Clips April 2, 2002

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips April 2, 2002

ARTICLES

Broadband users pass dial-up in time on Net 
State Signals Intent to Regulate DSL
Internet: Survey of American cities finds most communities have progressed in
making the most   of the Web.
Basement bands see digital light
Chip in your shoulder? Family wants info device
FirstGov search misses deadline
Tech revs up ambulance services
Financial systems still troubled
Tenn. recruits teachers online
Judge Weighs Dismissal of Charges in Digital Copyright Case
AT& T, Comcast to Stop High - Speed Cable Internet Fee
XM Satellite Signs Up More Customers Than Expected
Recycled PCs head for African schools
Thousands send online tributes
Silver surfers taking to the net
Science summit deemed success
Supreme Court drops age-discrimination case
Year-old hole exposes credit cards
Old worms make like spring chickens
Customs needs to adequately staff IT modernization office, report says 
Defense weighs digital signature switch to match other agencies 
Air Force pinged on Web data
How Geo-Encryption Makes Copyright Protection Global
IBM Buys Biometric Laptop Security
Public libraries to test digital service 
Corporate Peer-to-Peer Gets a Closer Look



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Chicago Sun Times
Broadband users pass dial-up in time on Net 

Broadband usage is rising, despite the slow pace at which applications are
developed that take advantage of high-speed, always-on connections and the
waning number of broadband providers.

During January, U.S. broadband usage exceeded dial-up usage for the first time
ever as measured by the amount of time people spent online, according to
Nielsen/NetRatings.

What does that mean?

That broadband usage has hit what the marketers call ''mainstream,'' with time
spent online by broadband surfers surpassing the critical 50 percent benchmark.
Industry analysts say greater broadband penetration will hasten the
much-ballyhooed convergence of television and the Internet.

Because only a fraction of Netizens have high-speed connections, the new
numbers suggest people with broadband are spending more time surfing, while
dial-up users are going online to take care of business and getting off.

In January, broadband users spent 1.19 billion hours online, compared with 1.14
billion for the dial-up crowd.

The number of broadband hours logged in January adds up to a 64 percent
increase over January 2001, when broadband users logged 727 million hours
online.

Dial-up usage slipped 3 percent last year, from 1.18 billion hours in January
of 2001 to 1.14 billion this year.

Households with broadband access rose 67 percent from January 2001 to January
of this year, for a total of 21.9 million homes with either cable, satellite or
digital subscriber line connections.

Dialup connections are still far more prevalent, however, at 82 million.

Studies show that broadband users are more affluent than dial-up users and are
getting exposed to more online advertising, so they buy more products and
services online.

***************
Los Angeles Times
State Signals Intent to Regulate DSL

California regulators have taken a key step toward regulating high-speed
Internet access over phone lines, a service that has grown fast but left a rash
of complaints in its wake from Internet service providers and frustrated
consumers.

A California Public Utilities Commission judge ruled late last week that the
agency has the authority to weigh in on a range of issues involving the
Internet access technology known as digital subscriber line service, or DSL,
including the quality of service provided, how it is marketed and a provider's
DSL business practices.

"Finally, consumers have a place to go when they are having problems with their
DSL service," said Michael Shames, executive director of the Utility Consumers'
Action Network, a consumer group based in San Diego. "The decision is a big
deal in the sense that it has a precedential impact nationally ... so I think
we'll see a trend of states taking a bigger role in DSL issues."

PUC officials were not available to discuss the implications of the DSL ruling
because government offices were closed Monday for a state holiday.

The commission has been gearing up to address DSL matters for almost two years,
ever since it was flooded with complaints from customers of SBC Pacific Bell's
DSL service. In the spring of 2000, installation and order mix-ups were
rampant, with customers exasperated over lost orders, no-show technicians and
lengthy service delays. PUC officials complained at the time that they didn't
have enforcement measures in place to act aggressively to protect consumers.

Since then, the PUC and sister agencies in other states have steadily increased
their oversight of DSL, a service that allows users to access the Internet at
high speeds over regular phone lines without disrupting phone calls. It has
become an important service for residential and small-business users, and a
critical and lucrative market for phone companies, which want to book the extra
revenue and beat cable companies selling a rival Internet service.

In the last year, a spate of bankruptcies involving DSL providers has added to
the state's concern because some customers have been left stranded with no
service and without enough notice to find a replacement carrier.

PUC Commissioner Carl Wood is considering including consumer protections for
DSL customers in his proposed telecommunications consumer bill of rights.
Earlier this year, the PUC launched an investigation into DSL billing problems
and other service quality issues at SBC PacBell, a unit of SBC Communications
Inc. and the state's dominant DSL provider and local phone company.

SBC PacBell does not disclose how many DSL customer it has, but experts put the
figure at more than 700,000 in California, or more than half of its 1.3 million
nationwide subscriber base.

The installation troubles at SBC PacBell eventually subsided, and although
complaints continue about billing and other matters, they are generally at a
lower rate than in 2000.

The PUC judge's ruling last week came as part of a complaint case brought by
the California ISP Assn. against SBC PacBell and its affiliates. The complaint,
filed in July, outlined policies and contract terms that the group says gives
an unfair advantage to SBC PacBell and the company's own Internet service
provider over unaffiliated ISPs.

SBC PacBell sought to have the complaint dismissed, arguing that the state did
not have jurisdiction over DSL matters in the complaint.

The PUC judge ultimately agreed that it could not regulate pricing or the terms
and conditions of the company's DSL offering, but found that the state has
clear jurisdiction over the related quality of service, marketing and business
practice matters.

John Britton, a spokesman for SBC PacBell, said the company does not
discriminate against unaffiliated ISPs.
***************
Washington Post
Washington Falls in List Of Internet-Savvy Cities 

Washington slipped in an annual ranking of America's most Internet-savvy
cities, while Baltimore jumped 23 spots to crack the top 20.

The District of Columbia fell to seventh place on this year's list, which was
published in the May edition of Yahoo Internet Life magazine. Last year, it
ranked fourth.

"D.C. didn't really fall; it just got lapped," said Don Willmott, the
magazine's technology editor. "It's just more of a case of everyone rising a
bit. Boston had a really great year, and Salt Lake had a bit of a fluke because
the Olympics brought so much content and the local government is so good on the
Web."

Willmott said Washington ranked sixth in online shopping, with average spending
rising to $237 per user from $180 last year.

Baltimore jumped from 46th to 20th in the rankings, mostly because of the local
government's online service offerings. 

San Francisco, San Jose and Austin remained in the top three spots, which
they've held in all but one of the five previous surveys. Boston jumped 12
places to No. 4 on this year's list, and Salt Lake City climbed 23 places to
sixth.

Willmott said the biggest news may be the fact that numbers were up almost
everywhere, despite the recession. It took a score of 36 out of 40 to win this
year, up from 33.3 a year earlier.

"Everyone's getting better," Willmott said.

The magazine uses a formula that measures Internet use, the number of high-tech
jobs, the extent to which businesses are online and how sophisticated the users
are. "We measure that by how often they shop and how many have gotten fast
access," he said.

The formula also includes an evaluation of the content that is available in the
area, including a ranking of how well local governments use the Internet.

This is the first time the magazine hasn't tinkered with the formula from one
year to the next, allowing a true comparison.

Top-ranked San Francisco has the highest percentage of households using the
'Net (78.8), is No. 2 in online spending per user ($356) and in domains per
1,000 firms (4,163), and sixth in broadband use and interest (54.9 percent).

The data are compiled from Forrester Research and Matthew Zook of the Internet
Geography Project.

The magazine ranks 86 metropolitan areas. Seven of the top 21 areas are in
California.

The bottom three this year were Tulsa; Scranton, Pa.; and Gary, Ind. 
***************
USA Today
Basement bands see digital light

In the basement of his New Jersey home, Nick Delonas is following his rock 'n'
roll dream. Any given night might find the 44-year-old programmer and guitarist
jamming with his buddies and recording the sounds for posterity. In another
era, Bob Dylan and The Band did something like that and called it The Basement
Tapes. These days, there's no tape involved. All the recording Delonas does 
and any extra instruments he wants  is on a PC running inexpensive digital
recording software.

"Once you get a basic little setup, you can do anything you want," says
Delonas, who started his home PC-based studio a few years ago for about $1,500.
His music is available for free on his hard-rock band's Web site,
www.ironia.net.

The trend to at-home digital recording, though not the most visible development
in the music industry, is having a huge impact. Fueled by plummeting PC prices,
low-cost software and other sophisticated tools, this recording revolution is
allowing anyone with the time and savvy to produce albums in their bedrooms
with quality near that of CDs recorded at professional studios.

Need horns? In the computer. Extra strings? No problem.

"I have no constraints," he says. "We've had over 30,000 downloads, so people
are listening, which is what I wanted."

The technology is so good that musicians  wannabes and pros alike  not only
have access to hundreds of digitally replicated instruments, but they also can
use it to mask a multitude of musical sins, from off-key singing to a note
played at the wrong time.

Even playing an instrument is no longer required. Software such as Cakewalk's
$49 Plasma lets you cut and paste snippets of audio, mix them and add effects
such as reverb.

"The tools are coming out of the ivory tower and are being put into the hands
of the masses," says Cakewalk's Chris Rice. The company's products target
"everything from high-end professional musicians to ... people who never had
any musical training but wish to express themselves creatively through music."

One result is that homegrown music is exploding, especially on the Internet.
The MP3.com Web site, for example, has 200,000 artists and 1.3 million songs;
about 95% of the artists are not signed to major labels, says Derrick Oien,
president of Vivendi Universal, which owns the site.

