SEATTLE—Two years after Microsoft launched Windows 95 in a marketing blitz unmatched in computer industry history, the sequel to the operating system is shaping up as a decidedly more minor affair.

The software giant last week released the first major test version of the updated system code-named Memphis,” sometimes known as Windows 98, and Microsoft executives will discuss how the product fits into the Windows family at a briefing for analysts and reporters Wednesday.

From what they have seen so far, many analysts believe the new system will offer users few reasons to upgrade from Windows 95.

You can construct a scenario where you would want Windows 98 on your current machine, but it’s pretty hard,” said Jesse Berst, editorial director of ZDNet AnchorDesk, an online news service. There’s not even a compelling reason for manufacturers to hurry to add it to their machines.”

Windows 95, by contrast, represented a true break from the older Windows 3.1 platform, with a new interface, new file management tools and the ability to handle information in bigger 32-bit chunks.

Microsoft’s unprecedented $100 million-plus publicity campaign had computer enthusiasts lining up at midnight to buy the $90 software package hours before its August 1995 launch under a carnival tent on the company’s Redmond, Wash., campus.

Since then Microsoft has sold 77 million copies of Windows 95, the vast majority pre-loaded on new computers, and has seen its revenues nearly double, driven by a wave of upgrades to 32- bit products.

Still, Berst said only about one-third of all Windows users have upgraded to Windows 95, and he and other analysts said the forthcoming release of another flavor” of the product already is causing confusion.

At the briefing Wednesday, executives led by group Vice President Paul Maritz are expected to focus on Memphis as well as an upgrade expected next year to the company’s high-end Windows NT operating system, which is emerging as a favored platform for business.

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Microsoft: ‘Memphis’ will be Windows 98 (970724)

SEATTLE (AP) — The long-awaited name for its upgrade to Windows 95 will be called Windows 98, and that’s when you’ll be able to buy it.

Despite the name similarities, the new version of Microsoft Corp.’s best-selling operating system will be much more user-friendly than the earlier one, the company said Wednesday in a briefing on new products.

Windows 98, formerly code-named “Memphis,” will be available sometime in the first three months of next year.

Microsoft said it listened to long-standing complaints by computer users that its software is too hard to use and acknowledged that earlier efforts to fix that have failed.

Windows 98 won’t be the technological leap that marked the introduction of Windows 95 two years ago. But officials promised software that would blend Internet, radio, television and other media into personal computers while being more reliable and far simpler to operate.

New versions of Microsoft programs, including Windows and Office, the best-selling bundle of business software, won’t be “bloatware,” said Jon DeVaan, vice president of the desktop applications division.

“Frankly, we haven’t done as good a job as we should at keeping our programs simple,” DeVaan said.

Failure to simplify

Windows 95 now runs on more than 100 million computers or approximately one-third of all personal computers in use, Microsoft said. Its Office programs are used by an estimated 60 million people worldwide.

The test version of Windows 98 was released June 30 to a select group of software developers and testers, said Jim Allchin, senior vice president of the personal and business systems group. An updated version will go out soon and test results will determine the final product’s shipping date, he said.

In late September, Microsoft will send out the long-delayed test version of the new Windows NT operating system for higher-powered computers and corporate networks, with the final version due sometime next year, he said.

Windows 98 will fully incorporate the latest version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser. That has upset Microsoft’s major Internet competitor, Netscape Communications Corp., which fears the move could shut out Netscape’s Navigator and Communicator Web software.

Microsoft released the test version of Internet Explorer 4.0 a week ago, and already 1 million copies have been distributed over the Internet, said Paul Maritz, vice president of the platform and applications group.

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Report: Information tech industry growing twice as fast as economy overall (980415)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Information technology, including business on the Internet, is growing twice as fast as the overall economy, the Commerce Department said today.

In the latest look at the impact of advances in telecommunications and computing, the Commerce report, “The Emerging Digital Economy,” also found that the industry employs 7.4 million workers, some of whom earn among the nation’s highest average salaries.

Traffic on the Internet has doubled every 100 days and Internet commerce among business will likely surpass $300 billion by 2002, the report concluded.

Other findings:

—The Internet is growing faster than all other technologies that have preceded it. Radio existed for 38 years before it had 50 million listeners, and television took 13 years to reach that mark. The Internet crossed the line in just four years.

—In 1994, a mere 3 million people were connected to the Internet. By the end of last year, more than 100 million were using it.

—Without information technology, inflation in 1997 would have been 3.1%, more than a full percentage point higher than the 2% it was.

—Workers in the information technology industry earn an average of almost $46,000 annually, compared to an average of $28,000 for the private sector overall. Workers in the software and service industries are the highest wage earners, at almost $56,000 annually.

“Information technology is truly driving the U.S. economy — more than previous estimates had revealed,” said Rhett Dawson, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, a Washington-based trade group of U.S. information technology companies.

The report recommends that governments stay out of the growing industry, saying electronic commerce shouldn’t be “burdened with extensive regulation, taxation or censorship.”

Government instead should help provide legal frameworks for business on the Internet, and rules should result from “private collective action, not government regulation” whenever possible, the report said.

The Commerce Department said consumers must be getting more comfortable making online credit-card purchases: 10 million people in the United States and Canada had purchased something on the World Wide Web by the end of 1997, an increase from 4.7 million people six months earlier.

The Commerce report also notes a shortage of highly skilled workers and recommends that students be better prepared.

“Countries that have an insufficient supply of skilled workers will see high-skilled, high-paying jobs migrate to countries that can supply the needed talent,” the report said.

Earlier this month, a Senate committee approved a bill to raise the number of “H-1B” visas, which allow high-skilled workers to remain in the United States for up to six years — from the current 65,000 annual limit to a maximum 115,000 for each of the next five years.

The legislation came after computer companies argued that the shortage of available talent would dampen the industry’s explosive growth. Organized labor has complained that high-tech companies are trying to guarantee themselves a constant supply of foreign recruits to hold down salaries.

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New Software to Lighten Web Traffic’s Load (980320)

SAN FRANCISCO (Wired) — Heavy traffic on the Internet might be leading to a horrendous crash soon, some say, but an increasing number of software solutions are cropping up to save the day.

A number involve “caching,” a software fix designed to store copies of Web pages closer to users and rein in network traffic loads.

The year has already proven prolific for new Web caching technologies.

Depending on who you listen to, the technology is either imperative to the health of the Web — or merely a limited fix for the network’s ongoing, unstoppable bulge.

“We’re dealing with the beginnings of the performance problem,” said Kelly Herrell, vice president of marketing at CacheFlow, maker of a two-month old Web caching device for company networks and Internet service providers. “If we don’t install caches, the Web will fail to work. It will get bogged down, and users will not get a response.”

Vendors are promoting new and improved approaches to Web caching, most notably in the form of dedicated devices like CacheFlow’s, whose hardware, operating system, and software are all built exclusively to cache Web content.

The caching of digital information has already proven successful in the internal designs of computers, operating systems, and other relatively predictable data paths — stashing frequently used computing instructions closer to processors that need them, for example.

Web caching assumes that the model will translate neatly enough to the far-flung corners of the World Wide Web. It is motivated by the idea that hundreds of thousands of copies of the same pages traverse the network unnecessarily; caching them offloads that traffic by storing pages at ISPs and other localized networks.

But despite Web caching’s impressive claims, some say it’s not at all clear that it can deliver on them, and that indeed, the odds are stacked against it. “The Web is so broad, it’s going to be a network sponge for years and years to come,” said Steve Glassman, who has studied caching as a researcher at Digital Systems Research Center.

Glassman sees caches only buying network administrators a little more time before their bandwidth fills up and another high-speed Internet access line must be installed. “Aggressive caching might give you three to six months breathing room that you wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Nonetheless, the business of Web caching is well underway among the faithful, and Forrester Research predicts it will become a multi-billion dollar market by 2002.

“What’s changing is the Internet is becoming more important — it is being used a lot more,” said Forrester analyst Brendan Hannigan. “From a manager’s perspective, delivering a good response time and a good experience for their users is important—and a cache is one way to do that.”

Indeed, his firm’s survey of Fortune 1000 companies found that half of participating companies were already deploying Web caches, and Forrester concluded that within two years, nearly all such companies would be doing the same.

This potential market has companies scrambling into the caching business anew, most focusing on the appliance-based approach. These companies include both established equipment vendors like Cisco Systems (with its Cache Engine), as well as new or smaller companies like CacheFlow (the CacheFlow 1000) and Network Appliance (the NetCache Appliance).

Inserted into the network like routers and switches, these newer caching products are in contrast to caching-enabled proxy software from Microsoft, Netscape, and others, which is meant to be installed on standard Web servers.

These new devices are complemented by related caching services that have also emerged. One recent alliance between WavePhore and SkyCache calls for delivering Web pages to caches via satellite.

To those running Internet-connected networks, the technology’s gleaming promise lies in reduced bandwidth usage — and therefore lowered bandwidth costs — and a bonus of better browsing performance.

Central to caching technologies is the issue of freshness — how to keep content sitting on a cache from going stale and thus bring users a delayed version of the Web. Typically, caches have performed updating on a periodical basis, querying the home server of a page or an object to see if an update is necessary.

But with infrequent updates, caching demands a trade-off between stale content and saved bandwidth. In Europe and other countries, for example — where caching set-ups are already commonplace due to pricier bandwidth — caching has typically required a freshness compromise.

Though their software uses up some network capacity, Web caching vendors say more frequent and more intelligent updates are the answer. How to go about that is one area in which different technologies compete. Since updating at the moment of a request can slow down the delivery of cached pages, CacheFlow trumpets its “active caching” technology.

Rather than waiting for page requests to check for a Web object’s freshness, active caching works to determine which of the many image and text components it holds are most likely to go stale.

Algorithms guess which page objects should be “pre-fetched” according to factors like the frequency with which it’s been requested already, the frequency with which the object has already changed, and the bandwidth “cost” of retrieving a particular object.

Forrester’s Hannigan says the ultimate effectiveness of active caching remains to be seen. “We have to see how it actually works in reality and we just haven’t seen that yet.”

Elsewhere on the caching front, the Web’s bedrock protocol itself, the Web routing language HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), is being updated in the upcoming version 1.1 to better relay caching information to networks.

New features will let page authors decide which parts of a page should be cached and which shouldn’t. Much further down the road, caching advocates anticipate “pushed” cashing—where instead of having to update themselves, caches will receive updates automatically from servers aware of their presence.

Active or passive, the success of a cache is measured in “hit rates.” The higher the percentage of page requests served by a cache — rather than the page’s original server — the more successful the cache is. CacheFlow, for example, says it has tested its product and found a hit rate as high as 75%.

While CacheFlow’s claims remain to be tested by widespread use, others say size is imperative to effective caching and high hit rates. Therefore, their approaches entail the deployment of caches of massive size, placed closer to the “middle” of the Web — as opposed to the periphery where smaller Internet service providers and company Intranets reside.

Mirror Image Internet announced this week its plan for massive, centrally located caches for installation at major Internet access points. Similarly, Inktomi is refocusing its business to sell Traffic Server, software meant to let backbone providers set up large-scale caches in the terabyte range to reduce network load, claiming a 40 to 50% reduction in adjacent network traffic.

But since caching a system like the Web means having to intelligently identify the most frequently used content on a network notorious for its size, sprawl, and unpredictability, some think caching designs, even the newer ones, may have met their match in the unparalleled properties of the Internet. With the Web continuing its explosive growth, some say, caching is pretty much going to remain a niche solution for a niche problem.

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Computer users on Windows 98: It’s not revolutionary (980422)

(CNN) — Computer insiders who have gotten sneak peeks at Microsoft’s Windows 98 find it’s an evolution for operating systems — but not a revolutionary new product.

The most noticeable change in the operating system is that it looks like a Web browser, so that moving around a computer screen feels like moving around the Internet.

“It’s best point is that it looks simpler and easier on the eyes ... less confusing to use,” said Cathy Baskin of PC World Magazine.

The look isn’t the only difference. There are as many as 3,000 changes in Windows 98 from Windows 95 — most of which are invisible.

Some functional changes, however, are apparent. The computer users who previewed the operating system found their machines ran a little faster, crashed less often and offered improved sound.

In addition, commercialism is built in to the software. A list of so-called favorite Internet destinations called “Active Channels” appears on every screen.

“Companies are paying Microsoft to display advertising directly on people’s desktops,” said syndicated columnist Larry Magid.

The new software also is designed to make it easier to hook up extra equipment, such as DVD drives that can play motion pictures and high-definition video games.

But, for Magid, the changes in Windows 98 are not worth the $109 retail price.

“I don’t see a hundred dollars worth of improvement in my computer system,” he said. “I think it should have been Windows 97 or Windows 95.5.”

As the reviews come in, it is not clear if the operating system will debut as scheduled.

A day after an embarrassing crash of Windows 98 at a public demonstration, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates declined to say Tuesday if it will ship as scheduled on June 25.

“The key thing is to get feedback ... making sure of everything,” Gates said at the BaanWorld 98 conference in Denver.

When asked specifically about the June date, Gates would only say, “It looks like we’re very close — within a few months.”

Gates said Microsoft had not given a specific release date, when in fact the software giant issued a news release on April 15 announcing that the successor to the hugely popular Windows 95 would be available in stores on June 25.

On Monday, as Gates kicked off a publicity campaign for Windows 98 with a speech at the huge Comdex convention in Chicago, the system crashed during a demonstration.

Gates tried to make light of the embarrassment, saying, “While we’re all very dependent on technology, it doesn’t always work.”

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Robert Bork: Antitrust case strong against Microsoft (980426)

WASHINGTON (CNN) —Even though Microsoft Corp. is a “great American success story,” the Justice Department can make a strong case that the computer giant is unfairly using monopoly power to stifle competition, says a former federal judge hired by one of Microsoft’s unhappy competitors.

Robert Bork, a one-time nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, said “the [antitrust] case of monopolization against Microsoft is cold.”

He disclosed April 17 that he had been hired by Netscape Communications Corp. to push the department to pursue an antitrust case against Microsoft.

“You have the monopoly. You have the expressed intent to stifle competition,” Bork said during an appearance Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation.” “You have the practices which are not necessary for consumers but do crush rivals.”

“Anything that happens in an antitrust case should certainly not damage Microsoft or its ability to innovate,” Bork said. “However, they ought not to be able to maintain their monopoly, not by doing a better product but by using these kinds of practices that exclude competition.”

Microsoft: Consumers stand to lose

But Charles Rule, a Microsoft legal consultant, said any Justice Department antitrust action against Microsoft threatens innovation in the entire computer industry and is bad news for consumers.

“You’re going to have the government standing over Microsoft’s shoulder — and ultimately, other computer manufacturers —deciding what products you can get, what features they can put into their operating system, maybe even affecting what prices Microsoft can charge,” said Rule, also on “Face The Nation.”

“I’ve got to wonder why we in America want to take this part of the economy that has worked so wonderfully, has driven economic growth, and essentially put Department of Justice lawyers and economists smack dab in the middle of making decisions consumers ought to be making,” Rule said.

Bork doesn’t favor breaking up Microsoft

Bork, who has a conservative reputation for opposing government intervention in the marketplace, said he doesn’t believe his work for Netscape conflicts with his pro-market views.

“Only a knee-jerk conservative would say that there’s never a case for antitrust,” he said. “Now, a monopolization case ought to be a rare thing. This is one of those rare cases.”

However, he said he doesn’t believe the government should try to break up Microsoft, as it did the telephone monopoly. Rather, he says the Justice Department should take steps to force Microsoft to stop monopolistic practices that have harmed Netscape and other competitors.

Netscape’s Internet browser, which has about 60% of the market, is the biggest competitor of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Netscape and other competitors have complained that Microsoft is using its dominant position in operating systems — its Windows software runs the vast majority of computers worldwide — to force computer manufacturers to give preference to Internet Explorer.

Rule: Computer manufacturers can offer both

But Rule said Microsoft’s goal is not to stifle Netscape but to “make the computing easier” by making Internet access easier.

“Microsoft creates a product. It says to a computer manufacturer, ‘If you want to sell that product, put it on your machine as we’ve made it. You can add additional features — Netscape’s browser —on to it,’” Rule said.

“When it comes to your house, you can go to the Internet, download Netscape’s browser. You can take the Internet Explorer icon off the desktop.”

Rule said Microsoft will include Internet Explorer on its new Windows 98 software, which will be released soon to computer manufacturers who use Microsoft systems.

“If computer manufacturers want to put Netscape’s browser on there, too, they can still do it, as they have in the past and can in the future,” Rule said.

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Microsoft: A game of monopoly too many (980512)

Afew months ago, I was offered some free investment advice from the richest man in the world. At a press lunch given by Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, I asked how worried he was by all the criticisms of his company, Microsoft.

Wasn’t Microsoft today in a position similar to General Motors in the 1970s, or IBM in the 1980s? It was, I suggested, foisting unreliable, inefficient and technically inferior products on an increasingly hostile public. Its enormous profits came not from superior products but from planned obsolescence, from useless bells and whistles and, above all, from overwhelming monopoly power. Wouldn’t someone eventually invent a “better mousetrap”—a simple, cheap and reliable computer—which would do to Microsoft what the Japanese did to General Motors, and what the personal computer industry did to IBM?

