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Online spending more than doubles
LONDON (Reuters) - Britons have more than doubled the amount of money they spend online over the past year as ever more people do routine tasks like grocery shopping and paying bills over the Internet.
Credit card provider Visa said in a study released on Friday that its UK cardholders spent over 2.4 billion pounds on the Internet in the first quarter of 2004, up 123 percent from the same period last year.
One of the biggest winners was the food and drink industry, where sales more than trebled because of a "massive rise" in people doing their supermarket shopping online, Visa said. Sales of books and music also surged, up 116 percent in the quarter.
Holidays were a popular item to book online, with travel and tourism sales up 159 percent over the same period.
The increasing trend towards shopping on the Web was reflected earlier this month in results from Internet retailer Lastminute.com, which said its total transactions soared 94 percent in the same three months.
A key survey of consumer confidence on Thursday also held steady in May, suggesting shoppers had not been deterred by the Bank of England's recent interest rate rises.
May 31, 2004 at 11:02 AM in eCommerce | Permalink | TrackBack (67) | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - SI to Move Ammunition Training Online
Mon May 31, 1:00 AM ETAdd Technology - washingtonpost.com to My Yahoo!
By Anitha Reddy, Washington Post Staff Writer
SI International Inc. won a contract worth up to $5 million from the U.S. Army to design and build an online system to train students in the use and disposal of ammunition and explosives.
The Army's Defense Ammunition Center said 5,000 to 10,000 students from the military, the Pentagon (news - web sites), state and federal agencies and allied nations would take courses each year through the system, planned for use by 2005.
By cutting out the breaks and question-and-answer session of a typical week-long instructor-led course, students on a computer would be able to cover the material in as little as eight hours, said Keith Anderson, the program manager overseeing the contract at SI.
The system would rely on sophisticated three-dimensional imaging to teach students how to identify different kinds of ammunition. Simulation technology would also let students participate in virtual sweeps of weapons sites or view demonstrations of proper storage techniques for explosives.
Oklahoma State University is working closely with SI International on the project and will eventually analyze student coursework to see if the Web training is effective.
SI, based in Reston, is also responsible for assembling a panel of ammunition experts that will be available as needed for the Army.
The contract has a term of one year but could be extended by three years. SI employees are to work on the project at offices in Reston, Rockville and Oklahoma City.
May 31, 2004 at 10:58 AM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (30) | Top of page | Blog Home
70% of emails now spam - Web User News
27/05/2004
Gail Robinson
Junk mail now accounts for nearly 70% of emails worldwide, according to the latest figures from email filtering specialists MessageLabs.
And there could be worse to come: 83% of all email traffic in the US is spam and MessageLabs predicts the UK will see US style spam levels by the end of the year.
40% of spam is healthcare related (we’re sure you’ve noticed all those Viagra and wonder diet messages clogging your in-box). However porn spam seems to be on a downslide. Filtering company Clearswift produces a regular Spam Index and found that just 4.8% of spam is pornography related.
A spokesperson for the company reasoned: “It appears that adult products and services are not generating sufficient returns for spammers. Instead, they are switching to more profitable models using stock tips and consumer products as a hook.”
Those Clearswift results in full…
40% is healthcare related
37.8% is financial
12.8% is direct products
4.8% is pornography
May 30, 2004 at 01:51 PM in Spam | Permalink | TrackBack (37) | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - Bank of Ireland Chief Quits Over 'Adult' Web Sites
DUBLIN (Reuters) - The chief executive of Bank of Ireland Plc, Michael Soden, resigned on Saturday after admitting looking at Internet Web Sites containing "adult material" on his personal computer.
Soden, who took over as group chief executive at Ireland's second biggest bank in March 2002, said he had done nothing illegal, but had breached company policies and apologized for any embarrassment caused.
"I wish to announce that I have tendered my resignation as group chief executive at Bank of Ireland with immediate effect," said Soden in a personal statement released by the company.
"This arises from access by me on my PC to Internet sites that contain content that infringed the group's policies on these matters. The content accessed was not illegal, but did contain links to material of an adult nature."
Soden said he had made it "a central part of my tenure" at the bank to set the highest standards of integrity and behavior.
"I now accept that accessing this material was inappropriate and would cause embarrassment to Bank of Ireland and to the people who work there," the statement added. "I deeply regret any such embarrassment."
In a separate statement the bank said it was beginning the search for Soden's successor immediately, and would make a further comment next week.
Soden, a Dublin native, joined Bank of Ireland from National Australia Bank in Melbourne, where he had been executive general manager of global business and personal finance.
He had previously held a number of senior positions in international banking, including chief executive of Citicorp Investment Bank in Canada, and Security Pacific Hoare Govett in London.
His resignation came on the same day the chairman of state airline Aer Lingus, Tom Mulcahy, resigned after being caught up in a tax scandal at Bank of Ireland's main rival, Allied Irish Banks plc, where he was a former chief executive.
May 29, 2004 at 04:43 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (32) | Top of page | Blog Home
Computer users urged to update protection
LOUIE ROSELLA
May 28, 2004
A Mississauga teen who allegedly hacked into more than 9,000 computers worldwide and launched a virus that caused many systems to crash now faces charges following an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
The 16-year-old boy, who cannot be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, is charged with a number of computer-related offences, including mischief to data, fraudulent use of computer systems and aiding/abetting mischief to data.
The RCMP's technological crime unit in London tracked a variant of the well-known Randex virus, which had weaved into the computers of more than 9,000 unsuspecting internet users since November through such popular file-sharing programs as Kazaa and Limewire, which are often used to download music and movie files. Once inside an online computer, the virus received commands sent from the original hacker over a chat room.
"The affected computers automatically responded to malicious commands issued on particular channels of certain internet relay chat networks," said RCMP Sgt. George Wiegers yesterday.
The virus installed a "Trojan" program, according to police, allowing unauthorized access to, and use of the victim computers. The hacker could then make use of the victim computers in multiple ways, including sending out large amounts of junk e-mail, or cause the computer to crash at any given time, police said.
Wiegers wouldn't get into the specifics of the case, but said people and businesses did suffer from the crippling virus.
"The target could be a computer or network critical to one company that needs the computer up and running," he said. "The company may suffer financially and may suffer in numerous ways."
The RCMP are advising home internet users to be aware of the risks posed by such viruses.
"People who are connected to the internet need to take proactive steps to protect their system," Wiegers said.
"Try to look at the computer system you have now and ask 'Is this computer system secure?' While there are no certainties in the ever-growing world of internet crime, Wiegers advised internet users to update their anti-virus, anti-trojan and firewall software.
Just last summer, stubborn computer worm known as "Blaster" wiggled its way into thousands of homes and offices in Mississauga
The infamous worm, designed to shut down infected computers repeatedly, hit households and businesses worldwide, exposing a vulnerability in the Microsoft system.
Also last summer, a variant of the Blaster worm, Welchia, hit Air Canada's computers at Pearson International Airport, creating massive delays and line-ups. Affected users were forced to download special anti-virus equipment that should be installed regularly anyway, according to police.
"Nothing's going to guarantee you're going to be 100 per cent secure but (you should) take steps to protect your computer," said Wiegers.
"This will significantly reduce the vulnerability of a person's computer from being accessed without permission."
THE MISSISSAUGA NEWS
May 28, 2004 at 11:20 PM in Virus | Permalink | TrackBack (35) | Top of page | Blog Home
Spam surge 'turning Britain into e-pariah'
By Graeme Wearden, ZDNet UK
Criticism of the UK's spam laws is growing nearly as quickly as the problem of junk mail itself
The government's failure to give businesses protection from unsolicited commercial email risks turning the UK into an Internet outcast, according to one of its political opponents.
The government's failure to give businesses protection from unsolicited commercial email risks turning the UK into an Internet outcast, according to one of its political opponents.
Michael Fabricant, the shadow minister for economic affairs, claimed this week that Britain's anti-spam laws need to be strengthened, given the continued rise in the amount of junk mail being received by email users.
"I believe that this legislation needs to be looked at again if Britain isn't to become a pariah nation amongst the global e-community," said Fabricant in a statement that largely repeated a speech he gave earlier this year.
