Clips October 15, 2002

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips October 15, 2002

ARTICLES

Internet Society Picked As Manager of '.org' [ICANN]
A New Focus On Movie Piracy
Silicon Valley Fights Back [DMCA]
States make vital link [SNN]
FBI planning Bay Area computer forensics lab
Computer Pioneer Uncapher Dies
Pressplay in Licensing Deal With BMG
How fair are Internet fares?
Energy feels the online squeeze [Access Online Research Articles]
Tough decisions [Homeland Security]
Route Control Devices: The Route Less Traveled
File swapping invades the home computer[P2P]
Colleges urged to join fight against Internet piracy
Traffic Cameras Could Help Solve Crimes
Super-Distribution Turns Pirates Into Friends
Spam fighter defeats junk email company [AUS]

****************************
Washington Post
Internet Society Picked As Manager of '.org'
By Robert Macmillan
Tuesday, October 15, 2002; Page E05

A Reston-based group of computer professionals yesterday won approval from 
global Internet addressing authorities to manage the ".org" domain, home to 
millions of nonprofit groups.

The international board of directors for the Internet Corporation for 
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted 11 to 1 to let the Internet 
Society manage the domain starting in 2003, said Mary Hewitt, ICANN 
spokeswoman. The decision was an endorsement of a staff recommendation made 
in August.Eleven organizations from around the world submitted bids to take 
control of ".org." VeriSign Inc., the current ".org" manager, will 
relinquish its hold on the domain at the end of this year as part of a deal 
it struck with ICANN to maintain control of the world's most recognizable 
domain -- ".com."

The spinoff of ".org" is part of a federal plan to privatize and globalize 
the Internet. In 2005, the ".net" domain will also be open to bid, but the 
present manager, VeriSign, will also be able to bid on it.

Accounting for more than 2.3 million Internet addresses worldwide, ".org" 
represents a substantial revenue stream for the organization that wins the 
contract. VeriSign now charges Internet address retailers $6 per year for 
every ".org" name they sell. Retailers, also known as registrars, in turn 
charge varying prices to individual users.

Mark Carpenter, director of Web strategies for AARP, one of the largest 
lobby groups in the nation, predicted a painless handoff to the Internet 
Society.

"We have bought that domain mostly from VeriSign in three-year chunks, and 
I don't think it's going to change anything," Carpenter said.

Rob Courtney, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology, 
said that the transition should have "a minimal impact."

"But I should say, we've never done this before," Courtney said. "It's the 
largest registry that we've ever tried to [transfer]. I don't want to 
trivialize the size of the task."

The Internet Society, founded in 1991, is the home of two key Internet 
standards-setting bodies, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the 
Internet Architecture Board. It has members in more than 100 countries.
****************************
Washington Post
A New Focus On Movie Piracy
Battling Bootleggers With Distortion
By Ellen McCarthy
Monday, October 14, 2002; Page E05

When the lights go down in a movie theater showing a sneak preview, 
camcorders sometimes come out. These digital pirates record 
surreptitiously, moviemakers say, and quickly duplicate and sell bootleg 
copies of the film overseas and on the street, sometimes before a movie is 
officially released.

The motion picture industry says it loses about $3 billion per year from 
piracy, and this low-tech technique is among the most widespread. But the 
nine employees of Herndon-based Cinea Inc. think they have cracked the case 
on how to prevent these bootlegs from making it to market.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology's Advanced Technology 
Program thinks Cinea is on to something, too. Last week the institute 
awarded a $2 million grant to help accelerate the work.

Rob Schumann, Cinea's founder and chief executive, said it took three years 
for his team to figure out how to capitalize on the notion that video 
recorders view images produced on film differently than the human eye. The 
emission of light often causes a distortion in the recorded image that is 
not visible to the average moviegoer.

"Your eye just sees motion, not a sequence of still images. Camcorders take 
discrete images of the world. It's actually a much more accurate version," 
Schumann said. "But if you take a camcorder and point it at a monitor, 
you'll see bars across the monitor."

Cinea's project intensifies the distortion, making films recorded by 
camcorder so marred that they become worthless. Those who pay for 
legitimate copies, Schumann said, would see no difference.

The company's executives estimate this could cut film piracy loss in half. 
Richard Taylor, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America, 
said it was impossible to say how much of the industry's loss actually 
stems from camcorder-based theft. Movie pirates also obtain copies of films 
by tapping satellite feeds, breaking into film labs and bribing studio 
employees.

"There are people who are determined to make profit or do damage to the 
film industry through piracy. If a major release comes out on a Friday and 
by midnight Friday it's up on the Internet, people may not go to the film 
or rent or purchase a copy of it later," Taylor said.

Taylor was not familiar with Cinea, but said his organization is working 
with the consumer electronics and information technology industry to devise 
protection.

Cinea has a small-scale version of the technology to prove the concept and 
will use the federal grant to develop and test a working model over the 
next two years. The project is expected to cost $2.3 million. The federal 
program generally splits the cost of development almost equally with the 
company, but it is contributing most of the money for Cinea's two-year 
project. In January Cinea landed a $2 million round of venture funding led 
by Monumental Venture Partners LLC of Tysons Corner.

Schumann set out to solve the camcorder problem after Divx, a DVD 
encryption project he worked on for five years, was dumped by its main 
backer, Circuit City Stores Inc., in 1999.

Many other attempts to create secure encryption for films have failed 
because of either hackers who figure out how to crack the code or 
opposition to proposals to create industry-wide standards.

"I recognized there was still a tremendous need for video security," 
Schumann said. "This is the anti-camcorder piece, which has been a problem 
for quite a period of time. The quality of camcorders gets better and 
better. The real economic piracy, the true lost revenue to the studios, 
occurs primarily with people going to first-run movies in the [United] 
States and shipping copies to Asia."

Michael Newman, a spokesman for the National Institute of Standards and 
Technology, said its awards go to projects that are often too risky for 
general investors but have the potential for broad economic benefits. A 
total of 40 awards, worth $101.6 million in all, were given out last week.

Schumann hopes the film industry contacts he made while working on Divx 
will bring Cinea to the attention of major studio companies. The reception 
so far has been positive, he said.

Taylor, of the motion picture association, believes anything that can cut 
down on piracy losses should be fully explored.

"The bottom line is that the loss of revenue harms legitimate consumers. It 
drives up the price for lost sales or rentals, and then you start talking 
about jobs being lost. If the chain of economic recouping is shattered, you 
can imagine the damage done," he said.
***************************
San Francisco Chronicle
Silicon Valley Fights Back
Hollywood has a worthy adversary in South Bay Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren

In Silicon Valley, where crack computer programmers and networking aces are 
now competing for jobs waiting tables and tending bar, the connection 
between government policies that are hurting the digital economy and 
skyrocketing tech-sector unemployment seems pretty obvious.

But outside those circles, many other Americans haven't connected those 
dots yet. More important, they haven't realized that the government is also 
about to come after them.

Take, for example, the legal rights consumers won in the landmark 1984 Sony 
Betamax case, which established "fair use" rights to make limited copies of 
CDs, records, TV shows, books and other entertainment products. As digital 
wares replace older analog media such as videotapes and audiotapes, those 
rights will disappear.

The fate of the high-tech economy has always hinged on the successful 
introduction of a steady stream of new technologies and services. One of 
the reasons so many techies are out of work right now is because companies 
don't hire people to make products that might be illegal, such as anything 
capable of copying digital media. And that means that what's left of the 
new-media industry will continue to die on the vine, taking the hopes of 
would-be suppliers to that industry, and much of the tech sector in 
general, down the tubes with it.

The digital slowdown is also undermining development and sale of the more 
advanced software, hardware, telecom and networking services that a more 
open and accepting attitude toward new technologies such as broadband media 
and peer-to-peer computing would have created.

Which is why safeguarding the right to make limited numbers of copies of 
legally owned entertainment products will be crucial for Silicon Valley in 
the digital age. If that right is protected, consumers would once again 
have reason to buy the newer technologies and services that are needed to 
reignite growth in sagging tech markets.

And the best way to do that, says San Jose Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, is to 
make sure the public understands what it has at stake.

Lofgren announced new legislation last week, called the Digital Choice and 
Freedom Act, that does just that. Designed primarily to appeal to 
consumers, the bill also offers the best shot yet at getting the faltering 
digital and broadband economies back into job-creation mode.

Rather than argue about what is best for Silicon Valley firms -- or, for 
that matter, for Hollywood studios -- Lofgren wants to shift the debate to 
the question of what is fair to the buyers of digital media.

Reframing the issue along those lines more closely links Silicon Valley's 
commercial interests with the desires of consumers across the country. The 
goal is to create a pro-consumer coalition among legislators to 
counterbalance the substantial influence commanded by the big-media 
conglomerates that are trying to turn back the clock on what were until 
recently well-established consumer rights.

At issue is whether the fair-use doctrine established in the Betamax case 
will continue to apply in the years ahead. The U.S. Supreme Court decided 
that case with a ruling that gave consumers the right to make what the 
court called "fair use" of any purchased media products. Those rights 
include the ability to copy a legally obtained media product onto another 
format, to share the product with a limited number of people such as 
friends and family or to give it away entirely or sell the copy that you 
own (as in the case of selling a used CD to a music store).

But legislation passed since then, most notably the Digital Millennium 
Copyright Act (DMCA), eliminated those rights for digital media. Under that 
legislation, Congress made it a crime to subvert copyright-protection 
schemes even if people were doing so only to make fair uses of the media 
they purchased.

