Jews and the Computer World
From the Jewish Tribal Review site
According
to Forbes magazine, by 1998 Michael Dell was the seventh
richest person on the planet, worth $16.5 billion, and also the
youngest to have ever been listed on the Forbes 500 "rich
list." He is the head of the Dell computer company, a
direct-sales firm. Dell is an active philanthropist in the Austin,
Texas, Jewish community.
In April 2001, Jewish movie mogul Terry Semel became the CEO of Yahoo. (He was, that same year, a co-chairman of the Israeli Film Festival). JEWISH POST, 2001]
Among such entrepreneurs is
ICQ ("I seek you") was a firm founded in Tel Aviv, Israel, "the brainchild of four Israeli computer programmers ... [Within six months] it claimed the title of world's largest online communication network." [NIESE, A., 11-15-2001] Another Israeli computer company, StarBand, "is America's first consumer two-way, always-on, high-speed satellite Internet service provider." [CEO: Zur Feldman; President: David Trachtenberg]
[http://www.starband.com/whoweare/index.htm] Starband is part of the Israeli company Gilat Satellite Networks, Ltd.
Even Jewish-American Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus "is also working to link the Israeli economy to his home state. The country has the second-highest density of startups after Silicon Valley, and the hardware mogul has helped persuade state officials to offer the Israeli firms incentives to relocate in Georgia." [MOTHER JONES, 3-5-2001]
Isabel Maxwell, daughter of corrupt British Jewish mogul Robert Maxwell, is "president of the Silicon Valley's hottest internet investment company" -- CommTouch ... The company was founded in 1991 by a group of technology-savvy former [Israeli] army officers led by Gideon Mantel, a bomb disposal expert ... [Ms. Maxwell] has a deep affinity for Israel ... CommTouch employs 400 staff. Its head office is in Silicon Valley. R&D sales are run from Tel Aviv." [CASSY, J., 6-22-2000, p. 26]
Then there is Lawrence Perlman, co-chairman of Seagate, "the world's largest disc-drive maker." [WALL STREET JOURNAL, 3-30-2000] John Roth is the CEO of prominent computer systems giant Nortel Networks. Benjamin Rosen, long time CEO of the company that sells the most computers, Compaq Computer, is "a pioneering figure in the personal computer industry and a founding investor in both Compaq Computer and Lotus Development." The CEO, President, and Chairman of rival Packard Bell NEC, the second-largest computer maker, was Beny Alagem, until he stepped down in 2000. He too is Jewish.
Lawrence Ellison is the CEO of Oracle Systems, Inc., the foremost producer of computer software for corporate databases. (Ellison has built a $150 million home in Woodside, California, featuring "a ten-building compound modeled after a Japanese imperial villa"). [LI, D., 4-1-01, p. 7] The aforementioned Michael Dell, head of Dell Computers, is one of the richest people on the planet. Sandy Lerner is the "founder of network software giant Cisco Systems." [WALSH, M., 12-23-1996, p. 17]
From: When Victims Rule. A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America
(Citation sources for the above quotes are at the end of this online book)
Googley-eyed over success,
USA Today, August 27, 2001
"Walk into Google's headquarters, and the first thing you see on the
wall is a constantly changing real-time projection of some of the 100
million daily searches taking place on its site — everything
from the song-swap service Kazaa to condoms to Martha Stewart. On the
Web Google At Google, with 1,800 queries a second, searching is what
it's all about. 'Our decision early on, and it turned out to be the
right one, is that just being the best search engine was enough,'
says Sergey Brin, 27, who co-founded Google in 1998 with
fellow Stanford University Ph.D. candidate Larry Page ... Brin
[is the] son of a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union
who has lived in the USA since age 6."
(a web site that critically analyzes Google)
Startup Nation. Israel has more startups than anywhere outside of
Silicon Valley.What's fueling the Internet boom? Soldiers, officers,
code-breakers, and spies,
Business 2.0, November 2000
"On the northern tip of Tel Aviv, where the old port used to be, sits
a nightclub called Dugit. One of many open-air clubs on this stretch
of beach, Dugit also rubs shoulders with auto shops, abandoned
warehouses, and a pet-supplies store. During most summer evenings,
Dugit and the other hot spots here attract some of Tel Aviv's hippest
after-hours club crawlers. But one recent sweltering night, Dugit
turned into a teeming nest of spies. They were Israeli soldiers --
300 elite operatives from some of the nation's most secretive
high-tech intelligence and electronic warfare units. They were on a
mission so sensitive that their superior officers had been
deliberately left out of the loop -- no need for them to know, and
they wouldn't have been happy had they known. Many had been enticed
here by one of the oldest tricks in the spy handbook: an invitation
from a pretty young woman working for the other side. Some of the
operatives were armed, M-16s hanging loosely from their shoulders.
All were hunting for what has become one of the most coveted
objectives in Israeli intelligence circles today: startup funding.
L'affaire Dugit was, in fact, a recruiting party thrown by a group of
Israel's big-gun high-tech companies. The attendees were targeted
because they are among the brains behind the Israel Defense Forces,
or IDF. They belong to units that dream up the state-of-the-art
intelligence and communications technologies that give the IDF its
tactical edge. These technological innovations power Israel's
far-ranging high-tech boom. In Israel, yesterday's soldier is
tomorrow's entrepreneur, and the event's sponsors, established
Israeli tech outfits that include Comverse Technology,
RoseNet, and Yazam, are trying to get an early line on
ideas to fund or geniuses to hire ... The United States has MIT,
Stanford, and a handful of other academic hothouses that nurture the
talent and research from which many high-tech powerhouses emerge. In
Israel, the military, much to its own discomfort, increasingly plays
that role. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, the military has
compensated for its lack of resources and manpower with brainpower.