Mr Gates’s reply was as succinct as my question was long-winded. He put on his trademark sneering grin and answered: “If that’s what you think, you should call your broker and short Microsoft stock.” Happily for me, I did not take Mr Gates’s advice. I knew exactly what he meant. Nobody has ever made money by betting against Microsoft. Companies that tried to compete against its ubiquitous products—Windows, Excel and Word—have mostly given up. Reluctant technical users determined to stick with more reliable operating systems, such as Apple and Unix, have capitulated and bought its products. And as for the small band of Wall Street bears, who have occasionally predicted setbacks for a company whose shares have risen 300-fold in just 11 years, they have long since been ruined. In a word, fighting Microsoft has been a sure recipe for disaster.

Today, however, Mr Gates’s legendary arrogance faces a very different kind of challenge. His new adversary is the US Government—with infinite patience and deep pockets. Last month Microsoft was sued by 11 of America’s state governments for allegedly illegal monpolistic practices. This week the US Justice Department is expected to file a much wider and more dangerous suit.

Exactly what action the Justice Department may propose is the subject of intense speculation in Washington and on Wall Street. Even if it goes as far as some rumours have suggested and demands a freeze on new products, or even a break-up of Microsoft, it will take years for the two antagonists to struggle through the American courts—this is perhaps why Microsoft’s share price is today 10% higher than it was when Mr Gates offered me his investment advice.

But whatever happens to Microsoft and its software—an issue that is obviously critical to almost every company in every modern industry around the world—an even bigger question is raised by the mere fact of Mr Gates’s confrontation with the US Government. Should the State interfere with a hugely successful company that has earned its supremacy in its market through free consumer choice?

These questions are timely in Britain, as well as America, with Parliament debating the new Competition Bill, including the controversial amendment to outlaw alleged abuses of market power by The Times. In my opinion, the answer to both questions is clearly “yes”. The State has the right and indeed the duty to intervene in genuinely monopolised markets. (Although how Britain’s newspaper market is being monopolised by The Times, which is not even number one in its market, is completely beyond me.)

More important than my view is the opinion of a very wide range of American economists, businessmen and politicians, including many on the Republican Right. A strong consensus in America now seems to support the principle of tough anti-trust action, at least in the case of Microsoft.

This new-found support for state activism in a free-market society such as America is not as surprising as it may seem. Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with big business. But more important than either emotion or ideology is the experience of American business history.

Throughout this century the US Justice Department has challenged the great monopolies created by wave after wave of industrial innovation. It broke up Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, Duke’s American Tobacco and J.P.Morgan’s banks. More recently, the Justice Department fragmented the telephone market, despite AT&T’s outstanding services and technological achievements. And it persistently hounded IBM, helping to create the opening in the computer markets which eventually produced the personal computer and now the software monopolies commanded by Microsoft.

In each case, the Government’s interference with free markets and world-beating companies has provoked predictions of disaster. Yet, in each case, the American economy and the industry concerned have emerged stronger than they were before the anti-trust actions began.

It is this long experience of aggressive enforcement of anti-trust laws—but only in conditions when monopolies can rigorously be shown to exist—that suggests the US Government will eventually succeed in breaking Microsoft’s power. If it does, the world economy and the computer industry will certainly benefit. And perhaps the sellers of Microsoft stock will even get some reward.

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Antitrust Action Against Microsoft (980518)

May 18, 1998 Antitrust Lawsuit Filed as Microsoft Ships Windows 98

May 17, 1998 After Talks Collapse, Clinton Backs Handling of Microsoft Case

May 16, 1998 Talks Between Microsoft, Justice Fall Apart

May 15, 1998 Microsoft Begins Meetings With Government Officials

May 14, 1998 Microsoft Delays Shipping of Windows 98 as Talks Continue

May 13, 1998 Sun Files New Objections to Release of Windows 98

May 12, 1998 Microsoft Wins Appeals Court Ruling on Windows 98

May 11, 1998 Microsoft Uses Political Tactics in Windows Campaign

May 8, 1998 Microsoft Stocks Plummet on Word of Antitrust Suit

May 7, 1998 Microsoft Battles Windows 98 Injunction

May 6, 1998 Report: Gates Meets With Senior Justice Officials

May 5, 1998 Microsoft Turns Up Heat on Those Who Would Block New OS

May 4, 1998 Microsoft Warns Wall Street Over Possible Windows 98 Delays

May 1, 1998 Tech Business Elites Urge Justice to Lay Off Windows 98

April 30, 1998 States Gearing Up for Suit Against Microsoft

April 29, 1998 Microsoft Fesses Up to Failure in Face of Probe

April 23, 1998 Microsoft’s Earnings Beat High Expectations

April 22, 1998 Microsoft Appeal Poses Vast Range of Issues

April 21, 1998 Judges Consider Microsoft ‘Integration’

April 20, 1998 Microsoft, Justice to Face Off Before Appeals Panel

April 10, 1998 Microsoft Meets Justice in Advance of Hearing

April 7, 1998 Justice, Microsoft Meet on Possible New Probe

April 6, 1998 U.S. Mulls New Charges Against Microsoft

Mar. 23, 1998 Microsoft Windows 98 Pre-Ordering Starts

Mar. 17, 1998 Gates: Microsoft to Double R&D

Jan. 8, 1998 Microsoft issues a formal apology for any possible disrespect it might have shown Judge Jackson or the Justice Department in its December courtroom antics. In the same breath, Microsoft makes it clear that though its tone may change, its position will not

Dec. 26, 1997 Microsoft files a motion to have special master Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig dismissed on grounds of bias against Microsoft, citing an e-mail to a Netscape employee in which Lessig complained that Explorer had “screwed up” his browser bookmarks

Dec. 17, 1997 The Justice Department demands that Microsoft be held in contempt of court for spurning the dictates of the preliminary injunction. In a separate action, attorneys general from nine states hold a secret meeting to discuss pressing their own antitrust claims against Microsoft

Dec. 15, 1997 Microsoft dismisses Judge Jackson’s preliminary injunction as a matter beyond his jurisdiction and comprehension. They offer three limited alternatives to their current practice of bundling Explorer and Windows 95: to ship an Explorer-stripped version of Windows that will not work; to ship an outdated, pre-Explorer version of Windows 95; or to ship the existing integrated Explorer/Windows package

Dec. 11, 1997 In a preliminary injunction, Judge Jackson orders Microsoft to immediately stop requiring PC-makers to bundle Explorer with Windows 95, but waives the $1 million fine demanded by the Justice Department. He defers final judgment until 1998, appointing a special master, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, to examine the issues and present findings to the court

Dec. 5, 1997 U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson hears opening arguments in the case

Nov. 20, 1997 The Justice Department cites internal Microsoft documents that contradict the company’s claim that browser integration into Windows had been long planned. Microsoft began integrating the browser for one reason, claims Justice: to crush Netscape

Nov. 11, 1997 An unabashed Microsoft files a formal response to the government’s allegations, stating it “retains unfettered freedom” to add new functions—including Web browsing—to Windows, and claiming it had long planned to integrate Explorer. In fact, it says, the integration is complete and irreversible: Windows and Explorer are one and the same

Oct. 20, 1997 The Justice Department files a complaint demanding a $1-million-a-day fine against Microsoft for alleged violation of the 1995 consent decree. The complaint claims that Microsoft overstepped its bounds by requiring PC manufacturers to bundle the Internet Explorer browser with their hardware products in order to obtain a license for Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system

Oct. 15, 1997 The European Union’s competition commissioner, Karel Van Miert, tells reporters that the European Commission will hold hearings on Microsoft’s trade practices before year’s end, based on a complaint it has received from an undisclosed competitor

Aug. 19, 1997 Two years after the consent decree, the Justice Department announces it has its sights set on Microsoft again — this time to determine whether the software-maker’s $150 million investment in Apple Computer, or its equity stakes in three companies that develop Internet streaming technologies, would squelch competition

August 1995 After months of legal wrangling, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Jackson officially approves the 1994 consent decree

April 1995 The Justice Department files suit to block a proposed merger between Microsoft and Intuit, claiming the marriage would quash competition in the electronic checkbook market. Within weeks, Microsoft scraps merger plan

July 1994 Microsoft settles antitrust charges with the Justice Department, signing on to a consent decree that forbids it from using its operating system dominance to squelch competition. Just days prior to the decree, Microsoft also settled charges with the European Commission, which has cooperated with the Justice Department in an unprecedented manner

September 1993 On the heels of similar action across the Atlantic, the European Commission launches its own anti-trust investigation of Microsoft after receiving a complaint from Novell, which alleges that Microsoft’s restrictive licensing arrangements with computer manufacturers constitute monopolistic practices under European Community law

August 1993 Frustrated by two FTC deadlocks in the investigation, the Justice Department takes over, focusing on Microsoft’s DOS marketing practices

June 1990 The Federal Trade Commission launches a probe into possible collusion between Microsoft and IBM in the PC software market

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MIT researchers create emotionally sensitive computers (980705)

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (AP) — Ever wish your VCR could sense your boredom and fast-forward through the dull parts of a movie? How about a compact disc player that could play music based on your mood?

While such ideas sound like something out of a futuristic film, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab are working on computers that can “read” a person’s mind by monitoring body movements.

“From a human standpoint, machines are very rude,” said Alex “Sandy” Pentland, the academic head of the Media Lab. “It’s about making machines aware of people.”

The technology is still experimental and years away from mass production. But under the direction of MIT professor Rosalind Picard, the Media Lab’s Affective Computing group has developed computer systems that use biorhythmic sensors attached to a user’s body and tiny cameras that record facial gestures to develop individual emotional profiles.

When a user becomes interested, frustrated or bored, the software can adjust, Pentland said.

“Technology has run us long enough and now we’re finding ways for us to run technology,” he said. “We want to make technology respond to us in a way that is helpful.”

Among the projects under development is an “affective tutor,” a computer education program able to sense a student’s level of interest or frustration. The software can sense states like boredom, anxiety, confusion and interest — as well as facial cues like smiles and frowns — and adjust its instruction accordingly.

An “affective VCR” could monitor a viewer’s face for signs of boredom and skip to the most exciting scenes of a movie, as well as shut itself off when a viewer falls asleep.

For some computer users, the idea of technology with insight into human emotions may be unnerving.

But Pentland said the rudimentary creations evolving in the Media Lab are a far cry from oppressive agents like HAL, the tyrannical computer in the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey”

“This is about making life better for people, not controlling them,” said Pentland.

Such technology is already in limited use among car manufacturers, who are experimenting with steering wheel cameras to tell if a driver is becoming sleepy.

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Nortel technology achieves ‘the death of distance’ (Ottawa Citizen, 991014)

The new optical fibre technology shown by Nortel this week can send 1.6 million copies of War and Peace across North America in a second.

Faster than you can say “Retreat from Moscow,” all these copies of an Internet version of Tolstoy’s biggest novel can be sent together through a glass fibre as thin as a single hair, translated into 80 colours of light.

Nortel calls this “the death of distance” — an ever-faster ability to turn voices and numbers and videos into light, transmitted so fast it will change communications, and especially the Internet.

If you like talk more than Tolstoy, one fibre can carry 80 million voices at once, with no interference.

Here’s the speed of change: Back in 1990, the standard speed of transmission was 2.5 gigabits per second, more than 2,000 times slower than Nortel’s newest achievement.

At that rate, Tolstoy’s story of tragic love and military disaster would have flowed through the wires at a rate of just 625 copies per second.

Fifteen years ago, you could have sent 12.5 novels per second, tops.

As computer makers drive down the costs of processing information by making computers more efficient, Nortel is pushing down the transmission costs by sending more signals through the same fibres.

Those parallel trends combine to improve Internet technology.

And as Nortel unveiled the fastest-ever fibre optic technology in Geneva Tuesday, a Nortel executive said the company is doubling its ability to carry signals fast every nine to 12 months.

The costs of making all these connections keeps falling with the improved ability to send more data at higher speeds, “what we at Nortel call the death of distance,” says James Frodsham, vice-president of brand management.

The latest platform, due for commercial sale in 2001, sends 6.4 trillion bits of information in one second. A terabit is a trillion bits of information.

The big use of this is in connecting eager new Internet customers to the operators of Web sites. If a customer has a 56K modem, that means it can send and receive 56,000 bits per second. That’s not the highest speed: You can find modems that handle one million bits (a megabit) per second, but they’re not common.

That means the optical technology can handle the information flowing to 112 million of these 56K modems, each handling 56,000 bits of information a second.

All of it is travelling down a single thread-like fibre at once.

Nortel is the builder of more than 10 networks of fibre optic cable criss-crossing North America, and about the same number across Europe. It calls them “backbone” optical networks.

Each works like a major highway: It takes a lot of data over a great distance very quickly, and at the end points this information can be switched to and from individual users.

The fibres carry all types of communication — voice, video, music and financial transactions — converted to trillions of ones and zeroes. Each one or zero is a “bit” of information.

While these backbone networks have been considered the fastest available, the new technology blazes past them.

“We’re actually the world leaders in that market today, and the current systems that we’re employing are operating at 320 gigabits per second,” Mr. Frodsham said.

There are 1,000 gigabits in a terabit. That means the 6.4-terabit fibre optic system shown Tuesday in Geneva can send signals 20 times faster than today’s fibre optic “backbone.”

But using the newer technology won’t make the fibre optic infrastructure obsolete.

It uses all the same fibres, and sends the same stream of ones and zeroes along it.

The fibres in fibre optics stretch 15,000 or 20,000 kilometres. Those aren’t changing immediately, Mr. Frodsham said: What’s new “is the equipment that drives the information through the fibres.”

“We’ve also announced the OPTera packet solution, which ... looks inside the information coming out of these pipes and switches it down the different pipelines.” That was announced about four weeks ago.

It means that in addition to being able to send more information through the cable, the switches at the far end that distribute it are faster as well.

“We’ve not hit the physical limit of the technology,” he said. “There are probably further enhancements to come.”

A widely accepted law in the computer industry say the performance of processors doubles every 18 months.

In the optical realm, change is even faster.

“We’re increasing the capacity at a rate that doubles every nine to 12 months,” he said.

At the same time, more people are getting more value out of the service.

For instance, by increasing the “band width” — the number of different colours in the light spectrum that can travel through a fibre optic line — you can include more types of information.

One such application is high-quality music transmission, possible today over the Internet.

Mr. Frodsham calls this a “band-width explosion” that doubles the amount of the light spectrum used in data transmission every 12 months.

And with falling costs and expanding numbers of ways to use the Internet, “you’ve got a very strong feedback loop that we think is going to drive exponential growth,” Mr. Frodsham said.

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Powerful Attack Cripples Internet (Foxnews, 021023)

WASHINGTON — Nine of the 13 computer servers that manage global Internet traffic were crippled by a powerful electronic attack this week, officials said.

But most Internet users didn’t notice because the attack only lasted an hour. Its origin was not known, and the FBI and White House were investigating.

One official described Monday’s attack as the most sophisticated and large-scale assault against these crucial computers in the history of the Internet.

Seven of the 13 servers failed to respond to legitimate network traffic and two others failed intermittently during the attack, officials confirmed.

The FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center was “aware of the denial of service attack and is addressing this matter,” spokesman Steven Berry said.

Service was restored after experts enacted defensive measures and the attack suddenly stopped.

The 13 computers are spread geographically across the globe as precaution against physical disasters and operated by U.S. government agencies, universities, corporations and private organizations.

“As best we can tell, no user noticed and the attack was dealt with and life goes on,” said Louis Touton, vice president for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet’s key governing body.

“We were prepared, we responded quickly,” said Brian O’Shaughnessy, a spokesman for northern Virginia-based VeriSign Inc., which operates two of the 13 “root servers” that provide the primary roadmap for almost all Internet communications.

Computer experts who manage some of the affected computers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were cooperating with the White House through its Office of Homeland Security and the President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board.

Richard Clarke, President Bush’s top cyber-security adviser and head of the protection board, has warned for months that an attack against the Internet’s 13 so-called root server computers could be greatly disruptive.

These experts said the attack, which started about 4:45 p.m. EDT Monday, transmitted data to each targeted root server 30 to 40 times normal amounts. One said that just one additional failure would have disrupted e-mails and Web browsing across parts of the Internet.

Monday’s attack wasn’t more disruptive because many Internet providers and large corporations and organizations routinely store, or “cache,” popular Web directory information for better performance.

“The Internet was designed to be able to take outages, but when you take the root servers out, you don’t know how long you can work without them,” said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a security organization based in Bethesda, Md.

Although the Internet theoretically can operate with only a single root server, its performance would slow if more than four root servers failed for any appreciable length of time.

In August 2000, four of the 13 root servers failed for a brief period because of a technical glitch.

A more serious problem involving root servers occurred in July 1997 after experts transferred a garbled directory list to seven root servers and failed to correct the problem for four hours. Traffic on much of the Internet ground to a halt.

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China to monitor all Net use (WorldNetDaily, 030411)

Communists want to crack down on 60 million Web surfers

China’s communist government announced last week that it is seeking to erect a “national boundary” to restrict access to the Internet, reports intelligence newsletter Geostrategy-Direct.

The official Xinhua news agency stated April 1 the boundary would be an attempt to “exercise cyber monitoring or limiting.”

The goal is to “find and sanction vicious Internet-based activities which are harmful to China and its people’s interests,” according to Hu Mingzeng, director of the Computer Network and System Security Research Center at Harbin Industrial University in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province.

