Clips July 1-8, 2003 PART II OF II

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

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Washington Post
File Swappers to RIAA: Download This! 
Sunday, July 6, 2003; Page F07 

The Recording Industry Association of America's announcement on June 25 that it will start tracking down and suing users of file-sharing programs has yet to spook people, say developers of these applications.

"Forget about it, dude -- even genocidal litigation can't stop file sharers," said Wayne Rosso, president of Grokster, one of several systems that allow users to upload and download files -- many of which are unauthorized MP3 copies of songs published by the RIAA's member companies. Rosso said file-trading activity among Grokster users has increased by 10 percent in the past few days. Morpheus, another file-trading program, has seen similar growth.

Maybe MP3 downloaders are interpreting the recording industry's threat -- an escalation from its earlier strategy of targeting file-sharing developers -- as a sort of "last call" announcement. Starting June 26, RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a news conference, the group would collect evidence against consumers illegally trading files of copyrighted music, with lawsuits to follow in a couple of months.

Or maybe consumers figure the odds of getting busted by the RIAA's legal team are low: A recent report by research firm Yankee Group estimates that 56 million people use file-swapping software in the United States.

Either way, the number of users seems to have grown last week.

"Anytime you get media attention, you get people interested to try it out," said Michael Weiss, chief executive of Streamcast Networks Inc., which developed Morpheus.

Weiss said he's also seen a surge of postings on Morpheus message boards from users who are ticked off at being in the RIAA's cross hairs. "People are just outraged at the actions of the recording industry," he said. "I've got people saying they want to organize groups to boycott buying CDs now."

Weiss said the recording industry should lobby for special taxes on CD burners and Internet access as a way to recoup losses incurred from file sharing, an idea that Grokster's Rosso also supports. Rosso was in Washington recently to talk to lobbyists about forming a coalition of file-sharing firms.

The RIAA has not expressed interest in that idea. As for any recent increase in file-sharing traffic, RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss said the organization would not discuss it.

But she said, "We're not looking for overnight miracles here."

-- Mike Musgrove 
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Federal Computer Week
Online voting experiment expanding
BY Margaret A.T. Reed 
July 3, 2003

Motivated by the "hanging chad" calamity of the 2000 presidential election, the Defense Department has chosen Accenture's new eDemocracy business unit to expand trial Internet voting for the upcoming 2004 elections.

The company will help the Federal Voting Assistance Program's (FVAP) participation in a Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE), one of a series of congressionally mandated initiatives to improve poll access to Americans.

"We created our elections practice in response to the market need that emerged following the 2000 elections," said Steven Rohleder, group chief executive of Accenture's government operating group, "and we continue to see tremendous global business opportunities in the election industry." 

Presently, 10 states participate in SERVE, in partnership with DOD and Accenture: Florida, Arkansas, Hawaii, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah and Washington.

SERVE will allow absentee uniformed services personnel, their families and overseas U.S. citizens to register to vote and cast ballots in the 2004 elections for federal office. They can use any Microsoft Corp. Windows-based computer with Internet access anywhere in the world.

A small-scale pilot experiment, Voting Over the Internet, was performed during the 2000 election. It involved 84 people from 21 states and 11 countries, providing FVAP with a successful baseline upon which to expand its program. Participants cast the first binding ballots via the Internet for federal, state and local offices. 

Using SERVE, county election officials will receive registration applications and ballots, but to ensure security, existing election administration systems will process the information. 

"Security is everyone's first question about Internet voting, so we made security the driving factor in the SERVE system design," said FVAP director Polli Brunelli. "We are working closely with state and local election officials to ensure that the integrity of the electoral process is maintained."
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Associated Press
U.S., E.U. Aim to Improve Wireless Access 
Wed Jul 2, 2:29 PM ET
By JONATHAN FOWLER, Associated Press Writer 

GENEVA - In a move to simplify high-speed wireless Internet access globally, negotiators have tentatively agreed to allocate more of the world's airwaves to technologies such as the popular Wi-Fi standard.


The deal, expected to receive final approval by Friday, gives another 455 megahertz of airwaves to wireless (news - web sites) local area networks, U.S. and European Union (news - web sites) officials said Wednesday. 


The action affects the 802.11a standard, a version of Wi-Fi that operates in the 5-gigahertz spectrum. 


The most prevalent Wi-Fi technology today, 802.11b. Slower than 802.11a, it uses the 2.4-gigahertz frequency, which is mostly unregulated and was not an issue at 180-nation World Radiocommunication Conference. 


In a compromise at the meeting, countries were asked to ensure that the wireless networks operate primarily indoors  a concession that pleased EU and other officials concerned about interference with earth-sensing satellites, radar and aircraft navigation systems. 


The agreement is expected to reduce confusion for traveling wireless users because frequencies will be standard in different countries. The conference is part of the United Nation's International Telecommunication Union. 


Earlier, the U.S. delegation said in a statement that without agreement "the world's airwaves could quickly become a chaotic jumble of competing and interfering signals." 


Wi-Fi is commonly used today to share high-speed Internet connections within homes and offices. It's increasingly being deployed in coffee shops, hotels and airports to provide Internet access to customers with laptop computers equipped with radios. 


In developing areas, wireless is seen as ideal way to provide Internet access to people lacking telephone or other wired networks. 


On the slopes of Mount Everest (news - web sites), for instance, fees paid by climbers to access wireless weather information and emergency services pay for trash collection and fund Internet access in several Nepalese schools. 


A Wi-Fi system is used by 7,600 American Indians scattered across California's sprawling San Diego County to document and preserve their cultural and linguistic heritage. 


More than 20 million people are expected to be using wireless Internet access worldwide by 2007, U.S. officials told the conference. Global equipment sales are increasing fast, from $1.1 billion in 2001 to a predicted $5.2 billion by 2005. 


In another travel-related move, conference participants also are expected to increase the allocation of frequencies in the 14,000-14,500 megahertz band to airlines that want to offer their passengers e-mail and other Internet services as they fly. 


A number of airlines offer in-flight Internet. On Wednesday, Scandinavian Airlines said would begin installing the service next year. Lufthansa says its entire long-haul fleet will offer wireless Internet beginning in January.
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Associated Press
Fla. Telecommuter Can't Get Unemployment 
Wed Jul 2, 5:09 PM ET
By MICHAEL HILL, Associated Press Writer 

ALBANY, N.Y. - A telecommuter who worked from Florida for an office in Long Island is ineligible for New York unemployment benefits, the state's highest court ruled Wednesday in a precedent-setting decision with potentially far-reaching effects. 


The Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that eligibility for benefits depends on where the worker is, not where the employer is. 


The court said no other state or federal court appears to have tackled the question of who should pay such benefits for interstate telecommuters  a dispute that is likely to arise elsewhere around the country with the increasing number of Americans working at home via computer. 


About 28 million Americans telecommute, according to the International Telework Association and Council. 


In this case, the court said, New York should not pay because Maxine Allen did her work in Florida. Florida already turned her down for benefits. 


New York Labor Department (news - web sites) officials said they were pleased with the decision. 


Richard McHugh of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for low-wage workers, said the ruling will probably have influence beyond the state because this is a new issue and New York's top court is closely watched. 


"It's going to have some implications for how this area of the law develops," McHugh said. "There's no question about that." 


Allen worked as a technical specialist for Reuters America, a financial-information provider, from 1996 to 1999. She moved to Orlando, Fla., in 1997 when her husband changed jobs, but Reuters provided her with a phone line and computer so she could work from her new home. 


Allen worked normal business hours, maintained daily contact with supervisors and sought permission to come in late or leave early, according to the court. 


Reuters decided to end the arrangement in 1999 and offered her work in New York, which she declined. 


After Florida refused her unemployment benefits, officials there advised her to try in New York. 


New York's labor commissioner declared her ineligible, a decision overruled by an administrative law judge but reinstated by an appeals board and an appeals court. Wednesday's ruling affirmed the lower court ruling. 


