Clips October 22, 2002

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips October 22, 2002

ARTICLES

Direct marketers want anti-spam laws
Two Dems Accuse HHS of Removing Info [Censorship]
Networks Act to Avoid More Blunders in Vote Tallies [E-Voting]
Errant E-Mails Ruffle House Democrats' Feathers
SeniorNet campaign pushes tech literacy
Internships go virtual as firms seek ways to save
A tough case to crack How IT can -- and cannot -- aid law enforcement?
Effort to double funding for science agency hits Senate snag [NSF]
Update: Navy searching for hundreds of missing computers
British Concern to Help U.S. Track Terrorists
Screensavers crack medical puzzle
Anti-terror fight goes to the source
Smart Fatigues Hear Enemy Coming
Professor's Case: Unlock Crypto
Terror Turns Real for Horror Site
Police Experts Meet on Internet Child Porn
Who controls your computer? [DRM]


*************************
CNet News.com
Direct marketers want anti-spam laws
By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
October 21, 2002, 3:48 PM PT

The Direct Marketing Association said Monday that unsolicited e-mail has 
become so noxious that a federal anti-spam law is finally necessary.
Until now, the DMA has opposed the majority of anti-spam bills in Congress 
or offered only lukewarm support. But the ever-rising tide of junk e-mail 
has made the influential trade association rethink its stand.

"Even legitimate business' messages are not being looked at because of the 
get-rich-quick schemes and pornography and so forth," Jerry Cerasale, the 
DMA's vice president for government affairs, said in a telephone interview 
Monday afternoon.



The DMA's change of heart, which comes as the group meets in San Francisco 
for its 85th annual convention this week, means that a sizable obstacle to 
federal legislation has vanished. The DMA, along with its allies at the 
U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Retail Federation, have 
previously scuttled some anti-spam laws from being enacted by Congress.

"We absolutely need legislation," Cerasale said. "So we're going to have to 
work to get a compromise that'll have enough support so it will pass."

The DMA told the Senate Commerce committee in April 2001 that a law 
governing spam might not be objectionable if it overruled about 20 state 
laws currently on the books and prohibited only "the practice of sending 
fraudulent electronic mail messages" with forged headers.

Now the association, which boasts about 4,700 members that include direct 
mail, catalog and telemarketing companies, says it will lobby for 
legislation that has both of those requirements and also provides a way for 
recipients to remove themselves from future mailings. "We're finding that 
we need to give the consumers the choice to try and allow them to control 
their inbox, to try and say no, I don't want this, while leaving the medium 
open for commerce," Cerasale said.

But, Cerasale said, a federal requirement that consumers "opt in" instead 
of "opt out" of bulk e-mail is unacceptable. "We think the opt-in creates a 
true noneconomic model," Cerasale said. "We don't believe you get a viable 
economic model in opt-in."

Ray Everett-Church, who represents the Coalition Against Unsolicited 
Commercial Email (CAUCE) and other tech clients, says he's taking a 
wait-and-see approach.

"The fact that they are realizing that self-regulation hasn't solved the 
problem is a very important step," Everett-Church said. "It marks a welcome 
change in their thinking. But the folks in the anti-spam community are 
waiting to see what the DMA defines as acceptable under any proposed 
legislation."

Taking steps to can spam
In September, three consumer groups asked the Federal Trade Commission to 
take swift steps to stanch the flow of bulk e-mail.

The DMA opposed the suggested rules as overly intrusive, and the American 
Civil Liberties Union said the rules would be unconstitutional if adopted 
by the FTC. "Self-regulation is the way to go in terms of preserving First 
Amendment rights and, at the same time, making sure that frauds are not 
perpetrated," DMA Vice President Jim Conway told CNET News.com at the time.

Around the same time, however, the DMA and companies including AOL Time 
Warner and Verizon Communications began meeting in private to figure out if 
new laws were necessary.

Because Congress has adjourned until after the November elections, there's 
scant time left this year to enact an anti-spam law, meaning the 
legislative push would have to wait until the new Congress convenes in 2003.

If the DMA does start lobbying, Everett-Church says the big question will 
be the wording of the final bill: "The question is how are they going to 
define spam and solve the problem in a way that actually makes a difference 
to consumers' mailboxes?"
****************************
Associated Press
Two Dems Accuse HHS of Removing Info
Mon Oct 21, 6:36 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AP) - Two Democratic congressmen contended Monday that the Bush 
administration is putting ideology over science, citing appointments to 
advisory committees and the removal of information from Web sites.


Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Sherrod Brown of Ohio demanded 
explanations in a letter to Health and Human Services (news - web sites) 
Secretary Tommy Thompson.


They complained that information about the effectiveness of condoms had 
been removed from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (news - web 
sites) Web site; that experts serving on advisory committees were being 
replaced because their views do not match the administration's; and that 
HHS is singling out AIDS (news - web sites) groups with probing audits.


In addition, they said, information showing that abortion does not increase 
the risk of breast cancer (news - web sites) was removed from a National 
Institutes of Health (news - web sites) Web site. "Scientific information 
... has been removed, apparently because it does not fit with the 
administration's ideological agenda," Waxman and Brown wrote.


They charged that "ideology has replaced scientific qualifications" as HHS 
chooses members of advisory committees. Among other examples, they pointed 
to a report on a CDC advisory committee on safe lead levels for children. 
The report found that nominations of respected academics had been withdrawn 
and replaced with consultants to the industry.


"We are deeply concerned that stacking advisory committees with individuals 
whose qualifications are ideological rather than scientific will 
fundamentally undermine the integrity of scientific decision-making at our 
leading public health agencies," the Democrats wrote.


HHS spokesman Bill Pierce said it is Thompson's prerogative to appoint 
whomever he chooses for advisory committees. By contrast, he said, Waxman 
and Brown "would like all of us to follow their agenda, their liberal 
agenda, on these issues."


"They should stop looking for conspiracy theories," Pierce added.
**********************
New York Times
Networks Act to Avoid More Blunders in Vote Tallies
By JIM RUTENBERG

Two years after the embarrassment of making erroneous projections in the 
2000 presidential election, the major television news organizations are 
taking extra measures to avoid a recurrence.

CNN is contracting nearly 1,000 extra people to stake out polling places in 
important precincts to call in the vote tallies as they come in. ABC News, 
like NBC News, will isolate its election night analysts from other 
networks' reports and even its own producers to insure that competitiveness 
does not influence the results. The Fox News Channel is beefing up its exit 
polling unit. CBS News is sending monitoring teams into closely contested 
states to help decipher data.

All the networks say they will rein in the competitive instinct that drives 
them to be first, before declaring winners and losers.

At the top of each network's list is the development of a system that will 
reduce reliance on the Voter News Service, the network consortium that 
provides election results, polling data and projections.

Among the problems, network executives blamed the service for providing 
flawed exit poll data that led them to call Florida initially for Al Gore. 
This, Republicans said, may have led some voters to stay home. The system's 
failure to detect an overcount for George W. Bush in Volusia County, they 
complained, helped lead them to later report that Mr. Bush had won the 
state. That, supporters of Mr. Gore said, left the impression that he was a 
sore loser when he contested the vote.

The problems led the House Committee on Energy and Commerce to hold a 
hearing on the network missteps where a 10-minute video clip of the various 
misreports was shown.

"It was the perfect storm for election screw-ups," said Ken Johnson, a 
spokesman for the committee and Representative Billy Tauzin, Republican of 
Louisiana, who is the chairman. "Clearly, V.N.S. was the eye of the hurricane."

A new V.N.S. computer system has been designed to avoid the problems that 
plagued the 2000 election. But it is still undergoing vital testing, and 
all of its component parts might not be ready by Election Day.

Ted Savaglio, executive director of the news service, said the system's 
most important function, the actual tabulation of votes, was fully 
operational. But Mr. Savaglio said, its exit polling, which asks people how 
they voted and why, still has some glitches.

That means that the sort of analysis the service usually provides might be 
a little bit less robust than it has been in years past. Mr. Savaglio said 
the service might be able to provide exit polling in some states, or only 
on a national basis on such facts as how specific blocs voted in general.

The system that takes the raw material of the exit polls and precinct 
counts to project winners in the various races is also undergoing testing. 
Mr. Savaglio said he was hopeful, but unsure, it would be fully ready by 
Election Day.

