The Newspaper Shop -- Friday edition

[walktalker]

May things like this never happen again

Senator calls for encryption crackdown
The horror of Tuesday's coordinated attacks on the commercial and military centers of America has prompted the U.S. Congress to call for a global ban on "uncrackable" encryption products. Speaking in the U.S. Senate on Thursday, Senator Judd Gregg proposed tighter restrictions on software that scrambles electronic data and often hinders a government's ability to obtain valuable criminal intelligence. "This is something that we need international cooperation on, and we need to have movement in order to get the information that allows us to anticipate and prevent what occurred in New York and in Washington," said Gregg, according to a report obtained by Wired.com. Reports this week have suggested that the FBI believes sophisticated encryption techniques were used to coordinate the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Networks boost security against attacks
An FBI warning has administrators of the nation's corporate networks double-checking -- and double-locking -- their systems in the wake of Tuesday's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. But despite the federal Terrorist Threat Advisory, which calls for IT professionals across the country to "implement appropriate security measures -- both physical and cyber," experts say corporate America is a long way from ready, or safe. Security service provider RedSiren Technologies Inc. spent the days after the terrorist assaults advising clients to take down all noncritical external Internet connections, including remote access and instant messaging capabilities. The company followed its own advice, shutting down its external Web site in the wake of the attack.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Technology could stop future terror attacks
The next time a terrorist aims a jet at a building, maybe the plane should say no. From computers that could steer airliners away from skyscrapers to face-recognition devices already used to spot card counters in casinos, technology could provide ways to make the skies safer, but at a cost, experts said. Current technology, which focuses on weapons searches, was bested by terrorists armed with knives and box cutters who crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon this week. To prevent this, new security systems could be buttressed with devices that look for terrorists before boarding and ones that keep the plane safe, experts said.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Anna virus writer's trial begins
Jan de Wit, the 20-year-old who wrote the Anna Kournikova virus, went to trial on Thursday, but the prosecutor asked for a relatively light sentence with no jail term -- 240 hours of community service. Public prosecutor Roelof de Graaf also asked the court not to return de Wit's computer, and a CD-ROM containing computer viruses. De Wit was charged with spreading data through a computer network, with the intent to cause damage. The maximum penalty for the offense is four years' jail and a fine of up to 100,000 Dutch guilders (U.S. $41,130).
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Wall Street braces to open Monday
.S. stock markets will remain idle for the fourth and possibly final day on Friday with Wall Street's work force battling heavy rain, numbing sadness and uncertainty over the future after an attack crushed the world's financial heart and killed perhaps thousands. The world's most powerful stock exchanges -- the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Market -- assured investors they would reopen for business Monday if a slew of tests over the weekend were successful. But some investors wondered if such a resumption would be possible just six days after hijacked planes toppled the twin
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...pt=zdnn_nbs_hl

Bush to call up 50,000 reserves
President Bush on Friday gave the Pentagon authority to call 50,000 reservists to active duty for "homeland defense" and other missions in response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. A brief Pentagon announcement said the military services have thus far identified requirements for 35,500 reservists: 13,000 in the Air Force, 10,000 in the Army, 3,000 in the Navy, 7,500 in the Marine Corps and 2,000 in the Coast Guard. No further breakdown was provided. The Pentagon did not say exactly when the reservists would be put on active duty.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7163858.html

Online chat ranges from hate to sympathy
Like many other Arab-Americans, Walid Besharat went online this week to help make sense of Tuesday's horrific suicide hijackings, an attack widely believed to have been masterminded by the militant Islamic fringe. What he found was both comfort and fear. On America Online chat boards, interspersed between expressions of sympathy and intense discussions of the meaning and cause of the tragedy, Besharat said he saw many people venting anti-Arab hatred. "It's really disturbing to see that," said Besharat, a Christian born in Jordan 43 years ago. The U.S. goverment's attempts to find the perpetrators have so far focused on Arab terrorist groups, and that has led some people to lash out at all Arab-Americans.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7165025.html

Recovery uneven as Bush vows victory
With the nation on maximum alert against future threats, President Bush is pledging a global campaign to whip terrorism and the likes of Osama bin Laden as Americans are grieving over attacks that claimed thousands of lives in New York and Washington. "Our country is strong. A great people has been moved to defend a great nation," the president said Thursday as he mapped a military response, consulted with world leaders and consoled the wounded in the wake of coordinated attacks Tuesday on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. The fight against terrorism, Bush said, "is now the focus of my administration."
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7163000.html