China has an estimated 60 million Internet users, and Chinese authorities periodically conduct crackdowns on Internet cafes and arrest users who access “unauthorized” information, such as information about the banned Falun Gong religious group or foreign media outlets.

Internet use has become “a seedbed for illegal activities,” Xinhua stated.

China has outlawed gambling, pornography, hacking, the “tipoff of state secrets,” terrorism and governmental subversion through the Internet.

“China has established a special cyber police force to intensify real-time monitoring, to intercept and delete harmful information and to capture and check illegal server data,” Xinhua stated.

Chinese authorities plan to monitor Internet use by surveilling keyboard activity and using other electronic measures.

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Catching Cyber Criminals Is Easier Said Than Done (Foxnews, 031208)

CHICAGO — Businesses have estimated that recent cyber attacks have caused more than $65 billion in damage, but worm and virus creators are able to use their technical skills to cover their tracks, making arrests extremely rare.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has said it is “a top federal law enforcement priority to stop crime on the Internet” and his administration has prosecuted more computer crime cases than any other. But when it comes to catching the authors of the countless debilitating computer viruses there have only been a small handful of U.S. arrests.

“The enemy’s formidable cyber skills make the cases tough,” said John Malcolm, deputy assistant to the U.S. attorney general. “These people are skilled ... at ... executing their crimes in sophisticated ways and then covering their digital footprints immediately.”

Computer security experts say anyone sophisticated enough to write a virus could easily figure out how to cover his or her tracks.

“I could do a couple of quick things on my laptop ... that you would not be able to trace me very easily,” said Kurt Roemer, security research director for NetContinuum, a provider of Web security appliances. “And if I didn’t brag about it to my friends or post it in a newsgroup ... then you are not going to find me.”

The FBI has tools for virus tracking but they say some victimized companies refuse to cooperate with investigators.

Microsoft is one company trying to make a difference — in November it announced a $5 million reward for anyone providing tips that can help law enforcement catch virus creators.

“Law enforcement can’t do this on their own ... and industry can’t do this on its own,” said Tim Cranton, a senior attorney for the software giant. “It’s a huge problem.”

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Bush to Sign ‘Can Spam’ Measure (Foxnews, 031216)

In the Oval Office on Tuesday morning, Bush was to sign the so-called “can spam” legislation. Passed by Congress earlier this month, the measure outlaws the persistent techniques used by e-mailers who send tens of millions of messages each day to peddle their products and services.

The bill would supplant tougher anti-spam laws already passed in some states, including California. It also encourages the Federal Trade Commission to create a do-not-spam list of e-mail addresses and includes penalties for spammers of up to five years in prison in rare circumstances.

“Spam and unsolicited e-mails are annoying to consumers and are costly to U.S. business,” Claire Buchan, deputy White House press secretary said. “This legislation will help address the problems associated with the growth and abuse of spam.”

In the afternoon, the president was to go to the Department of Housing and Urban Development to sign the American Dream Downpayment Act. It is aimed at helping families that can afford monthly mortgage payments but not the initial costs associated with buying a house.

Three-fourths of non-minority Americans own their own homes, but less than half of blacks, Hispanics and other minorities are homeowners. Through grants to state and local governments, low-income families would receive an average of about $5,000 to be help cover downpayment and closing costs on a first home.

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Gullible Users Spreading ‘Mydoom’ Worm (FN, 040128)

The continued spread of a cleverly engineered computer virus exposes a key flaw in the global embrace of technology: Its users are human.

Posing as a legitimate computer error message, the worm successfully tricked e-mail recipients into spreading it to friends, co-workers and business associates.

Although users have grown wiser about falling for such tricks, virus writers have also gotten smarter about fooling them.

“People that are bent on doing these things continue to display a high degree of intelligence,” said Bob Jorgensen of Boeing Co., whose e-mail systems slowed down because of the worm. “We need to continue to work to stay one step ahead” through better technology and education.

MessageLabs Inc., which scans e-mail for viruses, said one in every 12 messages contained the worm, called “Mydoom” or “Novarg.” Security experts described it as the largest outbreak in months.

“It’s the trust factor you are exploiting,” said Oliver Friedrichs, senior research manager with anti-virus vendor Symantec Corp. “Most people, when they receive something, they want to trust it. You don’t want to miss something people may be sending you.”

Upon activation — usually when a recipient clicks on an e-mail attachment — the rogue program searches though address books and sends itself to e-mail addresses it finds. It chooses one as the sender, so recipients may believe the message comes from someone known.

Unlike other mass-mailing worms, Mydoom does not attempt to trick victims by promising nude pictures of celebrities or mimicking personal notes. Rather, messages carry innocuous-sounding subject lines, like “Error” or “Server Report” and messages in the body such as “Mail transaction failed. Partial message is available.”

It is precisely because the message’s tone is so basic that many computer users conditioned to be suspect of attachments wound up opening Mydoom anyway, said Chuck Adams, chief security officer with NetSolve Inc., a security firm in Austin, Texas.

Some corporate networks were clogged with infected traffic within hours of its appearance Monday, and operators of many systems voluntarily shut down their e-mail to keep the worm from spreading during the cleanup.

Keynote Systems Inc., which tracks Internet performance, recorded a slight degradation in Web site availability and speed.

The worm, however, falls short of a homeland security or national security threat, said Amit Yoran, the U.S. government’s cyber-security chief.

Mydoom infects computers that run Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating systems, though other computers were affected by network slowdowns and a flood of bogus messages. Unlike other recent attacks, it does not appear to exploit any Windows security flaw.

Besides sending out tainted e-mail, the program appears to open up a backdoor so hackers can take over the computer later. The worm also tries to spread through the Kazaa file-sharing network and was programmed to try to overwhelm the Web site of The SCO Group Inc. beginning Sunday by repeatedly sending fake requests.

SCO’s site has been targeted before because of its threats to sue users of the Linux operating system in an intellectual property dispute, and spokesman Blake Stowell said the site was unavailable at times Tuesday, apparently because of infected computers set to the wrong date.

On Tuesday, SCO announced a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Mydoom’s creator.

Anti-virus vendors have posted software updates to catch the worm, and security experts warned computer users not to open questionable attachments, the Mydoom ones carrying extensions like “.exe,” “.scr,” “.cmd,” “.pif” or “.zip.”

But no amount of warning will ever eliminate threats entirely.

“Folks are just going to fall prey to things that look like familiar things that happen to their e-mail, like getting an error message, a forwarded message or a reply message,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

With 128 million Americans already online — and newcomers less aware of these tricks joining all the time — “it takes a relatively small fraction of folks to make mistakes,” he said.

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‘Sasser’ Creator Launched New Version (FN, 040510)

BERLIN — An 18-year-old German who confessed to creating the “Sasser” computer worm launched a new version meant to limit the damage just before his arrest last week, investigators said Monday.

Authorities who have questioned Sven Jaschan got the impression his motive was to gain fame as a programmer, prosecutor Detlev Dyballa said.

Dyballa labeled as speculation news reports that Jaschan may have created the disruptive program to drum up business for his mother’s computer store, PC-Help, in the small town of Waffensen.

“One can never rule out anything, but there are no facts to suggest it,” he told The Associated Press by telephone.

Jaschan was arrested Friday at his mother’s house, where police said agents found him sitting at his computer. Investigators say the machine contained the worm’s source code.

Earlier Friday, investigators said, Jaschan unleashed the new “Sasser e” — a failed attempt to limit the damage caused by the four previous versions.

Frank Federau, a spokesman for the state criminal office in Hanover, said the worm was “a slightly modified form” of the program that raced around the world over the past week, exploiting a flaw in Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

“He did it with good intentions, but it had exactly the same damaging effects,” said Sascha Hanke, a Microsoft data protection official in Germany.

Like the other versions, the new variant — which notified users of a Microsoft patch against Sasser — caused computers to crash and reboot.

“The cause was erroneous programming of the virus,” Hanke said. Police have said Jaschan was responsible for all versions of Sasser as well as the “Netsky” virus.

He is being investigated on suspicion of computer sabotage, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He was released pending charges after questioning last Friday, where he admitted creating Sasser, police said.

A trial could begin at the end of June, Dyballa said.

Investigators were still examining the contents of Jaschan’s confiscated computer Monday.

“This will take quite a long time,” criminal office spokesman Detlef Ehrike said. Officials are working to prepare hundreds of pages’ worth of data for a possible court case, he said.

The teenager has told officials his original intention was to create a virus, “Netsky A,” that would combat the “Mydoom” and “Bagle” viruses, removing them from infected computers.

That led him to develop the Netsky virus further — and after modifying it created Sasser.

“He’s not stupid — he’s a really good programmer,” Dyballa said. “But I don’t know whether he was aware of the scale” of the damage.

Sasser affects computers running Windows XP or 2000.

Last Monday, the worm hit public hospitals in Hong Kong and one-third of Taiwan’s post office branches. Twenty British Airways flights were each delayed about 10 minutes Tuesday due to Sasser troubles at check-in desks, while British coast guard stations used pen and paper for charts normally generated by computer.

Waffensen residents described Jaschan as shy and withdrawn, and said he hoped to study computing after finishing high school.

“He only got involved when the talk turned to computers,” said Christian Mueller, a chef at the Eichenhof restaurant. “I’ve never heard him talk about anything else.”

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Virus Hold Computer Files ‘Hostage’ for $200 (Foxnews, 050524)

WASHINGTON — Computer users already anxious about viruses and identity theft have new reason to worry: Hackers have found a way to lock up the electronic documents on your computer and then demand $200 over the Internet to get them back.

Security researchers at San Diego-based Websense Inc. uncovered the unusual extortion plot when a corporate customer they would not identify fell victim to the infection, which encrypted files that included documents, photographs and spreadsheets.

A ransom note left behind included an e-mail address, and the attacker using the address later demanded $200 for the digital keys to unlock the files.

“This is equivalent to someone coming into your home, putting your valuables in a safe and not telling you the combination,” said Oliver Friedrichs, a security manager for Symantec Corp.

The FBI said the scheme, which appears isolated, was unlike other Internet extortion crimes. Leading security and antivirus firms this week were updating protective software for companies and consumers to guard against this type of attack, which experts dubbed “ransom-ware.”

“This seems fully malicious,” said Joe Stewart, a researcher at Chicago-based Lurqh Corp. who studied the attack software. Stewart managed to unlock the infected computer files without paying the extortion, but he worries that improved versions might be more difficult to overcome. Internet attacks commonly become more effective as they evolve over time as hackers learn to avoid the mistakes of earlier infections.

“You would have to pay the guy, or law enforcement would have to get his key to unencrypt the files,” Stewart said.

The latest danger adds to the risks facing beleaguered Internet users, who must increasingly deal with categories of threats that include spyware, viruses, worms, phishing e-mail fraud and denial of service attacks.

In the recent case, computer users could be infected by viewing a vandalized Web site with vulnerable Internet browser software. The infection locked up at least 15 types of data files and left behind a note with instructions to send e-mail to a particular address to purchase unlocking keys. In an e-mail reply, the hacker demanded $200 be wired to an Internet banking account. “I send programm to your email,” the hacker wrote.

There was no reply to e-mails sent to that address Monday by The Associated Press.

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said more familiar Internet extortion schemes involve hackers demanding tens of thousands of dollars and threatening to attack commercial Web sites, interfering with sales or stealing customer data.

Experts said there were no widespread reports the new threat was spreading, and the Web site was already shut down where the infection originally spread. They also said the hacker’s demand for payment might be his weakness, since bank transactions can be traced easily.

“The problem is getting away with it — you’ve got to send the money somewhere,” Stewart said. “If it involves some sort of monetary transaction, it’s far easier to trace than an e-mail account.”

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Tear Down That Firewall (American Spectator, 050615)

The rise of the so-called New Media, the decentralized network of non-traditional news gatherers, such as blogs and camera/cell phone-wielding, on-the-spot “reporters,” has generated much discussion over its implications for the established media. Certainly this is interesting. But perhaps a more consequential query is: What impact will the New Media have on human liberty?

For the world’s mixed bag of tyrants, despots, and other assorted authoritarians, the recent wave of information technology may have offered these corrupt rulers a first glimpse at their own mortality. As the ability to share and analyze information en masse and under the radar flourishes, dictatorial regimes everywhere will become more endangered as their ability to operate in the shadows is diminished.

Because all crooked governments rely to some degree upon dishonesty, transparency is inevitably destabilizing. North Korean political officers, for instance, have always sought to indoctrinate their people with stories about America’s hatred for North Koreans and its determination to sink their country beneath the sea.

There is a correlation between civil liberty and a free press: the more disreputable the ruler, the tighter he must control the press to legitimize his actions. A recent example occurred last week, when 46-year-old Samir Kassir, a Lebanese newspaper columnist known for his staunch criticism of the Syrian regime and its military occupation of his country, was assassinated. Lebanese authorities wasted no time pegging the blame for his car bombing death on Syrian military/intelligence agents.

Syrian President Bashar Assad did not exactly project an image of innocence when, only four days after the assassination, he spoke publicly to his party’s congress about the need to quash emerging media outlets. Assad warned that “These many inputs, especially with the evolution of communication and information technology, made the society open, and this opened the door for some confusion and suspicion in the minds of Arab youth.”

Mr. Assad inveighed, in particular, against what he sees as the hidden agenda of this new technology: “The ultimate objective of all this is the destruction of the Arab identity; for the enemies of the Arab nation are opposed to our possessing any identity or upholding any creed that could protect our existence and cohesion, guide our vision and direction, or on which we can rely in our steadfastness.” This fiction drawn by Mr. Assad is precisely the sort of fiction most vulnerable without a state-controlled press.

Mr. Assad, no doubt, resents the popularity of the New Media in the Middle East. When American forces entered Iraq, the embedded journalists were not the only sources from which Americans obtained on-the-ground reportage. As soon as Saddam’s grip on the Iraqi people was broken, Iraqis went to computers and finally began speaking their minds with unfettered candor. Popular blogging brothers Omar and Mohammed Fadhil of Iraq The Model were immediately embraced for picking up where American correspondents fell short: they published personal accounts of Iraqis experiencing the euphoria of liberation. If you peruse the “blogrolls” of Iraq The Model and other popular Iraqi blogs like Mesopotamian and Iraq at a Glance, you’ll see a vast network of freedom-minded Arabs excitedly sharing news and ideas about what’s transpiring in their backyards.

Last fall, Iran attempted to put a stop to this burgeoning, Internet-driven, reformist movement by shutting down popular websites. Many of Iran’s 15,000+ bloggers responded by changing their sites’ names as a form of protest and evasion, signaling that the Internet was not within government control. Three of the sites that were shut down — Emrooz, Rooydadnews.com, and Baamdad.tk — were later re-launched in stripped-down form, one as a blog. Apparently, Iranian officials are now contemplating replacing Iran’s Internet with an Intranet, which would cut them from the rest of the worldwide Web. For their part, Iranian bloggers express confidence in their ability to circumvent any new controls.

Chinese political leaders must sympathize with the Iranian mullahs. Almost as soon as the Internet blossomed, Chinese agencies were assigned to censor any information deemed damaging to the solidity of Communist Party power. To this day, websites in China are required to register with the government. Last year, in Tibet, Chinese authorities implemented a new rule requiring local residents to use specially issued ID cards for Internet access. This week, the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (MII) announced that by June 30, all bloggers must register with it the identity of the person responsible for a site.

After trying to register with MII, one Chinese blogger reported to the BBC that an official told him not to bother, because, “There is no chance of an independent blog getting permission to publish.”

What’s been dubbed the Great Firewall of China is that regime’s attempt to filter the information that flows into Chinese computers. To date, their success has been, at best, marginal. Many Chinese techies have managed to sidestep these blockades by setting up proxy servers, which can disguise the origins of websites.

The State Department, meanwhile, has had some success with their Voice of America e-mail broadcasts. These VOA electronic newsletters deliver a collection of articles relating to current events on the Chinese mainland that the people in the PRC would not otherwise hear. Chinese officials are constantly trying to block these VOA transmissions.

For the many Chinese-oriented Web sites based in America, the Great Firewall of China has proven to be as impenetrable as its famously porous namesake. The Web site GlobalSecurity.org attributes the rulers’ futility to “poor interagency coordination and very poor links between the central government in Beijing and the various layers of local governments that are build into the system.”

Not surprisingly, the most tyrannical regime in the world, that of North Korea, allows no freedom of the press at all. In April of last year, two trains were destroyed when freights filled with flammable gas and explosives erupted in a terrifying inferno. Initially, the blast was said to have been set off during an assassination attempt on Kim Jong Il. While hundreds perished, thousands were injured, and the surrounding town of Ryongchon was destroyed, the world was kept in a media blackout, with no camera crews permitted access. North Korean officials were hesitant to even confirm the disaster. Finally, satellite images of the devastation were acquired and widely disseminated around the world. But in North Korea, the state-run TV prohibited its citizens from seeing any images of the reality, airing instead video of military processions and patriotic music.

During Ukraine’s recent “Orange Revolution,” many Americans suffused traditional TV broadcasts with New Media reporting. By plugging into the dozens of Kiev-based blogs, people could see images and anecdotes imbued with the elated earnestness that comes with being an eyewitness to history. It’s an interesting phenomenon and demonstrably true: Excitement can travel thousands of miles through small, fiber-optic cable (or: can be uploaded, bounced off a satellite, and downloaded onto computers 20,000 miles away). For tyrants, the proliferation of communication technology is becoming their worst nightmare. Try as they might, even slick, practiced Chinese bureaucrats cannot keep pace with technology. For the world’s oppressed, New Media is transforming liberation from fantasy to a dream ever more real.

