Clips January 6, 2004

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips January 6, 
2004

ARTICLES

Spam Is Still Flowing Into E-Mail Boxes 
Army lays out logistics plan for global communications
In N.H., Benson presents first laptops to pupils
Mars rover landing scoops up record traffic for NASA site
Defense personnel lines shift with IT 
NIST releases security level guidance

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Washington Post
Spam Is Still Flowing Into E-Mail Boxes 
Senders Evade Federal Law Banning Junk Messages 
By Jonathan Krim
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page E01 


Computer users hoping that a new federal law would help cut the spam
flowing to their in-boxes so far have been disappointed.

Since President Bush signed the new restrictions into law Dec. 16 and
they went into effect Jan. 1, spam-filtering companies and Internet
providers report little change in spam patterns, which have relentlessly
marched to higher levels over the past two years. Estimates vary, but
spam accounts for roughly 60 percent of all e-mail traffic, with costs to
fight it exceeding $10 billion a year.

At California-based Postini Inc., which provides e-mail protection and
filtering for businesses, spam reached a new high last week, accounting
for 84.9 percent of the roughly 1 billion pieces of e-mail it handles
each week.

"We're not seeing the hard-core spammers cleaning up their act in
any way," said Andrew Lochart, Postini's director of product
marketing.

At Brightmail Inc., the leading spam-filtering company, the number has
held steady at about 60 percent of the e-mail it handles. Internet
account providers Earthlink and America Online said they also have seen
little measurable change in spam patterns in the past couple of weeks.

The new law is designed to attack the most nefarious spammers and their
techniques for avoiding detection. The law makes it illegal to disguise
the originating Internet address of spam, to use misleading subject
lines, and to electronically "scrape" or copy e-mail addresses
from Web sites that then can be used to send spam or be sold to other
marketers.

The law also requires that marketers provide valid ways for consumers to
request to be free of future mailings, and to honor those requests.
Marketers also must place their physical addresses on their
e-mails.

As companies, consumers and policymakers have been more aggressive in
trying to combat spam, many bulk e-mailers have moved their operations
overseas to avoid detection and prosecution under U.S. laws. That
movement has accelerated in the past two weeks, said America Online
spokesman Nicholas J. Graham.

Graham said that of the roughly 2.4 billion pieces of spam AOL blocks a
day, there has been a roughly 10 percent shift in their origins to
overseas-based Internet addresses. AOL's spam-fighting group believes
this reflects spammers successfully commandeering unprotected machines
and networks overseas and turning them into spam-delivery engines, Graham
said.

America Online also has seen an uptick in spam peddling counterfeit
Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, and quick-weight-loss gimmicks, which Graham
attributed to the holiday season.

None of the Internet service providers or spam-filtering companies
spotted indications that spammers are complying with even pieces of the
law. 

The most notorious spam still has no unsubscribe links. If the
unsolicited e-mail does, it is likely to be used by spammers to confirm
that they have hit a valid e-mail address, Lochart said.

This presents consumers with a dilemma. Under the new law, spammers are
in violation only if they disregard the opt-out request, but many
anti-spam groups advise consumers not to click those links if the e-mail
appears to be from an illegitimate business.

Subject lines also increasingly contain garbled characters to try to
evade spam filters, and some simply contain links to Web sites that might
contain pornographic content. The new law requires pornographic material
to be labeled as such.

In an informal survey of incoming e-mail trapped by spam filters, The
Washington Post found one bulk company had included a prominent
unsubscribe link and a physical address on its e-mails pitching men's
ties and auto loans. The e-mails were sent by Optinrealbig.com, a
Colorado-based bulk mailer recently sued by New York state prosecutors
for fraud in an elaborate spam scheme.

The company's owner, Scott Richter, has denied the charges.

The new federal law is controversial, because it supplanted some state
laws that were more restrictive on e-mail marketing. The early returns
fuel critics who have argued that the worst spammers will ignore the new
law, while other firms will send more commercial e-mail as long as it is
within the rules.

But the Internet and spam-filtering providers said it is still too early
to pass judgment on the new law.
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USA Today
Army lays out logistics plan for global communications
By Frank Tiboni, Federal Computer Week


Army officials must connect its logisticians to global communication
networks to more quickly get materiel to troops, a new report
concludes.

According to an Army white paper issued Monday, the service cannot get
materiel accurately and quickly to soldiers overseas, and cannot
effectively receive and distribute materiel upon receipt. 

Army officials over the next two years must fix four logistics
weaknesses, including connecting logisticians, updating supply
distribution, improving force reception and integrating the logistics
chain.

"Army logisticians will be an integral part of the joint battlefield
network with satellite-based communications that provides 24/7
connectivity on demand, enabling them to pass and to receive key data
from the battlefield to the industrial base," the document said.

