Clips April 18, 2002

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips April 18, 2002

ARTILCES

Feds might use Microsoft product for online ID 
White House cyber czar describes next phase of Internet plan 
Search Technology Helps Organize Government Records 
Nations wary of e-democracy
Major overhaul to split apart embattled INS 
Carnivore's New Leash on Life?
Mothers Watching Less TV, Surfing Web More-Jupiter 
Mobile technology, with its promise of allowing users to work, play and shop
Games Anyone?
Keeping Lines of Communication Open Is Hard When Overseas
These Nets Have Security Holes
Struggling for a Slice of the Wireless Pie
Warming to Wi-Fi
On Tiny Screens, Advertisers See Opportunity
OMB slashes e-gov initiatives
Detroit develops homeland plan
Funding sought for GovNet study
Wireless priority set in D.C., NYC
Let the net run your life
Rural residents demand broadband
State buys software for imaginary staff 
Biting into Bluetooth The much-hyped and much-delayed standard for short-range
wireless
E-signatures not making their mark 
Radio giant to offer music downloads

************************
Feds might use Microsoft product for online ID 

Forget about a national ID card. Instead, the federal government might use
Microsoft's Passport technology to verify the online identity of America's
citizens, federal employees and businesses, according to the White House
technology czar. 

On Sept. 30, the government plans to begin testing Web sites where businesses
can pay taxes and citizens can learn about benefits and social services. It's
also exploring how to verify the identity of users so the sites can share
private information. 

Microsoft's Passport is being considered as a way to authenticate users of the
Web sites, said Mark Forman, associate director of information technology at
the White House. 

"They are involved in that discussion,'' he said, adding that the government
has not yet selected which technology it will use. 

Forman, who is overseeing the government's purchases of $100 billion worth of
technology this year and next, was a featured speaker at the Microsoft
Government Leaders Conference in Seattle this week. 

Forman is a former Senate staffer who worked for IBM and Unisys before he
joined the Bush administration. 

Describing himself as the government's chief information officer, he said his
priorities are to impose businesslike approaches for technology deployments and
to monitor improvements they bring. 

After the Sept. 11 attacks, some politicians and business leaders have called
for a national identification card, but Forman said that's not in the works.
"We don't have any plans for a national ID card," he said. 

The White House is instead pursuing an "e-identification" initiative, an effort
to develop ways to authenticate people and businesses online who already have
government identification numbers such as Social Security,
business-registration and employer-identification numbers. 

At the government-leaders conference, attended by representatives of 75
countries, Microsoft presented a blueprint for its "e-government" strategy that
suggests they use Passport to verify the identity of visitors to their Web
sites. It also suggested that its bCentral business Web site could be used to
process business tax payments and that citizens could use its MSN Web site to
handle address changes and voter registration. 

Governments have long been some of Microsoft's biggest customers. Its desktop
software for office workers and back-end software running networks are widely
by used by state and federal agencies, and the company has developed Internet
portals for the United Kingdom, Mexico and other nations. 

But getting the United States to use Passport to authenticate its 285 million
citizens online would be a coup for the Redmond software company. It would also
be a large step toward fulfilling Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' stated goal of
getting everyone on the Internet to use Passport as their sign-on tool. 

Yesterday, appearing at the conference, Gates reiterated the goal, saying he
expects governments in many countries will find it difficult getting to
"critical mass" with authentication systems they develop on their own. He said
some governments may opt to use companies such as Microsoft or America Online
as "the bank" that registers people for online usage. 

Passport was introduced in 1999 and is the keystone of an array of online
services the company introduced a year ago, when Gates revealed his ambitions
for the service. 

After privacy advocates attacked the plan and a coalition of major corporations
formed an alliance to develop standards for authentication systems that would
work together, Microsoft toned down its approach. It now acknowledges that
Passport will co-exist with other tools. 

Forman said his team has also been contacted by the coalition, called the
Liberty Alliance, and will meet with them at some point. 

The current version of Passport requires little personal information other than
an e-mail address, but a new, more secure version expected by mid-2003 may be
used to store sensitive data on Microsoft's network. 

Microsoft says it has 200 million people registered to use Passport, most of
whom signed up because Microsoft told them it was needed to use other Microsoft
services, such as its free Hotmail e-mail service or Windows XP operating
system. According to Gartner, a research company based in Stamford, Conn., only
2 percent signed up because of the service's stated purpose: to avoid having to
use multiple identifications and passwords at different Web sites. 

Avivah Litan, vice president and research director at Gartner, said expanding
Passport benefits Microsoft by drawing more Web traffic, making its sites more
appealing to advertisers and enabling the company to charge "click through"
fees for online sales executed using the service. 

But the company may ultimately decide it's not worthwhile to boost the service
from a tool of convenience for consumers to a verification service relied upon
by businesses and government. 

"Once you start vouching for identity, that makes you liable for fraud, that
makes you liable for identity theft," Litan said. 

Also at the conference, Microsoft announced plans to bring Internet access to
government services to Mexico through a network of kiosks developed with the
company's technology. 
********************
Government Executive
White House cyber czar describes next phase of Internet plan 
By Shane Harris 

ORLANDO, Fla.Speaking before a conference of hundreds of federal technology
personnel and industry officials Wednesday morning, Richard Clarke, President
Bush?s point man on national cybersecurity, outlined the next phase in the
controversial plan to build an impenetrable information network for the federal
government, known as Govnet. 

Clarke said a team from the General Services Administration had completed a
review of more than 167 responses from technology companies on how the network
could be built, and that the reviewers had concluded that creating a
stand-alone network, one not connected to the vulnerable systems of any other
networks, is technologically feasible. Clarke added that some Defense
Department and intelligence agencies, as well as some organizations in the
Energy Department, already operate these kinds of solo networks today. 

The government can?t afford to put off major upgrades to information security,
Clarke said, noting that terrorists have continued to call upon their followers
to attack the nation?s critical infrastructure of power grids and information
systems, many of which are connected to the Internet.

Every government agency has failed a test of its information security conducted
by the National Security Agency, Clarke said. He criticized technology experts
in government and the private sector for living in a ?fantasy land? where they
underestimate the power of online attacks and the vulnerability of agencies and
corporations to such attacks. 


Clarke qualified the Bush administration?s commitment to Govnet, saying it is
merely a ?concept,? not an actual program or project. ?Govnet is a
question?that may lead to programs,? Clarke said.


Lawmakers have not set aside any money in the president?s budget for next year
to fund the network, even though Bush has called for a 64 percent increase in
information security spending across the board. Leading technology firms have
criticized the Govnet plan as immature, unclear and underfunded. 


Clarke said the White House would seek permission from Congress to begin
assessing how much it would cost to build the hacker-proof network and what the
design of that system would be. He mentioned five possible paths the next phase
of Govnet could take: 


Use ideas received from industry in response to the initial Govnet proposal to
improve security on existing networks. 

Switch agencies over to other existing stand-alone networks. 

Allow agencies to build their own stand-alone networks. 

Create a back-up network to ensure continuity of critical government operations
in the event of a terrorist attack. 

Create a multi-agency stand-alone network. 

Those options have been informally floated by technology firms over the past
several months and offer little in the way of new thinking on how Govnet would
be built. Clarke offered no insight into which approach the White House might
favor, nor did he specifically endorse one approach over another. 


Clarke admonished the information technology industry, including such giant
firms as Microsoft, for not manufacturing sufficiently secure products. He
noted, however, that commitment to security has been revitalized by the Sept.
11 terrorist attacks.


Clarke said that in a recent videotaped message, al Qaeda terrorist network
chief Osama bin Laden praised the September attacks and called on his followers
to attack the information infrastructure of the United States. ?I hope the
bastard is dead,? Clarke said. His comments were greeted with applause from the
audience.
******************
Reuters
Search Technology Helps Organize Government Records 
Wed Apr 17, 3:05 PM ET 
By Andrea Orr 

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Some U.S. government officials engaged in the War
on Terror would like to see privacy laws relaxed so they can get better access
to email and other sensitive material exchanged over the Internet. 

  
Other bureaucrats would be happy just to have a better filing system. 

Tracking down terrorists, after all, does not necessarily require intercepting
top-secret conversations. Sometimes it is a more mundane task of making sure
one government agency can share its records with another. 

Speculation has been rife, for instance, that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta
might not have been allowed back into the U.S. last year if officials at the
Department of Immigration had known about an outstanding warrant for his arrest
resulting from a Florida traffic violation. 

There is also the curious case of Ziad Samir Jarrah, the hijacker believed to
have seized the controls in the United Airlines flight that crashed in
Pennsylvania. Jarrah remained on the Federal Aviation mailing list long after
Sept. 11 and just this month the FAA (news - web sites) sent a newsletter to
his old address in Florida. 

Communication between different agencies is not the only problem. Some
government agencies cannot even access critical documents produced by their own
employees, if those records have never been transferred out of e-mail. 

Yet another problem is that foreign language documents can fall through the
cracks because many computers are not advanced enough to read them. 

A NEW CHALLENGE FOR SEARCH ENGINES 

Several Internet search engines and software makers are trying to address those
challenges. Companies like CMGI Inc's AltaVista Co, and Inktomi Corp , which
started out organizing the billions of documents on the World Wide Web, today
are selling similar technologies to help government agencies organize all the
material they have collected over the years. 

These companies say many government offices that are bogged down in paper and
old computer records, constitute a promising market for their services,
especially at a time that so many private-sector businesses are cutting back on
tech spending. 

"I would say about 25 percent of our business is selling to the government,"
said Phil Rugani, executive vice president of AltaVista's Software division,
which counts the U.S. Army, Navy and Airforce among its customers. 

"The need to find information within the vast repositories of the government
world has, shall we say, been heightened since Sept 11. It is a very good
business for us." 

Palo Alto, Calif.-based AltaVista stepped up efforts to sell software to both
the private sector and the government after its consumer search engine was hit
by the collapse in the online advertising business. 

Today, while Google (news - external web site) holds a commanding lead in the
consumer Internet search business, several second and third-tier search players
are looking elsewhere for business. 

"A lot of government agencies are realizing that a lot of the valuable data
they store is unstructured," explained Troy Toman, general manager of
enterprise search at Inktomi. 

"Since the generation of desktop publishing, it has become much easier for
people to create and publish documents. The problem is that the set of tools to
find all this material has been a little slow to keep pace." 

WALKING BEFORE YOU CAN RUN 

If searching the finite number of documents that exist within a single
government organization seems like a minor task relative to searching
everything that exists on the Internet, it actually presents a number of unique
challenges. 

Unlike the Web itself, where all the text exists in the same HTML format, most
individual organizations have no such consistency. Files typically exist in
hundreds of different formats from Microsoft Word to Lotus Notes, as well as
old computer languages that are not used anymore. 

