Clips 3/21/02

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips March 21, 2002

ARTICLES

Wireless Firms Resigned on NextWave, Seek Airwaves
Clarke: President?s IT budget puts money behind policy
E-Mail-Deleting Governor Sued
Web Porn Crackdown Widens
Voice Recognition Leaps Into Appliances
Hackers Deface Thousands Of Domains Parked At Verisign
'Social Engineering' Spreads New Plague of Web Chat Viruses
UK Publisher Plans Giant Research Web Site 
Senator urges FBI not to eliminate computer security center 
House passes contractor telecommuting bill 
White House orders agencies to remove sensitive info from Web 
Big Potential From Small Things 
INS Official Wants More Input From Contractors 
N.W. Side man charged as hacker 
Five Chip Makers to Work on Semiconductors
FBI considering changes to cyber-security unit
Smaller WorldCom tops in complaints of slamming
INS details broken process
Debating e-gov: curtail or proceed?
Bill proposes 'high-tech guard'
GAO: Agencies struggle with IT architectures
Finding Pay Dirt in Scannable Driver's Licenses
A Proper Table for Passover, Then Easter
Grinding Terror or Grand Adventure: Choose Your War
Batteries Promise Not to Fade Before the Light Does
Finally, a Way to Itemize Star Trek Memorabilia
A Concrete That Percolates, Keeping Snow and Spies at Bay
Technology briefs: Top Layer releases tool to fight DOS attacks
New web controls to protect children
UK slow to close digital divide
Women beat men in web browsing
The Rising Tide Of Spam: More than ever, a big drain on our time and money
Hacker suspect sent to jail after hearing
Send an e-mail, go to jail
E-gov projects likely to end up in a bell curve
New technology to transmit video without wires through home
Love at first site Create your own Web page with inexpensive and easy-to-use
design sites
The truth behind PC sales figures: Does everybody really have one?
ICANN's problems more than bickering
Amazon boosts service to Germany and U.K.

**************
Reuters
Wireless Firms Resigned on NextWave, Seek Airwaves

ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) - U.S. wireless carriers said this week they were
resigned to the fact they will not get access anytime soon to airwaves tied up
in a bankruptcy dispute and called on the government to find other airwaves so
new services can be deployed and expanded. 

  
A huge swath of airwaves for major metropolitan areas like New York and Los
Angeles held by NextWave Telecom , a carrier trying to emerge from bankruptcy,
are at the center of a legal dispute expected to last for at least another
year. 

Established carriers like Verizon Wireless, VoiceStream and others are
scrounging for more airwaves to meet rising demand -- about 45 percent of
Americans already own a mobile phone -- and to roll out wireless high-speed
Internet services that include streaming video and interactive games. 

"We need a meaningful amount of clear spectrum in order to be able to offer
third-generation services and unless the government makes more spectrum
available, America is falling behind," John Stanton, chief executive officer of
VoiceStream Wireless, a unit of Deutsche Telekom , said in an interview. 

"We can't wait to figure out whether or not we've got that (NextWave) spectrum
to take steps to improve quality of service or continue to increase capacity to
service our customers," he said. 

The government is engaged in a wide search for airwaves it uses that could be
switched to commercial use, however Federal Communications Commission (news -
web sites) Chairman Michael Powell likened the search to the infantryman's
crawl he knows from his days in the military. 

"It's just messy, there's nothing clean about this," he said at the Cellular
Telecommunications and Internet Association annual conference this week. 

Tom Wheeler, CTIA chief executive officer and the industry's top lobbyist,
retorted that the government needs to quicken (news - web sites) the pace to a
"blitzkrieg" effort. 

The U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) has agreed to weigh in on whether the
FCC (news - web sites) can legally repossess licenses for mobile telephone
service from NextWave because the carrier failed to pay on time, a process that
will take about a year. 

The FCC resold the licenses in an auction last year to other carriers for
$15.85 billion, taking about $3.2 billion in deposits, but the sale was thrown
into limbo in June when an appeals court ruled the FCC could not repossess the
licenses from NextWave, which had already filed for bankruptcy, simply because
of nonpayment. 

Because of the protracted legal wrangling, the carriers want their money back
and want the government to concentrate on finding other spectrum. 

"I don't think we have any choice" but to wait it out, said Harvey White,
chairman and chief executive of Leap Wireless Inc. , one bidder in the NextWave
auction. "I don't think there's anything we can do to influence that." 

Cingular Wireless Chief Executive Officer Stephen Carter said the licenses its
partner, Salmon PCS, would acquire if the legal wrangling came to an end would
boost Cingular's capacity as service expands. 

The NextWave spectrum "was always a bonus to us," he told Reuters. Cingular,
the No. 2 U.S. carrier, is a joint venture of BellSouth Corp. and SBC
Communications Inc. . 

Verizon Wireless, the biggest U.S. wireless carrier, has said it considers its
participation in the NextWave auction void. The carrier bid $8.5 billion for 67
disputed licenses. 

Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group
Plc , has tried different ways to either acquire the licenses or recover the
$1.71 billion down payment it deposited with the FCC for the licenses. The
agency has not acted and a court so far has refused to compel the FCC to return
the funds. 
**************
Government Computer Week
Clarke: President?s IT budget puts money behind policy

Presidential cybersecurity adviser Richard Clarke, speaking to industry
representatives at the FOSE trade show in Washington today, said 8 percent of
the $52 billion proposed fiscal 2003 IT budget is earmarked for security.
Executive branch officials are prohibited from soliciting the private sector to
lobby Congress for budget approval, Clarke said, ?so I will not say to you that
it would be helpful.? The budget request is the result of major changes in the
federal budget process, Clarke said. For the first time, the Office of
Management and Budget took agencies? IT security needs into account when
evaluating budget requests. Budgets that did not address security deficiencies
were sent back, and money in funding requests was shifted around by OMB, Clarke
said. He would not say just what changes were made. ?I?m not going to name
names of federal departments we did this to,? Clarke said. The General
Accounting Office, Congress?s investigative arm, has complained about the lack
of such information from the executive branch. In its recent evaluation of
agency implementation of the Government Information Security Reform Act, GAO
said the lack of information about remedial plans has hampered Congress?s
ability to oversee compliance with GISRA. Clarke also stumped for proposed
amendments to the Freedom of Information Act that would exempt private-sector
IT security information submitted to federal authorities from FOIA exposure.
*****************
Wired News
E-Mail-Deleting Governor Sued

SALT LAKE CITY -- Four news organizations have sued Gov. Mike Leavitt,
contending he is illegally destroying his e-mail. 

Leavitt's deletion of electronic documents amounts to destroying public
records, the lawsuit filed Tuesday contends.

The governor is "depriving the public of its constitutional right of access to
information concerning the conduct of the public's business," The Salt Lake
Tribune, Salt Lake City Weekly and television stations KUTV and KTVX said. 

Leavitt spokeswoman Natalie Gochnour said the governor had not had time to
review the lawsuit, but said, "We believe we are abiding by the law. We
basically view e-mail much like a conversation." 

In 1998, a federal judge ruled that the White House cannot erase computer
files, including e-mail, without first announcing its intentions and giving
researchers at the National Archives time to protest. 

The Utah dispute started last year when the Tribune asked for paper and digital
correspondence from the governor's office concerning congressional
redistricting. 

Leavitt's lawyer, Gary Doxey, turned down the request and said he advised the
governor to routinely destroy e-mails, many of which Doxey said were personal. 

The governor told the Tribune in November that he deleted all his e-mail after
three days. 

"It's something I decided several years ago after conferring with my counsel,"
Leavitt said. "In this job, I just deal with too many sensitive issues." 

City Weekly Managing Editor Christopher Smart said the demand that Leavitt save
official records is "common sense and reasonable.... It's clear we don't seek
to know about his personal communications." 

Rebecca Daugherty of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in
Arlington, Virginia, said whether the e-mail should be preserved depends on its
content. 

"If these are records that have to do with conduct of government, they ought to
be preserved the same way paper records are preserved," Daugherty said. 

She said it wouldn't apply to a governor's e-mail asking a staffer to bring him
or her a cup of coffee. 
******************
Associated Press
Web Porn Crackdown Widens 

WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States and 10 other countries executed search
warrants on people suspected of exchanging child pornography over the Internet,
the Customs Service announced Wednesday.

In the United States, the targets of the investigation included a U.S. military
pilot, a registered nurse, a network administration for a publishing company
and an artist, Customs said. Search warrants involving eight people were
executed in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Nevada, Oregon and Alaska.

From the searches, Customs agents seized 12 computers, more than 600 CDs,
floppy disks and external computer drives, hundreds of videos, a digital
camcorder and a book on how to seduce children, the agency said.

One arrest was made in the United States, the agency said. The government said
that three of the individuals being targeted in the investigation had been
members of the wonderland child pornography ring that was broken up in 1998.

At the same time, search warrants were issued by the United Kingdom, Canada,
France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Japan, Finland, Austria and Sweden,
Customs said.

The investigation, dubbed Operation Artus, began in November 2001, when agents
of the German National Police, using evidence gathered from a search warrant,
discovered that a German man had been exchanging child pornography over the
Internet, Customs said. The man provided nicknames of some members of a group
that German authorities believed were involved in the exchange of child
pornography.

As a result of the German investigation, law enforcement authorities were able
to identify eight people in the United States that the U.S. government believes
are involved in the child pornography ring, Customs said. Other people outside
the United States were also being targeted by other countries for their alleged
involvement in the ring.

Customs said that "a common aim of members was to find and exchange child
pornography in DVD quality movie file format. As a requirement, members had to
offer new child pornography material from time to time to remain part of the
group," Customs said.

Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner said the investigation "is yet another
example of how important international cooperation is to solving these types of
cases."

The action comes after the FBI (news - web sites) this week said it expects to
arrest at least 50 more people by week's end as it busts up an Internet
child-pornography ring that allegedly included two Catholic priests and six
other members of the clergy.

The agency said Monday its "Operation Candyman" sweep already had resulted in
criminal charges against more than 89 people in 26 states. The effort targeted
members of three Internet discussion groups on Yahoo Inc.'s Web site, including
one called "Candyman," apparently named after a song in the 1971 children's
movie "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory."
****************
New York Times
Voice Recognition Leaps Into Appliances

BE careful what you say around the house. Your appliances may be listening.

Voice control, long the stuff of science fiction and computer lab experiments,
is popping up in more and more mundane household devices like clock radios, MP3
players, television remotes, telephones and light switches. You no longer have
to push buttons or twist dials to listen to music or brew coffee: you simply
tell your appliances what you want, and through built-in microphones and
microprocessors they understand and obey your commands. 

These low-end voice controls are not designed for space travel but rather to
make everyday devices easier to use. A voice- activated television remote, for
example, can spare you from having to remember hundreds of channel numbers. And
even relatively simple voice-controlled devices like light switches can be a
boon to people with physical disabilities or with poorly placed wall switches
in their basements.

And yes, voice control is also kind of fun. 

"Sometimes voice control doesn't really start from a need  it starts as a
feature," said William Meisel, the publisher of Speech Recognition Update, a
monthly newsletter. "Manufacturers say, `This is a feature that will make us
look high-tech and distinguish us from the other guys without costing us too
much.' "

It is a feature that could find its way into many more living rooms and
kitchens. Todd Mozer, chief executive of Sensory, a company based in Santa
Clara, Calif., that makes specialized speech recognition chips for appliances,
said that more than 15 million such devices had been sold worldwide. If you
include cellphones with voice-dialing, the estimate rises to 100 million.

After seeing ads for a number of voice- activated appliances, I started to
fantasize about never having to lift a finger around the house. I wanted to
give orders to my appliances. They would listen and obey. I would be king of
the house. The clock radio, the television set, the lamps  all would be my
trusty servants. 

Speech recognition existed at Bell Laboratories in the 1950's, but it did not
appear commercially feasible until 1967, when A. J. Viterbi, a professor of
engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles, introduced an
algorithm that helped digital signal processors match voice patterns to data
stored in a computer's memory.

In the 1970's, speech recognition appeared in systems built for the phone
company and the Defense Department, but it was not until the 1980's that
voice-controlled devices began to enter the home, at first in the form of toys.
For example, the Julie doll, released in 1987 by Worlds of Wonder, turned her
head when her name was spoken. 

Other voice-activated appliances were sold in the 1980's and 90's, but until
recently the digital signal processors remained expensive, about $20 a unit.
Today a general-purpose chip like the RSC-364 from Sensory costs as little as
$1. The prices have fallen so far so fast that some manufacturers can't resist
adding voice activation as a gee-whiz component. 

I sampled six such devices, all recently released. VOS Systems offers a
voice-operated dimmer switch for lamps for $35 and a voice-activated module for
appliances for $30 that can be used with any AC device. KashNGold's InVoca line
includes a voice-activated clock radio for $100 and a television remote control
for $100. Then there is the Gigaset 4215 voice-controlled wireless phone from
Siemens ($180) and a $239 voice- controlled MP3 player, the MXP 100 Sport from
e.Digital. 

I tried the VOS appliance module first. After glancing at the manual, I plugged
a lamp into the device and the module into a wall outlet. My wife came into the
room just as I said, "Lights." The lamp turned on! Buoyed by that success, I
hooked up the television remote and the lamp dimmer switch in the living room
and the clock radio in the bedroom. The appliance module was dispatched to a
boombox in the kitchen.

As it turns out, these devices have to be taught to respond to commands, and
the procedure is slightly different for each appliance. That typically involves
saying a keyword three or four times until the device is satisfied that it can
pick it out in a noisy room. For example, training the television remote
required punching in each channel number, then repeating the keyword I chose
for that channel. I also programmed macros, or single commands that trigger a
sequence of responses. For example, the phrase "Play tape" turned on the
television, tuned in Channel 3, turned on the VCR and pressed the Play button. 

The training process can be pretty humbling. First of all, you are talking to a
household appliance. Second, you are saying the same words over and over,
hoping to get your point across. It's embarrassing when you say something
important and somebody doesn't understand. It's even more embarrassing when
that somebody is your toaster.

I am not the first person to be taken aback by the training required for some
voice-controlled devices. "That's where a lot of people get into trouble," said
John Lockyer, a senior technical adviser at Smarthome, a home-automation and
smart-appliance retailer based in Irvine, Calif. "They expect it to be like
`Star Trek,' where voice recognition recognizes all voices, all languages, and
it knows what you want it to do. But there can be a great deal of setup time."

Even worse, some of the devices talk back. A synthesized female voice in the
television remote kept criticizing my delivery. I would utter a command like
"TV power," and she would reply, "Too soft." 

After completing the training with all of the devices, which took about three
hours, we had a peaceable kingdom. I would say, "Radio on," and the clock radio
would turn on. When I said "Sports," it would tune in a sports talk station I
had programmed. "TV power" turned on the television, and when I said
"Discovery" the cable box clicked over to the Discovery Channel.

Then the poltergeist struck. It started with the living room lamp, which would
turn on and off seemingly at will. The clock radio soon started doing the same
thing: we would come home to an empty house and find that the radio had turned
itself on and tuned in to an oldies station.