Allen, who represented herself in the case, said she was disappointed with the ruling but has no plans to pursue the case. 
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New York Times
Libraries Planning a Meeting on Filters
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
July 3, 2003

Officials of the American Library Assocation will call a meeting with the makers of Internet filtering software next month to voice concern over a federal law that requires libraries and schools to use Internet filters or risk losing federal money.

The law, the Children's Internet Protection Act, was upheld last week by the Supreme Court after the librarians challenged the law on constitutional grounds. 

Judith Krug, director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association, said that in the meeting, tentatively scheduled for Aug. 14, librarians will ask the companies to ensure that their software can easily be turned off and on again by librarians.

The group will also demand that the companies reveal their database of blocked sites to libraries so they can determine which programs best suit the libraries' needs, or they may work with third parties to develop new filtering software.

"If we can't get what we want from the filtering companies, I say let's make our own," Mr. Krug said. 

A representative of one of the leading filtering companies said the industry was ready to cooperate with the librarians. David Burt, a spokesman for N2H2, said his company's product made disabling the software easy. But he said there might be more disagreement about releasing the list of blocked sites, which would be valuable to the company's competitors.

Besides, he noted, "we would be making available the world's largest and best collection of porn sites, and that's not the business we want to be in."

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CNET News.com
Spam-bot tests flunk the blind 
By Paul Festa 
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
July 2, 2003, 4:00 AM PT

An increasingly popular technique for preventing e-mail abuse is frustrating some visually impaired Net users, setting the stage for a conflict between spam busters and advocates for the disabled. 

Many companies have recently begun requiring users to pass a verification test in order to access their services--typically by typing into a Web form a few characters that appear on the form in a guise that prevents a computer or software robot from recognizing and copying them. 

The technique, now used by Web giants Yahoo, Microsoft, VeriSign and others, seeks to block software bots from signing up for Web-based e-mail accounts that can be used to launch spam and from scraping e-mail addresses from online databases. 

The scheme is winning high marks in the battle against unwanted junk e-mail. But it is also increasingly hindering the progress of Web surfers with visual disabilities--raising the ire of advocates for the blind, spurring plans for alternatives from a key Web standards group, and eliciting warnings from legal experts who say that the practice could expose companies to lawsuits brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

"It seems that they have jumped on a technological idea without thinking through the consequences for the whole population," said Janina Sajka, director of technology research and development for the American Foundation for the Blind in Washington, D.C. "These systems claim to test whether there's a human on the other end. But it's only technology that can challenge certain human abilities. So someone who doesn't have that particular ability is excluded from participation. That's really inappropriate." 

Efforts to create tests aimed at distinguishing humans from machines go back decades, with the most famous formulation of the problem posed in 1950 by the English mathematician and World War II "Enigma" code breaker Alan Turing. Turing's controversial hypothesis was that a machine could be defined as "intelligent" if a questioner could be fooled into believing it was a person. 

Visual tests in a sense turn that theory on its head, assuming that a machine is defined by its inability to perform a task that is easy for most humans to accomplish. 

The increase in use of visual tests--Yahoo in recent weeks has started springing them on users of its mail service--comes as Internet service providers and other companies are acknowledging and attacking the spam problem with unprecedented energy. Assaults on spam have come fast and furious this year on the litigation, legislation and technology fronts. 

Companies that have implemented the technique call it a winner. Microsoft last month said it had achieved a 20 percent reduction in e-mail account registrations after implementing the test. 

VeriSign, in another example, uses the technique to prevent automated queries to its WhoIS database of Web addresses and their registrants, in part to keep bots from harvesting the database for potential spam recipients. 

Some Web sites using visual tests provide work-arounds for the visually impaired; some don't. But existing work-arounds are less than perfect and less than universally implemented. 

Of the three above-mentioned companies with visual verification tests on their Web sites, only VeriSign's provided no alternative for the visually impaired. The company did not respond to requests for comment. 

Microsoft's Hotmail service provides an audio alternative to its visual test, in which letters are read aloud instead of being displayed in a graphical file. But one such audio file--deliberately garbled to prevent its being read by a computer--was unintelligible to four out of four CNET News.com reporters, all with good hearing, who tried to decipher it. 

Microsoft said it would review the audio work-around and defended its accessibility efforts generally. 

"Microsoft has been exploring and evolving accessibility solutions that are integrated with products for more than a decade and takes its responsibility here very seriously," wrote a Microsoft representative in an e-mail exchange. "They're committed to raising the standard for the whole industry in the making of accessible technology." 

Microsoft maintains a Web page listing its resources and products for the visually impaired.

Yahoo lets people who can't see its visual verification test fill out a Web form that it promises it will process within 24 hours. But even that slower work-around is not available to all Yahoo sign-up services--for example, for people signing up for a new ID through Yahoo's instant messenger application. 

Yahoo said engineers were working on a customer support option for YIM, and that it would be added to the next version. The company added that the option is currently available for those who register through the IM Web site. 

Looking for a better way
The increasingly popular visual test, and the difficulty of using current work-arounds, has raised enough hackles among advocates for the disabled that working groups within the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative have begun discussions on how to standardize an alternative. 

Two WAI working groups are hashing out proposals to guide Web sites in designing blind-friendly bot repellants, and the WAI hopes to address the issue in the next working draft of its Web Accessibility Guidelines, Version 2.0, which is due by year's end. So far, published working drafts of the guidelines are silent on the issue. 

"What visual verification is testing is whether someone is a sighted human, even if that's not the intent of the organizations using it," said Judy Brewer, director of the WAI. "This has been a known problem for several years, and I know that we've received different complaints about it. But it's not necessarily an easy problem to solve." 

Brewer did not specify what alternatives the WAI working groups were debating. 

The American Foundation for the Blind's Sajka, who is himself blind, stressed that the technique posed problems also for those with less than total visual impairment. The camouflaged characters common to the tests are often impossible for the color blind to make out. They also thwart people who have trouble with contrast, he said. 

Sajka raised the specter of bringing discrimination lawsuits against companies that implement similar tests.

In light of an October ruling that said the Americans with Disabilities Act did not apply to Web sites, and a May 15 ruling by a federal court that distinguished Web sites from the "public accommodations" that fall under federal civil rights statutes, Sajka acknowledged that suing implementers of visual verification might require asking Congress to pass additional legislation mandating accessibility for the disabled. 

"The industry would like to avoid regulation, and if that's the case, thinking through this kind of thing would be a good idea," Sajka said. "I think we would rather they realized they have a responsibility, than our having to go up to the Hill or go to court. The technology is so entrenched in day-to-day living, and just because something is a cool idea doesn't mean it's the right thing to do." 

But one lawyer with extensive experience in discrimination law said Web companies shouldn't consider themselves out of the ADA woods just because of the October ruling in "Access Now and Robert Gumson v. Southwest Airlines," decided by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. 

"That is something for which sites would almost certainly be required to make an accommodation for people with visual impairments who want to access them," said Kerry Scanlon, a partner with Kaye Scholer, and formerly Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Noting that the Southwest Airlines decision had been appealed, Scanlon also cited comments by Judge Richard Posner indicating his opinion that the ADA covered the Internet, and predicted that the courts would ultimately overturn the Southwest Airlines ruling. 

"I think it's unlikely that the courts will ultimately hold that the ADA does not apply to the Internet," Scanlon said. "I don't think, given the role the Internet plays in commerce today, that the courts are going to say that the provisions passed to protect 50 million people with disabilities in this country aren't going to apply to the Internet." 

One spam opponent came to the defense of companies with visual tests, calling the tests crucial weapons against the growing legions of spam-sending machines. 

