The Times: Tech column - Virus hype/Intelligent TV/eBay wife auctions

By David Rowan

They were "script kiddies", four Israeli schoolchildren aged 15 to 16 who wanted to trump a rival gang and earn kudos for their coding skills. So they allegedly wrote a virus called Goner, disguised it within an e-mail attachment, and released it on an unsuspecting world.

"Hi," read the friendly message that last week arrived here, and in a few hundred thousand other Outlook in-boxes. "When I saw this screen saver, I immediately thought about you. I am in a harry (sic), I promise you will love it!"

Those who opened the attached file would have found their anti-virus software disabled and their PC potentially used to attack faraway networks. Within a few days, the anti-virus company MessageLabs had counted 133,000 cases of "one of the most incredibly fast-moving and potentially dangerous e-mail viruses we've seen". The experts warned this could be the big one that ended civilisation.

Well, maybe, although the real threat appears to come from virus panic itself. As corporate networks slowed under the weight of "virus warning" e-mails, and computer-security companies clamoured to sell ever more profitable "solutions", Rob Rosenberger, a 39-year-old computer consultant and scourge of the antivirus industry, was giving his verdict on Goner: just another over-hyped means for anti-virus businesses to create "mass hysteria". "This was one more easy-to-detect virus written by a pimply bunch of mediocre 16-year-olds," says Rosenberger. "The panic was another opportunity for antivirus firms to earn valuable free media exposure."

Within computer-security businesses such as McAfee, Sophos and Symantec, Rosenberger is seen as a troublemaker. From his office in Iowa, he crusades - through his Vmyths.com website - against what he calls an "addiction" to anti-virus updates. "The anti-virus companies realised long ago that they were sitting on a massive cash cow," he says. "They can't lose: each time their products fail and let through new viruses, people love them more."

New virus alerts circulate almost daily, so commercially available scanning software is a highly profitable business. Richard Clarke, the US cybersecurity czar, talks of malicious Internet attacks as "the functional equivalent of 767s crashing into buildings". No wonder McAfee's subscription website has attracted well over a million customers.

"The problem with most anti-virus software is that it won't stop a virus it doesn't already know," says Rosenberger. "That's just amazing. No one seems to be telling the industry that viruses are getting through because their products are faulty." He wants protection software, as well as scanning for known viruses, to profile all incoming files and block those with virus-like characteristics.

Fortunately for the industry, as the four Israelis were last week facing court charges, another "dangerous" worm, Gokar, was spreading around the world from Asia. So can we presume that this panic, too, will be short-lived? Rosenberger is sceptical. He insists that a well-constructed corporate network will cope without anti-virus software: "But the average Joe isn't in a position to protect himself, so I do urge people to get addicted to this software, though it hurts to say that."

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We predict the next wave of "Microsoft conspiracy" activism: it will centre on Big Brother software that understands your viewing preferences. Last week, Microsoft signed a deal with Predictive Networks, whose profiling software builds a personal picture of you and targets ads that it thinks fit your "digital silhouette". With new set-top boxes, this will be valuable to marketers, but privacy activists are fuming. If Web "cookies" were too intrusive for European legislators, they'll have fun with intelligent TV.

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You may have seen the hottest item on eBay's auction list: "Buy an entrepreneur wife." Heck, you may even have bid. One such advertisement reads: Kay Hammond, "a 24-year-old, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Internet entrepreneur" from Birmingham, claims to have achieved all her ambitions except marriage.

Now, this sounds like a clever PR stunt to promote her IT company (which, naturally, we won't name), but we will be watching to ensure that Ms Hammond honours her obligation. For eBay is very clear that its auctions constitute "legally binding contracts".


(The Times, December 17 2001)

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Evening Standard: The fog of the Afghan media war

By David Rowan

OSAMA bin Laden has spent the past few days, according to media reports, digging his own grave (The Sun), planning his live suicide on al-Jazeera TV (The Mirror), directing his fighters on horseback (CNN), and, as a Times graphic helpfully explained, sitting in his sevenfloor mountain cave with a family saloon car parked at the entrance.

It's amazing what journalists can report when they're not there.

The Afghan battlefront may be shrouded in confusion and secrecy, but newspaper deadlines and 24-hour TV channels will not wait.

War reporters, working under threats to their safety and obstruction from military controllers, find their newsdesks demanding copy when they have few new facts to report. The result, say some seasoned war correspondents, is a speculative fever that can at times misinform.

