Internet Changes Everything

March 30, 2004

Is your computer spying on you?

Is your computer spying on you? | csmonitor.com

By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

It's sometimes called the "new spam." It slips right through firewalls and antivirus programs, riding the coattails of legitimate programs you've chosen to download from the Internet. In its more common and benign forms, it will send you pop-up ads targeted to your interests and clog your computer's memory. At its most malicious, it can steal your passwords and credit-card numbers, maybe even let a remote user take over your computer.

It's spyware, a broad term for programs that hide on users' computers without their knowledge. It has become so pervasive that both federal and state governments are looking into ways to prevent or at least regulate it.

While it's hard to tell the share of computers that have been infected with spyware, estimates run as high as 95 percent. One popular spyware detection program, Spybot Search and Destroy, lists nearly 800 spyware programs that it can find and remove.

While most of the spyware found on computers appears relatively benign so far, experts suggest users take measures to protect themselves (see list below).

Children online can be especially vulnerable because they may have less technical savvy and frequently download so-called peer-to-peer software from the Internet, often called freeware or shareware.

"One of the ways these programs end up on people's computers is that they can be bundled with other free applications they download, which can include file-sharing applications, screen savers, or other kinds of free utilities," says Michael Steffen, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) in Washington, D.C.

Kazaa, a widely used music- swapping program that has been downloaded 270 million times, has carried at least 12 kinds of hidden spyware at various times over the past two years, according to a recent study at the University of Washington in Seattle.

But with the exception of pop-up ads or slower operations, users may not notice anything happening when spyware programs are present, experts say. And the programs often apply a legal fig leaf by asking for consent to be installed as part of a lengthy EULA (End User License Agreement) that many users OK without reading.

In Congress, a bill to battle spyware sponsored by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D) of California, Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon, and Conrad Burns (R) of Montana recently joined one filed in the House last July by Rep. Mary Bono (R) of California. They aim to ensure that users know when programs are being installed on their computers, so that they can refuse them if they wish, and that spyware that is installed is just as easily removed. The Federal Trade Commission would enforce compliance.

The FTC has already announced that it is holding a spyware workshop in Washington on April 19 to gather information about the problem.

In addition, the Utah legislature has sent a bill regulating spyware to the governor for his signature. Iowa and California have also considered bills to prevent spyware.

"The Internet is a window on the world, but spyware allows virtual Peeping Toms to watch where you go and what you do on the Internet," Senator Wyden said in a statement about the Senate bill, called the Spyblock Act.

"The FTC is beginning to look at the extent to which these applications are unfair and deceptive, and we think that's a really good thing," Mr. Steffen said in phone interview. "We think a lot of these [spyware] programs already represent violations under existing fraud statutes or under other laws."

Although new legislation may have a role to play, Steffen says any solution must also include educating the public, and self-regulation within the industry.

"The spyware and adware stuff comes in from all over, and it's really as dangerous as a virus," says Roger Thompson, vice president for product development at PestPatrol in Carlisle, Pa., a maker of antispyware software.

Along with imposing pop-up ads and collecting data about users, spyware can change computer settings without users' consent, change users' Internet home pages, or send them to counterfeit versions of familiar websites, where they are enticed to give out personal information.

"Keystroke loggers" record and transmit every key hit by the user, which could include such sensitive items as passwords and credit-card numbers. And they may have a "backdoor" capability, that allows an outside party to plant new programs on the computer at any time, Mr. Thompson says in a phone interview.

Perhaps most insidious, some spyware comes attached to programs advertised to remove spyware from a computer. That's why it's important to obtain antispyware programs from a reputable source, experts say. The CDT has sent a letter of complaint to the FTC against one company that it says was using spyware to change computer users' home pages without their consent and then telling users that they should buy an antispyware program to protect themselves.

Different forms of spyware
How they work	No. of known programs*
Browser hijackers - Software that changes web browser settings to modify home pages, for example, or search functions, making users easier to track or dupe.	153
Keyloggers - Particularly dangerous kind of spyware that records all keystrokes to capture passwords and account and credit-card numbers.	63
Malware - A variety of malicious software, such as viruses, worms, and trojan horses, that can freeze computers or destroy files.	168
Spybots - Classic spyware that monitors users' behavior, collects logs of activity, then transmits them to third parties without the user's knowledge.	142
	* Data from Spybot S&D

SOURCE: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON STUDY

STAFF

Spyware is sometimes confused with cookies. Cookies are pieces of data, not an application, used by a website to record information about users' visits. Most browsers on most computers have cookies installed by sites to help them access the sites more easily and quickly, such as remembering login or registration IDs, user preferences, or "shopping cart" information. Cookies can raise privacy issues, but they are not considered spyware.

But even relatively innocent programs that only display ads can be the source of more serious problems. The University of Washington study looked for just four of the most common spyware programs - Gator, Cydoor, SaveNow, and eZula - on 31,303 computers on the university's system. It found that 5.1 percent of the computers had at least one of the four installed on it, despite the fact that the vast majority of the machines were protected by a network firewall intended to keep out viruses and other malicious intruders.

The study also found security flaws in Gator and eZula that meant they could be "hacked" into by a third party to become more malicious and possibly even take control of a computer.

"This potentially means that there are tens of millions of computers with these programs on them that might be vulnerable to ... attacks," says computer scientist Steven Gribble, who helped conduct the study. Gator has since patched its program to prevent such an attack, he says.

"I'm glad the government is getting involved," Gribble says by phone. "I'm optimistic that legislation will help, but I'm pessimistic that it will solve the problem. My suspicion is that it's going to get worse."

How to protect yourself from spyware

Future legislation may help reduce spyware. But computer users can also take action now to protect themselves. Among the suggestions from experts:

� Think before you click. Download software only from sources you trust. Never download programs offered in pop-up ads.

� Understand what you are downloading. Read the End User License Agreement or other explanatory material, which may contain wording that gives your consent to spyware being loaded onto your computer.

� Install and run trustworthy anti-spyware software. Spybot Search and Destroy is one favorite of experts and is free at www.download.com.

The Center for Democracy and Technology also mentions AdAware (also free at www.download.com), Spyware Eliminator, and BPS Spyware/Adware Remover.

Other reliable products such as PestPatrol (www.PestPatrol.com, $40) may cost money (though PestPatrol has a free trial version that will detect, but not remove, spyware). Internet providers such as Earthlink and AOL are also beginning to offer antispyware programs to their users.

� If you encounter spyware that bothers you, report it to the FTC.

SOURCES: CDT, Monitor research

March 30, 2004 at 10:45 PM in Security | Permalink | TrackBack (166) | Top of page | Blog Home

Illegal Internet Networks in the Developing World

2004-03: Joshua Gordon, Illegal Internet Networks in the Developing World, 2/2004. - Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Joshua Gordon, 2/2004.
Enabled by falling costs associated with constructing international voice and data networks, and motivated by high fees charged by incumbents for international telecom services, illegal Internet network operators are proliferating in many developing countries. Unlicensed international data networks are commonly used by competitive local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who do not have the means to obtain an international gateway license, and by Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSPs) that deliver international calling services utilizing Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology.

Incumbent telecom operators and regulatory authorities in countries where unlicensed international networks are prevalent claim that these networks deprive local governments of badly needed revenue. However, unlicensed international network operators also offer a new, market-oriented model for bringing the developing world online. This model is not without political, economic, and legal risks. For example, illegal Internet networks pose a potential global security hazard as data transmitted over these networks can be difficult to monitor by intelligence agencies. Voice calls made using Internet telephony technology over these networks can be doubly difficult to track using existing legal intercept technology.

As evinced by a recent WTO ruling, growing recognition of illegal telecom networks may lead the international community to push governments of developing countries to adopt more liberal pricing and licensing policies and to pressure governments of developed countries to crack down on companies in their jurisdiction that partner with illegal network operators.

Full Report

March 30, 2004 at 10:30 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

Gates Drops More Longhorn Release Hints

Yahoo! News - Gates Drops More Longhorn Release Hints

Erika Morphy , www.enterprise-windows-it.com
Bill Gates (news - web sites) has tantalized the I.T. industry with another clue as to when it can expect to see Longhorn, the next version of the Windows operating system. Speaking at the Gartner Symposium/ITexpo event in San Diego, California, he told the audience that an updated alpha release will come out this year

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - news) reportedly plans to release a beta this year as well. As for general availability, Gates said speculation that it will be in 2006 is "valid."

However, he emphasized that "Longhorn is not a date-driven release," as there are several technological "must haves" that could impact the release date.

One subject Gates did not mention is the effect last week's EU antitrust ruling will have on Longhorn. Given the wide latitude the EU left itself in dictating how Microsoft products can be packaged, it generally is assumed that Longhorn could be impacted -- even though, technically, the case was about Microsoft's media player.

Delay, Delay, Delay

"Microsoft is not going to bow to EU," Yankee Group senior analyst Laura DiDio told NewsFactor. "They have too much invested in Longhorn, which has been enhanced with many features ... including Web services and collaboration, and integration between the core OS and other applications, including Office."

Thus, Microsoft's strategy will be to "delay, delay, delay," DiDio predicts. "Microsoft will appeal the EU ruling, a process that can take at least three to four years."

Meanwhile, if it pushes up its release date of Longhorn and gets out a pilot this year, the EU ruling ultimately will be moot, DiDio notes. "Once the appeals processes has been exhausted, and assuming Microsoft is still held liable, Longhorn will have been in the market -- and it will, in fact, probably be time for another release."

This, of course, happened in the United States after various rulings against Microsoft. The EU is a little different though; its regulator agencies have greater enforcement powers than its counterparts in the United States, making it more difficult for Microsoft to run out the clock.

A Little Clarity, Please

At this point, though, it is still a guessing game. For starters, much of what the industry knows about Longhorn is mere speculation, Gartner analyst Michael Silver told NewsFactor, based on slideware, which is always subject to change.

For example, when the concepts of Yukon and Longhorn first emerged, Longhorn was tightly linked to Yukon, Gartner research analyst Betsy Burton told NewsFactor. "The early vision was that Yukon would be the storage mechanism for Longhorn. Now, Microsoft is positioning Longhorn as an OS that uses Yukon's technology. That is a fairly vague comment, obviously."

March 30, 2004 at 10:24 PM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

Cybersecurity Liability Seen Increasing; not just a technology issue

Yahoo! News - Cybersecurity Liability Seen Increasing

Sun Mar 28, 6:26 PM ET
By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hackers, viruses, and other online threats don't just create headaches for Internet users -- they could also create prison sentences for corporate executives, experts say.

Though business groups have lobbied successfully against laws focused on cybersecurity, companies that don't make efforts to secure their networks could face civil and criminal penalties under an array of existing laws and court decisions, according to security and legal experts.

"Computer security is not solely a technology issue," said Dan Burton, a vice president at computer-security firm Entrust Inc (NasdaqNM:ENTU - news). who serves on a private-sector board to boost accountability.

Though health-care, banking and deceptive-business laws all create security obligations, a new accounting-reform law now being phased in is likely to have the biggest impact.

The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act holds executives liable for computer security by requiring them to pledge that companies' "internal controls" are adequate, and auditors are starting to include cybersecurity in that category, said Shannon Kellogg, director of government affairs at RSA Security Inc. (NasdaqNM:RSAS - news)

Violating that provision could lead to criminal charges by the Justice Department (news - web sites) and jail, said David Becker, a partner at the law firm of Cleary Gottlieb in Washington and former general counsel at the Securities and Exchange Commission (news - web sites).

"Any egregious intentional violation of federal securities law could be criminal," Becker said.

Companies that can prove they have taken concerted steps to improve their networks stand a much better chance of success in court, experts say.

Online viruses and worms like SoBig and Slammer have clogged computer networks and knocked vital Web sites offline, costing businesses some $55 billion in productivity last year, according to anti-virus company Trend Micro Inc (NasdaqNM:TMIC - news).

Other online risks, from identity theft to espionage, are harder to quantify.

The U.S. government released a plan to increase online security last year, but it contained few hard-and-fast requirements for the businesses that control roughly 85 percent of the nation's Internet infrastructure.

Another proposal to require public companies to disclose cybersecurity efforts was shelved last fall after business groups objected.

But many of the experts who advocate a hands-off approach say businesses will have to upgrade their online defenses, thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley and other laws.

Health-care companies will have to ensure by April 2005 that electronic patient data is stored in a confidential and secure manner, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

Banks and other financial-services groups face similar obligations under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.

Companies that don't live up to their security promises have faced action by the Federal Trade Commission. Drug maker Eli Lilly and Co. (NYSE:LLY - news) agreed to beef up its internal security after it inadvertently revealed the e-mail addresses of customers who used its Prozac anti-depressant medication.

Some courts have held businesses accountable as well. A Maine state panel ruled last year that Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ - news) should have foreseen that its network would be vulnerable to Internet attacks like the Slammer virus, and thus should be forced to make infrastructure payments to the state even when its network was down.

In Washington, a judge has several times ordered the U.S. Interior Department to unplug its computers from the Internet until it can guarantee that trust-fund payments to American Indians are secure against hackers.

"In the realm of terrorism and cyberterrorism, courts are more willing to find negligence than they did before," said Bill Cook, a partner at Wildman Harrold in Chicago.

Others are less convinced that a courtroom precedent is emerging, though they say that is no excuse not to improve computer defenses.

"There are some court cases, but I don't know that there's really enough to pull together," said Bruce Heiman, a partner with Preston Gates & Ellis in Washington. (Additional reporting by Kevin Drawbaugh)

March 30, 2004 at 03:06 PM in Security | Permalink | TrackBack (24) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 28, 2004

Emerging Digital Economy - US Department of Commerce, Apr 1998

This was a document I found useful in 1998 when it was published, and now its useful for historic purposes. This is very much pre-dot com in its thinking.

Emerging Digital Economy - US Department of Commerce, Apr 1998

March 28, 2004 at 01:23 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Internet in 2010 - Paulette C. Sallas

history.html

In the year 2010, Internet access will be quite different than it is today. Completely reliable Internet will be available through totally wireless remote access. This access will be from hand held, pocket computers. "Crashing" from the Internet is definitely a thing of the past.

Structured guidelines and regulations have been instituted for use with the Internet. Every person is assigned a PIN number that allows them filtered access to Internet sites. This alleviates the concern teachers had allowing students to freely 'surf the web'; students are now age and content restricted from certain Internet sites. Also instituted are guidelines and requirements for posting information on the Internet. There is a strict review process that removes the chance for incorrect information to be posted.

Technology has continued to grow replacing e-mail with the new video letter systems. This allows you to speak your letter into your computer while being video taped. Your 'letter' and image will be sent over the internet to your recipient allowing for a more personal approach to communication using technology.

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Life in 2010

We have seen the rise and fall of all shopping on the Internet and seem to have found a happy medium. All catalog shopping is eliminated and now done over the Internet. This has not, however, done away with stores to shop in. They are still very much alive and thriving because people still require human, personal interactions with others.

As has been the statistics since the late 1990's, the life expectancy of each generation has been increasing by 10 years compared to each previous one. As a result, we've had to inhabit space. Retirement communities have been established on the moon where room and care are provided for the aging population. A socialistic approach has been established. All the elderly receive equal, quality medical care, eliminating the need for prohibitively priced health insurance.

We've seen more and more interest coming from big businesses with the further developments of inhabiting outer space. It won't be long before these big business have 'office space' available in the depths of our universe. Areas for building are at a premium here on the planet.

As technology continues to grow so do the controversies. We have seen an increase in numbers and voice of those that want to limit technological advances. There is a growing concern over the need for human contact and interaction with people. The advances in technology have greatly limited the physical presense in business and social interactions, thus creating a void in "human" contact.

March 28, 2004 at 12:57 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (41) | Top of page | Blog Home

History of the Internet

history.html

The Internet's history can be traced back to ARPANET, which was started by the US Department of Defense for research into networking in 1969.

Many people wanted to put their ideas into the standards for communications between the computers that made up this network, so a system was devised for putting forward ideas. Simply stated, you wrote ideas in a paper called a 'Request for Communications' (RFC) and let everyone read it. People commented on and improved your ideas in new RFCs. (This sounds a lot like open source to me.) The first RCF (RFC0001) was written on April 7, 1969. This is probably the closest thing to a 'start date' for the internet. There are now well over 2000 RFCs describing every aspect of how the internet functions.

ARPAnet was opened to non-military users in the 1970's. Most early takers were big universities. International connections started in 1972, but the internet was just a way for computers to talk to each other and for reasearching networking. The World Wide Web and e-mail, as we know them, were not in extistence.

It wasn't until the early to mid 1980's that the services we use most started appearing on the internet. The concept of 'domain names' weren't introduced until 1984. Before this, computers were addressed by their IP addresses. Most protocols for e-mail and other services appeared after this.

The part of the Internet most people are familiar with is the World Wide Web. This is a collection of hyperlinked pages of information distributed over the Internet via a network protocol called HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol). This was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. He was a physicist working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wanted a way for physicists to share information about their research; the World Wide Web was his solution. At this time, the web was started, but it was text-only. Graphics came later with a browser called NCSA Mosaic. Both Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape were origianally based on the NCSA Mosaic browser.

The graphical interface opened up the internet to novice users. In 1993, it's use exploded as people were allowed to 'dial-in' to the Internet using their home computers and a modem to ring up an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to obtain their connection. Before this, the only connected computers were at universities and other large organizations that could afford to hire cables between each other to transfer data. But now, anyone can use the Internet, and it has evolved into the 'Information Superhighway' we know and love today.

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Timetable of Events Related to the Internet

1982 -Transmissions Conrol Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) established
Internet is formed as a connected set of networks using TCP/IP
1983 -name server developed at University of Wisconsin which no longer requires the users to know the exact path to other systems
-desktop work stations come into being switching networking needs from a single, large, time-sharing computer connected to the Internet to, instead, connecting entire local networks

-Internet Activities Board (IAB) established

1984 -Domain Name System introduced
-number of hosts breaks 1000

1985 -Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force come into existence
1986 -Networking News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) designed to enhance Usenet news performance over TCP/IP
1987 -number of hosts breaks 10,000
1988 -FidoNet gets connected to the Net, enabling the exchange of e-mail and news
1989 -number of hosts breaks 100,000
1990 -The World comes online (world.std.com) becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access
-the first remotely operated machine to be hooked up to the Internet, the Internet Toaster by John Ronkey, makes its debut at Interop

1991 -Gopher is released by Paul Linder and Mark P. McCahill from University of Minnesota
-WWW released by CERN, Tim Berners-Lee developer

1992 -the term 'surfing the Internet' is coined by Jean Amour Polly
1993 -InterNIC created to provide specific Internet services:
directory and database services
registration services
infomation services
-U.S. White House comes online

-United Nations comes online

-businesses and media begin taking note of the Internet

1994 -shopping malls are on the Internet
-First Virtual, the first cyperbank opens up for business

1995 -RealAudio, audio-streaming technology, lets the Net hear in real-time
-Radio HK, the first commercial 24 hour, Internet only radio station starts broadcasting
-traditional online dial-up systems (Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy) begin to provide Internet access

-a number of Net related companies go public, with Netscape leading the pack

-registraion of domain names no longer free- A $50 annual fee has been imposed which up to now was subsidized by NSF. NSF continues to pay for .edu registration and, on an interim basis, for .gov

1996 -US Communications Decency Act (CDA) becomes law in the US in order to prohibit distribution of indecent materials over the net; a few months later, an injunction against its enforcement is imposed. The Supreme Court unanimously rules most of it unconstitutional in 1997.
-Restrictions on Internet Use around the world:
China - requires users and ISPs to register with the police
Germany - cuts off access to some newsgroups carried on Compuserve
Saudi Arabia - confines Internet access to universities and hospitals
Singapore - requires political and religious content providers to register with the state
New Zealand - classifies computer disks as "publication" that can be censored and seized

1997 -The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is established to handle administration and registration of IP numbers
1998 -Internet users get to be judges in a performance by 12 world champion ice skaters on March 27th, marking the first time a television sport show's outcome is determined by its viewers
-Electronic postal stamps become reality with the U.S. Postal System allowing stamps to be purchased and downloaded for printing from the web

-Open Source software comes of age

1999 -First Internet Bank of Indiana, the first full service bank available only on the net opens for business
-Free computers are all the rage (as long as you sign long term contracts for Net service)

March 28, 2004 at 12:55 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Future of Branding - Driving Forces:

Driving Forces

The Future of Branding - Driving Forces:
By: Bliss Nancy, David Assaf, Franco Henrique, Kirkwood Alistair, McClelland Ruth, McCullough Sean, O'Day Jerriann

Driving Force I � Media Fragmentation
What:
This is the fragmentation of traditional advertising media with the emergence of non-traditional forms of media and other alternatives in communication that reach consumers and create brand value. These include interactive electronic media, event and sports sponsorship and product placement in movies etc. It is increasingly difficult for advertisers to reach consumers.
Why:
Growth of cable and satellite television stations leads to more choice
Cost of advertising on network television prohibitively expensive
Enablers:
Technological advances � cable, Internet etc
Massive increases in computer power
Cost of communications reduced
Increase of market segmentation as a corporate strategy
Demand for niche programming and media
Introduction of remote controls and video recorders giving consumers option to opt out of advertisements
Inhibitors:
Mergers and acquisitions by large media groups
Big businesses buying up Internet companies
Growth of spam
Paradigms:
More choice for the consumer leads to information overload
Predictability:
If Alexander Graham Bell had been asked to predict how the telephone would take off a few years after he developed it, one doubts he�d have come even close to recognizing its future potential. Media fragmentation has increased multi-fold with the opening up of the Internet. The Internet as a means of advertising brands (products) is still in its infancy and the outcomes are both numerous and diverse.
Influence:
Forming Alliances if only with companies with similar quality standards to create brand awareness more effectively and economically, for example, Jaguar Cars are marketed with Pirelli tires and Birds Eye Lasagna with Ragu sauce.
Experts:
Ashton Adams and several other Branding gurus all accessible on-line.
Major advertising agencies, for example Saatchi & Saatchi.
Timing:
Cable and satellite late 70s to early 90s
Video recorders and remote controls 80s
Internet mid 90s onwards
Links to Other Forces:
Globalization of brands
Group identification
Possibilities:
Personalized advertising aimed at single individual

Driving Force II � The Globalization of brands
What:
Globalization describes the expansion of national and regional markets, communities, laws, cultures, values, and politics from a local (regional or national) arena into a broader, international arena, ultimately spanning the planet. As this process occurs, these items (markets, communities, laws, etc.) become standardized as they interact, influence and combine with their counterparts from other parts of the world.
Why:
First, there is the increasing competitiveness of international business � markets within specific countries became saturated. To continue growth, corporations turned to international markets. Second, to gain economies of scale - investments in R&D, production, marketing, and administrative activities, can be distributed among many countries � and expansion cost become smaller. Third, with exposure, consumers acquired �globalized� preferences and, thus, product markets also became global.
Enablers:
Technology � computing power reduced the cost of information/analysis and transactions. The Internet will continue this push, since it is inherently global and inexpensive.
Communications � access to information about other areas in the world (via Internet, telecommunications, and other sources) has increased, as has the ability to communicate with people (employees, partners, others) �over there�.
Deregulation � barriers to international trade and communications are falling and/or standardizing. The WTO (World Trade Organization) and GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) were very important forces behind it. Countries have also deliberately reduced trade barriers, liberalized trade and investment controls, and removed obstacles to direct foreign investment. Increasingly, governments believe that such policies promote economic growth and national welfare.
International Finance (rapid capital flows) � Technology developments allowed banks and other financial players to fund/enable foreign expansion and to track various investment opportunities around the world
Inhibitors:
Fundamentalism and intolerance � a rejection of Western values and hence technology, as represented by the US and European multi-national companies and banks that have lead the global economic expansion. Further, the belief that one�s own race, nation, social group is better than any other cause the rejection of any �foreign� ideas and things.
Protectionism � governments increase trade barriers in order to improve their trade balance with other countries. They can also increase barriers for foreign trade to foster the national industry, and for foreign investments to avoid multinationals to send their profits back to their country.
Paradigms:
Old - Tacos in Mexico, escargot in France, hamburgers in the USA
Protectionism / Local versus Regional versus International / State sovereignty
New - any type of food, almost anywhere (McDonald�s in Moscow)
Free trade / Global trade links / Network of regions, independent of the state.
Predictability:
High - Globalization has been around at least since the 1950s, and has been increasing. Further, the enablers have been growing more and faster than the inhibitors.
Influence:
Low/High - Very little influence by individuals or smaller companies whereas large, protected companies may be able to influence local governments to �close� borders or implement trade barriers.
Moderate (decreasing) - Governments can implement protectionist policies; however, there is risk that the country�s competitiveness and standard of living will be left behind. The WTO can also limit the possibilities of what a government can do.
Experts:
Michael Porter, Lester Thurow, Bruno Solnik, Levitt, Quelch and Hoff.
Timing:
Ongoing � until 2005 it should intensify even more in most regions of the world.
Links to Other Forces:
The financial community
Brand extensions
Media fragmentation
Possibilities:
First, economies of scale (please see the enablers� part above for more details), since the internet is global by nature and cheaper than most media. Second, a global brand has more credibility, as people believe that as it is already successful in many countries, that is a good indication of its quality. Third, it�s quicker, easier, and cheaper to introduce a new product that has an established global brand.
Web Resources:
http://www.utexas.edu/ftp/coc/adv/research/papers/MButler.html
http://www.ltbn.com/Articles/art13.html
http://www.smu.edu/~rmason/cbandwww/Chinapresent.html

Driving Force III � Brand Extensions
What:
The development where new products are introduced using the name/association of existing brands. Examples of this trend include Virgin which has a long list of diversified companies and products all using the Virgin name and Coca Cola introducing diet, caffeine-free and flavored versions of the original product.
Why:
Companies seeking to diversify, increasing competition and the need for quick short-term success.
Enablers:
Rise of niche consumers
Specialized advertising
Technological advances
The difficulty to differentiate
Inhibitors:
Over proliferation of brands and weakening of image
Increasingly cynical marketplace
Decreasing brand loyalty in many categories
Predictability:
Trend likely to continue, as consumers seem comfortable in accepting it in the face of information overload but this may be problematic for some brands which could be weakened.
Influence:
Companies will continue cashing in on the image of brands
Timing:
Ever increasing from the 70s through to the present day
Links to Other Forces:
Globalization
The financial community
Fitting in the group

Driving Force IV � Growth of private labels
What:
The growth of private labels or low-priced imitators of product leaders has increased substantially. Often these products are manufactured by the companies that own the brand leaders themselves running the risk of �robbing Peter to pay Paul�. This trend is particularly evident in the U.S. and Western Europe.
Why:
More price sensitivity in mature markets
Retailers have gained more power in recent years and can dictate terms
Enablers:
Less brand loyalty trend for staple goods
Price wars amongst competing stores
Supply chain improvements
Inhibitors:
Mergers and acquisitions of competing companies
Move towards electronic commerce based home shopping
Predictability:
Electronic commerce will influence this trend (probably negatively) � to what degree is unsure.
Timing:
Took off in late 80s with EDI developments between suppliers and retailers
Links to Other Forces:
Commoditization

Driving Force V � Fitting in the Group
(Note: the observations have a decidedly western perspective)
Le Corbusier's notion that form follows function seems to have withered away in today's competitive global marketplace. Function has become less of an issue as products have reached, within range, basically the same standards; there are not really "bad" products that are able to survive on the market. Not only has form become a deciding purchasing factor, but also who else is buying the same form has been guiding our purchasing habits. The "look" of the thing, the "feel" of the thing, the "personality" of the thing, the value of the thing, and the association of the thing, have all become reasons why we decide to purchase what we do. And synchronizing one's look, feel, values and personality with some idealized group has increasingly directed our purchasing habits. We want to fit-in, and brands offer simple and clear paths to follow to get to the group.
While our parents (or grandparents) bought things based on what they needed, what they could afford, what was available in the vicinity, later generations have become preoccupied with having the clothes, toys, cars, etc. that identify them as the "cool" people, the rich people, the successful people. While this may have always been a preoccupation among the elite's of societies, the media and increased disposable income has facilitated an extension through a number of social economic levels.
Enablers:
Increased wealth or disposable income has given more leverage to how and what we buy.
As daily chores became easier, more leisure time allowed the opportunity to consider more frivolity in our lives (post war generations). A more materialistic society then evolved which now looks for the means to purchase more and more of the "right stuff" by working more and more.
Unmonitored advertising to a new generation of consumers has allowed marketers to mold "fit-in fiends".
Increased availability of a wide variety of brands: it is now possible to get practically anything, practically anywhere. Equally, it has been possible for the media (first with radio, then television, then Internet) to bombard with information on the groups one would like to be identified with.
Enlarged reference groups: when once it was the immediate or extended family, friends and neighbors with whom we had physical visual contact, now it has been enlarged to include people we may never see or meet but with whom we easily interact electronically.
Inhibitors:
A financial crisis similar to the Depression of the 1930's would force consumers to rethink what and how they buy. Likewise, a disaster (e.g. environmental) or large-scale war may not only financially limit our purchasing, but may force a wake-up call to reevaluate what is important in our lives: material goods or other.
A growing suspicion of marketers' intentions or a feeling of being manipulated may cause a backlash against the feeling that certain brands will fit you in.
Paradigms:
Old: Buy it because it does the job, I need it, and I can afford it.
New: Buy it because of how it helps to define who I am.
Predictability:
Although faint signs of reversing trends (not to be a cookie cutter image associated with a particular group) sometimes emerge, the imminent end of materialism in the developed world does not appear to be a worry that companies bombarding us the latest "must have" items need to lose sleep over. More often than not, the rejection of fitting in simply results in a new group (e.g. punk or grunge).
Influence:
Companies have capitalized on the social trend of identifying with groups and of purchasing to demonstrate membership by recognizing the trend and by directing their marketing to influence the niche markets of the group members or wannabes. Niche magazines (GQ, 17, Vogue etc.) offer ready-made segments in which to promote brands and their qualities.
Experts:
The plethora of consulting companies specializing in branding, niche marketing, etc. might be expert sources of insights as to why and how we buy what we buy; social scientists and consumer behaviorists for the same reasons and perhaps with a less biased slant.
Timing:
Post war boom offering more economic freedom, social mobility, and more widely attainable "model" lifestyles
Eighties "me" generation always wanting more
Increase with each expansion of media access
Links to Other Forces:
Media fragmentation
Brand extensions

Driving Force VI � Commoditization
What:
Commoditization describes the non-differentiation evolution of products across many industries. Products are either becoming identical or so similar as to not even make a difference to the consumer. This is occurring most predominantly in certain industries such as automobiles, as well as in many technology products. Often what is found in a GM is the same chassis and engines as a Mazda, for example. Is there any real difference in many of the mainstream computer brands where most of their parts are purchased from the same supplier?
Why:
Whereas competition was traditionally based on a product level, it would seem that consumers are placing more emphasis on the service aspects when making purchase decisions. Producers are constantly divesting their production capabilities in order to focus on the higher margins frequently offered in its service divisions such as design, financing, consulting, etc. As such, outsourcing is playing a significant role in the supply of these traditional producers, hence supplying the exact same or similar products to multiple customers.
Enablers:
Logistics: Lessons learned from companies such as Wal Mart have spurred incredible innovation in the field of logistics. Enterprise tools have become available for production companies, which has made outsourcing of production a more attractive proposition. Such tools as EDI, ERP, etc. have driven companies to focus their efforts on higher margin business units, usually service oriented.
Technology: Products have become more complex, more difficult to repair & maintain, thus requiring expert service. The rising need for such services has made providing such services more attractive to business savy companies.
Capital: Funding for new businesses has been extremely high in the recent past, allowing rapid entry and increasing competition into capital intensive industries that have been providing exceptional returns. The spur of competition has driven margins lower, making production an undesirable business for many industries.
Communication: Access to service support through telephone lines as well as the internet have spurred a significant build-up of service oriented businesses. Traditional producers have been using these mediums to provide access to consumers.
Inhibitors:
Economics: Costs of establishing an appropriate infrastructure in fossil (mature) firms creates a barrier in going to an outsourcing model.
Protectionism: Manufacturers may find it difficult to divulge sensitive knowledge to outsourcing partners for fear of losing proprietary technologies our capabilities that can be accessed by competitors.
Paradigms:
Past Salesperson�s lead point: Our products are the best in the industry
Future Salesperson�s lead pitch: Our follow-up services are the best in the industry
Predictability:
MEDIUM � The move towards homogeneity between products and diversity among services is a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps littered throughout history, warming up in the Eighties but not becoming a real �movement� until the Nineties. Humans are strange beasts; it will not be easy to predict their reaction to knowing that any product they choose from any manufacturer will be nearly identical.
Influence:
LOW - Certainly those producers who choose to rush against the winds of change must aggressively attack their competitors, probably to little avail and only cornered to one single entity. �Slam� advertising may be one method of defending their positions. For example, if the highlight of a competitor is its superior after-purchase support, then a rival without such support could say something to the effect of: �the reason they offer such wonderful support is because they know they just sold you an expensive piece of crap and you will be needing it. Our products are of the highest quality, we work to improve our products so that you will never need to use our services.�
Or just convince all the major consulting firms in the world that the real money to be made is in production rather then services. They will develop a new buzzword that will reinvent business, as we know it and all the producers will return to production.
Experts:
Commerce Departments that track the division between services and products as they relate to GDP and other economic indicators. Consumer Behavior experts that can provide insights into how people will react to the changes.
Timing:
2005, when I assume everyone will have certain expectations about the service levels offered for products they purchase (even the Dutch). I like this year particularly because I would expect that nearly everyone in 1st & 2nd world countries will own some form of a computer, which I think will be one of the predominantly commoditized products (Intel Inside!?).
Links to Other Forces:
Growth of private labels
Possibilities:
It is quite possible that the rate of competition could accelerate due to this movement. If commoditization continues, the services will become ever more important (to a point). Because many things will be outsourced, new entrants have lower barriers to entry because offering services has less upfront capital costs.

Driving Force VII � The Financial Community
What:
The merger and acquisition frenzy of the 80s and 90s led financiers to discover undervalued companies from which profits could be made. As an off-balance sheet item, brands became vitally important as primary undervalued assets. Acquiring companies could increase its intangible asset base and amortize its assets.
Why:
Fuelled by the belief that strong brands resulted in better earnings and profits for companies thus leading to greater value for shareholders. Example � Nestle bought Rowntree for $4.5 billion, five times its book value. Such transactions have recognized the value of brands and intensified the need for sustaining brands.
Enablers:
Changes in accounting and financial reporting practices
Relaxation of borrowing criteria to assist in purchases
Snowball effect of profiteering � everyone looking to do the same
Inhibitors:
The economy as a whole
Accusations of profiteering
Companies being more bullish in valuing their intangible assets
Predictability:
Cyclical in nature with the fortunes of national economies being a major influence
Timing:
Mid 80s onwards
Links to Other Forces:
Globalization
Brand extensions

March 28, 2004 at 12:52 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home

Imagineering the Future of the Internet: Sketches from the Year 2010

Imagineering the Future of the Internet...

by Christopher M. Wright
Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." So proclaimed Popular Mechanics magazine in 1949. The history of technology forecasting is littered with the wreckage of predictions gone awry. Not even a Thomas Edison or a Bill Gates can hit the mark every time. So why should a view of the Internet's future, painted today, not provoke laughter 10 years from now? One assurance lies in a new engineering standard, already adopted, which will reshape the form and line of the Internet in the years to come. We can detect the approximate color and hue by studying the uses that people currently make of the Internet and thinking about how the usage concepts might apply in a more technologically advanced environment. With one's fingers on the right elements, it is possible to sketch a view of the Internet's future that will prove accurate, at least in broad outline.
What will ordinary users encounter on the Net in 2010? What business models are likely to thrive in that environment? This article addresses these questions and presents bold ideas for next-generation Internet services from exciting companies already at work building the future.

new and enhanced functionalities

The new standard, Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) was first devised in 1995 and endorsed by an Internet task force in 1998. Most significant players (Cisco, Microsoft) are already testing equipment and connections that conform to IPv6 on a testbed called the 6bone, a virtual network layered on top of today's IPv4-based Internet. The migration to IPv6 is expected to be gradual, something that will take place over the next 5-10 years, and the two standards will coexist during that time and beyond.

