courtship.

Intel Corp. chief executive Craig Barrett said in a recent interview that he is
wary of taking too much government money because, historically, high-tech
companies' dependence on federal funding has turned out to be a weakness. After
the aerospace industry collapsed in the early 1990s, for example, California
went into a deep recession.

More important, though, Barrett is skeptical that more technology is the answer
to winning the war on terrorism.

"This is essentially a low-tech problem you're trying to solve," Barrett said.
"You won't be able to do it with databases. You need a .357 magnum."

****************
Washington Post
The Long and Winding Road to Security Clearance 

The road to a personal security clearance is a six- to 18-month journey. Here's
what it takes:

?  A government contractor or federal agency manager determines an employee
needs access to classified information. 

?  The employee fills out the security investigation form, usually Standard
Form 86, which asks for a host of personal information and references. The
employee is fingerprinted and signs a form allowing the agency's investigators
to access his or her personal records. 

?  The form is sent to a personnel investigation center. An investigator,
either a federal employee or a private contractor, conducts interviews and
checks police, financial and employment records, among others. Typically, the
investigator conducts records checks and interviews references dating back
seven to 10 years. 

?  The investigation results are sent to an adjudication facility, where a
federal employee evaluates the results using established guidelines to
determine eligibility for access to classified material. The clearance is
granted or denied. 

?  Individuals must undergo a re-evaluation of their status every five years
for top-secret clearances and 10 years for secret clearances. 

Private-Facility Clearance

The road to a private-facility security clearance is a journey of about four
months.

?  In order to get a personal security clearance, an individual's business
operation must first obtain a facility security clearance. The headquarters
office must be cleared before any branch offices. The Defense Security Service
issues facility clearances for the Department of Defense and 22 other agencies.

?  A letter of sponsorship must be sent to the Defense Industrial Security
Clearance Office in Columbus, Ohio, from a federal agency, or from a cleared
prime contractor on behalf of a subcontractor. The letter details the level of
classification the facility's employees require access to, and whether the
information must be stored at the private facility.

?  DISCO makes sure the company isn't already cleared or debarred from federal
contracting.

?  A DSS field industrial security representative identifies key company
officials who must receive personal security clearances in connection with the
facility clearance. The representative analyzes the company's foreign interests
and also meets with the facility's security office to ensure the office has a
viable security program. 

?  The facility receives a Contract Security Classification Specification from
its customer, which provides the security requirements and classification
guidance needed for performance of a classified contract. 

?  DSS conducts oversight visits annually for facilities storing classified
information, and every 18 months for other cleared facilities.

Common Misperceptions

One misperception about the security clearance process is that an applicant
should hide information from investigators that could jeopardize his or her
case. 

"It's best to be open and honest with us and state all the facts and let the
investigation takes its course. It's a lot better than trying to hide
something," said Tom Thompson, director of the Defense Security Service
personnel security investigations program. Applicants can be disqualified for a
clearance if their deception is discovered. 

Click here for more misperceptions.

Post-Sept. 11 Delays in Clearance Processing

Despite ongoing efforts to improve the clearance process, applicants are
unlikely to see a dramatic drop in the time it takes -- six to 18 months on
average -- because caseloads are growing in response to the war in Afghanistan
and the domestic war on terrorism, federal agency officials said. 

"The proliferation of IT is going to be one driver ... and all of the military
actions going on in the Middle East will drive our immediate requirements up.
We know that it is going to get busier because the services have told us their
needs are increasing," said Tom Thompson, director of the Defense Security
Service personnel security investigations program. The Alexandria, Va., Defense
Department agency conducts investigations for the military services and
military contractors. DSS expects its 1,100 investigative agents and other
personnel to handle about 600,000 applications in fiscal 2003, Thompson said. 

The most time-consuming investigation comes before issuing a top-secret
clearance to an individual for the first time, Thompson said. It's also the
most expensive, at $2,447 to conduct, according to DSS estimates. The
investigator is required to check records and references that go back seven to
10 years or more. Even if the applicant supplies records such as college
transcripts, the investigator probably has to retrieve those records as well.
And, Thompson said, "we have to go out and interview all your references --
anywhere you've worked, neighbors, and we interview you. There is a lot of
legwork." 

Speeding Up the Process

The cumbersome security clearance process should speed up considerably under a
new government initiative to move the process online. The Office of Personnel
Management leads the e-clearance effort, part of the enterprise human resources
e-government initiative, one of 24 government-wide e-government programs. 

****************
Los Angeles Times
Telecom's Fiber Pipe Dream
Upstart firms saw riches in circling the globe with high-capacity optic cable.
Instead, they were laying the foundation for their own downfall.

The world's phone calls, faxes and e-mails zip through strands of glass no
thicker than a human hair, riding across countries and continents on pulses of
multicolored light.

The strands are bundled in cables that run beneath city streets, through
mountain passes and under the seas.

The cables were laid by a band of upstart companies that spent $50 billion or
more in the last few years to wire the planet. These massive networks will
serve the public for years to come, delivering the electronic goods of the
Digital Age. But the companies that built them are not celebrating. Many are in
financial ruin. The recent collapses of Global Crossing Ltd. and other
communications firms have roiled financial markets and cost investors and
employees tens of billions of dollars.

How did such a triumph of engineering leave so much corporate wreckage?

News reports of Global Crossing's meltdown have dwelt on accounting sleight of
hand and extravagant executive pay. But what actually drove the company and
others like it into the ground was an epic miscalculation.

These upstarts bet that if they built communications networks with far more
capacity, or bandwidth, than had ever been available before, customers would
rush to use them.

The network builders employed new technology that crammed much more data onto
each strand of glass. This enabled them to slash prices for long-distance data
transmission well below the rates charged by established networks, such as
those of AT&T Corp. and British Telecom, that used older equipment.

The newcomers believed that the combination of low prices and abundant
bandwidth would unleash a frenzy of activity on the Internet. Consumers and
businesses would pay for all kinds of services that previously had been too
expensive. People would watch Web movie channels on their TV sets. Doctors
would diagnose illnesses via the Internet. Corporations would hold video
conferences with employees around the world.

The problem was that too many companies had the same dream, and they built too
many digital toll roads to the same destinations. The prices commanded by
long-distance networks did drop--but much more steeply than the newcomers
expected. And the demand for their services did rise--but not nearly as much as
they had banked on.

As a result, many of the upstarts couldn't bring in enough cash to pay interest
on the money they borrowed to lay all that cable.

Their plight is a textbook example of the boom-and-bust cycle of high-tech
capitalism. It illustrates how technological innovation, plowing relentlessly
forward, can make companies and then break them.

The financial outlook is not universally bleak--many network operators remain
healthy, and some regions are not overloaded with fiber. But on many of the
routes that drew the heaviest investment, such as those between the United
States and Europe, the bandwidth glut is likely to remain for five years or
more.

"People have laid huge amounts of fiber in the ground," said Internet analyst
Tony Marson of Probe Research Inc., "and there is a distinct possibility that
quite a lot of that will never actually see any traffic."

Explosion of Internet Traffic Fueled Demand

If any one person inspired the burst of network building, it would be an
English computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee.

The expert in storing and retrieving data invented the World Wide Web in 1989
while working at a European nuclear research laboratory.

Before then, Internet users had to type arcane computer commands to search for
and view files on the network. Berners-Lee devised a way to present documents,
pictures and graphics on electronic pages that could be retrieved with the
click of a mouse.

The new technique transformed the Internet from a hard-to-use research tool
into a communications medium for the masses.

Two developments in the early 1990s aided that transformation. First, in 1992
Congress lifted the ban on commercial uses of the Net. Then, in 1993 and late
1994, the first easy-to-use browser programs were released, simplifying the
task of viewing or building a Web site.

Up to that point, Internet use had doubled every year or so. Afterward, traffic
exploded, increasing tenfold in 1995 and again in 1996, according to
researchers at AT&T Labs.

"People thought it could double every quarter forever," said analyst Paras
Bhargava of BMO Nesbitt Burns, a Canadian investment bank.

As people and businesses began buying, selling and chatting online by the
millions, it seemed that no amount of Internet bandwidth would be enough.

"All these [dot-com] companies were cropping up, it seemed weekly, and there
was no end to that in sight," said Glenn Jasper of Ciena Corp., a telecom
equipment manufacturer in Maryland. "So the conventional wisdom was we've got
to grow the capacity of our networks not for the traffic that's out there now
or even next week but for a year from now."

For years, those networks had been operated in the U.S. by a handful of giant
phone companies and abroad by government monopolies. These companies relied on
a small number of equipment suppliers, such as AT&T's Western Electric
subsidiary.

They lost their chokehold on the industry, however, just as Web traffic was
exploding. Governments around the world started prying open their
telecommunications markets to competition. At the same time, advancing
technology gave birth to a litter of new equipment suppliers that specialized
in fiber-optic gear.

Long frozen out of the telecommunications business, investors suddenly had a
chance in the mid-to-late 1990s to crash the party. Venture capitalists opened
their checkbooks to bankroll new networks and equipment companies. Investors
jumped on board as soon as shares were offered to the public.

"There was a lot of money available," said Todd Brooks, a general partner at
Mayfield Funds, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park. "You had billion-dollar
IPOs, and the gold rush mentality set it."

Before long, engineers were stringing glass around the globe--a "new economy"
version of the race to build railroads across America in the 19th century.

Global Crossing and other companies tunneled under streets, carved trenches and
sent ships across the oceans, laying hundreds of thousands of miles of
fiber-optic cable. Many of the network builders were so sure of the growth to
come that they packed the cables with extra fibers that were left
inactive--"dark," in industry vernacular--for future use.

But all the while, technology was advancing in a way that would delay the need
for those extra fibers--and, paradoxically, lure more competitors into the
fray.

Fiber-optic networks use lasers to transmit light in split-second flashes.
Think of them as tiny, high-speed versions of the blinking semaphore signals
that ships use to communicate at sea.

Equipment makers improved that technology in two ways: by speeding up the
flashes of light and by using different colors to send multiple signals at the
same time over a single fiber. These innovations greatly expanded the capacity
of fiber-optic networks.

Statistics illustrate the magnitude of the change.

In 1994, the entire global communications network could transmit about 1
trillion pieces of data a second, said economist, author and technology pundit
George Gilder.

Today, a single fiber strand has more than 1 1/2 times that capacity if it uses
the best optical equipment on the market.

In the U.S., 10 of the largest networks had a total of about 40 such fiber
strands in service in 2000, according to a study by Probe Research, based in
Cedar Knolls, N.J. The networks also had 570 dark fibers waiting in reserve.
And since then, two emerging national data networks, Touch America Inc. and
Velocita Corp., have added more than 100 fibers to the total.

The increase in bandwidth is even more dramatic between the U.S. and the rest
of the world. For example, the capacity of networks linking the United States
and Europe has multiplied nearly 80 times since 1997, said Richard Elliott,
co-founder of the Band-X technology research group in London.

By the end of 2002, capacity is expected to nearly double again--and that's
just counting the fibers that are in service, not those left dark to
accommodate hoped-for growth.

Marketing to Businesses

A catalyst in this explosion of capacity was Global Crossing. Unlike AT&T and
other established long-distance companies, Global Crossing showed little
interest in consumers' phone calls. Instead, company executives wanted to sell
bandwidth wholesale to other long-distance companies and corporations, which
would use it for their own communications needs.

Global Crossing's founder was financier Gary Winnick, a onetime furniture
salesman and investment banker who worked alongside junk-bond king Michael
Milken in Beverly Hills. Trumpeting the opportunities presented by
telecommunications deregulation and fiber optics, Winnick raised $750 million
in 70 days in 1997 for the first leg of his network: an 8,700-mile cable from
the United States to Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.

