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RAIN 10/29: Weekend Update Part 1



There are 15 stories in this posting.

The Scotsman 10/26/01
Historic university hit by £7m blaze
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/index.cfm?id=118802

by Jeanette Oldham
FOR 100 years the Bower Building stood out as a proud and distinctive element of the Glasgow University skyline.
Last night it was in ruins after a fire which caused £7 million of damage and destroyed works by Charles Darwin valued at more than £2 million.
The blaze, which broke out on the top floor destroyed dozens of rare books and manuscripts.


The Times 10/26/01
Darwin papers lost in blaze
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-2001372249,00.html

by Gillian Harris
Scotland Correspondent
AN investigation began yesterday into the cause of a fire which caused more than £8 million worth of damage and destroyed irreplacable works by Charles Darwin when it ripped through a historic University of Glasgow building.



Asahi Shimbun 10/25/01
Bill labels research a defense secret
http://www.asahi.com/english/politics/K2001102500317.html

Defense research projects-including war simulations-will fall under the category of national secrets, according to a bill aimed at imprisoning those who leak such information.
People who disclose information about defense projects or abet in such leaks face a maximum five-year prison term, Shingo Shuto, director-general of the Bureau of Defense Policy at the Defense Agency, said in an interview with The Asahi Shimbun.



Clayton County News-Daily 10/26/01
Officials: State archives should be boost economy
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=2552603&BRD=1099&PAG=461&dept_id=99012&rfi=6

by Justin Reedy
Clayton County will soon be home to every historical document in the history of Georgia.
On Thursday the Clayton County Development Authority approved a $40 million bond that will fund the state Department of Archives and History to be built in Morrow.
The facility will be part of Gateway Village, a planned development area that will house office and retail buildings, hotels and conference centers, in addition to the archives building. Gateway Village is at the intersection of Ga. Highway 54 and Clayton State Boulevard, and is adjacent to the campus of Clayton College and State University.



Eastside Journal 10/26/01
Court orders ex-employee to return yacht secrets
http://www.eastsidejournal.com/sited/story/html/71250

by Nick Perry
KIRKLAND -- A disgruntled ex-employee of Craig McCaw called an old yachting buddy offering secret keel plans for two America's Cup racing boats, court documents show.
McCaw's OneWorld challenge, based in Kirkland, is suing Sean Reeves in King County Superior Court after Reeves allegedly tried to sell secrets worth $2.5 million.
Reeves was named yesterday for the first time in new documents filed in the Trade Secrets Act case. The court has ordered Reeves to return OneWorld's secrets pending further findings.



Econtent 10/2001
Legit hack creates legal controversy
http://www.ecmag.net/Magazine/News/news01/ecnews10b.html

by Thomas Pack
Last August, a research team led by Princeton professor Edward Felten presented a paper that was at the center of a debate over the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which restricts dissemination of decryption information and, according to some academics and civil libertarians, limits the freedom of scientific research.
The controversy began last fall when Felten's team, which also included researchers from Rice University and a Xerox research center, broke encryption technologies created by the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a collection of 200 major record labels and hardware/software manufacturers working to protect digital audio. In a public challenge, the SDMI had been offering a $10,000 prize to anyone who could remove a digital watermark from a music file in less than a month.



Winona Daily News 10/26/01
Educators get a lesson in Winona County history
http://www.winonadailynews.com/news/6museum.php

by David Krotz
Winona County teachers and students who are planning to be teachers got a healthy dose of education at the second annual Discover Winona County History Day.
They were invited to attend an open house at the Winona County Historical Society to learn about the resources available to help them be more effective in the classroom.
"It sounds corny, but it's a place where history comes alive," said Jamie Nicholas, a senior at Winona State University who is majoring in social science and history with an eye to teaching in high school after graduation.



The Guardian 10/26/01
Reports on secrecy kept under wraps
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,581000,00.html

Progress reports comparing how well individual Whitehall departments have been doing at sweeping away unnecessary secrecy must themselves be concealed, the Cabinet Office says.
They claim the right to keep secret monitoring reports which track how many historical files are being opened up by each department.
In recent years, the government has been trying to speed up the release of closed files to the public record office, the official archive.
Departments were told to try and open the thousands of records which have been suppressed for longer than the normal 30 year period.