MessageLabs reported this week that spam now makes up almost 70 percent of all mail sent worldwide, indicating that the problem is getting worse. In January it was reported that Britain had become one of the top ten countries responsible for sending spam.
The government brought in legislation last year that made it illegal to send unsolicited commercial mail to a personal email account, but which gave no protection to business accounts.
This decision has been heavily criticised by experts. As ZDNet UK reported last month, it's unlikely that any suspected spammer will face prosecution this year, due to the limited powers that have been given to the Information Commissioner, who is enforcing the law.
Government officials recently met with the Office of the Information Commissioner to discuss whether the law should be tightened up.
A spokeswoman for the Office of the Information Commissioner said on Friday that these discussions were ongoing with "nothing promised either way".
May 28, 2004 at 10:29 PM in Spam | Permalink | TrackBack (46) | Top of page | Blog Home
TheStar.com - Spam master off to slammer
`Buffalo Spammer' gets the maximum
Carmack sent out 825 million e-mails
WASHINGTON - A New York state man who sent out millions of "spam" e-mails has been sentenced to 3 1/2 to seven years in prison.
Howard Carmack, known as the "Buffalo Spammer," received the maximum sentence for 14 counts of identity theft and forgery, the state attorney-general's office said yesterday.
Carmack sent out 825 million bulk e-mail messages using stolen identities and forged addresses, the court found, and was the first defendant to face charges under the state's new identity-theft statute.
He was found guilty in April.
The forgery conviction fetched the longest sentence, while the other convictions drew shorter sentences of one year to four years. All will be served concurrently, said Brad Maione, spokesperson for Attorney-General Eliot Spitzer.
With good behaviour in prison, Carmack could be out in 3 1/2 years, Maione said.
Internet provider EarthLink Inc. won a $16.5 million (U.S.) judgment against Carmack last year, and EarthLink officials testified in the criminal trial as well.
"We're satisfied that today's sentencing sends a strong message to spammers, and EarthLink will continue to investigate spammers and work with law enforcement," EarthLink lawyer Karen Cashion said.
Many of Carmack's alleged activities are illegal under a national anti-spam law that took effect in January, seven months after he was charged.
reuters news agency
May 28, 2004 at 07:55 AM in Spam | Permalink | TrackBack (50) | Top of page | Blog Home
Survey: E-Government Slowly Winning Acceptance (TechNews.com)
By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 26, 2004; 6:14 PM
Telephones, letters and face-to-face contact still beat out the Internet when it comes to how Americans choose to interact with their government, according to a report released earlier this week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
But the Internet's popularity as a way for obtaining government information and services continues to grow -- percent of the Internet users who took part in the survey said they used the Internet either to obtain information from a government Web site or to obtain services from a government office or agency.
The report was based on a telephone survey of 2,925 randomly dialed participants conducted earlier this month; 63 percent of the respondents said they were Internet users.
Overall, the survey found that people who contacted the government during 2003 preferred more traditional communications means by a margin of 54 percent to 37 percent. Nearly 74 percent of Internet users who said they contacted the government during the year used the telephone, wrote letters or showed up at a government office in person.
Only slightly more than half of Internet users -- 54 percent -- said they went online to conduct business with the government, such as renewing their vehicle registrations, applying for a passport or writing a letter to a local elected official.
The study shows that agencies should not "put all their government outreach eggs into one basket," study author John Horrigan said. "It's important to see how e-mail and the Web complement the traditional means of contact. One way to get the biggest bang for your buck is to figure out how these people use the different tools."
The Pew report "validates that the direction that we're going in is the right direction. We recognize that every person wants to deal with their government in the medium that they feel comfortable with," said Karen Evans, the White House official in charge of e-government efforts.
Making it possible for citizens to obtain government services via the Internet costs much less than dealing with people on the telephone or in person, making e-government an increasingly popular tool at the federal, state and local levels, said Lisa Mascolo, managing partner at Accenture's federal government practice in Reston, Va.
Mascolo said government offices will get a better citizen response to their e-government efforts if they make their sites easier to find and navigate.
"We came to the conclusion that up to 26 percent of the people didn't really know where to find or how to find the Web sites," she said. "And once they get there, [agencies] need to encourage them to use the Web site, not just for research but to conduct their business with e-government."
Accenture contracts with multiple government agencies at all levels on e-government and other services. The company released its own e-government survey earlier this month. Their primary conclusion was that people's e-government activities mainly involve research, not actually getting services taken care of.
TechNews.com Home
© 2004 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
May 27, 2004 at 10:35 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (33) | Top of page | Blog Home
The New York Times > Technology > Comcast Plans Internet Telephone Service
By REUTERS
y Reuters
The Comcast Corporation said yesterday that it would offer telephone service over the Internet to more than 40 million households by 2006, as it follows a host of other cable operators challenging local telephone companies.
Comcast also announced that its chairman, C. Michael Armstrong, 64, had stepped down a year earlier than planned. He was succeeded by the chief executive, Brian L. Roberts. Mr. Armstrong was the chief executive of the AT&T Corporation before Comcast acquired AT&T Broadband in 2002.
Comcast, the nation's largest cable television company, said it would begin an aggressive rollout of telephone service with a technology known as VoIP, or voice-over-Internet protocol, which allows phone calls to be transmitted using a cable modem over high-speed data lines.
Comcast follows Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Systems and Cox Communications in combining phone service with video and Internet service in an effort to take business from the Baby Bells, while giving consumers an incentive not to switch to satellite television.
But with 21.5 million subscribers, Comcast is far larger than its competitors, and analysts say it offers the biggest long-term threat to telecommunications carriers in the areas it serves.
"Comcast will likely become one of the biggest phone companies over the next decade," said John Hodulik, a UBS analyst. "We expect these carriers to see accelerating pressure on residential access lines in 2005 as these deployments occur."
Shares of Comcast rose 12 cents yesterday, to close at $29.69. Shares of SBC declined 55 cents, or 2.3 percent, to $23.50, and Verizon fell $1.05, or nearly 3 percent, to $34.40.
Comcast's service area encompasses large chunks of the markets of larger carriers, including 30 percent of SBC Communications, 27 percent of Verizon Communications, 23 percent of BellSouth and 28 percent of Qwest Communications International.
The largest Baby Bells have been bracing themselves over the last year for tougher competition, and some have experimented with VoIP offerings of their own.
Verizon is expected to introduce its nationwide VoIP service before the end of June, while Qwest has tested a VoIP service in Minnesota.
A spokesman for SBC, Michael Coe, said that while the company saw cable companies as a long-term threat, SBC had time to respond.
"It's going to take a while for consumer VoIP to take off," he said. "SBC won't be standing still."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
May 27, 2004 at 10:32 PM in Telecommunications | Permalink | TrackBack (33) | Top of page | Blog Home
The New York Times > National > Survey Finds U.S. Agencies Engaged in 'Data Mining'
By ROBERT PEAR
ASHINGTON, May 26 - A survey of federal agencies has found more than 120 programs that collect and analyze large amounts of personal data on individuals to predict their behavior.
The survey, to be issued Thursday by the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, found that the practice, known as data mining, was ubiquitous.
In canvassing federal agencies, the accounting office found that 52 were systematically sifting through computer databases. These agencies reported 199 data mining projects, of which 68 were planned and 131 were in operation. At least 122 of the 199 projects used identifying information like names, e-mail addresses, Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers.
The survey provides the first authoritative estimate of the extent of data mining by the government. It excludes most classified projects, so the actual numbers are likely to be much higher.
The Defense Department made greatest use of the technique, with 47 data mining projects to track everything from the academic performance of Navy midshipmen to the whereabouts of ship parts and suspected terrorists.
Senator Daniel K. Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, who requested the report by the accounting office, said: "I am disturbed by the high number of data mining activities in the federal government involving personal information. The government collects and uses Americans' personal information and shares it with other agencies to an astonishing degree, raising serious privacy concerns."
A federal advisory committee appointed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week that Congress should pass laws to protect the civil liberties of Americans when the government scans computer records and data files for information about terrorists.
Newton N. Minow, chairman of the committee, said he and other panel members would formally present their report to Mr. Rumsfeld on Thursday.