"It's an extremely complex situation in Afghanistan, a far more fluid war than people are used to, and there has been a fundamental lack of understanding of this in the reporting," says Robert Fox, this paper's correspondent, among others.

"Unlike D-Day, Barbarossa or Desert Storm, you cannot have a comprehensive operational plan. Yet none of the journalists has picked up on this. Military knowledge has gone out of fashion." As a result, Fox says, the "Sunday Times style of journalism" has become the norm - "they get a headline and then write to it".

Sir John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph's defence editor and a noted military historian, echoes the view that "speculation is inevitable in such circumstances - the truth tends to emerge later". There may be few reporters actually on the front lines, but he believes that "a roughly accurate picture of events" is none the less emerging. "The whole point about front lines is that if you put your head above the parapet, you tend to get shot. That's the limit of accurate reporting."

WITH special forces operating around Tora Bora, Sir John suggests, the media should focus less on "nosy-parkering" that could endanger lives and should leave the military to perform its task. "What's happening there is none of the media's business, frankly. It's their duty to report the number of dead and wounded, but anything else is media prurience."

Yet even the casualty figures are proving hard to establish, not least because military planners have sought to control the information flow. Both the press agency UPI and the independent Institute for War and Peace Reporting have contradicted US Defense Department figures for special-forces deaths. Last week, tension erupted between America's press and the US military commanders when "pool" reporters were blocked from covering a "friendly-fire" bombing near Kandahar, where three Marines were killed. Sandy Johnson, Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press, condemned the lack of access as "outrageous", and complained: "What's the point of having reporters over there if they can't cover the news?" The New York Times protested at "a gross abuse of the ground rules for the press pool", and the Washington Post condemned the military for "locking those reporters up".

Eventually the Pentagon admitted that "errors were made" and promised greater access in future.

In the meantime, a certain amount of guesswork appears inevitable. "There's something called responsible speculation," says Michael Evans, defence editor at The Times. "If you've got three facts and 800 words to write, it's perfectly possible to file a good story, but it will need some informed speculation. No one in Afghanistan is getting the full picture. "

So what of The Times's own extraordinary graphic of November 29, which showed in great detail the (so far unexplored) contents of Bin Laden's Tora Bora caves? " Obviously no one's been inside the whole complex, but I don't think it's misleading," Evans says. "Readers will be aware that someone hasn't just walked in and drawn it on the spot. "

(Evening Standard, December 12 2001)

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The Times: Tech column - Food tech/E-Envoy progress/KPMG stupidity

By David Rowan

IN A LAND which hails tinned omelette and chips as a culinary revolution, and where frozen sushi is the supermarkets' latest gourmet delight, you might not consider food technology to be at the cutting edge of research. But with fortunes to be made by forecasting the next epicurean trends, US nutrition companies are playing with their food to a remarkable extent in the technology labs.

Food technologists are getting excited about everything from new "functional foods" - such as therapeutic breads modified to calm you down - to beers manufactured so as to minimise hangovers.

Not all breakthroughs, they stress, will catch on: there may be a limited market for that new American delicacy, shrink-wrapped slices of bread covered in peanut butter and jam. So what innovations can we expect in the near future? Enormous work is going into developing "neutraceuticals" - functional foods that offer pharmaceutical benefits, whether muesli steeped in St John's wort, or fruit chews containing inulin, considered effective against Crohn's disease and irritable bowel syndrome. Biotechnology, though still controversial, will play a role: Unilever, for instance, has developed a genetically modified tomato that increases vastly the levels of flavonols, seen as highly effective against heart disease and cancer.

The way these healthy ingredients are obtained is also changing. Claudia O'Donnell, chief editor of Prepared Foods magazine, is excited about technologies that "separate and extract" useful nutritional products from natural sources - such as fermentation technologies used to obtain Omega-3 fatty acids, which help to counter heart disease.

Food will stay fresh for longer without losing its taste, thanks to high-pressure sterilisation. Until now, heat has been the easy way to pasteurise food - but you get that tell-tale long-life flavour. Now everything from avocados to ham is undergoing new pressure treatments to kill microbes: a company in Louisiana, for instance, found that bombarding oysters with 35,000psi of pressure separated them from the shell while killing most of the bacteria.

"We're going to see much more of this technique," says Clair Hicks, professor of food science at the University of Kentucky. "We don't yet know how it will work with canned soups, but at 100,000psi you could make meat-based canned soups that are as delightful as any you make fresh."

New packaging technologies could finally do away with the family butcher. Meat cuts will be factory-packed within specially formulated gases that will keep them "fresh" for weeks. This new "modified atmosphere packaging" will also work for fruit, so expect apple slices to hit the shelves weeks after they left the tree.