No single company had ever built an undersea cable with private investors'
money before. But when Global Crossing quickly found buyers for all that new
capacity, "any doubts about the need were quieted," said Elliott of Band-X.

Winnick soon had plenty of company on the fund-raising circuit. A host of other
entrepreneurs dazzled investors with charts showing the skyrocketing growth of
the Internet and the plummeting cost of doing business.

For example, James Q. Crowe, chief executive of Colorado-based Level 3, boasted
that his company's state-of-the-art fiber network would undercut its older
rivals' prices by 15% to 20%. Crowe raised a reported $6.5 billion before Level
3 had activated its first strand of fiber.

"There were a lot of companies sort of going at this in parallel," said Dave
Passmore, research director at Burton Group, a network analysis firm. "They all
got in when they viewed this as an unexploited market."

Ron Kline, an analyst for the telecommunications research firm RHK Inc. in
South San Francisco, said it wasn't necessarily wrong for a new carrier to
think it could win the battle for customers. "The problem was there were too
many people thinking about it."

The greatest advantage went to the carrier with the newest technology and
highest capacity. It spent less to push data through its network than its
competitors did, which meant it could charge lower prices.

So companies kept building networks even as the supply of bandwidth grew well
beyond demand. And as technology kept improving, the upstarts soon had to
compete with newer, more advanced players. No network could hold on to its
advantage for long.

"In some bizarre movie about the telecom industry, you would have guys from the
carriers going out and killing guys in the labs to prevent them from coming up
with new technologies," said Ron Banaszek of TFS Telecom, a Swiss consulting
and investment firm for communications and energy companies.

Today, about 16 advanced transcontinental fiber networks are competing in the
U.S. long-distance business, said Larry Roberts of Caspian Networks in San
Jose, which supplies communications equipment. That's three times as many as
there were two years ago.

The increase in capacity and competition drove prices to the floor.

Wholesalers such as Global Crossing typically sell companies a certain amount
of capacity from one city to the next--for example, enough to transmit 155
million pieces of data a second from New York to London. A bank with offices in
those two cities might use that capacity to connect its computers.

In 1997, that capacity cost about $14 million upfront, plus annual fees of
$250,000 to $380,000, said Elliott of Band-X. Today, the same bandwidth could
be bought for $350,000 upfront and $15,000 a year.

Industry Forecasts Were Too High

So what happened to the burgeoning demand that was supposed to be the
industry's lifeblood?

The extreme growth rates in Internet traffic seen in 1995 and 1996 were just a
blip, reflecting the advent of Web browsers, said Andrew Odlyzko, director of
the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota. Since then, he
said, the amount of data flowing over the Net has reverted to its previous rate
of increase, roughly doubling every year.

That's a lot of bits to move--but not nearly enough to fill the networks built
during the boom.

One reason demand failed to mushroom as expected was the shortage of bandwidth
in local fiber-optic networks. Before consumers start downloading symphonies or
watching pay-per-view events online, they need a high-speed connection to the
Internet. But in the U.S., fewer than 10% of all homes have one.

There may be a data fire hose running from coast to coast, but the typical
consumer is still connecting through a straw.

Many consumers are unwilling to pay the extra cost of a high-speed line
because, in their view, the Internet is not compelling or important enough to
justify it. The entertainment companies that could make the Net more appealing
to consumers, including most movie studios and TV networks, are staying on the
sidelines until more homes have high-speed connections.

Some analysts and equipment makers argue that demand is growing faster than the
prevailing estimates indicate, increasing 2 1/2 to three times a year on the
main U.S. Internet pipelines. They argue that networks are getting so jammed in
some areas that long-distance companies will be ordering more within a few
months to a year.

But even those growth estimates fall well short of the giddy projections of a
few years ago. And the situation may get worse before it gets better, if
Bankruptcy Court allows Global Crossing and other insolvent carriers to write
off their debt and stay in service.

"That will launch a whole 'nother round of price wars that will cause pain for
everybody in the industry," said Russ McGuire, chief strategy officer for
telecommunications consultant TeleChoice Inc. "It will get worse for everyone,
and in the end, Global Crossing will still go away."
****************
Los Angeles Times
State Spam Laws Rarely Enforced
Internet: It's difficult to track down senders on the Web, and prosecutors are
busy with other crimes.

Anyone cleaning out a bulging e-mail in box probably has wished for a law
regulating spam, the unsolicited electronic messages that promise instant
weight loss, overnight riches and triple-X pictures.

Twenty states, including California, have laws governing the distribution of
commercial e-mail to individuals and companies. Violations can lead to fines
and even jail time.

But the laws almost never are enforced. No one has been prosecuted under
California's 4-year-old anti-spam law. It's the same in Delaware, which has one
of the toughest laws in the country--at least on paper.

Only in the state of Washington has an attorney general filed a case.

"Anti-spam laws are, at best, a partial solution," said law professor David
Sorkin of John Marshall Law School in Chicago.

His Web site, at www.spamlaws.com, posts information about spam laws and cases.

Part of the problem is that the anonymous nature of the Internet makes it
difficult to track down those who send illegal messages. And few attorneys
general or district attorneys are willing to spend the time and money necessary
to match message to mailer, particularly when overloaded with murders, rapes
and other violent crimes.

"Out of sympathy to them, I'm sure they have other things on their docket that
need to be taken care of," said Tom Geller, executive director of the anti-spam
SpamCon Foundation. "But if they want a case that will please the citizenry, I
would urge them to raise the priority of spam prosecutions."

Spam costs consumers an estimated $8.8 billion a year worldwide just in
connection costs, according to a 2001 survey by the European Commission, which
initiates policies for the European Union.

Consumer complaints fueled the passage of California's 1998 spam law, which
requires unsolicited commercial e-mail to begin its subject line with ADV or
ADV:ADLT if the message is of a sexual nature. Filters on e-mail programs can
be set to detect those characters and delete the messages before they appear in
an in box.

The law, upheld last year by the state Court of Appeal, also requires that spam
include a valid e-mail address or toll-free number that a recipient can use to
get off a bulk e-mail list.

No law enforcement agency has taken action, however. Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer
said his office held off because district attorneys usually get the first shot
at bringing cases under a new law.

But representatives of the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said
they are caught in a Catch-22 when it comes to bringing criminal charges under
the law as written.

"To file a case, we would need to be able to examine the logs of an Internet
service provider to prove who had sent the spam," said Deputy Dist. Atty.
Jonathan Fairtlough, with the department's high-tech crimes unit.

That would require a search warrant or a subpoena, neither of which can be
obtained unless charges are filed, he said.

Civil cases also could be brought, but the Los Angeles County department that
would initiate them--the district attorney's Consumer Protection Division--said
it has not received an actionable complaint from consumers.

"Being that the Internet is a global institution, the consumer who has gotten
an e-mail from somewhere in the world does not think to call the local D.A.,"
said Tom Papageorge, deputy district attorney in charge of the division. "The
average consumer just hits delete rather than making a copy of the e-mail,
filling out a complaint and getting it to the local authorities."

Lockyer said that in lieu of actions by district attorneys, his office may get
involved. He has a team of lawyers studying the issue to determine whether they
could successfully prosecute under the 1998 law.

"I'm hopeful it will only be a matter of weeks before we can come to some kind
of conclusion," Lockyer said.

Delaware has the strongest spam law in the country, banning unsolicited
commercial e-mail outright. Under the 1999 law, the only way to legally send a
state resident a commercial e-mail is to have his or her permission beforehand.

"There were so many consumer complaints that we wanted the strongest law
possible," said the state's attorney general, Jane Brady. But there have been
no prosecutions. "I have told my staff that I'm really losing patience, but
it's a very difficult process," Brady said.

The difficulty in upholding these laws is not a lack of spam. Of the billions
of e-mails that arrive each month at Atlanta-based EarthLink Inc., one of the
world's largest Internet service providers, as much as 25% is spam, a
spokeswoman said.

The problem, Brady and other law enforcement officials say, is determining who
sent an illegal spam.

Spammers started using various tactics to stay anonymous in the mid-1990s, when
junk e-mail became a popular commercial ploy.

At first, they altered the "From" line of their messages to make it look as if
it was sent by someone else. By 1997, more sophisticated spammers were routing
their bulk e-mails through unsuspecting ISPs to hide the messages' true
origins. The technique, which makes tracing more difficult, was called
hijacking an open relay.

ISPs struck back by installing equipment on their mail servers to prevent
hijacking. The spammers then found ways to search electronically around the
world for unprotected servers.

"They would use software to look for relays that could be hijacked and then
just send a few e-mails through each," Internet security consultant Steve
Atkins said. "It became an arms race between spammers and the people trying to
shut them down."

The spammers are winning, mostly because of the vast number of unprotected mail
servers, especially in countries relatively new to the Internet.

In fact, some major ISPs--including UXN in Europe--have taken the drastic step
of blocking all e-mails that come from China because of that country's high
number of unprotected servers.

In Washington, the attorney general's office took action soon after that
state's law was ratified in 1998. "We had gotten a lot of complaints not only
from residents but also from Internet service providers who said that spam was
costing them a lot of money to deal with," senior counsel Paula Selis said.

The attorney general filed a civil suit against Oregon resident Jason Heckel,
who allegedly was selling his booklet "How to Profit From the Internet" through
spam. "His deal was that he was selling something that told people how to set
up their own spam business. Kind of ironic for our first case," Selis said.

Heckel challenged the constitutionality of the law, but it was upheld last year
by the state's Supreme Court. Now the case is scheduled to return to court in
September. If Heckel is convicted, he could be fined as much as $500 for each
spam.

With officials not prosecuting in California, private individuals and firms
have attempted to take civil actions on their own. This can be done under the
California law, although the biggest penalty the law allows for a private suit
is an injunction to stop the spam.

Only one private case has made it to a Superior Court. It was brought in Sonoma
County two years ago by Mark Ferguson against a matchmaking site, Friendfinder.

Ferguson said he was getting 200 spams a day. When he asked spammers to stop,
they sent even more. "The spammers were just flaunting it," he said. "It was
like, 'Ha, ha, you can't catch us.' "

Ferguson, 39, began spending part of every day trying to battle spammers, a
tradition he kept up even after his Web design business declined because of the
tech downturn and he took an appliance delivery job.In 1999, Ferguson chose the
Palo Alto-based Friendfinder as the target of a class-action suit because it
seemed to be a highly successful operation.

"I was doing this to make a point," Ferguson said. "If they can't afford to
fight, what good does it do?"

He also wanted a company that could pay a sizable settlement to him, the
lawyers and anyone who joins the class action. Ferguson is attempting to go
beyond the relief stipulated by the anti-spam law by alleging that handling
spam wears down and causes physical damage to home computers.

The case first went to a Superior Court, where a judge dismissed it, saying
that the law was unconstitutional because it violated interstate commerce
freedoms.

Last year, the state Court of Appeal rejected the decision, affirming the
constitutionality of the law.

Friendfinder has asked the state Supreme Court to consider the case. If the
court declines or upholds the appellate court decision, Ferguson will be able
to pursue his case.

Friendfinder owner Andrew Conru, who founded the Palo Alto-based company in
1996, said the firm has never sent an unsolicited commercial e-mail. "Spammers
are just bad businesspeople," Conru said.

Friendfinder has been vilified in anti-spam newsgroups by people who said they
have received numerous spams advertising the site. Conru said these were sent
out mostly by members of the company's affiliate program, which pays a referral
fee for every paid subscriber brought in.

Another private suit was filed last month by California's largest law firm,
Morrison & Foerster. It alleges that bulk e-mailer Etracks sent 6,500 illegal
spams to employees and others who use the law firm's e-mail accounts.