Then the sassy television remote started making programming decisions.
Something about the voice of Bernie Mac, star of the Fox sitcom of the same
name, kept making the remote switch channels. Once a movie commercial set off
the remote signal to turn up the volume. That triggered the remote again. The
set grew even louder. I managed to jump on the remote and turn it off before
the speakers exploded.

Right around that time, my wife went to visit her sister 3,000 miles away.

To find out how to control my appliances a little better, I called Mr. Mozer at
Sensory. The solution turned out to be voice spotting, a feature that Sensory
includes on its chips that involves using a keyword to get a particular
device's attention before uttering a command. 

"We had one customer who did a voice-activated fireplace," he said. "You don't
want your fireplace to accidentally go on, so there we used a gateway word. You
had to say `Superfireplace' or something like that first and then `Turn on.' "

Peace was restored in our house after I retrained the appliances by using voice
spotting. Instead of just saying "Sports" to my radio, I would first say,
"Radio." Pause. An L.E.D. on the radio turned from orange to green, showing
that it was ready to accept my command "Get sports." The radio might mistakenly
hear its keyword, but it would rarely follow that up by also mistakenly hearing
a command.

After that problem was fixed, I started to appreciate the convenience of using
voice interfaces. It's a lot easier to say "TV . . . HBO" than to remember and
punch in a two- or three-digit channel number for every channel. It's also nice
to be able to control the television while eating. 

Similarly, the Siemens Gigaset 4215 cordless telephone lets me call people
simply by pressing a button and saying a name into the mouthpiece. This is
helpful for people like me who can never remember phone numbers. The Gigaset
4215 can dial only 20 people by voice command, though; if another person in the
house trains the phone to his or her voice, the two of you get only 10 numbers
each. 

Voice dialing is being built into cellphones, too. Voice Signal Technologies,
for example, makes software for cellphone manufacturers that converts text
information into phonetic information without any user training. It can
recognize thousands of names in contact lists downloaded from your PC to your
cellphone, allowing you to dial by saying by saying "Pete Jenkins's home" or
"Maria Gonzales's cellphone."

The benefits of voice activation are most pronounced in devices that usually
require a lot of button-pushing. For example, E.digital's MXP 100 MP3 player
lets you play a song by simply uttering the title and then saying "Play." It
does this without any training by matching what you say to titles on its song
lists. I kept on trying to trip it up with song titles like "Mandolin Wind,"
but it almost always found the correct song.

People in the industry anticipate some problems as more voice-controlled
devices hit the market. The most obvious one is that such devices require their
human masters to remember dozens of commands for each device. 

"There aren't standards there in terms of the actual language that you're using
to control these devices," said Dr. Judith A. Markowitz, a speech-processing
industry analyst in Chicago. "You make up a command, and at the moment it is
the most logical command for that action. A day later you have no idea what
that command is."

Mr. Mozer said that a solution might be to have one device control all the
others. 

"Rather than having to learn a new interface and read a new manual every time
you buy a consumer electronic product, you can use this device as your
interface," he said. "So you tell it to set the microwave to high. You tell it
to record `Gilligan's Island' on TV. And it has the intelligence to come back
and say, `Hey, do you want "Gilligan's Island" with this episode or this other
episode because they're both playing today.' "

That technology may be closer than people think. Home automation products like
the HAL2000 voice control system from Home Automated Living use a Windows-based
PC and a home networking system to control appliances. HAL2000 recognizes the
owner's voice commands and even uses the PC's modem to accept voice commands
over the phone.

So not only will appliances listen to everything you say, they will even take
your phone calls.
***********************
Newsbytes
Hackers Deface Thousands Of Domains Parked At Verisign

A security breach Tuesday involving Verisign's Network Solutions unit disrupted
potentially thousands of domain customers, company officials confirmed today. 
Attackers compromised a system that hosted thousands of "parked" domains that
had been registered through Network Solutions and were still under
construction, according to a Verisign representative. 

Web surfers who typed in the address of any of the affected domains were sent
to a black page which featured an image of a mutilated rag doll and the words,
"Did Web Pirates domain your domain?" 

According to its Web server banner, the system was running Microsoft's Internet
Information Server (IIS) on Windows 2000. The server was operated by
Atlanta-based hosting firm Interland under an outsourcing agreement, according
to Verisign spokesperson Pat Burns. 

"At no time were there any issues with Verisign's domain name service," said
Burns. 

Interland officials said the problem was identified and corrected later
Tuesday, and the company is working with law enforcement to investigate the
incident. 

In an online interview Tuesday, a member of Web Pirates, a Brazilian Web
defacement group, said he only learned of the hacking incident after receiving
numerous angry e-mails from victims. 

According to the member, who uses the nickname Splash and whose ICQ profile
said he is 16, he was not aware that anyone from the group had defaced the
Interland server. 

The security incident came at a bad time for the organizers of an upcoming
conference for senior executives in Texas' technology industry, who planned to
launch their homepage at Texastechnologyconference.org Tuesday. 

"This is somewhat catastrophic to us, to tell you the truth," said conference
director Lisa Cohen, who noted that the summit is scheduled to begin April 4
and depends heavily on the Web site for publicity. 

Some Verisign customers who were affected by the hacking were surprised to
learn that the domain registration firm had outsourced the hosting of their
domains. 

"I wouldn't expect a company like Verisign to farm out domain parking. I would
think they would want to own that responsibility," said Matthew Caldwell, chief
security officer for GuardedNet, which owned an undeveloped domain affected by
the breach. 

Rick Forno, chief security advisor for Shadowlogic and the former head of
security for Network Solutions, said Verisign has begun relying on numerous
partners for services it bundles with domain sales. 

While Verisign has the ultimate responsibility to its domain customers, the
blame for the security breach falls squarely on Interland, he said. 

"Verisign may want to re-evaluate the clause in their contract that talks about
security  if there even is such a clause," said Forno. 

According to its Web site, Verisign's Network Solutions unit is the world
leader in domain name registration and related identity services. The company
said it has more than 6.2 million customers with over 13.6 million active
domains under its management. 
*****************
News Factor
'Social Engineering' Spreads New Plague of Web Chat Viruses

CERT said the reports it has received indicate intruders are using automated
tools to post messages to IRC or IM service users. 

The enticements of pornography, free software and security -- otherwise known
as "social engineering" -- that have been common among e-mail-borne computer
viruses now have spread to instant messaging (IM) and Internet Relay Chat
(IRC), according to CERT, a federally funded security center based at the
Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. 

CERT said it has received reports that "tens of thousands of systems have
recently been compromised" using "social engineering attacks" via IRC or
instant messaging. 

The attacks attempt to trick Internet chat users into downloading what purports
to be antivirus protection, improved music downloads or pornography but is
actually malicious code, the center reported. 

While use of social engineering among virus writers and hackers is nothing new,
the IRC and IM tricks have allowed thousands of computers to be taken over and
used in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks or infected with Trojan
horse or backdoor programs, according to CERT. 

"Although this activity is not novel, the technique is still effective, as
evidenced by reports of tens of thousands of systems being compromised in this
manner," CERT said in an incident note. 

CERT noted that the reports it has received indicate intruders are using
automated tools to post messages to IRC or IM users. The messages reportedly
offer the opportunity to download software but result in systems being
"co-opted by the attacker" for use in DDoS attacks or to spread malicious code.


"It's significant for a couple of reasons," CERT Internet security analyst
Allen Householder told NewsFactor. "First because of the sheer numbers -- we've
had tens of thousands of reports. 

"It's also an audience that doesn't tend to get our message," Householder
added. "This is a home user thing." 

Malicious Mainstay 

Senior director of Symantec Security Response Sharon Ruckman told NewsFactor
that both virus writers and hackers have long used social engineering to dupe
users. 

"What we've seen is that over the years, social engineering is one of the main
ways to spread any malicious activity," she said. "That's always been a method
hackers use to come in. On the virus side, it's about spreading." 

Ruckman said the best defense against falling victim to social engineering is
the transfer of "best practices" to all platforms with which users communicate,
including IRC and instant messaging. She warned users to "always be concerned
which people are giving you information." 

Social Engineering Setup 

McAfee research fellow Jimmy Kuo told NewsFactor that another trend in social
engineering with IRC networks involves picking out individuals, spamming them
with unsolicited messages, then offering a bogus spam solution that is actually
malicious code. 

Kuo said many IRC services increasingly are coming under attack as hackers try
to build "IRC bot nets," or networks of compromised systems, which are used by
hacker groups to attack one another. 

Be Suspect of Security 

While social engineering ploys have employed a number of ways of enticing users
-- pornography, personal greetings and playfulness - bogus security warnings
and advice are becoming increasingly prevalent. 

CERT said one example of recent social engineering attacks is this message:
"You are infected with a virus that lets hackers get into your machine and read
ur files, etc. I suggest you download (malicious URL) and clean ur infected
machine. Otherwise, you will be banned from (IRC network name)." 

CERT said other topics used recently to trick users include music downloads,
antivirus protection and pornography. Symantec's Ruckman noted that use of
links and files that look like legitimate URLs is also on the rise. 

New Tricks and Channels 

Ruckman added that as antivirus programs and other security measures have
improved, people spreading malicious code have had to become more creative in
their trickery or move beyond e-mail to other channels. 

He called the recent spate of social engineering attacks on IRC and IM services
an example of both possibilities. 

"It's the same idea with a slightly different spin on it on a new channel,"
Ruckman said. "We have seen more viruses trying to spread over IRC -- that's
been a trend in the last six months."  

*****************
Reuters Internet Reports
UK Publisher Plans Giant Research Web Site 

LONDON (Reuters) - Plans to create one of the biggest reference libraries on
the Internet were unveiled in Britain on Wednesday. 

  
Reference work publisher Oxford University Press hopes to publish 1.5 million
entries on 20 subjects on a subscription Web site by 2010. 

"For us to have a future as an information provider we have to be doing it on
the internet," David Swarbrick, the project director, told Reuters. 

The OUP says the Web site, http:/www.oxfordreference.com, will dwarf existing
general knowledge sources in print and could be the biggest on the Worldwide
Web. 

From astronomy to zoology, the Web site will cover everything from science and
medicine to statistics and the arts. Dictionaries, dates and quotations in four
languages will also be offered. 

About 200 people worked on the online resource, with much of the data being
transferred from books to the web in India, the OUP said. 

But the giant resource comes at a price: Annual fees start at $248.6 for
schools and rise to $4,260 for large libraries. 

The first part of the project was launched on Wednesday with 3,000 bodies
across the world already signed up for free trials. 

The OUP is the world's largest university press with its roots in the early
days of publishing in the late 15th century. 

It publishes more than 4,500 new books each year and employs 3,700 worldwide.
***************
Government Executive
Senator urges FBI not to eliminate computer security center 

FBI Director Robert Mueller is considering whether to eliminate the National
Infrastructure Protection Center, the federal government?s central coordinator
of information about threats to the nation?s transportation, communications,
finance, power and water systems, according to a letter obtained by Government
Executive.


According to the letter, which Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sent to Mueller
Tuesday, the FBI director outlined a proposal to dismantle NIPC during a
February meeting with the senator. Grassley wrote that Mueller is considering
placing one part of NIPC in the FBI?s criminal division and another in its
counterterrorism/counterintelligence division. 


In a Presidential Decision Directive issued in 1998, President Clinton
formalized NIPC?s role, saying it should ?provide a national focal point for
gathering information threats to infrastructures. The directive gives NIPC the
authority to coordinate the federal government?s response to attacks on
elements of the nation?s critical infrastructure. 


Grassley said that splitting the center?s national security and law enforcement
roles would detract from current information-sharing initiatives. Moving NIPC?s
functions primarily into the criminal division, which investigates criminal
acts after they occur, ?will only increase the problems NIPC had in the past
with quickly analyzing threat information and issuing timely and accurate
warnings,? Grassley wrote.


NIPC now gets information from a number of fledgling private sector
organizations called information sharing and analysis centers (ISACs). This
feedback is important because 90 percent of the nation?s critical
infrastructure resides in the private sector. 


Private sector sources told Government Executive that they have been wary of
working with a federal organization that is part of the FBI. ?People don?t like
to be asked questions by the FBI,? said one source who wished to remain
anonymous. Furthermore, the sources said NIPC takes information from the ISACs
but rarely provides them with legitimate warnings or analysis in return.


Grassley said in his letter that Mueller?s plan ?would destroy the fragile
trust between NIPC and the private sector ?.The broken trust would in turn
curtail, if not end, the flow of information from the private sector to the
FBI, leaving the bureau essentially blind about threats to critical
infrastructure.?


Grassley wrote that his staff has tried for two weeks to get updates about the
plan but has received no response. Mueller could make his decision by next
week. If he decides to dismantle NIPC, Grassley threatened to introduce
legislation that would remove NIPC from the FBI. 


Rumors that the Bush administration has been considering moving NIPC out of the
FBI have been circulating for about a year, the sources said. But simply moving
NIPC out of the FBI won?t solve its information sharing and communication
problems. ?It?s like talking to a brick wall up there,? one source said.


In his letter, Grassley said he ?and others in Congress would view
implementation of this plan as a classic example of FBI jurisdictional
encroachment: diverting funds and personnel from one unit with a clear mission
to other units with a very different mission, and laying primary claim to a
crime issue that is high profile, second only to terrorism, that many other
agencies handle as well,? Grassley wrote. ?If you feel the FBI needs more
resources to investigate computer and Internet crimes you should make your case
to Congress.?


According to an FBI spokesman, the agency will respond to Grassley by March 22,
as he requested in his letter.
****************
Government Executive
House passes contractor telecommuting bill 

From National Journal's Technology Daily 


House lawmakers on Wednesday overwhelming approved a measure to enable
employees of contractors who work for federal agencies to begin telecommuting.

With a vote of 421 to 0, the House approved H.R. 3924, which would allow
contract employees to begin working from home, so long as their job poses no
risk to national security.

The bill also prohibits federal agencies from refusing to hire federal
contractors because their employees work from home.

Exceptions would be made when agencies can demonstrate a specific justification
for barring telecommuting policies, such as when their contractors deal with
classified information.

Republican Reps. Dan Burton of Indiana and Tom Davis of Virginia co-sponsored
the measure. 
****************
Government Executive
White House orders agencies to remove sensitive info from Web 

From National Journal's Technology Daily 


The White House on Wednesday ordered all federal agencies to scrub their Web
sites of sensitive information on weapons of mass destruction and other data
that might be used by terrorists, according to a Washington Times report.

Late Wednesday afternoon, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card sent a memo to
agency heads and executive departments ordering an "immediate re-examination"
of public documents. The officials were told to report their findings within 90
days to the Office of Homeland Security.

Agencies also must pull "sensitive but unclassified information," according to
a second memo.

That memo--written by Laura Kimberly, acting director of the Information
Security Oversight Office, and Richard Huff and Daniel Metcalfe, co-directors
of the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy--told agencies to
also consider "the benefits that result from the open and efficient exchange of
scientific, technical, and like information."

White House officials say the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 have forced the
administration to strike a more cautious balance between openness and secrecy.
***************
Washington POst
Big Potential From Small Things 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- The next big thing to come out of this birthplace of
high tech could be small:

Think tiny molecular delivery devices for medicines.

Or "smart" dust that can monitor people without being detected.

Maybe supercomputers the size of grains of salt.

