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October 31, 2004
Internet cast-offs block the roads
THOUSANDS of unwanted home-delivery goods, many ordered on the internet, are clogging up Britain’s roads as they are returned, according to a government-sponsored report, writes Andrew Porter.
Ministers are now demanding retailers come up with better solutions to curb the impact of the traffic on roads and the environment.
The report says £500m is being lost by unnecessary freight journeys. The problem is set to get worse because of a European Union directive demanding that large electronic items are recycled.
The Efficiency of Reverse Logistics report has been drawn up by the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport with Cranfield School of Management and Sheffield Hallam University. It concludes that retailers have given little thought to how to manage returns in “a sustainable way”.
David Jamieson, the junior transport minister, has challenged industry “to find solutions and change business practices to reduce the [number of] wasted products and the £500m of avoidable transport effort”.
According to the Office for National Statistics, the amount spent via mail order and internet shopping in the three months to July 2004 was 12.5% higher than in the same period last year, the highest since records began in 1986.
Present estimates are that internet shopping will be worth £17 billion this year in the UK, representing 7% of all retail sales.
October 31, 2004 at 12:34 AM in eCommerce | Permalink | TrackBack (100) | Top of page | Blog Home
October 30, 2004
U2 online deal hastens last spin for the CD
Apple shares soared by £1 bn over its special edition iPod and digital box set for the Irish group, writes Chris Ayres
THE new album by the rock veterans U2 is called How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. An alternative could have been How To Kill The Compact Disc And Make Two Billion Dollar
That may be what the Dublin quartet have achieved since Tuesday by signing an unprecedented joint marketing and licensing deal with Apple, the Silicon Valley firm behind the iTunes online music shop and the iPod digital music player.
Shares in Apple climbed vertiginously close to an all-time high yesterday after a week of excitement on Wall Street about the deal. That means Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr effectively added $2 billion (£1.1 billion) to the stock market value of the company.
It also makes their online music deal by far the most lucrative signed by any rock band in history.
The deal will see Apple release a black, U2-branded edition of the iPod player and offer an exclusive 400-track “digital box set” of all the band’s albums. The U2 iPod is expected to be released in Britain in the middle of next month. The new U2 album, meanwhile, will be in the shops on November 23.
Asked if the Apple deal meant the beginning of the end of the CD, Paul McGuinness, the band’s manager, said: “Oh yes, but it’s happening anyway. Having said that, the entire legal downloading business is still only 3 per cent of the total. And the digital box set is only really available to those with broadband, or high-speed, internet. It’ll be pretty pointless with dial-up.”
There are fears, however, that the commercial venture could backfire on a group known for their Christian-inspired lyrics and outspoken views on everything from Aids in Africa to Third World debt.
Some fans feel cheated that the band is getting so corporate. Apple’s latest iPod advertising campaign, meanwhile, features U2 performing their new single, Vertigo — in what could be construed as the band’s first commercial endorsement. The Vertigo video was broadcast exclusively for 24-hours on America Online’s Music First View service. On the Slashdot website, one fan called the $349 U2 iPod “the most expensive U2 album yet”.
U2’s deal with Apple is yet another knee to the groin of the traditional music industry, which suffered a steep 7.1 per cent decline in CD sales last year. The band’s total CD sales, including such classics as The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, stand at 120 million. According to Apple, more than 5.7 million iPods — critically lauded as the “Walkman of the 21st Century”, despite battery lifespan problems — have been sold since they were released in 2002. Although rival players have been released, Apple still has nearly two thirds of the market. Meanwhile, the launch of iTunes last year as the first legal music downloading website helped to double the value of online song sales to $270 million (£147 million). Online sales are forecast to reach $9 billion (£5 billion) by 2005. Rivals, including Bill Gates’s Microsoft Corporation, have tried to take business away from Apple, but so far with limited success.
Next Column
LEON NEAL
Death knell: U2’s deal is yet another knee in the groin for the traditional music industry, which suffered a 7.1 per cent decline in CD sales last year
U2’s special edition iPod
The black U2 iPod will come with a $50 (£27) voucher for the digital box set, which will be sold via the iTunes service for $149 (£81).
Mr McGuinness said the deal was no different from any of U2’s other promotional activities.
“We’ve always done ‘co-op’ advertising, which means we share the cost of advertising with music retailers, be it iTunes or Tower Records,” he said yesterday.
“Apple didn’t pay us to be in the Vertigo ad. It would be a lot different if we were selling Coca-Cola. As for the black U2 iPod, it can be seen as just another piece of U2 merchandise.”
He added that the money made by the iPod would not be going to charity.
Mr McGuiness said: “That’s something we wouldn’t discuss anyway.”
October 30, 2004 at 11:37 AM in Business Models | Permalink | TrackBack (38) | Top of page | Blog Home
The Times, another extraordinary day for a newspaper with an extraordinary history - Oct 30th, 2004
Dear Times Reader,
Monday, November 1, 2004, will mark another important date in The Times’s long and extraordinary history, a history highlighted by changes in format and appearance, but whose constant has been quality journalism. Over the past 216 years The Times has played a pivotal role in British society and it remains by far the most influential of British newspapers. The Times was the first paper to employ a foreign correspondent, and it now has more staff correspondents abroad than at any time in its history. The paper’s business coverage is read by far more business people than that of any other quality newspaper in Britain, and the originality and variety of our columnists is rightly renowned. None of that will change, but from Monday, November 1, The Times will be a compact newspaper.
Since we launched the compact edition almost a year ago, it has been clear that the format has attracted many new readers to The Times and further expanded our influence. While our principal rivals are in serious decline, an increasing number of readers has noticed the qualitative difference in coverage and switched to The Times.
There are few relationships as intimate as that of newspaper and devoted reader, and there is no doubt that some readers accustomed to the broadsheet will take time to adjust to the new format. Where is the Crossword? How do I find the Obituaries? Where is the Need-to-Know page in the Business section? We will do our best to navigate you to your favourite articles and writers; each day for the coming week, there will be a special panel on Page Two providing practical guidance. The page numbers may be different, but the compact is created by the same editors, designers and reporters who produced the broadsheet, and they are the best in the profession.
The Times has been the beacon of fine journalism in this country and around the world. Our new format ensures that The Times will continue to prosper and to perform its unique and crucial role in British society.
Yours faithfully
Robert Thomson
Editor
October 30, 2004 at 11:27 AM in Journalism | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home
Secret Service Busts Internet Organized Crime Ring
Yahoo! News - Secret Service Busts Internet Organized Crime Ring
Fri Oct 29, 4:00 PM
Dan Verton, Computerworld
In what it called an "Information Age undercover investigation," the U.S. Secret Service announced the arrest of 28 people from eight states and six countries allegedly involved in a global organized cybercrime ring.
Charges filed against the suspects include identity theft, computer fraud, credit card fraud, and conspiracy.
The investigation, code-named Operation Firewall and announced Thursday, resulted in what the Secret Service described as a significant disruption of organized criminal activity online that was targeting the financial infrastructure of the United States. The suspects are alleged to have collectively trafficked in at least 1.7 million stolen credit card numbers.
Financial institutions have estimated their losses associated with the suspects targeted by the investigation to be more than $4.3 million.
"Led by the Secret Service Newark Field Office, investigators from nearly 30 domestic and foreign Secret Service offices and their global law enforcement counterparts have prevented potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in loss to the financial and hi-tech communities," said Secret Service Director W. Ralph Basham in a statement. "These suspects targeted the personal and financial information of ordinary citizens, as well as the confidential and proprietary information of companies engaged in e-commerce."
Multinational Cooperation
Operation Firewall began in July 2003 and quickly evolved into a transnational investigation of global credit card fraud and online identity theft. The underground criminal groups have been identified as Shadowcrew, Carderplanet, and Darkprofits. The organizations operated Web sites used to traffic counterfeit credit cards and false identification information and documents. The groups allegedly used the sites to share information on how to commit fraud and sold the stolen information and the tools needed to commit such crimes.
International law enforcement organizations that took part in the investigation and arrests included the United Kingdom's National Hi-Tech Crimes Unit, the Vancouver Police Department's Financial Crimes Section, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Europol.
Officials in Bulgaria, Belarus, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Ukraine also were involved.
October 30, 2004 at 01:41 AM in Online crime | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home
New Worm Variant Spreads, Clogging E-Mail
Yahoo! News - New Worm Variant Spreads, Clogging E-Mail
Fri Oct 29, 9:31 PM
By CHRISTINE NUZUM, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK - At least one new variant of a worm spread rapidly from Asia and Europe to U.S. computers Friday morning, filling up people's e-mail accounts, but otherwise causing little apparent damage
Alex Shipp, senior antivirus technologist at the e-mail filtering company MessageLabs Inc., said the variant of the so-called Bagle worm was "comparable in size to MyDoom," the virus that slowed Google and other Internet search sites in January. MessageLabs recently had received about 900,000 e-mails containing the virus. Ship estimates that MessageLabs receives about 1 percent of the e-mails containing a given virus or worm.
"We were seeing 165,000 an hour, but it's leveled off at 100,000 an hour, if you can call that leveling off," Shipp said.