The panel said federal agencies should generally be required to obtain court approval "before engaging in data mining with personally identifiable information" on United States citizens. It also said that federal investigators should, if possible, work with anonymous data, stripped of personal identifiers, and use the minimum amount of data needed to achieve their purpose.
The panel was created to quell a political uproar over a Pentagon plan to hunt terrorists by monitoring e-mail messages and fishing through huge databases of financial, medical and travel information.
The accounting office defined data mining as the use of sophisticated technology, statistical analysis and modeling to uncover hidden patterns and subtle relationships in data, and to infer rules that allow for the prediction of future activity.
Of the 199 data mining projects, 54 use information from the private sector, like credit reports and records of credit card transactions. Seventy-seven projects use data obtained from other federal agencies, like student loan records, bank account numbers and taxpayer identification numbers.
In its catalog of data mining, the accounting office listed these projects:
¶The Internal Revenue Service mines financial data to predict which individual tax returns have the greatest potential for fraud and which corporations are most likely to make improper use of tax shelters.
¶The Defense Intelligence Agency mines data from the intelligence community and searches the Internet to identify people, including United States citizens, who are most likely to have connections to foreign terrorist activities.
¶The Department of Homeland Security seeks clues to possible terrorist activity by looking for patterns in myriad records of crimes, arrests and unusual behavior, traffic tickets and incidents involving the possession of firearms.
James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group, said: "In many cases, the private sector is subject to stricter standards than the government. The Fair Credit Reporting Act, for example, imposes limits on commercial uses of personal financial and other data, but there are virtually no limits on government uses."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
May 27, 2004 at 10:28 PM in Phishing & identity theft | Permalink | TrackBack (64) | Top of page | Blog Home
The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > For Some, the Blogging Never Stops
By KATIE HAFNER
O celebrate four years of marriage, Richard Wiggins and his wife, Judy Matthews, recently spent a week in Key West, Fla. Early on the morning of their anniversary, Ms. Matthews heard her husband get up and go into the bathroom. He stayed there for a long time.
"I didn't hear any water running, so I wondered what was going on," Ms. Matthews said. When she knocked on the door, she found him seated with his laptop balanced on his knees, typing into his Web log, a collection of observations about the technical world, over a wireless link.
Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession. Such bloggers often feel compelled to write several times daily and feel anxious if they don't keep up. As they spend more time hunkered over their computers, they neglect family, friends and jobs. They blog at home, at work and on the road. They blog openly or sometimes, like Mr. Wiggins, quietly so as not to call attention to their habit.
"It seems as if his laptop is glued to his legs 24/7," Ms. Matthews said of her husband.
The number of bloggers has grown quickly, thanks to sites like blogger.com, which makes it easy to set up a blog. Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5 million blogs.
Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at best, maintained infrequently. For many bloggers, the novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades.
Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets in. A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs.
Indeed, if a blog is likened to a conversation between a writer and readers, bloggers like Mr. Wiggins are having conversations largely with themselves.
Mr. Wiggins, 48, a senior information technologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, does not know how many readers he has; he suspects it's not many. But that does not seem to bother him.
"I'm just getting something off my chest," he said.
Nor is he deterred by the fact that he toils for hours at a time on his blog for no money. He gets satisfaction in other ways. "Sometimes there's an 'I told you so' aspect to it," he said. Recent ruminations on wigblog.blogspot.com have focused on Gmail, Google's new e-mail service. Mr. Wiggins points with pride to Wigblog posts that voiced early privacy concerns about Gmail.
Perhaps a chronically small audience is a blessing. For it seems that the more popular a blog becomes, the more some bloggers feel the need to post.
Tony Pierce started his blog three years ago while in search of a distraction after breaking up with a girlfriend. "In three years, I don't think I've missed a day," he said. Now Mr. Pierce's blog (www.tonypierce.com/blog/bloggy.htm), a chatty diary of Hollywood, writing and women in which truth sometimes mingles with fiction, averages 1,000 visitors a day.
Where some frequent bloggers might label themselves merely ardent, Mr. Pierce is more realistic. "I wouldn't call it dedicated, I would call it a problem," he said. "If this were beer, I'd be an alcoholic."
Mr. Pierce, who lives in Hollywood and works as a scheduler in the entertainment industry, said blogging began to feel like an addiction when he noticed that he would rather be with his computer than with his girlfriend - for technical reasons.
"She's got an iMac, and I don't like her computer," Mr. Pierce said. When he is at his girlfriend's house, he feels "antsy." "We have little fights because I want to go home and write my thing," he said.
Mr. Pierce described the rush he gets from what he called "the fix" provided by his blog. "The pleasure response is twofold," he said. "You can have instant gratification; you're going to hear about something really good or bad instantly. And if I feel like I've written something good, it's enjoyable to go back and read it."
And, he said, "like most addictions, those feelings go away quickly. So I have to do it again and again."
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, 26, a graduate student at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied bloggers, said that for some people blogging has supplanted e-mail as a way to procrastinate at work.
People like Mr. Pierce, who devote much of their free time to the care and feeding of their own blogs and posting to other blogs, do so largely because it makes them feel productive even if it is not a paying job.
The procrastination, said Scott Lederer, 31, a fellow graduate student with Mr. Hall, has a collective feel to it. "You feel like you're participating in something important, because we're all doing it together," he said.
Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net, a company that builds Web sites for newspapers and magazines, and a blogging enthusiast, defended what he called one's "obligation to the blog."
"The addictive part is not so much extreme narcissism," Mr. Jarvis said. "It's that you're involved in a conversation. You have a connection to people through the blog."
Some compulsive bloggers take their obligation to extremes, blogging at the expense of more financially rewarding tasks.
Mr. Wiggins has missed deadline after deadline at Searcher, an online periodical for which he is a paid contributor.
Barbara Quint, the editor of the magazine, said she did all she could to get him to deliver his columns on time. Then she discovered that Mr. Wiggins was busily posting articles to his blog instead of sending her the ones he had promised, she said. "Here he is working all night on something read by five second cousins and a dog, and I'm willing to pay him," she said.
Ms. Quint has grown more understanding of his reasons, if not entirely sympathetic. "The Web's illusion of immortality is sometimes more attractive than actual cash," she said.
Jocelyn Wang, a 27-year-old marketing manager in Los Angeles, started her blog, a chronicle of whatever happens to pop into her head (www.jozjozjoz.com), 18 months ago as an outlet for boredom.
Now she spends at least four hours a day posting to her blog and reading other blogs. Ms. Wang's online journal is now her life. And the people she has met through the blog are a large part of her core of friends.
"There is no real separation in my life," she said. Like Mr. Wiggins, Ms. Wang blogs while on vacation. She stays on floors at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco with access to a free Internet connection. ("So I can blog," she explains.)
Blogging for a cause can take on a special urgency. Richard Khoe, a political consultant in Washington who in his spare time helps run a pro-John Kerry group called Run Against Bush, posts constantly to the blog embedded in the group's Web site (www.runagainstbush.org). He blogs late into the night, although he knows that the site still attracts relatively few visitors.
"Sometimes you get really particular with the kind of link you want, so you search a little more, then a little more, then you want to see what other people are saying about that link you chose," he said. "And before you know it, some real time has passed."
Others find they are distracted to the point of neglectfulness. Tom Lewis, 35, a project manager for a software firm in western Massachusetts who has a photo blog (tomdog.buzznet.com/user), has occasionally shown up "considerably late" for events and has put off more than a few work-related calls to tend to his blog.
Mr. Jarvis characterizes the blogging way of life as a routine rather than an obsession. "It's a habit," he said. "What you're really doing is telling people about something that they might find interesting. When that becomes part of your life, when you start thinking in blog, it becomes part of you."
The constant search for bloggable moments is what led Gregor J. Rothfuss, a programmer in Zurich, to blog to the point of near-despair. Bored by his job, Mr. Rothfuss, 27, started a blog that focused on technical topics.
"I was trying to record all thoughts and speculations I deemed interesting," he said. "Sort of creating a digital alter ego. The obsession came from trying to capture as much as possible of the good stuff in my head in as high fidelity as possible."
For months, Mr. Rothfuss said, he blogged at work, at home, late into the night, day in and day out until it all became a blur - all the while knowing, he added, "that no one was necessarily reading it, except for myself."