The mind-bending ideas seem straight out of works of science fiction, but some
out here think they may be possible in the near future as interest grows in
something called nanotechnology.

Literally the manipulation of atoms or molecules, nanotechnology is a sort of
"superscience" that encompasses everything from computing and materials science
to health care. Its goal is to figure out a way to reconfigure the tiny
particles to create things Mother Nature never imagined.

Just a few years ago, nanotechnology was on the fringe of respected science,
and skeptics still abound. But venture capital bigwigs are beginning to bet on
the science, and real research is underway at the NASA Ames Research Center
here. Even Washington is beginning to take notice after a series of
breakthroughs.

"The debate has shifted from 'Will it happen?' to 'When will it happen?' " said
Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute, a research institute
dedicated to nanotechnology.

Indeed, the prestigious journal Science noted that the demonstration of a
nanoscale computer circuit by industry and academic researchers was 2001's
"breakthrough of the year," surpassing even the completion of the mapping of
the human genome.

Major high-tech corporations including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola and
Raytheon have launched nanotechnology initiatives, but these giants by no means
have a monopoly on the research.

Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, said his
firm has invested $40 million over the past two years in 12 upstart
nanotechnology and related ventures. Much of the funding has gone to those
working on shrinking electronics, but he's personally interested in companies
that research mechanical-biological hybrids, such as those using a
hemoglobin-like substance to make dense computer chips.

"All the great unknowns of science revolve around nanotech in many ways," said
Jurvetson, who has three pictures of atoms on a wall of his office in Redwood
City and uses words such as "magic" and "mystery" to describe the field.

The Bush administration has become so interested in the potential of the field
that it has earmarked $604 million this year for nanotechnology research and
development. That's up 43 percent from the 2001 budget. In one of the
government's biggest public displays of its faith in the technology, the
Pentagon recently announced that it would spend $50 million over the next five
years to create a new laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
to focus on creating nanotech gear for soldiers.

The research is increasingly important here in the heart of the high-tech world
because companies are reaching the limit of how small they can make silicon
chips. Without miniaturization, some say, the technology revolution could be
stalled, and next-generation devices such as "chemistry labs on chips" --
capable of instantly analyzing soil samples or rocks on other planets -- would
never be built.

For NASA, making things smaller and lighter is important because of how much it
costs to carry stuff into space.

Meyya Meyyappan, who oversees about 60 scientists on NASA's nanotech team at
the Ames Research Center, said his ultimate goal is to build what he calls a
"thinking spacecraft" -- one with enough computing power on board so it can
"make autonomous decisions so we don't need to control everything from
Houston."

That's critical for a successful manned mission to Mars. It costs $100,000 per
pound to get something there, meaning that carrying a Cray computer is out of
the question. And it's impractical to try to relay computations from Earth to
Mars because it takes the signal 20 minutes to get from one point to another,
and 20 minutes to get a response back.

"If we don't make things smaller," Meyyappan said, "we won't be able to go on
any new missions."

The recent breakthroughs in nanotechnology have also prompted worries from many
prominent scientists, such as Sun Microsystems' Bill Joy. They compare it to
atomic research in the 1950s and today's mammal-cloning efforts. They point to
nightmare scenarios such as the one in Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel "Cat's
Cradle." The story's scientist had discovered a way to stack up water molecules
to make ice solid at room temperature. But the molecules somehow get loose and
end up freezing the world's oceans.

NASA's Meyyappan calls this the "scary part" of the science but dismisses it as
nothing more than a "Hollywood story."

"Pretty much everything man has made since the dawn of civilization he has been
able to control," he said.
****************
Washington Post
INS Official Wants More Input From Contractors 

The Immigration and Naturalization Service might have one of the most
sophisticated and efficient systems in the world for handling its more than 25
million paper files. 

But "my job is putting our National Records Center out of business," said
assistant commissioner for IRM Scott Hastings at a breakfast presentation this
morning at FOSE 2002. 

INS has been taking its lumps lately for slow processing of information to law
enforcement agencies, such as data about the Sept. 11 terrorists. But Hastings,
bolstered by his boss, CIO George Bollinger, said systems and processes in
place at INS should result in effective automation efforts. 

"We already have an enterprise architecture plan and a capital planning
process," Hastings said. "Our challenge is maintaining the discipline of that
construct and delivering results tomorrow." 

He said two things must happen for interagency data sharing and e-government
projects to succeed. First, agency executives and industry must present a
united front to Congress to get past a stovepiped appropriations process. 

"Policy-makers listen to us individually. We need critical recommendations
jointly endorsed and put forward. We need to do this in self defense if nothing
else." 

Second, industry must get past a work-order mentality and tell an agency when
it issues poor specs. 

Bollinger said that one agencywide software release required 23 versions in the
first year because of change orders resulting from bureaus each wanting local
bells and whistles. 

"The contractor should have said, 'You haven't gotten your requirements right.'
" Bollinger said. "That's an obligation contractors have. You need to tell us
how to do it right, not just give us what we ask for." 

Hastings said that when a request for proposals is issued for INS' planned
Exit/Entry System, he hoped contractors would propose end-to-end systems, not
simply pieces of technology. 

Reported by Government Computer News, http://www.gcn.com. 
****************
Chicago Sun-Times
N.W. Side man charged as hacker 

A 19-year-old Polish national from the Northwest Side has been charged with
crippling a mid-size Canadian Internet service provider, authorities said
Wednesday.

Andrzej Maj, with help from accomplices, shut down OA Group Inc., based in
Edmonton, for most of a day in August 2000 after becoming angered at one of the
Internet firms using the service provider, authorities allege.

The assault is called a "denial of service attack," in which the Internet
service provider is flooded with requests to its servers. The servers can't
cope and shut down.

Authorities were unable to provide an estimate of how much the attack cost the
service provider.

The new charges against Maj are in addition to those made last year accusing
him of buying five diamonds over the Internet for more than $14,000 using a
stolen credit card number. 

In all, investigators found about 1,000 stolen credit card numbers on Maj's
computer, authorities said.

Maj allegedly set up a phony company to take delivery of the diamonds and then
sold some of them over the Internet through eBay.

Prosecutors say Maj admitted that the sole purpose of the firm he created was
to deal in stolen merchandise.

Not all of the customers were satisfied. Maj put up for sale at least one of
the diamonds multiple times, prosecutors allege. He would keep checks but not
ship the product to the buyers.

Maj is being held without bond as a flight risk, Assistant U.S. Attorney Barry
Miller said.

The investigation involved cooperation among FBI agents, the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police and U.S. postal inspectors.
*****************
Los Angeles Times
Five Chip Makers to Work on Semiconductors

Toshiba Corp., NEC Corp. and three other Japanese chip makers will jointly
develop technology that will shrink the size of semiconductors and boost
efficiency, part of a move to compete against foreign rivals. With the aid of
government money, Toshiba, NEC, Hitachi Ltd., Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and
Fujitsu Ltd. will work together to shrink the size of the circuitry on
semiconductors, packing more functions and information-handling capacity on
smaller pieces of silicon wafers.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the five companies will choose
one domestic factory to build labs and prototype-producing lines as early as
May. The ministry will spend $238 million to buy equipment for the factory but
has no intention of owning shares in the venture. Each chip maker is spending
millions to shrink circuit features on chips, a process typically requiring
huge investments in research and development.
****************
USA Today
FBI considering changes to cyber-security unit

WASHINGTON (AP)  The FBI is considering important changes to its premier
cyber-security unit, responsible for protecting the nation's most important
computer networks, but indicated Wednesday it won't dismantle the unit as some
in Congress and the Bush administration have feared.

FBI Director Robert Mueller has outlined a plan on Capitol Hill in recent weeks
to break up the $27 million-a-year National Infrastructure Protection Center,
formed in February 1998 to watch over the nation's systems controlling banking,
water, power, telecommunications and government, congressional and
administration sources said Wednesday. They added that they expected Mueller to
make a formal decision as early as next week.

The proposal affecting the unit, whose reputation has improved markedly in the
past year after a string of early embarrassments, quickly raised concerns among
some lawmakers, Bush administration officials and industry experts. They
worried that a narrow focus by the FBI on criminal investigations into computer
attacks might discourage corporations from disclosing details of threats and
attacks on their private networks.

Such a move "would destroy the fragile trust between NIPC and the private
sector, which controls 90% of the nation's critical infrastructure," Sen.
Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote this week in a letter to the FBI director.
"The broken trust would, in turn, curtail, if not end, the flow of information
from the private sector to the FBI, leaving the bureau essentially blind about
threats to critical infrastructure."

But the FBI said late Wednesday it has no plans to dismantle the unit, which
Assistant FBI Director John Collingwood praised as "a vital part of the overall
cyber-effort, especially with its many ties to the private sector."

Collingwood said Mueller met with Grassley and many others to discuss the
unit's future, and said the FBI director "will have further discussions before
making any final decisions on how best to configure FBI headquarters."

The FBI director in December reorganized the bureau's headquarters, creating a
new cyber-crime division under a new executive assistant director for criminal
investigations, Bruce J. Gebhardt, whose background is mostly in organized
crime and drug cases. Counterterrorism is another division where the FBI
indicated the unit might end up.

"What is under consideration is how the FBI can best coordinate its many
cyber-functions and how we can maximize our support to NIPC," Collingwood said.

The topic was expected to come up Thursday during a Senate Judiciary Committee
oversight hearing.

Grassley, a Judiciary Committee member and one of the FBI's toughest
congressional critics, indicated that Mueller outlined the proposal in a
meeting last month. Other congressional and administration sources, speaking on
condition of anonymity, said they also have discussed the break-up proposal in
recent weeks with Mueller. Some who discussed the idea with the director said
they believed he was leaning toward breaking up the unit; others said they
thought he was only considering the idea.

Grassley cautioned Mueller: "You do not fully realize the consequences of your
proposal."

"It doesn't sound like a particularly good idea," agreed Harris Miller, head of
the Washington-based Information Technology Association of America, a trade
group. "If it's put into the criminal division, it becomes an enforcement
function, not an information exchange."

The ITAA runs an early-warning center about online threats for the nation's
technology companies. Other such centers exist in the electric,
telecommunications and financial industries.

Grassley warned Mueller that some companies participating in such privately
organized warning centers have indicated they would stop sharing details with
the FBI about online threats if the unit were dismantled.

Under the plan, it was unclear how or whether the FBI would continue to
exchange warnings with U.S. corporations about online threats. Already, that
branch of the FBI unit is physically moving out of the bureau's headquarters to
share a building near the White House with part of the Office of Homeland
Security and a little-known cyber-protection unit within the Commerce
Department.
***************
USA Today
Smaller WorldCom tops in complaints of slamming

WorldCom is the USA's No. 2 long-distance carrier, but it's No. 1 in slamming
complaints.

According to the Federal Communications Commission, WorldCom since 1997 has had
more such complaints than No. 1 AT&T and No. 3 Sprint. Slamming is when a
company switches a customer's long-distance service without permission. The FCC
notes that many complaints do not lead to discovery of wrongdoing.

But WorldCom serves only about 20% of U.S. homes and claims about 20% of U.S.
long-distance revenue, FCC data say. AT&T serves about 50% of residential
customers and claims 35% of total revenue.

"That is an eye-opening number of complaints for a company with a smaller share
of the market," Gene Kimmelman of Consumers Union says of WorldCom.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is examining WorldCom's sales and
billing practices, among other things. The SEC inquiry asks about disputed
customer bills, overbilling complaints and overbooking of sales. WorldCom
spokeswoman Claire Hassett says WorldCom is cooperating with the SEC, and,
"It's our understanding that slamming is not a central focus." WorldCom also
says its financial practices are proper.

But a 2-year-old shareholder lawsuit against WorldCom alleges sales agents
inflated revenue by signing up customers for services they didn't order.
WorldCom says the lawsuit is "without merit."

This month, WorldCom agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle a California lawsuit
filed in July 2000 alleging slamming and unfair business practices. The state
probe found evidence of slamming and cramming, which is billing for add-on
services without customer permission. It also found that some customers were
charged for services they had canceled. WorldCom didn't admit wrongdoing. As
part of the settlement, it set up more measures to track and resolve
complaints.

In June 2000, WorldCom paid the federal government $3.5 million to settle a
slamming investigation by the FCC. As part of that agreement, it also beefed up
anti-slamming tactics. WorldCom also uses independent companies to verify
orders by customers. Hassett says such steps "are among the most sweeping in
the industry."

Wall Street hasn't paid much attention to WorldCom's sales tactics. But they
could "become more of a factor than we thought," depending on the SEC inquiry,
says Credit Lyonnais analyst Rick Grubbs. "They need to speak to the integrity
of their revenues," he says.
**************
Federal Computer Week
INS details broken process
When he became commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service last
August, James Ziglar said he quickly discovered that the troubled agency
information technology systems "were big on information and small on
technology."

Among the worst of the systems was the one used to process requests for student
visas, Ziglar told a House immigration subcommittee March 19.

Paper visa applications pour into INS, where they are reviewed  a process that
can take up to a year. If approved, a notice is mailed to the student and
another goes into a box.

"Literally, a box," said Ziglar, who was called before Congress to explain INS'
latest performance disaster. On March 11, notice finally arrived at a Florida
flight school that student visas had been approved for Mohamed Atta and Marwan
Alshehhi. 

The pair died Sept. 11 when they piloted hijacked airplanes into the World
Trade Center in New York in the most serious terrorist attack against the
United States. 

INS process plodded on, as if oblivious to the worst terrorist attack in U.S.
history. When the box was full, it was shipped to London, Ky., where workers at
Affiliated Computer Services Inc., type information from the forms into a
database, scan the forms and create microfilm copies.

The electronic data and the microfilm were sent back to INS. Then the company
had six months to send the second copy of the approval notice to the school the
foreign student plans to attend. 

"I found too much reliance on manual data entry," Ziglar told the subcommittee.
"I found a lack of real-time data and a lack of readily accessible electronic
information for accurate and timely reporting."

INS was unable to interconnect its own computer systems, let along connect with
those operated by law enforcement agencies. Ziglar said he "found that
enterprise architecture was still on the drawing board."

Ziglar got little sympathy from the subcommittee. Republicans and Democrats
alike pummeled the INS.

"If the INS is unable to identify terrorists whose acts are complete," how can
anyone be confident that they can detect and deter future terrorists, asked
subcommittee chairman Rep. George Gekas (R-Pa.).

"We should be grateful this egregious error occurred with dead terrorists, not
live ones," said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas).

"The INS is worse than useless," said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). "It expends
funds but produces nothing."

Ziglar said that since the attacks, he had ordered changes in some visa
procedures:

* Student visa applications are now checked against terrorist databases to
prevent issuing visas to known terrorists.

* Processing time for student visa status changes has been cut to 30 days at
two processing centers and about 60 days at two others.

* The average time it takes to process adjustment of status applications has
been cut from 30 to 13 months, Ziglar said.

* The INS plans to replace its paper student visa system with an Internet-based
administration and tracking system by Jan. 1, 2003.

INS inspectors now have computer access to some State Department visa data at
ports of entry.

****************
Federal Computer Week
Debating e-gov: curtail or proceed?

E-government's promise of an informed citizenry and "real democracy as no one
has ever imagined it" may be curtailed by new concerns over homeland security,
said Rep. Paul Kanjorski.