That's why it's great news that, at long last, the entertainment industry 
is finally being put on the defensive.

Lofgren's legislation would protect the fair-use rights of consumers and 
entrepreneurs to use digital forms of entertainment in the same ways that 
were permitted for older, nondigital types of media. That means consumers 
would still be allowed to copy a Bob Dylan song off their favorite CD and 
give it to a friend, or copy "West Wing" digitally and then e-mail the 
program to a family member who might have missed it.

It would also mean no more arrests of people such as Dmitri Sklyarov, the 
Russian programmer who was busted at a technology convention in Las Vegas 
last year and thrown into jail after his company published software that 
disabled a method used to prevent copying of electronic books.

Nothing in Lofgren's proposal would permit wider sharing, beyond friends 
and family, of copyrighted materials or their unauthorized resale, which 
would still be prohibited under federal law. But its passage would make the 
world safer for a new generation of consumer-electronics, computing, 
entertainment and communications offerings, such as personal video 
recorders that allow consumers to send TV programs over the Internet and 
other similarly innovative products and services. Growth in those new 
directions would go a long way toward putting people back to work, as well 
as opening up new types of job opportunities few of us can presently imagine.

Escalating unemployment in Silicon Valley might not concern members of 
Congress outside California very much. But Lofgren figures her 
congressional colleagues will care if they start getting inundated with 
letters and e-mails from voters in their own districts objecting to 
Congress interfering with fair-use rights consumers have come to expect.

Lofgren is an excellent tactician who has chosen a smart place to make 
Silicon Valley's stand.


I've been covering her for nearly 20 years. Throughout that time, she's 
been a reliable and effective champion of underdog causes. She's also an 
incredibly hard worker whom opponents routinely underestimate.

Given her track record, it's not surprising Lofgren has stepped up to the 
plate on this issue.

She won re-election to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors in 1988 
without having to go through a runoff, by pocketing more than 50 percent of 
the vote in what was supposed to be a primary. Her first race for Congress, 
in 1994, saw her pull out an upset victory over her heavily favored rival, 
former San Jose Mayor Tom McEnery. She hasn't had a serious challenge since 
then, something she forestalls by keeping up the informal weekend meetings 
with voters at local shopping centers that have become her trademark. Her 
popularity makes Lofgren nearly unbeatable, which means she will be a 
durable opponent for congressional colleagues who rely on corporate backing 
to keep their seats. Her strong local support also explains why Lofgren is 
willing to take on issues that many other politicians fear.

One example: When she served on the Santa Clara County Board of 
Supervisors, Lofgren was often that body's most effective defender of 
programs that serve the mentally ill. In that case, Lofgren's winning 
tactic was to show her colleagues how providing services to the mentally 
ill saved taxpayers money in other ways.

Fortunately, most of Silicon Valley's unemployed workers don't have serious 
mental-health problems, at least not yet. But they do fall into a somewhat 
similar category. As a group, they have been left behind, abandoned by the 
leaders of many of their former companies, who care more about their own 
stock options than they do about what happens to their workers. They're 
also scorned by others who seem far too eager to portray joblessness in the 
tech sector as a deserved comeuppance for arrogant yuppies rather than as a 
still-unfolding human tragedy. At the moment, few people other than Lofgren 
who are in positions of power appear to be in much of a hurry to get the 
digital and broadband economies back on track.

Lofgren's legislation has at least a shot of doing just that. At a minimum, 
the argument surrounding copyright issues might finally stop revolving 
solely around the often-misleading claims the entertainment industry bosses 
make about the need to protect the rights of artists, whom they in fact 
routinely rip off.

Instead, members of Congress will also have to contend with growing numbers 
of voters in their districts who are sure to begin seeing the issue as 
Lofgren has framed it: as a question of what people should get when they 
put their hard-earned money down to buy a tape, a video or cable-TV 
service. It's a safe bet most of them won't want the federal government 
putting unreasonable conditions on the use of media products they've paid 
good money for.

To be sure, it's possible that when the dispute surrounding the legality of 
copying digital media is finally resolved, tech firms and consumers might 
still find themselves on the short end of the stick.

But Lofgren's approach makes it at least equally possible that the most 
influential big-media corporate powers will be forced to yield to what is 
in the end our nation's largest and single most powerful interest group: 
America's roughly 280 million couch potatoes.

From where I sit, it looks like Silicon Valley's chances of winning this 
fight just improved, big time.
********************************
Federal Computer Week
States make vital link
BY Judi Hasson
Oct. 14, 2002

Seven more states have signed up for an e-government system that will 
enable Social Security Administration officials to access information in 
state databases to process benefits applications and check for potential fraud.

E-Vital, one of the Bush administration's 24 e-government initiatives, will 
give SSA access to birth and death information maintained by bureaus of 
vital statistics in each state. The agency will check birth records to 
verify the identity of applicants and death records to make sure benefits 
are not being paid in the name of someone deceased.

SSA officials say it has taken months of planning and testing to get the 
project off the ground because of the close cooperation required by the states.

But after launching an e-Vital pilot project with Colorado in August, SSA 
plans to expand the project into seven other states by the end of the 
year  Hawaii, Missouri, Mississippi, Minnesota, Iowa, California and Oklahoma.

To receive benefits or a Social Security number from SSA, citizens have had 
to provide the agency with birth or death information. If an individual 
didn't have the appropriate document, he or she had to request a copy from 
a state bureau of vital statistics. Duplicate records cost money, and it 
can take time to find the original.

With e-Vital, SSA will be able to contact a vital statistics agency 
directly for the information and access records electronically. The agency 
will be able to process benefit applications more quickly and at a lower cost.

"It is pretty straightforward," said John McGing, e-Vital program manager. 
"All transactions have security and audit trails. The information is 
available only to people authorized to get it."

SSA partnered with the National Association for Public Health Statistics 
and Information Systems, a nonprofit association representing state 
statistical directors. The association was responsible for contacting the 
states and getting them on board.

In the e-Vital system, states store statistics in Web databases, and SSA 
uses a Web browser-based system that goes to a hub operated by the 
association, which routes the information to the right state. The project 
costs about $850,000, according to McGing.

Other federal agencies are interested in using the system as well, 
including the Department of Health and Human Services, the State 
Department, the Railroad Retirement Board and the Internal Revenue Service, 
said Dean Mesterharm, SSA's acting chief information officer.

"The major purpose is to check information regarding birth," he said. "It 
could be used for identity checking as well and death information. You can 
check a number of things with this. And preventing fraud is one of the 
benefits."
************************
Mercury News
FBI planning Bay Area computer forensics lab
By Sean Webby

The FBI is creating a $3 million computer forensics lab in Silicon Valley, 
using the latest imaging software and high-end computers to sleuth for 
cyber-clues of child pornography, corruption, murder and more.

The 12,000-square-foot Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, at the foot 
of the Dumbarton Bridge in Menlo Park, will be available to help detectives 
from San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Alameda counties hunt for 
digital clues. Investigators can bring seized computers and disks to be 
searched for incriminating e-mails, encrypted documents and other evidence 
within hardware or software.

Labs like these are popping up around the country in response to what 
investigators are saying is an exponentially growing mass of new case 
evidence to be analyzed.

``Where we used to look at a homicide suspect's letters, now it's evolved 
into an electronic format,'' said Mark Mershon, the special agent in charge 
of the FBI command in San Francisco. ``This is a quickly growing need, and 
law enforcement needs to pool its resources to face it.''

The lab is expected to be operating by next year. It will be staffed by 
about 15 highly trained investigators culled from the FBI and local 
agencies, including the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office and 
San Jose and Palo Alto police departments.

Meanwhile, Santa Clara County is using a $250,000 state grant to start its 
own six-investigator computer crime lab within a month, according to lab 
director Kenneth Rosenblatt. Many of the functions of that lab, based in 
the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office, are set to be folded 
into the FBI lab when it opens.

There are two regional computer labs in operation -- in San Diego and 
Dallas. In the pipeline is this lab as well as centers in Chicago and 
Kansas City.

``This is where everything in law enforcement is going,'' said Randall 
Bolelli, director of the FBI's regional forensic lab in San Diego. ``Almost 
every case these days involves a computer in some way. And as hard drive 
space and capacity keeps increasing, we have more things to look at.''

For years, police departments and prosecutors have had to rely on computer 
forensics from overburdened, in-house experts. Investigators are hoping the 
new Silicon Valley lab will help them keep up with the dramatically growing 
need for processing criminal computer evidence.

Computer evidence has been at the heart of many of the area's child 
pornography investigations, but these days, experts say, computer evidence 
is involved in virtually every type of case, including investment fraud, 
robbery, sex crimes, murder and terrorism.

For example:

? The FBI used computer forensics in this spring's Operation Candyman. 
Seven South Bay residents were among 40 child pornography suspects arrested 
in a nationwide child porn sweep.

? In Palo Alto earlier this year, detectives investigating a child 
molestation complaint looked in the files of the suspect's computer and 
found a journal where he expressed his love for the elementary school 
student. The man was convicted.

Law enforcement interviewed about the regional lab agreed that the 
increasing workload needed to be attacked in a united way.

Jack Grandsaert, the San Mateo County deputy district attorney in charge of 
computer forensics, said there are people complicit in crimes going free 
for lack of trained investigators.