The service hopes to upgrade its logistics in two years.

"It's our strategic vision," said Lt. Gen. Claude Christianson,
the Army's deputy chief of staff for logistics. "It is tied directly
to what we have experienced in the past few years." 

The full white paper is available on the Army's Web site.
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USA Today
In N.H., Benson presents first laptops to pupils
By Stephen Frothingham, Associated Press

ALLENSTOWN, N.H.  Anticipation of new laptop computers was enough to
pull many seventh-graders out of warm beds on the snowy first day of
school after a long holiday vacation. 
The white Apple iBooks  handed out by Gov. Craig Benson in Armand R.
Dupont School gymnasium  were even preferable to a snow day, some
pupils said Monday. 

Benson helped raise $1.3 million in private donations to provide the
laptops at Armand R. Dupont and five other schools. Before handing out 62
laptops at Allenstown, he urged the pupils to be patient with their
teachers. 

"You probably know how to use a laptop or a computer better than
your teachers," Benson said, smiling. 

"We're going to have teach them how to use computers to maximize the
educational benefit." 

Benson presented laptops to seventh-graders in Haverhill and Canaan later
Monday, and planned to distibute them to to pupils in Wakefield, Thornton
and Tilton on Tuesday. 

About 600 New Hampshire pupils and 40 teachers will get computers. The
schools also get projectors, printers, digital cameras, a server and a
wireless network connecting laptops to each other and to the Internet.

Teachers can control the children's laptops during classes, said Benson,
a former high-tech CEO and gadget lover. The laptops are loaded with
Windows software, including one of Benson's favorite programs,
PowerPoint, which creates electronic slideshows. 

"If a teacher wants to pick Jane in the third row and put her screen
up on the wall, they can do that," Benson said. 

The program was inspired by one in Maine, where all seventh-graders were
provided with Apple laptops in a state-funded program. 

In New Hampshire, 19 school districts with high property tax rates and
low test scores were invited to apply. The winning schools were chosen
based on their proposals. 

Allenstown  a plaintiff in the landmark Claremont lawsuits that
changed the way education is funded in New Hampshire  struggles to
pay for education, and the school offers few extravagances. After
Benson's presentation, the pupils carried their chairs from the
auditorium back to their classrooms. 

"This wasn't something you'd expect us to get at our school,"
said seventh-grader Sarah Kruczynski. 

"I think it will be interesting, but not necessarily more fun,"
she said. 

The machines eventually could replace textbooks, said Principal Betsey
Cox Stebbins. 

"It would be wonderful to see lighter backpacks," she said.

Pupils will return the laptops at the end of the school year, for use by
the next class of seventh-graders. 

Peter Letvinchuk, a language arts teacher supervising the school's laptop
program, said the machines will be used for Web research in all classes.
He's looking forward to reducing paperwork and accepting term papers,
homework and tests electronically. 

He still plans to grade tests by hand. 

"I want to see where the kids are falling down, where their
strengths are," he said. 

Spell-checking software should eliminate spelling errors in homework, he
said. 

"Now nobody has any excuse," he said. "But I'll have to
give spelling quizzes with pen and paper."
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Computerworld
Mars rover landing scoops up record traffic for NASA site
The previous record occurred after last year's crash of the space shuttle
Columbia 

Story by Todd R. Weiss 

JANUARY 05, 2004 ( COMPUTERWORLD ) - The Saturday landing of NASA's
six-wheeled Mars Exploration Rover Spirit on the surface of Mars has
become the most widely watched Internet event ever sponsored by the space
agency. 

By 11 a.m. EST today, the home page of the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration had received some 513 million hits during the previous 48
hours, as millions of people around the world watched the interplanetary
mission's progress via the Internet. The actual landing took place just
before midnight EST Saturday. 

By comparison, the breakup and loss of the space shuttle Columbia Feb. 1
as it attempted re-entry into Earth's atmosphere attracted far fewer home
page hits, said Brian Dunbar, NASA's Washington-based Internet services
manager. The space agency recorded 75 million hits during a 24-hour
period as that tragedy unfolded, setting the previous record for Web
traffic to the site (see stories). 

For NASA, space missions generally create huge amounts of interest from
people around the world, Dunbar said, and the Mars mission is capturing
more attention than any recent mission. 

"Mars has been a part of our culture, with The War of the Worlds and
other popular science fiction," Dunbar said. 

Last year, NASA stopped hosting its own Internet infrastructure and hired
network hosting company Speedera Networks Inc., which can add capacity on
demand as loads increase, Dunbar said. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based
vendor has been able to keep up with the peak demands and loads without a
hitch, he said. 

The Spirit is the first of two rovers slated to land on Mars by the end
of the month. On Jan. 24, the Mars rover Opportunity is expected to land
and begin its own set of experiments and exploration of the planet.