"Anything that restricts people's ability to use e-mail lessens its usefulness as a communications medium," said Laura Atkins, president of the SpamCon Foundation. "On the surface, it's not a good thing. But there's so much abuse out there that the (Internet service providers) have to do it. Any site that does it should provide an alternate way for a blind person to sign up. But you can't condemn the ISPs for doing what they're doing to minimize the abuse." 
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Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Thursday, July 3, 2003
Junk e-mailer backs plan for limits
Spammer seeks national standards for such advertising rather than bans
By HIAWATHA BRAY
THE BOSTON GLOBE

Ron Scelson admits that he's an outlaw. 

But he'll gladly go straight, he insists, as soon as the federal government legalizes his business, which happens to be spamming.

Scelson sends out millions of junk e-mail advertisements every day from his home in Slidell, La. Many of them are illegal under the laws of Louisiana and many other states. 

So Scelson wants a federal law that would establish a national standard for e-mail advertising, and new e-mail technology that would let users permanently block their e-mail addresses from unwanted ads. 

Under his plan, Scelson said, consumers could screen out unwanted messages, while still allowing Scelson to continue the e-mail advertising business that has made the high school dropout a wealthy man.

"I'm not saying I'm for spam," Scelson said last week. "Don't get me wrong. I'm just for a right way to do it."

Scelson's views are getting a sympathetic hearing in a surprising place: IntelliReach Corp., a Dedham, Mass.-based maker of corporate e-mail software designed to filter out spam. IntelliReach's chief technology officer, Greg Arnette, says the current arms race between spammers and the makers of spam filters is going nowhere fast, and he agrees it will take a combination of federal law and new e-mail technology to turn the tide.

To understand the problem better, IntelliReach has reached out to Scelson, even setting up a teleconference last week in which Scelson answered questions from corporate e-mail managers eager to fend off the spam onslaught. Arnette called it "going behind enemy lines in the war on spam."

Scelson said he collects e-mail addresses from public e-mail directories, such as that run by the Yahoo Web site.

 
 
"It isn't nice to go get people's addresses and send mail to them," he acknowledged. But there's no law against it; indeed, Scelson noted, it's little different from the way telemarketers get phone numbers out of the white pages directories.

But Scelson said that anti-spam measures have forced him into a life of crime. For instance, in many states, e-mail ads must be identified as ads in the subject line of the message. But many Internet services automatically delete all messages marked as ads. Complying with these state laws would ruin his business, Scelson said, so he doesn't.

Scelson also puts fake information in the message header to conceal the source of the messages, another practice forbidden in many states. This makes it harder for anti-spam activists to track down Scelson's Internet providers and pressure them to cancel his accounts. "I agree that you should be able to tell who I am," Scelson said, "but not when they're going to be able to shut you down."

In any case, Scelson says that while he controls his spam business from Louisiana, the e-mails are dispatched from Internet companies in China, South America, South Korea, and Russia. "They all like money," Scelson said. Besides, they're all immune to U.S. law.

And yet, Scelson said he'd be willing to stop faking his message headers and to start marking his messages as ads if a federal law required it, even though this would make it easy for consumers to filter out his messages. 

Scelson would also embrace the idea of a national list of e-mail addresses that would be off-limits to spammers. "I have 180 million total in my database," Scelson said. "If I lose all but 40 million people, those are the 40 million who are buying from me anyway."

But there's a catch. Scelson knows that spam is so unpopular that many U.S. Internet companies would refuse to send the stuff, even the "legal" kind. And consumer Internet services such as America Online would still filter out much of this material before it reached people's mailboxes. So Scelson demands that any federal law would force Internet providers to allow unhindered transmission of legal spam. "If you mail legal, the carrier has no right to stop your mail or break your circuit," Scelson said.

It's a compromise that would infuriate hard-core anti-spam activists, who regard junk e-mailers with the revulsion most of us reserve for Osama bin Laden. But IntelliReach's Arnette seemed open to the proposal. "I'm in favor of a reasonable solution that gives end users empowerment," he said. "That's what we're focused on -- more user control over the mailbox."

Besides, Scelson has another suggestion that's growing in popularity on all sides of the debate. He wants changes to e-mail technology that would let people permanently opt out of receiving spam. A committee of the Internet Engineering Task Force is at work on such a plan, but Scelson says he's already written some software that would do the trick.

Installed on all e-mail systems, it would let a user simply check a box and permanently close his account to unsolicited messages. The system could be bypassed, Scelson admitted, but doing so could be made a federal crime. The government could concentrate on rounding up the outlaw spammers, leaving the law-abiding sort free to ply their trade.

Would the plan work? Who knows? But nothing else has. Besides, it would make an honest man of Ron Scelson, and surely that's worth something.
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USA Today
Court decision protects bloggers from libel lawsuits
SAN FRANCISCO (AP)  In a case involving a North Carolina man, a federal appeals court has extended the First Amendment protections of do-it-yourself online publishers. 
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's largest appeals court, said that online publishers can post material generated by others without liability for its content  unlike traditional news media, which are held responsible for such information. 

"It clarifies the existing law," said Eric Brown, who represented the defendant in the suit. "It expands it in the sense that no court had really addressed bloggers, list serve operators and those people yet, certainly not on the level of the 9th Circuit Court." 

Blogs, short for Weblogs, are online diaries updated frequently by tech-savvy writers who use the medium to comment on current events and everyday life. 

Online publishers and free speech advocates lauded the court's decision. 

"The decision is a real victory for free speech," said Jeralyn Merritt, a lawyer and blogger who manages talkleft.com, a Web site about crime-related news and politics. "Now we can publish information we receive from someone else without fear of getting sued." 

Merritt said it would be impossible to monitor the nearly 200 messages posted on her site every day. 

"I can't be responsible for the content of those comments," she said. 

The decision recently was the most discussed topic according to Daypop.com, a current events search engine that crawls the Web and reflects its collective conscience, identifying the topics that are generating the most interest in the blogging world. 

The decision last week was based on the 1996 Communications Decency Act, Brown said. 

Other cases have said commercial service providers on the Internet are not responsible for information posted by a third party. And this decision says noncommercial Web site hosts are only liable when they post information that a reasonable person would have known wasn't meant to be published. 

This case involved a handyman, Robert Smith of Asheville, N.C., who said he'd overheard a lawyer, Ellen Batzel, say she was the descendent of a top Nazi politician. Smith said Batzel also had what looked like old European paintings in her house. 

Smith e-mailed Ton Cremers, who runs the Museum Security Network, sharing his suspicion that the paintings in Batzel's house were looted Nazi goods. Cremers' Web site tries to find stolen artwork by sending information to museums and law enforcement personnel. 

Cremers posted Smith's e-mail to his listserve  and Batzel saw it. 

She disputed the claims, sued Smith, Cremers, and the Museum Security Network for defamation, and won. 

Cremers appealed, and the federal appeals court found that "a service provider or user is immune from liability when a third person or entity that created or developed the information in question furnished it to the provider or user under circumstances in which a reasonable person in the position of the service provider would conclude that the information was provided for publication on the Internet." 

It was significant that even though Cremers made minor edits to Smith's message, he was still entitled to the immunity, said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit concerned with the protection of digital rights. 

"It was a reaffirmation of this trend in other cases," said Tien. "You don't have to be a passive conduit to have this protection." 

The decision is a relief for bloggers and other online publishers. 

"We write for the enjoyment of it," said Merritt. "If we could get sued, I'm not sure it would be worth it." 
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CNET News.com
Billboard tracks Net music downloads 
By Stefanie Olsen 
July 2, 2003, 4:15 PM PT

Billboard magazine is charting new territory this week, adding data for the first time on sales of Internet music downloads to its lists of top-selling albums. 

Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks retail music sales and is the source of Billboard's top music charts, will make data available Wednesday on music downloads sold at several digital-tunes services. These include Apple Computer's iTunes, Roxio's Pressplay, MusicNet, Liquid Audio and Listen.com. It also plans to track sales from the upcoming Napster service. 

Nielsen SoundScan's announcement that it will begin recording download sales lends credence to Web music-retail efforts and could help raise the general profile of online services among consumers and the recording industry. The entertainment industry also will finally have a window into digital music sales after years of fearing that illegal file swapping in peer-to-peer communities is cannibalizing offline album sales. 

