Clips July 22, 2002

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips July 22, 2002

ARTICLES

Senate Getting Badly Needed E-Mail Update
WAR ON TERRORISM: Georgia on track with Bush's plans
House homeland panel reverses field on baggage-screening deadline
Internet extends legal reach of national governments
New centers promote telecommuting among federal employees
Oracle's Ellison Says U.S. Should Centralize Data
RealNetworks Poses Challenge to Microsoft
Raising the Accessibility Bar
Lawyers discover eBay as legal-evidence bazaar
Umpires Renew Attack on Monitoring
The Instant-Mess Age 'IM' Isn't Private
With 'Old' Design, Japanese Supercomputer Beats Top U.S. Machine
Fighting Piracy, Hollywood Hunts Down People Trading Films Online
Official: USA vulnerable to cyber terrorism
Higher Learning at Warp Speed
S.Korean Broadband Internet Access Hits 20 Percent
More Doctors Use Internet for Work, Survey Finds
Urdu website breaks new ground
No home for digital pictures?
Computer experts to back the Grid
Defining redundancy
Homeland strategy sets IT agenda
OMB puts hold on homeland IT
Federal Computer Week Policy briefs
Liars unmasked
Feds endorse guide for Windows security
Building smarter borders
OMB will consolidate Homeland Security systems work

*************************
Washington Post
Senate Getting Badly Needed E-Mail Update
By Brian Krebs

After more than four years of planning, the U.S. Senate is finally 
replacing its 12-year-old e-mail system, an antiquated communications tool 
that staffers say has given new meaning to the term "snail mail."

"With the old system, it could take anywhere from 15 minutes to sometimes 
days for an e-mail to get to its recipient," said Matt Payne-Funk, a 
systems administrator for Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), whose Washington 
office is among the first to migrate to the Microsoft Outlook-based e-mail 
system that will replace the old system.

With the exception of a few minor glitches, the transition has so far been 
a successful, Payne-Funk said, with most messages now processed "almost 
instantaneously."

Since 1990, senators' 100 Capitol Hill offices and 400 collective field 
offices have sent and received e-mail through "cc:Mail," a program 
introduced by Lotus in 1985. Last year, however, the Senate was finally 
forced to switch to a new e-mail system after Lotus stopped selling and 
supporting the program.

Payne-Funk's office mates are still marveling at the new systems' ability 
to send e-mails that include Web pages - a feature that was largely 
unnecessary in the pre-World Wide Web era of cc:Mail.

Technologically speaking, the Senate is several product cycles behind the 
House of Representatives, which began transitioning to an earlier version 
of Microsoft's e-mail software in 1996.

While most Senate offices now boast relatively new and powerful computers 
and high-speed Internet access, the Senate's e-mail service remains 
painfully slow, said one of many Senate staffers who asked not to be 
identified for this story.

"If I really want to get a message to someone quickly, I'll use my Web mail 
account through Yahoo," the staffer said.

Andy Davis, spokesman for Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ernest "Fritz" 
Hollings (D-S.C.), said he was encouraged by the prospect of a more 
efficient and reliable system.

"Hopefully it'll be one that won't have quite as many glitches as we've 
experienced in the past," he said.

It seems that nearly every Senate office has its own horror story about the 
old e-mail system.

One senior staff member for a subcommittee with oversight over technology 
policy issues recalled receiving an e-mail recently that she had sent 
several days before. The missive had bounced back with a message explaining 
that the mail server had given up after trying to deliver it 63 times.

The aging mail software often fouls up communications between Senate 
offices in Washington and field offices across the nation.

"Honestly, sometimes it seems like it would be faster to get in your car 
and drive the information to the home office than to use this system," one 
staffer said.

The unpredictable behavior of the Senate e-mail system has also created its 
share of public relations nightmares.

Last year, a longtime Senate press officer e-mailed a news release to more 
than 140 reporters. The message somehow got caught in a vicious loop, 
mailing itself to all of the recipients every hour for several days.

"It was a pretty harrowing experience," the press secretary said. "I nearly 
got death threats from more than a few reporters," the staffer said.

In recent years, the Senate e-mail system has groaned under the weight of 
an increasingly tech-savvy electorate. In February 2001, an avalanche of 
messages slowed the chamber's e-mail system for nearly an hour. The month 
prior, the same e-mail servers were overwhelmed by a torrent of e-mail 
following Attorney General John Ashcroft's confirmation hearing before the 
Senate Judiciary Committee.

Administrators have since scaled the system to accommodate large volumes of 
e-mail, said Tracy Williams, director of technology development for the 
Senate Sergeant at Arms Office, which administers the system.

The challenge now, Williams said, will be to transition to the new Senate 
e-mail system without causing significant outages or delays.

"Like any big project, it's not without its bumps along the way, but 
overall it's going very well," Williams said.

Williams said the goal is to move all Senate offices to the new system by 
November.

Sources familiar with the project, however, say many senators seeking 
reelection this year have refused to make the switch in their offices until 
after Election Day.
**************************
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
WAR ON TERRORISM: Georgia on track with Bush's plans
Don Plummer - Staff
Wednesday, July 17, 2002


Georgia homeland security officials say they already have addressed most 
areas identified Tuesday by President Bush as state responsibilities.

"We've already put several measures in place addressing most of those 
things," said Mickey Lloyd, deputy director of Georgia Homeland Security.

Lloyd was among those briefed Monday night by federal Homeland Security 
Coordinator Tom Ridge during a nationwide conference with state homeland 
officials.

A 90-page "National Strategy for Homeland Security" unveiled by Bush 
identifies six areas to be addressed by the states. They are:

> Creating tighter minimum standards for driver's licenses.

> Ensuring the availability of terrorism insurance.

> Training to prevent cyber attacks.

> Tightening control of financial institutions to reduce money laundering.

> Updating procedures for ordering quarantines in cases of bio-terrorism.

> Planning for continuity of court operations after an attack.

The only surprise for Georgia officials in Bush's plan, Lloyd said, was the 
call to develop a plan for court operations.

"That's something we're going to have to take a hard look at," Lloyd said. 
"But if that's what the marching orders are, we'll get started on it right 
away."

Such a plan for court operations should be ready by the end of the year, a 
court official said. The plan, updated and expanded from one developed for 
the 1996 Summer Olympics, will be shared with each of the state's 159 
county court systems, said Billie Bolton of the state's Administrative 
Office of the Courts.

On driver's licenses, Georgia is one of just a few states to include the 
applicant's digitally encoded fingerprint. A change under consideration 
here is to require proof of identity from all license applicants.

In January, state Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine denied a request by 
companies to exclude terrorism coverage from homeowners' policies.

State officials have joined the FBI's InfraGard program, a consortium of 
private sector and government organizations that share information about 
and seek to prevent cyber attacks. The Atlanta InfraGard chapter, which 
counts more than 200 members, is one of the nation's most active, chapter 
president Phyllis Schneck said.

A state banking official said the state might add laws regulating money 
transfer businesses to reduce money laundering.

"Georgia already regulates check cashers and sellers of money orders and 
travelers checks," said David Sorrell, acting commissioner of the Georgia 
Department of Banking and Finance. "State laws do not now cover wire 
transfer companies and currency exchanges, but that is one of the things we 
are looking at."

On quarantine, a new law calls for public-health officials to develop such 
plans in case of a bio-terrorism attacks, said Stacey Hoffman, director of 
risk communications at the Division of Public Health in the state 
Department of Human Resources.

The law also designates the Division of Public Health as the lead agency 
when the governor declares a national public health emergency, Hoffman said.

A spokeswoman for Gov. Roy Barnes said he and other state officials will 
review the president's recommendations.

"The state's Homeland Security Task Force has been reviewing the situation 
since last year to assess Georgia's preparedness level and assess where 
Georgia may need to shore up in regards to homeland security," spokeswoman 
Joselyn Baker said.

Since Sept. 11, Georgia has spent $6.3 million on added security, plus 
several million more in federal grants, Baker said.

In a survey of state homeland security programs conducted this year by the 
National Governors Association, Georgia was found to be in relatively good 
shape, partly because of its experience in preparing for the 1996 Summer 
Olympics in Atlanta.

State legislators have introduced more than 1,200 anti-terrorism bills 
since Sept. 11. In Georgia, Barnes set up the inter-agency task force to 
coordinate actions between state and local agencies and with federal agencies.

The task force includes public safety, emergency management, public health, 
environmental protection, transportation and defense agencies, along with 
representatives of local law-enforcement officials and fire chiefs.

The centerpiece of its efforts is a new anti-terrorist intelligence center, 
which shares space with the FBI counter-terrorism task force.
**********************
Government Executive
House homeland panel reverses field on baggage-screening deadline
By Tom Shoop and Brody Mullins

The House Select Homeland Security Committee reversed itself Friday, first 
voting to retain a year-end deadline for the Transportation Security 
Administration to implement baggage-sreeening systems at airports, then 
later accepting an amendment shifting the deadline to Dec. 31, 2003.

Friday morning, the committee accepted, on a 6-3 vote, an amendment offered 
by Democratic Caucus Vice Chairman Robert Menendez of New Jersey to keep 
the current deadline for setting up explosive-detection systems at 
airports. The deadline was included in the legislation creating the TSA 
last fall.

House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, who drafted the homeland 
security legislation and chairs the ad hoc committee, tucked a provision 
into the legislation Thursday that would have removed the deadline.

Friday, Armey said his decision was a tough one, but it was "the right 
one"and one he could make because he plans to retire at the end of the 
year. But Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts of Oklahoma and Rep. 
Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio, joined Democrats in voting to strip the language 
from the bill.

Later, though, Watts backed a measure to shift the deadline for 
implementing explosive-detection systems as far back as March 31, 2004. 
Republicans argued that the current deadline was simply unrealistic and 
would require airports to implement inferior systems.

"We want the best technology in airports as possible," said House Majority 
Whip Tom Delay, R-Texas.

But the amendment drew the ire of Democrats on the panel. Currently, "very 
little baggage gets checked [for explosives]," said Menendez. "The 
overwhelming percentage goes unchecked. That's why Congress overwhelmingly 
voted to have deadlinesto keep those people's feet to the fire to produce 
those explosive detection devices as soon as possible."

In the end, though, the panel voted 6-3 to accept a compromise offered by 
Rep. Martin Frost, D-Texas, to shift the deadline to Dec. 31, 2003.
***********************
Mercury News
Internet extends legal reach of national governments

NEW YORK (AP) - Police in Italy didn't care that five Web sites they deemed 
blasphemous and thus illegal were located in the United States, where First 
Amendment protections apply.

The police shut them down anyway in early July, simply by sitting down at 
the alleged offender's Rome computer.

Talk about the long arm of the law.

Under pressure from their citizens, governments around the world are 
increasingly abandoning the hands-off attitude they initially had toward 
the Internet. They are now applying their laws far beyond their borders -- 
thanks to the borderless medium.

Put another way, foreign citizens and businesses are now being subjected to 
copyright, speech, consumer protection and other laws enacted by 
governments in countries where they've had no voice.

Though these international tensions existed long before the Net, the global 
network's growth exacerbated them.

In Italy, two men are under investigation for allegedly running sites that 
combined pornographic pictures with offensive statements about the Madonna. 
Authorities say they were weighing blasphemy, computer fraud and other 
charges that could result in fines and up to three years in prison.

Though the sites were hosted by U.S. companies, including Blue Gravity 
Communications Inc. of Pennsauken, N.J., authorities in Italy used a 
suspect's computer and password to reach across the ocean and replace the 
offending images with the insignia of the special police unit that tracked 
him down.

Blue Gravity's chief executive, Tom Krwawecz, said the company was never 
informed. And he believes U.S. laws -- not Italy's -- ought to apply.

``That's where the content is actually located, regardless of who's looking 
at it and where it's being looked at,'' Krwawecz said. ``How are we to know 
what the laws of another country might be?''

David Farber, the moderator of a popular online mailing list on technology 
with recipients all over the globe, envisions a time when he'll have to cut 
back on his postings for fear of lawsuits elsewhere.