Particularly in the past 20 years, the IDF has invested billions of
dollars in developing technological warfare. The result is a number
of secret, semisecret, and open-secret divisions devoted to coming up
with cutting-edge technologies designed to help Israel know what its
enemies are doing -- and to kill them when the need arises .. With
the spread of the Internet, the kind of technological wizardry once
used to guide missiles, beam secure communications, and break codes
suddenly presents enormous commercial opportunities. 'By sheer luck,"
says Professor Shimon Schocken, dean of the school of computer
science at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a private Israeli
university, 'Israel already had the solutions to so many of the
problems of the Internet.' Even a short list of hot tech companies
that have recently spun out of Israel's military-technological
complex is long, [including Amiram Levinberg's]
Gilat Satellite Networks, which last year made more than half
of the interactive VSATs (small satellite earth stations used in
communications networks) sold in the world. Several of the founders
of Israel's best-known tech success, the Internet security firm
Check Point Software Technologies, are former members of 8-200
who specialized in developing firewalls between classified military
computer networks. Today, the seven-year-old company has a market cap
of $23.4 billion and commands 52 percent of the worldwide market for
commercial firewall software. Gideon Hollander, CEO of
wireless software maker Jacada, is a veteran of those units,
where he worked on artificial intelligence systems. Founders of new
startups iWeb (software for delivering Web ads), CTI2
(Web telephony), AudioCodes (voice-compression technology),
and hundreds of others are former secret warriors. All this
technological ferment has catapulted Israel into the front ranks of
global tech powers -- and transformed an economy that just a decade
ago was a disaster. There are now more startups in Israel than there
are anywhere outside Silicon Valley. Israel, a country of 6 million
people, ranks third in the world in the number of Nasdaq-listed
companies, behind the United States and Canada. ... (More recently,
according to Israeli and international press reports, Israel acquired
a urine sample from ailing Syrian president Hafez Assad by
clandestinely doctoring a toilet that was set aside for his exclusive
use at the funeral of Jordan's King Hussein in February 1999. The
toilet's pipes were rerouted to lead to a specimen jar; Israeli
agents later analyzed the sample for clues about the Syrian leader's
health and concluded that he was living on borrowed time. Assad died
16 months later.) But it is military intelligence, more than any
other single factor, that accounts for Israel's tech prowess. In
fact, the demands made by the elite intelligence units seem as if
they're meant to be basic training for startup entrepreneurs.
Soldiers work in small, highly motivated teams, with brutal hours and
little sleep. The pressure to innovate is crushing -- national
survival is at stake ... Aryeh Finegold ... recently founded
his third company, Orsus, an e-commerce software maker. As an
engineer for Intel in the United States in the 1980s,
Finegold was a principal architect of the 286 and 386 chips.
One of his previous startups, Mercury Interactive, an
e-commerce monitoring software company, has a market cap of about
$11.2 billion ... Talpiot's [a special military division]
role in the current tech boom is no secret. Assaf Monsa and
another Talpiot graduate, Yair Mann, along with two other
alumni of elite tech units, three years ago founded RichFX,
which has developed streaming video technology that Monsa says uses
between one-twentieth and one-hundredth of the bandwidth gobbled up
by competing systems ... Marius Nacht, another Talpiot grad,
is a co-founder of Check Point. Eli Mintz, CEO and president
of Compugen, a gene sequencing technology firm, and Yuval
Shalom, co-founder and CTO of Wiseband, a maker of wireless phone
technologies, also went through Talpiot .... [Another military
group, Mamram] comes from its founding members: 8 Ashkenazi Jews
and 200 Iraqi immigrants who were specialists in wireless
communications and had worked for Iraqi Railways. Their skills became
the cornerstone of the electronic intelligence gathering, encryption,
and other activities known to be among the unit's specialties. It's
illegal for past and present members to talk about 8-200, although it
has become something of an open secret in the tech world. The unit
has also attained a mythical status among venture capitalists for the
entrepreneurial wizards who are veterans of the unit ... About 90
percent of Israeli startups are incorporated not in Israel but in the
United States. That's in part because the United States is such a
huge market, but it's also because the country has a less troublesome
tax regime and deep ranks of managerial and marketing expertise from
which Israeli companies can draw. Some of Israel's largest and most
successful tech companies call the United States home:
Comverse, a voice messaging company with a market cap of $14.9
billion, is based in Woodbury, N.Y.; Mercury Interactive is
based in Sunnyvale, Calif. More common these days is what's known as
the fast exit, whereby startups either sell out to a foreign
multinational entirely or split themselves in two, keeping R&D in
Israel but moving sales and marketing to the United States."
Netscape
Heeds Jews' Gripes Over Web Directory,
[Jewish] Forward, November 22,
2002
"Internet giant Netscape has acknowledged anti-Israel bias in its
massive Web cataloguing service and has taken several steps to
correct the situation, including dismissing the volunteer editor
Netscape says was responsible. Responding to a complaint by the
Jewish Internet Association, an Internet watchdog group, Netscape's
Robert Keating said the company would also eliminate a category that
linked users to Jewish extremist groups such as Kahane Chai and would
add a separate list of pro-Israel organizations under their own
category ... The service, known as the Open Directory Project, is an
effort to create a comprehensive catalog of the Internet, with
millions of Web sites placed into categories and subcategories.
Hosted and administered by Netscape, the directory is now featured by
various search engines, including the popular Google. Tens of
thousands of volunteer editors choose the Web sites, Web site
descriptions and categories that will be placed in the directory, but
Netscape 'sets the editorial policies and direction' of the project,
according to the directory's own Web site. Netscape has said that the
volunteers are chosen by unpaid senior editors, who are approved by
Keating, the editor in chief of the project. Chriss said his
organization discovered problems in the directory last month, and
sent a letter with specific allegations of bias and distortions to
Steve Case, chairman of Netscape's parent company, AOL Time Warner.
[Chuck Chriss, president of the California-based Jewish
Internet Agency] complained that the directory contained a link
to 'Jewish Hate Groups,' including Kach and Kahane Chai, but did not
contain a corresponding category for Islamic extremists, nor any
sites describing antisemitism among Muslims ... Shortly afterwards,
Chriss received a letter from Keating saying Netscape agreed that
there was bias in the directory and that it had decided to dismiss
the volunteer editor who they said was responsible. In addition, the
company eliminated the 'Jewish Hate Group' section, added a separate
list of pro-Israel organizations under their own category and
included the Jewish Internet Association's own pro-Israel 'Palestine
Facts' Web site. Chriss told the Forward last week that he did not
blame Netscape for the initial bias, saying they had a small staff
supervising tens of thousands of volunteer editors ... Derick Mains,
a Netscape spokesman ... suggested that pro-Israel activists
volunteer to be editors on the directory and correct some of the
perceived bias."
GIL
SHWED, Chairman and CEO Check Point Software Technologies
Ltd.,
CIO Magazine, October 1, 2002
"You can forgive Gil Shwed for not wanting to discuss his age,
which he reluctantly confirms is 34. He was just shy of 25 when he
and two colleagues started Check Point Software. The company's
rise thrust Shwed into a spotlight most executives don't see
for decades. His appearance on Forbes' 2002 list of under-35
'billionaire babies' has led some wags back home to call him the
'Bill Gates of Israel.' All that attention comes thanks to Check
Point FireWall-1, the first mass-market firewall that made its
debut just as the Internet was taking off in 1993. That product and
subsequent Check Point offerings are credited with helping define the
nascent markets for network security and virtual private networks. It
was during Shwed's four years in the Israeli Defense Forces
that he first had the idea for stateful inspection—the network
security standard for which he holds a patent."
