Edupage, 7 July 1998 (fwd)

Mustafa Akgul (akgul@Bilkent.EDU.TR)
Wed, 8 Jul 1998 09:12:31 +0300 (EET DST)


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Edupage, 7 July 1998. Edupage, a summary of news about information
technology, is provided three times a week as a service of EDUCAUSE,
a consortium of leading colleges and universities seeking to transform
education through the use of information technologies. The organization
has offices in Boulder, Colorado and Washington, D.C.
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TOP STORIES
Accused Of Child Porn On The Net, Reporter Plans Appeal
Court Says First Amendment Doesn't Cover Source Code
Is Y2K Bug A Date Problem Or A Math Problem?
California State U. Drops Plans For Vendor Partnership

ALSO
Palm's Pilots Want To Pilot Something New
PSINet Says "Auf Wiedersehen"
Shaky Voice Mail
W3C Okays Netscape's Web Technology
The State Of The Apple

ACCUSED OF CHILD PORN ON THE NET, REPORTER PLANS APPEAL
Freelance journalist Larry Matthews, who works for National Public Radio and
public television in Maryland, has pleaded guilty to a child pornography
charge only so that he can speed up the appeal process. Charged with 15
counts of using his computer to trade images of underage girls in sexual
acts, Matthews says he was merely acting as a journalist hoping to expose
child pornography trading on the Internet. However, he lost of hope of
acquittal at the trial level when the judge in the case ruled that "a press
pass is not a license to break the law." (New York Times 7 Jul 98)

COURT SAYS FIRST AMENDMENT DOESN'T COVER SOURCE CODE
A U.S. district court judge turned down Case Western Reserve professor Peter
Junger's argument that he should be allowed to publish several encryption
programs on the Web because the underlying software code should be treated
as free speech. The ruling conflicts with a decision last summer in a case
involving mathematics professor Daniel Bernstein that said distribution of
software code over the Internet was constitutionally protected. "Source
code is 'purely functional' in a way that the Bernstein Court's examples of
instructions, manuals and recipes are not," said Judge James Gwin in the
Junger case. "Unlike instructions, a manual, or a recipe, source code
actually performs the functions it describes. While a recipe provides
instructions to a cook, source code is a device, like embedded circuitry in
a telephone, that actually does the function of encryption." Mr. Junger
plans to appeal Judge Gwin's decision. (Wall Street Journal 7 Jul 98)

IS Y2K BUG A DATE PROBLEM OR A MATH PROBLEM?
Although his solution doesn't work on every system menaced by the "Year 2000
problem" (in which software coded with 2-digit dates in the year fields will
cause incorrect calculations when the 20th century yields to the new one),
entrepreneur Allen Burgess had a breakthrough insight: "I woke up in the
middle of the night and had the idea. It's not a date problem. It's a math
problem. We had to find and fix the math." So Waltham, Massachusetts
company Data Integrity developed a Y2K tool (called the Millennium Solution)
that is being used by Citibank, Credit Suisse, First Boston, NationsBank,
and the U.S. Interior Department. One part of the Millennium Solution
searches for math in a software program; if a two-digit date is found to be
part of the math calculation, the Millennium Solution uses a trick of
addition to get the calculation to work correctly. For example, to
calculate age in 01 (i.e., 2001) of a person born in 67 (i.e., 1967): 01 -
67 = minus 66. Add 50. Add 50 again. Correct answer: 34 years old. (USA
Today 7 Jul 98)

CALIFORNIA STATE U. DROPS PLANS FOR VENDOR PARTNERSHIP
California State University is abandoning plans for a controversial proposed
partnership, known as the California Educational Technology Initiative
(CETI), which would have teamed the university system with technology
companies for networking upgrades and services. The original four companies
involved were Fujitsu, GTE, Hughes Electronics and Microsoft, but Hughes and
Microsoft dropped out of the plan in April, saying the deal didn't make good
business sense. The companies would have managed CSU's computer networking
system, in exchange for upgrades to campus networks and technology, and
would have been able to sell unused network capacity to outside users.
Richard West, the CSU system's senior vice-president for business and
finance, says the university will now "reduce the scope of any proposed
follow-on CETI-like deal, both from a revenue and risk-of-debt point of
view. Our discussions with private companies will be more in the form of
traditional vendor/customer relationships, most likely." (Chronicle of
Higher Education 10 Jul 98)

==============================================

PALM'S PILOTS WANT TO PILOT SOMETHING NEW
Palm Computing president Donna Dubinsky and chief technology officer Jeff
Hawkins are departing amicably but abruptly from that company to develop
their own devices based on the operating system used in the PalmPilot, the
tiny keyboard-less computer that has become one of the fastest-selling
computer devices in history. In contrast to the PalmPilot, their new
product will be aimed at the consumer rather than the business market.
Dubinsky said: "Jeff and I are entrepreneurs. It's always been in the back
of our minds to get back in that environment." (San Jose Mercury News 6 Jul 98)

PSINET SAYS "AUF WIEDERSEHEN"
U.S. Internet service provider PSINet says it's moving part of its Internet
operations out of Germany, following the controversial German court ruling
that held the former head of CompuServe's German operations responsible for
allowing the spread of pornography over the commercial service's network.
PSINet says it plans to maintain a strong presence in Germany, but will move
a part of its business that stores and displays Web pages for home users and
clients to other parts of Europe. "For our customers and our managing
directors... we needed to move some services to places where the laws are
international, and not Bavarian-like," says PSINet's managing director in
Germany. (Wall Street Journal 7 Jul 98)

SHAKY VOICE MAIL
Beth Givens of the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse says: "Voice mail
can be a chink in any corporation's security armor. Every corporation
should have a policy that prescribes what can and cannot be communicated by
voice mail." The latest known case of corporate voice mail invasion took
place in May at the Chiquita company in Cincinnati. The company's voice
mail system was allegedly cracked by a Cincinnati Enquirer investigative
reporter who has been fired over the incident. Chiquita executive Steven G.
Warshaw said: "Our business and my personal privacy were violated in the
most extreme way." He added: "There is not a system in the world that is
foolproof. If there is a record of a communication it can be obtained by
others by surreptitious means." (Washington Post 7 Jul 98)

W3C OKAYS NETSCAPE'S WEB TECHNOLOGY
The World Wide Web Consortium has accepted Netscape's "action sheet"
technology, which provides a way to separate script-based event handling
from the structure of HTML and XML documents. "It looks like it will make
Web pages more maintainable," says an analyst with N.C. Focus. "Good
knowledge engineers can make this happen, allowing XML to produce a lot in a
little bit of text." The "action sheet" technology enables the packaging of
reusable actions, which can then be easily accessed by Web pages as needed,
or cached for quick reuse. Microsoft has proposed a similar technology for
Internet Explorer. (InternetWeek 6 Jul 98)

THE STATE OF THE APPLE
Computer industry analyst Peter H. Lewis of the New York Times says there's
a new sense of optimism among Apple proponents at a large East Coast meeting
of Macintosh fans this week: "Led by co-founder Steven P. Jobs, Apple
appears to have stabilized its management team, halted a precipitous decline
in market share, outlined (at last) a clear path for its Mac operating
system, and streamlined and invigorated its product lineup." He says the
downside is that Apple's decision last year to kill off its clone market
contributed to the overall decline in the Mac operating system's market
share. (New York Times 7 Jul 98)

Edupage is written by John Gehl (gehl@educause.edu) and Suzanne Douglas
(douglas@educause.edu). Telephone: 770-590-1017

Technical support for distributing Edupage is provided by Information
Technology Services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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