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Be on the wave or under it™
The News – 09/27/01
In
this Issue:
National
ID Cards As A Solution?
Oracle boss Larry Ellison recently called for the
establishment of national ID cards as a curb to terrorist attacks. He’s also
put his money where his (rather
large) mouth is by offering to donate the Oracle software to implement the
scheme.
If you’ve been following SNS recently, you can probably guess I
don’t think much of this idea. The terrorists had ID cards, after all. The
Boston
Globe reported that five of the hijackers had recently obtained Florida
licenses. Ellison proposes that Americans be fingerprinted and that the
information be placed on a database used by airport security officials to
verify identities of travelers at airplane gates. He brushes aside civil
libertarians’ concerns about the possible use of such a system to infringe on
the privacy and other civil rights of law-abiding citizens. Echoing Sun
Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy’s famous “get over it” pronouncement, Ellison
said: “Well, this privacy you're concerned about is largely an illusion. All
you have to give up is your illusions, not any of your privacy. Right now, you
can go onto the Internet and get a credit report about your neighbor and find
out where your neighbor works, how much they earn and if they had a late
mortgage payment and tons of other information.”
Doesn’t that make you feel better? I wonder how easy it would be
to get Larry Ellison’s credit report and other private information.
Anyway, the business effect of Ellison’s offer could be chilling
to not only the database industry Oracle competes in, but also the employee
identification and airport security industries. If the government gets into the
business of assuring identity, many companies in these industries will go the
way of the airport skycaps.
SiliconValley.com
Briefly
Noted
- Shameless Self-Promotion
Dept.: I’ve added a new directory to the
Directories section of the StratVantage Web site: Email Newsletters. After
conducting a fruitless search for a central place listing various email
newsletters, I decided to establish one myself. I’ve seeded it with
newsletters I receive and find useful. If you’ve got a favorite, send it
along and I’ll add it.
StratVantage
Directories
- Random Web Usage
Tip: eMazing has
a nice tip of the day service you can subscribe to. Even a Web junkie like
myself can learn a thing or two from their service. Their latest tip about
Internet Explorer is a good example: “When a page is taking forever to
download all of its graphics, press the Spacebar to stop the graphics and
allow you to read the text. Another trick is to click Stop and then click
Refresh. Sometimes starting over will get you a faster download.” I knew
the second tip, but not the first, which is very useful when some huge
gratuitous image file is downloading and preventing me from getting on
with it.
eMazing
- Expanded
Wiretap Authority Analyzed: Alert SNS Reader Jeff Ellsworth sends along a
pointer to an article written by Georgetown University law professor and former
Clinton chief of staff John Podesta. It’s a very easy to read
consideration of the problems facing law enforcement in the digital age
and the threats to freedom that could be involved if we help them do their
job better.
WashTech.com
-
YAMV (Yet Another
Microsoft Virus) Report: I’m
thinking of making this a regular feature. A new Visual Basic script-based
worm, dubbed Vote, is a mass mailer which sends itself to e-mail addresses
harvested from the Windows address book of infected systems. It is an
email file with the subject line "Peace between America and
Islam," and it not only sends large amounts of e-mail, but also
overwrites HTML (Web) files on the infected computer and can delete the
system's Windows directory and reformat the hard drive when the machine is
restarted. The e-mail includes an attachment document called WTC.exe, which,
when double-clicked, infects the computer. This makes Vote unlike the
Nimda worm, which can infect without double-clicking, and thus experts
consider the virus low risk. Nonetheless, businesses should make sure all
employees know not to double-click attachments from unknown emailers. In
addition, businesses should make sure antivirus protection is up to date
on all computers.
