Internet Changes Everything: January 2004 Archives

January 31, 2004

Major eGovernment & IT action plans unveiled for London by Ken Livingstone

Major eGovernment & IT action plans unveiled for London by Ken Livingstone :: PublicTechnology.net :: eGovernment & public sector IT news from

The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has launched a comprehensive overview of his policies on Information and Communication Technology. A key theme of his plan is widening take up of ICTs, both as a means of ensuring that technology plays its part in combating social exclusion, and so that London’s business community remains ahead of the game in terms of telecommunications provision.

This is a must-read document for anyone involved in eGovernment, whether in central or local government, as many of the action points defined in the report are of far-reaching impact both within London, but also in the light they throw on IEG3 statements and both strategies and tactics in other major cities and towns across the UK.

The five main areas covered by the report are:
> ICT and business: enhancing London�s competitiveness
> Social exclusion, equality and ICT for London�s communities
> Technology and the public sector: improving the quality of London�s public services
> LondonConnects: London�s e-government agency
> World class infrastructure for a world class city

The policy statement reviews measures already taken by the Mayor, the LDA and LondonConnects and describes the key priorities for continued joint working across the capital, including the need for advances in the public sector�s use of new technology.

The Mayor�s vision is, he says, to develop London as an exemplary sustainable world city based on strong and diverse economic growth. This embraces a socially inclusive approach enabling all Londoners to share London�s success, and a fundamental improvement in the way we manage our environment and make use of natural resources.
The Mayor sees his interest in information and communications technology in two key areas:
> to see where and how new ICTs may represent opportunities or threats to the delivery of the Mayor�s vision for London, and
> to identify what the Mayor and his agencies can do about any of these issues.

Launching the report, Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone said:

"London has a great record when it comes to embracing technology. All London schools and colleges are connected to the Internet, with over eighty percent on broadband, while fifty percent of Londoners are logging on at home. Detailed figures show lower income households are often choosing not to get on-line. London�s business community leads the UK in adopting new technology, but some sectors are slower to take advantage. It is essential that London remains a world leading centre of ICT development and adoption, especially in the way that we champion equal opportunity of access for all.�

The Mayor�s E � Envoy, Val Shawcross AM, added:

�The impact of new technology on London�s citizens, businesses and visitors is one of the key challenges facing London at the beginning of the 21st century. Technology impacts on every aspect of every day life and we are committed to ensuring no-one is left behind. One of the key areas projects we want to develop, through LondonConnects, and in partnership with the London boroughs and other key partners, is a city-wide public services portal. This will bring integrated web access to all public sector services in London from a single starting point and help London government at all levels provide a better service to our citizens.�

Ken Livingstone�s says in his report:

"The continued success of London as a world city depends on many things � not least the continued, and fast, development of our use of, and infrastructure for, information and communications technologies.

I am pleased, therefore, to publish this short statement which sets out a series of policies and actions needed to make sure that London maintains its position as one of the worlds leading centres of technology adoption and innovation.

As information and communications technologies (ICTs) have become ever more ubiquitous there is a need to set out clear priorities for action for London. ICTs are important for London�s continuing business success and global competitiveness. But this economic imperative is balanced by the need to ensure our most excluded or deprived communities receive support and assistance so that the adoption of new technologies does not further worsen social divisions in our city.

This statement sets out some key areas for action by the Greater London Authority and its group of functional bodies. It emphasises the importance of collaborative working to improve our public services and the important role to be played by LondonConnects, our regional e-government partnership.

Technology now offers the chance to join-up the work of key agencies, for instance so that information about children at risk is available to the right professionals at the right time, whether they work for the NHS, a London borough or a voluntary agency; so that Londoners can do all their business with Government at one visit rather than being sent from office to office; so that we can all move through the city with ease and efficiency.

I look forward to continuing to work with all key partners, in industry, in the public sector, and in London�s voluntary and community sector to achieve a London where all sectors can reap the benefits that technology has to offer."

January 31, 2004 at 12:01 PM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Major eGovernment & IT action plans unveiled for London by Ken Livingstone

Major eGovernment & IT action plans unveiled for London by Ken Livingstone :: PublicTechnology.net :: eGovernment & public sector IT news from

Launching the report, Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone said:

The Mayor�s E � Envoy, Val Shawcross AM, added:

Ken Livingstone�s says in his report:

January 31, 2004 at 12:01 PM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Experts worry about Mydoom Internet worm after-effects

Yahoo! News - Experts worry about Mydoom Internet worm after-effects

Fri Jan 30,12:35 PM ETAdd Technology - AFP to My Yahoo!

WASHINGTON (AFP) - With half-a-million dollars in reward as a lure, computer users and security experts scrambled to curb the spread of the Mydoom computer worm amid concerns of serious after-effects from the world's worst Internet epidemic.

The original Mydoom bug was still propagating worldwide along with a variant called Mydoom.B that some said could be more dangerous but may not be spreading as quickly.

In Moscow, a top anti-virus firm said Friday that Russia was 80-percent likely to be the origin of the Mydoom worm and could be an attempt to distribute unsolicited spam mail.

The Russian security firm Kaspersky Labs said it had traced the first emails infected with Mydoom to addresses with Russian Internet providers.

"We have special software to monitor Internet traffic across the world. This detected that the first emails infected by the worm came from Russian providers," the firm's spokesman Denis Zenkin, told AFP.

"But there is a still a 20-percent chance that this was an attempt to mislead. Virus programmers from other countries could have registered an email address in Russia and transmitted their harmful programs via it," he added.

Indeed some experts saw the attacks against Microsoft and SCO, the Utah-based software vendor, as a diversion aimed at hiding the real goal -- to create email relays that can be re-sold to the spam industry.

The SoBig virus of last year "turned out to be piloted by members of organized crime which now use tools in a coordinated way created by spammers, virus instigators and hackers to spread their operations", according to Clusif Clusif, a group of information technology security systems.

Microsoft and SCO, the owner of the Unix (news - web sites) operating system, have together offered 500,000 dollars in rewards for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of Mydoom's creators.

"This worm is a criminal attack," said Brad Smith, senior vice president and general counsel at Microsoft.

"Its intent is to disrupt computer users, but also to keep them from getting to anti-virus locations and other sites that could help them. Microsoft wants to help the authorities catch this criminal."

Alexander Gostiyev, a Kaspersky Labs expert, told a press conference in Moscow that the attack "was very well planned and prepared, perhaps for several months and at least 1,000 computers were infected in advance."

Kaspersky Labs, which describes itself as one of the world's top-10 anti-virus firms, said some 600,000 or so computers had been infected by the bug.

Mydoom spreads through e-mail attachments and downloads from the popular Kazaa file-sharing service, which lets Internet surfers share content such as games, movies and music.

Part of Mydoom's "success" is that it -- unlike many earlier bugs -- poses as an error note with the main text message attached, prompting users to open the attachment to read it, thereby inadvertently launching the virus.

"The truly worrying phenomenon with these new viruses is the spread of undetectable open access on users' machines, be it by Mydoom or old viruses," said Francois Paget, director of research at Network Associates.

He said it was leading to a large number of vulnerable machines since there were 20,000 attempts at creating open access on computers every month.

Consequently, Internet access providers are becoming ever more pressing in their recommendations to customers to equip themselves not only with anti-virus software but also a firewall to oversee traffic leaving the computer as well.

This is all the more important because of the explosion of high-speed connections, which means that ever more computers are being permanently left "on-line".

California-based Panda Software said Mydoom.A was still spreading rapidly, even though individual computer users may be seeing fewer infected e-mails.

It said one in every five e-mails is carrying this worm, making four million infected e-mails in circulation.

January 31, 2004 at 12:13 AM in Virus | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

MyDoom Worm Spreads as Hunt for Author Intensifies

Yahoo! News - MyDoom Worm Spreads as Hunt for Author Intensifies

By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - A cyber dragnet aiming to flush out the author of the MyDoom computer worm intensified Friday as the outbreak crippled still more e-mail networks.

Investigators and security experts hoped their hunt would get a boost after Microsoft Corp. offered a $250,000 reward Thursday for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the creator of one variant, MyDoom.B.

The offer follows a similar $250,000 bounty from software firm SCO Group Inc . The "doom" viruses are programmed to unleash digital attacks aimed at overwhelming both firms' Internet sites starting this weekend.

"If there is a break, it will come from the bounties," said Mikko Hypponen, research manager at Finnish anti-virus firm F-Secure.

MyDoom.A, also known as Novarg or Shimgapi, emerged on Monday often masquerading as an e-mail error message from a "Mail Administrator" and other official-looking addresses that contains a file attachment.

Hundreds of thousands of computer users have clicked on the seemingly benign attachment, infecting their computers.

The attachment releases a program capable of taking over the victim's computer, experts warned, before scouring the Internet for more vulnerable machines.

The effect is a massive logjam of data traffic that bogs down e-mail servers and rejects many incoming and outgoing messages.

Computers running any of the latest versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system are at risk of being infected, although the worm does not exploit any flaws in Windows or software.

Patches capable of wiping the virus off a machine are available at anti-virus sites.

NO RESPITE

Friday, there was no sign of a let-up.

"It's still spreading voraciously. We've intercepted in excess of eight million viruses since the very first copy started Monday," said Paul Wood, chief information analyst with MessageLabs, an e-mail security firm.

After dissecting the malicious program, security experts got a little closer to unmasking the perpetrator. The author apparently signed the worm with the name "Andy" and left the message: "I'm just doing my job, nothing personal, sorry."

The first infected e-mails detected appear to have originated in Russia, but, Wood said, it was unclear if they were the engineers behind MyDoom or just early victims.

Nabbing virus writers is a difficult undertaking. Such clues have been used in the past to form a picture of the suspect. "Most often virus authors are caught when bragging about their exploits somewhere," said Wood.

Still, a series of bounties Microsoft placed on the heads of the Blaster and Sobig.F virus writers in November have come to nothing as chatter about their exploits has been scarce in the usual online forums.

Given the tight-lipped approach, security experts and police suspect the authors may be a new breed of virus writers that possibly have a connection to organized crime groups or spam e-mail peddling syndicates.

January 31, 2004 at 12:11 AM in Virus | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Wired magazine names UT professor's Web log as world's most popular

MSNBC - Insta Star

By MICHAEL
The Knoxville News-Sentinel
Updated: 6:05 a.m. ET Jan. 31, 2004

January 31, 2004 - While Glenn Reynolds juggles teaching law and being a father to an 8-year-old daughter, he dabbles on the Internet.

Now he's juggling the risk of being dubbed "big media," which is a frequent target of his

The popular technology magazine Wired in its February issue names Reynolds of the University of Tennessee as the author of the most popular Web log, or blog, in the world.

The article notes Reynolds' Web log, www.instapundit.com, gets more than 100,000 visits a day, the equivalent of a cable news show or a medium-sized daily newspaper.

Reynolds is in part credited in Tennessee with being an inspiration for the start of the Rocky Top Brigade, a collection of a number of Tennessee bloggers found at www. http://southknoxbubba.net/rocky_top__brigade.htm

The magazine does not say how it arrived at the distinction, but since it has appeared, Reynolds said no one has come forward to say they have more visits than his.

Reynolds tackles a multitude of national and international issues with a bit of a Libertarian bent to his various takes.

And he often takes on big media, such as the networks, The New York Times or the Washington Post. For example, he chided the Times recently for not giving pro-American protests in Iraq enough play.

With this designation by Wired, Reynolds was asked if he's not now big media. He laughed and responded, "Not until I get that big paycheck or an expense account."

Tracking traffic of the more than 1.5 million estimated Web logs can be a challenge. Some don't release that information, and there are different ways to characterize that traffic.

For example, a visit is essentially logging onto the Web site. Page views are how many different pages on the site a reader clicks on.

Within the blogging community, Technorati at www.technorati.com, is a respected site that measures traffic. In its Top 100, Reynolds site is ranked fourth. That site bases its ranking on the number of blogs that link to a particular blog.

Regardless, Instapundit is recognized as "certainly the largest news blog," said Nashville free-lance journalist Bill Hobbs, who is a veteran blogger at www.billhobbs.com.

Reynolds started his blog shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, and became interested in it while teaching Internet law.

Reynolds said blogs will continue to grow, with more video and coverage of local issues, and that will further challenge local and national media outlets.

Michael Silence can be reached at 865-342-6310

January 31, 2004 at 12:09 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (260) | Top of page | Blog Home

Phones, Too, Get TV Time

State of the Art: Phones, Too, Get TV Time

By DAVID POGUE

HEN gadget lovers are young, it doesn't take much to give them dilated pupils and sweaty palms. You just whisper into their ears, "Batteries included." But as they grow older, it takes more and more to give them the same thrill. For a while, the term "remote-controlled" satisfies them, before they move on to such potent concepts as "flat panel," "six-megapixel" and "64-bit multiprocessor." But once they've tasted the honey of "wireless broadband," how will they top it?
Sprint has a couple of suggestions (if you're a gadget freak, please pull over to the side of the road): "cellphone TV" and "camcorder phones." Yes, it's true: video has now come to the very small screen.

Sprint's MobiTV service, for example, lets you tune in to any of 13 TV channels, right there on your cellphone. (The service requires one of Sprint's newish "Java-enabled" phones: the Sanyo 8100, VM4500, or RL2500; the Samsung VGA1000; and so on.)

You download the MobiTV software from the Sprint Web site directly to the phone. Once you find and open the program - eight button presses - it takes about 20 seconds to tune in to MSNBC, which is always the first channel that comes up. The other options include some big-name channels (ABC News, Discovery, CNET) and some not-so-big (College Sports Television, California Music Channel, CMC Beat Lounge and ToonWorld TV Classics).

Truth be told, MobiTV might have been better named MobiSlideShow; although the picture is colorful and sometimes sharp, the image changes only once every couple of seconds. (Contrast with regular TV, which flashes 30 images per second to create video.) The phone devotes the rest of its energy to supplying an uninterrupted soundtrack, with the understanding that your brain is much more tolerant of video interruptions than audio breaks.

Particularly in this era of high-definition TV, you might wonder how Sprint has the gall to call this television at all. One frame every two seconds? That's practically a PowerPoint presentation.

Yet incredibly, MobiTV works. Your brain is so used to watching regular TV that it fills in the visual blanks. The format, the sound, the lighting, the timing, those weird newscaster vocal inflections ("Firefighters at the scene have few details of the blaze") - it's all so familiar that the low frame rate isn't nearly as annoying as you would expect.

That's not to say that MobiTV doesn't have its annoyances. Once the "TV" comes on, it fills only a scrap of the screen, an area literally the size of a rectangular postage stamp. As a result, the various charts, subtitles, captions and bottom-of-the-screen "crawls" of news stations like MSNBC are illegible. (Oddly, sports broadcasts don't suffer as much. Yes, you're seeing mere snapshots of the game in progress, but it beats listening to the radio.)

An even greater irritation is the way the audio freezes every few minutes. You don't actually lose any words during the silence; instead, in mid-syllable, the soundtrack takes a sudden and disconcerting break. Meanwhile, you get this itchy feeling that you're falling farther and farther behind the live broadcast.

Surprisingly, watching TV doesn't diminish your phone's battery life nearly as much as you would expect. Playing nonstop, the Sanyo 8100 powers its TV for well over two hours before requiring a recharge. (Perhaps 2004 will be remembered as the year cellphones began requiring three battery-life ratings: talk time, standby time and TV time.)

Even so, the phone itself seems to fret about battery power. Every three minutes, it starts vibrating like a hovering stage mother, and a message appears, saying: "Are you still there?" Pressing any key returns you to the broadcast, but it's too bad there's no key called: "Well, duh! If I were done watching, don't you think I would have closed the phone?"

Finally, your viewing environment makes a big difference. In sunlight, the Sanyo's screen becomes a slab of solid black onyx. And on most of these phones, the speakerphone is too feeble to provide the audio in anything but a totally silent room. Otherwise, wearing an earpiece is the only way to listen.

These are, no doubt, first-generation technical glitches. Better networks and software upgrades are surely on the way. Now is the time, though, to contemplate the cultural implications of TV on your phone.

Consider, for example, how cellphone earbuds introduced a strange public phenomenon: otherwise well-dressed, clean-cut passersby, hands in pockets, apparently muttering or yelling to themselves as they walk by. Now, thanks to Sprint, a new public sight may soon become commonplace: people slumped in bus stations, airport lounges and meetings, staring motionless and slack-jawed at their cellphone screens for minutes on end, as though they're being chewed out by particularly long-winded spouses on the other end.

Then, of course, there's the little issue of driving. You could argue that Americans multitask in the car quite enough already. Will Sprint customers listen to news, sports or music on their cellphones in the car instead of turning on the radio - but glance down now and then for a glimpse of the video?

Still, when it comes to cultural change, the TV cellphone can't hold a candle to the impact of the camcorder cellphone, which Sprint now offers in the form of the Sanyo VM4500. With only two button presses, you can begin recording an actual movie with sound. Each video clip can be up to 15 seconds long; the phone can hold 10 of them at a time.

Of course, you may never reach that limit, because the real joy comes from sending them from the phone to the Web, to someone's e-mail box or to another cellphone. All of these options are listed on a single, simple menu, although video clips take some time to send - maybe 30 seconds - and a similar interval to receive on the other end.

When you send a video by e-mail, your recipient gets a text message that says, "You have received a video from: 9334888115

@messaging.sprintpcs.com" (the digits represent your phone number, of course). When you click Play Video, your browser opens a Web page containing the actual movie.

The result is not an Imax film by any means - in fact, its resolution is 96 by 128 pixels, and the audio and video sometimes drift out of sync. But the color is terrific, the motion is smooth, and the VM4500's speaker is loud enough to make the soundtrack audible even over life's dull ambient roar. (You can examine a sample video at www.nytimes.com

/circuits.) A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a video must be worth at least 50 pictures.

Sprint isn't the first company to offer video mail; T-Mobile's Nokia 3650, for example, creates 10-second clips with sound. The Nokia, though, is a larger computer-phone, not a sleek black flip phone like Sprint's.

Both Sprint and T-Mobile offer surprisingly reasonable flat fees. Sprint charges $15 a month (on top of your voice plan) for unlimited Internet access, TV, picture sending, and video sending. T-Mobile charges $5 per month for unlimited picture and video sending and offers an � la carte plan: 25 cents per video. (T-Mobile Internet access is a separate $5 fee.)

Like it or not, the age of cellcorders has arrived. Privacy policies will need updating, of course; the nation's locker rooms and Y.M.C.A.'s are only just now getting around to banning still picture phones.

In the big picture, though, videophones have almost infinite promise. Think of how useful instantaneous video clips could be in the business world ("Yo, Casey, is this how the capacitor is supposed to fit the sprocket?"), not to mention the personal world ("Sorry you had to travel on your birthday, honey, but the kids want to sing you a little something.''). As for shoplifters and 7-Eleven holdup artists, consider yourself put on notice: in the cellcorder era, all the world's a security camera.

These technologies aren't rock-solid yet; the TV is choppy, and the movies are minuscule. On these phones, "video quality" is practically an oxymoron.

But it's a cellphone, for heaven's sake - you're getting TV and capturing video on a cellphone. For the tech-obsessed of today, and the masses of tomorrow, that's quite a thrill already.

E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com

January 31, 2004 at 12:08 AM in Wireless | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 30, 2004

Microsoft's browser play

News: Microsoft's browser play

Purveyors and consumers of Web content and software, already unsettled by the pact between archrivals Microsoft and AOL Time Warner, may be in store for an even more radical upset: the end of Microsoft's standalone Internet Explorer browser.
Brian Countryman, IE program manager, said in a May 7 Web chat posted to Microsoft's Web site that the software maker is phasing out standalone versions of its Web browser.

Since then, Microsoft has struggled to reconcile Countryman's remarks with promises that current users of the standalone version of IE will be provided with upgrades. Countryman did not return calls. A Microsoft representative pressed for clarification of Countryman's comments acknowledged that the company did not, in fact, know what it was going to do.

"We don't know what's happening," said the representative. "There are a lot of different options, and it's too early to talk about any of them...Nothing has been decided yet."

That ambiguity leaves an array of possible outcomes, including forced upgrades to the next client version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, for users of older versions of the operating systems who want to patch security holes or other bugs in IE.

"Lack of updates for older Windows operating systems such as XP or 2000 would...require customers to upgrade to Longhorn to gain the latest browser functionality," wrote Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg in an instant message interview.

Many business users and consumers will no doubt move to Longhorn in the future, since it will be installed on the majority of new PCs. And licensed users of Windows can access Windows Update, Microsoft's online service for automatically updating Windows, to obtain any patches or bug fixes for IE.

But having pushed its Web browser software with the help of its OS monopoly, Microsoft now has the opportunity to reverse the process, using its dominance in browsers to prod other customers to upgrade to new versions of Windows.

The apparent move to discontinue standalone IE also makes Microsoft competitors Apple Computer and America Online appear prescient in their recent maneuvers to secure long-term access to browser technology. Apple in January launched its own browser, based on the open-source KHTML development project, and analysts at the time attributed the move to Apple's desire to maximize its independence from Microsoft and IE.

The timing may have been just right, if the elimination of a standalone IE leads to the discontinuation of a version of the browser for the Macintosh OS.

AOL Time Warner, for its part, has just ended its browser-related legal claims against Microsoft as part of a $750 million settlement that included a seven-year free license for IE. The decision to secure that license has many at AOL Time Warner breathing a sigh of relief now that Microsoft has announced the discontinuation of standalone IE. Without the deal, the move could have threatened the company's long-term access to a usable version of the Web's most popular browser in its proprietary service.

AOL Time Warner declined to comment.

From a legal and strategic perspective, Web users now face a situation in which the dominant browser, which achieved that dominance in large part by being offered free of charge, will now only be available as part of an operating system that costs $199 for the "Home" edition and $299 for the "Professional" edition. Upgrades for Windows XP Home and Professional cost $99 and $199, respectively.

IE is everywhere
The removal of IE as a free, downloadable software application could have a profound effect on the Web and the development of Web standards.

One possibility is that its removal could benefit makers of standalone browsers, such as Norwegian software company Opera Software (which charges for one version of its browser and gives away an ad-supported one) or Netscape Communications, a unit of AOL Time Warner.

"My take is that not distributing IE without Windows is good news for us," said Jon von Tetzchner, chief executive of Opera. "This means that a lot of companies are left with the choice between using Opera and paying Microsoft a hefty fee for a Windows upgrade that (makes obsolete) their computers. In the current market, many companies are trying to cut their costs, and a lot of them have no compelling reason to upgrade Windows."

But the future of Netscape, as well as the AOL Time Warner-funded Mozilla open-source project, appear clouded, after the media giant's rapprochement with Microsoft, in which AOL threw the weight of its subscriber base behind IE. Many speculate that Netscape's days as an AOL unit are now numbered.

A second possibility is that IE has gained such an overwhelming share of the market, as the de facto browsing standard, that Web surfers will be compelled to buy Windows--or upgrade Windows--in order to satisfactorily access important Web sites.

Despite the efforts of standards groups such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), of which Microsoft is an active member, many Web sites are still coded to work with IE, rather than the standards that IE and other browsers support.

Some sites explicitly state that their tools and applications work "best" or "only" with IE. And Microsoft's heavily trafficked MSN Web site has been locked in a high-profile battle with Opera over oddities in the way MSN renders in the Norwegian browser.

Microsoft declined to answer most specific questions on this story, but the company representative said Microsoft would "ensure that all current IE users will have access to updates in the future."

Microsoft would not clarify whether that meant there would be continued updates to IE for Windows on a standalone basis, or for the Mac, and if so, what it meant when it promised to end production of standalone IE.

Microsoft did seem to suggest that however it plans to take care of existing users of standalone IE, their options would be even less certain once the company's next version of Windows comes out.

"If you're using IE now, for Mac or Windows, you will have access to any appropriate updates," said the Microsoft representative. "There will be continued innovation and improvement. For the near and immediate future, customers will have access to IE. It's not going anywhere as a product. What happens in the Longhorn timeframe--it's too early to discuss."

The antitrust angle
The degree to which Microsoft's browser and operating system were linked became a central point of contention in the government's antitrust lawsuit against the company.

The government sued Microsoft in 1998, alleging that the software giant had used its monopoly power in desktop operating systems to develop a chokehold on browser software. A federal judge agreed and ordered the company to be broken up into separate application and operating system companies to prevent future abuses. That order was later overturned on appeal, and Microsoft eventually worked out a settlement that leaves it free to develop the OS as it sees fit.

In its defense against the charge it illegally tied the browser to its monopoly operating system, Microsoft argued that the operating system could not function properly without the Web browser.

Now Microsoft has flipped its argument around, claiming that future versions of the browser won't be able to function properly without the OS.

"Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1 (Service Pack 1, a collection of bug fixes and updates to the browser)," Countryman said in the May 7 chat. "Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS."

Antitrust experts said that because the appeals court had found, on a technicality, that the government had failed to prove IE commanded a monopoly, Microsoft's move to remove standalone IE from the market wouldn't run afoul of any restrictions placed on the company by the courts.

The courts forbade Microsoft from refusing to offer a version of Windows without IE, antitrust lawyers pointed out. But the company remains free to offer IE only bundled with a $199 copy of Windows.

"They have to let OEM licensees, HP or whoever, put Netscape or another browser on the other computer and have it work with Windows," said Richard Liebeskind, a partner with Pillsbury Winthrop in Washington, D.C., who worked for both the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice on antitrust issues. "I don't know that there's any obligation to make (Internet) Explorer, because it's not the product Microsoft has been found to have monopolized. The government lost that part of the case--Microsoft got off on a technicality."

Perhaps paradoxically, the removal from the market of IE as a separate product makes reality conform with Microsoft's longtime defense against charges that it tied the browser and the OS.

"Obviously, having a separate product out there prolonged the argument that there were two products that would form the basis of an unlawful tie," said Mark Ostrau, antitrust chair at the technology law firm Fenwick & West. "This gets rid of one pesky aspect of the case. It brings to the inevitable conclusion what Microsoft had in mind all along. And it won't be the last time that this occurs. Windows is like Los Angeles--it likes to annex a lot of outlying areas over time."

Asked where another standalone Microsoft application might disappear from the market, Ostrau advised, "Watch what happens with the media player."

January 30, 2004 at 09:31 AM in Microsoft | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

U.K. bank sees browserless future

U.K. bank sees browserless future - News - ZDNet

Online bank Egg is considering a move away from pure Web interfaces for its customers, in a shift that will have implications for developers as well as customers.
If Egg, which made its name as a pure online bank with no physical branches, takes this route, those among its 3 million customers who want to make the most of the bank's features would have to run the Windows operating system.
"Today, Egg is primarily Web-based," said Chief Information Officer Tom Llube, addressing the Developing Software for the Future Microsoft Platform conference at London's QEII Conference Centre this week. "But going forward, we will have to move it to smart-client-based solution."

The smart client--in this case, an operating system that incorporates browser functions--is likely to involve Longhorn, Microsoft's next version of the Windows operating system, said Llube, who provided a demonstration for the audience at the conference.

Longhorn, which isn't expected to debut until 2006, will include many technological enhancements, including a new data storage and retrieval system and better graphics than current versions of Windows. Microsoft has also hinted that Longhorn's debut will coincide with a move to end the distribution of stand-alone Web browser software.

The move from the browser-based model to a smart-client model will be an important shift for Egg, Llube said. "Longhorn is a key bit of the jigsaw that enables me to take that step. Our view is that any company serious about this type of thing needs to look at smart-client, customer-side computing."

Later, in a question-and-answer session with journalists, Llube denied that the change would force all customers to move to Longhorn. Those using other operating systems such as Linux or the Mac OS would still be able to use the services through a Web client as all Egg customers currently do, said Llube, but those who wanted to videoconference live with the bank's support desk, for instance, would need to run Microsoft's upcoming operating system.

But, he said, the bank will move away from the current "one size fits all" model to having a range of services suited to different types of users. "So, if I have a critical mass of users on Longhorn who expect a different class of experience, we will cater for them, but we would support the others."

Llube also said the changing philosophy will affect the way developers will have to think. "My developers are going to have think much more about what it means to a customer--how it looks to them--than they do at the moment," he said. "I am becoming more discriminating about the type of developer I think I need, if I'm to develop these types of application. It is because technology is so fundamental to us. It runs through everything we do."

January 30, 2004 at 09:30 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Microsoft Holds Off on Major Changes to Web Browser

Yahoo! News - Microsoft Holds Off on Major Changes to Web Browser

Thu Jan 29, 9:31 PM ETAdd Technology - Reuters to My Yahoo!

By Reed Stevenson
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. said on Thursday it would hold off making key changes to its Internet Explorer Web browser despite an earlier verdict that found parts of the popular program infringed on technology it did not own.

Microsoft, which had said earlier it would make such changes, said it believed that its claim on underlying technology for the Web browser would be upheld by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Microsoft had said last year it would change Explorer and other widely used programs after an Illinois jury delivered a $521 million verdict against it for infringing on technology developed by a privately held firm, Eolas Technologies Inc., and the University of California.

The dispute involves Web browser technology that allows other mini-applications to work with Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office said in November it would reexamine the Eolas patent after Internet advocacy groups including the World Wide Web Consortium raised claims that preexisting inventions may invalidate Eolas' patent claims.

"The action by the Patent Office may result in the cancellation of the Eolas patent," Microsoft said in a statement issued on Thursday.

"Given these circumstances, and after consulting industry colleagues and developers, Microsoft, for now, will not be releasing an update to Internet Explorer," it said.

The lawyer who represented Eolas in its lawsuit, which was brought against Microsoft in 1999, said he was confident that his client's patent would be upheld.

"I'm pretty confident that when the patent office looks at this, they're going to see they were right the first time," said Martin Lueck, who heads the business litigation group at Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi LLP that represented Eolas.

HIGH STAKES

Earlier this month, Judge James Zagel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois upheld the $521 million verdict against Microsoft, saying jurors were correct in determining that the company had infringed on patents held by the University of California and Eolas, which jointly hold a key Web browsing technology patent.

The judge also suspended an injunction that would have required Microsoft to make changes to its programs, pending the outcome of the patent office's reexamination of the patent.

The stay, the patent office's inquiry and pressure from software developers that depend on Microsoft's products, likely prompted the company's decision to hold off on making changes, said Richard Horning, an intellectual property attorney with Tomlinson Zisko in Palo Alto, California, who has no stake in the trial.

"There's big money at stake here and Microsoft is playing tough," Horning said, "They're doing it because they can."

Microsoft had said it has been working with rival makers of Internet programs, including Apple Computer Inc., Macromedia Inc. and RealNetworks Inc. on how best to respond to the challenge. Those companies make the widely used Quicktime, Flash Player and RealPlayer media applications.

Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler said Microsoft would appeal the judge's ruling.

Lueck, the lawyer for Eolas, said his client was still open to a settlement with Microsoft, which holds more than $52 billion in cash.

"They've managed literally to make billions of dollars and protect their Windows empire by using this invention," Lueck said. (Additional reporting by Eric Auchard in New York)

January 30, 2004 at 12:37 AM in Microsoft | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Making of the Digital Press Corps, 2004

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: January 29, 2004

ANCHESTER, N.H., Jan. 27 - Howard Dean was taking questions from a crowd of New Hampshire voters the other day when a young man asked him, "Governor Dean, can I pray for you?"
Dr. Dean, the Democratic presidential candidate and former governor of Vermont, responded that he could use all the prayers he could get. Whereupon the young man immediately began a dialogue with the Almighty.

29CAMP.deborah.jpg
WEIGHING IN - Deborah Apton, a producer for ABC News, says she carries 40 pounds of electronic gear.

"Oh, I didn't know you meant right now!" Dr. Dean interjected, before telling him to go ahead.

As bizarre campaign moments go, this one was brief and not really all that bizarre. But Mike Roselli, a producer for CNN, thought it was worth alerting his bosses in case they needed fresh tape of Dr. Dean.

So Mr. Roselli quickly punched an e-mail message into his BlackBerry. He titled it "Pray For Me," concisely recounted the incident and concluded: "The prayer includes a plea to God asking him to cure Dean's cold." It ended: "Amen. Live NBC Feed. 12:47:22."

With the time code, CNN could find the comment, which was being filmed by a pooled crew from NBC. Mr. Roselli, a campaign veteran, thought the prayer was more interesting than some of the material being beamed from CNN producers who were following other candidates ("Candidate X drinks a chocolate milkshake!") but conceded that he had sent it partly because he could. And he worried that someone else might.

"Four years ago, I wouldn't have called that in until the event was over," he said. "But there's more competition now, 24 hours a day."

A deadline every minute, once the preserve of the wire services, is now the motto for most of the press corps, from print reporters with newspaper Web sites to still photographers, cable producers and bloggers. The news cycle has condensed into one endless loop, and with it has come a endless stream of technology to accommodate it, or fuel it, since it is hard to say which came first.

Campaign reporters, like war correspondents, are not necessarily gadget geeks. But the rapacious 24-hour news cycle has forced them onto the cutting edge to do their jobs better - or at least faster. The equipment is even altering the shape of the correspondent's day, which now includes scrolling in the morning through The Note, an online political briefing from ABC News, and checking one another's Web sites at night, trying all the while to get a jump on everyone else.

The great leaps forward for print reporters in this campaign cycle are wireless laptops and digital tape recorders with software that allows them to download a candidate's speech immediately onto the laptops as an audio file. For television reporters, it is the ubiquitous hand-held minicam, which blurs the line between home video and politically revealing moments, like those captured by Alexandra Pelosi in "Journeys With George," her movie of George W. Bush shot with a hand-held camera during the 2000 campaign.

Certain accessories are also a must. Many reporters have discarded their bricklike power adapters for a versatile, much cooler-looking and more functional one that lets them charge their laptops on an airplane or in the cigarette lighter of a car. And there is no need to carry around floppy discs or CD's, when they can use a flash memory stick the size of a finger to transfer data from one computer to another. To reduce the load, reporters might also bring along a stringy portable Palm charger instead of the clunky cradle.

Add these to the standard arsenal of cellphones, BlackBerries and palmtops, and reporters have few excuses for why an editor can't find them, why they can't meet a deadline or why they have no idea what's happening on Mars.

To Web-crazed gadget geeks, these items are yesterday's news. But for many reporters, such supersonic portable gear simply isn't necessary. Only when they get into the competition of the campaign bubble do they realize what they have been missing.

The digital tape recorder that produces audio files has become essential for reporters trying to keep track of multiple speeches and bang out an article before flying off to another location.

With the audio software, up comes an image of a tape recorder on the computer screen. "It's so easy to play, rewind and play a quote over and over until you've got it," said Glen Johnson of The Boston Globe, who has been following Dr. Dean and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.

Mr. Johnson said his Sony digital recorder solved two problems. "It's got a much longer capacity than the standard reel-to-reel recorder, with up to five hours," he said. "And I can archive and organize all the speeches and permanently keep everything that's said on the trail without having to lug around a bunch of tapes and be out on the road without the tape I want."

He can also e-mail the audio files back to The Globe, which can put the sound bite on its Web site.

With an air card - a modem using a cellular connection - a reporter can file from the bus itself, without worrying about finding a phone line (or missing the bus).

If the reporter's news organization has not paid the $80 per month for air-card service, wireless service is often provided by Nathan Naylor, a 36-year-old entrepreneur and former press aide to Vice President Al Gore. During the Gore campaign in 2000, Mr. Naylor was responsible for making sure that phone lines and power cords were in place for the traveling press corps. When those lines were missing, he said, he was besieged.

After the 2000 campaign, he went to work for Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada. Both the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when cellphone lines were jammed, and the subsequent anthrax scare, which forced Mr. Reid into ancillary quarters, prompted Mr. Naylor to brainstorm about how to maintain communications during emergencies. The result is an oasis of mobile Internet access that he calls Soapbox. He advertises it as a way to "get in the bubble," although its great advantage for reporters is that it allows them to reach outside the bubble.

Mr. Naylor essentially hops from campaign event to campaign event, locating or arranging connections from which he can create portable Internet hot spots. On Jan. 19, the night of the Iowa caucuses, he set up his Soapbox and sold high-speed Internet access to more than 150 reporters sitting with their computers in the Polk County Convention Center in Des Moines. (Most used Wi-Fi cards to connect wirelessly to the Soapbox, but those with Ethernet cables could plug in as well.) He also planted auxiliary boxes at the caucus-night parties held around town by four candidates - Mr. Kerry, Dr. Dean, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina and Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri. A reporter could get access at all five spots for $100; installing phone lines at each site would have cost five times as much.

Reporters who in 2000 faulted Mr. Naylor for their limited ability to file from the Gore campaign now praise him for enabling them to file faster from practically anywhere. And there are fewer fights in the filing centers over the always-limited number of phone lines.

But there is a drawback. Because reporters can now file around the clock without a hard phone line, campaigns have reduced the filing time that they build into a candidate's schedule. This has also reduced the need for a filing center, an often-intense place that campaigns would set up at least once a day with phone lines and power outlets for the traveling press corps.

For reporters, filing time in the filing center was relatively sacred. It was a chance to sit still, hook up with the home office, check e-mail, focus, and usually eat. But on a bad news day for a candidate, the campaign handlers might restrict that time.

"Sometimes, campaigns would limit the time you had for filing so they could control the amount of research you did and who you talked to," said Mr. Johnson of The Globe. With wireless Internet access, "we're free from that shackle," he said. "The wireless card works in 75 percent to 80 percent of the places where we are. You don't have to work within the parameters of the filing center."

Mr. Naylor agreed. "This rewrites the rule book of the little chess game that the media and the campaigns play, and it tilts the advantage more toward the reporters," he said. "A campaign operative can't use a filing center or a phone cord to limit your access to what's happening in the world."

Wireless access is also important because campaigns rely heavily on e-mail to send out schedules, schedule changes and statements, not to mention attacks on their opponents. And Wi-Fi has created a new sport: surreptitiously seeing how long your computer maintains its signal as the plane gains altitude. "The peak is about 6,000 feet,'' Mr. Johnson said.

Not every reporter, to be sure, is enamored of what technology has wrought. Jules Witcover, 76, a columnist for The Baltimore Sun, who covered his first campaign in 1960 by handing his copy to a Western Union boy, said he prefers to stick with the basics. He writes on a laptop. He confesses he carries a cellphone, but has told his editors that it doesn't accept incoming calls; in truth, he just doesn't answer it. And he uses a tape recorder because he realized some years ago that note-taking can be fairly unreliable.

But he does not like what the proliferation of gadgets has done to journalism, or to journalists. "Technology has impinged on reporting," he said. He said that candidates used to schmooze with reporters on the plane because they could pick whom they wanted to talk with and others would respect their privacy. Now, he said, if a candidate comes back, everybody gathers around. And with boom microphones and discreet recording gear and phones that can secretly take pictures and transmit them instantly, the candidate cannot relax.

"Rather than take a chance, they don't do it," Mr. Witcover said. "It has eroded the relationship that you could build up with a candidate."

Beyond that, he said, even a long bus ride at night is no fun anymore because most people are on their cellphones - and always on deadline.

January 30, 2004 at 12:32 AM in Journalism | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 29, 2004

A Year of Contention at Home and Abroad

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In 2003, Americans found themselves increasingly at odds with each other - and the rest of the world. The title of our major survey of the nation's political landscape captured the public mood: "Evenly Divided and Increasingly Polarized."

That survey, based on more than 4,000 interviews and drawing on trends dating back to 1987, found an electorate that once again is viewing issues and events mostly through a political prism. The spirit of national unity that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is now a distant memory, swept away amid rising polarization. Republicans and Democrats are now further apart on basic attitudes toward government, national security, business and other issues than at any point since 1994, when voter anger propelled GOP into the control of Capitol Hill.

America's international image, already in decline, went into free fall as a consequence of the war in Iraq. The second major installment of the Pew Global Attitudes Project showed that the war widened the rift between the U.S. and its Western European allies and inflamed the Muslim world. Yet that survey also showed that throughout much of the world, American-promoted values - free markets, the rule of law, and democracy - are broadly accepted.

At home, the war in Iraq and a slow economy cast a shadow over President Bush's 2004 prospects. However, Bush's approval ratings remained in the mid-50% range and the Democratic field had a long way to go to sort itself out -- and to pose a serious threat to unseat the president.

Americans also were increasingly divided along religious lines, a trend underscored by the religious backlash against gay marriage. A survey cosponsored with the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life showed that churchgoers who hear critical messages about homosexuality from the pulpit are far more unlikely than others to express negative views of gays.

This report summarizes what we learned from nearly 50,000 interviews in the U.S. and worldwide, as published in 31 research reports and 14 commentaries during the course of the year.

January 29, 2004 at 11:23 PM in World Affairs | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Net Crime Hits Gambling Sites on Super Bowl Eve

Yahoo! News - Net Crime Hits Gambling Sites on Super Bowl Eve

By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - Organized crime gangs are shaking down Internet betting sites on the eve of American football's Super Bowl, threatening to unleash a crippling data attack unless they pay a "protection" fee, police and site operators said.

Britain's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) told Reuters it is investigating a series of attacks and threats of attacks on companies in the United Kingdom.

But security experts say sites based in the Caribbean and continental Europe have also been targeted.

"These are not groups of amateur hackers -- great deals of money are changing hands," said an NHCTU spokesman. "These are for-profit crimes and all intelligence suggests that organized crime is involved."

One such target is Curacao-based VIP Management Services, which runs seven gambling sites including www.VIPSports.com and www.Betgameday.com.