"Purchasing digital downloads has proven to be a viable emerging technology among a rapidly growing segment of music fans," Rob Sisco, president of Nielsen Music, said in a statement. Nielsen SoundScan, a division of Nielsen Music, and Billboard are owned by VNU Media, based in the Netherlands.

Nielsen SoundScan will report digital downloads under the "nontraditional" category, which includes Internet, mail order and concert venue sales. In 2002, the Internet accounted for nearly 80 percent of those sales. And sales in this segment have risen exponentially in the last five years despite a total overall decline in CD sales in 2002, according to the company. 

Nielsen SoundScan will report only permanent digital music downloads sold through online services, rather than songs played through streaming-music subscription offerings. Digital download sales of recorded albums and singles will be included in the album and singles sales charts, respectively.
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BBC Online
Fileswappers urged to join lobby 
Tuesday, 1 July, 2003, 11:43 GMT 12:43 UK  

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) Let the Music Play campaign is encouraging the estimated 60 million Americans who swap files to push for artist royalties and legal status for file sharing. 

It comes a week after the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said it would sue individual internet users who consistently uploaded or shared music files on the internet.

Copyright law is out of step with the views of the American public and the reality of music distribution online," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. 

"Rather than trying to sue people into submission, we need to find a better alternative that gets artists paid while making file sharing legal." 

'More sharers than voters' 

The EFF said its new campaign was an alternative to the litigation the RIAA was planning. 

It said music swappers should write to their congressmen to push the issue. 

"Today, more US citizens use file-sharing software than voted for President Bush," said the EFF's lawyer Fred von Lohmann. 

"Congress needs to spend less time listening to record industry lobbyists and more time listening to the more than 60 million Americans who use file-sharing software today." 

The EFF's position echoes earlier calls by music-swapping sites such as Morpheus and Grokster calling their users to lobby Congress. 

Future co-operation 

Michael Weiss, chief executive of Los Angeles-based StreamCast, said last week: "The record industry called peer-to-peer users pirates, but what these people are are hundreds of millions of voters." 

Meanwhile, a group of entertainment executives met with representatives from file-swapping services on Monday to try and co-operate in the future. 

The Distributed Computing Industry Association met in Los Angeles. 

It was led by former Hollywood agent Derek Broes, who previously has called on the two sides "to find solutions to this problem that is threatening the very essence of our business." 
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Associated Press 
U.S. Develops Urban Surveillance System 
Wed Jul 2, 1:46 AM ET 0 
By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer 

WASHINGTON - Police can envision limited domestic uses for an urban surveillance system the Pentagon (news - web sites) is developing but doubt they could use the full system which is designed to track and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a city. 

Dubbed "Combat Zones That See," the project is intended to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas. 


Scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology also could easily be adapted to keep tabs on Americans. 


The project's centerpiece would be groundbreaking computer software capable of automatically identifying vehicles by size, color, shape and license tag, or drivers and passengers by face. 


The proposed software also would provide instant alerts after detecting a vehicle with a license plate on a watchlist, or search months of records to locate and compare vehicles spotted near terrorist attacks, according to interviews and contracting documents reviewed by The Associated Press. 


The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops technologies for fighting 21st century wars, is overseeing the project. 


Scientists and privacy experts  who have seen face-recognition technology used at a Super Bowl and monitoring cameras in London  are concerned about the potential impact of the emerging DARPA technologies if they are applied to civilians by commercial or government agencies outside the Pentagon. 


"Government would have a reasonably good idea of where everyone is most of the time," said John Pike, a Global Security.org defense analyst. 


DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker dismisses those concerns. She said the Combat Zones That See (CTS) technology isn't intended for homeland security or law enforcement and couldn't be used for "other applications without extensive modifications." 


But scientists envision nonmilitary uses. "One can easily foresee pressure to adopt a similar approach to crime-ridden areas of American cities or to the Super Bowl or any site where crowds gather," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. 


James Fyfe, a deputy New York police commissioner, believes police will be ready customers. 


"Police executives are saying, `Shouldn't we just buy new technology if there's a chance it might help us?'" Fyfe said. "That's the post-9-11 mentality." 


Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske sees law enforcement applications for DARPA's camera project in "limited" scenarios. But citywide surveillance would tax police manpower, Kerlikowske said. "Who's going to validate and corroborate all those alerts?" 


Fyfe endorses using cameras at high-risk sites, like the Brooklyn Bridge, but doubts the value of tracking all vehicles. "The bad guys will learn we can track cars by license plates, so they'll steal a car, leave it at the scene and flee by subway," he said. 


DARPA plans to award a three-year contract for up to $12 million by Sept. 1. 


The first phase would help protect troops at a fixed site, using at least 30 cameras, mostly small $400 stick-on devices linked to a $1,000 personal computer. In the second phase, at least 100 cameras would be installed to support "military operations in an urban terrain." Both prototypes should be expandable "to handle ... thousands of cameras." 


The second-phase software should be able to analyze the video footage and identify "what is normal (behavior), what is not" and discover "links between places, subjects and times of activity," the contracting documents state. 

   



The program "aspires to build the world's first multi-camera surveillance system that uses automatic ... analysis of live video" to study vehicle movement "and significant events across an extremely large area," the documents state. 

Both configurations will be tested at Fort Belvoir, Va., south of Washington, then in a foreign city. Walker declined comment on whether Kabul, Afghanistan (news - web sites), or Baghdad, Iraq (news - web sites), might be chosen but says the foreign country's permission will be obtained. 

DARPA told more than 100 executives of potential contractors in March that 40 million cameras already are in use around the world, with 300 million expected by 2005. U.S. police use cameras to monitor bridges, tunnels, airports and border crossings and regularly access security cameras in banks, stores and garages for investigative leads. 

But many of these cameras record over their videotape regularly. Officers have to monitor the closed-circuit TV and struggle with boredom and loss of attention. 

By automating the monitoring and analysis, DARPA "is attempting to create technology that does not exist today," Walker explained. 

Though insisting CTS isn't intended for homeland security, DARPA outlined a hypothetical scenario for contractors in March that showed the system could aid police as well as the military. DARPA described a hypothetical terrorist shooting at a bus stop and a hypothetical bombing at a disco one month apart in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, a city a bit larger than Miami in size and population. 

CTS should be able to track the day's movements for every vehicle that passed each scene in the hour before the attack, automatically compare their routes and identify any vehicles with a common starting point. 

Joseph Onek of the Open Society Institute, a human rights group, said current law that permits cameras in public areas may have to be revised to address the privacy implications of these new technologies. 

"It's one thing to say that, if someone is in the street, he knows that at any single moment someone can see him," Onek said. "It's another thing to record a whole life so you can see anywhere someone has been in public for 10 years." 
*******************************
Australian IT
Parents sue over school webcam
Correspondents in Nashville, Tennessee
JULY 02, 2003  
 
A TENNESSEE school allowed security cameras to film children undressing in locker rooms and then stored the images on an internet-accessible computer, according to a lawsuit filed by a group of angry parents.

The lawsuit filed last week in the federal court in Nashville seeks $US4.2 million ($6.2 million) in damages. 
The parents contend the school system violated students' rights by putting hidden cameras in boys and girls locker rooms at Livingston Middle School. The cameras reportedly captured students, aged between 10-14, in various stages of undress. 

"The parents have been devastated by the conduct of the school officials, by the videotaping and by the breach of trust," said attorney Mark Chalos, who represents the parents of 16 girls and one boy. 

Chuck Cagle, lawyer for Overton County Schools, said he would not comment because he had not read the lawsuit. 

EduTech Inc, the company that installed the surveillance cameras in several Overton County schools also was named in the lawsuit. Officials with the company had no comment. 

Parents learned of the cameras when a student reported a suspicious device in the school at Livingston, about 130km east of Nashville. 