The challenge becomes not just locating files, but knowing where to look for
them, and that in turn presents a whole new set of privacy concerns over who
should be able to see what. 

"The reality is that after 30 or 40 years of technology, information sits
everywhere, absolutely everywhere," said Rugani of AltaVista Software. He said
his company's software, which searches in 36 languages and 225 file formats, is
like a door to a refrigerator, opening it provides a window to all the things
that are stored on different shelves. 

Verity Inc. , another Silicon Valley software maker, says that its work selling
software to the government has forced it to add a new level of security so that
unauthorized personnel can not even get as far as seeing a list of search
results when querying subjects outside of their jurisdiction. 

Verity recently helped the U.S. Airforce integrate information from hundreds of
different Airforce Web sites, the first step in enabling it to communicate with
other branches of the military and other government groups. 

"They have all this information scattered all around the world, and it is not
all organized," explained a Verity spokesman. "It is an example of having to be
able to walk before you can run." 
********************
Federal Computer Week
Nations wary of e-democracy

In some towns in Sweden, local government meetings are carried live on the
Internet and viewers are permitted to participate by asking questions or
offering comments.

Using the Internet to encourage citizen participation in civic life puts Sweden
on the frontier of electronic democracy, the next step beyond e-government.

In nearby Russia, however, only about 20 percent of the population knows what
the Internet is. And those who do are leery of a technology that has the
potential to enable the government to monitor their online activity  which, in
fact, the government does, said Anthony Jones, director of the Gorbachev
Foundation of North America.

For all its promise to change government, the Internet seems to produce more
Russia-like suspicion than the Swedish-style embrace when it comes to
e-democracy.

Even in countries where e-government has broad official sanction, such as Great
Britain, there seems to be deep ambivalence about letting the public
participate too directly in electronic governance.

A discussion among international e-government experts April 16 in Seattle
highlighted the caution with which even the world's oldest democracies are
approaching the electronic version of that form of government.

The problem, it seems, is the idea of turning democracy over to the people.

Unlike the widely accepted e-government  which uses information technology to
speed the delivery of information and services to the governed  e-democracy
uses technology to let the governed participate in government, said Steven
Clift, head of the Web-based organization Democracies Online.

It's an idea that gives U.K. politicians pause, said Andrew Pinder, e-envoy for
the United Kingdom.

In the United Kingdom, elected representatives don't want to find themselves
"disintermediated" by such online innovations as direct polls, Pinder said. The
United Kingdom wants to preserve the notion of representative democracy, he
said. "Representatives are an important shock absorber" who apply reason and
experience, while the masses are more inclined to act with emotion on the spur
of the moment, he said.

France sees similar danger in direct democracy, said Michel Gentot, president
of the National Commission on Computer Science and Liberties, an organization
dedicated to IT and civil rights in France.

But neither U.K. nor French officials have experience with e-democracy to
validate their fears. In Sweden, e-democracy has improved the relationship
between citizens and their elected leaders, said Miklas Nordstrom, chairman of
Sweden's Social Democratic Party IT Commission.

Politicians have been forced to respond more quickly to citizens' complaints
because people are no longer willing to simply wait for action from the
slow-moving bureaucracy, Nordstrom said.

E-democracy may work best at the local level of politics, where decisions are
more likely to directly impact those involved in making them, Jones said. It
may be idealistic to expect that most people will want to get involved in
politics at the national level, he said.
**********************
San Francisco Chronicle
Major overhaul to split apart embattled INS 
Congress is still considering more drastic changes at agency

Washington -- Attorney General John Ashcroft yesterday announced a major
overhaul of the beleaguered Immigration and Naturalization Service, even as
Congress considers its own more drastic plan. 

The overhaul will begin to separate the agency's conflicting missions,
splitting enforcement functions such as the Border Patrol from the parts of the
agency that handle immigration benefits such as naturalizations. 

House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., wants to
separate the agency in two and has bipartisan support for the idea in the
House, where members in both parties receive huge volumes of constituent
complaints about INS incompetence. 

Ashcroft said he was responding to an order from President Bush for immediate
reform, following the agency's embarrassing notification to a Florida flight
school that two of the dead Sept. 11 hijackers, including ringleader Mohammed
Atta, had been approved for student visas. 

INS Commissioner James Ziglar called the plan "a landmark day in the history of
the INS. For at least 30 years, the operations of the INS in the field have
remained exactly the same." 

Dismissing past restructuring efforts as partial reorganizations of the
Washington headquarters, Ziglar said this plan would change "how we do our
business in this organization at the place where it's needed most, and that's
in the field." 

Five changes will take place "effective immediately," all on the enforcement
side, with similar changes to come on the services side of the agency,"
Ashcroft said. They will streamline the "chain of command" in the meandering
bureaucracy to enhance accountability in an agency famous for lacking it. 


CHANGES OUTLINED
The changes would: 

-- Establish a direct chain of command in the Border Patrol to Washington chief
Gus de la Vina, instead of going through sector chiefs and regional directors.
Ashcroft said the change would give the Border Patrol "clarity of mission" and
greater consistency, allowing the chief to direct agents where they are needed
most. 

-- Create new positions of chief financial officer and a chief information
officer to improve INS financial management and the use of new technology.
Ziglar said he found it "truly remarkable" that an agency of 35,000 employees
lacked positions considered essential to a medium-sized business. 

-- Put Washington in control of alien detention facilities. 

-- Establish a new Office of Juvenile Affairs to handle unaccompanied children
in INS custody. 

-- Create an 11-member board to advise the INS on restructuring. 

Ziglar said the changes at the Border Patrol would eliminate the problems he
had had trying to send 318 Border Patrol agents to U.S. airports after the
Sept. 11 attacks, when he had to exert emergency powers to assign the agents. 

"In effect the Border Patrol chief has never had direct authority over his own
organization, until today," Ziglar said. 


ASHCROFT DECLINES TO COMMENT
Ashcroft refused to comment on the status of an administration proposal to
merge the INS with the Customs Service, now in the Treasury Department. But an
INS official said Bush wanted further work on the plan, which faces stiff
congressional resistance. It was first proposed by Homeland Security Director
Tom Ridge, who is trying to consolidate border security functions. 

Douglas Doan, senior vice president of New Technology Management Inc. of
Reston, Va., which helps oversee the design and use of surveillance and
inspection technology for Customs and the INS, said Customs was "light years"
ahead of INS in its use of new technologies. 

"The INS has some really good, motivated people, but they don't listen to them"
at headquarters, Doan said, in contrast to Customs, where agents generate ideas
about improving operations. 

"At INS, it's unfortunate but the perception is that headquarters doesn't
listen to them, so they shut off a while ago and don't have a good flow of
ideas coming up," he said. 
******************
Wired News
Carnivore's New Leash on Life?

SAN FRANCISCO -- A graduate student at Dartmouth College wants to tame the
FBI's Carnivore surveillance system. 

Alex Iliev has proposed a way to force anyone who wants to monitor e-mail or
Web browsing to follow the rules -- and not snoop on private data that should
be off-limits. 

Iliev's system relies on technology, not Congress or federal judges, to keep
Carnivore on a very short leash. 

Much of the public outcry over Carnivore and similar eavesdropping methods
arises because they take a vacuum-cleaner approach, sucking in all the data
flowing through a network and then storing only the desired information. But if
the snooperware is buggy or if police agencies go beyond what a court order
allows, the system will snare far more traffic than it is authorized to retain.


Iliev's proposal, titled "Prototyping an Armored Data Vault" (PDF) and
presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies workshop this week, says "a
design goal is to store packets securely, so that they may be accessed only
through the security mechanism imposed by the vault." 

Here's how it works: An Internet service provider, university or corporation
could choose to record all activities of people using the network. The data
would be encrypted, with the only key able to unlock the information kept by
the vault. 

An FBI agent who wanted to access the information would obtain a search order
that was digitally signed by a judge. The vault would recognize that signature
and divulge only the information specified by the court. There would be no
chance -- assuming the vault was programmed properly -- for a fishing
expedition. 

Even if the FBI physically seized the vault, legally or otherwise, it's
supposed to be just about impossible for the cops to crack. Iliev's program
runs on an IBM 4758 cryptographic coprocessor, designed to destroy itself if it
detects an intrusion attempt. 

IBM says its coprocessor features "physical penetration, power sequencing,
temperature, and radiation sensors to detect physical attacks against the
encapsulated subsystem." The U.S. government has certified it to meet the FIPS
140-1 standard at level 4, the most secure. 

The U.S. Department of Justice and IBM partially funded this research. Since
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, FBI use of Carnivore has increased sharply. 

Iliev says he isn't necessarily suggesting that administrators store terabytes
of traffic -- after all, the best way to protect someone's privacy is never to
have their information on file in the first place. 

Rather, Iliev says, if an administrator is required to play Big Brother, he
wants them to have a reasonable way to do it. 

"It might be preferable if collection of data to a large extent were not deemed
necessary," says Iliev, who is a 23-year old PhD candidate in Dartmouth's
computer science department. "But if it is, then people might be more willing
to bear with this. People can be confident how it would proceed." 

"We want this to take place in an environment where people who have their data
collected can be confident that how they agreed to have their data accessed
will be how it will be accessed," he says. 

Other applications for the vault, beyond storing network data, include
encrypting medical or financial information that would be released only to
authorized users. 

Sean Smith, an assistant professor of computer science who co-authored the
paper with Iliev, previously worked at IBM where he designed the software for
the coprocessor. 

"We tried to make it as unbreakable as feasible," Smith says. "As far as we
know, it's held up." 

The source code for the vault, which runs under the Linux operating system, is
available on Dartmouth's website.
************************
Reuters
Mothers Watching Less TV, Surfing Web More-Jupiter 
Wed Apr 17, 5:25 PM ET 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Women with children are tuning in to less television and
more Internet these days, Jupiter Media Metrix said in a report to be released
Thursday. 

  
"Women with children most likely have more time constraints, and therefore a
limited time budget for media consumption. Therefore, increased use of the
Internet is more likely to cannibalize time that was once spent watching
television for these women," said Jupiter analyst Jon Gibs in the report. 

About 44 percent of women with children said their usage of the Internet caused
them to spend less time watching TV, the Internet research firm found in its
report. 

Jupiter recommended that advertisers and programmers interested in reaching
mothers should therefore consider increasing their online marketing efforts
relative to TV advertising. The report comes at a time Internet companies are
trying to woo advertisers to the Web by proving to them that the ad dollars
spent online will go a long way. 

About 29 percent of mothers surveyed said they used the Web to play games
online and the same percentage used the Internet to download music while 40
percent used the Web to conduct research for school and homework-related
projects. 