Addressing / Embedded Systems

Most observers believe that the Internet will run out of addresses in a few years if nothing is done. Because the Net was originally designed to link a few researchers and not to be a mass medium, the patchwork IPv4 addressing solutions (NAT) are problematic. IPv6 upgrades the data packet address space from 32-bits to 128-bits, exponentially increasing the number of unique IP addresses available.

A prime use of IPv6 addressing capability will be embedded systems -- placing microprocessors in every device imaginable, from refrigerators to gas pumps, and linking them to the Internet for control and information gathering purposes. Thus the Internet will become the network for millions upon millions of intelligent devices. Wind River Systems has developed graphical Web-browsing capabilities for smart phones, cable TV set-top boxes, car navigation systems and other devices.

In 1998, NCR demonstrated a microwave oven with a touch-screen front panel allowing users to bank, shop and check e-mail while nuking their couscous. The same year another manufacturer announced a smart refrigerator that monitors its own contents and automatically orders replacements. Other home uses of embedded systems will include pacemakers and vital sign monitors linked to hospitals, lawn sprinklers that check the weather forecast before turning themselves on and cars that detect failing parts and e-mail their owners. Commuters will control the heat and light at home from their cars.

In the office, every printer and copier will be able to send output to other continents. Gas pumps will stream video from CNN, vending machines will signal when it is time to replace the Orangina and manufacturers will send software upgrades to machine tools on factory floors in several countries at the push of a button. Vauxhall Motors in the U.K. has a Web site featuring traffic reports updated every 40 seconds from electronic road sensors all over England. This is just a glimpse of the services that Net-linked embedded systems will provide by the year 2010.

Autoconfiguration/Mobile Computing

People in networks currently have problems trying to connect their laptops to the Net in field offices, other cities or even just down the hall. With 'static' addressing, network administrators have to configure new addresses manually. The supposed fix, 'dynamic' addressing (DHCP), does not always work well, granting addresses one day and taking them away the next.

IPv6, on the other hand, is a true plug-n-play solution that supports mobility without the need to change settings manually. Under IPv6, a mobile device keeps its home address and is automatically assigned temporary addresses at new locations. Network routers then automatically forward data from the home address to the relocated device. Also supporting mobility is an incorporated standard ('Mobile IP') which keeps nomadic wireless devices connected as they move through various IP subnets, in the way that cell phones roam without being disconnected. The future will bring more Internet-ready hand-held devices like palmtops, cell phones, music players, tiny attachable cameras and TVs. The Nokia 9000I is a digital cell phone, fax machine and Web browser that points in the direction of the mobile office.

Coupled with advances in voice recognition and thin displays, mobile computing will allow people to keep their calendars, consult their address books and read continuously updated multimedia "newspapers" on the fly, adding yet another dimension to a Net that will be all around us in 2010.

Selectable Quality of Service (QoS) / Bandwidth on Demand

Data transmissions on the Net often move at a snail's pace or disappear into the 'connectivity cloud' -- never to return. Selectable QoS is one answer to the increasing congestion on the Net -- service agreements that guarantee end-to-end session characteristics in exchange for variable pricing. People will voluntarily pay extra to reserve bandwidth when and where premium service is needed, for example to allow real time videoconferencing, telesurgery or multiplayer entertainment.

Commercial QoS offerings appeared in late-1998 but were unable to assign priority to data at the packet level. IPv6 supplies flow control labels that assign priority to individual packets, prompting the network to handle the packets in the manner requested. QoS services include simple priority, real time transmission, start/stop times and acceptable packet loss rates. Coupled with IPv6 native security features, QoS will facilitate the creation of corporate Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Companies will be able to specify data paths, authenticate data sources and encrypt data at the packet level, allowing them to conduct business over the Net through 'steel pipes' secure enough to obviate the need for firewalls in some instances.

Multicasting/Internet Television

Ordinarily, a Web server must crank out a new set of data packets for every user who requests them, clogging routers and backbones with large identical data sets. Under multicasting, the job of replicating packets is distributed and data transmission is localized. A server sends a data stream to strategically placed 'mrouters,' which replicate the packets and send them on to their final destinations. After the initial transmission to the 'mrouters,' data streams for live events and other group downloads stay off the backbone, thus relieving network congestion. It is commonly said that viewers 'tune in' to multicast channels. Multicasting is already being tested on the MBone, but IPv6 will bring the service to its full potential, adding live video (i.e., television) to the growing list of what the Internet will be doing for users on an everyday basis in 2010.

Business Models

Online Communities: The Net is good at aggregating small groups of people who fly under the radar of mass marketers. With its search engines and global reach, the Net enables dispersed but like-minded individuals to find each other and build communities. A site might coalesce around common interests (womenconnect.com for female professionals) or shared values -- Didax is a Christian site featuring forums, chats and targeted books and music. Virtual communities can also revolve around specialized niche products or a desire to aggregate group purchasing power to get a better deal on major transactions. Sonnet Financial is online buyers' group, pooling orders for foreign currency and obtaining the most favorable interbank rate in international markets.

Business-to-Business (BTB): Retailing has gotten all of the attention so far, but the really big money is in business-to-business Web commerce. Network products provider Cisco has led the way, now deriving 60% of its revenue -- measured in billions -- from Web sales. The OASIS Marketplace lets electric utility companies buy power from each other, racking up $25 billion in transactions in 1998 and saving money by automating negotiations down from days to seconds. GE saves 15-20% through online procurement and takes a cut on every transaction created by opening its online supplier system to outside buyers. Buyers save money on FreeMarkets Online, an auction site for heavy industrial components like air conditioner compressors.

By automating the supply chain on the Internet, companies can save money, solve problems and increase customer satisfaction despite becoming more impersonal. Danish auto parts supplier Ostergaard noticed that its auto mechanic customers all began work at 8 a.m., diagnosing car problems and thumbing through a forest of paper catalogs to look for replacement parts. Then they all tried to place orders at the same time, jamming a telephone switchboard at 9 a.m. with hundreds of calls, many of which ended up on hold. So Ostergaard replaced the catalogs with an online sales system. A later improvement allowed buyers to check online whether parts were actually in stock. The last step was to link to suppliers' systems, enabling the immediate transmission of orders for out-of-stock parts. Ostergaard can now guarantee 24-hour delivery on any part ordered, capturing more transactions and increasing customer satisfaction in the process.

Customer Relations: Companies are also using the Web to automate other interactions with customers. Here once again Cisco leads the way. Cisco's award-winning customer service site on the Web helps 50,000 customers with 24/7 global availability of product documentation and order tracking tools. One tool lets personnel in different departments collaborate on an order before Cisco ever sees it. Self-help FAQ lists and troubleshooting tools solve most of the problems customers have, leaving a call center to handle the rest. By providing self-service, proactive notifications and immediate access to critical information, Cisco increases customer satisfaction and reduces 800-number charges, labor costs and software distribution expenses. Other companies are reducing their reliance on telephone technical support through the use of e-mail, accessible knowledge bases, business chat (instant messaging) and intelligent agents. Brightware claims that its intelligent agents can automate 80% of all customer sales and service interactions by asking the right questions and serving up appropriate information. Brightware is also developing fully automated chatter-bots, expert systems that will "converse" freely with customers. Some sites go beyond customer service to build customer community or capitalize on customer knowledge. Snapple, Saturn and SportsLine let customers chat with each other online. Netscape users and RomTech game players beta-test new versions, identifying the bugs and suggesting improvements. Lego lets children write and post software on the Net to increase the functionality of its robotic toys. Honda asked its viewers to design the perfect car. Cisco also seeks customer assistance in designing next-gen products, speeding up the design process, uncovering glitches and better ensuring that the final result is something people want.

Virtual Organizations: One type of virtual organization is a federation of specialized independent firms flying under a single brand, working in concert to deliver products or services to consumers who may never know that more than one company is involved. Like a pro football team, the lineup may change from season to season, but the jerseys remain the same.

The idea is not new. "Sears roofing" has long been offered through independent contractors. The arrangement benefits consumers who can easily find a source they feel they can trust to stand behind its work. The investment site E*Trade provides full-service brokerage by teaming with Reuters for news, BancBoston Robertson Stephens for recommendations and First Call for earnings estimates. Electronics distributor Marshall Industries parses data from 150 manufacturers, presents it through the Marshall site, verifies credit with Wells Fargo and ships via UPS.

Digital Products/Digital Delivery: The Web's versatility is illustrated by its ability to distribute all manner of digitized information -- text, video, CD-quality sound, images, animation and software. Egghead dropped all of its retail outlets and sells software only over the Web. GartnerGroup delivers high-end industry reports, some costing thousands of dollars, via the Web. Mapquest creates street maps for insertion into company Web sites with hyperlinks to points of interest and business data. Viewpoint offers 3-D models for games, video production and forensic work, as well as standard motions for character animation. PhotoDisc sells stock photos to publishers over the Web that can be searched by subject, color and other attributes. ESPN holds subscriber-only live netcasts featuring diagrams by former big league coaches, trivia contests and chances to win sports-related trips. Hollywood studios are working on the digital distribution of first-run movies to theaters over the Web. The Net is creating value in numerous ways, making it not only a versatile medium but also an engine of prosperity.

Virtuoso Firms Display Their Artistry

Dab a little IPv6 on the palette, mix with other improvements like bigger bandwidth and XML mark-up language, throw in some usage concepts from above, and here is what happens when cutting edge firms take brush in hand and step up to the canvas:

Medical Consumer Media (MCM) / 'Smart Clothing': Winner of the AMA's Best Web Site award in 1997, MCM of Reston, Virginia, (www.medcm.com) created the first educational pharmaceutical Web site (for GlaxoWellcome) and virtual reality experiences for Merck and others. Looking ahead to the new addressing and selectable QoS functionalities of IPv6, MCM sees a market for Web-connected 'data suits' or 'smart clothing' that will help rehabilitate stroke victims and others whose mobility has been compromised from accident or disease. The suits will contain thousands of embedded microprocessors emitting signals via wireless connection to network computers, resulting in spectacular 3-D visualizations based on minute calibrations of muscle and finger movements. A dozen sensors might be enough to create stick figure representations on one local computer, but it will take IPv6 addressing and the distributed computing power of the Net to achieve the fine gradations MCM envisions. Stroke victims lose their muscle dexterity. Data suits will detect minute improvements in muscle control and provide immediate feedback to physical therapy patients as to how they are progressing versus a baseline established in a previous session. Smart clothing will eventually move patients' extremities in accordance with pre-arranged signals, providing electro-mechanical support as current state-of-the-art prosthetic devices are beginning to do. MCM sees applications for data suits beyond medicine, from 3-D games to tennis instruction.

BoxerJam/'Leisure Currency' : BoxerJam of Charlottesville, Virginia, offers real time multiplayer games on AOL, Sony Station and its own Web site (www.BoxerJam.com). Its Strike A Match word game won an AOL Members' Choice Award in 1997 and is played by millions. BoxerJam is excited by the concept of nomadic devices because it takes online entertainment out of the living room and makes it available no matter where people happen to be idled or waiting -- in the car, the doctor's office, etc. In addition, selectable QoS will make data transmissions over the Net more reliable. Paying for QoS will enable BoxerJam to offer new games with Jeopardy-size prizes over the Net to people currently unwilling to pay entry fees because of high data disruption rates.

Rewarding people for playing also underlies BoxerJam's idea for a leisure currency earned by playing more games, bringing in new players and buying products from BoxerJam sponsors. Players could spend the currency in an envisioned BoxerJam store, earning $10 off a J.Crew sweatshirt, for example. The currency will function like the Green Stamps of yesteryear. IPv6 authentication headers will enhance security, alleviating concerns that the currency will be fraudulently generated or stolen. BoxerJam will team with affinity partners in larger promotions that will let players earn more currency by watching certain TV shows or otherwise choosing an affiliated entertainment or merchant over a competitor.

Chaos NewMedia/Virtual Companies for the Disabled: Chaos NewMedia of Charlottesville, Virginia, (www.chaosltd.com) creates commercial Web sites that draw their strength from building online communities. It created a site for Wedding RSVP where a couple and their guests can interact with information about an upcoming marriage. Chaos envisions the disabled forming virtual companies to deliver digital products over the Net, including magazines, software and multicast news channels.

The disabled tend to be isolated and underemployed. The Internet has already helped them touch the world and participate in community through chat rooms, e-mail and shopping. They can leverage IPv6 and other improvements to the Net to sell from home through virtual companies made up of employees spread from California to Maine. Such companies will use collaborative authoring tools to create digital products, virtual private networks to keep track of company affairs and selectable QoS to circulate drafts and convene real time conferences. In this vision, programmers in California might get together with marketers in Michigan and finance folks from Florida. Thus, the Net can help geographically dispersed disabled individuals pool their talents and create knowledge-based enterprises -- the ultimate in cottage industries -- and build community in the process.

The Gallery Tour Winds to a Close

The face of the Internet is changing. Connectivity is broadening with the addition of embedded systems, mobile computing, Internet TV and IP telephony. Usage is broadening as the Net simulates many attributes of earlier media like newspapers and radio, adds elements of its own like interactivity and digital delivery, and creates value in heretofore unimagined ways. Connect the dots and what emerges is a picture of a continuously improving medium of unrivaled versatility, a multi-faceted tool possessing unprecedented power for group communications, a universal network from which is unfolding a rich and never-ending tapestry of new uses and applications. By 2010, the face of the Internet will look like something from the hand of Pablo Picasso -- a cubist montage liberated from the narrow perspective of the desktop and drawn from many different vantage points instead. People in 2010 will encounter an omnipresent, partly invisible Net through a whole host of intelligent devices, not just through their PCs. People will get their e-mail through voice commands in their cars and otherwise live their lives in a world suffused with an Internet gone ambient. Thus will the Internet in 2010 be setting the frame for ubiquitous computing, the next wave to come after mainframes, PCs and networks.

March 28, 2004 at 12:49 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (46) | Top of page | Blog Home

Future of the Internet and Web

I have been thinking about what internet will look like in 2010. This prediction from 2000 is exactly what it won't look like ... this type of natural extrapolation will have some validity, but doesn't account for legislation, online crime, and spam.

I am starting to think the internet will have some different flavours that we haven't expected, and it won't necessarily be as easy as we expect. It will almost certainly cost the consumer more than we expect. I am not thinking of internet access, which will probably go down in price ... the cost will be in what you need to do online.

Future of the Internet and Web An Introduction to the Internet -- in 2010

(This material last modified 11/16/2000 21:51:26.)
True Mobile Computing
Internet will be faster, more easily accessible
Now standard computer connected to Internet via wire into wall or telephone connection
Will begin to give way to transmitters mounted on side of computer sending and receiving information to and from reception station
Will work like cellular telephones work now
Will allow computers to be re-positioned as necessary within office or entire building with no need for re-cabling
Will also allow Internet access while walking or driving

Better Internet Accessibility for All People
Research work proceeding at rapid pace to make Internet and World-Wide Web truly accessible to vision impaired, hearing impaired, or individuals with other impairments
Software and hardware hold great promise for solving such problems

Telephone Calls
Internet is becoming truly global communications medium
Many computers now equipped with audio and video playing and recording devices

Entirely possible that "telephone" calls of future will be transmitted over the Internet

Entire phone system as we know it (including local and long distance calls) may some day be viewed as simply one of features of the Internet

Handset could be computer peripheral, hands-free operation, access to databases, auto-dialing, video phone, conferencing, video conferencing

Merging of the Internet with Radio, Television, Newspapers, Magazines, Books
broadcast.com -> radio and TV broadcasts
World-Wide Web beginning to look a lot like television with animated images and streaming audio and video

Why not simply combine the two?

On Monday, Sept 27, 1999 abcnews.com and Sam Donaldson launched first Web-only newscast by major network

Watch television programs either "live" or at any more convenient time

No reason to use VCRs if television programs can be accessed at any time desired from the Internet

Paper versions of newspapers, magazines, books ... might have to print yourself

Digital newspapers, magazines, books with Web links

Replacing CD-ROMs and DVDs with the Web
CD-ROM (Compact Disk - Read-Only Memory) and DVD (Digital Video Disc) store tremendous amount of information and make it available quickly to computer
But, information on CD-ROM and DVD become out-of-date

CD-ROMs and DVDs are stopgap measure until bandwidths and computer speeds get so good that anything now on CD-ROM or DVD can be accessed just as quickly over the Web

Using the Web as a Book Supplement
Nothing will ever replace the satisfaction of touching, holding, and ultimately reading a good book!
But, books get out-of-date

Supplementary Website for book with information constantly updated so that combination of book and Website are as current as possible

Will allow detailed information on a Website that an author might think is not worth putting into the book because only a few people might find it interesting

Electronic books (ebooks) replicate the look and feel of a book but can use information from the Internet

The Postal Service Goes Almost Completely To Email
Why bother to carry a piece of paper from Canton, Ohio, to Paris, France?
Only information on that paper are what recipient in Paris really needs to see

Large portion of what is now sent as mail will be able to be delivered just as well, more cheaply, and much more quickly via email

Post Office and magazine publishers are already exploring this

E-Commerce
E-Commerce will become commerce
Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B) continue to expand

Digital signatures become as legal as actual signatures

"Bricks and mortar" businesses will learn better how to use Internet and Web and succeed in this environment

Software and Data Files
Application Service Providers (ASPs) make services available on Web (tax preparation, calendars, home thermostat control, ....)
All your files (addresses, letters, recipes, ...) are kept on one computer -- accessible from all others -- making every computer "your computer"

Distance Learning
Teaching and learning may get turned upside down by the Internet
Internet (especially Web) permits all course material -- readings, assignments, supplementary materials, and exams -- to be available on computer network

Great advances being made in digitizing audio and video

Lectures, discussions, and even labs could be made available on the Internet

Student in rural Indiana could "attend" Purdue University via the Internet

Challenges in getting such a scenario to work

Student discussion ("chat") rooms hold tremendous promise

"Unlimited office hours"

Quality of education is terribly important and may be able to be made even better with use of Internet and Web technology

March 28, 2004 at 12:47 AM in @ My Views @ | Permalink | TrackBack (49) | Top of page | Blog Home

Microsoft Readies News, Blog Services

Yahoo! News - Microsoft Readies News, Blog Services

Fri Mar 26, 7:00 PM ET
Joris Evers, IDG News Service
Expanding its push into the Internet search space, Microsoft says it plans to launch Internet search services for news and Web logs later this year.

The new services, called MSN Newsbot and MSN Blogbot, up the ante in the battle for Internet search market share. Microsoft has already said it is working on its own general Internet search engine, expected to be launched this year, to go head-to-head with Google. The Friday announcements were made at a Microsoft meeting for online advertisers.

"Consumers are saying that they are not finding the results that they want from any search site today. There is a huge room for improvement in the search space," says Karen Redetzki, a product manager for MSN at Microsoft.

Also Friday, Microsoft said it is working on a natural language search engine, dubbed MSN Answerbot. This service will take questions from users and find answers on the Internet, rivaling a similar service from Ask Jeeves. No release date for MSN Answerbot has been set, but Redetzki says it is about three years away.

Service Strategy

MSN Newsbot will gather news from more than 4000 sources worldwide. The service is being tested at newsbot.msn.com. Google and Yahoo also offer news search services. The MSN Newsbot test version is online in 10 of MSN's 38 markets today and that number will be expanded, Redetzki says. "We're looking at worldwide roll-outs for all of our search products," she adds.

Microsoft is claiming a first with MSN Blogbot, a service that will let users search Web logs, or "blogs," personal-journal type Web pages that have become increasingly popular. Many consumers even use blogs as a news source, according to Microsoft.

MSN Blogbot will aggregate content from hundreds of thousands of Web logs and index that content based on which Web logs are most popular and credible, Redetzki said. The service should go into beta soon, and Microsoft plans to introduce MSN Blogbot worldwide, she said.

Microsoft has made Internet search a key investment area and is building its own search engine from scratch. The company's current search services on the MSN Web site are offered through a partnership with Yahoo.

"Microsoft excels at software issues, and to build a search engine from scratch is a software issue. This is a perfect opportunity for Microsoft to take on this software challenge head on," Redetzki says.

MSN Newsbot will be the first of the new services to officially launch. It will be followed by MSN Blogbot and the general search service based on the newly developed Microsoft search technology, Redetzki says.

March 28, 2004 at 12:37 AM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (24) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 27, 2004

Focus: Closing the net

Times Online - Sunday Times

Credit-card providers face growing pressure to disavow profits made from online porn, says John Burns

In September 1999, the FBI raided the home of Thomas and Janice Reedy in Fort Worth, Texas. Inside they found the largest child pornography business ever, one which had 250,000 subscribers, including 100 in Ireland.

Operating as Landslide Productions, the Reedys were earning up to $1.4m (�1.2m) a month selling child porn images over the internet. For a monthly fee of about $30, the likes of Tim Allen, the celebrity chef from Cork, could access websites with titles such as Child Rape containing images of four-year-olds being sexually abused.

Many of the paedophiles used credit cards to pay for the images, and that was how they were caught.

Professor Max Taylor from Copine, a child-porn research unit in Cork, reckons that credit-card companies made up to $3m a year from Landslide�s tawdry trade, based on their 4% to 6% commission on each transaction.

�There is a social problem here � pornography � and people are benefiting from it,� says Taylor. �Barclaycard made a profit of �3.8 billion (�5.7 billion) last year, and American Express made $6 billion. It is not unreasonable to say that a fraction of that may come from what people would see as being unsavoury if not illegal.�

Credit-card companies are coming under increasing pressure to disavow this money. While it is difficult for consumers who object to pornography to have a direct impact on those who produce it � they are already boycotting the �product� � they are now realising they can influence banks that enable its finance.

�If companies have been identified as having links with the pornography industry, then people should act by taking their business elsewhere,� says Joanna McMinn, director of the National Women�s Council.

This threat will be taken more seriously by Irish financial institutions after a campaign by the women�s group shamed Bank of Ireland two weeks ago into promising to get out of a deal with a UK pornography magazine firm.

The bank had offered a �7m loan to Remnant Media to purchase 45 top-shelf titles, such as Asian Babes, from Richard Desmond, joint owner of the Irish Star with Independent News & Media, and owner of Express Newspapers in Britian. The women�s council urged members to close their Bank of Ireland accounts in protest. Surprisingly, it worked.

�It was customer comment that swayed our decision,� admitted a bank official. �We didn�t lose any business but we did move quickly in response to the threat.�

The women�s council is understandably chuffed. Now it has identified this new target � the link between credit-card companies and pornographic websites. �Women have moved into the labour market and a lot more of them have credit cards. They should use them to have an influence. It is easy to change credit card,� says McMinn.

But can it score a second success, and do Irish banks even have a case to answer?

THE business of EuroConex, a company based in Arklow, Co Wicklow, is to check out businesses that want to receive payments by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diner�s Club, Laser in Ireland and Switch in Britain. It considers new clients from a credit and an ethical point of view.

�Three types of businesses are prohibited,� says Willie Byrne, head of sales and marketing. �Adult entertainment, child pornography, and sexual-encounter firms such as escort agencies. We will not sign up any of these people.�

Of course, websites that plan to sell pornography do not show up at the bank with names like MegaBoobs.com. Some present themselves as sellers of lingerie or even more innocuous products.

�As part of our signing-up process, we do a full review of the website addresses to make sure it is a legitimate e-commerce business, and we also look at associated sites and links,� says Byrne.

In the Irish market, this is a relatively straightforward procedure and involves tens of applications per week rather than hundreds. EuroConex has a staff of about 15 involved in processing applications from merchants, and checking out websites is just a part of their duties.

�Occasionally something slips through the net,� says Byrne. �Big business is involved in these pornographic sites and they tend to be resourceful. It�s a bit like fraudsters. Even the most scrupulous acquirers will be compromised from time to time.

�This hasn�t happened to EuroConex, but if we did find a site with adult pornography we would disable it on our system. If we found something illegal, we would report it to gardai.�

The Irish Payment Services Organisation, which represents banks who issue credit cards in Ireland, says none of them knowingly process transactions for any porn sites. AIB�s credit-card centre, for example, says it has an unambiguous policy in relation to applications from merchants involved in trading in pornography: �We do not accept business from such companies.�

Visa says it employs a company, Intercap, to scan the web looking for child porn websites that use the Visa sign. Any they find are reported to police.

There is a key distinction to be drawn here. Every right-thinking person would approve of credit-card firms doing all they can to eradicate child porn. But adult porn is a much more difficult ethical issue simply because, as Visa notes, it is legal.

�We have 21,000 member banks from very different parts of the world and there are some very different views on that sort of thing (adult porn),� says a Visa spokesman. �If something is legal, that�s as far as we can go.

�Visa is owned by banks � those are our customers. The card-holders are customers of the banks, so if people want to put pressure on the banks, that�s fine.�

One thing the banks say they will not do is to snoop in customers� accounts to check who is making payments to MegaBoobs and the like.

�We are not doing Big Brother,� said a Bank of Ireland official. �There are so many millions of transactions anyway.�

Most websites that use credit-card facilities erase the details of each transaction once it�s completed anyway, points out Evan Ryder, a computer services technologist with University College Galway. The Data Protection Act in Ireland stipulates that such details cannot be retained by credit-card companies.

�I don�t think companies like Visa will do much more, because the only extra action they could take if a card-holder attempted to purchase pornography online would be to report the card number or refuse to complete the transaction,� says Ryder. �Both approaches are probably illegal in some countries and would involve expensive changes to the credit-card company�s or bank�s systems. It would also require a database of blacklisted businesses to be maintained continuously.�

But this is the extra mile Taylor feels credit-card companies should travel. �I don�t know how to solve it technically, but they have a responsibility to solve it,� he insists.

Credit-card providers have no difficulty telling their customers they have exceeded their credit limit, no matter what part of the world they may be in, argues Taylor, so why can�t they stop porn sites using plastic to sell smut? �Commercial companies that make money out of pornography have a responsibility to society, and I don�t think it�s enough for them to say, �We�re doing all we can�. I want them to look at re-designing their systems so that they can clearly identify website owners that carry porn, and stop money going to them.�

Some in the banking industry privately admit they sympathise with this argument. �There are credit-card companies that take a very commercial view and say to themselves, �These porn sites will find an acquirer somewhere, so it may as well be us�,� said one industry source.

�In Britain, there are mainstream adult websites with top-shelf magazine stuff. Companies like Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland are acquirers for these sites.�

The very least such companies could do, says Taylor, is make a donation to charity equivalent to the profits they make from the sale of sex images. �If they agree that porn is reprehensible, how about giving Women�s Aid $2m a year?� he wonders.

Without a credit line, a lot of internet porn would be out of business. Those operating child-porn sites are not, Taylor believes, sexually interested in children. They are usually criminals and in it for the money. �If you shut down the money, you shut down the sites,� he says. �They would go and do something else.�

He doubts that any Irish financial institution is knowingly involved in anything inappropriate, but feels that the Bank of Ireland case could be a watershed of sorts.

�What was important was that people expressed their view and the bank listened,� he says. �Big organisations only think about these things when it hits their pockets.

�There was a sadder side to that case too, though. It showed that there is a very well-organised women�s voice; but there�s no organised children�s voice.�

ACTUALLY, Copine is that voice. The team of six, based at University College Cork and led by Taylor, is the only child porn research group in the world. Its budget, of almost �200,000 a year, comes mostly from the European Union. Success for Copine is when, like last week, a paedophile they detect posting children�s images on the net in America is arrested.

Cutting the credit lines won�t solve the problem itself. Paedophiles get around the payment system by swapping images online, usually by posting pictures anonymously to newsgroups, of which there are about 50,000. But if credit-card companies need inspiration, they could draw it from internet search engines that do not address paedophile queries any more. Although, as Taylor admits wearily, there are ways around that too. �The internet is an anarchic place,� he says. And a lucrative one.

March 27, 2004 at 11:29 PM in Financial Services, Online crime | Permalink | TrackBack (27) | Top of page | Blog Home

Questionable Results at Revamped Yahoo

washingtonpost.com: Questionable Results at Revamped Yahoo

By Leslie Walker
Thursday, March 11, 2004;
Say it ain't so, Yahoo. You wouldn't sell out loyal users to those money-grubbers on Wall Street, would you?

I am a big fan of Yahoo, believing it has the best general portal on the Web. Still, I am worried about where Yahoo is heading with its revamped Web search, especially after testing it last week.

The best spin may be that Yahoo is experimenting with ways to balance the needs of users and advertisers. The worst would be that Yahoo is letting advertisers rule its search roost, contrary to the way users seem to rule at rival Google.

Both are struggling to decide how best to sprinkle related ads across search results, an issue with big implications for other online media companies. The issue merits special attention now because Yahoo divorced Google as its longtime search partner last month and began -- for the first time -- showing results generated by its own Web-crawling software.

Yahoo made a huge investment to accomplish this, plunking down more than $2 billion in cash and stock to buy companies with technology it hopes will make its search engine as smart as Google's.

This competition is good news, because Google was gaining too much market share. In December, it processed roughly three out of every four Web queries, according to the Web traffic measuring firm comScore Networks Inc. Even after subtracting the searches it conducted on behalf of Yahoo, Google is still handling roughly half of all Web searches.

Big bucks are at stake. The more queries each handles, the more they can charge advertisers to place small text ads beside and on top of results. Search ads are projected to generate more than $3 billion in the United States this year. Piper Jaffray Cos. estimates Yahoo will net about $1 billion from search ads this year.

So what worries me about Yahoo's new search? When I run comparison queries at Google and Yahoo, several obvious differences jump out. First, Yahoo devotes a lot more space to ads -- so much that on some queries, you might not even notice the regular results for all the ads. They often consume three-quarters of the screen that is supposed to display top results.

Second, Yahoo places ads in a more prominent position than Google, with fewer visual cues to separate them from non-commercial results. No doubt this translates to more clicks for advertisers and more money for Yahoo, since advertisers pay only when people click on their ads. But I find it annoying to have the ads dominating the center of the page.

Finally, Yahoo made a change last week that most visitors can't see, yet which troubles me deeply. It announced a new program, Site Match, allowing businesses to pay to get their sites included in Yahoo's Web index. Yahoo said the payments will have no effect on rankings, and therefore these paid listings won't be marked as ads.

Yet each time a user clicks on a Site Match link, the site owner must pay Yahoo at least 10 cents. Piper Jaffray estimates the paid-inclusion program will dump $50 million to $100 million into Yahoo's coffers this year.

Yahoo says Site Match is designed to help it index Web pages hidden inside databases and other hard-to-access places. In return for payments, the sites will also get crawled more frequently by Yahoo's indexing software and be allowed to submit more information in formats Yahoo hopes will allow for smarter query-matching.

Tim Cadogan, Yahoo's vice president of search, said Yahoo is selectively offering the program for free to nonprofits with huge databases, including the Library of Congress. He added that Yahoo has a general disclosure on its Web site explaining that some sites pay to be in its index; it does not identify which ones.

But critics call paid-inclusion a form of hidden advertising, saying it could taint results by indirectly influencing the rankings. That's why Google said it has never allowed sites to pay to be in its index, even though Google works closely with large sites to help them give access to Google's crawler.

Google co-founder Larry Page said each search result involving payment should be labeled to preserve public confidence. "I see it as very much like with traditional media," Page said, "where if someone is paying you, you make clearly understandable to the reader that it is an advertisement."

Ask Jeeves Inc. said it recently discontinued a similar program because it was unable to make fair comparisons between sites crawled in the regular fashion and those paying to provide information.

In interviews, Yahoo executives insisted the goal of their paid-inclusion program is to boost relevance and comprehensiveness of results. Still, it's hard to believe that boosting revenue isn't a goal, too. Otherwise, wouldn't Yahoo let sites submit their pages for free?

Some advertisers aren't happy about program, either. They don't like paying for each click when their listings are appearing inside the regular search results, rather than with the ads. Some also complained that they can't set daily spending limits or caps on particular keywords, as they can with other search ad programs.

"It's like, 'Let's throw money at it and hope it shows up,' " said Andy Timmons, who manages online marketing for thousands of contractors at EveryContractor.com.

Mind you, Yahoo is making some other smart moves to link its search results to other content inside its own network, material such as travel guides and company profiles that Google may have trouble matching. One example is the local mapping feature Yahoo debuted this week. It lets people pinpoint the location of businesses and community resources on maps. Start with a map of the area around any address, say 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., then you can selectively add restaurants, parks, banks, movie theaters and other entities in more than 50 categories. Roll your mouse over each entity's icon on the map, and up pops its address, phone number and Web address.

Yahoo is still figuring out how to integrate local advertisers into this mapping service, but initial charter sponsors such as Holiday Inn appear as clearly marked external links that you can click to add their hotels to the map.

Let's hope Yahoo doesn't move toward a paid-inclusion model on maps, too, in effect littering them with advertising icons. Rather, I hope it takes to heart the criticism about hidden advertising and revamps Site Match to -- at the least -- require each paying site to clearly identify itself.

Leslie Walker's e-mail address is walkerl@washpost.com.

� 2004 The Washington Post Company

March 27, 2004 at 11:00 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home

Rival Portals Want Share of Ad Budgets

Yahoo! News - Rival Portals Want Share of Ad Budgets

Sat Mar 27, 7:39 AM ET
By Lisa Baertlein
REDMOND, Wash. (Reuters) - The major Internet portals must both compete and cooperate if they are to take advertising revenues away from more established media, including television, Yahoo Inc. (NasdaqNM:YHOO - news) Chief Executive Terry Semel said on Friday.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft's Internet unit, MSN, which uses Yahoo's Web search and search-based advertising services, are hoping to gain a bigger share of large companies' advertising budgets.

Major companies now devote only a tiny fraction of their budgets to the Web -- with estimates ranging from around 1 percent to 3 percent.

But the Web portals see an opportunity to raise that share sharply, partly at the expense of American television networks, which face a fragmenting audience.

"We have a common goal. That goal is to take a greater and greater share of (the) market," Semel told attendees at an online advertising conference hosted at Microsoft Corp.'s (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) headquarters.