The lawsuit contends that images, captured by the cameras and stored on a hard drive in the office of the assistant principal, could be accessed from remote computers via the internet. It claims the computer's password security had not been changed from the default setting. 

The images were reportedly accessed 98 times between July 2002 and January 2003 - sometimes late at night and early in the morning - and through internet service providers in Tennessee and South Carolina. 

William Needham, director of Overton County Schools, said the assistant principal has been transferred to another school in the system. 

Mr Chalos said he does not know if the cameras are still operating. 
*******************************
Associated Press
Iran Cracks Down on Banned Web Sites 
Tue Jul 1, 4:18 PM ET
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer 

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran is blocking access to Web sites containing pornographic material and opposition-driven dissent against the country's Islamic establishment, an official said Tuesday. 

   

More than 140 Web sites promoting dissent, dancing and sex have been blocked since the crackdown began last month, said Farhad Sepahram, an official at the Telecommunications Ministry. 


Religious hard-liners are increasingly concerned about Iranians' access to information from the outside world, a sign of worry such communications are playing a role in stirring pro-reform sentiment, such as the recent anti-government protests by young people. 


Sepahram said most of the blocked Web sites belong to opposition groups. Among them is one run by Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was toppled by the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and one by Abolhassan Banisadr, Iran's first elected president after 1979 who now opposes the cleric-dominated establishment. 


Also blocked are the Voice of America's Farsi-language service and radiofarda.com, a U.S.-financed, Farsi audio program. 


The United States cut off diplomatic relations with Iran in 1979 after militant students stormed its embassy in Tehran. Washington has also imposed trade sanctions on Iran, which it accuses of aiding terrorist groups. 


Sepahram said his ministry also is blocking some pornographic sites run by Iranians from outside the country, but he conceded it is impossible to close access to all sex-related sites. 


He said the list of sites to be blocked came from the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council, an unelected body controlled by hard-line clerics. 


The council was set up by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 revolution. Reformist President Mohammad Khatami (news - web sites) is the chairman, but most members are appointed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini's successor, and conservatives outnumber reformists on the panel. 


Khatami was elected on promises to loosen social and political life, but Khamenei's unelected establishment has hindered his efforts to deliver greater freedoms. 


Hanif Mazrouei, a writer for a reformist Web site and the son of a leading reformist legislator, predicted the crackdown will fail. 


"In the 1980s, the government banned videos. In recent years, it went on to impose restrictions on satellite dishes, but none worked," he said. "Blocking Web sites is more difficult to do. They can't deny a nation impatient for change from information they like to know."
*******************************
Government Computer News
07/01/03 

Wanted: coordination for sharing homeland security data 

By Wilson P. Dizard III 
GCN Staff

PHILADELPHIAOfficials who handle homeland security data say the government lacks a mechanism for coordinating data-sharing protocols and standards, they said at the Information Sharing for Homeland Security conference today. 

"One thing that is missing is a shared governance," said Lee Holcomb, chief technology officer at the Homeland Security Department. 

This isn?t a purely technical issue, he said. "Governance has more to do with maintaining the funding base to make sure the edges of the networks are connected.? 

But Maj. Joseph T. Booth, command inspector for the Louisiana State Police, said, much technical work is still needed to link systems that stow potentially useful information. 

"A lot of the networks are not connected," he said. ?There are connectivity and data exchange difficulties." 

Federal, state and local network managers need protocols, Booth said. The answer is to create an overarching network weaving together existing systems, he said. The network would have to provide features for the unique needs of the end-user agencies, Booth said. 

"I think it would be wise to earmark money for this kind of connectivity," he said. 

A senior intelligence community IT official added, "You have to have a governance plan to set standards and protocols for transactions between networks, no matter what you do within your own network.? 

Such a policy exists for the top-secret and secret level systems used with the government?s intelligence community, the official said. But no such plan exists for the sensitive but unclassified level and for law enforcement information, he said. 

"As for funding, that is a very difficult area to control," the official said. "I think the Homeland Security Department's problem is that it is bringing together so many agencies that the networks are hard to coordinate." 

Lawmakers agree a strategy is needed. "What we want to see is a plan," said Kim L. Kotlar, legislative director for Rep. William ?Mac? Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of a House Select Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Science and R&D. 

Illinois has done similar work, said Aaron R. Kustermann, a criminal intelligence analyst with the Illinois State Police. He said the State Police have several intelligence networks, some with links to the FBI and to what he called a superwarehouse, the state?s Information Sharing Initiative. 

As to the homeland security systems that run at all levels of government, Kustermann said: "Someday, there is going to be a job for an integrator to take these systems and integrate them," he said.
*******************************
CNET News.com
Court: Anonymous P2P no defense 
By Paul Festa 
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
June 30, 2003, 6:28 PM PT

Operators of peer-to-peer networks cannot escape copyright infringement claims by giving their members the ability to mask the content that changes hands on their networks, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

Calling the tactic a form of "willful blindness," the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago upheld a lower court's injunction against the Madster file-swapping network that had ordered the service shut down pending a trial. But, in a mixed decision, the court also bolstered a key defense argument invoking a comparison between file-swapping software and personal home video recording. 

Before it was shut down, Madster had offered its users the ability to encrypt files traded over America Online's AOL Instant Messenger client. As a result, its operators had argued that they had no obligation to seek to block illegal files swapped on the network because they were unaware of specific copyright violations. 


In a decision that could dampen efforts to bring privacy to file-swapping networks, the court on Monday rejected that reasoning. 

"One who, knowingly or strongly suspecting that he is involved in shady dealings, takes steps to ensure that he does not acquire full or exact knowledge of the nature and extent of those dealings, is held to have criminal intent," the panel wrote in the 23-page decision. 

Privacy in file-swapping was put on the front burner last week when the Recording Industry Association of America said it would begin investigations aimed at bringing lawsuits against individuals who make large numbers of files available for uploading on peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster. 

Since June 17, a file-swapping client promising improved privacy known as Blubster 2.5, has seen more than 3.3 million downloads, according to CNET Download.com, a division of CNET Networks. 

"I wouldn't say it's the end of the road for (Madster), but one of the things that makes it tough is that the (court) is highly critical of the willful blindness approach to running these sorts of companies," said Tim Wu, an associate professor at the University of Virginia Law School. The opinion "suggests that deliberately creating something beyond your control is not going to get you out of copyright infringement." 

Madster, previously called Aimster, is one of several peer-to-peer, or P2P, online file-swapping services designed to facilitate the sharing of computer files, including audio tracks. Its more famous predecessor, Napster, has been credited with revolutionizing the distribution of popular music, though lawsuits by the recording industry shut it down. The services are also used to swap digitized copies of films and TV programs. 

The Aimster case is not the only file-swapping case wending its way through the courts. In April, the courts handed a major defeat to the recording and movie industries with a decision holding that file-swapping networks Streamcast and Grokster were not liable for contributory infringement due to illegal activities of their users. 

In December, a federal court ordered Madster to shut down after the service failed to comply with a preliminary injunction ordering it to put an end to copyright infringement. Monday's ruling upheld that decision. 

"We are pleased that the injunction against Aimster was upheld, effectively shutting it down until trial," Motion Picture Association of America President and CEO Jack Valenti said in a statement. "This is another indication that so called 'file-sharing' businesses designed to benefit from the illegal use of copyrighted movies will not be tolerated." 

Madster operator Johnny Deep said Monday that although the court had failed to lift the injunction against him and his service, it had taken his side in approving a legal analogy between Madster and Sony's Betamax video recorder--an analogy the recording industry is eager to discredit. 

"The court agreed with us on matters of law," said Deep in an interview. "It said Sony does apply. It disagreed completely with the record industry on that." 

In the 1984 Sony case--Sony Corp. of America, Inc. v. Universal City Studios, Inc.--the Supreme Court ruled that making a product that has "substantial noninfringing uses" is not itself a contributory infringement, even if that product is used to infringe. Therefore Sony couldn't be held responsible for the unlicensed copying on its Betamaxes of copyrighted works. 

