[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

RAIN 0316 Weekly Update: Technology (24)



The Sun Herald 03/07/02
Company shredding its way to success
By TIMOTHY BOONE
THE SUN HERALD
Concerns about privacy and security are boosting the business of a year-old firm that provides a mobile shredding service across South Mississippi and Mobile.
Shred-It trucks, carrying heavy industrial shredders, are now calling on about 150 clients, including banks and hospitals, said Anthony Lowery, general manager of the Mobile franchise. In one hour, the shredder can grind 1,200 pounds of paper into a mountain of thumb-sized scraps, ready for recycling.
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/thesunherald/2807968.htm


BBC News 03/08/02
Hacking with a Pringles tube
By Mark Ward
BBC News Online technology correspondent
Empty cans of Pringles crisps could be helping malicious hackers spot wireless networks that are open to attack.
Security company i-sec has demonstrated that a directional antenna made with a Pringles can significantly improves the chances of finding the wireless computer networks being used in London's financial district.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1860000/1860241.stm


AP 03/10/02
Malaysia Digital ID Slow to Take Off
PAULINE JASUDASON
Associated Press Writer
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - The Malaysian government touts its new smart ID card with a litany of boastful slogans, like "Highly secure," "Single card, multiple solutions" and
"Incredible transformation."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/2832885.htm


ZDNet News 03/11/02
Are we ready for digital paper?
By Eric Schonfeld
Special to ZDNet
March 11, 2002, 4:30 AM PT
COMMENTARY-- Things go digital. That's just the way it is. Computers, phones, organizers, the tools in your doctor's office, music, cameras, movies, even dog tags and picture frames -- they've all been transformed by digital technology. Yet there's one artifact that has stubbornly resisted the trend -- paper. Despite countless attempts to digitize it or replicate its qualities electronically, paper refuses to get with the program.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-856627.html


GovExec.com 03/08/02
Study says federal Web sites need to be easier to use
By Joshua Dean
jdean@govexec.com
Web sites in the federal government provide the public with high quality information, but they aren’t easy to use, according to a recent study.
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0302/030802j1.htm


Wall Street Journal 03/11/02
Web's Uses Go Beyond Shopping, To Science, One Aquarium Shows
by Kara Swisher
It floats suddenly from the corner of the computer screen into view, a ghostlier version of the once-popular undersea screensavers.
But this large squid on the Web site of a Bay Area marine-research institute is real -- and unmistakably in its natural surroundings. Seeing it so easily and in real time is a minor miracle, brought online by a complex series of technologies that are becoming more commonplace.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1015802424615871560,00.html



SLATE 03/12/02
E-Mail Impersonators
How to identify "spoofed" e-mail.
By Bill Barnes
After my wife cast her ballot on the morning of Election Day 1996, she arrived at work to find an e-mail from none other than the president of the United States (president@whitehouse.gov). He thanked her for her vote and promised to address her hot-button issues of education and women's rights. She was a little disturbed, but as it turned out the sanctity of her secret ballot hadn't been compromised. Someone (her husband) had merely sent her a spoofed e-mail.
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2063042



Los Angeles Times 03/12/02
A Music Lesson on Piracy for Hollywood
By PATRICK GOLDSTEIN
Tom Bonadeo noticed something funny last summer. The traffic patterns began to change on the broadband service he oversees as chief technology officer for NTC Communications, a firm that wires hundreds of apartment complexes near college campuses on the East Coast. Even though his company had enlarged its broadband capacity, its network was being clogged up every night with downloads from Morpheus, the popular file-sharing program that allows music fans to download a vast array of free songs.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-000018088mar12.story?coll=la-headlines-technology


The Industry Standard Australia 03/13/02
Disappearing emails a legal threat
By Sandra Rossi
13 March, 2002 9:03 Sydney,
E-mail's most vexing question: how do you know it's missing if it never arrives – may
be annoying for users. However, it could be a serious legal problem for IT managers who
could fall foul of federal archiving laws.
http://www.thestandard.com.au/idg2.nsf/cw_AllH.../5B21B8D878EFB126CA256B7A0079E6FE?OpenDocument



Salon 03/13/02
Chained melodies
Copyright-holding corporations are pushing new laws and computer-crippling technologies in their war on piracy. But can anything keep geeks from copying the music and movies they crave?
By Damien Cave
A sense of panic, instead of anticipation, coursed through Brian Cianessi when he bought the "More Fast and Furious" movie soundtrack just before Christmas. He had heard that the CD was one of the first to be copy-protected for sale in the U.S. market. He feared his days of music ripping would soon be over; Universal Studios had allegedly found a way to keep listeners from making MP3s out of the album's nu-metal gems.
Cianessi, a 24-year-old Los Angeles computer programmer, wasn't interested in posting the songs to KaZaa, Gnutella or any of the other file-sharing networks that have sprung up in Napster's wake. He had no desire to be a pirate. But he did want to play songs
from the album on his MP3 player. "I was just worried that I wouldn't be able to rip the tracks, and subsequently transfer them to my car stereo, which has no CD player, only hard drives," he says.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/13/copy_protection/print.html



GovExec.com 03/13/02
GSA pushing e-gov, security initiatives
By Liza Porteus , National Journal's Technology Daily
The General Services Administration is embarking on a set of initiatives to implement President Bush's agenda to enhance egovernment services and boost agencies' computer security.
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0302/031302td1.htm