``Before we used to look at the typewriter ribbon. Now, think of e-mail, 
who the suspects are corresponding with,'' Grandsaert said. ``Well, we 
often can't find it because it is encoded. And so we miss out on a 
co-conspirator that might have had a mother lode of evidence.''

The lab is also expected to function as a training center for local law 
enforcement. As investigators are rotated out of the lab, they will return 
to their agencies with the latest training. Among the skills being taught 
at the San Diego lab, for example, is how to remove evidence from a 
computer without damaging the files, how to find ways around firewalls and 
secret passwords, and how to remove evidence from a computer without 
disabling it.

Although Menlo Park's regional lab will be created and funded by the FBI, 
its control will be transferred to a local police agency after two years. 
That agency has not been picked yet, Mershon said.
*****************************
Associated Press
Computer Pioneer Uncapher Dies
Sat Oct 12, 5:23 AM ET

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Keith Uncapher, a computer pioneer at the University of 
Southern California who was a key player in the development of the 
Internet, died of a heart attack, the university announced. He was 80.



Uncapher, who founded the Information Sciences Institute at USC's school of 
engineering in 1972, died Thursday.

Under his tenure as executive director, ISI researchers worked on the 
development of the Internet's system of domain names that includes ".com" 
".net," ".org" and other addresses.

"He and his creations were at the center of the information technology 
revolution of the 20th century," said Herbert Schorr, Uncapher's successor 
at ISI.

Before forming ISI with a staff of three, Uncapher worked for RAND 
Corporation in Santa Monica. He was director of RAND's computer science 
division, where he led a project on "packet switching" technology, which 
breaks down digital messages into parts and sends them over a network to be 
reassembled at their destination.

"Keith Uncapher was a brilliant pioneer whose work advanced not only USC 
and its school of engineering, but the whole field of computers," said USC 
President Steven B. Sample.

Born in Denver on April 1, 1922, Uncapher graduated with an electrical 
engineering degree from California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, 
and served for four years in the U.S. Navy (news - web sites) during World 
War II.

He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (news - web sites) in 
1998.

In 1986, Uncapher co-founded the not-for-profit Corporation for National 
Research Initiatives in Reston, Va., where he was senior vice president.

Uncapher lived in Playa del Ray. He is survived by his wife, Doris, and two 
sons.
*****************************
Los Angeles Times
Pressplay in Licensing Deal With BMG
By Jon Healey
October 15 2002

Pressplay, an online music venture jointly owned by the music divisions of 
Sony Corp. and Vivendi Universal, said it has licensed songs from a fourth 
major record company: BMG, one of the three labels that co-own rival online 
venture MusicNet. Terms were not disclosed.

The deal leaves Pressplay without music from only one major record company, 
AOL Time Warner subsidiary Warner Music Group.

Industry-authorized services such as Pressplay and MusicNet have struggled 
to compete with free file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and Morpheus, on 
which users can make unauthorized copies of songs for free.

The only subscription service offering music from all five major labels is 
Rhapsody from Listen.com, but unlike Pressplay, Rhapsody doesn't let users 
download songs or record them onto CDs.

Pressplay executives hope to close that gap by the end of the year, when 
they expect to have deals with all five major labels.
***************************
USA TODAY
Shopping for fares just got a bit more complicated
By Chris Woodyard,

How fair are Internet fares?

A dispute between the nation's most popular Internet travel site and the 
fourth-largest airline is raising new questions about where consumers can 
find the best deals.


Northwest Airlines charges that Internet site Expedia refused to guarantee 
that airlines wouldn't get favorable treatment based on the amount of money 
they pay to have fares listed. Expedia says it doesn't show favoritism to 
any airline in its basic fare listings.

The bias issue becomes increasingly important as more travelers turn to the 
Internet to book flights, hotels and rental cars. About $30 billion in 
travel is expected to be bought online this year, up from $24 billion last 
year, according to Jupiter Media Metrix.

Northwest was removed from Expedia earlier this month after it couldn't 
reach agreement on fees.

"They wouldn't commit to be non-biased," says Al Lenza, a Northwest vice 
president. "They have commitments to push certain airlines. They wouldn't 
give us a commitment that they wouldn't do it."

Expedia, ranked ahead of Travelocity by online travel research firm 
PhoCusWright as the most popular travel site for the first half of the 
year, says that agreements with individual airlines cover special services, 
like e-mail promotions and banner advertising. But that doesn't affect the 
basic listings when a consumer asks for all fares on a certain date between 
certain cities.

Still, consumer advocates and online experts say the latest clash between 
Expedia and Northwest raises new questions. "What is going on?" asks Bill 
McGee, editor of the Consumer Reports Travel Letter. "There's something 
behind the curtain, but we don't know what it is."

Adds PhoCusWright analyst Lorraine Sileo, "It's not obvious to consumers 
that there are relationships."

The airline-Internet site tiff became public Oct. 1 when Northwest's Lenza 
sent a letter to Expedia saying that despite months of negotiations, they 
were unable to reach agreement on a fee schedule. Although neither side 
will comment on the proposed terms, Northwest alleged that the deal would 
have made Expedia the highest-priced outlet of any sort for selling its 
tickets. Northwest says it sells 11% of its tickets on its own Web site. 
Less than 5% of Northwest's tickets were sold over Expedia.

"You advised us that Expedia was unwilling to commit to display Northwest's 
products in an unbiased manner," the Northwest letter to Expedia says. 
Lenza told Expedia that Orbitz, an Internet travel site owned by Northwest 
and four other major airlines, had a bias-free fare display and is a lot 
cheaper as an outlet for selling tickets.

Since being removed from Expedia, Northwest has prominently noted in 
full-page newspaper ads that its fare sales are "not available on expedia.com."

Expedia defends its listings. "Generally speaking, we feel like a consumer 
who spends some time shopping on Expedia is going to end up finding the 
lowest price," says Erik Blachford, president of Expedia North America. 
"The vast majority of time, we're going to show the lowest price in the 
market."

But it may take a few more clicks than some consumers expect.

Travelers who went to Expedia earlier this month to price an Oct. 23 to 
Oct. 30 round trip from New York to Los Angeles would have seen an initial 
screen listing the lowest available fare at $251 on American Trans Air.

But those who asked to search only fares on a single airline, America West, 
would have seen a lower fare, $221. The same $221 fare was available and in 
plain sight on Orbitz.

Blachford says the difference is not an issue of bias. Rather, it's due to 
Expedia's search programming. With thousands of flights to choose from, a 
general search doesn't go as deep as checking fares of a particular carrier.

Despite Northwest's allegations and analysts' questions, a Consumers 
Union's test of travel Web sites found that in nine sessions involving 540 
inquiries on 10 popular non-stop routes, Expedia was the best site for low 
fares. It delivered the lowest price 44% of the time.

The test pitted Expedia against Travelocity, Orbitz, Cheap Tickets, 
OneTravel and TravelNow.

But while they deliver cheap fares for bargain hunters, travel sites also 
have to make money for themselves. Major airlines, scrounging for new ways 
to cut losses, stopped paying commissions last year for ticket sales over 
travel Web sites. So, unlike the $5 or $10 fee tacked on by Orbitz, the 
independent travel sites have sought to cut deals with individual airlines 
for banner advertising, e-mail promotions and other special gimmicks.

Analysts note that Web sites run the risk of losing customers if they don't 
have the best fares. Only 36% of online travel consumers say they are loyal 
to a single site. The rest are willing to switch, says PhoCusWright's Sileo.

McGee notes the absence of government monitoring of travel sites for bias. 
So his advice for consumers is simple: Shop around before you book a flight.
****************************
Federal Computer Week
Energy feels the online squeeze
Access to science articles may close in face of concerns about commercial 
competition
BY William Matthews
Oct. 14, 2002

Beset by large commercial publishing companies, the Energy Department may 
pull the plug on a 2-year-old Web service that offers the public free 
access to scientific articles produced by the federal government and about 
30 small publishers.

PubScience lets researchers and the public search for abstracts and, in 
some cases, full articles from more than 1,400 scientific journals. The 
journals focus mainly on physical sciences and energy-related disciplines.

But in a notice on the PubScience site in August, DOE proposed shutting 
down the Web site but said it would accept comments on the matter until 
Sept. 8 and consider them before taking action.

For now, PubScience remains online and part of the notice on the search 
page says, "A decision will be announced in the near future."

The Web service has been under attack for more than a year by big 
commercial publishing companies and the Software and Information Industry 
Association, who say it is an example of a government service that unfairly 
competes with commercial activities.

PubScience offers access to articles from publishers as diverse as the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, the National Academy of 
Sciences, the Nature Publishing Group and Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry.

The Software and Information Industry Association, which represents 
"information content" companies, argues that the site should be shut down 
because it "duplicates and competes with databases" offered by its members. 
In a position paper, the association says competition from PubScience 
"makes it increasingly difficult for these private- sector companies to 
continue offering their products."

Two commercial Web sites offer similar free access to article abstracts. 
One, Scirus, is owned by publishing giant Elsevier Science. The other, 
Infotrieve, is a commercial document retrieval and delivery service.

In the August announcement that DOE may pull the plug on PubScience, agency 
officials said that Scirus and Infotrieve provide access to 90 percent of 
the journal literature available on PubScience. Thus, agency officials 
said, PubScience should be discontinued.

The notice provoked outrage among librarians, who say PubScience is 
essential because it can be counted on to offer free access to scientific 
information, but commercial publishers cannot.

The American Library Association warned that Scirus and Infotrieve "could 
at any time change the no-fee status" of their search services.