"Not only do I welcome the idea of doing things together, I think it is absolutely critical," Semel said. "There is no such thing as a major marketplace for advertisers ... if there is only one network to talk about."

"What we have here is a very powerful marketing vehicle," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told conference attendees on Thursday, noting that he would like to see large advertisers putting 8 percent to 12 percent of their ad budgets toward online campaigns in 2005.

Internet advertising, which suffered a major blow during the dot-com collapse, has rebounded with the help of Web search advertising.

According to Internet research company Embarked, U.S. online ad spending is expected to grow to $8.6 billion in 2005 from $6.9 billion in 2003.

Semel, a former Hollywood studio head, compared today's online advertising industry to the early days of network or cable television.

The future of Web advertising depends more on the establishment of better practices and standards, and less on technology, as it has in recent years with the growth of lucrative Web search ad services popularized by Yahoo division Overture Services and Google Inc.

"Unlike the technology world, where if you own the secret sauce you will dominate with that secret sauce, this requires strong competitors who have, if not equal, similar personalities and similar opportunities," said Semel.

Yahoo last year spent more than $1 billion to buy Web search players Into and Overture Services, while Microsoft has promised to roll out its own Web search technology this year.

March 27, 2004 at 10:57 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (20) | Top of page | Blog Home

PluggedIn: RSS Readers Offer New Ways to Read the Web

Yahoo! News - PluggedIn: RSS Readers Offer New Ways to Read the Web

Sat Mar 27, 7:32 AM
By Reed Stevenson
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Noticed those little orange boxes on the Web lately with the letters "XML?"

It's not a mystery or an obscure engineering feature, but rather a new way to get news and information delivered to your PC without having to browse through page after page of Internet sites.

Called RSS, for Really Simple Syndication, these feeds are used to send information across the Internet using XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, the de facto new standard in formatting Web pages and information to be sent over networks.

"Technology has made more information available more readily," said Jim Pitkow, chief executive of Moreover, one of the architects of RSS, also shorthand for Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary. "But on the Internet the access time to get to that information has been greatly reduced."

To make it easier to read, or at least scan a lot more headlines in much less time, new software programs called RSS readers have been proliferating on the Web.

SharpReader, available at http://www.sharpreader.net, is a Windows-based application that monitors RSS feeds and dishes up instant messaging-style notices of incoming headlines, which can be read in a window resembling an e-mail program.

In most cases, incoming RSS items provide links that take the user directly to the full article or posting on a provider's Web site.

The feeds can be set up by simply copying a Web address into an RSS reader.

RSS readers aren't limited to desktop programs, however.

There's also a version that can be built into Microsoft Corp.'s (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) Outlook organizer called Newsgator, at http://www.newsgator.com, which makes reading RSS feeds as simple as reading e-mail.

For those who want to monitor RSS feeds without installing new software on PCs, a variety of Web sites have also popped up that allow users to create their own lists of RSS feeds to monitor over the Web.

NOT ONLY NEWS

Users can subscribe to syndicated feeds from a variety of sources -- The New York Times, for example -- but RSS feeds also help keep track of online weblog postings and even product announcements.

Bloggers, or online journal keepers, use RSS extensively to monitor each other's postings and most popular blogging programs include automated RSS feeds.

And recently, Amazon.com Inc. (NasdaqNM:AMZN - news) began offering RSS feeds of dozens of product categories that allow Web shoppers to stay up-to-date on the Web retailer's latest offerings and deals.

"We're really helping users to be able to discover Amazon products in a whole new way," said Jeff Barr, technical program manager at Seattle-based Amazon.

Amazon also encourages Web developers to use RSS feeds and XML to create their own storefronts, for which they can receive a commission for products that shoppers choose to purchase by going through their Web sites.

Although online feeds, also called syndications, are becoming increasingly popular, identifying and choosing the right programs and versions can be tricky.

There's a separate version, Atom, that is also widely used, though many RSS readers are being designed to handle both. Atom provides essentially the same services based on a slightly different structure, which in most cases is invisible to the end-user.

Still, many are convinced that RSS is here to stay.

Many companies have big plans to develop RSS, which many expect to become a ubiquitously available technology.

March 27, 2004 at 12:13 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 26, 2004

Bush Pushes Broadband Rollout by 2007

Yahoo! News - Bush Pushes Broadband Rollout by 2007

Fri Mar 26, 4:44 PM ET

By Caren Bohan
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites) on Friday proposed 2007 as the goal for universal availability of high-speed Internet access to keep America competitive and innovative.

Speaking at length on the subject for the first time since August 2002, Bush discussed broadband while highlighting home ownership in the critical state of New Mexico -- a state he narrowly lost in the 2000 presidential election.

"We ought to have universal, affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007," Bush said. "And then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter consumers have plenty of choices."

"It's important that we stay on the cutting edge of technological change, and one way to do so is to have a bold plan for broadband," he said. Bush did not elaborate on how he would accomplish the 2007 goal.

Policymakers in Washington have been debating how to accelerate the rollout of high-speed Internet service. Some 20.6 million homes and small businesses already subscribe to it either from a telephone or cable television company.

Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) Chairman Michael Powell has pushed an agenda to reduce the regulations on telephone companies, which in the past have had to share their networks with rivals because of their dominance in serving homes.

"I look forward to working with my commission colleagues, Congress and the administration to deliver on this vision for the American people," Powell said in a statement.

Last year the agency decided that the dominant local telephone companies like BellSouth Corp. (NYSE:BLS - news) did not have to offer rivals access to new fiber optic lines -- key for full broadband deployment -- at low, government-mandated rates.

Cable companies do not have to share their networks with rivals but some permit subscribers to have an alternative Internet service provider.

Minutes after the president spoke, Democratic presidential contender John Kerry (news - web sites) mentioned broadband as a key growth area during a campaign speech laying out his economic policy.

"I will focus on raising American competitiveness. By spurring the growth of new industries like the broadband technology that will dominate the future," Kerry said during his speech in Detroit.

Bush also urged that broadband access be tax free. "The Congress must not tax access to broadband technology if we want to spread it around," he said.

Congress has so far been unable to renew a ban on taxing the monthly fees that Internet providers like EarthLink Inc. (NasdaqNM:ELNK - news) charge customers. The ban lapsed in November, but states have not moved to impose new taxes.

More consumers have signed up for the broadband from cable companies, with about 13.7 million lines compared to roughly 7.7 million using telephone companies' digital subscriber line (DSL) services.

"I think it's certainly consistent with the idea of where tomorrow's jobs will be and he's obviously showing a commitment to technological advancements," said Paul Glenchur, an analyst at Schwab Soundview Capital Markets in Washington.

"Given that you haven't seen this issue talked a lot about on the campaign trail, it's interesting that it's creeping in now," he said. "I don't know whether you can read much into it based on what you heard."

March 26, 2004 at 10:41 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (5) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo! Buying European Shopping Service

Yahoo! Buying European Shopping Service

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: March 26, 2004

Filed at 6:21 p.m. ET
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Yahoo! Inc. is buying Europe's leading online shopping comparison service for about $575 million in cash, the latest push by the Internet giant to offer more ways to find merchandise and information on the Web.

The 475 million euro acquisition of Paris-based Kelkoo S.A. , which was announced Friday, continues a recent Yahoo shopping spree aimed at improving the company's searching prowess.

In the past year, Sunnyvale-based Yahoo has spent more than $2 billion for two other search companies, Inktomi and Overture Services, in a bid to narrow the gap separating it from the Internet's leading search engine, Google Inc.

Buying Kelkoo ``will help further Yahoo's goal to create the most comprehensive and best user experience on the Web globally,'' said Yahoo Chairman Terry Semel.

Like similar U.S. services, Kelkoo allows online shoppers to compare the prices of products sold by an array of merchants. The site makes money by collecting referral fees from merchants whose links are clicked upon by Kelkoo's visitors.

Shopping comparison sites have become increasingly popular as more people become comfortable with e-commerce. Many shoppers also use the online comparison sites to learn more about products and become more price savvy.

In the United States, shopping comparison sites attracted 35.2 million unique visitors last month, according to the most recent statistics available from comScore Media Metrix, a research firm. That popularity is translating into profits.

Shopping.com, the leading comparison site in the United States, earned $6.9 million on revenue of $67.2 million last year, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this week. The Brisbane-based service is planning an initial public offering of stock to capitalize on its recent success.

Yahoo last year upgraded its own shopping comparison service to broaden its appeal. Google offers a comparison service known as Froogle. Other popular U.S. sites include NexTag, BizRate, PriceGrabber and MySimon.

Kelkoo, founded in 1999, compares the prices of more than 3 million products sold by more than 2,500 merchants. Last month, Kelkoo attracted 8.7 million unique visitors connecting to the Web from home in eight European countries tracked by the research firm Nielsen/NetRatings. The site also has a small following in the United States, drawing 1.8 million unique visitors in February, according to comScore Media Metrix.

About 250 employees work for Kelkoo in nine countries. Yahoo anticipates retaining all of Kelkoo's work force.

Shares of Yahoo closed up 19 cents at $47.13 Friday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

March 26, 2004 at 10:28 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (34) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 25, 2004

Stand and Fight: An Arsenal for Spam Victims

Basics: Stand and Fight: An Arsenal for Spam Victims

By J. D. BIERSDORFER

HE subject lines on junk e-mail may present rich source material for cultural anthropologists, but for most users, spam is simply a maddening headache. Fortunately, effective weapons are emerging in the Battle of the In-Box.
You can install special software that works alongside your e-mail program to filter incoming messages, or choose a new e-mail program with ingenious spam-blocking features. Or, because spammers frequently use fake return addresses to evade filters as they blast out millions of messages, you may choose to install a companion program that requires the sender to verify his or her identity before the message can be delivered. Such options enable you to stand firm against spam without having to get a new e-mail address.

Add-On Programs

Most of the programs created specifically for screening out spam have a similar lineup of features. They allow you to import the names in your e-mail address book so that all your regular correspondents are already on the approved list. You can create custom filters and set the software to monitor several e-mail accounts. Some of the programs even provide handy toolbar buttons that integrate with common programs like Outlook Express, so that a junk message can be disposed of with a click.

These types of programs, most of which work with a variety of e-mail software, give you considerable control in managing your spam. They run independently of your mail program, though, so you have to remember to start them up. Once you do, the spam-swatting program typically checks your mail server and downloads the mail, filters it and then sends on the legitimate mail to your regular in-box. You can scan the contents of the program's spam holding pen, rescue any mistakenly blocked messages and quickly delete the rest.

SpamKiller 5.0, McAfee Security's latest spam-busting program, works with most stand-alone e-mail programs for the PC that use the POP3 or MAPI protocols for fetching mail from the mail server, as well as with MSN/Hotmail accounts. It requires Windows 98 or later and can be downloaded for $39.99 at www.mcafee.com or purchased on CD for $49.95; a yearlong subscription for filter updates is included.

The program's filters are thorough; they even have the scanning power to quash scams and virus hoaxes forwarded by friends. SpamKiller can generate complaint letters to be sent to the spammer's Internet provider, although spammers' addresses are so commonly forged that this tactic is less effective than it once was.

Spamfire Pro from Matterform Media works with just about any e-mail program using the POP3 protocol and it is also one of those rare programs that works with both Windows 98 and later and Mac OS 9 and X. A free 15-day trial version is available for a test drive, and buyers ($39.95; www .matterform.com) get a free year of spam-filter updates. The program's graphical toolbar lets you quickly add friends and enemies to your filter lists, and even more gratifying, it offers a Revenge menu.

The Revenge menu, which comes with a disclaimer warning against abusing it, includes straightforward tasks like generating a fake bounce message to indicate that your e-mail account has been closed. If the message seems like a scam, you can use the menu to forward it to the Federal Trade Commission.

The Revenge menu includes two more satisfying options for those who have had quite enough spam, thank you. A Bug the WebBugs feature strips out the invisible tracking code buried in the message and replaces it with gibberish or any message you choose before sending it back to the spammer's logs. And a Toll-Free Numbers item locates the free telephone numbers listed in the spam in case you would like to personally tell the merchant what you think of his marketing efforts.

Built-In Filters

Some e-mail programs themselves now include aggressive mail-blocking tools, eliminating the need for you to buy and install a separate program just for spam control.

Eudora 6.0 by Qualcomm, the latest edition of a 15-year-old e-mail program named after the author Eudora Welty, works with most versions of the Windows and Macintosh operating systems using the POP3 or IMAP4 protocols for e-mail. There is a free version of Eudora, but it is the paid edition that gets you integrated spam filtering. The full version of Eudora 6.0 sells for $49.95 (an upgrade is $39.95) at www.eudora.com.

Longtime Eudora users will find a mostly familiar interface, with an addition: a SpamWatch feature. After setting up SpamWatch in the program's preferences and deciding how aggressively you want to screen your mail (stricter settings increase the chance that legitimate messages get nabbed, but looser restrictions may allow more spam to slither through), you simply let Eudora check the mail as usual.

As the program downloads mail from the server, it quickly screens each message. Messages that trip your selected SpamWatch trigger get dumped in a Junk mailbox and everything else continues on its way to you. If spam does get through, you can either select the message and label it as Junk for the program's future reference or raise the filtering level by adjusting your SpamWatch preferences.

Many other e-mail programs, including Web-based mail systems like Hotmail, are now including dedicated spam filters. Microsoft Outlook 2003 has an option for screening junk mail, America Online 9.0 Optimized for Windows gives users more control than ever for spam screening and the Junk filter in the Apple Mail program for Mac OS X 10.2 and later efficiently shuttles spam into its own mailbox.

Challenging the Sender

Filters are always locked in a race with spammers, who will struggle to enter the in-box any way they can. An alternative approach is to use a "challenge response" program, which typically requires senders to prove they are who they say by answering an automatic e-mail reply triggered by their message to you. Obviously, this is something that spammers do not stick around to do after dumping their bulk mail.

ChoiceMail One 2.1 from DigiPortal Software is a challenge-response program that works with most Windows systems and e-mail software. You can have the program put the people in your address book on an approved list; anyone else who sends you mail must fill out a form and send it back.

Once you get the form back, you can decide whether to add the sender to your approved list. Since most spammers will never respond to the form letter, their junk mail is effectively blocked. The program, which sells for $39.95 at www.digiportal.com, can gather up and screen the mail from all your various POP3 mail accounts as well as from Web-based mail systems like Yahoo, Hotmail and America Online.

Zaep AntiSpam 2.0 from RhinoSoft, another system for Windows, is a little more complicated to set up and requires you to keep a computer on all the time, but families and small businesses with multiple e-mail accounts and multiple computers may find it appealing. The company offers more information and various price plans at www .zaep.com.

Finding the message-filtering solution that fits your needs may take some time and patience, but a mailbox free of spam, scams and shams can make life a little bit easier.

March 25, 2004 at 07:52 PM in Spam | Permalink | TrackBack (32) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Net's Late Bloomers

The Net’s Late Bloomers

By KATIE HAFNER
Published: March 25, 2004
Walnut Creek, Calif.
WHEN Helen Karjala decided to set up her own computer last year, she was fearless. She patiently plodded her way through the process of setting up the machine and connecting to the Internet, an ordeal that can bring unwholesome utterances to the lips of people half her age.

"I started investigating the wires and the prongs and I thought, 'I can do this,' " recalled Mrs. Karjala, who is 88. "Of course, I needed a magnifying glass."

Mrs. Karjala, who lives in Rossmoor, a retirement community in the San Francisco Bay area, now spends at least an hour each day at the computer. She exchanges e-mail messages with two dozen relatives in Finland, keeps her language skills polished by reading a Finnish newspaper online, and collects chicken and eggplant recipes.

Once largely written off as a lost cause, older Americans are now coming into their own as Internet users. They are researching their family histories, sending e-mail, running virtual book clubs, reading about religion and travel, and pursuing other interests lifelong and new.

According to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a research organization in Washington, the ranks of Americans over 65 who use the Internet have jumped by 47 percent since 2000, making them the fastest-growing group to embrace the online world.

Despite the increases, this age group still has a long way to go. Only 22 percent of Americans over 65 go online, the study shows, compared with 75 percent of those ages 30 to 49. But as Americans who are more comfortable with computers gradually reach the age of 65, the percentage going online (or more precisely, staying online) should soar.

"People who are in their 50's now, once they begin on a computer there's no going back," said Tobey Dichter, president and chief executive of Generations on Line, a nonprofit organization based in Philadelphia that provides libraries, nursing homes and senior centers nationwide with special software geared toward the elderly. "Once they get adept, especially at the Internet, they don't give it up."

Susannah Fox, director of research at Pew, said the biggest factor pushing older Americans toward Internet use has been family. "Younger Internet users have probably encouraged their parents and grandparents to start communicating with e-mail, and many seniors have turned out to love it," Ms. Fox said.

For many of those younger users, the encouragement has extended to actually setting up a computer for an aged relative. And there are other sources of help: Generations on Line is just one of several programs that have sprung up to assist older people. Senior centers and retirement communities often have their own programs to guide the uninitiated.

Mrs. Karjala, for example, said she was inspired by the computer club at Rossmoor. After her husband, Matt, died four years ago, she began visiting the club's quarters to send e-mail messages to relatives. She was so taken with the novel mode of communication that she decided, with encouragement from the club's administrators, to install a computer in her home.

In setting up an Internet connection, Mrs. Karjala was aware that she was entering a world populated mainly by people far younger than she was, but she persevered. "It's my main hobby now," she said. "I don't do lawn bowling." Her new goal is to hook up a printer a friend gave her.

Leonard Krauss, 74, president of the Rossmoor club, said that Mrs. Karjala's experience was hardly unique. "People are continuing to learn and stay mentally active instead of vegetating," he said.

That is the case with Kathryn Robinson, who was 99 when she first learned to use a computer. Ms. Robinson, who is now 101 and lives at Barclay Friends - A Senior Living Community, a nursing home in West Chester, Pa., discovered the Internet through Generations on Line. She uses the Internet daily to send greeting cards, look up information and communicate with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

"The computer has kept me busy and kept me in touch and interested in life," she said in an e-mail exchange. "It's always a surprise to find new information about subjects that interest me."

Indeed, a prominent support structure like Generations on Line or the Rossmoor computer club can be surprisingly magnetic.

Of the 9,500 people who live at Rossmoor, where the average age is 78, nearly one-third participate in the computer club, Mr. Krauss said. "And it's growing," he added.

"There's definitely some peer pressure," said Louise Daum, 73, another Rossmoor resident who is just starting out online. "I thought I'd better dive in while I'm still mentally capable."

Mrs. Daum worries that she will hit the wrong button and lose all her work, or even break the computer - common fears among the elderly.

"This is a generation that takes things very seriously," Ms. Dichter said. "The first thing they worry about is that they'll break the machine."

As more older people gain online access, there has been a concurrent rise in the number of Web sites geared for them. Government agencies, in particular, have patterned their sites after early models established by organizations like SeniorNet, which has been around since 1986 and has had a Web site, www.seniornet.org, since 1995. The United States Administration on Aging has one (www.aoa.dhhs.gov), as does the Social Security Administration (www .seniors.gov). And hundreds of general sites have a special section devoted to the elderly, like a Yahoo health site, dir.yahoo.com /health/senior_health.

Sites like these are intended to make it easier than ever for older people to use the Web. Still, the barriers for an older person thinking about going online can be formidable, Ms. Dichter said. "The phrase I always hear is, 'They're leaving us behind,' " she said. "That's what you hear as a constant refrain from people in their seventies."

Just the typing can be a deterrent. "Older people type very slowly," Ms. Dichter said. "Some women who had been secretaries can type pretty fast, but for a lot of men it's a real hunt and peck."

Then there are the peculiarities of Web pages. "Older people haven't been able to learn how to tell what's clickable and what's not," Ms. Dichter said.

Using the mouse, especially for those with tremors and arthritis, is another challenge. One of the Rossmoor computer club's classes concentrates on nothing but mouse navigation.

"I tell people to come to the mouse class because it's there that you can really decide if you want to do it or not," said Don Torrence, 77, a Rossmoor resident who teaches the class. One of the first activities in the class involves playing computer solitaire, as the game requires a great deal of clicking and dragging.

Mrs. Karjala was especially grateful for the introduction to solitaire. She still remembers her mother banning all card games from the house when she was a child.

Physicians even prescribe computer use to older patients who have suffered minor strokes, to help them regain motor control. (For Mr. Torrence, it worked the other way: the computer helped him figure out he had had a stroke when he sat down at the keyboard one day and could not move the mouse. "That's when I told my wife to call 911," he said. He has since recovered.)

Rossmoor's two computer classrooms are outfitted not just with computers but with a few additional aids, too, like a public address system, for those with hearing difficulties. Those who attend sometimes get so excited that they forget other things. "One woman who entered the classroom with her walker got so inspired by the class that she left without it," Mr. Krauss said. "We have people leaving their canes behind all the time."

Technical needs at Rossmoor are modest. Mrs. Karjala is perfectly happy with her Windows 95 operating system and her dial-up connection. When a reporter asked her if she might be interested in getting a high-speed connection, she asked what that was, then shook her head, "Oh no, I don't need that," she said. "I have plenty of time."

Intimidation and fear still can put people off. Many older people are not accustomed to mechanisms that work so quickly and essentially invisibly.

"People over 65 grew up in more of a mechanical world and if you do something wrong things break and they can't be undone," said Tom Tullis, senior vice president for human interface design at Fidelity Investments in Boston, which has watched elderly people interact with computers in usability labs. "Your toaster doesn't have an undo button on it. If you burn the toast, it's burned."

Mr. Tullis said that the older people who come into his labs will often be slow to commit to a mouse click. "We refer to it as cautious clicking behavior," he said. "They'll put their mouse over a link, then debate about whether it's the right link to click on, and you don't see that with younger folks."

Ms. Dichter said that time and again, when she talks with older people who have ventured successfully onto the Internet, she is struck by the sense of independence they gain. "The first positive impact on a person's life is that self-empowerment, that feeling of, 'I can do it,' " she said. "Then they're stunned and amazed at the resources available."

In a survey of 16,000 searches performed by older Americans connected to the Internet through Generations on Line, Ms. Dichter's organization found that those users are not fixated on disease and illness. Rather, she said, "they are curious and interested in the world around them."

In the survey, travel, history, hobbies and genealogy were among the top search topics. Disease and illness ranked sixth. "They'll look up Stephen Foster, Little Rascals, Billy Eckstine and Betty Grable," Ms. Dichter said. "It's a source of pleasure to be able to research things from the past, and they also look up hometowns and read newspapers from other languages."

Watching Mrs. Karjala sitting at her computer desk, set up in the corner of her small guest room, one cannot help wondering if the computer occasionally heightens a sense of isolation.

Ms. Dichter agreed that this could be the case for old people who live alone. But for those in nursing homes or retirement communities, it fosters a sense of togetherness, she said. "It happens over and over, when you watch people in a senior center and someone is at the computer, and pretty soon there's a whole cluster of people kibitzing."

Ms. Dichter pointed out that going online was now something of an imperative for the elderly. "There are resources dedicated to seniors that aren't available any other way but online," she said. Many agencies and services now have far fewer operators taking calls, she noted. "Now,'' she said, "everybody directs you to the Web site."

March 25, 2004 at 07:48 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

PEW: seniors exhibit rapid online growth

Pew Internet & American Life Project

22% of Americans 65 and older use the Internet.

The percent of seniors who go online has jumped by 47% between 2000 and 2004. In a February 2004 survey, 22% of Americans age 65 or older reported having access to the Internet, up from 15% in 2000. That translates to about 8 million Americans age 65 or older who use the Internet. By contrast, 58% of Americans age 50-64, 75% of 30-49 year-olds, and 77% of 18-29 year-olds currently go online.

Women reach parity with men in the wired senior population.

In the year 2000, about 60% of wired seniors were men and about 40% were women. In February 2004, the gender ratio among wired seniors has shifted to 50% men and 50% women � the same ratio as the general Internet population.

Online seniors as a group are still made up predominately of whites, highly-educated seniors, and those living in households with higher incomes who have Internet access, although there have been gains in other segments of the seniors cohort since 2000. For instance, the number of seniors who live in households with moderate amounts of income has risen dramatically, as has the number whose education ended with a high school diploma.

Once seniors get online, they are just as enthusiastic as younger users.

Wired seniors are often as enthusiastic as younger users in the major activities that define online life such as email and the use of search engines to answer a specific question. Also, wired seniors are as likely as younger users to go online on a typical day.

Communication and information searches attract wired seniors. There has been sharp growth in the number doing key Internet activities such as health searches, e-shopping, and online banking.

Email is equally popular among Internet users age 65 or older and their younger counterparts. Fully 94% of wired seniors have sent or received email, compared to 91% of all Internet users.

There have been big increases since 2000 in the number of online seniors doing several key activities. It is important to stress, though, that even with these high growth rates, it is usually the case that online seniors have done these online activities at lower rates that younger Internet users.

66% of wired seniors had looked for health or medical information online at some point in their online life by the end of 2003. That is a 13-point jump since 2000, and a growth rate of 25%. And online seniors are much more likely than other Internet users to have logged on to get information about Medicare and Medicaid.

66% of wired seniors had done product research online by the end of 2003. That is an 18-point jump since 2000, and a growth rate of 38%.

47% of online seniors had bought something on the Internet by the end of 2003. That is an 11-point increase since 2000 and a growth rate of 31%.

41% have made travel reservations online by the end of 2003. That is a 16-point increase since 2000 and a growth rate of 64%.

60% of wired seniors had visited government Web sites by the end of 2003. That is a 20-point jump since 2000, and a growth rate of 50%.

26% of wired seniors had looked for religious and spiritual information by the end of 2003. That is a 15-point jump since 2000, or a growth rate of 136%.

20% of online seniors had done banking on the Internet by the end of 2003. That is a 12-point increase since 2000 and a growth rate of 150%.

Many off-line seniors are far removed from the Internet.

Most seniors live lives far removed from the Internet, know few people who use email or surf the Web, and cannot imagine why they would spend money and time learning how to use a computer. Seniors are also more likely than any other age group to be living with some kind of disability, which could hinder their capacity to get to a computer training center or read the small type on many Web sites.

Tomorrow�s seniors will transform the wired senior stereotype.

There is a burgeoning group of Americans who are slightly younger than retirees and who are vastly more attached to the online world. In February 2004, we find that 62% of Americans age 50-58 years-old and 46% of Americans age 59-68 have Internet access. By contrast, just 17% of Americans age 69 and older have access.

In fact, older Baby Boomer Internet users (between 50-58 years old) are more like Generation X Internet users (between 28 and 39 years old) than like their older, �Mature� generational neighbors (those between 59 and 68 years old). For example:

75% of Generation X Internet users and 75% of Baby Boomer Internet users get news online, compared to 67% of Mature users.

59% of Generation X Internet users and 55% of Baby Boomer Internet users do research online for their job, compared to 30% of Internet users between 59 and 68 years old.

The �silver tsunami� identified in the Pew Internet Project�s 2001 �Wired Seniors� report has gained momentum. As Internet users in their 50s get older and retire, they are unlikely to give up their wired ways and therefore will transform the wired senior stereotype.

March 25, 2004 at 10:27 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

Program Manager � Position # 105647 � Location: Redmond, WA, USA

Microsoft hiring for "my wallop", their official enttry into blogging shceduled for later this year.

Full Time Position

The Social Computing Group, a research and prototyping team, is looking for an experienced Program Manager who can drive and deploy cutting edge research communication technologies. You will have the opportunity to work with researchers, designers, and developers to shape the development and deployment of Wallop, a communication and sharing tool that enables users to build conversations and share media in the context of a social network (blogs social networks).

Primary responsibilities include coordinating cross team work to develop and validate end-to-end usage scenarios, developing partnerships with product groups for technology transfer, and work with external research and design/practications working with related technologies. Candidate should have a passion for cutting edge communication technology and customer focus, 3-5 years experience shipping communication services at Microsoft, including multiple product ship cycles in a pm, lead pm or group program manager role, and experience working on prototyping, incubation, or startup projects. Candidate must have experience with user interface design, and a strong technical aptitude in web technologies (http, ASP/ASP.net, HTML, scripting, Flash, C#), dataflow (SQL, XML schemas), and large scale server operations. Since this position will involve acting as a representative of a research project, the job includes preparing and presenting talks, discussions, and demonstrations for internal and occasionally external audiences at all levels, and may involve collaboration with other organizations. Candidate should have a demonstrated ability to build and manage cross-group and external relationships; must be self motivated and proactive in their daily work, have excellent interpersonal, verbal and written communication skills, and a bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field. Preference will be given to candidates with strong demonstrated skills in negotiations, strategic thinking, planning, and decision-making.

To apply for a full-time position at Microsoft Research, or as a visiting researcher or postdoctoral researcher, send your curriculum vita to mrjobs@microsoft.com in Microsoft Word or ASCII text format. Tell us about your research interests, education, experience, and the full time position you are interested in applying for.

March 25, 2004 at 10:09 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (21) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 24, 2004

Former IF chief Spowart targets IFAs with Adventi

finextra news: Former IF chief Spowart targets IFAs with Adventi

12 March 2004 - Jim Spowart, a key player in the rise of direct banks Intelligent Finance (IF), Standard Life Bank and Direct Line, has joined small Scottish IT support firm Adventi as director of business strategy and invested a six-figure sum in the business.

Spowart, who stepped down as chief executive of IF last year, had been expected to return to financial services with a new play on the direct banking model.

He says: "I had been in discussions with a number of international banks about various projects, one or two looking at large-scale opportunities, but this is something that truly appeals. I want to help (Adventi) become a major IT service force in the UK."

Adventi, which was set up by managing director Graham Bucknall in June 2002, currently employs 30 people out of offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh and has annualised turnover of �1 million. The company offers high-level and instant support for small businesses hit by computer failure and viruses.

Spowart believes there is a big opportunity for the firm to expand into independent financial services as the Financial Service Authority takes control of the regulations over the sale and management activities of the mortgage market. The watchdog is expected to lay down tough rules on IT security and data management.

�There is a need for more transparency, there are issues with online information and data protection and there is a need to keep accurate customer records held on secure storage,�says Spowart: "While many IFA firms have IT, they will desperately require the peace of mind of having their own IT director. That's where Adventi offers this security."

March 24, 2004 at 08:29 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home

Sainsbury's Bank prepares for online growth

finextra news: Sainsbury's Bank prepares for online growth

23 March 2004 - UK supermarket bank Sainsbury's has revamped its Web site in anticipation of a continued shift by consumers to online purchasing of financial services products.

Introducing a redesigned Web site with new online customer support tools, Sainsbury's Bank points to research by NOP World Financial which suggests that the 31% growth in the online purchasing of financial services products seen in 2003 will continue in 2004. According to these figures, the number of adults who arrange financial services products online should increase to 3 million.

Research from the bank - which reports a 600% increase in people using its site in the past three years - indicates that a majority of people (52%) prefer the convenience of banking online. Others cite a lack of sales pressure (45%), speed (39%), product discounts (37%) and having more time to understand products and services (31%).

Derek Bottom, deputy chief executive, Sainsbury�s Bank says: "People are becoming increasingly time poor and this has been a significant factor behind the growth of online banking and supermarket banking in general. Our strategy is to provide quality products in a way that customers find convenient and easy to use and a strong online presence is central to us maintaining this."

In terms of which financial services products are most likely to be bought online, motor insurance tops the league. NOP World Financial�s research estimates that 2.3 million people bought retail financial products online last year, and 52% of them purchased motor insurance. This is followed by credit cards (26%) and home insurance (22%).

March 24, 2004 at 08:24 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (19) | Top of page | Blog Home

Quarter of retail shopping to move to the Web by 2009

finextra news: Quarter of retail shopping to move to the Web by 2009

23 March 2004 - Within five years, a quarter of all UK shopping will be conducted via the Internet or mobile devices, according to the Interactive Media Retail Group.

IMRG says that 2004 is the year that Internet shopping will become mass market, as millions of consumers routinely go online to research and buy every kind of product and service. The industry body forecasts that twenty million British shoppers will spend �17 billion online this year.

By 2009, the value of the market will have risen to �80 billion, as one-in-four retail purchases in the UK are made online. A further 20% of purchases will be influenced by online research.

IMRG is making the forecasts on the back of four years of hard data collation from online retailers. It says payment systems and consumer confidence have now dropped down the priority list of member organisations, who are increasingly turning their attention to customer retention strategies and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Whereas 27% of British consumers have shopped online, the European Commission reported this month that Internet shopping is still not widely used in the European Union with just 16% of consumers having made a purchase over the Web, and that consumers' lack of confidence is a key inhibitor.

March 24, 2004 at 08:20 AM in | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 23, 2004

U.S. Web Usage and Traffic, February 2004

U.S. Web Usage and Traffic, February 2004

› › › Traffic Patterns
By ClickZ Stats staff | March 23, 2004

Nielsen//NetRatings examined where U.S. Internet users were going and how long they were staying during February 2004. While there were much fewer at-work users than there were at home, the working Internet population spent more time online and surfing.

Average Web Usage, U.S., February 2004
	Home	Work
Number of Sessions/Visits Per Person	31	66
Number of Domains Visited Per Person	55	104
PC Time Per Person	27:52:29	78:00:30
Duration of a Web Page Viewed	00:00:53	00:00:59
Active Digital Media Universe	141,389,993	49,906,443
Current Digital Media Universe Estimate	204,306,915	54,196,870
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

According to the traffic measurements, Yahoo! and Microsoft were among the sites that garnered the most unique visitors, with users spending considerably more time at sites belonging to the Time Warner Network, such as America Online.

Top Parent Companies for February 2004, U.S., Home
Parent	Unique Audience (000)	Time Per Person (hr:min:sec)
Microsoft	93,672	01:32:48
Time Warner	82,530	03:59:38
Yahoo!	79,603	01:57:25
Google	47,427	00:18:00
eBay	45,698	01:24:30
United States Government	36,364	00:20:56
RealNetworks	26,125	00:29:59
Amazon	24,417	00:14:47
InterActiveCorp	22,870	00:20:12
Terra Lycos	22,113	00:09:10
Note: Parent company is a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs owned by a single entity.
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

Top Parent Companies for February 2004, U.S., Work
Parent	Unique Audience (000)	Time Per Person (hr:min:sec)
Microsoft	44,545	01:59:51
Yahoo!	36,692	02:40:30
Time Warner	35,400	05:11:09
Google	28,911	00:35:29
United States Government	26,450	00:31:33
eBay	23,763	01:24:09
Amazon	17,042	00:19:04
InterActiveCorp	16,632	00:26:52
RealNetworks	14,689	00:43:32
Landmark Communications	12,559	00:14:41
Note: Parent company is a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs owned by a single entity.
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

Definitions:

Number of Sessions per Month: The average number of computer sessions per person for the specified reporting period. A session consists of Web sessions and/or any period of time spent using computer applications.

Number of Unique Domains Visited: An average of the total number of unique domains visited per person for the specified reporting period.

Page Views per Month: The total number of times a Web page has been requested by a user. Page views are counted only when they fully load into the user's browser window. Pages accessed from the user's local cache are included in page view counts. Unique pages will be counted each time they are requested.

Page Views per Surfing Session: Average number of Web pages viewed per person per Web session for the specified reporting period.