"We were first targeted in September and have been under intermittent attack ever since," said Alistair Assheton, managing director of the privately held six-year-old firm.

E-XTORTION ARTISTS

The so-called denial-of-service attacks, which can disable a corporate data network with a barrage of bogus data requests, are a standard tool for hackers aiming to knock out a site.

Lately, police say, crime gangs have adapted it to extort businesses. Security experts and police said they believe the gangs are based in Eastern Europe and Russia, taking advantage of the region's weak cyber crime laws and its legions of savvy programmers.

Assheton said that on Monday he received the latest threat via e-mail. It was a demand for $30,000 to be wired via Western Union to the extortionist's account or risk being hit. "They essentially said 'pay up or you will go down for the Super Bowl,"' he said.

Police sources said this type of cyber "protection racket" has grown in recent months. The risk of being knocked offline by a digital attack on Super Bowl weekend, one of the busiest betting periods of the year, could doom a gambling site.

Jeffrey Weber, who writes an online news letter dedicated to the industry, called www.Alltopsportsbooks.com, estimated an outage of a few hours is costly. "That's $500,000 to $1 million dollars worth of action wiped out in one shot," he said.

PAY UP -- OR ELSE

Reuters obtained a copy of an e-mail extortion threat distributed earlier this month. It demanded sites pay $15,000 for six months' worth of protection.

"If you wait to make a deal with us when the attacks start, it will cost you $25,000 for six months protection and the lost revenues as your site will stay down until the $25,000 is received," the e-mail threat said.

Weber said a number of small sites have paid up, calculating it would be cheaper than going dark during a busy period. "It's almost like the criminal elements of the neighborhood bookmakers has merged with the world of online bookmakers," he said.

Noting the relatively small sums demanded -- to ensure the victim does not go out of business and can continue to pay up -- security and law enforcement sources said they believe this is the work of gangs with experience in such shakedown schemes.

"This is very professional," said one security expert.

The Net crime wave is not exactly new. Extortionists and crime groups have targeted businesses of all sizes since the early days of e-commerce.

Law enforcement has been hampered because until recently companies were reluctant to report the incidents for fear of hurting their business reputation. Police hope a recent spirit of cooperation will help their cause.

January 29, 2004 at 10:51 AM in Online crime | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 28, 2004

Governance � the new dependency culture?

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

By Niall Fitzgerald

MANY of you will have received questionnaires designed to evaluate governance within your organisations. Some of you may even have filled them in.
One I received in the new year seemed at first glance standard enough. It had the familiar covering letter reminding me that successfully discharging my responsibilities as a corporate board director had never been more difficult and that I should be concerned about improving the effectiveness of my board.

Nothing to quarrel with there, save that the task would be considerably eased if one didn�t have to bother with questionnaires which, in this case, ran to no less than 120 questions. This in spite of the assurance on the front cover that �this questionnaire will take no more than 15 minutes to complete�.

Clearly the authors of the survey were not interested in a considered and thoughtful response to the questions or at least didn�t believe they were going to get one. All that was required to produce the definitive survey was to get as many people to tick as many boxes as fast as possible. To coin a phrase, they wanted you to comply, they didn�t want you to explain.

This minor irritation led to a further, more worrying thought: who actually has got the time and the inclination to do this properly? And I don�t mean responding to questionnaires but rather who has the time, the inclination and the ability to perform the role of non-executive director as envisaged by the regulators both in this country and abroad? Having codified those elements of business practice that can best serve to restore public confidence in the proper governance of our corporations, we now need to identify who will populate those boards and bear the responsibilities. Codes of practice and regulations only get you so far; they are given true life and meaning by those who are charged with honouring them.

A company can have the most fulsome mission statement and the most finely honed business principles, but unless they are administered with true integrity they will not count for much. Remember, Enron boasted an ethics code second to none, but it was suspended when it threatened to get in the way.

It is a truism, but nonetheless worth restating, that good practice is only ever as good as those asked to practice it.

The governance challenge for 2004 and beyond, therefore, is to ensure we populate the boards of our companies with capable people of integrity that shareholders can trust. Without them, the improvements in corporate governance that we plan for will be as illusory and insubstantial as a Cayman Island bank account.

It is not just integrity we want � we also want ability to understand the business issues, comprehend the financial challenges and, most importantly, the courage and independence to speak up and, if necessary, stand alone.

Potential candidates exist in many walks of life � and this is the second challenge. The expansion of the non-executive contribution in British corporate life gives us an opportunity to broaden the diversity of the average boardroom and import other talents and perspectives into the board. A wider pool from which NEDs will be chosen is not only desirable but inevitable.

However, Harvey Goldschmidt, the jurist and Commissioner of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, recently opined that the chairman of an audit committee of a public company could expect to spend up to 200 hours per year on the task. That�s a full month�s working and no weekends off. He may have been exaggerating for effect, but this scale of commitment is beyond most people with a full-time job.

The consequence is that many key board positions are unlikely to be held by working business executives.

This in turn raises the possibility that large numbers of NEDs in the future may draw their principal income from the company on whose board they serve. This need not necessarily impair judgment, but true independence rarely flourishes in a climate of financial dependency.

There is also the risk that the new breed of NEDs will be intellectually dependent on the company too. If they come with no business experience it will be a steep learning curve to acquire the self-confidence to challenge and interrogate. Boardroom decisions need not be rocket science, but some corporate activities are inevitably complex and it is not always easy for inexperienced NEDs to know when to strike the balance between inquiry and trust.

The lesson from all this is simply that we must be vigilant in the exercise of quality control when appointing NEDs to our board. An infusion of new blood and new talent is to be welcomed but financial and intellectual independence must be guaranteed.

Otherwise the corporate scandals of 2010 may be categorised not by megalomania and greed but rather by naivety and inadvertence.

The author is chairman of Unilever

January 28, 2004 at 08:31 PM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Businesses test new 3G service

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

By Nic Hopkins and Dan Sabbagh

VODAFONE has begun trials of its third-generation (3G) mobile services among British businesses, bringing the mobile operator a step closer to a general launch of the high-tech phones. The technology will allow users to make video phone calls, download music and play games.
The company has also signed an exclusive agreement with South Korea’s Samsung for the supply of its Z100 mobile handset and is understood to be in talks with other suppliers for similar deals.

�We are testing the 3G data card with a number of businesses to get their feedback on the development of the service for our corporate customers,� Vodafone said.

The data card plugs into the back of laptop computers and allows customers to download data such as video and software at high speed. �The type of function we are looking at will give them faster access to business applications so they can work much more effectively in a wireless environment,� a spokesman for Vodafone added.

Vodafone is expected to launch its 3G services in September or October, a year after it had originally hoped, when it will begin competing with Hutchison Whampoa�s 3. Orange and mm02 also intend to launch 3G services towards the end of the year.

A spokesman for Vodafone said the company had begun the second phase of testing its 3G services, having successfully completed internal tests.

Samsung�s Vodafone deal strengthens the early hold on the 3G handset market enjoyed by the Far East, after Japan�s NEC launched a model with 3. Their initial success has come at the expense of the market�s northern-hemisphere powers such as Nokia, Siemens and Motorola.

January 28, 2004 at 08:29 PM in Wireless | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

MyDoom virus attack poses 'critical threat' to internet

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

By Ellen Connolly

THE MyDoom computer virus has overtaken the Sobig.F bug as the largest virus outbreak, clogging the internet with millions of infected e-mails in its first 36 hours and prompting the FBI to mount an investigation.
“It’s already taken over from Sobig and doesn’t look like slowing, or plateauing, until probably Friday,” Natasha Staley, information security analyst of MessageLab, UK headquarters, said yesterday. “In the first 24 hours we intercepted one million of Sobig compared to MyDoom, where we’ve intercepted 1.2 million, so that’s an indication of the degree of penetration.”

The Sobig.F virus, which struck in August, caused more than 300 million infected e-mails to be sent during its first week.

Mikko Hyppoenen, the head of anti-virus research at the Finnish virus security company F-Secure, said that MyDoom has generated more than 100 million infected e-mails.

Normally computer virus outbreaks wane after 24 hours, when most computer users have had a chance to update their anti-virus protection software, but yesterday, 36 hours after being first detected in Russia, the MyDoom outbreak continued its spread. It was not expected to tail off until tomorrow.

Scott Chasin, the chief technology officer at the United States-based security firm MX Logic, described MyDoom as a �critical threat�. He said yesterday that the company had seen a peak at 1,200 infected e-mails per second.

The MyDoom virus outbreak, also known as Novarg, erupted late on Monday, during normal office hours in North America. As a result, most of the infected computers and e-mail traffic are in Canada and the United States.

Some analysts said that users are opening the attachments and spreading the virus because the e-mails appear innocuous, sometimes referring to failed mail deliveries.

The virus arrives on e-mails with messages such as: �Mail transaction failed. Partial message is available.� If the user opens the accompanying file, the virus W.32.Novarg.A@mm, is activated and sends a copy of itself to everyone in the address book.

Ms Staley said that while home computer users were likely to be the most affected, some businesses in Britain and the US would have suffered significant financial loss.

Mikael Albrecht, of F-Secure, said that the virus�s main purpose was to attack and overload the website of one of the world�s biggest vendors of the Unix operating system, a competitor of Microsoft Windows.

SCO Group, the Unix operating system owner, said that it was offering a $250,000 (�136,000) reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the virus creators.

The bug�s secondary function is to provide its author with a �back door� to the infected computers to control them remotely, possibly to co-ordinate an attack, he said.

An FBI spokesman said that it was �actively investigating� the MyDoom worm to find out where it had originated. �We have not done a full assessment, but it�s serious enough to warrant the FBI to look into this,� he said.

January 28, 2004 at 08:16 PM in Security | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Google Considers Diverse IPO Methods

Yahoo! News - Google Considers Diverse IPO Methods

Tue Jan 27, 2:04 PM ET

PALO ALTO, Calif. - Google Inc.'s initial public offering could go a long way toward furthering the cause of Internet auctions of new stock.

Google, the Mountain View, Calif., search-engine giant, hasn't yet formally filed to go public. Yet, it's widely believed that its initial public offering will contain some way to let investors bid for shares via a Dutch auction, akin to the OpenIPO bidding process now used by West Coast investment bank W.R. Hambrecht & Co. In a Dutch auction, the price of the stock is set high and gradually lowered until matching bids are received.

People familiar with the company say Google has been looking at combining an online auction with the more traditional distribution of stock through Wall Street underwriters.

IPO experts say the mixing of the two methods could give Google a stronger hand in negotiating with Wall Street banks. It also could secure a higher offering price when the shares do reach the market, and that could put more money directly into Google's pockets.

It would also increase the access to retail investors, who often don't get a chance to snap up shares in the hottest IPOs. They may come to expect easier auction access to other new offerings.

In short, Google's planned IPO, without question one of the year's most widely anticipated financial events, could raise the profile of auctions as a means for selling IPOs to the public and prompt "a very big change in the marketplace," says Tom Taulli, co-founder of CurrentOfferings Inc. "It will stick in the minds of investors."

By all accounts, there's already strong demand for Google shares even before a single offering paper has been filed. The 6-year-old company has been profitable for a couple of years, owns a commanding share of the U.S. Internet search market, with 35 percent of searches done at its site, and has accumulated a hoard of admirers on Wall Street.

Given these high expectations, the company's use of an auction and a traditional underwriter will prove an interesting test of the technique. First off, Google would be the largest company ever to employ such a combination, with its total deal targeted at between $3 billion and $5 billion.

"It certainly would make a statement," says Paul Bard, an analyst at Renaissance Capital. The market could "definitely see more companies interested in that kind of approach."

Google wouldn't be the first to blend an auction with a tradition stock offering. In May 2001, Instinet Group Inc. set aside 2.4 million of the 12.2 million shares it was selling in an IPO to offer through W.R. Hambrecht through a Dutch auction.

Many IPO market watchers say a successful debut by Google could help open the gates for young companies that have weathered the downturn. About 50 companies with solid financial footing could follow Google if the IPO turns out well, says Eric Hahn, an investing partner at the Inventures Group, a Silicon Valley investment firm.

However, Google will set an imposing high water mark for the sales and profitability these companies might be required to show. Estimates of Google's 2003 sales vary widely, from just under $600 million to nearly $1 billion.

Safa Rashtchy, a senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co., suggests the higher number is more accurate. He calculates that Google booked revenue of between $900 million and $1 billion last year, and he bases his work on the rapidly growing Internet search advertising market.

The U.S. market expanded 83 percent in 2003 to $2.3 billion and will grow another 44 percent in 2004, says Rashtchy. The overseas market is smaller, probably only $500 million in size in 2003.

Others with knowledge of the company say its fourth-quarter sales were close to $250 million, meaning that the projected "run-rate" of the business is presently $1 billion.

Either way, Wall Street will be watching.

"This is the first really hot company to go public in a long, long time," says Douglas Whitman, president of Whitman Capital LLC. "Wall Street wants to see how big the euphoria can be around this."

January 28, 2004 at 01:07 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Amnesty Says China Cracks Down on Internet Users

Amongst countries who "don't get it", China must rank right up near the top!

Yahoo! News - Amnesty Says China Cracks Down on Internet Users

LONDON (Reuters) - China has imprisoned a growing number of people for expressing opinions on the Internet or downloading banned information from the Web, the rights group Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

The London-based group said the 54 people it was aware of that had been detained or sentenced for such activities represented a 60 percent increase on November 2002.

That figure does not include an "unknown number of people (who) remain in detention for disseminating information about the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS (news - web sites)) over the Internet," the group said.

"We consider them all to be prisoners of conscience and reiterate our calls to the Chinese authorities to release them immediately and unconditionally," it said. Its full report on Internet use in China is published at its Web site, amnesty.org.

The group said those detained include students, political dissidents, professionals and practitioners of the banned Falun Gong (news - web sites) spiritual movement, most of whom had been accused of "subversion" or "endangering state security."

It welcomed the release of Liu Di, a psychology student from Beijing, freed last November after being held for a year without access to her family after posting messages in an Internet chat room calling for the release of another Internet activist.

But it said "she should never have been detained in the first place."

January 28, 2004 at 01:04 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

In Online Auctions, Misspelling in Ads Often Spells Cash

An interesting view of a netherworld within eBay.

In Online Auctions, Misspelling in Ads Often Spells Cash

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

Published: January 28, 2004

hen Holly Marshall wanted to sell a pair of dangling earrings, a popular style these days, she listed them on eBay once, and got no takers. She tried a second time, and still no interest.
Was it the price? The fuzzy picture? Maybe the description: a beautiful pair of chandaleer earrings.
Such is the eBay underworld of misspellers, where the clueless — and sometimes just careless — sell labtop computers, throwing knifes, Art Deko vases, camras, comferters and saphires

They do get bidders, but rarely very many. Often the buyers are those who troll for spelling slip-ups, buying items on the cheap and selling them all over again on eBay, but with the right spelling and for the right price. John H. Green, a jeweler in Central Florida, is one of them.

Mr. Green once bought a box of gers for $2. They were gears for pocket watches, which he cleaned up and put back on the auction block with the right spelling. They sold for $200. "I've bought and sold stuff on eBay and Yahoo that I bought for next to nothing" because of poor spelling or vague descriptions, he said.

David Scroggins, who lives in Milwaukee, also searches for misspellings. His company provides entertainment for weddings and corporate events, and microphone systems for shows at Wisconsin's casinos. He has bought Hubbell electrical cords for a 10th of their usual cost by searching for Hubell and Hubbel. And he now operates his entire business by laptop computers, having bought three Compaqs for a pittance simply by asking for Compacts instead.

No one knows how much misspelling is out there in eBay land, where more than $23 billion worth of goods was sold last year. The company does flag common misspellings, but wrong spellings can also turn up similar misspellings, so that buyers and sellers frequently read past the Web site's slightly bashful line asking, by any chance, "Did you mean . . . chandelier?"

One unofficial survey � an hour's search for creative spellings � turned up dozens of items, including bycicles, telefones, dimonds, mother of perl, cuttlery, bedroom suits and loads of antiks.

Contacted, the sellers were often surprised to hear that they had misspelled their wares.

Ms. Marshall, who lives in Dallas, said she knew she was on shaky ground when she set out to spell chandelier. But instead of flipping through a dictionary, she did an Internet search for chandaleer and came up with 85 or so listings.

She never guessed, she said, that results like that meant she was groping in the spelling wilderness. Chandelier, spelled right, turns up 715,000 times.

Some experts say there is no evidence that people are spelling worse than they ever did. But with the growth of e-mail correspondence and instant messaging, language has grown more informal. And much as calculators did for arithmetic, spell checkers have made good spelling seem to quite a number of people like an obsolete virtue.

Not that spell checkers are used by nearly everyone. Indeed, experts say the Internet � with its discussion boards, blogs and self-published articles � is a treasure trove of bad spelling.

"Before the Internet came along, poor spelling by the public was by and large not exposed," said Paige P. Kimble, the director of the National Spelling Bee. Now, though, "we are becoming acutely aware of what a challenge spelling is for us."

Sandra Wilde, author of the 1992 book "You Kan Red This!: Spelling and Punctuation for Whole Language Classrooms K-6," said language served a variety of purposes, so that in some settings it might make sense to skip punctuation or to speak in slang. She likens instant messaging, for example, to notes passed at the back of the classroom when the teacher's back is turned: there is no premium on proper spelling.

"On something like eBay though," she said, "it matters.'

Henry Gomez, vice president for corporate communications at eBay, said the company did not generally hear from sellers who misspell, and had no way of gauging how many sales might have involved misspelled listings.

But some sellers clearly bear in mind the potential for disaster when preparing their advertisements. Warren Lieu of Houston, who was selling hunting and fishing knives on eBay recently, covered all the bases: his listing advertised every sort of alphabetic butchery, including knifes and knive.

Mr. Lieu, a computer programmer, keeps a list of common misspellings, including labtop for laptop and Cusinart for Cuisinart.

His strategy of listing multiple spellings, he said, is based on his experience as a buyer. "I'm a bad speller myself," he said. So his mistakes in searching for items led him to realize that he could buy up bargains.

"I'd go ahead and deliberately misspell it when I searched for items," he said.

Jim Griffith, whose official title at eBay is dean of eBay education, teaches 40 to 50 seminars a year around the country. Although the auction house flags common misspellings online, Mr. Griffith said, the most common question he gets is, "When will eBay get a spell checker?" His answer? "You go to a store called a bookstore, and you buy something called a dictionary."

Even some who have made money off misspellings have felt their bite.

When Mr. Scroggins, who has been helping his parents sell off the contents of his father's jewelry and watch repair store, recently listed "a huge lot of earings," it attracted only three bids, and sold for just $5.50.

And then there was the time he sold the family's flatwear.

January 28, 2004 at 12:55 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 27, 2004

Jay Rosen: The Blog Transformation of Journalism

This from Chris Lydons blog. Its interesting to watch the unfolding of the Democratic Primary tonight in blogs. Its already history, and the debates, discussions are underway.

Jay Rosen of NY University, Journalism faculty, has a "bottom-up" vision for journalism which might be happening before our eyes.

Christopher Lydon Interviews... :

The terms of authority are changing in American journalism," Jay Rosen observed in a long conversation after the opening day of BloggerCon.

For more than a decade Jay Rosen has been a frustrated advocate of people-first, bottom-up "public journalism." The premise of his project (and his book, What Are Journalists For?) was that, as an act of civic conscience, major media might abandon the celebrity circus approach to covering, for example, presidential campaigns. The idea was laughed at, left for dead after the 1996 season. Yet Jay Rosen never quit, and the spirit burns bright on his blog, PressThink. Today, strangely, he believes we're in sight of real public journalism--not as a matter of corporate or professional conscience but because: the tools of journalism are being democratized; the costs not just of blogging but of digital radio and television are suddenly minimal; "amateurs" from the Baghdad Blogger to Instapundit have shown a flair for the game; audiences seem to love the new entrants; and major media institutions are having their own independent crisis of confidence and credibility. Jay Rosen's reading of the New York Times' internal review of the Jason Blair scandal was that "the Kremlin model doesn't work anymore," either with staff or readers. Change is in the wind.

Here's the summary quote about The Blog Effect:

"Blogs are undoing the system for generating authority and therefore credibility of news providers that's been accumulating for well over 100 years. And the reason is that the mass audience is slowly, slowly disappearing. And the one-to-many broadcasting model of communications--where I have the news and I send it out to everybody out there who's just waiting to get it--doesn't describe the world anymore. And so people who have a better description of the world are picking up the tools of journalism and doing it. It's small. Its significance is not clear. But it's a potentially transforming development... I like [it] when things get shaken up, and when people don't know what journalism is and they have to rediscover it. So in that sense I'm very optimistic."

Jay Rosen, who runs the journalism program at New York University, has taken his lumps for his reformist vision in the past. His fresh hope is founded on something more than idealism. Listen here.

January 27, 2004 at 09:21 PM in Business Models, Journalism | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Amazon's Profit Grows on Holiday Sales

Yahoo! News - Amazon's Profit Grows on Holiday Sales

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN - news) on Tuesday posted a higher quarterly profit, fueled by the company's busiest holiday season yet.

Seattle-based Amazon had a fourth-quarter net profit of $73 million, or 17 cents per diluted share, compared with $3 million, or 1 cent a share, in the year-ago period.

January 27, 2004 at 04:24 PM in eCommerce | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Mydoom spreading as fast as Sobig

BBC NEWS | Technology | Mydoom spreading as fast as Sobig

A malicious computer virus spread via e-mail is clogging networks and may allow unauthorised access to personal computers, experts have warned.
The worm, Mydoom or Novarg, is carried as an e-mail attachment in a text file and sends itself out to other e-mail addresses once opened by the recipient.

The virus may also open a "back door" to the computer to give hackers access.

It is also spread through file-sharing networks and experts think it could be worse than last summer's Sobig worm.

Thousands of e-mails triggered by the worm, which only affects computers using Microsoft Windows, were bombarding networks within hours of its discovery on Monday.

E-mail security firm MessageLabs said it had stopped over 580,000 copies of the worm in the last 24 hours, and Symantec have had more than 150 reports an hour from companies and individuals who have received it.

Website attack?

The mass-mailing worm is very similar to other types, such as 2003's Bugbear and Sobig, and relies on e-mail to get from place to place, Symantec's Kevin Hogan explained to BBC News Online.

"It is very much in line with Bugbear or Sobig. We are seeing almost exactly the same number of reports of the virus, which means it has the same rate of spread.

"It is a very simple example. It simply relies on a human to double click on an attachment to run it."

MYDOOM DETAILS
From: random e-mail address
To: address of the recipient
Subject: random words
Message body: several different mail error messages, such as: Mail transaction failed. Partial message is available
Attachment (with a textfile icon): random name ending with ZIP, BAT, CMD, EXE, PIF or SCR extension
When a user clicks on the attachment, the worm will start Notepad, filled with random characters

If the attachment is opened, it will do two things, Mr Hogan said. It deposits a back door, or a piece of software that listens to commands sent remotely over the net and acts on them.

"But it also seems it will attempt to perform a denial of service attack on SCO from 1 February to the 12th," said Mr Hogan.

SCO is one of the largest Unix open-source vendors in the world. It has been in the news recently because it has claimed that key parts of the open-source operating system, Linux, are under SCO's copyright.

Last year's Blaster worm attempted a similar attack on Microsoft's website, which was stopped.

No porn promise

Unlike many of its predecessors, Mydoom does not entice the recipient to open the attachment by promising nude pictures or personal messages.

Instead, the e-mail carrying the virus often bears the subject "Test" or "Status". The message inside may read: "The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment".

Many of the e-mails have look like they have been sent from organisations like charities or educational institutions, in an attempt to fool the recipient into opening the e-mail.

PROTECT YOURSELF FROM VIRUSES
Install an anti-virus program.
Keep it up to date
Get the latest patches and updates for your operating system
Never automatically open e-mail attachments
Download or purchase software from trusted, reputable sources
Make backups of important files

This happens when the virus sends itself out to all other addresses on an infected machine, "spoofing" the sender's e-mail address as it does so.

"Mydoom can pose as a technical-sounding message, claiming that the e-mail body has been put in an attached file," said Graham Cluley from security firm Sophos.

"Of course, if you launch that file you are potentially putting your data and computer straight into the hands of hackers."

Users are advised to delete or ignore the e-mail attachment - which usually ends .exe, .scr, .zip, .cmd or .pif - to avoid damage.

Symantec have advised anyone who has received the worm to avoid opening or double clicking the attachment.

Users should also ensure their anti-virus software is up-to-date, so that if the attachment is opened by accident, the software will catch it.

If anti-virus software does not spot an infection once the attachment is launched, users should download the free tools available to deal with it.

The security firm added if users start getting unusual pop-up messages from their desktop firewall, the chances are the computer has been infected.

The top two viruses of 2003, Sobig-F and Blaster-A, accounted for more than one-third of all the malicious programs seen during 2003.

January 27, 2004 at 10:21 AM in Virus | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 26, 2004

Online Music Industry Is Focusing on Europe

By VICTORIA SHANNON
Published: January 26, 2004

CANNES, France, Jan. 25 - Europe is the next battlefield for portable digital music, with its eager consumer market and attractive demographics, but complex cross-border legal and financial obstacles are delaying the entry of the biggest names, including Apple Computer.

Still, the online music industry is hungry for the European market, according to many executives at an international music conference that started here on Saturday, and it is preparing to take on the established European leader, On Demand Distribution, a company co-founded by the musician Peter Gabriel that is known as OD2 and powers most existing music services in Europe.

No one involved doubts that the European appetite exists. Last week, the Coca-Cola Company began an Internet-based music downloading service in Britain that attracted 10,000 downloads in its first 24 hours.

Europe is the world's second-biggest music market, behind the United States, and has sales of about $11 billion. According to Forrester Research, European download sales were just 24 million euros ($30.5 million) last year.

The diverse languages and cultural tastes seem the least of the hurdles in Europe. Here, a lower percentage of households have personal computers, are connected to the Internet or have fast, broadband network connections than in the United States.

"A majority of the U.K. population has yet to experience downloading," said Rafael McDonnell, head of strategic marketing alliances for Coca-Cola in Britain, at the conference here, known as Midem. "We need to drive that habit."

Executives at Apple and Napster said over the weekend that they would love to help Coke do that, but they are still held back by arranging downloading rights across Europe. Eddy Cue, Apple vice president for applications and Internet services, said that the company still planned to offer its iTunes Music Store in Europe some time this year, but he declined to give a specific date.

"Different prices in different countries, different release dates, there are obstacles we are still sorting through," Mr. Cue said. "They're not insurmountable."

Chris Gorog, the chairman and chief executive of Roxio, which owns the new Napster service, said he, too, would open for business to Europeans this year as well - as soon as the licensing hurdles are overcome and consumers can get the same kind of choice as the United States version.

"We debuted with over half a million tracks in the U.S., and we'd like to start with the same in Europe," Mr. Gorog said. "The music studios are rolling out the red carpet, but the primary obstacle now" is getting agreements from music publishers that represent songwriters, country by country. "Our approach to the market will be to create local, national services reflective of the culture," he said.

William Booth, head of music publishing for EMI, said Sunday that he expected a single royalty agreement that covers most of Europe's publishing collection agencies to be settled within the next three to four months.

Coke solved the problem by offering its service on Mr. Gabriel's OD2 platform. OD2 has worked over the last several years to extract agreements throughout Europe, and so far it is the only service to have done so. The OD2 platform is branded largely by Web portals and Internet service providers in individual national markets, like Wanadoo in France, Tiscali in Italy and Virgin Downloads in Britain.

Charles Grimsdale, chief executive of OD2, noted that the company has had to develop support for various release dates by country, 6 pricing systems and 13 payment mechanisms. Purchases made via Carte Bleu, for example, the leading payment card in France, are cleared only by French banks.

On Monday, Cable and Wireless will introduce a music-download package for the European market. Like OD2, Cable & Wireless is aiming at companies that want to brand their own service, like Internet service providers or retail companies.

"From our analysis, there's plenty of business to be done," said Andrew Wilding, an executive with Cable and Wireless, which is a partner with the 24/7 Music Shop. "The vagaries of the European market have been factored into the platform," he added. Cable and Wireless's first customer is expected to be Phonofile, a Danish Web site.

Negotiations with holders of music licenses have not been concluded. Even before all the digital music participants are in place - Sony has said it will begin its Connect downloading business in the United States, Europe and Asia this spring, and the Rhapsody service from RealNetworks intends to export its service to Europe - analysts are predicting the inevitable shakeout.

Josh Bernoff, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said participants like Coke in Britain and Wal-Mart Stores in the United States are unlikely to be long-term players. (Coke has said it has no plans to expand the service beyond Britain.)

"This is not part of Coke's core business," Mr. Bernoff said. "The connection to music is valuable to them, but it doesn't make sense to me that a soft drink company would be the leading download site in Europe."

January 26, 2004 at 07:10 PM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

CDs Will Die But Net Music May Be a Business Bubble

Yahoo! News - CDs Will Die But Net Music May Be a Business Bubble

Sat Jan 24,12:23 PM ETAdd Technology - Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
CANNES, France (Reuters) - Music downloads will render the ubiquitous compact disc all but obsolete in the next five years, yet half of all companies that begin selling digital songs online will fail by year-end, a researcher warned on Saturday.

By 2008, one third of music sales in the United States and nearly 20 percent in Europe will come in the form of downloads and streaming music over the Internet, building a multi-billion dollar business for the battered music industry, according to a new study by consultancy Forrester Research.

"The industry is going through a complete change in the way people consume music," Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research analyst told a gathering of music and technology executives at the annual MidemNet conference.

He said the U.S. market alone for downloads and subscriptions to online music stores will top $300 million this year from a virtual standing start a year ago.

"By 2007 or 2008, CDs will be something only old people have," Bernoff said.

Introduced 20 years ago, the CD revolutionized the music industry, pushing cassette tapes and vinyl to the scrap heap.

Digital downloads offer virtually no improvement in sound quality over the CD, but they can be easily transported and stored on a host of devices.

Anticipating the single biggest consumer shift in a generation, scores of companies are rushing to sell tracks that can be played on computers, mobile phones or a plethora of digital gadgets.

Many of them, such as Coca-Cola which introduced an online download service in the UK last week, are new to the business.

One industry official has estimated the number of new entrants in the online music market would top 50 this year -- from telecoms firms such as Cable & Wireless to retail giant Wal-Mart.

"By the end of 2004, half of the businesses that started will be out of business," Bernoff predicted, likening it to the late 1990s when the world caught the e-commerce bug.

"I haven't seen this level of irrational exuberance since the height of the bubble," he added.

The greater availability of music online appears to be winning some fans over from free file-sharing sites, recent studies show.

But piracy is still costly. Forrester estimated that in the U.S., the largest music market in the world, file-sharing cost the industry $700 million in sales in 2003 among the 12-22 year-old demographic.

January 26, 2004 at 07:01 PM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Clinton's Gift to Internet Age - Only 2 E-Mails

This is just plain funny .... President Clinton sent two emails while in office .... two! And one was a test.

Yahoo! News - Clinton's Gift to Internet Age - Only 2 E-Mails

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (Reuters) - The archives of the Bill Clinton (news - web sites) presidential library will contain 39,999,998 e-mails by the former president's staff and two by the man himself.

"The only two he sent," Skip Rutherford, president of the Clinton Presidential Foundation, which is raising money for the library, said Monday.

One of them may not actually qualify for electronic communication because it was a test to see if the commander in chief knew how to push the button on an e-mail.

Former Ohio Sen. John Glenn has the distinction of being the first American to orbit the Earth and the only person to receive an e-mail written by Clinton when he was in office.

The e-mail was sent with the help of Clinton staffers to the space shuttle while it was in orbit and Glenn was a part of the crew. It praised Glenn for his return to space after almost 40 years.

Rutherford said Clinton, who relished the chance to speak to voters, did not make time to send e-mails, even though Internet usage exploded during his presidency.

"He's not a techno-klutz. I don't think President (George W.) Bush sends e-mails, either," Rutherford said of Clinton.

"Most of the decisions in the Oval Office are made through decision memos," Rutherford said.

The 40 million e-mails of the Clinton administration are almost exclusively comprised of memos, notes and correspondence among his aides and cabinet members

Then as now, Rutherford added, Clinton was more apt to write personal notes or telephone than communicate through e-mail.

January 26, 2004 at 06:58 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

E-mail scam uses anti-terrorism hook

A variation on the fear approach to identity theft.

CNN.com - E-mail scam uses anti-terrorism hook - Jan. 26, 2004

By Daniel Sieberg
CNN
Monday, January 26, 2004 Posted: 2:55 PM EST (1955 GMT)

(CNN) -- E-mail users are being warned about a new identity theft scam that tries to snare victims by accusing them of violating the government's anti-terrorism Patriot Act.

The fraudulent message appears to be from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and asks people to verify their identity by clicking on a bogus Web link.

"In cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security, Federal, State and Local Governments [sic] your account has been denied insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation due to suspected violations of the Patriot Act," the fraudulent e-mail states.

It goes on to claim that the person's deposit insurance will be suspended until certain private information, such as a bank account number, is submitted.

Hundreds of complaints have been registered throughout the United States since Friday, the FDIC said, but there's no way of knowing exactly how many consumers may have fallen victim. The FDIC and the FBI are investigating the source of the fraudulent e-mails and seeking to disrupt them.

An FDIC official said Monday the federal agencies seemed to have effectively shut down the scam over the weekend, but the originators of the e-mail have changed their tactics. The agency said there are now a few versions of the fraudulent e-mail circulating, each steering users to different Web sites.

"Unfortunately, they're still at it," the FDIC representative said. "But it appears that most consumers are calling to ask about it before doing anything."

No one should access the Web link provided within the body of the e-mail in case it spawns a computer virus, the FDIC official added. She said although the fake Web sites look like the FDIC page, there was no computer intrusion at the FDIC offices.

The e-mails initially appeared to come from Pakistan, but now they seem to be coming from computers in Taiwan and China, the FDIC said. However, the stolen data appears to be funneled through an Internet address in Russia.

It's not unusual for Internet scam artists to hijack "innocent" computers in various parts of the world to cover their online tracks.

Spoofing a particular agency or company in an e-mail message is known as "phishing" or "carding."

If someone receives an apparent "phishing" message, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recommends that people contact the firm requesting the data by phone to verify the information. The FTC also suggests reviewing bank and credit card records on a regular basis, and reporting suspicious activity to the agency.

Previous "phishing" scams have targeted customers of companies such eBay, Citibank and PayPal.

January 26, 2004 at 06:56 PM in Phishing & identity theft | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Files 'overloaded' Mars probe

In the hard to imagine but true category. NASA scientists missed that the RAM on Spririt was inadequate to accomodate the files which the unit would have to manage ... wow - this seems an inexcuseable mistake made by people who are just a little to far distanced from reality, when they are spending good money to build, what should be the "easy part", i.e. the computer for Spirit.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Files 'overloaded' Mars probe

Nasa scientists say hundreds of computer files that have accumulated on the Mars rover Spirit may be the cause of problems that have crippled it.
These "cruise files" will now be deleted from the second Mars rover Opportunity before it rolls on to Mars to begin its science mission.

The Spirit rover suffered a major malfunction on Thursday 22 January causing a loss of contact with Earth.

Opportunity landed on Sunday and is apparently in excellent health.

Surface development manager for Spirit, Jennifer Trosper, said the problem involved two types of memory used by Spirit: Ram and flash.

Contact re-established
The space required in the rover's Ram memory to manage the data files stored in its flash memory was more than anticipated due to the build-up of files, Ms Trosper told a news conference.

"We have lots and lots of files on the spacecraft," she said. "We've been all the way through cruise [the journey through space], we've been using flash for that whole time. We have some cruise files on the file system.

"We were unaware of [the problem] because of the accumulation that happened during cruise and our 18 sols on the surface."

Project scientists have now re-established contact with the rover and are attempting to send it commands.

Rover health check

Mission controllers have started loading a "script" on the rover designed to locate the root cause of the problem and confirm the scientists' "hunch".

They will try to run a health check on the memory on Tuesday and try to delete some of the problem files on Wednesday.

After an initial reset on Thursday, Spirit became locked in a loop, continually rebooting its computer.

"We don't know yet if Spirit will be perfect again. Our current theory is one in which software will fix the problem, but there are other health checks we need to do," said Ms Trosper.

She added that scientists were still considering that a fault with the rover's high-gain antenna and motor control board that may have occurred during routine checks could have caused Spirit's breakdown.

But this scenario is considered much less likely by scientists working on the rover's recovery.

Halfway around the planet from Spirit, Nasa's Opportunity rover is having better luck.

Nasa released a new colour picture of the rover's landing site at Meridiani Planum, showing smooth, dark soil and a rocky outcrop of bedrock.

Scientists believe Opportunity has landed in a crater about 20 metres (66 feet) across.

They have confirmed that two-way communications between Earth and the rover on Mars are working normally and that the rover had the correct bearings - which will be vital once Opportunity rolls on to the Martian soil and begins driving around.

January 26, 2004 at 06:52 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Experts See End to Computer 'Spam' by 2006

I admire the comment by Gates that spam will be all but eliminated by 2006, but its unclear to me how that will happen. Currently the only strategy I see is that it is being "managed" by key word filters, and email address recognition. Both of these strategies are easy for spammers to get around, so I will await with interest the new tools which support Gates argument.

Yahoo! News - Experts See End to Computer 'Spam' by 2006

By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Internet users beware -- within a couple of years you may have fewer opportunities to reduce your debt or increase your p#$^s size.

Unwanted "spam" offers currently account for more than half of all e-mail traffic, but at least two high-tech executives say the torrent of pornography and unbelievably low mortgage rates could slow to a trickle by 2006.

Microsoft Corp (Nasdaq:MSFT - news). founder Bill Gates (news - web sites) predicted the demise of unsolicited commercial e-mail at the World Economic Forum (news - web sites) in Davos, Switzerland on Friday, according to a company spokesman.

His prediction was backed up on Monday by the head of a prominent anti-spam company.

"I believe we'll solve spam by the end of 2005," said Enrique Salem, president and chief executive of privately held Brightmail Inc., which scrubs spam for large Internet service providers like Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ - news) and BellSouth Corp.(NYSE:BLS - news).

That may seem like wishful thinking to Internet users who have seen no drop in herbal Viagra offers since a new federal anti-spam law went into effect on January 1.

Salem said Brightmail numbers show that the proportion of spam has increased to around 60 percent of all e-mail, from 58 percent in December.

That figure should peak around 65 percent later this year and than start to decline as improved filtering techniques take hold and federal agents begin enforcing the new law, he said.

Brightmail rolled out a "reputation service" on Monday to profile e-mail sources and pinpoint those who send out spam. Mail from "clean" sources like friends and reputable businesses will pass unencumbered, while other addresses that have generated a large number of complaints will be blocked.

Combined with identity-verification services being developed by Time Warner Inc's (NYSE:TWX - news) America Online and other large Internet providers, the reputation service should block enough spam to make the business unprofitable, Salem said.

At Davos, Gates outlined several other techniques to discourage spam, a company spokesman said. Spammers could be slowed down through "computational puzzles" that suck up computer processing power or require a human to solve them. Another approach could require senders of unsolicited e-mail to pay a fee unless it is waived by the receiver.

"We as a company believe that by a couple of years from now spam will be down to a very manageable trickle ... it will be almost an afterthought," Microsoft spokesman Sean Sundwall said.

America Online introduced a new security feature last week that would make it harder for spammers to hijack an AOL address.

A company spokesman said fighting spam was a priority at the No. 1 Internet provider, but he declined to predict when it would end.

"It's very popular right now, in fact I'd say it's in vogue to say you have the largest, greatest cure-all to solve spam forever," said AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham. "But these are the same people who think we'll end up living in a world with no taxes and a cure for the common cold."

January 26, 2004 at 05:01 PM in Spam | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 25, 2004

The Tyranny of Copyright?

By ROBERT S. BOYNTON

ast fall, a group of civic-minded students at Swarthmore College received a sobering lesson in the future of political protest. They had come into possession of some 15,000 e-mail messages and memos -- presumably leaked or stolen -- from Diebold Election Systems, the largest maker of electronic voting machines in the country. The memos featured Diebold employees' candid discussion of flaws in the company's software and warnings that the computer network was poorly protected from hackers. In light of the chaotic 2000 presidential election, the Swarthmore students decided that this information shouldn't be kept from the public. Like aspiring Daniel Ellsbergs with their would-be Pentagon Papers, they posted the files on the Internet, declaring the act a form of electronic whistle-blowing.

Unfortunately for the students, their actions ran afoul of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D.M.C.A.), one of several recent laws that regulate intellectual property and are quietly reshaping the culture. Designed to protect copyrighted material on the Web, the act makes it possible for an Internet service provider to be liable for the material posted by its users -- an extraordinary burden that providers of phone service, by contrast, do not share. Under the law, if an aggrieved party (Diebold, say) threatens to sue an Internet service provider over the content of a subscriber's Web site, the provider can avoid liability simply by removing the offending material. Since the mere threat of a lawsuit is usually enough to scare most providers into submission, the law effectively gives private parties veto power over much of the information published online -- as the Swarthmore students would soon learn.

Not long after the students posted the memos, Diebold sent letters to Swarthmore charging the students with copyright infringement and demanding that the material be removed from the students' Web page, which was hosted on the college's server. Swarthmore complied. The question of whether the students were within their rights to post the memos was essentially moot: thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, their speech could be silenced without the benefit of actual lawsuits, public hearings, judges or other niceties of due process.