Because multiple e-mails containing a worm or virus are often sent to one computer, it's difficult to estimate the number of affected users, said Shipp.
One software security company, McAfee Inc., said another variant of the Bagle worm was also quickly spreading Friday, but similarly did not seem to be destroying files or damaging software.
Both versions can be transferred through shared network files as well as through e-mail.
They attach themselves to files and then send themselves to e-mail addresses that they find on infected machines. Viruses or worms often use e-mail addresses from computers they infect to fool the recipients into opening an attachment.
If a recipient opens the attachment, the worm creates a so-called back-door, "a small program that sits on your machine quietly listening for someone to contact it," said Kevin Hogan, senior manager of security response at Symantec Corp. A computer user who contacts the backdoor can transfer files between his machine and the infected one, Hogan said. The worm variants can also disable security software, experts said.
"It's pretty much a vanilla mass-mailing worm," said Hogan. "It does a lot of the things that we've seen these sorts of worms do in the past."
McAfee first received reports of the worm variants from Europe. Symantec said the first complaints it fielded were from Japan. Antivirus providers received a rash of reports of a worm in the United States at the start of the workday Friday.
Symantec, McAFee and Computer Associates International Inc.'s eTrust division had received no reports Friday of disabled files or other damage.
Much of the standard security software can readily detect and protect against these latest variants of the Bagle worm, which spreads through shared network files as well as e-mail messages, experts said.
"Most of the major antivirus vendors already have detection and so does Computer Associates," said Stefana Ribaudo, product manager for consumer products at Computer Associates' security division. "Users are receiving the latest signature files from their vendors, which will keep them protected."
McAfee said computer users who don't subscribe to antivirus software can go to its Web site download a free remedy, called "Stinger," that will detect and remove the worm.
__
Christine Nuzum is a correspondent for Dow Jones Newswires.
October 30, 2004 at 01:38 AM in Virus | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home
My F900iC .. now thats a phone
This is the best phone in Japan right now ... read Joi's comments on his new phone.
I spilled juice on my phone and had to get a new one. I got a F900iC. It's the first 3G phone with the new FeliCa contactless IC card built in.
October 30, 2004 at 12:13 AM in Telecommunications | Permalink | TrackBack (7) | Top of page | Blog Home
October 29, 2004
Firefox aims for 10 percent of Web surfers
Firefox aims for 10 percent of Web surfers - ZDNet UK News
Ingrid Marson
ZDNet UK
October 25, 2004, 14:10 BST
The Mozilla Foundation expects one in 10 Internet users to be browsing using Firefox within the next year
Maybe the browser wars really are back.
Bart Decrem, the marketing contact for the Mozilla Foundation, told ZDNet UK on Friday that he expects the browser's market share to reach 10 percent by the end of 2005.
"I think we'll get to 10 percent over the next year. We don't have 10 percent of the Web at the moment, but we have the momentum," claimed Decrem.
He is confident of hitting this goal as interest in the browser has been accelerating over the last few months. He said this momentum can be seen in the increasing number of downloads for each version of Firefox: version 0.8 was downloaded 3.3 million times in four months; 0.9 was downloaded 6.5 million times in three months; and the pre-release version was downloaded five million times in just one month.
ZDNet UK's own figures show that since the beginning of this year there has been an increase in the percentage of site visitors using a Mozilla browser. In February around 9 percent of site visitors were using a Mozilla-based browser; this increased to 19 percent in October. Over the same period, IE use decreased from 88 percent to 79 percent.
CNET News.com and W3Schools.com, a Web development tutorial site, have found similar trends. The move from IE to Firefox is also shown by the fact that half of Firefox downloads are from IE users, according to Decrem.
Mozilla is also attracting increasing interest from non-technical users, who see the perceived speed of their Internet connection rise after switching to Firefox, according to Decrem.
"We get user emails saying, 'You're 10 times faster than IE'," said Decrem. "Benchmark tests show we're about the same speed, but home users who have been accessing the Internet for five years may have 15 or 20 pieces of spyware, which means that every time they access a Web page, the malware could be making an additional 15 connections to the Internet, to log the information it has gathered."
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for security firm Sophos, said that spyware and virus writers tend to write malware specifically for IE. This can noticeably slow down Internet access for home users who access the Internet via dial-up, although broadband users are unlikely to notice any difference.
"Some spyware hooks specifically into IE," said Cluley. "But other spyware, such as those which log key presses and pass them onto an Internet site, are likely to work on any browser."
Decrem said the recent interest in Firefox validates Netscape's decision to open the source code of its Communicator software in 1998.
"Netscape open-sourced the source code to 'harness the power' of the open-source community," said Decrem. "Now, six years later, this vision is finally coming into fruition. To get over the finish line we needed a non-profit organisation, which allows us to build new partnerships and do innovative marketing."
Decrem believes Firefox has been able to exploit public interest in open-source software by providing an easy to ease, accessible application.
"People have been hearing about open source for 10 years now," said Decrem. "They're intrigued by it and are inspired by the community approach, but they've not been able to experience it for themselves. Firefox is open source and turns up on your doorstep in a way you can consume. It is easy to use with good features."
Decrem believes that other open-source projects would get more interest from non-technical users if they took a tougher approach to jettisoning unnecessary functionality.
"At Firefox we are disciplined about getting rid of features," said Decrem. "It is hard to do that in an open-source development model. You need to take the open-source energy and overlay a product management discipline."
Another open-source project which has accepted the need for streamlining, is the Linux desktop GNOME, which over the last few years has made various changes to simplify the desktop. However, this approach has been unpopular with some GNOME developers, who spun off the GoneME project in July 2004 to develop a version of GNOME for experienced users.
"Current leadership in the GNOME Project have chosen a path that ignores the needs of experienced users," says the GoneMe Web site. "Many features are being added that many established users don't want or need. Some of the best of the old features are being dropped."
Creating a product for the average user also requires strong usability testing, according to Decrem.
"We have spent 10 years watching how people use stuff, for example, tab browsing came from watching people visit the same Web sites every day. Too often the Linux community lives in a bubble -- there is not enough interaction with tend users."
October 29, 2004 at 08:45 AM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home
KPMG issues stark warning over VoIP
KPMG issues stark warning over VoIP
By Kristyn Maslog-Levis, ZDNet Australia
A stark warning over the security and quality of voice-over-IP services has been issued by KPMG
KPMG has released a new whitepaper warning businesses to consider the risks involved in implementing voice over IP (VoIP).
The new whitepaper entitled "Voice-over-IP -- decipher and decide" warns that organisations who that fail to fully understand and address risks associated with VoIP could find their security compromised.
Although there is extensive information available from numerous sources regarding the benefits of VoIP and IP Telephony, there is a "distinct absence of information detailing the risks and associated risk management practices," KPMG said.
KPMG said that the introduction of VoIP means that voice traffic needs to be treated in the same context as data for security purposes, since it will share a common medium.
"The increased technical complexity of integrating voice and data into one network further increases an organisation's dependence on network availability. Many organisations fail to recognise that with this increased technical complexity comes increased security and availability risks that must be appropriately assessed, and the necessary risk management measures applied."
"As hardware PABX systems are replaced with computers and network hardware running common operating systems, networks will become increasingly vulnerable to common threats such as viruses and denial of service [DoS] attacks. Exposures that were experienced with traditional systems are more prevalent with VoIP and IP Telephony, as networking awareness is more widespread. Each entry point to a network is a potential point of attack and therefore risk management is essential."
DoS attacks can occur when a network or device is overloaded with meaningless traffic or sent a specific command that will disable it, rendering the network unavailable. One example of a DoS attack is repeatedly sending a hang-up command to each handset, which is difficult to detect or prevent.
"As voice is sharing a network with traditional data, it is susceptible to the DoS techniques that have been applied against data networks for many years. A malfunctioning or manipulated handset has the ability to cause a DoS attack by flooding the network with traffic."
KPMG added that VoIP is also susceptible to viruses and therefore requires an appropriate management framework. Depending on the telephone handset operating system, handsets might also require virus protection.
KPMG also stated possible confidentiality problems that businesses will face when changing to VoIP.
"In the event that voice traffic is carried over an external network -- such as the Internet -- eavesdropping would be a risk. An example of the potential implication of not encrypting is having a user's phone banking details -- account number or pin tones -- intercepted across the network."
The paper said that encryption can minimise the threat of VoIP eavesdropping. However, a risk assessment is needed based on the sensitivity of calls and the level of control over the network infrastructure.
"Traditional telephony operating over a dedicated PSTN network does not require encryption. A confidentiality breach in the traditional network generally requires physical connection to the network to eavesdrop on conversations from selected lines. This can be complex in large networks."
KPMG emphasised that the implementation of VoIP and IP telephony "must be driven by the organisation's business strategy and not technology imperatives".
"Business benefits can be achieved from the adoption of VoIP and IP Telephony if the decision to implement is business driven rather than technology driven. Project success is dependent on having a clear understanding of the business needs and strategic organisational goals that can be satisfied by new IP Telephony applications."
KPMG said that based on their discussions with a number of clients, many organisations in the Asia Pacific region only consider implementing VoIP when traditional PABX systems have reached the end of their life.
