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TECHWATCH
ONLINE
SURFERS AVERAGE SIX HOURS A WEEK ON THE NET
A recent poll conducted by Louis Harris and Associates indicates that
the average online computer user in the U.S. spends six hours a week surfing
the Web. That time does not include sending and receiving e-mail, which
is the most popular online activity. Sixty-three percent of online users
say they use e-mail "often," a 10% increase since September 1998. The
next most popular activity (39%) was conducting research for work or school.
Thirty-one percent of users shop online, with books the most frequently
purchased item (software ranked in second place). (Reuters 24 Mar 99)
TRENCH
WARFARE IN THE INFORMATION AGE
The National Research Council has issued a report warning that military
forces are not giving sufficiently serious attention to their Command,
Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence Systems (known as
C4I). "The rate at which information systems are being relied on outstrips
the rate at which they are being protected. The time needed to develop
and deploy effective defenses in cyberspace is much longer than the time
required to develop and mount an attack." Military analyst Kenneth Allard
says, "Twenty-first century combat is the war of the databases, in which
information flow must go from the foxhole to the White House and back
down again." (AP 22 Mar 99)
E-BUSINESS
INSURANCE
A unit of insurance giant Marsh & McLennan Co. will begin offering clients
"e-business" insurance under its Net Secure coverage. The policy is intended
to protect companies from damages caused by hackers, viruses, "spammers"
or other Internet perils that could disrupt their businesses or expose
them to liability lawsuits. Net Secure also will provide a preset amount
of compensation for loss of "intellectual property" stored on a network
that has been violated. Although other insurance companies also offer
"e-business" insurance, a spokeswoman for Marsh & McLennan says her company's
coverage limit of $200 million is among the highest available in the industry.
(Wall Street Journal 22 Mar 99)
NIH
EYES PLAN FOR ONLINE PREPRINT PUBLISHING
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is considering a plan to build
a Web-based public clearinghouse for biomedical research papers. The project
has the backing of NIH Director Harold Varmus and a number of other high-ranking
public health officials, but the agency says it's not ready to discuss
specifics at this point. One dilemma has been how to avoid siphoning off
too much income from some scientific societies that rely on their publishing
activities for continued viability. The NIH site likely would be modeled
loosely on the e-print archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which
have become a major repository for information on physics and astronomy.
A "streamlined" peer review process would ensure that information stored
on the NIH site would have merit among the biomedical community. (Science
12 Mar 99)
AUSTRALIA
TO CRACK DOWN ON INTERNET PORN
The Australian government says it will introduce legislation as soon as
possible to ban all illegal or X-rated material on Australia-based Web
sites, and will limit access to soft porn to people over 18. The government
would require Internet service providers to remove Australian sites that
carry such material if ordered to do so by the Australian Broadcasting
Authority. Meanwhile, the head of the Internet Industry Association, which
counts two of Australia's biggest ISPs as members, says, "It's simply
impracticle for local ISPs and carriers to block material that's coming
from offshore," and that what's really needed is more self-regulation
by the industry, combined with parental supervision and international
coordination. "We would love to see the government provide the funding
for educational materials so that parents can learn about things they
can do in the home." (Reuters 19 Mar 99)
APPLE
OPENS UP ITS SERVER OPERATING SYSTEM
Apple is taking an "open source" approach to the new "Darwin" operating
system it has developed for its server computers, called Mac OS X Servers.
"Open source" makes the source code freely available, and is growing in
popularity because of the increased stability and security made possible
when large numbers of programmers and software developers are continuously
testing the software and fixing problems. Darwin will function as a platform
for server programs that coordinate the shared operations in work groups
and other environments. It is a variant of the Unix operating system,
and includes the operating system inner software "kernel" known as Mach,
as well as a set of services based on the Berkeley Systems Design version
of Unix. (New York Times 17 Mar 99)
INFORMATION-AGE
ECONOMY IS HERE
Replacing an industry classification that has existed for 60 years, the
U.S. Commerce Department has introduced a new system that recognizes this
leap into the information age. Using the new system, the government reports
that in 1997 computers and electronics manufacturing accounted for 1.7
million of the country's jobs at 17,000 locations. The Commerce Department
also says that more e-mail than snail mail was sent in 1997, and that
U.S. consumers bought more computers than automobiles. [The report is
silent on the question of whether there were more computer crashes than
automobile crashes, but if there weren't the highways would be impassable.]
