International anger over reports of industrial espionage

Australia: The widely reported Echelon network [1], child of the NSA and the rumored UKUSA agreement, took a step out of the closet when the director of Australia's Defence Signals Directorate openly admitted [2] that his country participates in UKUSA.

US: Members of the House of Representatives demanded that the NSA reveal what guidelines protect citizens' privacy from Echelon; but NSA refused [3] on grounds of attorney-client privilege. To the best of my knowledge this is the first such claim in the 200-year history of Congressional oversight of administrative agencies [4]. Representative Bob Barr introduced an amendment to the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000 (H.R. 1555) that requires the director of central intelligence, the director of the NSA, and the attorney general jointly to prepare a report detailing the legal standards used to initiate and gather domestic intelligence. The House approved the amendment on 13 May before sending the bill to the Senate.

Germany: The cabinet released a policy statement [5] encouraging its citizens to use encryption without restriction. Without mentioning Echelon by name, the statement nods in its direction. Here are an English translation [6] and Wired's coverage of the story [7].

Sweden: The Foreign Department is investigating the claims of industrial espionage in the European Parliament's IC2000 report [8]. (The text downloads 332K. Turn off graphics to avoid another 761K; the graphics add little to the report.) This Datateknik story [9] tells the tale (in Swedish).

[1] http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html
[2] http://www.theage.com.au/daily/990523/news/news3.html
[3] http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1999/0531/web-nsa-6-3-99.html
[4] http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_exnews/19990604_xex_us_spy_agenc.shtml
[5] http://www.bmwi.de/presse/1999/0602prm1.html
[6] http://jya.com/de-crypto-all.htm
[7] http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/20023.html
[8] http://www.iptvreports.mcmail.com/interception_capabilities_2000.htm
[9] http://www.datateknik.se/arkiv/99-10/frame3.html

This one is bad. Discovered last Monday in Israel, Worm.Explore.Zip [10] has spread with Melissa-like speed and infected Motorola, GE, Intel, Microsoft, and other companies, some of whom shut off email service on Thursday. Like Melissa, and like PrettyPark (see below), this worm relies on victims using Windows machines to execute an email attachment. When they do it mails a friendly message to everyone in the victim's in-box and then destroys all files with extensions .h, .c, .cpp, .asm, .doc, .ppt, or .xls on any mounted drive, by setting their file length to zero. You might be able to recover parts of a file using a disk editor but it would be difficult and time-consuming. (The worm can't execute on Macintosh or Unix, but these systems could lose files if mounted in a Windows network.) For the immediate future, don't execute any email attachment you receive named zipped_files.exe; and update your anti-virus profile. Thanks for the heads-up to TBTF Irregular [*] Karl Hakkarainen <kh at ultranet dot com>, who notes of his employer: "We'll be crawling over the rubble of this one for quite a while."

[10] http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/worm.explore.zip.html
[10a] http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/06/biztech/articles/15comp.html

PrettyPark worm/trojan hits Windows users

A new worm program, operating in the mode of Melissa, is spreading fast among Windows users. Here is the best summary [11] I have found. Some reports say home users are particularly hard-hit, because they don't update their virus detectors as reliably as business users do. PrettyPark was first reported late last week in France and spread rapidly over the weekend. When a victim -- recipient of a tainted email message -- executes an attachment named PrettyPark.exe, the worm replicates itself by copying the email message to everyone in the local machine's address book. It then silently checks every 30 minutes to see whether the user is connected to the Net, and if so sends usernames, password files, address lists, and other files to a number of Internet Relay Chat channels. Makers of anti-virus software produced filters for PrettyPark in short order. If you run on Windows 95, 98, or NT, check with your anti-virus vendor. The worm does not affect Macintosh or Unix systems.

[11] http://www.nwi.net/~pchelp/bo/prettypark.htm

Rules that appellate court cannot say the PTO blew it

TBTF for 1998-12-15 [12] outlined the issues in the so-called Zurko patent appeal, which had the potential of opening up the patent process to sturdier outside review. Yesterday the Supreme Court reversed the lower-court ruling [13]. I asked Mary Ellen Zurko, the lead inventor on the patent, to comment on the ruling's implications.

Country-code representatives are only one of the unhappy constituencies

Newly minted TBTF Irregular [*] Ant Brooks <ant at hivemind dot net> travelled to Berlin for the ICANN meeting in late May as the representative for the .za country code, and sent TBTF this report [14]. Brooks asks that we read it as an attempt to express his personal views of the proceedings, and nothing more.

In an unfortunate coincidence of timing, by leaving South Africa for Berlin, Brooks forfeited his right to vote in his country's second free election.