While network executives expressed some frustration with the pace of 
getting the new system ready, they said they would rather it proceed 
carefully than too quickly. They said they had plenty of backup, including 
a separate vote-counting system run by The Associated Press.

"Our watchwords are 100-percent accuracy and reliability," said David L. 
Westin, the ABC News president. "We're not going to run anything with the 
risk that we're wrong."

Like its competitors, ABC has agreed not to project a winner in a given 
state until the scheduled closing time for all the polls.

ABC said competitive pressure partly contributed to the missteps in 2000. 
That is why it plans to keep its analysts away from televisions showing 
what the competition is reporting.

CBS News, on the other hand, will put its analysts in its main studio, to 
make sure that there is communication between anchors  who hear regularly 
from experts and reporters in the field  and executives making the actual 
decisions based on computer data.

CNN seems to be going to the greatest lengths to safeguard against error. 
Under a new system called CNN RealVote, the network will send nearly 1,000 
people out to precincts in 10 key states. Those people "will actually phone 
in real votes when the ballot boxes are opened," said Walter Isaacson, the 
CNN chairman. "That's a system that's meant to be a double-check on exit 
polls."

All of the networks emphasized that they would move slowly this time.

"Viewers may have to stay up a little bit later to find out who runs the 
House and Senate," said John Moody, Fox News Channel senior vice president 
in charge of news. "But they will find out."
*****************************
Washington Post
Errant E-Mails Ruffle House Democrats' Feathers
By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, October 22, 2002; Page A25


President Bush and his aides called the congressional vote on Iraq a matter 
of conscience. Apparently not everybody in the White House shares that view.

A day after Congress voted to authorize Bush to use force against Iraq, a 
mass e-mail was distributed by the executive office of the president. It 
referred to Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), who led the opposition to the 
resolution, as "doddering old Bob Byrd, the senile senator from West 
Virginia." It called Hispanic Democrats in the House who opposed the 
resolution "self-centered, do-nothing, $150,000/year plus perks yo-yo's."

"If they have a defense for their actions," the memo said, "they should 
deliver it to the kids in uniform that could one day have their ass shot 
off to protect these ninnies!"

Democrats demanded an apology and an explanation for the e-mail, written by 
a California Republican but distributed through White House e-mail by a 
White House official without identifying an author. The e-mail offered a 
view at odds with the official White House line that the Iraq vote was not 
about politics.

The author of this missive was Fernando Oaxaca, 75, a former Ford 
administration official and former chairman of the Republican National 
Hispanic Assembly. Oaxaca e-mailed the memo to GOP faithful across the 
country, including a few Bush White House officials. A White House aide 
then distributed the memo, without Oaxaca's name, to more than 100 Latino 
activists -- among them some staffers for the Hispanic Democrats Oaxaca had 
skewered.

"As far as I know it was an error, or a mispunching of a button in their 
e-mail system," Oaxaca said yesterday. He said he wrote the memo as a 
private citizen and the White House "is entitled to do what they want."

Sources said a relatively senior Bush aide liked the memo and directed a 
young aide to forward it to Hispanic Republican activists; the memo was 
accidentally sent instead, without explanation, to a mostly Hispanic 
Democratic group. Still, that does not explain why the White House would 
distribute such an e-mail, even to its allies.

On Oct. 11, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer described the 
previous day's Iraq votes as "matters of conscience, and the president 
thinks it is entirely appropriate for elected officials in both parties to 
exercise their good conscience on behalf of their constituents."

Fleischer's briefing ended at 12:57 p.m. At 2:49 p.m., the White House sent 
out the memo. Titled "Can you believe this?" the e-mail proclaimed the "sad 
results" that "every Latino Democrat in the Congress voted against 
supporting the president." It suggested the lawmakers "lack something our 
brave young volunteers in our armed forces have plenty of" and declared 
them "out of touch with their constituency and out of touch with America."

Referring to Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), David E. Bonior (D-Mich.) and 
Gary A. Condit (D-Calif.), the memo said of the Hispanic lawmakers: "Except 
for Bonior and McDermott, the congressional Baghdad Boys and Gary Condit, 
who else are they following? The other anti-Bush bloc voters, the Black 
Caucus?"

The memo closed with a series of phrases connected by ellipses: "Let's tell 
all these Washington folks how we feel . . . let's stay on their case . . . 
time is going by . . . the next anthrax or nerve gas delivery might come 
across our borders or dumped on our Embassies or Armed Forces facilities 
overseas . . . while we wait for the political circus to end!"

The e-mail ended with "Que verguenza!" -- Spanish for "how shameful."

That's what Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.) thought -- for opposite reasons. 
On Friday, the combat veteran and chairman of the Hispanic Caucus fired off 
an angry letter to Bush requesting a "formal apology" and information about 
"what is being done to address this shocking misuse of government resources."

"Less than 24 hours after this serious issue was discussed on the floor of 
the people's House, one of your aides forwarded a mean-spirited, misguided 
and offensive message to dozens of individuals, including members of my 
staff," he wrote. Reyes expressed hope that "dissemination of such a 
mean-spirited message will be thoroughly investigated and those responsible 
will be appropriately disciplined."

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said the memo "was written by an 
outside activist and it does not reflect the president's views. We regret 
that it was mistakenly forwarded. The White House respects those who differ 
with us on this."

In another White House e-mail controversy, the president himself sent a 
solicitation for campaign funds that apparently went to some federal 
employees' government addresses. "Your donation . . . will make a big 
difference to my agenda to make America safer, stronger, and better," said 
the e-mail, from "President George W. Bush" at the address 
"georgewbush@xxxxxxxx"

The mass e-mail was intended for GOP faithful everywhere and likely was not 
targeting federal workers. But a government worker who received the 
solicitation at his ".gov" e-mail address complained to Rep. Henry A. 
Waxman (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, 
about a possible Hatch Act violation. "Obviously inappropriate, obviously 
illegal, and obviously a reflection that the administration will do 
anything to raise campaign dollars," said an obviously irritated Waxman.
***************************
Mercury News
SeniorNet campaign pushes tech literacy
By Mary Ann Ostrom
Mercury News


SeniorNet is launching its first national advertising campaign beginning 
today to encourage older Americans to become computer literate.

The yearlong campaign explaining the benefits of the Internet will consist 
of three public-service television ads in 23 markets, including the Bay 
Area. Planet Earth Media Foundation will produce the campaign, an in-kind 
donation valued at $4.7 million, and the San Jose-based Skoll Community 
Fund contributed a $250,000 grant.

SeniorNet, a San Francisco-based non-profit, provides support for more than 
220 learning centers nationwide that train older adults in using 
technology. Although older adults are among the fastest-growing group to go 
online, a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project found only 22 percent 
of Americans ages 65 or older are regular Internet users. The first ad, 
being unveiled today at an event at Adobe Systems headquarters in San Jose, 
features a woman talking about the benefits of using the Internet to stay 
in touch with family and friends.

``It's clear we're not reaching everyone who needs to hear this message,'' 
said Ann Wrixon CEO and President of SeniorNet, founded in 1986. ``There 
are significant benefits to going online in terms of getting health 
information and avoiding social isolation. No one has taken on the 
challenge of doing the public education that needs to be done.''

Part of the campaign's aim is to draw the attention of government, business 
and community leaders in a bid to increase funding for older-adult 
technology training, Wrixon said.

Among speakers at today's campaign kick-off are Nuala O'Connor Kelly, the 
U.S. Department of Commerce's chief counsel for technology, Dixie Horning, 
executive director of the UCSF National Center of Excellence in Women's 
Health and SeniorNet's board chair, Jeff Skoll, former eBay president and 
founder of the Skoll Community Fund, and John Nicol, general manager of 
Microsoft Network's TV Services.
****************************
USA Today
Internships go virtual as firms seek ways to save
By Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY

Some cost-cutting employers are trying a novel alternative to the 
traditional student apprenticeship: virtual internships.

Companies are hiring college students to work on projects from afar rather 
than relocating them for short-term assignments. The programs, dubbed 
e-internships, are a new way for companies and pending graduates to get 
connected. (Related: Internship can give you a leg up.)

Employers are experimenting with the idea because more college students 
have access to computers, virtual work has become more commonplace and 
companies want to tap more-affordable labor sources. Firms can save money 
because the internships may be short in duration or unpaid. For example:

At Cardinal Health in Dublin, Ohio, college students in states such as 
Arkansas and Ohio have been hired for virtual internships. Using school 
computers, they've worked on data warehousing and other projects and 
searched for errors on Web sites. The students are paired with a mentor and 
are paid. The company is a provider of health care products and services.
Says Dennis Joseph, 23, a senior at Southern Arkansas University in 
Magnolia, who is testing applications as a virtual intern: "It tests your 
communication skills and shows you can work virtually."