Many countries do not value free speech the way the United States does, nor 
do they give speakers as much leeway in defending libel lawsuits. So 
mailing list mavens like Farber need to be concerned about whether items 
they post might violate a law somewhere.

``We live in a world where we communicate worldwide and we travel 
worldwide,'' Farber said. ``If I violate some Australian law and then land 
in Sydney, do they throw me in jail?''

Indeed, U.S.-based Dow Jones & Co. is challenging an Australian 
businessman's right to sue it in Australia over an article published in the 
United States and posted online. A lower Australian court last August 
allowed a lawsuit to proceed.

It's not just speech that's at issue.

Consider a privacy law recently passed by the European Parliament requiring 
companies anywhere in the world to obtain permission before sending 
marketing e-mail to Europeans.

Jim Conway of the New York-based Direct Marketing Association worries that 
U.S. companies may have to scale back U.S. campaigns if they cannot assure 
that their mailing lists contain no European addresses.

The European Commission's Marian Grubben acknowledges that the new law 
complicates national boundaries and could be hard to enforce. But she said 
doing nothing isn't a choice, given the amount of junk e-mail her citizens 
receive.

``We could probably use something that I would call the law of the Net, but 
if it's anything like the law of the sea, it took 20 years to get that 
sorted out,'' said Vinton Cerf, one of the Net's early developers.

Until then, there's a risk that individuals and businesses -- particularly 
multinationals -- may feel obliged to curtail speech and other online 
activities.

Already, a French court ordered California-based Yahoo! Inc. to remove 
Nazi-related items from its online auctions, even though such materials are 
legal in the United States. Yahoo is challenging the decision.

Enough of these cases, and larger companies will play it safe by banning 
legal but unpopular speech and activities, said Michael Geist, a law 
professor at Canada's University of Ottawa.

Individuals like Farber may have to think twice before pressing ``send.'' 
Farber said he hasn't received many legal threats yet, but ``if this 
happens too much, and I start getting letters from overseas, it's going to 
water down my willingness to do things and say things.''

Google and other U.S.-based search engines have voluntarily removed links 
to a Web site that gives tips on railway sabotage -- a means of protesting 
nuclear waste transports. German railroad Deutsche Bahn had threatened to 
sue in German court.

The United States, too, is guilty of trying to extend its reach.

A U.S. copyright law was used to jail a Russian programmer in California 
for writing software that was legal in his country. He was later freed, but 
charges remain against his Russian employer.

And because a large part of Internet traffic goes through the United States 
-- even if both sender and recipient live elsewhere -- last fall's 
anti-terrorism bill lets the Justice Department prosecute foreign hackers 
when they attack computers anywhere in the world.

Of course, enforcement is another matter. In the case of the Russian 
programmer, authorities had to wait for him to attend a conference in Las 
Vegas before moving to arrest him.

Motohiro Tsuchiya, professor at the International University of Japan's 
Center for Global Communications, believes multinational businesses will 
ultimately pressure governments to move toward uniformity -- through 
treaties and other cooperative arrangements.

But at what cost?

The current patchwork ``does make things more complicated,'' said Milton 
Mueller, a professor at Syracuse University who studies Internet 
governance. ``But it's also much more responsive to variation in human and 
economic conditions around the world.''
************************
Government Executive
New centers promote telecommuting among federal employees
By Tanya N. Ballard
tballard@xxxxxxxxxxx

Federal employees weary of braving the commute between locales in 
Montgomery County, Md. and Washington may soon be able to use two new 
telework centers slated for Washington's Maryland suburbs.

The General Services Administration is now accepting proposals for two 
federal telework centers, one near Wheaton, Md., and another in the 
Germantown, Md., area. GSA operates nearly 20 telework centers in the 
Washington area, which has some of the worst traffic congestion in the country.


Rep. Connie Morella, R-Md., had pushed for the creation of the centers, 
adding language to the fiscal 2002 Treasury-Postal Appropriations Act 
requiring GSA to study the feasibility of adding telework centers in 
Montgomery County. The report, released in May, concluded the area needed 
the facilities.


"Traffic congestion is a major problem for the entire Washington region," 
said Morella in a statement announcing the centers. "With so many federal 
employees traveling to jobs, both within Montgomery County and elsewhere in 
the region, the use of telecenters will provide a real opportunity to make 
a significant impact on traffic."


Telework centers allow federal employees to do their jobs closer to home by 
providing work stations with computers, phones and other needed technology. 
The cost of using a telework center full-time ranges from $240 to $980 per 
month. Agencies pay those fees out of their own budgets.


Morella and Reps. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Steny Hoyer, D-Md., have 
championed teleworking to reduce the Washington's area's traffic, make the 
federal government more efficient and improve federal employees' quality of 
life.


Though telecommuting has long been recognized as a way to boost employee 
morale and productivity and reduce absenteeism, the idea has been slow to 
catch on in the federal government. Wolf added language to the fiscal 2001 
Transportation Appropriations Act requiring the Office of Personnel 
Management to ensure that 25 percent of the federal workforce participate 
in telecommuting programs at least some of the time by April 2001. As of 
November, just 4.2 percent of federal workers telecommuted.


"The federal telework program is still evolving," Morella said. "It is not 
yet a mainstream work arrangement, and there are challenges ahead. Telework 
is a legitimate option to help alleviate some of our region's 
transportation problems. I look forward to the day when the entire federal 
workforce will telecommute to the maximum extent possible."
**************************
Reuters
Oracle's Ellison Says U.S. Should Centralize Data
Fri Jul 19, 9:06 PM ET
By Judith Crosson

DENVER (Reuters) - Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle Corp. on Friday 
renewed his campaign for a government-initiated database of U.S. medical 
and criminal records, the kind of sweeping and controversial project the 
No. 2 software vendor has offered to undertake before.

"There should be one system," Ellison told some 3,000 attendees at Colorado 
Gov. Bill Owens' third annual technology conference in Denver.

A unified system would be both cheaper and safer, eliminating many of the 
current problems in health care and criminal justice, he said.

For example, patients risk adverse drug reactions because one pharmacy that 
fills a prescription has no way of knowing another pharmacy might have 
provided a second drug that could make the patient sick if both were taken 
together.

"Government should take a lead in this so we can stop killing people," 
Ellison said.

Centralized database systems would also allow emergency medical personnel 
to better treat someone in an accident far from home and help police 
departments better track criminals, he said.

"You're saying 'What a threat to privacy,"' he said to an audience that 
seemed sometimes skeptical that such information could be responsibly 
entrusted to a single system.

PRIVACY BARTERED FOR CREDIT

But Ellison, who founded Oracle in 1977 after a deal with the Central 
Intelligence Agency ( news - web sites) that helped launch the firm, said 
security would be enhanced, not diminished, by centralizing control of 
sensitive data.

"You barter 100 percent of your financial privacy in exchange for credit," 
he said, referring to credit card companies' use of central databases to 
assess credit standing.

Besides, he said, a central database with controls would be more secure 
than leaving records at a physician's office where employees have access to 
them.

Oracle has maintained close ties to federal, state and local governments 
and such contracts make up an estimated 25 percent of its revenue.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the company joined a 
partnership to focus on airport security. At one point, Ellison also 
offered to supply the government software to create a national ID system to 
thwart terrorists.

More recently, Oracle became the center of a controversy over a major sale 
of its software to California, after auditors said the contract was rushed 
through without competitive bidding and could end up costing taxpayers too 
much.

Oracle defended the agreement and produced its own analysis of the deal to 
show that it would actually save the state millions of dollars over the 
life of the contract.

Oracle shares closed at $9.72 on Friday, less than half of its 52-week high 
of $20.

But Ellison mocked the idea that depressed stock prices, layoffs in 
technology and the disappearance of scores of dot-com companies spelled the 
demise of the information economy.

"It's just the dawn of the Information Age. You ain't seen nothing yet," 
Ellison said.

He also sneaked in a jab at his arch-rival, Microsoft Corp. , and its 
Chairman Bill Gates ( news - web sites).

Oracle has promoted its software as being more secure than competing 
alternatives in a bid to take advantage of Microsoft's recent problems with 
hackers and viruses exploiting loopholes in its software.

In the early months of the year, Microsoft interrupted software development 
work and sent engineers on special training at a cost of at least $100 
million to improve security.

But Ellison noted that Microsoft's high-profile "stand-down" had come 
largely in February, "The shortest month of the year," he quipped.
**************************
New York Times
RealNetworks Poses Challenge to Microsoft
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, July 21  In a significant challenge to Microsoft, 
RealNetworks plans to announce a new version of its software on Monday that 
can distribute audio and video in a range of formats, including Microsoft's 
own proprietary Windows Media.

The new software is intended for large media companies and other 
corporations that need to send audio and video data to customers and 
employees in a variety of different formats. But RealNetworks acknowledged 
that it was possible that the company might incur Microsoft's legal wrath.

Nevertheless, Rob Glaser, a former Microsoft executive who founded 
RealNetworks as Progressive Networks in 1994, said he believed the strategy 
was good for both Microsoft and consumers.

"A rational way for them to respond would be to say, `This is great,' " he 
said. "That would be Microsoft of the future."

Mr. Glaser said his company, based in Seattle, had developed a version of 
the Microsoft Media Server software that comes with the Windows operating 
system.

He said RealNetworks' engineers had studied the data that was sent between 
the Microsoft media server software and the Windows Media Player program 
and recreated the technology needed to play files in the Microsoft format. 
This method created a so-called clean-room version, meaning the developers 
built the transmission software without any knowledge about the underlying 
program.

Microsoft has adopted a similar strategy at several junctures, Mr. Glaser 
said, reverse-engineering technologies like NetWare, PostScript and 
JavaScript at different times.

Microsoft executives said the company currently licensed the Windows Media 
Player technology to a variety of companies including Yahoo, RealNetworks 
and the America Online unit of AOL Time Warner. But a Microsoft executive 
said that a clean-room copy of the Windows server technology could lead to 
quality and performance issues.

"It's kind of hard to speculate about the technology until we see it," said 
Dave Fester, the general manager of the Windows Media division. If a 
company has not licensed the server software, he added, "we would need to 
look at it and see what they're doing."

RealNetworks appears to be endeavoring to avoid being "Netscaped," a 
reference to the fate that befell the Netscape Communications Corporation 
when Microsoft decided to make an Internet browser, which was pioneered 
commercially by Netscape, a standard part of the Windows operating system. 
Netscape was later acquired by AOL Time Warner. Microsoft's decision to 
build an Internet browser into Windows and give it away at no additional 
cost led directly to a bitter antitrust lawsuit brought by the Justice 
Department in 1997.

RealNetworks, which was a pioneer in the market for streaming media to 
desktop personal computers, has been under growing pressure from Microsoft, 
which is giving away both the server and Windows Media Player program as 
part of its operating strategy. RealNetworks also faces challenges from 
Apple Computer, which offers the QuickTime media player as a part of its 
Macintosh OS X operating system and sells a more full-featured player.

Moreover, in recent months Macromedia Inc., which makes the Flash animation 
software used on many Web sites, has added video capabilities to its 
technology, making it a potential rival.

RealNetworks is gambling that with a proliferation of different standards 
and formats for video and audio, the media corporations that make content 
available over the Internet will flock to a single system that supports 
multiple types of data. The company is trying to shift the focus of the 
competition from the PC desktop to the server, according to analysts.

Several analysts said the RealNetworks shift in strategy could put 
Microsoft on the defensive.

"Real has got the experience and sophistication to pull this off," said 
Richard Doherty, the president of Envisioneering, a market research and 
consulting firm based in Seaford, N.Y. "It will open up a new horse race."

Until now the companies have been engaged in a technology war to rapidly 
increase the power and quality of each of their media players. At the same 
time, they have competed over which of the programs are placed on the 
desktops of personal computer users. RealNetworks claims to have 700,000 
subscribers for pay services, but it is perceived as being increasingly 
vulnerable, according to some analysts, because Microsoft has included its 
Media Player as part of the Windows operating system, which dominates the 
PC market.