Semel:
The New Yahoo on the Block,
news.com, April 17, 2001
"Terry Semel has already made his mark on Hollywood. Now he's
hoping to do the same with one of the Internet's most visited Web
portals. On Tuesday, Yahoo announced that Semel will
replace outgoing Chief Executive Tim Koogle after an executive search
mounted less than two months ago. The move brings a media veteran
with international experience and a self-proclaimed specialty in
marketing to the helm of the troubled Internet bellwether. It also
puts Semel back in the hot seat about a year and half after he quit
his job as co-head of Warner Bros., presumably to pursue a quieter
life running an Internet investment firm."
Steve
Ballmer, Jewish Virtual Library (A
Division of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise)
"Steve Ballmer, 43, was appointed president and chief
executive officer of Microsoft Corp. on January 13, 2000. In
his capacity as president and CEO, Ballmer is responsible for the
overall management of Microsoft ... The Detroit-born son of a Jewish
mother is now the world's richest Jew, worth an estimated $25
billion."
Time
Magazine Honors Survivor.
Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, January 2, 1998
"Time magazine has named a Holocaust survivor its 1997 Man of the
Year. The magazine honored Andrew Grove, chairman and CEO of
Intel, which produces nearly 90 percent of the world's personal
computer microprocessors. Grove was born Andras Grof in Hungary to a
dairyman and a bookkeeper ... [Intel] is now worth $115
billion and earns $5.1 billion annually in profits, making it the
seventh most profitable company in the world." [Other Jewish
moguls in the computer world in recent years include Michael
Dell, head of Dell Computers; Steve Ballmer,
president of Microsoft; Nate Kantor, president of
MCI International; Steven Kirsch, founder of
Infoseek; Mark Goldston, CEO of NetZero;
Mitchell Kapor, head of Lotus Development
Corporation; Mark Cuban, head of Broadcast.com and
Audio.Net; Lawrence Perlman, head of Seagate;
John Roth, CEO of Nortel Network; Benjamin
Rosen, founder of Compaq computers; Beny Alagem,
CEO, president, and chairman of Packard Bell NEC
(Hewlett-Packard); Laurence Ellison, CEO of Oracle
Systems; Sandy Lerner, founder of Cisco Systems;
Irwin Jacobs, founder of Qualcomm Inc., Rob
Glaser, CEO and Chairman of Real Networks; Monte
Zweben, President and CEO of Blue Martini Software;
Jerry Greenberg, co-founder of Sapient; Eric
Greenberg, Chairman of Scient; Danny Lewin, founder
of Akamai Technologies; and Dan Snyder, head of
Snyder Communications.] The Jewish Exponent
estimates that 10-15% of all Microsoft employees are
Jewish. -- [Mono, Brian. Spiritual Wealth: The Economy Is
Doing Just Fine, Jewish Exponent, 12-30-99, p. 9] Among the
above, Lewin was killed in the World Trade Center terrorist
attacks. As CNN noted: "Lewin was named one of the top 10 people of
the Enterprise Systems Power 100, a list of industry leaders chosen
for their effect on the IT (information technology) landscape and for
their ability to influence the industry's direction ... Born in
Denver, Colorado, and raised in Jerusalem, Lewin is an officer in the
Israel Defense Forces, having served in the country's military for
more than four years." [SIEBERG, D. Akamai:
Co-Founder Dies in WTC Plane Crash, 9-11-01, CNN.com]
I'll Gladly Pay You Tuesday. How PayPal Has Already Won the Battle of
the Internet Payment Systems,
PBS, August 31, 2000
"Max [Levchin], who is 25 years old and working
for his fourth Internet startup company, is Chief Technical Officer
at X.com. And X.com, while it sure sounds to me like a great place to
find dirty pictures online, is actually a financial services site on
the World Wide Web. X.com's claim to fame is PayPal, an Internet
payment system built by ... Max Levchin. Since it was launched
last Fall, PayPal has become the payment system of choice for 3.3
million web surfers, many of whom use it to buy and sell things on
eBay and other auction sites. When PayPal (not yet X.com) was
organized in January 1999, it wasn't a particularly auspicious time
to start a micropayment system, or any payment system for that matter
... Max, who is a very bright, very articulate kid who
immigrated nine years ago from the Ukraine and speaks better English
than I do, fits the Silicon Valley model better than does PayPal. Max
lives in an apartment with no furniture, drives a $57,000 sports car,
and has a mother back in Chicago who fears (she doesn't know for
sure) that her son is a failure because he doesn't have a Ph.D. or
even a masters degree. PayPal, on the other hand, just shifts around
dollars and cents from one person to another."
AOL's
Point Man in the Web War. How CEO Barry Schuler plans to leave
Microsoft in the dust,
Business Week,
Ray Kurzweil (well known in the "Artificial Intelligence"
field has a web
site.
Kurzweil's 1996 lecture in Israel, "Israel
in the Age of Knowledge." He sits on two advisory
boards for an Israeli company called Jerusalem Global
Ventures.
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles,
March 28, 2003
"When Susan Samueli met her future husband, Henry, at a
dance at Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles in 1979, she never
could have anticipated how different her life would be today. That
was 24 years and three children ago, before Samueli became a
household name in much of Southern California, as Henry co-founded
Broadcom, the leading provider in
broadband high-speed communications technology. It was way
before Broadcom went public, and the Samuelis, with Henry
serving as chief technical officer, became multimillionaires
nearly overnight ... Her family, her Judaism and her career (she ran
an alternative health-care consulting practice until 1995) all guide
her new life, just as they did her old one ... Samueli’s
interest in health care is matched by her husband’s passion for
technology. 'But we have a common interest in Judaism,' Henry
said. Raised in the Valley, Susan Samueli was always immersed
in the activities of an active Jewish community. 'It was very
different where I went to high school at Grant. During the High
Holidays, the campus was empty. Of course, everyone was ditching who
wasn’t Jewish, too,' Samueli said ... In the spring of
2001, the Samuelis bought 20 acres of land adjacent to the already
existing Tarbut V’Torah Community Day School for $20 million.
The site, overlooking the hills and valleys of much of Orange County
and directly opposite UC Irvine, will be the future site of the
Samueli Campus. The campus currently provides both elementary and
high school education. The second phase of the building project
includes a full-service Jewish Community Center with a fitness
center, pool, theater and auditorium and facilities to house the
Jewish agencies of Orange County. Groundbreaking will begin when the
$20 million campaign goal is reached. (Approximately 80 percent of
phase two has been raised.) The couple has also been instrumental in
the construction of two Orange County synagogues and recently funded
a synagogue in a suburb of Tel Aviv. They also give extensively to
the Bureau of Jewish Education, Jewish Family Services, the Jewish
Federation of Orange County and Morasha Jewish Day School."
Business 2.0, April 2003
"Pound for pound, who's the biggest, richest media mogul on the Web?