"The indexing industry has a track record of pricing products out of the 
reach of most small libraries and colleges, with prices jumping annually by 
hundreds or even thousands of dollars," warned Marylaine Block, a retired 
librarian and publisher of Ex Libris, an online magazine about libraries.

Started on Oct. 1, 1999, PubScience is in some ways the online version of a 
paper abstracting and indexing service that DOE has provided for more than 
50 years.

The practice began during the Manhattan Project, when government scientists 
were busy creating an atomic bomb. Scientific articles on atomic energy 
were cataloged in the government-published Nuclear Science Abstracts, then 
later in the Energy Science and Technology Database.

According to DOE's Web site, the Nuclear Science Abstracts were distributed 
to libraries "at no cost in order to ensure maximum public access and 
dissemination of the results of research and development projects."

"PubScience continues that tradition," according to DOE's Web site.

Actually, the Web site goes well beyond that tradition, said David LeDuc, 
public policy director at the Software and Information Industry Association.

"If PubScience were just a digital version of what DOE did prior to the 
Internet, we wouldn't be concerned," he said. "But PubScience took that 
concept and expanded it to include over 1,000 private-sector journal titles 
and links to full text articles. That's not at all what DOE did in the 
beginning.

"PubScience is so broad, and DOE showed no intention of limiting its scope. 
In fact, they showed every intent to continue expanding it." That's why 
PubScience is seen as competing with the private sector, he said.

The Software and Information Industry Association and other trade 
associations waged and won a similar battle to keep the Internal Revenue 
Service from offering online tax preparation services to taxpayers, arguing 
that the IRS would be competing with private tax preparation companies.

But librarians like Mary Alice Baish argue that the federal government has 
an obligation to ensure the availability of scientific information, much of 
which is generated with government funds.

"If we lose PubScience, we're going to lose something unique," said Baish, 
a representative from the American Association of Law Libraries.

Library associations worry that the fate of PubScience may be a harbinger 
of the future for informational Web sites run by other government agencies, 
including the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Patent and Trademark 
Office, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The fact that the plug has not yet been pulled "is a potentially hopeful 
sign," said Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation 
of American Scientists. "It may show that the Department of Energy is 
potentially ready to listen to another point of view."

***

Cost of change

In a plea to the Energy Department to spare PubScience, a Web service that 
provides access to journal articles in the physical sciences and other 
energy-related disciplines, a coalition of library associations highlighted 
the cost of commercial services.

The coalition, headed by the American Library Association, cited the 
results of three test searches using PubScience and two other 
science-specific search engines, Scirus and Infotrieve. In the first search 
for an article, PubScience contained the abstract but Scirus and Infotrieve 
did not, and Infotrieve charged $15.50 for the full article.

A second search yielded abstracts at PubScience and Scirus and no abstract 
at Infotrieve, which charged $34.50 for the full article.

In a third search, PubScience offered an abstract and links to the full 
article for free; Scirus offered an abstract and charged $30 for the 
article; and Infotrieve offered no abstract or link, but charged $14.45 for 
the article. "There is no information service comparable to PubScience," 
coalition officials said.
****************************
Federal Computer Week
Tough decisions [Homeland Security]
Commentary
BY Bruce McConnell
Oct. 14, 2002

In July, Office of Management and Budget Director Mitchell Daniels Jr. 
seriously exercised the Clinger- Cohen Act by sending two memorandums to 
the federal agencies that will be affected by the proposed Homeland 
Security Department.

The memorandums directed agencies to cease information system development 
efforts that exceed half a million dollars and to appear before the 
Information Technology Investment Review Group led by OMB and the Office of 
Homeland Security. The group is composed of chief information and financial 
officers and other senior officials from the various agencies affected.

The reviews make sense for at least three reasons. First, there will be a 
large number of systems coming into the proposed Homeland Security 
Department. Every major incoming agency has its own personnel system, for 
example. It will be hard enough to integrate those systems as they are 
without attempting to modify incompatibilities.

Second, the exposure of each project to senior officials in other agencies 
creates a peer-review process that brings valuable outside perspectives. 
One is reminded of the cross-agency IT Acquisition Review Board created 
before enactment of the Clinger-Cohen Act, which was highly successful at 
improving projects in selected agencies.

Finally, the group creates an excellent environment for the management 
officials of the new department. Given the tremendous management challenges 
the new department will have, this is an important way to build trust and 
establish good ties among the incoming entities.

Although the group's deliberations are not made public, some things are 
known. The review process has not become a source of significant delay. 
Several major procurements have passed its scrutiny, such as the 
Transportation Security Administration's infrastructure buy and the Coast 
Guard's modernization of its maritime 911 system.

The peer nature of the group is a potential weakness, however. Just as a 
chief executive officer who sits on another company's executive 
compensation committee is reluctant to reduce the pay of his peer, so too 
will one's fellow CIOs avoid being too critical of one another's projects. 
This danger is mitigated somewhat by the existence of clear decision 
criteria and by the group's need to be relevant to the process.

Although clear criteria can make yes-or-no decisions easier, the problem is 
what to do to satisfy mission requirements when a proposal is weak.

Until an enterprise architecture for the new department is completed, "no" 
may be a reasonable short-term answer. But ultimately, the requirement must 
be met, and the management problem that caused the "no" must be rectified.

Given the importance of its mission, we must hope that the Homeland 
Security Department will draw the best from its incoming components and 
take advantage of those skills in industry.

McConnell, former chief of information policy and technology at the Office 
of Management and Budget, is president of McConnell International LLC (www. 
mcconnellinternational.com).
***************************
Government Computer News
NSF expands computing grid project

By Patricia Daukantas
GCN Staff

The National Science Foundation is expanding its distributed grid-computing 
project to encompass a fifth high-performance computing center.

As part of the $35 million extension, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center 
will get a high-speed connection to the TeraGrid's 40-Gbps optical network, 
said Dan Reed, director of the National Center for Supercomputing 
Applications in Champaign, Ill.

NCSA, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the Energy Department's Argonne 
National Laboratory in Illinois and the California Institute of Technology 
in Pasadena are already part of the grid project, first announced in August 
2001 [see story at www.gcn.com/20_24/news/16873-1.html].

When it goes into operation in the third quarter of 2003, the TeraGrid will 
demonstrate the concurrent use of distributed systems, Reed said. For 
example, a researcher could mine data at the San Diego center, feed the 
data into a large simulation at NCSA and visualize the model's results at a 
third high-performance computing center.

The high-speed backplane of the network is now operating, but the project 
is still awaiting new Linux clusters at the participating computing 
centers, Reed said. The TeraGrid project includes funding for clusters 
based on the 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 processor and on the not-yet-released 
third-generation Itanium, code-named Madison.

One reason the grid has taken two years of construction time is that 
project researchers have been waiting for vendors to produce hardware that 
meets the grid's needs.

"We were looking ahead a generation" to predict what technology would be 
available a year ahead of the project's start date, Reed said.

TeraGrid participants plan to demonstrate several applications on prototype 
hardware at next month's SC2002 conference in Baltimore, Reed said.
***************************
Government Executive
Lawmakers focus on security-related technology issues

By Chloe Albanesius, National Journal's Technology Daily


The big news in Congress this week was the approval of a resolution 
authorizing unilateral military action in Iraq, but lawmakers also 
introduced several technology-related bills focusing on security and issues 
like identity theft, privacy and Internet safety.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., introduced his long-awaited legislation, S. 
3107, designed to improve the databases involving state-issued driver's 
licenses. A similar measure, H.R. 4633, has sparked privacy concerns and 
been characterized as an initiative that would create a national 
identification card. But an aide to Durbin said the new Senate bill "is 
pretty narrowly crafted to improve the process at which licenses are issued."

On another front, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., filed legislation that would 
exempt government contractors from liability involving technologies and 
services sold to the government for homeland security purposes. The 
measure, S. 3076, is identical to language in the Senate's version of 
broader homeland security legislation, H.R. 5005.

It would add homeland security technologies and services to an existing 
executive order that allows the president to indemnify contractors for 
national security reasons. The measure would cover contracts with federal, 
state and local governments.

The issue of the deadline for installing explosive-detection devices at 
airports also resurfaced. The latest measure, S. 3071, would require all 
airports unable to meet the Dec. 31 deadline to issue reports to Congress 
detailing their progress.

In the House, a new measure, H.R. 5588, aims to curtail identity theft by 
making "aggravated identity theft" a separate crime, increasing the 
sentence for anyone who uses the identity of another to commit a crime. And 
a related Senate measure, S. 3100, seeks to limit the misuse of Social 
Security numbers.

Two lawmakers with oversight of telecommunications issues, meanwhile, filed 
legislation on reallocating airwaves occupied by government agencies. The 
bill, H.R. 5638, would establish a fund to reimburse those agencies when 
they relinquish the spectrum for commercial use and move to another band of 
airwaves.

The following technology-related measures also were introduced this week:


S. 3103 and H.R. 5631, which would close a loophole that allows federal 
regulators to overrule local officials on where to locate cellular and 
broadcast towers.

H.R. 5602, which would establish a board to advise the FCC on the impact 
its decisions may have in rural America.

S. 3067, which would make permanent a 2001 law on securing government 
information systems.

S. 3093, which seeks to stop Internet "jamming," or censorship, of 
politically sensitive Web sites in countries like China.

H.R. 5585 and H.R. 5598, which seek to improve the system for collecting, 
evaluating and disseminating statistics on the educational system.