Fear that online information will aid terrorists is forcing e-government
advocates to reconsider the idea that putting more information online is
better, the Pennsylvania Democrat said during a March 20 discussion about the
future of e-government.

Before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, e-government supporters believed that
making more information available to all would lead to better-informed
citizenry and to better decision-making.

Now they must wonder whether disseminating information over the Internet is
helping "disarm ourselves," Kanjorski said at the discussion sponsored by Adobe
Systems Inc. In place of openness, e-government advocates must ask how much
information should be put online and who will have access to it.

"It raises the question: 'Can we move as rapidly as we had hoped'" to develop
e-government, he said.

The Bush administration is pushing forward with its e-government initiatives
nonetheless, said Norman Lorentz, the new chief technology officer at the
Office of Management and Budget.

"There has always been a dynamic tension between security and openness," he
said. In many instances, "the horse is already out of the barn. There's a lot
of stuff out there that we wish wasn't." But the administration is going
forward with 24 e-government initiatives.

From EZ Tax Filing and online access to loans to easier international trade
applications and online training, the initiatives are "very pragmatic and very
citizen-focused," Lorentz said.

He expressed special wishes for the success of one initiative, E-Recruitment.
"Has anyone tried to get a job in government lately?" asked Lorentz, who began
working at OMB Jan. 2. "The system is broken." 

Lorentz said the federal government should not try to build an electronic
recruiting system from scratch, but should seek help from the commercial
sector. Before joining OMB, Lorentz was chief technology officer for Dice Inc.,
an online technology employment company. 

The 24 e-government initiatives are intended to be online in 18 to 24 months,
Lorentz said. He predicted "four to five will roll out quickly, some this
calendar year." Most will take closer to two years and "two to three" may have
to be redesigned or scrapped. 

Lorentz did not say which projects he expects to be ready early or which he
expects to flounder.
****************
Federal Computer Week
Bill proposes 'high-tech guard'

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and George Allen (R-Va.) introduced legislation
Wednesday to create a high-tech volunteer corps that could be mobilized quickly
in the wake of an emergency such as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

The legislation would make it easier to mobilize high-tech teams  modeled after
the National Guard, urban search and rescue and medical emergency response
teams  to respond to threats posed by terrorist attacks, natural disasters and
other emergencies.

Wyden, who is chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation
Committee's Science, Technology and Space Subcommittee, and Allen, who is
ranking member, said the bill would utilize private industry to create rapid
response teams that can offer private-sector expertise and equipment. The teams
would be certified by a central office created in the executive branch of the
federal government. 

The legislation would set up a comprehensive database of equipment and
emergency help that could be accessed quickly and would create a national
clearinghouse and test bed for innovative technologies relating to emergency
prevention and response.

"Access to this database would enable federal, state and local officials, as
well as nongovernmental relief organizations, to locate quickly whatever
technology or scientific help they may need," Wyden said on the Senate floor
March 20.

The legislation would also establish a program that would award seven grants of
$5 million each to help fund pilot projects to enable interoperable
communications among first responder agencies. 

The proposal has the support of some of the biggest technology companies in the
country, including Microsoft Corp., AOL Time Warner Inc., Intel Corp. and
Oracle Corp.

"A national strategy for ensuring the resiliency of our [information
technology] infrastructure against attacks and natural disasters is long
overdue, particularly as our country has become increasingly dependent on the
interconnected digital network," wrote Andrew Grove, chairman of Intel Corp.,
in a March 18 letter to Wyden.

Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.) plans to introduce similar legislation in the
House.

****************
Federal Computer Week
GAO: Agencies struggle with IT architectures

The majority of federal agencies and departments have only just begun to
develop an information technology enterprise architecture that would eliminate
separate and duplicative systems, according to a General Accounting Office
governmentwide review.

GAO has developed the initial version of a five-step enterprise architecture
management maturity framework that it used to measure agencies' progress in
developing and implementing an enterprise architecture.

The framework is based on the federal CIO Council's "Practical Guide to Federal
Enterprise Architecture," which GAO developed with the council and released
last year, said Randy Hite, GAO's director of IT architecture and systems
issues. 

Of the 116 agencies surveyed by GAO in its review, 98 met the minimum
requirements for stages one and two of the framework  which means that the
agencies have either no enterprise architecture plan or are just starting to
develop one. 

However, only five agencies meet the requirements of stages four or five  under
which agencies have a complete enterprise architecture plan, or they have a
plan and a policy to update and maintain the plan.

Agencies are required to develop and use enterprise architectures under the
Office of Management and Budget's Circular A-130. However, until recently, most
agencies did not understand the importance of having an enterprise architecture
and did not have personnel with the skills to develop them, leaving the federal
government far behind the private sector, according to the GAO report, which
was released March 19.

"The current state of the federal government's use of [enterprise
architectures] is mixed, but overall it is not sufficiently mature to support
well-informed IT investment decision-making," the report stated. "As a result,
most federal agencies currently run the serious risk of investing in IT
solutions that will not overcome but will, rather, perpetuate longstanding
incompatibilities and duplication within agency operational and systems
environments."

OMB recently has increased its focus on enterprise architecture. For instance,
in the fiscal 2003 budget, agencies must demonstrate how every IT investment
aligns with their architecture. However, OMB has no way to measure agencies'
progress in developing these architectures. 

GAO developed the maturity framework to have a way to measure and compare
agencies' capabilities after it collected volumes of enterprise architecture
survey information from agencies, Hite said. Now GAO is recommending that OMB
work with the federal CIO Council to use the framework to help agencies improve
their enterprise architectures and to measure the agencies' progress, according
to the report. 

GAO is also recommending that OMB require agencies to submit an annual update
of their progress against the framework, and then for OMB to provide an annual
governmentwide review to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and the
House Government Reform Committee.
****************
New York Times
Finding Pay Dirt in Scannable Driver's Licenses

BOSTON -- ABOUT 10,000 people a week go to The Rack, a bar in Boston favored by
sports stars, including members of the New England Patriots. One by one, they
hand over their driver's licenses to a doorman, who swipes them through a sleek
black machine. If a license is valid and its holder is over 21, a red light
blinks and the patron is waved through.

But most of the customers are not aware that it also pulls up the name,
address, birth date and other personal details from a data strip on the back of
the license. Even height, eye color and sometimes Social Security number are
registered.

"You swipe the license, and all of a sudden someone's whole life as we know it
pops up in front of you," said Paul Barclay, the bar's owner. "It's almost
voyeuristic."

Mr. Barclay bought the machine to keep out underage drinkers who use fake ID's.
But he soon found that he could build a database of personal information,
providing an intimate perspective on his clientele that can be useful in
marketing. "It's not just an ID check," he said. "It's a tool."

Now, for any given night or hour, he can break down his clientele by sex, age,
ZIP code or other characteristics. If he wanted to, he could find out how many
blond women named Karen over 5 feet 2 inches came in over a weekend, or how
many of his customers have the middle initial M. More practically, he can build
mailing lists based on all that data  and keep track of who comes back. 

Bar codes and other tracking mechanisms have become one of the most powerful
forces in automating and analyzing product inventory and sales over the last
three decades. Now, in a trend that alarms privacy advocates, the approach is
being applied to people through the simple driver's license, carried by more
than 90 percent of American adults. 

Already, about 40 states issue driver's licenses with bar codes or magnetic
stripes that carry standardized data, and most of the others plan to issue them
within the next few years.

Scanners that can read the licenses are slowly proliferating across the
country. So far the machines have been most popular with bars and convenience
stores, which use them to thwart underage purchasers of alcohol and cigarettes.

In response to the terrorist attacks last year, scanners are now also being
installed as security devices in airports, hospitals and government buildings.
Many other businesses  drugstores and other stores, car- rental agencies and
casinos among them  are expressing interest in the technology.

The devices have already proved useful for law enforcement. Police departments
have called bars to see if certain names and Social Security numbers show up on
their customer lists.

The electronic trails created by scanning driver's licenses are raising
concerns among privacy advocates. Standards and scanning, they say, are a
dangerous combination that essentially creates a de facto national identity
card or internal passport that can be registered in many databases.

"Function creep is a primary rule of databases and identifiers," said Barry
Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, citing
how the Social Security number, originally meant for old-age benefits, has
become a universal identifier for financial and other transactions. "History
teaches us that even if protections are incorporated in the first place, they
don't stay in place for long." 

But companies that market the scanning technology argue that it poses no threat
to privacy. 

"It's the same information as the front of the license," said Frank Mandelbaum,
chairman and chief executive of Intelli- Check, a manufacturer of
license-scanning equipment based in Woodbury, N.Y. "If I were to go into a bar
and they had a photocopier, they could photocopy the license or they could
write it down. They are not giving us any information that violates privacy."

Machine-readable driver's licenses have been introduced over the last decade
under standards set by the American Association of Motor Vehicle
Administrators, an umbrella group of state officials.

Under current standards, the magnetic stripe and bar codes essentially contain
the same information that is on the front of the driver's licenses. In addition
to name, address and birth date, the machine-readable data includes physical
attributes like sex, height, weight, hair color, eye color and whether
corrective lenses are required. Some states that put the driver's Social
Security number on the license also store it on the data strip.

The scanning systems present a challenge to efforts by state and federal
governments to limit the amount of information that can be released by
departments of motor vehicles. In 1994, Congress passed the Driver's Privacy
Protection Act, largely in response to the murder of Rebecca Schaeffer, an
actress who was killed in 1989 by an obsessed fan who had found her unlisted
address by using California motor vehicle records. 

Before the law was adopted, states were selling driver's license information to
direct marketing companies, charities and political campaigns. Businesses
selling, for example, fitness products and plus-size clothing were able to
focus on customers within a given range of height or weight.

While the privacy act staunched the flow of information from state motor
vehicle departments, there are only spotty controls over how businesses can
create such databases on their own. In Texas, the driver's licenses can be
electronically scanned for age verification, but the information cannot be
downloaded from the machine. In New York, businesses are only allowed to store
name, birth date, driver's license ID number and expiration date for the
purpose of age verification. Many states require people to give consent to be
on marketing lists, but businesses generally interpret consent to mean not
actively removing their names from a list.

When Mr. Barclay, the bar owner, saw a demonstration of Intelli-Check
(news/quote)'s driver's license scanner at a trade show in 1999, he was
surprised. "It had never dawned me that that strip had information on it," he
said. 

He bought an Intelli-Check system, which costs about $2,500 and can scan both
bar codes and magnetic strips. Now, three years and 1.3 million scanned
customers later, he has grown to understand how the data reflects the bar's
business. 

On Tuesdays, for example, the number of customers born between 1955 and 1960
spikes when the 40-something crowd comes for the jazz.

Thursday night is popular among people who have the upscale Boston ZIP codes
02109, 02111 and 02113. They come to hear Cat Tunes, a band well known among
those who go to Martha's Vineyard.

When the singer Chad LaMarch performs on Sundays, women make up 60 percent of
the crowd. "The men always follow the women," Mr. Barclay said. 

While attributes like age and sex can be observed from simply looking at the
crowd, the hard statistics are more valuable in negotiating with liquor
companies over promotions, he said. 

Other bars are using the information gleaned to give repeat customers special
treatment, similar to the way airlines reward their frequent fliers. Some are
planning to tap into the addresses.

"Let's say I'm doing an all-male-performer show," said Kenny Vincent, who owns
a bar in New Orleans called Kenny's Key West. "I could just mail to just girls
I want to target between 21 and 34. I have all that information. The whole
reason to have a database is to advertise and market to your customers."

In some cases the data can be correlated to what customers buy. Polka Dot
Dairy/ Tom Thumb, a convenience store chain based near Minneapolis that
operates about 100 stores, including the Bonkers chain, in Minnesota and
Wisconsin, installed machines made by the Logix Company to comply with age
minimums on the sale of tobacco. But Terry Giebel, a controller at Tom Thumb,
said the ability to build customer databases was also a selling point.

"Any marketing tool that we have that makes us different than our competition
is an advantage," Mr. Giebel said. "We could do direct marketing to people who
are smokers."

But such cross-linking of data raises concerns. "As more and more people in the
private sector want to make use of that identity document, it becomes coercive
since it's linked to the transactions," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director
of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. 

The scanner can also be programmed to reject troublesome customers. Simply
knowing that a quarrelsome man is named Greg and lives in a specific town can
be enough information to lock someone out. The Rack has determined people's
identities simply by remembering the face and approximate time of arrival,
since the bar also has a digital video camera that films people as they walk
in. "You don't need a lot of information to find out who someone is," Mr.
Barclay said.

Newer, two-dimensional bar codes that can store more data have been adopted by
almost 30 states, including New York. Some states are already using this extra
storage capacity to pack in biometric information. Georgia stores two digital
fingerprints as well as the person's signature. Tennessee stores a facial
recognition template. Kentucky recently became the first state to embed a
black-and-white electronic version of the photograph in the bar code.

Such biometric information is designed to add extra security to the document,
even though few scanners are designed to read such specialized information.

But as Americans debate expanding the national standards for driver's licenses
to improve security, the scanner technology has already gained impetus. 

Logan Airport in Boston is using the machines to check the identity of
passengers. New York University Hospital scans and stores visitors' driver's
license information. Delaware has installed the machines to screen visitors at
the state legislature and its largest state office building.

The scanners' manufacturers are generally aware of the potential for personal
information to be abused. The Logix Company, based in Longmont, Colo., allows
clients like bars to view aggregate but not specific data, to prevent a
scenario in which "a bouncer at a bar stalks a blond, 20-year-old, 5-foot-7
girl," said Lana Rozendorf, a sales manager with Logix. "As a company we want
to take responsibility for who has responsibility for this information."

But with Intelli-Check's scanners and those of many other manufacturers, the
information is stored locally, with the client gaining easy access. 

Mr. Vincent, who uses an Intelli-Check scanner at his bar in New Orleans,
shrugged off the notion of someone's abusing the information. He said he had no
interest in keeping information on people who objected to being in his
database. "Will I use it in the wrong way?" he said. "No." 

Then he paused. "But then again, what is to stop the next guy?"
************
New York Times
A Proper Table for Passover, Then Easter

I USED to worry that our household's unusual holiday traditions might confuse
the children. But I didn't fully realize the toll they took on the fellow who
bags our groceries until one recent day when he held aloft two boxes, one full
of matzos for Passover and the other harboring pastel tablets of Easter egg
dye, and asked cautiously, "Are these both yours?" 

Yes, and the lamb shank, the horseradish root and the milk chocolate bunnies.
My husband and I have not taken a strong position on God. But technically, he's
Jewish, I'm Catholic, and as a result our three daughters observe more official
holidays than our plumber does. 

"So, are we getting ready to celebrate Easter or Passover?" my 11- year-old
asked, as I was checking the white "company" tablecloth for stains this week. 

"Yes," I said. And I felt a twinge of what in another person might be described
as doubt. But while I'm wrestling with my secular approach to spirituality,
we'll keep celebrating both holidays. 

Which brings me to the immediate problem: the Easter table. Yes, the big,
solid-white linen cloth is, as I feared, stained, perhaps irrevocably, with red
wine. And the smaller, backup white one probably won't do because, as my friend
Lisa informed me on Saturday during a party (my daughter's bat mitzvah), "I may
have accidentally invited some people to your house for Easter." 