International Truck and Engine, a maker of commercial trucks and diesel 
engines based in Warrenville, Ill., has launched a virtual internship 
program. Last year, four students at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio, worked 
for the company and were supervised by phone and e-mail. The students, who 
each received $500, worked on a Web-marketing project.
"We get a lot of great work at a low cost," says Jim Clarke, manager of 
channel development in used truck operations. "The only thing is (that) 
they don't learn anything about the company culture. But it's a good 
recruiting tool."

At Edwards & Hill Communications in Baltimore, about 10 college students 
have participated in virtual internships. Using their own computers, the 
students post casting notices online for the multimedia company, which runs 
a Web site catering to the entertainment industry.
No one knows how many companies are offering virtual internships, but 
hiring experts say they're a creative approach that could catch on.

And even though students may never set foot in the companies that hired 
them, the e-internships often retain the hallmarks of traditional programs. 
Students often have mentors, projects to work on and online brainstorming 
sessions with colleagues.

"It was a pretty cool experience," says Guru Pinglay, 26, a technical 
support analyst at Cardinal Health who previously worked as a virtual 
intern and was hired in June. "The communication problems were more, but 
that was the only disadvantage."
*****************************
Federal Computer Week
A tough case to crack
How IT can -- and cannot -- aid law enforcement's search for a D.C.-area sniper
BY William Matthews
Oct. 21, 2002, 2002

Technology has received a prominent role in the hunt for a sniper who has 
killed nine and wounded two in a two-week spree in the Washington, D.C., 
metropolitan area, but even technology experts say the case is most likely 
to be cracked by cops, not computers.

"This is a fairly low-tech kind of crime," said Jay Siegel, a forensic 
science professor at Michigan State University's School of Criminal 
Justice. "What's going to solve this crime is old-fashioned police work. It 
does not require a lot of technology."

Nevertheless, numerous government agencies at the federal, state and local 
levels turned to information technology as a tool to help catch the sniper. 
Last week, the Army was preparing to contribute high-tech reconnaissance 
planes to track a getaway vehicle if another shooting occurs.

Meanwhile, police in Montgomery County, Md., where the shootings began Oct. 
2, are working with a Canadian company to develop a computer-generated 
geographic profile of the sniper, which is intended to identify the area in 
which a criminal lives based on the locations of his or her crimes.

The FBI is using its computerized Rapid Start Information Management System 
to comb a vast database of evidence, tips and old cases, searching for 
similarities, patterns and matches that might steer police to the sniper.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has searched its National 
Integrated Ballistics Information Network for digital images of bullets or 
shell casings for any that might match the bullet fragments recovered from 
the shooting victims and the single shell casing found near a middle school 
where a 13-year-old boy was wounded Oct. 7.

Maryland state troopers have increased their reliance on recently acquired 
handheld computers for retrieving information from the Maryland Interagency 
Law Enforcement System, the FBI's National Crime Information Center and 
databases containing information on vehicles and suspicious individuals.

Despite the array of high-tech tools, after more than two weeks of sporadic 
sniping attacks, police still had no suspect, no motive, no composite 
sketch of the sniper, no positive identification of the gun, no license 
plate number and only a vague description of a possible getaway van and a 
truck.

"In the current state of things, you probably won't see a large impact" on 
the sniper case from computer and technology systems, said David Epstein, 
director of scientific services at the National Forensic Science Technology 
Center in Largo, Fla.

In some instances, the technology is too new to improve the chances of 
solving such cases. The ballistics information network, for example, "is 
still in the process of being rolled out," Epstein said. It contains 
relatively few ballistic images compared to the number of guns in 
circulation. Thus, finding a match for the sniper's weapon is highly 
unlikely, he said.

Early in the investigation, hope for a quick resolution was fueled by 
reports that the police were using geographic profiling to help locate the 
sniper's home.

With assistance from Environmental Criminology Research Inc., police 
created an electronic map that marked the location of each shooting. Based 
on that information, the profiling system used a complex algorithm to 
calculate where the sniper was likely to live. The procedure has been used 
in about 700 investigations and has been credited with helping solve about 
150 of them, according to ECRI President Ian Laverty.

But in this case, days passed, shootings continued at sites more distant 
and dispersed, and the sniper remained at large. "What we usually find, 
having followed up on a lot of these cases, is that technology alone does 
not solve the crime  and it's not intended to," Laverty said.

The science of extracting useful information from raw crime data, as 
geographic profiling does, "is just getting out of its infancy," Siegel 
said. "We're just learning that we can learn a lot from data."

That's what the FBI is trying to do with its Rapid Start system, said FBI 
spokesman Barry Maddox. Agents feed data and thousands of tips collected at 
the shooting scenes into the system, which analyzes them and compares them 
with data culled from old cases. Rapid Start hunts for data matches, 
similarities and patterns, and alerts agents to information that might 
point to a perpetrator.

Rapid Start, which has existed for more than a decade, was used in the 
investigations into the Oklahoma City bombing and the terrorist attack on 
USS Cole in Yemen, according to the FBI. Maddox wouldn't say whether it has 
yielded useful results in the ongoing sniper investigation.

The system has substantial capabilities, according to Siegel. Yet, 15 days 
after the first shooting, he was surprised that police still had not 
located the sniper's van. In a case like this, he said, technology is no 
substitute for "basic police legwork."

In all, a dozen or more law enforcement agencies have been working on the 
case, and their ability to communicate and cooperate showed marked 
improvement since their previous joint efforts, when they responded to last 
September's terrorist attack on the Pentagon and the anthrax attacks a 
month later.

Montgomery County, for example, used a notification system put in place 
after Sept. 11 to send electronic messages to key officials in the county 
when the sniper attacks began. "They were able to mobilize their emergency 
operations center and their emergency operations processes," said John 
Cohen, president and chief executive officer of PSComm LLC, a consulting 
firm that advises government agencies on how to use technology.

Extraordinary coordination among local, state and federal authorities made 
it possible for police to swiftly seal the exit ramps and block lanes along 
20 miles of Interstate 95 and nearby roadways south of Washington, D.C., 
after the eighth slaying, which occurred at a Virginia gas station during 
rush hour Oct. 11. But the massive hunt came up empty-handed.

Police hope for better results with the aid of an Army RC-7 Airborne 
Reconnaissance Low plane, a small, four- engine plane mainly used to hunt 
for drug smugglers in Latin America and monitor North Korean military 
activities. Packed with $17 million worth of electronic systems, including 
computer-enhanced long-range cameras and heat-seeking sensors, the plane 
can stay aloft for about 10 hours.

John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, dismissed the idea that the 
plane's infrared sensors might be able to spot the flash of a rifle muzzle. 
And although equipment such as the plane's moving target indicator "is good 
for telling you whether the North Korean army is crossing" the 
demilitarized zone, it is not capable of spotting a vehicle of a particular 
color and tracking it through traffic, he said.

The long-range camera might prove useful if the plane happens to be in the 
immediate area of a sniper attack, but it would be useless if the attack 
occurs miles away, he said.

"This stuff isn't easy," Epstein said.
*****************************
Government Executive
Effort to double funding for science agency hits Senate snag
By William New, National Journal's Technology Daily

The reauthorization bill that would put the National Science Foundation 
(NSF) on track to double its budget in five years snagged in the Senate 
just before lawmakers recessed last week.

The bill, H.R. 4664, was set for voice-vote passage last Tuesday, according 
to the Senate Democratic cloakroom, but a senator anonymously objected, 
leading to no action before senators departed Thursday to campaign for the 
Nov. 5 election.

Industry groups charge that a Republican senator delayed action on behalf 
of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), reportedly 
because of concerns about the planned spending increase. But an OMB 
spokeswoman said the office has no official position on the bill.

The House passed the measure June 5 by a margin of 397-25. It would 
authorize 15 percent funding increases for NSF each year from fiscal 2003 
through fiscal 2005, including $5.5 billion for the agency next year, an 
increase of $719 million from fiscal 2002.

"The irony of the situation is [that] the appropriations committees have 
called for 13 to 14 percent program increases at NSF in the coming year," 
said David Peyton, director of technology policy at the National 
Association of Manufacturers.