GovExec.com 03/13/02
Lawmakers examine Veterans Affairs IT security efforts
By Liza Porteus , National Journal's Technology Daily
Although the Veterans Affairs Department has been held up as a model for how government agencies should utilize information technology resources, it has a long way to go before it achieves satisfactory computer security, panelists told a House  Appropriations subcommittee Wednesday.
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0302/031302td2.htm



NewsFactor 3/13/02
Text-Mining Technology Sorts Data the Smart Way
By Lou Hirsh
Randy Collica, a senior business analyst with Compaq, said that a principal strength of the new data-mining technology from SAS is that it can, if programmed correctly, evaluate the context of written data.
'You've got to enable the program to capture all possible uses -- for example, that 'eat' and 'eating' are both forms of the same word.'
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/16764.html



Philadelphia Inquirer 03/14/02
Making mischief for cell phones
Hackers and virus writers are hard at work in Europe and Japan,
where the devices have advanced capabilities.
By Jim Krane
Associated Press
For malicious computer hackers and virus writers, the next frontier in mischief is the mobile phone.
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/2856621.htm



Wall Street Journal 03/14/02
DigitalConsumer Takes Up the Fight Against Copyright Plans in Congress
by Walter S. Mossberg
A crucial debate is shaping up in Congress and in private industry about how freely you, the consumer, will be able to use digital music and video in the future.
The record companies and Hollywood are scheming to drastically erode your freedom to use legally purchased CDs and videos, and they are doing it behind your back. The only parties represented in the debate are media and technology companies, lawyers and
politicians. Consumers aren't invited.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1016069415668607840,00.html?mod=technology_featured_stories_hs



The Mercury News 03/13/02
Firms pushing customers toward estatements
By Deborah Lohse
Mercury News
At E*Trade Financial, customers must make special requests to get statements on paper instead of online.
At Datek, they must pay $2 for trade confirmations on paper instead of via e-mail.
These online firms are leading the way in a push by financial services companies to make customers go ``paperless'' and get their financial data online instead.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/2849636.htm



International Herald Tribune 03/14/02
Bend me, shape me: the future of CDs
John Schmid International Herald Tribune
Thursday, March 14, 2002
Flexible and other next-generation disks are hot items at fair
HANNOVER, Germany The ubiquitous reach of the information age now threatens to leave even the reclusive cigar lover unspared.
The day has arrived when a smoker can unseal a metal tube and find the stogie inside enveloped by a flexible-as-foil compact disk that holds as many megabytes of information as any rigid CD.
http://www.iht.com/articles/51160.htm



Houston Chronicle 03/14/02
Schools go high-tech to catch fraud
By PAIGE HEWITT
Special to the Chronicle
Some students still scribble test answers on the bottom of their shoes. Others still conspire in the sly testswapping routine. But today, more students who cheat are turning to technology to do their dirty work.
Book reports and research projects can be bought online for as little as $10. For about $150, any kid with a keyboard can tap his way to a Web site and, within a few hours, be the owner of a customized paper that's formatted and footnoted perfectly -- all the student has to do is print it out and turn it in on time.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.hts/metropolitan/1295199



FCW.com 03/14/02
County records forms online
BY Brian Robinson
Arizona's Maricopa County, the nation's fourth largest county, has begun a program
that eventually will enable up to 20 percent of the document processing of its Recorder's Office to be done completely online.
http://www.fcw.com/geb/articles/2002/0311/web-records-03-14-02.asp



New York Times 03/14/02
Piracy, or Innovation? It's Hollywood vs. High Tech
By AMY HARMON
eaders of two of the nation's most prominent industries, entertainment and technology, have begun publicly sniping at each other over how to stop consumers from illegally copying digital movies, music and television programs.
The feud grows out of Hollywood's frustration with the illicit flow of copyrighted works over the Internet. Despite courtroom victories against Napster and others deemed to contribute to Internet piracy, millions of people continue to download free digital copies of everything from Jennifer Lopez's latest hit single to the Disney movie "Monsters, Inc."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/14/technology/14PROT.html



Governing.com March 2002
The HIPAA Headache
It’s complex, costly and confusing. Most states are still trying to figure out what the law that standardizes electronic health data is all about.
BY PENELOPE LEMOV
http://governing.com/3hipaa.htm



New York Times 03/14/02
In a Seamless Image, the Great and Small
By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE
IN the daily business of print journalism, losing sight of the big picture is not just a metaphorical _expression_. It is a very real experience for thousands of graphic artists and page designers working on computer screens, zooming in to look at the details of an image and zooming out to look at the overview.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/14/technology/circuits/14FOCU.html



Fortune 3/18/02
The Best PDAs for Business
If you don't yet use an e-mail-enabled handheld on the job, we have a prediction:
There's one in your future.
by Peter Lewis
For Michael J. Fagel, a disaster-recovery specialist, wireless data service came of age in the rubble of the World Trade Center. While working in the chaos of ground zero just days after the towers fell, he says, "no cellphones worked, land lines were inoperative, and I needed answers about hazardous materials. There were no books or data, because we couldn't carry them on the site."
http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=206620



Forbes 04/01/02
Software
Analyze This
Erika Brown, 04.01.02
Despite the software slump, sales are booming in business intelligence, a new tool that promises relief for performance anxiety.
Owens & Minor sold $4 billion worth of medical supplies to 150 hospital groups in the U.S. last year. But it provides something even more powerful: knowledge. Three years ago it began sharing with customers its ability to track purchases of adhesives, catheters and stents, giving them a peek at O&M's own shipping performance and order backlog.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/0401/096.html?_requestid=6117&_requestid=3967







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