Both rovers rely on an embedded operating system from Wind River Systems
Inc. in Alameda, Calif., that manages the trajectory, descent, operations
control, data collection and communications for their missions. That
VxWorks operating system was embedded in a specially prepared,
radiation-hardened 20-MHz PowerPC CPU installed on each of the rovers,
along with 128MB of RAM (see story). 

The two Mars missions are seeking answers to the age-old questions of
whether there are verifiable signs of water on the planet and whether
life has ever existed there. 

"It would help answer one of the basic questions," Dunbar said:
"Are we alone in the universe?"
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Federal Computer Week
Defense personnel lines shift with IT 
BY Matthew French 
Dec. 29, 2003  

Technology is changing the face of the Defense Department, as the roles
of service members have blurred between combat, combat support and
administration. 

DOD leadership for the past several years has grappled with the issue of
getting uniformed personnel out of administrative jobs that can be
performed by civilians. While the front-line troops can clearly be
defined as combatants, it has become harder to tell which end is the head
and which is the tail of the American fighting machine, said Dov Zakheim,
chief financial officer for the Defense Department. 

"The whole nature of tooth and tail is changing fundamentally,"
Zakheim said on Dec. 17. "If you have a military person operating an
[unmanned aerial vehicle] that is operating in Iraq, and the [operator]
is stateside  which we can do now  is that tooth or is it tail?
I don't know any more." 

Zakheim credited technological change and bandwidth expansion projects
with allowing soldiers to fight a battle from thousands of miles away in
comparable safety. But that also means that "the nature of the front
office/back office has changed and the nature of rotations have
changed," he said. 

"Instead of having a military person come in and act in a clerical
role in [the Defense Finance and Accounting Service], that military
person could just as well be operating a UAV," he said. 

The armed services have 1.3 million people in uniform, about 300,000 of
whom are deployed overseas. A large portion of the remaining 1 million,
however, are filling roles that civilian employees or contractors might
handle better, retired Marine Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro, a member of the
Defense Business Practice Implementation Board, said during a public
board meeting July 30. 

Zakheim said the department is looking into what jobs being performed by
uniformed personnel can be outsourced or picked up by existing civilian
employees. 

"This is not a cost-free drill, by definition," Zakheim said.
"If you're taking a military person out of, say, DFAS, you have two
questions you can ask: Can a civilian already on the DFAS staff take over
the work; or can several civilians cover the work that this one
individual is doing?" 

Zakheim said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified that he thinks
DOD officials can convert about 10,000 military slots to an equivalent or
lesser number of civilian posts. 

Zakheim cautioned that he was not saying that 10,000 back office military
employees will suddenly find rifles in their hands, but that putting
uniformed people into the jobs that are inherently military will make DOD
a more efficient organization. 

David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said at
the July Defense Business Practice Implementation Board meeting that
having the flexibility to extract uniformed personnel from jobs in which
they never should have been placed will be vital to continuing the
department's transformation efforts. 

DOD officials are seeking flexibility through the Defense Transformation
for the 21st Century Act, parts of which were rolled into the recently
signed Defense Authorization Act.
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Federal Computer Week
NIST releases security level guidance
BY Diane Frank 
Dec. 22, 2003

The National Institute of Standards and Technology recently released a
draft of the last piece of guidance for agencies to determine the proper
level of security on information systems.

Released late last week by NIST's Computer Security Division,
"Special Publication 800-60: Guide for Mapping Types of Information
and Information Systems to Security Categories" provides the middle
step for guidance and standards required under the Federal Information
Security Management Act (FISMA) of 2002. 

NIST's categories of security impact are based on draft Federal
Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 199, which the division released
in September. The goal of the guidance is to have agencies assign impact
levels without considering potential security controls and
countermeasures, but in October, NIST released another draft guide
outlining minimum-security controls for each category. 

Officials plan to hold a government-only workshop about the latest draft
Feb. 26-27, 2004. For details, e-mail elaine.fry@xxxxxxxxx Comments on
the draft publication are due by Feb. 20, 2004, and can be sent to
800-60_comments@xxxxxxxxx 

NIST also released a draft interagency report on smart card technology
development and adoption within agencies. The draft report is in response
to a January General Accounting Office report that recommended that NIST
play a greater role in smart card implementation 
governmentwide.

Also in response to that report, NIST hosted the Storage and Processor
Card-Based Technology Workshop to identify requirements from agencies and
industry. The draft outlines the results of that workshop, which
identified gaps in many areas of the smart card arena, including
biometric interoperability, co-existence of multiple technologies on a
single card and the need for common standards for identity
methods.

Comments on the smart card draft report should be submitted to
card-comment@xxxxxxxx by Jan. 30, 2004.
To review the draft publication 800-60, see:
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts.html

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