"People you ran into on the street?" I asked. 

"No, people who know you," she said, looking around the crowded room. "I
think." 

It should be quite an egg hunt. Luckily, I have in reserve Table Plan C, which
calls for the use of my most beautiful cloth, white embroidered linen, which
once belonged to my husband's grandmother. The only problem: with the cloth's
openwork pattern, I need an undercloth, preferably pink (we are talking about
Easter, after all, when the pale green Depression-glass dishes make a rare
public appearance). 

Buying a tablecloth is not as cut- and-dried a proposition as you might think.
Beyond the issues of color and fabric  linen? cotton? rayon?  loom the thorny
questions of shape and size. I am not that picky, other than to stay with
natural fibers (yes, I iron), but still have found that most stores
unfortunately stock limited options  and always in the wrong color. While I am
not one of those Victorian purists who call for a white-only table, I do try to
avoid mauve. And turquoise. 

Since I needed a specific size to fit under the openwork cloth, I decided to
shop online for greater selection. If I had been after a white cloth, my work
would have been over in minutes. There were a number of specialty retailers,
like The Linen House (www.thelinenhouse.com), for instance, which offered a wide
variety of fabrics and sizes, at prices that ranged from affordable ($34.85 for
a small-size white linen damask) to some that I consider more suitable for a
monthly car payment ($317.75 for a large embroidered linen cloth described as
having the "refined elegance of a grapevine motif"). 

And some linen sellers, like Gracious Style (www.graciousstyle
com), also sold protective felt table liners in a variety of sizes (for $70 to
$100). There I found a pricey pink damask cloth called the St. Tropez (which
cost $145 for the rectangular size I needed), but its pattern, described as
"fanciful vines, birds and butterflies," would not work as an undercloth.

At BlueLight.com, I looked at 10 thumbnail images of the Martha Stewart
Everyday collection of tablecloths, where the cotton Victorian Lace Woven
Tablecloth seemed like a good value ($15.19 for the 60-inch- by-104-inch
rectangular size). Unfortunately, it did not come in pink. At
www.marthastewart.com, where the merchandise was significantly more expensive, I
found a pink linen tablecloth for $135 (70 inches by 108 inches) but was too
cheap to pay that much. 

I considered the possibility of giving up. I flirted briefly with the idea of
bleaching the red wine from my big white linen cloth. I phoned Cynthia Cooper,
who sells vintage cloths at www.antique-linens.com, for stain-removal advice. I
figured that someone who handled rare and expensive fabrics (one of the cloths
at her site had a price tag of $1,450) would know the answer. 

"Don't bleach," said Ms. Cooper, a self-described linen addict who confesses on
her Web site: "Old linens make my heart pound faster. If they have a wonderful
monogram, I start to sweat! If they are dated, it sends shivers down my
spine!!!" 

"But on your Web site, you say old linens are sturdy," I said. "Rugged, you
say. You said you sometimes even make a paste with automatic dishwasher soap
and water and rub it on to remove stains." 

`I'll try almost anything if I get desperate," she said. "But bleach will
destroy the fibers. Lay the cloth outside on the grass on a bright day and let
the sun do the work." 

"I tried that, last summer," I said. "The stain is still there." 

"Did you keep the cloth damp?" she said. "I run out with a spray bottle from
time to time." 

I promised, in the end, not to bleach. And to go rinse out all my previously
tortured linens (how did she know I am a serial bleacher?) in vinegar water.
Right away. Then I bought a pink cotton tablecloth from Williams-Sonoma
(news/quote) (www.williams
-sonoma.com) for $39. Described as a "tinted hotel tablecloth," it came in
seven sizes and shapes and in four colors. When it arrived, I saw that the
cloth was a good-quality heavy fabric. (It will, of course, need ironing.) 

But if something stains it? "Don't bleach it," a customer service
representative told me over the phone. "Soak it overnight, use a fine fabric
detergent, try vinegar, just don't bleach it." 

Note to anyone Lisa may have invited to Easter: white wine will be served.
L'chaim.
*************
New York Times
Grinding Terror or Grand Adventure: Choose Your War

OUTSIDE an almost deserted town I crawled through mud from bush to bush,
steadily moving toward my objective. As I tried to run across a clearing into
an empty house, I heard a shot and saw a flash of red, and I was dead. Not
wounded, dead. 

I was playing Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, a game that gives the
player a disturbingly realistic vision of war. My reaction to such a game might
once have been, "That is so cool" but this time I did not feel that way. With
American troops fighting in Afghanistan, I could only wonder whether this was
perhaps what war is: real people crawling on the ground and dying without ever
seeing who shot them. 

Starting off as a simple foot soldier, a player will later command squads and
tanks and fly fighter planes and helicopters. The game is so real and so
comprehensive that the United States Marine Corps is using a modified version
called Virtual Battlefield Systems 1 as a tool to train troops. 

The fictional plot of Flashpoint, set in 1985, centers on an attempt by rogue
Soviet troops to take over a NATO-protected island. You ride toward a hot spot
in the back of a truck with your comrades as they trade war rumors in hushed,
scared voices. On the battlefield, missions are chaotic, with shifting goals.
You see war from a soldier's perspective, trying to capture a town or protect
an encampment for no other reason than because you have been ordered to do so. 

In early missions, I did what I would probably do in real combat: I crawled on
the ground, hid behind bushes and let my companions do all the shooting. Thrown
onto the battlefield, confused and scared, barely able to see the camouflaged
soldiers firing from more than 100 meters away, my only strategy was survival. 

After allowing me to coast through a few missions, Flashpoint raised the
difficulty level. I found myself alone in a forest, surrounded by enemy forces,
with my fellow soldiers all dead. It was no longer possible to hang back and
let other soldiers kill the enemy. If you fail to complete a mission, you can
be discharged for incompetence, although in real life it is more likely that
you would be put on permanent latrine duty. 

There are other games in which you can be killed by a single bullet; in that
regard, Flashpoint follows a tried-and-true model of realism. But the game goes
beyond simple realities like ballistics. It is not afraid to risk being boring,
for example. At times you may find yourself driving for miles through a
peaceful area. What saves such sequences from tedium is a pervasive sense of
danger that gives the game emotional depth. 

Flashpoint is not a fun game, just as "Saving Private Ryan" was not a fun
movie. It is disturbing and engrossing, an adult game, not because of the
bullets, but because of the profound and unsettling horror of the unexpected. 

On paper, Operation Flashpoint is similar to Halo, a game developed by Bungie
for the Xbox. Both games allow players to fight side by side with soldiers who
are remarkably skilled and to steal enemy vehicles and take command of mounted
guns. But if Flashpoint gives players the kind of ground-level view of war
offered in films like "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "The Steel Helmet,"
Halo is more reminiscent of movies made during World War II, which depicted war
as a noble adventure fought by fearless, tough-as-nails soldiers. 

A science-fiction first-person shooter, Halo begins with murderous aliens
boarding your spaceship. Weaponless, you run through the ship while other
soldiers battle aliens. With its rousing musical score and wisecracking
soldiers, Halo portrays war as most games do, as mindless fun. What makes Halo
notable is how well it is done. 

Your fellow soldiers are just as smart as those in Flashpoint, the weapons are
imaginative (one of them shoots small bullets that explode a few seconds after
attaching themselves to an enemy), and a soldier can leap into an abandoned
enemy aircraft and start blasting the bad guys from the air. 

Halo is best when you and a friend play as a team in the cooperative mode. The
first time I played with a friend, he climbed into a jeep that had a gun
mounted in the back. I discovered that I could also climb in and take control
of the gun, which I thought was about the coolest thing in the world (in
single-player mode you can drive up to a soldier and he will climb in and man
the gun). Another good reason to play in cooperative mode is to have someone to
talk to when you get lost. The geography is vast and can be difficult to
navigate. You will sometimes find yourself wandering about looking for the way
out. 

Unfortunately, Halo can be repetitive. Many missions involve entering a big
room and killing a bunch of aliens, then moving through a hall into a similar
room and killing another bunch. After doing this three or four more times, you
go back through the same rooms killing even more aliens. It is as though the
designers created a short game and used a cookie-cutter approach to pad it out.


In spite of the tedious stretches, Halo is an exciting game and makes war look
like so much fun that you might want to run out and enlist. But war is not like
that. When Marine recruits whose only experience of war is playing games like
Halo sit down to play the military version of Operation Flashpoint, they may be
in for a surprise.
*************
Batteries Promise Not to Fade Before the Light Does

Digital cameras have a reputation for slurping down battery power like linemen
at the Gatorade table during a summer football practice. A new long-lasting
battery may give photographers many more snaps per pack in a year when some
industry analysts are predicting a 29 percent increase in digital camera sales.
It could mean a lot less fumbling to change the batteries before the baby
moves. 

The new battery, a nickel-zinc type developed by Panasonic specifically for
power-mad digital cameras, will soon be available to consumers and will come in
the familiar AA-size used by most camera models.

The nickel-zinc battery was tested in Japan against two popular alkaline
battery brands in various digital cameras from six major manufacturers. 

The cameras took flash photos every 30 seconds until their batteries were
drained. The results showed that the nickel-zinc batteries could produce an
average of 50 more pictures than the alkaline competition. 

The new batteries will cost around $6 for a pack of four and should start
arriving in stores in May  just in time for all those summer-vacation photo
ops.
************
New York Times
Finally, a Way to Itemize Star Trek Memorabilia

Collectors of everything from Fitzgerald first editions to ceramic chicken
figurines now have another software option for keeping track of their
inventory, a cataloging program called MyStuff. 

Version 1.1 of MyStuff, made by a company called Collectify, is compatible with
Windows 95 and later and includes many new features to help collectors corral
their collections on the computer. 

MyStuff provides areas in which to enter information on an object's history,
condition and location, and allows the user to import a digital image of the
object within the listing. MyStuff records could be useful for wider purposes,
including appraisals, insurance policy information, inventory and accounting.
Users can also use the software to create slide shows and screen savers. 

MyStuff version 1.1 sells for $99.95. Users can download a free 30-day trial
version and find more information at www.collectify.com.
*************
New York Times
A Concrete That Percolates, Keeping Snow and Spies at Bay

SECURITY experts looking to prevent spies from eavesdropping on computers by
intercepting the electromagnetic waves they throw off don't turn to Martha
Stewart for interior-design inspiration. The solutions they employ are often
unattractive and well beyond even her budget. For example, one involves
building a room within a room out of welded thick steel plates.

But a new concrete that can conduct electricity may make it possible to
construct buildings in which the basic structure does double duty as an
electromagnetic shield.

Not that the scientists who developed conductive concrete at the National
Research Council of Canada were looking to play a role in the world of
counterespionage.

"The initial development evolved from a discussion I had with a graduate
student," said James J. Beaudoin, the lead researcher and a concrete expert at
the research council's Institute for Research in Construction, based in Ottawa.
"We were trying to come up with projects to address the needs of people in cold
climates, such as snow and ice melting." Concrete that could conduct
electricity would also create heat through resistive heating.

Of course, electrical elements and pipes carrying heated liquids have long been
embedded in concrete to create ice-free garage ramps and walkways. But such
installations are expensive and difficult to repair.

Nor, Dr. Beaudoin acknowledges, is the idea of a concrete that can carry
electricity a particularly novel one. "But most of the concepts developed in
the past wouldn't be useful because you couldn't build anything with them," he
said. "They didn't have structural integrity."

Early on, Dr. Beaudoin and other researchers at the research council looked
into using carbon fibers similar to those that are woven into special fabrics
and covered with resins to create lightweight but strong parts for aircraft and
sports equipment.

Less exotic fibers have long been used in concrete for a variety of purposes,
like increasing its ability to deform without shattering. The lab did
eventually come up with a concrete mix that retained its strength after the
addition of the carbon fibers and gained the ability to conduct electricity
evenly  a property that Dr. Beaudoin calls percolation.

But as anyone who has seen the price tag of a carbon-fiber-composite bicycle
knows, carbon fibers are expensive. "You have to remember we are dealing with a
construction material here," Dr. Beaudoin said.

The group found a much cheaper substitute in coke breeze. Coke is essentially
coal that has been reduced mostly to carbon by high-temperature baking. Most of
the time it is added to blast furnaces at steel mills. Coke breeze is the
leftover material that is too small for the steel industry. With coke breeze,
the lab was able to create a conductive concrete that is only two to three
times more expensive than ready-mix concrete.

Finding a suitable additive proved to be only half the problem. Mark Arnott,
the conductive concrete project manager, said that a far bigger issue was
developing special mixing, handling and curing processes that ensure consistent
electrical conductivity between different batches of the concrete. "We could
give you the recipe but you would most likely not be able to produce the
material," he said. (The recipe would not make light reading in any case. The
manual on making and using the conductive concrete runs about 400 pages.)

Because of the complexity of creating this concrete, St. Lawrence Cement, a
Swiss-owned company based in Montreal that has licensed the technology,
initially plans to offer it only in precast pieces.

Except for the positive and negative leads embedded in them, St. Lawrence's
conductive concrete slabs look much like those sold at The Home Depot
(news/quote). At the offices of a construction company in Oakville, Ontario,
owned by St. Lawrence, the concrete company built a sidewalk and a loading ramp
to test the material late last year. 

The winter has been unusually mild, so the system has not been overwhelmed by
snow. But Peter J. Tumidajski, the manager of new product development for St.
Lawrence, said that the eight times it did snow, the self- heating ramp was
never more than slushy. "You never actually get a buildup of snow," he said.
"It always keeps up." A 20-by-80- foot pad at the National Research Council's
far more wintry grounds in Ottawa melted the snow and ice without fail for
three years.

Although a relatively high voltage is used, the actual current flowing through
it is small because of the high resistance of the concrete. So it is safe to
touch the concrete.

St. Lawrence is dreaming of bigger things than loading ramps, however. Dr.
Tumidajski hopes that the material, encased in two layers of conventional
concrete, will be laid on the decks of highway bridges. The system would have
two functions. When relatively high-voltage electricity was sent through it, it
would melt ice and snow. But a much lower voltage could be sent through the
concrete to inhibit the electrochemical corrosion of the steel reinforcing bars
that are buried in it.

Several Canadian and United States government agencies, including the United
States Army Corps of Engineers, have approached the research council about
using conductive concrete to trap computer signals. While a variety of
technologies are used within computers and monitors to limit the amount of
electromagnetic radiation they throw off, high-security facilities are
generally housed within something called a Faraday cage. In effect, this
involves surrounding the room with metal, ranging from aluminum or copper mesh
for less-secure facilities to one-quarter-inch-thick steel plate in more
high-security applications.

Whatever their proportions, all Faraday cages work on the principle that a room
made of a grounded, electrical conducting material will block electromagnetic
waves from escaping. 

Dr. Beaudoin and Mr. Arnott said there was no doubt that the conductive
concrete could block emissions. "But we don't have any hard data on how such a
system will react," Mr. Arnott added. Research is now under way to come up with
precise measurements of the concrete's efficiency. 

There is one immediate use for conductive concrete. But it makes the prototype
loading ramp  not to mention the counterespionage applications  seem positively
glamorous. In rocky areas, it is often difficult to ground radio towers so that
energy will dissipate when lightning strikes. One solution, Mr. Arnott said, is
"to just pour a trough of conductive concrete at the base."