The law firm also is claiming damages because Etracks allegedly used the
Morrison & Foerster mail server to distribute the e-mails.

Etracks--a Belmont, Calif., firm that distributes bulk e-mail for numerous
companies--did not respond to a request for comment on the suit.

In the meantime, spam is a part of everyday life for computer users.

"The problem with spam is that it is the tragedy of the common," SpamCon's
Geller said.

"Millions of people feel damaged very slightly. In order to gain true redress,
you have to coordinate these millions to give power to an individual. That's
not easy to do."
****************
Los Angeles Times
Business Cards Going Digital

"Here's my card." That's one of the most common three-word phrases in
business--right up there with "Let's do lunch" and "I'm laid off." Even in this
e-era, the lowly business card endures.

In fact, the business card has evolved along with the times.

There are virtual cards that can travel with e-mail messages and optical cards
that can hold megabytes of information. Hand-held computer users routinely beam
contact information to each other using infrared links. And a clever scanner
and its accompanying Internet service have brought conventional cards into the
digital age. The virtual business card is made possible by an Internet standard
called vCard. All current e-mail programs support the vCard standard, as do
Palm- and PocketPC-based hand-helds and even some cell phones.

Once you store your contact information as a vCard--consult your e-mail
program's online help to learn how--you can include the vCard as an attachment
to your outgoing e-mail. If your e-mail recipients want to add you to their
electronic address books, they can do so with a few mouse clicks.

Yahoo Inc.'s People Search, an online white pages service, also supports vCard.
After you locate those long-lost friends, add their contact information to your
little silicon book by saving it as a vCard.

The biggest problem with a virtual business card is that you can't put one in
the hand of a prospective colleague.

Optical business cards bridge the physical and the digital, combining a printed
name and address with enough storage space to hold video and audio clips,
digital images or thousands of pages of text.

Optical business cards are essentially rectangular CD-ROMs: They're the same
size as an ordinary business card, but can store about 50 MB of data.

Photographers and designers can distribute portfolios of their work, musicians
can hand out demo discs, real estate agents can give away virtual tours of
their listings, and salespeople can include catalogs in Portable Document
Format.

CD business cards work in virtually any PC or Macintosh with a tray-loading CD
mechanism. They can jam if you use them with a slot-loading CD drive--the kind
that suck the CD into place.

Prices for CD business cards vary widely and are lower when you order large
quantities. One replicator, Redmond, Wash.-based Isomedia Inc., charges 70
cents a card in quantities of 1,000, and 55 cents each in quantities of 5,000.

Most replicators also sell blank CD-R media that you can burn using your own CD
burner, and many will preprint the blanks with your contact information.

Then there's that stack of paper business cards cluttering your desk drawer.
Pitch them all, I say--but first, run them through Corex Technologies' $299
CardScan Executive 600c. This pint-sized scanner is smaller than a Rolodex and
connects to the Universal Serial Bus port of a Windows PC. (It also works with
Macs running Connectix Corp.'s VirtualPC.)

The CardScan's character-recognition software does an impressive job of
deciphering complex card layouts and putting each piece of information in the
correct place. Impressive, but occasionally imperfect. You'll want to proofread
vital statistics such as numbers to make sure they're right.

In my tests, scanning a card took about 10 seconds. If you've written notes on
the back of a card, you can scan it, too, and the CardScan software will save
an image of your scrawl.

Once you've scanned a stack of cards, you can save the contacts in a variety of
formats, including vCard.

You can bring them into your e-mail program's address book, beam them to your
hand-held, or upload them to CardScan.Net, a free service that stores your
contacts online so you can retrieve them from anywhere in the world. You can
even view a MapQuest-generated map of any contact's address.

Try that with your Rolodex.
****************
USA Today
DoubleClick settles Web privacy suits

NEW YORK (Reuters)  Internet advertiser DoubleClick on Friday said it had
agreed to purge consumer information it had collected and adhere to an enhanced
privacy policy, as part of a settlement of federal and state class action
lawsuits filed against the firm.

The agreement, which will result in the dismissal of charges filed since
January 2001, requires DoubleClick to take actions to protect consumer privacy
including an education effort, purging of consumer information, and adherence
to an enhanced privacy policy.

DoubleClick will also pay for up to $1.8 million of legal fees. The company
said it had accounted for this charge in the third quarter of 2001.

Shares of DoubleClick closed at $11.99 on Thursday on the Nasdaq. Stock markets
were closed on Friday for the Passover and Easter holiday.

****************
USA Today
Smart cards eyed as solution to long airport lines

DALLAS (AP)  Electronic Data Systems and other technology companies are
competing to develop a "smart card" that would let frequent travelers who
undergo a retina scan or hand scan speed through airport security lines.

The appeal of such a card seems obvious to anyone who has stood in an hour-long
security line at some U.S. airports.

Those lines have become the bane of harried business travelers, who now must
leave for the airport much earlier to ensure catching their flight.

But EDS and the other companies working on a smart card say the idea is more
than a mere convenience. With help from business-travel groups, they are
lobbying administration officials and Congress to approve the cards as a needed
security measure in the wake of the Sept. 11 hijackings.

"We're doing an improved job now of scanning and screening, but we still need
to enhance the screening and do more physical checking," said Jim Dullum,
president of global transportation business at EDS. "We need to enhance that
with better knowledge of the people getting on the airplane."

Variations of the smart card are already used by the U.S. military, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, Israeli travelers and some
corporations.

Personal information about the card holder is stored on a magnetic strip or
computer chip. At security checkpoints, the person submits to at least one
biometric measurement  usually a scan of his iris, face, hand or fingerprint 
which is compared to an image of the same person that is stored in a data base
or on the card itself.

In airports, the cards could be used to separate frequent fliers  who, it is
assumed, are less likely to be terrorists  from other travelers. Security
agents wouldn't check driver's licenses of frequent fliers and let them spend
more time examining "unknown" passengers.

Critics say a "trusted-traveler" program would require intrusive background
checks, allow the government to easily track people and fail to make the skies
any safer.

"It's going to encourage security personnel to put their guard down and
encourage people to obtain phony documents or (for terrorists) to obtain them
by laying low for a while," said Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the
American Civil Liberties Union.

Promoters of the cards say that card holders would still be subject to bag
searches, like everybody else.

Industry officials say so-called biometrics might be even more useful in
verifying the identity of airport workers. Security experts say about 1 million
airport workers have access to planes and baggage areas without going through
metal detectors.

Plano, Texas-based EDS touts a system it helped develop three years ago at Tel
Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, using hand geometry technology from Campbell,
Calif.-based Recognition Systems. About 50,000 Israelis use the system each
month to go through a quicker passport-control process lasting less than a
minute.

A competitor, Reston, Va.-based Maximus, makes cards for the U.S. military.
Both companies say the cards are tamper-resistant and a major improvement over
current means of identification for airline passengers.

"It's far easier for someone to get a fake driver's license," said Rachael
Rowland, a spokeswoman for Maximus. "With these cards, nobody else is going to
have the same digital map of your fingerprint."

EDS and Maximus say they could start pilot programs using smart cards in a few
airports within two or three months of getting approval from the U.S.
Department of Transportation.

But much to the companies' frustration, the government hasn't given an
indication when it might decide whether to approve the technology.
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta recently said he worried that "sleeper
cells" of terrorists could get travel cards.

"They are patient. If it takes them four or five years to get an ID card,
that's a short time," Mineta told The Associated Press.

There are other unanswered questions about the way cards would work: Who would
conduct background checks? What kind of personal information would be gathered?
How would privacy be protected?

David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association and a supporter of
the cards, acknowledged that some of his members were concerned the government
could use the cards to track their travel habits.

Lines at most airports have gotten shorter since last fall, as airports add
security agents and travelers learn the check-in process. But card supporters
say air travel will return to pre-Sept. 11 levels, overwhelming security
agents.

Technology companies believe that if tens of thousands of travelers learn to
use smart cards, it will hasten their use in other aspects of our lives 
resulting in even more sales.

"Once it's in place for an application like this, that we all sign up for, that
will open the doors," said Dullum, the EDS official.

In addition to companies that make the smart cards, the biggest beneficiaries
figure to be the airlines themselves.

In recent surveys, nearly one-third of business travelers  the airlines'
highest-paying and most-loyal customers  say the airport hassle has made them
less likely to fly. Anything that saves time for business travelers is likely
to mean more revenue for airlines.

"We need to help the airlines with business travelers so that they are there
for the rest of us," Stempler said.

****************
USA Today
Emergency wireless system a step closer

By Dan Caterinicchia, Federal Computer Week

The government is one step closer to having a priority wireless access system
for use during emergencies.

Government officials have been pushing for such a system since the events of
Sept. 11 wreaked havoc on wireless telephone networks.

After a deal with Verizon Wireless for a priority access system fell through
late last year, VoiceStream Wireless may provide that service starting with a
pilot program in New York City and Washington, D.C., scheduled to begin in May,
according to Reuters.

The pilot program, announced March 26, will ensure that mobile phone calls from
national security and emergency personnel on VoiceStream's network will be
connected regardless of the amount of traffic on the system.

The new system will be part of the White House's National Communications System
and eventually will be expanded nationwide, Brent Greene, deputy manager of
NCS, told Reuters. He said a competition is in progress "to put in such
capability nationally that would have a much broader national footprint by the
end of December and then a year later full operational capability."

The Federal Communications Commission was still in the process of approving a
waiver for VoiceStream Wireless for the priority access system, said an NCS
spokesman, adding that the Reuters story saying that the FCC had already
granted the waiver was premature.

The waiver is necessary for wireless telecommunications companies to develop
and implement a short-term immediate solution in selected markets for wireless
priority access in those areas during national emergencies without meeting the
queuing and other requirements established in FCC rules.

Tom Wheeler, president and chief executive officer of the Cellular
Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA), said that the VoiceStream
deal, which is designed to minimize the impact on wireless subscribers while
enabling essential government functions to continue in an emergency, is "the
right thing to do," but should be taken even further.

Wheeler asked the government to "free up the additional wireless spectrum it
has long bottled up" in order to better serve the nation's more than 130
million wireless customers.

At the Milcom conference last October, Lt. Gen. Harry Raduege Jr., director of
the Defense Information Systems Agency, said the wireless priority system was a
"national priority" and would be used to aid emergency response efforts in
selected cities.

The government already has a priority system for landline communications: the
Government Emergency Telecommunications Service, which worked effectively in
the aftermath of Sept. 11, said Raduege, who also is manager of NCS. GETS,
which gives government workers a code and categorizes them for priority access,
is viewed as the model for the wireless priority access system.

Less than a week after Raduege's comments, various media outlets reported that
an agreement had been struck with Verizon, the nation's largest wireless phone
service provider. Verizon issued a statement Nov. 5, 2001, that said the deal
was not yet done.

A little more than a month later, Verizon withdrew its request for the FCC
waiver stating that "the better course is to respond to the government's
emergency communications needs in ways that do not require FCC action at this
time."

****************
USA Today
Computer memory prices inching up

There are few ways to boost computer performance that are as easy and cheap as
upgrading memory.

Since the beginning of the year, however, historically low memory prices have
started creeping back up, prompting this gentle urging to anyone who has been
procrastinating on an upgrade: do it now. Industry analysts say prices are only
going to climb higher throughout the year, and it may be another year or two
before the market gets soft again.

"Memory prices have been edging up every couple of weeks," said Richard Gordon,
who watches the semiconductor industry for the Gartner analysis firm. "Memory
prices fluctuate a good deal; it's just the nature of the industry."

Besides higher retail prices for memory modules, consumers should also expect
computer manufacturers to be a bit less generous with the memory they had been
stacking into desktop and laptop systems in hopes of moving inventory.