"As a result, organisations' preparedness for these new technologies is inadequate. Without adequate risk management, VoIP implementations can result in reputation damage, a negative impact on customer service or affect the bottom line. The overriding risk is that the implementation of VoIP and IP Telephony will not meet the requirements of the business. Organisations need to understand the impacts that these technologies have on their business processes, and then match them to the business strategy."
KPMG also questioned the integrity of VoIP in the whitepaper.
"VoIP packets travel independently of one another, and like data packets are vulnerable to loss. This does not generally pose a problem for data packets, however, this may have implications for VoIP communication. Out-of-sequence or lost data packets can result in degraded voice quality. With voice and data now sharing the same medium, the risks associated with availability increase and require appropriate assessment by management."
The paper advised organisations to assess and understand the business benefits and opportunities that VoIP brings to their individual businesses.
KPMG said that organisations should "familiarise themselves with the appropriate processes to identify technologies, suppliers and implementation requirements" as well as the maintenance and operational requirements. The organisation should also "assess the security and availability risks relative to the business' risk profile and how these will be dealt with".
October 29, 2004 at 08:42 AM in Telecommunications | Permalink | TrackBack (4) | Top of page | Blog Home
Interesting sudy of internet evolution, through to blogging
This study provides a good internet history lesson, and frames the evolution from, research, to commercialisation, to humanisation.
Richard Giles blog: Corporate Blogging - My Talk From Perth Blog Nite.
Blogging, the term at least, has been around since 1997, but corporate blogs haven't taken of yet. There are some signs it's starting, but there are some good reasons it should. This post is based on tonights presentation at Perth's Blog Nite, and it'll cover the reason for the growth of blogging, reasons a company should blog, and how one can get started. ..........................
October 29, 2004 at 07:33 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home
October 28, 2004
Attack prompts Bush website block
BBC NEWS | Technology | Attack prompts Bush website block
The official re-election site of President George W Bush is blocking visits from overseas users for "security reasons".
The blocking began early on Monday so those outside the US and trying to view the site got a message saying they are not authorised to view it.
ALTERNATIVE ADDRESSES
https://georgewbush.com/
http://65.172.163.222/
http://origin.georgewbush.com/
But keen net users have shown that the policy is not being very effective.
Many have found that the site can still be viewed by overseas browsers via several alternative net addresses.
Hack attack
The policy of trying to stop overseas visitors viewing the site is thought to have been adopted in response to an attack on the georgewbush.com website.
Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign said: "The measure was taken for security reasons."
He declined to elaborate any further on the blocking policy.
The barring of non-US visitors has led to the campaign being inundated with calls and forced it to make a statement about why the blocking was taking place.
In early October a so-called "denial of service" attack was mounted on the site that bombarded it with data from thousands of PCs. The attack made the site unusable for about five hours.
About the same time the web team of the Bush-Cheney campaign started using the services of a company called Akamai that helps websites deal with the ebbs and flows of visitor traffic.
Akamai uses a web-based tool called EdgeScape that lets its customers work out where visitors are based.
Typically this tool is used to ensure that webpages, video and images load quickly but it can also be used to block traffic.
Geographic blocking works because the numerical addresses that the net uses to organise itself are handed out on a regional basis.
Readers of the Boingboing weblog have found that viewers can still get at the site by using alternative forms of the George W Bush domain name.
Ironically one of the working alternatives is for a supposedly more secure version of the site.
There are now at least three working alternative domains for the Bush-Cheney campaign that let web users outside the US visit the site.
The site can also be seen using anonymous proxy services that are based in the US. Some web users in Canada also report that they can browse the site.
Traffic control
The international exclusion zone around georgewbush.com was spotted by net monitoring firm Netcraft which keeps an eye on traffic patterns across many different sites.
Netcraft said that since the early hours of 25 October attempts to view the site through its monitoring stations in London, Amsterdam and Sydney have failed.
By contrast Netcraft's four monitoring stations in the US managed to view the site with no problems.
Data gathered by Netcraft on the pattern of traffic to the site shows that the blocking is not the result of another denial of service attack.
Mike Prettejohn, Netcraft president, speculated that the blocking decision might have been taken to cut costs, and traffic, in the run-up to the election on 2 November.
He said the site may see no reason to distribute content to people who will not be voting next week.
Managing traffic could also be a good way to ensure that the site stays working in the closing days of the election campaign.
However, simply blocking non-US visitors also means that Americans overseas are barred too.
Most American soldiers stationed overseas will be able to see the site as they use the US military's own portion of the net.
Akamai declined to comment, saying it could not talk about customer websites.
October 28, 2004 at 08:08 AM in Politics | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home
Google buys Internet map provider
TheStar.com - Google buys Internet map provider
NEW YORK—Web search leader Google Inc. said yesterday it has acquired Keyhole Corp., a supplier of online satellite maps that allow users to zoom down to street level to specific locations.
Terms were not disclosed. Both Google and Keyhole are based in Mountain View, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Keyhole's system is built on a database with trillions of bits of mapping data collected from satellites and airplanes.
"With Keyhole, you can fly like a superhero from your computer at home to a street corner somewhere else in the world — or find a local hospital, map a road trip or measure the distance between two points," Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice-president of product management, said in a statement.
Google said it cut the price of Keyhole's mapping service to $29.95 (U.S.) a year from $69.95, effective immediately.
Google is flush with cash from its $1.67 billion initial public offering in mid-August. Since then, its shares have more than doubled from their $85 debut price on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
With an Internet connection, a user can enter an address or other location information and Keyhole's software hooks up to a database and takes the user to a digital image of that location.
The three-dimensional, interactive software gives users the option to zoom in from space-level to street-level, tilt and rotate the view or search for other information such as hotels, parks or automated-teller bank machines.
Google rivals Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN also offer online mapping services using detailed maps that allow users to zoom down to street-level scale.
Google shares rose $4.17, or 2 per cent, to $185.97 yesterday.
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
October 28, 2004 at 08:01 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home
October 27, 2004
Daily Endorsement Tally: Kerry Picks up 30 Papers, Widens Lead
Daily Endorsement Tally: Kerry Picks up 30 Papers, Widens Lead
By Greg Mitchell
Published: October 17, 2004 11:00 AM EDT
NEW YORK Sen. John Kerry picked up a raft of newspaper endorsements Sunday, widening his lead over President George W. Bush in this area.
Kerry gained the editorial backing of at least 30 papers while Bush won the support of 17 that we know of, giving Kerry the overall lead by 45-30 in E&P's exclusive tally. Kerry has more large papers on his side, maintaining his "circulation edge" at nearly 3-1, with approximately 8.7 million circ to Bush's 3.3 million. (See chart, with complete tally, below.)
Bush did pick up several major papers this weekend, earning the endorsements of the Chicago Tribune, The Arizona Republic, Denver's Rocky Mountain News, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Indianapolis Star, and The Dallas Morning News.
Among Kerry's new supporters were five papers that had backed Bush in 2000: the Bradenton Herald in Florida, the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colo., the Columbia Daily Tribune in Missouri, the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, Ill., and The Muskegon (Mich.) Chronicle.
Three other papers that backed Bush in 2000 announced they would not support either candidate this year: The Tampa Tribune, the Wichita Falls Times Record News in Texas, and the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal.
In addition to the big-city papers already mentioned, Bush also won backing from the Omaha World-Herald, The Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press, The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., the York (Pa.) Daily Record, The Repository in Canton, Ohio, The Times Reporter in New Philadelphia, Ohio, The New York Sun, the El Paso Times, and Las Cruces Sun-News in New Mexico, and The News-Gazette in Champaign-Urbana, Ill.
Among the papers endorsing Kerry today were several in the key swing state of Florida: The Miami Herald, the St. Petersburg Times, South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida Today in Melbourne, The Palm Beach Post, the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and, as already mentioned, the Bradenton Herald. In other battleground states, he picked up the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and the Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune, the Dayton Daily News and Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio, and, as previously mentioned, the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colo.
Kerry also got the nod from major papers in states already friendly to him: The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, The Sacramento Bee, The Fresno Bee, and The Modesto Bee.
Other papers backing the Democrat were The Kansas City Star, The Roanoke (Va.) Times, the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald, The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, the Mail Tribune in Medford, Ore., and The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, Calif. Clearly, many papers in the Knight Ridder and McClatchy chains have rallied to Kerry's side.
Many of the editorials backing Kerry denounced the incumbent in unusually harsh language. The Miami Herald accused Bush of "narrow partisanship." Up the coast, the Daytona paper cited his "embarrassing performance." The Sacramento Bee said, "The nation has paid a steep price for Bush's arrogance -- mounting deficits and debt at home, loss of standing and effectiveness abroad." For The New York Times, his presidency has simply been "disastrous."
In supporting Bush, The Indianapolis Star nevertheless called both candidates "unsatisfying" and the Chicago Tribune also seemed a bit torn: "There is much the current president could have done differently over the last four years. There are lessons he needs to have learned. And there are reasons -- apart from the global perils likely to dominate the next presidency -- to recommend either of these two good candidates."