There are dozens of data formats for playing audio and video on the 
Internet, but the dominant ones are RealAudio and RealVideo from 
RealNetworks, QuickTime from Apple, Windows Media from Microsoft and the 
industry digital movie standards MPEG-2 and MPEG-4.

Microsoft and RealNetworks are currently locked in a close race for desktop 
media player leadership. In the first quarter of this year, according to 
survey data collected by Jupiter Research, a market research firm based in 
New York, RealNetworks' RealOne Player had a 29.1 percent share of media 
players, while Microsoft's Windows Media Player had a 28.2 percent share. 
Apple's Quicktime player was third, with a 12.2 percent.

The new server software from RealNetworks is part of a version of the 
company's media server that is to be introduced on Monday and which will be 
called the Helix Universal Server. RealNetworks said it would offer 
performance data based on a test it financed at an independent testing 
service, KeyLabs, that indicate that the Helix software can, under some 
conditions, deliver up to four times the speed of the Windows Media Server 
in Microsoft's operating system. (Software servers are programs that run on 
powerful computers and can send streams of digital information to many 
computer users simultaneously.)

At a news conference scheduled to be held in San Francisco, RealNetworks is 
also expected to announce that it plans to make the Helix software 
available as part of a strategy known as community source, which will make 
it possible for RealNetworks partners and competitors to take advantage of 
the original programmers' instructions.

RealNetworks is to announce a range of partners, including Hitachi, 
Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Deutsche Telekom, NEC, Nokia, Cisco Systems, 
Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Palm, Texas Instruments and others. These 
partners could then incorporate the software into their own hardware and 
software products.

Under the licensing strategy, companies will be able to freely gain access 
to the underlying code that the Helix program is based on, but they will 
still pay a licensing fee when they sell commercial products based on the 
technology.

The community-source approach to software, which was pioneered by Sun to 
distribute its Java programming language, is a variation upon the original 
free software or open-source approach which has confounded the software 
industry in recent years.

While open-source software can be freely shared, with some restrictions, 
the community-source approach is more restrictive and yet still tries to 
persuade others to collaborate and add innovative ideas.

Other large technology companies including Sun, I.B.M. and Apple, have all 
now adopted variations on such open-source strategy, with varying results. 
In Sun's case, the company has been criticized because, while Java has 
become an industry standard, the company has not been the principal 
financial beneficiary in many cases.

RealNetworks is trying to strike a balance between opening up its 
technology to persuade others to participate and innovate and not losing 
control of the technology entirely, Mr. Glaser said. "We think we've struck 
the balance well," he said.

Analysts said the strategy shift by RealNetworks was likely to shake up the 
industry. "The moment you've open-sourced something you've cornered your 
competitor," said Matthew Berk, an analyst a Jupiter Research. "To date 
this stuff has been very proprietary. Opening it up makes it accessible to 
creative and gifted programmers who will come up with wild stuff that the 
companies have never considered."

Mr. Glaser said he expected other companies to produce technology that 
would rival RealNetworks' commercially as a result of the community-source 
strategy.

One possibility is that companies such as Sun or I.B.M. could decide to add 
the Helix technology of RealNetworks as a standard component of their 
operating systems. Although RealNetworks might not get a significant 
financial benefit from such an arrangement it could contribute to making 
its Helix software a de facto industry standard.

Mr. Glaser said he had struck upon the idea of making his media server 
software open source while visiting with an executive from Nokia, the 
world's largest cellphone maker.

"Taking all of this stuff beyond the PC has been a huge motivation for us," 
he said. When he realized that Nokia was interested in deploying the 
software technology on as many as 30 to 40 different types of phones, he 
realized that RealNetworks did not have enough programming talent to 
support the effort.

"I told him, `I don't think we have enough engineers even if you guys were 
willing to pay us,' " he said.

That touched off a search for an alternative way of having the two 
companies cooperate.
*************************
Wired News
Raising the Accessibility Bar
By Kendra Mayfield

An Italian inventor built the first typewriter to help a blind countess 
write legibly. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone because his 
wife and mother were deaf. The remote control was invented for people with 
limited mobility. Today's office scanners evolved from technologies created 
to make talking books for the blind.

From the typewriter to the remote control, special access tools developed 
for disabled individuals eventually become conveniences for everyone.

Stanford University's Archimedes Project is working to make information 
accessible to everyone -- not just individuals with disabilities, but also 
the elderly, those who can't read and just about anyone else who uses 
computers and information appliances.

The Archimedes Project is building accessible technology that outperforms 
other commercial products so "non-disabled people will want it," said 
project leader and co-founder Neil Scott.

This summer, Stanford graduate students will collaborate with industry 
executives to create innovative products for people with disabilities 
through a 10-week program called the Archimedes Access Factory.

Guest speakers such as Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the 
Future; Doug Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse; and John Ittelson, 
director of the Idea Lab, will discuss how their work advances universal 
access.

Traditionally, adaptive technology requires individuals with disabilities 
to use modified versions of existing computers and devices.

Widely used interface strategies often rely too heavily on a single sense, 
such as sight. When the graphical user interface (GUI) was introduced, 
developers assumed that blind and visually impaired people wouldn't use it, 
creating an almost impenetrable barrier for those computer users.

Blind or visually impaired users rely on screen readers or other adaptive 
technologies to navigate computers and the Internet.

But that approach is becoming impractical as developers struggle to keep 
pace with technological obsolescence and increasingly complex operating 
systems and software.

"One of the key problems for disabled people is that when equipment is 
arbitrarily obsoleted, they don't have the resources to keep (getting 
hardware and software) upgraded," said Scott. "Obsolescence is really a bad 
thing for the disability industry."

The Archimedes Project's approach is radically different. The project 
designed a Total Access System (TAS) that enables individuals with special 
needs to have access to any computer or computer-based device.

Each individual is equipped with an "accessor," a single device that allows 
the user to utilize all computers and information appliances without 
specialized hardware or software. These accessors use speech recognition, 
head-and-eye-tracking and other "human-centered interfaces" that match 
individual needs.

A Total Access Port connects the PC and the user interface, providing 
standardized access to all user input and output.

"A key element (of the TAS) is to allow a person to select whatever input 
and output strategies fit the way they do things," said Scott. This 
approach "allows people to truly mix and match different modalities.... It 
gives them a huge amount of flexibility."

The Total Access System assists people such as J.B. Galan, who has an 
undergraduate degree from Stanford and an MBA from the University of 
California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Galan has been a 
quadriplegic since he was injured in a diving accident at age 16.

Galan uses a voice-recognition system that projects his words onto a 
computer screen. He can control the cursor using head movements.

Despite its benefits, accessible technology must continue to improve before 
it sees mainstream adoption.

"Voice recognition isn't reliable enough yet," said Scott.

Even though systems have become faster and more accurate, "it still takes 
time for a person to figure out how to use it."

The Archimedes Project is using disambiguation software to determine how to 
create a voice recognition system that has a "very high certainty for a few 
words that fit the current context," said Scott.
The project will focus on using intelligent agent systems "to make (a 
computer) behave more like a person," and "to take away the need for a 
person to learn a script before they can do anything.

"We want to get away from having to spell out (instructions to a computer) 
to (having a computer) be able to express intent."

Scott wants to apply invisible computing to the next generation of 
accessible technologies.

Rather than designing products specifically for individuals with 
disabilities and generalizing them to the rest of the population, the 
Archimedes Project is figuring out what accessible products they can make 
for the general population that will also be affordable for people with 
disabilities.

The project is developing equipment with a lifespan of decades, rather than 
creating hardware that lasts just a few years and requires frequent upgrades.

"There are billions of people that need very basic access tools if they are 
going to be part of the information," Scott said. "In the Third World, the 
aging and the disabled aren't that interested in upgrading.

"We want equipment in the disability field to be driven by need and 
performance, rather than market forces to have the latest and greatest."
************************
Los Angeles Times
Lawyers discover eBay as legal-evidence bazaar
By Lisa Girion

After a heated bidding war on eBay, Mark Lanier recently paid $2,125 to win 
a 1941 Naval Machinery manual.

It sounds like a peculiar collecting hobby, but to Lanier it was serious 
business. The Houston lawyer, who sues companies on behalf of 
asbestos-exposure victims, was bidding against a defense lawyer to get his 
hands on an evidentiary trophy filled with details on where and how 
asbestos was used aboard ships.

eBay might be known best as a place to buy bobblehead dolls, ancient Roman 
coins and millions of other idiosyncratic collectibles, but the world's 
most famous Internet auction also has become an unlikely source for legal 
evidence. It's a place where a growing number of lawyers bid  often against 
each other  for everything from smoking-gun documents to killer products.

Although "evidence" is not one of eBay's 18,000 product categories, lawyers 
who know what they are looking for can filter 11 million items by punching 
in keywords. There are dozens of active "asbestos" auctions daily.

Asbestos lawyers aren't the only ones shopping for evidence on eBay. A Los 
Angeles lawyer preparing lawsuits for lung-cancer victims, for instance, 
recently bought a cache of old cigarette advertisements that he figures he 
can use to re-create for jurors the atmosphere in which his clients got 
hooked.

eBay is a rich source of evidentiary ephemera for asbestos litigators, 
primarily because their sickest clients, those with an incurable and rare 
form of cancer, don't develop symptoms until decades after they were 
exposed to the hazardous mineral fiber.

A virtual time capsule, eBay holds out a seemingly endless supply of 
commercial and household artifacts, historic corporate documents, 
maintenance manuals and product catalogs that can help asbestos lawyers pin 
down where clients encountered the hazardous material  and who can be held 
liable.

"There is no better place to shop and buy real evidence than on eBay," 
Lanier said.

Technology changes litigation

eBay's evidence market still is a largely unknown phenomenon. At the 
Internet marketplace's headquarters, where the stated mission is to help 
"practically anyone trade practically anything on Earth," spokesman Kevin 
Pursglove said he was unaware that eBay had become an evidence bazaar. 
Detecting such highly specialized, micro markets "is a bit of a challenge," 
he said, with millions of items for sale on any given day.

It is not widely known within the legal community, either. "You can quote 
me as saying 'Wow,' " said Deborah Hensler, a Stanford University law 
professor who tracks legal trends.

Surprise aside, trolling the Web for evidence is a logical extension of 
lawyers' increasing use of the Internet for everything from identifying 
causes of action to publicizing class-action lawsuits, Hensler said. 
"Technology is changing the dynamics of litigation."

Most asbestos injury cases are settled before reaching a jury verdict, and 
lawyers say the evidence they gather online often can help tip the balance 
toward a favorable settlement for their clients.

Lawyers from the other side of the bar also search for help in defending 
companies against allegations of decades-old asbestos use.

"You are talking about activities that occurred 20, 30, 40 years ago," said 
Eliot Jubelirer, a San Francisco lawyer who represents corporations. 
"There's nobody alive today who was in those companies years ago."

Legal bidding war

Lawyers who frequent eBay evidence auctions say the number of bidders has 
grown noticeably over the past 18 months.

"There were not a lot of people bidding on these things early on, and you 
could pick things up very reasonably," said Al Brayton, a personal injury 
lawyer. "Today, you get not only the plaintiffs' bar bidding, but you have 
the defense bar bidding. The prices have gone up a lot in the last year. A 
lot."

The rising prices, particularly for items that contain or describe the use 
of asbestos, are drawing more merchandise out of attics and garages.

"The market has grown dramatically from what it was a year ago," Brayton 
said. "People are now catering to the market and going to flea markets all 
over the country and looking for things with asbestos in them that they can 
sell."

The creation of such niche markets is one of eBay's most valuable 
functions, said Florian Zettelmeyer, an assistant professor of marketing at 
the University of California at Berkeley. "What these lawyers have done is 
tap into the core strength of the Internet, which is to pull together 
suppliers," he said.

Ernie Chmura, a Chicago-area computer programmer, became a purveyor of 
asbestos evidence almost by accident. He initially went to eBay's Web site 
last year to sell "three generations of junk" and his prized electric-train 
collection to help pay for funeral and medical expenses after his wife died 
of cancer.