One of those artists, Emily Richards, 27, is one of the most-heard pop singers
never to have appeared on MTV. By day, Richards is a manager for
PricewaterhouseCoopers in Los Angeles. In her spare time, she cranks out songs
in her home recording studio, outfitted with about $12,000 in equipment.

"You're on your own clock," says Richards, whose studio includes a digital
recording workstation by Roland that stores audio on a hard-disk drive similar
to those in computers. "You have as long as you want, and it allows you to
expand your creativity."

Though her seven albums have sold a modest 22,000 copies combined, the songs
she's posted on her MP3.com page have been downloaded more than 1.6 million
times, earning her royalties of about $60,000  much more than the typical indie
artist.

In the hands of pros, the technology has opened even more creative options.

Stephen Mason and his platinum-selling rock band, Jars of Clay, recorded most
of its new album, The Eleventh Hour, in his basement studio.

Mason spent about $3,000 for a Macintosh computer and an entry-level version of
the professional recording system Pro Tools, a $995 combination computer
expansion card, instrument interface and software that allows users to record
up to 24 tracks of audio and another 128 of data, called MIDI, from electronic
instruments such as keyboards or drum machines.

"We started pretty basic," says Mason, 26, of Nashville, who set up the studio
early last year. Just five years ago, the recording devices, synthesizers,
effects and other gear that's standard in many entry-level recording packages
would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. These days, Mason says, "you can
put together a digital studio for a reasonable amount of money."

The band later upgraded to add computers and a professional version of Pro
Tools, ultimately spending about $30,000 to increase the power of their studio.
The setup let them "try as many hare-brained ideas as we wanted."

Today's digital recorders let artists record hundreds of tracks, or separate
instruments. Thus, Jars of Clay could instruct its drummer to play each song in
several styles, then piece together a composite track.

"We would say, 'Now we want you to play this take like Keith Moon,' and then
he'd get done with that, and we'd say, 'Play without cymbals,' and then, 'Play
another one as the lethargic alterna-rock English drummer,' " Mason says.
"Then, through the ease of cutting and pasting, we were able to get the best of
all of those."

The technology also helps artists clean up musical glitches. "There'll be times
when I'll sing a whole take and there's one note that kind of goes flat," says
Trent Reznor, the creative force behind the industrial rock band Nine Inch
Nails and a long-time Pro Tools user at his New Orleans studio. "We can go in
and correct the pitch a little bit at the end."

Of course, the ability to do this musical sleight of hand is changing the
expectations of people who hire musicians to write scores for movies and TV.

"I'll be given a show, then I have to write 40 minutes of music and I've got
four days," says Shawn Clement, of Canyon Country, Calif. Since 1994, he's
worked in his home digital studio to record the scores for video games, films
and TV shows, including the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

To meet the tight schedule, Clement has an array of keyboards and other
instruments that he records using PCs and Cakewalk Sonar XL software ($599).
"What they expect after a week is a final, mastered, produced soundtrack."

Not everyone believes this proliferation of digital recording technology is
entirely an advance. Clement, for example, says that in his field "everybody
and anybody can be a composer or songwriter, so the overall quality (of music)
is definitely down. You hear that, especially if you watch a lot of cable
shows."

Others say the computer's ability to fine-tune performances is taking the soul
from the sounds.

"We can auto-tune that voice so that guy sounds perfect," says Eddie Kramer,
the legendary producer/engineer who worked with Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Led
Zeppelin and others. "And that's frightening to me because ... this is a
generalization, but you are now messing with (the music) to the point where
there is no reality to it."

Reznor agrees  but only to a point. "Sure, there's a lot of bad music that
comes out," he concedes. "But there's some good music that wouldn't have been
able to come out if you had to spend $1,500 an hour in the studio."
***************
USA Today
Chip in your shoulder? Family wants info device

BOCA RATON, Fla. (AP)  Jeff Jacobs' neck is fused to his spine at a slightly
downward angle, making it painful for him to look straight ahead without
leaning back. He takes up to 10 medications a day for a number of other
ailments, and several times he has nearly died.

One of his family's biggest worries is that he could become sick and unable to
speak for himself in an emergency.

But thanks to a tiny computer chip that can be implanted in his body and
scanned for personal and medical information, those fears may be eased.

Jacobs, his wife, Leslie, and their 14-year-old son, Derek, could become the
nation's first family to be fitted with the device, called VeriChip. It is
awaiting approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

The VeriChip, made by Applied Digital Solutions in Palm Beach County, is about
the size of a grain of rice. It would be injected under a person's skin,
probably in the arm, and could be read only by scanners.

Similar technology has been used in the past few years on millions of dogs and
cats as a way to identify the pets if they are lost or stolen.

Applied Digital says the chip can provide instant access to a patient's medical
records, which is especially valuable in emergencies or in situations in which
the patient is unconscious and unable to provide a medical history or, say,
allergies to any medications. It could, for example, be used to identify and
diagnose a lost Alzheimer's patient.

Ultimately, the chips could be coupled with global-positioning satellites to
locate Alzheimer's patients who have wandered off, or find kidnapping victims 
an idea the company hopes to market in Latin America.

The chip could also be used as a security tool.

"It can be used as an inexpensive method to gain entry into a secure power
plant, the cockpit of an airplane, or any place where a high level of
authentication is required for entrance to a building," said Keith Bolton,
Applied Digital vice president and chief technology officer. "It's a lot less
expensive than retina scanning or thumbprint recognition equipment."

The chip has stirred debate over its potential use as a "Big Brother" device to
track people or invade the privacy of their homes or workplaces. Civil
libertarians call it crypto-fascism or high-tech slavery. Religious advocates
say it represents "the mark of the Beast," or the anti-Christ.

Jacobs and his family brush aside those arguments. Anyone can be tracked
through the Internet and e-mail, credit cards and cellular phones, they say.

"We're kind of amazed there's such a hullabaloo about it," Jacobs said. "It's
like someone presenting the world with a gift. It's inconceivable this could do
anything but good."

Jacobs, a 48-year-old dentist, has suffered through cancer, a car crash, a
degenerative spinal condition, chronic eye disease and abdominal operations. He
has had to quit his dental practice and doctors have told him they are not sure
how long he will live.

Jacobs' son heard about the device from the news and pestered his mother to
call Applied Digital.

"My husband almost died four or five times. We have been rushed to the hospital
where he is unable to talk, and these nurses and doctors ask him for
information," she said. "This way, they can take two seconds to scan it and you
have the information, accurately."

The chip is expected to cost around $200 and the scanner between $1,000 and
$3,000. Applied Digital plans to give away chip readers to hospitals and
ambulance companies in hopes they will become standard equipment.

The timing of a decision from the FDA is unclear, but approval is probably
several months away at the earliest.

***************
USA Today
Courtroom challenge to Net filtering law continues

PHILADELPHIA (AP)  Inside the stately courtroom of U.S. District Judge Harvey
Bartle III, there's language coming from the bench and the witness stand that
renders George Carlin's "seven words you can't say on television" tame by
comparison. And then there's the nudity.

In the first week of a trial debating the constitutionality of a requirement
that public libraries install porn-blocking software on their computers,
gray-haired librarians uttered words that could make a longshoreman blush,
soft-spoken computer analysts described bizarre sexual proclivities and federal
judges mulled the definition of "fetish."

One of the three veteran jurists hearing the case, U.S. District Judge John P.
Fullam, summed it up as he flipped through a huge binder of color printouts
from pornographic Web sites: "Dirty pictures."

And though the judges seem to be taking a certain enjoyment in the proceeding's
unusual nature, they're focused on the importance of the issue: How or if a law
can shield children from hardcore pornography without trampling on the First
Amendment's guarantee of free speech.

Week two of the trial over the Children's Internet Protection Act, or CIPA,
began Monday. 

The law, signed by President Clinton in 2000, requires that public libraries
receiving certain types of federal funding install filtering software to
prevent access to online smut. The rule was challenged by the American Library
Association and a group of public libraries and library patrons. The American
Civil Liberties Union is now arguing their case.

Librarian Candace Morgan, the first plaintiffs' witness, didn't flinch when
government attorney Timothy Zick placed an open binder of Web porn photos in
front of her.

"Is it your testimony that I have the right to look at these Web sites?" Zick
asked.

"Yes, it is," replied Morgan, the associate director of the Fort Vancouver,
Wash., regional library.

Shown a particular page with an extremely raunchy title, she read it aloud  to
the uncomfortable snickers of some audience members  and matter-of-factly
stated, "We have sex manuals with similar pictures to this one."

Government witness Chris Lemmon, of computer testing firm eTesting Labs, was
clearly less comfortable when asked to describe some of the more disturbing Web
sites he had encountered. He haltingly described pornographic sites involving,
among other subjects, elderly women.

"It was disturbing," he testified.

Unlike two previous laws addressing Internet porn that were struck down by
federal judges in Philadelphia, CIPA deals only with funding and not with
direct restrictions on Internet access.

The 1996 Communications Decency Act, which made it a crime to put
adult-oriented material online where children can find it, was thrown out by
the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

The 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which required sites to collect a credit
card number or other proof of age before allowing Internet users to view
material deemed "harmful to minors," was sidelined by the 3rd U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court is expected to rule this year.

The plaintiffs in the latest case say CIPA relies on inexact technology that
censors protected speech and lets porn through; amounts to "economic
censorship" for libraries serving poor areas; and improperly takes content
decisions away from the libraries and their patrons and gives them to the
federal government.