Terry Semel? Nope. Sumner Redstone? Not exactly. Try
Matt Drudge. Years after his big "scoop" -- leaking that
Newsweek was sitting on a story about the tryst between
President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky -- Drudge's
website is bigger than ever. Run on a shoestring, the Drudge
Report, a plain-Jane page of news links and occasional scoops,
clears, by our back-of-the-envelope estimate, a cool $800,000 a year.
While other news sites make money, they don't mint it
Drudge-style. New York Times Digital scored an
operating profit of $8.3 million last year. But it has 237 full-time
employees, meaning that each worker accounts for about $35,000 in
profit. (And that doesn't take into consideration the fact that the
site's reports are actually generated by the newspaper staff, a cost
allocated to the paper side only.) By any calculus, Drudge's
site might be the most efficiently run on the Web; it makes the
Times site look bloated. Drudge's is a two-person
operation (although he never mentions his right-hand man); that means
it makes $400,000 per employee. And he never has to leave the comfort
of his Miami condo. Lessons From a Web Media Powerhouse How to give a
two-man shop the reach and influence of a major news organization. 1.
Offload the Work. Instead of paying reporters to ferret out stories,
Drudge gets the news through his network of sources. 'To my
knowledge Matt does virtually no independent reporting
whatsoever,' says his pal Lucianne Goldberg. 2. Aggregate,
Don't Duplicate. When Drudge gets wind of breaking news, he doesn't
bother trying to report the story. Instead he just points his readers
to other news sources that already have the story, whether it's an
obscure Norwegian paper or the New York Times. 3. Zero
Bureaucracy Means Great Speed. Drudge can post breaking news in the
time it takes to type a headline into an HTML file. There's no anchor
to put in the makeup chair or layers of editors who need to vet a
story before it goes live. 4. Don't Discuss Business. Drudge
never explains how he stays on top of the news 24 hours a day. This
builds mystique and creates buzz, which translates into traffic. The
result: millions of readers and not a penny spent to advertise the
website ...In fact, Drudge does sleep. And he isn't exactly
chained to his keyboard. 'He swims on the beach every day and goes
and has a burrito for lunch,' according to friend Lucianne
Goldberg, a conservative talk-radio host ... Michael
Kinsley, founding editor of Slate, who once tried,
unsuccessfully, to do business with Drudge, says the
go-it-alone persona is just a mask. 'Matt's very different
from his public image. He thinks he's this incredibly powerful,
ruthless avenger,' Kinsley says. 'But he's actually sort of an
innocent, Walter Mitty type -- except that his fantasies are more or
less true.' In fact, he's written the book on building an online
media business."
[Note: Akamai Technologies was co-founded by Daniel Levin.
Levin, an officer in the Israeli military, was killed in one of the
planes involved the 9-11 attack. Another censor listed below is
Yahoo! -- which is headed by Terry Semel, also Jewish and a judge at
a recent Israel Film Festival.]
Al
Jazeera and the Net - free speech, but don't say that,
By John Lettice, The Register (UK),
April 7, 2003
"Arabic satellite TV network Al Jazeera's efforts to build an
English-language web site have run into another speed bump. Akamai
Technologies, whose 'Accelerated Networks can stand up to
unpredictable traffic and flash crowds for even the largest events,'
fired Al Jazeera last week. Akamai issued a statement saying
it had worked 'briefly' last week with Al Jazeera, but that it
had decided 'not to continue a customer relationship' with the
channel. No reason was given for the decision, but an Al
Jazeera spokeswoman told the New York Times that companies
were coming under 'nonstop political pressure' to refuse to do
business with the channel. Al Jazeera launched an
English-language web site at the end of last month, and this
immediately came under fire on several fronts. It was hacked, DDoSed,
Network Solutions was tricked into allowing the domain to be hijacked
(which inspires confidence), and US host DataPipe gave it notice
after what Al Jazeera claimed was pressure from other
customers. The English language site was up at time of writing, but
Al Jazeera clearly needs to find a robust, long-term solution,
and this is equally clearly going to be very difficult indeed. There
are many ironies to the multi-decked 'get Al Jazeera' campaign; one
attack suppressed the site with the slogan 'Let Freedom Ring!' (only
up to a point, presumably), while practically none of those busily
denying themselves the right to access it can have had time to read
it in the first place ... Al Jazeera protests, in fairly mild
terms, that it is 'increasingly appearing to be subject to a campaign
designed at limiting its access to Western audiences,' and this does
look awfully like the truth ... Essentially Al Jazeera's 'Iraqi
propaganda' activities are no greater (perhaps even rather less) than
those of many liberal media outlets. In the UK many of these have
also been criticised by the government, but they have not been the
subject of major hacking attacks, nor have hosting and services
companies declined to do business with them. We should also clarify
something regarding the footage of the prisoners and the dead
servicemen; military spokesmen to the contrary, reproducing such
images is not a breach of the Geneva Convention. The Geneva
Convention is directed at governments, and does not cover news
organisations. Al Jazeera has arguably broadcast images of the Iraqi
Government breaching the Geneva Convention, but that is not the same
thing. To get this into perspective, note that one of the most
striking pictures from the Vietnam war was of a South Vietnamese
officer shooting a prisoner - do we argue that this should not have
been published? If Al Jazeera had footage of an Iraqi shooting a
British prisoner, should that be broadcast? The other way around? Are
our standards today different from those of the 60s, or do the
criteria differ depending on the nationalities of the participants
and/or the audience? The answers are not straightforward, nor should
they be ... By Western standards Al Jazeera may have breached
standards of taste and decency, and may not (again by Western
standards) have sufficiently contextualised bin Laden and Iraqi
exercises in propaganda. But by Middle Eastern standards Western
media could similarly be accused of too readily parrotting propaganda
in the other direction, and of too frequently operating a system of
self-censorship. There's some merit to both points of view, the
demise of Arnett being a good example of self-censorship, but there's
no good reason for casting Al Jazeera into outer darkness - unless of
course the problem is that its coverage has been increasingly
reaching a Western audience. Or an Internet audience. Back in the
irony department Yahoo!, which you may recall had some trouble
with the French government a while back over Nazi memorabilia, is one
of the companies declining to carry Al Jazeera advertising owing to
'war-related sensitivity,' and there's probably a high correlation
between people who want Al Jazeera run off the web and people
who oppose virtually any kind of internet censorship. Al Jazeera
meanwhile has racked up millions more new TV viewers than it could
possibly hope to gain via a web site, and its service has continued
to be available in the US during the war. So why is the Internet
different? To some extent, it possibly isn't. Al Jazeera seems to
have been able to run an Arabic web site without coming under serious
fire until it introduced the English version. Similarly, it's been
able to run an Arabic TV station without Western companies trying to
pull the plugs on it, and with Western governments denouncing it on
the one hand while using it in order to get to its audience on the
other. So it's possibly OK if it's over there, in Arabic, but not if
it's over here, in English (if it goes ahead with its planned English
TV service later this year, then we'll no doubt find out). The
Internet is different, however, in that despite it being, allegedly,
the New Frontier, the ultimate medium for free speech, it's also
eminently suited to the suppression of free speech. Sure, anybody can
set up a web site and say whatever they like, but only if not too
many people read what they say, and only if they're careful about
what it is they say. Say something controversial that enough people
don't like, and you'll get attacked. Say something particular
pressure groups don't like, and you'll get attacked on multiple
fronts, bombarded via email, mail and voice phone, indirectly via
your neighbours, other people in your organisation, hosts your
organisation deals with, other outfits using the same hosts who don't
like the publicity."