Proponents of the bill said it would put NSF on a similar funding course as 
the National Institutes of Health (NIH), whose budget currently is being 
doubled over five years. According to an industry source, a White House 
official early in the Bush administration said that officials saw a lot of 
political support for NIH but not as much for other research areas.

As a result the tech industry "has been working hard" to increase political 
support for NSF's budget increase and believed it had succeeded. "So what's 
the problem?" the source said.

Funding for NSF falls under the appropriations bill for the Veterans 
Affairs and Housing and Urban Development departments.

Before departing, the Senate did approve by voice vote another bill sought 
by some in the tech industry. The measure, H.R. 2733, would authorize the 
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to work with 
manufacturing industries to develop and employ standards for information 
exchanges aimed at ensuring a seamless flow of information along the supply 
chain.


"We're looking for ways to reduce the costs of software duplication to the 
supply chain, where suppliers have to run multiple programs to do business 
with different customers" Peyton said. "We're going after excess cost in 
the supply chain."

The problem affects the automobile and aerospace industries in particular, 
he said. The bill would authorize $47 million over four years for NIST to 
work with industries. "We look forward to the appropriations committees 
funding the work in line with the authorization," Peyton said.
*****************************
Computerworld
Update: Navy searching for hundreds of missing computers
By DAN VERTON
OCTOBER 21, 2002

At least 595 laptops and desktops belonging to the Navy's Pacific Command 
in Hawaii have been potentially lost or compromised, according to an 
internal report that detailed the service's inability to account for 
hundreds of computers, some of which contained classified data.
The audit, conducted in July by the Naval Audit Service, concluded that the 
mishap poses a "threat to national security." It was obtained last week by 
Defense Week, a defense industry trade magazine, despite Navy efforts to 
block its release.

The report identifies failures and breakdowns in the Navy's system for 
tracking sensitive equipment deployed aboard Navy ships and submarines -- a 
system that remains largely paper-based and manual.

John Yoshishige, a spokesman for the Navy's Pacific Command in Hawaii, said 
that since last week the number of missing computers has been reduced from 
595 to 187.

"And we expect that some of those may still turn up ashore," Yoshishige 
said. "The inventory in the report was only of afloat units."

He was referring to PCs and laptops used onboard ships and submarines.


In addition to ordering an inventory of all shore-based units, the 
commander of the Pacific Fleet has also directed that the command's CIO, 
known in Navy parlance as the N6, develop an inventory control management 
system that will be used by all Pacific Fleet commands.

This isn't the first time the military has lost computers containing 
sensitive data. For example, in August, two laptop computers classified at 
the top-secret level disappeared from a Sensitive Compartmented Information 
Facility (SCIF) run by the U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base 
in Tampa, Fla. The only reason those laptops were discovered to be missing 
was that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had ordered investigators to 
look into how plans for an invasion of Iraq had leaked to the media.

Missing laptop and hard-drive fiascos have also stung the State Department, 
the Department of Energy and even the FBI in recent years. In August, the 
Justice Department acknowledged that it couldn't located 400 laptops and 
775 weapons belonging to the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency. In 
addition, the classification level of 317 of the computers belonging to the 
FBI couldn't be determined.

Accountability problems often stem from the fact that individual military 
and civilian agency officials are appointed as control or accountability 
officers for a vast array of equipment, including mobile computers, desks 
and chairs, that's often deployed for extended periods of time around the 
world. In addition, the process of keeping tabs on equipment is often 
determined by the individual officer assigned to manage the hardware and 
isn't subject to any departmentwide or governmentwide standard.
*************************
New York Times
British Concern to Help U.S. Track Terrorists
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 20  Autonomy, a British developer of sophisticated 
information retrieval software, plans to announce on Monday that it has 
been chosen to provide an analysis system to help the United States 
government track suspected terrorists.

The company, which has headquarters here and in Cambridge, England, said 
that the General Services Administration had awarded it the multimillion 
dollar contract and that licenses for the software were being made 
available to the 21 agencies that may one day make up the proposed 
Department of Homeland Security.

The company's executives said they were not permitted to divulge the 
specific agency driving the contract award, but said that it was a 
"security-oriented agency."

John Cronin, Autonomy's vice president for the government sector, said that 
Steven I. Cooper, the chief information officer for the interim Office of 
Homeland Security established by the Bush administration, had been "very 
much" involved in the decision to purchase the software.

Autonomy's software uses statistical techniques to search for patterns of 
information across large masses of data. Mr. Cooper has said publicly on 
several occasions that the domestic security effort will require technology 
that will allow government agencies to share and analyze information, and 
that data-mining technologies will be a central part of the operation.

The Autonomy software will make it possible to build automatically updated 
indexes of disparate databases that are now maintained separately by 
different government agencies.

"The problem you have is that any one of these agencies can come up with 
pieces of the puzzle," said Michael R. Lynch, the chief executive of 
Autonomy. "This system will be accessed by over 200,000 people ranging from 
experts on shipping to experts on North Korea."

The chief knowledge officer of the Coast Guard, Dr. Nathaniel S. Heiner, 
said that a number of government agencies were already working toward 
integrating their data sources and that the Autonomy tool was a significant 
addition. "We can't leave any stones unturned when it comes to finding the 
right mix of information and getting it into the right hands," he said.

Industry analysts said that the Autonomy software could play a role in the 
effort to bring together information from different agencies with 
incompatible computer systems.

"They're looking at Autonomy as the simplest thing that can be incorporated 
into all of the agencies to build collaboration," said French Caldwell, a 
computing industry analyst at Gartner Inc., a market research firm. He 
added, however, that true collaboration would be a remarkably difficult 
challenge for the government. Many agencies currently do not even share 
secure electronic mail, he said.

One early application for the Autonomy software will be as part of a 
consolidated watch list for suspected terrorists that the agencies will 
maintain, according to Mr. Cronin of Autonomy. He described the possibility 
that dozens of separate data repositories would be accessible by Autonomy 
software known as the Intelligent Data Operating Layer, which is designed 
to integrate unstructured text documents and traditional database information.

Once the Autonomy indexing system is established, it could be used both to 
search all of the repositories simultaneously as well as to automatically 
generate alerts in response to certain inquiries.

The Autonomy software has the flexibility to search names and words with 
variable spellings as well as to retrieve information based on patterns 
that are related but may not match exactly.

The software is based on Bayesian statistical techniques, which are used to 
match patterns and are gaining favor among software designers and 
artificial-intelligence researchers.

The agencies that will acquire licenses to the Autonomy software under the 
contract include the Office of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the 
Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, the Federal 
Emergency Management Agency and the State Department.
****************************
BBC Online
Screensavers crack medical puzzle

The spare capacity of thousands of computers has helped scientists solve a 
complex problem - which could one day help them fight disease.

It is one of the first occasions so-called "distributed computing", in 
which each volunteer machine is given a chunk of data to compute, has led 
to a research paper published in a top scientific journal.

Problems suitable for "distributed computing" are those which would take 
years of processor time if carried out on just one, or a small group of 
computers.

However, if the task is divided between many thousands of computers, the 
time it takes to finish the job falls dramatically.

The downloaded software swings into operation when the computer has been 
idle for a set period.

The principle has been used for everything from the design of new drugs to 
the search for extraterrestrial life.

Folding conundrum

The success has been achieved by the Folding@home project, run by 
scientists at Stanford University in the US.

It is looking into proteins - essential chemical messengers which control 
many vital body functions.

Each long protein molecule is a sequence of amino acids folded into a 
complex, three-dimensional shape which is key to its particular role.

Protein misfolding is thought to play a role in many diseases, including 
CJD and Alzheimer's.

The aim of the Folding@home project was to simulate just part of this 
folding process, which takes just a few microseconds to happen.

A single average computer would take all day just to simulate one 
nanosecond of protein folding.

Willing volunteers

Folding@home was launched two years ago, and has so far recruited 200,000 
PC owners.

A new recruit will download data analysis software, then be assigned 
particular computational tasks, sending the results back when they are 
completed.

A group of 30,000 computers was able to perform 32,500 folding simulations 
and accumulate 700 microseconds of data.

The results - predicting that a particular protein would take six 
microseconds to fold - tallied well with laboratory tests.

Dr Vijay Pande, from Stanford University, said: "These experiments 
represent a great success for distributed computing.