The government maintains that librarians can unblock sites improperly censored
by the software  and they say safeguards need to be placed between children and
World Wide Web porn purveyors lying in wait for them.

Libraries that don't want filters can simply turn down the subsidies, the
government lawyers say.

The judges are expected to rule on the case by early May to give libraries time
to comply if the law is upheld and goes into effect as scheduled July 31. Any
appeal of the panel's decision would go directly to the Supreme Court.

***************
USA Today
Can new search engine out-search Google?

SAN FRANCISCO (AP)  Apostolos Gerasoulis has a message for everyone who relies
on Google as an online guide: It's time to move on.

After spending the past six months fine-tuning the technology, Gerasoulis and
his development team in Piscataway, N.J., are rolling out a souped-up search
engine called Teoma and taking dead aim at Google, widely regarded as the best
way to find anything on the Web.

"We are the next generation in search," said Gerasoulis, a Rutgers University
mathematics professor who has had Google in his sights since founding Teoma in
1999. "Google has reached its maturity."

The souped-up version of Teoma's site is to debut at 8 p.m. ET Monday.

Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., views Teoma as "an interesting
approach" to searching, but remains confident its site will continue to provide
the quickest, most useful responses, said Craig Silverstein, Google's director
of technology.

"We think the jury is still out on how effective (Teoma) is," Silverstein said.
"The user interaction required to get where you want to go can be pretty
time-consuming."

Analysts say the increased competition should improve the quality of online
searches.

"I doubt Teoma will become a Google killer," said Danny Sullivan, editor of
SearchEngineWatch.com. "But it could become an interesting second choice, and
that should keep Google on its toes."

Teoma isn't the first to try to outdo Google.

Online search pioneer AltaVista launched a copycat site, raging.com, in May
2000 to try to recapture some of the following it lost after Google's
emergence. But the site never made significant inroads and AltaVista ended the
experiment last year.

Sullivan said Teoma must first prove it's the best among lesser-known search
engines, a field that includes alltheweb.com and wisenut.com.

Teoma  a Gaelic term for "expert"  lacked the financial resources to mount a
serious challenge to Google until Gerasoulis and fellow owners sold the company
to Emeryville, Calif.-based Ask Jeeves for $4.4 million last year.

Since then, Teoma has continued to provide search results on its site, but Ask
Jeeves kept the most powerful tools under wraps  until now.

It won't be easy to topple Google, founded in 1998 by Stanford University
graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Google processes more than 150 million search queries a day through its own
site and others, such as Yahoo, that license Google's technology. Google
indexes 3 billion Web documents, compared with 200 million for Teoma.

Google users will notice similarities between the sites. Like Google, Teoma
offers a mostly blank page broken up by a few bright colors.

Both sites depend on complicated algorithms to analyze search requests, but
Teoma says its formula is more effective because it breaks the Web into
clusters of online communities. Teoma says this approach categorizes results
better and offers more helpful choices.

Teoma also presents links to subcategories that may be related to a topic, as
well as a section devoted to "expert" sources.

"When you are looking for something on the Web, we will help you find it, learn
about it and investigate it," Gerasoulis said.

Teoma's multilayered approach might overwhelm some Web surfers accustomed to
Google's straightforward approach.

"One of the beautiful things about Google is that it really is 'Search for
Dummies,' " said industry analyst Rob Lancaster of the Yankee Group. "Teoma is
going to have to educate people how to get the most from its site."

Unlike Google's early days, Teoma will have ample marketing muscle.

Ask Jeeves continued to build one of the Web's best-known brands even as its
natural-language search engine lost ground to Google and other rivals.

Teoma already boosted Ask Jeeves' main site, which began incorporating the
improved technology in mid-December. Since then, Ask Jeeves says, the site saw
a 25% increase in clicks on its search results while the rate of people leaving
in apparent frustration has declined by 15%.

In the summer, Ask Jeeves plans to license Teoma's search engine to other
sites. Licensing is already a successful business for Google, which collected
$7.1 million in fees from Yahoo last year.

"Google is always going to be good, but we think we can offer a very viable
alternative," said Steve Berkowitz, president of Ask Jeeves' Web properties.
***************
Federal Computer Week
FirstGov search misses deadline

Search not for the new FirstGov search engine. It's going to arrive late.

AT&T Corp. and its Norwegian search engine partner, Fast Search & Transfer,
failed to meet the March 31 deadline for installing the new $10.5 million
search engine on the federal government's Internet portal. 

So the General Services Administration, which runs FirstGov, has signed a
contract to pay about $18,000 a month for the Inktomi Corp. search engine that
the site had been using for free since going online in September 2000. Free use
of the Inktomi engine was a gift to the government from founder Eric Brewer.

Under terms of a contract awarded March 7, the AT&T and Fast Search engine was
to be "ready for implementation by March 31." However, a search of the Web site
April 1 produced no sign of the new engine. 

"It's taking longer to move equipment into place [than expected]," GSA
spokeswoman Eleni Martin said. She was unable to say when the new engine is now
scheduled to go online. FirstGov officials were unavailable for comment and
representatives from AT&T and Fast Search & Transfer did not return phone calls
for this report. 

The new search engine is expected to do a better job of finding and returning
federal and state government documents on the Internet. The current Inktomi
search engine has been criticized for overwhelming its users with too many
search results and for retrieving documents that match the search terms but are
not relevant to the context of the search.

The Fast Search engine is supposed to do a better job of sorting documents by
relevance. For example, the engine will be able to display search results by
category, subject and agency, according to GSA.

GSA's choice of a foreign search engine company has sparked controversy among
domestic bidders for the contract. At least two American-based search engine
companies demanded "debriefings" in which they questioned GSA contracting
officials about the award to Fast Search.
***************
Federal Computer Week
Tech revs up ambulance services

More than 100 ambulance services in South Dakota  most of them volunteer
organizations  have been outfitted by the state with new computers and software
that government officials hope will significantly boost the services' ability
to react during major disasters and emergencies.

The new systems will bring all of the ambulance services on to the Internet,
many of them for the first time, allowing state officials to quickly reach them
via e-mail in the event of an emergency.

The systems also will help streamline the bureaucracy of the ambulance
services, enabling them to file required trip reports electronically rather
than using error-prone scanning of paper forms. That scanning method produced
error rates of 15 percent to 25 percent, according to Kevin Forsch, director of
Health Systems Development and Regulation in South Dakota's Health Department.

"Also, the services had been begging to get online for testing purposes, so
people could recertify without having to travel" to testing centers, he said.
"The new systems will also allow for electronic billing and give the services a
way of easily communicating with each other."

Electronic filing also will enable the ambulance services to build their own
local databases so they can analyze what emergencies they respond to and when,
Forsch said. They'll then be able to schedule such things as extra training
where it is needed.

Forsch said that more than 80 percent of the ambulance services in South Dakota
are staffed completely by volunteers and have no dedicated funding sources. The
money the services have received from local contributors has gone toward paying
for essentials, and getting into the Electronic Age has been a lower priority.

Delivery of the systems and computer training was completed in mid-March. Plans
to develop statewide networks are in the works, and the ambulance services are
expected to begin filing reports electronically by May 1.

***************
Federal Computer Week
Financial systems still troubled

For the fifth consecutive year, the federal government was unable to present
auditable financial books, the General Accounting Office has found.

GAO said the Defense Department's pervasive financial management problems were
the single largest obstacle to a clean audit opinion. But problems with other
agencies' financial systems also are critical, said David Walker, the
government's comptroller general.

"Federal agencies have started to make progress in their efforts to modernize
their financial management systems," Walker said in his audit report, released
March 29. "However, the need for timely, accurate and useful financial and
performance management information is greater than ever given the increasing
demands of the federal budget."

The financial report for fiscal 2001, published by the Treasury Department,
acknowledged the government has pervasive problems with financial systems.

"The federal government faces agency-specific and governmentwide challenges in
modernizing its financial management systems," the financial report said." Many
financial management systems need upgrading or replacing before they can
provide information to support efforts to achieve the president's goal of a
citizen-centered, results-oriented and market-based government." 

GAO found that 18 of the 24 agencies identified by the Chief Financial Officers
Act were able to attain unqualified audit opinions on their financial
statements, the same number as last year, but up significantly from the six
agencies in fiscal 1996 that attained that level.

The departments of Justice and Transportation moved from qualified to clean
opinions. And the Federal Aviation Administration, which had been on GAO's
"high-risk" list, has cured many of its financial management weaknesses, the
report said.

However, GAO warned that many agencies have been able to obtain unqualified
audit opinions only by making Herculean efforts. Those efforts necessitate
"significant resources...extensive ad hoc procedures and...billions of dollars
in adjustments to derive financial statements months after the end of a fiscal
year," GAO said.

Walker noted that even though they have unqualified opinions on their financial
statements, "many agencies do not have timely, accurate and useful financial
information...with which to make informed decisions and to ensure
accountability."

DOD officials said last month that they had abandoned efforts to obtain a clean
opinion and were instead focusing on fixing the core financial management
problems.

The audit report praised the DOD's broad effort to clean its financial house.
The department is close to making a contract award for its financial management
system architecture, which will act as a roadmap for fixing its financial
systems.
***************
Federal computer Week
March 29, 2002
Tenn. recruits teachers online

Faced with increasing pressure to recruit qualified teachers for its schools,
Tennessee has struck a pact with Teachers-Teachers.com, a private Web-based
recruitment service, to provide all of its school systems with access to the
company's national database of resumes from about 46,000 educational
professionals.

Teachers-Teachers.com has made deals with several other states to provide its
service to smaller groups of school districts, but Tennessee is the first to
sign a statewide contract that covers all of its 138 school systems. The state
provides the service to school systems and individual recruiters at no cost.