Many mothers also tend to use online coupons for local services and grocery
products and about 41 percent of mothers surveyed said they buy things online
on sale that they wouldn't have bought otherwise. 

Women without children were more likely to turn to the Internet for making
travel arrangements, doing research for work, checking stock quotes and reading
the news online. They also spend more on the Web than women with children. 

The report found that about 63 percent of women without children spent over
$100 online over the past three months while only 52 percent of women with
children said the same. 
********************
Los Angeles Times
Mobile technology, with its promise of allowing users to work, play and shop
any time, anywhere, is poised to lift off.
Technology: Telecom firms race to install next-generation wireless networks
that will enable 'the next big thing' to flourish.
By KAREN KAPLAN
TIMES STAFF WRITER

After several years of false starts, the grand hopes for mobile commerce in
2002 rest in no small part on the slender shoulders of Adirem Quintel.

The 25-year-old field technician for Nortel Networks Corp. is part of an army
of thousands of workers who are quietly yet methodically visiting cellular
towers across the nation and upgrading them for a new generation of faster
wireless networks.

Quintel typically visits two or three of them a night, each time installing a
sophisticated piece of digital switching equipment for Verizon Wireless Inc.
that allows cell phones, two-way pagers and hand-held computers to transmit
data as fast as desktop PCs with dial-up connections to the Internet. Wireless
carriers expect to have their next-generation wireless networks turned on in
the country's major metropolitan areas by year-end. Verizon has launched its
Express Network in Salt Lake City, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Northeast
corridor connecting Boston, New York and Washington. Sprint PCS Group Inc.
plans to switch on its entire nationwide high-speed network this summer.
Cingular Wireless, AT&T Wireless Services Inc. and others are going forward
with new networks as well.

All of them are betting that the new technology finally will entice Americans
to use their cell phones, hand-held computers and other mobile devices to shop
and conduct business--a trend that is supplanting the letter "e" in the
technology vernacular with the letter "m."

"The potential for m-commerce is directly related to the roll-out of these
networks," said Ben Macklin, a senior analyst at EMarketer Inc., a market
research firm based in New York. "It provides consumers with a much more
compelling type of offering."

Already a hit in parts of Asia and Europe, mobile computing has long been
anticipated as the next big thing for the Internet.

For corporate America, so-called m-business promises to help companies
streamline their operations and increase efficiency by allowing workers to
conduct business without being tethered to the office. It will allow real
estate agents to access listings from the road and enable insurance adjusters
to process claims without returning to the office.

For consumers, m-commerce offers the tantalizing prospect of shopping for
books, baseball tickets or other items on portable gadgets while commuting on
the subway or standing in line at the post office. They will be able to
exchange electronic greeting cards on their cell phones, place bets on
racehorses using two-way pagers and download video games to their personal
digital assistants.

Forecasters at New York market research firm Jupiter Media Metrix predict that
by 2005, $22.2 billion worth of goods and services will be purchased on mobile
devices worldwide. Businesses and consumers in Asia are on track to spend $2.6
billion on m-commerce this year, and their counterparts in Europe are expected
to ring up $500 million in sales by Dec. 31.

In contrast, otherwise indulgent North Americans are projected to spend a
paltry $100 million using their mobile devices in 2002. But analysts expect
those spending habits to change once the faster wireless networks come online.

The new networks--generally called "3G" because they represent the third
generation of wireless technology--will enable new forms of m-services,
m-entertainment and, of course, m-advertising that are far more appealing than
the offerings available in the U.S. today.

Stock trades from wireless PDAs are slow, and Web sites redesigned for tiny
cell phone screens are cumbersome to navigate with only about a dozen keys on
the number pad. As a result, less than 2% of Americans whose phones are
equipped with Web browsers use them for mobile commerce, said Dylan Brooks,
Jupiter's senior wireless analyst.

"That points to the lack of a compelling experience," he said. "A fairly large
number of people have used their phones to do something, but the actual user
experience isn't such that it really ropes people in."

Whether that will change depends on a variety of factors, including the
development of new-fangled devices with bigger screens, improvements in voice
recognition technology that will eliminate the need to type on miniature
keypads, and the emergence of new applications that will entice users to open
their wallets.

But after several false starts, analysts now believe the most critical factor
for the U.S. is the roll-out of 3G networks.

"I liken it to the automobile: You had to have roads before you could have a
car," said Ken Hyers, senior analyst in the mobile carrier services group at
Cahners In-Stat/MDR, a Newton, Mass., consulting firm.

And that's where Quintel comes in. For the last three months, she has been
spending her nights cruising around Southern California in her black sport
utility vehicle visiting Verizon cell sites. The essential piece of equipment
that brings them onto the company's 3G network is a channel element module, a
metal box about the size of a coffee table book that converts calls from the
digital wireless network into signals that can be carried on the traditional
phone network and vice versa.

Each box can handle at least twice as many voice calls as the one it replaces,
or it can boost voice capacity while ferrying data at speeds of 40 to 60
kilobits per second, about three to four times as fast as current wireless
technology allows.

Quintel can swap the equipment in less than 20 minutes and can usually do two
or three upgrades a night. And Verizon has well over 1,000 sites to upgrade
just in Southern California before it can turn on its network here next month.

All the major wireless carriers are upgrading their networks to accommodate
high-speed data transmissions. Though they employ different technologies, the
networks all handle more calls by taking advantage of faster processors inside
phones and cell sites. They also use compression technology and more efficient
coding algorithms to squeeze more calls onto their networks at once.

As the networks come on line, analysts say business users will be the first to
benefit from the increased speed. The flood of data will be most useful for
people using wireless networking cards to connect to corporate networks and the
Internet on their laptops and PDAs.

Businesses also are more willing to pay the higher prices that carriers will
charge for 3G services, said Cahners analyst Hyers.

Consumers will follow in the next 12 to 18 months, although they may never
embrace m-commerce as enthusiastically as their counterparts in Asia and
Europe, analysts said. People there spend more time commuting on trains, where
their hands are free to play with wireless gadgets, but Americans pass their
commutes behind the wheel.

Americans also are spoiled by the fast Internet connections they can get with
desktop PCs, which display the Web on large, full-color screens.

"The ease of doing things online with a PC and the richer experience there
[are] baked into the psyche of a lot of online consumers," said Jupiter's
Brooks. "The idea that they'll replace that activity with wireless is probably
a nonstarter."

Although mobile computing may never supplant desktop computing, analysts still
believe that m-commerce and m-business activities eventually will become an
important part of the technology spectrum. The first big step is 3G.

"Before, you saw a gazillion people try to develop applications and the network
wasn't really there to support them," Hyers said. "With the new networks coming
out, we will see a lot of people trying to do it again. That's what's going to
make the difference."
*****************
Los Angeles Times
Games Anyone?
Entertainment firms, hearing the ring of cash registers, offer compact fun to a
huge market of cell phone users.
By JON HEALEY
TIMES STAFF WRITER

April 18 2002

A large U.S. corporation recently handed down an unusual edict to its
employees: Stop bowling in the office.

It seems that during staff meetings, too many workers were quietly rolling
animated bowling balls down virtual alleys on their cell phones. That's one of
the simple forms of amusement being ushered in by a new generation of handsets
that are equipped to entertain as well as communicate.

Cell phone users around the globe are or soon will be sampling songs, watching
soccer highlights, caring for electronic girlfriends and fishing on virtual
lakes. They might even pay a celebrity to supply their voicemail greeting.
Granted, a mobile phone is no one's first choice for music or video. But close
to a billion people carry one everywhere they go, and that's why major
entertainment companies are plotting ways to get their products onto wireless
networks.

Those networks will need much more capacity before they'll be able to deliver
songs, TV programs or movies. So companies are focusing on more compact forms
of amusement that take advantage of the phones' increasing power.

Games are one example. The current generation of phones can dial into the
Internet and deliver rudimentary games such as Jamdat Mobile's "Gladiator," in
which players maneuver black-and-white icons through a medieval kingdom and
trade blows--slowly--with online opponents.

New phones for next-generation networks, such as the ones Verizon and Sprint
are deploying this spring and summer, can download games such as Jamdat's
"Bowling" so users don't need to connect to the Web as they play. These games
are still far simpler than what you'd find on Nintendo or a computer, but
they're more detailed, responsive and instantly gratifying than the previous
versions.

The games typically rely on a phone's tiny up, down, left, right and OK buttons
to control the action. In the bowling game, for example, players must click the
OK button at just the right time to set the optimum speed, direction and spin
of the ball. Those three elements determine the animated ball's path and how
many pins it lays low.

Beyond games, companies are starting to work entertaining elements into the
basic functions of the phone, including its sounds, its screens and the
messages it sends.

For example, New Line Cinema, a film distributor owned by AOL Time Warner,
offered downloadable "Lord of the Rings" theme music and icons to VoiceStream
phones last fall.

"I have 'The Bridge at Khazad-dum Theme' as my ring tone," said Gordon
Paddison, a marketing executive at New Line. "People go, 'Oh my God, where did
you get that?' It's great because it's such a recognizable tune."

Nokia brought customizable ring tones to the European masses in 1998, and
they've become wildly popular despite their cheesy beeps and bleats. Who knows
what will happen as sound quality improves, as it will in many of the new
phones?

The next round of Nokia handsets, for example, includes software from Beatnik
Inc. that brings higher fidelity to ring tones, games and multimedia messages.
Those models and other phones also will have the ability to download and play
"song tones," or ring tones that are snippets of actual songs.

Moviso, a subsidiary of media conglomerate Vivendi Universal that focuses on
wireless services, plans to offer the first song tones this summer. Shawn
Conahan, Moviso's president, also is eager to offer multimedia messaging
services that use celebrated performers or athletes to deliver customized
tidbits of information.

Sony already is developing a multimedia messaging service featuring actors and
scenes from the upcoming movie "XXX," said Rio D. Caraeff, vice president of
wireless services for Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment. The company plans to
announce deals soon with several global wireless phone companies to offer
mobile messaging and games built around Sony films, he said.

About half a billion phones today are equipped to handle messages enhanced with
pictures, and upward of 10 million will soon be able to deliver messages with
music and animation, said Adam Lavine, chief executive of FunMail Inc. in
Pleasanton, Calif. The FunMail service, which is rolling out on several
networks, automatically embellishes messages with cartoon figures and graphics.

Consumers in Japan may have access to the richest variety of cell-phone-based
entertainment. One example is the Love by Mail virtual girlfriend service,
which supplies users with a demanding female cartoon figure.

Last year, NTT DoCoMo, the dominant wireless phone company in Japan, enabled
customers with camera-equipped cell phones to snap and send photos
wirelessly--a service that attracted 20% of the subscribers.