S. 3064, which would make it illegal for healthcare entities to use patient 
data for sending marketing materials about drugs used to treat their 
patients' ailments.

S. 3089, which would grant normal trade relations to products from Ukraine.

H.J. Res. 116, which would recognize that people who obtain copyrighted and 
non-copyrighted materials should be able to use them in non-commercial ways.

S. Res. 338, which would designate October as "Children's Internet Safety 
Month."
*************************
Government Executive
Virginia senators push homeland security contractor liability bill

From National Journal's Technology Daily


Virginia Republican Sens. John Warner and George Allen have introduced a 
stand-alone bill that would exempt government contractors from liability 
involving technologies and services sold to the government for homeland 
security purposes.

The bill, S. 3076, is identical to language that the two previously 
included in a Republican-backed alternative to the Senate's version of a 
measure, H.R. 5005, that would create a Homeland Security Department, 
according to Warner spokeswoman Meredith Moseley.

The new bill would add homeland security technologies and services to an 
existing executive order, allowing the president to indemnify contractors 
for national security reasons. It would cover contracts with federal, state 
and local governments.

Moseley said the separate bill is just another way to push the issue. The 
measure has been referred to the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which 
Warner is the ranking Republican.
***************************
Computerworld
Route Control Devices: The Route Less Traveled
By Robert L. Scheier
OCTOBER 14, 2002

Bandwidth costs are plummeting, telecom providers are closing their doors 
right and left, the dot-com bubble has burst, and the last thing your boss 
wants to do is spend money. So why would you even think about buying 
something called a route control server, with a price tag of $50,000 or more?
Because some IT organizations that have tested them say they can help you 
buy fewer leased lines and avoid hefty surcharges for short spikes in 
usage. They can also deliver better, more predictable network performance.

But you'll pay anywhere from $20,000 to $250,000 for route control 
appliances, or at least $1,200 per month for a route control service. 
Pricing depends on the amount of data being monitored, the size and 
complexity of the network, and whether the route control server is 
monitoring all Web traffic or just virtual private network (VPN) traffic on 
a corporate intranet.

For now, the technology makes sense only for the 10,000 or so enterprises 
that multihome, or use more than one Internet service provider, says Peter 
Christy, co-founder of Nets Edge Research Group in Los Altos, Calif. That 
could change, though, as prices fall and companies rely more and more on 
Web-based applications.

"You can pay a network engineer to sit there and tweak your routing updates 
by hand every day," says a technical analyst at a Midwest financial 
services firm, "but that's not a very good use of a $100,000-a-year-plus 
individual." The technical analyst expects to see a return on his $120,000 
to $130,000 route control appliance investment within a year by cutting 
bandwidth costs as he moves a 4,000-node VPN from private networks to the Web.

Better Than BGP

Route control devices load-balance across multiple network connections by 
gathering and analyzing information about Web traffic and then sending new 
suggested data paths to the corporate router. That new route could be the 
fastest, or the least expensive, since the appliances also take into 
account the type of billing arrangements with each Internet service provider.

"With our technology, you can buy any two random [network] providers and 
get better performance than picking the two more expensive providers and 
letting BGP [the Border Gateway Protocol] make the decision," says Andy 
Gottlieb, vice president of marketing and corporate strategy at San Mateo, 
Calif.-based RouteScience Technologies Inc., which makes route control 
hardware.

BGP, which the Web uses to handle routing, chooses the route through the 
Internet that requires the fewest hops between networks. But BGP has no way 
of rerouting packets if the hops it has chosen are already overloaded or 
the connections to them have been cut. BGP does allow for other 
considerations, such as speed or cost, but they are too complicated for all 
but the most experienced network engineers.

The result: "BGP routing typically selects the wrong route at least half 
the time," says Doug Ruth, CEO of Origix Corp., a Minneapolis-based network 
and data services provider that uses the GlobalRoute routing service from 
Sockeye Networks Inc. in Waltham, Mass. Not only is GlobalRoute faster than 
BGP, but it also finds a way around problems sooner, Ruth claims. A few 
months ago, he says, GlobalRoute instantly rerouted his traffic around a 
slowdown in the UUnet network, a process that took BGP about two hours.

Going for Predictability

While performance is important, in today's economy it's often more 
important to provide "good-enough" performance that's predictable. Rather 
than shave that last millisecond of response time, customers ask vendors to 
"keep performance consistent and predictable, and save me as much money as 
possible," says Eric Wolford, senior vice president of marketing and 
business development at Fremont, Calif.-based netVmg Inc., which makes 
network route control appliances.

Predictability is crucial when companies replace expensive private networks 
with VPNs that encrypt sensitive corporate data and send it over the less 
expensive, but less predictable, Internet. In a multihoming environment, a 
route control server does a good enough job of speeding outgoing Web 
traffic to users, says Gottlieb. But achieving leased-line levels of 
performance and predictability over a VPN, he says, requires optimizing 
traffic flowing both ways, which means a route control device at both ends 
of the line. While that's an added expense, he says, using route control on 
a VPN can cut a customer's network operating costs by as much as 95% by 
removing the need for a leased line.

Getting a closer look inside the Internet might help in other ways. The 
technical analyst at the financial services firm hopes to use the reports 
provided by netVmg's Flow Control Platform to show which "providers out in 
the cloud" he's really using. Typically, if many of his customers used 
AT&T, he would also, in the hope of providing better performance to those 
customers. But if the reports showed most of his traffic actually flowed 
over non-AT&T lines, he might shift to a less-expensive Internet provider 
with little or no performance hit.

Better load balancing can also save customers from buying more links to the 
Web than they need, or from paying premium charges because of short-term 
spikes in traffic on one connection. Wireless hardware and software vendor 
Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego is using RouteScience's PathControl 5008 
appliance on three Internet links that range from 11M to 30M bit/sec. CIO 
Norm Fjeldheim says that, as a result, he was able to improve network 
performance by upgrading one of his existing links rather than buying an 
entire new connection.

As organizations move more applications onto the Web and prices fall for 
route control products, they will become absolutely essential, says 
Christy. He argues that network management is becoming as crucial as 
employee management or financial managementand you wouldn't do either of 
those from inside a cloud.
***************************
Washington Post
Hollywood's Demands Could Cripple Consumer Technology, Panelists Say


By Jim Krane
AP Technology Writer
Tuesday, October 15, 2002; 3:03 AM


SAN FRANCISCO  Congress would be "putting the dinosaurs in charge of 
evolution" if Hollywood succeeds in obtaining a federal law that would 
restrict consumer use of digital video and music, a civil liberties 
attorney told an Associated Press conference.

Legislation introduced by Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., would require 
consumer electronics makers to equip devices with a built-in "copyright 
chip" that would enforce a government-approved encryption scheme.

"The content industry is saying, 'We need to be able to tell the technology 
industry what they can and cannot build,'" Fred von Lohmann said Monday 
during a panel discussion on protecting intellectual property in the 
digital age. "That's what the fight is all about."

Von Lohmann said some digital video recorders, digital music players  and 
newer DVD and CD formats already on the market  feature built-in 
copy-protection that aims to thwart consumers' freedoms to copy and share 
their music and video.

If Hollywood can legally compel technology companies to lock 
copy-protection into consumer devices, von Lohmann said consumers won't be 
the only ones hurt.

The restrictions will also stifle innovation and damage the economy, said 
the attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His clients include 
online music-swapping companies that have been sued by the recording industry.

Chris Cookson, Warner Bros.' chief technology officer, insisted that 
proposed restrictions aren't aimed at blocking consumers' personal uses of 
music and video, but to prevent piraters from distributing it over the 
Internet.

With digital broadcast technology advancing quickly, technology and 
entertainment companies haven't been able to agree on even the most 
rudimentary policies.

Hollywood wants to add a "digital flag," or identifier, to coming digital 
television broadcasts, that would hamper copying. But Intel Corp., Philips 
Electronics NV and other hardware companies have balked at building 
anti-copying measures into their devices.

In a separate discussion at the two-day conference, futurist author Howard 
Rheingold said powerful mobile computer technologies were enabling the 
quick organization of "smart mobs" of like-minded people  for good and bad.

Rheingold said text messaging via cell phone played a key role in 
organizing mass demonstrations that led to the January 2001 ouster of 
Philippine president Joseph Estrada. In the future, more pervasive uses 
could organize pro-democracy rallies  or criminal or terrorist movements, 
said Rheingold, whose book "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution" is 
being published this month.

Earlier Monday, an executive from Hewlett-Packard Co. said that while the 
battle between Microsoft Corp. and the open-source software movement may 
dominate headlines, both the Windows and Linux operating systems are 
gaining market share at the expense of Sun Microsystems Inc. and other 
companies that customize hardware and develop unique flavors of the Unix 
operating system.

HP, for one, builds servers based on Unix, open-source Linux and Microsoft 
Windows, fulfilling the demands of customers who are often passionate about 
one choice or the other, said Rick Becker, a company vice president.

HP sees no conflicts in satisfying both camps as customers seek the lower 
cost and improving capabilities of industry-standard hardware. That spells 
trouble for makers of custom servers, including Sun and International 
Business Machines Corp.

"People are leaving proprietary ... systems and moving to industry 
standards," Becker said.

He was joined by Larry Augustin, chairman of VA Software Corp. and Doug 
Miller, director of Unix migration strategy in Microsoft's server products 
group.