As he searched the Web site to see what similar items were fetching, he 
noticed a 1949 plumbing-supply catalog, with a section on asbestos 
products, that went for $350. Chmura pulled one just like it out of his 
late father's attic and put it up for auction. "From a sales standpoint, 
only fishing equipment and the book "Dracula Was a Woman" were as 
nutty  way out of expectation," Chmura said.

eBay evidence boon to cases

It's impossible to know how many lawyers are plying eBay for evidence, but 
it's hard to believe anyone spends more time  or money  at this form of 
discovery than Mark Lanier. The Texas lawyer paid $1,025 recently to win a 
47-year-old pack of sealed cigarettes believed to have asbestos filters. 
The 1955 Kent Micronites might become Exhibit A in litigation he is 
preparing on behalf of more than 20 clients who have asbestos-related 
cancer and who smoked the brand.

Regardless of where it comes from, Lanier said eBay evidence is a boon to 
the development of cases. In the days before he discovered eBay, Lanier 
would fly investigators to search for documents in the public libraries in 
the hometowns of target companies.

"We had to convince the librarian to take things out of the case to take 
photographs and Xeroxes for hard data," Lanier said. "I'll still do that 
kind of stuff, but generally what I can get off eBay is better than what I 
can find elsewhere. It's a phenomenal thing."

Noticing Lanier's penchant for asbestos items on eBay, an Ohio engineer 
offered to sell him a collection that he described as his personal museum. 
Lanier paid $5,000 for the collection that includes household appliances, 
dozens of samples of floor and roofing tiles, a firefighter's uniform, a 
baseball mitt and even an action figure known as "Asbestos Man," believed 
to have appeared in the 1960s.

Lanier, who has the items sealed in Plexiglas to prevent the release of 
hazardous fibers, wastes no time introducing his collection at trial, often 
using them as props during his questioning of potential jurors.

"I'll ask jurors, 'Who has worked around asbestos?' and get 20 percent to 
raise hands," he said. "I'll bring 20 to 30 products into the courtroom 
(and) then I say where they put this stuff. When I'm done, 100 percent of 
the people will realize they've been exposed to asbestos. It helps the jury 
understand this is not just an issue for the plaintiff in this case, but 
this is really a larger issue that commands attention."
***************************
New York Times
Umpires Renew Attack on Monitoring
By MURRAY CHASS

Major league umpires, apparently believing in truth in advertising, took 
action yesterday to eliminate what appears to be their endorsement of a 
computerized system that tracks their calls of balls and strikes. The 
umpires thus extended their attack on baseball's attempt to use the system 
to monitor their work.

After a conference call that included 45 umpires, the officers of the World 
Umpires Association wrote a letter to QuesTec asking that it remove a 
reference to them from the company's Web site. QuesTec, based in Deer Park, 
N.Y., has developed a system to track pitches by computer; the system is in 
place at about half a dozen major league parks.

"The umpires ask you to take immediate action to remove the incorrect 
impression that might be derived from your Web site," said the letter, 
which was signed by John Hirschbeck, Joe Brinkman and Tim Welke.

The letter cited a question-and-answer section on QuesTec's Web site 
(questec.com) dealing with the QuesTec Umpire Information System:

"How do the umpires feel about it? In general, they support it! They had 
the opportunity to really watch the technology in action and to talk to us 
about how it works and how we thought it might be used. M.L.B. has also 
worked very hard to clearly lay out why they wanted this technology and how 
they would use it. We wouldn't dare say everyone loves it at this point 
but, from what we have seen, the umpiring community as a whole agrees this 
information has a lot of potential value and they want to work with it to 
see what can be learned."

The union officers disputed the company's claim, writing that the umpires 
"do not generally support" the system. The umpires and their technical 
consultants, the letter added, have "serious concerns" about the use of the 
system under game conditions. "Even if the QuesTec system were more 
accurate, there remain legitimate questions as to whether this device 
belongs in Major League Baseball," the umpires said in the letter.

Some umpires have been notified that they have called certain pitches 
incorrectly.

In a May 10 letter to Hirschbeck, who is the union president, Ralph Nelson, 
vice president for umpiring, told him that he had called 30 of 127 pitches 
incorrectly in a game he umpired in Cleveland a week earlier. "You called 
22 pitches strikes that were well off the plate," Nelson wrote.

The union has filed two grievances against the commissioner's office, one 
arising from elements covered in the letter and the other based on the 
refusal of the commissioner's office to answer the union's questions and 
provide requested information about the system. The commissioner's office, 
in turn, has sued the union over the first grievance.

The umpires have disputed QuesTec's data. They say that the system has 
difficulty tracking certain breaking pitches and that the operators of the 
system have been inconsistent in defining the strike zone for the computer.
************************
Washington Post
The Instant-Mess Age 'IM' Isn't Private,
and That's a Problem for Firms, Workers
By Shannon Henry

"I think Mark is doing the right thing by going into rehab," Tim Gordon, 
vice president of an online concierge service, typed quickly to a friend. 
Sitting at his office computer, Gordon was multitasking in cyberspace as 
usual, holding several instant-messaging conversations at once.

And that's why he accidentally sent the message to a co-worker, not to his 
friend.

Sound familiar? Are you cringing? Even people who successfully navigated 
earlier methods of communication, who never put a thank-you note in the 
wrong envelope, or dialed one friend's number thinking it was another 
friend's, have by now experienced electronic-mail mortification. It may 
have been an offensive joke accidentally sent to the boss or a love note 
that got broadcast company-wide.

Personal embarrassment pales, however, when compared with the ramifications 
of a business message getting into the wrong hands. E-mail has made it 
easier to have that happen. Click the mouse and, poof, there go those 
inventory figures your group needed. But you may, through inattention, have 
sent them to your competitor. And the use of instant messaging, those 
real-time electronic exchanges between friends and colleagues, is 
heightening the potential for disaster, or at least embarrassment.

Because while e-mail and instant messaging may be casual, they are not 
without consequence. Particularly in business.

The first big electronic wake-up call came when Microsoft Corp.'s internal 
e-mails were used against the software maker in the Justice Department's 
antitrust case. That caused a jolt, but a lot of people nodded off again, 
lulled into complacency by the gentle clicking of their mouse.

Despite warnings, many continued to believe (still do) that electronic 
notes disappear into the ether, never to be seen again. Not quite. Just ask 
Merrill Lynch securities analyst Henry Blodget, whose e-mails became the 
cornerstone of a federal investigation into his company. When those 
internal e-mails became public, we read what Blodget wrote about stocks 
he'd recommended: "such a piece of crap," and a "dog."

And so our collective attention shifted once again to the consequences of 
our e-mail actions. As most people now know, it turns out it's much harder 
to shred an electronic document than a paper one, especially when it has 
been sent to numerous recipients, copied, saved and forwarded. Today no 
corporate malfeasance story would be complete without mention of the 
authorities seizing the hard drives of the company's computers.

By now e-mails sent must number in the trillions or beyond. As for the more 
recent instant messaging, about 16.9 million people "ping" others at work, 
according to ComScore Media Metrix in Reston.

The casual nature of both -- the teen-speak of BTW ("by the way") and LOL 
("laughing out loud"), etc. -- stems in part from the fact that both were 
devised for use in private life, for communicating with friends and family 
from a home computer. But it didn't take long for companies to recognize 
the obvious usefulness of ways to send company-wide memos (e-mail) and keep 
up an ongoing conversation among employees (instant messaging).

And so firms patched together their own systems. E-mail programs were an 
easy purchase. For messaging, though, some use proprietary intranet-type 
programs that allow communication only within the organization. Others 
imported one of the top instant-messaging services created for consumers by 
AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft. And some have resorted to a patchwork of programs.

It's the instant messaging that now causes confusion. The technology-savvy 
(or just those who follow the news) know that e-mails can be retrieved from 
computers' hard drives. Many companies back up internal e-mails. For 
instance, the Securities and Exchange Commission requires all 
broker-dealers to keep for three years "originals of all communications 
received and copies of all communications sent by such member, broker or 
dealer (including inter-office memoranda and communications) relating to 
his business as such."

But most people think that instant messages are different, that once a 
message is sent, because it doesn't appear in any mailbox or sit on any 
server, that the thought is forever gone, the evidence irrevocably erased. 
In theory they're correct: Spokesmen for AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo 
Messenger and Exchange 2000 IM from Microsoft all say that instant messages 
skip from server to server, but that no material is cached.

"People don't understand the nature of IM," says Michael Gartenberg, a 
research analyst with Jupiter Research in New York. Because of that, he 
predicts instant messaging will become much more of a problem to businesses 
than e-mails in the very near future. He expects companies to soon begin 
creating policies that monitor the message flow.

In a recent report titled "What May Lurk in Your IM Session," the Gartner 
Group research firm recommends that companies develop written policies on 
acceptable use of instant messaging. "IM can be used as an untraceable 
channel for leaking files, source code and financial information," the 
report warns. Untraceable, says the report's author, Richard Stiennon, 
because some companies are still not tracking the mail.

Although the major IM services do not archive messages, recipients can 
choose to save them. And the messages do travel through servers, at 
different speeds depending upon the time of day and the system's 
configurations. While the mail may not be officially cached, it is possible 
to retrieve it at certain moments, like taking snapshots. "In theory, the 
FBI could monitor IM traffic over AOL," says Stiennon. "In practice, it's a 
difficult task."

Corporate message theft is the modern-day version of disgruntled employees 
walking out with boxes of sensitive files, says Stiennon. Now, he says, 
they just send company information to their personal accounts, where it can 
be disseminated more easily. Stiennon says he knows of a case at a dot-com 
where an angry employee logged into his boss's computer and posted the 
boss's messages to a public Web site.

Speaking of this medium where people often say things they wouldn't dare 
write even in e-mails, let alone on a piece of stationery, Stiennon 
advises, "Treat IM like it's going to end up on the front page of the 
[newspaper] the next day."

Gartner predicts that by 2005, instant messaging will be used more often 
than e-mail.

The Way We Work
Michael Loria, director of advanced collaboration at the Cambridge offices 
of IBM, has been studying the way workers communicate. Early results, he 
says, show that employees find that messaging is a more helpful 
communication than e-mail, and often better than the telephone. About half 
of IBM's 300,000 employees use a combination of the company's Lotus 
Sametime IM system and AOL Instant Messenger, sending 2.5 million messages 
a day. Their "buddy lists" are integrated, meaning a co-worker and a parent 
could be on the same list.

Loria has seen firsthand how pervasive the communication has become. When 
he wants to talk to a co-worker, his first impulse is not to pick up the 
phone or walk over to a neighboring office, but to check out his buddy list 
to see if that person's name is in green, meaning he's online. He also uses 
instant messaging to talk to his wife and kids.

Loria figures allowing AOL into the IBM mix helps users become more 
comfortable with the system because it makes them feel they can talk to 
anyone who's important to them; it becomes part of their culture. He's not 
a fan of systems that only allow communication among one company and says 
the concept of proprietary systems makes his hair stand on end.

"IM is a persisting connection between people," says Loria.

Businesses have at least three reasons to fear instant messaging, not so 
different from e-mail in that regard: the liability from notes that come 
back to haunt the company, lost productivity as employees chat the day 
away, and the blocking of the network's pipes as conversations drag on.

"It started as recreation for teens, and then they brought it into the 
workforce with them," says Tim Gordon, vice president for operations at 
VIPDesk.com. He says every employee at his company is under 40 and about 
half are under 30. "It's a tool they expect to have."

In fact, instant messaging is required of VIPDesk.com employees. About half 
of the online concierge company's employees work outside its Alexandria 
office. Gordon says using IM helps keep costs down by avoiding 
long-distance telephone calls. And it also helps keep far-flung workers 
connected to the company culture. Many are IM friends and have never met 
IRL -- in real life.

VIPDesk.com so far has no policies about saving messages or what can be 
sent in them, except a rule that customers' credit card numbers are not to 
be IMed. Gordon says the company plans to set up a real policy soon, one 
that takes into consideration that work and play have merged. "It's not 
screened, it's not monitored, it's not tracked," says Gordon. "Someday that 
could be a problem."