"Understanding how proteins fold will likely have a great impact on 
understanding a wide range of diseases."

The results were published in the online version of the journal Nature.

This is by no means the first success for distributed computing - it has 
cracked complex mathematical problems before - but it is the first to be 
published in a journal such as Nature.

The most famous project, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence 
(SETI), which analyses radio telescope data, has also thrown up some 
promising "leads".
***************************
BBC Online
Anti-terror fight goes to the source

US anti-terror agencies are linking their intelligence databases to pool 
information about suspects and spot hints about future attacks.
The pool will include text documents, video and audio gathered from a 
regularly updated collection of sources of information about terror groups.

The agencies will analyse the information looking for trends, key 
individuals or recurring phrases that signify code words or concealed 
messages.

British firm Autonomy is providing the technology to sift through the data 
looking for clues.

Code clause

The US Department of Homeland Security is behind the project to unify the 
intelligence databases of the 21 agencies, which includes the CIA and FBI, 
and will try to ensure that anti-terror work becomes closely co-ordinated.

It hopes that by strengthening links between the intelligence databases of 
all the agencies involved in the fight against terror it will get a better 
idea of if, when and where future attacks might come.

Autonomy's software will be used to analyse text, video and audio sources 
looking for common concepts, phrases or individuals to produce a 
consolidated watch-list.

Analysis of freshly gathered intelligence will also help the agencies keep 
abreast of the plans of suspected terror groups.

The sophisticated analysis could also make it easier for anti-terror 
agencies to pick out the common code words or phrases used by groups to 
co-ordinate their activities.

More than 200,000 employees across the anti-terror agencies will be using 
the software.

Before now US anti-terror groups have struggled to find out how attacks are 
co-ordinated.

Widespread rumours that Al Qaeda is hiding passwords and plans inside 
pornographic images on the internet have not been substantiated, even after 
millions of images have been scanned.

The Department of Homeland Security was created after 11 September 2001 
with the aim of preventing future terror attacks on US soil.
*****************************
CNET News.com
Google sued over site ranking
By Stefanie Olsen
October 22, 2002, 9:30 AM PT

Top billing in Google search results has become so coveted that one Web 
hosting company is suing for it.

Search King, an Oklahoma City-based Web site network and advertising 
seller, filed a lawsuit Friday against Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, 
alleging the search giant unfairly bumped down its Web addresses from top 
rankings in search results. The complaint was filed in the U.S. Western 
District Court of Oklahoma.

The popular search service "purposefully reduced Search King's value, as 
well as that of Web sites hosted by Search King," according to the 
complaint. This is "due to the fact that Search King was legally profiting 
from the page ranking assigned by Google to certain Web sites, with the 
intent to cause Search King's clients to cancel contracts with Search King."


Google could not be immediately reached for comment.

On its Web site, however, the company explains that Web site rankings may 
change each time it updates its index, which is every four weeks.

"You can be assured that no one at Google has adjusted the results to 
decrease the ranking of one site or increase the ranking of another," 
according to the site. "Google's order of results is automatically 
determined by several factors, including our PageRank algorithm."

At the center of the dispute are the "PageRank algorithm" and Google's 
hidden recipe for calculating search results--which have made it a hit with 
Web surfers the world over.

Though the company has largely kept secret its formula for answering 
queries with fast, germane results, it has publicized one big part of the 
equation. PageRank is a factor that determines a site's importance in 
results based on the popularity it has in the Web community--roughly 
tabulated by the number of links coming to that site and the importance of 
those pages linking to it. It boils down to a number between 1 and 10 given 
to a site to determine its position in specific results. Translated, a site 
with a PR 10 is favored in results over a site with PR 7.

According to explanatory notes on Google's Web site: "Google's order of 
results is automatically determined by several factors, including our 
PageRank algorithm. Due to the nature of our business and our interest in 
protecting the integrity of our search results, this is the only 
information we make available to the public about our ranking system."

Because Google is one of the largest search services on the Web, high 
ranking in its index could mean traffic from America Online, Yahoo and 
other licensing partners, as well from Google.com. With knowledge of how 
PageRank works, Web marketers and search engine spammers have tried to 
reverse-engineer the formula by creating elaborate link structures, or 
"link farms," to multiple sites to create page popularity and boost PageRank.

On a list of "do's and don't's" to get listed in the Google index, the 
company says Web sites should not "participate in link exchanges for the 
sole purpose of increasing your ranking in search engines."

Who's No. 1?
Some industry watchers say that the practice of building "link farms" 
resulted in recent changes to Google's search algorithm in September. 
Marketers such as Search King complain that Google's changes come with no 
forewarning to a Web community so dependent on it for traffic.

Search King owner Bob Massa said in the lawsuit that the site's PageRank 
was 7 out of 10 from February 2001 to July 2002, when it was then raised to 
an 8. But a month later, things went downhill for the network.

According to the complaint, the Web hosting company in August started the 
PR Ad Network--an advertising network in which it sold text links on the 
popular Web sites to get them a better listing in Google's results.

Shortly after Search King boasted the trick, the PR number for its Web site 
and those it hosts dropped from an 8 to a 4. The PR Ad Network itself was 
given a zero, "which in the Internet community is recognized as a manually 
determined penalty," according to the suit.

"Due to the high value associated with page rank, the purposeful reduction 
of Search King and related Web sites' page rankings has damaged (its) 
reputation and diminished its value," according to the suit.

"Google, as a provider of a ranking system upon with the Internet community 
relies, must apply the system in a manner that is not arbitrary, nor aimed 
at restraint of trade."

Search King is seeking a preliminary injunction against Google to be 
restored to its previous ranking. It is also seeking unspecified damages in 
excess of $75,000, a threshold it is using to file the suit under claims of 
tortious interference with contractual clauses.
*****************************
CNET News.com
Justice Dept. reaches for "smart" gun
By Sandeep Junnarkar
October 22, 2002, 8:02 AM PT


The U.S. Justice Department is turning to technology to help guns recognize 
whose finger is on the trigger.

The National Institute of Justice, the research and development arm of the 
Justice Department, is teaming up with Metal Storm, an electronic gun 
maker, to study how a firearm could be designed to determine whether the 
person wielding it should be allowed to fire it.

"If an officer drops a gun or it is taken away from him during a tussle, a 
'smart' gun could not be turned against him because there would be means of 
specifically identifying the authorized user," said Charles Vehlow, Metal 
Storm's chief corporate officer. "The study will identify the various 
technologies that could make this possible and recommend the best ones to use."


The research will focus on biometrics systems such as fingerprint 
technologies, computer chips that could be programmed to recognize an 
individual's grip or other physical features, and electronic keys and codes.

"Biometrics clearly have advantages over keys and codes in terms of time 
needed to activate or disarm a firearm," said Vehlow.

Interest in biometrics--systems that recognize people by scanning for 
unique physical features such as fingerprints, an eye's iris and the 
contour of a face--has surged since the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon 
and World Trade Center in September 2001. Law enforcement agencies and 
private companies in the airline and travel industry are hoping to rely in 
part on some new technologies to help counter security threats.

Within law enforcement, there is a sense of urgency to find a way to 
protect officers from their own firearms. A review conducted over a 10-year 
period looking at how law enforcement officers were killed found that one 
in six was shot to death by their own firearm after being disarmed by a 
suspect. The report, dubbed the "FBI's Law Enforcement Officers Killed and 
Assaulted Uniform Crime Report," also found that 113 firearms were stolen 
from police officers during that period.

Earlier, the National Institute of Justice funded the Sandia National 
Laboratories, to the tune of $500,000 to study the problem of firearms 
being taken away from police officers, identifying the extent to which 
officers are assaulted and killed with their own firearms and also 
identifying the requirements officers would want in a "smart gun."

The institute is providing Metal Storm, a company traded on the Nasdaq 
Stock Market, with almost $200,000 for the current research and 
development. The company, based in Arlington, Va., said it would submit the 
results of the study in the first half of 2003, providing an analysis of 
the design, use, manufacturing process and costs of delivery a "smart gun."
******************************
Wired News
Smart Fatigues Hear Enemy Coming

Call it a security blanket for soldiers: GIs may someday march into battle 
armed with a swatch of fabric rather than bulky electronics.

Computer scientists and textile experts are working together to weave 
fabric with electronics that can assist the military in sound detection and 
other useful applications.