When traffic to the blog, greg.abstract.ch started to rise, he began devoting half a day every day and much of the weekend to it. Mr. Rothfuss said he has few memories of that period in his life aside from the compulsive blogging.
He was saved from the rut of his online chronicle when he traveled to Asia. The blog became more of a travelogue. Then Mr. Rothfuss switched jobs, finding one he enjoyed, and his blogging grew more moderate.
He still has the blog, but posts to it just twice a week, he said, "as opposed to twice an hour." He feels healthier now. "It's part of what I do now, it's not what I do," he said.
Suffering from a similar form of "blog fatigue," Bill Barol, a freelance writer in Santa Monica, Calif., simply stopped altogether after four years of nearly constant blogging.
"It was starting to feel like work, and it was never supposed to be a job," Mr. Barol said. "It was supposed to be an anti-job."
Even with some 200 visitors to his blog each day, he has not posted to his blog since returning from a month of travel.
Still, Mr. Barol said, he does not rule out a return to blogging someday.
"There is this seductive thing that happens, this kind of snowball-rolling-down-a-hill thing, where the sheer momentum of several years' posting becomes very keenly felt," he said. "And the absence of posting feels like - I don't know, laziness or something."
Tim Gnatek contributed reporting for this article.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
May 27, 2004 at 10:26 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home
By Jay Wrolstad
Enterprise Security Today
May 27, 2004 11:02AM
Yahoo is offering the beta version of a new anti-spyware tool, dubbed "Anti-Spy," to an audience of test users. ISPs and Internet security experts are taking aggressive action against spyware, which can monitor the Web sites a computer user visits and collect passwords and credit-card information.
Yahoo has launched new anti-spyware software, becoming the latest Internet service provider to combat a problem plaguing virtually every computer user with an Internet connection.
Anti-Spy, available in a beta version, resides on the toolbar, making it easier for customers to scan for and remove malicious software, including spyware. Provided by anti-spyware specialist Pest Patrol, it is currently available for download to a limited audience.
A Growing Concern
Spyware often is installed, unbeknownst to the user, along with the download of a file-sharing program or other software. Once on a machine, it can monitor keystrokes and determine sites visited -- collecting passwords, account numbers and e-mail addresses while delivering unsolicited ads.
ISPs like AOL and EarthLink also have addressed this growing problem. AOL launched a version of anti-spyware software for its customers in January. And I.T. security companies, such as Symantec , now are focusing on spyware as a serious threat to network security
"Yahoo, like its competitors, needs to protect the customer base," said Bruce Hughes of TruSecure. "We are seeing spyware now that can do some serious damage -- such as change DNS settings and automatically redirect search results."
A Problem for Businesses
Spyware typically enters a computer through Internet Explorer vulnerabilities. "More and more ISPs and Web portals are taking action to block spyware," Hughes told NewsFactor.
While consumers are more susceptible to spyware assaults, such attacks are a problem for businesses, too, since workers frequently download software behind the firewall.
Spyware has become more sophisticated, said Forrester Research security analyst Michael Rasmussen, presenting potential problems for enterprises that can be held liable for security breaches . "This is no longer a benign technology," he told NewsFactor.
In conjunction with the beta launch of Anti-Spy, Yahoo is offering a forum to keep customers up to speed regarding security issues related to spyware and other malware.
May 27, 2004 at 10:02 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - Why Banks Should Focus Online
Thu May 27, 2:34 PM ETAdd Technology - NewsFactor to My Yahoo!
Kimberly Hill, www.crm-daily.com
Most banks think they know who their most profitable customers are. But they are wrong, says Forrester Research's Ron Shevlin. And that error leads them to miss the tremendous opportunity of the online channel.
"Banks think their best customers are those who own the most products," Shevlin told CRM Daily. "But that does not take into account two things: the cost to serve those customers and their future potential with the institution."
Cost vs. Profit
Banks consistently make the mistake of assuming that the customers who buy the most products are making them the most money, Shevlin explained. But their calculations rarely take into account how much it costs to provide them with customer service.
Take, for example, a person who has three separate accounts with a bank, Shevlin said, who presumably would be considered a "best customer." However, what if that individual were to call the time- and resource-intensive contact center once or twice each week? The bank actually might be losing money on those particular accounts.
In addition, certain lifestyle or life-stage factors might make that customer a dead-end prospect. Those three accounts likely would remain static for some period, and the customer might not be likely to purchase any additional products or services from the bank.
Take It Online
By contrast, customers who use the online tools offered by banks are much more attractive cross-sell and upsell prospects, Shevlin's research has found. "Statistically, people who use their bank's Web site are far more likely to consider additional products," he said.
That propensity crosses demographic groups. In the past, the people most likely to use self-service tools through the online channel were the younger, more tech-savvy, and more affluent members of the customer population.
Now, however, those most likely to venture online with a bank are account holders that have been led there by an employee servicing another channel -- such as a teller or a telephone customer-service representative.
Thus, a bank's best customers are those that are cheaper to serve and those that are likely to consider additional products -- and those customers are exactly the ones using online self-service tools.
May 27, 2004 at 08:52 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (48) | Top of page | Blog Home
The Australian: Salam Pax succumbs to unbearable weight of blogging [May 20, 2004]
By Elisabeth Wynhausen
May 20, 2004
JUST five days after leaving Baghdad, Salam Pax has rushed from a television studio to an interview in the atrium of a glossy Sydney hotel. The whole thing seems a little surreal, he says. Salam Pax as he is now known the world over, is the 31-year Iraqi man whose weblog – or "blog" – provided the most immediate account of life during the war in Iraq.
His web diary began on a lighter note as a way of keeping in touch with his friend Raed, a Palestinian from Jordan he had met while the two were studying architecture.
There was a time he practically felt he knew the few fellow bloggers reading him. But the site had millions of hits in the ominous build-up to the war, as his blog recorded the hardships of life under Saddam Hussein, with sharp barbs and sly humour. When he went offline, during the war, it was feared he might have been picked up by the Iraqi secret police.
Pax survived. But his blog has succumbed – not to the authorities but to the terrible weight of becoming the virtual personification of Iraq.
"As the world starts looking at your website, you get more and more weighed down with the responsibility of it," he tells Media.
In Australia as a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival, Pax is an animated, round-cheeked man as full of surprises as his web diary, now published in book form by Text. He, too, has a sneaking preference for books, he admits in his rapid-fire English.
"The truth is I still prefer printed stuff. I still print loads of stuff out," he says. "The disadvantage of the book is that you don't really see how things are put in context. In a weblog, the whole point is, click on the link, read the article, make up your mind , then tell me whether you agree with me or not. The weblog is just immediate."
Indeed some believe that web diaries like his will eventually replace war reporting. Salam Pax is not one of them, however.
"Someone wrote 'these bloggers commit random acts of journalism' – and they are random. You always have to remember that all blogs really are opinion pieces."
On the other hand, the blogger has the access journalists may be denied.
Because an Iranian expatriate adapted the software to allow people to blog in Farsi, he says, "there is a huge Iranian blogging community". "A couple of months ago there was a big student uprising in Iran."
The journalists who tried to enter the country were refused permission by the authorities.
"There was no possibility for a journalist to go in and talk to people. But you had five or six incredibly good weblogs that were showing pictures of dorms that had doors kicked in and blood spattered on the walls,"
Pax says. While the boundaries between journalism and blogging have blurred, with some journalists producing weblogs their own organisations have the right to edit – subverting the idea of the weblog – Pax has gone in the opposite direction.
He writes a column, Baghdad Blog, for the Guardian newspaper but gave up his web diary last month, at least for the time being. He was starting to censor himself, he says.
"There are almost 30 Iraqi blogs now, all of them started after the war. Blogging as an Iraqi became a political statement. You're supposed to say right at the top of your blog whether you love the Americans or you're a Saddamist.
"People don't realise there are a hundred shades of grey in between," says Pax, who managed to be open-minded from first to last.