P.J. McNealy, a senior analyst at research firm GartnerG2, cautioned that
DoCoMo's success with mobile entertainment may reflect unique social factors
not found in the U.S.

"People [in Japan] spend two hours on the train every day, going to and from
work. Hand-helds are a main source of communications and entertainment,"
McNealy said. For most U.S. workers, who drive to work, "cell phone
entertainment isn't exactly optimal."
*********************
Los Angeles Times
Keeping Lines of Communication Open Is Hard When Overseas
Travel: Executives, faced with few roaming agreements or uniform technologies,
combine tools to connect.
By JEFFERY D. ZBAR
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

April 18 2002

Alan Reiter recently spent four digitally disconnected days in Sao Paulo,
Brazil.

Although he owns a BlackBerry 957 e-mail device, Reiter found himself cut off
from electronic messaging, 5,000 miles from his Chevy Chase, Md., office.
BlackBerry has no service in Brazil.

Staying digitally connected is tough for world travelers, said Reiter,
president of technology consulting firm Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing.
"You really have problems." As the business world becomes digitized, access to
crucial data often gets severed when executives travel abroad. Wireless
Internet connections are hard to make because of different communication
technologies around the world and the lack of roaming agreements between
wireless service providers and the cellular companies whose networks carry
their content.

About 70% of the world uses the GSM, or global system for mobile communication,
standard for cellular phone networks. Not the United States, said Tony Carter,
a spokesman for Cingular Wireless in Atlanta. Cingular, for example, serves
only California, Nevada and parts of the Southeast with GSM--or less than 30%
of the company's market area, he said.

The technology conflicts have made some of the most popular U.S. devices
useless overseas. Research in Motion has separate U.S. and European networks
for its BlackBerry hand-held. Only the company's new 5820 international
wireless digital and phone device receives e-mail forwarded to the user in
Europe from a server in the United States, a spokeswoman said.

Connections slowly are being made. Users of the Handspring Treo 180
communicator can access their data if their cellular providers have
international roaming agreements. Connections can be made for e-mail, SMS
(short message service for mobile phones) and wireless Web, depending on the
country.

Some companies combine tools to create connections. When Tim Roper, senior
director of business development with Palm Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., travels
to London, he slips a Bluetooth networking card into his Palm M515. The card
enabled Roper's Palm to use his Bluetooth-equipped Sony Ericsson T68 GPRS
mobile phone to make an Internet connection and check e-mail.

His phone can get network coverage because his carrier, Cingular, has roaming
agreements throughout Hong Kong, Singapore, Europe and some parts of Latin
America.

"It's just like I'm on an Internet terminal somewhere," Roper said. The cost?
About $399 for the M515, $129 for the Bluetooth card and $199 for the T68 phone
plus his air time and roaming costs.

As for Reiter, he has a game plan for his four yearly visits to London. He uses
a $300 British cell phone, the Virgin Mobile prepaid wireless telephone and
e-mail device. Reiter spends about $15 a year in prepaid minutes for wireless
Web access and e-mail.

Because it's a short message service, the Virgin phone will download only the
first 200 characters or so of a message, Reiter said. But it's better than when
he's in Asia or Latin America and he's totally disconnected.

Other solutions include world phones, which use a combination of frequency
bands to access wireless networks in many international markets. Satellite
phones use orbiting satellites to make connections. Both are expensive, with
phones starting at $900 and service running from $1 to $2 a minute.

Eventually, digital convergence is supposed to deliver the full range of
wireless services to one device that can be transported anywhere--and still
work.

Until more international roaming agreements are forged, and technology becomes
more uniform globally, world travelers can expect continued missed messages,
said Malcolm Spicer, editor for wireless technology at PBI Media in Potomac,
Md.

In the meantime, travelers should call their digital provider before departing
to see what countries have such agreements, Spicer said. Other options? Check
with airlines or go online to see if airports have vendors that rent wireless
data devices.
********************
Los Angeles Times
These Nets Have Security Holes
Safeguards: Hackers can easily break into many networks. Experts advise the use
of common sense.
By CHARLES PILLER
TIMES STAFF WRITER

They call it "war driving." Hackers plug an antenna into a laptop computer,
jump into a car, and then the fun begins. They easily break into wireless
computer networks, which often spew unencrypted information into the airwaves
for anyone to pick up.

"There are two kinds of people doing wireless security assessments in Silicon
Valley: people like me, and the 19-year-old kids who do it for sport," said
Jonas Luster, president of D-fensive Networks Inc., a Campbell, Calif.,
security consulting firm.

During a recent security audit in a Silicon Valley parking lot, Luster's
electronic "sniffer" detected 169 wireless networks using the most popular
standard, known as "Wi-Fi." Just six had any form of security. The experience
with Wi-Fi is just the tip of the iceberg. The coming of so-called 3G wireless
networks, which will allow cell phones and hand-held computers to access the
Internet at high speeds, is creating a new realm of vulnerabilities.

Though wireless networks differ in their strengths and vulnerabilities, none
escapes the fact that they transmit information through the air and are
designed to traverse the infamously insecure expanses of the Internet.

Despite such concerns, the push for wireless convenience, mobility and commerce
is racing ahead.

Last year, about 7.5 million devices were sold that connect personal computers,
laptops and hand-held computers to Wi-Fi networks, which dominate the home and
business markets, according to market research firm Allied Business
Intelligence. Research firm EMarketer Inc. forecasts that by 2004, 63 million
people in the U.S. will be connecting to the Internet by using cell phones or
personal digital assistants.

Businesspeople use Wi-Fi to view documents from distant conference rooms.
Forklift drivers use wireless hand-helds to monitor inventory in warehouses.

Shoppers browse Amazon.com or answer e-mail over wireless links while sipping a
cafe latte at Starbucks. The coffee chain has equipped hundreds of outlets with
Wi-Fi, and many other restaurants and airports have done likewise.

That mobility comes at a price.

During an audit for a Silicon Valley company, "we picked up signals from a
nearby hospital," Luster said. "It was a large amount of patient data,
completely in clear text," meaning the information was not scrambled or
encrypted.

"We approached this hospital, and I offered to [plug the gap] for free," he
said.

The hospital refused to talk to him, Luster said.

"It would have been an admission of a problem, and people don't want to do
that," he said.

On another occasion, he stumbled across a Nevada casino that was broadcasting
unencrypted details of its security operations.

Call it the "if I can't see it, it can't hurt me" effect. Computer-savvy
businesses take at least basic steps to protect wired networks, such as using
anti-virus programs and installing software "firewalls" to block hackers.

Yet unwired vigilance is rare. Wi-Fi security is among the most leaky in the
wireless world, and because its nodes often connect to standard networks, they
can expose all manner of company secrets.

The root of the problem, experts said, is the same one that has plagued
standard computer networks for decades. Wi-Fi was designed for convenience and
economy, not security.

Default Wi-Fi security settings are next to useless. Few users bother to learn
about advanced settings for wired equivalent privacy, or WEP, which is built
into Wi-Fi devices. Manufacturers don't ship products with the most secure
settings turned on because that causes conflicts with Wi-Fi products from other
vendors.

WEP is meant to encrypt data traveling over the airwaves and patch holes in
company networks through wireless access points, or hubs. But even when set up
properly, WEP provides weak protection on both fronts. Hacking software called
AirSnort and WEPCrack, freely available online, allow even inexperienced
hackers to obtain WEP's encryption "key" to unscramble airborne text.

Ease of use has led to another big problem: "rogue" access points. A multitude
of technically savvy but careless employees set up ad hoc wireless connections
to their company networks.

"Companies say, 'We don't need wireless security because we don't have a
wireless network,'" said Christopher W. Klaus, chief technology officer of
Internet Security Systems Inc., an Atlanta-based security company. "But just
sniffing around their office, we find four or five access points."

Large businesses can install virtual private networks, which block hackers
fairly reliably. But that solution can be prohibitively costly and complex.

Experts advise common sense: Turn on WEP to deter casual eavesdroppers, and
shut down rogue hubs.

They also urge caution in setting up authorized hubs. Wi-Fi is meant to
broadcast only 150 feet, effectively within one building. But if hubs are set
inside windows on the building's periphery--where no walls impede signal
strength--networks become open to remote hackers, Klaus said.

He has picked up Wi-Fi signals six miles from a network access point. Bad guys
do the same, using a popular hacking tool, a Pringles potato chip can, as the
antenna.

Ultimately, Wi-Fi security should improve as new standards upgrade WEP over the
next couple of years. The first of these, called 802.1x, will be finalized
within a couple of months. It changes the WEP encryption keys about every five
minutes, rendering common hacking tools ineffective.

As consumers adopt high-speed 3G cellular phones, they may want to consider
Wi-Fi's cautionary tale.

The 3G networks will fix voice encryption problems that make many of today's
cell phones easy to tap. But 3G mobile commerce will require interaction with
Web sites and networks whose security may not be so reliable. Such glitches
have plagued PC-based e-commerce from its inception.

"3G services will all be insecure," said Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and
chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security Inc. in Cupertino,
Calif. "We'll be patching it up as we go."
********************
Los Angeles Times
Struggling for a Slice of the Wireless Pie
Consumer services: Pizza-ordering system tested by Domino's and Motorola
highlights hurdles of m-commerce.
By ROB KAISER
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

April 18 2002

You're hankering for a pizza and have a cell phone in hand. Why not go online?

That's the deal Motorola Inc. is pushing.

The Schaumburg, Ill., cell phone giant, searching for ways to sell more
Internet-enabled handsets, has developed a "three-click" mobile pizza ordering
system for Web-enabled phones, which Domino's Pizza tested last year in Las
Vegas. Results from that trial show the wireless industry is set to
revolutionize the pizza delivery business. Or perhaps the findings merit more
study of the concept.

The answer depends on whether you ask Motorola or Domino's.

"This is easier than ordering over [a regular] phone, especially repeat
orders," said Tim Krauskopf, a vice president of Motorola's Internet software
and content group.

"Ordering online is more difficult than picking up the phone," countered Matt
Maguire, Domino's vice president for information services.

The differing responses highlight the hurdles purveyors of "m-commerce," or
mobile commerce, must leap before winning the hearts of restaurant and retail
executives, not to mention consumers.

M-commerce, like its older cousin e-commerce, is expected to offer companies a
new sales channel that could transform how consumers get information,
entertainment and products, including pizza. Yet the hype about how m-commerce
can turn cell phones into electronic wallets and let stores fire off instant
messages to nearby shoppers hasn't translated into changes in consumers'
habits.

And that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

Wireless analysts said the most popular m-commerce offerings for consumers in
the U.S. during the next couple of years probably will be downloadable games
and ring tones.