Genetically modified foods will finally gain acceptance. "It's just a matter of time," Professor Hicks says. Even now in the UK, she points out, more than 90 per cent of hard cheese is made using a genetically modified enzyme, recombinant chymosin.

"Look back in history, and you'll see that consumers will eventually migrate to a good product that's safe and appeals." Still, Professor Hicks is in no hurry to sample the delights of canned omelette and chips.

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The Government's Office of the e-Envoy was busy congratulating itself last week on "the huge progress made towards ensuring that the UK is a world leader in the knowledge economy" - that is, putting half of government services online, establishing a network of local "online centres", and promoting the cause with lots of mindnumbingly forgettable adverts.

Sorry to spoil the party, guys, but your annual report forgets to mention the recent survey that put us 19th out of 27 countries for contacting the Government online, or the OECD report on broadband use which puts us near the bottom of a long list. Maybe you and your chums at Oftel should start by forcing BT to lower the cost of broadband access - and make it easier for us, say, to submit company tax returns without having to buy special software.

Otherwise your worthy action plans might start looking a bit ambitious.

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EVERY now and then a company makes an electronic faux pas that is so bad that the entire Internet community comes out in force against it. Step forward Frank Dunne, senior manager at KPMG for "Global Brand & Regulatory Compliance", who last week e-mailed Chris Raettig, a London-based programmer whose personal website was linked to KMPG's.

Dunne had been unable to find "a formal agreement" authorising the link, and demanded that it be removed. Raettig refused, replying that "the free associative nature of hyperlinking" was the basis of the Web, and then posted the correspondence on his site. By Friday, Raettig had become something of a Web hero, with 102 other websites adding new links to KPMG's site. Er, Mr Dunne, doesn't your firm claim to understand e-business?

(The Times, December 10 2001)

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Evening Standard: Beware - 'positive' news ahead

By David Rowan

THIS is painfully difficult for a journalist to admit, but there seems to be a depressing amount of good news around at the moment. It doesn't have to be all terrorism, war and recession, you know: a whole other sector of the press is competing to bring you the uplifting stories that will sweeten your day.

This week, to reflect the goodwill supposed to afflict newspapers this season, the Media desk has binned its normal reading in favour of Positive News, The Positive Press and Good News Daily. In print and especially online, teams of reporters now face the appalling task of finding upbeat stories to tell.

Take Positive News, a 55,000-circulation tabloid produced in Clun, Shropshire. Its new issue celebrates the 32 families building a commune in Gloucestershire, Daniel Barenboim's workshop for Israeli and Palestinian students, and the launch of a new Movement for the Abolition of War. Its front-page headline would shame The Star: "May Peace Prevail on Earth".

Shauna Crockett-Burrows, a 71-year-old former actress, set up Positive News nine years ago "because the mainstream media tend to be so negative - you never get to hear about the many people taking chances to improve their lives". The newspaper is distributed free from health-food shops and the like, and is funded by subscriptions ("The Guardian, Observer and Daily Mail take us"), donations and advertising for alternative-energy systems and organic food boxes. Advertising has remained stable since 11 September (good news!), although the editorial task, Crockett-Burrows admits, has become "more challenging".

Still, she notes, there is a positive side even to the Afghan war: "People are much more informed now about US foreign policy, which is good. And in the Middle East, we know about the number of groups working to bring peace. "

There is more good news on the web, where Positive Press (www. positivepress.com) guides readers to upbeat stories "to encourage more constructive and positive journalism". Concerned that the media's focus on disasters and catastrophe leads to a prevailing cynicism, it highlights "countless daily acts of human intelligence, ingenuity and generosity". This week we learned about Amanda Lollar, who has been nursing thousands of injured bats; Barbara Turner, teacher extraordinaire and Harold Fisher, still building churches at 100. Elsewhere, NewsForTheSoul.com was reporting yesterday that a turkey had been liberated from the Christmas table, and GoodNewsDaily. com had Erin Brockovich posing lasciviously as its Hero of the Day.

The phenomenon is even being regionalised: GoodNewsIndia. com led on Mahadeva, a Bangalore undertaker who is "an icon for dignity of labour and indomitable spirit".