Time Spent per Month: Average time spent during active computer sessions per person for the specified reporting period.

Time Spent During Surfing Session: Average time spent per person during an active computer session for the specified reporting period.

Duration of a Page Viewed: Average duration of time that a Web page was viewed per person over the specified reporting period.

Internet Universe: The Nielsen//NetRatings Internet universe is defined as all members, 2 years of age or older, of households that currently have access to the Internet from a personal computer.

Active Internet Universe: People that have used a computer capable of connecting to the Internet AND visited a Web site and/or launched any computer file tracked by Nielsen//NetRatings' applications metering module.

Current Internet Universe Estimate: People over the age of 2 that have access to the Internet from a personal computer at home; includes active and non-active persons in the household.

March 23, 2004 at 11:49 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (45) | Top of page | Blog Home

E-mail, VoIP Span Net Activities List

E-mail, VoIP Span Net Activities List

By Robyn Greenspan | March 16, 2004

Online communication methods made the very top and the very bottom of the list of Internet activities, as measured by Harris Interactive. According to the poll of U.S. Internet users, conducted during December 2003, the majority of respondents use e-mail regularly, while very few participate in chat rooms or make phone calls via the Web.

Harris Interactive found that roughly two-thirds of respondents sent or received e-mail often or very often � a decline from December 2000 when nearly three-quarters of survey participants had the same response. At the other end of the spectrum, only 5 percent reportedly participated in chat rooms often or very often, compared to 6 percent in December 2000, and a mere 3 percent made online phone calls often or very often.

Online voice communications may become more available amidst reports that Vonage, an Internet phone service provider, will begin selling its wares through retailer Circuit City. Using a broadband connection, a regular phone, and an adapter, Vonage expects its service to rival traditional phone service through discount pricing and recent improvements to quality.

Joseph Laszlo, senior analyst, broadband and wireless, Jupiter Research (a unit of this site's corporate parent), comments on the arrangement between Circuit City and Vonage: "We've always thought that IP telephony really takes off only when it's invisible � e.g., easy to use, connects via a standard telephone handset, and lets you call anyone else, whether they're connected via a circuit phone or a [Voice over Internet Protocol] VoIP [define] connection. Vonage is the first high profile offering to fit this bill, differentiating it from some other VoIP providers, like Skype, which are much more limited in their value proposition."

However, Laszlo doesn't expect mainstream availability will aid VoIP adoption: "At the end of the day, though, Vonage's impact on this market is likely to be limited. What will really drive VoIP adoption will be offerings from cable operators and existing, traditional telcos. Their offers will be tightly bundled with broadband, pay TV, and other communications services, and they will have marketing might that will put any upstart telco to shame."

While VoIP still has a long road toward mainstream adoption, a number of other activities are also struggling for increased penetration. Roughly half of all respondents indicated that they have never played or downloaded games, or used the Internet for financial management and investing, and one-third have not logged on for travel planning or reservations.

Internet Activities Never Performed
Make phone calls	87%
Take courses	75%
Participate in chat groups	74%
Search for a job	61%
Pay bills	60%
Financial management and investing	53%
Download or play games	49%
Find and download software	47%
Make travel plans and reservations	33%
Source: Harris Interactive

Among the activities that measured the greatest increases from 2000 to 2003: information gathering about products and services; research for work or school; obtaining information on local amusements and activities; and exploring new and different sites.

cellspacing="1" border="0">

Internet Activities Performed Often or Very Often
size="2">Activity	size="2">Dec. 2003	size="2">Dec. 2000	size="2">Change
Gather information about products and services	41%	25%	+16
Research for work or school	45%	37%	+8
Explore new and different sites	32%	24%	+8
Obtain information on local amusements and activities	19%	11%	+8
color="#000000">Source: Harris Interactive

Our general reaction to this research is that people are finding different uses for the Internet, other than e-mail," said Humphrey Taylor, chairman of the Harris Poll, Harris Interactive.

March 23, 2004 at 11:32 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (45) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 22, 2004

U.S. Shuts Down Internet 'Phishing' Scam

Yahoo! News - U.S. Shuts Down Internet 'Phishing' Scam

Mon Mar 22, 2:10 PM ETAdd Technology - Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government said on Monday it had arrested a Texas man who crafted fake e-mail messages to trick hundreds of Internet users into providing credit card numbers and other sensitive information.

Zachary Hill of Houston pleaded guilty to charges related to a "phishing" operation, in which he sent false emails purportedly from online businesses to collect sensitive personal information from consumers, the Federal Trade Commission said.

According to the FTC, Hill sent out official-looking e-mail notices warning America Online and Paypal users to update their accounts to avoid cancellation.

Those who clicked on a link in the message were directed to a Web site Hill set up that asked for Social Security (news - web sites) numbers, mothers' maiden names, bank account numbers and other sensitive information, the FTC said.

Phishing has emerged as a favorite tool of identity thieves over the past several years and experts say it is a serious threat to consumers.

Hill used the information he collected to set up credit-card accounts and change information on existing accounts, the FTC said. He duped 400 users out of at least $75,000 before his operation was shut down on Dec. 4, FTC attorneys said.

Hill will be sentenced on May 17, according to court documents.

A lawyer for Hill was not immediately available for comment.

Scam artists have posed as banks, online businesses and even the U.S. government to gather personal information, setting up Web pages that closely mirror official sites.

FTC officials said consumers should never respond to an e-mail asking for sensitive information by clicking on a link in the message. "If you think the company needs your financial information, it's best to contact them directly," FTC attorney Lisa Hone said.

Those who believe they may be victims of identity theft should visit (http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft), she said.

America Online is a division of Time Warner Inc . Paypal is owned by eBay Inc. .

March 22, 2004 at 06:13 PM in Online crime | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

PluggedIn: USB Gizmos, Gadgets and Trinkets Abound

Yahoo! News - PluggedIn: USB Gizmos, Gadgets and Trinkets Abound

Sat Mar 20, 9:59 AM ETAdd Technology - Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

By Ben Berkowitz
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Back in the 1990s, when the computing industry banded together to develop an easier and faster way to connect peripheral devices to computers, they expected the new technology to be used for printers and cameras, not rubber duckies.

Nor coffee-cup warmers, for that matter. Or blankets or humidifiers or any of the many strange-but-true gizmos that hook up to desktops and laptops.

The Universal Serial Bus, or USB, standard has opened the way for new generations of external devices to connect to computers efficiently and quickly, without the need to tighten screws or adapt different types and sizes of pins and holes so that everything fits together.

But since the USB standard also provides a way to power those external devices directly from the computer -- usually without an additional plug -- it has provided the more enterprising designer with a creative outlet to build weird, wacky and, in some cases, useful products.

Take for example the USB desk fan, with soft blades and a flexible neck, perfect for the cubicle farm or studio apartment. Or for the rare smoker who is still allowed to puff indoors, there is a USB ashtray, whose filter sucks away the smoke. Both are available from ThinkGeek (http://www.thinkgeek.com) for under $40.

Harder to find at retail are the Arvel USB Fragrance-Oil Burner, an aromatherapy device that creates a tranquil feeling that even the worst computer crash can not disturb, and MIB's USB heating blanket, perfect for keeping warm during the winter months.

"The percentage of things that are just actually silly is pretty small," said Jeff Ravencraft, chairman of the USB Implementers Forum and a technology strategist for Intel Corp. (NasdaqNM:INTC - news) "From some point of view, they're probably fairly practical-type implementations."

MASS STORAGE

As with any technology, hardware sizes have shrunk with time and innovation, and now USB plugs are starting to show up in the unlikeliest of gadgets.

The technology has caught on quickly in the area of portable mass storage -- putting as much as a gigabyte of data on a device the size of a key chain.

According to the USB Flash Drive Alliance, which promotes and encourages development of such products, USB drives now outsell other flash memory formats, like the compact flash and Secure Digital cards used in cameras and personal digital assistants.

But the key-chain drive design quickly became routine, inspiring people to create new shapes and sizes.

Among the devices with built-in USB storage are watches, pens, Swiss Army Knives -- and even ducks.

The i-Duck from Japan's Solid Alliance, starting at $49, plugs into a USB port and offers up to 256 megabytes of memory -- enough for many, many copies of the song "Rubber Ducky."

"We were very surprised at the success of the i-Duck," said Douglas Krone, chief executive of Dynamism, which sells imported Japanese technology to gadget-hungry U.S. consumers. The product, which comes in a range of colors and lights up, has been selling out constantly at Dynamism since its launch late last year.

Many other unusual USB gadgets, like a USB noodle cooker, also come from Japan, where Krone said cuteness is as important as function.

"It's just an appealing concept," Krone said. "There's no really advanced technology involved here. It's just using the power from the USB port to do something."

March 22, 2004 at 07:31 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (42) | Top of page | Blog Home

Gadget snapshots from Cebit

BBC NEWS | Technology | Gadget snapshots from Cebit

Armed with a SonyEricsson P900 cameraphone and a wi-fi enabled PDA, BBC News Online's Jon Kossmann picks out the latest gadgets on offer at the giant Cebit technology show in Germany.

THAT'S WHAT I CALL HANDY

The Motorola MPx fits snugly in the palm of the hand. An incredibly versatile Pocket PC device with tri-band GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth and Wi-fi all built in.

It will run the soon to be released Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition, which has the ability to support landscape or portrait usage. Expected to be available around autumn this year for around 750 euros (�500).

IS IT A CAMERA, IS IT A PHONE?

Here is a beautiful example of why the manufacturers of digital cameras are starting to get worried - the new Sony Ericsson S700 with a 1.3 megapixel camera.

They are calling these handsets "Dual Front", as one side looks like a mobile and the other like a camera.

I am sure that by the end of the year they will have broken the 3 megapixel barrier on the mobile phone.

MICROSOFT GETS CREATIVE

Here is the pocket multimedia player we have heard so much about recently. Sporting an 80 GB hard drive, this beauty can store and play all your pictures, music files and video files, (in Windows WMV format).

The screen is gorgeous and it is a lot lighter than I expected. This one is going to be a hit until Apple take their iPod into the video/image world.

POCKET CONVERGENCE

Everything really is getting smaller and smaller, while at the same time more and more powerful.

At Cebit, there are USB flash memory sticks of every description.

This one, which caught my eye, combines MP3, Mpeg-4 video and an MP3 player in one small device.

VIRTUAL LASER KEYBOARD

This ingenious device connects to a Pocket PC, Palm or Windows device and projects a keyboard on any flat surface using a laser. You can then type using the virtual keys.

It was very responsive and accurate when I tested it, but a shame it does not use Bluetooth to connect to the device. It should be available in the autumn.

FRAUNHOFER 3D SCREENS

The institute responsible for the MP3 format has moved on to the third dimension, bringing a plethora of 3D hardware including this incredible screen which displays a 3D image without the need for special glasses.

A camera at the top tracks the position of your eyes to create the effect.

VIRTUAL ENGINEERING

Siemens shows off more 3D hardware, which as well as providing a heads up display of what you are looking at, actually recognises the component in view, then displays information on it to the headset display.

Audi also has shown some recognition devices to help their engineers look like cyber-cyclists too.

CELEBRITY TWINS

Swedish company, Softhouse, has come with a fun application where you can send a picture to their server by MMS and it then uses facial recognition to match your face with a celebrity.

Apparently I'm an 81% match with Brendan Fraser. Obviously, it's him that looks like me, not the other way round.

FLIP AND CLICK

New mobiles of all shapes and sizes competed for attention at Cebit.

The hall was buzzing with talk of new picture phones, 3G handsets and data phones.

This cameraphone from the people behind Japan's i-Mode service, NTT DoCoMo, comes with a snazzy twist-flippable display.

March 22, 2004 at 07:00 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (63) | Top of page | Blog Home

Wrong Signature on E-Mail Swamps Professor

Yahoo! News - Wrong Signature on E-Mail Swamps Professor

Sun Mar 21, 3:47 PM ETAdd Technology - AP to My Yahoo!

By ERIK STETSON, Associated Press Writer
RICHMOND, Va. - It's a parody James M. Kauffman said he wished he had written — but he didn't, a point that the University of Virginia education professor emeritus has been repeating and repeating.

Kauffman's name and title have been circulating under a long-lived e-mail that satirizes the anti-homosexual pronouncements of conservative radio talk show host Laura Schlessinger (news - web sites). The result has been a flood of daily calls and e-mails from people around the world.

"It hasn't completely shut things down or paralyzed me," he said. "But it has taken up a substantial amount of my time."

Kauffman said he's not sure how a version of the letter ended up circulating with his name and title. He said someone may have added his name to the letter deliberately. Or, he said, it could stem from the signature file his e-mail program automatically attaches to his messages since he forwarded the letter, in fun, to friends.

"I don't know whether someone I e-mailed about something else cut and pasted it," Kauffman said.

The letter satirizes Schlessinger's use of scriptural citations in moral contexts, noting Leviticus 18:22, which calls homosexuality a detestable sin, and referring to other biblical pronouncements.

"When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord � Lev. 1:9," reads the letter's opening shot. "The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?"

Other paragraphs purport to ask Schlessinger's advice on issues from scripturally sanctioned slavery, Leviticus 25:44 � "why can't I own Canadians?" � to prohibitions against touching the skin of a dead pig, Leviticus 11:6-8 � "may I still play football if I wear gloves?"

The urban legends Web site Snopes.com traces the letter back to at least 2000, but can only speculate about its author.

Vincent Weafer, senior director of security response for Symantec Corp., which specializes in information security, said Kauffman's case illustrates some of e-mail's pitfalls. Some e-mail joke letters, chain letters, hoaxes and scams have persisted online for a decade or more, Weafer said.

Kauffman, 63, said hearing from people who find the letter amusing has mostly been fun. "The vast majority of the messages have been congratulatory," he said.

He has even written a standard reply for people who e-mail him about the letter: "I wish I could take credit for writing the letter, but, alas, I cannot. 'Thou shalt not raise a false report' (Exodus 23:1)."

___

On the Net:

Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/drlaura.asp

March 22, 2004 at 12:06 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home

Loyal Users Cheer Google's Integrity

Yahoo! News - Loyal Users Cheer Google's Integrity

Sun Mar 21, 3:21 PM ETAdd Technology - AP to My Yahoo!

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer
NEW YORK - With a gigantic index of nearly 4.3 billion Web pages and counting, Google has become the Internet's top search engine. Credit good technology, but perhaps as important, Google's Philosophy No. 6: "You can make money without doing evil."

But in this age of corporate malfeasance and cutthroat consolidation, is that just wishful thinking? Can Google, on the verge of an expected public offering, still be trusted?

Loyal users seem to think so.

When John Young heard a radio interviewer ask whether a song was pastiche, he didn't grab a dictionary. He typed an approximation into Google to get the word's spelling and meaning.

When Young, a design consultant in Whittier, Calif., gets new clients, he "googles" them to see if they pay their bills. And he likes that Google's sponsored links, paid for by advertisers, are inconspicuously placed to the side on results pages.

For Ted Kaczmarek, a senior network engineer in Jersey City, N.J., the quality of the search results proves Google isn't influenced by the bottom line.

"A lot of times, I see some of the most obscure stuff come up No. 1," he said. "I know those people aren't paying any money because they haven't got any money."

That is not to say there haven't been complaints about the 5-year-old search engine, which comScore Media Metrix credits for three-quarters of U.S. searches in December, about half at google.com and the rest through partners that tap Google's index.

The likelihood that Google will go public and sell stock has generated rumblings that shareholder considerations might trump those of Google users.

And already, advocacy groups have complained about Google's policy of rejecting critical ads alongside regular search results. Recently, Google banned an environmental group's ads that protested a cruise line's sewage treatment methods.

Some merchants also complain that sudden changes in Google's ranking formula can wipe them off the Internet. They suspect pressure to buy ads, though Google says its changes help thwart tricks Web sites use to artificially boost listings.

Google's formula, for the most part, remains top secret, and Google co-founder Larry Page acknowledges that the company could do better in spelling out guidelines on advertising and censorship.

"We're quite a young company, growing really fast and dealing with real global issues," Page said. "Sometimes it takes time to understand the issues."

In the meantime, "secrecy always feeds the imagination and gives people the freedom to think whatever the wildest thing they can conjure up is," said Frank Hayson, editor of a Web site named Watching Google Like A Hawk.

Doug Cutting, lead developer of an open-source alternative called Nutch that seeks to better explain decisions behind its search results, said people may trust Google today, "but should we have to trust them forever just blindly?"

A play on the number Googol � 1 followed by 100 zeros � Google Inc. was born on Sept. 7, 1998, in a garage in Menlo Park, Calif. Through word of mouth among the tech elite, its search engine soon toppled powerhouses at the time, including Yahoo and AltaVista.

The secret sauce: A ranking system that equates relevancy with popularity. Google believes sites are more likely to link to other sites they find useful, so a site scores higher the more links it has to it. The result is greater relevancy than using keywords alone.

Because Google finds Web sites and scores them using automated software tools, it can index millions more sites than human-powered search directories, which once were considered the best.

Over time, Google became even more influential as it licensed its technology to supplement searches at Yahoo and America Online. (Yahoo! Inc (NasdaqNM:YHOO - news). ended the relationship last month and, like Microsoft Corp. is aggressively developing rival technology.)

But Google as the market leader also draws the brunt of complaints, even those that apply to rivals, too. And that has led to some calls, though none serious or strong, for regulation or oversight.

"We have all sorts of protections against government abuse, ... but figuring out what to do when you have a private party wielding a lot of power is a puzzle," said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor.

Although some have compared Google to an electric company, which is generally regulated to ensure that moneymaking concerns don't hurt the public interest, Google see itself more as an information provider.

Defending a federal lawsuit over changes in Google's ranking system, Google argued that its results are merely opinions. A judge agreed, saying the company deserved First Amendment protection.

In an interview, Page said Google shared values that most journalists hold: providing "really good, trustworthy, objective, unbiased information."

Nonetheless, some critics have suggested that a mechanism be created for appealing decisions on ranking. A public forum, they say, could help hash out policy issues. Perhaps Google could use a public liaison like ombudsmen found at many news organizations?

Zittrain said Google has moved toward more openness, citing its decision to publicize cases where organizations and companies, alleging copyright violation, pressure Google to remove links to critical sites.

By law, Google must remove the links or lose immunity from lawsuits, but now it also discloses specific cases through an independent site, Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.

Google has yet to do that for sites removed under pressure from France and Germany, which have strict laws banning hate speech. Page said the company still was exploring the legality of doing so.

Nancy Blachman, an author of Google tutorials and the wife of a Google software engineer, said Google doesn't add features lightly, holding "a lot of discussions about the ramifications" of each one.

Even the ads, Blachman said, favor users.

Ads are ranked not just based on payments, but on the number of clicks they get, so unpopular ads can get dropped even if their sponsors are willing to pay more.

Experts believe the market will ultimately keep Google honest, and even with shareholders to answer to, its executives should recognize that trust is a key asset.

"If Google did something that would be bad for users, people would find out about it very quickly," said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research. "That would hurt their brand."

___

Anick Jesdanun can be reached at netwriter(at)ap.org

March 22, 2004 at 12:04 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

Time Warner Says Not in AOL Talks with Microsoft

Yahoo! News - Time Warner Says Not in AOL Talks with Microsoft

Fri Mar 19,11:52 AM ETAdd Technology - Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX - news) on Friday denied a report that it has held talks in recent months with software maker Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) about selling its America Online Internet unit.

"We do talk to them (Microsoft) about digital rights management ... but the other stuff is just not true," said Time Warner spokeswoman Tricia Primrose, referring to a New York Post report about talks on a possible merger between Microsoft and AOL.

Microsoft spokesman Kent Hollenbeck said the company does not comment on rumors and speculation.

The newspaper, citing unidentified sources familiar with the matter, said lawyers at the media company have begun studying potential antitrust issues stemming from a possible Microsoft acquisition of AOL, and so far they have found few roadblocks.

March 22, 2004 at 12:02 AM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 21, 2004

AOL Says It Sees Sharp Decline in 'Spam' E-Mail

Yahoo! News - AOL Says It Sees Sharp Decline in 'Spam' E-Mail

Fri Mar 19, 1:23 PM ETAdd Technology - Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - America Online, the nation's largest Internet provider, said on Friday it has seen a dramatic decline in the amount of "spam" e-mail entering its network over the past month.

Other surveys have shown that the amount of spam has not declined since a national anti-spam law took effect on Jan. 1. But AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the company had seen a 27 percent decline since Feb. 20.

Spammers attempted to send 2.6 billion messages to AOL members on Feb. 20. That figure declined steadily and reached 1.9 billion on March 17, Graham said.

Over the same period, AOL saw its daily number of complaints from members about spam messages not caught by the service's filters drop by nearly half, to 6.8 million from 12.7 million. Graham attributed the decline to improved filtering techniques and fear of litigation under the new law.

"We hope spammers are thinking twice before hitting the send button," Graham said.

On March 9, AOL and several other large Internet providers sued hundreds of e-mail marketers in the first test of the new law.

But U.S. Internet users said in a survey released on Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that spam was more irritating than ever.

Get-rich-quick schemes, miracle cures and other unsolicited bulk messages accounted for 62 percent of all e-mail in February, according to filtering company Brightmail Inc.

Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed said they had reduced their use of e-mail because of spam, up from 25 percent who said so last June.

AOL is a unit of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX - news).

March 21, 2004 at 11:20 PM in Spam | Permalink | TrackBack (30) | Top of page | Blog Home

Survey: Home Internet Access in U.S. Hits 75 Percent

Yahoo! News - Survey: Home Internet Access in U.S. Hits 75 Percent

Thu Mar 18,12:51 PM ETAdd Technology - Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Nearly three of four people in the United States have Internet access at home, Internet audience measurement service Nielsen/NetRatings said on Thursday.

In a February telephone survey, an estimated 204.3 million people, or 74.9 percent of the population above the age of two and living in households equipped with a fixed-line phone, had Internet access, up from 66 percent in February 2003.

"In just a handful of years, online access has managed to gain the type of traction that took other mediums decades to achieve," Kenneth Cassar, director of strategic analysis at Nielsen/NetRatings, said in a statement.

U.S. women were slightly more likely to be Web surfers than their male counterparts, the company said.

Internet penetration for women aged 35 to 54 was 81.7 percent, compared with 80.2 percent for men in the same age group. For the 25 to 34 age group, Internet usage was 77 percent for women and 75.6 percent for men.

"Women make the majority of purchases and household decisions, so it's no surprise that they are utilizing the Internet as a tool for daily living," Cassar said.

March 21, 2004 at 11:19 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (58) | Top of page | Blog Home

T-Mobile gears up for UK 3G launch

vnunet.com T-Mobile gears up for UK 3G launch

By Robert Jaques [19-03-2004]
Service for laptops and handsets will offer download speeds of up to 384Kbps will be accessible by corporate customers using a laptop PC card.

But the operator revealed that it also has a portfolio of handsets in the pipeline, including the Nokia 7600 which supports its Mobile Jukebox service and the viewing of video clips, and the Sharp TM100, which features a 't-zone' button to launch the operator's mobile portal.

The devices will automatically select the quickest network available depending on coverage, and either General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) or Universal Mobile Telecoms System (UMTS) or, in the case of notebooks, Wi-Fi.

"The new network is yet another vital building block in our multimedia network," said Ren� Obermann, chairman of T-Mobile, in a statement.

"We will help our customers choose the optimal technology to suit their individual needs by providing innovative terminal equipment and services.

"Our target is easy-to-use, seamless communications. This is why we offer our customers services based on GPRS, UMTS and wireless Lan."

March 21, 2004 at 11:08 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (25) | Top of page | Blog Home

Online Banking Still a Web of Worry (in Russia)

Online Banking Still a Web of Worry - Gateway To Russia - News From Russia

If you're thinking of opening a Russia-based bank account and want to be able to manage it over the Internet, your choices are limited. According to the Internet-finance web site www.ifin.ru, approximately 32 Internet banking systems were set up by roughly 160 banks in Russia by 2003. These numbers can be misleading, though, since only half of the banks that claim to offer online banking are actually doing it. Western banks operating in Moscow still emerge as the Internet-banking winners, but there are some Russian banks close on their heels, and that might be worth considering if you want the convenience of online services from a Russian bank account. Alfa Bank Express, a division of Alfa Bank, allows its clients to perform all the same transactions online as at the bank's branches. There are no extra charges for doing banking over the Internet, but services that are offered for a fee at the branches also cost money if they are performed online.

For example, while account transfers between Alfa Bank Express accounts are free both online and at the branch, transferring funds to other banks costs 1 percent of the transfer amount, but no more than 300 rubles ($10.50) and no less than 50 rubles, at a branch or online. Alfa Bank Express has an English-language web site, which is well structured and easy to use, but online banking is offered solely in Russian. Guta Bank does not offer online banking in English, either, although the bank has an English-language web site. Like at Alfa Bank Express, Guta Bank's Internet access system allows customers to buy and sell foreign currency, deposit and transfer funds, pay certain household bills and order a printout of account transactions. Online banking costs $11 per year at Guta, but extra charges, such as fees for transferring funds to other banks, apply. Guta Bank, Alfa Bank Express and other banks that offer extensive online banking options for individuals also offer them for corporate clients. International player Citibank, as you would expect, offers online banking in English and Russian to both individuals and companies. John, an expat living in Moscow, is a Citibank client who has no complaints about the bank's free online service. "Citibank is an old hand at Internet banking and the staff are very professional," John said. "I chose Citibank Russia as the company to house the 20 employee accounts of the company I work for, and it has worked out very well." Another Western institution, Austria's Raiffeisen Bank, recently began offering online banking services in English and Russian through its Raiffeisen Connect program. The system is free for the bank's clients, but fees for monetary transfers apply. Ruble transfers cost 0.5 percent of the entire transfer amount, but no more than 200 rubles. If the transfer is in dollars or euros, it costs 1 percent of the transfer, but no more than $150 or 150 euros, respectively. Ian Schier, an American managing a marketing company in Moscow, does online banking with DeltaBank, but his reviews are less than stellar. "DeltaBank's rudimentary Internet service allows access to balance information online," Schier said, "but the information is usually not updated properly and is therefore incorrect." Schier only finds the DeltaBank's online banking service useful when he needs to monitor large payments or transfers. Other banks in Moscow offer Internet banking options. However, since such services are new, or are merely part of a marketing ploy, it is often the case that bank employees themselves have trouble explaining what their customers can do online, or even verifying whether online services exist at all. Rosbank, for example, advertises Rosbank Line, an online banking program, on its web site. But when the bank was contacted, three Rosbank employees could not explain how Rosbank Line operates, two had not heard of its existence, and one flatly disagreed that online banking is even offered by Rosbank. The unreliability of Internet access in Moscow is often cited as another reason for not using online banking in Russia. The quality of an Internet connection can vary widely, depending on where you live. To avoid the hassle of logging on to the Internet to use online services, some people prefer to stick to the precursor to Internet banking -- telephone banking -- to check account balances. Unlike online services, telephone banking is relatively widespread among banks in Russia, which offer account information by providing access telephone numbers or sending SMS messages to clients. "Using the Internet at home means waiting forever for my dial-up service to go through and then being disconnected from the Internet several times in the span of 30 minutes," said Karina, a young Russian woman, who checks her balances and monitors transactions by receiving SMS messages from International Moscow Bank on her cellphone. .TX-..**********************************************
[The Moscow Times]

March 21, 2004 at 07:52 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home

Wi-Fi Interoperability Problem on Rise

Wi-Fi Interoperability Problem on Rise (TechNews.com)

The Associated Press
Thursday, March 18, 2004; 8:33 PM
HANOVER, Germany -- Increasing complexity and stronger security is making it harder for new wireless computer networking products to hook up with each other, an industry group promoting the technology said Thursday at the CeBIT tech fair.

The Wi-Fi Alliance said that 22 percent of the devices - such as wireless networking cards for computers, access ports and printer servers - submitted for testing at its four partner laboratories failed to work on a network on the first try.

The group certifies Wi-Fi equipment in an attempt to help the technology grow, by sparing consumers hair-pulling experiences as they try to use Wi-Fi-enabled laptops or handheld computers to wirelessly surf the Web at coffee shops and airports. The Wi-Fi Alliance has certified 1,100 devices since 2000.

"As equipment becomes more advanced, we're actually seeing interoperability failures go up," said Brian Grimm, marketing director for the alliance, which is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Wi-Fi, short for Wireless Fidelity, uses radio signals to share broadband Internet connections within a few hundred feet. The alliance, whose over 200 partners include Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Philips, Sony, Texas Instruments, Nokia, and Cisco Systems, estimates there are between 25,000 and 30,000 public Wi-Fi spots worldwide.

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� 2004 The Associated Press

March 21, 2004 at 12:40 AM in Wireless | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

Enticing Attachments Spell Trouble

Enticing Attachments Spell Trouble (TechNews.com)

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 21, 2004; Page F07
Surely most people have gotten the news by now. E-mail attachments can be bad stuff. Click on the wrong file and you could be installing a bug that crashes your system, makes your financial information available to some guy in Russia or commandeers your computer for an attack on some company's Web site.

Still, people sometimes have a hard time resisting the urge to click when that strange or unexpected file-bearing e-mail arrives -- even the folks who should know better.

"As a computer professional, I know that the attachment is likely a virus, yet my curiosity wants to look inside and see what makes it tick," Ira Bland, a programmer in Ashburn, wrote in an e-mail. "It takes considerable effort to put on my logical hat and just delete the thing."

He's not alone, apparently. David Perry, global director of education at Trend Micro Inc., often gives talks at local computer user groups, which are mostly populated by tech-savvy types. Whenever he gets to the part of his standard presentation where the bad software shows up attached to an e-mail in his inbox, "people in the audience shout, 'Click on it! Click on the virus, we want to see what happens!' " he said.

For anyone still wondering whether there is such a thing as an entirely safe or trustworthy file type, the answer seems to be a simple no. A year ago, for example, security experts generally thought zip files were safe, but recent attacks using the format have turned even this once-trusted format into a rising security risk.

What's more, file types have become somewhat irrelevant as hackers have gotten better at disguising dangerous ".exe" or executable files in Windows as file types that are perceived to be less risky, such as text or Word documents.

In its default mode, for example, Windows XP presents files with the name "readme.txt.exe" as "readme.txt" -- hiding the ".exe." and making even a reasonably alert computer user think the file is a probably-harmless text file.

To protect from getting duped by such disguised executable files, some computer security experts recommend Windows XP users turn off a "hide extensions" option that is turned on by default in the operating system. To do so, click the "My Computer" button in Windows XP, choose "Tools" then "Folder Options." Choose the "View" tab and uncheck the option marked "Hide extensions for known file types."

Though Microsoft is a frequent target of criticism for the security practices in its products, computer experts generally caution that there's no way to make the computing world 100 percent safe. Computer security firms can put up more roadblocks and safeguards, but sometimes users get fooled in new ways.

These days, computer users have to learn to ignore a growing range of e-mail trickery, from e-mails that look as if they were sent by somebody familiar to e-mails that convincingly disguise themselves as bounced e-mail. As a result, computer security experts flatly counsel against clicking on any attachment that a user wasn't already expecting.

As for the unexpected e-mail attachment that appears to come from a friendly source, Alfred Huger, senior director of engineering with computer security firm Symantec Corp., said that recipients should verify that the file is legit by e-mailing or calling the sender before clicking on it.

But the most successful cons or hacks tend to play off a sense that someone will lose something if they don't click or respond, said ex-hacker Kevin Mitnick, author of a book on the subject, "The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security."

He says people just aren't wired to ignore such e-mails, even when they know they probably should.

Mitnick uses telemarketers as an example. "People do not want them to call during dinner . . . yet the average American feels uncomfortable hanging up," he said.

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� 2004 The Washington Post Company

March 21, 2004 at 12:38 AM in Spam | Permalink | TrackBack (24) | Top of page | Blog Home

Mean Maschine

Bit of a flashback here!

Mean Maschine - [Sunday Herald]

Live Electronica: Kraftwerk - Carling Academy, Glasgow
Reviewed by Leon McDermott

A disconnected voice says: “Ladies and gentlemen, die mensch maschine, Kraftwerk.” And so it begins: a history of dance music, condensed into two hours. The music that has sprung forth from Kraftwerk’s D�sseldorf studio, KlingKlang, has prefigured so much of dance music that without them, the world would sound a whole lot different. Techno, house, electro, hip hop and ambient all owe Kraftwerk a debt that’s still being worked off. It’s all here: the cold, dispassionate synths that are the thread between Fritz Lang’s streamlined vision of the future and the outer reaches of techno; the clanking, juddering beats that provided the building blocks for electro; and bass that is at times as subterranean and as sinister as anything the likes of Dizzee Rascal has produced.

They open with the rising cadences of The Man-Machine, in front of a crowd � everyone from ponytailed pensioners to wide-eyed kids � which receives the quartet as enthusiastically as any kiddie pop show; afterwards, people wax lyrical about having seen them in Edinburgh in 1991, the last time they played Scotland. Not that their music � or the band themselves for that matter, wearing matching black suits and ties, their mostly hidden red shirts adding a touch of colour � seems to have aged: 1983�s Tour De France still resonates with the bicycle-loving optimism that brought it into being, while the repetitive, cyclical chords of Autobahn (a song now in its fourth decade, and which introduces itself with a cavalcade of revving engines and cheeky car horns) still sound like they were made for some future where roads remain things to be cherished and worshipped, rather than the mundane, gridlocked things they actually are. Kraftwerk, one might assume, still think this should be the case; no worries for them about global warming and the exploitation of the world�s oil supplies needed to keep the wheels turning.

However, as much as Kraftwerk�s music is that of the shiny new electronic future, there�s a dark, brooding side to their take on the world. As vintage footage of models on the catwalk plays behind the band, the emotionally dislocated narrative of The Model, in which everything � work, socialising, sex � is reduced to a financial transaction, plays out over sighing, resigned synths. There�s emotion here, but presented in as detached a way as possible.

Instead, Kraftwerk reserve what love they have to give for machines. Trans-Europe Express, their 1978 ode to intercontinental railways � subsequently sampled by Afrika Bambaataa for b-boy classic Planet Rock � practically seethes with love for the possibilities of travel; Pocket Calculator (in this incarnation, substantially beefed up with thumping, floor-shaking beats) is reworked as a slab of pulsating techno, occasionally interrupted by choppy bursts of percussion and synths. For The Robots, the band are replaced on stage by their famous robotic dolls. You wonder, as their arms wave almost in time to the juddering bassline, if Kraftwerk themselves are actually backstage sipping on cups of tea as the crowd applaud four lifeless dummies. It�s Thunderbirds as techno gods, and a wry joke at the expense of those people who assumed that they�re a band with no sense of humour, a band who could never be truly loved.

Another break, and the band return, this time in splendidly over-the-top neon-checked lycra; the flesh that covers the robotic frames that have just left the stage.

That a thunderous cheer greets the arrival of their mannequins speaks volumes; the audience loves them as much as it loves the band. It�s Kraftwerk�s best joke: because for all that they worship technology, they don�t worship it half as much as their fans.