"It gives the consumer a chance to dip her toe in m-commerce without diving
in," said Adam Guy, a wireless analyst with Strategis Group.

More elaborate offerings will be constrained by outdated infrastructure,
conflicting standards, security concerns and device limitations.

"It's got to get to the point where the application is so easy that people say,
'This is easier than dialing,'" said Adam Zawel, a wireless analyst at Yankee
Group in Boston.

That's the challenge Motorola is taking on in the pizza business.

Motorola wanted to develop a shopping "engine" that can be used for various
m-commerce applications.

Krauskopf said the company decided to test its software in one industry and
settled on pizza because it is a $30-billion market, already has strong
telephone ties and includes many repeat orders.

For pizza outlets, Krauskopf said, the concept clicks because it cuts down on
the number of employees needed to enter orders and reduces errors in order
entry.

Yet the concept faces serious logistical issues.

The biggest barrier from the consumer point of view, Krauskopf said, is getting
people to program their phones with their favorite combinations of toppings,
address and billing information, so they can quickly enter repeat orders.

Many pizzerias often present their own limitations, particularly if they don't
have computer-based ordering systems installed.

In the test with Domino's, Motorola had to set up a simple version of the
ordering system for locations that didn't have the computer systems. Users
could see a menu and specials but still had to make a call when they were ready
to place an order.

Many businesses still don't have Internet ordering systems.

For example, Pizza Hut offers online ordering in only three places: Columbus,
Ohio; Kansas City, Mo.; and the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Manish Patel, chairman and co-founder of Where2getit Inc. in Northbrook, Ill.,
said that though his firm develops Internet store-location search pages and
maps for companies such as La-Z-Boy Inc. and Reebok International Ltd., clients
have expressed little interest in building m-commerce capabilities.

"At this stage, no one is really moving," Patel said.

That doesn't mean, though, that some companies aren't getting ready.

Donatos Pizzeria, which is owned by McDonald's Corp., has decided to use
Motorola's m-commerce offering.

"We're probably a year away from really pushing it," said Tom Krouse, senior
vice president of marketing at Donatos. "Our hope is it just grows on the front
end of this wave."

Donatos has drive-up windows where customers can pick up orders, and Krouse
expects the ability to click orders into cell phones will be popular with
people who use that service.

Still, Donatos will have to clear technological hurdles before it can offer the
service in its 200 locations as well as get franchisees on board with the
concept.

"The plan would be to make it available to all customers, but you have to make
sure that everybody is set up properly," Krouse said.

Ensuring that the infrastructure works and then converting customers to use the
service take much more time than cranking out pronouncements on the hype
machine, a lesson well learned by e-commerce pioneers.

Domino's Maguire said every vendor who visits him asks how online ordering has
grown in recent years. He turns around the question, asking whether they would
order pizza online.

"They start thinking about the logistics of it all, and they say they would
still call," Maguire said.
****************
Los Angeles Times
Warming to Wi-Fi
The network technology is so inexpensive and easy to set up that it has sparked
a kind of populist movement. 'Hot spots' are sprouting all over.
By JON VAN
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

April 18 2002

Cell phone executives hype the arrival of their new "3G" networks, but a lowly
technology from the computer world has been steadily gaining converts as an
alternative path to the nirvana of high-speed mobile access to the Internet.

The technology is known as "Wi-Fi," and it's the most popular method of
creating wireless networks in homes and businesses. For a few hundred dollars,
anyone can pick up the gear at a local computer store and have a network
running in a few hours.

Although cellular carriers are spending billions to build their high-speed
nationwide networks, Wi-Fi adherents point out that their off-the-shelf
technology is faster, cheaper and easier. But there's one important caveat: Its
range is only about 150 feet. That might seem like a fatal flaw for a
technology vying for a piece of the wireless revolution--a movement built on
the promise of ubiquitous high-speed Web access that works whether you're
sitting in an easy chair or on a bullet train.

But as the revolution has gathered steam, the industry has begun to realize
that the nationwide reach of 3G networks is not really necessary for everyone.
What's important is to be able to connect in a few key locations: home, office,
airport, hotel and--why not?--the coffee shop.

Business campuses are embracing Wi-Fi networks, and even retailers are
installing local systems for customers' use while they shop. In many urban
areas, computer buffs can move from one Wi-Fi "hot spot" to another, keeping
their Web connectivity as they go.

"You can go to airports and other hot spots and be amazed at the performance,"
said Adam Sewall, the former chief executive of wireless gear maker Spectrum
Wireless Inc., who now works at ComVentures, a venture capital firm in Palo
Alto, Calif.

Even wireless carriers forging ahead with their "third-generation" plans are
waking up to the benefits of including Wi-Fi hot spots as part of their
national networks--not as a replacement but as a supplement.

At least two wireless carriers, VoiceStream and Sprint PCS, already have
invested in Wi-Fi firms. Most others have deals in the works.

Wi-Fi, short for "wireless fidelity" and also known by the techie moniker
802.11b, is the wireless version of the common ethernet networks that link
computers in homes and corporate offices. The original selling point of Wi-Fi
when it was introduced several years ago was that it eliminated the need to
snake miles of wires throughout a building.

The earliest version of wireless ethernet transmitted information at about 1
megabit per second--not particularly fast compared with the
100-megabits-per-second speeds of wired ethernet. Today, Wi-Fi transmits
information at a respectable 11 megabits per second, and a recently adopted
standard, 802.11a, will bump speeds up to 54 megabits per second.

Wi-Fi still isn't up to wired speeds but runs rings around 3G wireless
technology. The advanced wireless networks that carriers such as Verizon
Wireless Inc., AT&T Wireless Services Inc. and Sprint PCS Group Inc. are
bringing out this year deliver speeds of 60 to 120 kilobits per second.

Wi-Fi is so cheap and easy to set up that it has sparked a kind of populist
movement. Wireless hot spots are popping up in all sorts of places, creating a
pseudo sense of ubiquity in some densely populated urban areas.

But in the suburbs, countryside or even big buildings, Wi-Fi begins to lose its
luster.

Russ Intravartolo, chief executive of StarNet Inc., an Internet service
provider based in Palatine, Ill., said his firm is expanding its wireless
high-speed Internet service to customers in Chicago's northwestern suburbs.
StarNet recently began using Wi-Fi to put wireless LANs, or local area
networks, into apartment complexes and discovered the difficulties inherent in
the technology.

"Bringing in the signal into a development and then distributing it to everyone
can be a struggle," he said. "We have this 14-story condo where we're trying to
serve the residents with a wireless LAN, but we find it won't work from one
floor to the other.... Even when you install a wireless LAN for one floor, it
may not propagate everywhere you want to reach."

These difficulties with Wi-Fi's low-powered radio technology probably will
ensure that the higher-powered signals of 3G will find a significant mass
market, said Annabel Z. Dodd, author of "The Essential Guide to
Telecommunications."

"In the end, I'd say Wi-Fi is complementary to 3G wireless," she said.

A San Diego bus that marries 3G and Wi-Fi may provide a glimpse of this hybrid
future.

Operating on the campus of UC San Diego, the bus is connected to the Internet
via an advanced 3G network providing speeds of 2.4 megabits per second. Riders
on the Cybershuttle access that network through a standard Wi-Fi network set up
inside the bus, which is essentially a rolling hot spot.

"It's like a mobile version of a cable modem," said Ramesh Rao, director of
UCSD's advanced Internet division.

Although it has many advantages, Wi-Fi could become a victim of its own
success. It uses unlicensed segments of radio spectrum that are shared by many
sorts of devices, including some kinds of cordless phones.

More applications for the same spectrum are in the works, said Roger Marks, who
chairs a standards committee for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers.

"There are so many products that want into the band that there are a lot of
concerns about the coexistence problem," Marks said. "It's hard because no one
has a clear answer. There's always a scenario how these things can interfere
with each other and scenarios where they don't.... But no one knows for sure."
*****************
Los Angeles Times
On Tiny Screens, Advertisers See Opportunity
By PRADNYA JOSHI
NEWSDAY

April 18 2002

The wireless revolution has bombarded cell phones and other hand-held devices
with opportunities for users to shop, play video games, check weather reports
and trade stocks. So it should come as little surprise that advertisers are
trying to squeeze their way onto the tiny screens as well.

Attracted by the prospect of seizing a piece of real estate that traditionally
has been devoid of ads, marketers are fantasizing about how they can use
matchbook-size screens to sell items such as movie tickets and Chevrolets.

Tens of thousands of college basketball fans who signed up for a play-along
cell phone game from ESPN received scores during last month's NCAA tournament
with a message: "Presented by Chevy Trucks." "Over the course of the
tournament, we delivered a significant amount of exposure for Chevy," said
Riley McDonough, vice president of sales for the ESPN Internet group.

New York-based media analyst Jack Myers predicts that 1% of all advertising
spending eventually will be directed toward mobile devices. That may seem
paltry, but it amounts to a $2.6-billion market by 2005.

But forecasts for mobile advertising revenue vary significantly--an indication
of its uncertain future. Analysts at Forrester Research anticipate less than $1
billion in 2005, even as market researchers at Kelsey Group expect the figure
to reach $6.8 billion.

Regardless of where the actual figure ends up, most acknowledge that the
opportunities are significant. "M-advertising" already is accepted in parts of
Europe and Asia.

In a campaign in Hong Kong for the Arnold Schwarzenegger film "Collateral
Damage," wireless ad firm SkyGo Inc. promoted a four-digit code on billboards
and movie posters. Fans who entered the code through the text-messaging feature
on their cell phones were given information about the movie, show times and
ticket prices, said Daren Tsui, SkyGo's president.

U.S. marketers are just beginning to experiment with wireless coupons, text
messaging and sweepstakes to get the attention of consumers who use wireless
devices.

Although advertising on cell phones may seem like an ideal medium to reach a
captive market and provide personalized information, many obstacles and
unknowns have kept advertisers on the sidelines.

Marketers always want to reach the widest audience possible, but most cellular
consumers have either basic digital phones or older analog models that lack
advanced features such as Internet access.

For another thing, there just isn't much advertising real estate to work with.

The limited space on cellular handsets generally has meant that most ads can
consist only of text messages. The new phones for high-speed "3G" networks
promise to deliver color, video clips and other messages.

Companies recognize that with such limited space, they have to deliver their
messages in compact and cunning ways.

A Manhattan-based company called Upoc has gained a lot of attention for its
idea of sending out "celebrity sighting" alerts to fans as a way to create buzz
without resorting to direct advertising.

Upoc--partly owned by Tribune Co., parent of The Times--has hundreds of such
message groups, created by the company and users, and about 250,000
subscribers.