Researchers at the University of Southern California and Virginia Tech have 
developed a fabric woven with conductive wires and a cluster of seven 
button-size microphones that can be used to detect the sound of remote 
objects, like approaching vehicles.

"The fabric gives us the capacity to make very large computing systems with 
integrated sensors and integrated power supplies and to do this very 
cheaply with existing textile manufacturing capabilities," said Mark Jones, 
a professor of electrical computer engineering at Virginia Tech.

A small circuit board attached to the fabric compares the sounds from each 
microphone and uses algorithms to compute the direction the sound is coming 
from.

That direction, called the line of bearing, is then reported by radio to a 
laptop or PDA that the soldier carries.

Currently, pockets in the fabric hold the batteries that power the system. 
In future models, the circuit board and batteries would be woven into the 
material.

The fabric can be placed on the ground or hung from a tree in unsafe areas 
like potential combat zones. The material could also be used to manufacture 
tents or parachutes.

It's a cheaper and less cumbersome alternative to some of the mobile 
detection systems the military uses now, which are usually mounted onto 
trucks or jeeps, said Bob Parker, deputy director of USC's Information 
Sciences Institute.

A prototype of the special fabric will be tested in November. Parker 
estimated that the fabric will detect objects more than 100 meters away.

To build the prototype itself, researchers first had to find a weaver.

Until she received the e-textile project's unusual request, Dana Reynolds 
had only woven scarves and decorative cloth.

"It was pretty scary because I have never dealt with weaving with wire and 
I was clueless as to how it would behave," said Reynolds, who has been 
weaving as a hobby for several years. "Actually, it's turned out to be 
pretty easy."

Reynolds wove in about 24 strands of wire in each direction with light, 
crocheted cotton thread. She wove three different layers of material: the 
vertical wires are on the bottom, the horizontal wires are on the top, and 
in between the two is a buffer layer. The buffer prevents the wires from 
short-circuiting.

"I had to manually dig down through the layers and pull up one intersection 
of the horizontal and vertical wires and hold them together temporarily 
with a pin," Reynolds said. "They took those intersections and attached 
whatever microphones."

She estimated that the whole process took several hundred hours --including 
discussions with researchers, setting up the loom and doing the weaving.

She used 40 balls of crocheted thread plus the wires to create the 
prototype. The next prototype will be larger, measuring 30 inches by 10 yards.

Mixing the old art with state of the art electronics is tricky because it's 
still in the earliest stages of development.

"Textile folks and computer scientists have to learn to speak a common 
language, and that's only begun to happen," Parker said. "They approach 
problems from very different viewpoints."

A professor at North Carolina State University has developed a similar 
project and sees e-textiles as a burgeoning industry.

"Look at the fabrics around you," said Abdelfattah Seyam, who teaches at NC 
State's College of Textiles. "We have fabric on seats, carpets, wall 
coverings. We have a really giant area covered by textile fabrics.

"There are millions of fibers in a little square of fabric. Taking some of 
these fibers would be more than enough to form very advanced electrical 
circuits," he said.

Seyam said existing textiles machines must be modified to incorporate 
devices that can connect conductive fibers.

Once that's accomplished, the potential applications are numerous.

In the case of homeland security, if a person is carrying a weapon or 
chemicals in an airport, carpets and wall coverings made of e-textiles 
could identify them.

"Microphones, radio transmitters, sensors to measure pulse rate and body 
temperature, GPS -- you can have all of that incorporated into fabric," 
said Anuj Dhawan, a PhD student in fiber and polymer science and electrical 
engineering at NC State. The average soldier, then, "doesn't have to carry 
electronic equipment and his mobility can be increased."

Eventually, e-fabric could be programmed to lift up a corner of the 
material by itself and take a photo, or roll up and move on its own, Parker 
said.
***************************
Wired News
Professor's Case: Unlock Crypto

Daniel Bernstein seems intent on striking the deathblow to U.S. government 
regulations on cryptography.

The latest chapter in his decade-long battle began to unfold on Friday, 
when lawyers representing both the Department of Commerce and Bernstein, a 
University of Illinois associate professor of mathematics, statistics and 
computer science, prepared to ask federal district court judge Marilyn Hall 
Patel to grant a summary judgment. At stake: the last remnants of a system 
that once prevented U.S. citizens from releasing software code that creates 
secure, electronic communications.

Bernstein is trying to eradicate the last of the export laws that 
previously kept Americans from distributing any work related to cryptography.

It's a bit confusing to some in the cryptography arena who feel that the 
current laws allow anyone to distribute their programs without fear of 
reprimand. Bruce Schneier, security expert and author of Applied 
Cryptography, said the future battle over encryption won't be trying to 
free software code, but rather preventing corporations from using it to 
limit rights.

"We always thought about cryptography as being a tool to protect the little 
guy versus the big guy," said Schneier. "It never occurred to us that the 
Digital Millennium Copyright Act would get passed."

Even with the looming fight over the DMCA, many are still uncomfortable 
with the court battle Bernstein continues to wage.

"When you empower people to do things, we empower them to do bad things," 
said Mike Godwin, staff council at the Center for Democracy and Technology. 
"It's a hard problem: What do you allow people to do in a free society? 
This is the hard part of democracy. You have to end up trusting people."

The problem, the government claims, occurs when the technology falls into 
the hands of people outside democracies. Earlier this year, for example, 
The Wall Street Journal bought a computer in Kabul, Afghanistan, that held 
encrypted files. The news organization broke the security -- with the help 
of the government -- revealing a wealth of information about al-Qaida 
activities.

The security was relatively easy to break, since the al-Qaida operatives 
who owned the computer used an off-the-shelf, 40-bit encryption program. 
However, if they had used one of the newer, more powerful encryption 
programs, those messages would likely have been lost forever.

That has been the heart of the government's fight to limit general access 
to cryptography for the last 30 years. It does this by requiring people to 
apply for a license called a commodities jurisdiction. Without this 
license, nobody can export any cryptography product, which includes 
publishing it on the Web -- and, for good reason, according to Stewart 
Baker, an affable Washington lawyer with Steptoe &amp Johnson.

Baker, who was general counsel for the National Security Agency from 1992 
until 1994, said there is strong evidence, for example, that World War II 
was won because we had better cryptographers than Germany and Japan. Behind 
tight security at Fort Meade, Maryland, the NSA has teams of mathematicians 
and programmers working on the some of the world's most powerful 
supercomputers, making and cracking codes.

Making the knowledge freely accessible to everyone, Baker said, takes away 
one of the United States' strategic advantages.

Bernstein has repeatedly beaten back the government's attempt to restrict 
cryptographic technology. But, Baker said, much of that battle was waged 
during a different political climate.

"If it had come up 10 years later, this battle probably could have been 
won," Baker said. "But even then it would have been a very hard battle 
because there are so many valuable uses for encryption.... My guess is that 
at the end of the day, we would have ended up here."

Here is a place where very strong public encryption technology is available 
to the public, thanks to a handful of people, working in a loose collective 
led by Dr. Whitfield Diffie. The group developed their own system for 
secure communication that was so strong the NSA deemed it a threat to 
national security to sell it commercially. That started an epic battle 
between the government and the technology community, which is chronicled in 
Steven Levy's book Crypto.

The legal flare-up began in 1995 when Bernstein filed suit against the 
State Department, claiming the export laws that limited where academics 
could publish their research were unconstitutional.

With the help of Cindy Cohn, now a staff attorney with the Electronic 
Frontier Foundation, Bernstein successfully challenged the government's 
ability to restrict publishing code. In 1999, Patel agreed with Cohn. Three 
years later, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Patel's ruling.

Since then, the government has eased restrictions on export technology, 
although the government still maintains the right to limit certain exports.
*****************************
Wired News
Terror Turns Real for Horror Site

Matt Rexer admits that he was hoping to raise a little hell on his website.

But the sudden appearance this week of a message purporting to be from 
Osama bin Laden, head of the al-Qaida terrorist network, on Rexer's Clive 
Barker fan site truly spooked the horror film fan.

The message that turned up on Rexer's site congratulated the "... Islamic 
world for the heroic operations of courageous jihad carried out by its 
pious fighter children in Yemen, against the tanker of the crusaders, and 
in Kuwait, against the American invasion and occupation forces," and was 
signed "Osama bin Mohammad bin Laden, your brother."

Rexer's site isn't the only one forced to act as an unwilling al-Qaida 
content host, according to online antiterrorist activist Andrew Weisburd.