The Dallas Morning News was more enthusiastic, however, declaring: "Americans want and need a president with a backbone steeled by courage and a heart tendered by compassion." It added, "This is not the time for America to go wobbly. ... This is not the time for Americans to abandon their president."
But The Tampa Tribune, which has long backed Republicans, declared that it found itself in "a position unimaginable four years ago" when it "strongly endorsed" the president. While it has no deep affection for Kerry, the paper noted, it expressed disappointment in Bush and said it would "not be lending our voice to the chorus of conservative-leaning newspapers endorsing the president's re-election. ... But we are unable to endorse President Bush for re- election because of his mishandling of the war in Iraq, his record deficit spending, his assault on open government and his failed promise to be a 'uniter not a divider' within the United States and the world."
Our current tally, with latest daily circulation numbers, follows. "G" and "B" refer to whether the paper endorsed Gore or Bush in 2000. (Chart updated Monday, Oct. 18.)
JOHN KERRY
48 newspapers total
8,935,195 daily circulation
ARIZONA
Arizona Daily Star (Tucson) (G): 109,592
CALIFORNIA
San Francisco Chronicle (G): 501,135
The Sacramento Bee (G): 303,841
San Jose Mercury News (G): 279,539
The Fresno Bee (G): 166,531
The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa) (G): 89,384
The Modesto Bee (G): 87,366
COLORADO
Daily Camera (Boulder) (B): 33,419
CONNECTICUT
The Day (New London) (B): 39,553
FLORIDA
St. Petersburg Times (G): 358,502
The Miami Herald (G): 325,032
South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Ft. Lauderdale) (G): 268,927
The Palm Beach Post (G): 181,727
Daytona Beach News-Journal (G): 112,945
Florida Today (Melbourne) (G): 90,877
Bradenton Herald (B): 52,163
GEORGIA
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution : 418,323
ILLINOIS
Daily Herald (Arlington Heights) (B): 150,794
IOWA
The Hawk Eye (Burlington) (G): 19,000
KENTUCKY
Lexington Herald-Leader (G): 122,748
MAINE
Portland Press Herald (G): 73,211
MASSACHUSETTS
The Boston Globe (G): 452,109
MICHIGAN
Detroit Free Press (G): 354,581
The Muskegon Chronicle (B): 46,505
The Argus-Press (Owosso): 11,438
MINNESOTA
Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (G): 377,058
Duluth News Tribune: 45,688
The Free Press (Mankato): 21,591
MISSOURI
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (G): 281,198
The Kansas City Star (G): 269,188
Columbia Daily Tribune (B): 18,874
NEVADA
Nevada Appeal (Carson City): 15,296
NEW MEXICO
The Albuquerque Tribune (B): 13,536
NEW YORK
The New York Times (G): 1,133,763
NORTH CAROLINA
The Charlotte Observer (G): 231,369
The Daily Reflector (Greenville): 25,777
NORTH DAKOTA
Grand Forks Herald (G): 32,385
OHIO
Dayton Daily News (G): 183,175
Akron Beacon Journal (G): 139,220
OREGON
The Oregonian (Portland) (B): 342,040
Mail Tribune (Medford): 35,524
The Register-Guard (Eugene) (G): 72,411
PENNSYLVANIA
The Philadelphia Inquirer (G): 387,692
The Philadelphia Daily News (G): 139,983
TENNESSEE
The Jackson Sun (G): 35,561
VIRGINIA
The Roanoke Times: 100,447
WASHINGTON
The Seattle Times (B): 237,303
Seattle Post-Intelligencer (G): 150,901
GEORGE W. BUSH
34 newspapers total
4,776,231 daily circulation
ALABAMA
Mobile Register (B): 100,244
ARIZONA
The Arizona Republic (Phoenix) (B): 466,926
CALIFORNIA
The San Diego Union-Tribune (B): 361,317
COLORADO
Rocky Mountain News (Denver) (B): 286,004
The Pueblo Chieftain: 52,208
GEORGIA
Savannah Morning News (B): 57,288
ILLINOIS
Chicago Tribune (B): 578,843
The Pantagraph (Bloomington) (B): 47,931
The News-Gazette (Champaign-Urbana): 39,190
INDIANA
The Indianapolis Star (B): 253,778
IOWA
Globe-Gazette (Mason City): 18,947
MASSACHUSETTS
The Sun (Lowell) (B): 50,369
MICHIGAN
The Grand Rapids Press (B): 139,216
The Oakland Press (Pontiac): 65,484
NEBRASKA
Omaha World-Herald (B): 197,627
NEVADA
Las Vegas Review-Journal (B): 170,061
NEW HAMPSHIRE
The Union Leader (Manchester) (B): 59,605
NEW MEXICO
Carlsbad Current-Argus (B): 8,030
Las Cruces Sun-News (B): 22,168
NEW YORK
The New York Sun: 18,000
OHIO
The Repository (Canton) (B): 66,014
The Times Reporter (New Philadelphia): 23,956
The Courier (Findlay) (B): 22,319
OKLAHOMA
Tulsa World (B): 139,383
PENNSYLVANIA
York Daily Record (G): 46,554
TENNESSEE
The Leaf-Chronicle (Clarksville): 22,057
TEXAS
The Dallas Morning News (B): 546,177
San Antonio Express-News (B): 252,889
Fort Worth Star-Telegram (B): 247,167
El Paso Times: 74,278
Amarillo Globe-News (B): 51,105
VIRGINIA
Richmond Times-Dispatch (B): 191,732
The Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg) (B): 47,866
WASHINGTON
The Columbian (Vancouver) (B): 51,498
Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is the editor of E&P.
October 27, 2004 at 11:05 PM in Politics | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home
October 26, 2004
Tributes pour in for DJ John Peel
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | Tributes pour in for DJ John Peel
Tributes have poured in from the music world after the death of veteran broadcaster John Peel, who died on holiday in Peru on Tuesday aged 65.
Members of The Smiths, The Undertones, The Manic Street Preachers, Radiohead, Blur and Joy Division have spoken about Peel's influence and legacy.
Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr said the band's early success was "largely due to the John Peel show".
Prime Minister Tony Blair also paid tribute to the BBC Radio 1 DJ.
Peel, whose radio career spanned 40 years, was on a working holiday in the city of Cuzco with his wife Sheila when he suffered a heart attack.
He was BBC Radio 1's longest-serving DJ and in recent years had also presented Home Truths on Radio 4.
Radiohead singer Thom Yorke said Peel was his "inspiration" since the age of 14. "Who am I going to listen to now? I'm thinking about you. Thanks John Peel."
Blur singer Damon Albarn said the world would be a poorer place without Peel.
"I will miss him deeply," he said. "I want to send my heartfelt sympathy to his lovely family. John's memory will never be forgotten because he had the spirit of music in him."
Feargal Sharkey, former frontman of The Undertones, described Peel as the "single most important broadcaster we have ever known".
'He changed my life forever'
The band's single Teenage Kicks was Peel's favourite song and he championed the track and the band on his show in the late 1970s.
Sharkey said: "In the autumn of 1978, something happened that was to change my life forever - John Peel played Teenage Kicks on the radio for the very first time. Today, it just changed again, forever."
Johnny Marr, who played with The Smiths on live sessions on Peel's show, said he was always the best DJ on the radio.
"We would try out new songs on the sessions and these often were the definitive version," he said.
Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker said: "In a world that is becoming ever more homogenised and pre-programmed, John Peel stuck up for the 'sore thumbs' of the music scene and I really can't think of anyone who could have done it better or who's going to do it now he's gone."
Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher called Peel "a rare breed amongst radio DJs". The Manic Street Preachers' James Dean Bradfield told the BBC News website: "It was because of him I got to hear some of the most obscure but influential music I ever heard.
"He was a lifeline to hearing music I would never have heard otherwise."
'Dreadful shock'
Bernard Sumner of Joy Division and New Order said the news of Peel's death was a "dreadful shock".
"If it wasn't for John Peel, there would be no Joy Division and no New Order," he said.
"He was one of the few people to give bands that played alternative music a chance to get heard, and he continued to be a champion of cutting-edge music throughout his life."
Kurt Wagner, of US band Lambchop, said Peel was "amazing" and his influence was felt far outside his home country.
Tony Blair's spokesman said the Prime Minister was "genuinely saddened by the news".
He added: "His view is that he was a unique voice in British broadcasting and used that voice to unearth new talent and different subjects and make them accessible to a much wider audience."
Peel was born in Heswall, near Liverpool, and joined Radio 1 at the launch in 1967.
He became one of the first DJs to give exposure to punk, reggae and hip-hop, before they crossed over into the mainstream.
'Devastated'
Radio 1 controller Andy Parfitt said Peel's death "absolutely devastated everyone".
"We're stunned and bereft. He's irreplaceable because what he had was 37 years of commitment to young music."
Mr Parfitt told Radio 1's Newsbeat Peel had been on a holiday of a lifetime when he died. "He had gone on holiday with his wife Sheila to a place where he had always wanted to go."
Radio 1 DJ Steve Lamacq said: "He was groundbreaking for me. He just broke the rules the whole time. He did things that just weren't done. He was a maverick and he got away with it.
"You have to have trust with a DJ, and everyone built that trust with John."