In Monday's decision, the court rejected the recording industry's argument that because Aimster was capable of blocking infringing uses, it should necessarily be considered a contributory infringer. Instead, the court ruled, if detection and prevention of copyright infringement were "highly burdensome" to a service provider, that provider would escape an infringement claim. 

Deep pledged to appeal the injunction on the basis of its being too broad--a contention the 7th Circuit explicitly rejected. He also pledged that his determination to fight would sour the recording industry on its promise to sue individual file-swappers in large numbers. 

"This is a case against me personally," Deep said. "And I'm going to give them a little taste of what it's like to sue these thousands of people who are determined and who believe that they're doing the right thing."
*******************************
Washington Post
Protecting Its Proprietary Pork 
Hormel Files Complaints Against Software Firm Spam Arrest 
By Jonathan Krim
Tuesday, July 1, 2003; Page E01 

It seems the makers of Spam lunch meat are fed up. 

For years, the Hormel Foods Corp. has watched as the name of its famous and popular product also has come to mean junk e-mail, a source of heartburn and anger for computer users everywhere. 

Unable to stuff this problem back into the can, Hormel is instead doing what companies often do: asserting its trademark rights. Claiming dilution of the trademarked name Spam, the company has filed complaints against Spam Arrest LLC, a Seattle technology company that provides spam-blocking software for e-mail users.

The Minnesota-based food company, which as of a year ago had sold 6 billion cans of Spam since it was introduced in 1937, challenged Spam Arrest's applications to trademark its own company name.

In a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Hormel argued that it has engendered "substantial goodwill and good reputation" in connection with its trademarked lunch meat and related products that would be damaged by Spam Arrest's use of the term. The company added that Spam Arrest's name so closely resembles that of its lunch meat that the public might become confused, or might think that Hormel endorses Spam Arrest's products.

The challenges involve two separate applications by Spam Arrest to trademark its name as both a software provider and a services vendor. One has been pending for several months, and the second was filed last week, according to Spam Arrest, which made available a copy of the original complaint. Both will be heard by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, though no date has been set. Hormel officials did not return several messages yesterday seeking comment.

On its Web site, the company states that it does not object to use of the word spam as a "slang term," as long as pictures of the meat are not used with such references.

Spam Arrest officials scoffed at Hormel's challenge. "Hormel is acting like a corporate crybaby and ought to can it," Brian Cartmell, Spam Arrest chief executive, said in a statement.

Trademark lawyers were skeptical that Hormel could prevail. "The problem that Hormel has is that the word has come to have a different meaning and has become adopted so widely that it is going to be difficult if not impossible for Hormel to prevail," said John W. Caldwell, a Philadelphia patent and trademark lawyer. 

Caldwell cited other examples, such as cellophane and the countertop material Formica, that have become ubiquitous.

Early Internet users coined the term spam to describe junk e-mail after a skit by the comedy group Monty Python. In the routine, a group of patrons at a restaurant chant the word "spam" in louder and louder volume, drowning out other conversation. 
*******************************
Washington Post
Some Do-Not-Call Users Hit Snag 


By Caroline E. Mayer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 1, 2003; Page E01 


About 11.4 million Americans had completed registering for the national do-not-call list to stop sales calls to their homes and mobile phones as of 3 p.m. yesterday. But 3 million others who submitted their phone numbers to the registry had not yet responded to a confirmation e-mail to complete the process, Federal Trade Commission officials said.

Users have 72 hours to click on a hyperlink in the e-mail to complete the registration process. Clicking on the link is supposed to automatically open a new browser window listing the phone number that was added to the registry and the date the registration expires. The FTC advises consumers to print this page for their records.

Officials at the FTC, which is maintaining the list, said some users were hampered from finishing the process because their Internet software does not accommodate the hyperlinks. Those users should cut and paste the Web address from the confirmation e-mail into the address field of their browsers to reach the validation Web page, said David Torok, who is overseeing the registry.

If users have not received a confirmation e-mail within 24 hours after trying to register their phone numbers, they should register again, advised Torok. Some people, he added, may have typed their e-mail addresses incorrectly in their rush to sign up.

The registry's staff tallied 242,000 registrations from Maryland, 328,000 from Virginia and 26,000 from the District as of Sunday night. California had the most residents on the list, with 1.3 million registrations.

About 85 percent of those who have signed up have used the Web site, www.donotcall.gov. The rest have registered by calling a national toll-free hotline, 888-382-1222. That number is now available only to residents of states west of the Mississippi River. It will open up to the rest of the country beginning next Monday. 
*******************************
Washington Post
Web Firms Choose Profit Over Privacy 
By Jonathan Krim
Tuesday, July 1, 2003; Page A01 

To parents interested in buying the popular Hooked on Phonics learn-to-read programs, the company made a firm promise on its Web site: It would never sell or rent their personal information to other marketers. 

But that pledge was empty. In the pages of a marketing trade publication, Gateway Learning Corp., the product's California-based parent company, was advertising to rent the list of Hooked on Phonics buyers to other marketers. 

At a price of $95 per 1,000 names, companies could arrange to have unsolicited advertising sent to 105,936 people who bought Hooked on Phonics in the past year. Included in the information made available to other marketers: ages of the buyers' children.

After inquiries from The Washington Post, the company changed its privacy policy and is no longer promising to keep such data from being offered to others. A company spokeswoman said the firm was simply slow to update its policy. Previous customers would be notified of the change and offered the chance to remove themselves from the list, she said.

Hooked on Phonics is one example of retailers, marketers and an array of service providers expanding their collection and use of consumers' e-mail addresses and other personal information, despite broad assurances to protect individual privacy and honor consumers' choices about how much marketing they want to receive.

Many firms use tactics designed to hide their intent to gather and profit from the data they collect, information that grows in value as more and more people use the Internet for information and shopping. 

"Companies continually troll for, and exploit, personally identifiable information," said Joseph Turow, a media professor at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in mass marketing. "Some Web sites unabashedly collect all the information they can about visitors and market [it] as aggressively as they can to advertisers and other marketers."

But these techniques have drawn scant attention as the flood of unwanted commercial e-mail has reached tidal-wave proportions. Instead, retailers, advertisers and Internet service providers such as Microsoft Corp., America Online and Yahoo Inc. have so far successfully lobbied government regulators to put the spotlight on deceptive practices of the most unsavory purveyors of scams and pornography.

Mallory Duncan, senior vice president and general counsel of the National Retail Federation, argues that mainstream corporations can police their own marketing practices. "The concern with spam is not with the Gap coupon you receive," said Duncan, who represents the largest lobbying and trade group for store owners. "It's the huge amount of porn and other things that were unsolicited."

With the onslaught of spam, almost all companies promise not to sell consumer data. But many don't mention that such information is rented. This means that the list owner won't release the data to an outside marketer, but it will send messages to the list on the outsider's behalf. Targeted lists available for rent number in the thousands, including those from magazines, professional organizations and even political interest groups such as Republicans for Jesus.

Recently, for example, the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation advertised that its list of donors, including postal addresses, was for rent.

A charity spokeswoman said that the rental list includes data only from donors who gave through direct-mail appeals, not online. But she acknowledged that those people were provided no privacy information; the charity's Web site says it will never sell or share e-mail addresses of donors. Direct-mail donors will now be given a chance to remove their names from the donor list, the spokeswoman said, adding that the organization's lists are offered only to "like-minded" groups.

Sometimes, consumers may not be aware they are handing over information to vendors working behind the scenes at certain Web sites.

Take CartManager, a Provo, Utah, company that is one of many providers of "shopping cart" software used by online retailers. Merchants use the service to manage their transactions. Customers select items, put them in virtual shopping carts, and provide appropriate billing and shipping information to complete the order.