Weisburd has been tracking the Web activities of terrorist organizations 
for the last several months. He said that takeovers have occurred on at 
least three other sites recently.

Rexer said he had no idea why his "geeky tribute to a horror movie series" 
was selected as a home for a terrorist rant.

"I find it utterly bizarre that they'd bury their message in the middle of 
a page that celebrates a decadent, sin-filled, Western movie series and 
that also sports the word 'hell' all over the place," Rexer said.

Rexer's life was further complicated when a report by the AFP news wire 
service appeared in newspapers around the world, pointing to islammemo.com 
and Rexer's cenobite.com as the two websites that had posted bin Laden's 
latest message.

After the story ran, Rexer's site started to get a lot of interesting new 
visitors.

"It was not a fun experience at all," Rexer said. "It's both terrifying and 
infuriating to check your site's log and see that suddenly a whole bunch of 
your http_referrers are coming from Arabic anti-American sites."

The message didn't appear directly on Rexer's site, but could only be found 
by accessing the site through a URL that led to the file where Rexer stored 
images for the site.

Rexer only found out that his website had been altered when a French 
blogger contacted him after reading the AFP story to ask about the unusual 
contents of Rexer's site.

Rexer said that he discovered on Tuesday that his Web host company, Liquid 
Web, had also (briefly) hosted alneda.com, a site listed as belonging to 
the Center for Islamic Research that many believe is an al-Qaida 
communication site.

The Alneda site has been attacked on a regular basis and currently bears 
the message "Hacked, tracked and NOW owned by the U.S.A."

Rexer speculates that familiarity with the hosting company may have allowed 
his site's attackers to exploit a security hole on its servers.

Liquid Web could not immediately be reached for comment.

Mike Sweeney, owner of networking consultant firm Packetattack, said it 
appeared Rexer's user ID and password for the administrative side was 
cracked, and the attackers probably used a well-known weakness on the Web 
server to bypass security.

"This is not a site hijack but more of a parasite website," Sweeney said. 
"You have the host website and then buried within it is a second website, 
or the parasite site."

Sweeney said the attack could have easily been performed by someone with no 
real technical skills using tools widely available online.

Rexer said after he discovered bin Laden's message lurking on his website 
he quickly shut down access to the site, changed his password and informed 
his Web hosting company of the problem.

"Liquid Web deleted the folder that contained the bin Laden garbage and 
gave me the last IP to log into my account," Rexer said. "I used Visual 
Traceroute's demo page to trace that IP to a German DirecPC.com user."

Sweeney said it was obvious from the tracks left behind that whoever 
altered Rexer's site wasn't particularly skilled.

"Any hacker worth their bits would have cleared the log so there would not 
be obivious traces of someone being there," Sweeney said. "Any IP that is 
found there will probably be a cybercafe or a site that had been hacked and 
then jumped from. Tracking it back probably won't really accomplish all 
that much."
****************************
Reuters Internet Report
Police Experts Meet on Internet Child Porn
2 hours, 2 minutes ago

THUN, Switzerland (Reuters) - Police and criminologists from 34 countries 
began a three-day meeting Tuesday aimed at combating crime against 
children, especially pornography on the Internet (news - web sites), 
officials said.



Some 85 experts are taking part in the talks which follow a series of raids 
across Europe netting thousands of suspected pedophiles or customers of 
online child pornography sites.


The specialized group from Interpol, the international policing 
organization, links experts from Asia, the United States, Europe and Africa 
and strives to keep up with rapid technological advances.


Makers of child porn on the Web leave few traces, making it difficult to 
identify and prosecute them.


Interpol has gathered some 150,000 images of child abuse from all over the 
world. It shares information with countries on previous cases, especially 
those just joining the online age.


"It is very important that law enforcement (groups) share this information 
so organizations which are new in this field don't have to start from the 
beginning," said Anders Persson, Interpol criminal intelligence officer in 
human trafficking.


Swiss Justice Minister Ruth Metzler told the meeting demand for child porn, 
"with younger and younger children and harder scenes," was increasing.


"Morals know no boundaries and children are turned into cheap products. 
According to Unicef (news - web sites), a million children are forced each 
year into pornographic productions that generate $20 billion in sales," she 
said.
*****************************
Reuters Internet Report
Internet Providers Snub UK Data Demands
Tue Oct 22,11:51 AM ET
By Corinne Amoo

LONDON (Reuters) - The Internet (news - web sites) industry dealt a blow to 
Britain's tough anti-terrorism legislation on Tuesday by refusing to reveal 
personal cyber-data to police.



It has turned down a request from Home Secretary David Blunkett to allow 
police and intelligence officers to access the personal records of their 
customers on request without the approval of a judge.


The government's plans have drawn fire from civil liberties campaigners.


"Millions of innocent users of telephone, email and internet will have 
their private communications information and their movements stored on the 
off chance it might be of use in the future," said Roger Bingham from 
Liberty, a civil liberties lobby group.


Blunkett's anti-terrorism surveillance plans urge Internet providers to 
store the personal information of British web and email users for longer 
periods of time.


They also urge the Internet providers to make this personal information 
accessible to intelligence and law enforcement agencies, without seeking 
judicial approval.


"Data retention is not intended to infringe the privacy of the law-abiding 
citizen but is designed to ensure that terrorism is in no way assisted by 
the developing technologies," said a Home Office spokesman.


The Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) are key players in the 
dispute and have told their members not to comply with the government's 
request, which they feel violates the Data Protection Act, 1998.


"We do not feel we can recommend Internet Service Providers voluntarily to 
comply with the government's proposed code of practice," an ISPA spokesman 
told Reuters.


"There are other laws such as the Regulation Investigatory Powers Act, 2000 
where law enforcement agencies can ask for personal information on approval 
by a judge."
******************
Sydney Morning Herald
Who controls your computer?
By Richard Stallman
Comment
October 22 2002

Who should your computer take its orders from? Most people think their 
computers should obey them, not obey someone else. With a plan they call 
"trusted computing," large media corporations (including the movie 
companies and record companies), together with computer companies such as 
Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead 
of you. Proprietary programs have included malicious features before, but 
this plan would make it universal.

Proprietary software means, fundamentally, that you don't control what it 
does; you can't study the source code, or change it. It's not surprising 
that clever businessmen find ways to use their control to put you at a 
disadvantage. Microsoft has done this several times: one version of Windows 
was designed to report to Microsoft all the software on your hard disk; a 
recent "security" upgrade in Windows Media Player required users to agree 
to new restrictions. But Microsoft is not alone: the KaZaa music-sharing 
software is designed so that KaZaa's business partner can rent out the use 
of your computer to their clients. These malicious features are often 
secret, but even once you know about them it is hard to remove them, since 
you don't have the source code.

In the past, these were isolated incidents. "Trusted computing" would make 
it pervasive. "Treacherous computing" is a more appropriate name, because 
the plan is designed to make sure your computer will systematically disobey 
you. In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a 
general-purpose computer. Every operation may require explicit permission.

The technical idea underlying treacherous computing is that the computer 
includes a digital encryption and signature device, and the keys are kept 
secret from you. (Microsoft's version of this is called "palladium.") 
Proprietary programs will use this device to control which other programs 
you can run, which documents or data you can access, and what programs you 
can pass them to. These programs will continually download new 
authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules 
automatically on your work. If you don't allow your computer to obtain the 
new rules periodically from the Internet, some capabilities will 
automatically cease to function.

Of course, Hollywood and the record companies plan to use treacherous 
computing for "DRM" (Digital Restrictions Management), so that downloaded 
videos and music can be played only on one specified computer. Sharing will 
be entirely impossible, at least using the authorized files that you would 
get from those companies. You, the public, ought to have both the freedom 
and the ability to share these things. (I expect that someone will find a 
way to produce unencrypted versions, and to upload and share them, so DRM 
will not entirely succeed, but that is no excuse for the system.)

Making sharing impossible is bad enough, but it gets worse. There are plans 
to use the same facility for email and documents -- resulting in email that 
disappears in two weeks, or documents that can only be read on the 
computers in one company.

Imagine if you get an email from your boss telling you to do something that 
you think is risky; a month later, when it backfires, you can't use the 
email to show that the decision was not yours. "Getting it in writing" 
doesn't protect you when the order is written in disappearing ink.