May 27, 2004 at 08:40 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (36) | Top of page | Blog Home
The move to branches is over-estimated. but this article does a pretty good job at rationalising that move. I worry that organsitons are making the move and not concurrently developing self service so that the branch focusses on revenue and only for those customers that choose the branch.
touchpoints - The return of the branch
27 October 2003
By Gillian Scott
The life of the bank branch has been turbulent over the last decade, to say the least. While the advent of online banking opened up an additional service channel for banks, often resulting in lower budgets for the retail branch, the emergence of internet-only banks provided a leaner, competitive threat to banks with traditional bricks ‘n’ mortar infrastructure for the provision of convenient financial services. Once banks looked at these channels as complementing one another, the bricks ‘n’ clicks model evolved.
But now the branch is making a comeback. According to a Finextra survey of 58 senior IT decision-makers at retail financial institutions worldwide, banks are currently looking to an investment in branch renewal and Internet activity as their delivery channel priorities, with the call center and other alternatives being relegated to a secondary supporting or experimental role. Moreover, spending on channels and customer-facing technology is expected to swallow up almost half of the IT budget in 2004.
Europe in particular looks likely to be a region that will witness considerable levels of branch renewal. According to Datamonitor’s March 2003 report Branch Renewal in European Retail Banking, spending on European banks’ branch renewal is predicted to undergo a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of almost 10 percent in 2005.
Why are financial institutions undertaking this change in strategy? One of the main drivers it appears has been a shift in approach and understanding of the role of the branch as a revenue-generating channel. Traditionally, it has been regarded as a transaction center, but increasingly the branch is seen as a retail center. Self-service technologies are being integrated into the branch environment to service the routine (high volume, low value) transactions, so that staff time is freed up for customer relationship building. What is clear is that the needs of the customer within the branch are paramount. Key elements include:
Convenience – such as 24/7 access to personal accounts at the ATM
Comfort – designated customer areas such as sitting areas to browse through literature or have a beverage
Personal touch – through the availability of face-to-face advice, particularly for high-value products such as mortgages and insurance. Furthermore, since most of the cash tends to be housed in the ATM at the branch, it means that there is less need for physical barriers between staff and customers, thereby allowing a less ‘formal’ relationship from the start.
To become more customer-centric and accessible, new branch designs and service styles have been implemented by leading financial institutions around the world, such as Multibank in Poland, where financial seminars are held in the branches after normal banking hours, thereby extending the value of the location and the relationship of the bank to its customers.
One issue facing banks is that it is difficult to measure the collective impact of the changes that are being made within the branch. Increasingly, banks need to be able to perform operational and quantitative analysis in order to justify change, and it appears that there is an increasing awareness and movement toward achieving ‘hard results’. Over time this will result in targeted spending determined by customer behaviour and interaction with all channels available at the branch.
Banks are also using their branches to differentiate themselves from their competition. In a recent article for Bank Systems & Technology, Anjalee Davis, Banking Analyst, Celent Communications, describes this growing phenomenon:
“Pressure on banks to [distinguish] will only increase with further market concentration and as core banking products (savings, loans) become pure commodities. . . it is difficult to differentiate products and services through pricing alone. As a result, banks are redesigning their branches and building new branches. This will support continued investment in next-generation branch applications and enterprise technology for at least the next five years.”
Finally, a less obvious driver of branch renewal: Celent also predicts that a few leading banks are utilising the need to replace their obsolete branch technology as an opportunity to begin “integrating their siloed channels” (Branch Renewal & Channel Integration: A Case Study on Citizens Bank), most likely to a Web-based platform. The result is clear, as Davis concludes: “Even with a return to a bull market, banks will continue investing in their branches.”
May 27, 2004 at 08:37 PM in @ My Views @, Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home
finextra news: HBOS sells off-site cash machines to Cardpoint for £75 million
26 May 2004 - Independent ATM operator Cardpoint has agreed the acquisition of 816 off-site cash machines from UK bank HBOS for £75 million.
The acquisition is the first substantial estate to be sold by a bank or a building society to an independent operator and it will establish Cardpoint as the market leader, both in terms of number of fully managed cash machines and by number of transactions, within the independent market place.
The HBOS remote estate is predominantly located in mature locations and generates average transaction volumes ten times higher than the existing Cardpoint estate.
Unlike Cardpoint, HBOS does not charge cardholders, but instead generates revenues through interchange fees payable by the cardholder’s bank or building society.
Cardpoint currently levies an average charge of £1.66 per withdrawal and says it will seek to convert "a proportion" of the HBOS machines to the Cardpoint model, resulting in "the generation of materially higher revenues than have historically been generated by the HBOS remote estate".
Cardpoint intends to finance the acquisition via a £35 million placing and open offer and £25 million in debt financing by the Bank of Scotland.
Confirmation of the agreement comes as the firm releases its interim financial statement detailing turnover of £13.8 million (2003: £2.9 million) for the half year to end-March 2004, and gross profits of £3.8 million compared with £0.4 million, in the year earlier period, including previously acquired businesses. Operating losses from continuing operations during the period more than doubled to £0.78 million from £0.38 million.
May 27, 2004 at 07:19 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (47) | Top of page | Blog Home
Wired News: A Scan of the Headline Scanners
The Web is awash in little orange buttons.
Those buttons take readers to pages filled with XML code for RSS or Atom syndication services. People who don't know about XML or RSS or Atom get a screen full of ugly computer code. But those clued into the secret handshake -- or more accurately, the right decoding software -- know those buttons are the key to speed-reading the Web.
Those buttons are for people who use aggregators (sometimes called newsreaders or RSS readers). These programs are hybrids of a Web browser and an e-mail client, allowing Web users to peruse hundreds of information sources in one place. Instead of surfing dozens of sites for the latest news or blog postings, aggregators let people read headlines from those sources in one window.
The aggregators come in many forms, sizes and prices. There are open-source apps for the desktop, Web-based applications and even readers for Palm PDAs. Wired News took a look at four leading readers to get a sense of which tools are the best for keeping an eye on breaking developments on the Web.
SharpReader: This program is a hefty, but free, stand-alone reader that runs on Microsoft's .Net framework. SharpReader, developed by programmer Luke Hutteman, looks and feels like a three-pane e-mail client such as Outlook Express, and easily handles hundreds of feeds divvied into folders.
It hasn't quite reached a 1.0 release, but it's already one of the best tools out there.
SharpReader makes it easy to group feeds into categories, so you can keep political blogs separate from news sources. SharpReader updates channels hourly by default, though this can be customized for each feed.
The program also slides small system-tray notification windows up the right side of the monitor when new items are retrieved. The first time you see the feature you might be alarmed, but the alerts can be easily turned off.
SharpReader's other plusses include a threading feature that shows a user which entries or news stories are being linked to by other entries in your blogroll. It also searches for a site's feed address on its own, once users type the site's main URL into the address bar.
The main drawback of SharpReader (aside from that it's only available on a Windows PC with the .Net infrastructure installed) is its reliance on Internet Explorer's rendering engine. Users occasionally get redirected pop-up ads outside SharpReader when clicking on a link in the third pane. And there's no option to open multiple tabs.
NewsGator: NewsGator also feels like Microsoft Outlook -- primarily because it runs inside Outlook. For those who use Microsoft's flagship e-mail product, the interface will be familiar.
You can easily add feeds to NewsGator by right-clicking on an RSS feed or XML button in Internet Explorer. Also, NewsGator can forward stories very easily, just like an e-mail in Outlook.
But NewsGator, which costs $29, has some serious limitations. It has troubles with sites that use a third party to take care of their feeds (latimes.com, for example, uses NewsIsFree.com for Web syndication). With that kind of feed, you need to click on a link essentially twice.
There also doesn't seem to be a way to rearrange the feeds, which are displayed alphabetically. Moreover, while grouping feeds into folders is possible, NewsGator cannot show you all the items in a folder or even tell you how many items are in there.
NewsGator is useful for those who don't want another application running. But it's best only for those who read a handful of news sources and don't mind clicking multiple times to see a story.
Bloglines: Unlike NewsGator or SharpReader, Bloglines is a Web-based application that lets you look at your list of news and blog sites from any Internet-connected computer.
Bloglines is free, powerful and intuitive, making it a good choice for those new to RSS. You can subscribe to hundreds of feeds without slowing the service (or your computer). It handles categories of feeds beautifully and has a strong search feature.
Bloglines also gives out disposable e-mail addresses so you can subscribe to discussion groups or news alerts and have them displayed in the newsreader without having to worry about flame-mail or spam. This is really handy for those who want to keep standing searches going on Google News, without having an inbox full of e-mails.