21 March 2004

March 21, 2004 at 12:15 AM in World Affairs | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 20, 2004

With Internet Fraud Up Sharply, eBay Attracts Vigilantes

With Internet Fraud Up Sharply, eBay Attracts Vigilantes

By KATIE HAFNER

Published: March 20, 2004

AN FRANCISCO, March 19 — Five months ago, Klaus Priebe, a soft-spoken building contractor who said he was sick and tired of fraud on eBay, decided it was time to catch the cheaters at their game.
In one recent auction, he bid as much as $2.5 million on a telescope worth no more than $2,000. He knew he would not have to pay for the telescope because he was sure that it did not exist.
The listing was a fake, he decided, because the seller offered free shipping and was registered in Andorra, a small country in the Pyrenees that is often listed by swindlers. Mr. Priebe said his wild bid was an attempt to protect innocent bidders from falling into the trap he had spotted.

Mr. Priebe, 42, is an eBay vigilante, one of a number of eBay members who are stepping in to fight online auction fraud � a problem they say is getting worse by the week � because they believe that the company does not do enough policing of its own.

But in eBay's view Mr. Priebe and his vigilante brethren are pariahs. Rather than embrace these virtual posses, eBay discourages them, occasionally going so far as to suspend the vigilantes' accounts.

"We love it that people want to help, but there's a right way to do it and a way that isn't constructive or in the interest of a good community marketplace," said Rob Chesnut, eBay's vice president for rules, trust and safety, who added that eBay was doing everything it could to make it safe to buy and sell on its Web site.

EBay, based in San Jose, Calif., has 800 people deployed around the world to fight fraud, he said, and does not need amateur help. "Just like in the offline world," he said, "you can't have people running around taking the law into their hands."

Critics, however, say the company is not only slow to stop fraud, but is loath to reveal how much of it goes on.

"EBay's denial of the extent of the problem is out of control," said Mark Seiden, a computer security consultant in Manhattan who stumbled upon a fake deal for a high-end espresso maker on eBay several months ago and has since uncovered hundreds of fraudulent listings. "They probably think their brand will be stronger if they hide the fraud."

Mr. Priebe, who lives in Pueblo, Colo., is not waiting for someone else to solve the problem. Like other eBay vigilantes, he routinely alerts eBay to listings he believes are fraudulent and sends e-mail messages to people who have bid on a fake item to alert them to the fraud.

"That's a part of safe trading," Mr. Priebe said. "I believe that wholeheartedly. Watch my back and I'll watch yours."

Deception is no stranger to eBay, which has 93 million registered users. Within its warm and fuzzy culture, based on trust and honesty, there have always lurked renegades.

There was the spectacular case in 2000 when a fake Richard Diebenkorn painting was nearly sold for $135,000 on eBay. Travel voucher fraud on eBay became such a problem that the company now requires frequent sellers to register with an independent verification company. The sale of fake rare stamps has spawned watchdog groups both on and off the auction site.

Yet far more rampant than art forgeries and fake collectibles these days are fraudulent listings for expensive consumer goods. Plasma televisions and laptop computers, mountain bikes, fancy espresso machines, treadmills, telescopes, even vehicles are prime candidates to be phantom objects on eBay, sometimes promoted with photos and descriptions lifted straight off the manufacturer's Web site. Often, the seller uses auction software to post dozens of items at once, flooding a category with fake listings.

Last year, some $200 million lost to online fraud was reported to the Federal Trade Commission. And nearly half the 166,000 complaints the agency received last year were about online auctions, a 130 percent increase from 2001. While the F.T.C. does not break out figures by companies, the vast majority of online auctions are conducted on eBay.

"It's gone nuts just since November of last year," said Greg Schiller, a computer and network technician in Aztec, N.M., who says he reports hundreds of fraudulent listings every day to eBay.

Against this tide, online vigilantes have had an impact. Last year, they were instrumental in cornering a pair of swindlers from Arizona who bilked eBay users out of nearly $110,000. Often, they are the ones who doggedly trace the source of the fraud to places like Romania, which appears to be a popular redoubt, although many Romanian swindlers claim to be based in Andorra. Indeed, by late last year, Mr. Chesnut said, more than 100 arrests had been made in Romania alone.

"It's very difficult to find people who are hiding in foreign countries where there's a language barrier and it requires cooperation with foreign agencies," said Deborah Matties, a lawyer in the marketing practices division at the F.T.C. and leader of the commission's task force on Internet auction fraud. But she said the agency did not work with vigilantes to ferret out online auction fraud.

Mr. Schiller and others say they engage in self-help activities in part because they yearn for the days when eBay was a much safer place. "EBay is a wonderful thing," Mr. Schiller said. "But a lot of people are getting ripped off for a lot of money."

The company says vigilantism, like Mr. Priebe's bidding tactics, is not a solution and will not be tolerated. The company also does not allow its members to send e-mail messages to bidders to warn them that they are bidding on something that does not exist, or to post details and item numbers on eBay discussion groups.

"If you allow that sort of activity, even the bad guys start posting about the good guys and you end up with a big free-for-all and a lot of finger pointing," Mr. Chesnut said. "That's not the right way to go about doing things."

EBay estimates that of the 20 million or so items that are for sale on its Web site at any given time, only about 2,000 items, or one-hundredth of 1 percent, are fraudulent. But that figure reflects only those cases that are settled through the eBay buyer protection claim process.

Mr. Seiden, the computer security consultant, says the actual number of fraudulent auctions is considerably higher. "EBay's protections don't apply to many kinds of transactions like Western Union scams, so they go uncounted," he said.

Mr. Chesnut said the company was aware of most of the fraudulent listings that the vigilantes report. But he contends the vigilantes can be mistaken. "There's a lot of information that they might not have at their disposal," he said. Hani Durzy, a spokesman for eBay, said it was "not a rare occurrence where eBay has noticed that vigilantes have disrupted legitimate auctions."

The vigilantes argue that the signs of fraud are quite obvious. A fraudulent seller almost always asks for payment via Western Union. Often there is no feedback from other users. And the seller usually offers to sell the item at a much lower price if the buyer agrees to leave eBay and close the purchase privately.

One common ploy is to set up an auction under the identity of a legitimate eBay user who has received positive responses from buyers in the past. Brad Celmainis, an eBay member in Calgary, Alberta, said that warning signals go up as soon as he sees a seller's history and spots incongruities.

"You'll get some lady who was selling teapots and baby clothes and all of a sudden she's an electronics kingpin," said Mr. Celmainis, who alerts bidders and eBay users whose accounts have been hijacked.

Stirling Smidt, a 28-year-old financial analyst in Wellington, New Zealand, could have used such a tip. He thought he had found a great deal on a digital camera on eBay, and promptly sent off 850 New Zealand dollars ($557) via Western Union to the seller who said she was in London.

"There was a lot of e-mail back and forth between the seller and me," Mr. Smidt said. "Her English was really bad and she kept saying, `I'm just a 57-year-old woman with a sick son and a camera to sell.' Things like that." The camera never arrived.

Ina Steiner, editor and publisher of AuctionBytes.com, an online newsletter about Internet auctions, said she was not a vigilante but she sympathized with their cause.

"If I get ripped off by somebody on eBay and I see they're still selling on eBay and ripping other people off, I want to reach out and warn people," she said. "EBay doesn't look kindly on that."

Mr. Chesnut said the company frequently warned its members to be wary of traps set to steal their account information. Further, he said, the site is now peppered with various warnings about unsafe practices, like sending money via Western Union and going off eBay to complete a transaction.

The company also routinely alerts winning bidders of fraudulent auctions, telling them not to complete the transaction, Mr. Chesnut said. Such was the case with the fake Diebenkorn painting.

Still, it was another eBay user's warning that saved Marianne Houkom. Ms. Houkom, 55, who lives in Newton, Kan., received an e-mail message from Mr. Seiden warning her that the espresso machine she was bidding on did not exist. She said she was horrified, and then relieved when someone outbid her.

Mr. Seiden said he felt obligated to inform bidders in fraudulent auctions because he did not trust eBay to catch all of those schemes. That may be because "the people in eBay seem to vary widely in their competence and understanding of claims of fraud and willingness to investigate," he said.

For his part, Mr. Priebe has tried to reason with some of the hucksters. He said he recently had an interesting if fruitless exchange with someone posting fraudulent auctions who said he was a 16-year-old living in Romania.

"He told me his parents wanted him to make money and that everyone in the U.S. is rich," Mr. Priebe recalled. "I said it isn't really that way and that karma was going to catch up with him one of these days."

March 20, 2004 at 10:51 PM in Japan | Permalink | TrackBack (19) | Top of page | Blog Home

Musical Chairs With the Big Boys

Musical Chairs With the Big Boys

By STEVE LOHR

Published: March 21, 2004

S RealNetworks the next Netscape?
Rob Glaser, the founder and chief executive of RealNetworks, a pioneering maker of music-playing software for the Internet, bridles at the notion. "Our situation is very different in some important ways," he said in a lengthy interview last week.
Netscape, of course, was a path breaker in Web-browsing software and Exhibit A in a sweeping government antitrust case that resulted in a stinging legal setback for Microsoft. Yet Netscape soon faded as a force in the industry.

The fate of RealNetworks is a question awaiting an answer. But the similarities between it and Netscape are uncanny, especially now that the European Commission is preparing to rule against Microsoft on Wednesday after a final round of settlement talks collapsed last week.

The commission will order the company to offer a version of its dominant Windows operating system for personal computers without a digital media player, a market in which RealNetworks was the front-runner until Microsoft moved in.

The ruling, if upheld on appeal, may make it easier for RealNetworks to get its software on more personal computers. But it will not undo the damage already done to the company's business.

In many ways, the European case can be seen as a sequel to the American antitrust suit against Microsoft. Netscape was at the center of that case, which Microsoft lost but then settled with the Bush administration in 2001. Some of the names have changed, but the pattern is the same.

In both cases, Microsoft was accused of being a nasty monopolist that bundled new software into Windows, gave it away and engaged in bullying tactics intended to stifle competition by crushing the early leader in an emerging market.

Competing on those terms proved to be near fatal for Netscape, which was eventually acquired and exists today in a forlorn corner of Time Warner. And it has not been any easier for RealNetworks, which has lost money for four straight years - $245 million in red ink.

As if battling Bill Gates were not enough, Mr. Glaser also finds himself pitted against perhaps the second-most-famous computer entrepreneur in the land: Steven P. Jobs of Apple Computer. Apple's iTunes music store has recently overshadowed RealNetworks' Rhapsody as the stellar brand in digital music.

The RealNetworks story has the added theme of former friends turned enemies. Mr. Glaser, 42, worked for a decade at Microsoft, where he became one of Mr. Gates's trusted lieutenants, and a very rich man. He left and founded RealNetworks in 1994, parting on good terms. Microsoft took a 10 percent stake in the start-up, originally called Progressive Networks.

But then Microsoft itself got into the digital media market, and the partners became adversaries. In 1998, Mr. Glaser testified before the Senate against Microsoft, describing what he said were the abusive tactics of his former employer. Later that year, Microsoft announced that it was selling its stake in RealNetworks.

The most recent salvo from RealNetworks came three months ago, when it filed a private antitrust suit against Microsoft, seeking $1 billion in damages. Despite the bitter rivalry, Mr. Glaser maintains that his company is neither defined nor obsessed by its huge competitor and Seattle area neighbor. "This is not some quixotic Ahab-and-the-whale thing," he said.

Mr. Glaser may be protesting too much, but there is a strong case to be made that his company's future will not be just a rerun of the Netscape script. RealNetworks seems to have the quick instincts of a survivor. Its losses are declining sharply, and it has overhauled its business.

For most of its young corporate life, the main business of RealNetworks was software - the software needed to play on a personal computer the music or video received in digital streams over the Internet and the software needed by developers and companies to create and send it.

Particularly in the last year, the company's digital media offerings to consumers - its Rhapsody music service, computer games and streaming video of Nascar races, N.B.A. games and news from CNN and ABC - have grown sharply. Most are sold as subscriptions, at $5 to $10 a month. In 2001, software accounted for roughly 60 percent of RealNetworks' revenue; by the fourth quarter of last year, the software share had fallen to 25 percent. Over the same period, the share of revenue from consumer services more than doubled, to 75 percent.

TODAY, RealNetworks can be thought of as the Internet equivalent of the early cable television networks of decades ago, like MTV or ESPN. And it is much less dependent on software than it was before, and thus less susceptible to being run over by Microsoft. RealNetworks says it will return to profitability in the second half of this year, excluding the legal costs of suing Microsoft, estimated at $3 million a quarter.

March 20, 2004 at 10:50 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home

Get Out of My Namespace

Get Out of My Namespace

By JAMES GLEICK

ou don't own your name. Just ask any John Smith. Then again. . . . .

� The Seattle coffee company known as Starbucks owns its name and, maybe, a little more. It has sued to stop a pair of coffee shops in Shanghai from using the name XINGBAKE. This is the age of globalization, after all. In Chinese, star = xing, and in a way Starbucks = Xingbake. ''We came first,'' Xingbake's general manager said. ''We can't lose.'' His name is Mao.

� An Atlanta music writer known as BILL WYMAN received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing the former Rolling Stones bass player known as Bill Wyman: demanding, that is, that he ''cease and desist'' using his name. In responding, Bill Wyman No. 1 pointed out that Bill Wyman No. 2 had been born William George Perks.

� The German car company known as Dr. Ing. h.c.F. Porsche AG has fought a series of battles to protect the name CARRERA. But another contender is a Swiss village, postal code 7122. ''The village Carrera existed prior to the Porsche trademark,'' Christoph Reuss of Switzerland wrote to Porsche's lawyers. ''Porsche's use of that name constitutes a misappropriation of the good will and reputation developed by the villagers of Carrera.'' He added, for good measure, ''The village emits much less noise and pollution than Porsche Carrera.'' He didn't mention that Jos� Carreras, the opera singer, was embroiled in a name dispute of his own. The car company, meanwhile, also claims trademark ownership of the numerals 911.

� A Canadian businessman known as Jeff Burgar, living in High Prairie, a small town in Alberta, owns lots of names in dot-com territory. He registered J.R.R. Tolkien's name as an Internet domain in 1996 and held on to JRRTOLKIEN.COM until this year, when a panel of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) took it away from him. The name Tolkien -- just the name, as distinct from the prose, stories, characters and ideas -- is big business. Others who claim to own pieces of it -- as a brand and a trademark, either registered or unregistered -- are heirs, publishers and moviemakers; never mind the several thousand individuals worldwide who happen to come by the surname honestly. Burgar, meanwhile, has taken some other names in vain: CELINE DION, ALBERT EINSTEIN, MICHAEL CRICHTON and about 1,500 more. In many of these cases, battles have ensued -- even the ghost of Albert Einstein fought back, via the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Burgar loses most of these cases, but not all. ''It's a kangaroo court,'' he said matter-of-factly. ''They seem to change the rules on the fly.'' Even so, he owns Bruce Springsteen's name, at least on the Internet.

The world is running out of names. The roster of possible names seems almost infinite, but the demand is even greater. With the rise of instantaneous communication, business spreading across the globe and the Internet annihilating geography, conflict is rampant in this realm of language and of intellectual property. Rules are up for grabs. Laws regarding names have never been in such disarray.

People war over names with the passion and righteousness seen in ancient battles for parcels of land. A select few names -- think of them as the pinnacles and hilltops -- develop a tremendous concentration of economic value. The word NIKE is thought by analysts to be worth $7 billion; COCA-COLA is valued at 10 times as much. No wonder the lawyers gird their loins.

Computer science offers a useful term of art: namespace -- a territory within which all names are distinct and unique; no fuzziness allowed. The world has long had namespaces based on geography and other namespaces based on economic niche. You could be BLOOMINGDALE'S as long as you stayed out of New York; you could be FORD as long as you weren't making cars. All the world's rock bands live in a namespace where PRETTY BOY FLOYD and PINK FLOYD and PINK and the 13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS and the 99TH FLOOR ELEVATORS happily co-exist. The Screen Actors Guild manages a formal namespace of its own -- one JULIA ROBERTS per universe. But traditional namespaces are overlapping and melting together.

Certain namespaces have grown dangerously overcrowded. Pharmaceutical names are a special case: a subindustry has emerged to coin them, research them and vet them. The Food and Drug Administration now reviews proposed drug names for possible collisions, and this process is complex and subjective. Rigor may be impossible, and mistakes cause death. METHADONE (for opiate dependence) has been administered in place of METHYLPHENIDATE (for attention-deficit disorder), and TAXOL (a cancer drug) for TAXOTERE (another cancer drug). Doctors fear both look-alike errors and sound-alike errors: ZANTAC/XANAX; VERELAN/VIRILON. Linguists are devising scientific measures of the ''distance'' between drug names. But LAMICTAL and LAMISIL and LUDIOMIL and LOMOTIL are all approved drug names. Meanwhile, of course, drug companies have other worries; they spend millions on market research to make sure their names are both serious and sexy. ROGAINE, the hair-growth treatment, was deliberately chosen to make you think ''regain.''

''Names are perhaps the single-most important issue of corporate communication today,'' said Naseem Javed, founder of a corporate naming company called ABC Namebank International. ''With millions and millions of product names clashing in cyberspace, a name is no longer something people can sit around a kitchen and come up with.'' A company can no longer say, ''We make machines for business and we are international, so we will be INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES.''

''GENERAL MOTORS worked for an industrial giant in the 20's, but it doesn't work today,'' Javed said. ''The loose change is gone -- all those zodiac signs and constellations, GENESIS and PEGASUS, they're all gone. Apples, oranges, pineapples. Look at the newspaper business -- you have thousands of papers, and they're all COURIER or JOURNAL or DISPATCH or POST. These people have a hell of a problem going into cyberspace.''

The desperation of company founders and marketing departments to find new names sometimes brings ludicrous results. To single out some of the worst, a California naming company has created the Shinola Awards; recent ''winners'' -- futuristic, forgettable, pseudo-Latinate, barely pronounceable -- include ACHIEVA, ALTRIA and CRUEX. The Royal Mail of Britain spent millions of pounds to reinvent itself in 2001 as CONSIGNIA -- a name that lasted barely a year before dying under the weight of derision.

Occasionally, though, desperation can lead to brilliance. It is surely not a coincidence that the two spectacular naming triumphs of the cyberworld are coinages verging on nonsense: YAHOO! (never omit the exclamation point) and GOOGLE.

Globalization tears down the walls that divide our collective mental universe. Some walls are geographic; others are just semantic. What is, for example, DOMINO? It depends on the context. Maybe your first thought involved pizza? Or was it sugar? In the software world, Domino is the name of e-mail server software. Elsewhere, it is a record label. And a game. As for DOMINO.COM, it belongs to none of these. As for the trademark, the United States has awarded ownership rights to several hundred contending parties. In a complex world, the simplest words are the most oversubscribed.

One approach to settling name disputes is to get inside our heads and figure out what's there. Litigators tried that in a famous Domino case, pizza v. sugar, employing public-opinion surveyors to find out which of the competing connotations dominated, mentally. Each side managed to produce surveys proving its points; this was done by asking different types of people. Customers buttonholed in Domino's pizza outlets tended to think pizza; housewives reached at home tended to think sugar. (A federal judge finally ruled that the two Dominos could co-exist.) There are six billion of us, but even as individuals, we are mercurial, our brains notoriously in flux. Whether MADONNA evokes the singer or the Virgin might depend on mood or time of day. So might the mental ''distance'' between the drugs ZELDOX and ZOVIRAX and ZEPHREX and ZYPREXA. The law, for better and for worse, insists on mind reading: cases hinge on psychological concepts like distinctiveness and confusion.

Most such battles now play out in the online world. Internet-style name disputes began breaking out in the last decade and became epidemic during the dot-com boom; they are now growing particularly knotty. The Internet is not just a churner of namespaces; it is also a namespace of its own. Navigation around the globe's computer networks relies on the special system of domain names, like COCACOLA.COM. Technically these names are just stand-ins for numbers, Internet Protocol addresses. The Internet's computers perform the conversions behind the scenes: translating, for example, COCACOLA.COM to 129.33.45.163. The mapping of a domain name to a particular address can be changed in a matter of moments; the necessary instructions propagate automatically across the network, under the control of a computer that happens to be situated in Reston, Va. -- a computer known as the primary root server or, less affectionately, the Black Box. The Internet's naming system was designed in an atmosphere of idealism and naivete, by technically minded people with no trademark lawyers on the payroll. Domain names were handed out to anyone who asked, first come first served. The storehouse seemed limitless, after all. This is where Jeff Burgar of High Prairie came in.

''I was working for an Internet service provider, and we had to register a domain name for our own company, and it just struck me that, Gee, this is a very interesting situation,'' he said. ''I looked out, and that's when I discovered that domain names were free. And we had a lot of faith in the Internet and what it could do.'' This was 10 years ago.

Burgar does not make himself easy to find; JRRTOLKIEN.COM and many of his other celebrity domain names are registered to an enterprise called Alberta Hot Rods. (A clerical error, he insisted.) He was wary of talking at all, because he did not want to be accused of the particular sin associated with this business: registering other people's names in the hope of extorting money from them. He denied that he has ever done this. He's just a collector, he said, or a publisher. ''This is basically freedom of the press,'' he said. ''Why can't I publish a Web site about Carmen Electra and call it CARMENELECTRA.COM?

''I really resent it when people accuse me of being a notorious cybersquatter, because I am not,'' he said.

He managed to hold on to the BRUCESPRINGSTEEN.COM domain name thanks to a split ruling by a panel of WIPO arbitrators. He registered it on behalf of the ''Bruce Springsteen Club'' of High Prairie, Alberta -- an organization that, in other ways, seems not to exist. The panel decided that the real Bruce Springsteen, ''the famous, almost legendary, recording artist and composer,'' has some rights to his name but that Burgar was not using it in bad faith.

If he isn't trying to sell them, what does Burgar do with them? Here he was a bit vague: ''The same thing we were going to do with any of the Web sites.'' Is the idea to create a fan site, then? Many celebrity names were first registered not by extortionists but by genuine fans. ''Well, let's see,'' he said sardonically. ''We have GENGHISKHAN.COM registered, and if I put up an information site about him, would you call that a fan site?'' Actually, though, the Genghis Khan information site must be in the nature of a future project. That domain name, like almost all of Burgar's, redirects users to a generic celebrity site he also owns.

efore there was an Internet, Ratan N. Tata of Bombay, chairman of the Tata Group, India's pre-eminent business empire, had no occasion to butt heads with an American pornographer, but he cares about his name and its value. He has controlled Tata Steel, Tata Engineering, Tata Power, Tata Chemicals, Tata Finance, Tata Telecom and Tata Tea, not to mention Tata Sons Ltd. and the Sir Ratan Tata Trust.

Then a New Jerseyan registered the domain name BODACIOUS-TATAS.COM and used it to display what subsequent legal proceedings referred to as ''sexually explicit material.'' The House of Tata went to court, arguing that the Web site was taking ''a cash ride'' on its good name. Tata won an injunction in 1999. This, however, as handed down by the Honorable High Court of Delhi, had no practical effect on the porn site in New Jersey. So the company filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization, demanding the cancellation of the domain name.

The arbitrator's decision has become notorious.

First, he ruled that TATA is an exemplary trademark: ''It is now generally accepted in most countries that well-known marks, particularly those surrounded by an aura of high repute, excellent quality and respectability, deserve wide protection.''

Then he considered the problem of the extra word, BODACIOUS. The problem was whether TATA and BODACIOUS-TATAS were ''confusingly similar'' -- the canonical test of trademark violation. He decided they were: ''The addition of a word like bodacious ['South Midland and Southern U.S. 1. thorough; blatant; unmistakable; 2. remarkable; outstanding; 3. audacious; bold; brazen' / Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, 1989], and the addition of the letter s, does not render the Domain Name less identical or less confusingly similar to a trade or service mark. Indeed, the opposite is true, particularly when one considers most of the meanings attributed to the word bodacious.'' Because of the Internet's ''tremendous reach,'' he ruled, people might well be fooled into thinking that the Tata Group had gone into the pornography business. Domain name canceled.

This caused a mild Internet storm. James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, which tracks many WIPO decisions on name disputes, considers this one an abuse of power. ''I can't imagine that anyone would think that a domain called BODACIOUS-TATAS had anything to do with this industrial giant, or that they would type it in by mistake,'' he said.

The world's czar of domain-name disputes may be a courtly Australian named Francis Gurry, deputy director general of WIPO, who is responsible for many of its various electronic-age activities. He is soft-spoken and unruffled and entirely convincing when he says that he had no idea what ''tatas'' meant. For a czar, his authority is quite circumscribed -- even a bit peculiar, as he is the first to point out. The World Intellectual Property Organization is an international body established by treaty among 180 sovereign states, yet in this one realm it is subordinate to a private corporation in the United States: Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Icann oversees the management of Internet names and addresses -- in other words, the Black Box. It farms out responsibility for registering the domain names to a collection of profit-making companies, more than 100 at last count, all of whom agree to abide by a dispute-resolution procedure drawn up in consultation with WIPO. The nuts and bolts of dispute resolution is farmed out, in turn, to arbitration bodies, principally WIPO.

The first flood of disputes came with the dot-com boom, which meant a quantum change in the nature of the domain name itself. ''I think the correct characterization of it is that it was a spontaneous mutation,'' Gurry said. ''These were technical addresses for a while, and then what caused the mutation was the allowance of commercial activity on the Internet. If you were only using it as a research medium, nobody was going to be more than passingly amused if you were going to be registering McDonald's or Coca-Cola or whatever it might be.''

With commercialization, everything changed. The McDonald's Corporation (and, for that matter, The New York Times Company) cadged their eponymous domain names from individuals who had presciently registered them. Other companies with important trademarks struggled, until Icann and WIPO established their system. Then came a surge of cases in the general category of trademark holder v. cybersquatter, routinely decided in favor of trademark holder. Time Warner won a case involving 108 variations on the theme of Harry Potter. Telia, the Swedish telecommunications giant, tried to win back 204 variations and succeeded with all but one: itelia.org. Such cases seemed fairly easy, to WIPO, at least. The new generation of name disputes is far more troublesome.

In these proceedings, trademark law is the elephant in the room, but trademark laws vary from country to country, and in theory the arbitrators are not supposed to rely on any nation's laws. They use Icann's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, or U.D.R.P. This boils down to a three-part test, each part meant to be straightforward and clear-cut:

The complainant must have rights to the name, or to a name ''identical or confusingly similar.'' The name doesn't actually have to be a registered trademark, but it needs to have been used in commerce, like a brand. Actors, musicians, even authors get protection this way, while politicians, scientists and religious figures do not. (FRANCISGURRY? ''No,'' Gurry said. ''I'm not commercializable, unfortunately. As it exists at the moment, the trademark system is a very materialistic conception. And when you put it on the Internet, it's not necessarily the result that people want.'')

The domain-name holder must be shown to have no legitimate rights to the name. This is not always as simple as it sounds.

The domain-name holder must be using the name in ''bad faith.'' This crucial term is not well defined. In practice, any attempt to get money for the domain name constitutes prima facie evidence of bad faith.

WIPO is trying to broaden domain-name rules to cover problems that lie outside the realm of trademark law. Its rulings apply directly only to Internet domain names, but the issues reach increasingly far, and the most difficult questions are only now beginning to arise, Gurry said. ''It's a problem that's larger than the Internet,'' he added. ''It's a problem of a name having a certain status in a certain locality, and now telecommunications and transportation are such that the name travels beyond the locality. Governments are no longer able to control the movements of persons, goods, capital, ideas, viruses or anything else across frontiers. There are consequences for names and for many other things as well.''

Trouble looms in international names for pharmaceuticals, because the drug companies' interest in proprietary trademarks comes into conflict with a public interest in generic names that patients can recognize wherever they may happen to be. Names based on geography have special problems too. ''They are not really being dealt with,'' he said. ''Country names, city names, towns, geoethnic names. ARAB, EUROPE, AMERICA: should there be any entitlement to these? What about names of indigenous people and tribes? Most have been registered, and the more we stray into the territory of naming systems and geography, the more we realize the illogicality.''

Here are two familiar names of beverages: MANHATTAN and BORDEAUX. Both are geographical names, but their legal status is entirely different, for a technical reason. One of these drinks has qualities derived from the region -- its soil and grapes, specifically -- and one does not. A true Bordeaux must hail from southwest France; you can mix an authentic Manhattan anywhere. Here is another: BUDWEISER. Before this was an American beer, it was a Czech town. ''There is a longstanding dispute,'' Gurry said, ''between the Czechs, who say that you cannot have 'Budweiser' in the Czech Republic, and Budweiser, which has a trademark. You can't buy Budweiser here in Switzerland for that reason.''

There are easy cases and hard cases. An easy case might be MADONNA.COM. The singer Madonna Ciccone won MADONNA.COM from one Dan Parisi, who was running yet another ''adult-entertainment portal,'' even though he pointed out that she was hardly the name's original user. His site had carried the disclaimer ''Not affiliated or endorsed by the Catholic Church, Madonna College, Madonna Hospital or Madonna the singer.'' At the last minute, he tried to transfer the domain name to the Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in Lincoln, Neb., but the arbitrators were unmoved.

But what about Anand Ramnath Mani, a graphic artist in Vancouver, who generally abbreviates his names? He registered ARMANI.COM, bumping into a trademark owned in many countries by Giorgio Armani and his representatives, who then spent years trying to get it away from him. They finally brought WIPO proceedings, pleading that ''every day, all over the world, people which are looking for the site of the famous stylist, finds, with surprise, the site of Mr. Anand Mani in Vancouver'' -- though, in fact, Mani never bothered to put up a Web site. The panel not only rejected the complaint but also rebuked the company for a bad-faith abuse of the process.

To most Americans, CRAZY HORSE is the name of the revered Oglala warrior a k a Ta-Sunko-Witko. In 1992, it also became the name of a malt liquor marketed by the Stroh Brewing Company. The year after that, predictably enough, it also became the name of a national boycott and public education program; eventually the brewers apologized to the Crazy Horse Defense Project, though remnants of the litigation continue to this day. In another namespace, meanwhile, Crazy Horse signifies something altogether different: France's leading nude dance revue and nightclub. When a Parisian buys a Crazy Horse baseball cap, T-shirt, cigarette lighter or dressing gown, Native American tradition doesn't enter into it.

In the academic study of names -- onomastics, as the discipline is called -- it is axiomatic that expanding social units lead to expanding name systems. In tribes and villages, single names were enough; everyone knew who was designated by ULF or OLGA, and there was no need to fight about it. But tribes gave way to clans, cities to nations, and people had to do better: surnames and patronyms; names based on geography and occupation. A half-century ago, Ernst Pulgram wrote in his illustrious ''Theory of Names'' that ''an increase in the complexities of the administrative and social constitution of an ethnic or political group tends to produce, as a rule, an increase in the complexity and rigidity of the onomastic system.'' So here we go again, he might say today. Cyberspace and globalization represent not just new opportunies for fights over names, but a sea change in the scale of modern society. Entities multiply.

''Consider the word apple,'' Pulgram wrote. To the horticulturalist or expert grocer, it hardly occurs: instead we have ''Pippins, Codlins, Reinettes, Baldwins, McIntosh Reds, Biffins, Rome Beauties.'' Now, of course, an Apple is a computer. It's also a record label and holding company for the Beatles. Apple Computer and Apple Corps managed to co-exist for a quarter-century, but now Apple Computer has a music store, and the Beatles' representatives have filed suit. Gurry updates Pulgram this way: ''People go in and out of different contexts, and they use different instruments that decontextualize and recontextualize, and they're here and there and everywhere. Communications and transportation have challenged the contextual basis of naming systems.''

As these conflicts have rattled the legal edifices of intellectual property, the response has been a sort of panic -- a land grab. Trademarks are a case in point. As recently as 1980, the United States registered about 30,000 a year. Last year, the number was 185,182, a jump of nearly 50 percent from just two years before. The vast majority of trademark applications used to be rejected; now the opposite is true. A few of the words and phrases trademarked in the most recent batch this month were DRIVE HARDER, RELAXED LUXURY, MYASSISTANT, A COFFEE SHOP IN YOUR OFFICE, FLEXIBLE THINKER (a Canadian motivational speaker), RINGWRAITH (the Tolkien moviemakers still going strong) and DOING HIS TIME (for ''transportation of families of prison inmates''). Are any of these so special, creative or individual that ownership rights ought to be assigned?

Notorious forms of litigation flow from the overprotection of names. Every small-business owner is burdened by frivolous cease-and-desist letters; sending these is a cottage industry. The Fox News Network was laughed out of court trying to control the use of the words ''fair and balanced''; yet for now, at least, Fox still does own trademark rights in those words, in two categories: television news programs and neckties. The organization that maintains the Dewey Decimal Classification system sued a library-themed hotel for using its numbers -- Room 700.003, for example, dedicated to the performing arts. (The case has been settled.) Pet Friendly of Alabama, maker of rope chew toys, is threatening Pet Friendly Rentals of California. Santa Claus has been trademarked in several hundred ways. None of this serves the public interest. It's wasteful overhead, it's expensive and it's noxious.

Time Warner surely ought to control HARRY-POTTER.COM, having licensed the rights from the wizard's inventor, J.K. Rowling, but just as surely the company is not entitled to every variation on the theme. Let the I-LOVE-HARRY-POTTER Web sites bloom. DaimlerChrysler may own DODGE and VIPER, but others, too, may have legitimate, partial interests in those words, arguably including Brad Bargman of Florida, who originally registered DODGEVIPER.COM and used it to offer advice and discussion for Dodge Viper enthusiasts. (WIPO nevertheless transferred the domain name to the company.)

So Jeff Burgar, accused cybersquatter, speaks for many Internet users when he views Icann and WIPO as defenders of the corporate trademark establishment. ''It's a business,'' he said. ''The arbitration process is geared to take domain names from one party and give them to another'' -- from the have-nots, he means, to the haves. ''The arbitrators are almost all of them attorneys who have a vested interest in looking out for big business or celebrities.''

To cope with the dynamic, entangled, variegated nature of our information-governed world, perhaps the law just needs to relax -- loosen the cords, instead of tightening them. A system based on property rights in names may be the wrong approach. The principle people really care about is authenticity and truthfulness. The law needs to prevent miscreants from pretending to be people they're not or from passing off spurious products -- but that is all. BODACIOUS-TATAS.COM may be unsavory, but it was not fooling anyone; it was not trying to impersonate the House of Tata; its wares were exactly as advertised.

Namespaces will collide. Let them.

James Gleick writes frequently for the magazine on technology. He is the author, most recently, of ''Isaac Newton.''

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

March 20, 2004 at 10:47 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (55) | Top of page | Blog Home

Spoofed Fleet Bank email which leads you to a duplicate of the Fleet Bank Online home page which captures your account log in data...

Fleet HomeLink Online Banking and Investing Email

This spoof Fleet Bank email (see image below) leads the ususpecting recipient to a near precise copy of the Fleet HomeLink Online Banking home page, but which is hosted in someone else's web space (see image below).

The bogus page does not employ any tactics to conceal its URL - http://netbsd.torun.org.pl/~ice/cgi-bin/webscr/fleethomelink/data/ - which resolves to Polish web space.