Imagine if you get an email from your boss stating a policy that is illegal 
or morally outrageous, such as to shred your company's audit documents, or 
to allow a dangerous threat to your country to move forward unchecked. 
Today you can send this to a reporter and expose the activity. With 
treacherous computing, the reporter won't be able to read the document; her 
computer will refuse to obey her. Treacherous computing becomes a paradise 
for corruption.

Word processors such as Microsoft Word could use treacherous computing when 
they save your documents, to make sure no competing word processors can 
read them. Today we must figure out the secrets of Word format by laborious 
experiments in order to make free word processors read Word documents. If 
Word encrypts documents using treacherous computing when saving them, the 
free software community won't have a chance of developing software to read 
them -- and if we could, such programs might even be forbidden by the 
Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Programs that use treacherous computing will continually download new 
authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules 
automatically on your work. If Microsoft, or the U.S. government, does not 
like what you said in a document you wrote, they could post new 
instructions telling all computers to refuse to let anyone read that 
document. Each computer would obey when it downloads the new instructions. 
Your writing would be subject to 1984-style retroactive erasure. You might 
be unable to read it yourself.

You might think you can find out what nasty things a treacherous computing 
application does, study how painful they are, and decide whether to accept 
them. It would be short-sighted and foolish to accept, but the point is 
that the deal you think you are making won't stand still. Once you come 
depend on using the program, you are hooked and they know it; then they can 
change the deal. Some applications will automatically download upgrades 
that will do something different -- and they won't give you a choice about 
whether to upgrade.

Today you can avoid being restricted by proprietary software by not using 
it. If you run GNU/Linux or another free operating system, and if you avoid 
installing proprietary applications on it, then you are in charge of what 
your computer does. If a free program has a malicious feature, other 
developers in the community will take it out, and you can use the corrected 
version. You can also run free application programs and tools on non-free 
operating systems; this falls short of fully giving you freedom, but many 
users do it.

Treacherous computing puts the existence of free operating systems and free 
applications at risk, because you may not be able to run them at all. Some 
versions of treacherous computing would require the operating system to be 
specifically authorized by a particular company. Free operating systems 
could not be installed. Some versions of treacherous computing would 
require every program to be specifically authorized by the operating system 
developer. You could not run free applications on such a system. If you did 
figure out how, and told someone, that could be a crime.

There are proposals already for U.S. laws that would require all computers 
to support treacherous computing, and to prohibit connecting old computers 
to the Internet. The CBDTPA (we call it the Consume But Don't Try 
Programming Act) is one of them. But even if they don't legally force you 
to switch to treacherous computing, the pressure to accept it may be 
enormous. Today people often use Word format for communication, although 
this causes several sorts of problems (see 
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html). If only a 
treacherous computing machine can read the latest Word documents, many 
people will switch to it, if they view the situation only in terms of 
individual action (take it or leave it). To oppose treacherous computing, 
we must join together and confront the situation as a collective choice.

For further information about treacherous computing, see 
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html.

To block treacherous computing will require large numbers of citizens to 
organize. We need your help! The Electronic Frontier Foundation 
(www.eff.org) and Public Knowledge (www.publicknowledge.org) are 
campaigning against treacherous computing, and so is the FSF-sponsored 
Digital Speech Project (www.digitalspeech.org). Please visit these Web 
sites so you can sign up to support their work.

You can also help by writing to the public affairs offices of Intel, IBM, 
HP/Compaq, or anyone you have bought a computer from, explaining that you 
don't want to be pressured to buy "trusted" computing systems so you don't 
want them to produce any. This can bring consumer power to bear. If you do 
this on your own, please send copies of your letters to the organizations 
above.

Postscripts:

1. The GNU Project distributes the GNU Privacy Guard, a program that 
implements public-key encryption and digital signatures, which you can use 
to send secure and private email. It is useful to explore how GPG differs 
from treacherous computing, and see what makes one helpful and the other so 
dangerous.

When someone uses GPG to send you an encrypted document, and you use GPG to 
decode it, the result is an unencrypted document that you can read, 
forward, copy, and even re-encrypt to send it securely to someone else. A 
treacherous computing application would let you read the words on the 
screen, but would not let you produce an unencrypted document that you 
could use in other ways. GPG, a free software package, makes security 
features available to the users; they use it. Treacherous computing is 
designed to impose restrictions on the users; it uses them.

2. Microsoft presents Palladium as a security measure, and claims that it 
will protect against viruses, but this claim is evidently false. A 
presentation by Microsoft Research in October 2002 stated that one of the 
specifications of Palladium is that existing operating systems and 
applications will continue to run; therefore, viruses will continue to be 
able to do all the things that they can do today.

When Microsoft speaks of "security" in connection with Palladium, they do 
not mean what we normally mean by that word: protecting your machine from 
things you do not want. They mean protecting your copies of data on your 
machine from access by you in ways others do not want. A slide in the 
presentation listed several types of secrets Palladium could be used to 
keep, including "third party secrets" and "user secrets" -- but it put 
"user secrets" in quotation marks, recognizing that this is not what 
Palladium is really designed for.

The presentation made frequent use of other terms that we frequently 
associate with the context of security, such as "attack," "malicious code," 
"spoofing," as well as "trusted." None of them means what it normally 
means. "Attack" doesn't mean someone trying to hurt you, it means you 
trying to copy music. "Malicious code" means code installed by you to do 
what someone else doesn't want your machine to do. "Spoofing" doesn't mean 
someone fooling you, it means you fooling Palladium. And so on.

3. A previous statement by the Palladium developers stated the basic 
premise that whoever developed or collected information should have total 
control of how you use it. This would represent a revolutionary overturn of 
past ideas of ethics and of the legal system, and create an unprecedented 
system of control. The specific problems of these systems are no accident; 
they result from the basic goal. It is the goal we must reject.

Richard Stallman is the founder of the free software movement.

Copyright 2002 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted 
without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
****************************
Broadband News Online
NGN 2002 Keynote: Cyber Security - Vulnerabilities, Threats, and Responses
The United States must prepare for a major attack on its networks at a 
level that could bring down the economy, warned Richard Clarke, Special 
Advisor to the President for Cyberspace Security, Critical Infrastructure 
Assurance Office (CIAO), in a keynote address at the Next Generation 
Networks conference in Boston . No one should assume that future attacks to 
networks will be simply the worms, viruses and denial of service zombies 
that we have experienced in the past. Al Qaeda, Iraq , or some other 
terrorist group could target the basic mechanisms of the Internet, seeking 
to disable or destroy key switches, routers and transmission facilities. 
Too many vulnerabilities exist. Preparing for such a threat, argued Clarke, 
is everyone's responsibility, not simply the role of government. He 
believes that Internet security currently faces a "tragedy of the commons" 
- everyone believes that someone else should be responsible for maintaining 
and securing the common good. While the federal government played a key 
role in creating the Internet, Clarke argued that the government should not 
run or regulate the Internet. It should be an advisor to industry, a role 
model and fund basic research.

Clarke shared nine specific security goals that he asked network equipment 
vendors and service providers to work on:



Routers and switches must be designed with security in mind.  Today, they 
are generally shipped without security features activated, and most do not 
use encryption and authentication.
Address the security vulnerabilities of BGP now
Address the security vulnerabilities of DNS now
Quickly adopt protocols that enhance security, especially IPv6.  A world of 
mixed IPv4 and IPv6 implementations actually increases the security threat.
Address the physical security of our networks, especially key sites and 
fibers where the backbone is concentrated. Peering points and telecom 
hotels are vulnerable.  Real redundancy, diversity and protection are needed.
ISPs should not blindly pass off traffic to their peers.  They have the 
responsibility to know what is in the packets and not to hand off viruses 
or attacks.  We need technology that allows us to scan packets in real time 
at high speeds.
We need a NOC system that can provide a real-time, holistic view of the 
entire Internet.  The industry could achieve this with some government 
support.
We must get over the belief that segmenting networks is a "violation of 
Internet religion."  We need some air-gapped networks, such as for 
utilities, aviation, banking, etc.
Security must be designed into systems from the beginning.  It is not 
acceptable to rush technology to market before finding and fixing the 
vulnerabilities, or treating security as a difficult to use add-on.
Last month, the Bush administration announced a Draft National Strategy to 
secure Cyberspace. The government is currently seeking input and commentary 
from the industry and the general public. Clarke encouraged everyone review 
and comment on the plan, which can be found at: 
http://www.whitehouse.gov/pcipb/
*******************************

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