There is already one odd result of the IM society at VIPDesk.com. Gordon 
has noticed that messaging is great fodder for the rumor mill in the 
office. Bad news or good, it gets the information around faster and, like 
most rumors, attracts more variations on the truth, like the old telephone 
game.

"I see 10 windows up" on employees' computer screens, says Gordon, "and I 
wonder how many are personal conversations. IM is a blessing and a curse."

Each of the 100,000 worldwide employees of GlaxoSmithKline has had access 
to the pharmaceutical company's in-house messaging system, Lotus Sametime, 
for about a year and a half. Philip Connolly, vice president for 
information technology communications at the company, says instant 
messaging has been a boon to its communication because it travels so much 
faster than e-mail and allows employees in different countries to have 
real-time conversations and make decisions more quickly. Many people also 
use it for "chitchat," he says, such as arranging lunch dates, and that's 
fine. The company has firewalls that prevent using AOL and other outside 
systems, he says.

"We're not there yet," says Selena Morris, a spokeswoman for Merrill Lynch 
& Co., when asked about IM policies at the investment bank. She says it 
would be difficult to tell if employees were using instant messaging. "If 
people are on the Internet we can't control their usage," she says.

Who's Watching?
But government is watching, even if some businesses aren't. "We have a 
number of enforcement matters currently underway involving electronic 
mail," says Nancy Condon of the National Association of Securities Dealers. 
She wouldn't give details and directed any further questions to the SEC.

The SEC won't comment on instant messaging in particular.

Gartner's Stiennon says it's well known that investment bankers on Wall 
Street live on messaging, and that most of the firms don't keep a record of 
the messages. "All traders use instant messaging today," he says. "There 
will be crackdowns."

This spring, AOL announced that it was working on a new version of instant 
messaging that would be custom-made for businesses. "Corporations are 
asking for it," says AOL spokeswoman Catherine Corre. AOL is working with 
VeriSign on a product that will encrypt messages but still let people 
communicate with current AOL Instant Messenger users.

AOL may in fact be launching this new product in self-defense. Gartenberg 
thinks many corporations will react to instant-messaging trouble by banning 
the use of such commercial IM systems as Instant Messenger. For those that 
don't go cold turkey, he expects stricter rules about documenting all 
incoming and outgoing communication. Gartenberg says any company that 
doesn't think messaging is a potential problem is "delusional."

Systems that were created for businesses, such as Sametime, says Loria, 
store, log and allow retrieval of messages. IBM also sells servers to IM 
customers.

New concern over keeping and monitoring electronic mail at businesses has 
not escaped the notice of software firms dedicated to Internet detective 
work. Akonix of San Diego this month introduced a new 
instant-message-tracking program. Ascentive in Philadelphia launched its 
product last year.

Software created by SpectorSoft of Vero Beach, Fla., takes pictures of 
everything a person does online, including Web surfing and messaging. The 
customer decides whether the snapshots are taken every second, every minute 
or at some other interval. Sales this year have doubled, says company 
president Doug Fowler, and they had tripled the previous year. One of 
SpectorSoft's recent add-ons is Chat Recorder, which automatically records 
all instant messages.

"Companies are just becoming more aware of abuse" by employees, says 
Fowler. His customers are looking for workers who spend all day on the 
Internet, who frequent porn sites and who send instant messages with 
disparaging information about the company. Fowler says one customer found 
out that an employee was embezzling money; another found that workers were 
running other businesses on company time or looking for new jobs all day.

When Fowler started his business in 1999, most of his clients were husbands 
and wives trying to prove infidelity and parents looking for teenagers' 
mentions of drug use or secret romances.

This year, about 40 percent of SpectorSoft's income is from corporate 
customers, including law firms, banks and media organizations. It was only 
about 15 percent corporate last year, and Fowler expects more than half of 
all his business will come from business spies next year.

One SpectorSoft customer, Richele Mailand, president of an architectural 
firm in Santa Barbara, Calif., used the software when she wondered why an 
employee had such an extreme drop in productivity. The person was supposed 
to work six hours a day for Richele Design, but the software showed that 
for about half of that time she was actually writing personal e-mail to 
friends and checking out Web sites. Mailand says she can't afford to pay 
for work that's just not getting done, and she fired the employee. "She 
stepped over the bounds," says Mailand.

Still, many workplace experts think asking employees to send only 
work-related messages is simply unrealistic. "People can't shut off their 
personal lives," says Bruce Pomerantz, a psychoanalyst in Chevy Chase who 
analyzes work and family issues. Pomerantz says businesses that peer too 
far over employees' shoulders will ultimately drive the workers away. "If 
you monitor people too closely, they'll want to leave the workplace," he says.

Douglas LaBier, president of the Center for Adult Development in Washington 
and author of the book "Modern Madness: The Hidden Link Between Work and 
Emotional Conflict," agrees. He says it's a mistake for companies to try to 
keep workers from using instant messaging for personal use. Sure, some will 
take advantage of the system. But those people would find a way around work 
without e-mail or IM.

And so messaging serves to blur the already muddied worlds of life and 
work. "IM is part of the careerization of life," says LaBier. It takes the 
image of the guy on vacation with his laptop one step forward.

And it is yet another appendage of our always-on culture. LaBier worries 
there may be a backlash as some of us find it intrusive, and feel that we 
can be tracked down wherever we are. "It can facilitate what needs to be 
done, but it becomes part of our mentality," he says.

"The happiest and most fulfilled people are able to have a sense of 
integration of who they are at work and at home, who don't wear two hats," 
says LaBier.
*********************
Washington Post
With 'Old' Design, Japanese Supercomputer Beats Top U.S. Machine
By Matthew Fordahl

LIVERMORE, Calif.  U.S. supercomputers have been the world's most powerful 
since the first high-performance machines analyzed virtual nuclear blasts, 
climate change and the makeup of the universe.

Now, one built in Japan with an "old" design runs five times faster than 
the previous record holder, a machine that simulates nuclear tests at 
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Japan's Earth Simulator supercomputer hasn't quite rattled the United 
States like the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957. But it does 
highlight some drawbacks of recent U.S. machines  and it has made more than 
a few scientists envious.

"This machine is powerful enough that a researcher who uses it can do in 
one day what it takes a researcher in the U.S. to do in one month," said 
Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee professor who tracks the world's 
500 speediest computers.

More than national pride is at issue. Certain research is better suited to 
machines like the Earth Simulator, whose design was abandoned by most U.S. 
manufacturers in favor of one that melds better with the rest of their 
computing businesses.

Supercomputers are built with thousands of processors that work in tandem 
to analyze the most complex issues  including nuclear test simulations, 
aircraft designs, drug creation and others  for governments, research 
centers and corporations.

Livermore's ASCI White supercomputer, like most recent U.S.-built machines, 
used off-the-shelf processors rather than custom parts specifically geared 
for high-performance scientific jobs.

The trend took off in the 1990s, as such processors grew increasingly 
powerful, making it difficult to justify the cost of developing chips just 
for the small scientific supercomputer market.

Now, supercomputers like ASCI White use the same chips  but thousands more 
of them  as do servers sold to businesses.

Such machines now make up nearly 92 percent of the top 500 supercomputers 
worldwide. In 1993, they made up only about 27 percent.

But some say the move away from custom processors places business concerns 
ahead of scientific needs.

"The arguments are all based on strange economic theories  none of them are 
based on technical grounds," said Burton Smith, chief scientist at Cray 
Inc., which still sells custom supercomputers.

NEC-built Earth Simulator, which will be used in climate and earthquake 
studies, is faster than all 15 of the biggest supercomputers in the United 
States combined, Dongarra said.

It performs 35.9 trillion calculations a second with 5,104 processors. ASCI 
White, by contrast, performs 7.2 trillion calculations a second with its 
8,192 microprocessors.

"U.S. scientists want to use it," said Kiyoshi Otsuka, leader of the Earth 
Simulator's research exchange group in Yokohama, Japan.

The high-performance title isn't expected to stay in Japan forever. IBM, 
which built ASCI White, Hewlett-Packard Co. and other U.S. supercomputer 
makers say they are working on even more powerful machines.

"We could do that in a heartbeat and we could do that for a lot less 
money," said Peter Ungaro, vice president of high performance computing at 
IBM, which sells supercomputers to foreign nuclear governments, research 
centers and corporations.

Officials at the Livermore Lab say their machine and others like it offer 
better price performance than those designed like the Japanese 
supercomputer. Earth Simulator cost about $350 million, compared with ASCI 
White's $110 million.

"For global climate, (Earth Simulator) is a great advance," said David 
Nowak, the ASCI program leader at Livermore. "It's just a very expensive 
machine."

But supercomputers built with off-the-shelf parts can be more expensive in 
the long run, said Guy Robinson, research liaison at the Arctic Region 
Supercomputing Center, where scientists study everything from climate 
change to how galaxies form.

Price isn't the only factor, however. Scientists say certain research 
problems work better or are easier to program on one supercomputer type 
over the other.

Custom supercomputers, for instance, have bigger data pipes, known as 
memory bandwidth, which is critical in climate modeling and some nuclear 
research.

That can be a drawback for off-the-shelf processors.

"In one sense, we have a tiny straw for data," Dongarra said. "And we have 
the processor, which would like a fire hose of data to come at it."

But off-the-shelf machines work best on data analysis such as in genetic 
research.

It's a case of finding the best fit for the research  and budget, said Fran 
Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

"From a political and financial perspective, we're not in an environment 
where we could build all these different kinds of tools with equal 
emphasis," she said.

J. David Neelin, atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Los 
Angeles, said computing is ultimately just another tool, like a laptop is 
for a student assigned to write a paper.

A faster machine does not guarantee quality.

"Are they going to get that essay out any faster or is it going to be any 
better? Well, their spell checker is going to run a little faster," he 
said. "In the end, it's the thought that goes into it that really makes the 
essay."
**************************
Washington Post
Fighting Piracy, Hollywood Hunts Down People Trading Films Online
By Simon Avery

LOS ANGELES  The movie industry is hunting down people who swap digital 
films online and demanding that their Internet service be cut off  all part 
of an effort to stamp out piracy and avoid the online trading frenzy that 
has plagued the music business.

The Motion Picture Association of America uses a special search engine to 
scour the Web for copyright movies, which circulate on the same 
peer-to-peer software networks as MP3 music files.

Since 2001, more than 100,000 customers have been ordered to stop their 
activities through cease-and-desist letters sent from their Internet 
service providers, the MPAA said.

In a newer initiative, AOL Time Warner's broadband division has begun 
trying to identify and stop customers who upload huge amounts of 
data  which in almost all cases means people trading bulky video or music 
files.

"We are not blocking the use of any applications or access to any Web 
sites," said Mark Harrad, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. "But we are 
doing various things to manage bandwidth better and to interfere with 
people who are in violation of (their) service agreements."

Harrad declined to elaborate on interference techniques. But he denied the 
effort was specifically targeted at people swapping music and movie files, 
saying the issue is bandwidth hogs, not piracy.

AOL Time Warner owns one of the seven major studios, Warner Brothers, a 
member of the MPAA. It also owns Warner Music Group, one of the five major 
record companies.

Meanwhile, Rep. Howard Berman, D.-Calif., is preparing legislation that 
would allow entertainment companies to obstruct the peer-to-peer networks 
with a variety of invasive electronic techniques, including software that 
blocks file transfers, redirects users to other sites or confuses users 
with fake files.

Privately, music industry officials already admit to frustrating file 
traders by putting up bogus files. Individuals trying to download 
unauthorized tracks from Eminem's latest CD last month, for example, 
occasionally got files containing only a single verse repeated 
continuously, rather than a complete song.

Such acts could, however, be illegal today under the federal Computer Fraud 
and Abuse Act.

The law allows people to duplicate copyright material for their own use. 
But the distribution power of the Internet, which allows someone to share a 
personal copy with millions, has left the concept of "fair use" unclear.

Movie files are harder to share over peer-to-peer networks because they are 
significantly larger than music files. At more than 600 megabytes, a full 
length movie can easily take six hours to download over broadband. By 
contrast, an average music file of six megabytes takes a few minutes.

But Hollywood studios worry that the rising number of broadband connections 
and improved video compression techniques will open the door to runaway piracy.