In recent months, Microsoft has toned down its criticism of open-source 
software, which is distributed with its programming code attached and often 
lets customers change it to their needs.

Two years ago, chief executive Steve Ballmer likened it to cancer. Now, the 
software giant says it wants to ensure that its products play well with 
Linux and other open-source solutions based on standards.
****************************
USA Today
File swapping invades the home computer
By Karen Thomas, USA TODAY

For parents who want to communicate with teenagers today, it's not enough 
to just be able to talk about sex, dating, drugs and alcohol with their 
kids  they also need to talk tech.

And many parents are far behind the curve. They know that when their kids 
go on the Internet, they aren't just doing research for school. But even if 
they ask, parents may feel clueless when teens start talking about swapping 
files and trading "warez." (Related story: Computer terms parents need to know)

Beginning a dialogue about online habits can be difficult, even when kids 
are receptive, says Anne Collier, creator of NetFamilyNews.org, a weekly 
online newsletter. "It's too hard to explain to Mom and Dad what they're 
doing online, and it's just daunting. ... Even though more parents are 
becoming aware of file sharing, it's still not top-of-mind for them."

But it should be  because dozens of online companies, such as KaZaA, 
LimeWire and Gnutella, now offer networks for what's known as peer-to-peer 
file sharing, or P2P. P2P software allows an individual on a home PC to go 
online and connect directly to the computers of other people they don't 
even know and make copies of their files  often song files, but also 
pictures, games, software and even movies. When your computer is online, 
others have access to your files too.

For parents, copying files from other people's computers raises not only 
copyright and ethical concerns, but also privacy and security issues. Even 
if "everybody else is doing it," you may not want strangers snooping around 
in your PC and gaining access to your files. And if a file your teen copies 
contains a virus, it could damage or destroy everything stored on your hard 
drive, from e-mail and vacation photos to financial records and tax forms.

P2P was popularized by the online music-sharing program Napster, created by 
college student Shawn Fanning in 1999. After its much-publicized copyright 
battle with the music industry, Napster has gone out of business, but it 
spawned a new wave of copycats offering not just music files, but pictures, 
games, pirated software and movies.

A teen, using a P2P program, types in a name or term to search for (Britney 
Spears for example) and is offered hundreds of songs, images, videos and 
other files. The computers involved only have to be on and connected to the 
Internet for the files to be invisibly transferred.

According to market research firm Ipsos-Reid, some 40 million 
Americans  19% of those ages 12 and over  use P2P software. Dozens of 
private P2P networks now allow fans to pass files back and forth. ZPoc, for 
instance, is for fans of Christian music; CyberChef is for trading recipes. 
There's even a P2P program just for fans of singer Alicia Keys.

While some online files may be original creations posted by the copyright 
holder (a home-recorded original song, for example), many files are 
illegal. In addition to music, videos and commercial movies, some users of 
file-sharing programs trade in "warez" (pronounced "wares")  slang for 
commercial software that's been pirated and posted online. Viruses and porn 
are common.

Yet until there's a problem, many parents don't even know their kids have 
installed a P2P program.

"I am very upset to find out that my 15-year-old son has been able to 
access and download pornographic images from 'Morpheus,' an Internet 
peer-to-peer site similar to Napster. I thought he was just downloading 
music!" wrote a mom named Candy from Kansas on the Web site NetFamilyNews.

"Parents need to learn what they are, so if they come across it, they know 
what it is," says Catherine Parsons of GetNetWise, a coalition of Internet 
businesses and public interest groups that educates families about online 
safety. "There are so many more than just Napster. They all have lawsuits 
pending, but they're still in operation."

Among specific concerns:

Security breaches. A report from Hewlett-Packard's HP Labs this summer 
cited a study that assessed the security problems with KaZaA, currently the 
hottest P2P program on the Net with an estimated 100 million downloads so 
far. "A parent (with) ... a secure ... connection to a corporation for 
downloading and working on important confiden- tial files, (could) have 
them inadvertently shared by a teenage son or daughter, without either 
party's knowledge," the report says.

Spyware. In attempts to make file sharing a profitable business, some P2P 
program creators have begun to bundle in "adware" and "spyware" 
applications, which allow marketers and other third parties to track 
consumers' online surfing and shopping habits to better target online ads. 
Even if aggressive marketing isn't a concern, those programs can 
significantly slow down a computer and possibly bring it to a silent halt.

Copyright issues. Unauthorized use of copyrighted material is a violation 
of most Internet access providers' terms of service, and companies are 
increasingly taking action against users when violations are reported. In a 
public education campaign launching this month, big names including 
Madonna, Britney Spears and Eminem will appear in TV, radio and newspaper 
ads denouncing file sharing as outright theft.

X-rated files. While parents may shrug off a few downloaded songs, Parsons 
notes that files contain "a cache of material that parents don't want kids 
exposed to." A House subcommittee looking into online porn used a 
file-sharing program to search for videos of Spears. Over 70% of the 
results turned out to be pornographic, the panel says.

With more homes getting high-speed Internet connections that make 
multimedia file sharing easier, the Federal Trade Commission a few weeks 
ago launched an initiative stressing security and anti-virus software. A 
safety mascot, "Dewie the Turtle," will remind families to maintain a 
"culture of security" on a Net-connected home computer, says FTC 
commissioner Orson Swindle.
*********************************
USA Today
Colleges urged to join fight against Internet piracy

SAN FRANCISCO (AP)  Film and recording industry advocates are appealing to 
universities nationwide to help crack down on Internet-based piracy, which 
costs the entertainment world billions of dollars in lost revenues every year.

In a letter sent to more than 2,300 colleges, entertainment industry 
leaders called on the universities to educate students against pirating 
music and movies over broadband Internet lines available on most campuses.

"We're simply trying to appeal to the universities for their help in making 
students aware of Internet theft," Jack Valenti, the president and CEO of 
the Motion Picture Association of America, said Friday. Valenti was one of 
four signatories on the letter.

"Students need to know that just because everyone is doing it doesn't make 
it right," he added.

In addition to educating students that piracy is tantamount to "electronic 
shoplifting," the industry trade groups called on the universities to 
implement penalties on violators.

Most universities offer high-speed Internet connections in dorm rooms and 
computer labs, which some students use illegally to share or swap MP3 files 
and some film files. Peer-to-peer technology now allows computer users to 
tap into one another's hard drives and share files.

Using 56K, or dial-up connections, films can take up to 12 hours to 
download, Valenti said. By comparison, high-speed connections allow feature 
films to be downloaded to a computer in minutes.

Universities have been targeted because they are a common source of 
high-speed connections in the United States, where only 13 million homes 
have high-speed Internet access.

The exchange of copyrighted files is not only a violation of federal law, 
it consumes valuable academic resources, the letter signatories said.

"Stealing is stealing is stealing, whether it's done with sleight of hand 
by sticking something in a pocket or it's done with the click of a mouse," 
the letter's authors said.

Ever since the music-swapping software Napster emerged in the late 1990s, 
students have been using enormous swaths of university bandwidth intended 
for the exchange of research data and other academic-oriented files.

Quoting the Chronicle of Higher Education, the letter's authors said one 
university discovered that at least 75% of its available bandwidth had been 
used by students and people outside the university while exchanging files 
using peer-to-peer technology.

Songwriters Guild of America President Rick Carnes warned that copyright 
violations threaten the future of the recording arts in the United States.

"Copyright encourages the promotion of new arts in our culture," said 
Carnes, who has written songs for Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire. "Without 
those copyright protections, the future of the arts is threatened."

The letter also was signed by Hilary Rosen and Edward Murphy, the 
presidents, respectively, of the Recording Industry Association of America 
and the National Music Publishers' Association.
****************************
New York Times
Traffic Cameras Could Help Solve Crimes
By JOHN TIERNEY

WASHINGTON, Oct. 14  It may seem impossible to pick out a serial killer 
roaming the highways of a sprawling metropolitan region, but the task is 
far from hopeless.

The van or car of the suburban sniper who is operating here has surely been 
captured at least briefly by a government camera already in place, and the 
authorities might have quickly developed a short list of suspects if they 
were using the more advanced cameras that monitor traffic in other cities.

Hundreds of cameras continuously record traffic on highways and streets in 
suburban Washington, including intersections near where the sniper fired. 
The police have not disclosed what information, if any, they have obtained. 
They have been spotted checking those cameras, including one that tickets 
red-light violators near the school in Bowie, Md., where a student was shot.

A sniper obeying traffic signals could have avoided the scores of red-light 
cameras in the region, because they typically photograph just violators. 
But the sniper must have shown up on the hundreds of video cameras that 
feed live images to traffic managers and public Web sites. Those cameras 
are along major suburban highways and at most major intersections in 
Montgomery County, Md., where the shootings began.

The images from those cameras are ordinarily not stored, though. Even if 
they were, the pictures are generally too widely focused and grainy for the 
police to read license plates. Other cameras, already used on toll roads 
here and on many roads in England, can instantly read and record license 
plate numbers.

"Our equipment could record every license plate on Interstate 95, whether 
the cars were in bumper-to-bumper traffic or moving 150 miles an hour," 
said Donal Waide, a project engineer for Computer Recognition Systems, a 
British company that 20 years ago using cameras and computers to spot 
stolen cars.