If you have received this email, please remember that it is very common for these email scams to be redistributed at a later date with only slightly different content or the same but with the fake page(s) hosted by a different provider. Also, once you have received one of these hoaxes, it is also common place to receive at least another one and usually a day or two after the first, although not necessarily from the same apparent sender.

The Spoof Email ...

March 20, 2004 at 10:34 PM in Online crime | Permalink | TrackBack (44) | Top of page | Blog Home

Coming Soon: TypeKey Authentication Services

This is a step forward for internet computing. Its along the same lines as the benefit which your homegrown Chevrolet gets from Formula 1 Racing development. This is a real step forward in blogging, which provides a centralised authentication authority to provide permission to comment in a blog.

But where it gets interesting is that same authority is available for use in commercial authentication also. The concept is bang on, and one which really only Microsoft have promoted with their Passport product ... mmmm do I see another Microsoft purchase impending, which would fit niley with the research work they are doing on mywallop.

TypeKey

The basics about TypeKey:
TypeKey is a free, open system providing a central identity that anyone can use to log in and post comments on blogs and other web sites.

Why should I use TypeKey?
TypeKey helps ensure that people who comment on a site have a verified identity, keeping conversations on track and helping to prevent abusive or offensive content (comment spam) from being posted. Sites that enable TypeKey have better accountability for the content that's being published.

As a TypeKey user, you get your own free TypeKey Profile Page, displaying only the information you choose to share. Those who are interested in finding out more about the person behind the comments on a site can visit the identity page to see what information is publicly available. You can even publish a TypeKey Profile Page while remaining completely anonymous.

Why should I enable TypeKey comment registration on my weblog?
Enabling TypeKey on your site lets you control who can post comments while only requiring a single sign-in for your commenters. A lower barrier to comment registration means your commenters won't encounter any barriers while expressing themselves. And all weblog comments and other data still live on your server.

Plus, TypeKey gives weblog authors more control over managing comments that have been posted, prevents comment spamming (junk comments) and prohibits unauthorized comments. This is accomplished by requiring commenters to log in with a verified account before they can post, and by offering weblog authors the power to approve or ban a commenter's ability to post on the site.

What about my privacy?
We're committed to providing a service that respects user privacy. Therefore, we will not publish information that you have not chosen to make public, nor will we share your information without your explicit permission. We're not in the business of selling email addresses, and we give users the option to choose whether they'd like to send their email address to the sites which they are commenting on.

Where can I use my TypeKey identity?
We expect that you'll be able to use your TypeKey login to post comments on thousands of weblogs when Movable Type 3.0 is available later this Spring. And TypeKey will work with TypePad weblogs as well as other tools and services soon after that.

How much does it cost?
TypeKey is free to use for both personal weblog authors and commenters, and only requires registration.

Who runs TypeKey? Is it safe?
TypeKey is a service of Six Apart. We're a well-established weblog software company, with hundreds of thousands of users and offices in the U.S. and Japan. We're committed to making sure TypeKey is reliable, safe, and secure, and we've made sure our privacy policy is as protective as you'd expect: We don't want to send junk mail to you any more than you want to receive it.

TypeKey never shares your password information with site owners, and comment information is only retained on the site you've commented on, not on the TypeKey service. TypeKey is a service for authentication and, in the case of comment registration, we leave it up to the weblog owners to decide who can post to their own weblogs.

Can I use this in my own web application?
We'll be providing documentation on how to integrate TypeKey authentication into your own applications shortly after the service launches. At that point, there will also be information about what is required to make use of TypeKey services in commercial applications.

March 20, 2004 at 07:14 PM in @ My Views @, My Blog | Permalink | TrackBack (28) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 18, 2004

Comment spam

Unfortunately comment spam got the better of the site, and I have turned off comments. It started slowly a few weeks ago, with one every 2 or 3 days, then 1 a day, then 4 day. Today i got 13, and since I deleted them I got another four imemdiately, so my sense is this was about to take off. I know others have had their ISP close down their blog due to network traffic associated with comment spam, and I see why.

MT v3 is coming soon, and rather than go with the interim 2.661 I am awaiting that, which has built in protection, and then I will will turn comments back on.

March 18, 2004 at 10:13 AM in My Blog | Permalink | TrackBack (26) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 17, 2004

AOL Growth Forecast Draws Skepticism

AOL Growth Forecast Draws Skepticism (TechNews.com)

By David A. Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 17, 2004; Page E01
America Online has projected that its subscriber base will grow by about 20 percent, or 6.4 million users, over the next four years, a plan that some industry experts and Wall Street analysts said is overly optimistic given the Internet firm has lost members for five straight quarters.

The Dulles-based firm initially had estimated that it would grow in the United States from 26.6 million subscribers to its flagship product and other U.S. services to 33 million users by the end of 2007, according to internal company projections. Those numbers have since been revised downward to about 30 million, or an additional 3.4 million users.

To achieve rapid growth, AOL had been counting on signing up more than 11 million new bring-your-own-access (BYOA) subscribers. These computer users would get high-speed Internet access from a cable or telephone firm, and also pay $14.95-a-month to keep their America Online accounts. AOL has 3 million such users now, and had estimated that the BYOA figure would grow to 14.5 million by 2007, a compound annual growth rate of 48.2 percent, according to projections contained in an internal company document used for business planning.

AOL also hoped to build its subscriber base by selling Internet access under other brand names. The newest, Netscape, is a low-cost, $9.95 per month dial-up service AOL launched this year. America Online is counting on signing up roughly 3 million new Netscape customers in the growing low-cost segment by 2007, according to recent projections.

Meeting targets for growth, and holding onto more of its high-speed and dial-up users, are important goals for America Online, which derives most of its revenue from monthly subscription fees. If AOL is unable to regain momentum, it could be forced to slash spending further, which may aggravate the problem of subscriber drain.

Some analysts said AOL could be headed for disappointment trying to achieve that growth without massive price cuts, something the firm has resisted.

"I'm dubious," said David Card, an analyst with Jupiter Research.

"It is overly optimistic," said Youssef Squali, an analyst with First Albany Corp. "I think the rate of loss is going to accelerate. The bleeding will continue."

AOL declined comment on its projections. In its annual report filed this week, AOL parent company Time Warner warned of the adverse impact on AOL if its new efforts to win subscribers are unsuccessful.

The company's focus on its bring-your-own-access service is the centerpiece of chief executive Jonathan F. Miller's strategy for the company. Miller has said that while AOL grew up in a dial-up world, the shrinking of that sector and changes in technology point to a future based on AOL providing top-notch content, including music and video, that appeals to customers who buy their high-speed Internet access from somebody else.

AOL is beginning to show traction that supports Miller's view. While its dial-up base was eroding, America Online added 1.2 million bring-your-own-access subscribers last year. But a number of analysts said the subscriber numbers America Online had projected in the high-speed sector would mean that roughly half of all households that add high-speed Internet connections would also have to elect to stick with AOL.

"These numbers don't jive," said Tim Horan, an analyst with CIBC World Markets. "There is no way."

Meanwhile, AOL's $23.90 per month flagship dial-up business continues losing customers to faster and cheaper competitors. While the firm lost 800,000 dial-up users last quarter alone, AOL had projected that the losses will slow to about 1.3 million annually for the next several years.

Jessica Reif Cohen, an analyst with Merrill Lynch, said that AOL might surprise people by attaining some of its aggressive subscriber targets, even though her own estimates differ.

"They are spending a lot of money and making a big effort. They could be right. It is not insane," Cohen said. "So many things can happen over the next few years. What if new content develops that seems compelling? There are a lot of, 'What ifs?' I don't know. One could say it is possible. A little on the aggressive side, but possible."

Numerous Wall Street and industry analysts said AOL's projections look too rosy, given that AOL lost 2.2 million subscribers last year alone.

Jed Kolko, vice president of Forrester Research, said his projections call for AOL, and other firms with dial-up subscribers, to lose about half of those users by 2007. For AOL, that would mean a decline from 21 million dial-up users to about 10.5 million. Internal company documents had projected that AOL would have about 16.2 million dial-up users in 2007.

Analysts said one way AOL might be able to increase its high-speed business more quickly is to forge marketing partnerships with cable or telephone firms. Microsoft's MSN subsidiary recently struck that type of partnership with Verizon. AOL last week announced an agreement with Covad Communications Group that would make it easier for subscribers to stick with AOL and sign up for a high-speed connection at the same time.

Thus far, though, such big-time partnerships have been slow to materialize, as growing cable firms and telephone firms have resisted sharing revenue with the nation's biggest Internet service. AOL has even been unable to persuade Time Warner Cable to market AOL as a primary part of its high-speed Internet service, even though both are part of the same giant media company.

In recent months, AOL pulled the plug on its own branded $54.95-a-month high-speed Internet service. That marketing effort was aimed at selling users high-speed access, along with America Online content and e-mail addresses, through one-stop shopping, but it didn't find enough takers.

Still going is a marketing partnership with Wal-Mart, the nation's biggest retailer. After giving away millions of free disks in Wal-Mart stores across the country, AOL's Wal-Mart Connect service has about 500,000 customers; America Online projected it will grow modestly in the years ahead, according to internal AOL documents. Meanwhile, its CompuServe brand, with about 1.2 million users, will shrink to 400,000 by 2007, according to projections.

Some analysts pointed out that America Online has a powerful marketing machine, plenty of cash and a stronger ability to increase its subscriber base than is generally recognized. They noted that one-time rival Microsoft has given up on the Internet access business and that AOL has a proven ability to continually sign up new dial-up subscribers.

"You have to take it with a grain of salt," Oppenheimer analyst Peter Mirsky said of AOL's internal projections. "I'm not willing to bet against AOL. They were supposed to be dead several times over. The likelihood that they could remodel themselves as a differentiated product in this space is something I would not want to dismiss."

March 17, 2004 at 09:38 AM in Business Models | Permalink | TrackBack (21) | Top of page | Blog Home

Experts Fear 'PhatBot' Trojan Could Lead to New Wave of Spam or Denial-of-Service Attacks

Hackers Embrace P2P Concept (TechNews.com)

Hackers Embrace P2P Concept

By Brian Krebs
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 17, 2004; 6:23 AM
Computer security experts in the private sector and U.S. government are monitoring the emergence of a new, highly sophisticated hacker tool that uses the same peer-to-peer (P2P) networking abilities that power controversial file-sharing networks like Kazaa and BearShare.

By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system have already been infected worldwide. The tool, a program that security researchers have dubbed "Phatbot," allows its authors to gain control over computers and link them into P2P networks that can be used to send large amounts of spam e-mail messages or to flood Web sites with data in an attempt to knock them offline.

The new hacker threat caught the attention of cyber-security officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, prompting the agency to send an alert last week to a select group of computer security experts. In the alert, the agency warned that Phatbot snoops for passwords on infected computers and tries to disable firewall and antivirus software.

A copy of the DHS alert was made available to washingtonpost.com by two sources at different companies who asked that their identities not be used because they did not want to risk losing access to future government alerts. Officials at the department and US-CERT -- a government-funded cyber-security monitoring agency -- confirmed that the message was genuine.

Phatbot is "a virtual Swiss Army knife of attack software," said Vincent Weafer, senior director of security response at Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec Corp.

Joe Stewart, a researcher at the Chicago-based security firm Lurhq, has catalogued Phatbot's many capabilities in an online posting. Those capabilities include: the "ability to polymorph on install in an attempt to evade antivirus signatures as it spreads from system to system"; "steal AOL account logins and passwords"; "harvest emails from the web for spam purposes" and "sniff [Internet] network traffic for Paypal cookies."

Phatbot is a kind of "Trojan horse," a type of program named after the legendary stealth attack because it let hackers take quiet control of unsecured computers. Security firms have catalogued hundreds if not thousands of Trojan horse programs in recent years, but Phatbot has raised substantial concern because it represents a leap-forward in its sophistication and is proving much harder for law enforcement authorities and antivirus companies to eliminate.

Like traditional Trojan horse programs, Phatbot infects a computer through one of several routes, such as through security flaws in Microsoft's Windows operating system or through "backdoors" installed on machines by the recent "Mydoom" and "Bagle" Internet worms.

But because Phatbot links infected computers into a larger network, hackers can issue orders to the infected machines through many routes, and cyber-security officials can only effectively shut down a Phatbot attack if they track down every infected computer.

"The concern here is that the peer-to-peer like characteristics of these 'bot networks may make them more resilient and more difficult to shut down," said a cyber-security official at the Department of Homeland Security who asked not be identified because the agency is still considering whether to issue a more public alert about Phatbot.

"With these P2P Trojan networks, even if you take down half of the affected machines, the rest of the network continues to work just fine," said Mikko Hypponen, director of F-Secure, an antivirus software company based in Finland.

Most major antivirus products detect Phatbot, but as soon as the Trojan infects computers it disables many antivirus and firewall software tools.

Roger Lawson, director of computing and information technology at the University of Vermont in Burlington, said he quarantined more than 200 computers -- more than 5 percent of the machines on the school's network -- because of Phatbot infestations. None of the school's antivirus programs detected the Trojan, and attempts to delete it caused Phatbot to recreate and restart itself, he said.

Phatbot's ability to disable computer security software means that the estimated number of infected computers could rise to as high as "several hundred thousand," said F-Secure's Hypponen.

A few computer experts said the rate of infection is much higher.

Igor Ybema, a network administrator at the University of Twente in Enschede in The Netherlands, put the number between 1 million and 2 million computers. His conclusion was based on a Phatbot command that forces infected computers to test their Internet connection speed by sending a file to one of 22 specifically selected Web servers around the world -- one of them at Twente.

He said Twente began monitoring traffic from computers running the tests in mid-February, about the time that rival hacker gangs began an online turf war that resulted in a volley of new worms like Bagle and "Netsky." By early last week, Ybema said he was tracking an average of 200,000 to 300,000 Internet addresses running the speed test every day. Ybema believes such traffic indicates that attackers who have previously relied on less advanced remote-access Trojans are now using Phatbot.

The majority of the infections appeared to come from home user broadband connections and from colleges and universities in the United States and the Asia-Pacific region, he said.

Earlier this month, computer network engineers at University of California, Santa Cruz monitored the same type of speed testing traffic as Twente's Ybema observed. Mark Boolootian, the network engineer who discovered the activity, said one reason infected computers may be conducting the speed tests is to give Phatbot authors an idea of which infected computers would be the fastest in sending out large amounts of spam or data aimed at overwhelming a major Web site.

Security experts are divided on whether a full-force phatbot attack will result in ruin or simply a ruinous headache.

"If there are indeed hundreds of thousands of computers infected with Phatbot, U.S. e-commerce is in serious threat of being massively attacked by whoever owns these networks," said Russ Cooper, a chief scientist at Herndon, Va.-based TruSecure Corp.

There are several incidents in the past several years that show how hackers used multiple ensnared computers to cause damage. In February 2000, a Canadian juvenile commandeered high-speed computers at University of California, Santa Barbara to knock Amazon, eBay, CNN.com, and a host of other Web sites off-line for hours. In October 2002, hackers used an army of commandeered computers to assault the 13 root servers that serve as the roadmap for Internet traffic.

But Lurhq's Stewart said his analysis of Phatbot indicates that the Trojan is designed to link computers into groups no larger than 50 computers, which would significantly limit the Trojan's effectiveness as a denial-of-service tool.

As a result, he said, Phatbot infected-PCs will more likely be used as highly effective spamming machines.

washingtonpost.com Staff Writer David McGuire contributed to this article.

March 17, 2004 at 09:11 AM in Online crime | Permalink | TrackBack (20) | Top of page | Blog Home

Apple Sells 50 Million Songs Over Internet

Yahoo! News - Apple Sells 50 Million Songs Over Internet

Mon Mar 15,10:23 PM

By Caroline Humer
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Computer Inc. said on Monday it has sold 50 million songs over the Internet in the 11 months since it launched its iTunes Music Store, putting it at least halfway toward its goal for the year.

Apple, which charges 99 cents a song, said it is currently selling 2.5 million songs per week, which would translate into 130 million songs per year, or about $130 million in annual revenue.

It's still not clear if Apple will meet its goal of 100 million songs downloaded during the first year of the new service. At the current rate, Apple will likely sell about 18 million more songs before the April 28 deadline, putting it at the 68 million mark.

But the Cupertino, California-based company said that the 50 million songs excluded an undisclosed number of songs redeemed through a PepsiCo. Inc. promotion to give away 100 million free songs. Not all of the songs given away are expected to actually be downloaded, or redeemed.

Rob Schoeben, vice president of applications marketing at Apple, declined to predict how many songs iTunes customers will have downloaded for its one-year anniversary in April but said that it has continued to steadily increase. For instance, the download rate was about 1.5 million songs per week in December.

"We're not predicting where we'll be on April 28 but the numbers are very strong," Schoeben said.

ALL EYES ON IPODS

While the sale of songs is a positive for the company and the industry, analysts noted it is actually the music store's effect on Apple's iPod digital music player, more than the service itself, that has helped the company's revenues and earnings.

The company sold 730,000 iPods in the December quarter and in February said it had 100,000 orders for its new iPod mini.

Apple, known for its Macintosh (news - web sites) computers, launched its iTunes music store for Mac users in April 2003. It expanded the service to personal computer users running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system -- a pool vastly larger than users running Apple's own operating system -- in October 2003.

Downloads of iTunes songs do not translate directly to the bottom line because of the costs of paying royalties to musicians and music companies, analysts have said. In 2003, Apple had revenues of $6.21 billion and earned 20 cents per share.

First Albany Corp. analyst Joel Wagonfeld said in a recent research note that he does not expect the store to be profitable for 12 to 18 months.

The primary financial benefit of the music store for Apple is its ability to drive sales of the iPod digital music player, said Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, a high-tech research consulting company.

In the fourth quarter, the iPod digital music player accounted for about 13 percent of overall sales.

"It's a razor-razorblade scenario," Bajarin said, in which the songs are the low-cost razors and the iPods represent the lucrative blades. "In Apple's case, the blades drive the selling of the razors."

That's important because the iPods are highly profitable for the company and sell for $249 to $500. "Running the store at break-even or even at a minimal loss, is a no-brainer," he said.

Apple shares fell $1.17, or nearly 4.3 percent, to $26.39 Monday on the Nasdaq.

March 17, 2004 at 08:34 AM in Business Models | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home

Online Currency Trade Booms at FX Multi-Bank Sites

Yahoo! News - Online Currency Trade Booms at FX Multi-Bank Sites

Mon Mar 15, 3:37 PM

By Gertrude Chavez
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Internet-based foreign exchange trading platforms called "multi-bank sites," which offer prices from a variety of dealers, are spearheading a boom in online currency trading, analysts said.

These sites are flourishing, propelled by corporations' frenzied pursuit of electronic trading across stock, bond, commodity and currency markets.

Market participants agree business can only get better for the online multi-bank systems, though most trading in the $1.2 trillion a day currency markets is still conducted by single bank systems or computerized inter-bank dealing systems like those provided by EBS and Reuters (RTR.L).

Total Internet-based currency trading volume exceeded market expectations in 2003, jumping 135 percent to $8 trillion last year from about $3.7 trillion in 2002, according to a survey by research firm Greenwich Associates in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Among the multi-bank platforms, the Greenwich survey said, growth in volume rose to 60 percent last year after a 30 percent expansion in 2002.

"The increase in online volume came from the biggest users of electronic FX globally, those who trade $10 billion or over. Large users who have already been online for a year or two are piling into this more aggressively," said London-based Peter D'Amario, a principal at Greenwich Associates.

Still the $8 trillion traded on Internet platforms in 2003 represented just 39 percent of those institutions that deal in foreign exchange, leaving 60 percent of the market untapped.

Quite a few corporations still prefer to deal with just one bank. In fact, demand for single-bank sites, or those systems that allow clients to view prices and trade with only one bank, also showed a steep increase, expanding by just under 50 percent last year, after seeing 20 percent growth in 2002.

Examples of single bank systems are provided by Deutsche Bank, CitiFX and UBS.

"Some customers feel that single bank sites do a better job of integrating their full needs. And for a lot of these users, simplifying, cutting costs and errors is really what this game is all about," said D'Amario.

LEADING MULTI-BANK PROVIDERS

FXConnect, owned by State Street Corp in Boston, leads the pack of online multi-bank providers, with estimated volume of between $18 and $20 billion a day, according to research advisory firm ClientKnowledge in London.

FXall, backed by a consortium of some of the biggest banks in the industry, has about $15 billion in daily volume, said ClientKnowledge.

Currenex, whose investors include The Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies and Barclays Capital, is doing about $3.5 billion in volume, while the privately-funded HotspotFX, which deals in pure spot transactions, has about $3.5 billion a day, according to the London research company.

These multi-bank Web sites cater to the entire wholesale or institutional sector, such as hedge funds, mutual funds and corporations seeking to hedge their currency exposure.

The institutional sector's entire volume amounted to an average of around $340 billion per day in 2003, said ClientKnowledge, or roughly 28 percent of the $1.2 trillion per day foreign exchange market.

The interbank dealer market, dominated by Reuters and EBS, represents about 40 to 50 percent of daily turnover, or about $600 billion of the $1.2 trillion per day currency business.

Participants in the interbank market execute transactions across electronic messaging or broking systems which match buyers and sellers.

"All of these multi-bank providers are now paying their way. They have enough revenue to cover their costs and systems," said Justyn Trenner, principal and chief executive officer of ClientKnowledge.

But Trenner said multi-bank providers just meet about 10 percent of the institutional market's foreign exchange needs. "There's definitely further room to grow, although there is a natural ceiling for growth. But that ceiling is still a long way off," he said.

March 17, 2004 at 08:31 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

Net Crime Gangs Try to Cash in on UK Horse Festival

Yahoo! News - Net Crime Gangs Try to Cash in on UK Horse Festival

Tue Mar 16, 3:27 PM

By Paul Majendie and Bernhard Warner
CHELTENHAM, England (Reuters) - Britain's William Hill (WMH.L) is the latest victim of a cyber extortion wave targeting gambling Web sites, this time hitting the bookmaker on the eve of this week's Cheltenham horse race festival.

Britain's second-biggest betting chain was hit by a barrage of data which disrupted its gambling Web site on March 11.

"We were targeted, but were able to take the appropriate action to minimize the nature of the disruption," Graham Sharpe, a William Hill spokesman said on Tuesday.

Police and computer security experts say organized crime is behind the growing crime wave, which typically intensifies in the days leading up to the biggest sports events of the year.

The culprits targeted a variety of sites before American football's Super Bowl in January, each time demanding money or threatening to take out the sites with a crippling data barrage.

And gambling sites have been on red alert with Tuesday's start of the three-day Cheltenham horse festival, kicking off one of Britain's biggest betting weeks of the year.

Police call it the age-old protection racket with a cyber twist. And, the crime wave is getting worse, authorities said.

"The level of intensity is higher than any we've seen before. They are increasing the force and frequency and sophistication in these attacks," said Richard Starnes, director of incident response for Cable & Wireless (CW.L), one of the largest Internet service providers (ISPs) in Britain.

Many ISPs are working with victimized sites and law enforcement to track down the culprits as larger and larger sites have been taken out for longer periods, experts said.

Both police and security experts believe gangs in Eastern Europe and Russia could be behind some of the attacks.

DEMAND FOR CASH

William Hill's Sharpe added that after last week's attack the company received an email the following day demanding $10,000 to avoid a repeat.

"We had and continue to have no intention of dealing with demands made by blackmailers," he said.

He added the extortion demand made no mention of the Cheltenham festival as a reason for the attack. He added, to his knowledge, it was the first time the site was hit.

The race festival attracts big-hitting gamblers who fearlessly take on the bookmakers with bundles of cash. On the course alone, two million pounds are bet on every race.

On the Net, betting fever is just as high. Online betting has been an important new growth area for high street gambling firms such as William Hill and Ladbrokes (HG.L), plus a wave of new dot-coms that have emerged to pounce on the market.

Betfair.com, one of the world's largest online gambling operations, takes in more than 50 million pounds per week in betting volume. "This is probably our biggest week," spokesman Hugh Taggart said of the meeting, which starts on Tuesday.

A sustained outage could cripple a young betting site's business operation for the year, and deflate a multi-billion-pound business sector still trying to establish the public's trust.

"We are aware of the threat to the online industry," said Betfair spokesman Taggart. "At such a critical moment, we are taking every precaution to ensure the security of the site and the security of customers' funds."

The crime wave, which dates back at least three years, has yet to yield any arrests.

However, police see a ray of hope. Cyber extortion attempts, once the industry's dirty little secret, are now being reported to the police with greater frequency and thus increase the odds of arrests.

March 17, 2004 at 08:29 AM in Online crime | Permalink | TrackBack (68) | Top of page | Blog Home

U.S. Interior Dept. Unplugged from Internet - Again

Yahoo! News - U.S. Interior Dept. Unplugged from Internet - Again

Tue Mar 16, 2:28 PM
By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Wide swaths of the U.S. Interior Department were taken off the Internet again on Tuesday after a federal judge concluded that the agency still has not fixed security holes that threaten payments owed to American Indians.

It was the third such shutdown for the Interior Department since 2001, when an investigator found that hackers could easily steal money from a system that allocates energy and mineral royalties to 300,000 Indians for use of their land.

U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said the system still remained vulnerable despite Interior's assurances to the contrary, and the agency could not be trusted to fix the problem by itself.

"The feigned indignance of Interior aside, there is simply no other alternative. Interior brought this on themselves," Lamberth wrote in an opinion signed on Monday.

The Interior Department said the order "is a new frontier in this court's efforts to run the operations of executive branch agencies."

"We are working closely with the Department of Justice (news - web sites) to quickly respond to this order in the appropriate legal venue," the agency said in a faxed statement.

Lamberth, who serves in Washington, ordered Interior to pull all its computer systems offline except for those involved in vital police and fire services.

Bureaus that oversee national parks and provide geological information can also remain online as they have no relation to the trust data, he said.

Divisions that oversee wildlife management, oil and gas royalty payments and Indian affairs were offline Tuesday. Employees are unable to access the Web or send e-mail to those outside the agency, spokesman Dan DuBray said.

The order also shuts down a program that provides Internet access to schools on Indian reservations, the agency said.

Interior could bring its systems back online if an independent reviewer certified them as secure and monitored them on a monthly basis, Lamberth said.

The Interior Department consistently attracts failing computer-security grades from congressional reviewers.

The blackout stems from a class-action lawsuit between the agency and Indians who allege that it has mismanaged trust accounts set up in the late 19th century to handle proceeds from oil, gas and minerals extracted from Indian lands.

Lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell, a member of Montana's Blackfeet tribe, charges that the government has lost track of billions of dollars and wants the judge to transfer control of the accounts to a court-ordered receiver.

Working with a court-appointed overseer, the agency had been able to bring nearly all of its systems back online within a year after Lamberth ordered them unplugged in 2001. But Lamberth ordered some systems offline again in July 2003 after a dispute between the agency and the overseer.

March 17, 2004 at 08:27 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (5) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 16, 2004

Testing Begins & More Info about 3.0

This from Movable Type. I am looking forward to V3.0 which will have the Typepad functionality, and strong comment configuration to deal with comment spam.

movabletype.org V3.0

03.16.2004
We're taking our first steps towards the release of Movable Type 3.0. The pre-beta version has just finished its initial two rounds of alpha testing and we're now opening the testing to a larger audience (we've picked 300 random addresses from those who applied and will be adding more as time progresses).
The testing that we're conducting will not only help ensure a stable final release but will also give us an opportunity to receive feedback on feature implementation from both users and developers.

March 16, 2004 at 08:20 AM in My Blog | Permalink | TrackBack (21) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 15, 2004

Estimating RSS Readership: One Suggestion

An important piece from Amy's blog, and it identifies the missing MIS that RSS feeds will require to provide evidence of viability and business casing, before business will ever get serious about RSS.

Estimating RSS Readership: One Suggestion: Contentious Weblog

RSS feeds are undoubtedly becoming an increasingly popular way for people to keep up with what's new online. But just how popular are they becoming? That's an important and tricky question.
Some recent articles and weblog entries have been touting the popularity of RSS feeds. These are great, and I'm happy to see them. However, I think there's an important part of the puzzle missing from this enthusiasm: How might publishers figure out how many people are really accessing their content via RSS?
I think we need a statistical guideline that could help publishers make a rough estimate of RSS readership: average polling interval. So far, I haven't seen anything quite like this, and it's possible this may not be a good idea, but I suspect it might help.

March 15, 2004 at 08:08 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (44) | Top of page | Blog Home

RSS tipping point

Chad Dickerson: March 09, 2004 Archives

Ever since we began publishing RSS feeds at InfoWorld, the requests for our home page had always exceeded requests for our Top News RSS feed. Not any more. Over the past several weeks, requests for InfoWorld's Top News RSS feed have regularly exceeded the requests for our home page. This has been going on long enough now that we're certain that it's permanent. I think it's a big deal.

During the business day, we track hour-to-hour performance (using a combination of shell scripts and Analog) and in any given hour, about 8 of our top 10 most requested files are RSS files. The actual numbers are proprietary, of course, but I can say that we have seen significant growth in overall RSS requests just in the past several weeks.

Feels like a tipping point to me.

(I realize that the characteristics of RSS aggregators' requests are different than those initiated by regular users browsing your site -- aggregators behave more like robots or spiders. But I still think this is significant.)

March 15, 2004 at 07:46 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (25) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 14, 2004

Watch Out! X-Malware Is Real

A new and intriguing attack approach, which is like a virus in some respects, but much more dangerous, because it is able to take a supposedly safe XML route into/ through an organisation, and take advantage of improperly designed implementations.

Forrester Research: Watch Out! X-Malware Is Real

XML-borne attacks on Web services and XML endpoints have not as yet made headline news, but the potential for such attacks is real. As the complexity of XML standards and deployments grows, a few early vulnerabilities and theoretical attack methods could turn into widespread problems. Although public XML endpoints are most at risk and the level of risk is not yet clearly understood, all XML endpoints are potentially at risk (including Web services, EDI over XML, XML embedded in an application). Education is the first step, followed by construction of a test suite of XML attacks. If applications fail the test suite, an XML security gateway can provide important protection.

March 14, 2004 at 01:15 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (48) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 13, 2004

Easier Internet Wiretaps Sought

Yahoo! News - Easier Internet Wiretaps Sought

Sat Mar 13,12:00 AM ETAdd Technology - washingtonpost.com to My Yahoo!

By Dan Eggen and Jonathan Krim, Washington Post Staff Writers
The Justice Department (news - web sites) wants to significantly expand the government's ability to monitor online traffic, proposing that providers of high-speed Internet service should be forced to grant easier access for FBI (news - web sites) wiretaps and other electronic surveillance, according to documents and government officials.

A petition filed this week with the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) also suggests that consumers should be required to foot the bill.

Law enforcement agencies have been increasingly concerned that fast-growing telephone service over the Internet could be a way for terrorists and criminals to evade surveillance. But the petition also moves beyond Internet telephony, leading several technology experts and privacy advocates yesterday to warn that many types of online communication, including instant messages and visits to Web sites, could be covered.

The proposal by the Justice Department, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration could require extensive retooling of existing broadband networks and could impose significant costs, the experts said. Privacy advocates also argue that there are not enough safeguards to prevent the government from intercepting data from innocent users.

Justice Department lawyers argue in a 75-page FCC (news - web sites) petition that Internet broadband and online telephone providers should be treated the same as traditional telephone companies, which are required by law to provide access for wiretaps and other monitoring of voice communications. The law enforcement agencies complain that many providers do not comply with existing wiretap rules and that rapidly changing technology is limiting the government's ability to track terrorists and other threats.

They are asking the FCC to curtail its usual review process to rapidly implement the proposed changes. The FBI views the petition as narrowly crafted and aimed only at making sure that terrorist and criminal suspects are not able to evade monitoring because of the type of telephone communications they use, according to a federal law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"Lawfully-authorized electronic surveillance is an invaluable and necessary tool for federal, state and local law enforcement in their fight against criminals, terrorists, and spies," the petition said, adding that "the importance and the urgency of this task cannot be overstated" because "electronic surveillance is being compromised today."

But privacy and technology experts said the proposal is overly broad and raises serious privacy and business concerns. James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a public interest group, said the FBI is attempting to dictate how the Internet should be engineered to permit whatever level of surveillance law enforcement deems necessary.

"The breadth of what they are asking for is a little breathtaking," Dempsey said. "The question is, how deeply should the government be able to control the design of the Internet? . . . If you want to bring the economy to a halt, put the FBI in charge of deploying new Internet and communications services."

Jeffrey Citron, chief executive of Internet phone provider Vonage Inc., said the FBI is overreaching. He said that he and other providers cooperate fully with law enforcement, and that if the FBI has ongoing concerns, it should strive to change the law governing wiretaps.

The FCC is in the midst of a wide-ranging review of how to regulate the fledgling Internet telephone industry. Chairman Michael K. Powell, responding to complaints from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, said last month that the FCC will also pursue a separate review of wiretapping rules.

The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), enacted in 1994, required telecommunications companies to rewire their networks so police could have access for wiretaps and other surveillance measures. But law enforcement officials and privacy advocates have argued fiercely in recent years about whether, and to what extent, the law should apply to such newer-generation technologies as Internet telephone and broadband services.

The Justice proposal asserts that "CALEA was intended to protect the capacity of law enforcement to carry out authorized surveillance in the face of technological change, and CALEA contains no exemption for telephony services provided through broadband access."

Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer and former general counsel at the National Security Agency, said the petition ignores the intent and letter of the CALEA law, which specifically exempts "persons or entities insofar as they are engaged in providing information services." The Justice Department and FBI argue that Congress nine years ago had in mind simple data-storage services, and did not envision the kind of Internet-based communications technologies available today.

The problem the FBI faces is that it cannot identify and break down information that travels as packets of data over the Internet. Phone calls placed over the Internet are changed from voice signals into data packets that look much like other data packets that contain e-mail or instructions for browsing the Internet.

CALEA does not require telecommunications providers to break down and identify which is which, or to decode data that might be encrypted. The FBI wants Internet providers to be forced to do so, experts said.

Justice and FBI lawyers also asked the FCC to "permit carriers to have the option to recover some or all of their CALEA implementation costs from their customers." The petition argues that the actual costs to individual customers would be minimal, although no estimates are provided.

Internet service providers yesterday reacted with caution. Many said they had not yet studied the FBI petition, and want to be viewed as cooperating with law enforcement whenever possible.

David Baker, vice president for public policy at Internet provider EarthLink Inc. in Atlanta, said the FBI appears to be going beyond concerns over voice communications technology on the Internet and is instead "seeking to apply CALEA to all information services."

March 13, 2004 at 09:39 AM in Online crime | Permalink | TrackBack (25) | Top of page | Blog Home

Spreading the domain beyond English Lands

Times Online - Industry sectors

By Nic Hopkins

IF THE internet had a centre of gravity, it would probably be somewhere around the middle of the Atlantic. The Azores, perhaps, sitting almost halfway between Europe and America.
But Paul Twomey, the chief executive of the body that oversees the internet, says that this is about to change. The pull from the Far East, and emerging markets such as India and China, is becoming very strong.