Between 400,000 and 600,000 copies of movies are downloaded illegally each 
day, according to the consulting firm Viant. Though far fewer than the 3 
billion daily music downloads off the now-defunct music swapping site 
Napster at its peak, it's enough to spook the movie industry.

"Our industry could be damaged as much as the music industry," said Ken 
Jacobsen, senior vice president of worldwide antipiracy at the MPAA.

The MPAA uses special monitoring software from San Diego-based Ranger 
Online Inc. The automated software provides the Internet address of the 
file-swapper, which the MPAA forwards to the relevant Internet provider.

The MPAA then asks the provider to contact the user with an ultimatum: 
Remove the copyright files from your computer or have your service 
disconnected.

Almost everyone served with a cease-and-desist letter by their Internet 
provider complies, Jacobsen said. The group said it does not keep records 
of how many users have actually been disconnected, though at least one 
recipient has fought back.

InternetMovies.com, a Hawaii-based Web site, filed suit against the MPAA 
for causing a business disruption after it was tagged for illegal 
file-swapping and had its Internet service disconnected. Jacobsen said the 
MPAA will wage a vigorous defense.

Some critics of the MPAA's initiative question how long Internet providers 
will continue to assist the hunt against their own customers.

It's just too expensive for the providers to lose those customers, said 
Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group 
representing defendants in copyright infringement suits.

"Hollywood is pressuring intermediaries to do their police work. That was 
never the intention of copyright law," von Lohmann said.

But the MPAA says Internet providers have many reasons to cooperate: They 
don't want illegal activity on their networks, they don't want to be 
exposed to litigation and they don't want users eating up extra bandwidth 
by trading large movie files.
*****************************
USA Today
Official: USA vulnerable to cyber terrorism
By Greg Wright, Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON  Government agencies, businesses and utility companies are 
making rapid gains in protecting their computer networks from hackers, but 
many remain vulnerable to cyberattacks, a White House aide said Thursday. 
"The key pieces have done a good job of it," Schmidt said after speaking at 
a New Technology Week newsletter seminar. "But, by any stretch of the 
imagination, this does not mean the work is done."



Equipment that used to be controlled manually by switches or valves, 
including dams and electricity plant controls, can now be operated from 
miles away via the Internet. And each day thousands of banking and market 
transactions are conducted over the Web.

In 2000, a hacker broke into a utility company computer in Maroochy Shire, 
Australia, and released millions of gallons of raw sewage into the town 
waterways. And in 1997, a teen-age hacker broke into the control tower 
computer system at Worchester, Mass., airport, disrupting service.

The FBI has already warned that al-Qaeda operatives are studying 
supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA) used to run 
utility and company computer networks, said Ben Venzke, chief executive 
officer of IntelCenter, a security consulting company in Virginia.

If al-Qaeda strikes again, it could combine a deadly bombing with a 
cyberattack to cut electricity, heightening panic, Venzke said.

Banking and financial institutions have made the most progress in 
protecting their systems from hackers, said Dan Verton, a cyber terrorism 
expert at Computerworld magazine in Washington, D.C. However, utilities, 
oil companies and industrial plants are lagging, he said.

The White House plans to release a cybersecurity policy plan in September, 
Schmidt said.

The House in February passed legislation sponsored by House Science 
Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., that would boost funding for 
cybersecurity research by $878 million. The full Senate is expected to vote 
soon on a similar bill from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chairman of the 
Science, Technology and Space subcommittee.

Wyden and Boehlert are also pushing legislation to create "Netguard," an 
emergency response team of computer experts that would aid the government 
in the event of a cyberattack. The House this week also passed legislation 
boosting criminal penalties against cybercriminals.

But despite the flurry of legislation and White House action, it could 
still take years for the nation to fully prepare its complex 
telecommunications system and power grid for a cyberattack, Venzke said.

"Even if you had every resource imaginable and had unlimited resources, you 
would not be able to tackle this problem overnight," he said.
************************
Los Angeles Times
Higher Learning at Warp Speed
Network: System being set up at Case Western Reserve University runs at 1 
gigabit per second.
By PAUL SINGER
ASSOCIATED PRESS

CLEVELAND -- If going online with your home computer is like turning on the 
tap for a glass of water, getting on the Internet this fall at Case Western 
Reserve University is going to be like opening a fire hydrant.

In all, 16,000 computers, including machines in every dorm room, will be 
capable of being linked over the coming year to a fiber-optic network that 
delivers data at up to 1 gigabit per second.

That's about a thousand times faster than the typical home broadband 
connection--so fast that the research university's computer mavens still 
don't know exactly what they'll do with so much bandwidth. And that's the 
point of this $27-million investment: Case will look to develop 
applications that benefit from a supercharged Internet.

With the new system, "You can actually do full-screen, full-motion, 
high-definition video with high-definition sound," said the school's 
technology chief, Lev Gonick. "That's pretty amazing when you think about 
research science."

Medical students will be able to watch surgery in real time from a remote 
location yet experience it as if they were in the room.

A musician in Cleveland could study with a teacher in, say, New York via an 
Internet audiovisual conference--provided the teacher had an equally fast 
connection.

"This is clearly one of the most aggressive if not the most aggressive 
deployments" of computer technology in academia, said Steve Corbato of 
Internet2, a national consortium of universities working on the 
next-generation Internet.

Corbato expects such so-called gigabit Ethernet technology to be common on 
university campuses within about two years.

For now, Case has got a leg up on such premier tech universities as 
Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon and Caltech, which offer only one-tenth of the 
speed at 100 megabits per second.

"Many universities are looking into gigabit networking on campus," said 
Joel Smith, chief information officer at Carnegie Mellon. "They just 
proceed more rapidly or less rapidly, depending on funding and other concerns."

Carnegie Mellon, like Case, was one of the first universities in the 1970s 
to experiment with networked computers. It has some gigabit-speed links 
between buildings and is constantly upgrading, Smith said.

And like many campuses, Carnegie Mellon offers wireless connectivity so 
students and professors can log in from anywhere.

"Rare is the university that can do this all at once," Smith said.

John Dundas, Caltech's director of information technology, said competitive 
pressures will force other universities to follow suit even though the 
technology at first will benefit a limited pool of graduate-level researchers.

"Until faculty are able to integrate these kind of technological 
innovations into their teaching, it's not going to have a lot of impact on 
the undergrads," he said.

Case Western, a 9,600-student university, contracted with Sprint and Cisco 
Systems for the upgrade. As part of the deal, Sprint can test new 
technologies at the school. In return, Case gets discounts on future 
technology upgrades.

The Case system will take about a year to complete, but it is already 
operating in several dorms.
***************************
Reuters Internet Report
S.Korean Broadband Internet Access Hits 20 Percent
Fri Jul 19, 4:05 AM ET

SEOUL (Reuters) - About 20 out of 100 South Koreans have access to 
high-speed Internet services, the world's highest penetration rate, the 
Ministry of Information and Communication said on Friday.



The ministry said in a statement South Korea ( news - web sites) had 9.21 
million high-speed Internet users at the end of June, 20 percent of its 
total population of 47 million.

The figures were up almost five percent from 8.78 million broadband users 
at the end of March.

South Korea ranked first with a penetration rate of 13.9 percent in 2001, 
according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 
(OECD). Canada ranked second with 6.22 percent.

KT Corp, South Korea's largest Internet service provider (ISP), had 4.3 
million users, or 47.1 percent of the domestic broadband market, the 
ministry said.

Hanaro Telecom Inc, the number-two ISP, had 2.4 million broadband 
subscribers, or 26.3 percent, followed by Korea Thrunet Co, which ranked 
third with 1.3 million or 14.1 percent.

The ministry data included broadband subscribers of smaller regional ISPs 
which offer high-speed Internet services using leased lines from bigger 
Internet network operators such as KT.

"Given the growth trend, South Korea's broadband users are expected to 
reach more than 10 million by the end of this year," the ministry said.

The fast growth in South Korea of broadband service came amid harsh 
competition and huge demand from South Korean users for faster Internet 
access and games, analysts said.

Shares of KT finished down 3.5 percent at 46,300 won on Friday against the 
2.5 percent decline in the broader benchmark stock index
***********************
Reuters Internet Reports
More Doctors Use Internet for Work, Survey Finds
Thu Jul 18, 4:21 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than three-quarters of the nation's doctors now 
use the Internet and nearly half of them say it has had a major impact on 
how they practice, a survey released on Thursday found.



About a third of doctors have their own Web sites, mostly to use for 
promoting their practice and for patient information, the survey by the 
American Medical Association found.

Of the 977 physicians interviewed for the survey, 78 percent said they used 
the Internet for work.

Of these, two-thirds said they go online every day, the AMA, which 
represents about a third of the nation's doctors, found.

"Although there is still a trend for younger physicians to use the Web more 
than older physicians, the percentage of older physicians using the Web 
increased rapidly from the previous year," the AMA added in a statement.

"In 2001, 65 percent of physicians 60 years of age or older used the Web, 
compared with 43 percent in 2000."
*************************
BBC
Urdu website breaks new ground

The launch of BBCUrdu.com is a landmark in online publishing as it is the 
first news site to use Urdu text, rather than scanned-in images of printed 
materials. Jon Wurtzel of the development team looks at the technical and 
editorial hurdles in producing the site.

The first challenge was enabling Urdu speakers to read the language online. 
Computers are not currently configured to display Urdu text because Urdu 
fonts do not come as standard with any operating systems.
So finding way for users to read properly displayed Urdu text online was an 
immediate test.

One of the underlying concerns was the need to serve a wide-ranging 
audience with differing levels of internet access and computer equipment.

The site had a requirement to be backwards compatible with the operating 
system Windows 95, functional with the latest operating systems such as 
Windows XP.

It also had to be future-proof so that the BBC could be confident that its 
current and subsequent content could be displayed on operating systems to 
come.

Future-proof

The current solution enables people to download an Urdu font that, once on 
their computers, allows them to see calligraphically satisfactory Urdu text.

The font works right now across multiple Windows operating systems. Because 
it is Unicode, it can technically work across multiple current and future 
operating systems as fonts become available.

For now, the content on the site is also designed to be compatible with the 
Urdu font Microsoft is developing for inclusion in its XP software.

A key population using this site come from Pakistan, where Urdu is the 
official national language. Interest in the site is, predictably, 
predominantly in large cities such as Islamabad and Karachi.

But users in remote Pakistani border and tribal areas, where internet use 
would not necessarily be expected, are also engaging with and emailing in 
their opinions to the site.

A diverse base of Urdu speakers in India, the US and Canada, South Africa, 
as well as Japan and the Persian Gulf, also use the site on a daily basis, 
accessing news in Urdu online in a way that would otherwise be unavailable.

Rich archive

Beyond providing round the clock news and analysis, as well as live and 
on-demand access to all of the BBC World Service's Urdu radio output, this 
news service also serves some uniquely rich content.

With an archive of over 40 years of Urdu news output, BBCUrdu.com provides 
access to historic audio clips, images and political reportage that can 
resonate with an audience that has memories of these moments.

These are early days for the integration of the Urdu language and desktop 
computers. BBC research shows that Urdu speakers are just beginning to use 
computers and the internet in significant numbers in their own language.

BBCUrdu.com reflects the potential for the digital development of the Urdu 
language by being the first to provide a technically and editorially 
comprehensive offer.

It serves an extensive regional and global news service in an internet 
environment lacking many alternatives. And it can serve to expand the 
online take-up of Urdu both in Pakistan and across the world.

You can hear more about BBCUrdu.com on the BBC programme Go Digital.
****************************
BBC
No home for digital pictures?

The popularity of digital cameras today may prove to be a disaster for 
future generations. Here's why...

Over the last 150 years mundane family photos have been routinely stuffed 
into shoe boxes or manila envelopes and forgotten, to be rediscovered 
decades later as priceless personal or even public records of the past.
But few pictures taken with digital cameras are ever printed out - most are 
stored electronically for viewing on a computer screen.