Memory, called RAM for random access memory, is measured in megabytes (MB) and
sold in modules that plug into the computer's motherboard. The more RAM you
have, the more documents you can have open and the more programs you can run
simultaneously.

Most computers use what's called SDRAM, or synchronous dynamic random access
memory.

Here's how prices have been rising:

? Recently, a 128 MB module of PC-133 SDRAM, among the most common forms of
memory on the market, typically sold for between $30 and $35. That was up from
about $25 at the end of last year, according to the Weekly Memory Pricing Guide
(www.sharkyextreme.com/guides/ WMPG/ index.php), which is a site that tracks
memory prices.

? Direct memory vendor Crucial (www.crucial.com) in Boise, Idaho, sold 128 MB of
PC-133 memory for about $15 near the end of last year. Now the same product
goes for more than $32  more than twice the price.

Memory is made worldwide  much of it in the Pacific Rim and Asia  and usually
sold in bulk to computer makers. Because of the large number of suppliers,
rapid innovation in the manufacturing process, and the fluid nature of
worldwide computer component markets, memory prices and supplies are in
constant flux.

"We manage production very carefully," said Geoffrey Hughes, with Korean memory
maker Samsung. "So the supply side can change quickly, and that will affect the
price equally quickly."

Your PC manual should provide instructions on how to install memory (it's quick
and easy) and what type of memory modules your system requires. Even though
memory modules look alike, many have subtle differences, so check before you
buy.
****************
USA Today
Video bootlegger pleads guilty

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters)  A California video bootlegger pleaded guilty Thursday
to charges of violating the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),
marking what prosecutors said was the second known criminal conviction in the
country under the controversial law.

Mohsin Mynaf, a 36-year-old from Vacaville, California, was accused of running
a videocassette reproduction lab in his home to pirate movies that he rented or
sold at three video stores.

Mynaf's guilty plea marks a rare conviction under the DMCA, the 1998 U.S. law
which sparked world headlines last year after U.S. prosecutors arrested a
Russian software programmer on charges of distributing technology to circumvent
copyright protections.

Mynaf, who pleaded guilty counts of criminal copyright infringement,
trafficking in counterfeit labels, and circumventing a technological measure
designed to protect a copyrighted work, faces up to 65 years in jail and a fine
of up to $3.5 million, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Krotoski.

The DMCA, which has been widely criticized by cyber-activists, prohibits anyone
from willfully circumventing a technological measure that controls access to a
copyrighted work for financial gain.

The Mynaf case is believed to be the first targeting the circumvention of
security measures on analog videocassettes, the U.S. Attorney's office said.

A lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that promotes
preservation of civil liberties on the Internet, said that prior DMCA cases
have targeted people engaged in legitimate activities, such as Web publishers,
software programmers and researchers.

"It's the first time the DMCA has been used to go after someone who is actually
infringing copyright," Robin Gross, an EFF staff attorney, said after hearing
about the Mynaf plea agreement.

In the first major DMCA case, Eric Corley, publisher of hacker magazine 2600,
was accused of violating the law by posting on his Web site the code used to
unscramble antipiracy protections in digital video disks. A New York judge
barred him from posting the code or linking to other Web sites that post it and
Corley has appealed.

In the most widely publicized DMCA lawsuit, ElcomSoft of Moscow is accused of
violating the DMCA by selling a program that lets people using Adobe Systems
eBook Reader copy and print digital books, transfer them to other computers and
have them read aloud by the computer. A hearing is scheduled for Monday in U.S.
District Court in San Jose, California.

The U.S. government originally had arrested an ElcomSoft programmer, Dmitry
Sklyarov, but released him late last year and agreed to drop the charges
against him in exchange for his testimony.

DMCA critics complain that the law is being used to thwart legitimate and legal
uses of technology and give broader control to copyright owners such as movie
studios and record labels. Film and music companies complain they have to
aggressively protect their intellectual property which, in the new digital age,
can so easily be copied and distributed electronically.

So far, the first criminal conviction under the DMCA, in Nebraska, involved a
modified computer chip that circumvented Sony software security measures to
allow the Sony Playstation to play unauthorized copies of copyright protected
Sony computer games, according to the U.S. Attorney's office in Sacramento.

Mynaf was arrested Dec. 5 and remains in federal custody with sentencing
scheduled for July 11 before U.S. District Court Judge David Levi.

In December, officials discovered more than 4,500 bootlegged videotapes at the
video stores in Vacaville, Fairfield and Vallejo, in a storage facility Mynaf
rented and at his home, the U.S. Attorney's office said.

Between Aug. 31 and Nov. 25, 2001, officials found nearly 30 bootlegged
videotapes at the video stores, and about 3,400 counterfeit copyright notice
labels.

To defeat the copyright protection on the videotapes, Mynaf used a "copy guard
defeater" wired into the video circuit on the reproduction equipment, officials
said. That device automatically stripped out the protection from the copies,
removing an electronic signal embedded in the recording of copyright work that
is designed to prevent anyone from making viewable copies.

****************
USA Today
Bail denied for former Global Crossing worker

CONCORD, N.H. (AP)  A federal judge denied bail Thursday for a man accused of
using a Web site to threaten executives at Global Crossing, where he was twice
fired.

But the judge threw out charges that Steven Sutcliffe had violated federal
privacy laws by posting the Social Security numbers of thousands of Global
Crossing employees on the site.

The case now moves to federal court in California, where Global Crossing is
based.

Sutcliffe worked in the technical support department for the bankrupt fiber
networks company in Beverly Hills, Calif. Last year he was fired, rehired, and
then fired again in September.

Global Crossing, which declared bankruptcy in January, had successfully sought
an injunction to shut down Sutcliffe's Web site last fall. But prosecutors said
Sutcliffe relocated the site using several Web hosting services around the
country and offshore.

He was arrested by the FBI Tuesday at his home in Manchester, where he moved
this winter. His brother lives in nearby Auburn and Sutcliffe's lawyer said New
Hampshire is Sutcliffe's homestate.

"We're pretty happy he's been apprehended," Cynthia Arten, a spokeswoman for
Global Crossing in Madison, N.J., said Thursday.

Prosecutors said the site includes threats against the company's lawyer and
other employees. They said at one place, Sutcliffe sent a message to an
employee: "If you call my house again and threaten me, or my family, or ever
appear near me, or my family, I will personally send you back to the hell from
where you came."

But Sutcliffe's lawyer in New Hampshire, federal public defender Jonathan Saxe,
urged Magistrate Judge John Muirhead to view the entire site on the Internet to
see the remarks in context.

Muirhead obliged, setting up three computers in the courtroom so that he,
Sutcliffe, lawyers and spectators could see and hear the site.

Saxe demonstrated the site's attempts at humor and Sutcliffe's detailed
arguments about his troubles with his former employer. He also pointed out a
disclaimer that said "this site does not advocate, encourage or condone any
conduct that is illegal at any time by any person."

Saxe said if Sutcliffe had meant to carry out the threats, he wouldn't have
moved to New Hampshire.

"This is a cyber-imagination case," Saxe said. "When we get into the real
world, there is no indication he's a problem."

But prosecutor Arnold Huftalen pointed out a photo of a Global Crossing
employee with her young daughter. The site also included the woman's address
and a link to a map to her house.

Afterward, Muirhead complemented Sutcliffe on his handiwork.

"That Web site is brilliantly conceived," he said. "But it's scary."

Sutcliffe could face up to five years in prison if convicted.

****************
USA Today
Animation software to be available to all

Fans of animation and effects-packed films such as Shrek and Lord of the Rings
will soon be seeing an explosion in groundbreaking special effects, thanks to
wider availability of the software used to create them.

Industry giant Alias/Wavefront already has a free streamlined version of its
Maya 3-D graphics software available for download from its Web site. A $5 CD
version is due next week.

Today, the company will announce drastic price cuts on its professional
versions, Maya Complete ($1,999) and Maya Unlimited ($6,999). That's far below
their former prices of $7,500 and $16,000  sums that might not faze Industrial
Light & Magic or DreamWorks but exclude small-time developers.

"Anybody who wants to do anything professional in 3-D now will be able to
afford the tools that the top innovators use," says company president Doug
Walker.

Maya Complete lets users build, animate and add voices to 3-D characters and
create 3-D objects and environments for movies and games. Maya Unlimited has
premium features for creating realistic cloth and fur. The free version offers
tutorials and the same capabilities as Maya Complete, but adds a watermark so
that saved output cannot be used professionally. Still, students and budding
animators can tinker with the technology used in films such as Ice Age,
Monsters, Inc., Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Titanic.

Part of the Maya strategy is to get dabblers to graduate to more powerful  and
more expensive  programs. "Going after the consumer market seems to be the Holy
Grail for 3-D content-creation apps just now," says Daniel R. Huebner, editor
of game development Web site Gamasutra.com.

More likely: Lower prices might attract studios that previously "found Maya too
expensive," he says.

Others in the 3-D industry have aimed at developing new talent, too. SoftImage
has a free version of its XSI 2.0 effects software available online, also with
a watermark. And last week NewTek cut the price of its LightWave 3-D software
from $2,495 to $1,595.

Game publishers have been including a free developer version of Discreet's gmax
animation software on games such as Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2002 so that
players can create new models, maps and character appearances. And Sony is
taking orders for its budget-priced Linux-based PlayStation 2 development kit
($199, due in May).

This is all good news for moviegoers and video game players, says Jennifer
Olsen, editor in chief of Game Developer magazine. "Removing the cost barrier
means that more people can learn to author high-end 3-D content," she says.
"The hobbyists today will be the professionals of tomorrow, creating the
sophisticated 3-D content consumers will be demanding."

****************
Federal Computer Week
DISA seeks detection system

The Defense Information Systems Agency last week announced plans to work with
GRC International Inc. to develop a system to help detect, analyze and defend
against cyberattacks across Defense Department networks.

In a March 27 notice, DISA officials said the department needed a system to
"monitor and analyze the immense amounts of computer traffic and detect the
missions of hacker attacks and denial-of-service attacks launched against
DISA's Global Information Grid daily." The grid includes unclassified and
classified DOD networks worldwide.

Numerous individual defense organizations already have intrusion-detection
systems on their networks, but DOD has only just begun integrating such
protection across the department. 

Integration allows officials to recognize more complex attacks after looking at
data across multiple units, said Becky Bace, former head of the National
Security Agency's Computer Misuse and Anomaly Detection research program. 

For the same reason, the General Services Administration's Federal Computer
Incident Response Center is working with the CERT Coordination Center at
Carnegie Mellon University to develop a similar analysis and correlation
capability for civilian agencies, said Sallie McDonald, associate commissioner
of information assurance and critical infrastructure protection at GSA.

Officials from DISA and GRC In.ternational could not be reached for comment.
****************
Federal Computer Week
Arizona test-drives PKI

Arizona's Motor Vehicle Division is testing use of public key infrastructure to
secure online transactions with commercial firms, potentially setting the stage
for broader use, including, one day, smart driver's licenses, a state official
said.

In the pilot program, which started in January, MVD provided three private
investigative companies with digital certificates so they can obtain certain
motor vehicle records, bypassing the manual process, said Jamie Rybarczyk, a
systems architect with the state Department of Transportation.

PKI technology allows users to securely and privately conduct transactions with
companies or government agencies through a browser. Transactions are encrypted,
providing the decryption key only when a user's identify has been authenticated
with a digital certificate.

"We believe, along with everybody else, this is the wave of the future,"
Rybarczyk said. 

Usually, private investigators  who are court-authorized to get information
from MVD  must wait in line, fill out a form requesting the specific
information, show proper identification and authorization, pay a small fee, and
then wait for the attendant to obtain the data from a mainframe terminal, he
said.