Tom Elliott works on the editorial page of the New York Sun.

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Bush labeled ‘a—hole’ in new Google bomb: President, Cabinet, Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter all targeted in vulgar filmstrip (WorldNetDaily, 050914)

President Bush is the target of a new “Google bomb” where he’s labeled an “a— hole” in a vulgar filmstrip when the graphic term is entered into the popular search engine.

A song and video critical of the president, his Cabinet and high-profile conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter appear as the sole result in Google searches when the words “a— hole” with a space between the words are put into Google’s engine, and the “I’m feeling lucky” button is punched.

A Google bomb is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by the Google search engine.

After a brief video about the impact of Hurricane Katrina, online surfers are treated to a musical series of photos of the conservatives, with captions mocking them for their perspective on current events.

For instance, Bush is shown along with the caption “Saddam has ties to al-Qaida.” A photo of Vice President Dick Cheney is included, with the caption, “Still says there are WMD.” Former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s caption reads, “A—holier than thou.” Conservative analyst Ann Coulter’s caption states, “Ann-hole (she hates your freedom).”

Other well-known figures in the video include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rev. Jerry Falwell, former presidential candidate Alan Keyes and Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly.

The site, FilmstripInternational.com, is registered to SLAB Media, based in Somerville, Mass.

“Google’s search results are objectively generated by machine algorithms,” Google spokesman Nathan Tyler told WorldNetDaily. “This is not a political statement from Google but rather a reflection of a recent Web phenomenon.”

As WND previously reported, when the words “failure” or “miserable failure” are entered into Google’s search box, the top result is the official White House biography for President Bush.

“In this case,” Tyler said, “a select group of webmasters used the words [miserable failure] to describe and link to George Bush’s website. From time-to-time, we discover focused campaigns that attempt to use links to influence Google search results. Ultimately, these efforts do not affect the overall quality of Google search results.”

Tyler did not answer a specific question about Google’s ability to prevent or change the graphic search result.

However, WND noticed that after corresponding with Google about the phenomenon, the obscene video was not always the first result when “a—hole” was used as one word, though it was always the No. 1 result during the first half of this week. When entered as two words, the vulgar filmstrip was consistent as the top result.

Google has been criticized recently for allowing ads critical of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, allegedly censoring conservative or Christian ads, and giving priority to large media companies in searches performed on Google News.

This is not the first time the A-word has been attributed to Bush by a major media group.

In November, WND exclusively reported that a photograph of President and Mrs. Bush featured in online election coverage by AOL Time Warner companies used the same slur in the coding of the picture.

The photo, which appeared on a Netscape site co-branded with CNN, originally was slugged a—hole.jpg as identified when viewers clicked on the “properties” of the picture. Though the original Web address of the photo with the slur has been disabled, readers could actually see the photo isolated with the slur by going to the online address the day after the election.

Netscape fired the employee responsible, and apologized if it offended anyone.

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Internet in U.N. hands? (Washington Times, 051108)

If you want to know why U.N. oversight of the Internet is a bad idea, look no further than two recent newspaper headlines.

The first concerns the news that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) threw its weight behind a pro-cultural protectionism treaty (in Paris late last month.) Treaty supporters want governments able to limit consumer access to foreign cultural goods, if this helps protect local cultures. A coalition of industrialized and unindustrialized states, including Canada, France and the United Kingdom, backs the treaty. The treaty amounts to a declaration of war against America’s internationally successful movie, recording and TV broadcast industries.

The treaty is worded sloppily, says Louise Oliver, U.S. Ambassador to UNESCO. During the debate over the treaty, she noted how a government, “in the name of cultural diversity, might invoke the ambiguous provisions of this convention to try to assert a right to erect trade barriers to goods or services that are deemed to be cultural expressions.”

“That term, ‘cultural expressions,’ has never been clearly defined and therefore is open to wide misinterpretation. Such protectionism would be detrimental to the free exchange of ideas and images. It could also impair the world trading system and hurt exporters of all countries,” Ambassador Oliver said.

The treaty’s backers may congratulate themselves for now but it isn’t clear how any government can insulate its population from foreign cultural “pollution” in the 21st century. The digital age makes it easy for consumers even of modest means to defy efforts to “protect” them from foreign cultural goods. The booming global trade in pirated DVDs demonstrates as much.

The day of the UNESCO decision, word came that the theocracy running Iran ordered tight restrictions on what movies can be shown in that country’s theaters. The “distribution and screening of foreign films which promote secular, feminist, liberal or nihilist ideas” is officially forbidden. Like the UNESCO treaty, Iran’s ban is a none-too-subtle shot at Hollywood.

No one should be surprised to hear Iran proudly backs the UNESCO cultural protectionism treaty. It is a member in good standing of the International Network on Cultural Policy (or INCP), an intergovernmental group based in Canada that lobbied for the treaty’s passage.

What have these two developments to do with the debate about U.N. oversight of the Internet? Well, plenty.

Many governments, such as Iran’s, fear a free flow of information via the Internet. Iran’s leaders fear the Internet for the same reason they fear foreign movies: Both expose the people to outside ideas and call the status quo into question.

It will be interesting to see if any repressive states use the UNESCO cultural protectionism treaty to legitimize their Internet censorship efforts. Watchdog groups such as the OpenNet Initiative, a freedom of Internet information study group involving collaboration between Harvard, Cambridge and the University of Toronto, will be able to tell us if they do.

While most Americans believe in the free exchange of ideas, opinions and artistic creations, as the recent hijacking of UNESCO shows, this is far from being a majority view, globally speaking. Iran used its position at UNESCO to work with like-minded states — some of which normally would treat Iran as a pariah — and pass the pro-cultural-protectionism treaty.

We cannot see the future with perfect accuracy. But let’s imagine the U.N. takes a role in Internet governance. One must wonder how much time would pass before many states involved in the UNESCO debacle organized a pro-Internet-censorship bloc and used the U.N.’s governance powers to meddle. Indeed, the INCP success in building support for the UNESCO treaty is a model any budding pro-censorship bloc could follow.

Those countries favoring the Internet’s continued free evolution would find themselves isolated and shut out, not because they were out-argued but due to simple numbers and an intolerance of dissent. This happened to the only two countries that opposed the cultural protectionism treaty — the United States and Israel.

The news about how Iran and its cohorts hijacked UNESCO should settle the matter. Should the U.N. govern the Internet? The answer must be clear and unambiguous: not now, not ever.

Neil Hrab was the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 2003 Warren T. Brookes Fellow.

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U.S. to retain oversight of Web (Washington Times, 051116)

Efforts to replace U.S. oversight of the Internet with an international committee were defeated yesterday during U.N.-sponsored meetings.

Hundreds of government, nonprofit and industry delegates meeting at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, Tunisia, agreed to establish a new international forum to discuss Internet issues, but it would not have any policy-making power.

“No new organizations were created,” said David Gross, the State Department’s Internet policy chief and head of the U.S. delegation. “No oversight mechanisms were established by anyone over anyone. There was also no change in the U.S. government’s role in relation to the Internet, and no mechanism for such a change was created.

“It was a clean sweep, I’d say.”

Several U.S. congressmen remain skeptical. Rep. John T. Doolittle, California Republican, with two other members of Congress, has introduced a resolution urging that the U.S. remain in charge of the Internet’s day-to-day operations.

“Whether they call it a ‘board’ or a ‘forum,’ it’s clear that the ultimate goal of the U.N. is still to wrest control of the Internet,” Mr. Doolittle said last night.

More than 11,000 government, business and civic leaders are in Africa for the three-day summit, which was scheduled to officially begin today and is focused on identifying ways to bridge the global “digital divide” between technology haves and have-nots. But the potential fight over future Internet governance dominated the preparatory sessions.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit based in Marina del Rey, Calif., oversees the Internet’s domain-name system under a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Commerce Department.

Many nations, including China, Brazil, Cuba and Iran, have sought to end the U.S. government’s oversight role, and the European Union recently proposed phasing out the Commerce Department’s oversight of ICANN.

U.S. government officials rejected all efforts to change the current Internet governance structure.

Mr. Gross said the new international forum, which Greece has offered to host in 2006, will be used to discuss issues related to Internet governance, from dealing with spyware and viruses to developments in electronic learning and health initiatives. It will not have any policy-making power.

The forum will be open to all public and private groups, including industry and academic specialists, he said.

The 25-nation European Union welcomed yesterday’s agreement, said Martin Selmayr, European Commission spokesman for information society and media.

“This is a very good result in terms of the internationalization of Internet governance and the more cooperative model of Internet governance,” he said. “This is a great move from unilateralism to cooperation, and the EU appreciates the huge movement made by the U.S. on this issue.”

Paul Twomey, ICANN’s president and chief executive, said the delegates fought over the role of governments, not the role of ICANN.

“This is the outcome the U.S. had wanted and ... it sounds like they headed off the efforts to shanghai ICANN,” said James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington.

He said the new forum “opens up the discussion, rather than just listening to the governments of China, India or Brazil moaning about ICANN.”

John R. Bolton, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on Monday said the U.N. summit would be worthwhile, but would not resolve an issue with so many global participants offering different opinions.

“Other governments are sophisticated enough to argue that they don’t want greater control over the Internet, they want greater benefits from it,” Mr. Bolton said at a luncheon meeting with reporters and editors at The Washington Times. “Greater benefits means a greater say in how those benefits are distributed, and that’s the camel’s nose under the tent that we have to be very careful of. Whatever happens in Tunis, I don’t think that’s the end of the issue.”

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Protect the ‘Net’ (Washington Times, 051116)

For anyone who is even slightly computer adept, the Internet has changed our world in both amazing and frustrating ways. It has made our lives easier, more difficult and, it also seems, a lot busier. In other words, the Internet is mixed blessing, but, it has to be said, it is a blessing nonetheless.

This amazing resource is, however, under attack, and anyone who cares needs to pay attention to what does on in the next few days at the World Summit on the Information Society, which starts today in Tunisia. The purpose of the meeting is to wrench stewardship of the Internet away from the United States and place it in the hands of the United Nations or associated international institutions, where governments like China and Iran would have a say in its governance. It would be a disaster.

The Internet is the epitome of freedom. It is wild, unregulated and free flowing, like a vast ocean of connections ebbing and waning. Its lightning-fast spread and influence suggest a deep atavistic resonance, a human need to stay connected and the urge to for unrestrained exploration. In many parts of the world, it is a tool for the advance of free speech and for democracy.

Family and friends in far-away places stay in touch with ease. Information, goods, pictures, music and movies are traded with a speed unimaginable just a few years ago. Web sites blossom and disappear. Bloggers challenge the conventions of the traditional news media. Dissidents in authoritarian countries can oppose their government as never before. From our homes or offices, we can access the span of human endeavor, some of which is, needless to say, very problematic — anything from textual analysis of the Bible and world literature to pornography and terrorist propaganda.

Who but Americans could have come up with such a concept? Who but Americans could have resisted placing this incredible tool in the control of the government? Grumble as we may about Washington and its ways, a philosophy of limited government still keeps Americans grounded in the world or private enterprise. This is what makes the Internet what it is.

The Internet evolved out of a Pentagon research project in the 1960s. Until 1998, it was overseen almost entirely by just one man, Jon Postel, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California. Since 1998, the Internet has been organized by a non-profit organization based in California with the acronym ICANN, which stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN manages the domain name system, the -.org, -.com, -.gov, -.net addresses, as well as all the country suffixes, serving as a clearinghouse for addresses.

The actual exchange of information takes place through a decentralized system of 13 technical centers or “root servers,” a diverse lot located at universities, NASA, U.S. military and non-profits. Ten of these root servers are in the United States. Stockholm, Amsterdam and Tokyo each have one. There is no central authority that controls the flow of all Internet traffic.

This free-wheeling state of affairs has developed strong opposition among governments that would like to control what information their citizens are allowed to access — China, Iran or Saudi Arabia come to mind — as it might lead to outbreaks of dissidence and even democracy. Others like the European Union and Canada are suspicious of anything controlled by Americans these days — even though it took American ingenuity to invent the Internet in the first place. And, of course, Secretary-General Kofi Annan of the United Nations never saw an institution he did not like and want to bring into the United Nations’ clammy embrace.

Now, control of the Internet has been on the agenda of this semi-official World Summit on the Information Society since it’s founding meeting in Geneva 2003. The U.S. government until recently played along, but in June of this year reversed its position in a brief statement issued by the Department of Commerce. The United States, it said, has no intention of giving up the Internet to the control of the United Nations or any other international institution.

Undoubtedly, this position will cause anger and hostility toward the United States at the meeting in Tunisia, but it is the right thing to do. What others should grasp is that this remarkable tool thrives under the current system of benign neglect. Preserving its relatively unregulated nature is the best thing we can do for the free flow of information worldwide.

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Misinformation Age: More computers, less learning (Weekly Standard, 060102)

We are supposed to be living in the “Information Age.” If we are, exactly what topic are people so well—informed about? Video games? The same experts who know for sure that we are in mid—Information Age take it for granted that young people are colossally uninformed. And young people are more likely than anyone else to spend long hours beating their way happily through the dense, trackless electronic jungle. They grow up with computers, the web, cell phones, hundreds of cable TV channels, and digital electronics in countless forms.

Consider the Information Age in the context of the dominant news story of recent years, the Iraq war. You can be superbly well—informed about Iraq if you follow the right websites. On the other hand, the Bush administration, the Democrats, and all the world’s intelligence services were poorly informed about Iraqi WMDs. (Although every few months, the rumor pops up that they were all relocated to Syria. Is it true? We don’t have that information.) Most people who visit Iraq nowadays remark when they get home that Americans are poorly informed about the situation on the ground. And leading Democrats presuppose a second layer of misinformation: When they accuse the administration of misleading the nation about WMDs, they assume that the public is badly informed about the extent to which the Democrats (along with everyone else) were badly informed. It’s true that Iraq was and is an Information Age war. The coalition war effort would have been radically different without networks and digital electronics. But many people have not been so informed.

Returning to young people (the cultural climate affects young people most)-either the Information Age is real, and they would be even less well—informed without it (which is hard to picture); or it’s a fraud and has failed to help or actually made things worse. The more carefully we ponder the facts, the more unsettling they become. And this issue is important. We can’t abolish the Cybersphere, and few people would choose to. But that doesn’t mean we have to take it as it is and like it and keep quiet. There is remarkably little commentary on the Cybersphere beyond consumer—level recommendations. You’d have thought Cybersphere criticism would be nearly as well developed as literary criticism by now. It isn’t.

So what’s the truth about the Information Age?

We can all agree that American public schools are a joke, and are more responsible than anything else for rising levels of public ignorance. Endless illustrations are available, but take just one for concreteness. Consider the contrast between mathematics and history. History teaching has been raked by heavy fire from ed—school ideologues for several decades. College—preparatory math classes have been relatively undamaged. In consequence, serious math teaching has made no progress but has (at least) held its own. History teaching has fallen to pieces.

College—preparatory math had been making steady progress. Before World War II, most incoming college freshmen weren’t prepared for calculus. By the 1960s, good colleges had cut out teaching any math course below calculus. In the late ‘60s, math—teaching moved a step higher: High schools started teaching calculus, and smart college freshmen routinely enrolled in second—year calculus courses. Since then, progress has stopped. Today most public high schools offer essentially the same math sequences they did a generation ago.

History has (predictably) been much harder hit. In the early 1970s, many good students took a year—long college—level (“Advanced Placement”) survey course in modern European history, and another in American history. Since then, modern educational techniques have worked an outright miracle. Today most incoming college students don’t seem to know any history at all. (Except what they’ve learned by themselves, or their parents have taught them.) The high school history textbooks favored by public schools here in southern Connecticut are pathetic. Their left—wing bias is blatant; the authors don’t even try to hide it. Maybe they don’t even see it. Recently, a graduate student at a major research university told me that she knew doctoral candidates in humanities departments who had never heard of (for example) Devil’s Island and the Dreyfus Affair. They will soon be turned loose on the world as aspiring young scholars.

It’s unfair to expect computers and the web to fix what the schools have broken. It is fair to ask whether the digital jungle has made things better or worse.

Of course it makes some people better informed, in some areas. But what’s the overall pattern? We’ve heard about it for years: “narrowcasting” as opposed to broadcasting. As information channels become cheaper to build and operate, they are able to concentrate profitably on narrower ranges of material. The pattern is obvious in the cable TV explosion (made possible by digital electronics). TV watchers have hundreds of channels to choose from; most are one—topic channels or movie channels. websites and blogs have been this way from the start: Most successful blogs cover one topic in depth (or anyway, at length).

For years people have discussed narrowcasting and its side effects. In the pre—cable days, there were only three TV networks, and a large proportion of all TV watchers would be tuned into one of them. The networks had a unifying effect on American culture. You could count on loads of people having seen the same junk you had. And the networks used to cover presidential nominating conventions, major presidential speeches and press conferences, big public events like space shots, and so on. This sort of unifying cultural force no longer exists.