New York Times 10/25/01
Inventing a way to index 50,000 memories of the Holocaust
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/25/technology/circuits/25NEXT.html

by Bonnie Rothman Morris
The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a center devoted to collecting and preserving the testimony of Holocaust survivors and witnesses, has an embarrassment of riches: more than 116,000 hours of video, representing the memories of more than 50,000 people. But until now it has been largely keeping them to itself.
The vast digital archive, which was established by Steven Spielberg in 1994, is virtually an impenetrable thicket to would-be users like historians, educators and documentary filmmakers. Although the interviews are cataloged, the indexing is not specific enough to guide users. The few researchers with access to the archive thus spend countless hours sifting through material before they find what they need.



Vnunet.com 10/26/01
Data snooping laws won't be forced on ISPs
http://businessintelligence.ittoolbox.com/news/dispnews.asp?i=56046

by Ian Lynch
UK government officials have promised not to force internet service providers (ISPs) to retain records of which websites their customers browse, what newsgroups they read and to whom they send emails.
Officials from the Home Office and the Department of Trade and Industry made the promise on Wednesday during a meeting with the ISP Association (ISPA), the London Internet Exchange, telecoms companies and the Confederation of British Industry to discuss new anti-terrorist laws.
"The government confirmed that data retention would not be mandatory," said the ISPA. However, although the proposed new anti-terrorist laws won't be compulsory, ISPs will be asked to sign up to a voluntary code of practice to clarify how long certain types of data can be retained.



Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel 10/26/01
Deletion of e-mail on pledge investigated
http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/oct01/pledge26102501a.asp

AP
Madison - The Dane County district attorney is investigating whether the school district's deletion of e-mail messages relating to the School Board's decision to prohibit students from saying the Pledge of Allegiance was legal.
Phillip Prange, a Republican fund-raiser, filed an open record request asking that all the e-mail sent to the Madison Metropolitan School District about the controversy be forwarded to him.
Prange acknowledged that the more than 22,000 messages could be used to form a contact list of those who might help an effort to recall a board member. But he said that was not the purpose of the request. He said he just wanted to read them.



Las Vegas Sun 10/26/01
Nevada officers plead guilty in FBI scandal
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-crime/2001/oct/26/512538189.html

by Jeff German
Two Nevada law enforcement officers arrested in the secrets-for-sale scandal that rocked the Las Vegas FBI office pleaded guilty this week to federal conspiracy charges in New York.
Maria Emeterio, 34, a former investigator with the Nevada attorney general's office, and Mary Ellen Weeks, 43, a suspended Las Vegas Municipal Court intake services officer, each pleaded guilty to one federal count of conspiring to steal FBI records, authorities said Thursday.
Both face up to five years in prison and are expected to be sentenced in February, said Stephen King, the assistant U.S. Attorney handling the case in New York.



Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10/26/01
McCaw's America's Cup effort sails into courtroom
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/local/44124_mccaw25.shtml

by Joshunda Sanders
Highly competitive? Cutthroat business practices?
Forget high tech. Think yachting.
Wireless-phone billionaire Craig McCaw's yachting organization is suing a former employee, saying the worker tried to sell design secrets for two racing yachts to a rival America's Cup competitor owned by software mogul Larry Ellison.
In a competition that court filings say can be "won or lost in the design phase," this is serious business. The lawsuit was brought under the state's Trade Secrets Act and involves some of the world's richest men.



New York Times 10/26/01
Mich. Museum pays $492K for bus
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Rosa-Parks-Bus.html?searchpv=aponline

AP
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) -- A Michigan museum has paid $492,000 at an Internet auction for a bus whose owners say was the one on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man in 1955.
Steve Hamp, president of the Henry Ford Museum, called the bus ``the most important artifact in civil rights history'' even as some wondered if it is the actual vehicle.



New York Times 10/26/01
MSN lockout stirs antitrust rumblings
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_0-1005-200-7667367.html?searchpv=cnet

by Sandeep Junnarkar and Joe Wilcox
As some third-party browsers remain unable to access Microsoft's popular MSN.com Web site for a second day, the lockout has stirred up further anti-competitive concerns about the giant software maker.
Microsoft has said it has reopened the redesigned MSN site to rival browser makers, but as of Friday morning, the most recent browsers from Mozilla.org and Opera Software still could not access MSN. Netscape users also continued to report access problems.


Peter A. Kurilecz CRM, CA
pakurilecz@aol.com
Richmond, Va