After persistent challenges by the students -- and a considerable amount of negative publicity for Diebold -- in November the company agreed not to sue. To the delight of the students' supporters, the memos are now back on their Web site. But to proponents of free speech on the Internet, the story remains a chilling one.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at New York University, calls anecdotes like this ''copyright horror stories,'' and there have been a growing number of them over the past few years. Once a dry and seemingly mechanical area of the American legal system, intellectual property law can now be found at the center of major disputes in the arts, sciences and -- as in the Diebold case -- politics. Recent cases have involved everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's book ''The Wind Done Gone'' (which tells the story of Mitchell's ''Gone With the Wind'' from a slave's perspective) to corporations like Celera Genomics filing for patents for human genes. The most publicized development came in September, when the Recording Industry Association of America began suing music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with defendants as young as 12. And in November, a group of independent film producers went to court to fight a ban, imposed this year by the Motion Picture Association of America, on sending DVD's to those who vote for annual film awards.

Not long ago, the Internet's ability to provide instant, inexpensive and perfect copies of text, sound and images was heralded with the phrase ''information wants to be free.'' Yet the implications of this freedom have frightened some creators -- particularly those in the recording, publishing and movie industries -- who argue that the greater ease of copying and distribution increases the need for more stringent intellectual property laws. The movie and music industries have succeeded in lobbying lawmakers to allow them to tighten their grips on their creations by lengthening copyright terms. The law has also extended the scope of copyright protection, creating what critics have called a ''paracopyright,'' which prohibits not only duplicating protected material but in some cases even gaining access to it in the first place. In addition to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the most significant piece of new legislation is the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, which added 20 years of protection to past and present copyrighted works and was upheld by the Supreme Court a year ago. In less than a decade, the much-ballyhooed liberating potential of the Internet seems to have given way to something of an intellectual land grab, presided over by legislators and lawyers for the media industries.

In response to these developments, a protest movement is forming, made up of lawyers, scholars and activists who fear that bolstering copyright protection in the name of foiling ''piracy'' will have disastrous consequences for society -- hindering the ability to experiment and create and eroding our democratic freedoms. This group of reformers, which Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, calls the ''free culture movement,'' might also be thought of as the ''Copy Left'' (to borrow a term originally used by software programmers to signal that their product bore fewer than the usual amount of copyright restrictions). Lawyers and professors at the nation's top universities and law schools, the members of the Copy Left aren't wild-eyed radicals opposed to the use of copyright, though they do object fiercely to the way copyright has been distorted by recent legislation and manipulated by companies like Diebold. Nor do they share a coherent political ideology. What they do share is a fear that the United States is becoming less free and ultimately less creative. While the American copyright system was designed to encourage innovation, it is now, they contend, being used to squelch it. They see themselves as fighting for a traditional understanding of intellectual property in the face of a radical effort to turn copyright law into a tool for hoarding ideas. ''The notion that intellectual property rights should never expire, and works never enter the public domain -- this is the truly fanatical and unconstitutional position,'' says Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the intellectual hub of the Copy Left.

Thinkers like Lessig and Zittrain promote a vision of a world in which copyright law gives individual creators the exclusive right to profit from their intellectual property for a brief, limited period -- thus providing an incentive to create while still allowing successive generations of creators to draw freely on earlier ideas. They stress that borrowing and collaboration are essential components of all creation and caution against being seduced by the romantic myth of ''the author'': the lone garret-dwelling poet, creating masterpieces out of thin air. ''No one writes from nothing,'' says Yochai Benkler, a professor at Yale Law School. ''We all take the world as it is and use it, remix it.''

Where does the Copy Left believe a creation ought to go once its copyright has lapsed? Into the public domain, or the ''cultural commons'' -- a shared stockpile of ideas where the majority of America's music and literature would reside, from which anyone could partake without having to pay or ask permission. James Boyle, a professor at Duke Law School, notes that the public domain is a necessity for social and cultural progress, not some sort of socialist luxury. ''Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain,'' he has written, ''every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property.''

In opposition to the cultural commons stands the ''permission culture,'' an epithet the Copy Left uses to describe the world it fears our current copyright law is creating. Whereas you used to own the CD or book you purchased, in the permission culture it is more likely that you'll lease (or ''license'') a song, video or e-book, and even then only under restrictive conditions: read your e-book, but don't copy and paste any selections; listen to music on your MP3 player, but don't burn it onto a CD or transfer it to your stereo. The Copy Left sees innovations like iTunes, Apple's popular online music store, as the first step toward a society in which much of the cultural activity that we currently take for granted -- reading an encyclopedia in the public library, selling a geometry textbook to a friend, copying a song for a sibling -- will be rerouted through a system of micropayments in return for which the rights to ever smaller pieces of our culture are doled out. ''Sooner or later,'' predicts Miriam Nisbet, the legislative counsel for the American Library Association, ''you'll get to the point where you say, 'Well, I guess that 25 cents isn't too much to pay for this sentence,' and then there's no hope and no going back.''

There is a growing sense of urgency among the members of the Copy Left. They worry that if they do not raise awareness of what is happening to copyright law, Americans will be stuck forever with the consequences of decisions now being made -- and laws being passed -- in the name of preventing piracy. ''We are at a moment in our history at which the terms of freedom and justice are up for grabs,'' Benkler says. He notes that each major innovation in the history of communications -- the printing press, radio, telephone -- was followed by a brief period of openness before the rules of its usage were determined and alternatives eliminated. ''The Internet,'' he says, ''is in that space right now.''

America has always had an ambivalent attitude toward the notion of intellectual property. Thomas Jefferson, for one, considered copyright a necessary evil: he favored providing just enough incentive to create, nothing more, and thereafter allowing ideas to flow freely as nature intended. ''If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property,'' he wrote, ''it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone.'' His conception of copyright was enshrined in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to ''promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.''

But Jefferson's vision has not fared well. As the country's economy developed from agrarian to industrial to ''information,'' ideas took on greater importance, and the demand increased for stronger copyright laws. In 1790, copyright protection lasted for 14 years and could be renewed just once before the work entered the public domain. Between 1831 and 1909, the maximum term was increased from 28 to 56 years. Today, copyright protection for individuals lasts for 70 years after the death of the author; for corporations, it's 95 years after publication. Over the past three decades, the flow of material entering the public domain has slowed to a trickle: in 1973, according to Lessig, more than 85 percent of copyright owners chose not to renew their copyrights, allowing their ideas to become common coin; since the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act lengthened present and past copyrights for an additional 20 years, little material will enter the public domain any time soon.

Some of the changes that expanded copyright protection were made with an understanding of their effects; what also troubles the Copy Left, however, are the unintended consequences of seemingly innocuous tweaks in copyright legislation. In particular, two laws that were passed years before the creation of the Internet helped set the stage for today's copyright bonanza. Before the 1909 Copyright Act, copyright was construed as the exclusive right to ''publish'' a creation; but the 1909 law changed the wording to prohibit others from ''copying'' one's creation -- a seemingly minor change that thereafter linked copyright protection to the copying technology of the day, whether that was the pen, the photocopy machine, the VCR or the Internet. In 1976, a revision to the law dispensed with the requirement of formally registering or renewing a copyright in order to comply with international copyright standards. Henceforth, everything -- from e-mail messages to doodles on a napkin -- was automatically copyrighted the moment it was ''fixed in a tangible medium.''

The true significance of these two laws didn't become apparent until the arrival of the Internet, when every work became automatically protected by copyright and every use of a work via the Internet constituted a new copy. ''Nobody realized that eliminating those requirements would create a nightmare of uncertainty and confusion about what content is available to use,'' Lessig explains, ''which is a crucial question now that the Internet is the way we gain access to so much content. It was a kind of oil spill in the free culture.''

Lessig is one of the most prominent and eloquent defenders of the Copy Left's belief that copyright law should return to its Jeffersonian roots. ''We are invoking ideas that should be central to the American tradition, such as that a free society is richer than a control society,'' he says. ''But in the cultural sphere, big media wants to build a new Soviet empire where you need permission from the central party to do anything.'' He complains that Americans have been reduced to ''an Oliver Twist-like position,'' in which they have to ask, ''Please, sir, may I?'' every time we want to use something under copyright -- and then only if we are fortunate enough to have the assistance of a high-priced lawyer.

In October 2002, Lessig argued before the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft, which concerned a challenge to the Copyright Term Extension Act. On behalf of the plaintiffs, Lessig argued that perpetually extending the term of copyright was a violation of the Constitution's requirement that copyright exist for ''a limited time.'' The court responded that although perhaps unwise on policy grounds, granting such extensions was within Congress's power. It was a major setback for the Copy Left. Given the Eldred decision, there is nothing to stop a future Congress from extending copyright's term again and again.

Lessig's efforts haven't been limited to the courtroom. In 2001, he was part of a group that founded an organization called Creative Commons, which offers individual creators the ability to carefully calibrate the level of control they wish to maintain over their works. The organization services the needs of, say, musicians who want rappers and D.J.'s to be able to download and remix their music without legal trouble or of writers who want their works republished without charge, but only by nonprofit publications. The Commons has developed a software application for the Web that allows copyright holders who do not want to exercise all of the restrictions of copyright law to dedicate their work to the public domain or license it on terms that allow copying and creative reuses. The aim of Creative Commons is not only to increase the sum of raw source material online but also to make it cheaper and easier for other creators to locate and access that material. This will enable people to use the Internet to find, for example, photographs that are free to be altered or reused or texts that may be copied, distributed or sampled -- all by their authors' permission. The Creative Commons now has a presence in 10 countries, including Brazil, whose minister of culture, the musician Gilberto Gil, plans to release some of his songs under the Creative Commons license so that others may freely borrow from them. Creative Commons is currently talking to Amazon and others about a plan to release out-of-print books under Creative Commons licenses.

One of the central ideas of the Copy Left is that the Internet has been a catalyst for re-engaging with the culture -- for interacting with the things we read and watch and listen to, as opposed to just sitting back and absorbing them. This vision of how culture works stands in contrast to what the Copy Left calls the ''broadcast model'' -- the arrangement in which a small group of content producers disseminate their creations (television, movies, music) through controlled routes (cable, theaters, radio-TV stations) to passive consumers. Yochai Benkler, the law professor at Yale, argues that people want to be more engaged in their culture, despite the broadcast technology, like television, that he says has narcotized us. ''People are users,'' he says. ''They are producers, storytellers, consumers, interactors -- complex, varied beings, not just people who go to the store, buy a packaged good off the shelf and consume.''

A few weeks ago, I met Benkler in his loft in downtown New York. He stroked his beard while explicating his ideas with the care of a man parsing a particularly knotty question of Scripture. Benkler was born in Tel Aviv in 1964, and while in his 20's, he helped found a remote desert kibbutz in an attempt to recapture the Zionist movement's original socialist spirit. The challenges of creating a community in isolation from the rest of society ultimately proved overwhelming. ''After a few years,'' he said, ''we realized that at the rate we were going we wouldn't attend college until we were in our 50's.'' It was a hard lesson in the difficulty of producing anything -- a community, a work of art -- in isolation.

But Benkler's belief in the importance of creating things in common rests on more than anecdotal evidence. What makes his argument more than wishful thinking, he said, is that he has some economic evidence for his view. ''Let's compare a few numbers,'' he said. ''How much do people pay the recording industry to listen to music versus how much people pay the telephone industry to talk to their friends and family? The recording industry is a $12 billion a year business, compared with the telephone business, which is a more than $250 billion a year business. That is what economists call a 'revealed willingness to pay,' a clear preference for a technology that allows you to participate in work, socializing and interaction in general, over a technology that allows you to be a passive consumer of a packaged good. Is that a study of human nature? No. Is it an economic measure that would suggest there is a lot of demand out there for speaking and listening to others? Yes.''

According to Benkler, the cultural commons not only offers a better model for creativity; it makes good economic sense. Like Lessig and other members of the Copy Left, he takes his bearings from the free software movement and views the success of products like Linux and services like Google as evidence of a viable collaborative (or ''peer to peer'') model for producing and sharing ideas -- a model that will augment and, in some cases, replace the current model. (He concedes that some products, like novels and blockbuster movies, will never be produced peer to peer, though they will draw on the work of artists before them.)

Benkler predicts that the recording industry will be one of the first businesses to go. ''All it does is package and sell goods,'' he said, ''which is technically an unfeasible way of continuing. They are trying their best to legislate the environment to change, but that doesn't mean we have to let them.''

The battle between the Copy Left and its opponents is as much a clash of worldviews as of legal doctrine. Aligned against the Copy Left are those who sympathize with the romantic notion of authorship and view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other. Jane Ginsburg, a professor at Columbia Law School who specializes in copyright law, fears that in the Copy Left's rush to secure the public domain, it gives short shrift to the author. A self-described ''copyright enthusiast,'' Ginsburg considers the author the moral center of copyright law and questions equating copyright control with corporate greed. ''Copyright cannot be understood merely as a grudgingly tolerated way station on the road to the public domain,'' she writes in a recent article titled ''The Concept of Authorship in Comparative Copyright Law.'' ''Because copyright arises out of the act of creating a work, authors have moral claims that neither corporate intermediaries nor consumer end-users can (straightfacedly) assert.''

Ginsburg and others embrace many elements of the ''permission society'' demonized by the Copy Left and cite developments like the iTunes store as a sign of greater consumer choice and freedom. In his book ''Copyright's Highway,'' Paul Goldstein, a professor at Stanford Law School, writes that ''the logic of property rights dictates their extension into every corner in which people derive enjoyment and value from literary and artistic works.'' He characterizes the permission society as a ''celestial jukebox'' in which access to every creation -- music, literature, movies, art -- is available to anyone for a price.

An entire ''digital rights management'' industry has arisen to bring this vision to fruition, each company calibrating a particular license through a system of micropayments -- play a song on your computer for one price; transfer it to your MP3 player for a slightly higher fee. Goldstein argues that the scheme of a business like iTunes is actually more efficient and democratic than the commons model championed by the Copy Left. ''The problem with the commons is that it doesn't take into consideration the direction of the payment; it doesn't reveal what kind of culture gets used and what kind doesn't,'' he says. ''I think it is good to have a price tag attached to each use because it tells producers what consumers want; it lets them vote with their purchase for the kinds of culture they want.''

But the Copy Left is convinced that there is a better way for the entertainment industry to adapt to the Internet age while still paying its artists their due. William Fisher, director of the Berkman Center, has spent the last three years devising an alternative compensation system that would enable the entertainment industry to restructure its business model without resorting to cumbersome micropayments. He has worked out a modified version of the system that artists' advocacy groups currently use to make sure that composers are paid when their music is performed or recorded. According to Fisher's plan, all works capable of being transmitted online would be registered with a central office (whether government or independent is unclear). The central office would then monitor how frequently a work is used and compensate the creators on that basis. The money would come from a tax on various content-related devices, like DVD burners, blank CD's or digital recorders. It is a brave proposal in a political culture that is allergic to taxes and uncomfortable with complex solutions. Still, if his numbers do indeed add up, Fisher's proposal might be the best thing that ever happened to the cultural commons: the creators would be paid, while every individual would have unlimited access to every cultural creation.

Fisher and Charles Nesson, his colleague at Harvard Law School, have showed this proposal to movie executives and lawyers for several media conglomerates. Fisher says that his ideas have been received with great interest by the very industries -- music, home video -- that see their business models disintegrating before their eyes.

When asked whether he thinks his ambitious scheme has a chance, Fisher says that the likeliest possibility would be for it to be adopted in countries that are neither so developed that they have signed on to international copyright protocols nor so undeveloped that they are desperate to do so. Only second-world countries, like Croatia or Brazil, he speculates, are unfettered enough to try something new. ''The hope is in the rain forest,'' he says, in countries that ''are more like the United States was before 1890, when we were a 'pirate' nation.''

And in the United States, is there any future for this sort of payment system? Perhaps when the various current schemes fail, Fisher's plan will seem more attractive, he says. ''What is involved here is nothing less than the shape of our culture and the way we think of ourselves as citizens,'' he adds. He describes a recent letter he received from a supporter of his work. ''When they come for my guns and my music, they'd better bring an army,'' it read. ''People are used to being creatively engaged with the culture,'' Fisher explains. ''They won't let someone legislate that away.''

The future of the Copy Left's efforts is still an open question. James Boyle has likened the movement's efforts to establish a cultural commons to those of the environmental movement in its infancy. Like Rachel Carson in the years before Earth Day, the Copy Left today is trying to raise awareness of the intellectual ''land'' to which they believe we ought to feel entitled and to propose policies and laws that will preserve it. Just as the idea of environmentalism became viable in the wake of the last century's advances in industrial production, the growth of this century's information technologies, Boyle argues, will force the country to address the erosion of the cultural commons. ''The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently,'' he writes, ''to see that there was such a thing as 'the environment' rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment. We have to 'invent' the public domain before we can save it.''

Robert S. Boynton, director of the graduate magazine journalism program at New York University, is writing a book about American literary journalism.

January 25, 2004 at 12:51 PM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Politics of the Web: Meet, Greet, Segregate, Meet Again

By AMY HARMON

HAT the Internet is newly teeming with grass-roots political activists of all stripes is one of the truisms of this campaign season. But to Melissa Kramer, a Wesley Clark supporter who spends hours online every day, it doesn't feel that way.
On Ms. Kramer's Internet, the politics are all General Clark, all the time. As soon as she drops her children off at school, Ms. Kramer logs on to Clark04.com, the official campaign Web log, to check the campaign press releases. Then it's on to the Clark "community" blogs, to post information about local Clark news in Dayton, Ohio, and read the views of other Clark supporters around the country. Later, she might visit the Web log of the film director Michael Moore, who recently endorsed General Clark.

The only time Ms. Kramer comes across, say, a Dean supporter is when one ventures onto the Clark Web site's discussion area. These partisan visitors, known among political bloggers as "trolls," are typically seen as trying to disrupt productive discussion, and regulars know to shun them.

"There's no point in going over to try to persuade people who aren't going to listen to you anyway," said Ms. Kramer in a telephone interview. "If I'm going to try to persuade someone, I'd save it for in-person. The Internet isn't good for that."

Many of the thousands of newly minted Internet activists outside the Clark camp seem to agree with her, if only on that subject. Online political discussion has become so fragmented so quickly that some public policy scolds warn that the Internet is in danger of narrowing the spectrum of debate even as it attracts more participants to it. The same medium that allows people to peruse a near- infinite number of news sources also lets them pinpoint the ones they want and filter out the rest.

"The experience of the echo chamber is easier to create with a computer than with many of the forms of political interaction that preceded it,'' said Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago and author of "Republic.com.'' "The discussion will be about strategy, or horse race issues or how bad the other candidates are, and it will seem like debate. It's not like this should be censored, but it can increase acrimony, increase extremism and make mutual understanding more difficult.''

Analysts say there is no question that the Internet is mobilizing citizens who might not otherwise be politically active. Howard Dean raised millions of dollars in small donations from Internet supporters. The conservative Heritage Foundation has used Meetup.com, the organizing tool that worked so well for Dr. Dean, to sponsor hundreds of small group meetings around the country. And more than 5,000 people are using the Clark campaign's software to create their own local Web logs.

That's encouraging to some social scientists.

"If people are getting together to talk about politics, that's better than people sitting watching a 30-second sound bite,'' said Robert Putnam, a public policy professor at Harvard.

But Professor Putnam, whose book "Bowling Alone'' lamented the demise of nonpartisan community groups like bowling leagues and Kiwanis clubs, said more interaction among people with diverse views would be preferable.

"The terribly polarized politics that we have now is the culmination of a trend that's been going on for 25 years,'' he said. "Whether the Internet is going to make the problem better or make it worse is a big, important question.''

On the Web right now, there are Howards for Howard, Independents for Kerry and Kids4Kucinich. There is little evidence that they are preaching to anyone but the converted.

One reason is that outsiders who raise questions about the candidate are often greeted with deep suspicion by insiders who know that the Internet's anonymous form of communication allows people to act as provocateurs with relative impunity.

On the Dean blog, Mitchell Gore, 39, a graphic designer in Portland, Ore., advised in a post last week: "Beware the stealth-troll post; the one that starts with something like 'I was supporting Dr. Dean, but ever since. ' These trolls want to start a Dean-bashing session. The best way to deal with them is to ignore them completely."

Still, even some Dean supporters, the pioneers of politics on the Internet, have begun to worry that their insularity contributed to their candidate's poor showing in the Iowa caucuses. "It's all well and good to cheer each other on,'' wrote one supporter last week. "But clearly that's not enough.''

The Internet became the ultimate tool for finding like minds and blocking out others long before supporters of candidates began seeking one another out on Meetup.com. With online dating sites where searches can be tailored by age and income, e-mail forums for the most narrow band of subjects, bookmarked sites and even spam filters, the Web allows users to tailor the information they consume more than any other medium. Social scientists even have a term for it: cyberbalkanization.

"Democracy has been defined as a process of discussion," said Bruce Bimber, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "The Internet's tendency to fragment people into like-minded groups is something those of us who study these things are worried about."

Professor Bimber's research from the 2000 campaign showed that partisan sites had much bigger audiences than nonpartisan, general information sites. Taking note of such data, Youth04, a nonpartisan group using the Internet to provoke political debate among young people, is trying to get them to meet in person.

"I concluded it was almost impossible to try to use the Internet as the place where these great discussions would take place," David Anderson, the group's executive director, said.

Many political activists see this blending of high-tech with high-touch, as it has come to be called, as a sign that the Web can be used for more debate. Scott Heiferman, the founder of Meetup.com, where people interested in any subject or cause can sign up to attend a local meeting with others similarly inclined, says Dean supporters once crashed a Kerry meet-up in New York. There have even been cases of priests showing up at atheist meet-ups. But the meetings are, by their very nature, self-segregating.

John O'Brien, a business consultant who attended a recent meet-up sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, said he enjoyed mingling with other conservatives. The only reason he would attend a Dean meet-up, he said, would be to heckle.

Blogs - or Web journals - are also more about monologue than discussion. President Bush's re-election campaign blog, for instance, does not include a largely standard feature that most online journals have: the ability for readers to reply to the posts.

But if Internet users tend to seek out people and information that reinforce the views they already hold, they are following a law of human nature that social scientists have observed for decades.

"Everything we know about psychology and political communication says people look for stuff that confirms their views," said Michael Cornfield, research director at the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. "It would be a surprise if the Internet doesn't accelerate the trend."

Some Internet activists don't see any problem with that. For MoveOn.org, the goal is to mobilize like-minded people to action against the Republican agenda, not to persuade them that it's wrong, said Eli Pariser, the group's campaign director.

"Changing people's minds is overrated," Mr. Pariser said. "Most of the people in this country are with us, and it's a matter of getting them active and getting them informed."

January 25, 2004 at 12:50 PM in Politics | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

RSS Feed (Really Simple Syndication)

Here is the BBC introduction and direction for using their RSS Feeds. Its simple, clear and well laid out for the novice.

BBC NEWS | Help | RSS | RSS Feed (Really Simple Syndication)

RSS Feed (Really Simple Syndication)

RSS is an easy way for you to keep updated automatically on websites you like. Instead of you having to go to websites to see if they've written a new article or feature, you can use RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication) to get them to tell you every time they have something new.
BBC News now offers RSS feeds (or channels) for most of its sections, eg World, Business, etc.

How can I make use of RSS?
In general you need to get hold of a program called a News Reader. This displays RSS information feeds from your chosen websites on your computer.
All you then have to do is choose which RSS feeds you want for instance, an RSS feed of all the latest Entertainment stories from BBC News.

How do I get a News Reader?
There are a range of different News Readers available; click on the Google link to find links to the most popular products, many of which are free to install.
Different News Readers work on different operating systems, so you will need to take this into account when you make your choice.

How can I sign up to RSS feeds from BBC News?
Go to the section of BBC News with the headlines you are interested in (eg World). Click on the link that says 'RSS version' in the red services strip at the bottom of the page.
You then need to follow the instructions for your particular News Reader in order to add this XML feed to your RSS list.

That link will take you to a page like this, with a link to the corresponding feed at the top.

Below is a selection of the BBC News pages available for syndication
You need a newsreader to access. You can right click any of these links, select "copy shortcut", and paste into your newsreader. Its that simple.

News Front Page
World
UK
England
Northern Ireland
Scotland
Wales
Business
Politics
Health
Education
Science/Nature
Technology
Entertainment

January 25, 2004 at 12:07 PM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

"Miserable Failure" and Google

Seth comments on Google bombing by politicians. This brings into play the entire credibility of internet, particularly amongst newcombers.

Infothought: "Miserable Failure" and Google

The "Miserable Failure" Google-bomb, of linking the keywords "Miserable Failure" to the White House page "Biography of President George W. Bush", was recently covered in the New York Times. It's now becoming a tactic in political campaigns.
Google-bombing, as I think of it, demonstrates the conflict between *popularity* and *authority* for search engines. As the article notes: about searching "miserable failure":
The more high-traffic sites that link a Web page to a particular phrase, the more Google tends to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of the president's official biography, the term does not occur on the destination site.

It's an illustration of many people repeating something (popularity) for purposes of having it accepted as meaningful (authority). This leads to obvious concerns as to just how much neutral authority can be corrupted by partisan popularity (note this assumes for the sake of discussion that course there's a neutral authority in the first place - a very arguable assumption). To wit (the link below is my own, for humor):

Google plays down the significance of Google bombing, saying the search results merely reflect what is actually happening on the Web.

"We're only seeing it with obscure queries where there's really not that much action on the Web about them," said Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology. "I don't think it's possible to do this sort of thing on queries with well-defined results like I.B.M.' So given that it only affects one query out of the more than 200 million a day we handle, it's hard to see it becoming much of a problem."

I'm actually a little puzzled by that statement. What does he mean by "well-defined results"? Maybe "results which have many links already". Then it looks like he's basically right. You can't capture a term which already has a strong meaning. But even so, there's a still a lot of search-space in which to play.

January 25, 2004 at 12:46 AM in Portals | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 24, 2004

That Gibberish in Your In-Box May Be Good News

Sp@m ShEn@nig@nS!!: That Gibberish in Your In-Box May Be Good News

By GEORGE JOHNSON

Published: January 25, 2004

F you could sit back with Zen-like detachment and observe the dross piling up in your electronic mailbox, the spam wars might come to seem like a fascinating electronic game. Like creatures running through a maze with constantly shifting walls, spammers dart and weave to sneak their solicitations past ever wilier junk mail filters. They are organisms, or maybe genomes, grinding out one random mutation after another, desperately trying to elude the Grim Reaper.

Viagra becomes "vi@gra" or "v-i-@-g-r-a." Then, as the filters adapt, "v1@gr@" and even "\/l@gr@." Currently, the Internet is swarming with mutants like this: "Cheap Val?(u)m, Viagr@, X(a)n@x, Som@ Di3t Pills Many M3ds RIZfURqgHr77B," the final string of gibberish hanging like an appendage of junk DNA.

Taking a different approach, a come-on for barnyard pornography devolves into "faurm galz bing e rottic." Another pitch promises to reveal "Seakrets of ((eks-eks-eks)) stars."

Dispiriting as it is to start the morning with a hundred of these orthographic monsters crouching in your in-box, there is reason to take heart. Measured in bits and bytes, the sheer volume of spam may not have diminished. But advanced filtering software, which learns to recognize the mercurial traits of junk e-mail, is having an effect. The spammers' messages are becoming harder and harder to decipher. Sense is inevitably degenerating into nonsense, like a pileup of random mutations in an endangered species gasping its last breaths.

Earlier this month, when Internet experts met in Cambridge, Mass., for the 2004 Spam Conference (available as a Web broadcast at spamconference.org), they showed just how far the science of spam fighting has come. For all the recent talk of suing spammers and compiling a national do-not-spam list, most speakers were putting their hopes in technological, not legal solutions. The federal government's new junk e-mail law, the Can Spam Act, barely rated a mention.

Terry Sullivan, a spam researcher with a doctorate in information science, described how he used a "handy 10-dimensional high-fidelity model of historical spam space" to analyze how junk e-mail changes over time. Long stretches of stability are suddenly interrupted by brief bursts of innovation, a pattern he compared to what some evolutionary biologists call punctuated equilibrium. The encouraging news is that there is enough stability - an enduring core of "spamminess" - for the invaders to be quickly identified and destroyed.

Another presentation, called "Cockroaches Hate the Light," considered how to authenticate senders so that spammers can't easily fake their identities. Other speakers proposed eco-electronic solutions like digital postage stamps that would put a price on sending e-mail - trivial for an individual user but making hit-or-miss barrages prohibitively expensive.

Like epidemiologists discussing how to predict and control a biological outbreak, conferencegoers compared the merits of various filtering techniques. Which is better: first-order Bayesian, token grab bag, sparse binary polynomial hash or markovian weighting? The meaning of the terms may be opaque to outsiders, but the underlying message comes through: the spammers are up against some increasingly advanced cybernetic artillery.

Many experts believe that solving the spam problem will require a combination of approaches. But laws take forever to pass and amend. Technological fixes like sender authentication and electronic stamps would also take time to carry out, but filtering is already here - and it is reducing the spammers' messages to feeble signals swamped by a roar of alphanumeric noise.

The turning point came in August 2002 when a computer scientist, Paul Graham, issued a manifesto called "A Plan for Spam," describing how to filter e-mail using a statistical method discovered in the 18th century by the English theologian and mathematician Thomas Bayes. Bayesian e-mail filters had been studied for years, but with Mr. Graham's paper the idea went mainstream.

Presented with thousands of examples of good and bad e-mail, a Bayesian filter compiles a list ranking each word according to how likely it is to appear in junk e-mail. Rising to the top of the roster are high scorers like Valium, Xanax, mortgage, porn and Viagra. Settling toward the bottom are words like deciduous, cashmere and intensify. Hovering in the middle are the vast number of neutral words that can swing either way.

When a new piece of e-mail arrives, the filtering program counts up the words and computes an overall ranking. If the number exceeds a certain threshold, the message is rejected as spam.

A message from a friend saying that she is so worried about refinancing her mortgage that she took a Valium will pique the filter's interest. But most of the text will probably consist of words with neutral or very low rankings, dragging down the score and allowing the e-mail to go through.

If a spam promising "l0w m0rtg@ge rates" slips by, the filter is informed by the user that it has made an error. The mutation is then moved higher on the list, as well as future mutations of the mutation, until the spammer is reduced to sending gobbledygook. A recent e-mail message making the rounds promised "Leacatharsisrn to make a fortcongestiveune on eBay!" (A Web link inside led to a site with information on a money-making auction scheme.)

Increasingly the subject lines convey no meaning at all: "begonia breadfruit extempore defocus purveyor." For the spammer, the hope, slim as it seems, is that a few curious souls will open and read the e-mail, which begins, "I finally was able to lsoe the wieght" and goes on to offer a product "Guanarteed to work or your menoy back!" Read out loud, the message sounds a little like HAL the computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey" sinking into aphasia as its synapses are severed one by one.

In what may be their final death throes, some spammers have begun sending messages consisting of a single image or a one-line sales pitch - "picospams" - with a link to a Web site. Often appended at the end, in an attempt to flummox the filters, is a scrap of Dadaist poetry - "feverish squirt feat transconductance terrify broken trite fascist axis stultify floc bookshelves. " Sometimes this "word salad," as it has come to be called, is rendered in invisible ink - white letters on a white background - or hidden inside an embedded formatting command.

No matter. The filters learn to adapt. If the spammers want to stay in business, ultimately they must convey at least a hint of meaning. After all, you cannot send a completely random message - or one that is blank - and expect many people to click the link.

January 24, 2004 at 10:25 PM in Spam | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Politics of the Web: Meet, Greet, Segregate, Meet Again

By AMY HARMON

Published: January 25, 2004

That's encouraging to some social scientists.

"If people are getting together to talk about politics, that's better than people sitting watching a 30-second sound bite,'' said Robert Putnam, a public policy professor at Harvard.

On the Web right now, there are Howards for Howard, Independents for Kerry and Kids4Kucinich. There is little evidence that they are preaching to anyone but the converted.

"I concluded it was almost impossible to try to use the Internet as the place where these great discussions would take place," David Anderson, the group's executive director, said.

But if Internet users tend to seek out people and information that reinforce the views they already hold, they are following a law of human nature that social scientists have observed for decades.

"Changing people's minds is overrated," Mr. Pariser said. "Most of the people in this country are with us, and it's a matter of getting them active and getting them informed."

January 24, 2004 at 10:24 PM in Politics | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Google Tries Out Its Own Friendster-Style Service

Not sure about this "friends of friends" model, but the current growth rate seems explosive, and Google are serious about getting into it.

Yahoo! News - Google Tries Out Its Own Friendster-Style Service

By Lisa Baertlein
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google, the No. 1 Web search engine, this week rolled out an Internet service called Orkut, a challenge to the pioneering social networking site Friendster.

The service, at (http://www.orkut.com), was released on Thursday. It is still in the test phase and membership is by invitation only, Google said.

"It's not part of Google's product portfolio right now," Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriguez said of the Google-affiliated service developed by company engineer Orkut Buyukkokten.

The launch of Orkut comes after Friendster's rejection late last year of Google's offer to buy the site that has become known as an online venue for hooking up friends of friends.

It also arrives as new social networking sites are cropping up at a frenzied pace, fueled by venture capital investments in companies like Friendster and the business-oriented networking service LinkedIn.

Google News and Google-operated Froogle, a comparison shopping site still in testing, also were the result of the personal projects that Google encourages employees to spend 20 percent of their at-work time developing.

In its user agreement, Orkut said it may share member information with Google.

Such information could be useful to Google as it battles Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and new entrant Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) to deliver the best personalized Web search product, which many industry watchers see as that market's next frontier.

Friendster has attracted venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which is also an early-state investor in Google.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, is expected to float shares sometime this spring in one of the most anticipated initial public offerings since the Internet boom of the late 1990s.

January 24, 2004 at 10:04 AM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

TOOTHBRUSH BEATS OUT PC, CAR, CELL PHONE AS THE INVENTION MOST AMERICANS SAY THEY CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT

News: Press Releases

2003 Lemelson-MIT Survey Also Finds Teens Need Encouragement From Parents, Teachers to Invent
Cambridge, MA, January 21, 2003 — While it may seem that technology gadgets are Americans’ most coveted items, teens and adults agree that the toothbrush is the one invention they cannot live without. The 2003 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, an annual survey of Americans’ perceptions about inventing and innovating, uncovered that technologically advanced items such as personal computers, cell phones and microwave ovens significantly lag in importance behind the toothbrush, which was developed in the 15th century.

When asked to select the invention they could not live without from among five choices � toothbrush, automobile, personal computer, cell phone and microwave � more than a third of teens (34%) and almost half of adults (42%) cited the toothbrush. The automobile ranked a close second, getting votes from 31% of teens and 37% of adults.

Of the remaining choices, teens ranked the personal computer third (16%), the cell phone fourth (10%) and the microwave last (7%). Adults deemed the remaining choices equally important; the personal computer (6%), microwave oven (6%) and the cell phone (6%) tied for third place.

Teens are Inspired to Invent but Seek Encouragement from Elders
The survey also revealed that teen creativity leads to inventive ideas. In fact, more than a third of all teens (36%) reported having a great idea for a unique invention. Interestingly, boys are far more likely than girls to develop innovative ideas (44% boys, 27% girls).

When asked what would motivate them to take the next step in developing ideas for a unique invention, nearly half (43%) of the teens surveyed agreed that encouragement from parents or teachers is the key.

Boys Considering Invention as a Career, Girls Less Interested
Encouragingly, boys are showing interest in science and invention as a career choice. When asked what they would like to be when they are older, a famous inventor (19%) was the second most popular career choice among boys. Becoming a famous athlete (42%) ranked first, with a famous actor (18%), a famous musician (16%) and the President of the United States (13%) placing third, fourth and fifth, respectively.

And, although girls� performance in science and math has improved greatly in recent years, the survey found that girls ranked inventor (10%) at the bottom of their list of career choices. Becoming a famous actress (32%) ranked first, followed by a famous musician (24%), a famous athlete (22%) and the President of the United States (17%).

�We are encouraged that teens are showing greater interest in invention,� said Merton Flemings, director of the Lemelson-MIT Program. �The challenge, however, is for parents and teachers to provide teens with the support and encouragement they require to take the next step in turning their ideas into reality. Parents and teachers may be more influential than they realize in fostering creative thinking and innovation among young people.�

Other issues explored by this year�s Invention Index survey include:

Impact of invention on U.S. leadership: The majority of teens (88%) believe invention and innovation will have a highly significant (32%) or significant (56%) impact in helping the U.S. maintain its leadership position.
Reasons to consider becoming an inventor: Boys and girls agree that the two most important reasons to one day become an inventor are to improve the quality of life and to have fun. Two-fifths (42%) of teens surveyed chose each of these answers.
Events attainable in this lifetime: The majority of teens (56%) and adults (60%) believe that finding a cure for cancer is achievable during their lifetime as a result of invention. In addition, more than a quarter of teens (29%) and over a third of adults (35%) think that solar-powered cars will replace all gasoline-powered cars.
About the Study
The Lemelson-MIT Invention Index has explored Americans� perceptions about inventing and innovating since 1996. Previous topics that have been covered include:

Most important invention of the 20th Century (2002)
Young Americans attitudes toward inventors and getting involved in invention and innovation (2001)
The importance of parents' and teachers' role in fostering invention and innovation in today's youth (2000)
The most profitable career areas for inventors (1999)
Areas of research and development supported by American taxpayers (1998)
Inventions that make life easier or more complex (1997)
Inventions Americans could not live without (1996)
Methodology
The 2003 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index Survey was conducted by Taylor Nelson Sofres Intersearch from a nationally representative sample of 1,042 adults and 400 teens. The interviews were conducted between November 20-30, 2002.

About the Lemelson-MIT Program
Based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, the Lemelson-MIT Program was established in 1994 by the late independent inventor Jerome H. Lemelson and his wife, Dorothy. The Program�s mission is to raise the stature of inventors and innovators and to foster invention and innovation among young people. It accomplishes this by celebrating inventor/innovator role models through outreach activities and annual awards, including the world�s largest for invention � the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize. The Lemelson-MIT Program is funded by The Lemelson Foundation, which supports other invention initiatives at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, Hampshire College, the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance and the University of Nevada, Reno.

1 Totals are less than 100% due to some respondents selecting a category marked �other.�
2 Totals are more than 100% due to some respondents selecting more than one career choice.

January 24, 2004 at 10:00 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Ted Rogers calculates the odds

TheStar.com - Ted Rogers calculates the odds

Cable executive contemplates taking a run at archrival Bell on its own turf

Internet puts telephone service within compa

TYLER HAMILTON
TECHNOLOGY REPORTER

It's been talked about for years, everybody expects to see it, but ask Ted Rogers about his plans to offer residential telephone service and the fiery patriarch of Rogers Communications Inc. tempers his passion with a healthy and arguably uncharacteristic dose of caution.

His archrival, Bell Canada, the country's largest phone company, is using satellites and new Internet technologies to push even harder on to cable-television turf. The only way for Rogers to stay competitive, experts say, is to use those same Internet technologies to offer local phone service through its cable network.

The 70-year-old cable pioneer uses words like "should" and "will." Recently, he has hinted he'll take the plunge in 2005, a year after many of his U.S. peers are expected to embrace voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP.

But push him on the issue and nothing appears certain. "We're only going to get into it on the basis that our brand is enhanced and not harmed."

Sitting in front of a gas fireplace in his cozy downtown office, Rogers points to the mantel and a picture of his father, the late Edward Rogers Sr., who died of an aneurysm 65 years ago when Rogers was only 5 years old.

"I'm not putting my name on something that isn't first-class, or I'm going to take my dad's picture up there, turn it around and it can face the wall," says Rogers.

The tributes to dad seem to run in five-year intervals, as a number of anniversaries this year would suggest. Rogers rocked Bay Street in 1994 with a $3.1 billion hostile bid for Maclean Hunter Ltd.'s cable and publishing assets.

When the deal closed, it was the largest merger in Canadian business history.

Five years earlier, in 1989, Rogers got into the long-distance business by acquiring 40 per cent of Unitel Communications. He later regretted the investment when Unitel crashed and burned, and eventually restructured as AT&T Canada.

Twenty years ago last month, Rogers � defying his board of directors � cobbled together some private financing and managed to win a government licence to provide cellular service in 23 cities across Canada, initially under the name Cantel. The vision and defiance paid off. Wireless is now the largest source of revenue and growth in Rogers' empire.

But the momentum first began to gather in 1979, when Rogers, then the country's fifth-largest cable operator, launched a successful takeover of Number 2 player Canadian Cablesystems. Further consolidation of the industry led him down a path of losses and debt, but that deal 25 years ago sealed his fate as Canada's leading cable baron.

"Ted's a tough cookie," says Lawrence Surtees, a telecommunications analyst with IDC Canada Ltd. "He likes to get what he wants."

The result is an impressive array of products and services. You can walk to the video store and rent a movie from Rogers, or order it "on demand" through his digital cable service, buy dozens of his magazines, including Maclean's, Canadian Business and Chatelaine, or read them online with your Rogers Hi-Speed cable connection. Rogers also owns the Toronto Blue Jays, and millions of people across Canada can get the scores on their Rogers Wireless mobile phones. Oh, and then there's the stable of 43 radio stations.