Snail
mail attack could be launched online,
New Scientist, April 15, 2003
"An avalanche of unwanted post could be released upon an unsuspecting
victim using nothing more than an internet connection and some simple
code, a team of US researchers says. The attack, devised by Aviel
Rubin at Johns Hopkins University and Simon Byers [also
Jewish?] and David Kormann at AT&T Labs, involves
automatically subscribing a victim to hundreds of thousands of
catalogue request forms that are available online. Using search
engines to instantly locate such forms and then simple code to
automatically feed a victim's name and address into them, the
researchers say such an attack would be dangerously simple to carry
out. 'We have been living in a state of bliss, spoiled by the lack of
any concerted attacks that utilise these new services, search engines
in particular,' the researchers write in a paper entitled Defending
Against an Internet-based Attack on the Physical World. The
researchers say guarding against an attack would be difficult ...
Aside from the impact on individuals, Rubin and his co-authors
warn that such an attack could even disable a local postal office."
Riptech [pdf file: Origin of
Attacks -- See page 16]
[sidebar to the article entitled: Kobe Submits DNA during
hospital visit]
ESPN, July 10, 2003
"A pair of sports fans have launched a Web site to take advantage of
the Kobe Bryant legal situation, the Rocky Mountain News
reported Wednesday. Californian Jeff Reichman and Boston-area
resident David Feingold have created a campaign and a retail
store at www.freekobe.com, where they are offering T-shirts, coffee
cups and hats. The two men launched the site Tuesday in response to
reports that Bryant, a guard/small forward for the Los Angeles
Lakers, was arrested in Eagle County on suspicion of sexual assault.
Bryant has not yet been formally charged. "There are not really any
superstars to look up to anymore," Reichman, 24, said to the
newspaper. The site's creators, according to the newspaper, say they
are seeking to "protect one of the few remaining role models in this
tumultuous world of basketball fandom." "It's not so much that we are
huge fans of Kobe, but it's more that we are fans of the idea that
there can be a hero, somebody to look up to in professional sports,"
Reichman said. The T-shirts and hats sold on the site feature a "Free
Kobe" logo and slogans such as, "Because we're running out of
heroes."
By JOHN SCHWARTZ, New York Times, July
11, 2003
"More than a thousand unsuspecting Internet users around the world
have recently had their computers hijacked by hackers, who computer
security experts say are using them for pornographic Web sites. The
hijacked computers, which are chosen by the hackers apparently
because they have high-speed connections to the Internet, are
secretly loaded with software that makes them send explicit Web pages
advertising pornographic sites and offer to sign visitors up as
customers. Unless the owner of the hijacked computer is
technologically sophisticated, the activity is likely to go
unnoticed. The program, which only briefly downloads the pornographic
material to the usurped computer, is invisible to the computer's
owner. It apparently does not harm the computer or disturb its
operation ... The current version of the ring is not completely
anonymous, since the hijacked machines download the pornographic ads
from a single Web server. According to the computer investigators,
that machine apparently is owned by Everyones Internet, a large
independent Internet service company in Houston that also offers Web
hosting services to a large number of companies. Jeff
Lowenberg, the company's vice president of operations, said that
he was not aware of any illegal activity on one of his company's
computers but said that he would investigate ...Mr. Stewart, who has
written a technical paper to help antivirus companies devise defenses
against the porn-hijacking network, has named the program "migmaf,"
for "migrant Mafia," because he thinks the program originated in the
Russian high-tech underworld. Hackers from the former Soviet Union
have been linked to several schemes, including extortion attempts in
which they threaten to shut down online casinos through Internet
attacks unless the companies pay them off. Antispam activists have
also accused Russian organized crime organizations of taking over
home and business PC's to create networks for sending spam. "They
always seem to lead back to the Russian mob," Mr. Stewart said."
Forbes, August 19, 2003
"A major U.S. telecoms carrier has ordered Israeli company ECtel's
lawful interception application, the firm said in a statement on
Tuesday. A valuation for deal was not given and a spokeswoman for the
firm declined to comment on the size of the contract. ECtel, a unit
of telecoms equipment holding firm ECI Telecom, makes monitoring
equipment for communications networks. Shares in ECtel were up 0.7
percent at $6.15 in morning trade on the Nasdaq exchange.
Billing
firm Amdocs closes in on two massive deals,
By Gitit Pincas, Haaretz
(Israel), August 24, 2003
"Billing software developer Amdocs has reached the advanced
stages in a $100 million tender conducted by credit card and
financial services company Visa, according to a source in the
industry. ABN AMRO, the world's 10th largest bank, is also examining
Amdocs solutions. Amdocs refused to comment on the
reports. Amdocs' billing and customer relationship management
(CRM) software is directed primarily at the telecommunications
sector, but the company has recently tried to penetrate the banking
and financial services sectors, as well as technology manufacture,
health care, commerce and retail. The industry believes the company
has a good chance of entering the financial services market, as its
CRM solution, Clarify, has already been applied under similar
circumstances. Amdocs maintains secrecy surrounding expansion
plans, code-naming projects like the Visa tender, Venus, and the ABN
AMRO project, Beta. Staff members involved in the projects are asked
only to use the code names to prevent information leaks. The Clarify
software became part of the Amdocs product line after the
company purchased Nortel subsidiary Clarify for $200 million in
October 200 ... Visa has issued more than 1 billion cards in 150
countries and handled $2.4 trillion in transactions in 2002. ABN AMRO
boasts more than 3,000 branches in 60 countries."