By using digital certificates, the investigators can connect to the MVD
intranet through a Virtual Private Network, fill out an online form, digitally
sign it and get results quickly, he said. "This is the perfect application to
allow people to access this online so they can do this from their own office,"
he said, adding they can do it any time of the day.

The pilot program still has several months to go, but so far it's a success.
Rybarczyk said.

To Rybarczyk's knowledge, the MVD is the first agency in Arizona testing, but
the potential for PKI is great, he said. For example, digital certificates
could be stored in a "smart" chip on driver's licenses, which could be inserted
into a card reader to initiate an online transaction. But that's in the future,
he added. 

For the pilot program, MVD is beta-testing a product called eTrust PKI 2.0 from
Islandia, N.Y.-based Computer Associates. Rybarczyk said the product, scheduled
for general availability in April, is user-friendly and scalable if digital
features are added to licenses.

Barry Keyes, vice president of Computer Associates' eTrust Security Solutions
division, said PKI is used in government, especially by law enforcement
agencies, because it provides a high level of confidentiality and integrity.

With PKI, he said, either a vendor can manage the technology and issue the
digital certificates, or a government agency controls the registration and
certificate issuance process. However, widespread use has not yet caught on and
one problem is the complexity in implementing and managing the technology, he
added.

It takes less than an hour to implement eTrust PKI 2.0, Keyes said, and the
bundled product contains a built-in directory and self-contained Online
Certificate Status Protocol responder, providing real-time validation of user
identities.

****************
Federal Computer Week
DOD details IT wish list
Fiscal 2003 budget request up 12 percent

The Defense Department is seeking a significant boost in information technology
spending for fiscal 2003, in part to help fund its goal of becoming a
network-centric department.

DOD, which detailed its IT budget wish list late last month, is requesting
$26.4 billion for IT and national security systems in fiscal 2003, up nearly 12
percent over fiscal 2002, according to an analysis by Federal Sources Inc., a
McLean, Va., market research firm.

"The requested increase is pretty dramatic  even for the Defense Department,"
said Payton Smith, an analyst with Input, a market research firm in Vienna, Va.
The increase is not surprising given recent events, he noted.

The budget proposal makes clear the importance of the armed services' ability
to respond to problems that may come their way, he said.

While the budget document includes only unclassified systems, the numbers might
be even higher if classified systems are included, analysts said. Richard
Turner, chief information officer at the National Security Agency, speaking at
a breakfast with vendors on March 27, said that NSA was seeking a 15 percent
increase for fiscal 2003.

The budget sends several clear messages, said Ray Bjorklund, a vice president
at Federal Sources. "You see the trans.formation message coming through," he
said, referring to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's overarching initiative
to modernize the armed services.

That focus on transformation is clear in the budget numbers, the programs that
are getting support and the emphasis on joint programs that can be used
departmentwide, Bjorklund said.

The budget also signifies greater power in DOD's command, control,
communications and intelligence (C3I), which is taking on a larger role in
managing and controlling investments across the department, he said.

John Stenbit, assistant secretary of Defense for C3I and DOD's CIO, has
repeatedly stressed the importance of having a network-centric department.

"That document has pretty clear messages about how the military departments and
agencies are aligning with network-centric warfare and the need to share
information across the organization," Bjorklund said. "There is a slightly
enhanced sense of jointness."

"This is something that has been percolating along for at least the last four
years," said Michael Kush, senior systems engineer for Vector Research Inc. and
chairman of the Government Electronics and Information Technology Association's
defense agency budget forecast team.

Input's Smith also noted that the budget proposal would increase spending on IT
infrastructure while cutting back somewhat on functional areas. That reflects a
governmentwide mind-set of looking at infrastructure and securing networks
against potential attacks.

If Congress approves the budget, the Navy and Air Force would see the most
significant budget increases of 16 percent and 13 percent, respectively,
according to Federal Sources.

The fiscal 2003 budget provides the Navy with a big increase for its
enterprisewide network effort across its shore-based facilities. Spending for
the Navy Marine Corps Intranet coincides with a significant spike in its
implementation schedule. By the end of fiscal 2003, EDS, NMCI's lead vendor,
will complete its rollout, reaching more than 411,000 seats.

DOD also is requesting an increase for its Defense Message System to $314
million, up from $286.8 million in fiscal 2002.

There is also significant funding for DOD's Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS),
which actually is more of a computer with a radio front end. The radio will
permit communications across DOD services. DOD is requesting $172 million for
JTRS in fiscal 2003, up from $165 million in fiscal 2002.
****************
Federal Computer Week
Army test drives transformation

The Army has begun a limited project in the Washington, D.C., area to test out
key concepts of a top-level initiative intended to link information systems
servicewide into a single infrastructure.

As part of the Army's Enterprise Infostructure Transformation program, the
service wants to standardize desktop computers and servers on a core set of
software based on Microsoft Corp. Windows 2000 and Active Directory software.

Under a $1.8 million contract awarded last month, Telos Corp. will assess the
viability of migrating Army users in the Military District of Washington. If
the idea looks good, the contract, which could exceed $6 million, includes
options for installing the software on more than 26,000 server and desktop
systems.

Active Directory is a technology that enables a systems administrator to manage
systems on a network and who has access to those resources. The infostructure
program is intended to reduce the cost of maintaining information systems,
while improving access to information and applications across the service.

Sandy Sieber, associate director of the Army Communications-Electronics
Command's Acquisition Center-Washington, said the pilot project will be used as
a test to "feed into what they decide to do Armywide."

The Telos team includes IBM Corp., Advanced Technology Systems, NCI Information
Systems Inc., Internosis and Abacus Technology Corp.

For years, the Army has had a "distributed and heterogeneous environment at the
[information technology] level," said Ralph Buona, vice president of new
business development at Ashburn, Va.-based Telos. "[The Military District of
Washington] is acting as a proof of concept to the larger [enterprisewide]
centralization process." 

The pilot will be performed initially at Fort Belvoir, Va., and upon successful
completion, the Army has the option to include the other five locations that
comprise the Washington military district: Fort Myer, Va.; Fort Meade, Md.;
Fort Hamilton, N.Y.; Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.; and Fort AP Hill, Va.,
Sieber said.
****************
Federal Computer Week
Do metrics measure up?

Performance-based services contracts, in which agencies hold contractors
accountable for attaining specific goals, have been around for a while. The
question now, federal officials said during a March 28 panel discussion, is
whether the concept actually helps an agency carry out its work.

Most agencies with large information technology outsourcing contracts have
spent the first few years of the contract getting a better understanding of how
to manage the contract, including the expectations of users and the
relationship with the vendor, officials said. They have also been struggling
with finding and managing the metrics used to gauge performance. 

So only now are agencies really getting to the point where they can start
examining whether the outsourcing contract has really helped the greater
mission of their agency, said David McClure, director of IT management issues
at the General Accounting Office, speaking on the panel of federal officials at
a breakfast hosted by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics
Association's Bethesda, Md., chapter.

GAO is starting a review of the reasons some agencies use for not awarding IT
services contracts and whether those reasons have any merit, McClure said.

NASA put in place several performance measures as part of its agencywide IT
outsourcing contract, the Outsourcing Desktop Initiative for NASA (ODIN), said
Lee Holcomb, the agency's chief information officer. Those measures include the
availability of service, the level of service delivery, the level of customer
satisfaction and the reduction in cost for each desktop.

Judging the measures to be successful, NASA is looking at the "more
challenging" issue of how ODIN is helping the agency do its business, Holcomb
said.

Agency officials recently began looking at the various business needs across
the agency to determine how ODIN can better support those needs, he said. They
will likely change the contract to provide better support and bring in new
metrics to measure the agency's performance improvements, Holcomb said.

Many agencies engaged in large-scale IT services contracts are following
commercial best practices outlined in a GAO report that came out last year,
McClure said. But some agencies still are not, and as part of its review, GAO
wants to find out why.

Many times, officials cite existing policy or legislation that does not in fact
prohibit using the best practices, and agencies and Congress need to determine
how to counteract those claims, McClure said.
****************
New York Times
Plan to Change Internet Group Is Criticized as Inadequate
The organization responsible for managing the Internet's address system has
embarked on a reform effort that has ignited a contentious debate not just
about its own future but about the very notion of Internet governance.

The organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, was
created by the United States government in 1998 to manage the system that
translates domain names like nytimes.com into numbers recognized by the
network.

But as its original narrow mandate has expanded into policy-making territory,
like deciding which extensions should join .com, .net and .org, the group, also
known as Icann, has been criticized for its cumbersome processes and lack of
openness.

In addressing these policy questions  like which extensions should join .com,
.net and .org and how to treat trademark holders  the group, also known as
Icann, has been criticized as slow, bureaucratic and lacking openness.

At the end of February, Icann acknowledged some of its shortcomings with a
30-page paper written by its president and chief executive, M. Stuart Lynn,
calling for reform. But the proposal, which focuses primarily on problems in
structure and financing, has caused a larger debate.

In the last month, various individuals and organizations have weighed in,
including several members of Congress, who have sent letters asking the
Commerce Department to get involved. (The Commerce Department was instrumental
in creating Icann and continues to have a contractual relationship with the
organization; that contract is up for review this fall.) 

No one seems to take issue with Mr. Lynn's case for reform. In fact, the paper
bluntly admits, "Icann in its current form has not become the effective steward
of the global Internet's naming and address allocation systems as conceived by
its founders." But critics say the remedies Mr. Lynn proposes, mainly changing
how the board is chosen and reorganizing the board's advisory committees, would
even further reduce public representation, long a criticism of Icann.

The proposal also suggests recasting Icann as a "public-private partnership"
and giving international governments a stronger role in the organization by
allowing them to nominate five members to the board. That suggestion has set
off alarm bells within the United States government, which intentionally
designed Icann as a private nonprofit corporation to avoid some of the pitfalls
of government bureaucracy.

Although sensitive to the fact that the Internet has become a critical
international resource, some people within the United States government are
also wary of any effort to hand over management of the address system to a
multinational quasi-governmental body.

For his part, Mr. Lynn said his proposal was intended simply as a starting
point, and he expressed some surprise at the vehemence of the response. "The
proposal put on the table was bound to change," he said in a telephone
interview last week. "If there are better ways, let's hear them."

Toward that end, Icann has established a Committee on Evolution and Reform,
which is soliciting public input over the next several weeks through a process
outlined at www .icann.org. That committee will make a recommendation to
Icann's board, which is expected to release its own recommendations by May 31.

But one question is whether Icann has the credibility at this point to manage
its own reform. Some view the Commerce Department as the only candidate for
exerting any influence over Icann and have called for it to assume a stronger
role.

"Commerce needs to make it clear to all involved that they really do need to
compromise and come to some workable structure if they want it to succeed at
all," said Esther Dyson, chairwoman of EDventure Holdings and a former
chairwoman of Icann.

That perspective seems to be gathering momentum. The chairman and several
members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to Commerce
Secretary Donald L. Evans in mid-March to express concern that Mr. Lynn's
proposal "will make Icann even less democratic, open and accountable than it is
today."

Ken Johnson, a spokesman for the committee, said it was likely to hold hearings
on the topic. "We are certainly going to have an oversight hearing on Icann
and, as they say, you can bet your bottom dollar that the reform plan is going
to be one of the key issues that we'll examine," he said. He added that there
was "a very good possibility" the hearing would happen before the summer,
noting that the timing of Icann's contract renewal in September was a factor.

Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, has also sent a letter asking the
Senate Commerce Committee to hold an oversight hearing on Icann. He raises the
question of "whether Icann is even the most appropriate organization to be
tasked with such a critical mission, which is central to our national
security."