Perhaps Bloglines' best feature is its recommendation list. Using collaborative filtering, Bloglines suggests feeds that are similar to the ones you read, based on the feeds subscribed to by others.
But the Web-based nature of the service has a drawback, since its speed is constrained by your Internet connection. This is particularly noticeable when looking at a feed like The New York Times' science feed, which has 1,605 items in it. You can weed out older items in a feed through a date-filtering mechanism, but the way to do that isn't easy to figure out.
KlipFolio: Serence's free KlipFolio takes a different approach to feeds. It's essentially a convenient notification tool that doesn't eat up much screen real estate -- it's about the size of an IM client. As such, it's not an ideal tool for browsing lots of sites. Still, it has a lot going for it.
Unlike RSS feeds which are generated by a website and read by a reader, Klips are custom scripts that run on a user's computer and scrape a website for headlines.
KlipFolio is great for reading a few sites' headlines. It even shows the first couple of lines of each story in a message bubble when you hover the cursor over the link. The customizable weather feature is quite handy. Users have even added a few custom scripts that make KlipFolio quite useful, including one that pulls headlines off Google News and another that will tell you if a given Web page has changed.
What's more, since KlipFolio is not limited to just reading RSS files, it is also a good bet for companies with internal databases that need to be tracked closely by employees.
Of course, there are plenty of other readers. Some of the better ones include Radio Userland (which merges a reader with blog-publishing software), NetNewsWire (a widely praised three-pane reader for the Mac), FeedDemon (a well-designed reader that has some smart features such as tabbed browsing) and NewsMonster, a reader that lives in the Mozilla browser and runs on almost any operating system.
May 26, 2004 at 07:31 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home
InfoWorld: The documentation dilemma: February 27, 2004: By Chad Dickerson: E-business Strategies
If this chore isn't getting done, maybe it's time to take a more practical approach
By Chad Dickerson February 27, 2004
During the past few years, IT departments have been shrinking in size without commensurately smaller workloads, and IT managers have had to focus on operational efficiencies to keep things running. At InfoWorld, we’ve been busy with dozens of major projects over the past few years, and one of the things I’ve had to examine is traditional documentation methods for our systems and processes. I’m sure many, if not most, of you share this problem.
When I use the term “traditional documentation,” I’m referring to the finely detailed operational manuals that describe a new system in sufficient enough detail so that any competent IT staffer could operate and debug the system. For IT professionals, traditional documentation often falls into the same category as flossing after every meal or changing furnace filters yearly — it's something you know you should do, but you don’t always get around to doing it.
If you feel guilty about the lack of traditional documentation in your IT organization, you shouldn’t — you might only need to change your approach. Over the past few years, I’ve become an adherent of the Alfred E. Neuman “What, me worry?” school of traditional documentation, because I’ve learned to attack the challenge differently. I realized that with limited staff, a rapidly changing IT environment, and increasing complexity, my own inflexible documentation practices had to be updated to reflect more dynamic environments.
You don’t have to be fully versed in agile software development methodologies to relax a bit and embrace one tenet of the Agile Alliance’s "Manifesto for Agile Software Development": Focus on working software over comprehensive documentation. Although this manifesto focuses specifically on software development, I find that it applies equally well to general IT issues outside of software development. Agile methodologies do not eschew documentation altogether, they just suggest that documentation efforts need only be focused on achieving “good enough” status.
Why is producing and managing traditional documentation a problem for most IT organizations anyway? Aggressive IT project timelines combined with overall IT complexity often leave little time for the level of detailed documentation that is sufficient to debug unforeseen problems within new systems. To complicate matters, many IT professionals abhor writing in the first place, and focused and concise writing is required for clear and useful documentation. Finally, management (that is, people like you and me) tends to talk a big game about the need for documentation while pushing IT staff onto new projects before completed ones are properly documented. An agile documentation process deals with each of these challenges.
While there aren’t a lot of resources for agile documentation available, I did find an excellent essay on the subject from Scott W. Ambler, entitled “Agile Documentation.” You can read Ambler’s complete essay for yourself, but if I could pick the part of his approach that I most identify with, I would choose these sentences: “The best documentation is the simplest that gets the job done. Don’t create a 50-page document when a five-page one will do. Don’t create a five-page document when five bullet points will do. Don’t create an elaborate and intricately detailed diagram when a sketch will do. Don’t repeat information found elsewhere when a reference will do. Write in point form. Document only enough to provide a useful context.”
This is solid guidance for CTOs perpetually concerned about lack of documentation but who don’t want to slow down their IT organizations with cumbersome and counterproductive documentation practices. No one ever got promoted for having comprehensive documentation anyway.
May 26, 2004 at 07:23 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (25) | Top of page | Blog Home
InfoWorld's internal Weblog started as an experiment. Already, it’s indispensable
By Chad Dickerson
What a difference a few Weblogs can make. In January, I wrote about the importance of leveraging the inherent simplicity in technologies such as RSS for enterprise information-sharing, and I mentioned a particular effort I had in mind: experimenting with a simple intranet Weblog. Mentioning a future effort in my column tends to solidify my own commitment, so we set up an internal Weblog system driven by Movable Type. Then, in response to a later column, I got quite a bit of reader e-mail asking me for more details on our use of Weblogs because that anecdote just scratched the surface. Consider this installment a closer peek behind the scenes here at InfoWorld.
Our internal use of Weblogs has greatly accelerated, and we’re beginning to see more tangible benefits as we’ve begun to reach a critical mass of internal contributors. At the end of March, my team held an off-site retreat and created a rolling six-month plan for IT initiatives at InfoWorld, which we posted to a Weblog available to all employees. For each month in the plan, we created a checklist of projects we would be working on and noted which ones would be completed in that month. We also scheduled what we call “fire drills” — our internal term for the intentional failure of a specific key system to test fail-over capabilities in the event of an unexpected outage of that system. Posting this plan on a Weblog made three key things happen. First, it forced the team to strategically organize its IT initiatives into a coherent roadmap fit for broader internal consumption. Next, it created a sense of accountability for these initiatives within the IT team because we had collectively agreed on the initiatives and documented the process. Finally, posting our plan for the entire company to see helped foster a sense of accountability to our non-IT colleagues within the company.
Since then, my team has been using the blog-driven IT roadmap in weekly staff meetings as a platform to discuss the initiatives we have completed and to look ahead to new ones. Our meetings no longer have agendas or redundant handouts, because we don’t need them. Of course, some items have dropped off our master plan altogether, and new ones have been added, but the important point is that our master plan is always updated and readily available on our intranet, and any changes are distributed via RSS to anyone who wants to see them. Aside from the public Weblog, we maintain our own Weblog for more technical documentation, which has raised our level of internal documentation by several orders of magnitude already.
Our internal use of Weblogs doesn’t stop there. Software Engineer Kevin Varley has created “Varley’s Project Notes,” his own Weblog to keep notes on his development projects. Kevin makes inventive use of the comment functionality available in Movable Type. After outlining coding and debugging tasks in posts with titles such as “Taxonomy Terror,” Kevin uses the comments feature to make additional notes about how his initial assumptions ultimately played out.
Weblogs are not just for the hard-core techies. Our editorial staff recently started its own Weblog to share updated style guides, edit calendars, and other tools of the trade. I’m looking forward to seeing what unexpected points of leverage they achieve with their Weblog. It’s amazing how a system so simple and easy can produce such profound results.
May 26, 2004 at 07:19 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - Police Go Back to Class to Catch Internet Crooks
By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - Police are heading back to the classroom as a new breed of criminals turns to the Internet to prey on unsuspecting victims. Across Europe and beyond, cyber investigators are being trained in computer forensics -- a crime-fighting technique that is part science, part sleuthing
Investigators comb through seized computer hard drives, looking amid countless disguised files for evidence the machine was used in a crime.
The clues could be elaborate computer programs designed to hijack a victim's PC, or e-mail and Web browsing logs revealing the identity of conspirators.
"It's akin to auto mechanics," said Dan Haagman, head of training for 7Safe Ltd, a Cambridge-based firm that instructs police and civilians in computer forensics.