Entertainment companies have created Upoc groups to send text messages with
news and tour dates for music groups such as Destiny's Child and information
about movies such as the current re-release of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial."

"When you asked people about it, they didn't consider it marketing," said Greg
Clayman, vice president of business development at Upoc.

Such innovative marketing campaigns have created an unusual problem for mobile
advertisers: No one is quite sure how to place a value on mobile ads because it
is not as easy as figuring out how to charge for a 30-second TV spot based on
ratings or a full-page magazine ad based on readership.

"We're still trying to come to an agreement on what a proper ad unit should
be," said Tim Hanlon, a vice president at Starcom Worldwide, a unit of ad
company Bcom3.

In addition, cellular companies in the U.S. have been slow to open their
networks to mobile advertising. Although companies have created the technology
to deliver ads and promotions to cell phones, the major carriers have taken ads
only on a limited basis. The ESPN wireless updates on the NCAA basketball
tournament, for example, were available only to AT&T Wireless, Nextel and
Sprint subscribers.

But some of these restrictions are coming down. Most cellular carriers are
standardizing their so-called short messaging service so their customers can
send text messages to a customer of another carrier.

As mobile advertising forges ahead, carriers say they are being careful not to
spark a consumer backlash. Executives say that they want to make sure privacy
guidelines are set up and that controls are in place to restrict "spam," or
unsolicited junk messages.

The downturn in the telecommunications sector has put spending for experimental
wireless products on hold, but marketers are hoping that as the U.S. economy
recovers, new promotions on wireless phones too will evolve into a medium that
consumers will accept.
*****************
Federal Computer Week
OMB slashes e-gov initiatives

The Office of Management and Budget has decided to fund just five of the 24
proposed e-government initiatives, shunning proposals it says duplicate
existing services or re-create services that are commercially available.

Those selected for funding are projects that concentrate on expanding the
foundation of electronic government.

The five are to receive $4.1 million from a $5 million fund established to
promote e-government. The remaining $900,000 is expected to be awarded to other
projects by June, said Mark Forman, OMB's associate director for IT and
E-Government.

The largest project is E-Authentication, which is to receive $2 million of a $5
million fund for innovative e-government projects. 

E-Authentication is a General Services Administration project to develop ways
to communicate securely with government agencies. It includes developing
electronic signatures and access controls to enable businesses and citizens to
send information and documents to government agencies with assurance that the
contents remains private and unaltered.

A "benefits wizard" is to receive $900,000. The money is to develop a tool able
to search across government agencies  federal, state and local  to determine
which benefits individual users may be eligible for based on questionnaires
they fill out.

About $750,000 goes to a business compliance site, which is to be a single
location on the Internet that provides information about business laws and
regulations imposed by an array of government agencies. The tool is intended to
help business operators determine which regulations apply to them and how they
can comply. It is also intended to put the process of applying for and
receiving business permits online.

As the government presence online grows, managing content is an increasingly
important function. OMB has approved spending $400,000 to develop a content
management tool for FirstGov, the federal Internet portal. 

Another $100,000 is earmarked for education and training of government
employees in e-government management.

Forman said between five and 10 of the proposed projects were rejected because
of "consolidation issues." To one extent or another, they were deemed to be
overlapping.

Another group was passed over because they were available commercially. Online
recruiting, for example, does not need to be done by the government because it
is already widely done by the private sector, he said.
**********************
Federal Computer Week
Detroit develops homeland plan

In one of the first such documents to come out of local government, Detroit has
published a detailed plan on how it intends to develop stronger defenses
against terrorist acts while boosting the city's regular services.

The 10-point plan includes as its first actions such things as: 

* The appointment of a city homeland security coordinator.

* Suggestions for linking emergency services through a wireless
interoperability network.

* The establishment of an Internet-based public health disease surveillance
system.

* Promotion of better links among stovepiped city government systems to allow
more thorough data mining and analysis.

The goal, according to John Cohen, president and chief executive officer of
PSComm LLC and one of the main authors of the plan, is to use a cost-effective
way to create an infrastructure that could stop the next terrorist act while
also improving the city's ability to deliver everyday services.

"The traditional approach to homeland security involves people spending
millions of dollars on equipment and infrastructure that is only rolled out in
the event of a major emergency such as a terrorist act," Cohen said.
"Financially that doesn't make much sense for cities that are strapped for
funds, and it won't necessarily prevent the next act of terror."

The plan will enable the city to take advantage of federal funding intended for
homeland security, he said. "But everything in the plan is designed to be
achievable whether the city gets that funding or not."

The plan is designed to accommodate Detroit's "unique" personality as a point
of entry on the northern border of the United States, as the home of the auto
industry, as a prominent symbol of the U.S. economy, for its diverse
population, as the largest city in Michigan and other features.

Cohen expects the plan will quickly produce significant milestones, the first
being security programs and procedures designed for the international G-8
meeting of energy ministers scheduled to take place in Detroit May 2 and 3.

Robinson is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. He can be reached at
hullite@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
********************
Federal Computer Week
Funding sought for GovNet study

The White House has created its list of possible solutions to provide a secure
intranet for critical government systems and is working with Congress to get
the $5 million necessary to fully explore those options, Richard Clarke,
President Bush's cyberspace security adviser, said April 17.

White House officials believe that some government applications need an extra
level of security, but the GovNet secure intranet idea cannot go forward until
the General Services Administration receives funding for a feasibility study
requested in the fiscal 2003 budget, Clarke said.

GSA briefed Clarke last month about the Federal Technology Service's review of
more than 160 industry responses to an October 2001 request for information on
the creation of GovNet.

"GovNet is a questionÖthat may lead to programs," he said.

The $5 million would be used to study specific architecture options and the
cost of each option, Clarke said. 

The options include:

* Taking steps, without creating a separate intranet, to improve existing
networks.

* Tying some of the civilian agencies' systems to the existing Defense
Department and intelligence community intranets.

* Having agencies create their own separate intranets.

* Developing a governmentwide backup separate intranet.

* Creating a new governmentwide offering within the FTS series of contracts for
agencies to use.

GovNet is technically feasible because secure, separate intranets already exist
in the government, including the Defense Department's Secret Internet Protocol
Router Network and the intelligence community's intranet.

And a virtual private network, which many GovNet critics suggested instead of a
separate, air-gapped network, is exactly that  virtual  and will not protect
against all Internet attacks, Clarke said.
******************
Federal Computer Week
Wireless priority set in D.C., NYC

The National Communications System announced April 16 that it has approved a
subcontract award from DynCorp to VoiceStream for Wireless Priority Service
(WPS) for the Washington, D.C., and New York City metropolitan areas. 

Brenton Greene, deputy manager of the NCS, said he was excited about the new
VoiceStream deal, which would establish an immediate WPS program to "assist
national security and emergency preparedness needs for key government
decision-makers, emergency responders and private-sector critical
infrastructure personnel in the New York City and Washington, D.C. areas."

The Federal Communications Commission earlier this month granted a temporary
waiver to VoiceStream to allow the company and the government to launch a
wireless priority access service for use during emergencies. Government
officials have been pushing for such a service since the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks wreaked havoc on wireless telephone networks. 

The FCC waiver, which was approved March 15 and announced April 3, was
necessary for wireless telecommunications companies to begin putting wireless
priority access in selected areas without meeting the queuing and other
requirements set by the FCC.

DynCorp is the systems integration for the NCS' Government Emergency
Telecommunications Service (GETS). That system, in which government workers are
given a code and categorized for priority access, is viewed as the model for
the wireless priority access system.

DynCorp awarded VoiceStream the subcontract for handset units for national
security and emergency preparedness (NS/EP) personnel at the federal, state,
and local levels of government in the Washington, D.C., and New York City
metropolitan areas. 

The WPS is planned to be operational within 60 days, Greene said. In times of
national emergency or crisis, when localized wireless networks can become
congested, the system will enable a limited number of designated national
security and emergency preparedness users to have a greater chance of being
able to place emergency calls by placing calls in a queue for the next
available channel.

The FCC governs authorized national security and emergency preparedness users,
and WPS priority assignments are for personnel and individuals in leadership
positions. 

The percentage of authorized WPS users on a wireless network compared with the
wireless network's customer base is expected to be less than one-tenth of 1
percent, according to VoiceStream.
**********************
BBC
Let the net run your life

Two men and three women are letting the net play God for 15 days by handing
over their daily decisions to the whims of others. 

Some 37,000 votes were cast during the first day of the Big Brother-style web
experiment, which runs to 2 May. 

"It has really captured the people's attention," said a spokeswoman for
Microsoft's internet service, MSN, which is behind the project. 

Aberdeen or Gran Canaria? 

One of the participants, 36-year-old Scot John, is hoping net users will help
him decide on a potentially life-changing decision.

"I'm looking to make some changes in my life, because I've become a bit
disillusioned recently," he told BBC News Online from his office in Aberdeen. 

"I've been a solid nine-to-fiver for most of my days and I'm looking for a bit
of time out." 

He is currently asking net users to decide whether he should buy a sensible
three-bed property in Aberdeen and settle down for good, or take a gamble and
invest in a bar in Gran Canaria. 

John originally applied to take part in the experiment for a laugh, but said he
would now do whatever people decide. 

"I have to trust them 100%," he said. 

Advice online 

This latest venture follows the worldwide success of reality TV show, Big
Brother. 

MSN's project is similar to the show as, at the end, a web jury will decide
which contestant has let the internet live their life to the maximum. He or she
will win £10,000. 

One of the participants, 31-year-old Miles, was attracted by the idea of
exposing his life to millions. 

"I'm fairly outgoing and involve friends and family in decision-making, he told
BBC News Online, "so it is intriguing to open it up to a wider population." 

"We're exposing more of our lives than happened on Big Brother," he said. 

The five contestants are: 

Miles, a 31-year-old Londoner who dreams of pop star Kylie Minogue and managing
the England football team 
John, a 36-year-old Scot who wants to be a travel writer but currently works as
a sales engineer in the oil trade 
Clare, a 27-year-old Londoner, is a serial monogamist with a penchant for the
seaside and forklift trucks 
Nik is a stockbroker and mother of three from northern England who dreams of
being an author 
Postwoman Julie, 30, from the Midlands lives with her son Robert and has been
on over 80 dates in three months.
********************
BBC
Rural residents demand broadband

Simon Faulkner is a computer consultant living in the "wilds of the
Staffordshire moorlands" and he currently relies on an expensive alternative to
ADSL fast net connection to communicate with his customers. 

Using a product called BT NetStart, Mr Faulkner can get large amounts of
bandwidth supplied to his house. The catch is in the cost - between £3,000 and
£5,000 a year. 

ADSL, by contrast, costs around £360 a year. 