What, then, stands out as the best good-news story of this otherwise awful news year? "Mmm, that's a tough one," Shauna Crockett-Burrows reflects. "It has been a very tricky year in that regard. "

(Evening Standard, December 9 2001)

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Evening Standard: Two days on a media studies course

By David Rowan

IT was 3. 54pm on day one before "post-structuralism" echoed through the media studies lecture hall - not a term, it must be admitted, much heard in the Evening Standard's newsroom. But deep within the University of East London's Beckton campus, journalism tutor Andrew Calcutt was delivering his two-hour lesson on "Understanding the Culture Industries" - and attention had turned to the feminisation of the media organisation as ideological change interacted with structural modification.

The "hard newsroom", we learned, was being "feminised" by a popular appetite for lifestyle stories - the fashion and "people" news that was often written by women, who thus gained "an equality of degradation in the post-(Henry)-Fordist workplace". As a result, a more caring "ethics man" had emerged to replace "the masculinist macho style of Kelvin MacKenzie's management technique".

He, for those too young, was the domineering Sun editor whose reporters would bang their heads against a wall to save Kelvin the trouble. Kelvin went on to clash with Janet Street-Porter at Live! TV, a relationship we analysed by watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary about their final boardroom struggle.

"Watch for the dynamics of power, and work out who's being disempowered at the board meeting," Mr Calcutt, a former journalist and musician, advised. "The men in the white shirts are being calculating and domineering, and feminisation is unravelling. Put in your minds the dichotomy between rhetoric and reality."

As dichotomies go, there's a pretty huge one between the jargon of media studies theory and the language actually spoken in the modern newsroom. From White City to Canary Wharf, editors tend to sneer at media studies degrees, famously derided by Chris Woodhead, former chief inspector of schools, as "vacuous" and "quasi-academic". Yet the number of students taking these degrees has doubled since 1995, with 2,660 applying last year for basic media studies and another 1,273 for journalism - catching up fast with the 8,495 choosing English.

So what makes this one of Britain's fastest-growing undergraduate disciplines? To find out, I spent two days at the University of East London, where 400 undergraduates are studying units with titles such as "Sexual Cultures" and "Popular Music: Theory and Practice". A third of the coursework is practical, offering training in production skills and new technologies, but the majority is designed to teach critical thinking.

"We're promising a training in deconstruction skills," explains David Butler, the subject co-ordinator. "It's important to understand the language of media representation and to learn how to think."

Mr Butler, a former freelance journalist on trade and political titles, has no time for the subject's critics and their "class snobbishness against the former polytechnics". "I'm not particularly interested in talking to elitists," he says, dismissing Chris Woodhead as a "fascist" whom it is "hard to find anyone to defend outside The Daily Telegraph". Media studies degrees are no less vocationally useful than traditional Oxbridge disciplines, he insists. "Apparently doing classics at Oxford is a suitable basis for becoming a civil servant. What's the link? So why is there a view that to work within the media there's a need for particular skills?"

According to Mr Butler - who, with his ponytail, stubble and black leather coat, would not be mistaken for a typical Oxford don - the ability to network is as important in today's job market as knowledge. "The best qualification for getting a job in the media is to be related to someone in the media," he says."The working-class students here have to work bloody hard to cultivate contacts."

Still, they appear to face better job prospects on graduation than students of more traditional subjects. A national survey recently suggested that 76 per cent of last year's media-studies graduates were working within six months, compared with 56 per cent for English and history. Admittedly, only four per cent of those were working as journalists - compared with 20 per cent in "clerical and secretarial" posts. At East London, last year's graduates are now working at Reuters, at BBC radio, in web design... and at the local cinema. Current third-year students hope to run a music magazine, produce for television and local radio, and work in music PR, with the Mirror's 3am Girls the most popular role models in print.

THE theory aspect, by students' general consensus, will be of limited value in the real world. They are realistic that "you won't get into TV because of a university project", and are quite focused on the value of contacts made through work experience. Sophie Price worries that "the bad name of media studies might actually disadvantage us - they'll think we're dropouts". Khadijah Moncrieffe recalls that when she was 16, on a work-experience placement at the BBC, "the producers were laughing when applicants' CVs listed media courses". Khadijah knows what counts more than the degree: "It's who you know."

Evelyn Ojo agrees: "Nepotism, that's the game in media. Being good isn't always enough."

Back in the "Writing, Knowledge, Power" class, lecturer Marianne Wells emphasises that news stories and TV documentaries, like history, are always told from a particular standpoint, and that "representation is never neutral".

"Think about absence and inclusion," Ms Wells says as she plays a Discovery Civilisation Channel video about the Wright Brothers' first flight. "Think about what kinds of power relationships are influencing interpretation."