Hackers
using Israeli 'net site to strike at Pentagon,
By Nitzan Horowitz, Middle East
Facts (originally from Haaretz
- Israel), July 30, 1999
"An Israeli Internet site is being used by international computer
hackers as a base for electronic attacks on U.S. government and
military computer systems, according to Pentagon officials who were
quoted in a Washington Times report yesterday. The paper said
that the National Security Agency detected the hackers and warned
government security officials last week about the electronic
penetration attempts. The warning was issued by the National Security
Incident Response Center, an interagency group set up by the NSA to
track computer attacks, the Washington Times explained. The
attacks were traced to an Internet protocol (IP) address in Israel,
said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. (An IP
address is a number that identifies a computer connected to the
Internet.) Many probes of government and military computers were
detected from the Israeli site, the agency noted, adding that the
site is a popular "jump point" for hackers in Israel and other
countries. Hackers have also used the site to store hacker-related
materials, such as software and database information, the Washington
paper reported. Such materials can include special password-breaking
programs that are used to find entry points into Internet sites."
White
House Names Yoran as Cybersecurity Chief,
By Roy Mark, siliconvalley.internet.com,
September 15, 2003
"Amit Yoran, the founder of an Internet government security
firm and a current vice president at Symantec, has been named
by the Bush administration to head the Department of Homeland
Security's (DHS) cybersecurity division. In his new role, Yoran
will be responsible for implementing the administration's
National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, a report issued by the White
House in February that depends more on private industry cooperation
than government mandates and regulations ... Yoran is the co-founder
of Riptech, an Alexandria, Va.-based firm that focused on
government cybersecurity. In July of last year, Symantec
bought Riptech for $145 million and Yoran stayed on as
vice president for managed security services. Before joining
Riptech, Yoran was director of the vulnerability
assessement program for the Defense Department's computer emergency
response team."
Wanted:
a search engine that feels our pain. Industry seeks a savvy,
more-human way to take Internet users where they're looking to
go,
By STEPHANIE EARLS, Times Union,
September 25, 2003
"The 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" introduced us to the HAL
9000, a self-actualized supercomputer that spoke in dulcet tones,
empathizing with its beleaguered crew while piloting them through
space (and, ultimately, plotting to kill them -- but that's another
story) ... "We want it to be people, not just a machine," said
Shelly Shapiro, director of the Holocaust Survivors &
Friends Education Center in Latham. But a machine it was, in 1995,
when Shapiro held a teacher's seminar in which she instructed
her charges to type the word Holocaust into computer search engines.
A top response that emerged on sites was a report by a notorious
Holocaust revisionist, claiming the Holocaust never occurred.
Sharpiro was horrified. "You could type in the word Auschwitz,
and up came pages about there being a debate on whether or not it
happened," she said. "Students don't want to go to the library
anymore, they want to go to the computer and have it act like a
librarian. But a librarian wouldn't put a book about white supremacy
on the bookshelves, presenting it like it's an argument."
Shapiro wanted the computer to think
like she would. She was told -- by AltaVista, for one -- that
responses were just math, but, she said, "we decided to find a way to
help the search engines do their job." In the end, Shapiro
found empathy at LookSmart, where Ontology Manager Alice
Swanberg in February agreed to "properly
categorize" the Holocaust denial sites ... In the meantime,
honing our genuine intelligence (and computer literacy) may be the
best way to get the Internet to respond in kind, said University at
Albany network services librarian and Webmaster Laura Cohen.
Learning to ask the right questions,
when it comes to search engines, is a start. "Search tools have
become very humanized in the past years."
Google
Fascists?,
IndyMedia (from
Google-Watch.org), October 13, 2003
"Take a look at this... 1. Google's immortal cookie: Google was the
first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038. This was at
a time when federal websites were prohibited from using persistent
cookies altogether. Now it's years later, and immortal cookies are
commonplace among search engines; Google set the standard because no
one bothered to challenge them. This cookie places a unique ID number
on your hard disk. Anytime you land on a Google page, you get a
Google cookie if you don't already have one. If you have one, they
read and record your unique ID number. 2. Google records everything
they can: For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet
IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser
configuration. Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on
your IP number. This is referred to in the industry as "IP delivery
based on geolocation." 3. Google retains all data indefinitely:
Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they
are able to easily access all the user information they collect and
save. 4. Google won't say why they need this data: Inquiries to
Google about their privacy policies are ignored. When the New York
Times (2002-11-28) asked Sergey Brin about whether Google
ever gets subpoenaed for this information, he had no comment."
Israel
top base for Internet attacks,
Interest Alert! (from UPI), October 20,
2003
A survey by Symantec says Middle Eastern countries comprised
six of the top 10 bases for Internet attacks, it was reported Monday.
In the first half of 2003, the top offenders included Israel as well
as Iran, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates,
WorldTribune.com said. Symantec ranked the threats according
to the size of a country's Internet population base.
Israel was cited as the biggest source of
Web-based attacks with an Internet user base of more than 1
million, Middle East Newsline reported. About 80
percent of all attacks originated from systems located in 10
countries. "The Internet is a great leveler and the issue of Web
security in the Middle East is no different from any other part of
the world," Kevin Isaac, regional director at Symantec,
said. "Wherever there is high bandwidth availability and a
proliferation of the Internet, the chances of breaches taking place
are high."
Israeli
Computer Hackers Foiled, Exposed,
By Michael Gillespie, middleeast.org
(For Washington Report on Middle East Affairs), September 3, 2003
"Israeli cyber warfare professionals targeted human rights and
anti-war activists across the USA in late July and August temporarily
disrupting communications, harassing hundreds of computer users, and
annoying thousands more. The Israeli hackers targeted Stephen 'Sami'
Mashney, an Anaheim, California, attorney active in the effort to
raise awareness of the plight of Palestinians. 'People have found an
alternate way to communicate through the Internet,' Mashney, a
Palestinian-American, told the Washington Report on Middle East
Affairs, 'and this attack is backfiring on the hackers. Many
people are being educated.' Mashney, who co-manages a popular
pro-Palestinian e-mail list hosted by Yahoo! logged onto his Internet
accounts on July 31 to find hundreds of e-mail messages from angry
Americans. He quickly realized that hackers had appropriated or
'spoofed' his e-mail addresses and identity and sent out a message
titled 'Down With America' in his name. The message named and
included contact information for 16 well-known human rights activists
and falsely claimed the activists wished to be contacted by anyone
desiring advice or assistance in fomenting and carrying out
anti-American, anti-Christian, or anti-Jewish activities. In an
obvious attempt to damage Mashney's reputation, the hackers appended
his name, law office telephone number, and website address to the
spurious e-mail. As Mashney was looking up the telephone number of
the local FBI office to report the hackers' crime, his phone rang. It
was the FBI calling, from Washington, with questions about the forged
e-mail message. Mashney later met with FBI agents in California. 'I
answered all their relevant questions,' said Mashney, who notes that
the hackers' attacks continued unabated for weeks and expanded to
include other new and innovative methods of harassment that were used
against many other activists associated with Free Palestine and other
public and private e-mail lists. Dr. Francis A. Boyle, professor of
International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law, is a
human rights activist who served on the board of Amnesty
International USA. A member of Free Palestine and other activist
lists, Dr. Boyle was also targeted by Israeli hackers who sent
counterfeit e-mails in his name. Again, the hackers' intention was to
sow confusion, provoke animosity, damage a reputation, and restrict
ability to communicate. When Boyle returned from a vacation in mid
August, he found 55,000 e-mails waiting for him. Like Mashney, Boyle
spent days sorting through the messages, writing personal apologies
to those offended by the bogus e-mails, and deleting thousands of
bounced messages. Unflappable, Boyle takes it all in stride. 'You
can't keep the Irish down,' wrote Boyle in an e-mail message to this
reporter. Israeli hackers also targeted Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, associate
professor at the Yale University School of Medicine. The hackers
forwarded to some 1,500 members of the Yale community e-mails that
Qumsiyeh had sent to a private list of activists. Many of his
university colleagues were annoyed, but Qumsiyeh, too, feels that the
hackers are doing the Zionist cause more harm than good ... Darrell
Yeaney, a Presbyterian campus minister who retired after serving at
the University of Iowa, is active in Friends of Sabeel, an ecumenical
Christian organization that supports the ministry of Sabeel, the
center for Palestinian Ecumenical Liberation Theology. He and his
wife, Sue, now serve as co-moderators for the Middle East Peacemaking
Group in Iowa. The Yeaneys report that the hackers appropriated their
address and sent out spurious e-mail in their names. Ames-based
activist, author, and editor Betsy Mayfield, whose work has appeared
in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, was busy with plans
for a mid-September Des Moines film festival, 'Boundaries: The Holy
Land,' when the hackers turned their attentions to her computer.