Mr Twomey, who heads the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), says the advance presents a technical challenge. The internet was spawned in America, then took root in the developed world where the use of Roman characters to assign web addresses became the accepted norm.

But that does not make the internet particularly user- friendly in places where the English language cannot be deciphered, let alone spoken. �The problem with the internet is that it�s grown from an English-speaking view of the world. Our biggest focus is how to grow beyond that,� says Twomey.

�The biggest growth is in developing markets, such as India and China.

�We�re starting to think about Hebrew, India and what we call the CJK group of languages, covering Chinese, Japanese and Korean.�

The trouble for Icann, a non-profit corporation with authority over systems that connect computers to web sites, is that to use non-English characters requires a high degree of localisation. At the same time, says Twomey, there is a need to ensure that there is inter-operability with the rest of the internet.

Twomey says: �The risk is that you could end up creating silos that are separated from each other. That�s why we want to have a technical body to oversee it . . . if you put it in the hands of individual governments you inherently politicise it.�

There is a hint of defensiveness in Twomey�s words, and that is because Icann�s authority over the internet is under siege.

The organisation is the subject of five lawsuits, all of which accuse it of overstepping its boundaries by influencing decisions on issues such as content and delivery.

The latest and most high profile suit was brought by VeriSign, a loss-making US firm in charge of allocating �.com� addresses.

It accuses Icann of acting as a business regulator by preventing its controversial Wait Listing Service (WLS) for expired domain names.

The International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations, meanwhile, is debating whether world governments should oversee internet policy matters directly instead of Icann. A working group has been set up to debate the issue and will report back next year.

Twomey says that putting the technical administration of the internet into the hands of governments would ultimately create islands of information, rather than a single surfable web.

�Governments have an important role in terms of public policy, crime prevention and content. But putting the technical elements into the political arena makes it a bargaining tool,� he says.

The issue will become even more important as the internet goes wireless.

Nine top computer companies, mobile handset makers and telecoms operators this week announced plans for a new internet names registry company to issue domain names for wireless devices in an attempt to boost mobile services.

The new firm, which Icann has yet to approve, will establish an as yet unnamed domain tag to simplify mobile access to the internet, replacing the many addresses with the mobile equivalent of the .com domain tag.

Twomey agrees that the internet should be allowed to take flight from the desktop computer.

�The challenge for the internet is not so much about what it is, but how to use it. What we need to ensure is that we embrace change but don�t lose touch with the concept that the internet is a global community,� he says.

March 13, 2004 at 08:26 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home

BCG Research: Online Banking Moves the Needle

Financial Technology Network

Customers who regularly pay bills online are about twice as profitable as other accountholders, according to a benchmarking survey conducted last summer by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). As a result, banks that have figured out how to drive customer adoption have a measurable competitive advantage in financial services.
The research effort was led by Carl Rutstein, vice president and director, and Jack Whitt, project leader, both of the Chicago office.

By examining the internal data of 20 of the top U.S. banks, BCG discovered that penetration of online bill-pay adoption has a long way to go. On average, of the banks that were surveyed, only 3.6 percent of their customers were described as active, online bill-payment customers, which was defined as those who have paid a bill online within 30 days. "The underlying denominator was 'total DDA accounts'--the total addressable pool of people who pay bills through your organization," says Whitt. "That's opposed to what's typically quoted, which is as a percentage of the online banking population."

The adoption rates at some banks, however, were well above average. Indeed, penetration rates ranged from 1 percent to 17.8 percent, even among otherwise comparable financial institutions. "All of these banks have wide ATM networks, wide branch networks, spend a lot of money on brand, have long relationships with their customers, and spend a good deal of money on their Web sites," says Rutstein. "As we look across the Web sites of all these large banks, they're more similar than they are different."

How, then, to explain the differences in bill-pay adoption among these banks? Although the top performers tended to waive the fee for online banking, these same banks also were the ones that best incorporated online banking into other customer channels, such as call centers and branch locations. "It's rare to see a bank that waives the fee, but where the Internet is a silo and it's considered a separate product," says Rutstein. "And it's typical for those banks that have waived the fee [to have Internet banking] fully integrated at all the other touchpoints with the customer."

The study also revealed that active bill-pay customers were twice as profitable as other customers. Even after controlling for demographic variables such as age, income and net worth, the results still pointed toward the boost in profitability of an online bill payment customer. "When you create control groups and you adjust for demographics, indeed, the '2x' lift in profitability occurs after they start becoming 'online-active,' " says Rutstein.

That goes right to the bottom line. "If you're going to have 10 percent of your population, versus 1 percent, using the online channel and being twice as profitable, you will actually see that difference in the efficiency ratio," says Rutstein.

Indeed, from a strategic standpoint, the organizational ability to convert off-line check-writers to online bill-payers may even have been moving the markets. But since BCG has been advising some of the banks involved in the recent wave of big-bank mergers, Rutstein couldn't comment on the extent to which the dynamics of off-line-to-online customer conversion has been a factor. But, he says, "We know the answer really well."

March 13, 2004 at 01:42 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home

Online Banking = Security Suicide

A sobering and extremely relavant point on URL's and online services. Not nearly enough attention is paid to this, and geeks are left to design inexpicable URL's which do nothing to re-inforce confidence in this time of phishing.

Steve's blog :: Online Banking = Security Suicide

March 13, 2004 at 01:40 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (28) | Top of page | Blog Home

Demographics not key to adoption of banking technology

Demographics not key to adoption of banking technology

COLUMBUS, Ohio – When it comes to people's desire to use ATMs and online banking, it's not just the young, educated, and affluent who are interested.
That's the finding of a new study at Ohio State University that examined the role that factors such as age, income, and education level play in people's adoption of electronic banking technology.

While conventional wisdom suggests that young, affluent, and highly educated people are more apt to try new technology, the study found that these groups use electronic banking more often only because banks market the technology to them.

"Banks are driving the demographics of their customers with their own targeted marketing campaigns," said Jinkook Lee, professor of consumer and textile sciences at Ohio State University, and lead author of the study. "We found that once people were introduced to a banking service, what really mattered was their personal attitude about the technology, regardless of their age, income, or education."

People who believed that banking technology was useful, reliable, secure, and easy to use were more likely to try it, regardless of background, she explained.

The study, which was based on data from the 1999 Survey of Consumers collected by the University of Michigan Institute of Social and Political Research, appears in the current issue of the Journal of Consumer Affairs.

Lee was inspired to begin the study around the time the 1999 survey was taken -- a time when the dot-com "bubble" caused rapid growth in online banking and investing, and researchers were predicting that the United States was quickly evolving into a paperless society.

"The reality turned out to be quite different. People were not so easy to sell on certain Internet technology, even when it was convenient," Lee said.

The researchers focused on the opinions of approximately 900 of the survey's telephone respondents, all of whom had accounts with a bank, thrift institution, or credit union.

They found that almost everyone had access to ATM machines, and two-thirds used the technology. In contrast, only two-thirds of respondents had access to online banking, and of those, less than one-quarter used it.

People's belief in the security of electronic banking was key to their willingness to try it, the researchers found. An opportunity to try the technology firsthand also boosted people's adoption of it.

The need for human interaction played a role. Even people who use ATMs and computer banking for shopping and making payments tend to deposit checks in person. By handing the check to a human teller at the bank, people feel they've attained an extra level of security beyond depositing an envelope into an ATM.

"I do that too," Lee said, laughing. "Many people do. It's a persistent trend."

Banks save money when customers use ATMs and computer banking, so the federal government is trying to encourage the use of these technologies. But banks have also been trying to save money on their marketing efforts by offering these services only to young, affluent, educated people.

One possible strategy for banks to increase the use of online banking would be to market to "early adopters" -- people who like to try new products and services -- regardless of demographic. The early adopters would then influence others, Lee said.

"Not everyone young and affluent is interested in banking technology," she pointed out. "People who are interested in new innovative things, such as computer technology or fashion, are not automatically interested in other innovations, such as new banking technology."

The Federal Reserve Board commissioned the study, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture funded the study.

Next, the researchers want to examine people's attitudes about electronic technologies for other financial products, such as insurance and investments.

###
Jinkook Lee's coauthors on the Journal of Consumer Affairs paper included Eun-Ju Lee of California State University and David Eastwood of University of Tennessee.

Contact: Jinkook Lee, 614-247-7892; Lee.42@osu.edu

Written by Pam Frost Gorder, 614-292-9475; Gorder.1@osu.edu

March 13, 2004 at 01:37 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (47) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 12, 2004

Ameritrade Says Customer Trading Fell in February

Yahoo! News - Ameritrade Says Customer Trading Fell in February

Fri Mar 12, 3:20 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Online brokerage Ameritrade Holding Corp. (Nasdaq:AMTD - news) on Friday said customer stock trading in February fell 22 percent from January's record level as investors eased their buying and selling.

Ameritrade, based in Omaha, Nebraska, reported 197,000 daily average trades in February, compared with a record 254,000 in January.

The company also raised the bottom of its projected per-share earnings range for its fiscal second quarter and full year by 3 cents. The new ranges are 16 cents to 19 cents per share for the quarter, and 56 cents to 79 cents per share for the year.

Separately, financial regulator NASD on Thursday fined Ameritrade and two affiliates $10 million for improperly extending credit to customers in violation of federal securities laws.

Ameritrade, whose main rivals include Charles Schwab Corp. (NYSE:SCH - news) and E*Trade Financial Corp. (NYSE:ET - news), said it opened 39,000 new accounts in February. The company has a total of 3.2 million customer accounts, although some of them have no money and are essentially inactive.

March 12, 2004 at 06:59 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 11, 2004

HUBBLE'S BIG BANG SNAPS

Totally off topic, but with all the troubles in the news today, and particularly the horrible bombing in Spain, which I am sure involves Al-qaida, this story is something more deep than we can ever imagine. Its about Hubble's last shot; watching the universe almost at the moment of inception, slightly over 13Bn years ago.

Question ..... what was happening 14Bn years ago?

Headline news from Sky News - Witness the event

The Hubble telescope has produced the deepest view of the universe ever seen, showing stars and galaxies formed just after the Big Bang.
The snapshot of the universe, called the Ultra Deep Field, captured light that had streaked through space for more than 13bn years.
It shows a chaotic scramble of around 10,000 galaxies smashing into each other and re-forming in bizarre shapes.

Ultra Deep Field shows around 10,000 galaxies

Hubble's images were collected by focusing its instruments at a single point in the southern sky for one million seconds, an exposure that took more than 400 orbits of the space telescope.

The portion of the sky photographed by the Hubble is very small. Astronomers compared the field of view it to looking at the sky through an eight-foot long straw.

Steven Beckwith, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute said: "For the first time we're looking back at stars that are forming out of the depths of the Big Bang.

"We're seeing the youngest stars within a stone's throw of the beginning of the universe."

The Ultra Deep Field may be the Hubble's last major contribution to astronomy.

Nasa has cancelled future plans to service the Hubble - a procedure which requires a manned shuttle mission - in the aftermath of the Columbia accident in 2003.

Last Updated: 11:19 UK, Wednesday March 10, 2004

March 11, 2004 at 10:50 PM in World Affairs | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home

Online Ads, E-marketing Up

Stats: Online Ads, E-marketing Up

By Robyn Greenspan

March 3, 2004

According to an annual analysis by a DoubleClick and Nielsen//NetRatings, 2003 not only heralded a good fourth quarter for e-mail marketing, but for the online advertising industry as a whole. The online ad serving firm measured a 49 percent increase in volume throughout the year, culminating in more than 200 billion impressions in the fourth quarter. However, with more ads in the market, response rates suffered.

Not only were there more online ads, they got larger. Leaderboard ads, sized at 728x90, registered a more than 900 percent increase throughout 2003, while button-sized ads (88x31) experienced a 58 percent decline. Other ad sizes that saw significant increases were various large rectangles and skyscrapers, with growth that ranged from 42 percent to 262.3 percent. The once-popular standard banner size � 468x60 � measured a 12.6 percent decline from Q1 to Q4, and square pop-ups (250x250) plunged 25 percent.

Rich media usage increased 42 percent over the course of 2003 � growing from 27.8 percent of ad impressions served in Q1 to 39.7 percent in Q4 � yet only 12 percent of advertisers are using the enhanced technology. Rich media captured the largest portion of the animation-using advertisers' portfolios during the third quarter of the year.

Ad click-through rates were a disappointment in the fourth quarter, however, they averaged .62 percent for the year � for every 1,000 impressions, 6 clicks result. Rich media responses declined from 2.15 percent in Q1 to 1.24 percent in Q4. The decline in click-throughs is likely a result of the increased ad volume, the report noted.

E-mail marketing crested through the end of the year, proving that despite rising spam rates, government legislation, and now, payment proposals, the mail gets through. DoubleClick's Q4 2003 e-mail survey revealed that deliverability, open rates and click-through rates improved, and Eric Kirby, DoubleClick's vice president and general manager of strategic services, expects the industry to survive emerging obstacles.

"There are two fundamental drivers behind this:

1) Consumers understand and value permission based e-mail relationships and differentiate these from spam and

2) leading companies are evolving their e-mail programs faster than the environment is becoming more difficult. In other words, they are keeping ahead of the challenges in many respects."

Courtesy of CyberAtlas.

March 11, 2004 at 10:12 PM in Online Marketing | Permalink | TrackBack (46) | Top of page | Blog Home

AOL Signs Covad Deal to Market High-Speed Internet

AOL continues to wrestle with its business model, and continues to use self-fulfilling prophesies to rationalise their actions.

This quote below ".... and reflects a broader industry trend to unbundle programming and access". What are they talking about? The industry never bundled access and programming; thats what only AOL have been doing, and it obviously doesn't work, so they should just acknowledge that, and get on with it.

Yahoo! News - AOL Signs Covad Deal to Market High-Speed Internet

Thu Mar 11,12:38 AM ETAdd Technology - Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - America Online on Wednesday said it has signed an agreement with Covad Communications Group Inc. (OTC BB:COVD.OB - news) to sell high-speed Internet access and services that it hopes will be more profitable than earlier deals.

The world's largest online service, owned by Time Warner Inc.(NYSE:TWX - news), said the new agreement will allow it to offer Covad's high-speed access at the same time new customers sign up for AOL's own high-speed online programming.

AOL stopped offering high-speed access in January, saying earlier agreements with Covad and other high-speed access providers were not economically viable due to billing and customer service costs.

The latest partnership is part of AOL's goal to focus more on services that offer such features as streaming video and music, and reflects a broader industry trend to unbundle programming and access.

Yahoo Inc. (NasdaqNM:YHOO - news) in December began offering premium service, which includes news and entertainment videos as well as online videos and games, for $5.95 a month for consumers who already have their own Internet connections.

Since 2002, AOL has offered AOL for Broadband, a service that includes music, radio and video programming features for customers with high-speed Internet connections of their own.

The Covad partnership differs from older deals in which AOL purchased high-speed access from telephone and cable providers and resold it to new customers, as well as provided customer service. Customers were billed directly by AOL.

The cost of providing back-end services like billing and customer services made such agreements less economically attractive, it said.

"We took a look at that business model and we were realizing what we were trying to do here was a variety of activities ... where we had much less expertise than the broadband providers," said Lisa Hook, president of AOL for Broadband.

The new agreement splits up the duties. Covad will bill the customer directly for access. AOL will bill subscribers for the programming portion of the offering.

Hook said the profit margins for the new agreements will surpass older deals, but declined to go into details. AOL said it planned to strike similar partnerships with more high-speed Internet providers.

AOL, which saw 2.2 million dial-up modem subscribers leave its service in 2003, has attempted to heavily market the new broadband offering. The company has about 25 million subscribers in total.

It will begin selling the new bundle with Covad's access for $34.95 a month with a 12-month contract.

AOL added 1.2 million new members to its AOL for Broadband service last year and now serves about 3 million in all.

March 11, 2004 at 11:07 AM in @ My Views @, Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (61) | Top of page | Blog Home

Being competitive more than cutting costs

Cranes is right. Becoming competitive is not just about cost cutting ....

TheStar.com - Being competitive more than cutting costs

DAVID CRANE

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal describes how Mexican manufacturers are responding to the challenge of China. They are upgrading the skills and capabilities of their operations so they can do the higher value work currently being done by manufacturers in the United States and Canada.
Mexico is reported to have lost 400,000 manufacturing jobs to China, which forced Mexican companies to learn how to make more complex products. The article describes how the manager of the Jabil Circuit Inc. 1-million-square-foot electronics complex in Guadalajara, after losing significant business to Chinese rivals, reorganized the facility to compete as a "North American factory" and not simply as a cheap-labour factory.

It is now busier than ever in higher-value activities, taking business away from a Jabil facility in the United States, forcing the closing of the U.S. plant with the loss of 500 jobs, and taking business away from France and Ireland as well.

Growing competitiveness from Mexico, China, India and other emerging market economies has led to cries of protectionism in the United States. Such actions, however, can only slow down the process of a global reallocation of manufacturing and production activities that is now under way, not halt it.

As Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates recently told a student audience at the University of Illinois, "the tools of technology are changing global competition" which is leading to widespread concern.

"The tools of technology are making it possible for not only manufacturing-type jobs to be done anywhere on the globe but actual service jobs, not just programming, not just call centres, but design, architecture, any kind of work if you have these rich collaborative interfaces that the Internet and the rich software on top of it make possible, that will let people compete for that work anywhere in the world."

In Canada, far too little thought is being given to where and how our manufacturing sector will fit into this radical restructuring of production that is leading to a global production system.

Prime Minister Paul Martin says he wants to build a 21st century economy for Canada, which would have to be an economy based on a culture of innovation and activities at the frontiers of science and technology.

However, the investment attraction strategy being pursued in Canada seems to be based on KPMG surveys that show Canada is a cheaper location for manufacturing than the United States, Germany or Japan. But it ignores cost comparisons with Mexico, China or India, which in many instances would be much more relevant.

At the same time, business groups like the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and business-funded think-tanks such as the C.D. Howe Institute are also focused on such cost comparisons, arguing that the way to build Canadian competitiveness is to have lower corporate tax rates than the United States.

If we see the competitiveness challenge as being one of simply driving down costs, then we will be in a losing race with Mexico, Brazil, China, India and other emerging market economies.

The Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters association shows signs that it sees the issue as more profound. It plans to spend much of this year engaging Canadians in a dialogue on what's needed to sustain successful future manufacturing, with the goal of producing a strategy paper by October.

Manufacturing employs about 2.4 million workers in Canada and accounts for 18 per cent of Canada's economic output. But its influence is greater than that since many business services depend on a healthy manufacturing sector, while the wages earned by manufacturing workers strengthen housing, retail and other industries. This makes the future of manufacturing a challenge for all Canadians.

As a background paper explains, "Canadian manufacturers are at a critical crossroads. They face a number of challenges � the appreciation of the Canadian dollar, fierce competition from emerging economies like China and India, escalating business costs and more demanding customers sourcing globally to serve global markets, to name a few."

Moreover, Canadian manufacturers "will face even greater challenges over the next five to 10 years as the business of manufacturing itself evolves rapidly in response to the development of new technologies and new competitive pressures."

If Canada is to have a sustainable economy in the years ahead, we have to wake up to the challenge of globalization in a much more profound way than we have so far. The world is changing at an extraordinarily rapid pace and our own standard of living is at stake.

March 11, 2004 at 12:28 AM in World Affairs | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 10, 2004

Top E-Mail Providers Sue Spammers Under New Law

Yahoo! News - Top E-Mail Providers Sue Spammers Under New Law

By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Four of the nation's largest e-mail providers said on Wednesday they had sued hundreds of online marketers under a new federal law that outlaws the worst kinds of "spam" e-mail.

The lawsuits -- filed by EarthLink Inc. (NasdaqNM:ELNK - news), Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news), Yahoo Inc. (NasdaqNM:YHOO - news) and Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX - news) unit America Online -- mark the first time the law has been tested since it took effect in January.

Six suits were filed in federal courts in California, Georgia, Virginia and Washington state. They claim the defendants obscured their identities and used other deceptive tactics to send out hundreds of millions of pitches for get-rich-quick schemes, pornography and other types of spam.

Company officials said the CAN-SPAM Act, passed last year, makes their fight easier by imposing national standards and increasing penalties to force spammers out of business.

"The lawsuits we file now have some added punch they didn't have before," AOL General Counsel Randall Boe told reporters at a news conference.

Spam accounted for 62 percent of all e-mail in February 2004, up from 50 percent six months earlier, according to anti-spam company Brightmail Inc. Internet providers say the unwanted traffic drives up bandwidth costs and frustrates customers.

The lawsuits filed Tuesday night invoke a wide array of federal and state laws, from trespass to trademark and organized crime statutes. But much of the behavior in question is specifically outlawed by CAN-SPAM.

Defendants falsified return addresses, routed their messages through other computers to cover their tracks, and used misleading subject lines like "important message from AOL," the lawsuits charged.

One group of defendants in Canada sent nearly 100 million messages to Yahoo customers in January alone and resold the e-mail addresses of those who asked to be taken off their mailing list, according to one lawsuit.

Eric Head, Matthew Head and Barry Head of Kitchener, Ontario, also tried to circumvent spam filters by including random, invisible text in each message, the lawsuit alleged.

The defendants could not be reached for comment.

"It's a myth that somehow you can evade the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts by putting a computer offshore," said Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Nancy Anderson. "Most of the individuals involved in spam reside in the United States."

The civil suits filed by the e-mail providers seek unspecified amounts of damages and penalties. Violators could also face jail time under the new law, though government prosecutors have filed no criminal charges yet.

"Every major case we've filed, we've definitely had law-enforcement interest and generally followed up, so I expect something will come out of this as well," said EarthLink Chief Privacy Officer Les Seagraves.

The Federal Trade Commission has several spam cases in the works, a spokeswoman said.

An FBI spokesman did not return a call seeking comment.

One privacy activist noted that Internet providers had ensured that the new law would prevent individual lawsuits, so their own marketing efforts wouldn't get them in hot water.

"Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo all send out vast quantities of e-mail, and they don't want to get sued," said Jason Catlett, president of the Junkbusters Corp. consulting firm. "There could have been thousands of litigants against spammers, not four."

March 10, 2004 at 06:34 PM in Spam | Permalink | TrackBack (30) | Top of page | Blog Home

Microsoft in firing line as US banks call for higher 'duty of care'

finextra news: Microsoft in firing line as US banks call for higher 'duty of care'

09 March 2004 - US community bank association ICBA is backing efforts by Washington-based banking industry consortium Bits to force software vendors to provide a higher "duty of care" on sales to the financial services sector, with Microsoft a prime target for reform.

Bits' efforts to shore up vulnerabilities in bank IT infrastructures are codified in a set of 'Business Requirements' that call upon the software industry to make security a fundamental component of software design; support older versions of software (such as Microsoft Windows NT) past the end of their estimated life cycle; and provide better security-trained and security-certified developers on product teams.

In addition, the Business Requirements encourage software vendor compliance with sector-security requirements before software products are released and the development of a patch-management process that is more secure, more efficient and less costly.

According to Bits, the cost of software vulnerabilities and patch management to the financial services industry is approaching $1 billion annually.

Speaking at an invitation-only cyber-security summit last month, Bits CEO Catherine Allen noted: "Financial institutions are ultimately responsible for ensuring the safety and soundness of financial services. We are working with vendors to see that the products offered to our members are safe and reliable, and will not burden companies with applying costly fixes."

The initiative has been welcomed by ICBA vice chair and Bits representative David Hayes: "The cost of addressing these issues is just as material for smaller banks as larger banks. Improving the security of the financial services sector's critical infrastructure is an issue of paramount importance to community banks and their customers."

According to the 2002 ICBA/InFinet Community Bank Technology Survey, approximately 59% of the respondents use Microsoft Windows NT. "Given this market penetration, it will be extremely onerous and costly for community bank users to prematurely migrate to successor applications due to a lack of product support," says Hayes.

March 10, 2004 at 10:46 AM in Financial Services, Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 09, 2004

Yahoo Launches New Local Search Tool

Yahoo! News - Yahoo Launches New Local Search Tool

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Internet media company Yahoo Inc. (NasdaqNM:YHOO - news) on Tuesday announced the launch of SmartView, a new local Web search tool, as it continues to battle Google Inc. for dominance in the high-profile search sector.

SmartView helps Yahoo Maps users find such things as restaurants, hotels, hiking trails, movie theaters, stores or automatic teller machines (ATMs) within a certain area.

For example, users looking for Chinese restaurants in downtown San Francisco can type in an area address or intersection and select for Chinese restaurants. The SmartView technology shows the locations of all of the restaurants. When users click on the markers they get the restaurant's name, address and telephone number, as well as links to more information, Web search and driving directions.

People who want to see a movie can use the tool to get theater locations and show times or buy tickets.

Yahoo, which is removing Google technology from all of its sites, has been integrating content from its properties to offer more personalized and targeted searches. Depending on the task requested by a user, SmartView may pull content from Yahoo's Yellow Pages, Movies or Travel sections, among others.

Many in the industry believe that local Web search advertising could be behind the next big online revenue boom. Yahoo, of Sunnyvale, California, is not without stiff competition.

Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ - news), the No. 1 U.S. telephone company, this month relaunched its online Yellow Pages site, SuperPages.com, to give advertisers the option of signing up for lucrative Web-search ad campaigns.

Google is testing a search-by-location product that allows users to plug in search terms along with an address, city and state, or ZIP code.

March 9, 2004 at 10:05 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

LloydsTSB benefits from investment in direct channels

finextra news: LloydsTSB benefits from investment in direct channels

08 March 2004 - LloydsTSB says increased investment in its direct channels has led to significant growth in customer usage in 2003.

The bank says some 260 million transactions were processed through its Internet banking service last year and sales from direct channels represented nearly 40% of total sales in 2003.
Banking product sales through the Web channel continue to grow rapidly with an average of more than 70,000 product sales per month, an increase of 80% on 2002. In addition, the usage of its telephone channel increased by 29% over the year.

Direct sales of insurance products also grew, with over one million new policies sold through direct channels in 2003, an increase of 14% compared to 2002. Sales through the Internet distribution channel almost doubled in 2003.

Reporting back from its foray into the energy markets, the group says customers purchased over 100,000 products from its gas, electricity and home telephone services business, Ideal, which was launched last July.

Income from credit and debit card services increased by �46 million mainly as a result of a growth in interchange income following the acquisition of the Goldfish credit card portfolio from energy outfit Centrica during 2003. LloydsTSB chief Eric Daniels this morning declined to comment on reports of a potential bid for UK Internet bank Egg, which has also profited from its sizeable credit card portfolio.

The group also says it is continuing to explore outsourcing and offshoring opportunities "to further improve central processing efficiencies". Lloyds TSB announced plans in October last year to close its call centre in Newcastle, leading to the loss of 986 UK jobs, and shift work to its new operaional centre in India. The bank also said last month that it was also hiring 150 workers in India in a pilot test of a programme to migrate general insurance work to the country, leading to the loss of jobs from call centres in Bournemouth and Newport.

March 9, 2004 at 07:36 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 08, 2004

Spam filters are tricky!

I have been trying for a week to send an email to my cousin's family, and kept getting error messages, "error 550". Turns out it is because I had "hello" in the subjet line, and the freeserve ISP automatically blocks any email with that subject. Presumably they do this due to the frequency of that subject line with spam.

So now a normal family email has to be configured to beat spam! Yet another nail in the email coffin .... at least email as we know it today. I shouldn't have to figure this out, nor would my cousins family have the faintest idea of what I went through to figure this out.

There has to be a way to develop trusted email, and even if it costs, I will pay for that just as I pay for regular post. The cost of a stamp is a guarantee of delivery, and Bill Gates suggestion might just be the right one.

March 8, 2004 at 10:35 PM in @ My Views @, Spam | Permalink | TrackBack (37) | Top of page | Blog Home

EU IP Legislation Stirs Controversy on Eve of Vote

Yahoo! News - EU IP Legislation Stirs Controversy on Eve of Vote

Mon Mar 8,11:03 AM ETAdd Technology - Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - Internet song-swappers and peddlers of knock-off Prada handbags could have their property seized and bank accounts frozen under a proposed EU law set for a vote before the European Parliament on Tuesday.

The EU draft directive is one of the toughest measures yet to protect companies' intellectual property (IP) rights in Europe, creating new policing measures to crack down on the growing unauthorized trade of counterfeit products on street corners and online piracy of software, film and music.

Under the directive's current form, firms who feel their trademarks and IP have been violated by individuals or groups can ask a judge to seize their assets and freeze their funds to assist in prosecution.

The proposed law, known as the European Union Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, has drawn criticism from consumer watchdog groups though who argue the penalties are the same for large-scale commercial counterfeiters as for individual file-sharers.

Their concern is that the more litigious factions in say the music industry would have enhanced powers to pursue individual file-sharers in Europe.

"Under this law, your home is not quite your castle any more. You will have to defend it quite aggressively," said Andreas Dietl, EU Affairs director for cyber-rights group EDRi, or European Digital Rights.

PROTESTS ABOUND

EDRi and various civil liberties groups said they had organized a protest on Monday evening in Strasbourg, France to voice their opposition to the directive on the eve of Tuesday's vote before the plenary session of Parliament.

If approved, the law would go before the European Council of Ministers for a potential ratifying vote later in the week.

Critics compare the directive to a tougher version of the controversial United States law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which music companies have used to sue individual song-swappers in America.

"This makes the DMCA look like a kiddie ride at Disneyland," said one Internet media executive.

The directive has been guided through the European Parliament by MEP Janelly Fourtou, wife of Vivendi Universal chief executive Jean-Rene Fourtou.

Vivendi 's music label Universal Music is one of the biggest proponents of tough new global anti-piracy laws to help in their battle to minimize rampant online file-sharing, a practice they blame for the contributing to industry's declining sales.

Janelly Fortou's office has defended the directive saying it should not be seen as legislation meant to solely target file-sharers.

It has been in the works for years and is designed to give IP-holders ranging from pharmaceutical firms to fashion labels a more effective legal tool to stifle the massive black market for brand-name knock-off products.

Defenders of the directive also point to the fact that it is largely modeled on existing laws in the United Kingdom, considered to be Europe's most protective regime for IP-holders.

John MacKenzie, an attorney for London-based law firm Masons specializing in IP law, said the proposed law would not lead "to dawn raids" on the homes of individual infringers as some consumer rights groups claim.

"There is a bit more balance in the directive than the consumer groups would have you believe," MacKenzie said. "The IP community has been rather sanguine because they believe that the courts will strike some balance."

March 8, 2004 at 06:55 PM in Business Models | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home

Backing Sellers and Protecting Buyers Online

Backing Sellers and Protecting Buyers Online (TechNews.com)

By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 8, 2004; Page E05
Steven L. Woda was an intern at a technology company during the summer of 2000 when he decided it was time to buy a personal digital assistant. So the business school student forked over nearly $400 to purchase one in an eBay auction. His credit card was charged, but the device never came.

Woda's anger over the situation stayed with him, so after graduation he and Jeffrey E. Grass, former colleagues in the surety bond business, set out to build a business that could offer consumers protection from this type of online fraud.

In July 2003, the two launched BuySafe Inc., an Alexandria company that backs online auction retailers with surety bonds that guarantee consumers will get their money back if an item is not received.

"I never had been able to walk in the store or shake hands with the proprietor. In the real world, that's how you develop a level of trust," Woda recalled. The company evaluates the financial standing and consumer reviews of retailers that want BuySafe's seal of approval. Every time a purchase is made -- and backed by a BuySafe surety bond, which is provided by Hartford Financial Services Group -- the Alexandria company reaps 1 percent of the total transaction price.

BuySafe's system launched in November and the company's founders say it has been used to insure more than 10,000 transactions. But BuySafe faces a number of challenges, including competing consumer protection services and a reluctance among some sellers to give up a portion of their profits. Woda and Grass are convinced that the price of losing skittish buyers will eventually push retailers using online auctions as their main sales channel to offer some kind of protection.

"As [an online] seller, you suffer from the perceptions of buyers who don't totally trust you," Woda said.

March 8, 2004 at 07:02 AM in Business Models | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

NTT DoCoMo tests WLAN roaming

infoSync World : NTT DoCoMo tests WLAN roaming

By: Anthony Newman, Monday 8th March 2004, 09:10 GMT

Major telecom operators from Japan and Singapore share Wi-Fi hotspots in new trial agreement from this April.

NTT DoCoMo announced today that DoCoMo and Singapore Telecom Mobile (SingTel Mobile) will conduct a trial to test international roaming between their Wireless LAN services. The trial is aimed at verifying technologies and marketability under a plan to jointly launch a commercial international roaming service.

During the trial, DoCoMo and SingTel Mobile will share access to their respective Mzone and "Outdoor Wireless Surf" Wireless LAN services, which they currently offer at cafes and other locations to enable users to connect to the Internet via PDAs and notebooks equipped with Wireless LAN cards. DoCoMo's Mzone service is currently available at 216 locations in Japan and SingTel Mobile's Outdoor Wireless Surf service is available at more than 230 locations in Singapore.

To participate in the roaming trial, users from Japan must subscribe to DoCoMo's Mzone service and will be asked to answer questionnaires before and after the trial. There will be no charge for participation other than the regular basic fee for the Mzone service.

In April 2003, DoCoMo and SingTel Mobile agreed to collaborate in 3G mobile multimedia services based on W-CDMA technology, including the joint study of advanced Wireless LAN services. Today's announcement is a part of this agreement.

The trial will be conducted from April to June 2004. Details on how to participate and other information regarding the trial will be announced later in DoCoMo's Japanese Mzone web site.

March 8, 2004 at 06:58 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (7) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 05, 2004

Firms Look to Limit Liability for Online Security Breaches

Yahoo! News - Firms Look to Limit Liability for Online Security Breaches

Fri Mar 5, 7:51 AM ET
By Jonathan Krim, Washington Post Staff Writer
In the face of ongoing attacks by computer hackers, some companies that store their customers' personal data are adopting a new defensive tactic: If your information is stolen, they're not legally responsible.

Across the Internet, retailers and other service providers that handle consumer transactions are requiring customers to agree to waive any right to sue the companies if the businesses are hacked, regardless of how secure their systems are.

The waivers are contained in lengthy terms-of-use agreements that consumers often click to accept without reading closely.

"You agree to assume all risk and liability arising from your use of Verizon Wireless's online services, including the risk of breach in the security" of its system, according to the mobile-phone giant's use agreement, if you choose to use its online billing system.

American Airlines' Web site sports similar language, warning that it is not liable for break-ins by outsiders "regardless of whether American Airlines was given . . . notice that damages were possible."

The waivers are yet another sign of the struggle to provide reliable online commerce in the face of increasingly sophisticated and organized computer criminals intent on making money, not just mischief.

Companies said that despite their best efforts, they cannot guarantee that personal data will be secure and don't want to get sued over intrusions. And they fear the Federal Trade Commission, which has actively pursued cases in which companies have failed to live up to security assurances made to customers.

But consumer advocates said companies should be held accountable.