BBC 6 Music's Liz Kershaw said he was " the least musically snooty person we know".
She said: "He was utterly sincere in what he was doing, not because he wanted to be famous but he though he was on a mission to bring stuff to people's ears.
'Great joy'
"He really did trawl through mailbags of demo cassettes. That's why we had Pulp and T-Rex, because he'd been discovering bands like that since 1967."
Singer Laura Cantrell, who was championed by Peel in recent months, said he had an "unabashed love for music".
"I really treasure that I got to know the man and his family, to hear his stories, and to be welcomed by he and Sheila to Peel Acres.
"To experience his sense of humour, the great joy that he took in his life was inspiring."
October 26, 2004 at 11:25 PM in World Affairs | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home
The master communicator
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | The master communicator
By Nicky Campbell
BBC Five Live presenter
John Peel was a broadcasting god. The Peelie you heard on the air was in every way the Peelie you met in the pub, chatted to in the record library and swapped gossip with in the corridor at Broadcasting House.
For any broadcaster that is the ultimate achievement. The man had a great brain.
He was erudite, knowledgable and one of the most genuine people I've met in this or any other business.
He could also be achingly funny. When he was on the 8-10pm slot on Radio 1 I followed him from 10-12, and we got to know each other well.
Sometimes he'd make me laugh so much and always the ascerbic observation was delivered with the pointed and yet disappointed John Peel wryness.
'Deeply thoughtful'
When once I mentioned that one of our weird and wonderful colleagues had told me he patronised several charities, Peelie painfully sighed, "And can't you just hear him."
The then-controller, Johnny Beerling, had a command posted up on the studio wall in bright colours to remind us all not to get too carried away. It read: "One thought - one link."
John found that hilarious and for Peelie to receive such a bumptious and presumptious instruction was plainly ludicrous. He was a deeply thoughtful man with a fascinating intelligence.
His command of the mother tongue - forged by a post-war upbringing and then the radicalism of the 1960s, and throughout a manifest love of language - was inspiring to listen to.
He was a master craftsman. He was a master communicator. That, married to his perpetual adolescent love for the musically marginal and utterly outre was a wonderful combination.
He was a great guy to have a good gossip with whether about politics or the current state of Radio 1.
I remember him once telling me playfully but with utter sincerity that another of our colleagues was "the most dangerous man he had ever met". Incidentally, he wasn't wrong.
And his strong sense of right and wrong, his hatred for bullies and charlatans and his humanity shone through all his work and came through the radio with every word and every record he played.
The Monday evening show the weekend after the Hillsborough tragedy was a piece of broadcasting I'll never forget.
He said nothing at the start of his show. He just played a record. A long slow record. It was Aretha Franklin's heart breaking gospel version of You'll Never Walk Alone.
I looked through the glass from my adjacent studio and John was just weeping. Silently. So were all of us - his listeners. Nothing more needed to be said.
I am pleased and proud to have known him, albeit a little. For my money, we have lost one of our greatest broadcasters.
October 26, 2004 at 11:20 PM in World Affairs | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home
Google Desktop Outshines Windows' File-Search Capabilities
Yahoo! News - Google Desktop Outshines Windows' File-Search Capabilities
Mon Oct 25,10:44 AM
By Rob Pegoraro, The Washington Post
Google is famed for its Web search engine, but over the past few years it has acquired a different role: Microsoft's No. 1 foreign aid donor. First, Google fixed some of Internet Explorer's worst defects with its Google Toolbar, a free add-in that blocks pop-up ads and provides a shortcut to (naturally) Google's search engine and an auto-fill option to complete Web forms. Now it has released the Google Desktop, another free program that fixes an equally glaring weakness of Windows: its woeful file-searching capabilities.
What a wonderful favor to do: Microsoft ought to send Google a thank-you note sometime.
What Google did for Web searching, Google Desktop -- available in a beta-test form at desktop.google.com for Windows 2000 (news - web sites) and XP -- does for file finding. Once installed, it quickly builds a database of the non-system files on your computer's hard drive, then indexes the contents of many commonly used types of files -- Web pages viewed in Internet Explorer, e-mail read in Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express mail programs, America Online instant messages, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and text files.
This indexing has yet to have any detectable effect on the performance of two PCs I've put Google Desktop on, despite its ludicrous speed. New e-mails turned up in Google Desktop's search results within six minutes of their arrival, and freshly viewed Web pages were indexed even faster, within about 10 seconds.
Since Google Desktop's index is updated so often, it also tracks changes to text and Microsoft Office files. Click a file's name in a Google Desktop window to open that file in whatever program created it; click the "cached" link to view older versions within your browser window. Only the text of them appears, which works fine for most Word and text documents; Excel and PowerPoint files, however, usually look like gibberish without their formatting and graphics.
Google Desktop requires 500 megabytes of free disk space to install, but it doesn't seem to use much space in practice -- just 120 megabytes or so of data on the machine I'm using now.
Google Desktop's advantage doesn't always lie in the speed with which it runs its searches; if you turn on Windows' "indexing service," a search option normally left off, Microsoft's software can rip through a search almost as fast as Google's. The selling point here is more convenience and simplicity.
First, Google Desktop is quicker to launch than Windows' own file-search tool. Instead of opening the Start Menu to launch a separate program, you just double-click Google Desktop's icon in the bottom right corner of the screen to open its search page in your Web browser. Type your query and hit Enter, and the search results appear. And you don't have to choose between searching by files' names or their contents -- or even specify what kind of file to get -- since Google Desktop searches everything at once.
Second, Google Desktop eliminates the need to use the often slow and clumsy search tools built into Microsoft's Web, e-mail and Office software, the usual backstops to the Windows file-search utility -- for example, Outlook's "find" command, which by default looks through only the current mail folder, or Internet Explorer's history-search option, which scans only the titles and addresses of recently viewed pages, not their content.
The effect of this is to abolish that "where'd I put this?" confusion that regularly sends me through the "find" or "search" modes of my word processor, e-mail client and Web browser to locate the item that I had read in one program or another a few days ago.
If even Google Desktop can't locate the factoid you seek on your own hard drive, a click of a link in the Google Desktop window forwards the query to Google's Web search. Conversely, any time you run a search in Google's normal interface, you'll be presented with Google Desktop's search results automatically (these are added on your PC by the Desktop program, not by Google's own computers).
One thing to watch for, if you share a computer with other people: Google Desktop's searches will encompass everyone's data unless you adjust its preferences to exclude it from some folders or file types. Likewise, if you see Google Desktop running on a computer you're about to borrow, you'd be wise to click its taskbar icon (a rainbow-colored swirl) and select "pause indexing" to stop it from tracking your own use.
It can take a while to get used to leaning on Google Desktop as your first-resort file-finding tool, instead of whatever data-search options are built into the program you are using at the moment. Clicking over to a completely different program -- even though it's far faster, accurate and elegant -- can feel weird.
After trying Google Desktop for a week, I'm almost ready to make that leap. Why "almost"? Google Desktop needs to search through more than just the files created by Microsoft's own programs. To start, it must expand its Web and mail-search capabilities to such popular non-Microsoft applications as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird and Qualcomm's Eudora. It also ought to be able to index the contents of Portable Document Format and Rich Text Format files, plus instant-message chats carried out in non-AOL software.
But knowing how consistently Google has worked to improve its other services, I'm sure those changes are coming. Microsoft and Apple (which plans to introduce a search capability much like Google Desktop in next year's update to Mac OS X (news - web sites)) should keep their notebooks handy.
Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.
October 26, 2004 at 07:45 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (19) | Top of page | Blog Home
Security for Internet Users Deemed Weak
Yahoo! News - Security for Internet Users Deemed Weak
Mon Oct 25,10:00 AM
By TED BRIDIS, AP Technology Writer
WASHINGTON - Internet users at home are not nearly as safe online as they believe, according to a nationwide inspection by researchers. They found most consumers have no firewall protection, outdated antivirus software and dozens of spyware programs secretly running on their computers.
One beleaguered home user in the government-backed study had more than 1,000 spyware programs running on his sluggish computer when researchers examined it.
Bill Mines, a personal trainer in South Riding, Va., did not fare much better. His family's 3-year-old Dell computer was found infected with viruses and more than 600 pieces of spyware surreptitiously monitoring his online activities.
"I was blown away," Mines said. "I had a lot of viruses and other things I didn't know about. I had no idea things like this could happen."
The Internet always has had its share of risky neighborhoods and dark alleys. But with increasingly sophisticated threats from hackers, viruses, spam e-mails and spyware, trouble is finding computer users no matter how cautiously they roam online.
The technology industry is feeling the pain, too.
Spurred by the high costs of support calls from irritated customers — and fearful that frustrated consumers will stop buying new products — Internet providers, software companies and computer-makers are making efforts to increase awareness of threats and provide customers with new tools to protect themselves.
Still, many computer users appear remarkably unprepared for the dangers they face.
The study being released Monday by America Online and the National Cyber Security Alliance found that 77 percent of 326 adults in 12 states assured researchers in a telephone poll they were safe from online threats. Nearly as many people felt confident they were already protected specifically from viruses and hackers.
When experts visited those same homes to examine computers, they found two-thirds of adults using antivirus software that was not updated in at least seven days.
