Archive for April 2003

Network Advertising Initiative’s E-mail Service Provider Coalition announces spam blueprint

E-mail Coalition Floats Plan to Stop Spam
‘The E-mail Service Provider Coalition of the Network Advertising Initiative plans to announce a blueprint for an Internet-wide technological solution to spam this week.

“We need to level the playing field and get one uniform standard,” said Trevor Hughes, executive director of NAI. The Coalition members include e-mail service providers such as ClickAction, Yesmail, Mindshare Design, Cheetahmail and Digital Impact.

The NAI plan would change the e-mail architecture to keep spammers out and allow legitimate e-mail to pass through. E-mail senders would undergo a certification process under which each would have to meet a number of qualifications. E-mail service providers would register their clients.’

Cisco publishes “lawful intercept” proposal

PennNet 21

PennNet 21:
U Penn Networking & Telecom strategy documents

Security Weblogs

“Help me like IM again” (spam destroys another medium)

O’Reilly Network: Help me like Instant Messaging again. [April 12, 2003]
“Help me like instant messaging (IM) again. I was an early adopter, but got burned.

Back when ICQ was still new I had adopted using it. It was fabulous and my friends & I had taken to using it instead of email. For each other anyway. Something bad happened though. Spam. By the bucketload. There were days when I’d here “Oh-uh!” twenty times a day with nothing but invitations to chat with someone cute and lonely. Right.

Despite clicking every checkbox in the preferences the spam didn’t stop. My friends & I eventually had to opt for using it less and less until we just couldn’t bother with it any longer. At least we had some spam prevention with out email clients or ISPs.”

Lawyers lie in wait for HIPAA?

Information Security Magazine, April 2003 – News and Analysis:
‘Attorneys nationwide reportedly plan to deploy decoy patients at health care organizations to see if doctors, dentists, hospitals and insurance companies have the policies, procedures and protections that ensure patients’ privacy, as required by the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Those that don’t comply risk hefty fines, possible criminal prosecution and costly civil lawsuits. Companies have had two years to educate staff, designate a privacy officer and adopt basic security measures. But there’s a good chance some providers will miss the deadline. … The threat of lawsuits may be a stronger motivator than government fines or jail time, says Kate Borten, a security consultant and president of The Marblehead Group in Massachusetts.

“The government has publicly stated it will be very forgiving if an organization demonstrates it meant well and has taken steps to become compliant,” Borten says. “The greater concern is the private lawsuit or bad press in a local community that will hurt business.”’

IBM alphaWorks Releases XML Forms Package

XML Cover Pages:IBM alphaWorks Releases XML Forms Package:

The XML development team at IBM alphaWorks labs has released an ‘XML Forms Package’ as one of several new technologies. The XML Forms Package is a toolkit consisting of software components designed to showcase the possibilities presented by W3C XForms. XForms is W3C’s next generation of web forms defined in a Candidate Recommendation specification. The IBM XML Forms Package “consists of two main components: the data model component and the client component. The data model component provides a set of Java APIs for creating, accessing, and modifying XForms data models. This package also includes a JSP tag library that provides a set of tags for use inside JSPs. The tag library interfaces with the XForms data model component APIs, thus providing JSP authors a means of accessing these APIs from within their JSPs. A detailed description of the data model APIs and the tag library, as well as their use, can be found in the documentation for the XML Forms data model. The client component includes two technologies: An XForms processor control and a Java XForms compiler. The XML Forms Package allows developers to deploy XForms applications without any client-side technologies, using the Java XForms compiler. It also includes an Internet Explorer process control with several useful extensions including local persistence, UI control extensions, and Web Services integration. The data model component allows JSP programmers to take advantage of XForms model constraints and validation without leaving their familiar programming environment and tools.”

directory of RSS Aggregators

What do over 2,600 climate scientists have in common?

Dean’s World: What do over 2,600 climate scientists have in common?

2,660 physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, and other environmental scientists (so far) have signed a petition saying that global warming hysteria is pseudoscientific baloney. They’ve been joined by an additional 5,017 chemists, biochemists, biologists, and other life scientists, and over 10,000 other scientists, attached to major universities and research organizations around the world. Yet if you went by what “environmental” activist groups like Greenpeace, Sierra Club, or the so-called “Environmental News Network” tell you, you’d think this petition, and others like it, never existed.

The Oregon Petition reads, in its entirety, as follows…

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

The petition was put together by Dr. Frederick Seitz, the former President of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Thousands of qualified scientists have signed it, and more are signing all the time. If you’re a qualified scientist or meteorologist who’d like to sign the petition yourself, or want to see a list of all the signers, click here to go to the web site run by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which is sponsoring the initiative.

The Oregon Petition is not the only such petition signed by scientists, either. Over 4,000 scientists from 106 countries, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, have signed the Heidelberg Appeal. This petition, issued in response to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro back in 1992, warns against “the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development.” They further warn “the authorities in charge of our planet’s destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudoscientific arguments or false and nonrelevant data.”

Bottom-Heavy Email

Tim Bray: Bottom-Heavy Email
‘We all got a note from Paul the CFO, who’s a bright and reasonable kind of person, telling us we should put one of those privacy disclaimers at the bottom of outgoing emails. This struck me as a ridiculous idea, so I pushed back a bit, and learned why these things exist. … While I’m not a lawyer, this seemed pretty shaky to me. I mean, if I send you something secret and you screw up and pass it on to the wrong person, and damage ensues, I may well decide to sue your ass even if you do have some boilerplate legalese at the bottom of your email. … “But, the insurance company requires that we do this in order for them to provide coverage.” I don’t have a come-back to that.’