Several Ames women whose only association with the crisis in the Holy
Land is their commitment to the Ames Interfaith Council (AIC)
reported being shocked by the sudden appearance of pornographic
e-mail and racist diatribes on their computer screens. Many Iowans
were targeted for harassment by the hackers, and hundreds of others
suffered varying degrees of inconvenience because they were somehow
connected to the cause of peace and justice in the Middle East.
Similar scenarios played out in other states across the USA. The
scale of the Israeli cyber warfare campaign, the number of targets,
and the variety of techniques used, coupled with specifically
targeted intrusions calculated to provide additional target addresses
for the application of the hackers' various forms of harassment,
suggest a sophisticated, coordinated, government-sponsored program
designed to impact directly upon the communications abilities of the
human rights and pro-Palestinian anti-war activism communities in the
USA. When the Israeli hackers 'spoofed' the AIC's e-mail address,
they invited a response they did not expect. Because the AIC list was
hosted by Iowa State University (ISU), because the world's first
electronic digital computer was invented at ISU in a Physics
Department laboratory in the early 1940s, and because he has
represented the ISU Muslim Student's Association on the AIC cabinet,
ISU Physics Department computer administrator Dr. Bassam Shehadeh
decided to track the hackers down. 'The hackers access the internet
via an ISP called on the West Bank,' said Shehadeh. When did not
respond to his repeated e-mail enquiries, Shehadeh called the
company, informed their representative that Palnet facilities were
being used to interfere with communications at a state institution in
the USA, and demanded an explanation. He provided information that
enabled Palnet technicians to identify the phone number of the
customer harassing Iowans. 'Everyone here is a victim but the
hackers,' said Shehadeh. 'The hackers use stolen identification to
get access to Palnet.' Shehadeh said the contact line the hackers
used for at least one message to the AIC list address was an Israeli
number in West Jerusalem or one of the surrounding settlements. A
Palnet representative also told Shehadeh the hackers have used
several lines and methods to access Palnet's facilities."
Palestine
Activism Spammed,
by Abby Aguirre, The Nation, October 10,
2003
"Within days of the April incursion of the Israel Defense Forces into
Jenin, pro-Palestine activist Thomas Olson received first a trickle,
then thousands, of e-mails with menacing subject lines such as:
"Mecca is for Muslims, Jerusalem is for Jews," "Die Hitler Scum" and
"I take it in the ass from Arafat." What then became daily e-mail
bombardments of pro-Israel diatribes, racist cartoons and pornography
soon progressed into a much more sinister form of cyber-harassment:
Olson became a victim of a type of identity-theft dubbed a "joe job"
by experts, wherein someone using Olson's name and e-mail address
sends out thousands of messages that grossly misrepresent his
position with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One such
"job" had Olson declaring "I love Hitler" to hundreds of his fellow
activists. Welcome to the concerted (and
ongoing) cyber-campaign to frustrate and intimidate US-based
pro-Palestine activists who attempt to organize on the
Internet. While spammings continue to crash servers and shut
down inboxes, these joe jobs in particular have been smearing
identities and wasting countless hours valuable to the activist
community. University of Illinois law professor and pro-Palestine
organizer Francis Boyle, for example, returned from a summer vacation
to find 55,000 e-mails waiting in his inbox--most of them
return-to-senders from a mass e-mail he supposedly wrote saying,
"When I see in the newspapers that civilians in Afghanistan or the
West Bank were killed by American or Israeli troops, I don't really
care." Boyle--a former board member of Amnesty International USA and
outspoken critic of the war in Afghanistan--spent four days sorting
through the e-mails, deleting failed deliveries and apologizing to
angry colleagues. Similarly, Monica Tarazi, director of the New York
chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC),
discovered that her e-mail account had shut down after someone using
her address spammed some eighty Yahoo! groups. And Yale medical
school professor Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh has on three separate occasions
learned that e-mails he wrote to various activist lists were altered
and forwarded to 1,500 members of the Yale community. Qumsiyeh has
also been the victim of outright forgeries, many of which attempt to
slander him by alleging that he is a Muslim advocating terrorist
acts."
[The issue here: the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the
Anti-Defamation League, and even the Southern Poverty Law Center are
in the literal business of prohibiting criticism of the
Jewish community. What exactly is "hate?' In these censorial
organization's grips, "hate" is virtually anything: whatever they
say.]
Yahoo
Asks Users to Help Delete Hate,
By Dana Williams, Tolerance.org
(Southern Poverty Law Center), Nov. 10, 2003 "From sports to
astronomy and religion to cooking, internet discussion groups are a
simple way to connect those with kindred passions. At Yahoo, these
groups are touted as a popular way for users to meet new friends or
keep in touch with old ones, with hundreds and hundreds of active
discussion communities listed on the site's group directory. But what
happens when a group's common interest is hate? ... Human rights and
anti-racist groups like the Simon Wiesenthal
Center have criticized Yahoo and other internet portals for
allowing members to host groups promoting racist and hateful
activities and ideologies. In 2000, the
Anti-Defamation League launched a campaign calling for the
removal of dozens of racist and anti-Semitic
clubs hosted by Yahoo, charging the company was violation of
its own terms by allowing these groups to post hateful messages, chat
and plan events. Yahoo removed dozens of racist groups following the
ADL campaign and has continued to remove such sites periodically ...