Tech world mourns loss of employees
In the days following terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, companies across the nation are mourning the loss of employees. Among those on the four planes hijacked Tuesday were employees from technology companies Cisco Systems, Oracle, Applied Materials, Compaq Computer, Akamai Technologies, Metrocall, MRV Communications, Netegrity, eLogic, Raytheon Company, Sun Microsystems, NextWave Telecom, BEA Systems, Vividence and 3Com. Cisco said Thursday that executive Suzanne Calley was among those killed when American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon on Tuesday in Washington, D.C. Calley, 42, was in strategic marketing for the networking giant and was in the midst of a business trip.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-7132225.html

Hackers divided over response to terrorism
Groups of online vandals and hackers are split over how to respond to this week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, with some Internet vigilantes calling for an assault on perceived terrorist sites and others pleading for calm. More than 60 self-styled "computer security enthusiasts" have banded together to strike out against Palestinian and Afghani sites, according to a statement released Thursday by admitted online vandal The Rev and a group calling itself The Dispatchers. "We, as a group, of individuals, have taken a stand, armed with technology...to disable our target in every method possible," the group said in the statement. "As of September 11th, 2001, we have united to fight back and to show that we will not tolerate...this anymore."
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Working to restore Manhattan phone service
In the aftermath of the World Trade Center tragedy, communications companies such as Allegiance Telecom, Verizon Communications and Sprint are attempting to reconnect customers by working around damaged networks and call center facilities in the area. A major phone-switching facility, where communications equipment is housed and from where calls are routed, was damaged by falling debris after Tuesday's terrorist attack, carrier executives said. As businesses and employees return to work in the coming weeks, an unenviable task faces many phone companies. Thousands of companies have been cut off from telephone service. Carriers are attempting to restore phone service as quickly as possible.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200...html?tag=mn_hd

IBM employee charged in bomb hoax
An IBM employee from New Zealand was sent in for psychiatric assessment in Singapore on Friday after being charged over a hoax e-mail that claimed a bomb was aboard a Singapore Airlines plane bound for South Africa. The alleged threat -- made just a day after Tuesday's devastating terror attacks in the United States -- delayed flight SQ 422 from Singapore to Johannesburg for six hours. The man, 35, was charged in court with transmitting a false or fabricated message. He is due to appear again on Sept. 28. If convicted, he faces up to seven years in jail and/or a maximum fine of nearly $29,000 (50,000 Singapore dollars).
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Video game makers to try not to offend
Leaders of the video game industry, long accused of promoting violence, say they will take pains not to offend a public shocked and grieving after Tuesday's terror attacks in the United States. "I think that our industry like any industry has a responsibility to look at what we do and assess whether tragedies like this should in fact influence how we approach making the products that we make," said Doug Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA), which represents 90 percent of the entertainment software industry. On Friday, Microsoft said it would remove the World Trade Center from the New York landscape in its upcoming "Flight Simulator 2002" game.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=mn_hd

The kamikaze factor
There was nothing high-tech about Tuesday's attacks, and that is one of the many reasons they were so profoundly unnerving. What ultimately matters isn't how these conspirators communicated but what they were prepared to do. The single most important fact about them is not technological but psychological, and it is something Americans continue to be in deep denial about: These people were willing, even eager, to die. That -- not any trouble monitoring their e-mail -- is what blindsided us, and that's something the United States is simply ill-prepared to face.
http://salon.com/tech/col/rose/2001/...aze/index.html

Day of infamy: Surviving the Terror
I was one who wanted a better look. I wanted to get closer. And the price I paid was leaving my shoes in the middle of a pile of suffocating bodies. At the Wall Street train stop, people were covered with papers. A plane crash. That's what everyone said. Then a boom. Everyone ran. I ran to my office a few blocks away and called my brother in the Midwest. I wanted to be closer. At the corner of Church and Broadway, I angled my way through a large, packed crowd to get the best view. We talked about people jumping. The police stood behind the yellow tape. Minutes later, there was a boom. I thought it was a bomb, so I crouched, but people ran, so I ran...
http://www.business2.com/articles/we....html?ref=cnet

More and better news later on

[walktalker]