Two-thirds of the computer users also were not using any type of protective firewall program, and spyware was found on the computers of 80 percent of those in the study.
The survey participants all were AOL subscribers selected in 22 cities and towns by an independent market analysis organization.
The alliance, a nonprofit group, is backed by the Homeland Security Department and the Federal Trade Commission, plus leading technology companies, including Cisco Systems, Microsoft, eBay and Dell.
The group's chief, Ken Watson, said consumers suffer from complacency and a lack of expert advice on keeping their computers secure. "Just like you don't expect to get hit by a car, you don't believe a computer attack can happen to you," Watson said.
"There really is quite a perception gap," agreed Daniel W. Caprio, the Commerce Department (news - web sites)'s deputy assistant secretary for technology policy. "Clearly there is confusion. We need to do a better job making information and practical tips for home users and small businesses available."
Wendy Avino, an interior decorator in Lansdowne, Va., said researchers found 14 spyware programs on her borrowed laptop and noticed that her $50 antivirus software was not properly configured to scan her computer at least monthly for possible infections.
"We don't go in funny chat rooms, I don't open funny mail," Avino said. "If it says 'hot girls,' I delete it. We do everything in the right way, so how does stuff get in there?"
She complained she was misled believing her commercial antivirus and firewall programs would protect her from all varieties of online threats; most do not detect common types of spyware.
"It is very complicated for the average home user," said Ari Schwartz, an expert on Internet threats for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington civil liberties group.
"There's a lack of accountability all around, from consumers who don't believe they should have to do this to companies who blame the consumer. It's finger-pointing back and forth," Schwartz said.
Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates (news - web sites), said the company spent nearly $1 billion on its recent upgrade to improve security for customers using the latest version of its Windows software.
AOL purchased full-page advertisements in major newspapers this month pledging better security for its subscribers. Dell has begun a campaign to educate customers how to detect and remove spyware themselves.
The government is increasingly involved, too.
The FTC this month filed its first federal court case over spyware. The House overwhelmingly approved two bills to increase criminal penalties and fines over spyware. The Homeland Security Department offers free e-mail tips for home Internet users to keep themselves secure.
___
On the Net:
Cyber Security Alliance: www.staysafeonline.info
Homeland Security tips: www.uscert.gov
October 26, 2004 at 07:43 AM in Virus | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home
October 25, 2004
Web Desktop Moves Raise Security Alerts
Web Desktop Moves Raise Security Alerts
By Matt Hicks
October 22, 2004
A pair of phishing vulnerabilities this week targeted at Google Inc. point to the kind of new threat Web companies can face as they expand their services into desktop applications, security experts say.
Because of errors in JavaScript code, Google found itself susceptible to phishing scams where an attacker could mimic its popular search site using a URL with the google.com domain, multiple researchers reported.
But the potential attacks didn't stop there, according to security and analyst firm Netcraft Ltd. They also could extend to gathering information from users using the recently released Google Desktop Search application, which indexes hard-drive files, e-mails, chat sessions and Web history and can display them along with Web results.
Google confirmed Thursday that it had fixed one of the vulnerabilities, and Netcraft on Friday said Google also had fixed a second, similar flaw. Google officials didn't return requests for comment for this story.
While the vulnerabilities may be gone for now, they are not unique to Mountain View, Calif.-based Google. Google is among leading Web companies that have increasingly expanded their core services. Companies such as Yahoo Inc., Amazon.com Inc and eBay Inc. have either released lightweight desktop applications—from browser-based toolbars to desktop companions—or opened their services to developers of desktop clients.
As they extend their reach to desktop applications, Internet companies are opening themselves to more malicious attacks, given the tenacity of attackers and the increased complexity of their services, said Ken Dunham, director of malicious code at iDefense Inc., a Reston, Va., security intelligence company.
"The more options and software you provide, then it's more likely that new avenues for exploitation will be introduced," Dunham said. "If someone wants to get into your house real bad, they can. Your job is to make sure yours is less likely to be attacked and robbed."
The potential for new vulnerabilities does not mean Web companies should stay stagnant, but rather that they must ensure that they conduct as much due diligence as possible to avoid programming errors and that they respond to threats, Dunham said.
Major online players by their nature expose themselves to attackers, and none is likely to be vulnerability-free.
"With all online applications, they have built-in vulnerabilities and over time, given the diligence of the hacker community, [attackers] will discover them," said Richard Stiennon, vice president of threat research at Boulder, Colo.-based Webroot Software Inc, which makes Internet security tools.
"I don't think you can say that it's out of the ordinary for the big, popular services to write in vulnerabilities, but it's going to become more a part of Google's experience as it becomes more predominant in its space and develops desktop applications," he said.
Google, for example, has increasingly added desktop complements to its search service. Along with the beta test of Google Desktop Search, it offers a Google toolbar for Internet Explorer and a Windows download called Google Deskbar for initiating Web searches outside of the browser.
The phishing vulnerabilities disclosed this week gained widespread attention, partly because Google has remained out of the security limelight. But the company's search toolbar has appeared on security bulletins before.
Late last month, the SecurityTracker.com list reported that the Google Toolbar could be used to execute arbitrary code.
Phishing has become a widespread problem for many of largest online services, such as eBay, and online financial service companies as attackers spoof corporate domains to lure consumers to malicious sites that appear legitimate.
Even Google rival Yahoo, by offering an instant-messaging client, has found itself battling security vulnerabilities. It also appears likely to offer more desktop applications. Earlier this week, for example, it acquired a desktop e-mail client with its purchase of Stata Laboratories Inc.
Ironically, as the major Internet companies gain a foothold on the desktop, they could find themselves under the kind of security spotlight that shines on software makers such as Microsoft Corp., security analysts said.
While much of the responsibility for security holes affecting Web sites can be traced to the Web browser, the same is not true for desktop applications, said Dan Hubbard, senior director of security research and technology at Websense Inc., a San Diego-based maker of employee Internet management software.
More and more desktop applications, especially those from Web companies, also are connecting to the Web and circumventing traditional firewalls by making use of ports 80 and 443, he said.
"Anytime that an application, no matter who creates the applications, has access to port 80 on your machine and access to a Web front end, then this can lead to [security] situations," Hubbard said. "Anytime you write an application that is going to be running on the desktop, you have to secure that application more than a Web services application."
PointerCheck out eWEEK.com's Security Center for the latest security news, reviews and analysis. And for insights on security coverage around the Web, take a look at eWEEK.com Security Center Editor Larry Seltzer's Weblog.
October 25, 2004 at 07:38 AM in Phishing & identity theft | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home
October 24, 2004
Identity Theft Is Epidemic. Can It Be Stopped?
The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Identity Theft Is Epidemic. Can It Be Stopped?
By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN
Published: October 24, 2004
PAUSING in the foyer of a comfortable suburban home two days before Halloween in 2002, Kevin Barrows, a special agent with the F.B.I., could not bring himself to open the front door. He and a team of agents had just spent several hours searching every room in the house, in New Rochelle, N.Y., but they were leaving empty-handed. Months of investigating had led Mr. Barrows to believe that someone was orchestrating a huge fraud from the house, yet he had not found a single scrap of evidence
Still, something bothered him about the furniture in one of the bedrooms. It seemed oddly oversized. So he headed back upstairs for a second look, and his attention focused on an expansive canopy over the bed. When he pushed at the draping, he found that it was weighed down with files. They contained reams of confidential financial information about hundreds of individuals whose identities had been pilfered in an intricate scheme that illicitly netted more than $50 million.
Two years later, the New Rochelle home has emerged as a linchpin in what federal law enforcement authorities describe as the biggest case of identity theft ever uncovered in the United States. The scheme was essentially masterminded by just two people: Linus Baptiste, who lived in the house and had contacts with a sprawling ring of Nigerian street criminals, and Philip A. Cummings, his former brother-in-law, who worked as a help-desk clerk at a Long Island software company. At least 30,000 people nationwide were victimized, according to law enforcement authorities and court documents.
"In a lot of ways it could have been the perfect crime," Mr. Barrows, who now works as a private investigator, recalled in a recent interview. "The execution was seamless, and if they had been smart enough not to use a phone line that traced back to that house we probably never would have found them."
The Baptiste case and others like it are at the forefront of one of the fastest-growing white-collar crimes in the country. Identity theft involves the most intimate, the most stealthy and perhaps the most intrusive of frauds - the wholesale lifting of someone's financial persona to secure bank loans, credit cards and mortgages in that person's name. Even when the crimes are discovered early, it can take months, sometimes years, for innocent people to restore tattered credit histories. While most consumers usually do not have to pay for illicit purchases on their credit cards, they may be held liable in thefts involving other types of loans.
"Ultimately, victims don't have to pay debts incurred by another person, but that's not the point," said Bridget J. Thomas, a homemaker in Prairieville, La., who spent months repairing her credit history in 2002 after a thief appropriated her identity to snare about $65,000 in loans. "It's the sleepless nights, and the time, and the stress you have to go through to clean up your record that really hurts victims."