So as digital cameras increase in popularity - an estimated 9% of European 
households now own one say Kodak, and 27% of new cameras sold are digital, 
according to research house GfK Marketing services - these treasure troves 
of family history that turn up in elderly relatives' attics will become a 
thing of the past.

The digital photos will still exist of course, though not as prints which 
can be dusted off and passed around. They will instead be collections of 
ones and zeros on various types of electronic storage media.

Obsolete technology

The problem is there will be no way to look at them. That's because 
technology evolves so fast that any storage medium in use today is bound to 
become obsolete sooner or later. Finding the right equipment to retrieve 
digital images stored decades previously on obsolete media will become 
almost impossible.

In fact it turns out that images stored electronically just 15 years ago 
are already becoming difficult to access. The Domesday Project, a 
multimedia archive of British life in 1986 designed as a digital 
counterpart to the original Domesday Book compiled by monks in 1086, was 
stored on laser discs.

The equipment needed to view the images on these discs is already very 
rare, yet the Domesday book, written on paper, is still accessible more 
than 1,000 years after it was produced.

Remember laser discs?

And anyone who stored pictures on a still video camera - a forerunner to 
the digital camera which was available in the late eighties - will find the 
special two inch disks that were used to store the images are unreadable in 
any modern computer. The pictures stored on them are effectively gone for 
ever.

Just as still video camera discs and laser discs have become mere 
technological curiosities in less than a decade, it's a sure bet than many 
of the storage media that are used today - cartridges with names like Jaz, 
Zip, Syquest, Bernoulli, state of the art CD-R and DVD-R discs, and the 
tiny SmartMedia, Compact Flash, Memory Stick, Secure Digital, Multi Media 
Card, and MicroDrive storage cards - will be obsolete and hard to access in 
a few decades' time.

I don't like mundanes

The only way around this is to transfer pictures from older media to newer 
ones every few years.

Inevitably the more mundane photos will be discarded to save time or 
storage space, yet it is precisely these pictures which make the most 
interesting ones in the future.

Contrast this with an exposed but undeveloped film. The chemistry of 
photography has not changed significantly over the years, so there's a good 
chance of retrieving the latent images on an exposed film that is many 
years old.

One way to reduce the worry about the future accessibility of digital 
photos is simply to upload them to one of the many free photo gallery 
websites which store and display users' pictures in online albums.

Vested interest

Although this does not guarantee that it will always be possible to see 
them, there is a certain safety in numbers: if enough people have an 
interest in a particular gallery continuing to make the photos it holds 
accessible then it's more likely that it will.

Since these galleries are often open to anyone with an internet connection, 
it's possible to browse the photo albums of complete strangers in other 
parts of the world, looking at their wedding pictures, baby photos or 
holiday snaps.

Some of these sites even allow you to buy prints of the photos online, or 
have the images put on to novelty gifts.

So while the rise of digital photography could be bad news for anyone 
interested in looking for photos of their own family, everyone will be able 
to create their own ideal family photo collection using other people's 
families by browsing these galleries and assembling one to taste.

Pick a few adorable babies, a beautiful spouse, a couple of party pictures 
and a set of kindly looking grandparents for the perfect family photo 
album, and for a few pounds more you can even have them printed on a mouse 
mat or T-shirt to show off to your friends.
*************************
BBC
Computer experts to back the Grid

Computer experts from all over the world are expected to endorse a 
blueprint for the evolution of a new technology - dubbed internet mark two.
More than 800 experts are gathering at the Edinburgh International 
Conference Centre to discuss "The Grid".

The new technology will allow researchers to link together computers to 
give them undreamed-of number-crunching power.

E-scientists hope the new framework will allow commercial development of Grid.

Sharing computer resources

The Global Grid Forum hopes to lay down a set of rules which will form a 
standard structure for the development of the new technology.

The UK National e-Science Centre (NeSC), which is hosting the event, will 
adopt a common framework designed to create a "seamless environment" in 
which computer resources can be shared via the internet.

This will enable the computing power of e-science research teams around the 
world to be shared to tackle massive projects that they would not be able 
to attempt with their own resources.

A network of high performance computers will help e-scientists collaborate 
to solve important problems facing the world in the 21st century such as 
climate change, the human genome and particle physics.

It is also hoped that the technology will eventually be transferred from 
the science labs to commercial and domestic use, in the same way as the 
internet.


Whereas the internet allows pre-prepared data to be accessed from remote 
computers, the Grid adds the power to process this data.

However, at present there are a patchwork of "standards" which do not 
operate on different systems and difficult to re-use "implementations".

It is important for the future evolution of grid technology and its 
possible commercial development that a common framework is agreed for 
issues such as security, information infrastructure, resource management.

The NeSC, which was opened at the University of Edinburgh in April, is part 
of the UK Government's drive to be at the front of the Grid when it comes 
to building faster and more powerful computing systems.

Scientific communities

It co-ordinates work on Grid technology being carried out at eight sites 
around Britain.

Professor Malcolm Atkinson, director of the centre, said: "e-science will 
change our ways of working. We'll solve hard problems faster. We'll focus 
the efforts of scientific communities, drawing on shared data and massive 
computing power to face urgent challenges.

"While the worldwide web allows us to share data, e-science allows research 
teams to collaborate to turn data into information and hence knowledge."
**************************
Federal Computer Week
Defining redundancy
Editorial

Officials at the Office of Management and Budget have common sense on their 
side when they talk about ways to eliminate redundant spending on 
information technology across government. But they should not be surprised, 
or disappointed, if their plans do not play out as they hoped.

The issue has surfaced numerous times in the past year, most recently 
earlier this month, when OMB Director Mitchell Daniels Jr. said the Bush 
administration would be looking for redundancies in the IT plans of 
agencies slated to join the proposed Homeland Security Department.

OMB is taking a similar approach to e-government, forcing agencies to pool 
their resources on projects of common interest.

And administration officials hope to improve their ability to identify 
overlaps as part of an upgrade to the Federal Data Procurement System, 
which tracks IT buying across government (see Page 59).

The problem is that redundancy comes in shades of gray, not in black and 
white. Although it's convenient to discuss the federal government as if it 
were a single entity, individual departments have developed their own way 
of doing work, based on the particulars of their mission, and their IT 
systems reflect those differences.

No doubt OMB will be able to streamline IT spending in e-government, 
homeland security and other areas, but OMB officials also might meet some 
justifiably stiff resistance. It brings to mind the struggles many agencies 
have had with commercial off-the-shelf software.

Common sense says agencies will save money and avoid trouble if they use 
commercial software as it was designed, rather than customize it. 
Unfortunately, the more complex the software, the less often this plan 
works. Witness the continuing problems agencies have had buying financial 
management software in recent years.

At what point does the need to reduce spending override the interests of 
individual agencies? That is a question OMB officials will have to ask 
repeatedly as they trim spending, and they should not expect simple answers.

It's not a perfect system. But perhaps the perfect system is one that 
tolerates imperfections.
*************************
Federal Computer Week
Homeland strategy sets IT agenda

The National Strategy for Homeland Security released last week shows how 
heavily the Bush administration is counting on technology to improve the 
nation's ability to collect, analyze and disseminate information.

The strategy identifies six critical areas  such as improving intelligence, 
protecting critical infrastructure and defending against catastrophic 
threats  and lists the major initiatives essential to each one.

Technology permeates the list  with initiatives as varied as creating a 
secure videoconferencing capability for communications between first 
responders and federal officials and creating "smart borders" using 
databases and biometrics.

Most programs listed  such as developing a secure data-sharing system for 
federal, state and local law enforcement and biometrics for border 
control  are already under way.

It is not surprising that the homeland security strategy focuses so much on 
technology, said Phil Anderson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic 
and International Studies (CSIS).

"Technology in large part is going to help us solve this problem," he said. 
"Everywhere you look, there are enormous advantages that can be gained 
through the use of technology."

Some of the technology essential to the strategy will require more research 
and development, particularly in the area of sensors and surveillance, but 
many of the requirements can be met with existing technology. "Most of the 
stuff is already on the shelf," Anderson said.

Connecting the Dots

The strategy follows close on the heels of the administration's plan for 
creating a Homeland Security Department, drawing together nearly two dozen 
agencies involved with national security. The national strategy takes the 
first close look at the information that is necessary to support the 
functions performed by those organizations.

"There's less focus here on moving boxes, and more on integrating 
information," said Don Kettl, executive director of the Century 
Foundation's Working Group on Federalism Challenges in Homeland Security. 
"There's a focus on connecting the dots through connecting the information."

Beyond the initiatives in each mission area, information sharing and 
systems form one of the four foundations of the national strategy. The 
strategy outlines five major initiatives in which technology will support 
homeland security:

* Integrate information sharing across the federal government.

* Integrate information sharing across state and local governments, private 
industry and citizens.

* Adopt common metadata standards for keeping track of data stored in 
databases across government.

* Improve public safety emergency communications.

* Ensure reliable public health information.

Information sharing is important to crossing boundaries that are in place 
at the federal, state and local levels, said Steve Cooper, senior director 
of information integration and chief information officer at the Office of 
Homeland Security.

The IT section of the strategy essentially provides "an overall charter or 
business strategy" for making that happen, he said.

One aspect of the IT plan that is likely to cause a lot of "interesting" 
discussion is the concept of databases of record, Cooper said. The idea is 
to identify or develop databases across government to serve as the official 
resources in certain topic areas, so that someone looking for particular 
information knows where to turn.

The strategy also outlines plans to develop metadata standards for 
"communities of practice" that cut across agency boundaries, such as first 
responders and law enforcement. These standards, likely based on Extensible 
Markup Language, will help users organize and search the information in 
agencies' databases.

The Office of Homeland Security has already formed several working groups 
to look at the legal and policy issues that might be involved, Cooper said. 
One hurdle is accommodating the information needs of particular agencies.

For example, much of the information that the FBI gathers is not 
intelligence, but evidence, and is closely held for use in prosecuting 
cases. Would, or should, the FBI begin to share such information?

Another hurdle, though, is the requirements to balance homeland security 
requirements with privacy and civil liberties, observers say.

"If the data is all from criminal histories or on foreign nationals from 
suspect countries, it may not be a problem," said Jim Harper, a lawyer who 
operates the privacy advocacy Web site Privacilla.org. "But if it's a big 
database accessible to lots and lots of people," and it contains 
information about people not suspected of being terrorists, that could be a 
problem, he said.

But both civil liberties and security advocates will have to be patient as 
the technology and policy come together and the information from across all 
levels of government and industry is consolidated or linked, Cooper said.

"Part of getting the balance right will be a bit of a pendulum, and I don't 
think that we're going to be able to nail it perfectly right out of the 
box," he said.

Building Blueprints

The federal government has taken steps to enable information sharing by 
developing an enterprise architecture that shows how different systems 
supporting homeland security will work together.

This initiative will build on the federal enterprise architecture already 
created by the Office of Management and Budget, although it must also 
include national security and intelligence agencies, Cooper said.

Federal officials are also working with the National Association of State 
Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) to get input on the architecture from 
the first-responder community.

Several NASCIO members had a conference call with officials from the Office 
of Homeland Security earlier this month to discuss different approaches to 
working together on this issue, and the two groups plan to meet 
face-to-face in mid-August, according to Elizabeth Miller, executive 
director for NASCIO.

Through its e-government strategy and the annual budget process, OMB also 
is pushing agencies to collaborate on technology initiatives. The emphasis 
on developing joint business cases will be enforced for homeland security 
investments as well, said Mark Forman, associate director for IT and 
e-government at OMB.

OMB has approved three homeland security-related pilot projects, which will 
last three to six months, to prove the concept of information sharing and 
joint investments, Cooper said. They are:

* Virtually consolidating or linking the many terrorist watch lists in 
existence at multiple agencies.

* Creating a homeland security portal for users at all levels of government 
to access and link to key subject areas, such as critical infrastructure 
protection.

* Developing a 10-state system to share and analyze sensitive information 
related to law enforcement among federal, state and local agencies.

Still Sketchy Picture

Those ideas are why the IT aspect of the national strategy is the most 
detailed  and therefore complex  part of the strategy, Kettl said. But 
every part of the national strategy still needs many more details before it 
can be considered complete, experts say.