Although NetStart is designed as a business product, it has one major advantage
over ADSL: it covers 95% of the country. 

Price drop? 

Mr Faulkner wants to know why BT cannot supply NetStart more cheaply as an
alternative to ADSL in rural areas. 

"BT says Oftel would not allow them to sell services any cheaper than they
already do when I speak to them about it," he said. 

A BT spokesperson confirmed that this is the case but said there was no reason
why rural residents could not share the expense. 

"I don't know if anyone would want to because it is designed for small
businesses with large volumes of e-mail and a need for e-commerce," she said. 

"But if there was one fixed address, a community centre for example, then in
theory it could be used." 

Community spirit 

Remote communities are realising that any chance they have of taking part in
the high-speed net revolution will involve a group effort. 

Mr Faulkner would be quite happy to link up with neighbours, some of whom run
small businesses from home or work remotely and would therefore appreciate an
always-on fast net connection. 

"I'd love to do something like that in this community. At the moment, I print
out a community newsletter and that could be done on e-mail," he said. 

"The only problem is we could create our very own digital divide for those that
don't have it," he pointed out. 

Townies cannot get it either 

As the cost of ADSL has fallen, so demand has jumped and BT Wholesale is now
getting around 10,000 orders a week. Pressure is on to extend the reach of the
technology. 

BT recently announced it would be ADSL-enabling another 100 exchanges, bringing
coverage of the technology to 66% of the population. 

But urban residents racing to get their hands on the technology have also
encountered problems, and BBC News Online has been contacted by dozens of
disappointed users. 

Tony Wood lives in the centre of Chesterfield within five miles (eight
kilometres) of an ADSL-enabled exchange but cannot get it. 

John Hazelden has the same issue. 

"I find it strange that BT say my exchange in High Wycombe, Bucks, is enabled
but yet I cannot get broadband although I am within five miles of the town
centre," he told BBC News Online. 

According to BT this is unusual. 

"There may be a few isolated incidences where certain households can't get it
for technical reasons but generally if you live within five miles of the
exchange you will," said a BT spokesperson.
*********************
San Francisco Chronicle
State buys software for imaginary staff 
Millions spent on unused Oracle database

Sacramento -- A flawed and possibly illegal contract between Oracle Corp. and
state bureaucrats could cost taxpayers an unexpected $41 million, a scathing
state audit revealed yesterday. 

The report, ordered by the Legislature, questioned why the state would purchase
$122.6 million worth of Oracle software and support services for 270, 000 state
employees when a survey showed little interest in using the products. 

The state has only about 230,000 employees -- and tens of thousands of them
don't even use computers. 

Details of the audit surprised even lawmakers who have been following state
contracting embarrassments for years. State Sen. Debra Bowen, a Democrat from
Marina del Rey who requested the report, called on the attorney general to
investigate and for the Department of Information Technology, the chief adviser
on the single-source contract, to be disbanded. 

The department "was set up to try to steer the state clear of contracting
disasters," Bowen said, "but instead it's got its hand on the stirring spoon of
one of the biggest cauldrons of all." 

The department, whose director briefly worked for Oracle, performed no detailed
analysis of the Oracle contract it was presented last year, the audit revealed.
It barely questioned a report by a state consultant that promised $111 million
in savings because of the bulk purchase and because the contract could last 10
years. 

State negotiators worked with little legal oversight and didn't know that the
hired consultant, Logicon, apparently stood to receive $28 million from the
Oracle deal. Logicon, a division of Northrop Grumman, acted as a financial
middleman for Oracle even though it was advising California taxpayers on the
most efficient way to purchase technology, the audit said. 

Now, a year after the Oracle contract was signed with the help of Logicon,
California taxpayers have spent about $17 million without a single state agency
asking to use Oracle's software. Logicon had predicted $13 million in savings
by now. 

The audit said Logicon used "inaccurate calculations but also made several
shaky assumptions" in calculating the state's savings. Auditors found that the
state could end up spending $41 million more on products and services than if
it bought software piecemeal. 

The audit comes in conjunction with a legislative hearing scheduled for
tomorrow examining the Information Technology office and the Department of
General Services. The audit said General Services was an "unprepared
negotiating team that left the state unprotected against numerous risks." 


AUDITORS QUESTION CONTRACT
The auditors said a court might conclude that the contract with Oracle is "not
enforceable" because it was handed out without competitive bidding, which is
required by state law. Other technology companies were not given the
opportunity to bid on the contract. 

Lawmakers are researching whether the state can renegotiate or void the
contract. The audit suggests the state might be liable to pay an unrelated
finance company that put up $52.3 million for helping Logicon finance the deal
with Oracle. 

Logicon declined to comment in detail. Oracle issued a statement saying the
contract allows state and local government to access Oracle software "at an
exceptionally attractive price." They quoted a report by the previous state
auditor predicting $110 million to $163 million in savings. 


AGENCIES DECLINE TO COMMENT
The state agencies involved in the deal also declined specific comment. But in
formal responses to the audit, they noted that the state got a good deal from
Oracle. They are nevertheless working to fix the system and prevent future
single-source contracts from being approved. 

Elias Cortez, director of the Department of Information Technology, previously
has said that his brief stint in 1997 with Oracle had nothing to do with
pushing the $126 million Oracle contract. The state audit notes that consultant
Logicon had prepared a report for the state a year earlier in which it warned
the state to keep an accurate tracking of how much software it needed. Months
later, Logicon went against its own advice and recommended the Oracle contract
for 270,000 software applications. 

Bowen said Attorney General Bill Lockyer should look into "Logicon's
responsibility to be accurate" in advising the state on how much software it
needed. Bowen also is trying to eliminate a state loophole that allowed Logicon
to both advise the state on technology contracts and then bid on them. 

The audit also questioned installing a single software system for the entire
state government and "creating the perception that Oracle is its de facto
standard for a database, reducing both competition and flexibility." 

After all this, lawmakers are disgusted. 

"The department is not doing a good job, is costing the taxpayers millions of
dollars, does not have a useful function, and needs to be eliminated," said
Assemblywoman Elaine Alquist, D-Santa Clara, whose husband, former Sen. Al
Alquist, created the department. 
******************
San Jose Mercury News
Biting into Bluetooth The much-hyped and much-delayed standard for short-range
wireless networks has finally emerged
By Mike Langberg
Mercury News

Bluetooth finally has some teeth -- you can now buy a few dozen products using
this new standard for short-range wireless networking.

But there's a distinct ``not ready for prime time'' feel to this first batch of
Bluetooth hardware; the products are too expensive and, as I discovered
first-hand, there are problems making them work together.

It's hard to describe Bluetooth to the uninitiated. At the most basic level,
it's a set of standards for using low-power radio transmitter/receivers to
connect all kinds of electronic devices, including computers, mobile phones,
personal digital assistants, printers, cordless headsets and even digital
cameras.

The technical rules for how this works are set by the Bluetooth Special
Interest Group (www.bluetooth.com), with backing from corporate heavyweights
including Ericcson, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, 3Com and Toshiba.

Bluetooth uses the 2.4 gigahertz frequency, the same as newer cordless phones,
microwave ovens and the wireless computer networking standard known as Wi-Fi or
802.11b.

What's exciting about Bluetooth is the hope it will become the convergence
point for all kinds of electronic information and entertainment devices.

Bluetooth is slower and has less range than Wi-Fi: a maximum data transmission
rate of 1 megabit per second compared with 11 megabits per second for Wi-Fi;
most Bluetooth devices operate over a range of just 30 feet, while Wi-Fi goes
as far as 300 feet.

But Bluetooth chips require far less electricity than Wi-Fi and, at least in
theory, will become much less expensive. These are crucial advantages in adding
wireless capability to devices such as handheld computers and mobile phones.
Wi-Fi drains too much power and adds too much to manufacturing costs for
pocket-size gadgets.

Bluetooth almost failed before it got started, however, because of excessive
hype in the waning days of the dot com-Internet-telecommunications bubble that
burst in early 2001. Many promises were made for widespread availability of
Bluetooth-enabled devices in 2000 and then 2001, without anything actually
happening. Bluetooth began to look like another pie-in-the-sky dream, bringing
to mind the old joke that Bluetooth was, ``The technology of the future, and
always will be.''

It wasn't until early this year that a significant number of Bluetooth devices
reached the market. Today, there is at least one Bluetooth-enabled product in
almost every category originally hyped for Bluetooth. (For examples, see the
chart accompanying this column, Page 1E.)

You can now or will be able within a few months to buy ultra-lightweight
cordless headsets for Bluetooth-enabled phones, Bluetooth adapters for every
type of handheld, PC Cards and USB adapters for adding Bluetooth to notebook
and desktop computers, and adapters for printers. There are also Bluetooth
access points that plug into a wired network for sharing Internet access.

Put all these devices together and you can imagine all kinds of interesting
possibilities.

With a Bluetooth headset, for example, you could leave a mobile phone in your
briefcase or purse and answer incoming calls just by tapping a button on the
headset nestled on your ear.

With a Bluetooth handheld in a hospital equipped with Bluetooth access points,
doctors and nurses could view medical records and write patient reports on the
spot without having to lug around heavy laptops.

At home, a Bluetooth digital camera could transmit pictures to a
Bluetooth-equipped computer without plugging in any cables.

If the demand for Bluetooth grows large enough, the cost for adding Bluetooth
capability to a ``smart'' device such as a mobile phone, handheld or personal
computer could drop as low as $5 -- low enough for Bluetooth to become almost
universal.

That's the rosy vision. Here's the hard reality.

Today, Bluetooth is still an expensive and limited option. There are only a
handful of mobile phones with built-in Bluetooth; I could find only one being
sold in the United States, the Sony Ericsson T68 at $199 from AT&T Wireless.
Bluetooth headsets cost about $200 -- a huge premium for getting rid of a
slender wire, considering corded headsets sell for well under $50. Bluetooth
modules for PDAs cost more than $100. Setting up a wireless computer network
with Bluetooth would cost two or three times as much as Wi-Fi.

I tried Bluetooth at home by borrowing a PC Card and USB adapter from 3Com,
along with a printer adapter from Epson. I installed the USB adapter on an HP
Pavilion desktop computer running Windows XP and the PC Card went into the slot
of my Compaq Presario laptop running Windows 98 Second Edition. I stuck the
printer adapter on the parallel port of an Epson Stylus Photo 890 inkjet
printer.

The 3Com adapters installed smoothly and both told me -- through an on-screen
window displayed by a 3Com program called ``Bluetooth Connection Manager'' --
that they recognized the presence of the Epson 890 printer.