The company, which handles transactions for dozens of small Web retailers, last month offered for rent its list of 781,000 postal and e-mail addresses of consumers who "regularly buy online." CartManager's privacy policy states that it might share such information. But a consumer might not even notice the fine print stating that a retailer's shopping cart is "powered by" CartManager, let alone look at the firm's privacy policy. The transaction is done through the Web site of the retailer, whose privacy policy is more likely to be scrutinized by concerned consumers.

CartManager executives did not respond to requests seeking comment.

In some cases, marketers are open about their intent, if people take the time to read the privacy policies on Web sites closely.

Some sites essentially exist to collect e-mail addresses and other personal data to allow future marketing. To entice people to hand over the data, they offer discounts on products or entry into sweepstakes.

But in a research study Turow supervised for the University of Pennsylvania, 57 percent of 1,200 adults who use the Internet at home thought that if a Web site merely has a privacy policy, their information would not be shared with others.

To expand their databases even further, some marketers employ a controversial technique known as "e-mail append."

List brokers, who buy and sell consumer data for companies, take names and physical addresses in one firm's database and look for corresponding e-mail addresses in outside lists that might contain enough information to match them up.

Columnist Jay Gibson explained the process in a recent edition of Opt-In News, an online publication for marketers. For example, a pizza restaurant cannot send e-mails about new services to a customer who orders over the phone because an e-mail address is not provided, Gibson wrote. "But they can take my name, physical address and telephone number, submit this information to an e-mail append service, and acquire it."

Paul Chachko, chief executive of Datagence, a firm that provides e-mail append, said the service can be performed properly by reconfirming with all consumers on the lists that they wish to receive marketing messages.

"The whole industry that we're involved with relies on . . . integrity and a self-policing environment," Chachko said. "But there are a lot of people out there that don't play by the rules. We've got to weed those people out."

Marketing executives say they have instituted strict self-policing guidelines, including ensuring that consumers have the ability to "opt out" of receiving future advertising marketing messages.

But opting out is not always easy.

Bluefly Inc., an online retailer, has an extensive privacy policy. 

"We take this matter very seriously, and have instituted many policies and procedures to insure that none of your privacy rights as stated herein are ever violated," the policy says.

The policy tells users that anytime they e-mail the company, they consent to receive messages from the company. But to be removed from future messages, users must e-mail the company.

A spokesman said the company would not send marketing messages to people who e-mailed requesting to be removed from future advertising. 

Citibank's parent, Citigroup Inc., requires customers of any of its hundreds of affiliates to tell each one that it wants to stop receiving marketing messages. Citibank has been the object of more than 30 complaints to the Federal Trade Commission over the past year by consumers charging that the company has failed to honor their requests to remove their names from lists, or made it nearly impossible to do so.

An FTC spokeswoman said the agency has not acted on the complaints, adding that it has received more than 1,000 similar complaints about a range of companies.

In a statement, Citibank said, "We continually review our performance, and believe our procedures have been extremely effective in providing for the privacy preferences of our customers."

Marketing and retailing executives want any anti-spam legislation to treat affiliates as separate entities, on the theory that customers of different products don't always pay attention to corporate relationships among companies.

Microsoft, which like many Internet providers markets to its members, recently proposed a system in which industry would agree to an electronic seal-of-approval process that e-mail networks could recognize and allow legitimate marketing through. Among the criteria for such a seal would be that requests of users to be removed from marketing lists would be honored.

But privacy advocates and anti-spam groups are dubious about industry governing itself. Instead, they want computer users to be free of commercial e-mail unless they specifically request it, a system known as "opt-in."

Marketing and Internet industry lobbyists have successfully warded off this approach, while at the same time co-opting the phrase. In marketing parlance, opt-in means that consumers have not specifically asked to be removed from mailing lists.

Thus, nearly all available e-mail lists are advertised as opt-in lists. But according to some in the industry, opt-in is at best a sliding scale.

"If you forget to check a box [asking to be eliminated] from further marketing, that's technically opt-in," said Sherri Jones, a vice president at TKL Interactive, a Southern California marketing firm. She said her firm sends e-mails to all list members asking them to confirm that they want to receive further advertising, a process known as "double opt-in."

Jones said that to regain credibility, her industry must move to a true opt-in system, in which no marketing occurs before a user requests it. 

"The opt-in procedure puts the control of the transaction in the hands of the consumer," she said, separating herself from her industry's trade groups. "That's a dramatic paradigm shift that I think a lot of old-school marketers are resisting."

Industry officials counter that if they don't have the right to approach consumers at least once, people will be deprived of potentially valuable offers that they would otherwise not hear about. 

Marketers also insist that they maintain the right to send messages to customers with which they have "existing business relationships."

Consumer groups say that this makes sense if that means a customer has recently purchased a product, but it should not apply if he or she merely requests information.

"Some companies, like psycho ex-boyfriends, tend to see relationships where they don't exist," said Chris Murray, legislative counsel for Consumers Union.
*******************************
Washington Post
Top Homeland Security Official Resigns Position 
Tuesday, July 1, 2003; Page A06 

A high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official in charge of the agency's analysis of intelligence about terrorists resigned yesterday, citing health reasons. 

The resignation came less than a month after assistant secretary Paul Redmond angered many House members at a hearing when he testified that his newly established office has not hired enough analysts or set up enough secure communications lines to receive classified FBI and CIA data for analysis purposes. 

A department spokesman said Redmond's resignation was "totally unrelated" to his June 5 testimony before the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, which congressional sources described as a major setback for the agency's relations with Congress.

Redmond is a legendary CIA counter-intelligence official who helped unmask some of America's most infamous spies before his 1998 retirement. 

In a statement last night, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said, "The entire country will benefit from Paul's work establishing a new agency, and it will be one of his greatest legacies."

-- John Mintz
*******************************
BBC Online
Computer viruses are on the rise, with one particularly sneaky bug topping the list for the first six months of the year. 
The number of viruses so far this year is up by nearly 20%, compared to the same time last year, according to figures from anti-virus firm Sophos. 

The most prevalent bug was the Bugbear.B worm, even though it only appeared just a few weeks ago. 

The virus spread so fast because it used different methods to trick people into opening infected e-mails. 

Blended threats 

Over the past six months, virus writers have become increasingly inventive in disguising computer bugs. 

Worryingly, they have used different channels to spread a virus, such as e-mail, file-sharing programs and internet chat software. 

Anti-virus experts Sophos said it had detected 3,855 new viruses in the first half of the year. This amounts to a jump of 17.5% over 2002.

The most widespread was Bugbear.B, which appeared at the beginning of June. In just 24 hours, the worm spread to 159 countries. 

It was what anti-virus experts call a "blended threat" - a bug which contain several techniques for spreading and infecting computers. 

"Bugbear.B entered the frame late, but nevertheless it has generated more enquiries that any other virus in the last six months," said Graham Cluley, Sophos Senior Technology Consultant. 

"By morphing its contents every time it forwards itself, and by spoofing the e-mail address of the person who sent the virus, Bugbear.B has been the most prevalent and irritating virus so far this year." 

Other popular viruses hide in messages pretending to be from Microsoft. 

The second most common virus was Sobig.C, which appeared in early June posing as an e-mail from Bill Gates. The previous month another virus was disguised as a message from Microsoft support. 

Avril bug 

Virus writers are always on the lookout for ways to trip up unsuspecting computer users and disguising a worm as a message from the world's best known software firm is the latest in a line of cunning tricks. 

Another technique is to use a celebrity name. So far the virus celebrity of the year is the Canadian teen sensation Avril Lavigne, with two Avril bugs making up 5.5% of all virus reported to Sophos. 

But attempts by virus writers to capitalise on interest in news events appear to have backfired. Viruses which used the Sars outbreak and the war in Iraq both failed to cause widespread infections. 