"You rule out things early on. You search for signs that give you a picture of a particular security breach," he added.
The same techniques can be used to trace or at least build a profile of a criminal suspect from a hacked PC or computer network, he said.
AS VALUABLE AS DNA
As criminals turn to high-tech gadgets and the Internet to commit crimes ranging from extortion to drug dealing, computer forensics is rapidly becoming as crucial to an investigation as DNA evidence, police say.
"I expect new staff to have an absolute minimum of computer and software forensics before they even walk in the door," said Marc Kirby, detective inspector for the computer forensics section at Britain's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit.
In addition to training local police in cyber-sleuthing techniques, Kirby's 55 investigators also hunt criminals.
Earlier this month, the NHTCU arrested 12 people in a case in which a Russian crime gang is accused of using an e-mail scam known as "phishing" to defraud UK bank customers out of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
In another success, a string of globe-spanning pedophilia stings has determined the identities of thousands of suspects who use the Internet to trade and collect pornographic images.
But police forces around the world remain a step behind.
In the UK, home to some of Europe's most advanced cybercrime fighting forces, just 1,000 of the country's 140,000 police officers are trained to handle digital evidence. Fewer than 250 have high-level computer forensics skills, says European information security lobby group EURIM.
Efforts have been ramped up across Europe to close the gap.
BACK TO CLASS
Earlier this month, British police toiled in the reflection of their computer screens. They were hunting the deep recesses of a computer for traces of an increasingly popular cybercrime weapon known as "malware" in a 7Safe training session.
Malware is malicious computer code programmed by an underworld of hackers, virus writers and sometimes spammers to commit all manners of crime.
In the training exercise, investigators discovered in a deep corner of the hard drive a nasty piece of malware known as a "Trojan" installed on the machine without the user's knowledge.
Criminals use "Trojans" and "backdoors" to infect PCs. An army of vulnerable machines can then be programmed to execute a digital denial-of-service attack on a Web retailer or flood the Internet with dubious e-mail messages aiming to defraud users out of their bank details in a typical phishing expedition.
The prospect of stopping zombie PC attacks from every corner of the globe is a new criminal threat.
As always, the only way for an investigator to catch a cyber criminal is to learn their tricks. "To truly understand malware they have to use it. To understand hacking they have to do it," Haagman said.
May 26, 2004 at 11:40 AM in Online crime | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home
Vodafone rings up bumper headline profits
LONDON (AFP) - Mobile telephone giant Vodafone said that annual profits jumped by almost one-fifth, driven by double-digit revenue growth and the addition of almost 14 million new customers.
Vodafone reported a net loss but posted a 19-percent rise in profit before tax, goodwill amortisation and exceptional items to 10.0 billion pounds (14.9 billion euros, 18.0 billion dollars) for the year to March.
Group revenue rose by 10 percent to 33.6 billion pounds, the company said in a statement.
Vodafone added 13.7 million new mobile customers in the year, bringing the total to 133.4 million around the globe.
"These results reflect a strong operational performance with an excellent level of free cash flow generation," said chief executive Arun Sarin.
Free cash flow, a key measure of a company's cash-generating ability, increased by 65 percent to 8.5 billion pounds.
Vodafone said it would buy back a further three billion pounds' worth of its own shares over the next year and raised its dividend by 20 percent.
The group forecast high single-digit customer growth in the coming year from existing operations, leading to similar growth in wireless revenues.
Despite a strong operating performance, however, Vodafone made a net loss of 9.0 billion pounds, down eight percent from the previous year, owing to significant goodwill amortisation -- the writing off of an investment in an intangible asset -- related to past takeovers.
Vodafone's bottom line is still suffering from an aggressive spending spree that has seen the group gobble up rivals such as German telecommunications group Mannesmann in a multi-billion-euro takeover in 2000.
In February, however, the company exited a multi-billion dollar bidding war for US cellphone operator AT and T Wireless, to the relief of many investors.
The group has also spent heavily on investment in third-generation (3G) mobile telephone licences and technology.
Unlike some rivals, however, Vodafone has opted for a gradual approach to the launch of the new technology, which has been plagued by delays.
Last month it announced a low-key roll-out of the long-awaited technology in Europe with a launch in Germany and Portugal.
Users have been promised improved quality, sound, pictures and videos, as well as increased speed when downloading games and ringtones.
They will also benefit from new services such as video calling, downloads of video clips such as sport and news, as well as the streaming of live events to their handset.
In February Vodafone announced the launch of its first third-generation (3G) mobile service: a data card giving users high-speed Internet access for their laptop computers.
"With the advent of our Mobile Connect 3G/GPRS datacard and Vodafone live! with 3G, we are well positioned for a future of transition as we take the lead in expanding market boundaries through new technologies and industry partnerships," said Sarin.
May 25, 2004 at 07:47 AM in Telecommunications | Permalink | TrackBack (36) | Top of page | Blog Home
finextra news: Egg combats Chip and PIN memory fears with online recall
24 May 2004 - UK Internet bank Egg has launched the world's first 'PIN browser', so that forgetful customers can securely view their credit card personal information number online.
Customers logging on to Egg can now call up their PIN by entering the three-digit security code on the back of their cards. The new service is being launched amid fears that a UK-wide conversion to PIN-based transactions at the point-of-sale could be stymied by consumers suffering from information overload.
Jerry Toher, marketing director at Egg comments: "With the vast amount of information consumers are required to remember there is a great temptation to write (PINs) down however this is not advisable.
In an Egg-commissioned survey of over 1000 adults conducted in February, ICM found that 41% of people admitted to being more forgetful now then they used to be, with nearly a quarter (22%) attributing this to the increasing number of passwords or codes they need to remember. Nearly a third (31%) admitted to forgetting one of their pass codes every month.
The research found that nearly all Brits (92%) use access codes at least on a weekly basis and a nearly a third (28%) use them several times a day.
Commenting, Professor Evan Heit, Warwick University says: "Whether a fact will actually be remembered will depend on other psychological factors such as whether it is personally relevant or meaningful, and whether it will be confused with other information. So, for example, a person would not be able to learn a lot of different passwords because these would be meaningless and easily confused."
The latest research tallies with an earlier survey commissioned by Visa, which found that two thirds of consumers in the UK have problems remembering multiple PIN codes.
May 25, 2004 at 07:37 AM in Security | Permalink | TrackBack (20) | Top of page | Blog Home
FOXNews.com - Foxlife - You've Got E-mail, but Will It Cost You a Job?
Monday, May 24, 2004
By Robin Wallace
"Babydoll," "Pryncess," "Pinkie" and "Angelgirl": These are all current, peppy, cute e-mail handles you might expect a teenager to have — but would you hire one of them?
Maybe if you were forming an all-girl pop band or planning a photo shoot for Lap Dancer Quarterly, but in corporate America? Maybe not so much. Yet, these oh-so-adorable names are just some of the silly, suggestive e-mail addresses employers have seen attached to resumes coming from job applicants with otherwise impressive credentials.
With an increasing reliance on technology to communicate, human resources professionals and employers say young job-hunters are stumbling into some major pitfalls by failing to realize what's cool — and what's not — when applying for work.
Pamela Holland, chief operating officer of Marjorie Brody Communications (search), a Philadelphia-based executive development and corporate training firm, was thinking about such un-savvy behavior when an applicant included his personal Web site on his resume. It didn't matter if the site displayed design and technical skill, Holland said — because she couldn’t get past the content.
“There were party pictures of him that didn’t convey him in a professional way," said Holland, who was stunned the applicant sent the site address to a potential employer. "It really called into question his judgment.”
Holland said she and her co-workers had a good laugh looking at the site — but the applicant didn’t get an interview.
“If someone puts a Web site on their resume, I’m going to look at it, but unless it is an example of their work, I’m going to say, ‘What a buffoon,’” said Holland.
Workers over 30 or so will remember the days when job seeking was a labor-intensive project of scouring newspaper want-ads, making the rounds of employment agencies and typing and mailing resumes and cover letters.
These days, technology has reduced the task of applying for work to little more than a few point and clicks. This also means the all-important first impression an employer gets of a potential employee is often an electronic one — and it's not always pretty, according to employment experts.