The wake of the Berlin meeting swirls with controversy over the way ICANN is carrying out its mandate [15] (free registration and cookies required). In this critical article [16] David G. Post invokes the shade of US founding father James Madison, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers. Post says we need to start a community dialogue -- call it the Netalist Papers if you must -- to define the governance we want for cyberspace.

Consumer advocates Ralph Nader and James Love sent an open letter [17] to ICANN chair Esther Dyson asking her to clarify the organization's stance on the issues raised by critics. No reply so far.

[14] http://tbtf.com/resource/brooks-ICANN.html
[15] http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/06/biztech/articles/07ican.html
[16] http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/dpost/icann/comment1.html
[17] http://www.cptech.org/ecom/estherjune11.html
[17a] http://www.icann.org/chairman-response.htm
[17b] http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article/0,1087,3_138581,00.html

A natural-language front end to a company's internal databases

Meet Andrette [18], knowledge worker for the new century. Andrette is a Klone from Big Science Company. She claims to be able to understand plain-English queries and to present data from back-office servers. So far Big Science doesn't have any customers whose Klone Servers are accessible outside their firewalls, so Andrette is the only one of her kind you can talk to. (This was the first question I asked Andrette, and she gave me a marketing-speak non-answer, although the correct answer is in the company's FAQ [19].) One useful thing Andrette knows how to do is to tell you what movies are playing near you, and even in this simple task the chatterbot became confused because I gave my zip code too early in the process.

It seems to me that these early stumbles are most likely limitations in Andrette's implementation, not in the underlying technology. And after all I have little context for a deep discussion with the Big Science Company. Keep an eye on them -- before long you may be chatting with a Klone in your first contact with your supplier's help desk.

Thanks to TBTF Irregular [*] Glenn Fleishman for the pointer.

[18] http://www.bigscience.com/
[19] http://www.bigscience.com/faq.html#whoUsing

[20] http://tbtf.com/jargon-scout.html

Filler App

The ever-inventive Marcia Blake <blakecomm at earthlink dot net>, a TBTF Irregular [*], passes on a term she used to describe a Net killer-app wannabe to the venture capitalist considering a seed investment:

Marcia Blake further proposes that the phrase take it offline, commonly used on listservs and intranets, is patently inaccurate. The intended meaning is to suggest that a topic be discussed outside the community in which the discussion arose; but such removed dialog still takes place online. She puts forward as alternatives take it offlist, or take it e2e (email-to-email). This latter invention, back-formed from the common f2f -- face-to-face -- suggests extensions in different directions for other new media: v2v (voice-to-voice) for a phone exchange, and perhaps c2c for online chat. A reader notes that e2e is used in SDLC testing to mean end-to-end.

FBC: fully buzzword compliant

Larry Carl <larrycarl at home dot com> believes that FBC was coined by his partner John Steely at daVinci TWG in Richmond, VA. Steely holds two M.S. degrees and Microsoft certifications as CP / CSD / CSE / CST. Let Carl tell it:

Fun with Microsoft's most recognizable display

This phony press release [21] (no charge for the Portugeuse translation) has been making the rounds. Seems that Microsoft has decided to use the BSOD as a competitive weapon and open it up for customization.

[21] http://www.penguin.cz/~had/bio/microsoft/bsod.php3
[21a] http://segfault.org/story.phtml?mode=2&id=370d421a-05ce09a0
[22] http://i-want-a-website.com/about-linux/may99.shtml#BSOD-Simulator
[23] http://pla-netx.com/linebackn/news/bsodprop.zip
[23a] http://www.sysinternals.com/

Been waiting for this since reading Popular Mechanics in 1953

A California company, Moller International, has been working since 1962 to develop a personal flying machine. Now they are publicizing the Skycar [24], which the company calls a volantor. It's a vertical-takeoff-and-landing craft that like the British Harrier jumpjet uses "nacelles" to contain and direct the force of its rotors. Here's a photo [25] of the 4-passenger M400. You can't buy one today because no government has certified the device as airworthy. In 1991 the US Federal Aviation Administration created a new aircraft category for the Skycar -- the powered-lift vehicle joins the existing categories of fixed-wing and rotary-wing craft. In 1992 Moller received the only generic patent ever issued in the US on an entirely new category of aircraft. (Patents have since been issued worldwide.) Moller estimates that the first production M400s could go on sale at around $1M. The company is counting on mass-market economies of scale to bring the price eventually into the $60K - $80K range.

When TBTF Irregular [*] Chuck Bury <cbury at softhome dot net> first forwarded this story I remembered seeing a similar vehicle profiled in the 1970s in the magazine Harpers Weekly -- except the photo I recalled looked more like a personal flying saucer than like the Batmobile. Lo, here is that very photo on the Moller Web site [26].