As a rule, computer users should keep their anti-virus software up to date and be wary of e-mails from unknown sources. 
*******************************
USA Today
07/01/2003 - Updated 07:50 AM ET  
 
High-volume Internet check-in predicted
By Barbara DeLollis, USA TODAY

Airline employees still check in most passengers for their flights, but airline executives say the day is coming when most travelers will do it themselves  half of them using their own computers.

Internet check-in is a "quiet revolution," says Al Lenza, Northwest Airlines' vice president of e-commerce and distribution.

"The Internet will definitely be the primary way for check-in. It will surpass (airport) kiosks," he says.

A small percentage of people use Web check-in. Some carriers  two are Southwest and JetBlue  don't offer it.

Among airlines that have had online check-in for several months, usage runs about 5% of eligible passengers at Delta to 11% at Northwest and 15% at AirTran.

About a third of eligible travelers use airport check-in kiosks.

Northwest likes Web check-in because it's cheaper than investing in more kiosks, it saves the airline ink and paper, and it can be used to sell customers items without lengthening transaction time at the kiosks, he says.

As airlines get more people to try Web check-in, passengers can expect new features beyond choosing a seat and printing a boarding pass, basic services now offered at most airline Web sites, Lenza says. Eventually, he says, airline passengers will be able to:

? Pay for their meal. Passengers could have the ability to pay for coach meals using their credit cards.

Lenza says this could be adopted in about two months if Northwest decided to permanently adopt meals for sale.

Check in for international flights. Northwest is now the only major U.S. carrier that allows Web check-in for international travel, although others  such as US Airways and American  allow it for some Caribbean flights.

Continental, which launched online check-in in March, says it plans to include international flights later this year.

? Review deals. Airlines can market airfare specials.

? Volunteer for getting bumped. Northwest is working on a way to recruit volunteers to give up their seats on oversold flights.

? Leave a hotel with a boarding pass in hand. Northwest is talking with hotel chains and cruise lines about having staff print out guests' boarding passes for them.

It could be slipped under a guest's door with the bill at night.

The guest would have to provide his or her last name, frequent-flier number and e-ticket confirmation number.
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Dear ACM TechNews Subscriber:

Welcome to the July 7, 2003 edition of ACM TechNews,
providing timely information for IT professionals three times a
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service, please see below.

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ACM TechNews
Volume 5, Number 516
Date: July 7, 2003

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Top Stories for Monday, July 7, 2003:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"Hackers Limit Disruption to Small Internet Sites"
"Government Prying, the Good Kind"
"PC Manufacturers Feel Pressure to Recycle"
"Committees Are Useful and Very Efficient--Well, in the Tech World"
"Who's Watching You Surf?"
"Just Between You and Me..."
"Blogs in the Workplace"
"Spam-Bot Tests Flunk the Blind"
"Study Reveals Net's Parts"
"Web Privacy Services Complicate Feds' Job"
"White-Collar Sweatshops"
"Fight Spam With the DNS, Not the CIA"
"With a Nudge or Vibration, Game Reality Reverberates"
"Linux Creator an Open Source"
"Reaching Through the Net to Touch"
"New Web Tool to Improve Multimedia Surfing"
"Wi-Fi: Security for the Masses"
"Another Digit, Another Deadline"
"Rethinking PKI"

******************* News Stories ***********************

"Hackers Limit Disruption to Small Internet Sites"
Hundreds of small Web sites around the world were damaged in a
coordinated hacker attack Sunday, just as some security experts
had warned last week.  However, damage from the attacks was
mitigated by a faction of hackers who attempted to prevent the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item1

"Government Prying, the Good Kind"
One argument goes that as the government feels entitled to
monitor the affairs of American citizens, so too are Americans
entitled to keep tabs on government activities; this reasoning is
illustrated by Government Information Awareness (GIA), a Web site ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item2

"PC Manufacturers Feel Pressure to Recycle"
With California's legislature considering passage of a law that
would require computer manufacturers to take responsibility for
recycling half of all their equipment by 2005 and 90 percent by
the end of the decade, Hewlett-Packard and other PC makers are ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item3

"Committees Are Useful and Very Efficient--Well, in the Tech World"
Committees in general have acquired a bad reputation, but this
negative image should not extend to the technology sector, where
many advances--including the new Serial ATA PC disk-drive
connection system--are the result of committee standards-setting, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item4

"Who's Watching You Surf?"
Certain privacy advocates are concerned that the Department of
Justice is keeping its exact figures on how many telephone and
email wiretaps it is carrying out a secret under the auspices of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), while ACLU ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item5

"Just Between You and Me..."
Quantum cryptography projects in Europe have set the technology
for commercial release in less than three years.  Quantum theory
provides a long-sought way to securely transmit the one-time
key-stream first devised by U.S. Army cryptologist Joseph ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item6

"Blogs in the Workplace"
There is growing interest among businesses, educational
institutions, and government agencies to use Web logs (blogs)
rather than email for internal communications.  Community Connect
director of operations Nicholas Tang uses blogs to coordinate ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item7

"Spam-Bot Tests Flunk the Blind"
Yahoo!, Microsoft, VeriSign, and other major ISPs are using a
technique designed to block software bots' attempts to sign up
for online email accounts that spammers can employ to distribute
bulk commercial email, as well as harvest the Internet addresses ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item8

"Study Reveals Net's Parts"
Researchers have discovered that the Internet's elementary
structure is modular, and determined by the number of nodes
(sites) that connect to a given node.  The team, based at
Denmark's Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, Norway's ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item9

"Web Privacy Services Complicate Feds' Job"
Increased government surveillance has spurred public interest in
online privacy services such as Anonymizer and Germany-based
Steganos, two of the most popular such services.  CNET Networks
reports downloads for privacy services applications from its ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item10

"White-Collar Sweatshops"
Laid-off U.S. high-tech workers are disheartened by employers
bringing in foreign workers on H-1B visas and outsourcing IT
operations to overseas labor; not only are more critical
white-collar positions such as programming and software ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item11

"Fight Spam With the DNS, Not the CIA"
Shenick Software Systems software engineer John Fitzgibbon puts
forward a proposal to close a loophole in the Domain Name System
(DNS) so that only outbound mail servers with legitimate DNS MX
records can send email, a strategy that may help hobble the ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item12

"With a Nudge or Vibration, Game Reality Reverberates"
The science of haptics, pioneered by the military and later the
automotive and medical sectors to develop technologies that give
users the ability to "feel" remote or virtual objects through an
electronic interface, is finding its way into the entertainment ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item13

"Linux Creator an Open Source"
Linux creator Linus Torvalds says in an interview with Mercury
News that he believes the SCO suit against IBM is not valid and
that should be apparent given the transparency of open-source
development.  The basis of the suit, according to Torvalds, is ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item14

"Reaching Through the Net to Touch"
University at Buffalo researchers recently disclosed that they
have created a haptic system that allows one person to feel the
tactile sensations experienced by another over the Internet.  A
team led by UB Virtual Reality Lab director Thenkurussi Kesavadas ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item15

"New Web Tool to Improve Multimedia Surfing"
Annodex software developed by Australia-based CSIRO Mathematical
and Information Sciences purports to facilitate more interactive
Web surfing by making multimedia files directly accessible and
searchable.  The software, which enables any section within a ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item16

"Wi-Fi: Security for the Masses"
The strong business value and convenience of having a Wi-Fi
connection is undercut by the ineffectiveness of Wi-Fi's Wired
Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol, which leaves Wi-Fi connections
vulnerable to any hackers in close enough proximity to an access ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item17

"Another Digit, Another Deadline"
U.S. retailers are facing a deadline reminiscent of Y2K in terms
of the work required, though the consequences for missing the
deadline will not cause systems to crash.  The Sunrise 2005
deadline was issued by the Uniform Code Council (UCC) in 1997 and ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item18

"Rethinking PKI"
Stephen Wilson of SecureNet contends that digital certificates,
as part of a public key infrastructure (PKI), are better suited
as application-specific "electronic business cards" rather than
the one-size-fits-all electronic passports they were originally ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0707m.html#item19


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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