The contract with Teachers-Teachers.com is just the latest in Tennessee's
efforts to develop a comprehensive system of personnel development for its
schools, said Cleo Harris, regional coordinator for the Education Department's
Middle Tennessee Regional Resource Center. Other ways to use the Web to improve
teacher recruitment and retention are also being studied, she said.

To use Teachers-Teachers.com, school systems can search the database for
candidates by residency, grade level, education and licensure areas, screen
candidates by listening to recorded interviews and receive email directly from
them.

The company began as a Maryland-based startup in early 2000 and had just 10,000
resumes in its database by the end of that year. The number of school systems
using the service "has gone up a lot" in the just the past six months as more
effort has gone into actively recruiting schools, according to Rebecca Clark,
Teachers-Teachers.com's director of member services.

About 600 public school districts and another 500 private schools and other
educational agencies currently are signed up for the service, Clark said.

Separately, Tennessee also recently announced a Web site
(www.k-12.state.tn.us/certinf) that the public can access to check the licensure
information of the state's teachers. The Education Department sees the site as
providing a double-barreled service, to parents wanting to know the
qualifications of their children's' teachers, and for the teachers to keep up
to date with their own endorsements and licensing expiration dates.
***************
New York Times
Judge Weighs Dismissal of Charges in Digital Copyright Case

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 1  A federal judge heard arguments today on a request
to dismiss the prosecution of a Russian software company charged with violating
a digital-copyright law. The case is one of the first legal challenges to the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which prohibits the sale of tools
that can help people circumvent the electronic locks that protect copyrighted
digital works like music or books.

The federal government has charged the company, ElcomSoft, with violating the
act for selling a program that allowed people to disable encryption software
from Adobe Systems (news/quote) that is used to protect electronic books.

Judge Ronald M. Whyte of Federal District Court in Northern California did not
issue a decision on the motions to dismiss the case. He could issue a written
decision before the next hearing, scheduled for April 15, or announce his
decision in court that day, lawyers said.

The lawyers for ElcomSoft, which is based in Moscow, invoked the First and
Fifth Amendments in asking Judge Whyte to drop the charges, calling the law
unconstitutionally vague.

The digital copyright act "does not define the tools that it purports to
prohibit," Joseph M. Burton, a lawyer representing ElcomSoft, argued in the the
court here.

Daralyn J. Durie, another lawyer representing ElcomSoft, said the law, known as
the D.M.C.A., banned tools that could be used for legitimate reasons, like
scholars' converting electronic books into searchable files or blind people's
transferring the books into audio files to be read aloud to them by a computer.

"There is essentially no fair use left once the D.M.C.A. is done with it," she
said.

The two lawyers also argued that computer code is speech. Banning technologies
like ElcomSoft's Advanced eBook Processor, which can decrypt Adobe's electronic
books, amounts to prohibiting free speech, they said.

Federal prosecutors replied that the buyer's use of the technology was
irrelevant if the seller marketed the tool as a way to circumvent copyright
laws.

Scott Frewing, an assistant United States attorney, said ElcomSoft's lawyers
had introduced their constitutional defense to add "unnecessary emotion" to the
case, which drew international attention after the prosecution of a Russian
programmer and ElcomSoft employee, Dmitry Sklyarov, in July.

Mr. Sklyarov was arrested in July at a computer hackers' convention in Las
Vegas, and became a cause célèbre for civil libertarians. The government has
since agreed to drop its prosecution of Mr. Sklyarov in exchange for his
testimony. ElcomSoft faces one charge of conspiracy and four charges of
trafficking in technology for use in copyright circumvention.

Congress passed the copyright law unanimously in 1998 with little discussion,
but it has spurred a heated debate since then. On one side, media companies
have fought aggressively to protect their digital copyrights as services like
Napster arose. On the other side, civil libertarians have called the law too
broad.

A California man was convicted last week of violating the law by reproducing
videocassettes in his home to sell or rent to local video stores. Mohsin Mynaf
of Vacaville, Calif., pleaded guilty to counts of criminal copyright
infringement, trafficking in counterfeit labels and circumventing a
technological measure designed to protect a copyrighted work. He faces up to 65
years in prison and a fine of up to $3.5 million.

***************
New York Times
AT& T, Comcast to Stop High - Speed Cable Internet Fee

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Many subscribers of high-speed Internet service via
cable will see their bill decrease slightly starting this month, because two
operators said on Monday they will stop charging a local franchise fee.

Companies like AT&T Broadband, Comcast Corp. (news/quote) and AOL Time Warner
Inc. (news/quote) (AOL.N) pay local governments up to 5 percent of their gross
revenue, or about $2.5 billion annually, for access to public rights-of-way to
offer service.

Many have paid the fees on revenue from the Internet service as well and the
law allows companies to pass along the fees to their customers.

However, last month the Federal Communications Commission concluded revenue
from that service should not be included in calculating the maximum franchise
fee cable operators can be required to pay.

AT&T Broadband, the cable operations of AT&T Corp.being sold to Comcast
(CMCSK.O), said as of April 1 it will not charge its Internet service
subscribers the franchise fee for the service, and that it would refund some
fees to customers.

``We will be crediting our customers'' fees charged back to March 15 when the
FCC ruling was issued, said Sarah Eder, a spokeswoman for AT&T Broadband, the
biggest U.S. cable operator.

She declined to disclose how much it collects from the fee but said AT&T has
about 1.5 million high-speed Internet subscribers, the majority of whom pay
$45.95 for the service and the rental of a cable-modem.

``Where franchise fees apply, we are notifying our customers and the local
franchise authority that we will no longer collect that fee,'' said Jenni
Moyer, a spokeswoman for Comcast, the No. 3 cable operator.

The company has more than 950,000 cable modem subscribers. She declined to
disclose how many are charged the franchise fee or the amount Comcast collects.

Spokesmen for AOL Time Warner, the second-largest U.S. cable provider, and for
No. 4 cable operator Charter Communications (news/quote) (CHTR.O) had no
immediate comment.
***************
New York Times
XM Satellite Signs Up More Customers Than Expected

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Satellite radio service provider XM Satellite Radio
Holdings Inc. (news/quote) (XMSR.O) on Monday said it ended the first quarter
with more subscribers than it had expected and is on track to meet expectations
for full year 2002.

The Washington-based firm said it had more than 76,000 total subscribers
compared to its forecast of 70,000 at the end of the period ended March 31. XM
said it remains on track to end the year with 350,000 subscribers.

``XM added over 48,000 subscribers in the first quarter, exceeding its target
by 15 percent, outpacing most Wall Street analyst expectations,'' said Hugh
Panero, XM's president and chief executive, in a news release.

XM Satellite broadcasts 71 music channels and 29 information and entertainment
channels through 2 satellites orbiting directly over the United States.

The company, which launched its service nationwide last November, competes with
Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. (news/quote) (SIRI.O), which started it equivalent
service in 4 cities in February.

Sirius said last week it plans to have nationwide service by July 1, one month
ahead of schedule.

Panero said the majority of subscriber growth at XM so far has come from retail
channels but it expects significant growth from the automotive sector in the
second half of the year when XM radios will become available in new car models.

General Motors Corp. (news/quote) (GM.N) has plans to offer XM radios on 23
models including the Buick, Chevrolet, and Pontiac cars beginning this fall. It
already offers XM in Cadillac Devilles and Sevilles.

XM also has similar deals with GM affiliate Isuzu, Nissan Motor Co. Ltd.
(news/quote) (7201.T) and Volkswagen AG (news/quote) (VOWG.F).

Agreements with auto makers are considered to be one of the best opportunities
to grow the satellite radio business.

XM radios are also available at consumer electronics retailers such as Circuit
City and Best Buy (news/quote).

As of January, XM radios were available in about 4,500 stores.

Shares of XM Satellite closed 67 cents lower Monday at $13.10 on Nasdaq.
***************
BBC
Recycled PCs head for African schools

A researcher at a Scottish university is setting up a scheme to collect surplus
computers and send them to schools in his native Uganda. 

"Most of the computers have been decommissioned, because the institutions which
were using them are upgrading," said Dr Morris Agaba, a research fellow at
Stirling University. 

So far he has collected 50 fully functioning computers, which he hopes to send
to a secondary school in Uganda by July. 

'Critical tool' 

Dr Agaba first thought of the idea of recycling computers two years ago, but it
was only when he teamed up with some colleagues over coffee that the whole
thing came together. 

He saw how every year, hundreds of thousands of working computers are scrapped
as institutions and companies buy the latest models. 

As a Ugandan who has studied abroad, Dr Agaba saw an opportunity to do
something to help introduce children in his country to the computer age. 

"I asked myself, how could I contribute something to the education of the
children in fringe environments and I thought the most critical tool I could
think of was computers," he told the BBC programme Go Digital. 

The first shipment of computers is destined for a school 250 kilometres
northeast of the capital, Kampala. 

The school only has one computer which is used for administrative purposes, so
its 1,000 pupils have probably never even seen a PC. 

"The availability of computers will greatly enhance their studies and enhance
their horizons," said Dr Agaba. 

Net horizons 

The machines will have some basic software, such as word-processing and
graphics programs. But this is only the first step. 

"Most important from my perspective is if they can get connected to the
internet, as they will have a door open to the vast amount of information
available there," he said. 

Dr Agaba is currently looking at cost effective ways of shipping the machines
to Uganda and even sending out volunteers to train the school teachers. 