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Computerworld
Technology briefs: Top Layer releases tool to fight DOS attacks 

Top Layer Networks Inc. announced the general availability of Attack Mitigator,
its dedicated tool to fight denial-of-service (DOS) attacks. 


Attack Mitigator is a rack-mountable appliance that sits on a corporate network
between the firewall and the router, according to Bob Bradley, senior director
of product line management at Top Layer. Attack Mitigator is the second of
Westboro, Mass.-based Top Layer's dedicated appliances, following the IDS Load
Balancer, which was released in November. The company's first product,
AppSwitch, was an all-in-one device. 


Attack Mitigator is designed to protect networks from DOS attacks and
distributed DOS attacks. It ships preconfigured to block 15 of the most common
such attacks, Bradley said. The device is designed to block attacks through a
combination of packet filters, connection counters and threat-assessment
technology. 


Attack Mitigator is available immediately worldwide and starts at $8,995. 


Gartner: E-mail marketing proves irresistible 


E-mail marketing campaigns are faster, cheaper and more effective than direct
mail campaigns and will ultimately supersede them, according to a study from
Stamford, Conn.-based market research firm Gartner Inc. 


The most effective form of e-mail marketing is permission-based, which gets a
reader response of between 6% and 8%, Gartner reported. Non-permission-based
e-mail marketing, commonly known as spam, receives a response rate of 1%, about
the same as direct postal mail campaigns, Gartner said. 


But e-mail marketing campaigns can be put together in seven to 10 business
days, compared with four to six weeks to complete a direct mail campaign.
Replies arrive in three days, compared with an average of three to six weeks
for a postal mail campaign. E-mail campaigns are 100 times cheaper than
direct-mail campaigns, with the cost ranging from $5 to $7 per 1,000 addresses.
Direct-mail costs range from $500 to $700 per 1,000 addresses, Gartner said. 
**************
BBC
New web controls to protect children

An internet watchdog has launched a new system as part of ongoing attempts to
keep children safe on the web. 
Worries about child safety on the net is the number one concern for parents and
high profile cases where children have met paedophiles online have intensified
fears in recent years. 

The labelling system developed by the Internet Content Rating Association,
(ICRA), enjoys the backing of some of the world's top sites including Yahoo,
MSN and AOL. 

The system is designed to give parents' control over net content by blocking
access to certain sites and chat rooms known to be used by paedophiles. 

The filters can be sent to block access to nudity, violence, drug and alcohol
promotions. 

Parents can download the software free from ICRA's website and can either opt
for pre-set filters or set up their own depending on how much freedom they want
their children to have. 

Choice not censorship 

Such filters have been criticised in the past by advocates of net freedom who
say it is bringing unnecessary censorship to the web. 

ICRA says that its system is about choice and is sophisticated enough to
distinguish sites that have educational, artistic or medical content. 

"We do not make judgements about what is good or bad," said ICRA chief
executive Stephen Balkam. 

"Parents decide and they have a strong, legitimate concern about what children
are doing on the internet." 

No filter system can be 100% safe though, he admitted, and such filters are not
designed to take the place of parental supervision. 

"You wouldn't leave a child wandering around Leicester Square and you shouldn't
leave them alone on the web. 

"Computers should not be buried away in the corner of the child's room," said
Mr Balkam. 

Backed by parents 
BTopenworld is the first Internet Service Provider, (ISP), in the UK to sign up
for the labelling system. 

Vice president Duncan Ingram said they were simply responding to parental
demands. 

"Security is the biggest issue for parents. The internet is uncensored which is
both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. 

"This is not about censorship but about choice, especially for parents," he
said. 

ICRA hopes to get the endorsement of every major ISP in the world and 50,000
sites are already joined up to the filter scheme. 

Online paedophile rings are becoming increasingly prevalent. 

This week two British men were charged with involvement in a sophisticated
internet paedophile group calling itself The Round Table. 

The group traded thousands of images of child pornography over the net.
****************
BBC
UK slow to close digital divide

As the UK Government launches a series of projects designed to bring broadband
to the countryside, it emerges that both town and country surfers could be
losing out. 
Around £30m has been handed over to Rural Development Agencies (RDAs) to find
the most cost-effective way of bringing high-speed net access to remote towns
such as Buckfastleigh in Devon. 

It is hoped that Buckfastleigh can become the first rural broadband town, with
high-speed net connections in the local school, health centre, town hall and
library. 

However, the government admits that despite making the money available over a
year ago, no technology to provide rural broadband has yet been found. 

For residents living in rural areas, existing technology simply cannot reach
them. 

A spokesman for the Department of Trade and Industry admitted that so far no
solution had yet emerged. 

"Buckfastleigh was chosen for the pilot because of its location. BT doesn't go
there and it is unlikely that any telecommunication company will invest in
places like that," he said. 

Bidding for broadband 

Satellite could be an option but it is very expensive and so local businesses
and public services would have to share the cost. Wireless is also being
considered in other remote areas. 

A brokerage system, where rural businesses and public services collectively bid
for broadband is being tested in the east of England. 

Critics point out that government noises about promoting broadband in rural
areas is doing little to find concrete solutions to the problem of a
geographical digital divide. 

A DTI spokesman admitted that getting money out to RDAs to deal with the
problem has been slow. 

"These things do take time due to bureaucracy and red tape," he said. 

Hard to connect 

For those urban dwellers lucky enough to get their hands on broadband, a survey
has found that 41% of users are finding it hard to set up services. 

The survey, commissioned by software firm Motive Communications, shows that the
initial setting up of a broadband connection was frustrating 20% of users. 

Connecting up to the internet was also flummoxing would-be surfers. 

Requests for customer service were found to be relatively high with 32% of
broadband users requesting help up to three times a month. 

The general manager of Motive Communications, Bruno Teuber, is concerned that
prospective users are being turned off the technology. 

"If ISPs and broadband operators fail to address these service issues, they
risk creating a nation of broadband castaways," he said.
**************
BBC
Women beat men in web browsing

Women know what they want from the internet and spend less time than men
getting it, according to analyst firm Jupiter MMXI. 
Women spend an average of seven hours online compared with male surfers who
clocked up 10 hours per month, its study found. 

While there are still half as many European women online as men, the number of
females getting wired has shot up by 29% in the past year. 

Spain has one of the lowest numbers of women surfers - 29% compared with 42% in
the UK. But they spend the most time online, favouring instant messaging sites
and file-sharing. 

The majority of wired women across Europe are young, except in Germany where
the over-50s spend over nine hours online each month, with almost four hours of
that time on AOL. 

Shop till you drop 

Generally men are more interested in browsing, reading content and downloading
software. 

Women use their time online more purposefully - shopping, organising travel,
banking and sending e-greeting cards. 

Report author Michele Poliziani believes sites need to tailor their content to
appeal to women. 

"Clearly sites that allow women to perform a function or provide information to
help with their daily lives in some way are popular," he said. 

For the average young British woman, the most popular site in February was a
supermarket site, sainsburystoyou.co.uk, followed by egreetings.com and a
health website, wellbeing.com. 

Retailers Argos and Marks and Spencer were also in the top five. 

Surprisingly, only one site aimed at women, ivillage, made it into the top 10. 

Music and the man 

For men, the music software site Winamp.com was the number one destination. 

It was followed by computer retail site dabs.com and music site hmv.co.uk. 

Portals such as lads' magazine fhm.co.uk were also popular, with
Datingdirect.com also making it into the top 20.
***************
San Francisco Chronicle
The Rising Tide Of Spam 
More than ever, a big drain on our time and money

San Francisco, California, USA -- If you're a customer of Internet service
provider AT&T WorldNet, you may recall that your e-mail was substantially
delayed around February 18 and 19. Hit with an unprecedented load of spam,
WorldNet's e-mail servers slowed down to a crawl, with reception delayed as
much as a day as its spam filters churned through the massive amount of mail. 

Since all the e-mails eventually reached the intended recipients, one could say
the incident was not such a big deal. True, in a way. But on the other hand,
this incident, the first major slowdown of a large ISP's e-mail servers due to
spam, serves as a wake-up call: Spam isn't just a minor annoyance any more. In
fact, many believe spam has grown into a huge percentage of all e-mail sent,
and that the percentage is getting larger all the time. And likewise, as
spammers steadily grow more savvy and use increasingly sophisticated techniques
and spamming software, the question arises: Can anything be done to stem its
flow? 

The first question to consider is whether spam is indeed on the rise. Sources
that track spam generally say yes. Brightmail, the San Francisco-based company
that filters the e-mail of corporate ISP customers like AT&T WorldNet, Verizon,
Earthlink and MSN, estimated last year that spam constituted 10 percent of all
e-mail. The company now says that figure has doubled. Online
business-statistics provider eMarketer estimates that due to e-mail
solicitations, the average U.S. e-mailer receives twice as many e-mails as he
or she sends, and Jupiter Media Metrix estimates that each Internet user
received 571 spam messages in 2001 and predicts that the number will nearly
triple to 1,500 messages per year by 2006. 

Of course, tracking spam is easier said than done. Tom Geller, executive
director of antispam organization SpamCon, says such statistics don't mean
much, because "the Internet is so vast and spread out that any e-mail tracking
is bound to be a tiny, statistically insignificant subsample of all mail
traveling across the Net." But he admits that the widespread perception is that
spam is increasing. 

Anecdotally, many are noticing that their personal spam load is growing. In the
course of researching this story and speaking to many people about spam, I
heard from every one of them that their e-mail boxes are increasingly filled
with unwanted messages advertising adult sites, insurance, Viagra, loans, DVDs
and other products or services. 

My brother, for example, says that every time he opens his AOL e-mail box,
about once every three days, he's likely to find hundreds of messages stacked
up. 

"I can't tell you how many times I've deleted e-mails from friends -- and from
you, Joyce -- because I just don't have the time to go through each one of
these messages and make sure they're really a spam message," Dave fumes. 

Dave is most likely dealing with the phenomenon of "dictionary" spamming.
Because he has an account with a major ISP -- an attractive spamming target --
he's vulnerable to spammers who use bulk e-mail programs that try every
possible combination of words appearing in a dictionary. 

"It'll run through first and try 'dog@xxxxxxx,' 'cat@xxxxxxx,'" says SpamCon's
Tom Geller. "Then it'll start combining the words -- 'dogcat@xxxxxxx,'
'catdog@xxxxxxxx'" 

Geller also notes that the longer you keep the same address, the more spam
you'll get as spammers find that messages sent to your mailbox don't bounce and
pass that information along to other spammers. My poor brother, who's had his
AOL account for over five years, is definitely in that camp. Also, according to
Brightmail CTO Ken Schneider, an e-mail account at a large ISP like AOL or
Hotmail is another way to ensure that you get lots of spam, as is having an
easily guessed nom de e-mail. If your e-mail address is long, is spelled
unusually or contains difficult-to-guess letter or number combinations, you get
a measure of protection. 

But not much, since spamming software is evolving all the time. Spammers are
now beginning to use software that tracks messages initially refused by e-mail
servers. If the program sends a message to johndoe@xxxxxxx and it doesn't get
through, the program will try 'jdoe@xxxxxxx,' 'johndoe1@xxxxxxx,'
'john_doe@xxxxxxx' and so on until the message gets through. 

According to Brightmail marketing VP Francois Lavaste, spammers are also using
software that randomly changes the spacing or wording of an e-mail header or a
return address in order to fool the simple text filters many users have set up
in their e-mail accounts. If you set up a filter to block e-mails with "sex" in
the subject heading, for example, the filter wouldn't know what to do with
"sex1" or "s ex," even though a human reading the subject line would understand
what to expect. 

Of course, programs exist to counteract the spam attacks. Brightmail, for
example, works with large ISPs to filter spam by setting up numerous fake
e-mail addresses and watching them for spam messages. When a message is
received, a technician at Brightmail's 24-hour San Francisco operations center
analyzes the message's headers, its subject line, its return address, its body
and other attributes. Brightmail then writes a filtering rule that filters out
messages with these attributes and installs that rule into the filtering
systems on ISP e-mail servers. 

This filtering method includes several variables that ensures its specificity.
"It's not as simple as filtering for a single word," says Lavaste. "[If you do
that,] you block a lot of legitimate e-mail." 

Consumers whose ISPs don't use filtering systems, or whose providers use
inefficient systems, may want extra spam protection. The first line of attack
is to write a filter for your own e-mail box. Directions on doing this abound
online: Do a quick search on "e-mail filter" and the name of your e-mail
program, and you'll soon find step-by-step instructions on writing filters for
common programs like Eudora, Outlook Express and Netscape Messenger. You'll
also find numerous tutorials out there on other spam-fighting or spam-avoiding
techniques. 

Another line of defense is programs like SpamKiller or Spam Buster. Such
programs analyze messages before they hit users' mailboxes and try to block
mail with spamlike attributes. 

"Spam commonly has an empty or missing 'from' field in its headers, as well as
empty or missing reply headers," says Thor Ivar Ekle, the man behind
SpamKiller. "SpamKiller also filters for certain senders, can block e-mails
sent from certain countries, can filter based on certain words found in the
body or in the subject line, all according to the level of protection the user
wants. SpamKiller can also import your e-mail address book and check to see if
mail's coming from a friend or not." 

Ekle says he has to update SpamKiller every six months or so as spammers get
better at evading filters. One new gambit, for example, is sending an image in
the body of an e-mail instead of text. With no text to sift through, filters
are often stumped. 

But spam-blocking programs aren't perfect. Sometimes they block legitimate
e-mails or let certain spam through. Tom Geller says most techniques will only
slow spammers down for a while until they figure out ways to get around the
newest filtering techniques, which is why SpamCon is focused on stopping spam
on a Net-wide level. 

Make no mistake, spammers aren't about to stop what they're doing without a
major law-enforcement hassle. Those who make a business selling spamming
services to companies hawking Viagra, adult sites or any other goods and
services have a vested interest in getting their messages to you. Even if their
response rate is really low, the costs involved in sending spam are so
miniscule that it's more than worth it. And some spammers have discovered they
don't even have to sell anything to make some cash. 

A former Autobytel Web developer "Rick," who asked that his name not be used,
says he doesn't spam, but his out-of-work programmer friend "Bob" does, by
using the following method: Bob creates a site that he registers as an
affiliate with companies like Amazon, Autobytel and Autoweb that makes it
legitimate for him to hawk their products. Bob then obtains lists of e-mail
addresses from acquaintances or friends of friends who work at companies about
to go under. (According to Rick, a lot of programmers and sysadmins at dying
dot-coms will sell their staff e-mail lists for a mere $400-$800.) Bob then
writes a script that sends newsletters to these people, offering products. If a
recipient buys a product, Bob gets an affiliate referral fee. Rick says the
purchase rate for click-throughs is about 2 percent, and with several of these
campaigns going at once, Bob makes anywhere from $2,000 to $8,000 a month. 

When told about Rick's claims, Geller professed suspicion: "Those response
rates are ridiculously high -- either he's so good at it, the legitimate
marketers would like to know his secrets, or he's lying so that he can sell
spamming services to someone who believes him." 