ANALYSTS say several factors have combined to make identity theft a particularly intractable crime: the growth of the Internet and digital finance, decades of expanding consumer credit worldwide, the hodgepodge nature of local and federal law enforcement, and the changing but often still inadequate regulations governing the credit industry.
Everyone is fair game. Thieves recently snatched the identity of a three-week-old infant in Bothell, Wash. And authorities say that the dead have been favorite targets of identity thieves for years. Nor is identity theft limited to people. A growing number of thieves now assume the false guise of entire companies, adopting a business's employer identification number to secure commercial loans, corporate leases or expensive office products, according to analysts, security specialists and law enforcement officials.
Schemes known as "phishing'' use e-mail messages to lure unwitting consumers to Web sites masquerading as home pages of trusted banks and credit card issuers, corporate security specialists say. Online visitors are then induced to reveal passwords as well as bank account, Social Security and credit card numbers.
The F.B.I. says that many identity thefts and cyberschemes that play out in the United States are hatched in Russia, Romania and West Africa and that the agency is trying to work with law enforcement officials in those places to stem the problem. A leading bank regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, warned in June that increased corporate outsourcing of call-center tasks and other jobs overseas had heightened the risk of identity theft.
Authorities have only recently grasped the full scope of the problem. It began to gain more attention a decade ago, prompting Congress in 1998 to make identity theft a federal crime and the Federal Trade Commission to set up a special victim assistance center a year later. Until a couple of years ago, analysts and federal authorities estimated the annual number of identity thefts to be in the hundreds of thousands. But in September 2003, the F.T.C. offered an eye-opening assessment of how widespread and damaging such crime might be.
In a report prepared by its consumer protection bureau, the F.T.C. said 27.3 million Americans had their identities stolen from April 1998 to April 2003 - with more than a third of them, or 9.9 million, victimized in the last 12 months of that period alone. The crimes ranged from the theft of a credit card number to more elaborate identity thefts used to secure loans. During those 12 months, the report said, businesses and financial institutions suffered about $48 billion in losses because of identity theft, and victimized consumers paid more than $5 billion in out-of-pocket expenses to regain their financial identities.
"The number of victims we were estimating in 2000 were 400,000 to 500,000 annually and by 2003 we were saying 750,000," said Linda Foley, executive director of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group based in San Diego. "The business community said 'Oh, you are wrong; those numbers are wrong.' Well, we were wrong. The numbers were much higher."
Experts say identity theft has evolved from isolated examples, like Ms. Thomas's, to ever broader and more financially damaging cases, like the one investigated by Mr. Barrows, that involve the speedy theft and aggregation of hundreds or even thousands of identities. Many of the most vicious cases, say analysts, involve corporate insiders who hijack sensitive personal information from corporate databases in order to begin picking people's pockets.
"We're in the information database age, and insider theft has turned toward the theft of information, and specifically personal information, because with an assumed identity criminals can purchase goods and services at will using someone else's credit," said Judith Collins, an associate professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University and an expert on identity theft. "Increasingly, we're seeing cases where identities are stolen in the U.S. and then used elsewhere overseas."
Last year, Dr. Collins completed a study of more than 1,000 identity theft cases from 1999 to 2002, the results of which she plans to publish soon. She said the report would indicate that about 5 percent of the crimes examined were linked to known or suspected terrorists.
Law enforcement officials say they believe that members of the Irish Republican Army and terrorists involved in the foiled plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport relied heavily on identity theft schemes to finance their operations. Operation Web Snare, a Justice Department investigation of cybercrimes that was begun last summer, found possible links between identity theft and terrorism financing, according to a government report on the investigation.
Dr. Collins said her study would highlight other important aspects of identity theft. For example, the study will show that corporate insiders set in motion about half of the identity theft cases examined. The F.T.C. has reached similar conclusions.
"Insiders are often targeted or corrupted by organized crime groups to provide information," said Joanna Crane, manager of the F.T.C.'s identity theft program. "You might see groups plant someone at a temp agency or janitorial agencies so they can steal files when they are contracted out to work for someone else."
Or, as the partnership of Mr. Baptiste and Mr. Cummings showed, cultivating a corrupt insider may be simply a family affair.
Mr. Burrows, the F.B.I. agent, said he had his first inkling of the scheme in early 2002, after the F.B.I. office in Detroit passed along a fraud case to his New York supervisors that the Detroit agents believed was unsolvable. A former lawyer and Wall Street analyst, Mr. Barrows had successfully investigated securities fraud, and his supervisors tapped him to investigate the matter. At the time, the authorities knew that about 15,000 people had been victimized, largely because someone had used corporate codes and passwords to access their credit histories from reporting agencies like Experian, Equifax and TransUnion.
"It didn't take a rocket scientist to discover that the weak link was somebody who had stolen confidential subscriber codes and passwords," Mr. Barrows said. "But the question of 'who' was much more difficult to answer."
Mr. Barrows joined forces with an assistant United States attorney in Manhattan. The pair began to focus on who would be in a position to get the codes. Several companies across the country, all of which were unaware of the problem, had had their codes stolen. The companies were diverse - including banks, auto dealerships and a hospital - but each used a software product made by a Long Island company, Teledata Communications of Hauppaugue. The software allowed companies to use personal computers to request and download credit histories from reporting agencies.
Mr. Barrows focused on Teledata employees as likely perpetrators. He looked almost exclusively at the company's help-desk representatives, knowing that those employees interacted with customers who provided confidential personal information like Social Security numbers. Mr. Barrows and an Equifax employee also began cross-referencing Teledata's telephone records with Equifax records to find instances when small auto dealerships ordered unusually large batches of credit histories. He said that phase of the investigation lasted four months and involved painstaking research akin to "looking for a needle in a haystack."
Luckily, Mr. Barrows and his Equifax colleague found their needle: a telephone number linked to Mr. Baptiste's home in New Rochelle.
AFTER Mr. Barrows discovered the credit files in the bedroom, he found a ledger detailing amounts paid and owed to Mr. Baptiste. Mr. Barrows also discovered a laptop computer hidden in the bedroom. It contained a document bearing the name of Mr. Baptiste's former brother-in-law, Mr. Cummings, who worked on Teledata's help desk.
According to court records and law enforcement officials, Mr. Baptiste approached Mr. Cummings in 2000 and offered to bribe him to download as many credit histories as possible, using appropriated corporate passwords and the Teledata software; at least 20 Nigerians in the Bronx and Brooklyn who were linked to Mr. Baptiste paid the pair $60 for each credit report acquired.
The Nigerians used the information to get credit cards in victims' names, the officials say. With the cards in hand, they went on shopping sprees at retail outlets like Home Depot, reselling their merchandise for cash to fencers for about half the purchase price charged to the cards. The identity thieves also used the pilfered information to deplete victims' bank accounts, change addresses on the accounts and take out loans.
All told, the Baptiste-Cummings ring stole identities from at least 30,000 people from 2000 to 2002, ringing up tens of millions of dollars in profits, according to law enforcement officials and court papers. While court papers describe Mr. Baptiste and Mr. Cummings as architects of the scheme, the United States attorney's office declined to comment on how the ring actually divided its loot.
Mr. Baptiste, Mr. Cummings and at least five other people were arrested shortly after Mr. Barrows searched the New Rochelle home. Mr. Baptiste and Mr. Cummings have pleaded guilty to fraud charges filed in federal court in Manhattan and await sentencing early next year. Their lawyers declined to comment on the charges, but Mr. Cummings, who appeared in federal court last month with an oxygen tube in his nose, is seeking a reduced sentence because he says his health is fragile. The United States attorney's office in Manhattan would not comment on whether other arrests were imminent.
"What everyone was horrified about in this case was how much damage could be done by one guy being in the right place at the right time," said Marcus Asner, one of the assistant United States attorneys prosecuting the Baptiste case.
William Nass, Teledata's president, said his company had screened Mr. Cummings carefully before hiring him and that his previous work record had included seven years at a major bank. Mr. Nass noted that Mr. Cummings worked for Teledata for just nine months beginning in June 1999 and that most of the crimes occurred after he left the company. While Teledata has since upgraded its products and procedures to defend against similar problems, Mr. Nass said that any company is vulnerable to crafty insiders.
Mr. Barrows agreed. "The hardest thing to battle is the insider because no matter what you do to try and prevent it, a corrupt insider will derail that," he said. He added that his case against Mr. Cummings and Mr. Baptiste "could really have gone unsolved except for fortuitous circumstances."
The fact that luck played such an important role in catching Mr. Cummings and Mr. Baptiste bothers critics of corporate and law enforcement efforts to battle identity theft. While they laud ambitious investigations and prosecutions like the Baptiste case, they note that such cases are rare.
"One of the key major problems is that prosecutors do not want to take on identity theft cases because they're so hard to prosecute," said Dr. Collins at Michigan State. "We're burdened with an elephant of a law enforcement bureaucracy nationwide that makes it difficult to prevent or even mitigate identity theft."
President Bush recently signed into law tougher punishments for identity theft, but some law enforcement officials say that hurdles remain. They say that smaller cases are sometimes ignored or delayed until they can be bundled into high-profile, high-impact prosecutions. "It's the simple reality of us trying to build that small case into something larger before I commit resources to it," said Dan Larkin, head of the F.B.I.'s Internet Crime Complaint Center. "For me to try to build that case I'm going to need to ratchet it up a little bit."