"A strategy should lead to a plan or plans" for executing the strategy, 
said CSIS' Anderson.

"What we have here is the commander's intent," he said. What is still 
needed is "a detailed plan that states how it is going to be accomplished."

It will probably be left to the proposed Homeland Security Department to 
develop that plan, Anderson said. "What's missing is a pretty good 
articulation of the threat," Anderson said of the president's strategy. 
"There may be one that's classified," but a threat assessment is essential 
for developing the "operations plan" needed to execute the strategy, he said.
***************************
Federal Computer Week
OMB puts hold on homeland IT

The Office of Management and Budget last week froze more than $1 billion 
worth of information technology projects being planned at major agencies 
that would be shifted to the proposed Homeland Security Department.

OMB, which is helping to create an integrated IT infrastructure for the 
proposed department, needs time to sift through agencies' plans and 
identify redundancies, said Mark Forman, OMB's associate director for IT 
and e-government.

The freeze, explained in a July 19 memo, affects new IT investments of more 
than $500,000 at the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast 
Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Immigration and 
Naturalization Service and other agencies.

The hold will remain pending a review of each investment plan, which could 
take days or weeks, by an interagency board that will recommend reductions 
and consolidations, Forman said.

Agency leaders must cease their investments and identify any current or 
planned IT spending not already included in the fiscal 2003 budget request. 
This information must be provided to OMB no later than Aug. 15.

Ongoing programs, such as the Customs Service's $1.3 billion Automated 
Commercial Environment, will not be affected, according to OMB. Plans for 
new homeland security-related projects, though, will be scrutinized to see 
if existing systems could meet those requirements.

"Things that are under way are exactly the kind of things that we want to 
leverage," Forman said.

Investments under consideration include:

* $26 million for Customs' Integrated Network.

* $91 million for the Coast Guard's National Distress and Response System 
Modernization Project.

* $1 billion for TSA's IT Managed Services contract.

Any emergency procurements that an agency cannot have held up will be 
reviewed by OMB within 24 hours, Forman said.

Because TSA's planned procurement will supply the new agency's basic IT 
infrastructure, a rapid but thorough review of TSA's needs against existing 
investments at other agencies is at the top of the review group's to-do 
list. Many decisions, including some of TSA's investments, will likely be 
made before the Aug. 15 deadline, Forman said.

TSA officials did not have any comment, but Ronald Miller, FEMA's chief 
information officer, said he supports the approach taken by OMB and the 
Office of Homeland Security.

"I think our first obligation should be...to use our resources wisely, 
which requires us to take a comprehensive look, and No. 2, to ensure we can 
find quick victories?best of breed solutions and use that as the foundation 
for the whole department," Miller said.

The cultural problems that will arise as program officials find out which 
investments will be combined or cut will be the hardest hurdle to overcome, 
said Roger Baker, former CIO at the Commerce Department and now an 
executive vice president at CACI International Inc.

"Every reasonable IT person in government knows there is substantial 
overlap and redundancy, but they're always hoping that it's not their 
program that is considered redundant," he said.

An overriding concern is that the reviews could stand in the way of 
necessary modernization efforts, said David Colton, vice president for 
strategic initiatives at the Information Technology Association of America. 
"Bean counting on the redundancies is important, but it should not be the 
top priority," he said.
*************************
Federal Computer Week
Federal Computer Week Policy briefs

GSA sets up performance office

The General Services Administration has established an office that will 
oversee agencywide efforts to improve performance and incorporate the 
President's Management Agenda into GSA's practices, the agency announced 
last week.

GSA Administrator Stephen Perry named Boyd Rutherford as the associate 
administrator of the new Office of Performance Improvement. The office will 
lead the implementation of the initiatives developed during the past year 
when GSA evaluated its management processes, including a study performed by 
Accenture to determine the impact of overlap between the agency's two 
contracting services.

After the evaluation, GSA set six agencywide strategic goals for 
performance improvement, closely mirroring the goals of the President's 
Management Agenda.

E-Authentication RFI released

GSA last week released a request for information for the proposed 
governmentwide gateway to authenticate users for e-government services.

GSA is the lead agency on the e-Authentication initiative, one of 24 
cross-agency initiatives overseen by the Office of Management and Budget as 
part of the President's Management Agenda. The gateway would consolidate 
the validation of multiple levels of authentication  such as a password or 
digital certificate  through a single interface that could be used to 
access other cross-agency services.

The RFI, released July 12, outlines nine areas where the GSA team wants 
input from industry on the best solution to meet the government's needs. 
The team is looking for advice on matters ranging from potential 
acquisition strategies and types of credentials to privacy concerns and Web 
technologies.

Responses to the RFI are due by Aug. 8 and must address all nine areas.
**************************
Federal Computer Week
Liars unmasked
A Legal View

The federal False Statements Act has been law in this country for nearly 
100 years. During that time, dozens of companies and individuals have been 
prosecuted for lying to government officials. However, those numbers are 
nothing compared to the explosion in prosecutions we're seeing now.

Federal law enforcement agencies are using computers and advanced data 
mining techniques to find and prosecute people who lie to government 
officials. Moreover, federal prosecutors are finding the law to be a handy 
tool for pursuing people in a variety of situations in which violations of 
other, more specific laws may be more difficult to prove.

The False Statements Act applies to every matter within the jurisdiction of 
every executive, legislative and judicial agency of the U.S. government. 
Under the act, it is a crime for any person:

* To knowingly and willfully falsify, conceal or cover up by any trick, 
scheme or device any material fact.

* To make any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or 
representation.

* To make or use any false writing or document knowing the same to contain 
any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or entry.

Punishment for a violation may include fines and imprisonment for up to 
five years.

In one recent example, the Justice Department used the act to arrest 
airport security guards who had used false Social Security cards when 
applying for employment. The case began with an Immigration and 
Naturalization Service review of computer records for more than 11,000 
individuals at a single location, leading to the identification of about 
200 suspects. Of these, 33 people working in the most sensitive areas of 
the airport were selected for indictment.

In the same way, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is using its 
extensive computer database of corporate financial information and 
sophisticated analytical systems to identify companies that may have filed 
materially false or misleading financial statements.

The government may choose to prosecute the companies, the individuals 
responsible or both. In fact, the SEC recently took steps that would make 
such prosecutions of company chief executive officers and chief financial 
officers easier by requiring them to personally certify in writing, under 
oath and for publication, that their most recent reports filed with the SEC 
are both accurate and complete.

The False Statements Act does not require a statement to be sworn, or 
signed under oath, to support a prosecution. But, as a practical matter, it 
is much easier for a prosecutor to persuade a jury to convict the accused 
when the allegedly false statement was made under oath.

The False Statements Act has always been a favorite tool of many federal 
prosecutors. Advances in information technology are making its use even 
more effective. As a consequence, prosecutions under the act can be 
expected to soar.
***************************
Federal Computer Week
Feds endorse guide for Windows security

New benchmarks published last week by a broad coalition of federal and 
private organizations could vastly improve the security of systems 
throughout government agencies, experts say.

The first step in that process is a set of security configuration 
recommendations called Consensus Baseline Security Settings for Microsoft 
Corp. Windows 2000 Professional. They are designed to help agencies ensure 
that their Windows-based workstations are properly configured to protect 
against external and internal cyberattacks.

Moreover, this initiative could serve as a model for future benchmarks that 
could be applied to other network protocols and systems, proponents say.

Predefined security settings will take some of the burden of securing 
systems off the shoulders of overworked systems administrators, who also 
may lack an in-depth knowledge of network security, said John Gilligan, 
chief information officer for the Air Force.

"Increasingly, software products are [becoming more] complicated with large 
numbers of settings," Gilligan said. "Often, administrators have to set the 
software for security. Putting this extra burden on over-tasked systems 
administrators who don't have the proper [security] insight is not the way 
to go."

Too often, security breaches in both the public and private sectors are 
caused by software running on network devices that have not been configured 
with appropriate security settings or lack the latest fixes and updates 
that would prevent new security vulnerabilities. About 80 percent of the 
successful penetrations of government systems are due to attackers 
exploiting vulnerabilities, Gilligan said.

The baseline security settings "give systems administrators the tools to 
implement standards that can be easily updated as they learn about new 
threats," said Richard Clarke, special adviser to the president for 
cyberspace security. The collaboration also demonstrates how the proposed 
Homeland Security Department should unfold, he added, with the private 
sector and government working together to protect the nation's critical 
infrastructures.

Agencies can protect their systems by downloading the benchmarks, free of 
charge, from the Center for Internet Security (www.cisecurity.org).

All Air Force installations will deploy the benchmark and scoring tool, 
Gilligan said, adding that all CIOs in the federal government should plan 
on doing so, though their participation is not mandated.

"I would also endorse continuation of the collaboration [between federal 
agencies and the private sector] to address a broader set of products" for 
the future, he said. Results of this collaboration can be shared with 
software vendors, so off-the-shelf software will conform to the security 
baselines, he added.

***

Windows lockdown

The Consensus Baseline Security Settings for Microsoft Corp. Windows 2000 
Professional workstations were developed and endorsed by a broad group of 
Windows security experts from key government and industry organizations.

Participants included:

* General Services Administration

* National Institute of Standards and Technology

* Defense Information Systems Agency

* National Security Agency

* SANS Institute

* Center for Internet Security
*****************************
Federal Computer Week
Building smarter borders

The Bush strategy for homeland security includes "smart borders," an idea 
that will drastically change the way U.S. borders -- land, sea and air -- 
will be managed for people and goods entering and leaving the United States.

The administration envisions a layered management system that enables a 
better screening system for vehicles, people and goods. It will require 
more technology to screen out potential terrorists and their weapons.

And it won't be a moment too soon, according to George Weise, the former 
Customs Service Commissioner (1993-97) who is now vice president of global 
trade compliance at Vasteria, a global technology solutions company.

He says there is little interaction between computer systems at Customs, 
the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Transportation Security 
Agency and others. And a reorganization would help this kind of coordination.

"There is no way, however, that any one agency can have the depth and 
breadth of expertise to make the final determination of admissibility, but 
with the proper coordination, a single agency like Customs, with 
appropriate interaction and coordination with the other agencies, can make 
admissibility determinations across a wide range of issues," Weise said.

Like others involved in evaluating plans to protect the United States, 
Weise said it's essential to put Customs inspectors on foreign soil to 
inspect cargo before it is shipped to the United States.

"Placing U.S. Customs inspectors overseas can help focus attention on the 
need to examine cargo before it departs for the U.S., but also could put a 
real strain on Customs resources unless Customs' budgets are expanded," 
Weise said.
*************************
Government Computer News
OMB will consolidate Homeland Security systems work
By Dipka Bhambhani

Office of Management and Budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. today told 
agencies of the proposed Homeland Security Department to stop work on all 
IT infrastructure and modernization plans with lifecycle costs greater than 
$500,000, pending approval by a new Homeland Security IT Investment Review 
Group.

The review group, composed of CIOs from the eight agencies involved, will 
have information from agencies to decide by Aug. 15 how to consolidate 
systems that deliver the same services, potentially saving taxpayers $100 
million to $200 million over the next two years, Daniels' memo said.

"There are high-quality infrastructures available at the Customs Service 
and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the board needs to 
decide which platform to build and obviously not continue building several 
at the same time," Daniels said earlier this month at a midyear budget 
review press conference.

The agencies involved would have collectively spent at least $360 million 
on IT infrastructure by the end of fiscal 2002 and more than double that 
next fiscal year, OMB said. In fiscal 2003, four agencies plan to spend at 
least $244 million on telecommunications investments, mostly for systems 
that deliver the same service, it said .

"A worker at La Guardia [Airport] ought to be able, if he needs, to 
immediately contact somebody at the Port of Los Angeles or a border station 
in Texas," Daniels said. "The new department cannot protect Americans if 
its people cannot communicate with each other."
**************************

Lillie Coney
Public Policy Coordinator
U.S. Association for Computing Machinery
Suite 510
2120 L Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20037
202-478-6124
lillie.coney@xxxxxxx