So far most of the surplus computers have come from the University of Stirling.
But he believes that there are many more machines which would be thrown away,
unless someone offered to take them. 

"This is something that can be done wherever there are surplus computers, not
just in the UK but also in the US," he said.
***************
BBC
Thousands send online tributes

More than 7,000 e-mails have arrived from countries as far flung as Australia,
Venezuela, Lebanon, Jamaica, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Africa, Taiwan and
Barbados. 

Another 30,000 people sent their condolences to an official memorial website
set up by Buckingham Palace, which invites visitors to share their thoughts and
memories of the Queen Mother. 

Dr Charles Shaw, the co-ordinator of Oldham Queens Jubilee Committee, told BBC
News Online the Queen Mother had been a role model. 

"The contribution of HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother is the most effective
example of duty and citizenship with spirit, joy and loyalty to subjects and a
powerful example for young and old to emulate," he wrote. 

'Great loss' 

But while many talked of the Queen Mother's symbolic importance, others
described a more personal sense of sadness. 

"As an old soldier and wartime fire-fighter, I feel a great loss," wrote Derek
Reynolds, from Canada. "A large chunk of my life has disappeared with this dear
lady's death. She will long be remembered and revered." 

One American reader said the e-mail deluge spoke for itself. 

"As I read through the tributes to the Queen Mother, I was struck by the
thought that in such uncertain times as these, ordinary people from all over
the world were taking time from their daily lives to connect and share their
sadness," Melissa Mitchell wrote. 

"It's a rare gift to be able to bring a planet of people who are different and
yet not so different together, if only for a moment. I think the Queen Mother
would have liked that."
***************
BBC
Silver surfers taking to the net


The number of people aged 55 and over using the internet in the UK has grown by
nearly 90% from last year, according to a survey from net measurement firm
NetValue. 

Two million older people are logging on to the net, accounting for 13% of the
total UK online population. 

The UK has one of the highest percentages of silver surfers in Europe. Only
tech-savvy Sweden and Denmark have more with 17.4% and 16.3% respectively. 

Good egg 

Older surfers are keen to keep their finances in order over the net, accounting
for more than 40% of online banking. 

Egg proved to be the most popular bank with silver surfers, showing that they
are willing to experiment with new brands. 

It will be good news for the banking sector and for more traditional
institutions that are considering migrating to the net, said NetValue Managing
Director Alkie Manias. 

Digging out roots 

Silver surfers are also interested in tracing their family history. Over-55s
are four times more likely to visit ancestry and genealogy sites than the
average internet users. 

Mr Manias believes that older people are taking to the net because they have
more time on their hands and spend more of that time at home. 

Their interest in genealogy is probably a cultural one he thinks. 

"Reaching that age you start looking back and different things, like tracing
your family tree, become important," he said.
***************
BBC
Science summit deemed success
March 26, 2002

The meeting in the United Arab Emirates capital was part of an ongoing effort
to improve relations between the Arab world and the West in the wake of the 11
September attacks on New York and Washington. 

The sense of urgency was reflected in the list of participants, which included
more than 50 high-level representatives from Arab and American scientific
organisations. 

The US Secretary of State Colin Powell sent his chief science and technology
adviser, Dr Norman Neureiter. 

Dr Neureiter told the meeting: "I believe so strongly in the powers of science
and technology co-operation to break barriers to communication between
countries." 

'Political will' 

To illustrate this point, Dr Neureiter added: "Electrons all travel in the same
direction and have the same charge, no matter where they are in the world. And
the language of science is a global language even if we are different." 

He expressed the wish that participants should emerge from the meeting "with
the same concrete ideas, even plans, for expanding science and technology
co-operation between the Arab and the Western worlds. 

"We all live on the same globe, even if our history and culture may be very
different," he concluded. 

A few months ago, Dr Neureiter told BBC News Online that he doubted whether
such co-operation could be achieved. "When you listen to some of the messianic
fundamentalism, you wonder whether dialogue can work," he had said. 

But when asked after the Abu Dhabi gathering whether he now thought
Arab-American dialogue could work, he replied more positively. "Yes it can
work," he said, "if both sides have the political will to make it happen." 

Funding proposal 

Financing scientific research programmes and initiatives, persuading Arab
governments about the important role science could play in society and the best
way to deal with the brain drain (a problem rife in the Arab world) were among
the many issues discussed in Abu Dhabi. 

The main organiser of the meeting was the Arab Science and Technology
Foundation (ASTF), a coalition of Arab scientists - those working in the Arab
world and expatriates. 

The ASTF was established two years ago to stimulate scientific research in the
region and hopes to become a grant-giving body for science and technology,
modelling itself on the US National Foundation of Science. 

The head of ASTF, Dr Abdalla Alnajjar, was keen to emphasize in his opening
remarks that the dialogue at the meeting should focus on "science and
technology and nothing else". 

Regular talks 

John Boright, the executive director of international affairs at the US
National Academy of Science (NAS), said it should not be forgotten that some
dialogue had taken place before 11 September. 

He said the NAS held regular meetings with Palestinian, Jordanian, Israeli and
Egyptian scientists on a number of topics such as the state of water resources,
telehealth and the environment. 

Other participants at the meeting included Osman Shinaishin, a director with
the US National Science Foundation; Farouk El-Baz, director of the Remote
Sensing Center at Boston University and a member of the Apollo space programme
team during the 1970s; Abdul Hamid Halab, a special adviser to the Ruler of
Sharjah on higher education; and the Libyan scientific research minister
Maatouk Maatouk. 

The meeting was held on the eve of what Nature magazine recently described as
an historic seminar: a gathering in Sharjah of more than 500 Arab scientists
from across the region and beyond. 

The Second Symposium on Scientific Research Outlook in the Arab World runs
until 27 March.
***************
Government Computer News
CVE dictionary contains more than 2,000 entries

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures lexicon, developed by Mitre Corp. of
Bedford, Mass., to bring order to IT security, has grown to include more than
2,000 entries. 

The lexicon, found at cve.mitre.org, standardizes names and descriptions of
known information security problems, making it easier for organizations to
share data and for security tools to interoperate. Development began three
years ago when there was no common way to identify or define the security
exposures known at that time. 

?When we started in 1999, there were 321 entries on the list. Now there are
2,032, plus an additional 1,994 candidates being reviewed,? CVE project leader
Margie Zuk said. 

Nearly 50 commercial, academic and government organizations, including the
National Institute of Standards and Technology, have adopted the CVE, and 75
vendors of network security products and services have announced that they will
conform to the lexicon. 

The list of top 20 Internet security vulnerabilities published by the FBI and
SANS Institute also follows the CVE lexicon.
***************
San Jose Mercury News
Supreme Court drops age-discrimination case
DECADES-OLD LAW IS AT HEART OF LAWSUIT

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court backed away Monday from a closely watched case
about age discrimination.

The justices changed their minds and decided not to rule whether older
employees have rights similar to those of minorities when it comes to
discrimination claims. The action puts off a decision that would affect --
possibly negatively -- millions of aging workers.

The case deals with whether a law prohibiting age bias at work allows lawsuits
that alleged an employer's action inordinately harmed older workers.

The high court had agreed to consider the question in December, when the
country was in a recession and thousands of jobs were being cut.

It dismissed the case Monday with a one-sentence ruling. The unanimous,
unsigned decision did not explain the court's reasoning, saying only that it
had acted ``improvidently'' when it chose to hear the case.

``If I were on the court and supported the older workers, I would like this
outcome. I'd like to fight this one another day, another presidency,'' said
Michael Evan Gold, a professor at Cornell University. ``For older workers this
is better than losing it.''

The case asked whether a 1967 law that bars on-the-job age bias allowed
lawsuits on grounds that an employer's action had a disproportionate impact on
older workers. Justices already have settled that impact suits are allowed
under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans discrimination based on a worker's
sex, religion or race.

A ruling could have had a broad effect. The 1967 Age Discrimination in
Employment Act covers about 70 million workers age 40 or older, nearly half the
workforce. The law bans different treatment for older workers just because of
their age.

The case's dismissal is a defeat for about 120 former Florida Power employees,
who contended they were fired as part of a company effort to change its image
and reduce salary and pension costs. More than 70 percent of those laid off
during company reorganizations in the 1990s were 40 years old or older.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the workers could not pursue their
lawsuit under the age discrimination act.

The case is Adams v. Florida Power Corp., 01-584.
***************
MSNBC
Year-old hole exposes credit cards

April 1   Who?s responsible when a year-old software bug hasn?t been fixed, and
as a result, customer credit card numbers are spit out onto the Internet; and
when the company involved doesn?t answer e-mails or phone calls, but all the
while, keeps handing credit card numbers to hackers? MSNBC.com tried to reach
the site, Waxboxes.com, but with no luck. Meanwhile, the source who found the
customer records tried to contact the credit card association fraud
departments, and that didn?t help. As the process unfolded, victims? credit
cards were still being revealed, and most likely stolen.