For an idea of what could be done today, Mr. Waide pointed to the Coolidge 
Bridge over the Connecticut River between Northampton and Hadley, Mass. 
Images are at http://crs-its.com/Coolidge /coolidge.shtml, a Web page that 
shows regularly updated pictures of traffic on Route 9. Besides taking 
snapshots of each car, the computerized system reads its license plate so 
the car can be identified again down the road, enabling the computer to 
tell the public exactly how fast traffic is moving.

A system like that on roads used by the sniper could allow a computer to 
sort through the license plates quickly and help the police narrow the 
search, said Dr. Lawrence W. Sherman, director of the Jerry Lee Center of 
Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania.

"If you placed a vehicle near several of the murder scenes, that 
information could help police find the sniper and the rifle," Dr. Sherman 
said. "In fact, it's even possible that the sniper has generally stayed out 
of the District of Columbia because he knows it has been more active than 
the suburban jurisdictions in setting up red-light cameras."

Although surveillance cameras might be useful in this case, Dr. Sherman 
said, it is unclear exactly how reliable they are at reading license plates 
or how effective they are at reducing the crime rate.

"There's been a remarkable spread of these cameras in the past two decades 
without much evaluation," he said. "Surveillance cameras have certainly 
helped solve some crimes. Murderers and robbers have been caught thanks to 
cameras at A.T.M.'s. But we haven't done the sort of randomized controlled 
trials to tell what effect they have on deterring crime or detecting 
offenders."

Keeping track of cars and trucks on the road could be a valuable tool 
against terrorism, especially in Washington, said Representative Ellen O. 
Tauscher, a California Democrat who has studied highway surveillance as a 
member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

"With the sniper, we see the unpredictable randomness that we see with 
terrorists," Ms. Tauscher said. "We need new tools to give us a very 
different way of looking at things. People have peace of mind knowing that 
there's technology out there protecting them and letting the bad guys know 
that they're being watched. We all have natural concerns about Big Brother, 
and you don't necessarily want to know who's driving. But it does help to 
know which car was where. I don't think most people object to the recording 
of the information, as long as it's not abused."

The police in the United States have used computer information from toll 
roads to track criminals. F.B.I. agents investigating the kidnapping and 
murder of Nelson G. Gross, a New Jersey millionaire, in 1997 tracked the 
kidnappers' across the George Washington Bridge, thanks to the E-ZPass 
transponder in Mr. Gross's car.

Such surveillance worries critics like Representative Dick Armey, the Texas 
Republican who is the majority leader. He wrote a letter last year to 
Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton objecting to a National Park Service plan 
to install surveillance cameras to catch speeders on the George Washington 
Parkway in suburban Washington.

"I'm committed to doing what it takes to make our roads safer, but not at 
the cost of our fundamental rights," Mr. Armey wrote. "Likewise, I am 
concerned that this may be seen as a step toward a Big Brother surveillance 
state, where the government monitors the comings and goings of its citizens."
***************************
CNN Online
Police can't pinpoint many 911 calls
Technical obstacles impede wireless locator service
Tuesday, October 15, 2002 Posted: 9:45 AM EDT (1345 GMT)

NORTH PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island (AP) -- Engine problems stranded two men on 
a boat in the Atlantic one recent afternoon. They could see land but had no 
idea where they were. So one called 911 on his cell phone.

The men were lucky to be along the coast of Rhode Island, where emergency 
operators have more power than most of their counterparts in America to 
help people calling from wireless phones.

An operator instantly received the boaters' precise latitude and longitude 
and passed the coordinates to the Coast Guard, which picked the men up 
safely before dark.

This is not heroic by comic book standards, but it's an ideal moment in the 
world of public safety. It's also how wireless 911 calls are supposed to 
work everywhere.

Six years ago, the Federal Communications Commission ordered phone 
companies to make it possible by 2005.

But while about half of 911 calls come from cell phones -- a percentage 
that increases every year -- meeting the FCC's demand for callers' location 
information has been excruciatingly difficult.

Phone companies have squabbled over details, and public safety agencies are 
short on resources.

The required upgrades -- to mobile phones, wireless networks, landline 
systems and the nation's 7,000 emergency dispatch centers _ are so 
complicated that only 1 percent of U.S. counties have the advanced level of 
wireless 911 service enjoyed by Rhode Island, according to the National 
Emergency Number Association.

Several places are scheduled to reach that level soon, and FCC officials 
and phone companies say the 2005 deadline is still attainable. But it 
probably will take a more efficient and cooperative effort.

"We need everyone sitting around the table at the same time," said John 
Melcher, president of the National Emergency Number Association, which 
represents 911 answering centers. "So far, the (landline phone companies) 
have not been at the table."

But some phone companies blame wireless carriers for delays. They point to 
developments like Wednesday's FCC announcement that AT&T Wireless will pay 
$2 million for missing deadlines in the rollout.

"I think we have done everything we can to try to move it along," said 
Kelly Boggs, regulatory manager for regional phone giant BellSouth Corp.

Technology plays catch up
For years, 911 operators have been able to instantly see the address of 
someone calling from a landline. When the FCC mandated location information 
for cell phones, technology to make that happen didn't exist.

The FCC set two stages. First, it required wireless carriers to give 
emergency operators the caller's number and the location of the 
transmission tower carrying the call.

But largely because many 911 centers aren't equipped to receive the 
information, fewer than half of the nation's counties have the so-called 
Phase One service, according to the emergency association.

Stricter requirements require more exact location
Phase Two, which began last year, requires wireless carriers to give 
callers' specific latitude and longitude, give or take a few dozen yards.

Some carriers are accomplishing that by having network equipment 
triangulate a caller's location; others are relying on Global Positioning 
System (GPS) chips in new cell phones.

In fact, the chips already are in more than half the handset models offered 
by Sprint PCS, one of the carriers furthest along in the Phase Two rollout. 
(The chips are activated only when a 911 call is made).

The challenge lies in relaying location coordinates through the wireless 
network and into the traditional landline system, which carries emergency 
calls into 911 centers. That requires overcoming the varying connection 
standards and databases employed by different phone companies.

The 911 centers also must upgrade computers and switching equipment so 
their operators can see the location information. Then each center has to 
be connected separately by each wireless carrier _ a time-consuming process 
that requires technicians from different phone companies to perform tests 
together, often in the middle of the night.

When it works, emergency officials say they can respond faster and more 
decisively.

The case for improving the system
A prankster in St. Clair County, Illinois, a district just east of St. 
Louis that has Phase Two service, recently used his cell phone to call in a 
bomb threat, then reported the phone stolen. Dispatchers tracked the 
original call "right to his front lawn, and he confessed," said Norm 
Forshee, St. Clair County's 911 coordinator.

But snags have cropped up at nearly every imaginable step:


Though much of the cost of enhancing wireless 911 -- which could exceed $1 
billion -- will be covered by phone-bill surcharges and government funding, 
not all financial details have been worked out.


BellSouth has angered wireless companies by suggesting they cough up 11 
cents every time one of their customers makes a 911 call that transmits 
location information. BellSouth contends the charge is necessary because of 
complications in the connection between its network and a database used by 
wireless carriers.


To make some networks handle incoming position information, wireless 
carriers have to add a small antenna to their transmission towers. Doing so 
requires permission from zoning agencies or landlords, which isn't 
automatic. For example, wireless carrier T-Mobile complained in an Oct. 3 
FCC filing that Salt Lake City had denied a necessary authorization.


Ideally, location information should be transmitted several times during a 
wireless 911 call for an accurate reading on someone in a moving car. That 
technology is still being fine-tuned.

Costs are an obstacle
Lagging equipment upgrades remain the biggest obstacle.

Even Rhode Island's pioneering system, which required $1.4 million worth of 
new equipment at the state's lone answering center, is still a work in 
progress.

Executive director Raymond LaBelle is asking lawmakers to grant $4 million 
for software that will instantly translate location coordinates into street 
addresses and photos of the spot in question.

"We're not perfect," LaBelle said. "But we're getting there."
*******************************
CIO Insight
Super-Distribution Turns Pirates Into Friends

Online exclusive: IBM Digital Media director of marketing Scott Burnett 
discusses the use of digital content controls as a promotional vehicle.

In the post-Napster world, companies outside the entertainment world are 
investigating the use of digital content controls to protect data and 
create buzz for new products. CIO Insight Copy Chief Debra D'Agostino spoke 
recently to Scott Burnett, director of marketing for IBM Digital Media, 
about the use of digital content controls as marketing tools.

IBM is taking a lead in developing digital content controls designed to 
both fend off pirates and attract new customers. Why is this significant?

The philosophy behind our digital rights management technology is what we 
call "super-distribution"allowing for content to be wrapped and rights to 
be ascribed to the use of that content as it travels over the Webnot just 
for music, but for any media type.

How do you think this technology will shape the market in the future?

Digital content protection in the digital age can provide for whole new 
opportunities for business. For instance, in the consumer world, there's a 
thing called super-distribution that is associated with CRM.

Let's say you and I download a piece of content. I download something I 
paid for and I send it to you. But it has super-distribution rights 
associated with it. You can access that file, but you may play it and 
review it once or keep it in order to get a taste for it, and then it 
allows you to separately license it for your own use.

That's what we call "super-distribution." It's almost like viral marketing 
in the consumer world. If I am able to provide a solution that allows these 
peer-to-peer networks to distribute these files and share them and pass 
them around, but do it all within a secure environment so that the content 
is really protected and I do have an opportunity for revenue, wouldn't that 
be something? That's where it's heading.