Rick agrees that his friend may be exaggerating about the amount of money he
makes -- but he adds that, by all appearances, Bob makes enough money to
support himself without a "real" job. Rick adds that when he's laid off from
his own dying company, he's likely to jump on the spam bandwagon while looking
for work. 

"I have kind of a mixed feeling, because I hate spam, but it's a good way to
make money if I lose my job," Rick says. 

Rick's story may send chills up the spines of Net users inundated by spam
already. I know my own spam load has jumped enormously in the last year, even
though I've been careful not to answer surveys, respond to spam, post my e-mail
address on Web pages or provide it when it's not necessary. 

And spam's not just a problem here in the United States. The European Union
released a study last year that estimated the financial hit on connection costs
due to spam to be about $10 billion euros a year worldwide. 

So just where does it all end? Spammers send messages and people block them,
which means spammers just devise new ways to get through. And the load on
e-mail servers just gets heavier and heavier. 

Maybe it's time for antispam legislation to be enforced more stringently. The
burden on businesses -- and consumers -- seems to be getting too heavy to bear
for long. Just ask WorldNet, or my brother or anyone who spends his or her
precious time and resources deleting message after annoying message from an
overstuffed mailbox.
**************
San Francisco Chronicle

Hacker suspect sent to jail after hearing

A man accused of hacking EBay, E-Trade and other companies has been thrown in
jail after employing a string of bizarre tactics at a routine hearing in San
Jose federal court. 

Jerome Heckenkamp, 22, claimed in a Monday court appearance that the person
charged must not be him because the government complaint wrote his name in all
capital letters. Heckenkamp argued that he capitalizes only the first letter of
his first and last names, said Ross Nadel, the assistant U.S. attorney
prosecuting the case in the Northern District of California. 

Heckenkamp also tried to testify to the charges he faces even though the
proceeding was only a hearing to set future appearance dates, Nadel said. 

Heckenkamp is representing himself after firing attorney Jennifer S. Granick
last week. He could not be reached for comment. 

In court Monday, Heckenkamp demanded to know whom the prosecution represented. 

When Judge James Ware informed him that Nadel represented the United States, 

"He complained that I had not brought my client with me," Nadel said. 

"Ultimately Judge Ware found that based on his conduct and his statements, that
he was a danger to himself and others and a flight risk, and remanded him into
custody," Nadel said. 

Heckenkamp's trial hasn't even started yet, but his case has already raised
eyebrows. Since being indicted on 15 counts of hacking and one count of witness
tampering last year, Heckenkamp has fired and rehired Granick several times. 

After being out on $50,000 bond, he returned to jail for two weeks in January
when a friend needed the bond money back. 

"I wish him the best. I hope the prosecutor and the court can ensure that he
gets a fair trial despite his lack of legal education," said Granick, who also
serves as clinical director at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. 

Heckenkamp is next scheduled to appear in court April 8. He is charged with
breaking into computers at EBay, E-Trade, Exodus, Juniper Networks, Lycos and
Cygnus Support Solutions and of causing more than $5,000 damage to each
company. 

He's also charged with intercepting electronic communications from the same
companies and with trying to persuade a witness to withhold testimony. 

The alleged hacking occurred in 1999, when Heckenkamp was a teen prodigy about
to complete his master's degree in computer science at the University of
Wisconsin. Each of the 15 hacking charges against him carries a maximum
sentence of five years and a fine of up to $250,000. The witness-tampering
charge carries a 10-year maximum sentence and a $250,000 fine. 

Heckenkamp is also charged with breaking into Qualcomm's computers in San
Diego. He is scheduled to go on trial for that case April 23 in San Diego.
****************
San Francisco Chronicle
Send an e-mail, go to jail

Stephen Martin of Sonoma says he's not angry about being only the second person
brought to trial under the U.S. Economic Espionage Act. 

Nor is he peeved about the year he spent in federal prison as a convicted
industrial spy. 

The thing that gets Martin's bacon sizzling is that people still have a totally
cavalier attitude about e-mail. 

"They think they can say anything in an e-mail," he told me the other day.
"People don't realize that horrible things can happen." 

Take Martin. Or don't. The guy, after all, is a handful. 

"I'm basically a bio-nerd," he said. "I'm someone with a giant I.Q. and an ego
the size of Brazil." 

He's also a 54-year-old who still lives at home with his mom and has no plans
to get out and find a job, even though he has a doctorate in immunology from
the University of California at Berkeley along with four other degrees. 

And to a Maine biotech company called Idexx Laboratories, Martin is a malicious
interloper who used e-mail to coax an employee into passing along trade
secrets. 

"The case speaks for itself," said Elisabeth Perry, a spokeswoman for Idexx. 

"He was found guilty." 

Nevertheless, Martin is now attempting to warn others about the potential
perils of electronic communication. 

As part of this effort, he sent out a press release last week on "how to e-
mail yourself to hell and/or federal prison with only the click of a mouse." 

For instance: 

-- "Try to correspond with someone who writes funny and endearing e-mails that
lull you into a noncritical state of mind." 

-- "Try to correspond with someone who will prompt the FBI to tap your phones."


-- "Try to correspond with someone who is much better looking, better behaved
and more sympathetic than you, especially in front of a jury." 

Needless to say, many of Martin's pointers stem from his own experiences. Or
his own perception thereof. 

In 1999, he was charged with manipulating an Idexx worker, Caryn Camp, into
handing over the company's inside dope. 

Camp had contacted Martin months earlier after coming across his Web site,
which at the time was espousing advances in veterinary technology. Idexx is a
leading manufacturer of veterinary technologies. 

Martin insists today that his seven-month correspondence with Camp was purely
innocent. "I was only interested in her knowledge of veterinary diagnostics and
regulatory affairs," he said. 

Prosecutors -- and, eventually, a jury -- saw things differently. Specifically,
they zeroed in on a single e-mail that Martin sent to Camp on July 21, 1999,
shortly before her planned departure from Idexx. 

Saying he was "embarrassed to ask this," Martin urged Camp to "absorb as much
information physically and intellectually as you can." 

He added: "I never had a spy before. We are going to be in the veterinary
business big time." 

Martin told me his comments were taken out of context and that, in fact, he
couldn't recall having written that or what he had meant to say. 

"I don't know why I threw that in there," he said. "But I do know that those
two lines sent me to prison." 

And off he went, to a minimum-security facility near Bakersfield, where Martin
said things actually weren't all that unpleasant. He worked a lot in the garden
and was nicknamed "Compost King" by the other inmates. 

Martin was released in November 2000 and spent a month at a halfway house in
San Francisco. 

He's now back at home with his mom and focusing his energy on a natural-
medicine organization called Grouppe Kurosawa, which the Web site describes as
a "bunch of super-intelligent freaks who do not work and play well with others.
" 

You can e-mail Martin if you like (grouppekurosawa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx), but he
may not write back. He makes it a policy these days not to correspond with
anyone who works for a private company. 

"I learned my lesson," Martin said. 

Better late than never. 

PG&E BONUSES: I quoted PG&E sources a while ago as saying that Chairman Robert
Glynn was likely to receive a bonus of $1.2 million for his hard work steering
the utility into bankruptcy. 

And sure enough, Glynn received $1.2 million last week, plus a stock award
worth $3 million. 

But one thing I had trouble pinning down was a rumor that the $64 million
overall that PG&E handed out to managers and administrators was a record high. 

If true (as my sources say is the case), this would have added an embarrassing
coda to the outlandish generosity PG&E showed those who engineered the largest
utility bankruptcy in U.S. history. 

PG&E spokesman Ron Low said he would check on it for me. And when I called back
later in the day, he said he was still checking. And when I called yet again,
he said he was still checking. 

My column ran, but I still phoned Low a few days later to see what he'd finally
managed to come up with. 

"Still checking," he said. 

"Ron," I replied, "you're not going to tell me if this is a record high, are
you?" 

Long pause. 

"No," he admitted. 

Good old PG&E. A class act all the way.
**************
Government Computer News
E-gov projects likely to end up in a bell curve

Progress on the Office of Management and Budget?s 24 e-government projects
likely will end up in a bell curve, according to Norman Lorentz, OMB's chief
technology officer. A few projects will lead the way, most will come to
fruition in the middle of OMB?s 18- to 24-month time frame, and a few will have
to be adjusted or scrapped altogether. Lorentz was a featured speaker at the
Association for Federal Information Resources Management luncheon yesterday at
FOSE 2002 in Washington and again today at an Adobe Systems Inc. breakfast. In
talking about one of the 24 projects, e-Recruitment, Lorentz called the
government?s recruitment process broken, citing his own experience in applying
for the OMB job he assumed in January. The e-Recruitment project will adapt and
scale up technologies already developed for job portals such as Monster.com,
Lorentz said; "When it makes sense, we'll private-label external capabilities."
But not all of the projects can follow a commercial model, he said: 

e-authentication, for instance, has no private-sector counterpart. "Initiative
by initiative, we're going to take a consistent approach" to authenticating
users who access e-government services, Lorentz said. "There's a dynamic
tension between openness and security. We should be able to allow citizens
access in any way they wantand measure what they want." Lorentz said OMB will
"take an open, plug-and-play approach in a consistent partnership with the
private sector. We'll rebrand methods that work for government use. It gets you
there faster, at lower cost and makes you marketplace-connected." Lorentz
predicted four to five of the 24 initiatives "will roll out quickly with some
deliverables this calendar year." He also joined a panel discussion yesterday
on managing the cultural changes of e-government projects, along with John
Condon, president for federal services of GDSS Inc. of Washington, Denise
McKeehan of Unisys Corp. and Keith Thurston, acting deputy associate
administrator in the General Services Administration's IT Office. The panelists
agreed that the best setting for cultural change is when there are both good
and bad consequences to adapting or failing to adapt to change. Lorentz said
four levers to culture change are reward and recognition, training and
education, communication, and compensation. "Reward and recognition is the most
powerful lever," he said. "It means a lot to be recognized by those higher up."
Compensation provides the biggest hammer, but managers have the least control
over it, Lorentz added. OMB is considering using both reward and recognition
and compensation in the form of bonuses for the e-government projects that make
the most progress, Lorentz said.
****************
San Jose Mercury News
New technology to transmit video without wires through home

Someday soon, you will be able to take the video stream that your set-top cable
box brings into your living room and beam it to the television set in the back
bedroom without hooking up any cables. You will be able to transfer the video
footage from your last vacation from the camcorder to the TV without fumbling
with wires. You will be able to send a multimedia presentation from a laptop to
an overhead projector without plugging in any cords.

These are some of the promises of ultra-wideband, a powerful technology that
can transmit streaming video and other bandwidth-hogging content around homes
and offices. Although ultra-wideband -- or UWB -- has been around for about 12
years, the wireless networking industry only last month received the crucial
go-ahead from the Federal Communications Commission to develop the technology
for mainstream commercial applications.

Now ultra-wideband is poised to potentially shake up the world of wireless
networking -- going head to head with more established wireless technologies
like 802.11 and Bluetooth -- as UWB-enabled TV sets, VCRs and other devices hit
the market in time for Christmas 2003.

``Ultra-wideband will allow you to make your surround-sound system and your
video system completely wireless,'' said Michael Gallagher, deputy director of
the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a bureau of the
Commerce Department that manages the federal wireless spectrum along with the
FCC. ``This lets you get rid of the rat's nest of wires.''

First developed by the military, ultra-wideband works by sending very short,
narrow pulses of electromagnetic energy across a broad swath of the radio
spectrum. The military already uses the technology in ground-penetrating radar
systems to detect land mines and other objects buried underground, and police
officers use it in imaging systems to monitor movement behind doors and walls.

But while ultra-wideband technology is quite compelling, it is also
controversial. That's because UWB signals can cross parts of the radio spectrum
already licensed for other uses, including the PCS spectrum used by cellular
providers like Sprint and the GPS spectrum used by the military for global
positioning.

Although companies developing UWB networking technology maintain that
ultra-wideband emissions are too low-powered to interfere with other radio
signals, it has taken the Federal Communications Commission three years to
approve the use of the technology for commercial wireless networking
applications. When the FCC -- with an endorsement from the National
Telcommunications and Information Administration -- finally gave the green
light last month, the commission was careful to restrict the parts of the
spectrum used by UWB and to limit UWB emission levels to minimize any risk of
interference.

Crosses spectrum

According to Rudy Baca, an analyst for the Precursor Group, a telecom research
firm, the approval of UWB for use in wireless networking -- even though UWB
signals cross parts of the spectrum licensed by others -- allows the FCC to
make better use of the existing radio spectrum at a time when spectrum is in
short supply.

The real question facing ultra-wideband now is whether it can break into a
market already dominated by two existing wireless networking standards:
Bluetooth, which is used for short-range personal area networks, or PANs, and
802.11, which is used in wider local area networks, or LANs.

Although some analysts don't see much of a difference between UWB and 802.11 in
particular, those developing the UWB market said the technology can do things
that the existing wireless networking systems cannot.

Most important, they say, UWB can handle more bandwidth-intensive applications
-- like streaming video -- than either 802.11 or Bluetooth because it can send
data at much faster rates. UWB technology has a data rate of roughly 100
megabits per second, with speeds up to 500 megabits per second. That compares
with maximum speeds of 11 megabits per second for 802.11b, often referred to as
Wi-Fi, which is the technology currently used in most wireless LANs; and 54
megabits per second for 802.11a, which is being rolled out as the next version
of Wi-Fi, called Wi-Fi 5. Bluetooth has a data rate of about 1 megabit per
second.

As a result, UWB is particularly well-suited for wireless home entertainment
networks, explained Jeff Ross, vice president of corporate development for Time
Domain, an Alabama company that designs UWB chip sets for military, law
enforcement and now commercial uses.

Cheaper to produce

Ultra-wideband is also less expensive than 802.11, which is critical in the
price-sensitive world of consumer electronics, said Chris Fisher, vice
president of marketing at XtremeSpectrum, a Virginia company developing UWB
chip sets that would go into consumer electronics like VCRs and TVs.

According to Fisher, the bill of materials -- the cost to the consumer
electronics manufacturer to place UWB technology inside a device -- is $20 for
ultra-wideband, compared with $40 for 802.11b and $65 for 802.11a.

In addition, UWB technology consumes much less power than 802.11, making it
ideal for use in battery-powered devices like cameras and cell phones. Wi-Fi,
in contrast, ``is limited to PCs and things that you can plug into a wall,''
said Geoffrey Anderson, vice president of Sony's advanced wireless technology
group.

Perhaps the biggest drawback of UWB is its range of operation, although the
technology can transmit signals farther when sending at lower data rates.
Ultra-wideband can transmit signals within a range of about 10 meters, or 35
feet. That's roughly comparable to the range of Bluetooth but smaller than the
range of both 802.11a at 15 meters and 802.11b at 50 meters.

Still, the range of an ultra-wideband network can be extended by placing
``repeaters'' -- other UWB-enabled devices -- around a home or office.

Someday, said Cahners In-Stat analyst Mike Wolf, ultra-wideband systems may
even emerge as a competitor to the 3G wireless data networks that cellular
providers like Sprint PCS and Verizon Wireless are now building.