Mr. Larkin said that the F.B.I. has been pushing for the last few years for greater cooperation among the bureau and state and local law enforcement agencies, and that the F.B.I. now had an "excellent ability to plug into" local identity theft investigations when invited.
For many victims, securing a police report can be an onerous, sometimes endless process. Local police departments often do not issue reports for residents if the identity theft occurred elsewhere, and most states do not require the police to do so. Yet credit issuers and reporting agencies typically demand a police report before they take a victim's claims seriously, often leaving consumers at a loss when they try to repair sullied credit histories.
Last year, President Bush signed a law that expands consumer credit protections and also offers provisions making it simpler for consumers to resolve identity theft problems and protect their accounts. The new law, which does not take effect until Dec. 1, also aims to make it easier for consumers to get police reports when their identities have been stolen.
A survey released last year by Gartner Inc., a research firm specializing in information and technology issues, criticized banks, financial service firms and other pillars of the credit industry as not putting into effect more rigorous computer screening procedures to protect customer accounts. It also said that ineffective screening ultimately forced identity theft victims to bear most of the crime's social and economic costs.
"We've created a victim population that is self-blaming," said Ms. Foley of the Identity Theft Resource Center. "Most of these problems start with companies that are too loose with consumer and employee information."
Some victims, after enduring the slow torture of mending their credit histories, say they know exactly whom to blame. "My anger at my perpetrator quickly transferred to the credit-granting community itself," said Ms. Thomas, describing how her emotions shifted after her creditors largely ignored her efforts to overcome identity theft. "They don't care what this does to victims because they don't have to care."
BANKS and others in the credit industry disagree, saying that they see the war on identity theft as a top priority. Nessa Feddis, senior federal counsel at the American Bankers Association, says fraudulent credit card charges, have been declining as a percentage of overall charges. Ms. Feddis, who was able to resolve her own past identity theft problems by placing a call to the Secret Service, says banks are "doing a good job of educating their customers" about identity theft and "providing ways to assist them."
A spokesman for the Consumer Data Industry Association, the trade group representing credit reporting agencies, said consumers could put fraud alerts on their credit histories if they wanted to keep prying eyes at bay. Representatives of Visa and MasterCard, the two largest credit card associations in the country, say that they are guarding customer account numbers more carefully, for example, by deleting the numbers in mail and other documents delivered to customers' homes.
Sergio Pinon, the head of security and risk services at MasterCard, said that MasterCard was deploying computer systems that analyze the spending patterns of individual card users and pluck out anomalies in case a fraud is under way. Like Ms. Feddis, Mr. Pinon said that he was the victim of an identity thief, but that he stopped the fraud because his bank had quickly spotted an intrusion into his credit card account.
Both MasterCard and Visa also monitor Web sites that broker stolen credit card numbers and other personal information. "One of the things we've discovered is that your identity is worth about $10" on the Internet, said Linda Locke, a MasterCard spokeswoman.
With identities so cheap, experts say that criminals who want to mask themselves inside the envelope of someone else's financial world will continue to have ample opportunities to express themselves.
"The only limitation to identity theft is the creativity of the thief, and that's scary because there's really no limit on creativity, is there?" Ms. Foley said. "The tour guides on this crazy ride are the thieves, not us and not law enforcement, and as long as that continues it's going to be a problem."
October 24, 2004 at 10:34 AM in Phishing & identity theft | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home
October 23, 2004
The History of Yahoo! - How It All Started...
Yahoo! began as a student hobby and evolved into a global brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information and purchase things. The two founders of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in a campus trailer in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations. Eventually, Jerry and David's lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories ... and the core concept behind Yahoo! was born.
The Web site started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers.
Jerry and David soon found they were not alone in wanting a single place to find useful Web sites. Before long, hundreds of people were accessing their guide from well beyond the Stanford trailer. Word spread from friends to what quickly became a significant, loyal audience throughout the closely-knit Internet community. Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in the fall of 1994, translating to almost 100 thousand unique visitors.
Due to the torrent of traffic and enthusiastic reception Yahoo! was receiving, the founders knew they had a potential business on their hands. In March 1995, the pair incorporated the business and met with dozens of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. They eventually came across Sequoia Capital, the well-regarded firm whose most successful investments included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems. They agreed to fund Yahoo! in April 1995 with an initial investment of nearly $2 million.
Realizing their new company had the potential to grow quickly, Jerry and David began to shop for a management team. They hired Tim Koogle, a veteran of Motorola and an alumnus of the Stanford engineering department, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell's WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer. They secured a second round of funding in Fall 1995 from investors Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. Yahoo! launched a highly-successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees.
Today, Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 232 million individuals each month worldwide. As the first online navigational guide to the Web, www.yahoo.com is the leading guide in terms of traffic, advertising, household and business user reach. Yahoo! is the No. 1 Internet brand globally and reaches the largest audience worldwide. The company also provides online business and enterprise services designed to enhance the productivity and Web presence of Yahoo!'s clients. These services include Corporate Yahoo!, a popular customized enterprise portal solution; audio and video streaming; store hosting and management; and Web site tools and services. The company's global Web network includes 25 World properties. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Yahoo! has offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada and the United States.
October 23, 2004 at 11:12 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (44) | Top of page | Blog Home
Google and Yahoo top e-business poll - 2003
Google and Yahoo top e-business poll
Google and Yahoo have been identified as two of the outstanding websites in an e-business survey carried out for the University of Michigan.
The study, which measures the top 200 companies in this sector during the second quarter of each year, shows that America Online, though still not a top performer, has made a dramatic improvement in the past year and may be on the way to attracting more customers.
Overall, the ACSI e-business industry score improved year on year, up from 68.7 (on a scale of 0-100) in 2002 to a score of 71.4 this year.
Google consistently places at the top of the search engine category; it had a score of 82 this year, while Ask Jeeves improved its performance by seven points, to 69, according to the study. Search engine Alta Vista trailed its competitors with a score of 63.
Google's score shows that it has one of the strongest relationships with its customers of any kind of company, online or offline, said ForeSee chief executive officer Larry Freed, whose company is an e-business partner with the university.
In the portal category, AOL made a dramatic six-point jump in performance, bringing its score to 65.
Yahoo is still the dominant player in this category with a score of 78, a two-point improvement on last year, and MSN also moved up two points to 74.
"AOL's improvement is very, very impressive," said Freed. "People have said AOL was down for the count before and have been proved wrong."
In the news and information category, MSNBC.com and ABCNews.com tied with 74 points, followed closely by CNN.com and USAToday.com, which tied at 72. NYTimes.com brings up the rear again this year with a score of 70, down one point from last year.
"News sites show every sign of being, basically, a mature industry," Freed said. "The innovation that we see coming from hypercompetitiveness in so many online industries just doesn't exist in the news field."
Freed said two clear trends are emerging.
First, two of the three categories - search engines and portals - have clearly dominant players, though for laggers in the portal category, at least, catching up with Yahoo seems possible.
However, he said, in the search engine category, for other search engines to pull alongside or surpass Google seems like a long shot.
Second, companies in the portal and search categories that lead their fields - and are leaders in e-business in general - are doing a good job of evolving their business models without losing customer satisfaction, loyalty and brand power.
"It is almost certainly not a coincidence that very strong customer satisfaction scores and the continued upward trajectory of these scores is happening in categories [search engines, portals] that did not exist before the internet, despite continuing evolution of business model," Freed said
October 23, 2004 at 11:10 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (4) | Top of page | Blog Home
Business Models on the Web - Professor Michael Rappa
Captioned piece from Professor Rappa, is a good review of the types of internet business models.
Business Models on the Web | Managing the Digital Enterprise | Professor Michael Rappa
Business models are perhaps the most discussed and least understood aspect of the web. There is so much talk about how the web changes traditional business models. But there is little clear-cut evidence of exactly what this means ......
October 23, 2004 at 11:08 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | TrackBack (29) | Top of page | Blog Home
Browser Trends - W3C
Mozilla doubles market share from 8% in January to 17% in September.
2004 IE 6 IE 5 O 7 Moz NN 3 NN 4 NN 7
October 69.8% 6.0% 2.3% 17.0% 0.2% 0.2% 1.3%
September 69.6% 6.2% 2.3% 16.9% 0.2% 0.2% 1.3%
August 70.3% 7.0% 2.3% 15.5% 0.3% 0.3% 1.4%
July 71.0% 7.7% 2.3% 13.8% 0.3% 0.3% 1.4%
June 72.4% 8.3% 2.3% 11.8% 0.3% 0.3% 1.4%
May 72.6% 9.2% 2.2% 11.0% 0.3% 0.3% 1.4%
April 72.4% 10.1% 2.1% 10.3% 0.3% 0.3% 1.4%
March 72.1% 10.7% 2.1% 9.6% 0.4% 0.4% 1.4%
February 71.5% 11.5% 2.2% 9.0% 0.4% 0.4% 1.5%
January 71.3% 12.8% 2.1% 8.2% 0.4% 0.5% 1.5%
October 23, 2004 at 11:00 AM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home