But the act of printing wasn't as easy. I could print from the laptop, but kept
getting a false error message telling me the computer couldn't find the
printer. I was never able to get the desktop to print, because I couldn't get
the computer fully configured for Bluetooth, even after spending several
frustrating hours talking to tech support people at 3Com and Epson --
apparently because of a problem between 3Com's software and Windows XP.

I did succeed in moving files back and forth between the two computers via
Bluetooth, but the pace was sluggish. Transferring a 17.6 megabyte file from
the laptop to the desktop took 5 minutes and 54 seconds; Wi-Fi would have done
the job in under a minute.

Epson warns that its print adapter won't do well with high-resolution photos,
because so much information must go between the printer and the computer. Using
my laptop, I had no problem printing an 88-kilobyte photo, a low-resolution
image suitable for sharing by e-mail. But when I tried to print a
high-resolution 1.9-megabyte 8x10 image through Bluetooth, the printer twice
stopped after completing only 20 percent of the job.

Beyond my unhappy personal experience, I'm concerned by several unknowns that
still surround Bluetooth. It isn't clear how widely Bluetooth will be supported
by major electronics manufacturers, leaving open the question of whether
Bluetooth will ever reach critical mass. Nor is it absolutely certain that
large numbers of Bluetooth devices operating within the same home or office
will avoid getting in each other's way, or won't suffer from interference by
other 2.4-gigahertz devices. And the Bluetooth consortium must still work out
several additional standards to speed up tasks such as photo printing.

What does all this mean for consumers?

I'd stay away from Bluetooth for now, given the expense and hassles involved in
becoming an early adopter. Instead, I'd give Bluetooth backers another year to
iron out compatibility headaches and deliver compelling products at reasonable
prices.
*********************
 MSNBC 
E-signatures not making their mark 

April 17  Even in the Internet age, your John Hancock still matters. Most
people are still putting pen to paper these days, despite a law signed by
former President Clinton nearly two years ago that made electronic signatures
the legal equivalent of traditional signatures.

      ELECTRONIC SIGNATURES were supposed to wipe out the need for
time-consuming and costly efforts to sign certain documents. Bank loans,
refinancing paperwork and legal documents were all targeted by backers of
electronic signatures, with the idea of eliminating the need for meetings,
notary publics or overnight deliveries to validate signatures.
       The technology certainly exists, but the promise of e-signatures has
fizzled in the face of security concerns, competing e-signature standards and
the fact that people still like to handle paper when it comes to big deals.
     ?I think a lot of people, even e-savvy people, are frankly more
comfortable in document-intensive transactions having a stack of paper to look
at, review and sign with someone present,? said Ian Ballon, an attorney who
focuses on Internet and e-commerce law at Manatt, Phelp & Phillips, in Palo
Alto, Calif. 
       Proponents of the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce
Act, which took effect in November 2000, thought the reality would be somewhat
different. Under the law, a simple click of a mouse could replace a physical
signature. Supporters of the law hoped it would revolutionize e-commerce,
decreasing paperwork, speeding transactions and allowing consumers to buy cars
or get mortgages completely online. 
       But people can already buy books, video games and Beanie Babies online
without signing their name and without the e-signature law. Meanwhile, most
high-end purchases, such as buying a car, and many financial transactions, such
as refinancing a home, still require consumers to put ink to paper.
      ?By and large, the e-sign law hasn?t had much of an effect,? said Chris
Musto, an analyst with Gomez. ?It?s hard for me to point to when it will.? 
       To be sure, e-sign has led to some changes. Last summer, Wells Fargo
began allowing students to apply for U.S. government-backed loans entirely
online using a Department of Education-issued personal identification number.
Meanwhile brokerages such as E*Trade allow customers to sign up and fund
accounts completely online and have begun delivering account statements and
updates electronically. 
       The recent tax season illustrates one of the most high-profile usesand
problemsof e-signatures so far. The Internal Revenue Service has been accepting
electronically filed tax returns since 1997, but until last year, it required
most taxpayers who e-filed to mail in a signed form. The agency now allows
taxpayers to select their own PIN to use as an e-signature, once they?ve been
verified by giving their date of birth and their adjusted gross income from
their previous tax return. 
       But e-filing has been slow to take off, despite the push from the IRS,
with about two-thirds of taxpayers still mailing in paper returns with
traditional signatures.
Not helping matters, the IRS has restricted the types of forms that taxpayers
can file electronically, and its process for verifying e-filed returns rejects
about 10 percent of them because of birth dates, Social Security numbers or
other information that doesn?t match numbers stored in often outdated IRS
databases. Security is also an issue: Last year, the General Accounting Office
issued a report that highlighted numerous security vulnerabilities on the IRS?s
servers.
       Another reason why the e-sign bill hasn?t lived up to its hype is that
while the law said electronic signatures have the same validity as those made
on paper, it didn?t specify what constituted an electronic signature. 
       Prior to the law, a consensus was building around recognizing digital
signaturesthose based on public key infrastructure (PKI) as a legal standard
for signing documents online. PKI uses encryption keys to lock and unlock data.
But because the e-sign law didn?t recognize any particular standard for
electronic signatures, it threw the standards battle back up for grabs, some
analysts say. 
       ?What e-sign really did was blow away PKI,? said John Pescatore,
research director for Internet security at Gartner. ?All that legal work went
away.? 
       In the absence of a standard, many companies have been reluctant to
accept electronic signatures because the law and electronic signatures haven?t
been put to a court test yet. And with few companies accepting electronic
signatures, there?s been little opportunity to test their validity in the
courts. 
       ?You get into a chicken-and-egg situation,? Pescatore said. 
       Plus there has been little consumer demandwhich isn?t that surprising at
a time when many customers are still uncomfortable using their credit cards
online, let alone major, complicated purchases or agreements. 
       Customers may even be at a greater risk with e-signatures than they are
with credit cards online. With a credit card, customers generally have complete
protection for online purchases and aren?t liable if the card is stolen or used
without their authorization. 
       The same isn?t true of e-signatures, which are usually secured by giving
a customer a particular PIN to get access to a ?signature page? on a Web site.
If someone were to fraudulently sign up for a mortgage or purchase a car in
another person?s name via an electronic signature, the person who had been
defrauded would have little legal recourse. 
       ?If I steal your electronic signature, I can order drugs, I can sell
your house,? said Margot Saunders, a managing attorney at the National Consumer
Law Center. ?People have not thought through the problem of replacing a very
simple signature that has so many implicit effects with an electronic
signature.? 
       Businesses have also hesitated to fully embrace e-signatures. Texas
Instruments, for instance, has set up an extranet for communicating with its
suppliers and distributors. Through the network, TI?s partners can place and
track orders. 
       Although the system relies on encrypted, digital signatures to verify
TI?s partners, those electronic signatures don?t replace the pen-on-paper kind.
TI only provides access to the system to companies who already have existing
relationshipsand paper contractswith the electronics giant. 
       ?From a legal agreement standpoint, e-signatures is not the mechanism we
use today,? John Jordan, IT security manager for TI. ?I think there?s still a
lot of apprehension? about using e-signatures. 
       Some are hoping the government will lead the way, particularly since
Congress has ordered federal agencies to reduce paperwork and do more
transactions electronically. The mandate has several federal agencies turning
to companies such as Entrust, an online security company. 
       Entrust has about 40 projects going on with the federal government and
recently helped set up a digital signatures program at the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office that allows patent attorneys to electronically file patent
applications, according to Daniel Burton, vice president of government affairs
at Entrust. 
       ?I think the government has taken some positive steps,? Burton said.
?Could they do more? Absolutely.? 
       Some say it will simply take more time. 
       Consumers will soon be able to buy term life insurance and auto
insurance online with e-signatures, said Behnam Dayanim, an attorney with Paul,
Hastings, Jenosky & Walker, in Washington, D.C., who lobbied for the e-sign
bill. But Dayanim noted that businesses are increasingly relying on electronic
transactions to speed deals within their companies or among their established
business partners. Such transactions might not be true e-signatures since they
usually rely on paper signatures on file, but they are a sign of progress, he
said. 
       ?When you look globally, it?s had a really pervasive but subtle effect
on how people do business,? Dayanim said. ?There?s more and more transactions
where the parties effectuate the transactions online. I think that?s in part
attributable to e-sign.?
********************
MSNBC
Radio giant to offer music downloads

April 17  A new music subscription service, carried on powerful Clear Channel?s
network of radio Web sites, is slated to launch Wednesday.

      OPERATED BY START-UP Full Audio, the long-promised service joins an
increasingly crowded field of hopefuls trying to temp Net music fans to trade
in their post-Napster file-swapping services for legal music downloads. The
small company is betting that distributing alongside the biggest radio
corporation in the business will give it enough clout with consumers to compete
with major label-backed rivals Pressplay and MusicNet.
       Analysts say the Clear Channel radio sites could indeed be a valuable
home for music subscription services. But they?re not ready to give FullAudio
and its giant partner the green light yet.
       ?It will be interesting to see how the Clear Channel audience reacts to
this,? said P.J. McNealy, research director with GartnerG2, a division of the
Gartner research firm. ?Radio has traditionally been free.?
      FullAudio joins Listen.com in the field of independents seeking
consumers? music dollars. Those dollars have to date been scarce, however.
While none of the major figures has yet disclosed subscriber figures, analysts
have uniformly warned that relatively few people would sign up until at least
next year.
At this point, even the major label-backed services are still working out
thorny licensing issues. Listen.com is the only service to have gained access
to music from four of the big five major labels. 
       MusicNet, Pressplay and FullAudio each offer music from three major
labels. Analysts have generally predicted that consumers would want access to
all five before signing up in large number.
      Each service also provides different features and prices. FullAudio?s
Clear Channel sites will offer 50 songs download per month for $7.49, or 100
downloaded songs for $14.99. Those songs can?t be burned to CD or transferred
to an MP3 player, however. 
       Rival services include a similar, but not identical set of features.
Pressplay and Listen each allow some limited CD burning, and Listen.com allows
unlimited songs to be played but is only a streaming service, for example.
       Other services are on their way. Most notably, Napster has been
attempting to launch its own legal music-swapping service for months, but has
been unable to settle its long-running court dispute with the record labels. 
       The FullAudio service will be a test of radio stations? brand loyalty
with consumers. The rise of CD burning, car MP3 players and satellite radio has
led some analysts to predict rough waters for radio stations ahead. 
       The service will initially launch on five Clear Channel-owned Phoenix,
Ariz., radio station sites, but will ultimately reach 30 Web sites as Clear
Channel brings stations in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Salt Lake City
into the program. 
       The radio giant will be looking at how the service does in those markets
before adding more. But even if they are ultimately successful, it will take
time, analysts caution. 
       ?Consumers haven?t exactly gone screaming into the streets with their
credit cards for these services yet,? McNealy said.
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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