The government developed the new classification system because "in an
information-based economy, the quality of information determines the quality
of policy." (USA Today 17 Mar 99)
DISSENTING
VOICES ON COMPUTERS IN THE CLASSROOM
In defiance of the conventional wisdom that it would be desirable (in
the words of President Clinton) to connect "every classroom in America
to the Internet by the year 2000," there are increasingly vocal critics
of the use of computers in K-12 instruction. One of the leaders of this
defiance is William L. Rukeyser of the nonprofit Learning in the Real
World organization, who says: "So many programs were being slaughtered
by this perception that if it didn't involve computers, it wasn't worth
anything. I quickly realized that there was this tremendous faith that
computers were in fact some plaster saint that would save the day." He
adds, "We're not pushing our brand of solution, and we're not saying that
the emperor has no clothes. We're just asking, 'Is his tie on straight
and do his socks match?'" (New York Times 17 Mar 99)
NEW
VIRUSES TARGET PROTECTED FILES
Two cryptographers have published a paper describing a new generation
of computer viruses that seek out the long keys used by "strong" encryption
programs and attach themselves to documents protected by those keys. The
randomness of the bits in encryption keys is what makes them stand out,
as most information on a computer's hard drive is stored in an orderly
fashion. The cryptographers recommend that network managers store keys
on smart cards rather than on a computer's hard drive, and securely delete
them every time they're used. For added protection, encryption programs
could spread a key among different memory locations, or all the data on
a computer's hard drive could be encrypted, so that the entire contents
appear to be random. (Data Communications 15 Mar 99)
COMING
TO TERMS WITH BYTES
Computer terminology is becoming more precise: the International Electrotechnical
Commission, which creates standards for electronic technologies, is adopting
new prefixes to describe data values. The new term "kibibyte" will more
accurately describe the number of bytes in a kilobyte -- rather than being
1,000, as could be inferred by the prefix "kilo," a kilobyte actually
has 1,024 (2 to the 10th power) bytes. The metric prefixes currently employed
-- kilo, mega, giga, etc. -- accumulate as a power of 10, rather than
the binary system used in computer code. Thus, the Commission will use
kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi , pebi and exbi to express exponentially increasing
binary multiples (2 to the 10th power, 2 to the 20th power, etc.). "There
was a need to straighten this out," says Barry Taylor of the National
Institute of Standards and Technology. (Science 12 Mar 99)
MOBILE
E-MAIL READY FOR TAKEOFF
A new class of devices that combine the features of mobile phones and
laptops is set to launch, enabling users to dial into corporate networks
and the Internet regardless of where they are. "The Internet is the killer
app for wireless data," says a product manager at 3Com's Palm Computing
division. By 2002, nearly 12.6 million U.S. consumers will be spending
more than $5 billion to connect to wireless networks, according to market
research firm Telecompetition, a four-fold increase over the number of
wireless data network users last year. Industry experts predict that combination
devices that do everything -- fax, e-mail, scheduling -- will not fare
as well in the market as lighter-weight application-specific devices.
"The only combination device the American public has bought in great numbers
is the clock-radio," says the chairman of the Portable Computer and Communications
Association. (Los Angeles Times 15 Mar 99)
RENO
WANTS KIDS TO LEARN CYBERSPACE ETHICS
Announcing new government and industry initiatives to promote cyberspace
ethics, Attorney General Janet Reno said, "All children know it's wrong
to break into a neighbor's house or read your best friend's diary. Unfortunately,
fewer realize that it's wrong to break into their neighbor's computers
and snoop through their computer files." (AP 15 Mar 99)
MOST
Y2K FIXES WILL LAST ONLY A GENERATION
The fix used to patch 80% of the world's computers to avert a Y2K crisis
is actually only a short-term remedy called "windowing." Rather than using
a permanent fix called "expansion," which requires transforming all two-digit
year-dates found in software into four-digit year-dates, the "windowing"
patch is a trick that forces software to "guess" whether dates fall in
the 1900s or the 2000s; typically, lower numbers (perhaps up to 30) will
belong to the new century, whereas higher numbers (such as 87) will belong
to the old century. Although many experts say this is the only practical
way to solve the problem, others are warning that the "windowing" approach
is just pushing the problem under the rug for awhile. Keith Rhodes of
the General Accounting Office says, "It's like the Fram oil filter guy:
You can pay me now or you can pay me later. It's not solving your problem.