Of course, the heyday of the TV networks themselves only lasted three decades (‘50s—’70s). Is it (perhaps) normal for U.S. culture to lack unifying influences? No. Before the TV networks, there were radio networks and mass—market picture magazines. Before that there were other sorts of magazines and, of course, books. (Abraham Lincoln famously remarked that Uncle Tom’s Cabin caused the Civil War. He was kidding; but not entirely.) In the United States, with its hugeness and ethnic hodgepodge, there have always been powerful centrifugal forces just beneath the surface. Those who are eager to grind under heel (like cigarette butts) every manifestation of religion in public life should keep in mind that Judeo—Christian religion and the Bible have, traditionally, been the most important unifying forces in American life. (But, of course, many of those who would love to stamp out all traces of public religion would also love to see the country deteriorate into a messy mass of separate subcultures.)

In the Information Age, it’s easy for people to stick with the topics they know and love. It’s easy to watch nothing but fashion and gardening shows, or the news 24 hours a day. It’s easy to read blogs that all focus on the same topic. Some people grow better and better informed about their topics of choice. Others just watch, read, or hear the same story (with minor variations) over and over and over-and grow less likely every month to meet with anything new.

Few of us are immune to the temptations. I’m certainly not. I have two boys, and the three of us are capable of sitting still for any number of World War II documentaries on cable TV; in fact, for any number of “The P—47 in the European Air War, 1943” documentaries. Each one teaches us a little more. But after a certain point, it becomes clear that each hour you spend this way is more apt to decrease than increase your store of knowledge-when you consider the other things you might be doing instead.

Of course the cybersphere is brand new, and things are bound to change. Two good developments are all but inevitable.

First: There’s one specialized field that draws a broad instead of narrow audience; that expands instead of narrows a person’s viewpoint. Namely, beautiful prose. At some point we will see a (sort—of) blog that does (in a bloggish sort of way) what the New Yorker did in the 1930s and ‘40s. It will publish paragraphs and short pieces on any topic, from no particular ideological angle. New pieces will appear every day, around the clock. Each will be lucidly written and precisely, beautifully edited. People will read for the sheer joy of reading. Information—Agers who don’t know what good prose is will be dazzled and won over.

Second: Search engines are riding high, but they solve only half the problem. If you know what you’re looking for, they help you find it. But people don’t only want to search, they want to browse. Before long there will be websites that let you flip through dozens of other sites as easily as you flip through a magazine’s pages; as easily as you browse lots of magazines at a newsstand.

But it’s clear what the web’s most important contribution to a well—informed public will be. Web—based schools will enormously expand our educational options, and make it much easier than it is today to circumvent educationally corrupt local schools. Many such web projects are already underway and doing fine.

The most important solution to the problematic Information Age has nothing to do with the web. Eventually we will get over the idea that playing with computers and the Internet is inherently virtuous. Schools ought to take the same line on web—browsing as they do on poker; it can be profitable if you’re lucky, but do it on your own time. It’s true that some schools have made sound educational use of computers and software. But my guess is that, on balance, American schools would do better if they junked their Macs and PCs and let students fool around somewhere else. Schools should be telling students to read books, not play with computers.

David Gelernter is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. His book on Americanism is due to be published by Doubleday in 2006.

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Computer Worm Threatens Major Destruction Friday (Foxnews, 060131)

NEW YORK — Friday may be D-day, as in “destruction day,” for millions of Windows computer users.

That’s the day a notably pesky e-mail worm, variously called “Nyxem.E,” “CME-24,” “BlackWorm,” “Mywife.E,” “KamaSutra” and “VB.bi,” among other names, is set to detonate its deadly payload.

Once activated, the worm will corrupt all documents on a infected machine with the following file extensions: .dmp, .doc, .mdb, .mde, .pdf, .psd, .ppt, .pps, .rar, .xls and .zip.

That means almost all files created using Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel or Microsoft PowerPoint could be lost forever, as well as “raw” Adobe Photoshop files, PDF files used by Adobe Acrobat and competing PDF readers, and several kinds of database and compression files.

Hundreds of thousands of Windows machines are believed to have already been infected, mostly in India, Peru, Turkey and Italy, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for Finnish security company F-Secure Corp.

The worm also tries to disable anti-virus software that is out of date, Hypponen said. Thus, users should make sure their software is turned on and has the latest definitions, generally available for free from the software vendor’s Web site.

“If you are infected, and you find out about it today, you still have time to get rid of the virus,” Hypponen said.

Nyxem.E hasn’t spread as far or as fast as many recent e-mail worms. But worms these days are generally meant to help spammers and hackers carry out attacks, not destroy files, so the impact this time may be more severe.

Microsoft Corp. issued an advisory Tuesday warning customers about the worm, which affects most versions of Windows.

Users should be safe if they have the latest anti-virus software or if their computers are set with limited privileges, a common setting in larger organizations.

They are vulnerable if they, like many small business and home users, leave their computers set with full administrative rights.

Users should also check the date on the computer. The worm hits the third of every month, so if the computer’s local calendar settings are off, Hypponen said, files may be destroyed sooner or later, even if the computer is never turned on Friday.

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Web 2.0: The second generation of the Internet has arrived. It’s worse than you think. (Weekly Standard, 060215)

THE ANCIENTS were good at resisting seduction. Odysseus fought the seductive song of the Sirens by having his men tie him to the mast of his ship as it sailed past the Siren’s Isle. Socrates was so intent on protecting citizens from the seductive opinions of artists and writers, that he outlawed them from his imaginary republic.

We moderns are less nimble at resisting great seductions, particularly those utopian visions that promise grand political or cultural salvation. From the French and Russian revolutions to the counter-cultural upheavals of the ‘60s and the digital revolution of the ‘90s, we have been seduced, time after time and text after text, by the vision of a political or economic utopia.

Rather than Paris, Moscow, or Berkeley, the grand utopian movement of our contemporary age is headquartered in Silicon Valley, whose great seduction is actually a fusion of two historical movements: the counter-cultural utopianism of the ‘60s and the techno-economic utopianism of the ‘90s. Here in Silicon Valley, this seduction has announced itself to the world as the “Web 2.0” movement.

LAST WEEK, I was treated to lunch at a fashionable Japanese restaurant in Palo Alto by a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who, back in the dot.com boom, had invested in my start-up Audiocafe.com. The entrepreneur, like me a Silicon Valley veteran, was pitching me his latest start-up: a technology platform that creates easy-to-use software tools for online communities to publish weblogs, digital movies, and music. It is technology that enables anyone with a computer to become

an author, a film director, or a musician. This Web 2.0 dream is Socrates’s nightmare: technology that arms every citizen with the means to be an opinionated artist or writer.

“This is historic,” my friend promised me. “We are enabling Internet users to author their own content. Think of it as empowering citizen media. We can help smash the elitism of the Hollywood studios and the big record labels. Our technology platform will radically democratize culture, build authentic community, create citizen media.” Welcome to Web 2.0.

Buzzwords from the old dot.com era—like “cool,” “eyeballs,” or “burn-rate”—have been replaced in Web 2.0 by language which is simultaneously more militant and absurd: Empowering citizen media, radically democratize, smash elitism, content redistribution, authentic community . . . . This sociological jargon, once the preserve of the hippie counterculture, has now become the lexicon of new media capitalism.

Yet this entrepreneur owns a $4 million house a few blocks from Steve Jobs’s house. He vacations in the South Pacific. His children attend the most exclusive private academy on the peninsula. But for all of this he sounds more like a cultural Marxist—a disciple of Gramsci or Herbert Marcuse—than a capitalist with an MBA from Stanford.

In his mind, “big media”—the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and international publishing houses—really did represent the enemy. The promised land was user-generated online content. In Marxist terms, the traditional media had become the exploitative “bourgeoisie,” and citizen media, those heroic bloggers and podcasters, were the “proletariat.”

This outlook is typical of the Web 2.0 movement, which fuses ‘60s radicalism with the utopian eschatology of digital technology. The ideological outcome may be trouble for all of us.

SO WHAT, exactly, is the Web 2.0 movement? As an ideology, it is based upon a series of ethical assumptions about media, culture, and technology. It worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone—even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us—can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 “empowers” our creativity, it “democratizes” media, it “levels the playing field” between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is “elitist” traditional media.

Empowered by Web 2.0 technology, we can all become citizen journalists, citizen videographers, citizen musicians. Empowered by this technology, we will be able to write in the morning, direct movies in the afternoon, and make music in the evening.

Sounds familiar? It’s eerily similar to Marx’s seductive promise about individual self-realization in his German Ideology:

Whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley. The movement bridges counter-cultural radicals of the ‘60s such as Steve Jobs with the contemporary geek culture of Google’s Larry Page. Between the book-ends of Jobs and Page lies the rest of Silicon Valley including radical communitarians like Craig Newmark (of Craigslist.com), intellectual property communists such as Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig, economic cornucopians like Wired magazine editor Chris “Long Tail” Anderson, and new media moguls Tim O’Reilly and John Batelle.

The ideology of the Web 2.0 movement was perfectly summarized at the Technology Education and Design (TED) show in Monterey, last year, when Kevin Kelly, Silicon Valley’s über-idealist and author of the Web 1.0 Internet utopia Ten Rules for The New Economy, said:

Imagine Mozart before the technology of the piano. Imagine Van Gogh before the technology of affordable oil paints. Imagine Hitchcock before the technology of film. We have a moral obligation to develop technology.

But where Kelly sees a moral obligation to develop technology, we should actually have—if we really care about Mozart, Van Gogh and Hitchcock—a moral obligation to question the development of technology.

The consequences of Web 2.0 are inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts. Its empowering promises play upon that legacy of the ‘60s—the creeping narcissism that Christopher Lasch described so presciently, with its obsessive focus on the realization of the self.

Another word for narcissism is “personalization.” Web 2.0 technology personalizes culture so that it reflects ourselves rather than the world around us. Blogs personalize media content so that all we read are our own thoughts. Online stores personalize our preferences, thus feeding back to us our own taste. Google personalizes searches so that all we see are advertisements for products and services we already use.

Instead of Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock, all we get with the Web 2.0 revolution is more of ourselves.

STILL, the idea of inevitable technological progress has become so seductive that it has been transformed into “laws.” In Silicon Valley, the most quoted of these laws, Moore’s Law, states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, thus doubling the memory capacity of the personal computer every two years. On one level, of course, Moore’s Law is real and it has driven the Silicon Valley economy. But there is an unspoken ethical dimension to Moore’s Law. It presumes that each advance in technology is accompanied by an equivalent improvement in the condition of man.

But as Max Weber so convincingly demonstrated, the only really reliable law of history is the Law of Unintended Consequences.

We know what happened first time around, in the dot.com boom of the ‘90s. At first there was irrational exuberance. Then the dot.com bubble popped; some people lost a lot of money and a lot of people lost some money. But nothing really changed. Big media remained big media and almost everything else—with the exception of Amazon.com and eBay—withered away.

This time, however, the consequences of the digital media revolution are much more profound. Apple and Google and Craigslist really are revolutionizing our cultural habits, our ways of entertaining ourselves, our ways of defining who we are. Traditional “elitist” media is being destroyed by digital technologies. Newspapers are in freefall. Network television, the modern equivalent of the dinosaur, is being shaken by TiVo’s overnight annihilation of the 30-second commercial. The iPod is undermining the multibillion dollar music industry. Meanwhile, digital piracy, enabled by Silicon Valley hardware and justified by Silicon Valley intellectual property communists such as Larry Lessig, is draining revenue from established artists, movie studios, newspapers, record labels, and song writers.

Is this a bad thing? The purpose of our media and culture industries—beyond the obvious need to make money and entertain people—is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent. Our traditional mainstream media has done this with great success over the last century. Consider Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo and a couple of other brilliantly talented works of the same name Vertigo: the 1999 book called Vertigo, by Anglo-German writer W.G. Sebald, and the 2004 song “Vertigo,” by Irish rock star Bono. Hitchcock could never have made his expensive, complex movies outside the Hollywood studio system. Bono would never have become Bono without the music industry’s super-heavyweight marketing muscle. And W.G. Sebald, the most obscure of this trinity of talent, would have remained an unknown university professor had a high-end publishing house not had the good taste to discover and distribute his work. Elite artists and an elite media industry are symbiotic. If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural “flattening.” No more Hitchcocks, Bonos, or Sebalds. Just the flat noise of opinion—Socrates’s nightmare.

WHILE SOCRATES correctly gave warning about the dangers of a society infatuated by opinion in Plato’s Republic, more modern dystopian writers—Huxley, Bradbury, and Orwell—got the Web 2.0 future exactly wrong. Much has been made, for example, of the associations between the all-seeing, all-knowing qualities of Google’s search engine and the Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But Orwell’s fear was the disappearance of the individual right to self-expression. Thus Winston Smith’s great act of rebellion in Nineteen Eight-Four was his decision to pick up a rusty pen and express his own thoughts:

The thing that he was about to do was open a diary. This was not illegal, but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death . . . Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off . . . He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act.

In the Web 2.0 world, however, the nightmare is not the scarcity, but the over-abundance of authors. Since everyone will use digital media to express themselves, the only decisive act will be to not mark the paper. Not writing as rebellion sounds bizarre—like a piece of fiction authored by Franz Kafka. But one of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 future may well be that everyone is an author, while there is no longer any audience.

SPEAKING OF KAFKA, on the back cover of the January 2006 issue of Poets and Writers magazine, there is a seductive Web 2.0 style advertisement which reads:

Kafka toiled in obscurity and died penniless. If only he’d had a website . . . .

Presumably, if Kafka had had a website, it would be located at kafka.com which is today an address owned by a mad left-wing blog called The Biscuit Report. The front page of this site quotes some words written by Kafka in his diary:

I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can’t even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk . . .

One of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 movement may well be that we fall, collectively, into the amnesia that Kafka describes. Without an elite mainstream media, we will lose our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard. The cultural consequences of this are dire, requiring the authoritative voice of at least an Allan Bloom, if not an Oswald Spengler. But here in Silicon Valley, on the brink of the Web 2.0 epoch, there no longer are any Blooms or Spenglers. All we have is the great seduction of citizen media, democratized content and authentic online communities. And weblogs, course. Millions and millions of blogs.

Andrew Keen is a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur and digital media critic. He blogs at TheGreatSeduction.com and has recently launched aftertv.com, a podcast chat show about media, culture, and technology.

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The Internet jihad (Washington Times, 060228)

A troubling video of an insurgent sniper in Iraq known only as “Juba” is spreading across the Internet. As National Public Radio describes it, in the professional-quality video, “Juba” is quiet, efficient and ruthless as he trains his sights on American soldiers and pulls the trigger. Jihadist messages accompany the grisly footage — in English. The video’s colloquial American vernacular strongly suggests the video was either made in the United States or by people deeply familiar with this country — and skilled in the use of the latest technologies.

“Juba” is just the latest indication of the frightening success of the Internet jihad. “Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today’s media age, but... our country has not,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said despondently earlier this month. Whether the United States is “losing” this high-technology war is debatable, but clearly we suffer critical losses the moment a “Juba” video in English comes into existence and spreads around the world.

It’s not just furtive recordings, videos, Web sites and e-mails; it’s proactive attacks on our own media outlets, too. In the weeks after her Web site published the Danish Muhammad cartoons, syndicated columnist and popular conservative blogger Michelle Malkin suffered repeated illegal “denial of service” attacks which incapacitated the site for hours. The attacks, traced to computers in Turkey, were dispersed once the Turkish Web-hosting company was notified. From here it is up to U.S. and Turkish authorities to pursue the hackers. No doubt many of them will elude consequences, however.

Mrs. Malkin’s experience is hardly unique: Hundreds of sites are hacked each year by technologically savvy Islamists and their sympathizers. In fact, at least one official Iranian government newspaper bragged recently of hacking “enemy” Danish and European Web sites in the wake of the Muhammad cartoon affair. Other militant Islamists have been credited with similar successes.

The United States is not paralyzed in the face of Internet jihad. We have tools to combat it, but they are the familiar ones: Tracing terrorist cells, unravelling technical clues and arresting the offenders. We should realize that there is no real technical fix for most of the Internet jihad — although technical know-how is of the utmost importance — and much depends on the cooperation of allies with whom the United States maintains extradition treaties. Arresting offenders sends the message that malefactors deserve: Do not collaborate with militant Islam, or else risk arrest, extradition and prosecution. This method is being tested today: Authorities in the United Kingdom are currently trying to extradite Babar Ahmad, a 32-year-old information-technology professional accused of running American Web sites that promote and support militant Islam. The particulars of this case are debated, but the implication is not.

Technical capability will matter much more in cases like Iran’s alleged hacking successes. Government-sponsored attacks must be confronted by the U.S. government’s best information-technology specialists in coordination with affected American companies and citizens. We are a wealthier and more technologically capable society than Iran’s; we can win this war.

“Today we are fighting the first war in the era of email, blogs, blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras, the Internet” and other technologies, Mr. Rumsfeld observed. That is surely true. It’s time for the United States to act. The “Juba” video undoubtedly exhibits digital clues and fingerprints; we would expect that U.S. authorities will investigate, track and prosecute its creators.

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Google in the Garden of Good and Evil: How the search-engine giant moved beyond mere morality. (Weekly Standard, 060503)

IS GOOGLE GOOD OR EVIL? In Silicon Valley, Google’s moral code is a contentious issue. To its local boosters, Google can do no ill; but to critics on both the left and the right, Google epitomizes all the worst hubris, hypocrisy, and greed of the dot.com era.