Such an emphasis on critical thinking would be commended at the traditional universities. But media studies at a former poly faces an extra battle to gain credibility among the very media it seeks to understand. For all the department's excellent production-training facilities, course study units entitled "Lesbian and Gay Cultures" and "Film and Feminism" risk playing to the media's own prejudices. And the jargon - essay questions on whether "the dual labour market is reproduced in the world of digital media production" - does not help bridge the gap between academia and workplace.

Andrew Calcutt, whose books include a cultural critique of Britain, insists that the subject is relevant to the world of work. "It's key," he says."Not because its a precise training for the job, but because students are trained in critical but disciplined thinking. Employers want critical thinking."

As for Kelvin MacKenzie, currently preoccupied with the Wireless Group's troubled share price, he was uncharacteristically "unwilling to comment" yesterday about his starring role in media education. Perhaps the newsroom really has been feminised.

(Evening Standard, December 5 2001)

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The Times: Tech column - Trojans/Ginger/Company Googling

By David Rowan

WHO'S watching what you type? Your keystrokes spell out your passwords, your credit-card numbers, and your private conversations - so it's no joke that Britain's fastest-spreading "viruses" can monitor your typing history and send it down the phone line.

They are known as Trojans - like the horses, the programs arrive at your computer in benign disguises - and in recent days "BadTrans-B" has been the troublemaker infiltrating the nation's e-mails. Arriving in Outlook in-trays, it can get to work without you even opening an attachment - and while it reproduces through your address book it tries to record your keyboard entries. Not much fun if a malicious hacker is out there waiting.

The online banks woke up to the risks a while ago, but now the ranks of law enforcement have decided that "key-logging", as it's known, might be quite useful. If governments want to keep track of potential wrongdoers, why not snoop on their keystrokes and arrange for the records to be automatically mailed back to HQ? The question is causing furious debate among computer-security experts.

The debate was sparked a fortnight ago, when the FBI was reported to be developing a key-logging program of its own. Known as "Magic Lantern", the software would be e-mailed to suspects' computers to "steal" the keys to unlock their encrypted messages. Passwords would be sent down the line without the suspects' knowledge - and so the popular Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption program, an excellent way of scrambling e-mails, would be rendered transparent.

Privacy advocates have been quick to warn of the software's potential for abuse, allowing agencies (including the British police) to mop up data without obtaining search warrants. But interestingly, the most agitated voices are now being heard within the virus-protection industry. If the people who make products such as McAfee have to co-operate with the Feds - to ensure that targets are not alerted to Trojans' arrival - then who will trust their "anti-virus solutions"?

Reports last week claimed that McAfee's owners have already been in touch with the FBI about reining in its products (the company denies this). Bulletin boards are already urging boycotts of "deliberately faulty" anti-virus kits.

There are three lessons to draw from all this. First, be aware that it is now straightforward for people to monitor your keystrokes for malicious ends - so if you use Outlook or Outlook Express, install whatever security patches Microsoft recommends against Trojans. Second, don't expect commercially available software to alert you if you come under the authorities' suspicion. And third, don't presume that encryption will safeguard your private messages: governments appear determined to overthrow online privacy - even if that means using hackers' tools to do.

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Every now and then a new technology is hyped as a life-changer before anyone has a clue what it is. Since January, an extraordinary buzz has been growing about a mysterious device code-named "Ginger" or "IT" - said to have impressed Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Steve Jobs of Apple enough to invest in it, and attracted a £175,000 book advance, even though the inventor, Dean Kamen, has still not revealed a bean. The leaks suggest that it is a hydrogen-powered scooter with a zero-emission engine, which if true could save a few oil barrels; but today the Good Morning America show finally promises to reveal the secret. If it's not a hoax - and the tech journals are sceptical - then this could be the biggest thing since, ooh, the Sinclair C5 ...

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HERE'S a trick that could cause chaos in your workplace. Google, the Internet search engine that also archives news groups, now lets you search for all the messages sent to chat rooms from a specific company domain. If, for instance, you want to discover what Microsoft employees have been posting to news groups, go to groups.google.com and search for "author:@microsoft.com".

Picking media companies at random, it took us seconds to uncover the following: the Wall Street Journal is desperate to talk to US postal workers for an article; a BBC documentary team is looking for "UFO witnesses to tell of their accounts"; and Richard Tait, the editor-in-chief of ITN, is apparently keen on obtaining a Peter Gabriel record.

Go on, try it - you never know what you will learn about your colleagues.

(The Times, December 3 2001)

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