Though many insiders agree that the security issue is a red herring (the United
States government still retains control over the so-called A-root server, the
central database of the domain name system), the scope of Icann's mission is a
matter of debate. Even Mr. Lynn acknowledged, "We need to have a much clearer
understanding of Icann's mission, what it's supposed to do and what it's not."
On that note, many heads are turning to the Commerce Department for
clarification.

So far, the Commerce Department has been reluctant to engage itself fully in
that discussion. But the debate over Icann in some sense relies on clarifying
whether it should continue to have a policy-making role  and if not, who should
take on responsibility for policy matters, which are inevitable as the medium
evolves.

Some critics have suggested that perhaps Icann's functions should be split up,
with each function distributed to whatever organization is best suited for that
role, though others say that would ultimately lead to more bureaucracy and
inertia.

For now, the Commerce Department is waiting to see what recommendations Icann
ultimately suggests for reform, though Nancy J. Victory, assistant secretary of
commerce for communications and information, said the department was conducting
its own analysis "so we can make some meaningful comment on what they come up
with."

She specifically called on the business world to provide recommendations to
Icann and the Commerce Department, noting that businesses had not been
particularly involved in this issue.

Ms. Victory also hinted that the Commerce Department was well aware of its
critical role. "Icann is a private-sector entity and they can structure
themselves any way they want," she said. But she was also careful to point out:
"We do have a contractual relationship with them, which we have the ability to
modify, or, if we want, terminate. That is how our input comes into this
process."

****************
New York Times
Game-Design Courses Gain Favor

ROCHESTER  When Andrew M. Phelps, an instructor at the Rochester Institute of
Technology, explains how to use software to draw people and terrains, it might
sound as if he is preparing his students to produce an animated film like
"Shrek."

In fact, the two dozen students listening intently to Mr. Phelps want to create
the next Lara Croft.

"With `Shrek,' you're just using a computer program as paint," said Zachary
Welch, 23, one of the students. "Games are interactive."

They are also a hot growth area. The Rochester Institute, whose department of
information technology just started the first master's program in computer game
design, estimates that the $20 billion computer game industry will grow to a
$100 billion-a-year business within a decade. 

Rochester's program takes its place alongside a few others around the nation.
In January, the Art Institutes of San Francisco, a commercial art school, began
offering classes in game design that lead to an undergraduate degree. And three
years ago, Carnegie Mellon University set up the Entertainment Technology
Center, which offers classes in computer animation and computer-generated
special effects that are applicable to creating games, even though it does not
offer a degree in game design.

Because computer game design is so new as an academic field, it is chancy to
predict whether graduates will find jobs. On the positive side, the abundance
of games on the market makes it ever harder to capture the loyalty of game
players. Thus, companies are desperate for those who can come up with the next
Doom or Quake. 

"We have all these jobs that we can't fill, because we can't find people with
the right skills," said Randy J. Hinrichs, a research manager at the learning
science and technology unit at Microsoft (news/quote). 

Pay scales do not reflect the shortages. Mr. Hinrichs said Microsoft would pay
a designer with a degree $70,000 to start, but Microsoft may be an anomaly.
Students, recruiters and other game executives say that entry-level game
designers rarely get more than $45,000, and experienced designers rarely earn
more than $120,000. 

There are exceptions, of course. Will Wright, who created the Sims, and Sid
Meier, who designed Civilization, certainly provide wealthy role models. Still,
"most of us probably will fail," said David Parks, 20, another of Mr. Phelps's
students, "but whoever comes up with the next really big game can make a
fortune." 

What keeps the students motivated, though, is their love of games, combined
with the intellectual challenge of game design. Animated movies have fixed
plots, but with a game, each image is predicated on the player's previous move,
so the game must be programmed with a form of artificial intelligence. 

Skills in creating and maneuvering complex graphics have applications beyond
gaming, of course. The Rochester Institute is collaborating with Cornell
University to devise methods by which game technology can be used to teach high
school biology. Several students said they could use their new skills in
business or government work. 

"We can work for NASA, for the military, for any place where graphics
simulations are in demand," said Konboye Oyake, 25. 

The students may in fact receive warmer receptions from the nongame world.
Debate is hot among game aficionados and industry executives about whether game
design can be taught  and if so, how, by whom and to whom. 

"I'm leery about the quality of game education versus experience," said Mark
DeLoura, manager of developer relations at Sony (news/quote) Computer
Entertainment Americas. "And gaming is interactive storytelling, so a
game-design degree would fit in more with a film school." 

Others argue about whether students should be drawn from among artists or
programmers. 

Mr. Phelps, the Rochester instructor, has an artist's eye  his own paintings
hang in his office  but he does not mind that few of his students share his
predilection. "Game design has become a software engineering problem," he said.


But Mary Clarke-Miller, academic director of the new media program at the Art
Institutes of San Francisco, has a different view. "Modern games incorporate
more complex artistic elements," she said, "so the industry needs trained
artists." 

The computer professors at Lehigh University, meanwhile, might agree with both.
They say they will not offer game-design courses until Lehigh's arts professors
get a complementary design-arts course up and running. 

"Programmers can make things appear on screen, but we want them to also know
how those things should look," said G. Drew Kessler, an assistant professor of
computer science and engineering at Lehigh. 

At the University of California at Irvine, Robert F. Nideffer, an assistant
professor of studio art, has been lobbying since 2000 for an interdisciplinary
game-design program that would draw faculty members from engineering, arts and
computer sciences. "So far," he said, "we haven't convinced the committee on
academic programs that gaming is a serious line of inquiry."

Only Carnegie Mellon seems to have already bridged the left brain-right brain
divide. Its Entertainment Technology Center, which offers courses in many forms
of computer animation and computer-generated effects, is jointly run by the
College of Fine Arts and the School of Computer Science, which each providing a
co-director. The center accepts half its students based on their computer
skills, the other half for their visual acumen. 

"Some 25 percent of our incoming students want to design games," said Randy F.
Pausch, the director from the computer side. "By our mere existence, we show
them that the field is about collaboration." 

Collegiality, in fact, may yet be the most valuable thing students take from
any game design class. After all, the specific technology they learn is quickly
obsolete. 

"Today's game designer is tomorrow's passé game designer," said Gail Z. Koch,
president of Comsearch, the technology recruiting firm. But that does not make
game-design courses a waste of time, Ms. Koch said. "These students form a
network," she said. "They can keep each other informed about which places have
jobs  and which have in-house training."
****************
New York Times
A Power Shift in Technology

The humbling fall to earth of the high-technology industry the last 18 months
has brought a series of changes, from the reduced value that the stock market
places on many companies to a more sober view of information technology's power
to transform the economy and the culture.

One byproduct has been a significant shift in the balance of power for buyers
and sellers in the technology sector. In the bygone era of a few years ago,
when established companies in every industry were said to be threatened with
extinction by an upstart dot-com, computer hardware and software was bought
with abandon, motivated by fear and fashion. Many corporate executives have a
lingering sense of being duped a bit by the grand promises of the industry's
"visionaries," who, after the party, look more like mere salesmen.

Today it is the corporate buyers of information technology who hold the whip.
Evidence of the shift in power to buyers, and away from vendors, is everywhere.
In the industry, the notion of "putting the customer first," given cynical lip
service in the past, is now regarded as deep wisdom.

The new ethos was amply on display last week at the annual PC Forum in
Scottsdale, Ariz. Esther Dyson, an influential industry analyst and publisher
whose newsletter Release 1.0 is determinedly focused on the intersection of the
present and the future, is host of the conference. PC Forum, in its 25th year,
takes the same approach, mixing executives of industry stalwarts like Microsoft
(news/quote) and Intel (news/quote) with aspiring start-ups, venture
capitalists and others.

A striking feature of the gathering this year was the prominence of chief
information officers of old-line companies like American Airlines and General
Motors (news/quote). They were the stars of the show, and the discussion topics
included "The Politics of Enterprise Software." These days, a promising
start-up needs a few big corporate customers to attract the venture capital
needed to survive.

Monte E. Ford, the chief information officer at American Airlines, spoke with
the weary wisdom of experience of the software industry's penchant for
promoting a "new savior product" every few years  enterprise resource planning
software, better known as E.R.P., customer relationship management software, or
C.R.M., and the industry's current darling, Web services.

Because corporations account for so much of the investment in information
technology, their buying decisions are crucial to establishing industry
standards. "We end up being kingmakers," Mr. Ford observed. Yet the vendor
kings  like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems (news/quote)  have
emerged with more market power in their hands than have the corporate
customers, even the largest. The customers' power to play the kingmaker, Mr.
Ford said, has often turned out to be "a sort of self-defeating proposition."

Yet the big customers have been flexing their power lately. A good example is
the Liberty Alliance, a consortium of technology companies, led by Sun, and
many large corporate customers like United Airlines, American Express
(news/quote) and General Motors. 

The Liberty consortium, announced last fall, was formed to develop online
identification technology for Internet commerce. Liberty was established at a
time when a pair of online identification technologies were under development 
one from AOL, with an initiative called Magic Carpet, and another from
Microsoft, with its Passport sign-on system well along.

The airline, auto and credit-card companies feared that AOL and Microsoft might
use their ID offerings  which allow consumers to fill out a single form to shop
on the Web, instead of having to fill out separate forms at many Web sites  as
a leverage point to lock in consumers and dominate Internet commerce. 

Another big technology company, Sun, was also known to be working on online ID
technology. Three weeks before the Liberty Alliance was announced in September,
Sun and about three dozen other companies met in San Jose, Calif. The fear
among the nontechnology companies, Tony Scott, the chief information officer of
General Motors, said in an interview, was that "we saw this really ugly
scenario with the potential for erosion of consumer confidence in the Web."

"This was not a good area," Mr. Scott said, "to have a big technology battle,"
by offering a service that would exclude rival products.

So as soon as the San Jose meeting began, Mr. Scott said, the assembled
companies had a simple message for Scott G. McNealy, the chief executive of
Sun. "We told McNealy," Mr. Scott said, "that if you want to use this as a
stick to beat up on Microsoft and AOL, forget it. We're out of here."

Indeed, Sun has stepped a bit to the side in the Liberty group. It will be
technology supplier, but the alliance is led by others, with Eric C. Dean, the
chief information officer at United Airlines, serving as president. Liberty has
pledged to take a "federated" approach, meaning it will work with other online
ID technologies, or interoperate. Since the Liberty announcement last fall,
Microsoft has pledged to adopt the federated model with its Passport service.

Yet the shift in power toward the corporate buyers, it seems, is more a
corrective swing of the pendulum than a permanent transition to making
technology companies mere order-takers. The reason: the high-tech industry
still does have the capacity, as it always has, to come up with innovations
that change the way people work and play.

Customers often help new innovations find their best and most practical uses.
Technology is a tool to help solve a problem that customers know they have. But
a singular focus on the customer can be a rearview mirror, a lesson recalled at
PC Forum by veterans of many a technology cycle. 

There was no great customer demand, for example, for Internet browsing
software. It was developed by a couple of students at the supercomputing center
at the University of Illinois, who went on with others and founded what became
Netscape Communications.

"Netscape brought to the world a whole new way to look for information,"
observed Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. "It shows that sometimes
the technologists are right." 

****************
New York Times
February Computer Chip Sales Off 35%

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 29 (Bloomberg News)  Worldwide sales of computer chips
fell 35 percent in February, declining at the slowest pace since June as chip
makers outside Japan got more orders from makers of mobile phones and digital
cameras, an industry group said. 

Sales fell to $10.01 billion from $15.48 billion in February 2001 and were
unchanged from the previous month, the group said. In January, computer chip
sales fell 40 percent, to $10 billion. 

Demand in the second quarter will be "slightly stronger," and the second half
will see "accelerating growth," according to the group, the Semiconductor
Industry Association of San Jose.