Right now, the way we discover music is we hear it on the radio or someone 
tells us about it. There's a lot of, "Hey, did you hear that new song from 
Oasis?" "No, I didn't." "Oh, it's on XYZ album." And then people start 
hunting and searching for that content. With this new technology, you can 
hear the music, and at the point of you being able to hear it, you can 
share itbut share it in a secure fashion. If you're able to do that, you're 
able to tap e-commerce into that sharing.

Most recently, in Europe, we tested our super-distribution strategy with a 
promotion for a new release from Oasis. The band was looking at how to use 
DRM to compliment existing business. IBM assisted them in producing two 
million CDs that were distributed in the London Times.

The CD had three song clips that people could play on their normal CD 
player. It also had additional protected content backed with the 
technology's security measures, which allowed only a limited number of 
plays if users put the CD into their computers.

The promotion tied together content from the artist, never-before-released 
contentboth video as well as musicand that was protected with DRM. Via a 
link to the band's Web site, it also provided the user a chance to preorder 
the CD; the album was not out, so this was kind of a promotion from HMV, 
the retailer.

So fans got this CD, and they could only play it a certain number of times 
on their computer and they couldn't distribute it online, but they could go 
to a Web site and order it online?

That's right. And this turned out to be one of the most successful 
promotions that the Sunday Times has ever done. If you think about it, 
there are a number of benefits from this promotion.

The Times was looking for additional subscribers and readership to their 
Sunday newspaper. They had one-point-something million. They were able to 
increase readership of this newspaper with that promotion because people 
wanted the CD. The band, Oasis, got what it wanted because it was able to 
create a buzz for their upcoming release to stimulate demand for 
preordering the album. The retailers benefited because they could connect 
to the consumers online to preorder the CD.

Look at it this way: Industries today have been embroiled in policy issues 
having to do with rights and issues of digital media and this whole MP3 
phenomenon and peer-to-peer file sharing. Congress is looking at the 
various legislative activities that are being proposed.

In the meantime, we have been very busy working with the industry on this 
technology, especially with how would you protect and ensure rights 
management and legitimate licensing of the content in this digital domain, 
knowing that over time there will be standard policies that will exist for 
which the technology will, in essence, be a slave.

So what you have here is a bit of the chicken and the egg. You have to have 
business models, you have to have prescribed conditions, and the aim of 
technology is to carry that out. How many copies can I make? Can I move 
from one device from another? All that kind of stuff. There's a multi-hour 
conversation we can have about that.

So you can actually turn file-swappers into cyber-salespeople, boost 
profits and gain information on those new customers as a result?

That's exactly what I am talking about. All the files that can be shared 
actually have a way to be tethered to e-commerce, tethered to a commercial 
relationship. Because the files that are shared today are free, there's no 
tether to commerce.

How might other companies across other industries use this technology for 
e-commerce?

Think about it from a corporate communications perspective. If I am able to 
super-distribute a video presentation that can be tethered to a tracking or 
audit system internally within my company, I am now able to manage where 
that content goes. I may be better able to better manage to those who 
receive the content.

If I send out a broadcast and I don't know where it goes, I may want to be 
able to tap that recipient with additional follow-up information from that 
broadcast, but I don't know who they are. So by being able to securely 
distribute content and track it, it provides for new opportunities. For 
both businesses as well as those who are distributing to consumers.

That sounds like it gets a little into privacy issues.

Yes, it's part of this whole thing, the ever-evolving policies, especially 
with privacy and all that kind of stuff. You know, that's what we're all in 
the middle of. These things may not have been completely reconciled in the 
digital domain, like how content should be shared, where privacy begins and 
ends. Privacy is where there needs to be a hand-in-glove relationship with 
technology and policy.

The way IBM looks at this is very clear. Technology is there as a tool for 
business and in many cases, technical capabilities get ahead of policy, and 
that needs to be reconciled, but the purpose is to be subservient to 
business. And in a case where technology gets ahead of that, you'll notice 
the pain. With dialogue or discourse associated with violating that policy. 
And then it has to catch up. We're going through that now, we're all kind 
of watching it. Ultimately the business needs to drive the technology. Not 
the other way around.

What companies outside the entertainment industry are already using this 
technology to experiment with super-distribution?

The very reason IBM set up the Digital Media Group, which I am in, is to go 
across industryto take a lot of the things we have been working on in the 
media industry and look at how that is going to transcend all industries. 
Because media is mediawhether it's for business or entertainment, there is 
a common element that has to be addressed. So what we've done is taken the 
next step to create this platform framework called the Digital Media Factory.

The DMF, in essence, enables the IBM e-business infrastructure. You see the 
"e" in our commercials, allowing for media to flow freely through the 
e-business infrastructure and IBM middleware, for which DRM is just one 
part on an open framework that we have evolved. There are no standards for 
DRM that are being reported right now, but we are anticipating that those 
standards will plug into the framework.

Consider the healthcare industry. If you look at the secure distribution of 
health records for MRI, for X-rays, there are imaging opportunities there 
for DRM and solutions it can provide. For wireless, there is an 
announcement we made with Nokia. Nokia is plugging in its server to our DMF 
for content to be secured and distributed to wireless devices. Content 
could take the form of music or video clips, or it could be business 
content and the sharing of a graphic-rich file or video.

And there are other uses. Think about manufacturing. Think about the 
airline industry. All of the maintenance associated with fixing planes? In 
many cases you'll want your documents associated with the logs as part of 
business going forward. In the retail industry, you could use digital 
content controls for promotions at a kiosk for various retail outlets, such 
as a Barnes & Noble promotion of electronic books, distributed digitally.

Is digital content protection something that all companies will be looking 
at five years from now?

I think we are on the cusp of this growth right now. We've seen the pain 
identified with MP3 files in the entertainment business and what it's done 
to that industry. That has really lit a fire under other commercial 
businesses to start thinking about how we are going to allow for 
distribution of digital content within their world.

What are we going to do in our world as our content or capabilities move to 
the Internet or to digital platforms? What kinds of digital rights or 
copyright protections or technologies can be employed to protect our 
contentwhether it be for business consumption, which might be proprietary 
information; educational, which might be copyrighted for fee-based content, 
from online or distance learning, because you're charging for the course; 
or for industrial purposes to actually distribute maintenance logs and 
information that might have graphics and schematics associated with 
maintenance logs? Every industry is now looking at this.

It's difficult to take a DRM technology that's made to be used only for 
music and make it work for other companies. And there are different ways 
you're going to want to have rights to the content. So instead of having a 
stand-alone technology, we have plugged it into an open framework for IBM 
middleware so that you have the flexibility to use the DMF specific to your 
industry or your company's needs.

As for the future, I think we're going to move toward standards. There 
needs to be a set of standards, but it's very difficult to work with 
standards. How do you standardize security? You can go so far as to say 
there are standards associated with digital rights management, but you 
can't divulge all the secrets as to how you're securing content because the 
secret gets out and you've lost. It is necessary to have standards at 
certain levels to how these things operate.

We are working diligently with those standards bodies on how this will 
evolve, organizations like MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) and OMA 
(Open Mobile Alliance). Our part is to work through the issues and 
especially how it evolves, so that it's standing but still open, as opposed 
to a completely vertical approachlike how Microsoft would approach it, 
which would be their way or the highway.

[This is one of four articles at CIO Insight, 
http://www.cioinsight.com/category2/0,3960,78,00.asp]

******************************
Sydney Morning Herald
Spam fighter defeats junk email company
Perth
October 15 2002

A "fearless spam fighter" has won a David and Goliath legal battle against 
a junk email marketing company.

A West Australian court yesterday threw out a civil case in which a direct 
marketing company wanted to sue a Perth man for complaining about its 
unsolicited bulk emails, or "spam".

The company, t3-direct, had claimed it had lost $43,000 in business after 
Perth electronics repairer Joe McNicol blew the whistle on the emailer, in 
a bid to stop receiving its junk emails.

Angry at receiving so much spam, Mr McNicol had posted on the Internet the 
company's "Internet protocol" details.

A spam "blocker" known as SPEWS - Spam Prevention Early Warning System - 
subsequently used the information in its database. People could then use 
this database to prevent t3's emails from reaching their intended addresses.

t3's parent company, The Which Company, said SPEWS' action had damaged its 
$1,000-a-day business.

The Which Company took Mr McNicol to court, claiming $43,000 in lost earnings.

The business claimed SPEWS had acted upon Mr McNicol's information.

But the West Australian District Court struck out the action.

Deputy Registrar Richard Hewitt found no evidence to prove Mr McNicol had 
made contact with SPEWS.

A major stumbling block for t3's case was its inability to contact SPEWS, 
which enjoys anonymity in cyberspace.

Mr McNicol, described in court as a "fearless spam fighter", vowed to 
continue his war against junk email.

"I actively report every spam that I get and I am going to be relentless 
and I am not going to let any of them go by me," he said.

A loss would have had damaging repercussions for email users, he said.

"It would have just scared everyone off and nobody would have complained 
(about spam)," he said.

"I think that since this case started the people who normally complain went 
a little underground because they were scared of the same thing happening 
to them.

"Now it says to them if you're not happy with these people complain loudly, 
be truthful about it because you don't need to be scared."

Outside court, Mr McNicol's lawyer Jeremy Malcolm compared the victory to 
that of David's famous win over Goliath.

"The accusation that my client had made an unfounded complaint simply 
wasn't true."

"This will certainly be a message to the bulk and unsolicited email 
industry that the courts aren't going to come down on their side because 
they have got the resources to back up a legal claim."

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