The
Standard (Australia)
-
Unmanned Aircraft
May Be Key: In this war unlike
any other, automated flying drones may be essential to gathering
intelligence in mountainous Afghanistan. One possible problem: These unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs) are largely untested. The Predator UAV has been
flying reconnaissance missions over Iraq, and the military has other
tactical UAVs including the Global Hawk, Pioneer and Hunter. Chances are
good that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, the
fathers of the Internet) will step up production of the “micro-UAVs” that
are currently on the drawing board. Deploying untested, leading edge
battletech has a precedent. The military first deployed an experimental airborne
battlefield-management system, the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack
Radar System, in the Gulf War. The bad news is control stations for UAVs
would need to be close to the front lines, probably in Pakistan.
EE Times
-
Background Check
Business Booming: Many
companies are benefiting from the recent tragedy, including those that
specialize in performing pre-employment background checks. The company
behind Pre-employ.com and MyBackgroundCheck.Com reports they are fielding
2,000 queries a day, double the normal number, since September 11.
LA
Times
- Nokia and Visa
Piloting Dual Chip Mobile Payment Service: One of the dreams of mobile commerce is the
ability to quickly and wirelessly pay for goods and services using a
mobile device. Nokia and Visa took a step closer to realizing the dream
recently when they announced a pilot in Finland of Nordea’s Open Plaform
chip card. Nordea’s card will be installed in 150 Nokia phones to be
distributed to customers in Helsinki. These customers can only buy
groceries and movie theater tickets, so the pilot is quite limited.
Nonetheless, it will offer good data on the use of the dual chip concept,
which relies on a chip card issued by a bank and a separate chip running
the Wireless Identity Module (WIM) application in a Wireless Application
Protocol (WAP) cell phone. If the pilot is successful, look to see the
technique rolled out in Northern Europe and the rest of Europe before it
arrives in the US. But be careful: Don’t lose your phone!
Nokia
- Visualization As
Decision Support: Sun and
Landmark Graphics have combined to offer a data visualization solution for
Unocal, which will use it to help improve departmental-level collaboration
and decision-making in oil and gas exploration and production. Oil
companies use massive amounts of seismic information to find pockets of
oil and gas. Unocal will use Landmark's 2003 versions of Earthcube™ and
OpenVision™ graphics applications to visually inspect the data and detect
telltale patterns. Up to now, such data visualization techniques involved
very expensive installations. Sun and Landmark’s solution promises to
bring such high-end capabilities within reach of smaller companies.
Sun
- Inventor of Popular Crypto Program
Clarifies: Phil Zimmerman invented a cryptographic
program called PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) in 1991. The program allows its
users to take emails or other documents and transform them into a
virtually unbreakable set of codes that only the intended recipient can
decode. In this way, users can communicate with others without law
enforcement officials being able to understand the communication.
Zimmerman was widely quoted – he now says misquoted – recently as being
full of remorse due to the likelihood his program was used by the
terrorists. After the article was published, Zimmerman clarified his
statement on the Cypherpunks discussion list for cryptographers:
The journalist slightly misinterpreted my
remarks, and missed the shades of grey in some of what I said. I did *not*
say that I was overwhelmed with guilt over PGP. I told her about my
crying, just as everyone else I knew had cried over what had happened. I also
told her about the hate mail, and that I "felt bad" that the terrorists
may have used PGP. Indeed I do feel bad about that. But feeling bad about
them using it is not the same as feeling that PGP was a mistake, or that I
have changed my principles about human rights and crypto. I thought I had
also made it clear that I had no regrets about developing PGP. She did not
report any individual facts incorrectly in her article. But I think she
connected the dots in a slightly different way, and seemed to conclude
that I was wallowing in guilt over PGP. I'm sure she meant no harm. I am
still very much aware that PGP was a good thing, and that strong crypto
helps more than hurts. I have been saying that to the press all week. I
just said it again in two more interviews I had before breakfast this
morning, and will continue to say it. It seems I have to say it more
forcefully. I will prepare a statement on this later today. In the
meantime, feel free to let our colleagues know that I have not gone soft
on civil liberties.
To stop terror, you must stop
terrorists, not abridge the rights of the rest of us.
Cypherpunks
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