Paul S. Moller gave this presentation [27] at the World Aviation Congress in 1998 -- it has some technical detail on the design and a quick overview of Moller's development history. A more detailed history is here [28].

[24] http://www.moller.com/skycar/
[25] http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/350000/images/_354367_m400_300.jpg
[26] http://www.skyaid.org/images/Image27.gif
[27] http://www.moller.com/skycar/presentWA/
[28] http://www.moller.com/skycar/marketing/history.html

The island of stability is reached at last

Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, smashing relativistic krypton into a target of lead, have produced three atoms of the heaviest element seen on the earth to date [29]. "We jumped over a sea of instability onto an island of stability that theories have been predicting since the 1970s," said physicist Victor Ninov, principal author of a paper on the discovery submitted to Physical Review Letters. Stability is a relative thing. In less than a millisecond each atom of element 118 decayed, by emitting an alpha particle, into element 116 -- the only atoms of this element ever seen on earth. Element 116 is also unstable, as are all the elements down to 106. The rapid cascade of six alpha particles was the sign the scientists were looking for to confirm the creation of element 118.

Thanks to TBTF Irregular [*] Chuck Bury for the speedy notification on this discovery.

[29] http://enews.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/elements-116-118.html

Two hundred million years ago, before North and South America, Africa and Europe headed for the compass points, the land of Pangaea experienced the largest volcanic outpouring in earth's history. Scientists have now put together the puzzle pieces to link the New Jersey Palisades with sites in Brazil, Europe, and Africa [30]. The volcanic event that paved an area the size of present-day Australia in the supercontinent's interior might have played a part in the late Triassic mass extinction(s) [31], which began the ascent of the dinosaurs. (Here's a fine drawing [32] for cyclical extinction theorists.) The Central Atlantic Magmatic Province was later torn asunder by tectonic forces, which carried fragments to places all around the Atlantic rim. Try this simple visualization [33] of the last 180 million years of the breakup of Pangaea; requires Shockwave 7.

[30] http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1999/split/pnu429-1.htm
[31] http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/darwin/exfiles/triassic.htm
[32] http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/darwin/exfiles/images/timeline.jpg
[33] http://www.geog.psu.edu/MacEachren/MacEachrenHTML/drift/drift.html

Martian water

The NY Times featured this image [34] above the fold: Mars colorcoded for altitude. (Here's another view [35] with a color key.) Besides highlighting the largest known crater in the solar system -- 1,300 miles wide and 6 miles deep -- the image shows that the planet bulges below its equator: the southern hemisphere of Mars is, on average, three miles higher than the northern. Here's the Times article [36]. For those who can't be bothered with registration and cookies, try the BBC's coverage [37]. The bulge could explain the origin of Mars's ancient floods, evidence of which is etched into the Red Planet's stone.

[34] http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/052899sci-mars-pix.jpg
[35] http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/052899sci-mars-pix.1.html
[36] http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/052899sci-mars-pix.html
[37] http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_354000/354266.stm

I'll see your kibi and raise you a mebi

The International Electrotechnical Commission has decided that we have had enough of the confusion caused by the fact that 2 to the 10th power is nearly, but not exactly, equal to 10 to the 3rd. Computer scientists early began using the prefix kilo to mean 1024, and by extension mega, giga, and tera to mean 1024 to the second, third, and fourth powers. The proposed new units are:

Here's an IEEE article [38] on the new units and here is the IEC's proposal [39] (PDF format -- see page 4). Next year you may buy a computer with 128 mebs of memory and a 20-gib drive. Thanks to Chris Duncombe Rae <duncombe at sfri dot wcape dot gov dot za> for prodding me on this story.

[38] http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
[39] http://www.iec.ch/tclet6.pdf

The finest zero-volume containers money can buy

TBTF Irregular [*] Anton Sherwood <antons at jps dot net> sends word on the latest project of cracker-hunter [40] turned neo-luddite [41] Clifford Stoll. He is manufacturing Klein bottles [42] in glass, "the finest closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifolds sold anywhere in our three spatial dimensions". See the specs here [43]; they owe something to the laws-of-physics warning labels [44] first published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

TBTF's 10,000th email subscriber is Chris Chiappetta <cchiappetta at jenner dot com>. He will, I hope, tell us what his $25 gift certificate from Amazon.com purchases, and perhaps even review it for us here. Chris just got his MBA from George Mason University with a concentration in MIS. Sounds like a winning combination to me. Can any TBTF reader give Chris a lead toward his ideal career path? He's looking for an IT job related to sports (Olympics, track, baseball), law enforcement, politics, the nonprofit sector (e.g. Boy Scouts), or a dynamic telecom or Internet startup. He's flexible on location. Chris currently works as a paralegal in Washington DC, mostly on telecom litigation. If you send him a tip, please drop me a copy.

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