?IT SEEMS NO ONE is responsible,? said Dan Clements, who runs CardCops.com, a
credit card theft information site. Clements heard about the flaw at
Waxboxes.com last week, and passed it along to MSNBC.com. 
       Almost exactly one year ago, the FBI issued a warning about shopping
cart software called ?PDG? that accidentally publishes customer order details
to the world. A flurry of fun for credit card thieves ensued. But the exposures
died down in about a month, after numerous e-mails and phone calls came from
PDG with instructions on how to fix the flaw  and after numerous news stories
chronicled the consequences of failing to patch.
       But the news apparently didn?t reach Waxboxes.com, a small sports
memorabilia dealer that only took a few orders a week at its Web site. Until
today, it was publishing every customer order onto the Web.
Finally, a call to Waxboxes? Web hosting provider on Monday shut off the faucet
of credit cards. The host, Interland Inc., said it had sold PDG?s software to
Waxboxes.com, meaning it was the Web site?s responsibility to install the
patch.
   ?PDG notified customers, in a series of six e-mails,? said Interland
spokesperson Barbara Gibson.
   But Waxboxes.com wasn?t alone. Clements also found a second Web site,
Derbytec.com, that was using the old, unpatched PDG software, and was
publishing customer orders  fortunately, without credit card data. The site
plugged its flaw when contacted directly by PDG on Monday.
   PDG president David Snyder said the company had made numerous efforts to
contact the company.
   ?I don?t know what to say about these sites,? he said. ?I am surprised there
are still sites out there that aren?t updated, given the massive amounts of
effort we put into contacting people.?
   But for Clements, the software patching process will always be imperfect.
Clements thinks the credit card companies need to take a more active role in
preventing security breaches and reacting to them. For example, there should be
fraud hotlines ready to cancel stolen cards that are found online.
     ?I contacted the fraud and risk people at Visa, Mastercard, American
Express ... at noon on Friday,? he said. At noon on Monday, the card numbers
were still being spit out by the Waxboxes.com site. ?I copied 20 people. But it
goes to the bottom of their to-do list. They just haven?t adapted to the speed
of the Internet.?
       Not so, says Casey Watson of Visa. Concerned Internet users who run
across stolen card numbers can contact the company at Visa.com or at
1-800-Visa-911, and the company will begin an investigation.
      ?E-mail is very powerful quick and instantaneous,? Watson said. ?We have
people watching {Visa.com e-mail} daily  e-mails get fired around the company
very quickly, and investigations are initiated. I?m not familiar with this
case, but I wouldn?t be surprised if Visa was involved.? 
       The card companies do have policies in place designed to encourage
merchants to take better care of customer data, like Visa?s Cardholder
Information Security Program. But Clements says those policies have no teeth.
       ?Have any of these guys suffered any consequences for listing those
cards in public?? he said. ?Many times in the past CardCops has notified the
credit card associations of vulnerabilities. And many times the flaw or hole is
still up after a month.?

***************
MSNBC
Old worms make like spring chickens

April 1  Two computer worms found last summer topped the charts in March,
highlighting the difficulty of eliminating the more successful digital pests
from the Internet.
       DATA FURNISHED BY e-mail service provider MessageLabs placed the SirCam
virus, which hit the Internet last August, at the top of its list of hostile
attachments. MessageLabs intercepts such attachments for its clients.
       Antivirus company Trend Micro?s virus-tracking center placed SirCam at
No. 3, right after Nimda and a variant of that 6-month-old worm.
       The success of the old computer viruses is the result of continued
susceptibility on the part of home computer users, said John Harrington, U.S.
marketing director for U.K.-based MessageLabs.
       ?Most of those home users don?t have antivirus programs in place, and
when they do have them in place, they don?t download the newest signatures,?
Harrington said.
       While businesses tend to respond to the threat of a new virus within
days or weeks, home users are not only more likely to leave a computer open to
attack, they?re also more likely to open a worm attached to an e-mail message.
       Not all leading viruses were released last year. A third antivirus
company, Russia-based Kaspersky Labs, released a Top 20 virus list for March,
placing the Klez worm, released on the Internet in mid-January, in the No. 1
position. SirCam reached the fourth-highest position on Kaspersky?s list.
       Which viruses top which lists varies depending on what the companies
measure and the region in which a company?s products are most popular, said
MessageLabs? Harrington.
       MessageLabs counts the number of attachments found in e-mail sent to its
clients, so worms that send more e-mail will generally top its list.
       Kaspersky and Trend Micro count the number of incidents reported to
their support centers. Trend Micro also counts the number of computers scanned
by its online antivirus scanner that were found to be infected. Kaspersky tends
to be more popular in Europe and Russia, while Trend Micro is most popular in
the Asia-Pacific region.
***************
Government Executive
Customs needs to adequately staff IT modernization office, report says 

The Customs Service must fill critical management positions to oversee its $1.3
billion-dollar information technology modernization project, according to a
recent audit by the Treasury Department?s inspector general. 

Top positions in the Customs Modernization Office (CMO), including jobs in
communications and the agency?s business management office, which oversees
contracts, are unfilled, according to a March IG report. The deputy director?s
position and another position in business management were also expected to
become vacant in January and March 2002. Customs would not say whether the
agency had filled any job openings recently. The office, which has eight
full-time employees and about 50 contractors, oversees the agency?s massive
Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) project. 

?Customs does not yet have the people and systems in place to adequately manage
the development of the ACE,? the interim audit report, ?Customs Needs to
Adequately Staff the Modernization Office? (OIG-02-058), concluded. According
to the report, the agency?s modernization office needs more staff to
effectively manage the billion-dollar project, oversee contractors and
establish realistic delivery schedules. 

ACE will replace the agency?s antiquated Automated Commercial System, which is
used to process summaries detailing the products in shipments of imports.
Increasing trade has caused Customs? current system to fail over the past few
years, causing backups at ports and border entry points across the country.
Customs awarded a $1.3 billion contract to IBM Global Services in April 2001 to
build ACE. 

?Succession planning and backup is especially important when such a small
organization is responsible for such a large and complex program,? the report
said. The audit recommended that Customs work with Treasury?s chief information
officer to ensure key positions in the modernization office are filled and
suggested sending staff from other Treasury agencies to CMO. 

Customs disputed the IG?s finding that it did not have the staff or systems in
place to adequately manage ACE. ?While we are always looking for ways to
improve our process, this report provides no detail concerning specific
problems experienced with the people, systems or reports that would support
this opening statement,? said William Riley, director of Customs? planning
office, in a letter to Clifford Jennings, director of information technology
audits in the Treasury IG?s office. For example, a senior manager is
temporarily handling communication responsibilities, Riley said. 

Customs agreed to develop a personnel chart for the modernization office to
ensure that it has enough staff to manage ACE. The agency also said the
assistant commissioner and director of the modernization office have provided
consistent leadership for the project, and that Customs employees ?are
supplemented by extensive contractor support.? 

?The Customs Service is taking the necessary personnel actions to ensure
continued, effective management of the ACE program over the life of the
project,? a statement issued by the agency said. ?The office of inspector
general has indicated that our planned actions satisfy the intent of their
recommendation.? 

The audit also criticized Customs for failing to communicate effectively with
contractors and other stakeholders about the modernization effort. The agency
could foster confusion if it continues to use bureaucratic jargon in meetings
and reports, the IG report said. 

Customs should also re-evaluate ACE?s 2002 schedule to make sure the agency and
contractors have enough time and resources to produce quality results. The
report said the project?s slow start and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and
their aftermath underscore the importance of monitoring the project?s schedule.
Customs agreed to closely monitor the schedule, but emphasized that the current
schedule has not been adversely affected. 

Riley also noted that Customs received more funding from Congress after Sept.
11 for the modernization project, boosting the agency?s resources. Congress
appropriated $300 million to start building ACE in 2002, up from $130 million
in fiscal 2001.
***************
Government Executive
Defense weighs digital signature switch to match other agencies 

The Defense Department is considering a switch in its program to secure digital
signatures for external transactions in order to align itself with the rest of
the federal government. 

The department is examining whether it should adopt or at least recognize the
Access Certificates for Electronic Services (ACES) public key infrastructure
(PKI) program established in 1999 by the General Services Administration to
provide trusted transactions for citizens and businesses. 

PKI provides a hack-proof way to verify that the holder of a private key
actually signed a document, as recognized by certified holders of a matching
decryption key. 

Defense and GSA working groups are meeting on technical and policy issues about
once a month, trying to work through differences in the programs used by each.
A decision on which system to use could come by summer, sources said. 

Defense is not considering a change to its internal PKI, under which service
men and other authorized users have ID cards, both physical (with a photo) and
digital, sources noted. 

For external contracts, Defense currently is using a commercially based interim
external certification authority (IECA), according to Keren Cummins, vice
president of government services at Digital Signature Trust (DST).

DST is one of three companies authorized by GSA to support the ACES program.
The others are Operational Research Consultants (ORC) and AT&T, which uses
VeriSign. DST, ORC, VeriSign and General Dynamics are contracted with Defense.
But because there are two systems, contractors must use two certifications. 

"Vendors are saying, 'Why do I need two certificates?'" Cummins said. "Any
federal agency but DoD can accept ACES." 

Contractors pay $175 for an IECA certificate from DST, while the agencies pay
the cost of ACES certificates, she said. Vendors feel ACES provides sufficient
security for contractors, Cummins said. "You can create such a high security
standard that no one opts in. Then you have nothing." 

Technical interoperability between the ACES and IECA systems should not be a
problem, said David Temoshok, PKI policy manager at GSA. The business and legal
issues are being worked out, he said.

"We hope to have DoD to a point where it can, as it says, 'merge,' " Temoshok
said. "If we issue a certificate to a government contractor, [Defense] should
be able to recognize that certificate."

Liability is one issue still being examined. Defense places more liability on
the contractor than GSA, another source said. This is more expensive for the
contractor, the source said. 

ACES is available government-wide. Temoshok said he can see a number of
agencies, such as the Treasury Department, Patent and Trademark Office, NASA
and the Agriculture Department's National Finance Center moving to ACES. The
Commerce Department recently opted in.

Temoshok noted that e-government is one of the five elements of the President's
Management Agenda. "We as government can be leaders in moving forward in the
use of electronic programs," he said. 