But one service is noticeably absent. What you can't get from Rogers today is a basic local telephone line, the kind that Bell Canada has been providing for more than 100 years.

"If Ted has a dream, it is the merging of wireless and cable with long-distance and local telephone service into one system, on one bill, all brought to you under the Rogers brand name," wrote Gordon Pitts in Kings of Convergence: The Fight For Control of Canada's Media.

The urgency wasn't there a decade ago, when companies such as Bell ExpressVu and StarChoice weren't luring cable customers to their satellite "deathstars." But with growth in satellite TV and plans by Bell to expand into video-over-Internet services, Rogers must decide once and for all whether he's going to battle Ma Bell on her own turf.

But as Rogers learned with his investment in Unitel, it doesn't take much for a dream to turn into a nightmare. When Rogers entered cable, it was still relatively new and ripe for consolidation. When he entered wireless, he was first out of the gate. Ditto for high-speed Internet services.

Residential phone service is an entirely different beast. It's a mature business and the incumbent has a lock on 99 per cent of the market. The cost of entry through traditional technologies has kept challengers away. It doesn't help that prices in Canada are among the cheapest in the world.

Phone service over cable using VoIP technology will lower the cost of entry. But some analysts wonder whether there's any money to be made by going there. "My view on telecom over cable is it's going to be a very skinny margin business," says Scotia Capital analyst John Henderson.

"Their cable business is more important to them than a little incremental growth from telecom."

Dvai Ghose, a telecom analyst at CIBC World Markets, worries about a mighty backlash from Bell. "In what way is Bell going to mess him up when he gets into VoIP?"

Already on the defensive, Bell announced its intentions in December to come out with its own VoIP product whenever, if ever, Rogers makes his move. Michael Sabia, chief executive of Bell parent BCE Inc., said then, "We will be in that business and nobody is going to outflank us."

And earlier this month, long-distance provider Primus Canada launched the first of what it expected to be a flood of so-called "second class" VoIP services that piggyback over any high-speed Internet connection, including those from Rogers or Bell.

It's not that Ted isn't spoiling for a fight. As recently as three years ago, after losing a six-month battle against Quebecor Inc. for control of cable giant Vid�otron, Rogers told a Canadian Club luncheon, "The key to success, even survival, is to come back punching." But unlike the stubborn hothead of the '80s and '90s who might have lunged first and faced the consequences later, today's Rogers is more inclined to take his time, size up his rival and calculate the odds. If the numbers don't look good, concede � or even walk away before the tussle. No more unmanageable debt, thank you. No more furious layoffs as a result.

"In the old days I would prefer to think of this as a battle and so on. I don't now. I guess I'm older, wiser," says Rogers. "I don't think it's in anybody's interest that people are so frantic competitors that they go bust.

"Our competitor, BCE, is in my opinion the best-run phone company in North American. ... So I'm not going to fool around and go toe-to-toe in telephony, which is their home game, unless I know that I've got a reasonable economic chance that we're going to do okay."

Tell him he's never shied away in the past from a big challenge or challenger and his response betrays a man looking for inward stability rather than outward expansion. "I've never been 70 before."

January 24, 2004 at 09:55 AM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 23, 2004

Reclaiming the internet

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

Junk e-mail is a curse — can the spam

Freedom may be the hallmark of the internet, but the junk e-mails it has spawned have become a form of oppression. Our computers are groaning with unwanted “spam” messages offering cheap loans, fake university degrees, imitation Viagra or pornography. Spam now accounts for 70 per cent of all e-mails in Britain, and it is rising at a rate that could bring down e-mail systems within a year, according to a watchdog called, appropriately enough, Spamhaus. The barbarians have shoved through the gate of cyberspace. It is time to repel them.

The British Government has been reluctant to crack down on the problem because it feared harming the marketing efforts of legitimate businesses. But its relatively tolerant interpretation of the EU electronic communications directive which became law last month, compared with other countries, has apparently attracted a flood of criminal gangs that are now using the UK as a base from which to send spam e-mails. While Italy has made all unsolicited bulk e-mail advertising illegal unless it has the consent of the recipient, Britain has outlawed such messages only to private addresses.

Yet there is little for legitimate businesses to fear. Few above-board businesses should need to send e-mails that are both unsolicited and sent in bulk to large numbers of people. A company making a sales inquiry would need to contact only a few addresses; a newsletter would go only to subscribers. In fact, about 90 per cent of all the unsolicited junk e-mail in Europe and the US is sent by only about 180 individuals.

The internet is a wondrous tool for productivity and prosperity that has yet to reach its full potential. To do so, it must become more trustworthy. Yet the opposite is happening. A report by the US Federal Trade Commission last year found that two thirds of spam e-mails make false claims, use misleading subject lines or forged �from� lines. E-mail frauds range from the near-legendary Nigerian begging letters, to fake web pages, to sophisticated �phishing� swindles that try to obtain your credit card or banking details.

Spam is also frequently the transmitter of the computer viruses that are attacking computers with greater frequency and ever more deadly effect. Last year�s Slammer virus infected 90 per cent of vulnerable computers within only ten minutes.

A whole industry has suddenly emerged to create anti-virus software, firewalls and other devices designed to thwart the criminals. Yet complexity is becoming the enemy of security. As long as software companies such as Microsoft try to lock their customers in with ever more sophisticated codes, there is a danger that they will also be creating more ways for criminals to break in. As long as users have to sign a waiver agreeing that manufacturers are not liable for software flaws, there is less incentive to simplify for safety. It is lamentable that the ridiculously profitable Microsoft has not put more effort into designing more secure software.

Changing the law to make software vendors partly liable could be one part of the answer. Tougher legislation could be another. The US Can Spam Act, passed last month, established tough jail terms for falsifying the �from� or �subject� lines of e-mail solicitations. But it remains to be seen how effective the measure will be, particularly since the bulk of spam e-mails originate outside the country. Some responsibility must also rest with those who are actually buying the diet programmes and fake aphrodisiacs. Alan Ralsky, the notorious spammer and convicted fraudster, claims to have sold products to 70 million people. The ultimate response to the cybercriminals is for each of us to become a little less gullible.

January 23, 2004 at 10:53 PM in Spam | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Britain is flooding the world with spam

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

By David Rowan

A NEW law against unwanted junk e-mails has led to a boom in British-based spam, according to a leading authority on unsolicited e-mails.

Criminal gangs, as well as established marketing firms, are taking advantage of the Electronic Communications Directive, which became law last month, to make Britain one of the world’s fastest- growing sources of spam.

For the first time, Britain is among the top ten originators of spam, which now accounts for about 15 billion daily e-mails around the world. AOL handles almost three billion junk e-mails a day, typically promising an enhanced male anatomy or drugs such as Viagra at blackmarket rates.

With spam now accounting for about 70 per cent of all e-mail traffic, a proportion that is rising rapidly, experts say that it could render e-mail virtually unusable within a year.

Most recent spam has originated in the United States, China and South Korea, with Britain barely attracting the attention of regulators. But last month, for the first time, Britain overtook India to become one of the ten main offenders.

There are now about 25 British-based internet service providers, and some of them account for thousands of internet addresses from which spam is being sent, according to the Spamhaus Project, a non-profit body run by volunteers that tracks known spammers and publishes their internet addresses so that internet service providers can block anything sent from them.

�The British problem has only just come to our attention in the past few weeks,� said Steve Linford, who runs Spamhaus from a houseboat on the Thames near Hampton Court. His website enjoys publishing death threats received and warnings that it will be sued for �deformation�.

This growth in spam in Britain appears to be directly related to the new law, which makes it a criminal offence, punishable by a fine, to send spam to private e-mail addresses after the Information Commissioner has issued an enforcement order.

After intense lobbying by the marketing industry, the Department of Trade and Industry agreed that business e-mail addresses should be exempted from the law.

According to Mr Linford, this has given spammers a justification for claiming that their unregulated sales pitches are solely intended for business in-boxes.

�We warned the Government that if it tried to regulate spam, rather than ban it, it would only legitimise it,� Mr Linford said.

The main operators send an average of 80 million spam e-mails a day, Mr Linford said, with a target of one sale per million.

�If they sell 80 packets of Viagra a day, that�s a lot of money from one PC on the kitchen table,� he said. Last August, a security flaw at a website selling a herbal supplement claiming to bring about penis enlargement revealed the scale of the business. In one month, 6,000 people replied to e-mails and ordered the supplement, at $50 (�28) a bottle.

As a result, criminal gangs from Italy, where spammers can be jailed for three years, are now setting up business here, Mr Linford said.

�It�s mostly small-time spammers, but we�re starting to see it rising as they know the law allows it,� Mr Linford said. �The Government needs to understand that there is no legitimate reason for anyone to send unsolicited bulk e-mail.�

Most spam arriving in British in-boxes still originates overseas. Many of the most prolific US-based spammers, such as Alan Ralsky, of Michigan, commonly use computer servers based in China, where regulation is weaker. British law does not address foreign-based spam operations.

Spamhaus protects the in-boxes of 200 million people by scanning the addresses of incoming e-mail, and bouncing back any that match its database of known offenders.

One difficulty lies in tracing the perpetrators. When The Times sought last night to contact Phone Direct, a British company that Spamhaus claims is responsible for large numbers of junk e-mails, we traced its web servers to a company called Scarlet Charger Internet, based in Reading. The website for Scarlet Charger Internet was inactive, and the contact number provided for its website registration was for a mobile phone which, when called, did not answer. Some spam operators go to greater lengths to escape detection. They use computer viruses to install miniature mail and web servers on infected home PCs. According to Spamhaus, about 70 per cent of spam comes from virus-infected machines belonging to innocent third parties. There are now 400,000 such active machines.

The spammers have a number of tricks to bypass internet firms� attempts to filter their bulk e-mails. Typically they will misspell words such as �Viagra� or insert spaces and invisible HTML (computer language) tags in the middle of words so that the filters are not activated.

The Department of Trade and Industry said last night it was committed to reviewing the process for dealing with spam and with monitoring the law�s enforcement. But a spokesman said that much of what appeared to be British traffic originated overseas.

�Spam statistics are notoriously unreliable and difficult to substantiate internationally,� the spokesman said. �Any rise would be a concern, but Britain is still a minor player.�

PROTECT YOUR IN-BOX

Never post your private e-mail address in a public part of the internet. Use a disposable web-based account if you post to news groups or chat rooms

If you have a website, replace the �@� sign in your given contact address with the word �at�, or similarly disguise the address. Spammers use programs to search the web for what look like e-mail addresses

Never respond to spam, even to request no further solicitations. You will only confirm that your address is active. And an abusive reply could be breaking the law

Do not forward chain letters, they will contain your e-mail address

Use an internet service provider that blocks spam according to databases of known offenders

Consider using spam-filtering software that blocks spams according to key words

Never buy from a spammer, it will help to make the business case for it

Always consider why a website wants your e-mail address. Supply it only when absolutely necessary, and ensure that you have opted out of receiving unrelated mailings

January 23, 2004 at 10:50 PM in Spam | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Bank Agency Warns of Fraudulent E-Mail

Yahoo! News - Bank Agency Warns of Fraudulent E-Mail

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. officials said on Friday they were investigating the source of e-mail purporting to come from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that warns consumers their bank deposit insurance will be suspended.

The FDIC said in a statement that the e-mail was not sent by the FDIC and appeared to be a fraudulent attempt to obtain personal information from consumers.

The agency said it started receiving a large number of complaints about the e-mail on Friday.

Consumers and their financial institutions were advised not to access the link provided in the e-mail or provide any personal information.

The bogus e-mail informs the recipient that the Department of Homeland Security has advised the FDIC to suspend all deposit insurance on the recipient's bank account due to suspected violations of the USA Patriot Act.

It further indicates that deposit insurance will be suspended until personal identity, including bank account information, can be verified, the FDIC said.

January 23, 2004 at 09:08 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

RSS from Yahoo, beta 2

Yahoo take a second crack at incorporating RSS feeds into my.yahoo.com . Interestingly, when I set it up today, it remembered the ones I set up when they tried the forst time with a beta last September.

Its clunky, but well worth the wait. my yahoo, remains my home page, and Yahoo continually demonstrate the ability to get it right. Google have a long way to go before they achieve the level of sophistication Yahoo has by getting it all, news, mail, calendar, notepad, groups, bookmarks, ad blocker, and just about anything else which intersts you, into one decently laid out portal.

http://e.my.yahoo.com/config/promo_content?.module=ycontent

January 23, 2004 at 07:52 AM in Internet evolution, Portals | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 22, 2004

U.S. Bank Warning About Hoax E-Mails

U.S. Bank Warning About Hoax E-Mails (TechNews.com)

The Associated Press
Monday, January 19, 2004; 7:20 PM
ST. PAUL, Minn. - U.S. Bank warned consumers on Monday to ignore e-mails that appeared to have been sent by the Minneapolis-based bank asking for bank account numbers and other confidential information.
The e-mail notifies receivers that their U.S. Bank accounts have been blocked because "we have been notified that your account may have been compromised by outside parties."

The letter goes on to say that "these parties have in the past been involved with money laundering, illegal drugs, terrorism."

U.S. Bank accounts have not been frozen or blocked, as the e-mail states, and receivers should not respond to its request to click on a Web link.

"We took immediate action to shut down the site. No account information has been compromised," U.S. Bank spokesman Steve Dale said on Monday. He had no details about the Web site.

U.S. Bank didn't know how widespread the e-mails are. The company has received inquiries about the e-mails from outside Minnesota, Dale said.

The bank believes that the e-mails started sometime Sunday, making their way into computer mailboxes of customers and others who don't even have an account with U.S. Bank, Dale said.

If anyone has responded to the e-mail, they should phone 1-800-US-BANKS and, following prompts, get in touch with U.S. Bank's "fraud liaison center" or its "Internet banking center," he said.

January 22, 2004 at 11:06 PM in Phishing & identity theft | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Why corporate blogs aren\'t

From the "dot communist". I think the reasons given against, are precisely the reason why corporate blogs will work. Admittedly it will require risk taking by company's prepared to permit unedited publishing direct to the consumer but thats where the conversations will begin.

the dot-communist

Here's something to chew on:
Can a publishing company ever really publish a weblog? Should it even try? Weblogging is *micropublishing*; it is to corporate media websites what 'zines are to paper publishing. So, when a publishing company posts content that has gone through an editorial vetting process using weblog software, is it (a) a weblog--or is it (b)just using weblog software as a content management system?
The answer is (b). Using weblog software to publish content in a weblog style does not a weblog make--weblogs are content filtered through an individual worldview, not a traditional editorial voice. Weblogs are write-and-post, typically, while almost no publishing company would give an individual the power to directly put content onto its website. Almost.
So, what's the point of a corporate weblog then? More to come...

January 22, 2004 at 09:59 PM in Corporate Blogging | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

EU Launches Anti-Spam Campaign, Seeks Tough Action

Yahoo! News - EU Launches Anti-Spam Campaign, Seeks Tough Action

Thu Jan 22, 1:47 PM ET

By Lisa Jucca
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union (news - web sites) governments should toughen sanctions against junk e-mails that now account for half of global Internet mail traffic, the EU Commission said in a policy document on Thursday.

"Spam," unsolicited e-mails, is now evolving from a vehicle for pornography or bogus financial offers to more sophisticated operations including electronic "identity theft" where internet users' personal details are intercepted and used for fraud.

The EU tried to fight the problem by introducing a ban on unsolicited e-mails in 2002, but the EU law is weakly enforced and several countries have not yet introduced it at national level.

"Although legislation will deter some spam, legislation alone will not be sufficient," the Commission said in its action plan against spam, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters.

"Member states and competent authorities should... create adequate possibilities for victims to claim damages and provide for real sanctions, including financial and criminal penalties where appropriate," said the paper, to be unveiled next week.

Consumer groups have criticized EU member Britain for passing an anti-spam law that carries a maximum penalty of just 5,000 pound ($9,225) for spammers.

Experts say this is no deterrent. According to anti-spam group The Spamhaus Project, Britain joined Spamhaus's top ten list of spamming countries in December.

"This is a bargain for spammers. Some of them make 20,000 to 30,000 pounds per week," Steve Linford, founder of the Spamhaus Project told Reuters recently.

In the United States, Internet giant America Online was awarded almost seven million dollars in damages in a spam case.

SPAM SCARE

"Spam has reached worrying proportions," the Commission said. "At present, there is a risk that users of e-mails or SMS simply stop using e-mails or mobile services, or refrain from using it to the extent that they otherwise would."

The Commission is urging business to introduce a code of conduct that bans certain practices.

Aware that most of the spam comes from outside the EU, the Commission suggests member states work internationally to root out "spam havens."

"You have to prosecute the spammers where they are," said Philippe Wacker, Secretary General of the European Multimedia Forum, which represents companies from the digital media sector.

"If someone is based in Belize, the only way to tackle the problem is by putting pressure on the countries concerned like you do with money-laundering and terrorism."

(Additional reporting by Bernhard Warner in London)

($1=.5420 Pound)

January 22, 2004 at 06:34 PM in Spam | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Risks Seen in Pentagon's Internet Voting Plan

Yahoo! News - Risks Seen in Pentagon's Internet Voting Plan

Wed Jan 21, 6:47 PM ET

By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government should abandon an Internet-voting system planned by the Pentagon (news - web sites) because hackers could easily tamper with election results, several computer-science professors said on Wednesday.

Military personnel and other U.S. citizens located overseas will be able to cast their ballots online for some primary and general elections this year under the Defense Department's Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, rather than casting absentee ballots by mail.

But their votes could be vulnerable to a range of cyber attacks that have already rocked banks, Internet providers and other businesses that operate online, said four researchers who serve on an advisory panel for the program.

Hackers could knock vote-tallying computers offline with a flood of data in "denial of service" attacks; set up phony Web pages to intercept or alter votes; or spread a virus to participants' computers to monitor or alter their voters, the researchers said.

"Because the danger of successful large-scale attacks is so great, we reluctantly recommend shutting down the development of SERVE and not attempting anything like it in the future until both the Internet and the world's home-computer infrastructure have been fundamentally redesigned, or some other unforeseen security breakthroughs appear," they said.

The Pentagon has no intention of shutting down the program, a spokesman said. "Security is enhanced, procedures are in place. I don't know them all and I wouldn't share them if I did," said Defense Department spokesman Glenn Flood.

Flood noted the four researchers who authored the report were not joined by the six other experts who served on the advisory panel.

The report was written by Johns Hopkins professor Avi Rubin; University of California professor David Wagner; David Jefferson, a computer scientist at the Livermore National Laboratory; and computer consultant Barbara Simons.

January 22, 2004 at 06:33 PM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

FTC Releases Top 10 Consumer Complaint Categories in 2003

Federal Trade Commission
for the consumer

Identity Theft Complaints Continue to Top List; Internet Related Fraud Complaints Soar
The Federal Trade Commission has released its annual report detailing consumer complaints about identity theft and listing the top 10 fraud complaint categories reported by consumers in 2003. For the fourth year in a row, identity theft topped the list, accounting for 42 percent of the complaints lodged in the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel database. The FTC received more than half a million complaints in 2003, up from 404,000 in 2002, and Internet-related complaints accounted for 55 percent of all fraud reports, up from 45 percent in 2002.

Howard Beales, Director of the FTC�s Bureau of Consumer Protection noted that in addition to the complaints consumers register directly with the FTC, other organizations, including the FBI�s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, The National Consumers League�s National Fraud Information Center, Canada�s Phonebusters, and Better Business Bureaus contribute complaint data to the FTC�s Consumer Sentinel database.

�More than 900 law enforcement agencies in the U.S., Canada, and Australia are using Consumer Sentinel, accessing one-and-a-half million consumer complaints through the Sentinel network,� Beales said. �They can coordinate actions, track down leads, and research other law enforcement tools. This model � one central source of consumer fraud data available to law enforcement, reflecting overall trends in fraud, ID theft, and emerging scams � is making our work more efficient for law enforcement and more effective for consumers.�

The top 10 categories of consumer fraud complaints in 2003 include:

Internet Auctions - 15 percent

Shop-at-Home/Catalog Sales - 9 percent

Internet Services and Computer Complaints - 6 percent

Prizes, Sweepstakes and Lotteries - 5 percent

Foreign Money Offers - 4 percent

Advance Fee Loans and Credit Protection - 4 percent

Telephone Services - 3 percent

Business Opportunities and Work-at-Home Plans - 2 percent

Magazine Buyers Clubs - 1 percent

Office Supplies and Services - 1 percent
Other findings from the report include the following:

Of the 516,740 complaints received in 2003, 301,835 were complaints about fraud and 214,905 were identity theft reports.

Identity theft reports represented 42 percent of all complaints, up from 40 percent in 2002.

The median loss for victims of fraud was $228.

The median loss for victims of Internet-related fraud was $195.

The major metropolitan areas with the highest per capita rates of consumer fraud reported were Washington, DC; Seattle/Bellevue/Everett, WA; and San Diego, CA. Higher reporting of fraud does not necessarily indicate a higher overall incidence.

The major metropolitan areas with the highest per capita rates of ID theft reported were Phoenix/Mesa, AZ; Los Angeles/Long Beach, CA; and Riverside/San Bernardino, CA.
Copies of the FTC report, �National and State Trends in Fraud and Identity Theft,� can be found online at www.consumer.gov/sentinel/pubs/Top10Fraud2003.pdf
or
http://www.ladlass.com/archives/files/Top10Fraud2003.pdf

The FTC works for the consumer to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices in the marketplace and to provide information to help consumers spot, stop, and avoid them. To file a complaint, or to get free information on any of 150 consumer topics, call toll-free, 1-877-FTC-HELP (1 877-382-4357), or use the complaint form at www.ftc.gov. The FTC enters Internet, telemarketing, identity theft, and other fraud-related complaints into Consumer Sentinel, a secure, online database available to hundreds of civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Claudia Bourne Farrell or Jennifer Schwartzman
Office of Public Affairs
202-326-2180

(http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2004/01/top10.htm)

January 22, 2004 at 06:24 PM in Phishing & identity theft | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Identity Theft, Internet Fraud Reports Up in U.S.

Yahoo! News - Identity Theft, Internet Fraud Reports Up in U.S.

Thu Jan 22, 3:13 PM ET

By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Americans reported losses of $437 million last year to identity theft and fraud as scam artists made themselves at home on the Internet, according to federal statistics released on Thursday.

The Federal Trade Commission said it received more than half a million consumer complaints in 2003 as scam artists financed their spending sprees with other people's credit cards and hucksters sold nonexistent products through online auction sites like eBay Inc .

But Americans are becoming more aware of the problem and act quickly when they discover they've been victimized, said Howard Beales, head of the FTC's consumer protection division.

Identity theft -- the practice of running up bills or committing crimes in someone else's name -- topped the list with 215,000 complaints, up 33 percent from the previous year.

Internet-related fraud, up 51 percent from 2002, accounted for more than half of the remaining complaints as scammers found victims through Web sites or "spam" e-mail, according to an FTC report.

Auction fraud was the most prevalent form of Internet scam, the FTC said, followed by complaints about e-commerce and Internet access services.

Consumers lost an average of $1,868 per incident, though that figure was skewed by a few reports of losses of more than $1 million. Half of those who filed reports said they lost less than $228.

The actual number of victims is probably much higher, as the FTC only reported on the number of formal complaints filed by consumers. More than 60 percent of those who filed reports did not call police, the FTC said.

The FTC estimated last year that identity theft has affected one in eight U.S. adults.

Beales said the FTC was now fielding more inquiries than complaints, a sign that consumers are taking steps to protect themselves.

Credit card companies also have gotten better at stopping fraud, he said.

"There was a time when pre-approved credit offers seemed to be a significant problem for identity theft. There has been a lot of response to that problem, and today there's no personally identifiable information in a pre-approved credit offer that's not in any other piece of mail you get," he said.

Consumers should keep credit cards in a safe place, shred financial statements and only shop on secure Web sites -- those with a small symbol of a lock in the Web browser -- to avoid becoming fraud victims, said Brian Keeter, a spokesman for Your Credit Card Companies, an industry trade group.

Congress passed laws to outlaw fraudulent spam and fight identity theft last year.

Credit-reporting bureaus will have to provide free reports to consumers annually and businesses will face restrictions on sharing consumer data under the new identity-theft measure, which was signed into law on Dec. 4 but has yet to take effect.

January 22, 2004 at 06:21 PM in Phishing & identity theft | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 21, 2004

Consumer Ministers Advance Initiatives to Protect Consumers in a Marketplace Without Borders

WINNIPEG, Manitoba, January 16, 2004 — Federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for consumer affairs met today in Winnipeg to deal with consumer protection issues associated with a rapidly changing and increasingly open marketplace. The meeting was co-chaired by the Honourable Lucienne Robillard, Minister of Industry and Minister responsible for the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec, and the Honourable Gregory Selinger, Manitoba Minister of Finance. The ministers announced agreement on a series of cooperative initiatives to promote consumer protection in the following areas: electronic commerce, identity theft, credit card chargebacks, interjurisdictional transactions, short-term credit markets, and the launch of new consumer information products.

The Canadian Code of Practice for Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce was endorsed by the ministers. The Code, developed cooperatively with business, consumer groups and governments, sets out good business practices for merchants conducting online commercial activities. Important consumer issues, such as a provision of clear information, payment security, contract formation and complaint handling are addressed in the Code. The ministers now look forward to working together with stakeholders to develop implementation mechanisms for the Code, which will both engage merchants to use it and enable consumers to recognize merchants who respect its provisions.

"The Canadian Code of Practice for Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce is a major accomplishment, and an outstanding example of how governments, business and consumer advocates can collaborate and cooperate to advance consumer protection," said Minister Robillard.

Ministers recognized the serious concern that identity theft poses for consumers, leaving victims with a poor credit rating, ruined reputation and money losses. The ministers agreed, as a first step, to harmonize information efforts to bring consumers the most reliable and complete information on how to reduce the risk of being victimized.

"As a very practical step toward helping victims of identity theft, we have, in partnership with law enforcement agencies, consumer groups and the private sector, developed a consumer information kit," said Minister Selinger. "Part of the kit is an identity theft statement, which can be used by victims to notify most major creditors of what has happened. Using this one standard form can help streamline the process of correcting the victim's credit report and restoring their good reputation."

Ministers endorsed a proposal to ensure that, in future, the credit card chargeback provisions now applicable to Internet sales will also be applied to other forms of distance sales, such as mail order or telephone selling. This would allow consumers to reverse charges should a merchant fail to meet certain obligations. To further the previous consultations on chargebacks with consumer and business stakeholders, the ministers have asked officials to consult with the credit card industry to determine the most effective way to achieve these objectives and to report back in six months regarding progress. Ministers can then determine the best course of action.

Consumers are increasingly buying goods and services from suppliers outside their jurisdiction. A coordinated approach is needed to protect consumers and resolve disputes across borders. The ministers welcomed the model legislation developed by a working group of federal, provincial and territorial representatives, and the Uniform Law Conference of Canada (ULCC), and acknowledged the clarity it provides on consumer protection in cross-border transactions. Each jurisdiction is reviewing the model to determine its applicability to their particular situation. Ministers will review progress on this issue at their next meeting.

Consumer ministers expressed concern about excessive costs and abusive practices encountered by some consumers in the short-term credit market (e.g., payday loans, cheque cashing, vehicle pawn lenders). Recognizing the need for improved consumer protection in a legitimate, viable marketplace for short-term credit, a group of ministers will work with officials to establish a consumer protection framework, including measures to address the issue of rollovers of loans, concurrent loans from multiple lenders and the habitual use of payday loans.

This work would entail the establishment of best practices for the industry, encouraging the traditional financial institutions (i.e., banks and credit unions) to improve consumers' access to financial services, as well as the development of a public education program to raise awareness of the full costs of, and alternatives to, small, short-term loans.

Consumer ministers endorsed the collaborative initiatives by all jurisdictions to bring reliable and relevant information to consumers. The ministers released "Reality Choices," a comprehensive package of information for young adults. Reality Choices is a series of online booklets (http://cmcweb.ca) for first-time consumers, with topics ranging from owning a vehicle, to finding accommodation, to understanding warranties and refunds. Ministers directed officials to develop distribution strategies to reach the broadest possible audience. The 2004 online version of the Canadian Consumer Handbook was also endorsed and launched at the meeting.

There are gaps in the level of awareness and protection for consumers of travel services due to ongoing changes in the travel industry. The ministers discussed the problem from each of their jurisdiction's perspectives and agreed that a coordinated approach to ensuring consumer protection in the travel industry is necessary. They directed officials to start work on such a coordinated approach, including issues such as protecting prepaid airline and other travel monies and full price advertising.

Ministers will meet again in the Fall of 2004 in Quebec City.

For more information on these initiatives, please see backgrounder. Further information on the work of the federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for consumer affairs is available at http://cmcweb.ca.

For more information, please contact:

Daniel Grenier
Office of Lucienne Robillard
Minister of Industry and Minister responsible for the Economic
Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec
(613) 995-9001

Nadine Delisle
Office of Gregory Selinger
Manitoba Minister of Finance
(204) 945-3810

January 21, 2004 at 11:06 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Cubans Surf Close to Home as Web Access Restricted

Yahoo! News - Cubans Surf Close to Home as Web Access Restricted

Wed Jan 21, 9:39 AM ETAdd Technology - Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

By Anthony Boadle
HAVANA (Reuters) - At a downtown Havana post office, Cubans line up for hours for their turn in the "surfing room."

When users get to one of the four computers, they can send and receive e-mail and surf an Intranet of Cuban Web sites, but access to the global Internet is barred.

Getting online is not easy in communist-run Cuba, where the state strictly controls all Web servers and recently announced plans to crack down on illegal Internet access.

E-mail accounts are available at the Cuban Postal Service, but writing to friends abroad comes at price: A three-hour prepaid card costs $4.50, one-third of the average Cuban monthly wage.

"It's very expensive for us, but this is the only way we can send e-mails at will," said Ignacio, a health ministry employee, facing a two-hour wait.

At the recently opened Servi-Postal cybercafe in Havana's leafy Miramar district, Cubans who can afford the dollar prices wash down ham and cheese sandwiches with cold Bucanero beers.

But even here Cubans don't get to surf the World Wide Web.

"The Internet is for foreigners. The Intranet is for Cubans," said Miguel Perez, managing the cybercafe in Havana's International Business Center where Cubans have to show identification and sign a contract to get an e-mail account.

Cubans said some small cybercafes do allow them Internet access, including the National Academy of Sciences (news - web sites) cybercafe where users are charged $5 an hour.

But President Fidel Castro (news - web sites)'s government, in power since a 1959 revolution, maintains that restricting access to the Internet is necessary for the social good in poor developing countries where the telecommunications infrastructure is insufficient.

Castro's critics say Cuba, like China, represses access to the Internet to stop the free flow of information and keep the lid on dissent in the one-party state.

Connectivity has grown quickly in recent years in the Caribbean nation of 11 million people. There are 270,000 computers in the country, 65 percent of them connected to Cuba's Web, according to the government.

Cuban domain names which end in .cu have multiplied to 1,100, some of which are used solely for e-mail, and there are now 750 Cuban Internet sites. Most are dedicated to informing the world about Cuba, either to attract tourism or counter the United States in an ideological war waged for four decades.

CRACKDOWN ON STOLEN PASSWORDS

Cuba has more than 480,000 e-mail accounts, roughly the number of users, but only 98,000 users can legally surf the Internet, according to government figures.

Cubans are authorized to access to the Internet through their work places in government offices, hospitals, universities, research centers, state-run media, artists and writers unions or foreign companies.

"We have given priority to the social use of the Internet, in health, education, science, press and television, banking and other important areas of the economy," Communications Minister Ignacio Gonzalez told a newspaper recently.

He argued that regulating Internet usage was a democratic way to share limited resources in developing countries.

Gonzalez said Cuba lacked bandwidth to allow unrestricted access to the Internet and blamed the technological lag on trade sanctions the United States has imposed on the island since the Cold War.

With government authorization needed to connect to the Internet, Cubans have increasingly sidestepped state control and turned to a black market for stolen or borrowed logon identities and passwords, costing up to $50 a month.

But three weeks ago the government decreed a crackdown on unauthorized Internet usage, ordering the state telephone monopoly ETECSA to stop illegal access.

Days later, apparently responding to a wave of protests, the main ISP in Cuba -- E.net -- announced that home users could connect if they paid in dollars, at a prohibitive rate for Cuban Web surfers of 8 cents a minutes.

The measure, which goes into effect on Saturday, will generate hard currency for Cuba's cash-strapped state and may have the effect of letting cost limit usage. Many Cubans see it as a way to further tighten control over who gets to use the Internet and muzzle freedom of expression.

"The new measures, which limit and impede unofficial use, constitute yet another attempt to cut off Cubans' access to alternative views and a space for discussing them," the human rights organization Amnesty International said.

Dissidents said the government was confining Internet access to its supporters. They also complained that Cuba blocks access to the Web sites of exile groups and dissident news services such as Cubanet.org.

"The authorities thought they could control the flow of information on the Internet, but no one controls the Internet, not even the government of the United States," said dissident Vladimiro Roca, whose e-mail account was closed two years ago.

"The only thing they can do is limit access by Cubans and block the Web sites they don't like," said Roca.

January 21, 2004 at 05:30 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 20, 2004

The Information Architecture of Cities

"The Information Architecture of� Cities", by L. Andrew Coward and Nikos A. Salingaros

Cities are systems of information architecture. Here, "architecture" is used in the sense of computer architecture -- it refers not to the design of buildings, but to how the components of a complex system interact. Information exchange includes the movement of people and goods, personal contact and interactions, telecommunications, as well as visual input from the environment. Information networks provide a basis for understanding living cities and for diagnosing urban problems. This paper argues that a city works less like an electronic computer, and more like the human brain. As a functionally complex system, it heuristically defines its own functionality by changing connections so as to optimize how components interact. An effective city will be one with a system architecture that can respond to changing conditions. This analysis shifts the focus of understanding cities from their physical structure to the flow of information.

L. Andrew Coward

School of Information Technology, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia 6150, AUSTRALIA.

E-mail: landrewcoward@shaw.ca

Nikos A. Salingaros

Department of Applied Mathematics, The University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas 78249, USA.

E-mail: salingar@sphere.math.utsa.edu
______________________________________________

Contents

Introduction
Understanding the city as a system
Cities should optimize information exchange
Different types of complexity
Systems and modular decomposition
Plug-and-play strategies are misleading
A city works like a brain, not a computer
The role of telecommunications
Networks and evolving city form
Conclusion

1. Introduction

Cities coordinate activities among a large number of human beings. To do this requires complex patterns of cooperation. Furthermore, this task must be accomplished under conditions in which the activities are changing continuously. There is a competition between opposing goals. One goal is to optimize the efficiency of exchange patterns best suited to the present situation, by making the infrastructure and information paths permanent. Another goal is to leave everything suboptimal but highly adaptive, so as to be able to change with unexpected variations in conditions. Still another is to impose hardware (i.e. buildings and roads) onto a city that achieves neither of the previous goals.

As an example that compares specialized versus adaptive cities in the long term, Jane Jacobs [1] contrasts a static city such as 19th century Manchester with a dynamic city such as Birmingham (England). Manchester was very successful in the cotton industry, but declined in the face of external competition. On the other hand, it has never been possible to point to one industry by which Birmingham earns its living; rather its capability has been the creation of new industries in response to changed conditions.

A specialized city that works well can be compared to a real-time electronic system, in that its functionality is decided beforehand and is specified in complete detail. Any functional change in an electronic system must be designed with all possible consequences in mind. This requires extensive testing before implementation in order to avoid undesirable side effects. For systems such as cities and biological brains, however, change is to a considerable degree heuristic (i.e. learned by the system itself in response to experience). Many other natural and artificial systems work by coordinating a complex combination of changing functions.

This paper talks about urban nodes and connections, and their interrelationship. It is a follow-up of an earlier paper [2]. Our work is part of recent attempts to understand cities as complex systems, including those by Peter Allen [3], Juval Portugali [4], and their collaborators. Jane Jacobs [1], Richard Meier [5], and Christopher Alexander [6] pioneered the understanding of complex city structure, studying and describing urban form in more realistic ways than the simplistic spatial geometry of the CIAM model [7]. We are looking for the processes whereby a living city develops, and a pathological city decays.

City form is dynamic, and it evolves heuristically. Planners need to implement a process of diagnosis and repair of the urban fabric, much as biological tissue calls upon mechanisms to repair itself. While our discussion here is going to be very general, a broad picture emerges of what a city is, and how to best help it do what it does. Some recommendations arise out of our conception of a city as a complex, organized system. We cannot deny that those proposals represent the opposite of the postwar CIAM approach to planning, which has prevented their implementation up until now. We hope that our conclusions will now give a needed boost to older insights we believe to be both correct and prescient.

2. Understanding the city as a system

Adaptivity, or the need to change functionality, forces a complex system to be modular at many levels of scale [8]. Following the example of electronic systems, "modules" are defined as clumps of activity that have larger information exchange within the module than with other modules [9, 10]. In a city, a functional module at the smallest level of scale could identify a person with the buildings and spaces in which most of his or her time is spent. At a somewhat higher level, modules could include small groups of people who interact strongly on a daily basis with various urban nodes. At a yet higher level, modules correspond approximately with institutions, individual businesses, educational and political organizations, etc.

Modularization is only approximate, because a city function may be partly in an identifiable module, but some elements of it will certainly reside within other modules. It is important to point out that our use of the term "module" is more akin to "network" than to a spatially compact object or region. This paper is liable to be misunderstood if the reader incorrectly envisions a functional module as a spatial module -- i.e. some physical built cube. Our modules enclose distributed patterns of interactivity, where actions occurring in different places communicate. They are really groups of structured links, so their visualization must avoid the misleading twentieth-century urban image of non-interacting spatial entities placed rigidly on some regular grid.

The networks of a city -- the paths, roads, telecommunications, etc. -- are the mechanisms that support information exchange. Nevertheless, a city processes information rather than merely moving it around. A complex pattern of information exchange coordinates city functions, drives a city's dynamics, and determines its evolving structure [5]. Information exchange at the smallest level of scale includes conversation, observation, and display by individuals. At a higher level, people or groups of people move from one function to another. Goods are moved, consumed, changed, combined, and created in a city. Exchanging information is much cheaper than moving people and goods, so a city has to efficiently coordinate different exchanges of different cost.

A system needs to minimize the overall cost of information exchange. Analyzing a city as a system therefore begins by identifying groups of people who exchange more information within the group than external to that group. Modules on any level cannot be identified cognitively in advance, and certainly not via any particular spatial distribution. City modules in general do not correspond with simple city functions. Urban structure needs to be assessed by abandoning strict visual ordering based on aerial views, and following the information flow. Concentrating on the evolving information and movement networks, intervention would then try to enhance city functionality by making information exchange more efficient (by means that include altering the physical structure). We are going to try and understand a city based on its networks of information exchange rather than its appearance on plan.

Before even defining urban modules, one method of improving city functionality is to make sure each of its channels carries multiple information exchanges. By that we mean that an information transfer or physical movement does more than a single thing -- more connections can then fit into the city because its paths help people carry out many different tasks simultaneously. People moving along such paths for the purpose of higher level information exchange can thus carry out lower level information exchange (e.g. observing). The time required for higher level exchange is therefore used more effectively.

Technically speaking, we are proposing fractal loading, which implies the coexistence of different but related things at different levels of scale. Fractal loading means that each high-level exchange also carries with it simultaneous exchanges on many smaller levels. This opposes maximizing the capacity of uniform communications channels dedicated to a single type of exchange. Thus, an ensemble of exchanges on different scales should be supported by a physical infrastructure that permits mixed information exchanges, and which does not let other competing exchanges squeeze out the weaker or lower-level exchanges. The opposite case of monofunctional planning forces many separate and competing exchanges of the same type into a single communications channel. An example of the latter is a choked highway, or the overloading of subway cars at rush hour. Not only is this inefficient, but it excludes other types of exchange.

We confirm one instance of fractal loading [11]. The use of urban space is linked to the information field generated by surrounding surfaces, and to how easily the information can be received by pedestrians. A primary information exchange is a pedestrian going from one point to another. He or she observes things that are unrelated to the primary reason for movement. This information is functional; it can recommend secondary behaviors to the observer who is executing a primary information exchange. A successful city is one in which even simple movements are a rich and rewarding experience. Urban space therefore works by violating the "functional" rule of twentieth-century planning. Successful urban geometry serves a multitude of needs on distinct scales; some strictly functional and others pleasurable.

Walking to an appointment in a European capital (indeed, in most of the world's cities) can be more pleasant than a drive to achieve the same end in a North American metropolitan area. In the former case, one sees other people, some of whom one might wish to talk to; observing others may provide clues on social currents and interactions; window displays provide information on available products and services, etc. Of course, we are discounting negative factors which would interfere with effective information exchange such as crime, inclement weather, or overcrowding. Drivers are subjected to unwanted information from billboards, while they choose aural information from music, news/talk radio, or chatting on their cellphone. Again, the primary exchange is loaded with secondary (wanted or unwanted) information.

Fractal loading has the crucial feature that removing the largest level of scale leaves all the other smaller levels of scale intact. Not having to execute a definite errand, undirected wandering in informationally-rich cities allows the visitor to accept recommendations offered by different visual environments, and to discover the results of such movement. It is thus possible to learn the rich and complex "visual language" of an unfamiliar city that has only changed gradually over hundreds of years. By contrast, in a non-fractal deterministic environment lacking all lower levels of scale, if you don't need to go somewhere, you will most certainly avoid doing so -- every movement is a chore, with nothing new to learn. This discussion re-affirms the importance of having a variety of information exchanges that can be achieved by physical movement.