"If companies are willing to derive the benefit of information collection, but not the responsibility to secure it . . . it won't be difficult for consumer attorneys to invalidate these provisions as being unfair," said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Although hacking takes many forms -- including targeting poorly protected home computers -- companies with extensive databases of consumers' credit card numbers, Social Security (news - web sites) numbers or other identifying information are prime targets, experts said. Organizations at risk include retailers, banks, credit card firms, universities and state agencies. Lax internal controls also have led to customers' data being exposed at several companies.

A robust market for stolen credit card numbers can easily be found on the Internet, with prices varying based on the amount of information available.

Meanwhile, identity theft cases continue to grow, jumping 40 percent last year over 2002, according to the FTC, though not all those resulted from hacking. Whereas a fraudulent charge on a credit card is generally covered by the credit card firm, a hacker gleaning enough data to create new accounts by posing as someone else can inflict long-lasting damage to the victim's credit rating.

No one knows how much of the supply of such data results from attacks on corporate networks, as opposed to online scams that trick consumers into providing information, or thieves sifting through garbage for credit card receipts or other personal documents.

But security experts said that companies are attacked by hackers far more often than is ever reported. According to a 2003 industry survey by the California-based Computer Security Institute and the FBI (news - web sites), only 30 percent of companies that said they suffered security breaches reported them to law enforcement.

Often, attacks on networks fail. If they succeed, some companies inform the affected customers, as several major banks and credit card companies have done in the past year. But for most industries, there are no national disclosure requirements.

"It's a convoluted system," said Dan Clements, chief executive of Cardcops.com, a company devoted to helping consumers determine whether their credit cards have been compromised. "No one has taken the lead in informing the American consumer that their information has been exposed. Everyone is pointing to someone else."

The result is that consumers have little way of evaluating the vigilance of a particular vendor when it comes to security.

"Right now, you're nowhere," said Philip J. Weiser, a professor of Internet law at the University of Colorado. "You have to find some vendors in the online world that make this a competitive issue" by advertising how their security features are better than others.

Few do. For most, security is a marketing tightrope act of touting a commitment to protecting data without over-promising that security can be assured.

Many firms make little or no mention of their security efforts.

"To make any statements about the quality of your data protection efforts is dangerous," said Charles H. Kennedy, a Washington lawyer who advises companies on their Internet policies. "You are holding yourself up to a standard of perfection."

Kennedy blames the FTC for the emerging trend of companies disclaiming liability for security breaches.

Because the agency's mandate is fraud and unfair trade practices, the FTC has brought three high-profile cases against companies for making security commitments they failed to meet.

In one such case, Eli Lilly & Co. was fined and forced to enter into a 20-year consent decree with the FTC after it inadvertently exposed the e-mail addresses of hundreds of users of Prozac. The agreement with the FTC required broad changes to the firm's computer security practices.

In another, Microsoft Corp. was found to have made misleading security promises to consumers who signed up for its Passport system, which is designed to streamline online transactions by automatically passing on personal data about its members.

"The FTC has been very aggressive in an area where they don't have a lot of statutory authority," Kennedy said. "Now companies are afraid to say anything."

But J. Howard Beales III, head of consumer protection at the FTC, said his agency would not be deterred, even if companies make fewer claims about security as a way of evading scrutiny.

"We're not saying every breach is avoidable," Beales said. But "if a company fails to take reasonable security measures, it would be easy to argue that . . . that's not fair to the consumer" regardless of what promises were made.

But liability for network attacks is an area of law with little precedent, said Peter P. Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University.

Many companies insist that they take the strongest security measures possible, no matter what their liability policies say.

"Verizon Wireless is very concerned with customer security and privacy," said Steven Tugentman, a Verizon Wireless associate general counsel. "But we are trying to be fiscally responsible to protect the company from lawsuits."

Like most online businesses, Verizon Wireless encrypts -- or scrambles -- information that passes back and forth between a consumer's and the company's computers when transactions are executed.

But companies often don't encrypt data that they store, relying instead on defending their systems against hackers breaking through in the first place. Others use third parties to store their data.

Barbara Lawler, chief privacy officer of Hewlett-Packard Co., said that encrypting databases can be expensive, especially for small businesses or those with multiple, older systems. Moreover, varying degrees of encryption exist, some of which can be easily decoded.

Hackers are increasingly using viruses and worms to leave trapdoors in computer systems, which can be exploited long after an attack if left undiscovered.

Lawler said HP, which sells computers, printers and other equipment online, decided to store only minimal customer data -- and not credit card numbers -- to minimize risk.

Lawler also supports considering a federal equivalent of a California law that requires companies to disclose breaches of unencrypted data. Privacy groups said it helps keep the heat on companies to be vigilant.

"It really is a stick to tighten up on security," said Joanne McNabb, the head of California's Office of Privacy Protection.

Some companies are taking a different tack, to distinguish themselves from competitors.

Without guaranteeing a security breach won't happen, online retailer Bluefly.com states it will pay for any credit card losses not covered by the credit card companies.

"We like that answer," Beales of the FTC said of Bluefly.com's policy. "There are people willing to compete on this characteristic."

March 5, 2004 at 10:56 AM in Security | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home

Webservices - what are the benefits?

Following quote from this Datamonitor report on Web Services is telling in that the future promise for anything as "simple" as WS, is never that simple. In particular its a technology solution, and it won't necessarily solve problems which businesses have to solve, such as strategy alignement.

"There can be no doubt that �real� WS have arrived and that there are a plethora of viable development tools / environments available from the vendors profiled and many others. However, organizations must ensure that their WS deployments do not complicate integration matters further. Some organizations are finding that WS are making integration environments far more complex, as it is now so easy for developers to generate a WS. WS should compliment but not take precedence over good system design, and must be aligned to the short- and long-term business and IT strategies."

__________________________
Datmonitor - Web Services installation review

March 5, 2004 at 09:59 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (21) | Top of page | Blog Home

NTT DoCoMo facility isn't quite as secretive as CIA

The home of imode (64K), and FOMA (384K), rich wireless services in Japan - something we can only dream of here.

North American telecoms are introducing phones with colour and camera's, but they are missing the point. Its like painting a Chevrolet with Ferrari Red. It doesn't make it go faster, and doesn't have any of the features of the Ferrari.

NTT DoCoMo facility isn't quite as secretive as CIA :: AO

CBS MarketWatch
NewsTeam | CBS [MarketWatch] | POSTED: 03.03.04 @08:00
YOKOSUKA, Japan - It may not be the Central Intelligence Agency, but NTT DoCoMo also operates its research and development center as if it were a top-secret facility.

Located 30 miles south of Tokyo in hilly inland overlooking Tokyo Bay, DoCoMo's 27-acre R&D complex is home to almost 1,200 employees, or about a sixth of its entire workforce. DoCoMo invests nearly 130 billion yen ($1.1 billion) annually in R&D, or about three percent of its sales.

On Tuesday, Japan's biggest mobile-phone carrier allowed journalists inside the company's R&D center for the first time in several years -- all in the name of demonstrating what so-called fourth-generation will look like when it rolls out the advanced mobile service in 2010.

It's all about speed. Fourth-generation services would allow for data transfer speeds of up to 20 megabytes per second for uplinks and 100 megabytes per second for downlinks -- up to 260 times faster than DoCoMo's popular 3G services, which allow for downlinks of 384 kilobytes per second.

"A mobile carrier investing this much money on research and development is rare in the world," says Kota Kinoshita, DoCoMo's executive vice president and chief technical officer.

DoCoMo has been in the spotlight a lot recently. It reportedly wanted to buy AT&T Wireless of the United States but was turned off by the heated bidding war between Vodafone and Cingular Wireless, which ultimately bought America's third-biggest wireless carrier for a whopping $41 billion.

Of late, DoCoMo has reportedly been considering selling its 20 percent stake in 3 UK due to frustration with its British partner's struggle to get subscribers for its i-mode service, which is popular in Japan.

Some analysts are skeptical about 4G given DoCoMo's already struggles with 3G.

"What may likely decide the fate and popularity of 4G would boil down to a simple payoff of costs and services," said Nagayuki Yamagishi, senior strategist at UFJ Tsubasa Securities. "DoCoMo failed in its three-generation service FOMA. If a user just needs to watch television on the cell phone, 4G's high-speed data transfers won't be necessary."

DoCoMo has just over two million third-generation FOMA services and over 40 million subscribers to second-generation i-mode services.

DoCoMo has said specifications for 4G won't be decided until at least next year.

"The 4G will make richer exchanges of communications possible and introduce a refreshingly comfortable wireless environment," said Toshio Miki, managing director of DoCoMo's multimedia laboratories. "I think virtual-reality communication will be introduced in 4G."

He is referring to technology that will allow 4G users to speak to each other face to face with the use of audio and video.

DoCoMo is also looking to incorporate 3D audio communication technology into fourth-generation telecom services.

The technology would allow users to know where the voice of callers is coming from. There are many ways to use the 3D technology. It could be used at museums where the guidance is given automatically when visitors enter a target area. Visitors would instantly tell the direction of the exhibit by sound direction.

Before launching 4G phones, DoCoMo is planning to introduce the world's first 3.5G phones in the domestic market by the middle of 2005. Halfway between 3G and 4G, 3.5G would cut the cost of transmissions by one third with minimal changes to infrastructure, DoCoMo said.

The 3.5G phones would enable downlinks at a maximum data transmission of 14 megabits per second - up to 35 times as fast as the current DoCoMo's 384 kilobits per second pace. The data transmission would average 2-4 Mbps, it added.

Using a notebook PC connected to a 3.5G phone, the experience isn't that much different from typical broadband high-speed connections. It could be a hit with Internet users if the price is right.

Kinoshita said that DoCoMo's R&D partners include Intel, Texas Instruments, Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, Ericsson, Nokia, NEC and Fujitsu.

Yokosuka Research Park is also home to more than 40 national and private research organizations from around the world. The research arms of Matsushita's Panasonic Mobile Communications, Fujitsu and DoCoMo's parent NTT, for example, also have facilities there, developing cutting-edge telecommunications technology.

Osamu Tsukimori is a reporter for CBS MarketWatch.com based in Tokyo. Asia bureau chief Allen Wan contributed to this report.

March 5, 2004 at 09:19 AM in Japan | Permalink | TrackBack (37) | Top of page | Blog Home

Ask Jeeves to Double Search Share with Acquisition

Yahoo! News - Ask Jeeves to Double Search Share with Acquisition

Thu Mar 4, 4:37 PM ETAdd Technology - Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Ask Jeeves Inc. (NasdaqNM:ASKJ - news) said on Thursday it would buy Interactive Search Holdings Inc. for about $328 million, rocketing the stock by as much as 43 percent as the company seeks to compete with the top Internet search engines Google and Yahoo.

The company said its plan to acquire the owner of search Web sites iWon, Excite and My Search would double Ask Jeeves' market share in the increasingly cut-throat industry to 7 percent, and would also boost its profits.

The deal solidifies Ask Jeeves' standing as a competitor in the market for Internet search and boosts its ability to negotiate with partners, the largest of which is Google, analysts said.

"They have always been a player in the search category, but with market share of only about 3 percent, they have not been considered a significant player in the space," Kaufman Bros. analyst Mark May said.

"This makes them a more important player by not only doubling their market share, but because they can now cross-promote their various properties and increase the share even further," he added.

Ask Jeeves, based in Emeryville, California, could pay up to $17.5 million more based on Interactive Search's performance. The companies expect the deal to close by the end of the second quarter.

Interactive Search had 700 million searches in the fourth quarter compared with 680 million for Ask Jeeves.

The companies approach search differently.

Ask Jeeves, which made its name with its original question and answer format, but has since moved to a technology that uses traditional keyword queries, returns results based on a proprietary analysis of popular links.

Interactive Search's sites return results based on the most popular links using search leader Google or offers results from multiple search sites on its My Search site.

"This acquisition fits exactly into our strategy of building multiple brands," Ask Jeeves Chief Executive Steve Berkowitz said during a conference call with analysts and reporters.

"Ask Jeeves doesn't have the answer for everybody," he added. "It's one approach to search. This just enhances our abilities to meet consumers in the places they want to be met."

Ask Jeeves expects the deal to nearly triple its profit excluding acquisition costs and amortization of intangibles in 2004 to between $57 million and $60 million from about $22 million last year. The company said it could not yet estimate net income on a generally accepted accounting basis for 2004.

Steve Sordello, Ask Jeeves' chief financial officer, said the acquisition would add to the company's profit "right out of the gate." He said he expected Ask Jeeves would close the transaction by the end of the second quarter.

It is projecting combined revenue after the deal closes of between $220 million and $230 million versus a stand-alone anticipated revenue of $148 million.

Separately, Ask Jeeves raised its guidance for the first quarter, saying it expects $37 million of pro forma income of 18 cents a share, up from earlier projections of $35 million and 15 cents a share.

Ask Jeeves shares closed the day up $8.30, or about 40 percent, to $29.01. Earlier, the stock climbed as high as $29.63 (Additional reporting by Lisa Baertlein and Michael Learmonth)

March 5, 2004 at 09:13 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (76) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 04, 2004

Pulse Software & Consulting Inc. Releases IVR Over IP Technology!

Pulse Consulting - IVR, Computer Telephony, CTI, AudioText and Call CenterPulse Press Release 3

The importance of customer contact solutions has prompted Pulse Software to offer companies the ability to converge global call centres over existing infrastructure.
Toronto, Canada - April 6, 2001. Pulse Software and Consulting Inc. has recently announced the release of its IVR over IP technology.
This technology allows companies to utilize their existing network infrastructure by offering voice traffic over data lines. Customer contact centres worldwide can be seamlessly linked to offer transparent customer contact solutions.
An IVR system can be located anywhere on the network allowing customers in different locations the ability to interact with the services offered.

Companies can operate call centres in various time zones in order to seamlessly service customers at any time of the day while reducing overall operating costs. The IVR systems come standard with Pulse�s Professional Development kit, which provides GUI-based rapid deployment of IVR changes and new call flows.

The IVR features many optional add-ons such as voice recognition (through a partnership with Nuance), text to speech, connection to any ODBC compliant database, connection to most mainframe and legacy systems, outbound calling capabilities, web interface, e-mail and fax capabilities.

Pulse offers total turnkey solutions including on-site installation and testing.

With the dominance of the Internet and IP networks worldwide, it is easy to see the growth potential of this product. With the infrastructure already in place, an organization can easily make the shift over.

For more information on this technology, contact Pulse Software at (905) 415-0010.

For More Info Contact:

Pulse Software & Consulting Inc.
500 Alden Road, Suite 216
Markham, Ontario L3R 5H5
CANADA
Tel: (905) 415-0010 Fax: (905) 415-1558
E-mail: sales@pulsesc.com Web: www.pulsesc.com

March 4, 2004 at 06:54 PM in Telecommunications | Permalink | TrackBack (26) | Top of page | Blog Home

Employees Still Swapping Files at Work-Survey

You would think businesses would have already figured this out, and closed down access!

Yahoo! News - Employees Still Swapping Files at Work-Survey

Wed Mar 3, 6:26 PM ETAdd Technology - Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Employees are still swapping music and other files on peer-to-peer applications at work despite the legal threat from the record industry, a survey released on Wednesday said.

Forty-two percent of the 300 respondents said they continue to use file sharing applications like Kazaa and networks like Gnutella (news - web sites), and 38.6 percent said they do their file swapping on company networks, according to the poll conducted by security provider Blue Coat Systems Inc.

Nearly 70 percent of the peer-to-peer application users said they spend more than 16 minutes a day sharing files and close to 16 percent said they spend more than one hour a day doing so.

Almost 60 percent of the employees polled said they are not concerned about whether the Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) will take legal action against their employers for the distribution of copyrighted material on the corporate network.

The record industry trade group sued more than 500 more people last month for online copyright infringement employing a "John Doe" litigation strategy until the defendants' names are known.

The trade group cites digital piracy as the main factor behind a three-year slump in CD sales, but the trend is changing as recent music sales figures show sales are up this year from a year earlier and companies launch for-pay music download services, like Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes.

The survey respondents, contacted via e-mail from purchased e-mail lists of Internet users, work at a range of public and private companies, with most located in North America, Blue Coat said.

Sunnyvale, California-based Blue Coat offers hardware that companies can use to control file sharing and other Web activities on their corporate networks.

March 4, 2004 at 09:30 AM in Business Models | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 03, 2004

Phishing scam 'most devious ever'

Phishing scam 'most devious ever'

By Andrew Colley, ZDNet Australia
An email attempting to trick Australian online-banking customers into divulging their details has been labelled the most 'devious' example that an antivirus vendor has encountered
A prominent antivirus vendor has described the latest email fraud scheme targeted at Westpac bank customers as the most "devious" the company has ever encountered.
The email, distributed en-masse to Westpac customers, represents the latest example of "phishing scams," designed to catch the unwary and fool them into divulging their online-banking security details.

Typically, phishing scam emails appear to have been sent from the victim's bank, and contain a link to a fake version of the bank's Web site and instructions to log on to the site to verify their credentials with the bank.

Rob Forsyth, managing director at anti-virus vendor Sophos, believes that the techniques used by online confidence tricksters in the latest Westpac email indicate the scheme is reaching new heights of sophistication.

According to Sophos, the scammers have become better impostors, incorporating phrasing and wording that the bank's customers would be familiar with from previous authentic advisories it had issued such as: "Westpac will never ask for your personal or login details by email" -- even though it then proceeds to direct the reader to do just that.

The architects of the latest scam also adopted a more insidious Web re-direction technique to bamboozle victims. Activating the link in the email directs the victim to a fake version of the site but also opens an authentic copy of the site in a second browser window behind it.

The fake version of the site asks for the victim's account access details but returns an error message if he or she attempts to use it. The victim is then sent to the real site unaware that they've been duped.

Forsyth fears that the practice of phishing is at risk of being trivialised in the public's mind. He said that the malicious nature of the crime should be acknowledged.

"I think this is not just a scam like the Nigerian scam -- this is actually direct fraud and the perpetrators of the crime should be dealt with severely," said Forsyth.

Andreas Baumhof, chief technical officer of Microdasys, a German-based Internet security company specialising in Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technologies used to protect commercial Web transactions, is also concerned for the well being of online-banking customers.

He said that advice given to the public is often wrong, pointing to a recent high profile case of phishing in the US involving ISP Earthlink.

Shortly before the scam, the US Federal Trade Commission advised the public to look for a icon depicting a lock in the window of their Browsers when conducted sensitive transactions. The lock icon is associated with SSL Web security technology which involves encryption and security certificates. The FTC's issued blanket advice advice that such communications were definitively "safe".

Baumhof said the advice was wrong and may actually have contributed to the Earthlink incident. In that case the scam's designers used encrypted SSL conections to direct users to their site but fraudulent certificates to persuade victims they were in the right place. Baumhof reasons that the FTC's advice gave the victims a false sense of security.

"You can only see that the session is encrypted but you can't tell who you're talking to unless you've verified the certificate," said Baumhof.

Meanwhile Sophos said it had conveyed its concerns to the Australian High Tech Crime Centre.

March 3, 2004 at 01:59 PM in Phishing & identity theft | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

March 02, 2004

VC money floods back to tech

ZDNet UK - News - VC money floods back to tech

Matt Loney
ZDNet UK
March 02, 2004, 15:10 GMT

Tell us your opinion

Venture Capitalists say there are more tech firms looking for investment, and more money around to invest, than at any time since 2000. But it won't be IPOs that provide the exit strategy this time around

The first two months of 2004 have brought with them more tech companies looking for venture capital, and more venture capitalists looking to invest, than any time since the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, according to anecdotal evidence from venture capitalists.

The market is blistering hot," said Bruce Huber, managing director at mergers and acquisitions (M&A) advisor Broadview, speaking at the UK Technology Partnering and Investment Forum in London on Tuesday: "I can't recall when we have been so busy. We are seeing an enormous amount of activity." Ulrich Kenny, partner of corporate finance house Ion Equity, agreed with Huber's temperature-taking, but said investors' old exit strategy of the IPO -- which allowed many people to make money on hot stocks in the late 90s -- is not longer as viable as it was. "The IPO window is still pretty fragile and not really open for many tech companies," he said.

The consensus of opinion at the conference was that mergers and acquisitions are much more likely to be used as exit strategies by investors, indicating consolidation among small and innovative IT vendors. According to Peter Rowell of technology investment bank Regent Associates, there were only 20 tech IPOs in 2003, compared to 1,400 M&As.

"One of the drivers -- particularly in hardware -- is a significant lack of R&D over the past couple of years, which leaves very little in pipeline to come to market," said Kenny of Ion Equity. "Those companies are forced to buy technology to fill the gaps."

David Fewer, an associate director of Ion Equity, said he has seen the market pick up since December. "Over the past couple of years a lot of companies were simply surviving, with VC money being pumped in just to keep them going," said Fewer. "Now we are seeing a significant pick-up in companies going out to raise new funds, and it is not survival money in the �1m to �2m range, it is of the order of �10m and it is being used to capture market share in growing markets."

Fewer's experience is echoed in recent funding announcements. Last month Open-source middleware vendor JBoss said its successful attempt to raise $10m, which coincided with a company restructure designed to allow it to go public, was oversubscribed. Also last month, US software company Tarantella said it had secured $16.4m in funding. In this case, the investors, who were institutions rather than venture capitalists, were looking for a raised share price from the company, which is already public, said chief executive Frank Wilde.

Fewer said he was surprised to hear of opportunities being oversubscribed but conceded that in terms of good companies, "it is getting competitive". Fewer, who cited figures showing that 48 percent of venture capitalists are currently raising funds, said: "For them to raise more funds, they need exit strategies, so there is also more mergers and acquisitions activity." But, he said, experiences like that of JBoss, which took only two months to raise the money, are still very rare. "The process to raise funds is still six months from starting the process to putting the money in the bank," he said.

Even if the increased level of activity is only temporary, it will come as welcome relief to many early stage tech companies. According to research published by VentureOne and Ernst & Young, investment in venture-backed companies fell from a high of $5bn in Europe (and nearly $30bn in the US) for the third quarter of 2000, to less than $1bn for the same quarter three years later in Europe (and $4bn in the US).

The UK Technology Partnering and Investment Forum is run by the European Technology Forum, a division of CNET Networks UK, which also publishes ZDNet UK.

March 2, 2004 at 11:54 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home

European companies 'afraid of new tech'

European companies 'afraid of new tech'

By Andrew Donoghue, ZDNet UK
Europe is lagging behind the US and Asia when it comes to investing in new technology, according to an industry veteran and leading venture capitalist
European companies are 'gun-shy' when it comes to implementing new technology, making the region a lot harder to sell into than the US or Asia, according to a leading venture capitalist.

Speaking at the UK Technology Partnering and Investment Forum in London, Joe Schoendorf of Accel Partners said that Europe is lagging behind the US and Asia when it comes to adopting emerging technology and embracing start-ups.

Schoendorf said his firm is working on statistics to back up this view and recounted a conversation he had with Eric Benhamou, chairman of networking giant 3Com's board of directors, who allegedly stipulates that he will not sit on the board of any start-up that decides to open an office in Europe before Asia. "It's harder to sell new technology into Europe than ever. People are gun-shy," he said.

If Schoendorf's observations are accurate then UK companies can at least take some comfort from the fact that they are at the head of the pack when it comes to European tech spending. Figures released by the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO) last month show that UK spending on IT and telecoms services in 2004 will exceed that of many other Western European countries.

The overall Western European market is expected to grow by 3.1 percent, compared to only 0.6 percent in 2003, with the UK expected have a particularly buoyant growth rate of 3.2 percent. This means the UK's spending will be worth ｣124.7bn euros (｣83.3bn), which will be just enough to overtake Germany, currently the largest ICT economy in Europe.

Schoendorf, a former board member of Macromedia and 18-year veteran at HP, claimed that the lack of investment in technology in Europe is not for a lack new products or companies. "The people I have met in Europe are as innovative and smart as anyone. When I am in meetings I can't tell that I am not in Silicon Valley," he said.

He identified Asia and China in particular as another real source of innovation, claiming he had met a start-up in Shanghai which was working on the next "Quantum leap" in Wi-Fi. "If you think China is about cheap labour and outsourcing then you couldn't be more wrong," he added.

But although he praised the entrepreneurial atmosphere in Asia, Schoendorf admitted that the region has its problems when it comes to the protection of intellectual property with around 90 percent of Windows in China being unlicensed.

He also cited the example of Huawei Technologies, one of the largest telecommunications companies in China, which is being sued by Cisco for patent infringement. Cisco claims Huawei unlawfully copied and misappropriated the US networking giant's software including its source code.

The UK Technology Partnering and Investment Forum is run by the European Technology Forum, a division of CNET Networks UK, which also publishes ZDNet UK.

March 2, 2004 at 11:52 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | TrackBack (27) | Top of page | Blog Home

Utility to Offer High-Speed Internet

Yahoo! News - Utility to Offer High-Speed Internet

Tue Mar 2, 8:38 PM ETAdd Technology - AP to My Yahoo!

By LISA CORNWELL, Associated Press Writer
CINCINNATI - A division of utility Cinergy Corp. plans to offer high-speed Internet service over its power lines, letting customers connect by simply plugging a computer modem into existing electrical outlets.

The idea of broadband service over power lines, or BPL, has been around for some time, but this appears to be the first large-scale rollout of the technology by a major utility.

"There have been several utilities working on this quietly and doing pilot programs," said Alan Shark, president of the Power Line Communications Association, an industry trade group. "Everyone has been very cautious in deploying this technology, but I think the demand will be incredible."

Cinergy Broadband LLC is teaming up with Current Communications Group LLC, a Germantown, Md.-based technology company, to offer the service in sections of Cincinnati this year. Plans call for an eventual expansion into Kentucky and Indiana; Cinergy hopes to market the service to 55,000 of its 1.5 million customers this year.

A second venture will bring the technology to smaller municipal and cooperatively owned power companies, covering 24 million customers across the United States.

The parties are committing more than $70 million to the ventures.

"We had very positive results from a pilot program that we began last January in about 100 homes and about 75 percent said they were very satisfied and willing to sign up for commercial service," said Cinergy spokesman Steve Brash.

Tim Barhorst, 51, of Cincinnati, was in the test program and is sold on the service.

"I have a home office and I have used DSL and cable, but I would choose BPL over them," said Barhorst, a technology consultant. He said the speed is comparable to the high-speed cable services and faster than DSL. "It has been very reliable and is the most cost-efficient for me."

Cinergy and Current Communications believe that the new technology offers several advantages over DSL and cable modem service, including the fact that no professional installation or additional wiring in a home is needed.

The service will be provided at three pricing levels, from 1 megabit per second for $29.95 a month to 3 megabits per second for $39.95 a month.

Customers will get one free modem, which must be plugged into an electrical socket for the system to work. Additional modems for multiple outlets will cost $30 to $40 each.

One major broadband rival, Time Warner Cable, claimed not to fear the competition. Spokesman Keith Cocozza said his company could offer better value by bundling several services together, such as Internet access with cable TV and phone service.

The Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) has said it will begin developing rules for the technology as another way to provide broadband access to consumers. FCC (news - web sites) Chairman Michael Powell said last year that because every building has a power plug, it "could simply blow the doors off the provision of broadband."

However, BPL has its critics, including the American Radio Relay League, a national association of amateur radio operators. The group contends that power line data transmissions will interference with radio tuned to the same frequency.

David Sumner, the league's chief executive, said that can cause problems for not only ham radio operators, but also short-wave broadcasts and military, public safety and government communications.

Cinergy's Brash, however, said interference has not been a problem.

In general, here's how the technology works. Data travels on medium-voltage wires in the power grid, getting transferred to fiber-optic or telephone lines to skip disruptive high-voltage wires.

Because signals can only make it so far before breaking apart, electronic devices on the power line reamplify packets of data. More elaborate techniques detour the signals around transformers before the data gets zipped into homes via the regular electric current.

Matt Davis, director of broadband services for the Yankee Group, a Boston-based research firm, is concerned that BPL technology has not developed sufficiently to be competitive and drive costs down. He also thinks it will struggle to compete with the bundled packages offered by cable and phone companies.

"I don't want to shoot it down, but there are some key things that are stacked against them," he said.

Karen George, research director for Primen, a Boulder, Colo.-based research company that tracks the retail energy market, says utilities have emphasized that providing Internet service will be important in underserved rural and suburban markets.

"The question is whether utilities will be able to make money off of it," she said.

___

On the Net:

http://www.cinergy.com

March 2, 2004 at 11:50 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home

Wave of viruses, worms sweep cyberspace: experts

Wave of viruses, worms sweep cyberspace: experts

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A wave of new computer worms and viruses has been sweeping cyberspace over the past few days, wreaking havoc on some systems and testing the software defenses of networks, experts said.
California-based Panda Software said the spread of viruses and the variants "has reached epidemic proportions worldwide."

In the wake of the Mydoom outbreak, described as the worst in Internet history, Panda said there are several versions of the Netsky virus and the Bagle worm spreading quickly.

"They are all spreading at an alarming rate and causing an increasing number of incidents around the globe," Panda said. "According to the data collated by PandaLabs, there are now millions of infected e-mails in circulation."

The British firm mi2g called the latest outbreak a "tsunami" of malicious computer code, or malware, saying it is "overwhelming both its victim organizations as well as anti-virus toolkit companies and security professionals across the world."

Most security companies, Internet service providers and systems administrators have been severely overworked since the initial outbreak of Mydoom in late January, mi2g said.

The company said the latest outbreaks appear to mark a shift from adventurous teens to criminals seeking to make money through various schemes, including one called "phishing" to obtain credit card or financial information.

"This is not the activity of hobbyists but organized criminals," mi2g said.

This epidemic "is particularly worrying for companies, as all the viruses propagate aggressively, meaning that they can rapidly collapse corporate networks," Panda said in a statement. "At present some 95 percent of infected computers belong to companies."

Panda said Netsky.D is proving to be the most dangerous of all of them, spreading the fastest.

According to Luis Corrons, head of PandaLabs, "The idea that an epidemic is caused by a single virus clearly needs reconsidering. Virus creators are aware of the effectiveness of launching waves of malicious code and the increased probability of infection, and so we can expect to see more of these tactics in the future."

MX Logic, a security firm based in Denver, Colorado, said the Netsky.D worm "has reached a critical threat level, with one in every 71 e-mails infected by the worm."

"The first two months of this year have been marked by an unrelenting onslaught of mass mailing worms and their variants, including Mydoom, Mydoom.F, Bagle and Netsky.D. We are convinced that the frequency and potency of mass mailing worms and their variants is likely to increase -- making it critical that email users take every precaution to protect their inboxes," said Scott Chasin, chief technology officer, MX Logic.

Netsky.D does not delete files or damage computers, but contaminated computers played a jingle for three hours Tuesday morning.

"The author may be amused by the thought of an office full of infected PCs, all beeping away," said Graham Cluley of the software firm Sophos. "But the Netsky worm causes real harm by clogging up email systems and making unauthorized changes to computer systems."

Over the past days, virus fighters have battled a number of new releases of the Bagle and Netsky Internet worm families, and on Tuesday afternoon some 10 percent of all e-mails in Europe were contaminated by bugs, statistics showed.

In contrast to most other viruses, Netsky.D does not have an expiration date, and it will therefore remain a menace for some time to come, experts pointed out.

March 2, 2004 at 11:49 PM in Virus | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home

US Leader of the SPAM World

US Leader of the SPAM World

ComputerWire Staff
The United States is the world leader in spam closely followed b China and South Korea, according to a report from antivirus software and services company Sophos. During a study of e-mail conducted for a two-day period last week, and reported yesterday, the US accounted for 56.74% of spam, while China ranked third with 6.24% and South Korea fourth on 5.77%.

March 2, 2004 at 11:47 PM in Spam | Permalink | TrackBack (37) | Top of page | Blog Home

Between 2.4 and 8.4 million US Internet users blog, yet Anick Jesdanun calls it hype

The Blog Herald: Between 2.4 and 8.4 million US Internet users blog, yet Anick Jesdanun calls it hype Archives

Another whacky internet poll has been released by the people from Pew Internet and American Life reporting findings that between 2% and 7% of US internet users maintain a blog, based mainly on a survey between March and May last year of 1,555 internet users. Based on their own calculations of 120 million internet users, the sample group comprises of 0.001% of all US Internet users. Now even if this sampling group is taken legitimately, by their own calculations between 2.4 million and 8.4 million US Internet users maintain a blog. Then enter the Australian's New York IT correspondent Anick Jesdanun.

Despite the ridiculously small sample, Anick has taken up with the cause of the anti-bloggers by writing an article syndicated through AP titled "Blog hype belies use". A few choice quotes include: "DESPITE the potential of turning every internet user into a publisher, relatively few have created web journals called blogs and even fewer do so with regularly...Some bloggers indeed update their journals often, in some cases several times a day. But it's clearly a minority who are taking advantage of the blog and its potential to steer the online discourse with personal musings about news events and daily life... Of those, only about 10 per cent update them daily, the majority doing so only once a week or less often."

So between 240,000 and 840,000 are updating their blogs lately. Is blogging the be-all and end-all of the Internet: it is certainly not, and nor has anyone pretended it to be. But a US market that involved figures similar to the population of New Zealand, where hundreds of thousands are contributing every day? Hype....I don't think so.

March 2, 2004 at 12:47 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (29) | Top of page | Blog Home

Blogging for Brain Augmentation

Amy's post perfectly sums up the reason I set up my own blog. There is no way to remember everything, and when you do need it, you can't recall the context, or where to look. Sorting things out in my own blog, as my own personal research medium still has limitations, but its paid dividends for me.

So now my blog should be renamed "my back-up brain".

Blogging for Brain Augmentation: Contentious Weblog

My brain is not enough! Too often, thoughts occur to me, or connections become apparent, that I very much wish to remember and use... but then along comes a flood of additional thoughts, and distractions, and minutiae, and so my moments of clarity dissolve into the infohaze.
I hate that.

March 2, 2004 at 12:37 PM in @ My Views @, Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (47) | Top of page | Blog Home

Internet is just a marketing brochure

There is nothing new in this Yahoo news where it appears that content will be made available based on willingness to pay Yahoo. This is already the case with Google.

Unfortunately this type of things as it becomes better understood will either limit the credibility of today's www, or it will limit the value in the traditional portal/ search engines.

March 2, 2004 at 09:08 AM in @ My Views @ | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo Adopts New Fees to Explore Web

Yahoo Adopts New Fees to Explore Web (TechNews.com)

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 2, 2004; 1:03 AM
SAN FRANCISCO -- Internet giant Yahoo! Inc. is adopting a new system for indexing Web pages that will charge businesses to include more material currently unlisted in its online search engine, marking the first volley in a duel with its former ally Google Inc.

Sunnyvale-based Yahoo is touting the approach, scheduled to be announced Tuesday, as a practical way to assure its search engine captures more of the so-called "Deep Web" - the billions of pages that aren't found during periodic crawls of the Internet.

The method, often called "paid inclusion," also will help Yahoo's search engine keep better tabs on the most current material on a Web page, company officials said.

More than 99 percent of Yahoo's search index will consist of Web links that don't pay fees, said Tim Cadogan, the company's vice president of search.

Search engine analysts generally applauded Yahoo's move, saying it could open a rich new vein of content that's lacking from all Internet search engines.

But the fees required to participate in the program are likely to raise worries a