"It's not easy, but this is the kind of work, if you're really interoperable,
that you need to work at," Temoshok said.

***************
Federal Computer Week
Air Force pinged on Web data

The Air Force is posting potentially inappropriate information on many of its
Web sites because it is not reviewing or maintaining those sites as it should,
according to a Defense Department inspector general's report released last
month.

The Air Force had 140 publicly accessible Web sites that contained "potentially
inappropriate" information, the IG found. These sites contained warnings such
as "For Official Use Only" and "Secret," yet were still accessible by the
general public.

"The Air Force had not developed adequate plans to annually review its Web
sites," the IG report said. "In addition, the listing of Air Force publicly
accessible Web sites recorded in Air Force Link did not match the data reported
in [the] Government Information Locator Service." The Air Force Link
registration database feeds information to GILS, which helps citizens identify,
locate, and retrieve information about the government. 

The IG also found that the process to remove sensitive data "was not reliable."

Among its recommendations, the IG suggested that the Air Force conduct annual
multi-disciplinary reviews of its Web sites and report the results to the
service's chief information officer. 

In written response to the report, John Gilligan, Air Force CIO, agreed with
the recommendations and said that a review process would be in place by August.
Specifically, the service's Office of Public Affairs would screen information
before posting and Webmasters would review sites for unauthorized information. 

Gilligan also said that the Air Force would ensure that Air Force Link and GILS
data are consistent, and that it would work "to ensure public Air Force Web
sites do not divulge inappropriate data."

Meanwhile, the Air Force has developed a training program for personnel working
on Websites, and oversight of Air Force Web sites has improved with the
establishment of the Air Force Web Risk Assessment Cell, the IG said. This
group is responsible for vulnerability analyses and threat assessments of the
service's Web site content.
***************
CIO Insight
How Geo-Encryption Makes Copyright Protection Global

Via an encryption scheme that uses GPS satellites to track users' locations,
Georgetown professor Dorothy Denning takes the copyright fight to Hollywoodand
into the heavens. 

For nearly 30 years, Dorothy Denning has been devising ways to keep the wrong
people from cracking into computers and stealing secrets locked up by
cryptographic algorithms. She'll hack into a technology, then use what she has
learned to figure out new ways to keep hackers at bay. 

In the 1970s, she led a project to help federal agencies like the CIA, IRS and
FBI share sensitive data without giving up their deepest secrets. A decade
later, she devised a system that detects hackers the moment they crack into a
system, enabling the U.S. Navy and other agencies to better guard classified
data. Before then, hackers sometimes wouldn't be discovered until much later,
during reviews of old network logs. 

Now, Denning is pioneering a new type of copyright protection, called
geo-encryption. It's a big deal in the information security arena, earning her
the moniker of "America's cyberwarrior" from Time magazine and stoking the
imaginations of everyone from Hollywood movie executives seeking ways to scare
off Napster copycats to hospital administrators looking for a safe way to
transport patient data across the Internet without fear of privacy breaches. 

Today, of course, there's little to stop someone from posting the latest hit CD
or DVD for anyone to download for free. But Denning thinks she's pretty much
solved that problem. 

Working with a Hollywood movie executive and an Internet entrepreneur, Denning
has invented a way to keep information scrambled until it reaches a precise
location, as determined by GPS satellites. Armed with Denning's geo-encryption
system, which she co-patented in 1998, only people in specified locations, such
as movie theaters, living rooms or corporate conference rooms, would be able to
unscramble the data. 

But the idea also has drawn interest from the Pentagon. Coded messages that the
Defense Department sends its commanders in the field, for example, could be
deciphered only in a certain room of a certain building in, say,
Kandahargreatly reducing the risk of malicious interception. 

Business intelligence, such as a private meeting among corporate directors,
could be scrambled and uploaded to a satellite from a conference room, and
downloaded and decoded in a conference room 1,000 miles away. Medical records
could be sent from a doctor in Peoria for a second opinion to a doctor in
Manhattanand all without the usual worries over privacy leaks to insurers or
investigators along the way. In addition, she says, "If someone hacked into
your system, you'd know exactly where he came from." 

The idea has its share of critics: "The problem is making the encryption device
and GPS receiver tamperproof," says Bruce Schneier, a fellow cryptographer.
Denning agrees that "you'll never solve the security challenge completely." But
she believes geo-encryption has seriously upped the ante in the brain race
against hackers. 

A year ago, Denning helped form GeoCodex, an Arlington, Va.-based start-up
that's developing devices to enable location-based authentication. Working with
Hollywood film executive Mark Seiler and MapQuest.com Inc. founder Barry Glick,
the technology is already attracting interest: Even top White House officials,
including the nation's top cyberterrorism cop, Richard Clarke, are looking into
its potential uses against cyberwarriors. 

Before Denning's invention, location-authentication methodologies relied on who
you were or what you knew. With Denning's work, suddenly, it is possible to
have an authenticated location, supplied by data from the network of 27 GPS
satellites. In addition, documents can be electronically stamped with the time
and place of their creation to establish ownership of intellectual property.
Says SRI International computer scientist Peter G. Neumann, who worked with
Denning in the 1980s to develop secure systems for the Navy: "To Dorothy, the
word 'no' is a green light." 

***************
News Factor
IBM Buys Biometric Laptop Security

A Florida semiconductor company Monday announced that it has integrated its
fingerprint security technology into the latest IBM (NYSE: IBM) laptops.

For the full story http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/printer/17042/
***************
CNET
Public libraries to test digital service 

An experiment in digital publishing will take a step forward this week, with
six regional library systems scheduled to begin testing online research
services from start-up Ebrary. 
The service, dubbed Ebrarian, lets people read articles and books online for
free but charges them to copy text or print pages. The company said it has
thousands of titles from more than 100 publishers. Among the topics offered are
history, classics, business, economics, technology, education and social
sciences. 

Mountain View, Calif.-based Ebrary said it plans on Tuesday to announce the new
customers: The Bibliographical Center for Research, which serves the western
United States; Palinet, which serves the mid-Atlantic region; New England-based
Nelinet; the Michigan Library Consortium; Wisconsin Library Services; and
Ohio's Ohionet. Ebrary said the networks will distribute its online research
service to 6,000 libraries in the United States, beginning with a 30-day trial
in April. 

 

Although publishers may be warming up to placing their copyrighted material in
a digital format, it remains to be seen whether the market for online libraries
will take off. In November, Colorado-based NetLibrary, which licensed digital
books to libraries, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Two months later, Dublin,
Ohio-based Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit group that offers
computer-based cataloging and reference services to libraries, purchased
NetLibrary's assets. 

"There's a vulnerability for all of these (online research) companies to be
financially successful," said Marti Harris, research director for Gartner.
"These digital content providers and relationships are very important and
essential for research as part of the whole library collection, (but) they're
not going to be replacing the traditional libraries...We're a long way off from
having a totally online library." 

Harris added that online research companies that act as middlemen could be left
out of the digital-publishing chain. She said publishers and libraries might
prefer to place books and materials in digital formats themselves. 

Ebrary said its service allows libraries to add to their existing digital
resources and catalog services. For instance, the Ebrarian includes research
tools that let people link to biographical information, definitions, maps and
other digital resources. The service also eliminates the hassle of retrieving
books that are not on a library's shelf. 

"Typically, when you go into a library what ends up happening is that if you
wanted to look at all the electronic resources, what you're forced to do is
almost go from terminal to terminal in order to do comprehensive research,"
said Ebrary CEO Christopher Warnock. "What we're enabling libraries to do is to
make these electronic resources accessible to people through their card catalog
system in a context in which all the libraries' resources can be more
efficiently used." 

This week's partnerships signal Ebrary's aggressive efforts to take a foothold
in the online-research publishing market. At the end of last year, Ebrary
agreed to work with a group of major publishers to distribute their titles
online. The partners included Penguin Putnam, academic publisher Greenwood
Publishing Group and John Wiley & Sons, a publisher of scientific, technical
and medical books. 

Founded in 1999, privately held Ebrary is backed by publishers Random House
Ventures, Pearson and McGraw-Hill. Warnock's father, Adobe Systems Chairman
John Warnock, is also an investor and sits on Ebrary's board of directors. 


***************
CIO Insight
Corporate Peer-to-Peer Gets a Closer Look

Remember Pointcast? Launched in February 1996, its so-called push technology
was designed to "push" content such as news and advertisements through users'
Internet connections. Trouble was, it gobbled up so much local network
bandwidth that corporations nationwide banned its use. The history of business
computing is littered with such "grassroots technologies." Some, like
client/server computing and desktop PCs, went on to become the dominant
corporate IT architecture; others, like Napster, became part of the fossil
record, a technology cart with no business-purpose horse.

Napster also has the dubious distinction of being an early version of
peer-to-peer technology, software that commonly allows two or more computers to
communicate directly without having to depend on intermediate servers. But
another peer-to-peer offering, instant messaging, may not only provide the
opportunity to offer a valued service to end-users at minimal cost, but may
demand so little upfront analysis that many IT executives won't even have to
calculate its return on investment before starting pilot programs.

Like many grassroots technologies, some industries are more receptive to
instant messaging than others. One arena where instant messaging seems to have
found a receptive audience is in creative services arenas such as advertising
and entertainment. "We're just starting to look at peer- to-peer technologies,"
says Ed Cannon, executive vice president and CIO of Grey Global Group Inc., the
New York-based holding company that includes advertising giant Grey Worldwide.
"We have about 4,000 users, and I would imagine there's probably anywhere from
5 percent to 10 percent of our population using IM at this point."