“It’s definitely on my radar whenever I present to a university — you have to have a professional e-mail address and a professional voice mail message," said career consultant Diane Darling.
Applicants should try to see themselves through the eyes of a possible employer, she said. What does your kooky e-mail address or prank voice mail message convey about you?
“It speaks to…how you present yourself in your job search,” said Rosemary Haefner, a senior career adviser with CareerBuilders.com (search).
While Haefner hasn't heard many complaints specifically about candidates' e-mail addresses, she said plenty of job seekers have had their chances torpedoed by inappropriate voice mail messages.
“Professionalism is the name of the game,” she said.
Experts say the big problem with e-mail is not just the wacky addresses, but the slang, jargon and sloppy spelling and grammar. You want the recipient to hire you, not LOL @ U.
“Never, ever would I recommend sending an informal e-mail as a cover letter. It’s one of the biggest mistakes people make,” Haefner said. “That needs to be a professional document and very well written."
The advances that revolutionized job-hunting in the 1990s corresponded with an economic boom that put workers in high demand. People snubbed their noses at many traditional protocols, and employers were forgiving. But now that the job market has contracted, employers no longer excuse lax standards.
"The vehicle for getting the information out has changed, but the rules are still the same," said Holland. "When jobs become tighter, standards become stiffer. There is a tremendous resurgence in traditional business [protocols]."
Thanks to technology, writers, photographers, graphic artists and other professionals can easily provide a sample of their work be creating Web sites that function as on-line portfolios. But as Holland's unfortunate applicant found out, a personal site can also backfire.
"Everyone is trying to find that leg up to stand out," Haefner said. "But the risk is that a lot of managers would see that as a negative."
Of course, every company has its own style. A hiring manager of a cutting edge tech firm may admire creativity that would likely be unwelcome on Wall Street.
"There's no way we'd ever consider hiring someone with a silly e-mail address," said a human resource manager at a major financial institution, who wished not to be identified.
The bottom line, experts say, is that job seeking is a sales game, and resumes, cover letters, e-mails, Web sites and voice mail messages are all part of the ad campaign applicants put out about themselves.
"People have to remember that they are a product," Holland said. "You are the most important product you will ever represent."
May 24, 2004 at 08:37 PM in email | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - Report: Sony Says 'Cell'-Based TV Ready by 2006
TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp (news - web sites) (6758.T) plans to offer a broadband television by 2006 that would incorporate the powerful new "Cell" processor it is developing with IBM Corp (NYSE:IBM - news) and Toshiba Corp (6502.T), a Japanese business daily said on Tuesday.
In an interview with the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Sony Chief Executive Nobuyuki Idei said it would use Cell to power its next-generation game console as well as a network television that will offer functions similar to a personal computer.
The Cell processor will be up to 10 times more powerful than conventional chips and able to shepherd large chunks of information through a high-speed Internet network.
Sony has said Cell -- due to start test production in early 2005 -- will power the next-generation PlayStation game console, which will probably double as a home server, as well as other digital home electronics.
For the three business years ending March 31, 2007, Sony has earmarked 500 billion yen ($4.42 billion) to spend on semiconductor development for Cell and other key devices. In the interview, Idei also said a potential acquisition of movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc (NYSE:MGM - news) would be aimed at effectively incorporating MGM's software library into Sony's film division.
Earlier this month, Sony said it was in exclusive talks with MGM on a possible takeover that would provide Sony with access to MGM's 4,000-plus film library that includes the James Bond and Rocky titles.
Seeking to allay concerns that the acquisition could dent Sony's finances at a time when it is trying to restructure its electronics division, Idei said the acquisition price would not cause people to worry.
May 24, 2004 at 08:25 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - Boeing Sees Internet on 12 Carriers by Year-End
Mon May 24,10:25 AM ETAdd Technology - Internet Report to My Yahoo!
By Steven Scheer
OVER THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN (Reuters) - Aerospace giant Boeing Co (NYSE:BA - news) expects about a dozen or so major airlines to offer its in-flight Internet service by the end of the year, a company official said on Monday.
Mike Woodward, director of Boeing's Connexion for Europe and the Middle East, said five carriers had signed up for its semi-high speed Internet service and another two had announced their intention to get it.
Germany's Lufthansa (LHAG.DE) launched the service last week on an Airbus A340.
"We have 15 active proposals with various airlines," Woodward said in an interview with Reuters from a flight over the Mediterranean Sea from Israel.
"We can expect to have 12 (total) major global carriers by the end of the year," he said. "We expect the first U.S.-based customer by the end of the year."
In addition to Lufthansa, Woodward said Scandinavia's SAS (SAS.ST), Japan Airlines (9205.T), All Nippon Airlines (9202.T), Singapore Airlines, China Airlines and Korean Airlines should have Internet service aboard their flights by the end of 2004.
"By the end of the year, there will be 60 aeroplanes flying with Internet service," he said.
Internet access is provided by Boeing's Connexion via satellite antennas mounted on the top of the aeroplane. Surfing speeds are around 200 kilobits per second and passengers may access their own e-mail accounts as well as communicate in real time through Instant Messaging (news - web sites) services even as high as 30,000 feet.
But passengers need to bring their own laptops with a wireless modem. They can then sign up for the service.
REVENUES SHARED
The cost to the passenger is $15-$20 on short flights and $30 on flights of more than six hours, but a plan can be chosen starting at around $10 for half an hour. Woodward said airlines share in revenues with Boeing.
He declined to say how much Boeing invested in the project or the cost to airlines but noted the capital expense is significantly less than installing in-flight entertainment systems in every seat.
Woodward said airlines have warmed up to the idea of providing Internet service now that their finances are improving. Airlines see Internet access as a way to increase revenues and market share, he noted.
"The last three years obviously have been a challenging time in the airline industry," he said. "We are seeing a lot of recovery and a tremendous amount of interest from major airlines around the world."
Although customers choose specific carriers for a variety of reasons, Woodward believes some passengers may choose an airline based on in-flight services.
"We think the ability to stay connected is in very high demand -- especially from business travelers," he said. "Once the service starts to become available, passengers will begin to expect this service on long-haul flights in three to four years."
Woodward added that the company's market research has shown that leisure travelers also want Internet service and that many passengers will pay the flat rate for the entire flight.
"It is not just for business passengers," he said. "It's a choice to use time more efficiently. People can work or entertain themselves with unlimited content available on the Internet."
May 24, 2004 at 08:23 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (20) | Top of page | Blog Home
Pew Internet & American Life Project
The number of Americans with access to high-speed Internet connections either at home or work is growing. As of March 1, the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 68 million adult Americans log on via broadband either at home or work. Fully 48 million adult Americans have broadband connections at home.
This is the first time the Project has tried to capture the total broadband universe and the relatively high figures suggest that broadband use is much greater than is widely presumed.
Impatience with tiresomely slow dial-up connections seems to tip home users into the broadband column, and this impatience plays a larger role than price of service in home adoption. Broadband in the home is increasingly the norm for the wealthier and better educated in America, as well as long-time Internet users. But there is evidence that relatively novice Internet users are moving from dial-up to broadband more rapidly than before.
Rural users lag in broadband adoption, and infrastructure availability is a reason for this. Here are some highlights from the Pew Internet Project’s February 2004 survey:1
55% of all adult Internet users – or 34% of all adult Americans – have access to high-speed Internet connections either at home or on the job.
39% of adult Internet users – or 24% of all adult Americans – have high-speed access at home, an increase of 60% since March 2003.
A surge in subscription to DSL high-speed Internet connections, which has more than doubled since March 2003, is largely behind the growth in broadband at home.
DSL now has a 42% share of the home broadband market, up from 28% in March 2003.
For the first time, more than half (52%) of a key demographic group – college educated people age 35 and younger – has broadband connections at home.
Only 10% of rural Americans go online from home with high-speed connections, about one-third the rate for non-rural Americans.
1. Between February 3 and March 1, 2004, the Pew Internet & American Life surveyed 2,204 Americans age 18 or over (1,371 Internet users). Margin of error is +/-2 percent points for the full sample and +/-3 percentage points for Internet users. 63% of respondents were Internet users in this survey.
May 24, 2004 at 02:13 PM in Web lifestyle | Permalink | TrackBack (35) | Top of page | Blog Home