China makes first arrest of Net hacker
Police have arrested a computer student suspected of littering government-run Web sites with pornography in China's first seizure of an Internet hacker, the official Xinhua news agency reported Friday. Police in the central province of Hubei detained 19-year-old Wang Qun last month on suspicion of posting erotica on the homepage of a well-known science Web site, the news agency said. Wang, who used the nickname "Playgirl," had bragged in Internet chatrooms about hacking into more than 30 domestic and overseas Web sites, it said.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Death estimates pass Pearl Harbor, Titanic
The gruesome search through the mass graveyard of the World Trade Center yielded no survivors Thursday, and hopes dimmed for the more than 4,700 missing. President Bush promised to visit New York to "hug and cry" with its shaken citizens. Separately, searchers found the black box of one hijacked airliner in Pennsylvania and received a signal from the black box of the plane that crashed at the Pentagon, officials said Thursday. Attorney General John Ashcroft said the FBI was working on "thousands and thousands of leads" in the investigation of Tuesday's terrorist attacks. Search crews will not be able to retrieve the black box at the Pentagon, which could contain information about the last minutes of the hijacked commercial jetliner, until they are able to enter the collapsed area of the Pentagon, where the plane's fuselage rests.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Senate OKs FBI Net Spying
FBI agents soon may be able to spy on Internet users legally without a court order. On Thursday evening, two days after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, the Senate approved the "Combating Terrorism Act of 2001," which enhances police wiretap powers and permits monitoring in more situations. The measure, proposed by Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California), says any U.S. attorney or state attorney general can order the installation of the FBI's Carnivore surveillance system. Previously, there were stiffer restrictions on Carnivore and other Internet surveillance techniques. Its bipartisan sponsors argue that such laws are necessary to thwart terrorism.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46852,00.html

Hiding Like Snakes in the E-Grass
The proliferation of cell phones, e-mail and faxes is making the hunt for terrorists increasingly more difficult. Security agencies have literally billions of messages to sift through every day -- many with encryptions that make it impossible for anyone other than the intended recipient to read. "If I dump a stack of hundreds of thousands of pages on your desk and tell you one page is a terrorist threat, it would take forever to get through," said Sayan Chakraborty, vice president of engineering at Sigaba, an e-mail encryption company. "Because one person can't read every message, you have to rely on computers to read messages and computers only do what we tell it to do."
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,46817,00.html

Websites Give Casualty Clues
Enough pieces of information can now be mined from the Web and news reports to piece together a rough sketch of Tuesday's terrorist attack's human toll. The likely number of total casualties at the World Trade Center became clearer Thursday when New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said that 4,763 people have been reported missing. Former tenants of the fallen towers have begun using the Web to communicate with employees and their families. The sites provide some idea of which companies have suffered most, and in some cases provide lists, by name, of those still missing. Some sites are difficult to access, presumably due to heavy traffic.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,46808,00.html

Security Measures Hit Skycaps
When the FAA announced that curbside check-in at airports would be eliminated, nobody felt worse than the skycaps -- those friendly folks who help passengers with their luggage. While passengers gloomily tried to get on their way at the reopened San Francisco International Airport on Thursday, the skycaps stood idly at their usual curbside posts, remarking on the unjustness of the whole affair. "This is the third time they stopped us," said a clearly upset, elderly skycap at the TWA post. He declined to give his name, but he was generous with his opinions of the Federal Aviation Administration's order: "They did this during the Gulf War, too, I remember. They always pick on the weakest link."
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,46823,00.html

Shared Files: Real or Mirage?
What you see on your computer screen is the document or Web page you opened, right? Wrong. In an attempt to protect sensitive information from would-be pilferers, Alchemedia's Mirage 3.0 plays tricks on users -- so what you see is not always what you get. What happens if you want to share confidential information with employees, business partners or vendors -- but you don't want them to copy, save on disk, print, forward or otherwise hold onto the data? Until now, you had only one choice: to encrypt the document. But Mirage 3.0, the newest application from Alchemedia, offers users another option.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,46675,00.html

This is how we know Echelon exists
The European Parliament published its report into the Echelon spying system last week in which it concluded it did exist, was against the law and that the UK had a lot of explaining to do. We've sifted through about 100 of the 194 pages and decided that since no one had yet to officially admit its existence, you may be interested in how the European Parliament decided it was definitely out there. The report admits from the outset that the existence of Echelon can only be proved by gathering together as many clues as possible so that it remains the only possible explanation.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/21680.html