Now that the FCC has given its blessing to the use of UWB technology for
wireless networking, Gartner Dataquest Group analyst Todd Hanson believes the
big challenge for companies like Time Domain and XtremeSpectrum will be to
bring consumer electronics manufacturers on board. ``They will have to
evangelize the technology,'' Hanson said.

Time Domain is already working with more than two dozen companies to develop
applications for its UWB chip sets. And Xtreme Spectrum plans to be providing
sample chips to potential customers by the middle of this year.

Delivering `more value'

Texas Instruments is also considering incorporating UWB into its chips. And
even Intel is studying the technology. ``Intel wants to help create a UWB
industry because it will allow devices we care a lot about, like PCs, to
deliver more value,'' said Ben Manny, co-director of the wireless technology
development organization in Intel Labs.

For now, consumer electronics manufacturers like Sony maintain that it is too
early to say exactly how they will use UWB technology in their products. But
they seem intrigued.

``Maybe this is a technology chasing a market today,'' Hanson said. ``But there
is a market for this.''
*****************
Mercury News
Love at first site Create your own Web page with inexpensive and easy-to-use
design sites

The geeky kid who lives down the street had better learn how to use a lawn
mower this summer.

There's no reason to pay him -- or a high-priced Webmaster -- to design and
construct your personal Web site now that a handful of Web publishing companies
are offering easy-to-use tools to make your home page look like a million
bucks.

``Instead of spending $10,000 or more designing a unique looking site, you
should be spending a few hundred a year and doing it yourself,'' said Justin
Kitch, CEO of Homestead, a Menlo Park Web publisher.

And you don't need a master's degree to do it.

Homestead -- much like Tripod, Yahoo's GeoCities and others -- has revamped its
publishing services in the past few months to include features such as
e-commerce tools, one-click uploads and domain name registration.

If you're a beginner, you'll like the wizards that allow you to simply pick a
template, insert text and photos and click on the upload button. More advanced
users will like the build-from-scratch features that allow them to pick their
own colors, fonts and design features such as borders and lines.

What you may not like is that many of the new features are available only to
those who cough up a few dollars every month.

It's all part of a new business plan that not only allows these companies to
pick up some revenue -- now that the free ride on the dot-com train has come to
a halt -- but also lets consumers place some value on their sites.

``The average everyday person wants ease of use and customization,'' said Mark
Hull, director of Yahoo's community services. ``They know what they want.
They've seen people with their own domain names with personalized sites. These
sites are fun and cool and powerful calling cards for people on the Internet
today.''

For no money, you can get fun and cool but you'll also get a long URL name and
plenty of pop-up ads. For as little as $5 per month, you can lose the ads. For
a few more dollars, you can get your own domain name. And if you're willing to
dig deeper in your wallet, you can have multiple e-mail addresses and extra
storage space to handle all of those photos and graphics you want on your home
page.

But that doesn't mean you have to cough up cash to create a presence on the
Web. Homestead has dropped its free service, though it is keeping a free 14-day
trial period for new customers, while the competition has kept free services in
place, realizing that there is a market there.

``I think there will always be some element of a free service out there,'' Hull
said. ``But after people get a taste of what publishing is all about and
realize that we're talking about fairly manageable costs, you gain an
appreciation of the higher-end services.''

Kitch notes that fee-based services have changed the look of the Internet as a
whole. When the services were all free, surfers were building sites about their
rock collections, favorite music stars or the daytime adventures of their pet
gerbils.

``A lot of those sort of sites have dropped off,'' Kitch said. ``I think the
market shifted toward serious hobbyists, clubs, teams, churches, small
businesses, those sort of things. Most of them are building kind of official
sites.''

A sports team, for example, could post team pictures, game statistics,
tournament schedules and even sell some merchandise.

But there's still plenty of room on the Web for teens who want to show their
love for 'N Sync.

Angelfire, a Web publishing service of Terra Lycos, targets teens and young
adults while its counterpart, Tripod, leans more toward serious hobbyists and
small businesses.

``You can see it on the sites, these are meant for different audiences,'' said
Charles Kilby, director of personal Web publishing for Terra Lycos.

``Look at Angelfire. It's very hip. Very young. When we acquired Angelfire, it
was heavy into teens with entertainment and fashion-related sites. Tripod
attracts an older audience, people who are a bit more technical. There are a
lot more business sites there.''

The company, Kilby said, is committed to keeping the free services in place.

``We want to be able to allow everyone to come and start with us,'' he said.
``Later, they can upgrade and improve their skills. We've seen people start
with basic pages and come back with multipage sites with things they learned to
use by poking around and visiting other member sites.''
*******************
Mercury News
The truth behind PC sales figures: Does everybody really have one?

Six in 10 U.S. households have at least one personal computer, the same as a
year ago. Does that mean everyone who wants a PC already has one?

A study from the Odyssey research firm this week delivered this news.
Immediately, people set about interpreting the figures. Odyssey blames
marketing based on processor speed or hard-drive size for the flat percentages,
saying PC makers should instead focus on what people can do with a PC.

``Most households without a PC report they don't have one because they don't
believe they need one,'' said Sean Baenen, Odyssey's managing director. ``It's
a breakdown in marketing, not sales.''

The truth could be more complicated. Other studies suggest it's overly simple
to imply that every household that wants a PC has one, or that if you call it a
``digital photo manager'' instead of a ``PC'' all of a sudden more people will
buy one.

There are three factors the industry seems to be ignoring. One, many non-PC
households already know they could use a PC -- they just don't absolutely need
one. Two, there is no reason to believe PC ``penetration,'' a term for the
percentage of people who own PCs, can get dramatically higher. Three, unlike
the telephone, television or dishwasher, the PC is less accessible to users who
are not fluent in English.

Many non-PC households know that having a PC would be useful, because they have
kids. Kids do book reports. And these days, teachers often prefer that book
reports be typed.

There are libraries, computer labs and community centers where students can
type their reports, and library officials say students heavily use the
computers in the afternoons. Still, students must reserve time on a computer --
a maximum of two hours per day in San Jose. That can make it harder to work on
it right before bed, since most days San Jose libraries close at 6 p.m.

``There is access throughout the system to personal computers -- we recently
instituted a `Reserve A Computer' system, and there hasn't been anyone who
really needed to use it who has been turned away,'' said Lorraine Oback,
marketing communications director for the San Jose Public Library System.
``It's just always convenient to do stuff at home. If you can reduce traveling
time, so much the better.''

Most PCs still cost at least $500. The ones available at electronics stores
usually cost more than that, after tax. For most families, that's a whole lot
of money, whether PC-makers call them ``cheap PCs'' or not.

Which brings us to the second point. When we look at the technologies that have
achieved a high penetration in the U.S. household -- things like the telephone,
TV and VCR -- none costs $500, and none is as complicated as the Windows and
Macintosh operating systems.

``Penetration, relative to the cost of the product, is pretty high,'' said
Steve Baker, analyst at NPD Techworld, a market research firm. ``One of the
fallacies with PCs is that we're going to get to 95 percent penetration. It may
not be that kind of a product.''

And there are challenges beyond price. Broader studies suggest that PC makers
have picked the low-hanging fruit, and if they want to sell computers to the
other 39 percent, they're going to have to fix some fundamental problems with
the mass-market computing experience.

For instance: A Commerce Department study released last month shows that as of
September 2001, 71 percent of Asian-Americans and 70 percent of whites said
they used computers in their homes or elsewhere. Just 56 percent of blacks and
49 percent of Hispanics said they use computers.

Blacks and Hispanics (``Hispanic'' is the term used in the survey) are the two
largest ethnic minorities in the country, so if they're buying less of
something, it matters to the bottom line.

Why are those groups using computers less? There are probably many reasons.

A statistic from the study might shed light on one issue: One in nine Hispanics
lives in a household in which Spanish is the only language spoken. About 14
percent of Hispanics who live in such households use the Internet. In the rest
of the Hispanic population, 38 percent used the Internet. That is a dramatic
difference.

``I think most of the people do want a computer in the home, at least one --
they're scared to go to the American stores sometimes, because of language,''
said Gloria Paredes, owner of Latino Computers, a San Jose business that sells
refurbished PCs. She said most households know they need a computer for the
children. ``I find that they ask for Spanish software. It's not easy to find.''
***************
San Jose Mercury News
ICANN's problems more than bickering
CHALLENGE BOILS DOWN TO HOW TO GOVERN NET

Once again, the people who decide how the Internet is supposed to function
aren't getting along. The Net is alight with e-flames, and people from all over
the world went to Accra, Ghana, last week to argue with the passion of parents
at a Little League game.

Sometimes, what these relatively anonymous Internet gurus worry about is
impossibly geeky. Things like root servers, protocol parameters and port
numbers are critical to making sure we see the right Web pages and get the
right e-mail, and we're grateful for these people -- as long as they don't go
into too much detail at parties.

But as the Internet has insinuated itself more deeply into global commerce and
daily life, more fundamental business and political questions have begun to
boil:

What are the rules for assigning and naming Web addresses, which enable us to
find anything and everything? Who controls, and profits from, granting and
registering these addresses? Should there be space reserved for purely public
endeavors? And so on.

Indeed, these questions are mere proxies for the really big one, the one with
incalculable zeroes after the $64: How, if at all, should the Internet be
governed?

This is such a colossal container of worms that people have basically chosen to
avoid tackling it head-on. But recently, the head of what passes for Internet
management tossed out a grenade that blew all the smaller issues out of the
way.

Internet management must go well beyond making the technical trains run on
schedule, he said. Let's forget about members of the public having seats at the
governing table, he said. Replace them with representatives of world
governments, he said.

Ka-boom.

To appreciate how incendiary this is requires only a short look back.

For several years, the people who work on these issues (also known as ``the
technology community'') have been toiling in the virtual lab, operating on the
basic premise that the Internet is best left to develop on its own. National
governments should be avoided at any cost, corporations should not have too
much power, and no country should predominate.

What evolved is the non-profit entity Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers, or ICANN (www.icann.org).

ICANN is an odd bird. It's a corporation in look and feel, with a chief
executive, a board of directors and an organizational chart befitting the best
of bureaucracies.

Some of its 19 directors are technology legends, such as board chairman Vinton
Cerf, who helped design the communications protocol that enables the Internet
to work. Another is a former president of Radcliffe College. There are
directors from Japan, South Korea, Ghana and Spain.

And five of these directors got their posts in a remarkable way: an electronic
vote open to all Internet users worldwide. About 33,000 ballots were cast.

At the ICANN helm is a grandfatherly Brit named M. Stuart Lynn, a technologist
who spent much of his professional life running the computer systems of U.S.
universities. A year ago, at 63, Lynn stepped out of retirement and into a
world riven by a level of infighting that made academic politics look like an
Up With People concert.

So Lynn and ICANN have struggled along, assigning domains such as ``.kids'' and
``.museums'' and signing contracts with registration companies. And in the
process Lynn has come to believe that ICANN is broken.

``The original noble `experiment' -- and it was noble -- to see whether a
purely private entity could successfully manage a critical global resource
simply will not work,'' he wrote recently.

So Lynn proposed his reforms, and the nicest of his critics accuse him of
mongering for power.

In the view of the more reasoned opponents, the elected public members provide
the checks and balances to ensure that ICANN's mission remains technical.

Strategically, perhaps Lynn's ploy on public elections will backfire, although
reports from Ghana indicate the board might end the conference by letting the
public members' terms expire in November and providing no process for
replacement.

But it's reasonable for Lynn to ask now whether the Internet, the most
pervasive commercial organism to come along since the telephone, needs broader
oversight. And if so, by whom? Even technical decisions have real-life
implications, about price, access and privacy, to name a few.

There are no fiendish black hats in this dispute, and all seem to genuinely
want to ensure that the Internet not become the province of special interests.

On the Internet all politics might not be local, but one hopes it remains the
art of compromise.
****************
TECH NEWS ROUNDUP

HANDHELDS

Adapter offers options for Visor expandability

While they have a common operating system, Palm-based organizers take different
approaches to expandability. Palm uses memory cards, Sony uses its own Memory
Stick, and Handspring uses the Springboard module. A new line of Springboard
modules from Portable Innovation Technology (www.pitech.com) will allow
Handspring Visor users to take advantage of all the possibilities.

The MemPlug adapter is available in four versions, for the Compact Flash card,
SmartMedia card, secure digital (SD) cards and the Memory Stick. It looks like
a standard module but has a slot that accommodates those storage solutions in
various sizes ranging up to 256 megabytes. Inserting a card from a digital
camera into the MemPlug allows the user to view pictures and short videos on
the Visor without first downloading the images to a computer. The MemPlug comes
with programs for backup and file transfer and a viewer for reading e-books.
The Compact Flash and SmartMedia MemPlug models are $50, and the SD and Memory
Stick versions are $70.

-- New York Times 

LAPTOPS

Sony introduces model with 16.1-inch display

Sony introduced a laptop computer that it says is the first laptop personal
computer to come with a 16.1-inch display. The new Vaio GRX laptop ``offers a
viewing area similar to a standard 17-inch CRT monitor in a flat, space-saving
panel,'' the company said. The notebook, which is powered by Intel's new
Pentium 4-M mobile processor, comes with a CD-RW/DVD drive, two PC card slots
and Sony's audio and video editing software. Sony said the machine will be
available later this month in three configurations. The most expensive model,
the Vaio GRX590, will cost about $3,000 and comes with a 40 GB hard drive. The
least expensive, the Vaio GRX550, will sell for about $2,100, but has a
slightly smaller 15-inch monitor. 

-- Associated Press 

KEYBOARDS

Logitech's new device doubles as case for Palm

Fremont's Logitech used this year's CeBIT in Hanover, Germany, to show off a
waterproof fabric keyboard that wraps around a Palm device to double as a case.


Logitech's European public relations manager, Garreth Hayes, splashed a soft
drink on it to demonstrate; the sticky stuff dribbled off without leaving a
stain. The $100 device, which ships in April, felt a little cramped and slowed
down typing speed compared with more conventional folding keyboards. 

CeBIT is the world's biggest technology show. 

-- Associated Press 

PaceBook separates display and keyboard

Liberating notebook users from cramped typing positions is the idea behind the
PaceBook. Its display and keyboard are separate, though they can be held
together by the device's case. 

The product by Taiwan-based PaceBlade lets users position the keyboard wherever
they want, including in portrait rather than traditional landscape mode, good
for reading Web pages. 

``There are a lot of mechanical issues with PCs,'' said PaceBlade director of
corporate development Michael Lim. ``For instance, hinges fail. Here, there is
no hinge.'' 

An infrared connection lets users position the keyboard anywhere, and the
touch-sensitive screen means information can be entered with a stylus or
on-screen keyboard. 
*************
San Jose Mercury News
Amazon boosts service to Germany and U.K.

Amazon.com, the largest Web retailer, began allowing individual customers in
the United Kingdom and Germany to list items for sale, expanding a service
available in the United States since 2000.

The Marketplace allows sellers to list their new and used items alongside new
items being sold by the company. The U.K. and Germany sites started with about
1 million listings, Amazon.com spokeswoman Christina Smedley said.

Amazon.com has said the feature gives customers a wider selection of
merchandise at lower prices, while providing added revenue; the Web retailer
charges a 15 percent sales commission. Sales from these listings accounted for
15 percent of the items sold on Amazon.com's U.S. site in the fourth quarter.



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