3. Cities should optimize information exchange

Optimization makes possible the exchange of a maximum of information with a minimum of effort. The cost of information exchange in most urban activities is woefully underestimated. A half hour trip has a cost and a value. How much valuable information exchange occurs? Do you see a wide range of behaviors? Are you exposed to people you want to influence? Would a city be more effective if people saw more directly what was going on? True costs are frequently disguised, because they are computed only for the "useful" portion of the trip. Note the tradeoff with shopping malls -- while those minimize information exchange costs for shopping, they result in excessive costs for transportation.

Informational networks do not possess a localized spatial geometry, hence do not fit neatly into a spatial module. They are and will always be at odds with a city that is forced into a simplistic visual plan. And yet, informational networks are what make up a living city. It is certainly impractical to design the informational networks of a major city in advance, and in any case, as the functions of the city evolve, it is vital that the city have the capability to evolve heuristically so as to optimize information exchange. No leadership will be able to anticipate and manage this at all levels of detail [7].

Consider, for example, the process by which decisions are made to invest in a new business. Such decisions require coordination between future technology directions, market needs, financial resources, and business resources. This knowledge will be distributed across many city networks. A city with efficient information exchange of the required type will be more effective in creating new business than one without. There is always a conflict, however, between the information exchange needs of different city functions. Ideally, the result will be a compromise that allows all functions to operate effectively. There must also exist mechanisms for adjusting this compromise as functional needs change. We propose a drastic change in the optimization processes used in planning: instead of optimizing single-channel connective links among monofunctional spatial nodes, we instead argue for optimizing the overall information exchange in a city.

The functions of an intermediate level module such as a restaurant include preparing meals from raw food; distributing prepared food for take-out; providing a node of social life where people go to see how others dress and behave; providing a center of social communication; hosting meetings between people to discuss business or politics, etc. This module is contained within the building that houses the restaurant, which is itself contained in a larger network module. Some restaurants become focal points for information exchange in a city -- often identified with a particular business in a large metropolitan area, or the restaurant is an important node in a small town's social and government networks. A larger module encompassing spatial patterns of activity in the neighborhood includes the restaurant as a submodule.

Nodes that do not form part of a larger module are often parasitic to the city, since they use its infrastructure without contributing to an overall functional coherence. Nevertheless, that is how most restaurants, stores, supermarkets, and office buildings are built nowadays. Entirely surrounded by an isolating parking lot, they are designed to be built in the middle of a wilderness, yet they are forced right into the urban fabric, tearing it in the process. Restaurants designed to work as highway truck stops are routinely erected inside the city, and of course they don't belong to it. People working in a nearby office building, which could provide clientele at lunchtime, have to drive their cars around a busy road to get to a restaurant that is literally next door.

Planners have in recent decades mostly adopted urban typologies that are essentially anti-urban. Every building ignores its local context and tries to be independent of ANY context. This is really an attempt to lower the complexity overhead due to local adaptation, a strategy that superficially appears to cut costs, but which in reality increases long-term costs. The cost-cutting corporate approach of "one size fits all" is prompted by the desire to connect a node to the entire city without giving preferential treatment to the adjoining urban fabric. Not only are local connections not given any consideration; they are explicitly excluded, making it impossible to connect to neighboring buildings. It is naively expected that a new building will connect instantly to the entire city, while totally ignoring the prohibitive transportation costs of doing so. This approach, however, merely reflects the modernist planning philosophy -- no concession to the surroundings, which means no local connectivity.

Naively separating housing areas from shopping areas creates serious problems. First, any information exchange between these functions will be at high cost. Second, there is little scope for network modules with necessary functions but no physical structure/location to contain them (in contrast to, say, a restaurant). We emphasize that the network has a separate importance for the city than spatial urban form. It is not sufficient to simply erect apartments next to office buildings. Functional modules must either be designed beforehand, or the connective geometry must be such as to allow their spontaneous emergence (impossible with today's modernist zoning laws). The footpaths, parking arrangements, and proximity to other locations all affect the effectiveness of information exchange within any emergent module. A particular urban unit must fit into the global whole; not only in spatial terms, but in terms of the information exchange with its neighbors and the rest of the city.

4. Different types of complexity

A wide range of systems are called complex, and it is important to recognize major differences between distinct types of complexity. We identify two broad categories of complexity, using the computer analogies of HARDWARE and SOFTWARE. A physically simple system in general contains a small number of component types, and all components of one type are identical. Physical simplicity results from the fact that components are interchangeable among themselves. Complexity arises only when those components interact. The interaction between any two components depends primarily on the types of the components and the distance between them. Complexity in this case derives from the very large number of latent connections of exactly the same type among many identical components. The combinatorics of having to connect every identical unit to each other generates an enormous number of connections. Since every system works according to its connections, using the above analogy labels this type of system as akin to complex software.

In a system where the hardware in complex, on the other hand, while there could still be a small number of different component types, different components of the same type are similar but not identical. The interaction between any pair of components is in general unique to that particular pair. We thus have a large number of connections, but each one is identifiable and distinct. Here, the components are encouraged to form markedly different connections among themselves. Since all components are unique, only those connections are necessary that are needed for the system to function. The total number of connections is drastically reduced from the previous system, which had to provide all theoretically possible connections among identical components, precisely because its components were neither unique nor identifiable.

The starting states in a physical or economic system are the initial conditions under which a dynamic process begins. In an urban context, a starting state is the state of a city at some given time in the past, and we are interested to see if the city remains healthy, or develops insoluble problems as it evolves in the future. The two different types of complexity imply drastically different system properties and behaviors. In a complex system that works in a manner more analogous to complex software, very slightly different starting states can give rise to radically different end points. This is called "chaotic" behavior. (Chaotic behavior is observed in a large number of systems in physics, biology, economics, etc., and is a key reason for the difficulty of weather prediction. Readers of popular science recognize the extremely sensitive dependence on initial conditions as the "Butterfly Effect", in which a butterfly in Brazil causes an infinitesimally small disturbance that can nevertheless affect weather patterns in Europe much later [12]).

In a complex system that is more analogous to complex hardware, slightly different starting points will tend to give rise to similar end points (i.e. similar input conditions should generate similar behaviors). Partial insensitivity to input variability guarantees stability -- called "homeostasis" in living systems, which are structurally complex by virtue of morphogenetic mechanisms that generate uniquely individual organisms within the same typology. Convergence on appropriate end points is achieved by controlling the variability at the system level.

Living cities combine both types of complex structure and functionality. A crucial realization is that a living city surpasses a certain "complexity threshold", below which it is dead and sterile. Incredibly, modernist planners deliberately created such dead cities, either on green sites, or out of previously living urban fabric. Analogies based on physical complexity that rely on identical components and interactions can be misleading. A stable complex system is characterized by uniquely individual components interacting in distinct ways. It does, however, give the misleading appearance of physical disorder as seen diagrammatically. Thinking of the traditional city as undesirably complex in its physical form mistakenly led planners to think that cleaning up visual complexity would solve urban problems. That idea is based on a serious misunderstanding of system architecture. The modernist city -- consisting of identical units interacting in the same way -- is problematic. Unmanageable complexity in the sense of software complexity is unavoidable for systemic reasons, despite the visual appearance of "order" imposed by the regular geometry.

Examples of this misunderstanding in action are described by Jane Jacobs [1]. City planners looking at aerial photos of living urban fabric found them to be visually complex, and decided to replace them with high-rise apartment blocks, which look neat on a plan. They thus killed the urban life in that region -- and never even acknowledged their mistake. The same misunderstanding led to such acts of violence to urban systems as cutting expressways through historical city cores. It seemed a visually simple and direct way to connect roads efficiently, but it totally ignored the fundamental complexity of the city. The automobile network must adapt itself into -- rather than disrupt or replace -- the network of information exchange that powers a compact, living city. We should expect that even a rudimentary understanding of system complexity be a prerequisite for any future urban planning decisions.

5. Systems and modular decomposition

Complex systems are coherent working wholes that cannot be completely separated into fully independent modules. A structure that can be easily separated into non-interacting constituents is not a complex system, but rather an aggregation of units (called a "heap" in systems theory). A conceptual separation into modules with some degree of interaction is widely used both for the design of artificial systems, and for the understanding of natural systems. Modules are defined as clumps of activity that interact more strongly within the module than external to it. Herbert Simon [13] has argued that there could be a small number of inequivalent separations of a system into components, all of which might make some sense because they identify different subsystems [7].

Systems driven by information exchange, whether natural or artificial, distribute their complexity between their hardware and software. Any functionally complex system is forced into a hierarchy of functional modules for two reasons [8, 14]. The first reason is that there are always advantages in minimizing the volume of information (design or genetic) required to build the system. As a result, such systems tend to contain a relatively small number of fundamentally different types of components. The system will be constructed from large numbers of a few basic types, with relatively slight variations within one type.

The second reason for a hierarchical structure is that any system needs to fix problems, and to make functional changes that do not disrupt existing functionality. Knowledge of a problem to be fixed, or a functional change to be made generally exists at a fairly high level in the system (e.g. a feature of the entire system does not work properly; an area of the city is declining). The necessary actions, however, must be taken on a much lower level in the hierarchy (e.g. replace a specific group of transistors; implement investment and regulatory actions). One has to find and follow logical paths that link high level conditions with detailed actions that are generating those symptoms. Connections linking the higher with the lower levels in a system help to define a hierarchy. These are the forces that lead to modularization; we now proceed to examine how modules are defined.

External information exchange among different modules must be minimized as far as possible, and activity largely (but not entirely) contained within the modules themselves. All modules on one level of scale must be roughly equal in terms of the number of primary component operations each module contains. If one module were much larger than the others, then most logical paths would pass through that one module, which would result in centralization instead of the distribution of functions. Most cities do have a central region, which is characterized by a peak in occupancy and traffic density, but larger cities are also polycentric.

An important lesson from computer systems is the hardware/software separation. Modular decomposition in software, such as occurs with "objects" and "patterns", works entirely in the abstract space where the program executes. This is entirely independent from the physical structure of the computer's hardware. In exactly the same way, a city works in two distinct spaces: the information exchange network, and the separate space of physical structures. We are applying modular decomposition to the former, not the latter.

Very large information exchange between two modules precludes their effective separation for the purpose of tracing logical paths. Modules are separated so that information exchange is minimized, corresponding with Courtois' [9] point that the join between modules -- the interface -- will be successful only if it occurs along a region that is weaker than any individual module's internal connections. No preconception, such as neat spatial ordering, can ever determine the partition into functional modules [7]. Defining modules by this process of "finding a compromise among different paths of information exchange" implies that such modules may have a very complex geometry. Using the above general rules for module formation gives guidelines for generating healthy urban fabric.

The geographical separation of residences from workplaces (enforced by postwar monofunctional zoning) is a case in point. Because these two urban regions -- apartment blocks or groups of suburban houses on the one hand, and office towers on the other -- interact so strongly with each other as a whole, they do NOT define separate functional modules, despite the simplistic expectations due to spatial clustering. Instead, the geometry forces functional module formation of the most inconvenient kind, with information exchange that is very expensive to maintain because of long links [2, 7]. The modules that do form are too weak, and suffer from overextended transport connections and a lack of internal coherence.

Another problem with this example is that there is simply no way to form modules of intermediate size. A stable hierarchy of different modules that fit within larger modules can never evolve in a monofunctional urban region; yet we know this to be a crucial feature of any working complex system. The nuclear household and its immediate connections defines the smallest module containing work, school, office, and supermarket. In the majority of cases, there is no successively larger module that contains this elementary module -- one immediately jumps from the nuclear household to the entire city. This lack of hierarchy is pathological from a systems point of view. From a social point of view, the decline of contemporary urban geometry is reflected in the fact that today's individual does not belong to any particular neighborhood or region.

High-rise office buildings and horizontal "office parks" are not functional modules. Typically, there is very little to no interaction between different offices in the same building or "park", compared to the exchange between each individual office and its headquarters, branch locations, customers, suppliers, bankers, etc. This elementary analysis invalidates both the office building and the "office park" as useful urban typologies, despite their recent proliferation. For similar reasons a region of suburban houses is not a functional module [7]. Creating office blocks and suburban house groups makes all genuine functional exchange high cost (or imposes systemic isolation). This is the system force behind Jane Jacobs' [1] observation that successful city neighborhoods are always mixed usage.

6. Plug-and-play strategies are misleading

Module reusability gives planners a false understanding of systems. Plug-and-play strategies in modular design offer the possibility of replacing a module that fails, or is superseded by an improved module. This also allows a module to be added to a system without rearranging the entire system. Conversely, a module can be removed when not needed, without requiring a complete reorganization. Plug-in complex modules became popular during World War II in military hardware. Savings in time resulting from the ability to quickly service a complex mechanism overrode the higher cost of replacing a module instead of diagnosing and fixing one of the module's internal components. The same mentality has been inherited by the computer industry, with throwaway modules as today's hardware standard. All of this depends on an interface that permits modules to connect easily to the system.

A successful application of this strategy is the development of a standard interface for connecting computer components, such as external hard disks, keyboards, monitors, etc. These standard connectors permit the rapid transmission of a large amount of data between hardware modules. Standardization is achieved by placing restrictions on the permitted interfaces, which leads to the simplification of protocols for information exchange. This in turn permits the interchangeability of modules.

Such plug-and-play capabilities can be misleading, however. In many instances of the forced modularization of complex computer systems, the net gain has been minimal or zero, because the modularization has been achieved by shifting the system complexity from the hardware to the software. In contrast to the above successful example, which is made possible by a simplification of protocols for information exchange, oftentimes simplifying the hardware makes the software carry the burden of complexity. That is, functionally simplifying the hardware moves most of the functional complexity into software. In those cases, the interface between modules becomes more complex rather than less complex. The system therefore becomes more difficult to maintain, even though its physical design looks simpler. So far, we are discussing physical (hardware) modules. As noted earlier, we need to consider the separate question of the modular decomposition of software.

It is extremely difficult to achieve plug-and-play with software modules in a complex real time system, unless the functions performed by different modules have very little interaction [15]. Object-oriented programming uses standard, simplified interfaces to stick software modules together, so as to enable different components to communicate inside a large complex program. Some complex software has been designed for plug-and-play modularity; for example, many large commercial programs possess modular features that a user may turn on or off. Nevertheless, cases are known of complex evolved software, such as that used for the air traffic control system, where one module cannot be removed without crashing the system (even though it is not supposed to affect the other modules).

Buildings, spaces, and infrastructure provide a rubric in which people exchange information through communication and movement. Planners picked up the idea of a spatial module as a result of thinking about visual complexity, and missed the fact that cities instead form functional modules. This misunderstanding has led to major typological and planning errors. A new residential subdivision, office tower, or shopping center is approved, with the misguided expectation that it will neatly plug into the existing city. As soon as one of these (non)modules is plugged in, urban forces spontaneously generate functional modules that do not look like anything envisioned by planners. Those functional modules stretch across a city, adding to its traffic congestion and utility wastage. The genuine modules that evolve are usually forced to be extremely weak by the wrong infrastructure and zoning, which are geared to support the integrity of the urbanistically irrelevant spatial (non)modules.

In fact, contemporary planning is heavily reliant on generating new spatial (non)modules, and plugging them into the city. Ostensibly designed as perfectly independent of the city, they are nothing of the sort. A suburban house cluster, office tower, or office park plugs into the city transportation network via a single road. This method falsely appears to follow the computer industry practice of using a restricted interface that permits module interchangeability -- but it is based on a misconception. Since such (non)modules contain a large number of interchangeable components, the latent connections with the rest of the city are enormous, and all have to go through the single available channel. This overloading certainly doesn't comply with the criterion of a simplified interface suitable for limited inter-modular interactivity. Paradoxically, when the interface works as it ought to -- by restricting interchange -- then the module dies off.

We know that early twentieth century urbanists adopted mass-production techniques from manufacturing, and applied them to cities. One of these was the extreme visual simplification of a city's hardware components, in the misguided attempt to implement the idea that urban units ought to look like reusable spatial modules. We should not be surprised, therefore, at the system consequences of this action. Physical separation and segregation of functions removes functional complexity from the city's built structure, and overburdens people's daily movement. The simplistic visual ordering of modernist planning, therefore, has as its unintended consequence an extreme functional complication (hence overloading) of the transportation network.

Going back to the city/computer analogy, much of today's urban activity and costs are due to the shifting of data. This is not a useful activity in a computer, but something that occurs only when there is a bug. Shifting data around and around serves no useful function -- it is not a part of software, and does not compute or process anything. Useful computing time is spent in processing information. The urban analogy of useless information shuffling is forcing people to move around a city unnecessarily to accomplish their daily tasks, consequently wasting time and energy. Planners using plug-in spatial (non)modules maximize this wasteful shifting around by means of an inappropriate urban geometry.

7. A city works like a brain, not a computer

Different system architectures characterize complex systems that work in a different manner, as for example a digital computer versus a mammalian brain. The functionality of an electronic system is expressed as a series of commands in software. The use of unambiguous contexts results in the familiar memory/processing separation of the von Neumann system architecture upon which most computers are based [8]. Information exchanged between two modules must have an unambiguous meaning to the recipient module in terms of its own functionality. Modules can then use their input information to generate outputs that are commands for the system.

Maintaining unambiguous contexts is impractical in a complex system such as a city, however, which has to heuristically modify its own functionality, or learn. In a system that learns, modules must heuristically determine their own inputs and outputs (i.e. learn by trial and error). Nevertheless, if a module changes its outputs, it is difficult for other modules which have previously received inputs from that module to readjust. The receiving modules cannot assign an unambiguous meaning to the new output. Therefore, outputs from modules can only change gradually, in ways that minimize the loss of meaning to other modules. In a city, this means that healthy urban fabric is generated by a slow evolution, and also a city must be allowed to evolve over time. On the other hand, radical redevelopment of healthy urban fabric destroys meaningful information exchanged within the city. The result is city dysfunction until enough time has passed to rebuild information contexts.

There are two possible information architectures for a complex system. One is the von Neumann architecture with a memory/processing separation supporting unambiguous information exchange, in which functionality is explicitly controlled. The other is the recommendation architecture with a clustering/competition separation supporting meaningful yet slightly ambiguous information exchange, in which functionality is defined heuristically [8, 14]. A competition subsystem interprets the outputs of submodules as a range of alternative behaviors, and quickly selects one of the alternatives. This process depends critically on consequence feedback to determine appropriate system behavior.

When it is necessary for functionality to change heuristically, or without central direction, a system adopts the recommendation architecture. Biological brains have evolved a recommendation architecture [8, 14, 16]. In the mammalian brain the clustering/competition separation corresponds with the anatomical separation between cortex and subcortical structures [8]. Commercial electronic systems, on the other hand, invariably use the von Neumann architecture. In the most complex electronic systems it is extremely difficult to evolve functionality in a controlled fashion. When a change is made, extensive testing and error correction is required, with the testing covering not just the modified functionality, but examples of all different system functions.

A von Neumann system architecture is not scaleable. Thus, a city that is finely tuned to work at a certain size cannot handle changes in its size very effectively. Since the recommendation architecture uses more resources than the von Neumann architecture to perform the same functionality, if there is no need for functional change, operational forces push the system towards the von Neumann architecture. Information exchange then tends to become unambiguous because the action required in every condition is well understood. However, if conditions begin to change, such a system will find it very hard to adapt. The system can no longer find an effective compromise between module equality and information exchange, which reveals itself in a steadily decreasing ability to make changes. The failure of 19th century Manchester is one urban example. The city became extremely efficient for the cotton industry, but could not adapt when circumstances changed.

Resolution of conflicting recommendations must occur in an institutionally separate function which does not require complex coordination. Electoral and legal institutions perform this role in a city. There are interesting similarities between the competitive subsystem as defined here, and legal and political mechanisms. In a physiological brain the competitive function will in general choose one or another option rather than try to find a compromise, because it is impossible to know whether a compromise will not make things worse. Thus the legal and government regulation process for resolving conflict in general selects a winner from amongst existing alternatives rather than generating novel behavior.

8. The role of telecommunications

Information and communications technologies need to be incorporated into traditional city functions [17, 18]. The dynamics of the rapidly evolving electronic city are as yet little understood, while the twentieth-century model of a city based on simplistic spatial ordering is irrelevant for modeling a communications network. Blocks of functionally segregated buildings, strictly aligned to a rectangular grid, do not reveal the various overlapping networks that actually drive a city to function [19, 20]. As a complex system whose output is commercial wealth and culture, a city has a functional architecture based on information exchange [5]. Information and communications technologies should fit neatly into the hierarchy of information exchange functions at different levels of scale.

As has been well documented [21, 22], the advent of telecommunications ever since the introduction of the telephone dramatically altered urban systems. Information exchange intensified to a degree that was previously unimaginable. Telecommunications is low cost in the sense that it requires very little physical movement of people. One of the principal reasons for the initial aggregation of people into cities was in order to communicate with each other at a low cost, and this is still the driving force behind, say, the Diamond districts of New York City and Antwerp. It could be argued that the need for persons in the same trade to cluster is in part replaced by telecommunications. However, this is only true if the type of information exchanged by telecommunications is exactly the same as that exchanged by personal contact.

Some authors predicted that telecommunications would replace commuting. The reasons this prediction failed are not hard to see when analyzed from the perspective of information architecture. Information exchanged through personal contact and people movement has a much richer content, including information derived from a combination of voice tone, expression, and body language [23]. In addition, a visit allows the visitor to observe a quantity of otherwise unavailable information, and allows the visited person to observe the reaction of the visitor to this information. The multiplicity of sources of environmental information cannot be duplicated by a restricted number of communications channels.

The developing field of "Knowledge Management" addresses some of the crucial issues that have long been ignored by architects and urbanists [24]. For example, what is the optimal physical working environment that is conducive to creative output? Surely this is a trillion-dollar question, considering that our civilization is based on an economic engine driven by human creativity inside buildings, rather than by subsistence farming. Going beyond the strictly spatial aspects of the surrounding information field [11], researchers in knowledge management identify every informational aspect of the environment, including office decoration and artifacts, human interactions, and social dynamics, as crucial to either supporting or hindering creative work [24].

Large corporations have generally found that introducing new communications mechanisms such as e-mail or videoconferencing does not in fact reduce the amount of physical travel. The effect of the new communication capability is to increase the complexity of projects which can then be undertaken, rather than to replace existing communications (again, we see the optimization tendency towards fractal loading). The exception is that if a new communication mechanism results in the same information exchange at lower cost in resources or time, the new one will replace the old. Examples are the replacement of telegraph by fax, and the replacement in North America of interstate train travel by air travel.

Working from home via an electronic link is now feasible, and there are several instances of successful applications. First, individuals constrained to remain at home can now link to informational nodes that would otherwise be too costly (in terms of time and arrangements) to interact with physically. Second, powerful and wealthy individuals can set up residence in some fancy resort, and conduct their business via electronic links. This is made possible because their financial resources enable them to have all necessary information available, and any personal level of information exchange is taken care of by a quick trip. The module here is an informationally stimulating environment for those who can afford it.

Someone stuck in an informationally-starved environment may not be altogether happy to work exclusively from home, however. He or she normally prefers to fight rush-hour traffic because an outing at least gives some informational stimulation, and enables face-to-face information exchange with coworkers. Suburbanites feel informationally deprived, spending hours on the telephone and in front of the television or computer monitor in an effort to remedy this. The workplace has for many people replaced the home as the primary social node. People don't want just to eliminate the ordeal of a lengthy daily commute by car, bus, or train; they want to get their daily information exchange at a lesser cost. Today we pay an inordinately high price in automobile traffic for very little meaningful information.

The same remarks also hold true for teleshopping. Certainly, the ability to order a product from a computer screen at home has revolutionized commercial interactivity, and will probably lead to further major changes in consumer habits. Nevertheless, key components of the shopping experience are social, sensory, and public. These include the trip to the shop; interacting with other customers; touching and feeling the product before making a decision; combining a shopping trip with something else, etc. This social dimension drives "shopping for entertainment", a past-time for a large number of people, and an emotionally-satisfying method of information exchange for everyone, including the busiest individuals on this planet.

Jennifer Light has examined the interactions between the physical city and the electronic city [25]. She does not share the pessimism of other authors about the latter replacing the former. We agree with her when she says that: "The decline of cities, then, cannot be explained simply as a physical phenomenon attributed to the growth of electronic media" [25]. This coincides with our own observations of new urban activity patterns, which use electronic connectivity to reinforce and regenerate the pedestrian urban fabric. Light even defends the shopping mall, which expresses information exchange needs that have been suppressed elsewhere in the city [25]. In our opinion, the decline of cities is a consequence of misunderstanding urban forces and networks, and urban typologies such as the shopping mall are reactions to rather than the causes of this decline.

The last examples demonstrate the need for functional module formation in a connected hierarchy. A nuclear module of one person working from home requires that it be contained in a larger functional module. If that is impossible, then the smaller module breaks down. This is the reason for people not being motivated to work from home, and this lack of a hierarchy of modules has prevented the realization of the much-hyped "telecity". In contrast to this, the wealthy businessperson who can work with a laptop computer from a high-class coffee shop, or next to the swimming pool of a resort hotel, has become embedded in a very pleasant and stimulating environmental module.

9. Networks and evolving city form

Unless adequate meaning can be conveyed by telecommunications, information exchange will involve the movement of people. An effective transportation network will allow a high proportion of required information exchange to take place via short walks (say < 10 minutes each way) with secondary information exchange; an intermediate proportion to take place by moderate overhead mechanical transport (say < 30 minutes each way); and only a small proportion requiring high overhead mechanical transport (say from 30 minutes to 1 hour each way). Journeys that occupy in total much of a working day will in general be ruled out. The distribution of both pathlengths and journey times should follow an inverse-power scaling law favoring the small scale -- where the number of paths is inversely proportional to their length [7].

Creating an effective network depends on the functional partitioning of the city, and will always require a compromise. The decision to reduce the overhead for one type of trip may increase the overhead for another type of trip. For example, widening a road and increasing vehicular traffic may make many pedestrian trips across the new road much longer, or make them altogether impractical, thus destroying many working functional modules that depended on those paths. It is therefore essential to investigate whether an apparent demand for a new high level network connection such as a major road could be addressed by a different module partitioning, which might reduce the need for trips in the direction of the proposed road.

Change in a city is ubiquitous. The goal of urbanism is to help a city evolve and redefine its modules so they can modify their functionality. It is not easy to determine the appropriate module and network changes so as to respond to changes in the city's needs and environment. Urban change must be a natural built-in function of the system, driven by a complex pattern of information exchange. As discussed earlier, centrally-directed changes typically introduce large numbers of unanticipated and undesirable side effects. Any attempt at total central direction of modules and networks on every level will result in steadily increasing dysfunctionality. In spite of this, planning now focuses on large-scale interventions, and does not tolerate spontaneous evolution driven by input at different levels.

The different modules on every level of scale will need to generate alternative recommendations for module and network change. A simple competitive process must select the most appropriate change. Consequence feedback then has to adjust the competitive subsystem to evolve its selections towards those that optimize the network. Knowledge relevant to one change may exist on a number of levels. There must therefore be mechanisms by which modules at many different levels of scale recommend change, which can then be received, interpreted, and integrated into a decision that optimizes overall city effectiveness. Less successful cities can copy explicitly from more successful cities, provided that the functional relationships are copied, and not just physical structures and individual institutions.

Here is precisely where the electronic city can help the real city. There are many ideas being generated on how to involve people in their own environment; promote both education on urban issues and feedback from residents; simulate and coordinate urban interventions; many things that were extremely difficult to do before the internet and the World-Wide Web [25]. If we proceed about this task in an intelligent fashion, then a new understanding of urban systems can be applied to revitalize urban life in many regions, and also to prevent the extinction of existing life in regions threatened by blind "modernization".

10. Conclusion

We made steps towards identifying the system architecture of cities by comparing them to complex information systems such as digital computers, biological organisms, and the human brain. A city works according to an information architecture that recommends, but does not demand an action. Functionality on all levels of scale is driven by the need to optimize information exchange, from a face-to-face meeting between two persons, to the movement of individuals, up to the daily movement of many people between urban nodes.

Functional modules should develop in a way such that more information is exchanged within a module than between different modules. Cities, like human brains but unlike electronic systems, must modify their functionality without explicit intellectual control over every detail of the change. Our model allows us to help a living city repair itself much as a living organism does, and to guide its evolution under changing conditions. Rather than using models based on visually regular aerial geometries, this approach makes it possible to evaluate changes to city plans, zoning codes, transportation, and communication networks in terms of their impact on overall city effectiveness.

Acknowledgments. NAS is very grateful to Rajendra V. Boppana, Jos� N. Iovino, Turgay Korkmaz, Josep Oliva i Casas, and Arthur van Bilsen for helpful comments and advice.

References

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[2] N. A. Salingaros, Theory of the Urban Web, Journal of Urban Design 3 (1998) 53-71.

[3] P. M. Allen, Cities and Regions as Self-Organizing Systems: Models of Complexity (Gordon and Breach, Amsterdam, 1997).

[4] J. Portugali, Self-organization and Cities (Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 2000).

[5] R. L. Meier, A Communications Theory of Urban Growth (MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962).

[6] C. Alexander, A City is Not a Tree, Architectural Forum 122 No. 1 (1965) 58-61 and 122 No. 2 (1965) 58-62. Reprinted in: J. Thackara (ed.), Design After Modernism (Thames and Hudson, London, 1988) 67-84. Available at: www.rudi.net/bookshelf/classics/city/alexander/alexander1.shtml

[7] N. A. Salingaros, Remarks on a City's Composition, RUDI -- Resource for Urban Design Information (2001) approximately 15 pages. Available at: www.math.utsa.edu/~salingar/RemarksCity.html

[8] L. A. Coward, A Functional Architecture Approach to Neural Systems, Systems Research and Information Systems 9 (2000) 69-120.

[9] P. -J. Courtois, On Time and Space Decomposition of Complex Structures, Communications of the ACM 28 (1985) 590-603.

[10] D. L. Parnas, P. C. Clements, and D. M. Weiss, The Modular Structure of Complex Systems, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-11 (1985) 259-266.

[11] N. A. Salingaros, Urban Space and its Information Field, Journal of Urban Design 4 (1999) 29-49.

[12] J. Gleick, Chaos (Viking/Penguin, New York, 1987).

[13] H. A. Simon, The Architecture of Complexity, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106 (1962) 467-482. Reprinted in: H. A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (M.I.T Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969) 84-118.

[14] L. A. Coward, The Recommendation Architecture: Lessons from Large-Scale Electronic Systems Applied to Cognition, Journal of Cognitive Systems Research 2 (2001) 111-156.

[15] D. Garlan, R. Allen, and J. Ockerbloom, Architectural Mismatch, or Why it's hard to build systems out of existing parts. In: Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Software Engineering, IEEE Computer Society (ACM Press, New York, 1995) 179-185. Revised version in: IEEE Software 12 (November 1995) 17-26.

[16] L. A. Coward, Pattern Thinking (Praeger, New York, 1990).

[17] P. Drewe, In Search of New Concepts of Physical and Virtual Space. In: Proceedings of the Conference: "Cities in the Global Information Society: an International Perspective" (University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, November 22-24, 1999). Published in: M. Schrenk (ed.), Beitrage zum 5. Symposion "Computergest�tzte Raumplanung" -- CORP 2000, Volume 1 (Vienna University of Technology) 37-44.

[18] P. Drewe, ICT and Urban Form: Planning and design off the beaten track, Delft University of Technology (Design Studio 'The Network City', Faculty of Architecture, 2000).

[19] G. Dupuy, L'Urbanisme Des R�seaux (Armand Colin, Paris, 1991).

[20] G. Dupuy, Les Territoires de l'Automobile (Anthropos, Paris, 1995).

[21] P. Droege (ed.), Intelligent Environments (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1997).

[22] S. Graham and S. Marvin, Telecommunications and the City (Routledge, London, 1996).

[23] E. M. Hallowell, The Human Moment at Work, Harvard Business Review (January-February 1999) 58-66.

[24] V. Ward and C. Holtham, The Role of Private and Public Spaces in Knowledge Management. In: Knowledge Management: Concepts and Controversies, 10-11 February 2000 (University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, 2000). Available at: bprc.warwick.ac.uk/km094.pdf

[25] J. Light, From City Space to Cyberspace. In: M. Crang, P. Crang, and J. May (eds.), Virtual Geographies (Routledge, London, 1999) 109-130.

January 20, 2004 at 02:17 PM in Corporate Blogging | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Fractal Web applied to Blogging

An excellent piece from Richard MacManus, at http://www.readwriteweb.com , talking about the relationship of blogs and fractal theory.

Read/Write Web

Today I listened to Christopher Lydon's recent interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. In it Berners-Lee discussed the state of the Web and outlined his vision of a "fractal society". It was also very interesting to hear his views on blogging, which I'd not heard him speak on before. At the beginning of the interview, he mentioned that the general public are "seizing on the Web as a way to have a conversation". I got the impression that TBL sees blogging as one aspect of this phenomenon, but he cautions that blogging is still practised by comparatively few Web users. Blogs are a "new structure", but just one part of the Web.

When Lydon asked him why he created the Web back in the late 80's/early 90's, Berners-Lee said he felt there was "a need to write where you can read". He initially designed it to be a "collaborative medium", but it's real impact has been as a "publication medium". A word he used a few times was "annotate" and one point in particular stood out here: that we should be able to annotate the Web in order to "make people accountable". TBL used the example of US politics, which he felt needed to improve its accountability. He suggested that the Web could enable the public to annotate what public figures say and evolve discussions around that. This reminded me of the W3C's read/write web browser, Amaya, which I've blogged about in the past. Amaya is one of the great missed opportunities of the Web, IMHO. Microsoft's Internet Explorer has roughly 95% of the market, yet it can only read Web content - it can't be used to write it (at least not without using an add-on tool, such as blog authoring systems like Radio Userland and Movable Type). I am of course referring here to the Universal Canvas, which is another one of my obsessions - and possibly right up there in mythical status with the Semantic Web. But I digress.

The main part of the TBL interview focused on Berners-Lee's theory of a Fractal Society and how the Web can be used to achieve this. Fractal Web is a complicated mathematics-backed theory and I need to read up on this some more. Indeed, TBL has been using the word "fractal" a lot these past few months in order to evangelise his concept. So people are just beginning to understand it now. Essentially "fractal" in the TBL sense means structure on many levels, which is the phrase he used to describe it. Berners-Lee observed that "complicated systems seem to be fractal" - and I inferred from this that he thinks blogging is such a system.

TBL wants people to try and achieve a "balance across the different scales". But achieving success on a global scale doesn't mean you need to become famous - it simply means "think global, act local". His suggestion is that we should divide our time over 10 channels, like so:

1 - You
10 - Your family
100 - Your social group
1000 - local community (eg your church)
etc up to the 10th level, which is a global scale.

Each of those levels represents the size of your audience, or the number of people you are dealing with (nb: TBL didn't specify what exactly the labels represented, but this is my understanding of what he said). He had an analogy of dropping marbles into 10 cans and the aim is to spread one's marbles around. TBL went on to discuss the fractal theory in terms of blogging:-

Blogging is an individualistic activity, in that you're expressing yourself via the Web in your writing and other multimedia. But blogging is also a fractal activity because, even though you're doing an individualistic thing, you're also "part of something bigger". When you blog, you're participating in a group activity. The question for us bloggers then becomes: which scale am I blogging at and therefore how much time should I be devoting to it in relation to my other activities? For example I am currently working at the 3rd level with my weblog - my audience can be counted in multiples of 10. So should my ultimate goal be to hop up a couple of levels and become an A-List blogger, where my blog reaches an audience of 10,000 or more? Or do I want to become a Citizen Blogger for my local community, so I move up to level 4 with an audience of around 1000? Or should I be happy writing for a small audience of people who share my interests? Maybe I can do a combination of these things - that is, different blogging activities aimed at different fractal levels. These are all questions that perhaps bloggers should be asking themselves. My initial impression is that Tim Berners-Lee's fractal theory helps us to balance blogging with other aspects of our social lives on the Web. Perhaps it's even an antidote to inequality in the blogosphere?

My favourite part of the TBL interview was when he said that blogging *should* be two-way. One should express oneself (=WRITE), but also listen to feedback (=READ). Berners-Lee thought that blogging has done exceedingly well to provide mechanisms for gathering and listening to feedback. But he wants people on the Web in general (and I'm hereby employing this concept to blogging specifically) to make a conscious effort to not constrain themselves to a rose-coloured view of the world. That is, don't become trapped in a self-reinforcing social group, that only links to and reads content belonging to other members of your group. Listen to other bloggers, listen to *all* the blogosphere. This is where I believe topic-based ontologies on the Web can be very useful and the likes of Topic Exchange and k-collector are improving the Web, by exposing us to content from people who we don't normally read but who nevertheless share our interests.

TBL wants fractal to refer to a balance between diversity and homogeneity. By this I took it that bloggers should be diverse enough to write about the things that interest them individually (the old 'to each his own' maxim), but at the same time the Net enables us to participate in conversations with other people in the blogosphere who share our interests - and all of this is going on at different levels. Looking at this from a personal viewpoint, my blogroll reflects the people I see as having similar interests to me and therefore I see us collectively as a "group" (nb: that doesn't mean the people on my blogroll necessarily see *me* as part of *their* group). On a local community level, perhaps this is where my Citizen Blogger post comes in - maybe I will begin to use the Web to contribute to my community as a Citizen Blogger. And on a global scale, well I need to work on improving myself on this level. It may mean doing some writing for a publication with a wider audience than my humble blog. For example, the people who volunteer their services to Digital Web magazine are involving themselves on a higher fractal level than just writing on their individual websites. They are writing for a bigger community of people and for a specific public purpose, so they have to adjust their output accordingly. This is just one example, there are many more options to explore and outside the Web Development community too.

As you have seen, the Tim Berners-Lee interview has inspired me to think and write about how I can improve my 'fractibility' (if there is such a word!). I look forward to listening to more Christopher Lydon interviews too, it's quite stimulating to the mind.

PS: Here are some links about the Fractal Web.

January 20, 2004 at 02:15 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

IT industry watches Iowa

Declan McCullagh, Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Democratic presidential candidates have remained relatively quiet on technology, but as primary season gets under way, the "offshoring" controversy could provide a catalyst to raise the profile of high-tech concerns in the campaign.
The flow of U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas has been a recurring theme of the Democratic debates leading up to Monday's Iowa caucuses and next week's New Hampshire primary, in a jab at President George W. Bush. As a result, lobbyists are closely tracking the positions of Democratic candidates on offshoring, which many companies argue is necessary to preserve their competitiveness.

"One of the concerns I have is what happens in this situation when, in their eagerness to create a policy issue, some of them have engaged in a lot of antitrade rhetoric and antiglobalization rhetoric," said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). "From the association's perspective, it will be an ongoing concern if it turns into a hard-and-fast policy concern in the general election."

Offshoring offers among the biggest technology interests in a campaign where neither Democrats nor Republicans have weighed in on hot-button technology topics such as spam, computer security, Internet taxes and online piracy.

Along with Reps. Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., and Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry has positioned himself against the technology industry on offshoring.

"In the U.S. alone, the value of IT services provided by offshore labor will double to $16 billion next year and triple again to $46 billion by 2007," Kerry's campaign Web site states. The site indicates that if elected, Kerry would try to slow the practice. Kerry also introduced legislation in November that would require employees of offshore call centers to identify their location.

ITAA's Miller, who says he has helped to raise money for candidate Howard Dean in a personal capacity, says IT companies would "be very disappointed in any presidential candidate who has made a fundamental of his campaign that he would remove the U.S. from a leadership role on trade issues...obviously this is a lot of posturing in the primary. We know that candidates in both parties have last-minute changes of heart when they have to go out in front of the general electorate."

Applause from industry
Probably the candidate with the most extensive record on technology is Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who has been active in Congress in areas as diverse as privacy, free trade and video games. That should be no surprise. Lieberman, who is polling in the single digits in Iowa and New Hampshire, is likely the Democrat with the least regulatory views on taxes and trade--crucial concerns to any industry with a global focus.

"Clearly Lieberman has the most articulated and defined positions and record in support of technology," said Dave McCurdy, president of the Electronic Industries Alliance, an umbrella organization of technology trade associations that comprises about 2,300 member companies. "Without question, he's more pro-high-tech even than the Bush administration."

Last May, Lieberman won the endorsement of technology executives and venture capitalists, including John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Handspring CEO Donna Dubinsky. Other Lieberman endorsers were Henry Samueli, chairman and chief technology officer of Broadcom; Dan Scheinman, a vice president of Cisco Systems; and John Freidenrich of the Bay Partners venture capital firm. Lieberman has received a "life rating" of 100 percent from the Information Technology Industry Council, which compiles lists of technology votes in Congress, with an emphasis on trade.

Before the 2000 election, Lieberman sided with the tech industry on key issues: lifting the cap on H-1B visas, renewing the moratorium on Internet taxes, extending the research and development tax credit, and promoting antispam legislation, among others.But on social issues, Lieberman has often drawn fire from civil liberties and First Amendment groups for his dogged campaigns against Internet prurience and video game violence. He has condemned video game makers for excessive violence, saying last year that the PlayStation 2 game "Grand Theft Auto III" was "sick and indefensible." He's also pressured companies such as Best Buy, Circuit City and Wal-Mart Stores to stop selling violent games to minors.

Another issue, Lieberman has advocated an ".xxx" or ".sex" top-level domain for pornographic content on the Internet. "This idea, which would in effect establish a virtual red-light district...has a lot of merit, for rather than constricting the Net's open architecture, it would capitalize on it to effectively shield children from pornography, and it would do so without encroaching on the rights of adults to have access to protected speech," Lieberman told a government commission in June 2000.

Both the Lieberman and Dean campaigns were caught spamming last year, something that is not restricted by the recently enacted Can-Spam (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) law.

McCurdy of the Electronic Industries Alliance also had kind things to say about Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who is tied with Dean in New Hampshire or leading by a hair, according to polls. "Kerry has made an effort to reach out to the technology community and is actually pretty knowledgeable on a number of the issues, though not always lining up (with us)," McCurdy said. "(Sen. John) Edwards a little less so, and Gephardt is not even in the ballpark because of his position on trade and outsourcing."

By the numbers
In a rarity among the candidates, former Vermont Gov. Dean has produced an Internet policy paper, "Principles for an Internet Policy," which outlines some themes familiar to frequent Net users; It calls, for instance, for the Internet's end-to-end nature to be protected. But it also reiterates pro-regulatory themes, calling for more federal spending to achieve "universal Internet access, regardless of economic or geographic position," for example.

Dean's campaign has relied heavily on the Internet for fundraising and organizing, which has produced a surprisingly strong showing for a Washington outsider from a state with just three Electoral College votes. Though Dean had staked out an early lead, he finished third in the Iowa caucuses, well behind first-place finisher Kerry and the runner-up, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.

Former Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who, according to an American Research Group poll is gaining ground in the days leading up to the New Hampshire primary, does not list any technology topic on his campaign Web site. Instead, the site is devoted to touting Clark's proposed tax hikes, foreign-policy advice, and prescription drug benefits.

Clark did receive more than $830,000 for his lobbying work on behalf of data-mining firm Acxiom, according to the Center for Public Integrity. Acxiom is the same company involved in a secret deal last year to use information on JetBlue Airways customers to create passenger profiles. Until last fall, Clark was on the board of Acxiom and Entrust, a Dallas-based company that sells security and digital identity products.

Kucinich warns of how the USA Patriot Act made it easier for police to wiretap the Internet, and notes that he was the only candidate to vote against the law. Kucinich also alleged last November that Diebold, which makes touch-screen voting machines, had unreasonably invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to silence critics on the Internet.

Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Edwards has one of the best privacy records of the Democratic candidates, whose number also includes the Rev. Al Sharpton.

"Sen. Edwards has twice introduced a spyware bill. It's very strong," Hoofnagle said. "It's an opt-in bill...The 'adware' companies of the world, like Gator, are always trying to seek exemptions from being defined as spyware. Sen. Edwards' bill didn't make compromises."

Introduced in January 2001, Edwards' Spyware Control and Privacy Protection Act would have required computer users to give their consent before software "that includes a capability to collect information about the user" could be activated. It died in committee.

Overall, however, political experts said technology will not play a central role in the presidential election season.

"It's safe to say that almost none of the really important Internet and technology issues will be debated during this campaign," said Adam Thierer, a policy analyst at the nonpartisan Cato Institute. "In an attempt to shore up votes and campaign cash for the technology community, all the candidates will probably just play it safe and stick to bland platitudes and generalities about how 'technology is vital to the U.S. economy.' It's just a bunch of hot air."

Thierer predicts that in the weeks leading up to the November general election, Bush will do the same. "The Bush campaign will be feeding us the exact same rhetoric and telling us he's the man that really cares about high-technology and the Internet in America," Thierer said. "But there has been no coherent vision or policy leadership on these issues from the Bush White House."

January 20, 2004 at 09:53 AM in Politics | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Millions of Europeans Pay for Music Downloads

Yahoo! News - Millions of Europeans Pay for Music Downloads

By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - Europeans purchased over three million song downloads in 2003 from the continent's primary online music store, OD2, raising faint hopes the lacklustre music industry is on the road to recovery.

A few million downloads is not going to immediately turn around an industry bracing for its fourth straight year of declining CD sales.

But the emerging download market offers a glimmer of hope for record label executives who have struggled for years to thwart free file-sharing services like Kazaa.

"I have to believe electronic distribution of music will be an increasingly important part of the business for record labels, but unfortunately I don't think this is an instant cure," Charles Grimsdale, chief executive of Britain's OD2, told Reuters Tuesday.

"The market is growing fast for sure, but new markets take time," said Grimsdale, who co-founded the company with rocker Peter Gabriel.

Still, the volume of downloads is growing 25 percent month on month, Grimsdale said, which would mean download sales should grow more than three-fold in 2004.

The more mature U.S. market is growing even faster. American music fans purchased 30 million download tracks in 2003 as online stores such as Apple Computer's iTunes proved a big hit with consumers.

The success of iTunes, combined with some encouraging reports that online piracy may be tailing off in the U.S., has helped propel shares of EMI, the largest stand-alone music company, more than 40 percent higher since the beginning of the year.

At 4:07 a.m. EST Tuesday, shares in EMI were trading down 0.3 percent at 225.5 pence.

For OD2, which licenses its download service to 30 European retail and Internet partners including HMV and Microsoft's MSN, the volume of downloads picked up in August when it introduced through MSN a tariff scheme allowing users to buy downloads without a subscription.

"Our sales increased in some cases as much as 900 percent at that point," Grimsdale said.

Grimsdale acknowledged competition will be much more fierce in 2004. Industry officials expect the big U.S.-based online stores such as iTunes and Roxio's Napster (news - web sites) will make their European debut by summer.

OD2 is the most established player in Europe, having arranged licensing deals with all five major music labels, giving it a catalog of 260,000 songs.

Grimsdale said it was the process of adding to its library several hundred thousands songs it has under license, giving it a catalog of one million songs. "We are furiously trying to fill the gap," he said.

January 20, 2004 at 06:21 AM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Spam Filters Grab Good With Bad

Wired News: Spam Filters Grab Good With Bad

02:00 AM Jan. 19, 2004 PT
Do not use profanity. Be very careful when discussing financial or business affairs. Avoid any mention of your private parts. Do not offer any guarantees, or refer to checks that may or may not be in the mail.
Refrain from describing anything or anybody as "free." Abstain from the exuberant use of punctuation marks. Shun simple salutations like "Hello," and opt instead to craft a detailed, personalized subject line.

Oh, and don't ever use the word opt, particularly in conjunction with the words "in" or "out."

These are fast becoming the new rules of e-mail communication, enforced not by prim-faced etiquette experts but by spam filters that scrutinize the contents of incoming messages for "spammy" words and shuttle suspects off to junk-mail holding tanks or directly into the abyss of the deleted items folder.

As spam continues to proliferate wildly -- within a week after the antispam Can-Spam act went into effect on Jan. 1, unsolicited commercial e-mail increased by almost 7 percent, according to spam-filtering vendor MX Logic -- some individual users, businesses and ISPs feel forced to filter for spam more aggressively.

And while vigorous filtering will purge spam from inboxes, it can also act as an unintended censor by suppressing any mention of the typical spam themes -- and even references to spam itself -- in legitimate personal e-mails.

"Patterns of e-mail use are definitely being impacted both by spam and by antispam filters," said Craig Hughes, chief architect at McAfee Security and co-developer of the open-source SpamAssassin spam-filter project.

"I myself run into the problem all the time, mainly because what I'm corresponding about frequently involves discussions of spam or particular spam strategies."

Hughes isn't the only one struggling to communicate about spam. America Online's public relations department recently sent out a press announcement about the company's spam-blocking efforts, and was dismayed to discover that many reporters' e-mail filters tagged the release as spam.

AOL media reps had to send out another mailing asking reporters to visit the company's corporate website to read the release.

"I've lost count of the number of e-mails that get bounced back thanks to spam filters getting triggered by completely innocent words and phrases," said Suresh Ramasubramanian, head of security and antispam operations for managed mail-services firm Outblaze.

"The presence and prevalence of such filters is an indication that the spam problem has grown huge, and is being largely dealt with by people who have little or no inclination to do anything beyond plugging in a spam filter, cranking its settings up to maximum paranoia and forgetting all about it. Filters need to be checked, tweaked and trained."

Marketers have been struggling to purge spam-filter triggers from their e-mails for some time, sometimes even turning to services that claim to run mail through a range of antispam filters and then suggest content modifications to ensure messages won't get snagged by filters.

But others who rely on e-mail to conduct their businesses, and have previously run afoul of filters, try to purge spammy words from their messages and then just cross their fingers.

"I've seen a number of examples where individuals have had to take spam-filtering technology into account -- when crafting important e-mail, they have had to put some real thought into content, especially the subject line," said Chris Belthoff, a senior security analyst with antispam and antivirus vendor Sophos.

Experts said new antispam technology is being developed that will both block spam and return freedom of speech to legitimate users. Some of the more promising tools involve various "sender authentication" schemes, such as SPF (sender permitted from) which provides a way of authenticating an e-mail sender's IP address and blocking e-mails with bogus sender information.

"If these efforts result in widespread adoption of some form of sender authentication, it will hopefully mean that users can stop worrying about being careful about message content," said Belthoff.

For the time being, "whitelists" -- a record of senders that have explicit permission to e-mail an individual no matter what subjects they may choose to discuss -- may be the only sure way to get around sensitive filters.

But many see whitelists as another censorship device, and mourn the loss of free and open e-mail communications, where anyone with an e-mail address was, at least in theory, reachable by anyone else.

Hughes believes e-mail filters will get smarter, but warns that smarter doesn't always equate to better. He also predicts that e-mail filters may produce interesting sociological side effects in the near future.

"If you consider the problem as being a dynamic, evolving system in which spammers, nonspammers and antispammers are all shifting to stay alive in the evolutionary landscape, the precision and sensitivity of the filters will likely oscillate over time -- barring the extinction of either spammers or nonspammers," said Hughes.

"Meanwhile, nonspammer newbies will tend to get hammered hardest in terms of having their mail blocked, since they don't know how to send it in ways which can get through. They will also get hammered hardest in terms of receiving spam, since they'll be less discriminating in their choices of spam filters."

Hughes also believes spammers will divide into several sub-species.

"Some will likely specialize in targeting the newbies and the unfiltered masses; these will probably tend to be pushing Viagra, cheap porn and the opportunity to communicate with interesting Africans who want to give them millions of dollars," said Hughes.

"Others will likely move up-market, probably sell their services to legitimate marketers, and specialize in targeting those users who have the very best filters."

"The stratification of e-mail users," he added, "both senders and recipients, due to these Darwinian pressures will be an interesting phenomenon to watch in the coming years. Unfortunately it looks like it'll be pretty miserable for those at the bottom of the pile."

January 20, 2004 at 12:07 AM in Spam | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 19, 2004

As Consumers Revolt, a Rush to Block Pop-Up Online Ads

The stats indicate pop ups are declining from a high of 8.7% of web ads in summer 2003, to 6.2% in December. This reflects the growth of pop-up blockers. What will be interesting is whether these annoying throwbacks to traditional "interruptive media" (TV Ads) will ie altogether, or be repalced by something similarly annoying.

Some day companies will get it that the way to internet consumers is to work with them, and not against them. Go with the consumer to where they expect to see your offering and integrate it into that site.

As Consumers Revolt, a Rush to Block Pop-Up Online Ads

By SAUL HANSELL

he boom in Internet pop-up advertisement may be about to, well, pop.
The big ads that flash in separate windows above or below Web pages are among the most intrusive, and to many people, the most obnoxious features on the Internet. Not coincidentally, the pop-up format is also among the most effective for advertisers and the most profitable for Web site publishers.

But the potential reach of these ads is starting to be sharply curtailed as major companies, like Time Warner's AOL unit, Yahoo and Google, distribute software that blocks pop-up ads from opening. This summer, Microsoft will put a pop-up blocking feature in the next release of Internet Explorer, the dominant Web browser.

"There is a consumer revolt as forms of advertising get more intrusive," said Rob Kaiser, vice president for narrowband marketing at EarthLink, the first big Internet service provider to distribute pop-up blocking software. The reaction to pop-ups, he said, is similar to the rush to join the government's do-not-call list to block telemarketing calls and the increase in the use of video recorders to block TV commercials.

Advertising executives, in television and the Internet market, note that consumers who block the ads are undercutting the economic model that provides them with free entertainment and information.

"I haven't spoken to any people who say I love pop-ups, send me more of them," said David J. Moore, the chief executive of 24/7 Real Media, an online advertising firm. "But they are part of a quid pro quo. If you want to enjoy the content of a Web site that is free, the pop-ups come with it."

But even companies like Yahoo and Microsoft, which receive significant revenue from advertising, have decided to bow to complaints from Web users.

"We are adding a pop-up blocker based on feedback from customers,'' said Matthew Pilla, a senior product manger for Windows at Microsoft.

Long a feature of AOL, pop-ups became widespread on the Internet about three years ago, as Web sites sought ways to replace the torrent of ad money that dried up after the dot-com boom. And a few advertisers, like X10, selling wireless cameras, and Orbitz, the online travel company, jumped onto the format early.

In December 2001, 1.4 percent of the Web ads measured by Nielsen/NetRatings were pop-ups or "pop-under" ads, which appear behind the main browser window. That rose to 8.7 percent in July 2003. But it has declined since, to 6.2 percent in December.

AdvertisementBanners.com, which places pop-under ads on Web sites, has found that 20 percent to 25 percent of Web users have pop-up blocking enabled on their computers, double the rate of a year ago, said Chris Vanderhook, the company's chief operating officer. Some advertising companies say that a smaller percentage of people are using blockers, but there is agreement that use of pop-up blocking is increasing.

In the year and half since EarthLink offered blocking software, one million of its five million customers have installed it. AOL added pop-up blocking to its software in 2002. Google added a blocker to its toolbar, a small program that adds some features to Internet Explorer. Yahoo, more recently, added a similar feature to its toolbar. And Microsoft's MSN just added a pop-up blocker to its most recent software.

The biggest potential impact will come this summer when Microsoft releases its Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, which will add a pop-up blocker and many other features to Internet Explorer. For now, Microsoft says Internet Explorer will not block pop-ups unless users enable the feature.

Still the prospect of nearly ubiquitous pop-up blocking unsettles some big advertisers.

"I don't want to see pop-ups blocked," said Matthew R. Coffin, the chief executive of LowerMyBills.com, a site that sells long distance and other services. Pop-up and pop-under ads, he said, attract more people than any other ad format. "People wouldn't click if they weren't interested."

The decline of pop-ups, he said, is all the more troublesome because it comes after the company had to slash use of e-mail advertising in response to the public backlash against spam. As a result, the company is moving to older forms of marketing.

"I'm very gung-ho on TV ads," he said.

Smaller Web publishers have fewer alternatives. Many independent Web sites are part of networks that pay them $3 to $5 for every thousand pop-ups they display.

"These pop-up blockers, as they become too widely used, will definitely cut into my income," said William Smith, who runs 40 Web sites from Winnipeg, Manitoba.

He says that 10 percent to 20 percent of his income comes from pop-up ads. Some of his sites, like thewinnipegpages.com focus on travel and others are pornographic.

Both types of sites take pop-up ads for products like Internet Eraser, software that eliminates records of what Web sites people visit. He said he tries not to have too many pop-ups interfere with users viewing his Web sites, but he does display pop-ups as they decide to leave.

"A guy has to make money," he said.

The larger Web publishers, by contrast, have reduced use of pop-up and pop-under ads. At Sportsline, pop-ups represented 5 to 10 percent of its ad revenue a few years ago, but now account for less than 1 percent. "We are totally ready for the day when you can't have any pop-ups," said Mark J. Mariani, Sportsline's president for advertising.

"Clients have started to shy away from pop-ups and pop-unders," he said. Sportsline now sets a quota of no more than one pop-up ad for each user in any 12-hour period. Instead, Sportsline, like many other publishers, is emphasizing larger advertisements woven into their main sites.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, the major trade group representing both advertisers and Web publishers, has decided not to fight the pop-up blockers.

"If consumers tell us that pop-ups are a bad idea and they don't really like them, then it's time to stop doing them," said Greg Stuart, the group's chief executive.

Yet that is not a universal view even among major companies. DoubleClick, the big advertising software company, is developing technology that will enable pop-up ads to evade the blocking software.

"There are advertisers who want pop-up ads and publishers that want to serve them," said Douglas Knopper, general manager for online advertising at DoubleClick. "Our role is to help them do that."

January 19, 2004 at 11:28 PM in Online Marketing | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Telegraph 'could move to Labour'

Is nothing sacred! So much for my post of a couple of days ago

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

By Christopher Walker

THE Daily Telegraph could switch its political allegiance from Conservative to Labour and go tabloid if the Barclay brothers succeed in buying the newspaper.

The twins, who own The Scotsman and other newspapers, said in a rare interview that nothing could be taken for granted.

Asked by The Guardian whether the Telegraph would continue to be the �house-organ� of the Tory party, he replied: �Certainly not.� He added: �In the last election, and I think the one before, The Scotsman supported Blair, and we were very happy about that.�

Sir David also said that the paper could downsize. �We would have to go all-tabloid if we did it. And my young family members like tabloids. The broadsheet is associated with an older generation. So we might be forced to do it.�

The twins announced on Sunday that they had a deal to buy Lord Black of Coldharbour�s stake in Hollinger International, which owns the Telegraph titles. But they are likely to face a legal battle to secure control.

January 19, 2004 at 08:06 PM in Politics | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Spammers' Scavenging E-Mail Virus Surfaces on Net

Yahoo! News - Spammers' Scavenging E-Mail Virus Surfaces on Net

LONDON (Reuters) - A new computer virus capable of harvesting millions of e-mail addresses from infected PCs was rapidly spreading across the Internet Monday, security experts said.

The infection, known as "Bagle" or "Beagle," appears to be the handiwork of spammers keen to collect a batch of e-mail addresses they can then re-sell to other spam e-mail marketers or keep for their own use.

"Bagle" also contains code that could turn an infected computer into a veritable "spamming" machine.

Security experts said it is patterned after the recent "Sobig" and "Mimail" outbreaks, which also turned scores of computers into zombie machines that spammers can control remotely to send torrents of get-rich-quick and sex aid messages to other computer users.

"It seems perfectly possible that Bagle is yet another worm written by spammers. When they have enough infected computers, they could automatically install invisible e-mail proxy servers on each machine and start spamming through them," said Mikko Hypponen, research manager at Finnish anti-virus firm F-Secure.

A host of virus-detection firms had placed their most severe ratings on the e-mail, noting it was spreading quickly from Asia through Europe and now to the United States.

The e-mail infection, or worm, contains a familiar subject line of "Hi" and an executable file attachment identified by ".exe." The body of the e-mail contains random characters.

The virus is triggered once a computer user clicks on the attachment, setting in motion an aggressive e-mail harvesting program that scans all documents on the infected computer and throughout the network it is attached to.

Computer analysts said most corporate e-mail filters should be able to block the infected e-mail, but that home users were particularly vulnerable.

January 19, 2004 at 06:06 PM in Spam | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Putin Web Site Targets Russia's Younger Generation

Yahoo! News - Putin Web Site Targets Russia's Younger Generation

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites) launched a charm offensive on the younger generation Monday with his own Web site for schoolchildren.

Three virtual kids, whose names have echoes of Russian fairy tale heroes, take visitors of the site www.uznai-prezidenta.ru on a Kremlin tour, give them a lesson in democracy and basic facts about the state, and lead them to a photo gallery of Putin, his family and pets.

A former KGB spy, Putin has usually distanced himself from shows of admiration, such as a pop song praising his virtues, a school book about his childhood published in his home city of St. Petersburg and a cafe named after him.

But late last year, Putin, 51, whose portraits hang in Russian offices and school rooms, said he did not mind his image being used as a state symbol.

Putin, Russia's most popular politician with around 70 percent support ensuring him an easy re-election in March, is not planning to stage an election campaign, his aides have said.

He said in televised remarks Monday the Web site was not meant to publicize him personally.

"Frankly speaking, I do not think that anything connected with my personality dominates the site," Putin said. "After all, it is the information about our state, the rights and duties of its citizens that are paramount."

Texts for the site have been provided by a popular children's author Grigory Oster, renowned for his mischievous book for children called "Bad Advice."

Itar-Tass news agency quoted the site's creators as saying they did their best to avoid controversial interpretations of history in an interactive game, which allows children to offer their own follow-up to historical events.

Putin's site was launched at a time when Russian education authorities are reviewing school history textbooks. Some authors complain that even the slightest criticism of Putin's rule is being erased.

January 19, 2004 at 01:23 PM in Politics | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Coke launches music download site

Guardian Unlimited | Online | Coke launches music download site

Press Association
Monday January 19, 2004

Coca-Cola today launched a website offering albums for download in what the drinks giant has described as "the first consumer branded, legitimate downloadable music site".
The site, mycokemusic.com, features more than 250,000 new and old tracks available for download at a cost of at least 80p each, while albums will start at �6.40.

Coca-Cola says it will have the largest collection of legal downloads available on the net, including exclusive and pre-release tracks from artists including Stereophonics, Kings of Leon, Sugababes and Lemar.

Pre-releases will be for sale on the site up to six weeks before they are available on the high street.

Music fans will be able to listen to an album through their computer for 1p a track, but users have to be aged over 18 because payment is via a credit or debit card.

Coca-Cola is mounting a formidable marketing campaign for 2004, including more exclusive tracks and the opportunity to win free downloads.

The 1980s band Tears For Fears, who have reformed after the success of the Gary Jules cover Mad World, will release their new single, Closest Thing To Heaven, exclusively on the site.

The site is supported by the British Phonographic Industry, which aims to crack down on illegal file-sharing.

A spokeswoman for the drinks giant said: "Coca-Cola is bringing legal downloadable music to a much broader and more mainstream audience than ever before.

"Consumers will be able to access the music they want, in a way that is simple and easy to use.

"We have talked to consumers and they have told us that what they want is a legitimate and simple way to access music."

The company recently signed a deal to become the official sponsor of the UK charts, but the BBC announced it was to drop mention of Coca-Cola from its Radio 1 chart countdown and Top Of The Pops following criticism by health campaigners.

January 19, 2004 at 07:56 AM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 18, 2004

Barclay twins clinch Telegraph

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Barclay twins clinch Telegraph

Heather Tomlinson and Dan Milmo
Monday January 19, 2004
The Guardian

The secretive multimillionaire Barclay brothers began a �260m takeover yesterday to buy the group that controls the Daily and Sunday Telegraph from Lord Black.

The move came shortly after Lord Black was ousted as chairman of the Telegraph's parent company, Hollinger International, amid a barrage of lawsuits about his conduct at the firm, and marks the end of his 18-year reign as proprietor of the rightwing establishment's favourite paper.

Sir Frederick and Sir David Barclay, owners of a �4bn media and leisure empire, are two of the richest men in the UK. Known for their reclusive nature, they run an empire that includes the Ritz hotel in London, the Littlewoods retail chain and the Scotsman.

Since the start of December, Lord Black has been talking to the brothers about selling them his controlling stake in Hollinger Inc, conducting negotiations by phone before he agreed the deal after a face-to-face meeting in New York on Saturday night. Yesterday, the twins said they would look for ways of "putting together" the Telegraph titles and their existing newspapers, including the Business, which could involve joint distribution or printing deals.

Hollinger's assets, which include the Jerusalem Post, the Chicago Sun-Times and The Spectator magazine, as well as the Telegraph titles, were, in effect, put up for sale following a shareholder revolt against Lord Black last year.

More than 100 expressions of interest are thought to have been received for the papers, with potential buyers of the Daily Telegraph including the Daily Mail and General Trust, and Richard Desmond, the owner of Express Newspapers.

But yesterday's surprise deal seems to have outflanked the Barclays' rivals, who are now expected to abandon their plans. However, Mr Desmond and Hollinger each own half of Westferry printers, which prints the Telegraph titles. Mr Desmond could now wrest control of the print works, which would be a blow to the Telegraph group.

The Barclay brothers are reported to be donors to the Conservative party, but are not as involved in the editorial side of their publications, in contrast to the "hands on" approach of Lord Black. Their political beliefs will be taken into consideration if the government asks the media industry regulator, Ofcom, to investigate the takeover.

All newspaper acquisitions can be subjected to a "public interest test" following new media ownership rules last year.

Lord Black controlled the newspaper titles through a complex structure with his holding company, Ravelston, at the top of the pyramid. Ravelston owns the majority of the New York-listed Hollinger Inc, which in turn controls the Telegraph's parent, Hollinger International. The deal yesterday involves the Barclays buying Hollinger Inc. On Friday, Hollinger International launched a lawsuit against Lord Black, Ravelston and others, asking for the return of more than $200m (�110m) taken through "improper means".

The US financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, has also asked a court to allow investigations to go on into Lord Black's conduct, irrespective of change of control.

It as yet unclear how this might affect the sale.

Sir David wrote to the Hollinger International board from a Monaco address yesterday. He offered to send his son, Aidan Barclay, to meet them to discuss the plans and said he would pay back any money owed to Hollinger International by Hollinger Inc, one of the demands of the lawsuits the company faces.

He also said the new ownership would end the "negative media attention" that had focused on Lord Black's relationship with the company.

Lord Black repeatedly denied wrongdoing in connection with the lawsuits over his role in Hollinger International.

January 18, 2004 at 11:10 PM in World Affairs | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Scottish banks at risk from terror scam

Scotsman.com News - Top Stories - Scottish banks at risk from terror scam

TANYA THOMPSON
HOME AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT

Key points
• Companies under daily threat of "electronic terrorism"
• Every bank "has account linked to terror"
• Scotland at particular risk because of security levels

Story in full AL-QAEDA is targeting blue-chip companies in Scotland as part of an audacious attempt to defraud the financial sector of millions of pounds, police officers have warned.

Sources suggest that every single bank has an account that is linked in some way to a terrorist group, while experts have said Scotland is particularly vulnerable because security is not as rigorous as in London and New York.

Terrorist groups including al-Qaeda have been linked to a range of scams including money laundering, and internet and credit card fraud.

Inspector Brian Connel, the assistant director of the Scottish Business Crime Centre, said companies were under a daily threat of "electronic terrorism" and Special Branch was working closely with business leaders to tackle the problem.

He said: "The financial institutions have been doing more auditing then they did in the past. They have come across very suspect bank transactions and they have brought the police in to check on it. Some of them have links with al-Qaeda ... al-Qaeda has cropped up a number of times."

While London and New York are the obvious choices for money laundering, it is feared that terrorist groups may see Scotland as an easy target. As a result, multi-nationals are now training staff to concentrate on counter-terrorism. Inspector Connel said: "London is a better physical target, but we have a massive financial sector in Edinburgh.

"For every major attack, there have been hundreds of others that go unnoticed because they are financial infiltrations. Fraud is one of the methods used by terrorist groups to raise funds."

Increasingly, consumers are the victims of bogus e-mails, telephone and credit card fraud, and many have alerted their banks to the fact that their account has been wiped out.

A fraud manager with a leading insurance company said many of the banks found it difficult to refuse big accounts, and they had unwittingly opened the door to terrorists.

He said: "Terrorists have used insurance companies, but the banks are at a higher risk."

David Capitanchik, a terrorism expert at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, said Scotland was a likely target given the high calibre of financial companies.

"Scotland�s financial institutions have quite a reputation. Terrorists may think it is less likely to come under scrutiny. They presume there will be more scrutiny in London and New York. It would make sense to look for a place which wouldn�t have the same focus as London."

Tom Wood, the deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police, said he was not surprised that terrorist groups were focusing on Scotland�s capital.

"Edinburgh is the headquarters of several international empires," he said. "It is now a global marketplace and terrorism is a global business.

"Financial irregularities have been the underpinning foundation of terrorist activities. What they all need is to raise funds to sponsor their terrorist acts."

Concerns about the financial sector come just days after the Bank of Scotland was fined a record �1.25 million for breaching anti-money laundering rules on the identification of customers.

The Financial Services Authority said in half of test cases Bank of Scotland had failed to retain a copy of customer ID or a record of where it was kept.

The fine is the largest ever imposed for inadequate record-keeping following the introduction of money laundering rules by the City watchdog in 2001.

The bank said the problems were first detected in December 2002 and that remedies were quickly put in place to deal with the failings.

A spokesman for the CBI Scotland said companies must remain vigilant and ensure that they are not aiding terrorists. He said: "We are aware of the dangers posed. It is not just the City of London that is affected; it is a global challenge."

January 18, 2004 at 09:28 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Interest in Online Banking Grows

December 22, 2003

Interest in Online Banking Grows

Barring a major security breach, online banking will enjoy steady growth for the foreseeable future as remaining U.S. households without Internet access go online, a new report concludes.
According to Jupiter Research (which is owned by the same parent company as this Web site), the number of online banking households will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14 percent to 56 million over the next five years.

The reason for the jump is simple -- more households will connect to the Internet. In addition, more users are expected to tap into their employers' high-speed connections to manage their personal finances.

Once the purview of well-heeled consumers, online banking will see its strongest growth from lower and middle class households (defined in this study as those with income of $75,000 or less), which will use bank Web sites to manage credit cards and auto loans, Jupiter Research says.

Other banking activities will also increase as users become more comfortable with the technology and banks add features to their sites.

"Basic activities such as viewing account balances and transferring funds between accounts continue to be some of the most popular," the report says. "In coming years, online users will increase their usage of self-service activities such as viewing online statements and check images."

Jupiter Research analysts say online banking has more to do with consumers' choice of channel (the Internet, rather than the teller or telephone) than differences between rival banks offerings.

"Banks should stay the course, broadening and deepening their capabilities, improving usability and promoting the site as a channel option for customers," the report says.

Leading banks will see benefits in customer retention and satisfaction, reducing the possibility of defections to other institutions. It might also help banks reduce costs by cutting the overall number of visits to tellers.

The report states "only possible threat" to increasing online bank usage is a security breach and concludes, "Security concerns are already a primary inhibitor of initial consumer adoption; if realized, they will be a serious drier of online attrition."

January 18, 2004 at 07:24 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Why Online Banking is safe

Why Online Banking Is Safe

In Internet banking, as with traditional banking methods, security is a primary concern. We have taken precautions to ensure your information is transmitted safely and securely. This Level of Security is achieved in part by:
Protecting the privacy and the confidentiality of the
communications between your browser and our servers.

Verifying that only authorized persons are allowed to access online banking.

Maintaining isolation of our computers from the Internet.

PRIVACY
The privacy of the communications between you (your browser) and our servers is ensured using encryption. Encryption scrambles messages exchanged between your browser and our online banking server. Encryption happens as follows: When you go to the sign-on page for online banking, your browser establishes a secure session with our server. The secure session is established using a protocol called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Encryption. This protocol requires the exchange of what are called public and private keys. Keys are random numbers chosen for that session and are only known between your browser and our server. After the keys are exchanged, your browser will use the numbers to scramble (encrypt) the messages sent between your browser and our server. Both sides require the keys because they need to de-scramble (decrypt) the messages when they are received. The SSL protocol not only ensures privacy, but also ensures that no other web site can "impersonate" your FI's web site, nor alter any of the information sent. You can tell whether your browser is in secure mode by looking for the secured lock symbol at the bottom of your browser window.

Encryption Level
The numbers used as encryption keys are analogous to combination locks. The strength of encryption is based on the number of possible combinations that a lock can have. As the number of possible combinations grows, it becomes less likely that anyone would be able to guess the combination in order to decrypt the message. Today's browsers offer 40-bit encryption, or 128-bit encryption. Although both result in a large number of possible combinations (240 and 2128 respectively), for your protection, our servers require the browser to connect at 128-bit encryption. Users will be unable access online banking functions at lesser encryption levels. This may require some end users to upgrade their browser to the stronger encryption level in order to access online banking functions.

How do I know if my browser supports 128 bit encryption?
To determine if your browser supports 128-bit encryption, click on "Help" in the toolbar of your Internet browser and click on "About [browser name]". A pop-up box or window will display. For Internet Explorer - Next to "Cipher strength" you should see "128-bit". For Netscape - the following text should appear: "This version supports high-grade (128-bit) security with RSA Public Key Cryptography".

If your browser does not support 128-bit encryption, you will need to upgrade to a browser that does in order to continue to access secure pages of the website. Supported browsers include Netscape Navigator 4.75, Internet Explorer 5.0 or 6.0, and AOL 6, 7 or 8, but other browsers that support 128-bit encryption may also work.

More Information on Browsers For your convenience, additional information for some common browsers is available at the links below:
Netscape
Microsoft Internet Explorer

AUTHORISATION
It is also important to verify that only authorized persons log into online banking. This is achieved by verifying your password. When you submit your password, it is compared with the password we have stored in our secure data center. We allow you to enter your password incorrectly a limited number of times. If you enter your password incorrectly too many times, your online banking account will be locked until you call us to reinitialize the account. We monitor and record "bad-login" attempts to detect any suspicious activity (i.e., someone trying to guess your password). You play a crucial role in preventing others from logging on to your account. Never use passwords that are easy to guess. Examples of bad passwords are: Birth dates, first names, pet names, addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, etc. Never reveal your password to another person. You should periodically change your password in the User Option screen of online banking.

NETWORK SECURITY
We provide a number of additional security features in online banking. Online banking will "timeout" after a specified period of inactivity. This prevents curious persons from continuing your online banking session in case you have left your PC unattended without logging out. You may set the timeout period in the User Options screen of online banking. However, we recommend that you always sign-off (log out) when you are done with your online banking. The network architecture used to provide the online banking service was designed by the brightest minds in network technology. While the architecture is too complex to explain here, it is important to point out that the computers that store your actual account information are not hooked up to the Internet. The transactions that you initiate through the Internet are received by our online banking Web servers. These Web servers route your transaction through firewall servers, which act as a traffic cop between segments of our online banking network used to store information, and the public Internet. This configuration isolates the publicly accessible Web servers from data stored on our online banking servers and ensures that only authorized requests are processed. Various access control mechanisms, including intrusion detection and anti-virus, monitor for and protect our systems from potential malicious activity. Additionally, our online banking servers are fault-tolerant, and provide for uninterruptible access, even in the event of various types of failures.

January 18, 2004 at 07:22 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

What is online banking?

Online Banking: The basics

If you're like most people, you've heard a lot about online banking but probably haven't tried it yourself. You still pay your bills by mail and deposit checks at your bank branch, much the way your parents did. You might shop online for a loan, life insurance or a home mortgage, but when it comes time to commit, you feel more comfortable working with your banker or an agent you know and trust.
Online banking isn't out to change your money habits. Instead, it uses today's computer technology to give you the option of bypassing the time-consuming, paper-based aspects of traditional banking in order to manage your finances more quickly and efficiently.

Origin of online banking
The advent of the Internet and the popularity of personal computers presented both an opportunity and a challenge for the banking industry.

For years, financial institutions have used powerful computer networks to automate millions of daily transactions; today, often the only paper record is the customer's receipt at the point of sale. Now that its customers are connected to the Internet via personal computers, banks envision similar economic advantages by adapting those same internal electronic processes to home use.

Banks view online banking as a powerful "value added" tool to attract and retain new customers while helping to eliminate costly paper handling and teller interactions in an increasingly competitive banking environment.

Brick-to-click banks
Today, most large national banks, many regional banks and even smaller banks and credit unions offer some form of online banking, variously known as PC banking, home banking, electronic banking or Internet banking. Those that do are sometimes referred to as "brick-to-click" banks, both to distinguish them from brick-and-mortar banks that have yet to offer online banking, as well as from online or "virtual" banks that have no physical branches or tellers whatsoever.

The challenge for the banking industry has been to design this new service channel in such a way that its customers will readily learn to use and trust it. After all, banks have spent generations earning our trust; they aren't about to risk that on a Web site that is frustrating, confusing or less than secure.

Most of the large banks now offer fully secure, fully functional online banking for free or for a small fee. Some smaller banks offer limited access or functionality; for instance, you may be able to view your account balance and history but not initiate transactions online. As more banks succeed online and more customers use their sites, fully functional online banking likely will become as commonplace as automated teller machines.

Virtual banks
If you don't mind foregoing the teller window, lobby cookie and kindly bank president, a "virtual" or e-bank may save you very real money. Virtual banks are banks without bricks; from the customer's perspective, they exist entirely on the Internet, where they offer pretty much the same range of services and adhere to the same federal regulations as your corner bank.

Virtual banks pass the money they save on overhead like buildings and tellers along to you in the form of higher yields, lower fees and more generous account thresholds.

The major disadvantage of virtual banks revolves around ATMs. Because they have no ATM machines, virtual banks typically charge the same surcharge that your brick-and-mortar bank would if you used another bank's automated teller. Likewise, many virtual banks won't accept deposits via ATM; you'll have to either deposit the check by mail or transfer money from another account.

Advantages of online banking

Convenience: Unlike your corner bank, online banking sites never close; they're available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and they're only a mouse click away.
Ubiquity: If you're out of state or even out of the country when a money problem arises, you can log on instantly to your online bank and take care of business, 24/7.
Transaction speed: Online bank sites generally execute and confirm transactions at or quicker than ATM processing speeds.
Efficiency: You can access and manage all of your bank accounts, including IRAs, CDs, even securities, from one secure site.
Effectiveness: Many online banking sites now offer sophisticated tools, including account aggregation, stock quotes, rate alerts and portfolio managing programs to help you manage all of your assets more effectively. Most are also compatible with money managing programs such as Quicken and Microsoft Money.

Disadvantages of online banking
Start-up may take time: In order to register for your bank's online program, you will probably have to provide ID and sign a form at a bank branch. If you and your spouse wish to view and manage your assets together online, one of you may have to sign a durable power of attorney before the bank will display all of your holdings together.
Learning curve: Banking sites can be difficult to navigate at first. Plan to invest some time and/or read the tutorials in order to become comfortable in your virtual lobby.
Bank site changes: Even the largest banks periodically upgrade their online programs, adding new features in unfamiliar places. In some cases, you may have to re-enter account information.
The trust thing: For many people, the biggest hurdle to online banking is learning to trust it. Did my transaction go through? Did I push the transfer button once or twice? Best bet: always print the transaction receipt and keep it with your bank records until it shows up on your personal site and/or your bank statement.

January 18, 2004 at 07:18 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Online Banking by the Numbers 2003

Online Banking Report: Internet Strategies for Financial Institutions. RESOURCES

A look at current online banking usage and projections through 2012
OVERVIEW
Mainstream users continue to flock to Web banking
If not for the foul economic climate and over inflated expectations of the late ‘90s, the online channel would be the toast of the industry. By most measures, online banking is a runaway success. Compounded annual growth since OBR’s founding, at year-end 1994, has been 80%. Worldwide, more than 100 million households now bank online, up 20-fold. In the U.S., household adoption passed 25% a few months ago, up 100-fold since 1994. Looking ahead, we project another doubling of usage in the U.S. to 50 million households by decade’s end. Worldwide, the total is expected to triple to 300 million or more households.

Not only is online banking penetration growing, but the level of usage is also increasing. Power Users, households that access bank accounts AND pay bills, have grown 5-fold in the past two years. However, less than half of the power users use their bank�s pay-anyone bill-pay service, electing instead to go directly to the biller�s site to settle the bill there.

If done right, banks are finding that online banking can increase customer satisfaction, boost retention, and improve profits. This 414-page statistical report outlines trends and usage of online banking, payments, credit cards, insurance, investments, and other financial services.

Published: December 2002

January 18, 2004 at 07:15 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Banks Try to Pave the Way to Online Bill Paying

By EVE TAHMINCIOGLU

Published: January 18, 2004

ON DILL, a sales manager for a software company in Dallas, had never given much thought to paying his bills electronically. But his bill-paying habits changed last August after he walked into a local Bank of America branch.
He had gone to the bank to open a basic joint checking account. While he was there, Janet Meier, a bank employee, convinced him to try the bill-paying service on Bank of America's Web site. Ms. Meier demonstrated the service and set up a free online bill-paying account for him. As part of the demonstration, Mr. Dill made a $1 test payment to himself; a week later, he said, a check arrived at his home.

Mr. Dill, 43, says he now pays more than 20 bills online every month. He saves more than $7 in stamps, not to mention the time he previously spent on paperwork and filing. "Now I sit down with my laptop in front of the TV and I can pay them," he said.

In some ways, Mr. Dill, busy and technologically savvy, is a prime candidate for online bill paying. He is among a growing number of consumers who have decided to deal with their monthly bills in cyberspace. About 19 million American households do some bill paying online, up from 7.8 million in 2001, according to Bruce Cundiff, an analyst at Jupiter Research, a technology research firm in New York. By 2008, he said, about 61 million households are expected to pay at least some bills online.

Beth Robertson, a senior analyst at TowerGroup, a research firm based in Needham, Mass., estimated that about 40 percent of major creditors already had electronic payment programs, and that an additional 35 percent planned to introduce them in the next two years.

"The big drivers are that these services are increasingly being offered for free, and a lot more billers are making electronic bill payment available," she said.

Also fueling the trend, she and other experts say, are the spread of high-speed Internet connections and improvements in bill-paying Web sites.

The training inside branch offices is also bringing more people on board. Bank of America says 3.2 million customers use its bill-paying site, up from 1.8 million at the beginning of 2003.

Some banks are offering incentives. Last year, Chase began sending letters to customers who were already doing some banking online but were not yet paying their bills electronically. It offered them $5 for each bill they paid online, up to $25, to help them start.

"We found that works well; once they try it they're hooked," said Leslie Ehrlich, senior vice president for marketing of the bank's electronic channels group.

The number of customers paying bills online has risen 25 percent since 2002, according to Chase, which would not be more specific. The average Chase customer who pays bills online usually pays about eight a month, Mr. Ehrlich added.

Banks and other companies, of course, have a vested interest in having customers deal with bills electronically. Online payments mean less expense for printing, handling and mailing paper.

But Internet bill paying has a long way to go before consumers give up paper forever. For one thing, most people who pay bills online still receive them in the mail. And some people just savor the ritual and perceived control of paying bills with pen and checkbook in hand.

Still, there are potential time-saving advantages as the process is streamlined and as payment choices expand.

Many online bill payers now go directly to businesses' Web sites, like those of telephone or utility companies. Others like to pay several bills from one site. That is where the banks and brokerage firms come in, along with services like Yahoo Finance, Paytrust and Checkfree. While some of these services are free - though banks may require that you keep a minimum balance with them - others charge $5 to $13 a month.

When paying a utility or other company directly, customers can log on to its Web site and authorize a credit card or debit payment. Verizon, among many other utilities, offers customers the option to make automatic monthly deductions from their bank or credit union accounts. Verizon will stop sending paper bills on request, but customers can still read complete bills online, including the usual promotional material and regulatory notices found in envelope stuffers, according to Maria Malicka, executive director of e-commerce at Verizon. The company will send a notice via e-mail when a new bill is available online. The number of Verizon bills paid online, including automatic and one-time debits, doubled in 2003, to 6.6 million from 3.3 million in 2002, she said.

Of course, going to the Web site of each creditor can be time-consuming. The average household gets 13 monthly bills, according to TowerGroup. Many people prefer to consolidate the process. Banks and independent financial Web sites offer a one-stop approach, allowing consumers to handle payments in one place on everything from mortgages to lawn services.

Users of these one-stop shops create a password-protected account. They may need an hour or so to set up their profile, listing names, addresses and account numbers of the creditors they want to pay - and when. The services, however, often have information about major companies in their systems, so users need only click on the right one. Automatic monthly payments can be set up for fixed charges like rent or the minimum payment on credit cards, although these, too, can be adjusted as needed.

Bill payers who need to send out a paper check, instead of transferring the money electronically, can do so online as well. When Mr. Dill needed to reimburse his father in Jacksonville, Fla., for football tickets, Bank of America issued a check for him and mailed it at no charge as a courtesy. (Of course, he could also have written a check himself.)

Although online payments are often debited immediately from a bill payer's account, the time they take to clear can vary. Payment directly to a company through its Web site is often completed in a day, while payment through a third party like a bank can take two to seven days. Of course, not all services let bill payers take funds from a variety of accounts. Bank of America, for example, does not allow customers to pay bills directly from outside brokerage accounts or credit unions, but Paytrust does.

For people who want to see their bills in their entirety online, there are companies that provide the service, but customers will have to redirect their paper bills to these firms, which, in turn, scan the bills into their systems. Paytrust (www.paytrust.com), a product of the Metavante Corporation in Milwaukee, is among the sites offering this service, for which it charges $12.95 a month. Paytrust and some other services also offer to send CD's at year-end with all billing information, for about $20. Many banks also allow customers to view a year's worth of bills so they can print and file them for tax or other purposes. This kind of service is usually free.

Cesar Malaga, 34, a utility technician from Bellport, N.Y., says he still likes to get all his bills in the mail, even though he has been paying them online through Chase for nearly three years.

"If something goes wrong I want to be able to return to a piece of paper," he said.

Lynnette Khalfani, 35, a writer from West Orange, N.J., knows firsthand that things can go wrong occasionally. She said she discovered recently that her checking account had been debited twice for the $800 annual maintenance fee on her time-share vacation home in Antigua. She said the extra charge was removed after it was reported.

Companies that offer online bill paying say billing errors typically affect very few customers - less than half a percent of all their online accounts, on average each month. Many companies say they offer to pay late fees if they are a result of their own error, and some say they will help in disputes with businesses or credit reporting agencies.

MATT COFFIN, the chief executive of LowerMyBills.com, a price-comparison service based in Santa Monica, Calif., suggests that consumers who are considering electronic bill payment start slowly, perhaps by paying one bill directly on a creditor's Web site. Most sites allow customers to make a one-time payment online.

A confirmation number is usually supplied via e-mail or directly on the screen. Mr. Coffin advised consumers to write down the number or print it out.

And if you are still worried, he said, "call the company in a few days to make sure it went through."

"Then go back and try a few other bills," he added, "and then sign up to do it every month." The bottom line, he said, is that the process will save money, trouble and time, and "maybe you'll save a tree."

January 18, 2004 at 06:55 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

MORE INTERNET MEDIA IDEAS

Internet Media Commentary - Alan Meckler: MORE INTERNET MEDIA IDEAS

I met Martha Stewart when she was just starting out as a caterer. She set up a stand in a clothing store in Westport, Connecticut -- probably about 1974. In fact one of the first parties she catered was my friend's surprise 35th birthday party. Of course we all know how things went after those early days in Westport! We also know that Martha has had some tough times with the SEC etc.
But Martha is fighting back. The fight is in the courtroom, but also on the Internet. Take a look at the Web site she has created to soften her image and tell "her" story about the messy stock problem she faces. You be the judge.
I am a big fan of the movies --- particularly Indies. And there is no better place to see what is new in Indies than at the Sundance Film Festival. Not many of us can spend the time to go to Utah, but many of us do get to Starbucks and that is your online ticket to Sundance doings.
If you have a Wi-Fi enabled notebook computer you can see what is happening at the Sundance Film Festival via Wi-Fi at Starbucks. This is an interesting promotion on behalf of Starbucks and T-Mobile (the Wi-Fi connection network found at Starbucks). If this works, you will see more of these promotions at Starbucks, McDonalds, airline clubs and the like.

The Internet is growing in many ways. More to come.

Posted by Alan Meckler at January 12, 2004 03:01 PM

January 18, 2004 at 12:50 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 17, 2004

Secretive tycoon twins to buy Daily Telegraph

TOT (totally off topic) but the influential Telegraph is changing hands. They already own the Scotsman, which is a paper of outstanding quality, and ownership of the Telegraph would be a positive move for its contunuance as a quality paper.

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

William Lewis and Andrew Porter

THE reclusive multi-millionaire Barclay brothers were poised last night to take control of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph newspapers. Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, twins who own the Ritz hotel and the Littlewoods retail group, were in advanced talks with Conrad Black, the beleaguered owner.

The Barclay brothers and Lord Black were hoping to announce a deal today, but people involved in the discussions warned last night the talks were delicately poised and could still fall apart. �We had wanted to keep these talks secret right until the end, and now the cat is out of the bag there is no knowing what the brothers will do,� a person involved in the talks said last night.

If successfully completed, the deal would see the Barclays taking control of the Telegraph group, The Spectator magazine, the Chicago Times group of newspapers and Israel�s Jerusalem Post.

Black, a Tory peer, is in dire financial difficulties and is facing an investigation from America�s regulatory body the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). He is likely to receive a cash payment from the Barclays of about �110m with the brothers agreeing to pick up outstanding debts of about the same amount.

The twins will buy the approximate 78% stake Black�s master company Ravelston owns in Hollinger Inc, a Canadian company. This will trigger a takeover offer for Hollinger Inc, which controls Hollinger International, owner of the Telegraph group. An earlier option for the Barclays to simply buy Ravelston has been scrapped.

Black will be able to use the cash to repay the sums he owes to Hollinger International, but the Barclays will become responsible for the loans Hollinger Inc has to repay.

Through buying Ravelston�s controlling stake in Hollinger Inc, the Barclays hope to gain management control over all of the media assets owned by that company and Hollinger International.

Despite the talks, the Barclays will still have to satisfy disgruntled investors, some of whom have filed lawsuits demanding compensation.Black and his wife Barbara Amiel have enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. They have four homes, a mansion in Toronto, a home in Kensington, London, an apartment worth �1.9m on New York�s Park Avenue and a home in Florida. When Vanity Fair visited their Kensington home two years ago its reporter was stunned by Amiel�s luxurious wardrobe and her boast of an �extravagance that knows no bounds�.

The Barclays already own four newspaper titles: The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday, the Edinburgh Evening News and The Business.

The negotiations with the Barclays have been conducted behind the back of Lazard, the investment bank that was asked by directors of Hollinger International to find potential buyers for its papers. Lazard has received more than 50 expressions of interest. Richard Desmond, owner of the Daily and Sunday Express, and Lord Rothermere, the largest shareholder in DMGT, which owns the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, have both said they were keen to acquire the Telegraph titles. The Barclays' acquisition of the newspapers will provide an early test for Ofcom, the newly created media regulator. The regulator will most likely probe whether the twins have sought to influence editorial policy at their newspapers.

There is also the potential of a clash between the brothers and Desmond, who owns a string of soft porn titles. His Express newspapers share a print works with the Telegraph and Desmond has hinted that any new owner would not be able to print at the plant.

Andrew Neil, editor-in-chief in the Barclays' empire, has not been included in talks to buy the group. Nor has Aidan Barclay, David's son, who normally has a hands-on role in the business affairs of the twins.

Last night there was speculation that Jeff Randall, the BBC's business editor, may be under consideration to edit the Daily Telegraph. The brothers were known to be impressed with Randall when he launched and edited their Sunday Business title, later The Business.

Black was this weekend in his Toronto home finalising the deal. When contacted by The Sunday Times he said: "Your habit of phoning me at home is becoming inconvenient. This is a breaking story. You will just have to wait for it."

Tweedy Browne, a New-York fund manager, first targetted Black and his associates for alleged impropriety. It demanded an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission into payments of almost $300m (�160m).

As news of Black's audacious plan to sell slipped out in New York there was another twist. The special committee of Hollinger International filed a $200m lawsuit targeting Black and releasing a series of embarrassing e-mails that highlight his extravagant behaviour.

One from Black to a colleague, sent in August 2002, stated: "There has not been an occasion for many months when I got on our plane without wondering whether it was really affordable. But I'm not prepared to reenact the French Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of nobility. We have to find a balance between an unfair taxation on the company and a reasonable treatment of the founder-builders-managers. We are proprietors, after all, beleaguered though we may be."

Additional reporting: Paul Durman and John O'Donnell

January 17, 2004 at 11:09 PM in World Affairs | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Live from Iowa

Dean's team continue to display a natural knack for levering internet, and its philosophy. The statement "Not all of the bloggers below support Howard Dean" is illustrative of Joe Trippi, (Dean's campaign leader) and his internet understanding. Personally I don't like Dean or his politics, but I do appreciate how he has levered internet, developed his own community, and created an internet brand which has raised enormous amounts of money via online.

While others including Bush & Clarke are copying by having their own blogs, the way they are being managed misses the nuances which Trippi injects into the Dean approach.

Blog for America: BloggerStorm!

Until January 19th, the focus of the political world will be on Iowa. Since the last presidential election, that political world has expanded -- it now includes thouands of blogs that, together, have shifted the balance of media power by providing reportage and analysis faster, and often better, than traditional media.

As the Iowa caucuses approach, Blog for America will provide this roundup of blogs either based in Iowa or whose authors have made the trip to Iowa to cover the race.

Not all of the bloggers below support Howard Dean -- the idea is simply to provide a clearinghouse for in-the-trenches coverage of the caucuses as only blogs can provide.To have your site included, send an email with a link to your blog to blog@deanforamerica.com.

January 17, 2004 at 10:48 PM in Blogging & feeds, Politics | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Web archive offers new perspective on the war

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

By Alan Hamilton

THE reputation of aerial reconnaissance took a skydive when Colin Powell showed controversial photographs of Iraq to the UN Security Council last year. But now we have something really worth looking at.
More than five million images shot from on high by the RAF during the Second World War will be made freely avail-able to the public when they are put on the internet next week. They offer a new perspective on historic events and encounters that we have only ever seen from ground level.

There are pictures of British paratroopers seizing Pegasus Bridge in the opening gambit of the Normandy invasion, American GIs pouring on to the D-Day beaches, the German battleship Bismarck under pursuit by the Royal Navy, and before-and-after pictures of the terrifying 1,000-bomber raid on Cologne, showing the miracle of a great city flattened but its great Gothic cathedral intact.

Yet there is no more disturbing image than that taken by a high-resolution camera from thousands of feet in the final months of the war of a great cloud of smoke drifting over the Polish countryside. It was the fires of Auschwitz, when the crematoriums of the death camps could not cope with the sheer volume of genocide and the victims were being burnt in mass pits.

The images are so detailed that prisoners in the camp can be seen standing in line for the roll call that might have been their last.

The huge photographic archive, previously stored in thousands of cardboard boxes, is being made available on a website created by the Aerial Reconnaissance Archives (Tara) at Keele University, an official place of deposit for Britain�s National Archives.

They were transferred to Keele in 1962 from the Allied Central Interpretation Unit at Medmenham, Buckinghamshire, where wartime analysts studied the material collected by the RAF reconnaissance crews, often in 3D using a stereoscope.

Such pictures proved invaluable in creating a detailed picture of the Normandy terrain in preparation for the 1944 landings which began the liberation of Europe.

Allan Williams, head of the project to put the photographs online, said yesterday that the availability of the pictures would shed new light on the role played by high-flying RAF photographers in providing Allied commanders with much vital intelligence in the days long before the advent of spy satellites.

�Their images allow us to see the real war at first hand, as if we are RAF pilots,� Mr Williams said. �It is astounding to see the pictures of Cologne before and after the bombings. It�s like a live action replay.�

Because of its relative inaccessibility, the archive has until now been little used because it was so labour-intensive to find any particular image. The most frequent users were European bomb-disposal agencies trying to locate unexploded Allied ordnance across the Continent.

One more high-profile user was Steven Spielberg, a film-maker with an obsession for accurate detail who searched the archive when making Band Of Brothers, his acclaimed television series based on the wartime exploits of E Company of 506 Regiment of the US 101st Airborne Division.

Soon the Keele project hopes to balance its archive with the view from the other side. It hopes to put online a further 2.5 million Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance photographs of Eastern Europe, seized by the Allies at the end of the war, used as a vital source of Cold War intelligence by the Soviet Union and declassified by Nato only ten years ago.

Eventually, Keele hopes to be able to offer the aerial photographs of all Britain�s post-war military campaigns, from Korea to Iraq. They may not show many weapons of mass destruction and even if they do, nothing will quite compare with the Holocaust smoke drifting over quiet Polish fields.

The reconnaissance photographs will be available at www.evidenceincamera.co.uk .

January 17, 2004 at 07:45 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

UK dial-up use 'down but not out'

ZDNet UK - News - UK dial-up use 'down but not out'

ZDNet UK
Matthew Broersma
January 16, 2004, 14:55 GMT

Broadband has begun to whittle away at dial-up Internet growth in Europe, but ISPs still have a difficult time ahead of them persuading users to switch, says IDC

Broadband services have begun to eat away at the traditional dial-up market in most Western European countries, but dial-up services will be a significant market for some time to come -- and are continuing to grow in some countries -- according to research published by IDC on Thursday.

The slow decline of dial-up and the steady growth of broadband will add up to substantial growth in overall consumer Internet connections through 2007, IDC projects. It sees broadband increasing at 36 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) to nearly 50 million connections over the next four years. Consumer dial-up connections are projected to decline by 9 percent a year from 52.5 million connections at the end of last year to 34.2 million in 2007.

Migration to broadband in the UK has been steady but slower than in some other European countries, such as the Netherlands, said analyst Chris Drake. This is in part because the introduction of flat-rate dial-up services created a low-cost, simple way for large numbers of people to get online, and many of these users see no reason to switch to broadband.

"There is a very large sector of the population of Internet users who don't see any need to move to broadband based on their usage, and on the amount they would pay for a broadband connection," Drake said. "Prices are still considered relatively high."

He also noted that there are psychological hurdles to switching for many users, with the process of getting a broadband connection considered complicated by some.

IDC sees UK broadband growth accelerating this year or next year, but success depends largely on whether ISPs can convince dial-up users to make the jump. "More work is needed to convince dial users of the benefits of broadband," he said. "There is a need for ISPs to consider offering content services to dial users, to whet their appetite, and give them an insight into how they could benefit from a faster connection."

Drake noted that while dial-up is on the decline generally, it actually has a strong growth potential in some countries that don't yet have flat-rate services, such as Belgium. Ireland only introduced flat-rate dial-up last year. "In countries where flat-rate dial doesn't exist, online household figures tend to be low," he said. "There is a case for introducing flat-rate into those countries, as there are sectors that have not yet been tapped into."

Overall Internet penetration in Western Europe will grow from 44 percent in 2003 to 52 percent in 2007, IDC projected, with the UK rising from 56 percent to 64 percent. Penetration in France will grow from 36 percent to 46 percent and in Germany from 47 percent to 53 percent. UK penetration is higher partly because of the earlier introduction of flat-rate services, Drake said.

January 17, 2004 at 07:17 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Illegal Music Downloading Climbs

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: January 15, 2004
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The number of people downloading music illegally surged a month after recording companies began suing hundreds of music fans, a marketing research firm said Thursday.
The number of U.S. households downloading music from peer-to-peer networks rose 6 percent in October and 7 percent in November after a six-month decline, according to a study of computer use in 10,000 U.S. households conducted by The NPD Group.

In a separate, bimonthly survey, 12 million individuals reported getting music on the free networks in November, up from 11 million in September, NPD said.

Previous surveys dating back to May -- when 20 million people said they were downloading music from file-sharing networks -- showed a steady decline in the number of file-sharers.

Russ Crupnick, vice president of The NPD Group, speculated the apparent increase in music file-sharing could merely be seasonal, as new album releases before the holidays heightened demand. He also said less media coverage of the recording industry's lawsuit campaign could have figured into the increase.

The Recording Industry Association of America has filed more than 380 copyright infringement lawsuits against individuals across the country since September and reached settlements for thousands of dollars with hundreds of individuals since.

Consumers might also have been tapping into the free networks to compare how they sized up to the new crop of legal digital music services, Crupnick said.

``It's important to keep in mind that file sharing is occurring less frequently than before the RIAA began its legal efforts to stem the tide of P2P file sharing,'' Crupnick said. ``We're just seeing the first increase in these numbers.''

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Washington-based RIAA, which coordinates the industry's anti-piracy campaign, said that effort is on the right track, regardless of what the NPD studies show.

``For us, the ultimate measurement of success has been, and continues to be, creating an environment where legal online music services can flourish,'' Lamy said in a statement. ``All indicators point in the right direction -- sales of CDs, legal downloads and awareness that file sharing copyrighted music is illegal -- have all increased.''

More RIAA lawsuits against file-sharers are coming, he added.

NPD's household data sample is representative of all U.S. households and has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.5 percent, NPD spokesman Lee Graham said. The firm's bimonthly survey is based on 5,000 respondents, age 13 or older, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1 percent, Port Washington, N.Y.-based NPD said.

Recent studies of online music piracy, which the recording industry largely blames for a four-year slide in overall music sales, haven't always shown the same upward trend in file-sharing.

A survey released earlier this month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and comScore Media Metrix found that since May, the percentage of U.S. Internet users who download music was down by half, to 14 percent. The same report also found declines in usage of popular file-sharing programs such as Kazaa and Grokster.

But NPD's findings mirror data from other file-sharing tracking firms, such as BigChampagne LLC, which says traffic on file-swapping networks like FastTrack and Gnutella has continued to rise.

January 17, 2004 at 11:18 AM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Results at I.B.M. and Sun Offer Signs of Recovery

By STEVE LOHR and LAURIE J. FLYNN

Published: January 16, 2004

ith solid quarterly results and an emphatic declaration of optimism, I.B.M. made a strong case yesterday that the recovery in technology spending is spreading to corporate buyers.
And Sun Microsystems, a computer maker sent reeling by the technology slump, provided another sign of improvement in the corporate market. Its quarterly loss narrowed sharply and sales held up better than Wall Street expected.

Sales and earnings at I.B.M. for the fourth quarter surpassed the consensus estimate on Wall Street, though the results were helped by currency gains from the weakness of the dollar. But perhaps more striking was the cheery outlook supplied by I.B.M. executives in the conference call with securities analysts yesterday morning. After the news, shares of I.B.M rose $3.71, to $94.02 a share.

Throughout the long slump in technology spending, the company's business held up better than most of its rivals. Even so, I.B.M. often stated that its corporate customers mostly remained wary and tight-fisted. Most of the recent improvement in the technology sector, including strong quarterly gains reported on Wednesday from Intel and Apple, has been fueled by rising consumer demand for everything from personal computers and cellphones to digital music players and digital cameras.

Yet I.B.M. is focused almost entirely on the corporate technology market. And the corporate business represents two-thirds of all spending on information technology.

"Our customers' confidence is growing and so is the confidence of the I.B.M. team," said John R. Joyce, I.B.M.'s chief financial officer.

In the fourth quarter, the evidence of a turn in corporate attitudes toward technology spending began to pile up, Mr. Joyce said. I.B.M. saw its sales of the computers that power corporate data centers, led by mainframes, rise significantly. And I.B.M. signed up $17 billion worth of new contracts in its big technology services group. The services contracts, typically spread over years, do not show up as immediate revenues, but they are a signal of growth.

Mr. Joyce predicted that 2004 is "the year when the information technology industry will begin its next growth cycle."

I.B.M.'s revenues in the quarter rose to $25.9 billion, 9 percent higher than the same quarter a year ago, and about $900 million higher than analysts' estimates, according to Thomson First Call. The revenue growth was less impressive than it might appear because 8 percentage points of that gain was attributable to currency gains. The weakening of the dollar means sales made in foreign currencies are worth more in dollar terms. About 60 percent of I.B.M.'s sales come from abroad.

"The revenue growth was nothing to write home about, but it was a good quarter for I.B.M.," said John B. Jones Jr., an analyst for the Soundview Technology Group.

The company reported a net income of $2.7 billion or $1.55 a share, compared with $1 billion or 59 cents a share a year ago.

I.B.M. also said its earnings from continuing operations came to $1.56 a share, or 6 cents higher than the Wall Street consensus and 41 percent higher than the $1.11 a share a year earlier. But the figure in the fourth quarter of 2002 included a 23-cent-a-share charge for costs related to the acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting in 2002. Excluding those one-time charges, I.B.M. profits from continuing operations rose 16 percent for the quarter.

Mr. Joyce said long-term growth expectations are for yearly revenues to increase in the "mid- to high-single digit range" and earnings per share to rise by "low double digits."

In the fourth quarter, Mr. Joyce noted that I.B.M.'s largest customer accounts were the fastest-growing part of its business, a stark change from the sharp cutbacks in corporate spending that made the technology slump so precipitous and long.

"The bounce up in the big-customer business is encouraging," said Steven M. Milunovich, an analyst for Merrill Lynch. "I.B.M. is a pure enterprise business. They don't do iPods or digital cameras or the rest of consumer technology. Over all, the tone of their comments was that maybe it's our turn now."

I.B.M.'s hardware sales increased 12 percent in the quarter. All of its computer lines did fairly well, but the biggest gains came from its old mainstay, mainframe computers, where sales were up 33 percent.

Software revenues increased 12 percent to $4.3 billion, and much of its software sales are products that run on I.B.M. mainframes.

The revenues from the company's largest business, services, increased 8 percent to $11.4 billion. But without currency gains, revenue from services declined by 1 percent. Analysts noted that the decline in profit margins in services, down 1.5 percent to 25 percent, was cause for concern. But analysts also pointed out that another big corporate technology services company, Accenture, reported lower profit margins this week. The slipping margins in services, they said, mostly show that price pressure remains severe in that arena.

January 17, 2004 at 11:16 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Aiding, abetting identity theft

TheStar.com - Aiding, abetting identity theft

TYLER HAMILTON

It was Halloween, so the rush home to hand out candy to neighbourhood toddlers pre-empted our normal evening dinner. After all the Nibbs, gumballs and miniature chocolate bars were handed out — along with cups of sangria for the parents — my wife and I were ravenous.
Dare I say, we ordered Swiss Chalet and paid for our feast with plastic.
After receiving these succulent chicken dinners — don't you just love the dipping gravy? — we began devouring our meals. But as I licked the tips of my fingers, my wife noticed a receipt stapled to the accompanying Swiss Chalet bag. Unbeknownst to me, the receipt carried my full Mastercard number and its expiry date

I was going to chuck this bag without giving it a second thought. But instead I sat in my dining room, a little peeved because I was out of gravy, and even more peeved because I almost threw out some highly sensitive financial information.

At a time when identity theft is running rampant, it drives me absolutely batty when I see companies behaving so irresponsibly. Less than two months before federal privacy legislation is applied to all businesses across Canada, you'd think that big-name merchants would have their houses in order, particularly for the small, easily correctible things.

Think again.

Rogers Video, Radio Shack, Rona, Winners, Bluenotes, Ikea � these are just a handful of the companies or merchants that include full credit-card details and expiry dates on the receipts they keep and hand out to customers.

"The question is whether there's any reason at all for that information to be displayed in a semi-public way, and I don't think there is," says Brian Keith, a partner with Borden Ladner Gervais in Toronto and a legal expert on privacy issues.

When you buy something with a credit card, Visa or Mastercard assigns the merchant an authorization number and the transaction is instantly approved. The merchant doesn't need to include the credit-card number or the expiry date on customer sales slips.

Granted, it does help to have certain information to help deal with product returns or exchanges. But an increasing number of companies are recognizing that there's no value to printing the expiry number. They're also beginning to truncate the actual credit-card numbers, meaning groupings of numbers are replaced with XXXX but enough digits are printed � say, the first and final four � to properly identify the card.

Kudos to retailers such as Dominion, Zeller's, Shoppers Drug Mart and, just recently Hudson's Bay Co., for truncating their credit-card sales slips.

Come Jan. 1, all businesses won't have a choice. That's when the final phase of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act kicks into gear, creating a number of obligations for organizations that gather and use personal information for commercial purposes.

One obligation is that personal information "be protected by security safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the information." These safeguards are meant to prevent loss, theft and "unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use, or modification" of personal data.

According to the law, methods of protection should include "limiting access on a `need-to-know' basis."

It seems clear that detailed credit-card information is sensitive data that, in the wrong hands, could be used to commit identity fraud. Also clear is that printing this information on slips that most people throw out doesn't adequately prevent unauthorized access, use or disclosure.

Finally, this information doesn't need to appear on printed receipts, meaning some companies aren't doing enough to limit access on a "need-to-know" basis.

"Identity theft is just an enormous problem," says Keith. "To provide the (credit card) number that allows someone to engage in identity theft when there's no need for it is sloppy."

And, I would argue, a violation of our privacy law.

So what do Visa and Mastercard have to say about it?

Rolly MacDonald, vice-president of security and risk management with MasterCard Canada, said that by April 2005 all newly-installed, replaced or re-located point-of-sale terminals used by MasterCard merchants can only show the last four digits of an account number on a receipt.

"Prior to that, we have strongly recommended to the Canadian industry to (voluntarily) truncate the numbers," said MacDonald.

The changes are being slowly phased in, he added, because the expense of replacing all point-of-sale terminals across Canada overnight would be immense.

Visa Canada had the same argument. Gord Jamieson, director of risk and security, said that truncating will likely coincide with the rollout of new terminals that can handle future "chip-based" credit cards. Unlike MasterCard, Visa hasn't yet mandated truncating.

"It's optional right now," he said. "However, Visa International put through a paper recently addressing a policy moving forward to make it mandatory."

By optional, he means it's optional in Canada. South of the border, Visa has mandated truncating in response to government pressure and a proposed Identity Theft Protection Act. Apparently, no pressure is being felt in Canada.

A study released last week by the Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Ottawa recommended that the government introduce legislation that would allow no more than five numbers of a credit card to be printed on a receipt.

I don't think this is necessary. The privacy legislation we already have, the one that hits every business on Jan. 1, already deals with this issue. Unfortunately, it hasn't caught anybody's attention. "It's something that hasn't been discussed yet with our legal department," admitted Jamieson.

Well, here's a chance to catch their attention, and the attention of merchants who deal with Visa and MasterCard. Go to my Web site, http://www.privacypayoff.com, and click on the word "Advocacy." There you'll find a list of merchants who don't yet truncate credit-card numbers on the receipts they create. Further down you'll find a list of merchants that do.

The list is small so far, and this is where you can help. Go through your credit card slips at home and find out which merchants continue to print full credit card numbers and expiry dates on their receipts. E-mail me the names of those companies and I'll add them to my list. My e-mail address is below.

This isn't an issue that can wait until 2006 or when merchants are ready to replace point-of-sale terminals. You can make a difference now, and hopefully the federal privacy commissioner will take notice, along with those merchants who continue to drag their feet.

January 17, 2004 at 11:05 AM in Phishing & identity theft | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Readers helped shine a light

TheStar.com - Readers helped shine a light

TYLER HAMILTON

I've been writing this column for about three years now, and each week I get valuable feedback from readers.
E-mails that come in tend to be supportive, but many are justifiably critical. Others still are downright rude and offensive. That comes with the territory, of course, and I try — usually as I bite my tongue — to find value even in the most scathing remarks.
Every now and then I write a piece that strikes a nerve with readers. This was the case on Nov. 10, when a column titled "Aiding, abetting identity theft" criticized retailers, restaurants and hotels that continue to print customer credit-card numbers and associated expiry dates on receipts.

The argument against this practice is that identity thieves can easily use this information to commit credit-card fraud or to develop profiles that aid them in more serious identity crimes. What's frustrating is that there is no need for merchants to fully print or retain this information, since all necessary data is electronically captured at the time of the transaction and presumably stored in a secure computer.

It's an easy fix � a simple software upgrade for merchant point-of-sale terminals. The software "truncates" or partially hides credit-card numbers on receipts, making them useless for anything but record keeping. Yet the practice of printing full numbers and expiry dates is still widespread, even if it may soon be a breach of the law when new privacy rules go into effect on Thursday.

Your response to this column was remarkable. With most columns, I'm delighted if I get feedback from a dozen or so readers. In this case I received more than 100 e-mails within three days and to date have received well over 200 messages.

Opinions were unanimous: Merchants need to stop this practice now. In fact, many of you went further by suggesting that your debit-card numbers should also be truncated.

As requested in the column, you also went through your receipts and sent me the names of merchants that don't truncate. I've compiled a list of more than 160 � all big-name retail chains, restaurants and hotels, excluding small boutique shops. Go to http://www.privacypayoff.com and click on "advocacy" to see the list.

Merchants have responded. A couple of major retailers contacted me, explained they had upgraded their systems nationwide, and asked that their name be taken off the list. I happily complied. No doubt, others are at least thinking about the issue now and will hopefully make changes in early 2004.

You all deserve a pat on the back.

This being the last Where It's @ column for the year, it wouldn't seem right if I didn't issue a broad forecast for 2004. Last week I tackled the wireless industry. This week I get out the crystal ball and predict 10 events � many controversial � that will define the larger technology world next year.

1. Following in the footsteps of America Online, Oracle and Google, a far greater number of North American companies will outsource high-paying computer jobs to India, China and other developing countries next year.

Business leaders and politicians in Canada and the United States will begin drawing attention to the issue, which threatens to undermine the North American job market and economy. Prime Minister Paul Martin and President George W. Bush will both voice their concerns in upcoming national elections.

2. Two more provinces in Canada will ban the use of cellphones while driving, following in the footsteps of Newfoundland. The bans will come after a string of horrible accidents involving mobile phones. The wireless industry will embark on another education campaign in an attempt to prevent new legislation, but political pressure for new rules will overcome industry protest.

3. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission will issue its long-awaited decision on telemarketing and will direct the federal government to set up a national Do-Not-Call list, similar to what exists already in the United States.

But the Canadian government will resist setting up a Do-Not-Spam list, arguing that such a list would not adequately reduce the flood of unsolicited junk e-mail. Instead, it will continue to use provisions in the Criminal Code that prohibit fraudulent and deceptive practices as a way to crack down on spammers.

It will also work more closely with U.S. authorities and share intelligence with other countries to bolster spam-busting efforts.

4. Linux will continue to win big deals, both on the server and on desktops. A new round of more malicious and persistent viruses will resume attacks on Microsoft systems, convincing more governments and businesses to diversify their computer systems.

Microsoft will introduce a more secure version of Windows XP and a take number of other security initiatives.

Those efforts will initially help restore trust in Microsoft software, but a high-profile virus/hacker attack that leads to a failure of critical infrastructure in the United States will serve as a major setback near the end of 2004.

The idea of a software liability regime will gain momentum and Linux, itself a victim of some mild attacks, will benefit from Microsoft's latest public relations nightmare.

5. A handful of online retailers and Internet service providers in Canada will announce their own music download sites, either on their own or in partnership with Puretracks.com � similar to the deal done earlier this month with Telus Corp.

FutureShop will be one of those retailers. As with announcements from Wal-Mart, Amazon.com and Coca Cola in the United States and Britain, these Canadian music sites will be operated on a break-even basis as a way to build brand awareness with online consumers.

Bell Canada will negotiate an exclusive deal in Canada with U.S.-based MusicMatch. Napster 2.0 and iTunes will enter the country on their own. Too many entrants means consolidation will begin during the second half of 2004.

The competition will force 99-cent "a la carte" services to drop their prices to as low as 70 cents per song and eliminate restrictions on burning CDs and transferring music.

6. The hydrogen and fuel cell market in Canada will make some modest gains next year, in preparation for a surge in 2005. Demonstration projects such as hydrogen "villages" and "highways," partly funded by government, will slowly emerge and two Canadian fuel-cell companies will announce profitable quarters in 2004.

Meanwhile, industry associations around the world will continue to formalize safety and technology standards for hydrogen production and distribution. There will also be some consolidation, part of a natural process that will determine Canada's three largest players five years from now.

At the end of the year, consumers will see their first line of portable computing products that can run on hydrogen fuel-cell cartridges. They will be high-priced, however. Few will buy.

7. Tech stocks will resume their climb next year as corporate spending on software and computer hardware gathers steam. But a large portion of money will be spent on security as companies and governments arm themselves against crippling cyber attacks.

Fears that the market is setting itself up for another crash will be proven wrong. On the contrary, the bull market will gain momentum as demand for telecommunications equipment in the second quarter draws investors to Nortel Networks Corp. and other companies in the sector.

Driving demand will be wireless network upgrades and the rush by large carriers and service providers to offer broadband IP services, including consumer and business-class IP-telephony.

8. Rogers Cable, following its peers south of the border, will surprise Bell Canada by coming out with a voice-over-cable telephone service late next year, rather than in 2005. This will force Bell to launch its own residential IP telephony project and accelerate development of its IP-television services in partnership with Microsoft.

Mobile wireless and fixed wireless phone services will also add to the competition, leading to a price war between all the major players and an onslaught of confusing product bundles in a bid to keep customers loyal.

9. An individual will launch a lawsuit against the Canadian wireless industry, claiming that daily cellphone use caused a near-fatal aneurysm and left the complainant partially paralysed. The individual will seek class-action status.

The controversy around the suit will set off a string of media reports that question the safety of mobile phones and other wireless technologies increasingly in use today, including home-networking products and radio-frequency tags.

Whereas the focus in the past has been on brain tumours, new reports will take a look at how wireless and increasingly powerful mobile phones have an impact on child brain development.

They will also look at whether mobile phone use causes nausea, headaches and a deterioration of cell membranes in adults. Politicians will begin asking questions.

10. Finally, the degree to which Canadians are concerned about data privacy will be demonstrated after the final and most far-reaching phase of the country's new private-sector privacy law goes into effect.

The federal privacy commissioner will be overwhelmed with complaints � many of them unwarranted, but a few drawing attention to some shady practices among a handful of high-profile businesses.

On the public front, the government pursuit of a national biometric I.D. card will be declared too costly and promptly abandoned. But a number of other controversial security initiatives will be introduced, requiring the privacy commissioner to stand up to at least two federal ministries.

Of course, I'm no Nostra Damus. Check back next year to find out how I scored. Until then, have a Happy New Year.

January 17, 2004 at 11:04 AM in Phishing & identity theft | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Music groups appeal copyright ruling

TheStar.com - Music groups appeal copyright ruling

TYLER HAMILTON
TECHNOLOGY REPORTER
May go to top court, lawyer says
Result may affect how artists paid

Industry groups representing retailers, electronics manufacturers and music companies launched separate court appeals this week related to a recent Copyright Board decision that imposed a levy of up to $25 on MP3 music players.
At least one legal expert says the appeals and the contentious issues they tackle may land in the Supreme Court of Canada, where a high court decision could force a rethinking of how artists and musicians are compensated for unauthorized copying of their works.

"It's not a surprise that we're seeing these appeals," said Michael Geist, technology counsel for Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP. "From the get-go we had a whole range of parties indicating they were unhappy."

Each group has its own gripe.

Retailers including Wal-Mart Canada, Staples Business Depot and Future Shop Ltd., have asked a federal court of appeal to declare "unconstitutional and invalid" the section of the Copyright Act that first created the levy, which has been applied to blank recording media such as cassettes and recordable CDs for several years.

They argue the section is too vague and the levy, as a tax in disguise, violates a section of the Constitution Act that forbids any body other than the legislature from imposing a tax on its own.

In a second appeal, a group of electronics and computer manufacturers, Apple Canada Inc., Dell Computer Corp. of Canada, Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Co. and Intel Corp., are asking the court to dismiss the Copyright Board's Dec. 12 decision to extend the levy to "digital audio recorders" such as Apple iPods and other MP3 playing devices.

Both retailers and device makers argue the levy raises the prices of their products and could lead to the development of a cross-border grey market and penalizes those who don't use recordable media to reproduce copyrighted music.

Canadian Private Copying Collective, or CPCC, the music-industry group that proposed the added levy, oversees its collection and distributes the funds to artists, is upset with the Copyright Board's decision to declare "illegal" a program that lets some organizations purchase blank recording media royalty-free.

The so-called "zero-rating" program exempts schools, hospitals, software companies and other groups from the levy if they promise to not make copies of music.

In its decision last month, the Copyright Board wrote, "the question is not whether or not zero-rating is desirable, but whether or not the board, or CPCC, is legally authorized to initiate such a program." It found that the program had no legal basis.

Paul Audley, a policy adviser for the copying collective, said the board didn't properly back up the ruling and, despite requests, has declined to clarify its position.

"There is a very mixed message in the decision," Audley said. "As far as our legal advisers are concerned, the program is a legal program."

Despite the board's ruling, Audley said the CPCC continues to offer zero-rating and has assured those who are part of the program they will respect all contracts. The appeal, he added, was launched to back up those assurances by getting a court to legitimize the program.

"Participants in the program want to know that it's not illegal," he said.

Geist said the private-copying levy is one of many the music industry collects. "The idea that this particular one happens to be unconstitutional is perhaps pushing the legal envelope a little bit."

The challenge against the MP3 levy could have more success, but the biggest fallout would be if the courts agree with the Copyright Board and reject the zero-rating program. This could lead to growing opposition to the levy as large organizations once sheltered by the program realize they are no longer protected.

"That could result in pressure on Parliament to scrap the whole thing or create official exemptions," Geist said.

These latest appeals against the private-copying levy represent a second wave of legal challenges against music-industry royalty schemes.

Last month, the Supreme Court of Canada began a landmark copyright case that will determine whether Internet service providers must pay a tariff for being a conduit for rampant downloading of free music. The court is expected to rule on Tariff 22 this summer.

"The two main statutory mechanisms to address online copyright are now before the courts," Geist said. "Both cases illustrate the problems with those systems."

Meanwhile, the Canadian Recording Industry Association has vowed to file lawsuits against those who share huge volumes of music on the Internet. This comes as Ottawa works through a mandatory review of the Copyright Act.

January 17, 2004 at 11:02 AM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

What's music worth?

TheStar.com - What's music worth?

TYLER HAMILTON
STAFF REPORTER
Music industry wants the price high. It may not fly. What's music worth?

Ask the music industry to describe 2003 and it might respond "The Year of the Loonie."
Few would have thought that an online version of the dollar-store concept would have such a dramatic impact on the world of music.
But when Apple Computer Corp. launched its iTunes Music Store last April and began selling songs for 99 cents (U.S.) per download, it opened up a floodgate of similar online offerings and gave hope to an industry fighting a losing battle against piracy.

Apple's iTunes store sold 1 million songs in its first week and 10 million by September. By the end of the year, Apple chief Steve Jobs announced that the 25-million threshold had been surpassed and that his download site was selling songs at a rate of 75 million annually.

The novelty of iTunes didn't last long. MusicMatch, Napster 2.0 and BuyMusic.com added more noise to the buzz by launching 99-cent �-la-carte download sites of their own, while Canada saw the unveiling of Moontaxi Media's home-grown music store Puretracks .com.

Everyone, it seems � from Dell Computer and Hewlett-Packard to big-name retailers Wal-Mart, Amazon.com and Best Buy � is getting into the action. Microsoft Corp. is expected to launch its own site this year, while RealNetworks Inc. recently debuted its RealPlayer Music Store as a direct competitor to iTunes.

It has become cool to offer music downloads for a buck, and a market that didn't exist 12 months ago is now growing crowded with options. The recording industry, facing a fork in the road, is more certain than ever about which course it must take.

"Now they've got a strategy and they're pushing down that road, and I think it's going in the right direction," says Duncan McKie, president of market research firm Pollara.

It was a long-time coming. Since the emergence of the Napster phenomenon in 1999, the music industry has been tripping over itself trying to protect a profitable business model based on an over-priced product: The compact disc.

Napster offered a way to download digital song files at no cost from a virtually limitless library of online music. Users got access to the tunes they wanted, could play them anywhere, and were able to burn their own custom CDs at home. It was copyright infringement, no matter how it was rationalized, but it was clear that the days of the pre-recorded CD were numbered.

"Why would I want to buy a full CD for $18 when I only want two tracks?" says Kaan Yigit, president of Toronto-based Solutions Research Group Consultants Inc., which has researched the music industry in Canada for 10 years.

"People were complaining about the value of music seven or eight years ago. So the minute Napster comes along, it was boom!"

Resistant to change and frightened to the core, the record labels joined forces and hauled out their legal war chest. A stable of pit-bull lawyers were unleashed on Napster, which was eventually shut down, and others were dared to test the industry's resolve. Others did � among them Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster � and music piracy jumped steadily over the years despite a series of high-profile courtroom brawls.

The impact is evident in the numbers: CD sales in the United States have fallen by nearly a third since Napster was shut down more than three years ago. What was a $1.4 billion industry in Canada five years ago is now estimated at less than $900 million. Illegal file sharing has been cited as a key factor in this steep decline.

The music industry didn't completely shun the technology. Many half-hearted experiments were launched that proved too restrictive and lacking in features. Some only let users stream rather than download music � a mistake.

And when users were permitted to download they could only get full albums instead of individual songs. CD burning was also limited, and playing digital files on different computers and devices was often forbidden.

Graham Henderson, senior vice-president of business affairs and e-commerce at Universal Music Canada, says the move to �-la-carte download services with fewer restrictions on CD burning and file portability was a major leap forward for the industry last year.

"All of those issues had for two or three years haunted us like ghosts in the closet," says Henderson. "Every time you said the word `portability' or `burnability' people would say, `Oh, no, we'll give them a copy for their hard drive and that's it.'

"We got over our hang-ups," he adds.

The licensing agreements that make services such as iTunes possible represent a major shift in thinking. Consumers can now access vast and growing online libraries of high-quality digital songs, and they can download and pay for them individually. The cost � so far averaging 99 cents per tracks � hasn't yet met with much resistance given the opportunity now to buy singles and create custom play lists and CDs.

True, the music's not free, but consumers can now do legally what they could only do illegally through Napster and its peer-to-peer ilk.

"A lot of people said I'm relieved I can do this without the lingering guilt feeling of having stolen something," says McKie, adding that a majority of Canadians he has surveyed acknowledge that free downloading of copyrighted music is wrong.

To make legal music sites more alluring, industry players are also promoting the purity of their libraries while emphasizing that Kazaa, Morpheus and other peer-to-peer networks are filled with "dirty tracks" � corrupt files, child pornography, malicious viruses and privacy invasive "spyware," among other nasty surprises.

A recent study from Herndon, Va.-based TruSecure Corp. found that 45 per cent of free files downloaded through Kazaa, the most popular file-sharing network, were viruses, worms and Trojan horse programs. A Canadian advertising campaign was launched in December to alert parents to the issue.

And where the threat of viruses and spyware fail to scare users away, the recording industry has been more than willing to launch lawsuits against individual file-sharers. Since September, the Recording Industry Association of America has sued nearly 400 alleged music-swappers and threatened thousands more. A grandfather who rarely used his computer and a 12-year-old girl were among those caught in the RIAA's dragnet.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Recording Industry Association said late last year that it is preparing to file its own lawsuits as part of a plan to deter Canadians from pirating songs.

A Canadian legal assault could prove tricky, however. The Copyright Board ruled last month that allowing songs on a computer to be downloaded by other Internet users is a breach of the law because it constitutes distribution of music, but nothing in the law forbids downloading for personal use.

Indeed, Canadians pay a levy that is built into the retail price of CD-Rs, MP3 players and other blank recording media. It is widely believed that the existence of this controversial levy confers on individuals a right to copy or download any copyrighted songs as long as they're kept for personal enjoyment.

CRIA disputes this interpretation, arguing that it goes against the spirit of the law and, if anything, is devoid of ethical considerations. The organization continues to warn that lawsuits are on the way.

South of the border the legal threats appear to be working, depending on who one asks. A report released earlier this month from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and comScore Media Metrix found only 14 per cent of Internet users surveyed between Nov. 18 and Dec. 14 admitted they sometimes downloaded songs to their computers.

A survey in May reported a figure more than twice as high, indicating that the lawsuits may be causing music pirates to have second thoughts. Critics of the study, however, warn that the results could be skewed if people are lying about their music downloading activities for fear of being sued later.

"What we probably have is a much bigger chill effect in reporting of what people are doing rather than an equally big change in behaviour with music downloads," says Kaan of Solutions Research Group.

January 17, 2004 at 11:00 AM in Business Models | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

LiveWire: Fans Rock Out to Online Music Reviews

Yahoo! News - LiveWire: Fans Rock Out to Online Music Reviews

By Derek Caney
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Were the Beatles a better band before they released "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band?" Were 1980s "indie-rock" band the Replacements a better band after they signed to a major label? Is Led Zeppelin the most overrated band in history?

If these topics can keep you and your friends engaged for hours at a time, then face it, you are a rock music geek.
Don't be ashamed. Many long, tall, cold ones have been downed during these sometimes heated debates. But when it comes to the Internet, geeks tend to agree on the music Web sites that satisfy their adenoidal tendencies.

They aren't digital download sites. They don't offer slick live footage and they aren't run by billion-dollar media conglomerates. They are sites that offer vast databases of information and have built their fan base mostly through word-of-mouth.

The best example is the All Music Guide (http:/www.allmusic.com), which is one of the most comprehensive searchable databases of artists, albums, songs, labels and individual musicians.

Each entry includes a comprehensive biography of the artist and reviews of most records in that artist's catalog with details on the dates of release and Billboard chart positions.

The site, which garners 4 million visitors a month, ranks No. 8 in the music category, as compiled by Web site measurement service Hitwise, behind behemoths Launch Yahoo, MTV and VH1, but ahead of such luminaries as Rolling Stone magazine's Web site (http:/www.rollingstone.com) and Billboard magazine's site (http:/www.billboard.com).

Tony Sachs, owner of NYCD, a record store in Manhattan, said the site is a resource for customers. "We have two computers in the store," he said.

"One of them always has AllMusic.com up. Last week, I did $200 of business from a customer because I let him look up all the artists and albums he wanted," Sachs said.

The site initially started in 1995 as an offshoot of All Music Guide reference books and has since grown into a business that licenses its database to the likes of America Online, Barnes & Noble and eBay. It is owned by Alliance Entertainment of Coral Springs, Florida.

For geeks who bother to leave their house, PollStar.com has searchable concert itineraries in venues across the country. Users can sign up for a service in which they submit their favorite artists. When itineraries are set, the Web site sends users an e-mail of newly announced dates.

Not only does Pollstar track national acts like Britney Spears or Coldplay, but they also track small indie acts.

"I was traveling to New Orleans on business and a few weeks before I went, I plugged in the city and the dates that I was traveling," said Seth Fineberg, a financial trade journalist and self-avowed rock geek. The site told him that indie rock act Holly Golightly was appearing while he was in town.

"They track some really obscure indie artists," Fineberg said. He uses Pollstar, an offshoot of a trade publication of the same name, to confirm rumors of tours and shows that he hears in newsgroups and discussion groups.

Record shopping is perhaps the most natural habitat for the rock geek. But the larger chain stores and download sites have made independent record shops an endangered species. Many rock geeks have taken their scouring efforts to the Web.

While eBay and Amazon may be the best-known names in Internet retail, a far more comprehensive selection is available on the Global Electronic Music Marketplace, or GEMM (http:/www.gemm.com).

Its selection of rare and out-of-print records outstrips the larger retail sites. Individual stores deal directly with customers, but use GEMM as a listing service, for payment processing and for its competitive commissions.

An offshoot of the rock geek is the gearhead -- the guys who memorize serial numbers to determine the year the guitar was made. For gearheads, Harmony Central (http:/www.harmony-central.com) is invaluable.

Harmony Central is a database of product reviews of musical instruments, bulletin boards and chat rooms to help musicians find the right instruments and collect tips on playing them.

"I look at the site probably three times a week to look at the unfiltered consumer reviews," said Ross Snel, a freelance writer who plays guitar in a New York band called Barbiana Complex.

The site's best feature is its user review database, which allows users to search for equipment by model and make. Reviewers rate the products on a scale of one to 10 in categories like sound, reliability and customer support. The accompanying commentary is usually plain-spoken and rarely condescending.

(The Livewire column appears weekly. Comments or questions on this one can be e-mailed to derek.caney(at)reuters.com.)

January 17, 2004 at 10:54 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

World War II Aerial Photographs on the Internet

Yahoo! News - World War II Aerial Photographs on the Internet

By Jeremy Lovell
LONDON (Reuters) - More than five million detailed aerial photographs from World War II go onto the Internet from Monday, giving the public their first views of some of the most dramatic and grisly moments of the conflict.

From the smoke billowing from the incinerator of the Auschwitz concentration camp in which millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis, to the U.S. landings on Omaha beach on D-Day, June 6, 1945, the pictures tell dramatic stories.

"These images allow us to see the real war at first hand," project head Allan William said. "It is like a live action replay."

"They were declassified years ago, but it takes days to find an individual image. Now they have been digitized and will be on the Internet it takes seconds," he told Reuters.

The pilots who took the highly detailed pictures were some of the most daring in the skies, flying unarmed, unprotected and alone often at very low level to fulfil their missions.

In the Auschwitz pictures for instance, prisoners can be seen queuing up for roll call, and in the D-Day pictures bodies can be seen floating in the sea.

Apart from these gripping images -- some of more than 40 million taken over the years and lodged in the National Archives -- there are also pictures of the German battleship Bismarck hiding in a Norwegian fjord.

Seven days after the picture was taken in May 1941, a combination of Royal Navy bombardment and Royal Air Force attacks had sunk the most feared German surface raider of the war.

There is also a picture showing in stark detail the devastation wrought by the mass bombing raids on the German city of Cologne.

Other pictures show gliders next to Pegasus Bridge, stormed by British airborne troops before dawn on the morning of D-Day in the first action of the Allied invasion to liberate France.

But the images are not just of historic interest. They are still used to this day in the frequent discovery of unexploded bombs left over as deadly mementos of the war.

"We are often contacted when an unexploded bomb is found. We see if we have aerial reconnaissance photographs of the area and send them over so they can see if there may be any more," Williams said.

The images will be available on the Internet from Monday, January 19 at www.evidenceincamera.co.uk, but Williams said the Web site was already under siege.

January 17, 2004 at 10:41 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Google Developing Ad Service for E-Mail -Sources

Looks like Google will come out with a competitor to Hotmail, which will also address some spam issues, but will have sponsored ads.

Yahoo! News - Google Developing Ad Service for E-Mail -Sources

By Lisa Baertlein
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc., which dominates the market for Web search, is developing a service that could dramatically extend the reach of its lucrative keyword-based advertising by linking such ads to e-mail, people familiar with the matter said on Friday.

Privately held Google, which is expected to go public later this year, faces rising competition in its core search business from e-mail providers including Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and MSN, Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) Internet unit.

Adding an e-mail service would provide a potential boost to Google as its technology lead in the search market seems destined to narrow and it prepares to answer to growth-hungry shareholders, analysts said.

The Mountain View, California, company, which has recently made several e-mail related acquisitions, is working on a way to serve advertising to an e-mail at the moment it is opened, people close to the company said.

"I'm sure Google is getting more and more concerned about locking in users. It wouldn't surprise me if they did something very sophisticated with e-mail," said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, who tracks the industry.

By moving into e-mail -- the Web's most-used program -- Google would open up a huge new market for its lucrative "sponsored links" advertising business that delivers ads tied to keywords in Web searches or on content pages, analysts said.

Offering its own branded e-mail -- whether for free or with enhanced services like spam filtering -- would also enable Google to tie users more closely to its search site and to steal customers from rivals, they said.

In an e-mail response to questions from Reuters, spokesman David Krane said, "Google has a number of projects in the works to test monetization in various scenarios.

"In fact, Google's AdSense contextual ads are already used in a number of e-mail newsletters," he said.

GOING PORTAL?

Google has for years said it would not turn its site into a full-service Internet portal like Yahoo or MSN. However, since it opened in 1998, Google has added portal-style discussion groups and is testing a comparison shopping site called Froogle, as well as a news site.

Google late last year purchased rival Sprinks, which had technology to deliver ads to e-mail as the messages were opened. Such real-time ad serving is important because it keeps ads fresh and insures that Google will not be giving away free ads or delivering ads nobody will see, industry participants said.

Kanoodle, a small privately held search company, in the coming weeks will roll out its own e-mail advertising product as part of its deal with CBS MarketWatch.com, Lance Podell, Kanoodle's president of search and content, told Reuters.

Under that deal, "sponsored link" ads will be served to MarketWatch's opt-in subscriber e-mails, including newsletters.

Google already knows how to deliver its sponsored link ads -- which are in the form of Web links and appear on the perimeter of Web pages -- to e-mail newsletters and content sites.

Furthermore, Google last year purchased an e-mail management software maker and in 2001 registered the domain name googlemail.com.

Some in Silicon Valley also believe Google could be preparing to launch free e-mail to compete with offerings from Yahoo and MSN's Hotmail.

"If they were to go the e-mail route they'd have to provide an offering that competes with free (e-mail). Anti-spam is one form of strong differentiation," said Jim Pitkow, chief executive of Moreover Technologies, whose personalized search company Outride was acquired by Google in 2001. (Additional reporting by Reed Stevenson in Seattle)

January 17, 2004 at 10:39 AM in email | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 16, 2004

Trend Micro Says 2003 Viruses Caused $55 Billion Damage

Yahoo! News - Trend Micro Says 2003 Viruses Caused $55 Billion Damage

By Jennifer Tan
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Trend Micro Inc., the world's third-largest anti-virus software maker, said on Friday computer virus attacks cost global businesses an estimated $55 billion in damages in 2003, a sum that would rise this year.

Companies lost roughly $20 billion to $30 billion in 2002 from the virus attacks, up from about $13 billion in 2001, according to various industry estimates.

"The economic and financial impact of virus attacks will continue to climb in 2004," Lionel Phang, Trend Micro's Managing Director told Reuters in an interview. He did not have a forecast for the year.

Spam threats and network viruses will likely become more prevalent in 2004, he said.

"The spam threat will increase exponentially, and will become the hideouts for viruses and hacking programs trying to gain an entry into the network," he added.

"Blended threats also will remain the standard way to attack networks, where one virus file will create four to five different activities within the system."

Phang offered the following example of a blended threat: a spam-generating virus causes a surge in the company's network traffic and prompts its network administrators to block the junk email, and while technicians try to fix the spam problem the virus drops a program into the system that monitors keystrokes and steals company passwords and user IDs.

Viruses can gain entry into computer networks via instant messaging channels, such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) programs and Time Warner Inc.'s ICQ service, Phang added.

Natasha David, an analyst with International Data Corp (IDC), said spam would emerge as the key transmission vehicle for viruses in 2004.

"Spammers are going to put viruses and worms in email attachments, so (junk email) will become more than just a nuisance," she said.

According to IDC, the global market for secure content management, which includes anti-virus solutions, message security and web filtering, is expected to hit $6.4 billion in 2007, representing a compound annual growth rate of 19 percent.

ONE ATTACK EVERY MONTH

Last year, there was almost one major virus attack every month, including the well-known Slammer worm, which shut down Internet service providers in South Korea (news - web sites), disrupted plane schedules and knocked out automatic teller machines in January.

The Lovegate Internet email worm surfaced in February, while the Bugbear and SoBig viruses, which spread via infected emails, appeared in June.

Analysts said the number of attacks between January and June 2003 exceeded 70,000, which is about twice the rate for 2002.

"About 20 to 40 new and variant virus threats were reported to Trend Micro on a daily basis worldwide in 2003," Phang said.

The company plans to focus on products and services for the small and medium businesses this year.

"This is the most vulnerable market segment in 2004 as their awareness level is really low, they do not have the dedicated IT expertise, and have a false sense of security about virus attacks, thinking they are too small a target for such attacks," Phang said.

January 16, 2004 at 08:57 AM in Virus | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Internet Language Runs Real, Virtual Mars Rover

Yahoo! News - Internet Language Runs Real, Virtual Mars Rover

By Gina Keating
PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) - The same piece of software that lets people all around the world play video games on their cell phones is now letting scientists drive the ultimate remote-controlled car across the surface of Mars.

Java, the software developed by Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq:SUNW - news) in the mid-1990s as a universal platform for Internet applications, gave NASA (news - web sites) a low-cost and easy-to-use option for running Spirit, the robotic rover that rolled onto the planet's surface on Thursday in search of signs of water and life.

For the next three months, NASA scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena will plot Spirit's wanderings with the Java-based Science Activity Planner that operates like a digital Gran Turismo.

"It takes all the raw data in the mission data base and builds a 3-D terrain you can spin around and zoom in," Gene Chalfant, JPL technical staffer, said.

With the same point-and-click skills one would need for, say, online shopping, the NASA team will plan Spirit's daily activities, page through voluminous data and communicate.

"It's a sandbox, in a way, to try different ideas," Chalfant said. "You pick the rock you want to investigate and command the rover to move there and the rover figures out the best way."

The team made virtually no changes to an online version of the program, dubbed Maestro, that lets space nuts page through panoramic color images, check out the rover's wheel-mounted hazard cameras or plan a rover mission just like real scientists.

The site (http://mars.telascience.org) has been so popular since its Jan. 2 launch that Sun had to provide extra bandwidth to keep NASA's servers up and running, Chalfant said.

The simulated rover drives on a 3-D model of the martian terrain as precise as the one used by the NASA mission.

"(Scientists) do exactly the same thing you can do," Chalfant said.

MIND BLOWN

Java's journey from mundane to extraterrestrial began nearly a decade ago when JPL scientists began noodling with the programing language to create a command and control system for the 1995 Mars Sojourner, said James Gosling, known as "the father of Java."

The JPL team showed Sun what they had done, and Gosling, a vice president and fellow at the Santa Clara, California-based software and systems developer, was hooked.

"I'm a geek anyway, so it sucks me in," Gosling told Reuters. He spent so much time at the Pasadena space laboratory that he became an advisory board member.

"They are doing things that people think are science fiction," he said. "It's a place to go to have your mind blown. It's hard to find a government agency ... where people are living their dreams."

Although Java's data-handling capabilities initially attracted NASA, the code's ability to transcend the many platforms used by mission scientists and engineers sold the space agency, Gosling said.

"They can have scientists all over the world looking at the data but collaboratively deciding on the way the mission should proceed," Gosling said. "They are all speaking different languages when they talk to the rover but everybody in the control room is using Java."

Separately, Alameda, California-based Wind River Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:WIND - news), created the embedded software in Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, that manage a wide range of functions, including data collection and communications.

January 16, 2004 at 08:54 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Spam E-Mail Plays on Men's Deepest Fear

We will never eradicate completely spam if people respond to it.

Yahoo! News - Spam E-Mail Plays on Men's Deepest Fear

Purveyors of the products insist they have received over 90 million orders but are notoriously hard to track down or even identify, and typically they refuse to speak with reporters when found.
According to Wired magazine, some 6,000 people ordered pills from Goringly.biz through the Amazing Internet Products Web site over a four-week period, spending on average $100 each for two bottles. Wired traced the ownership of AIP to a 19-year-old New Hampshire chess whiz, Braden Bournival, who shied away from a reporter for the magazine who approached him at a chess tournament last summer.

January 16, 2004 at 08:50 AM in Spam | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 15, 2004

PC sales up 12 percent in quarter, 10.9 percent for 2003: survey

Yahoo! News - PC sales up 12 percent in quarter, 10.9 percent for 2003: survey

Thu Jan 15,12:22 PM ETAdd Technology - AFP to My Yahoo!

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Worldwide personal computer sales grew 12 percent in the fourth quarter, lifting growth for the year to 10.9 percent, according to market research firm Gartner Inc.

Gartner reported Wednesday that sales for the October-December period were 48.4 million and 168.9 million for the year, based on preliminary data.

"Strong consumer demand, robust notebook growth and falling prices were the three key driving forces for shipment growth in 2003," said Charles Smulders, of Gartner.

"The professional market also showed positive growth, but it was still slow progress. In the US market, enterprise buyers were still cautious on IT spending, but they did show gradual increases in purchases in the second half of the year."

Dell was the top seller in 2003 based on worldwide shipments with a 15 percent market shares but Hewlett-Packard (14.3 percent) was the top vendor in the fourth quarter of 2003, helped by a strong focus on the US consumer market.

The number three worldwide seller was IBM, followed by Fujistu-Siemens and Toshiba.

But Gartner noted that PC makers were changing their products to make computers do more, and sell other products as well.

"The fourth quarter of 2003 was a turning point for several large PC vendors as they entered the computer electronics space, with a portfolio of products that bridged the PC and consumer electronics markets, such as Media Center PC and consumer electronic devices, such as LCD TVs," Smulders said.

January 15, 2004 at 06:45 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Microsoft to Tweak Online Shopping

Yahoo! News - Microsoft to Tweak Online Shopping

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) has agreed to modify an online shopping feature in Windows, clearing up concerns that it might be a breach of the company's landmark antitrust settlement with the U.S. government, the Justice Department (news - web sites) said on Thursday.

Microsoft will modify the "shop for music online" feature so that it will no longer automatically invoke the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser even if a computer user prefers a different one, the department said.

Microsoft expects to have the changes available to customers by February or March in the form of a Windows update that it will offer for download, the department said.

Justice Department officials have been charged with monitoring compliance with the settlement since it was endorsed by District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in 2002.

The pact is designed to give computer makers greater freedom to feature rival software on their machines by allowing them to hide some Microsoft icons on the Windows desktop.

It also aims to give Windows users the freedom to choose non-Microsoft software for functions such as Web browsing.

The music-shopping feature gives Windows users a way to go quickly to the Internet to buy compact discs from retailers.

Microsoft has already made several concessions to the department to resolve questions about compliance with the antitrust settlement.

Last year Microsoft agreed to make it cheaper and easier for rivals to license computer code needed to make server software work properly with its Windows operating system.

Microsoft also agreed to give more prominent display to a button in Windows that allows computer users to remove Internet Explorer.

Company spokeswoman Stacy Drake said Microsoft decided to make the changes "for business reasons" and did not concede that the feature was violation of the settlement.

"While we differed in our interpretation of the consent decree, we are pleased that the changes we are making also address government concerns over the feature," Drake said.

January 15, 2004 at 06:43 PM in Microsoft | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Survey: Net Campaign Tactics Can Turn Off Young

I never ceases to amaze me that todays internet marketers, still don't get it that you CANNOT use traditional marketing approaches for online; email is a "traditional" marketing method - the corollary to direct mail, so marketers continue to fall on it, rather than immerse themselves in blogs, RSS feeds and approaches which address consumers stated need for privacy, "opt-in" and an experience tailored to their needs.
Yahoo! News - Survey: Net Campaign Tactics Can Turn Off Young

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Political candidates looking to attract Net-savvy young voters should avoid burying them in a blizzard of e-mail and instead concentrate on chatrooms and "Web logs," according to a survey released on Thursday.

The Internet can be a powerful tool for organizing young people but can just as easily alienate them as well, two nonprofit groups found.

Presidential candidates have used the Internet since at least 1996 to augment traditional media campaigns. Democratic candidate Howard Dean (news - web sites), in particular, has used it to build a base of younger supporters this season.

But a slick Web site and a blizzard of e-mails will not automatically lure young people to a campaign, according to the survey of 1,000 15- to 25-year-olds.

Online communication techniques such as sending text messages to cell phones and buying "banner ads" on Web sites, were more likely to alienate young people rather than win them over, the survey found. E-mail updates and "get out the vote" messages were likely to turn off young people as well.

Other approaches, such as online chatrooms to answer questions, issue-specific e-mail messages and "Web logs" with information about the campaign were more likely to attract attention, the survey found.

"The Internet can be an important tool for getting young people politically engaged, but it's not a silver bullet," said David Skaggs, executive director for the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, which sponsored the survey with the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

The survey was conducted from Nov. 17 to 24 last year.

January 15, 2004 at 06:02 PM in Politics, email | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Bank of Scotland fined GBP1.25m

As a result of terrorism activities, the new rules on money laundering have been tightened, and BofS have been hit with a big fine.

Guardian Unlimited Money | News_ | Bank of Scotland fined �1.25m

Press Association
Thursday January 15, 2004

Bank of Scotland was fined a record GBP 1.25m today for breaching anti-money laundering rules on the identification of customers.
The Financial Services Authority (FSA) said that in half of test cases BoS had failed to retain a copy of customer ID or a record of where it was kept.

The fine is the largest ever imposed for inadequate record-keeping following the introduction of money laundering rules by the City watchdog in 2001. But the sum is exceeded by the �2m fine issued against Abbey National for failing to keep proper money laundering procedures in place.

Andrew Procter, director of enforcement at the FSA, said the record-keeping failures by BoS could have "seriously undermined" its ability comply with the requirements of law enforcement agencies.

He added: "The size of the fine demonstrates that failure by firms to put in place and maintain effective systems and controls will be dealt with severely by the FSA."

BoS, which is part of the HBOS group, said the problems were first detected in December 2002 and that remedies were soon put in place to tackle the failings. These included the introduction of improved automated systems. The Edinburgh-based group added: "Bank of Scotland regrets this error on its part and is working closely with the FSA in the fight against money laundering.

"There is no evidence of any money laundering or of any Bank of Scotland customers having been adversely affected as a result of the problem."

The FSA added that compliance rates at BoS had improved significantly since January 2003 and that it was satisfied the bank had dealt with the issue.

In the Abbey National case, the FSA found the bank had failed to ensure suspicious activity reports were promptly reported to the National Criminal Intelligence Service. The FSA's money laundering rules were introduced in December 2001 as part of the global crackdown on the funding of terrorist activities.

January 15, 2004 at 11:48 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 14, 2004

Internet 'Geek' Image Shattered by New Study

Internet users are not the geeks many think they are. Also they trust internet news more than other media.

Yahoo! News - Internet 'Geek' Image Shattered by New Study

By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - The typical Internet user -- far from being a geek -- shuns television and actively socializes with friends, a study on surfing habits said Wednesday.

The findings of the first World Internet Project report present an image of the average Netizen that contrasts with the stereotype of the loner "geek" who spends hours of his free time on the Internet and rarely engages with the real world.

Instead, the typical Internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user, it says. And, television viewing is down among some Internet users by as much as five hours per week compared with Net abstainers, the study added.

"Use of the Internet is reducing television viewing around the world while having little impact on positive aspects of social life," said Jeffrey Cole, director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, the California university that organized the project.

"Most Internet users generally trust the information they find online," he told Reuters via e-mail.

The findings are derived from surveys of Internet and non-Internet users in 14 countries: the United States, Britain, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Japan, Macao, South Korea (news - web sites), Singapore, Taiwan, China and Chile.

The study does however support some long-established Internet usage trends including the fact that the wealthiest segments of the population are the most avid users and that more men than women surf the Web. But figures vary widely by country.

For example, the gender gap is most pronounced in Italy and smallest in Taiwan. According to the study, 41.7 percent of Italian men are online compared to 21.5 percent of Italian women. In Taiwan, the difference is 25.1 percent for men and 23.5 percent for women.

The digital divide, a phrase used to describe how poverty impacts Web usage, appears to be tightening around the world, Cole said.

In seven of the 12 countries for which the information was available, more than 20 percent of the poorest segment of the population uses the Internet. Sweden, Korea and the U.S. have the highest usage of Internet users among the poor.

SKEPTICAL SWEDES

The credibility of information published on the Internet also received a surprising boost.

Despite the existence of countless spoof Web sites and message boards that carry oddball political rants, more than half of Internet users surveyed said "most or all" of the information they find online is reliable and credible.

The most trusting users are in South Korea while Swedes are the biggest skeptics about the veracity of Web news.

The Chinese, meanwhile, are among the most active Net socialisers. According to the study, Chinese Internet users say they rely on the medium to interact with others who share their political interests, hobbies and faith.

"It's more than in any other country and a significant figure for citizens of a nation in which religion is officially banned," the study said of Chinese users' willingness to discuss religion online with others.

January 14, 2004 at 08:55 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

January 13, 2004

MoveOn Puts Power of Internet to Use in Politics

Yahoo! News - MoveOn Puts Power of Internet to Use in Politics

By Ellen Wulfhorst
NEW YORK (Reuters) - MoveOn.org, an online grass-roots activist group that aims to influence millions of voters with an anti-Bush television ad this month, has harnessed the power of technology like never before in U.S. politics, experts say.

The group, which promotes liberal political causes from its Web site, has attracted 2.3 million members and raised millions of dollars by making the most of the Internet's low cost, immediate impact and broad access, they say.

"This is the election that is realizing the potential of the Internet," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "We haven't seen anything that's comparable to this kind of mobilization before."

The MoveOn ad, chosen late on Monday after a contest with some 1,500 entries from amateurs and professionals alike, shows young children doing tedious, menial jobs such as washing dishes and hauling garbage, followed by the line: "Guess who's going to pay off President Bush (news - web sites)'s $1 trillion deficit?"

The 30-second piece by Denver ad executive Charlie Fisher was chosen by a celebrity-studded panel of jurors, including political strategist James Carville, rock musician Michael Stipe and the public online. The contest got its share of bad publicity when two entries compared Bush to Adolf Hitler, but none of the Hitler ads was a finalist.

The winner was announced at a music-filled, high-energy gala in New York on Monday, where supporters cheered on outspoken celebrities like comedians Al Franken and Margaret Cho and moviemakers John Sayles and Michael Moore.

SEX SCANDAL START

The Internet-based MoveOn, which got its start as an anti-impeachment movement during the White House sex scandal of the Clinton administration, has found the right recipe for using the Internet, said Ron Faucheux, a contributor at the Washington-based Campaigns & Elections Magazine.

"They have put together what will probably be a model for new advocacy groups for the future, for the left, the right and the middle," he said. "It's the combination of Internet, television, newspaper and grass roots. It's not just a Web site sitting there by itself."

The liberal group, backed by such deep pockets as financier George Soros, has 2.3 million members who donate money, staff phone banks and sign petitions. It raised millions of dollars last year and was among the first to plant former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (news - web sites) firmly on the political map in a virtual primary last summer.

Taking his lead from MoveOn's Internet push, Dean too has harnessed the Internet to raise millions of dollars from people who do not normally contribute to political campaigns.

"We really believe this isn't an apathetic country, that people want to be involved in making the country a better place," said Eli Pariser, MoveOn's campaigns director. "What we provide is a simple and easy way for people to do what they already want to do which is to speak out and have an impact."

MoveOn has bought $300,000 worth of advertising time on CNN to run the contest-winning ad in the days around the president's Jan. 20 State of the Union address, he said.

It also is hoping to run the ad during the NFL Super Bowl on Feb. 1. Such 30-second slots average $2.25 million and reach about 88 million people, according to Advertising Age magazine.

MoveOn is reminiscent of "Get Out the Vote" movements in 1972, when 18-year-olds got the right to vote, said Jamieson.

"A lot of people feel alienated by the Washington power establishment, big interest groups and political parties and big money," said Faucheux. "There's a lot of voters in this country and political activists looking for ways to participate."

January 13, 2004 at 10:30 PM in Politics, Web lifestyle | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Online banks 'get top marks'

Guardian Unlimited Money | Cash clinic | Online banks 'get top marks'

Sarah Crown
Tuesday January 13, 2004

Online bank customers are increasingly enthusiastic about their method of banking, with 70% now rating the service as excellent or very good, according to an independent survey of the sector released today.
The results from the Virtual Online Banking Survey, published quarterly, showed that customers' assessments of online banks have improved significantly over the past 12 months. The survey asks customers to rate their banks on a scale of one to five (one being poor; five excellent). The average rating out of five for achieved by the UK's online banks rose from 3.6 in 2002 to 3.9 in 2003.

The survey found that the greatest improvements were in the speed of the online banks' systems and the ease of use. Ratings have also improved considerably for the payment of standing orders and direct debits function.

The results give a much-needed boost to the sector's image, which suffered in 2003 following a series of email scams directed at banks' online operations designed to trick users into disclosing their bank password.

The scams heightened the perception of poor security, a serious deterrent to those considering online banking, and caused several banks to close their online operations temporarily until the problems was resolved.

Despite these security concerns, however, the UK's online banking sector is growing fast. Market analyst Datamonitor predicted that the number of online accounts in the UK would have reached 11.5 million by the end of the 2003, compared with 10 million in 2002.

Part of the increase may be down to the fact that the sector is no longer just made up of internet-only bank customers. All the big high street banks now have online operations, and while the survey shows that online-focused banks such as Smile and First Direct still have the highest overall approval ratings among their customers (4.4 in both cases), it was the online operations of the high street banks that made the most progress in 2003.

Quentin Ashby, director of Virtual Surveys Ltd, which runs the survey, said: "Ratings for most online banks have improved over the past year but improvements in overall ratings have been most marked for banks such as NatWest and Alliance & Leicester, who have previously obtained very low scores. While they have a long way to go to achieve the same scores as the best online banks, it is good to see them moving in the right direction."

David Head, head of NatWest's internet division, agrees. "The survey ties in with our own customer research, which has indicated increasing levels of satisfaction among our users," he said. "We put this down to the fact that we have listened carefully to what our customers have been telling us, and have altered our service accordingly, focusing on improving download times, simplifying the sign-up process and adding features such as real-time balances."

January 13, 2004 at 03:35 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo Proposes Anti-Spam Standard For Internet

Yahoo! News - Yahoo Proposes Anti-Spam Standard For Internet

Larry Seltzer - eWEEK
When it comes to proposed technical solutions to spam, I'm a pessimist in general and confirmed skeptic at heart. Such proposals, in their attempts to make spamming impossible, invariably force everyone to change all their mailing software, dooming any practical prospects of the plan.

However, "invariably" could be too strong a word. For example, Yahoo, which claims to be the largest mail provider in the U.S., recently proposed a domain-level authentication system to combat spam. What's interesting here is its conscious attempt not to overreach. The company is still being circumspect in releasing details of its "Domain Keys" system publicly because the proposal is still being formulated, but officials did share the substance of the plan.

What would SMTP authentication accomplish? It wouldn't, in and of itself, prevent someone from spamming. What it would do is allow spammers to be identified and effectively blacklisted.

Authentication systems usually involve digital certificates, perhaps even for each user. For e-mail the sender might sign each message with his or her private key, and after looking up the sender's public key in some publicly-available system, usually a certificate authority, the recipient could confirm that the message was in fact signed by the person claiming to be the sender.

Check out eWEEK.com's Messaging Center at http://messaging.eweek.com for more on IM and other collaboration technologies.

Yahoo's Domain Keys proposal has two interesting innovations that make it different and intriguing: First, authentication is only performed on a domain level, not the user level.

For example, in a world running the Domain Keys system if you get a message from wacka-wacka@hotmail.com, you could confirm that it really did come from hotmail.com. That's well and good in the case of Hotmail, since it's safe to assume that Hotmail has enough internal authentication that the sending user really was wacka-wacka.

But what about a message from igor@fraunkensteen.com? You may be able to confirm that it really came from fraunkensteen.com, but did it really come from igor? This actually could be an issue if mail.fraunkensteen.com isn't very picky about who it accepts SMTP connections from. Some have suggested that spammers could simply move to a series of new, cheap throwaway domains as old ones become blacklisted. This is a reasonable concern, but I'm not sure how serious it is.

The other interesting innovation with Yahoo's plan is that no fancy and expensive certificate authorities are involved. Instead, the domain's private key is stored in DNS, where everyone can get at it fairly easily to check signatures.

Domain Keys would also present a problem to users (like me) who use a From: address with a domain different that the one for the SMTP server sending the message. Because the From: address is the most obvious spot to check for domain authentication, it's the one used by Domain Keys (at least in the initial proposal) for recipients to check.

Certainly, I agree that if you have to pick one address to check, From: is the only one to pick. Still, many users have From: addresses with a different domain than their SMTP server. Domain Keys would cause problems, at least in the short term, for folks that travels and for users in Internet cafes. No doubt it would burden administrators who will have to make sure that client systems are using the right SMTP server to correspond to their From: address, something that doesn't matter now.

Next page: Squishing Worms...

The transitional period for Domain Keys would also bring its share of problems. In the end, presumably any unsigned mail would need to be treated as untrusted; so once the switch is thrown and respectable people start enforcing authentication, anyone who doesn't implement the system will be unable to send e-mail to the respectable e-mail world.

Trust me, Domain Keys would be on the front pages of every newspaper and even featured in an episode of Friends (or take your pick of a Top Ten show since Friends ends in May). Yet when it happens, expect that there will still be lots of people outraged that they didn't get sufficient notice. Look for lawsuits to commence.

Yahoo! disagrees on this point. In the news article linked above, Brad Garlinghouse, vice president for communication products at Yahoo said: "If we can get only a small percentage of the industry to buy in, we think it can have a dent."

I've heard the same theory from other serious people in the industry. So, perhaps I'm over reacting.

Yahoo's plan goes beyond stopping spam. Halting phishing attacks and certain worms is also a major motivation for Yahoo.

Consider the e-mail worms that appear to come from some address at Microsoft, such as Xombe, the most recent one, which appears to come from windowsupdate@microsoft.com. This kind of attack would never get through even the first time under Domain Keys, because it wouldn't actually come from the address it now appears to come from.

Check out eWEEK.com's Special Report: Securing Windows for more on keeping Windows safe.

Speaking of worms, it's worth noting that one of the major innovations in e-mail worm technology a couple of years ago was the inclusion of an SMTP engine as part of the worm code itself. All of these attacks would have to be upgraded by hackers to even attempt to function under domain keys.

Domain Keys stops these worms from using their current mode of operation, which is to harvest addresses off the victim's system and use them both as the sender's address and the recipient's. Since the worm wouldn't have access to the private key for the From: address domain, its progress is mostly stopped.

The best the worm author could do (correct me if I'm wrong) is to hard-code the private key for one domain or multiple domains to which he or she has access to the private key. This would be a bad idea (for them) for a couple reasons: one, it might make it easier to trace the author of the worm; two, either the site could be taken down or the keys regenerated and the worm would die quickly.

Next page: Can Yahoo Actually Do It?

If this proposal is ever to get off the ground, the next step, after feedback to Yahoo, will be a standards process with a proposed standard from Yahoo.

Since every mail server on the Internet will have to implement Domain Keys if it wants to send mail, for all practical purposes there will need to be monetarily free and open-source implementations available. If it looks promising, at some point early in that process� because the spam problem is so urgent�some people will want to implement it even if the standards process is incomplete.

There are plenty of mail servers in the world running on a lot of different platforms. A few of them are more important than others, such as Sendmail, QMail, Exchange and Notes. The free implementations of Domain Keys will have to cover a very large percentage of mail servers in use.

So what would be the critical mass of servers needed to implement the technology before it could be considered dominant, or implemented enough that one could say that it's unreasonable for people not to implement it? How do we quantify this critical mass?

The answer would have to be framed in terms of e-mail users who use the servers in question. Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft joined in an alliance against spam last year. If all three members of the coalition were to endorse one technology and promise to implement it, that move would represent a huge percentage of Internet mail. It would be hard for other vendors and services to ignore such an initiative.

At some point, governments and large corporations would also adopt such a technology and require others who want to communicate with them to implement it too.

If I sound enthusiastic, I'm really more skeptical than that. Remember, this is a proposal to require all mail server operators to change their software. It's a proposal to change the most widely-used protocols on the Internet.

Something of this magnitude isn't done unless it's really, really necessary. And (this is important) you absolutely have to get it right the first time.

As Yahoo points out, this is why they're asking for feedback on their proposal.

Check out eWEEK.com's Special Report: Canning Spam for all you need on the most troublesome problem on the Internet today.

There are other potential problems with domain keys: The system would increase the processing load on every mail server by adding digital signing to the process, and I assume it would also increase the amount of DNS traffic a fair amount as recipient servers look up the public keys of the senders.

Authentication also means a step away from anonymity for users on the Internet. This doesn't bother me so much, but it does bother a lot of other people. It's possible, certainly with a system like Domain Keys, for a domain to keep its users anonymous even if the fact that mail is coming from it is not hidden. If you feel that mail from that domain is not trustworthy you can block it.

Domain Keys is a fascinating idea most because, in its attempt not to overreach, it demonstrates how formidable a challenge it is to make a technical solution to spam within the existing Internet infrastructure. Even Domain Keys requires changes so widespread that fundamental that it's easy to envision a rocky transition period at a minimum. Spam is a tumor, rapidly growing into the body of Internet email and choking the life out of it. Surgery like Domain Keys can be painful and unpleasant and it's not always successful, but perhaps we'll really try it before email actually dies.

Security Center Editor Larry Seltzer has worked in and written about the computer industry since 1983. Be sure to check out eWEEK.com's Security Center at http://security.eweek.com for the latest security news, views and analysis.

Blogging the Market; Part 4

Continued ... Bibliography

Part 1
Part 2