Intelligence technology may not stop terrorists
A key question arising from the terrorist atrocities that rocked the US on Tuesday is why the intelligence services failed to provide any prior warning. Some analysts believe that over-reliance on technology-based surveillance may have led to such a catastrophic lack of awareness. Erich Moechel, an Austrian journalist specialising in international intelligence, believes there has been a lack of investment in human intelligence work. "Over the last couple of years, they have been running in the wrong direction," Moechel told New Scientist. "They have concentrated too much on signals intelligence and not human intelligence. Terrorism is essentially low tech."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991297

Destroyed Paper Documents Could Leave Information Void
The destruction of the World Trade Center, a repository of countless reams of information on companies and individuals, has left some organizations reeling from the potential loss of vast quantities of data. Disaster-recovery experts said Tuesday that most of the largest financial services firms routinely back up data and store it in remote locations, ensuring that the bulk of it survived the attack. But organizations that heavily rely on paper documents and smaller companies that do not routinely back up their information are vulnerable to significant losses.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/co...ogy%5Fcolum n

Computer Giants Up the Ante
Adversaries in the computing world, Microsoft and Apple find themselves in similar positions this season. Both have new versions of their operating systems due out soon. Both of these releases involve thorough revisions of massive amounts of computer code — and both will put a higher degree of stress on your computer if you decide to upgrade. System requirements — that sometimes tricky fine print on the box that tells you whether your computer is good enough to run a program — creep up every year. But the changes in Microsoft's Windows XP and Apple's Mac OS X 10.1 are more substantial than most, and their box specs show it.
http://www.washtech.com/news/software/12478-1.html

Engineered Microbes' Uses Are Many But Their Impact Still Unknown
Twenty years before soybeans were crossed with fish genes and rice was boosted to become a multivitamin, the biotech industry began with bugs. In 1972, when a General Electric scientist engineered bacteria that would eat crude oil, it seemed we might be on the verge of a new age of environmental cleanup. Sprinkle some bacteria and watch oil spills, pesticide slicks and toxic dumps disappear like ice on a salted roadway. But while transgenic or genetically modified crops took off, the microbe industry never quite materialized.
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/bios/

Wind-powered building design revealed
Buildings with integrated wind turbines could generate at least 20 percent of their own energy needs, and perhaps all. They would be more power efficient than ordinary wind farms or solar powered constructions, say UK researchers. A team of aerodynamics engineers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's Energy Research Unit, Oxfordshire, UK, has come up with a design for a multi-tower office building or block of flats with wind turbines fitted in between. Curved towers would funnel wind towards the turbines and improve efficiency, they say. Preliminary testing on an seven-metre prototype indicates that the design could be twice as efficient as a stand-alone wind power generator, despite the fact that it does not move to face the wind.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991292

The Astronaut's New Clothes
A lonely figure in a bulky space suit walks slowly across a giant meteorite impact crater. The rocky desert landscape appears cold, dry and hostile — not unlike Mars. In fact, the man is testing the space suit astronauts might wear if they ever go to the Red Planet. The scene is Devon Island in the Canadian high arctic, a place about as close to the desolate setting of Mars as you can get on Earth. The 20-kilometer-wide Haughton Crater on Devon Island, the result of a meteorite impact about 23 million years ago, is the only such impact crater known to lie in a polar desert environment, which makes it the ideal testing ground for Mars mission space suits. NASA has no immediate plans to send a man or woman to the Red Planet. But several companies have been working on a space suit for Mars.
http://www.sciam.com/explorations/20...uit/index.html

DNA Chip Gives Positive ID
For the last five years, DNA chips have been a powerful research tool, holding much promise for future use in clinical settings. These tiny silicon or glass surfaces, covered with thousands of DNA fragments, are used by researchers to discover genes in DNA samples. But still elusive is the holy grail of this technology — a single, fully automated handheld device, or "lab on a chip," that can instantly analyze DNA from a single strand of hair or drop of blood. One company that has taken a big step in that direction is San Diego-based Nanogen.
http://www.techreview.com/web/cameron/cameron091401.asp

More news later on

Shared Files:Real or Mirage?

so you just shoot an image of the screen w/a digital cam if need be and ocr it into word. it adds a couple of steps. won't stop an industrial spy by any means. are these guys serious, they're selling this app to sophisticated companies, why would anyone buy it?

- js.

[walktalker]

I had to this paper, sorry guys