“Take their work in Africa,” one idealistic entrepreneur, a Google booster, told me, at a recent technology summit. “Bank rolling the $100 laptop for African kids proves their commitment to human rights and universal justice.”

“Google’s China policy is much more revealing,” counters a Google critic, an equally idealistic software engineer. “Google sold out to the communists. They couldn’t care less about the rights of ordinary Chinese citizens.”

Might Google be so unconventional as to exist outside traditional moral categories, to be simultaneously good and evil? On the Internet, anything is possible

THE MOUNTAIN VIEW-BASED Google is certainly an unusual company. Any search for Google’s morality begins, naturally enough, at google.com—it’s such an intelligent search engine that it knows itself. Entering the keywords “unconventional company” into google.com leads to a web of links about Google itself, all describing the Fortune 500 company as the most unconventional of American enterprises.

But artificial intelligence only goes so far. No Internet algorithm, even one authored by Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page, can explain the company’s moral code. To answer this question, we must go offline, to Charles Taylor’s 1991 study of unconventionality, The Ethics of Authenticity.

Taylor traces the modern idea of individual authenticity back to Rousseau’s romantic theory of

the self. Taylor says that this conception of the individual transforms truth into a subjective notion that is peculiar to each individual soul. Thus, an established moral code or social convention means nothing to each individual. Only the self, in all its authentic glory, can encode its own morality. As Taylor writes:

Being true to myself means being true to my own originality, and that is something only I can articulate and discover.

Consequently, each unconventional soul becomes, in the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, “enclosed in their own hearts.” Originality replaces a common ethical code as the source of individual morality. The result is the countercultural ethic of “doing your own thing” in which everyone is free to pursue their own conscience.

This ethic of authenticity is the key to understanding Google and, as a bonus, gives us a sneak preview of the next big thing in the global economy: authentic capitalism.

TWO YEARS AGO, Google attached an open letter to its April 29, 2004 IPO filing. Authored by Sergei Brin and Larry Page and entitled “An Owners’ Manual,” it represented a confession of Google’s core business and ethical principles. The letter began in a militantly authentic voice:

Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.

The Google guys, whose close partnership is rooted in their shared unwillingness to make ethical compromises, went on to promise investors that they would continue to do their own thing. Above all, that meant making money and “having a positive impact on the world.”

Once authentic, always authentic. Two years after its unconventional IPO, Google continues to do its own thing. The denizens of the Googleplex continue to revolutionize the online search and advertising businesses. Google’s shares now stand above $400, having more than quadrupled since the IPO. Profits are up, increasing 60% in the first quarter of 2006. Today, Google is increasingly perceived by both Wall Street and Silicon Valley as the next Microsoft.

But beyond its meteoric economic success, Google’s unconventionality is as much ethical as operational. The company aggressively conforms to two laws, one economic, the other moral; laws that Max Weber would call the ethic of responsibility and the ethic of conviction. One the one hand, Google is a Wall Street paragon of economic profitability, responsibly returning profits for its investors quarter after quarter; on the other, Google is unashamedly committed to the public good, to improving the lives of as many people as possible, to being trustworthy and pursuing the public good.

THIS DUALITY can be seen in the company’s strategies in China and Africa. In China, Google places profit squarely over morality; in Africa, the priorities are reversed.

Google’s strategy in China, from early 2000 onwards, was to build a Chinese language version of its search engine that would mirror the content on the English language google.com. But on September 3, 2002, the Chinese government, deploying the so-called Great Firewall of China, shut down the Chinese language version of google.com because domestic Chinese Internet users had been using the uncensored search

engine to access forbidden websites.

The company was faced with a joint ethical and business dilemma. It could either negotiate a compromise with the Chinese government or effectively cede the Chinese market to local search engine Baidu. Brin, Page, and company CEO Eric Schmidt chose to do business with the authorities in Beijing and build a “customized solution” for the China market.

In December 2005, Google signed a deal with the Chinese government that enabled the company to establish a legal presence in China. On January 27 of this year, the newly-engineered search engine “google.cn” launched. In contrast with the original Google Chinese language site in China (which continued to hobble along, ever vulnerable to the capricious whims of the Great Firewall), google.cn is censored. The Google engineers added an algorithm which replicated the ideological desires of the authorities in Beijing. As Clive Johnson explained in a recent New York Times magazine piece about Google in China:

Brin’s team had one more challenge to confront: how to determine which sites to block? The Chinese government wouldn’t give them a list. So Google’s engineers hit on a high-tech solution. They set up a computer inside China and programmed it to try to access Web sites outside the country, one after another. If a site was blocked by the firewall, it meant the government regarded it as illicit—so it became part of Google’s blacklist.

Google chose to mimic the Great Firewall. Everything that the Chinese government blocks, Google also blocks. Sensitive links, to Falun Gong, Tibetan opposition, or Tiananmen Square commemoration sites, no longer appear—instead, google.cn informs its users that the requested information is not available due to Chinese law. The presence of this information is, therefore, defined by its absence, by its holes rather than its wholeness. It’s a scheme which might have been imagined by Kafka or Orwell.

On January 6 of this year, three weeks before google.cn launched, I attended Google co-founder Larry Page’s keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Unsurprisingly, Page didn’t speak about his China strategy. Instead he romanticized the bright side of Google’s moral equation—their Africa policy:

Now let me switch gears to talk about a very serious issue. About 15% of the people in the world are on the Internet right now—15%. We still have a huge way to go to get everyone online. . . . If you look at a picture of earth from space at night, you’ll see that anywhere there’s electric light, there’s Internet, and anywhere there’s Internet people are using Google. It all corresponds perfectly. But it’s very sad that, for example, there are almost no queries coming from anywhere in Africa. I think that’s an important thing to work on.

But in spite of this “sad” reality, Page had been “working on” a solution for the poverty of queries emanating out of the electronically dark African continent:

To try to help this, something we’ve been supporting is the MIT $100 Laptop Project. . . . It’s a very cool project and they have very ambitious goals for it. They want to actually get 100 million of these out in the hands of children worldwide. It’s also a very cool device, with a half a gigahertz processor, 128 megs of RAM and 500 megs of flash. And they’re also doing a lot of cool things to get the price down. But I think it’s really important to get devices like that out there in the world to give people greater access.

Getting a laptop into the hands of every African child isn’t just a dream. In February of this year, a few weeks after Page’s CES speech, Google announced the appointment of Silicon Valley visionary Larry Brilliant as executive director of Google.org—the company’s $1 billion philanthropic arm. In a February 23 interview with Wired magazine, Brilliant articulated the value of providing underprivileged African children with laptop computers and wi-fi Internet access:

I envision a kid [in Africa] getting online and finding that there is an outbreak of cholera down the street.

SO HOW CAN WE EXPLAIN Google’s seemingly irreconcilable Africa and China strategies—one so morally wholesome, the other so full of ethical holes? One explanation, of course, is hypocrisy. Many critics, particularly those on the traditional left, argue that Page and Brin are capitalist hypocrites, no different from the robber barons of the 19th century, making an ill-gotten fortune out of China and then easing their consciences on meretricious humanitarian gestures in Africa. Neither Larry Page’s humanitarian trips to Ethiopia nor the philanthropy of Google.org, critics argue, have any significance beyond the symbolic. As the neo-Marxist cultural critic Slavoj Zizek notes in a recent London Review of Books essay, the Google founders are “liberal communists” whose “frictionless capitalism” allows them to simultaneously flatten the world economy, make a fortune, and feel ethically good about themselves.

But Zizek’s interpretation of Google’s ethical hypocrisy falls into the classic Marxist trap of explaining human motivation purely in terms of material greed. Hypocrisy might be the right word to describe Google’s brand of morality—but I would argue that this is a hypocrisy rooted in values, not economic self-interest. Google’s moral code reflects the unconventional values of its founders. It represents the hypocrisy of authentic capitalism.

Much has been made of the Google dictum which states: “Our informal corporate motto is ‘Don’t be evil.’” But this Manichean distinction is beside the point. To the founders of Google, more important than being either good or evil is being true—true to oneself and true to one’s principles. Google’s moral code represents the capitalism of authenticity. It’s what makes Google different.

Page and Brin’s faith in themselves and in Google are absolute. They are authentic and they have transmitted their personal authenticity into their company. So if Google says something is good, like say, the importance of being part of the Internet in China, then it must be good. If Google says something is evil, like, say, the absence of the Internet in Africa, then it must be evil.

Google’s authentic capitalism means that any moral argument is valid, provided that the Google guys believe it. Clive Johnson, in his New York Times magazine piece, puts it succinctly, describing Google’s China policy as being defined by the company’s “halcyon concept of itself”:

The carrot was Google’s halcyon concept of itself, the belief that merely by improving access to information in an authoritarian country, it would be doing good. Certainly, the company’s officials figured, it could do better than the local Chinese firms, which acquiesce to the censorship regime with a shrug. Sure, Google would have to censor the most politically sensitive Web sites—religious groups, democracy groups, memorials of the Tiananmen Square massacre—along with pornography. But that was only a tiny percentage of what Chinese users search for on Google. Google could still improve Chinese citizens’ ability to learn about AIDS, environmental problems, avian flu, world markets.

Johnson goes on to quote Brin on why Google decided to collude with the authorities in Beijing.

Revenue, Brin told me, wasn’t a big part of the equation. He said he thought it would be years before Google would make much if any profit in China. In fact, he argued, going into China “wasn’t as much a business decision as a decision about getting people information. And we decided in the end that we should make this compromise.”

One could argue with Brin’s logic, but not with his belief in the virtue of his own argument. The unconventional Brin has so much faith in his own moral judgment that he felt completely confident he could make the right ethical decision on China.

So, is Google good or is Google evil?

Perhaps the best answer is the Nietzschean idea of being beyond good and evil. The ethic of authenticity, known to philosophers like Charles Taylor as radical moral relativism, is the new new-thing in Silicon Valley. Google’s moral self confidence, its eagerness to do its own thing, whether in Africa, China, or outer space, makes it a pioneer of authentic capitalism. Google’s moral code, its sense of right and wrong, its definition of justice, is what it says it is.

Andrew Keen is a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur and digital media critic. His book, The Great Seduction, will be published by Currency/Doubleday in 2007.

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Professor: BlackBerry Addiction Lawsuits Likely in Future (Foxnews, 060825)

TORONTO — Keeping employees on electronic leashes such as laptops, BlackBerries and other devices that keep them constantly connected to the office could soon lead to lawsuits by those who grow addicted to the technology, a U.S. academic warns.

In a follow-up to an earlier paper on employees’ tech addictions, Gayle Porter, associate professor of management at the Rutgers University School of Business in Camden, N.J., has written a paper that states workers whose personal lives suffer as a result of tech addictions could turn their sights on their employers.

“These people that can’t keep it within any reasonable parameters and have these problems in their lives at some point may say: ‘My life is not all that great. How did this happen? Who can I blame for this?’,” Porter, who co-authored the study with two other academics, said in an interview on Thursday. “And they’re going to say, ‘The company’.”

The paper, which is still under review and expected to be published in an academic journal in the near future, highlights the potential for fallout resulting from technologies initially aimed at boosting a company’s productivity.

But instead of increased efficiency, lawsuits against employers who supply workers with gadgets are “very possible,” she says.

Research In Motion Ltd.’s (RIMM) BlackBerry wireless device — jokingly dubbed the “CrackBerry” by some — is well known for what some describe as its addictive properties.

In most major North American and European cities, businesspeople can be seen gazing nose-down into their BlackBerry screens, tapping out terse e-mails.

Porter says she isn’t picking on RIM or the BlackBerry in particular, but notes that terms like “CrackBerry” show that “there is, however lightheartedly, some acknowledgment that many people have kind of gotten out of control with using these devices.”

Others complain of simply being unable to unplug at home, with laptops, e-mails or conference calls keeping them working into the wee hours.

Addiction to technology — blamed by critics on the seeming ubiquity of portable e-mail devices, smartphones, cellphones and laptops, coupled with long working hours — is hardly a new phenomenon.

But Porter argues litigation could be the next step, as employees seek redress for technology dependence.

She predicts companies could use a free-will argument in defending themselves: “They’re going to, I would suspect, say that this was an individual choice.”

A RIM spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment.

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Wikipedia Editor Out After False Credentials Revealed (Foxnews, 070307)

NEW YORK — Wikipedia, the controversial online encyclopedia, is planning to ask its army of faceless Internet editors — known as Wikipedians — to verify their credentials after one of the most prolific of their number was exposed as a fraud.

The online reference work was dealt a serious blow last week as it emerged that EssJay, a Wikipedia editor understood by the site and its users to be a tenured professor of religion at a private university with expertise in canon law, was in fact a 24-year-old from Kentucky called Ryan Jordan with no higher educational qualifications to speak of.

What is more, Mr. Jordan’s expertise and dedication to the site seemed so great that he was given a full-time job at another company run by Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder.

After initially ignoring the problem, Mr. Wales has since asked Mr. Jordan to resign from Wikia, the Internet company he controls, and has removed him from the Wikipedia Web site.

Wikipedia has come under fire from all sides amid claims that much of its content is unreliable and prone to Internet vandals who deliberately print false information on the Web site.

The EssJay affair, which has enraged critics and supporters of Wikipedia in equal measure, is the most serious instance of fraud experienced by the Web site so far.

The Wikipedia founder was in Japan when the EssJay fraud was exposed in the U.S.

Mr. Wales said the site and its users will soon devise a scheme to adequately check credentials of those Wikipedia editors who claim to possess them.

But Wikipedia, by its nature, is self-policing and its experts are not required to have credentials, so a valid check will be hard to implement.

“I don’t think this incident exposes any inherent weakness in Wikipedia, but it does expose a weakness that we will be working to address,” Mr. Wales said. “The only thing inherent in the Wikipedia model is a volunteer effort to create the highest possible quality encyclopedia.”

Mr. Wales told The Times that he is “personally saddened” by the identity fraud in one of his most trusted editors, and confessed that he did not take the issue as seriously as he should have done.

Mr. Wales first thought Mr. Jordan was merely using a false identity to protect himself from online cranks and maintains that his 20,000 or more entries in the Wikipedia have never been called into question.

“He got himself into this years ago, and kept it up because he saw no way out,” the Wikipedia founder said. “He started his deception before we became friends, and I was not particularly aware of his alleged credentials. I know him as an excellent editor.”

Mr. Wales admitted that Wikipedia users and editors alike operate using a much higher degree of trust than many in the real world find unusual, but that the Wiki model had weeded out a falsehood in the end.

“Mr. Ryan was a friend, and still is a friend,” the Wikipedia founder said. “He is a young man, and he has offered me a heartfelt personal apology, which I have accepted. I hope the world will let him go in peace to build an honorable life and reputation.”

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Three Strikes for ‘.XXX’ Domain (Christian Post, 070401)

The hotly contested “.xxx” domain—which would have drawn in and regulated porn sites that currently exist within the “.com,” “.biz,” “.org,” or “.net” domains.—was rejected for a third time on Friday.

Christians expressed their approval over the ruling, saying that the bill was rightly rejected because it would have increased the problems among pornography use on the internet. They added that children would be exposed to pornographic images more readily, and it would increase accessibility.

“When it comes to deciding between protecting the profits of pornographers and protecting children, our children come first,” said Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) special counsel Patrick Trueman, in a statement. “The proposed ‘.xxx’ domain offered nothing but false hope to those wanting to keep Internet pornography from children. Pornographers would simply expand to ‘.xxx’ and maintain their current .com sites, perhaps doubling the number of porn sites and doubling their menace to society.”

Before the proposal was defeated by a 9-5 vote Friday, many had criticized the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) – the international board that manages Internet domain names – for reviving the proposal in January after Florida-based ICM Registry LLC agreed to hire independent organizations to monitor porn sites’ compliance with the new rules. ICM, a startup that handles Web-site registrations with the aim of overseeing sites that want to have the “.xxx” Internet suffix, first floated the “.xxx” proposal seven years ago. ICANN has been accused of trying to gain money since each site would have a $60 annual fee paid to the board.

The .xxx domain was one of the few issues where online pornographers and Christians shared a common view on. Christians were worried that the new domain would legitimize the adult video industry, and that it would be even more difficult to protect children from mature content sites. Porn site owners disagreed with the domain because the government could later mandate its use. The “.xxx” domain also would essentially “ghettoize” those sites under that URL.

Instead of creating a new domain, Christians have been in favor of the government monitoring and creating some restrictions on adult web sites to keep children from accessing porn sites online. They feel that more can be done to restrict pornography, and that there are more than enough tools to completely protect children.

“Both hardcore pornographers and sympathetic federal judges are laboring under the misconception that the Constitution provides smut peddlers with an absolute right to disseminate all forms of graphic and obscene material on the Internet,” explained Matt Barber, Policy Director for Cultural Issues for Concerned Women for America (CWA), in a CWA response. “They ignore both Supreme Court precedent and federal laws which permit reasonable restrictions to be placed on such material. They demand unfettered access to your children requiring that the filth they produce remain just one click away. They cower behind the First Amendment, shielding their perversions from all scrutiny and moral parameters.”

Federal law currently prohibits the distribution of hardcore pornography, but it has mostly focused on only small companies with extreme sexual cases, such as depicting animals, human waste, and vicious rape material. This only covers only 1% of illegal content, according to ADF, a legal defense that defends Christian right to defend and hear the “Truth.”