"Strong consumer spending for mobile phones, DVD's and digital cameras
continued to move chip sales slightly upward," the association's president,
George Scalise, said in the report. "Although business investment has yet to
pick up, consumer confidence and inventory replenishing continue to rise,
driving the early stages of the overall recovery." 

Revenue from dynamic random access memory chips, the main memory in personal
computers, rose almost 24 percent in February from January because prices
increased, Mr. Scalise said. 

Sales in North and South America rose 2 percent in February from January, while
sales in Asia- Pacific excluding Japan increased 0.3 percent, the association
said. Europe had a 1.5 percent month-on-month drop, and Japan's sales fell 1.2
percent. 

****************
Computerworld
W3C group to tackle Web services standards


By PAUL KRILL AND MARK JONES, INFOWORLD 
(March 29, 2002) 
Faced with demand to develop more sophisticated Web services, a new working
group -- formed within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) -- is set to tackle
key standards challenges, including reliable messaging and extended Simple
Object Access Protocol (SOAP) functionality.

Featuring 67 members from companies such as Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems
Inc. and ChevronTexaco Corp., the Web Services Architecture Working Group is
expected to publish next month a working draft containing requirements of an
architecture for deploying Web services. 

The move reflects growing demand for standards capable of supporting
transaction-based applications and comes amid political jockeying among the key
vendors driving the standards debate, including IBM, Sun and Microsoft. 

The Web Services Architecture Working Group joins other groups that are
developing Web services within the W3C, such as the XML Protocol Group and Web
Services Description Working Group. 

Topping the group's agenda is the development of standards for composing Web
services, creating reliable messaging for business-level transactions,
improving security and extending the capabilities of SOAP. "We're trying to
define and describe how Web services are going to work from a high-level view,"
said Hugo Haas, Web services activity lead at the W3C in Cambridge, Mass. 

SOAP will form one component of the architecture, according to W3C spokeswoman
Janet Daly, but the project itself will include more than just SOAP. "It's
about building a model for an effective and extensible Web services
architecture," Daly said. 

According to the group's charter, the architecture it plans to publish must be
modular and must feature a set of XML-based technologies to address individual
functionalities. In addition, the architecture must be platform-independent and
not preclude any programming model. 

A short list of the drivers behind the framework includes supporting the Web's
extensibility, accounting for the disparity of document formats and
communication protocols seen on the Web, and reconciling how to deal with mixed
XML vocabularies. Also, the group plans to address key privacy and security
concerns that have plagued the development of Web services, according to the
W3C. 

News of the group's plans comes after executives from Sun Microsystems wrestled
with its role in the development of Web services standards during a press
meeting at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco. 

Sun and the Java community face the reality of how to deal with emerging
standards bodies such as the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I),
which is backed by approximately 40 companies, including IBM and Microsoft. Sun
has yet to join the organization. 

Sun executives all but conceded that groups such as the WS-I pose a challenge
to the development of "open" Web services standards and Java-based technology.
"The market pressures are very much at hand," said Simon Nicholson, manager and
market strategist at Sun's XML Technology Center in Oakland, Calif. 

"I [personally] have a strong antipathy for smoke-filled rooms," said Jon
Bosak, a Sun distinguished engineer and pioneer of XML. 

****************
Computerworld
Q&A: Java creator Gosling says .Net falls short of expectations

SAN FRANCISCO -- Java creator James Gosling, a vice president and fellow at Sun
Microsystems Inc., shared his views on Microsoft Corp.'s rival .Net development
environment, its new C# (pronounced C-sharp) language and its promotion of Web
services with Computerworld during this week's JavaOne conference.

Q&A: Java creator Gosling says .Net falls short of expectations
****************
Computerworld

Yahoo unveils new privacy, marketing policies


Privacy advocate Jason Catlett called Yahoo Inc.'s changes to both its privacy
and marketing policies a "large step backwards" today.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo posted the policy changes on its Web site
yesterday and began e-mailing notices to members of its user groups and other
services. The changes affect U.S. customers only, and the company issued no
formal announcement about them. 


According to statements by Yahoo, the changes consolidate three privacy
policies the company had for children, financial services and user discussion
groups into a single policy. The company also modified its marketing efforts
from an "opt-in" system to an "opt-out" system -- and reset all user
preferences for newsletters and marketing pitches. 


That means users who signed up for Yahoo services in the past and who did not
ask to receive marketing information will now begin receiving all of Yahoo's
newsletters and pitches -- at least, until they tell the company to stop. 


"It is designed to make it easier for you to manage the marketing
communications you receive from Yahoo and ensure you get the latest relevant
information to meet your needs," the company said in its letter to users. "We
have reset your marketing preferences and, unless you decide to change these
preferences, you may begin receiving marketing messages from Yahoo about ways
to enhance your Yahoo experience, including special offers and new features." 


A spokeswoman for the company who didn't want to be named said that this way
customers who signed up for Yahoo back when the company had fewer advertising
and marketing pitches will now be able to see those pitches. 


But Catlett, president of Green Brook, N.J.-based Junkbusters Corp., said the
new policy really just allows Yahoo to send users more spam. He called the
changes a setback for the cause of privacy and antispam. 


"Other companies have done this before and took a lot of criticism for it,"
Catlett said. "It is very pushy and it is just wrong. Why can't these companies
take no for an answer? Why do we have to keep saying no, no, no, no, no?" 


In addition to creating a single privacy policy, Yahoo told users it made other
changes, too. It will now reserve the right to share private information about
users it suspects of criminal activity and said it reserves the right to share
information in the event it is sold. 

****************
BBC
Deaf Kazakh pupils go online

A school in Almaty is opening the online world to the deaf and hearing impaired
in central Asian republic of Kazakhstan. 

The Almaty School for the Deaf has worked with a US Government agency and local
businesses to develop computers and internet courses. 

Several of the school's students recently attended the first of several
national training sessions for deaf teenagers and adults in Kazakhstan's
capital, Astana. 

"The whole training was fascinating, exciting, amazing, I cannot even express
it in words," said one of the students, Elena Pegina. 

Other students were equally enthusiastic. 

"We received enormous satisfaction that we could pass our knowledge of the
internet to others in the same way that we received it," said Katherine
Nigmatulina. 

Elena and Katherine are looking for jobs with businesses in Almaty and plan on
using their computers skills in them. 

Ambitious 

Trainers from the school are now planning an ambitious training schedule to
include several other cities in Kazakhstan. 

The project was organized through the US State Department's Internet Access and
Training Program (IATP). 

This program is in operation in all of the former Soviet Union. In Central Asia
and several other regions, it is administered by an American organization, IREX
(International Research & Exchanges Board). 

The IATP in Central Asia has developed the first internet courses for the deaf
and disabled in countries across Central Asia. 

It sent a deaf trainer from Tashkent in Uzbekistan to the Almaty School for the
Deaf who introduced the internet to students in November 2000. 

Donations 

Teachers from the school were able to get computers donated from local
businesses and set up one of the first computer labs for deaf students in the
former Soviet Union. 

After winning a small grant, the school went on to create a website which
defined in sign language technical and internet-specific terms needed by deaf
students. 

For example, there were no gestures for words such as "browser", "host" or even
"internet". 

The school worked with deaf scholars to create this language and make it
available on their website. 

Teachers from the school are impressed with how the internet has increased the
children's' vocabulary, made them more curious about the world and given them
career aspirations far and above what they had before.
****************
BBC
Net calls set to attract Indians

Indians can now make long-distance calls from their PC after the government
removed a ban on internet telephony. 
The move, part of the Indian Government's telecom reforms, came into effect on
Monday. 

It will offer Indians a cheaper alternative to expensive long-distance calls,
with the country's rates among the highest in the world. 

Long distance tariffs have dropped significantly in recent months and are
expected to fall by another 15-20% from Monday, after government deregulation. 

Later this month, a number of private companies will offer long distance
services, ending the monopoly of the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) a
state-owned firm which was recently privatised. 

Internet calls 

Although the number of Indians with personal computers is quite low, many are
expected to make use of the facility through cyber cafes. 


Some internet service providers are planning to offer consumers prepaid calling
cards. 

"We will sell the cards through 10,000 retail outlets across India over the
next few months," Jasjit Sawhney, CEO of internet service provider Net4India,
told BBC News Online. 

"We hope to sell about 3-4,000 cards over the next year." 

Calls to Britain and the United States are expected to cost about 10 rupees and
five rupees a minute (20 and 10 cents), down from current rates of about 45
rupees ($1). 

Observers say internet calls will attract many individual consumers in India,
where phone penetration is fairly low. 

States like Punjab and Gujarat, from where a high percentage of expatriate
Indians hail, are being especially targetted. 

But it was unlikely to appeal to corporate users because of the inferior
quality. 

However, Mr Sawhney believes that many small businesses could use the facility.


"Many of these businesses have been using the facility illegally up until now,"
he said. 

Rates slashed 

Also on Monday, the decades-long monopoly held by VSNL ended heralding a fall
in long-distance rates. 

"We expect call charges from India to come down by 40-50% soon," Kobita Desai,
analyst at Gartner Inc., told Reuters. 

The Indian long distance telephone market is estimated to be valued at about
$1.2bn a year, and is expected to grow by about 15-20% each year. 

Until now, 80% of the long distance market consists of incoming calls but this
is expected to change as prices drop, prompting more Indians to call abroad.
****************
BBC
E-mail in haste, repent at leisure

Of all the technological innovations of recent decades, few have the ability to
wreck your life quite as quickly, and to quite the same extent, as e-mail. 

Yet e-mail has never been so popular. In January 2002 UK homes sent and
received 550 million e-mails, compared to 258 million letters, according to
NetValue, a UK-based internet measuring company. 

The reason e-mail can be so personally devastating is that an ill-advised
message can all too easily be forwarded on and on in a matter of seconds. 

Within minutes of being sent, any e-mail you write just might be being
scrutinised by thousands or even millions of people around the world, as Peter
Chung and Claire Swire discovered to their cost. 

Mr Chung, an investment banker, took a job with equity investment firm The
Carlyle Group in Seoul. Not long after his arrival he sent an e-mail to his
former colleagues detailing his intentions to bed as many local women as
possible and to indulge himself in free entertainment from bankers hoping to do
business with the company. 

The e-mail was forwarded to friends, who in turn forwarded it to more friends.
Soon his e-mail had circled the globe and been posted on the internet. The
Carlyle Group's management was apparently not amused, and Mr Chung resigned
shortly afterwards in disgrace. 

Smutty e-mailers 

Claire Swire became a laughing stock around the world in a matter of days after
sending a sexually explicit message to her boyfriend, Bradley Chait. 

Rather ungallantly he forwarded it to a handful of friends, and the message
spread around the world in a matter of hours. Before long the tabloid
newspapers got wind of it, and Miss Swire was forced into hiding to avoid
photographers eager for her picture. 

While it is hard to address and post a letter to the wrong person, a couple of
ill-aimed mouse clicks can easily send an e-mail message back to the sender
instead of forwarding it to someone else. 

Patricia Cusack, the manager of Monte's, a London club, reportedly wrote an
e-mail to her secretary describing potential new member Jason Gissing as "an
ass****". She inadvertently e-mailed the message back to Mr Gissing, it was
forwarded around the world, thus damaging Monte's and Ms Cusack's reputations. 

Snail mail more secure 

You might think that if you can trust the recipient not to pass its contents
on, then an e-mail is more confidential than a letter - surely it is less
likely to be intercepted and read without your knowledge than a conventional
letter? 

Not so: former MI5 spook Peter Wright revealed in his autobiography Spycatcher
that the intelligence services have the utmost difficulty opening a letter that
has simply been sealed with Sellotape without revealing that it has been
tampered with. 