It's delaying the inevitable." (San Jose Mercury News 15 Mar 99)
Y2K
PROGNOSTICATORS CHEERING UP
A growing number of Y2K experts are beginning to cheer up a bit about
the prospects for millennium doom, and now predict things won't be so
bad after all come Jan. 1, 2000. Edward Yardeni, chief economist for Deutsche
Bank Securities, has revised his estimate for the chance of a long global
recession triggered by the glitch, from a 70% chance to 45%. "I've toned
down the message partly because progress has been made. I would be happy
to back off entirely." And some of the problems previously cited as particularly
vexing -- for instance, embedded microprocessors in power plants and hospitals
that would be difficult to repair -- seem to have been overstated. Giga
Information Group recently released a report titled "It May Rain, but
the Sky Won't Fall," that said the problems with embedded microprocessors
"will not have the crippling effect originally thought." "There won't
be a systemic shutdown," says a senior advisor for Giga who estimates
only about 3% of the chips have been found to have minor problems. "You
will have some localized inconveniences with some localized failures."
(Los Angeles Times 12 Mar 99)
MOTOROLA
SUES INTEL OVER WORKERS' MINDS
Motorola is seeking injunctions against Intel from hiring key Motorola
knowledge-workers in order to get access to secrets they take with them
in their heads. A Motorola executive explains, "It became obvious that
our intellectual property and knowledge was significantly at risk here.
We don't want them to place these former employees in a position where
they will disclose our trade secrets." (San Jose Mercury News 12 Mar 99)
EMULATING
SUCCESS
Emulation, which enables new computers and software to "emulate" previous
versions in order to run older software, is on the rise, spurred on by
the rapid turnover in hardware and software in the past couple of years.
And rather than just translating instructions in order to perform equivalent
operations on the new machines, new dynamic recompiling emulators go on
to analyze how the new code works and translate the clumsiest bits all
over again in order to improve efficiency. TeraGen's emulator follows
the route taken by Intel to make its new chips compatible with earlier
microprocessors: it translates the intricate instructions favored by earlier
chip designers into micro-operations, which can be rearranged by the processor
to improve performance. (The Economist 13-19 Mar 99)
DOMAIN
NAMES DROPPED FROM INTERNIC DATABASE
Internic -- the Internet domain name administration arm of Network Solutions
Inc. -- dropped thousands of names from its database last week, preventing
e-mail messages addressed to those names from being delivered. Users whose
names were lost will be forced to get new ones from Network Solutions
-- something that's caused critics to accuse the company of ulterior motives:
"They [NSI] seem to be embarking on a campaign to benefit their [domain
name registration] system," says the VP of one ISP. An NSI spokeswoman
denied the charges: "This is part of targeting people who register thousands
of domains and sell them for a profit." NSI will lose its monopoly over
domain administration in September 2000, when the Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) takes over. (Data Communications
10 Mar 99)
ALL
INFORMATION ALL THE TIME
Brian Halla, chairman and CEO of National Semiconductor Corp., predicts
that the information appliance market will dwarf the PC market: "Man will
be surrounded by these information appliances. We always use the analogy
of the electric motor. All day long you've been surrounded by electric
motors. And you've never once thought about the electric motor, certainly
not about who made the electric motor. It's the same with these information
appliances. Literally, in the information age -- we're not quite there
yet -- but man will want an infinite amount of information instantaneously,
any time, anywhere. And it'll be interactive. That means he won't want
to carry his box around with him, but he'll always want access to the
database. . . . When a consumer gets in his car, he'll look at the dashboard
and say, 'E-mail, please.' And that's different from being in the age
of the computer. It's not like you're going to sit at your desk and calculate
prime numbers. You want to sit at your desk and get access to the Web
and your database on the Web. And you want to do the same thing when you're
sitting on an airplane. You'll stick your card in the back of the airplane
seat in front of you and have access to your database." (Investor's Business
Daily 11 Mar 99)
JOURNALISTS
TOLD NOT TO SPREAD Y2K FEARS
Federal Reserve Board member Edward W. Kelley Jr. is cautioning journalists
to avoid undermining Americans' confidence in the banking system with
overblown and unwarranted reports about the Y2K problem. He said, "If
glitches occur or problems loom, report fully on them of course, but make
sure to place the problem in an appropriate context." There needs to be
concern about "the possibility of our citizenry becoming so overly worried
about what might happen that there could be the very type of problem we
are working so hard to prevent." But Kelley should be somewhat reassured
by a new USA Today/Gallup Poll for the National Science Foundation indicating
that only 21% of Americans now expect major problems in 2000 -- a percentage
down from 34% just three months ago. (USA Today 10 Mar 99)
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