“This approach has given a green light to the largest porn companies, which distribute a wide variety of illegal hardcore material on hundreds of thousands of .com sites,” added Trueman in a statement. “Congress did not intend to exclude 99% of hardcore pornography when it passed new pornography laws targeting Internet pornography 10 years ago.”

Trueman, who formerly served as the chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Crime Division from 1988 to 1993,warns that the “.xxx” domain will probably emerge again in the future.

“There is too much money at stake,” he said.

According to AP, ICANN will no longer hear ICM’s proposal, but an entirely new application could be considered. Furthermore, Stuart Lawley, ICM’s president and chief executive, said ICM would pursue the matter further and said a lawsuit against ICANN was likely.

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Notorious Spam King Nabbed in Seattle, Could Face Long Prison Term (Foxnews, 070531)

SEATTLE — A 27-year-old man described as one of the world’s most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday, and federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.

Robert Alan Soloway is accused of using networks of compromised “zombie” computers to send out millions upon millions of spam e-mails.

“He’s one of the top 10 spammers in the world,” said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company’s Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. “He’s a huge problem for our customers. This is a very good day.”

A federal grand jury last week returned a 35-count indictment against Soloway charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.

Soloway pleaded not guilty Wednesday afternoon to all charges after a judge determined that — even with four bank accounts seized by the government — he was sufficiently well off to pay for his own lawyer.

He has been living in a ritzy apartment and drives an expensive Mercedes convertible, said prosecutor Kathryn Warma. Prosecutors are seeking to have him forfeit $773,000 they say he made from his business, Newport Internet Marketing Corp.

A public defender who represented him for Wednesday’s hearing declined to comment.

Prosecutors say Soloway used computers infected with malicious code to send out millions of junk e-mails since 2003. The computers are called “zombies” because owners typically have no idea their machines have been infected.

He continued his activities even after Microsoft won a $7 million civil judgment against him in 2005 and the operator of a small Internet service provider in Oklahoma won a $10 million judgment, prosecutors said.

U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan said Wednesday that the case is the first in the country in which federal prosecutors have used identity theft statutes to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else’s Internet domain name.

Soloway could face decades in prison, though prosecutors said they have not calculated what guideline sentencing range he might face.

The investigation began when the authorities began receiving hundreds of complaints about Soloway, who had been featured on a list of known spammers kept by The Spamhaus Project, an international anti-spam organization.

The Santa Barbara County, Calif., Department of Social Services said it was spending $1,000 a week to fight the spam it was receiving, and other businesses and individuals complained of having their reputations damaged when it appeared spam was originating from their computers.

“This is not just a nuisance. This is way beyond a nuisance,” Warma said.

Soloway used the networks of compromised computers to send out unsolicited bulk e-mails urging people to use his Internet marketing company to advertise their products, authorities said.

People who clicked on a link in the e-mail were directed to his Web site. There, Soloway advertised his ability to send out as many as 20 million e-mail advertisements over 15 days for $495, the indictment said.

The Spamhaus Project rejoiced at his arrest.

“Soloway has been a long-term nuisance on the Internet — both in terms of the spam he sent, and the people he duped to use his spam service,” organizers wrote on Spamhaus.org.

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Microsoft System May Monitor Workers’ Brains, Bodies (Foxnews, 080116)

Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical well-being and competence.

The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolisms.

The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rates, body temperatures, movements, facial expressions and blood pressure.

Labor unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer’s assessment of their physiological state.

Technology allowing constant monitoring of workers was previously limited to pilots, firefighters and NASA astronauts. This is believed to be the first time a company has proposed developing such software for mainstream workplaces.

Microsoft submitted a patent application in the U.S. for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers.

Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure,” the application states.

The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly.”

Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health.

If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.

Britain’s Information Commissioner, civil-liberties groups and privacy lawyers strongly criticized the potential of the system for “taking the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level.”

“This system involves intrusion into every single aspect of the lives of the employees,” Hugh Tomlinson, an expert on data protection law at the London law firm Matrix Chambers, said. “It raises very serious privacy issues.”

The U.S. Patent Office confirmed Tuesday that the application had been published last month, 18 months after being filed. Patent lawyers said that it could be granted within a year.

“This system takes the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level with a new level of invasiveness but in a very old-fashioned way because it monitors what is going in rather than the results,” said Peter Skyte, a national officer for the British union Unite.

Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office, a governmental agency that reports directly to Parliament, was no less alarmed.

“Imposing this level of intrusion on employees could only be justified in exceptional circumstances,” a spokesman said.

Microsoft refused to comment on the application.

“We have over 7,000 patents worldwide and we are proud of the quality of these patents and the innovations they represent,” a spokesman said. “As a general practice, we do not typically comment on pending patent applications because claims made in the application may be modified through the approval process.”

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Toshiba Ditches HD DVD Format, Hands Victory to Sony (Foxnews, 080219)

TOKYO — Toshiba said Tuesday it will no longer develop, make or market HD DVD players and recorders, handing a victory to rival Blu-ray Disc technology in the format battle for next-generation video.

“We concluded that a swift decision would be best,” Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida told reporters at his company’s Tokyo offices.

The move would make Blu-ray — backed by Sony Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which makes Panasonic brand products, and five major Hollywood movie studios — the winner in the battle over high-definition DVD formatting that began several years ago.

Nishida said last month’s decision by Warner Bros. Entertainment to release movie discs only in the Blu-ray format made the move inevitable.

“That had tremendous impact,” he said. “If we had continued, that would have created problems for consumers, and we simply had no chance to win.”

Warner joined Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Co. and News Corp.’s Twentieth Century Fox in that move.

Nishida said his company had confidence in HD DVD as a technology and tried to assure the estimated 1 million people, including some 600,000 people in North America, who already bought HD DVD machines by promising that Toshiba will continue to provide product support for the technology.

Both HD DVD and Blu-ray deliver crisp, clear high-definition pictures and sound, which are more detailed and vivid than existing video technology. They are incompatible with each other, and neither plays on older DVD players. But both formats play on high-definition TVs.

HD DVD was touted as being cheaper because it was more similar to previous video technology, while Blu-ray boasted bigger recording capacity.

Only one video format has been expected to emerge as the victor, much like VHS trumped Sony’s Betamax in the video format battle of the 1980s.

Nishida said it was still uncertain what will happen with the Hollywood studios that signed to produce HD DVD movies, including Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation.

Toshiba’s pulling the plug on the technology is expected to reduce the number of new high-definition movies that people will be able to watch on HD DVD machines.

Toshiba Corp. said shipments of HD DVD machines to retailers will be reduced and will stop by end of March.

Sales in Blu-ray gadgets are now likely to pick up as consumers had held off in investing in the latest recorders and players because they didn’t know which format would emerge dominant.

Despite being a possible blow to Toshiba’s pride, the exit will probably lessen the potential damage in losses in HD DVD operations. Goldman Sachs has said pulling out would improve Toshiba’s profitability between 40 billion yen and 50 billion yen ($370 million-$460 million) a year.

The reasons behind Blu-ray’s triumph over HD DVD are complex, as marketing, management maneuvers and other factors are believed to have played into the shift to Blu-ray’s favor that became more decisive during the critical holiday shopping season.

Once the balance starts tilting in favor of one in a format battle, then the domination tends to grow and become final, said Kazuharu Miura, an analyst at Daiwa Institute of Research in Tokyo.

“The trend became decisive I think this year,” he said. “When Warner made its decision, it was basically over.”

With movie studios increasingly lining up behind Blu-ray, retailers also began to stock more Blu-ray products.

Friday’s decision by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the largest U.S. retailer, to sell only Blu-ray DVDs and hardware appeared to deal a final blow to the Toshiba format.

Just five days earlier, Netflix Inc. said it will cease carrying rentals in HD DVD.

Several major American retailers had already made similar decisions, including Target Corp. and Blockbuster Inc.

Also adding to Blu-ray’s momentum was the gradual increase in sales of Sony’s PlayStation 3 home video-game console, which also works as a Blu-ray player. Sony has sold 10.5 million PS3 machines worldwide since the machine went on sale late 2006.

HD DVD supporters included Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp. and Japanese electronics maker NEC Corp.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game machine can play HD DVD movies, but the drive had to be bought separately, and Nishida said about 300,000 people have those.

Worldwide sales of personal computers with HD DVD drives total about 300,000 worldwide, including 140,000 in North America and 130,000 in Europe, he said.

Recently, the Blu-ray disc format has been gaining market share, especially in Japan. A study on fourth quarter sales last year by market researcher BCN Inc. found that by unit volume, Blu-ray made up 96% of Japanese sales.

Sony said it did not have numbers on how many Blu-ray players had been sold globally.

Toshiba’s stock slipped 0.6% Tuesday to 824 yen after jumping 5.7% Monday amid reports that a decision was imminent. Sony shares climbed 2.2% to 5,010 yen after rising 1% Monday.

Also Tuesday, Toshiba said it plans to spend more than 1.7 trillion yen ($15.7 billion) for two plants in Japan to produce sophisticated chips called NAND flash memory, which are used in portable music players and cell phones. Production there will start in 2010.

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Hackers Flood Epilepsy Web Forum With Flashing Lights (Foxnews, 080331)

Web-site hacking has reached a new low, both morally and technically.

Unknown miscreants had a good time two weekends ago when they posted hundreds of flashing animated images onto discussion boards hosted by the Landover, Md.-based Epilepsy Foundation.

Flashing lights or bold moving patterns can trigger often violent seizures among 3% of the estimated 50 million epileptics worldwide.

“I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn’t move and couldn’t speak,” RyAnne Fultz, who has epilepsy, told Wired News about her reaction to viewing one of the images on March 23.

Fultz’s 11-year-old son walked over and closed the browser window after about 10 seconds. Fortunately, she suffered nothing more than a bad headache.

By then, the second day of vandalism on EpilepsyFoundation.org, the jerks had moved on to hijacking the browsers of anyone who clicked on certain forum posts, filling the screens with bright, flashing colors.

Technically, none of this was hacking, since it didn’t involve breaking into anyone’s Web site, and any snotty kid with a rudimentary knowledge of JavaScript could do it.

The Epilepsy Foundation shut off the discussion board on Sunday for about 12 hours, and the attacks stopped.

“This was clearly an act of vandalism with the intent to harm people,” said Eric R. Hargis, the foundation’s president and CEO in a statement released Monday.

However, it doesn’t seem to have been the first instance. A Texas-based discussion Web site called Coping With Epilepsy said it suffered a similar attack last November.

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Supercomputer sets record (Paris, International Herald, 080609)

SAN FRANCISCO: An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.

By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time — compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers — petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.

“This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.

Each new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step closer to faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also produced software and hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest of the computer industry for consumer and business products.

Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented computing began dominating research and development spending on technology shortly after the cold war ended in the late 1980s, and that trend is evident in the design of the world’s fastest computers.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an IBM Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.

“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”

The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers will most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the complexity of the system’s hardware.

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

“We’ve proved some skeptics wrong,” said Michael Anastasio, a physicist who is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “This gives us a window into a whole new way of computing. We can look at phenomena we have never seen before.”

Solving that programming problem is important because in just a few years personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens or even hundreds of processor cores. The industry is now hunting for new techniques for making use of the new computing power. Some experts, however, are skeptical that the most powerful supercomputers will provide useful examples.

“If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy Malibu you’re driving will benefit from this,” said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based in Richardson, Texas.

Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers of the world, he suggested.

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.

Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the title of the world’s fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer created by IBM reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the Bush administration to reinvest in high-performance computing.

“It’s a sign that we are maintaining our position,” said Peter Ungaro, chief executive of Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He noted, however, that “the real competitiveness is based on the discoveries that are based on the machines.”

Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, IBM is already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing. “You do these record-setting things because you know that in the end we will push on to the next generation and the one who is there first will be the leader,” said Nicholas Donofrio, an IBM executive vice president.

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.

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Beyond the ads, Microsoft’s fevered campaign to improve Vista (Paris, International Herald, 080906)

NEW YORK: Yes, Microsoft is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on an advertising blitz to polish the tarnished brand of its Windows Vista operating system.

But according to Bill Veghte, the man responsible for sustaining what may be the most lucrative franchise in history, the ads are just “air cover.”

For more than a year, Veghte and his team have been working on the ground, developing ways to transform the experience of buying and using personal computers that run Microsoft software.

Corps of Microsoft engineers, for example, have been dispatched to tweak hardware and software to make Vista PCs faster and less prone to crashing. Microsoft has stepped into the world of PC retailers in a way it never did before, with training and advice—and is even paying to put hundreds of “Windows gurus” in stores.

By now, Microsoft insists that it has resolved most of the technical problems surrounding Vista, which was introduced in January 2007, after repeated delays. Many industry executives and analysts agree.

Yet Vista’s travails have opened the door to alternatives to Windows as never before. Windows, to be sure, still commands more than 90% of the market for personal computer operating systems. But Apple’s Macintosh operating software—which runs only on Apple machines—is gaining ground, especially in the United States.

Microsoft’s stumbles have also given momentum to the shift of software away from the PC and onto the Web. And Web-based programs for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and other tasks run on a browser, undermining the value of the underlying operating system. Indeed, Google’s entry into the browser market is an implicit declaration that the browser is increasingly supplanting the PC operating system as the strategic software gateway to computing.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer currently holds more than 70% of the browser market. But Web-browsing software is free, a byproduct of Microsoft’s decision to bundle its Internet Explorer with Windows in the 1990s, partly to undercut the early leader in browsers, Netscape Communications.

Microsoft makes its living largely off Windows, and a very good living it is. In the year ended in June, Microsoft’s Windows group generated revenue of nearly $17 billion and operating profits of more than $13 billion, a phenomenal 77% margin.

The lucrative Windows business depends on consumers and corporations upgrading to new versions of Windows.

“What we’re seeing with Vista is that for the first time, some significant portion of consumers and business customers have decided it’s not worth upgrading,” said David Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “If they don’t, the end of the franchise is at hand.”

The main Vista problem, Microsoft says, was that given the delays, uncertainty and significant code changes in the operating system, the rest of the industry was not ready when Vista finally arrived. There are one billion worldwide users of the various versions of Windows, and Windows is the hub of a vast business and technical ecosystem. Hundred of thousands of hardware devices and software applications run on Windows. The third-party software and hardware requires connecting programs, called drivers, to work smoothly with Windows.

Vista, a big shift from its predecessor, XP, required a lot of these new connecting programs to be written—and Microsoft did a poor job of communicating how much work was needed. Often, Microsoft says, an older driver still worked on Vista, but it made the PC sluggish or it crashed Vista. Today, 77,000 hardware devices and components run compatibly with Vista, more than twice the number when Vista was introduced.

“We are in a very different position with Vista than we were even six months ago,” said Veghte, senior vice president for Windows strategy and marketing. “And there are a lot of people holding forth with criticism of Windows Vista that have not used Vista, or not recently.”

Just after Vista shipped, Steven Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, tapped Veghte to move to the Windows business. In his 18 years at Microsoft, Veghte has had a wide-ranging career in sales, marketing and software development. (He holds two patents.)

Vista’s troubles were seen within Microsoft’s management ranks as an opportunity. Mike Nash, who had worked with Veghte before, signed up to join him.

“There was so much we could do better,” said Nash, who is vice president of Windows product management. “Our task was to shake things around and make the Windows business much more sustainable over the years.”

In a meeting in July 2007, Ballmer signed off on Veghte’s plan to step up investment in the Windows business. In broad terms, the strategy was to reposition the Windows brand in a multiyear marketing campaign that Veghte called “a sustained conversation about what Windows is.” The team dubbed its mission “FTP 168,” short for Free the People 24x7. To them, it means the freedom to do all manner of things with Windows on a PC, cellphone or on the Web, at any time.

The campaign is meant to move the Windows brand decisively beyond the PC, so the Windows business can thrive even if the PC becomes less important in computing. Microsoft believes its broad reach in PC, mobile and Web software gives it the upper hand against rivals like Apple or Google.

“It’s about the PC, phone and the Web, and Microsoft and Windows can connect those for customers in a way no other company or technology can,” Veghte said.

To set more detailed plans, Veghte plucked 10 other managers from across the company, and the group set up offices away from the headquarters in Redmond, Washington, in an office building in nearby Bellevue, which they called “The Bunker.”

In their opening meeting, Veghte, according to team members, began by saying three things: Your personal reputations are on the line. We won’t automatically respect what Microsoft has done in the past. We’ll try and test things quickly, in rolling pilot projects.

In a Seattle warehouse, Microsoft built a “retail experience center” to test shopping concepts and behavior. With retail now accounting for 40% of PC sales worldwide, and growing twice as fast as other sales channels, Microsoft decided it had to get more directly involved instead of just delivering products and promotional subsidies.

“We weren’t coming in with the tools and people to help them,” said Bill Brownell, general manager of retail marketing at Microsoft.

Microsoft is conducting more retail research and sharing it with retailers, and paying for a few hundred Windows experts in Best Buy, Circuit City and other stores. These “Windows Gurus” technically work for employment agencies, but Microsoft recruits them, pays them and trains them.

Manny Gouveia, 30, is a “Windows Guru” in Orlando, Florida. A college graduate and technology enthusiast, Gouveia received a seven-day training program at Microsoft, regular online training and participates in two conference calls a week to share information and tips with Microsoft and other gurus. He works at a Circuit City store, where he demonstrates how a Vista PC can be used to edit movies, post family photos on Web sites and record television shows.