So you can be pretty confident that a letter you receive which is still taped
closed has not been read before it reaches you. 

By contrast many companies scan the contents of employees' e-mails
automatically; some computer viruses send copies of e-mails you have previous
sent to other addresses stored on your computer; and many people believe that
the giant Echelon eavesdropping system can and does scan the content of every
e-mail sent anywhere in the world. So much for confidentiality. 

RIP secrecy 

And before you start sending e-mails anonymously, how anonymous is it possible
to be? Each message you send contains information about the computer or group
of computers it is sent from, the path it takes to its destination, even the
name of the e-mail program you used to write it. 

The UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act can also require internet
companies to install equipment which enables every piece of a subscriber's
communication traffic - website visits, purchases, downloads as well as e-mails
sent and received - to be recorded. 

The lesson is clear: e-mail may be quick and cheap, but it has its drawbacks.
It's more bother to find a stamp and address an envelope, but at least it gives
you time to reflect on the wisdom of sending the contents in the first place.
****************
San Francisco Chronicle
Bust in Bangalore 
Sept. 11 dealt a cruel blow to India's version of Silicon Valley

Bangalore, India -- When it comes to technology, this city of 5.2 million has
earned a lustrous name for itself. 

With 925 software firms and an unprecedented 80,000 software engineers, it has
become the Silicon Valley of India, accounting for one quarter of the country's
$6.2 billion in software exports. Bay Area notables Cisco, Apple and
Hewlett-Packard all have sites here. 

That's why even when the Nasdaq began to slide in 2000, and the original
Silicon Valley sank into recession, Indians were optimistic. 

With 60 percent of India's software exports already going to the United States,
analysts predicted that the slowdown would simply push U.S. employers in the
direction of more low-end offshore work. 

After all, a programmer in Bangalore could be hired for as little as $200 per
month, and office space could be leased from 26 cents to $1 per square foot per
month. 

But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks accomplished what the U.S. downturn had not
-- wreaking severe damage on India's information technology business by
accelerating the loss of confidence among American businesses and consumers. 


VISA HOLDERS SENT HOME
Analysts in India say that American IT companies panicked over the potential
economic ramifications of Sept. 11, suddenly withdrawing their investments in
projects abroad. Simultaneously, budgets were trimmed at U.S. tech firms, and
many Indian H-1B visa holders returned home. 

India was quickly faced with a shrunken and devalued market for its tech
services, leading to a sharp fall in billing rates and contracts for
outsourcing work from American customers. 

By the close of 2001, according to Infotech.com, venture capital funding in the
country was down 20 percent. About 10,000 private tech training centers had
closed, and the number of students enrolled in such institutes fell by about 30
percent. 

Campus hires became a thing of the past, and the category of Computer Science
and Information Technology lost its rank as the first choice on common entrance
tests to Indian engineering colleges. 

During the third quarter of 2001, growth in net profit was negligible even
among India's strongest IT companies: a 2 percent rise at Infosys, a 3 percent
rise at Wipro, an 11 percent drop at Satyam. 


SARIS IN THE OFFICE PARK
Bangalore's fancy DuParc Trinity office park is home to such notables as Wipro,
Intel Asia, Apple, Compaq India and Siemens Communication Software. 

While men in suits and women in saris sweep busily through the doors, Abdul
Saywed, a network services specialist for Wipro, one of India's largest
information technology service vendors, said appearances can be deceiving. 

"There have been lots of layoffs in smaller companies. Nobody wants to invest
anymore," he said. "We lost all our U.S.-based projects after Sept. 11. And
most of the small IT companies have totally vanished." 

The social impact of the tech recession is still in the early stages, but it
could prove profound. 


ENGINEERS LESS MARRIAGEABLE
"I've seen layoffs and salary cuts," said Nadim Abbas Khan, an operations
manager in Hardware Logistics, the courier service for Compaq. "But I've also
seen that parents don't want software engineers for husbands anymore." 

At one time, software engineers ruled. "Everyone wanted software," said Tanveer
Ahmed, owner of a marketing company in Bangalore. "Landlords would only rent
houses to people in software. The joke went that if he has a cell phone, a car
and jewelry, he's probably a software engineer." 

Siby Mathew, an executive software developer for Siemens, said, "It used to be
that merchants in stores charged higher prices for software engineers. Not
anymore; now they assume you're laid off." 

Arranged marriages are the norm in India; prudent parents are now exercising
caution when it comes to candidates in technology. Holders of H-1B visas are no
longer worth their weight in gold. 

"It's very sad," said D. Jagannath, an Internet facilitator at Wipro. "Guys who
were working offshore have been thrown back here; people have lost jobs, or had
their salaries cut by 30 percent." 

Sanum Pushparag, a sales coordinator at Apple, pulled out a poem written by a
Wipro engineer that won first prize in the company's poetry contest. 

New house, new cars, 

all dreams are shattered. 

"I knew this would happen," 

a father-in-law muttered. 

Our frequent flier miles 

are badly hit. 

Foreign visit boasts 

have gone down a bit!! 

But S. Sadagopan, founder and director of the Indian Institute of Information
Technology in Bangalore says the recession has also had some benefits. 

"People are becoming more modest, more human, less arrogant," he said.
"Education, not mere jargon-smattering, is valued. Deep skills, not shallow
exposure, are appreciated. Loyalty is valued today." 

Founded in 1999, the institute, a public-private partnership funded by the
industry and the state government, became one of the top IT schools in India. 


BRAIN DRAIN
The institute's graduates quickly made a name for the institution. About 80
percent have joined well-known IT firms; 15 percent have gone into what is
known here as "the enabling sector" (traditional companies like utilities,
banks and manufacturers that need to stay abreast of new developments in
technology); and 5 percent headed for the managerial and entrepreneurial
fields. 

Even the institute, however, has seen a sharp drop in admissions applications.
Sadagopan said there were about 20 percent fewer this year. 

Bangalore has had some good news of late. AT&T recently chose IBM's service
division here for a giant applications development outsourcing project. Sun
Microsystems named India as one of its top five locations, predicting that
manpower would increase from 400 to 4,000 during the next five years. And Cisco
Systems bought 29 acres of land and committed itself to establishing a campus. 

But the area's vulnerability to the vagaries of the U.S. tech cycle has
prompted a search for new markets and made Indian self-reliance a higher
priority. 

Said Siemens' Mathew: "A continuing recession in America means reduced orders
for us. The focus of Indian business now is to expand to Europe and Asia." 

****************
Government Computer News
Navy sets up a network command

In June, a new Navy command will begin overseeing all the service?s networks,
information operations and space activities. The Naval Network Warfare Command
will be at the Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek in Norfolk, Va. Navy
Secretary Gordon England authorized NETWARCOM early this month, a Navy
spokeswoman said. 

Lt. Brauna Carl said the NETWARCOM commander will have charge of the Naval
Network and Space Operations Command in Dahlgren, Va., the Fleet Information
Warfare Center in Norfolk and the Navy Component Task Force Computer Network
Defense in Washington. Other commands will report to the head of NETWARCOM for
fleet support matters. 

Carl said the Navy has fleet commanders for surface ships, submarines and
airplanes. Now NETWARCOM will push the leadership concept out to end-to-end IT
operations management. No commander has been selected yet. 

The Navy?s announcement said that formation of the new command ?shows the
Navy's recognition that networks, as warfare enablers, are becoming
increasingly important.?
****************
San Jose Mercury News
Groups push for cable Web competition
COMPANIES SHOULD OPEN LINES TO HIGH-SPEED RIVALS, CRITICS SAY
Gary Davis would have rather hired a mom-and-pop outfit for his high-speed
Internet service, but his only option at the time was Road Runner, part of the
AOL Time Warner media empire.

While a smaller service provider might have shown Davis how to connect multiple
computers to a single cable modem, Road Runner leaves him responsible for his
own setup -- and any problems that arise.

``I really have to know my stuff and be on my own,'' said Davis, a businessman
in the West Hills area of Los Angeles. ``I prefer working with a smaller
firm.''

Internet users like Davis are the reason public-interest groups want the
federal government to require competition for Internet services over cable
lines.

Time Warner and other cable companies say they already plan to open networks to
competitors and fear that any government mandate would only stall those
efforts.

``There can be more innovation and more competition if businesses negotiate
deals, as opposed to being mandated,'' said Sarah Eder of AT&T Broadband, the
country's largest cable company.

The Federal Communications Commission so far is siding with the industry,
recently defining cable Internet access as an ``information service'' largely
free of government oversight.

Three public-interest groups and two competitors have appealed the FCC decision
to a federal court in Washington, D.C.

``It threatens the Internet as we know it,'' said Andrew Jay Schwartzman,
president of the Media Access Project, which represents the public-interest
groups.

Dial-up providers

The Internet blossomed in the 1990s because phone companies had to let any
Internet service provider offer dial-up service.

America Online signed up millions of beginners. EarthLink and other national
providers picked up users who felt constrained by AOL's beginner tools. Local
ISPs filled gaps throughout rural America.

``The Internet was not brought to you by the phone company or the cable
companies,'' said Dave Baker, EarthLink's vice president for law and public
policy. ``It was brought to you by AOL and EarthLink and Mindspring and
thousands of independent ISPs that were not phone companies.''

To a limited degree, competition migrated to high-speed Internet services
offered through souped-up phone lines called DSL.

L A Bridge Internet, a Los Angeles-area ISP, used DSL to let doctors obtain
MRIs and other results directly from a medical imaging center. Tony Capelli, a
vice president, set up a closed, secure network not possible under standard
packages from local phone companies.

Capelli would love to do something similar for Hollywood writers and producers
to share top-secret scripts, but they live in remote areas served only by cable
-- and thus out of reach of L A Bridge.

Competition is coming to cable -- but too slowly in the eyes of public-interest
groups.

Most markets have just one option. That, critics say, leaves cable companies
with power to give preferential treatment to business partners, or make
competitors' content difficult to find or slow to load.

``I'm concerned thousands of Web sites will fade into the digital twilight,''
said Jeff Chester, executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy.
``Small and medium-size businesses and start-ups, civic and non-commercial
communicators will be at a disadvantage.''

Market forces

The cable industry insists it has no reason to discriminate.

Market forces are adequate because cable companies risk losing customers to DSL
and other high-speed services should they attempt such controls, said Adam
Thierer, director of telecommunications studies at the Cato Institute, which
favors limited government.

Marc Smith of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association said
government mandates would constrain operators from building systems and
tweaking networks to meet consumer demands.

Besides, he said, cable operators are voluntarily embracing competitors, one at
a time.

AT&T Broadband is letting EarthLink offer service in Seattle and Boston, while
Comcast customers in Indianapolis and Nashville will have access to United
Online.

Though the deals could help the companies win government approval for their
proposed merger, they were not mandated.

Meanwhile, Time Warner signed deals with several regional and national
competitors -- beyond the three required as part of its merger with AOL.

With competition, Time Warner's Road Runner will match EarthLink's offerings
and begin supporting the home networking setups that Davis was looking for. In
addition, Davis can now get EarthLink, though not the L A Bridge service he had
before he moved.

Nevertheless, EarthLink and others continue to seek mandated access, saying
many markets still offer no choice. And where there is choice, they say, cable
companies still set the rules in contracts with rivals.

Francois Bar, a Stanford University communication professor, worries that cable
companies could stifle the type of innovation that encouraged development of
free Internet-carried phone calls.

``The phone companies were not happy about it, but there was nothing they could
do,'' Bar said.

If cable can control the pipes and discourage alternative uses, he said, the
Internet will simply evolve into an interactive form of television.
****************


Lillie Coney
Public Policy Coordinator
U.S. Association for Computing Machinery
Suite 507
1100 Seventeenth Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20036-4632
202-659-9711