But the company has yet to roll out its own sanctioned instant messaging
service. "Our teams are dispersed at different offices around the country, and
in some cases at different offices around the world," says Cannon. "One thing
we're concerned about with IM is that viruses can come in that way. But we also
have the philosophy of letting some things grow out in the field and then
seeing how we can make it part of our overall culture."

In fact, says Cannon, he'd rather let IM grow on its own for a while. "My
personal opinion is, when you're in a professional services organization, the
ability to track down information and to interact contributes to the overall
productivity of a professional. The easier we make that interaction, the better
professionals we have overall," he maintains. "If you're giving employees
technologies that give them a better professional and personal life, it's a
better result for the company. People are just balancing work and life, and we
look at the technology as a way to help them achieve that balance."

The Studio System

Venerable entertainment studio Warner Bros., a unit of AOL Time Warner Inc.
based in Burbank, is another creative environment where IM has been allowed to
flourish. "What we found," says Anthony Lloyd, Warner Bros. vice president of
computer operations, "was that there were many people who had some sort of a
chat function to communicate with friends and family." But like Grey Global,
there was no gate-keeping mentality in IT to enforce strict software usage
standards. "We're an entertainment company," says Lloyd. Employees are allowed
substantial leeway, "so long as you're not doing something illegal," he says.
However, Lloyd does admit the company is developing acceptable-use policies to
control its liability for inappropriate uses of instant messaging.

Through its shift from Microsoft Outlook to AOL Time Warner's America Online
and Netscape messaging software, the entertainment studio recently provided
instant messaging to its 10,000 users. But because IM was built into the
software, the company didn't feel the need to calculate any potential return on
investment for IM itself.

Yet despite the popularity of instant messaging for personal uses, Lloyd
reports that few employees are actually using IM in their daily work. "It's not
looked at as a critical path for how we do business," says Lloyd. "The culture
here at the studio is that IM is more of a novelty, because you don't have
history, versus an e-mail chain."

The tactic at less free-wheeling operations has typically been more cautious.
St. Agnes Healthcare, a Baltimore-based hospital, now has 800 users running an
instant messaging software application created by WiredRed Corp. called e/pop.
"Even though we have a clinical system in place that tells us there's a bed
available, if someone comes into the ER, it's easy to send an e/pop and ask if
there's a bed free," says Jonathan Schoemann, technical support engineer at St.
Agnes. "This way, instead of doing 15 phone calls to see who's got a
wheelchair, you just do one IM, and they say, 'We've got it, we'll send it
down,'" says Schoemann.

Because of its low cost, St. Agnes' IT department didn't bother to compute the
service's ROI ahead of time. "For the big players in the game, such as
Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc., [whose systems] cost an extreme amount of
money to deploy," says St. Agnes IT director Larry Lawson, "we would have
probably wanted to justify [the expenditure]. But with the cost of WiredRed's
product, it's not something that's going to break your budget right from the
get-go. It's something that most healthcare providers can afford, and you do
not have to pay a consultant to come in and do an ROI [estimate] for you."

That's why St. Agnes' IT professionals took it on faith that the service was
worth providing. "It's hard to quantify exactly what you're getting," says
Lawson, "but you're getting an increase in productivity from everyone who uses
this. If they don't have to go through the phone book, they can communicate
more quickly. They don't have to go around the hospital looking for
wheelchairs; they can send an IM and get an immediate response." Lawson is
emphatic about the payback. "Time is money, time is production, and with the
shortage of nurses that everyone is having right now, it plays a big part."

That ease of communication is the main reason IM is becoming so widespread in
U.S. businesses. A recent report from Jupiter Media Metrix Inc. claims the
number of instant messaging users in the workplace has risen by 34 percent over
the past year, to 13.4 million, just under 10 percent of the U.S. workforce.
But David Ferris, founder and president of Ferris Research in San Francisco,
believes that IM use at businesses with 500 or more employees hasn't exploded
yet. "We think it's quite smallbetween five million and 10 million corporate
users," he says. "We keep expecting it quickly to expand, and it hasn't. But by
2007, we'd expect on the order of 200 million corporate users worldwide."

Ease of Use

Other potential fertile ground for peer-to-peer services such as instant
messaging may include technology-driven companies. "We're actually just
starting to get into peer-to-peer for some internal applications with Microsoft
XP, using it as another tool to have people interact with our help desk so
people can log on with instant messages and other features," says Michael
Vaughan, vice president of engineering for Norwood, Mass.-based Corporate
Software, whose applications allow users to track software licenses. "A lot of
folks have been either personally exposed to it through home use, or more than
likely their kids are using it."

But like Warner Bros., Corporate Software didn't compute ahead of time any
potential return because IM services were included in software they were
already rolling out. "Unless it's innocuous, or just part of the
infrastructure," says Vaughan, "there's an ROI done with most of the major
projects." Instant messaging fell into the former categories. "It's just in a
pilot state, seeing if the business uses it, or will they still pick the phone
up?" says Vaughan. However, Vaughan believes that IM will catch on. "We're
early adopters," he proclaims. "There's a group [of users] here that really
tries to push" new technology.

Other industries are not quite so accepting. "We're not using any instant
messaging per se," says Dat Bui, first vice president and technology
architecture manager in the home loan and insurance services division of the
40,000-employee Washington Mutual Inc., the nation's largest savings
institution. "We don't even have teleconferencing," he admits. "The banking
industry is fairly behind in that kind of workgroup automation process."

The same is true for AnnTaylor Stores Corp., the New York City-based clothing
manufacturer. "I don't know of any widespread use of [instant messaging] inside
the company," says Ron Gayda, vice president of Internet technology for
AnnTaylor.com. "We would have to identify an application that would require
that kind of technology to chase it down."

Says Grey's Cannon: "I can tell you, we do have some concerns about IM for
network overhead and viruses, and we're taking a hard look at how we're going
to bring this into the whole organization and institutionalize it."

"I think one of the concerns," says Warner Bros.' Lloyd, "is that it's not
considered to be as reliable, because you don't have the traceability" of
e-mail services. Once an instant message recipient shuts the receiving PC down,
the message is typically lost forever.

St. Agnes' Lawson is concerned about privacy issues. "We have to be extra wary
in healthcare," he says, "because you have patient records, which are probably
the most critical parts of the patient-care chain." Washington Mutual's Bui
agrees. "In our business, we have to protect the information not just from the
consumer standpoint, but also from the financial standpoint."

And there are ramifications for IT departments as well. "Should IT
organizations be embracing peer-to-peer systems? I think so, because they scale
much more organically," says Dr. David P. Reed, former vice president and chief
scientist of Lotus Development Corp. and now an independent researcher and
adviser. "But one problem is that managing peer-to-peer systems can be more
complex, because IT loses control." Like other grassroots technologies,
peer-to-peer allows users to implement their own applications without having to
go to IT for approval, because users believe they can perform their work
better.

One example of this is Warner Bros.' use of peer file-sharing software from
Xerox Corp. that allows users to access directly their catalogs of scripts and
call sheets, which organize movie and television production work each day.
Previously, the company had to print copies of call sheets for dozens of
people, mailing or messengering them to recipients. Movie and television
scripts had to be distributed manually as well, often with substantial delivery
costs. With its new file-sharing system in place, however, Warner's Lloyd
reports first-year savings of $250,000 in printing costs for call sheets, and
more than $300,000 for reduced script distribution costs.

Efficiencies of Scale

Some see the ability to include the members of an organization's "extended
enterprise"people and workgroups outside the corporate firewallas central to
the value of peer-to-peer. "The ability to work seamlessly, efficiently and
effectively with outside players is becoming a critical success factor
regardless of industry, company size or geographic location," says Ray Ozzie,
creator of Lotus Notes and currently chairman and CEO of Groove Networks Inc.,
a Beverly, Mass.-based maker of peer-to-peer collaboration software. "Winning
enterprises won't approach this as a debate between centralized versus
decentralized technologies, but instead will find the best and most effective
means of integrating both to support the critical needs of the business."

Yet despite such vision, the peer-to-peer market today is small. Industry
analysts Frost & Sullivan place the entire market at $43.7 million in 2001,
which includes instant messaging, file sharing and peer collaboration software.
Gartner Inc.'s Robert Batchelder is a little more generous. "If it's $150
million or $200 million, I'd be surprised. But it's going to grow dramatically.
By 2005, the whole notion of P2P stuff will be $1 billion," he claimed, though
some of that will be consumer technologies such as music sharing. Frost &
Sullivan predicts that by 2007, 6.2 million enterprise users will have access
to peer-to-peer networks, and that revenues will grow to exceed $4.96 billion.

The real opportunity for a clear return on investment with instant messaging
and file sharing will come when these services work together more seamlessly,
such as with nascent efforts like Groove Networks' Groove client and servers.
Ultimately, some believe that services such as instant messaging and file
sharing will merge into other applications. "In this whole space, we're fairly
early in the curve," says Corporate Software's Vaughan. "I see all this stuff
tying together eventually. I see a merging of voice and traditional e-mail and
instant messaging all into one."

But today, because of its simplicity, instant messaging and other peer-to-peer
technologies can solve only very specific business problems. "It's a great
technology," says Walid Mougayar, founder of Toronto-based
PeerIntelligence.com, a knowledge hub that chronicles the impact of
peer-to-peer technologies, "but it's not going to take the world by storm, and
we should have the right expectations of what it can do and cannot do." What it
can't do today is regularly justify its return on investment. But that doesn't
seem to be stopping many CIOs from looking to roll out useful services to
end-users.


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