“We’re there to give people a sense of the great experiences they can have with a PC, not just e-mail and Web browsing,” Gouveia said.

“People do come in with the view that Windows Vista is not up to par,” he said. “But I can turn that perception around in five minutes.”

With PC makers, Microsoft started an initiative called Vista Velocity to improve performance. It includes days of specialized testing, close collaboration between engineers at Microsoft and PC makers, fine-tuning software programs and hardware drivers. On some models, for example, the boot-up time for Vista has been reduced by 60%.

At Sony, 20% of its Vaio consumer models have gone through the Vista Velocity program so far, and the goal is to eventually have them all go through the program, said Mike Abary, senior vice president for marketing in Sony’s Vaio PC business.

The result, Abary said, has been significantly improved performance that should make for a “more compelling why-to-buy proposition.”

“There has been hesitation in the marketplace,” he said.

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Record Labels to Sell Music on Memory Cards (Foxnews, 080923)

NEW YORK — Just as vinyl once gave way to compact discs as the main physical medium for music, could CDs be replaced now by a fingernail-sized memory card?

Perhaps not entirely, but SanDisk Corp., four major record labels and retailers Best Buy Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are hoping that albums sold on microSD memory cards will at least provide an additional stream of sales.

The companies unveiled plans Monday to sell memory cards loaded with music in the MP3 format, free of copy protections.

Called “slotMusic,” the new format is meant to address two intertwined trends.

Most albums are still sold in a physical format — 449 million were sold on CDs in 2007, while 50 million were sold digitally, according to Nielsen SoundScan — yet CDs are decreasingly popular. Albums sold on CD dropped almost 19% last year.

Given this, the record labels — Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group Corp. and EMI Group PLC — are hoping slotMusic can be another physical revenue source, and one that is more versatile than CDs given the kinds of gadgets people carry around these days.

Unlike when the CD was introduced and people had to buy new players, many people already have the ability to play slotMusic albums, since many cell phones and multimedia players support microSD cards.

These new albums will come with a small USB dongle that lets buyers use them with computers, too. [The USB dongle will also enable users to transfer the songs to iPods, which don’t have memory-card slots, via a PC.]

“Particularly in this kind of economic climate, the idea of being able to use an electronic device you already own to enjoy music rather than going out and buying a dedicated player is pretty compelling,” said Daniel Schreiber, who heads the audio-video business unit at SanDisk, which created the microSD card format and is working on the technology behind slotMusic.

Schreiber said slotMusic albums will be sold on 1 gigabyte microSD cards, which means they will be able to hold a full album and related content such as liner notes and cover art.

Buyers will be able to use extra space on the cards to hold songs and photos from their own collections.

[The files will be MP3s encoded at a bitrate of 320 samples per second, the highest possible setting ensuring roughly CD-quality sound.]

The cards and dongles will come in boxes similar to current CD packaging, and Schreiber expects the cost of slotMusic releases to be “in the ballpark” of current CD prices.

It’s not yet known exactly when — or how many — albums will be initially sold in the format, but Schreiber expects retailers to give a “sizable amount of shelf space” to slotMusic albums.

The albums are expected to debut at multiple retailers, including Best Buy and Wal-Mart stores in the U.S., and later in Europe.

Rio Caraeff, executive vice president of Universal Music Group’s eLabs digital music unit, said the label will initially release about 30 titles in the slotMusic format. The titles will include old and new albums, such as one by singer Akon.

“We want to provide the benefits of digital music to people who go to physical retail environments,” he said.

Asked whether he sees the format taking the place of the CD, Caraeff said, “I think we would certainly hope that would be the case, but I don’t think we are so tied to that.”

NPD Group entertainment analyst Russ Crupnick sees a potential for slotMusic to emerge as a compelling format.

He said the industry needs “desperately” to give people a new reason to head back into the music sections at brick-and-mortar stores.

“Not that we want them out of the gaming section, but once they’re done looking at ‘Guitar Hero’ we want them to come look at the music section,” he said.

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‘Dangerous’ computer worm no cause for alarm, experts say (Ottawa Citizen, 090327)

OTTAWA — Take a deep breath and relax: the “Cornflicker” worm — the computer virus you’ve been warned about this week — is not that big a deal, say Internet security experts.

“The sky is definitely not falling,” said Dean Turner, Director, Global Intelligence Network Symantec Security Response. “Some folks who have been talking about it have misinterpreted some of the technical details … but, we should definitely be aware of this.”

Newspapers, TV networks and websites have been reporting that the Conflicker worm could cause tremendous damage to computers around the world when it updates itself on April 1.

It has caught the attention of computer security experts for its technological brilliance and has even forced industry wide collaboration to address the threat, dubbed the Conficker Working Group.

But tools are now in place to remove the worm from any personal computer system, vulnerabilities have been plugged and the worm has stopped propagating itself, say experts.

In short, there is little need to worry that the Internet’s virtual Armageddon is upon us.

There are three versions of the worm and only one, which has infected the fewest systems, has the April 1 update code.

The first version of the worm, Conficker.A, started to spread around the Internet in November. An updated version, dubbed Conficker.B, was released by the worm’s writers in January. Conficker.C has been programmed to update itself with an archive of websites on April 1. All three versions contain a list of 50,000 websites from which it can download commands from the nefarious individuals who programmed it. Conficker.A and Conficker.B randomly select 250 of the websites daily and use the them to update themselves. On April 1, Conficker.C will try to download a new file of 50,000 websites and will poll 500 per day looking for orders.

Conficker.B, the most widespread variant of the worm, has the ability to communicate with other infected computers, leaving anti-virus experts wondering why the worm, if it was going to do something, hasn’t already done so. It is not set to the April 1 date. “We are just as likely to see the switch get flicked today as we are tomorrow or three weeks from now,” Turner said.

The worm has stopped spreading. The writers of the virus seem to have removed the viruses ability to replicate itself, which would suggest they believe they already have enough infected computers to accomplish whatever they are planning, according to Turner. He said the worm could be used as a botnet, where infected computers act in a zombie-like fashion and attack a specific financial institution or country. However, it’s too early to tell how or even if it will be used for such attacks.

Shutting down the websites that feed Conficker its commands isn’t easy. The worm has managed to infect computer servers that supply websites such as Google.com, Yahoo.com and even Facebook.com, according to virus researcher and anti-virus maker F-Secure Corp. box The Conflicker worm does not affect Apple computers. PC users can easily protect their computers by keeping their systems updated with the latest security patches from Microsoft, and to scan their systems regularly with anti-virus software.

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Federal Web Sites Knocked Out by Cyber Attack (Foxnews, 090708)

WASHINGTON — A widespread computer attack that began July 4 knocked out the Web sites of the Treasury Department, the Secret Service and other U.S. agencies, and South Korean government sites also came under assault.

South Korean intelligence officials believe the attacks were carried out by North Korean or pro-Pyongyang forces.

U.S. officials so far have refused to publicly discuss details of the attack or where it might have originated.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that its own Web site was among several commercial sites also hit.

The U.S. government sites, which included those of the Federal Trade Commission and the Transportation Department, were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week.

South Korean Internet sites began experiencing problems Tuesday.

The South Korean sites included the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, the National Assembly, Shinhan Bank, Korea Exchange Bank and top Internet portal Naver. They went down or had access problems since late Tuesday, said Ahn Jeong-eun, a spokeswoman at the Korea Information Security Agency.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the nation’s main spy agency, told a group of South Korean lawmakers Wednesday it believes that North Korea or North Korean sympathizers in the South were behind the attacks, according to an aide to one of the lawmakers briefed on the information.

The aide spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the information. The National Intelligence Service — South Korea’s main spy agency — said it couldn’t immediately confirm the report, but it said it was cooperating with American authorities.

Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said the agency’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a notice to federal departments and other partner organizations about the problems and “advised them of steps to take to help mitigate against such attacks.”

The U.S., she said, sees attacks on its networks every day, and measures have been put in place to minimize the impact on federal Web sites.

Kudwa had no comment on the South Korean attacks.

It was not clear whether other federal government sites also were attacked.

Others familiar with the U.S. outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack.

Attacks on federal computer networks are common, ranging from nuisance hacking to more serious assaults, sometimes blamed on China. U.S. security officials also worry about cyber attacks from Al Qaeda or other terrorists.

This time, two government officials acknowledged that the Treasury and Secret Service sites were brought down, and said the agencies were working with their Internet service provider to resolve the problem.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

Ben Rushlo, director of Internet technologies at Keynote Systems, said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the FTC site was down Sunday and Monday.

Keynote Systems is a mobile and Web site monitoring company based in San Mateo, Calif. The company publishes data detailing outages on Web sites, including 40 government sites it watches.

According to Rushlo, the Transportation Web site was “100% down” for two days, so that no Internet users could get through to it.

“This is very strange. You don’t see this,” he said. “Having something 100% down for a 24-hour-plus period is a pretty significant event.”

He added that, “The fact that it lasted for so long and that it was so significant in its ability to bring the site down says something about the site’s ability to fend off (an attack) or about the severity of the attack.”

The FTC site, meanwhile, started to come back online late Sunday, but even on Tuesday Internet users still were unable to get to the site 70% of the time.

Web sites of major South Korean government agencies, including the presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry, and some banking sites were paralyzed Tuesday.

An initial investigation found that many personal computers were infected with a virus ordering them to visit major official Web sites in South Korea and the U.S. at the same time, Korea Information Security Agency official Shin Hwa-su said.

Denial of service attacks against Web sites are not uncommon, and are usually caused when sites are deluged with Internet traffic so as to effectively take them off-line.

Mounting such an attack can be relatively easy using widely available hacking programs, and they can be made far more serious if hackers infect and use thousands of computers tied together into “botnets.”

For instance, last summer, in the weeks leading up to the war between Russia and Georgia, Georgian government and corporate Web sites began to see “denial of service” attacks.

The Kremlin denied involvement, but a group of independent Western computer experts traced domain names and Web site registration data to conclude that the Russian security and military intelligence agencies were involved.

Documenting cyber attacks against government sites is difficult, and depends heavily on how agencies characterize an incident and how successful or damaging it is.

Government officials routinely say their computers are probed millions of times a day, with many of those being scans that don’t trigger any problems.

In a June report, the congressional Government Accountability Office said federal agencies reported more than 16,000 threats or incidents last year, roughly three times the amount in 2007.

Most of those involved unauthorized access to the system, violations of computer use policies or investigations into potentially harmful incidents.

The Homeland Security Department, meanwhile, says there were 5,499 known breaches of U.S. government computers in 2008, up from 3,928 the previous year, and just 2,172 in 2006.

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North Korea May Be Behind Wave of Cyberattacks (Foxnews, 090708)

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean intelligence officials believe North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces committed cyber attacks that paralyzed major South Korean and U.S. government Web sites, aides to two lawmakers said Wednesday.

The sites of 11 South Korean organizations, including the presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry, went down or had access problems since late Tuesday, according to the state-run Korea Information Security Agency. Agency spokeswoman Ahn Jeong-eun said 11 U.S. sites suffered similar problems.

She said the agency is investigating the case with police and prosecutors.

In the U.S., the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the July 4 holiday weekend and into this week, according to American officials inside and outside the government.

Others familiar with the U.S. outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said that the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

The Korea Information Security Agency also attributed the attacks to denial of service.

Yang Moo-jin, a professor at Seoul’s University of North Korean Studies, said he doubts whether the impoverished North has the capability to knock down the Web sites.

But Hong Hyun-ik, an analyst at the Sejong Institute think tank, said the attack could have been done by either North Korea or China, saying he “heard North Korea has been working hard to hack into” South Korean networks.

On Wednesday, the National Intelligence Service told a group of South Korean lawmakers it believes that North Korea or North Korean sympathizers “were behind” the attacks, according to an aide to one of lawmakers who was briefed on the information.

An aide to another lawmaker who was briefed also said the NIS suspects North Korea or its followers were responsible.

The aides spoke on condition of anonymity and refused to allow the names of the lawmakers they work for to be published, citing the classified nature of the information.

Both aides said the information was delivered in writing to lawmakers who serve on the National Assembly’s intelligence committee.

The National Intelligence Service — South Korea’s main spy agency — declined to confirm the information.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said military intelligence officers were looking at the possibility that the attack may have been committed by North Korean hackers and pro-North Korea forces in South Korea. South Korea’s Defense Ministry said it could not confirm the report.

Earlier Wednesday, the NIS said in a statement that 12,000 computers in South Korea and 8,000 computers overseas had been infected and used for the cyber attack.

The agency said it believed the attack was “thoroughly” prepared and committed by hackers “at the level of a certain organization or state.” It said it was cooperating with the American investigators to examine the case.

South Korean media reported in May that North Korea was running a cyber warfare unit that tries to hack into U.S. and South Korean military networks to gather confidential information and disrupt service.

An initial investigation in South Korea found that many personal computers were infected with a virus program ordering them to visit major official Web sites in South Korea and the U.S. at the same time, Korean information agency official Shin Hwa-su said. There has been no immediate reports of similar cyber attack in other Asian countries.

Yonhap said that prosecutors have found some of the cyber attacks on the South Korean sites were accessed from overseas. Yonhap, citing an unnamed prosecution official, said the cyber attack used a method common to Chinese hackers.

Prosecutors were not immediately available for comment.

Shin, the Information Security Agency official, said the initial probe had not yet uncovered evidence about where the cyber outages originated. Police also said they had not discovered where the outages originated. Police officer Jeong Seok-hwa said that could take several days.

Some of the South Korean sites remained unstable or inaccessible Wednesday. The site of the presidential Blue House could be accessed, but those for the Defense Ministry, the ruling Grand National Party and the National Assembly could not.

Ahn said there were no immediate reports of financial damage or leaking of confidential national information. The alleged attacks appeared aimed only at paralyzing Web sites, she said.

South Korea’s Defense Ministry and Blue House said that there has been no leak of any documents.

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U.S. Government’s Cyberdefense System Doesn’t Work (Foxnews, 090708)

The flagship system designed to protect the U.S. government’s computer networks from cyberspies is being stymied by technical limitations and privacy concerns, according to current and former national-security officials.

The latest complete version of the system, known as Einstein, won’t be fully installed for 18 months, according to current and former officials, seven years after it was first rolled out.

This system doesn’t protect networks from attack. It only raises the alarm after one has happened.

A more capable version has sparked privacy alarms, which could delay its rollout. Since the National Security Agency acknowledged eavesdropping on phone and Internet traffic without warrants in 2005, security programs have been dogged by privacy concerns.

In the case of Einstein, AT&T Corp., which would test the system, has sought written approval from the Justice Department before it would agree to participate, people familiar with the matter say.

An AT&T spokesman declined to comment.

The total cost of the system, designed to protect all nonmilitary government computers, is classified, but officials familiar with the program said the price tag was expected to exceed $2 billion.

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Study Reveals Concerns, Impact of Social Media on Evangelical College Students (Christian Post, 090913)

A first-of-its kind study on the impact of social networking activities on evangelical Christian college students is raising some red flags but also acknowledging the benefits of tools such as Facebook and text messaging.

“It isn’t yet clear whether over-zealous use of computer-based activities will be formally accepted in the U.S. as a distinctive, unique form of addiction,” commented Gordon College psychology professor Bryan C. Auday, who teamed up with Sybil Coleman, Gordon College professor of social work, for the study.

“What is clear from our study is that a surprisingly high percentage of Christian students who frequently engage in electronic activities report several troubling negative consequences. But ironically they also mention many positive outcomes related to the time that is spent on Facebook or text messaging their friends,” Auday added.

For their study, titled “Pulling Off the Mask,” Auday and Coleman surveyed 1,342 students between 18 and 27 years of age on four evangelical Christian college campuses with an equal class representation to explore the specific trends, behaviors and attitudes Christian students perceive of themselves regarding social media usage.

Questions, posed entirely online, included the amount of time participants engage in a specific electronic activity during an average day; the primary reason for using a specific site; the impact (both positive and negative) of usage on personal life and relationships; the ability or inability to stop usage, and the possible conflict of usage with personal Christian values.

“We’d received enough anecdotal evidence from college students to raise some red flags about these issues,” said Coleman. “But we felt it was crucial to gather scientific data from students about both the benefits and concerns (of usage) if we were going to get a clearer picture about how we could best respond.”

What the professors found after conducting their survey was that over half (54 percent) of participants confessed to “neglecting important areas of their life” due to spending too much time on social media sites.

And when asked if one were to define addiction as “any behavior you cannot stop, regardless of the consequences,” 12.7 percent affirmed that they believe they are addicted to some form of electronic activity.

Around 21 percent, meanwhile, felt that their level of engagement with electronic activities at times caused a conflict with their Christian values.

“During the critical years of young adulthood, Christian college students need to be mindful that academic and social development are important, yet incomplete in terms of nurturing the whole person. The spiritual condition also needs attention,” commented Coleman.

“Since the evidence from this study raises several concerns for their time management skills, possible neglect of important areas in their lives and their psychological and spiritual health, the next question needs to be, how can we help?” she added.

Conducted in April 2009, “Pulling Off the Mask: The Impact of Social Networking Activities on Evangelical Christian College Students . . . A Self-Reported Study” was released this past Thursday at the 60th anniversary conference for the Religion Newswriters Association in Minneapolis.

Gordon College, located in Wenham, Mass., is among the top Christian colleges in the nation and the only nondenominational Christian college in New England. The institution is a member of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities.