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 (213) | 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 Warne