Roy says hate-monitoring organizations like the Intelligence Project
regularly gather information from these discussion communities that
helps identify users involved in other hate activities."
[Google was co-founded by Sergey Brin, (who is Jewish) in
1998 with Larry Page (Jewish)]
Google
Goes Yiddish,
By Steve Lipman, Jewish World
Review, February 10, 2004
"How do you say "search engine" in Yiddish? If you're a
traditionalist, you probably don't. "In the shtetl," where Eastern
European Jews' language of preference developed, "there weren't such
things," says Miriam Hoffman, professor of Yiddish and Yiddish
literature at Columbia University. No computers, no Internet, no
on-line features that perused databases. But we're not in the shtetl
anymore, and Yiddish has taken another high-tech step on the
information highway — Google, which bills itself as the most
popular English-language search engine in the world,
just introduced a Yiddish version,
www.google.com/intl/yi, complete with Yiddish menus and
messages. Users need, of course, the software
for the Hebrew/Yiddish alphabet on their computers. For
Hoffman, who says she is "not a computer person," that's no problem.
"I do have the Yiddish lettering on my computer." "I think it's
wonderful. Why shouldn't they have
Yiddish?" says Hoffman, who writes plays in Yiddish and
introduces the language to college students.
"I'm surprised," she says,
"that this wasn't done before."
Google isn't saying why it added Yiddish to its
roster of common and more-obscure language sites, which includes
Afrikaans, Latvian and Punjabi. It didn't make a formal announcement,
and a Google spokesman did not return a call for comment from this
paper. Presumably, there is enough interest in cyberspace
— with growing nostalgic interest in
Yiddish, academic courses at prestigious universities, and an
increase in its speakers in the Orthodox community — to warrant
the step. In May, Google posted an announcement
asking for volunteers to translate its home page, toolbar, wireless
and other programs into Yiddish."
[The Internet has the potential to become a vast Jewish spy
network. It may already be.]
Microsoft
launches damage control after code leaks from Israeli source,
By Galit Yemini, Haaretz (Isrel),
February 19, 2004
"The developments in the affair of the leaking of the source code for
the Windows operating system continue to make headlines around the
world. Tuesday evening, Microsoft officially
confirmed that the leak came from a computer at the Israeli Mainsoft
software company; but at this stage, the investigation is
still underway and no further details are available. Microsoft is
investigating the leak in coordination with the American Federal
Bureau of Investigations, and when the probe is complete, Microsoft
will publish its findings. Microsoft emphasized that the leak was not
the result of a breach of Microsoft's network, nor was it caused by
the open code programs under which Microsoft's code is given to big
clients such as governments and strategic organizations. The code was
given to Mainsoft just as it is given to other Microsoft business
partners that are developing software based on Microsoft products.
Just three days after the leak, hackers have
already taken advantage of a security flaw discovered in parts of the
code that was leaked to the Internet, and have created the first
virus based on this flaw. The flaw is in the Explorer browser that is
part of Windows. The storm broke a few days ago, when parts of
the source code for Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system were
leaked to the Internet. The source code exposes the innards of the
operating system, revealing exactly how it works.
Anyone who discovers the source code can do as
he pleases with the operating system. Microsoft has been
making its living for years from the sale of software licenses; its
copyrights to the software are on that valuable source code - the
core of the software. When Microsoft gives the code to business
partners like Mainsoft or big clients like governments, the code is
marked with a unique "fingerprint" for each client, so that if the
code is accidentally leaked, the source of the leak will be
discovered immediately. "Microsoft's greatest fear stemming from the
leaking of the code is not a violation of its copyrights,"
explains Jimmy Schwarzkopf, research director of Meta-Group
(Israel). "This is a problem that will eventually be solved in court,
because they are protected from a copyright perspective.
The problem is the protection against hackers.
Microsoft will find it difficult to protect itself. If the code gets
into the hands of hackers, their ability to create viruses will be
infinite. That is something that will be very hard for
Microsoft to combat." According to the various reports, the Mainsoft
computer from which the code was leaked is the computer used by
Eyal Alalouf, Mainsoft's director of technology, who has so
far maintained media silence and is refusing to respond.
Mainsoft is an Israeli start-up that
develops software for converting Microsoft applications to run on the
Unix operating system. Mainsoft has already been responsible for one
small scandal, when it was reported in 2000 that the company was
developing software for converting Microsoft applications to run on
the Linux open code operating system - a code that Microsoft refuses
to support to this day, and which is considered the natural outgrowth
of the Unix closed code. Mainsoft, whose headquarters are in
San Jose, New Mexico, and whose R&D center
is in Israel, has been a partner of Microsoft's since 1994.
Mainsoft has disclosed only that it will cooperate fully with
Microsoft and the authorities in investigating the leak.
Microsoft and FBI investigators are due to
arrive in Israel over the next few days to continue the
investigation. "This story is causing
tremendous harm to the Israeli high-tech industry," says
Schwarzkopf. "If it turns out that the Israelis are
responsible for the leaking of the code, and that it was done
maliciously and not by accident, it will burn a great many Israelis
in the industry. Israelis have a reputation
around the world for cutting corners anyway, and Israelis are
working very hard to change this negative image. If the
investigations prove that the suspicions were correct, it will not be
good for us."
Mainsoft
[See above article] executive officers,
President and CEO: Yaacov Cohen
Vice President, Products: Philippe Cohen
Vice President, Technology: Eyal Alaluf
[Increasing Jewish world censorial hegemony. The Jewish
Lobby intimidation factor censors more public discourse:]
by Brian Hutchinson, National Post
(Canada), March 10, 2004
Beware
of Zionist controlled PayPal,
La Voz Aztlan, March 13, 2004
"Dear Readers and Subscribers: This morning I had a telephone
conversation with a representative of PayPal concerning the sudden
closure of La Voz de Aztlan's account that we were using to receive
credit card donations. The young lady at PayPal said that the account
was closed because our news and information service is antisemitic.
We had been warned by hateful Zionists that they would do everything
possible to shut our website down. Our readership is well aware of
the constant harassment and attempts by Zionists as well as by
Zionist organizations such as the ADL of B'nai B'rith and the Los
Angeles based Wiesenthal Center to permanently silence us. These
Zionists have sent us a constant barrage of threats through e-mail,
U.S. mail and by telephone. They have created serious trouble for us
with our Internet Service Providers and with companies we contract
with to host our website. Recently, they also sabotaged Verizon
Telephone Company equipment that resulted in knocking us offline for
days. This time the Zionist have issued orders to PayPal to close our
account resulting in our loss of a significant source of funds we
utilize to remain online. La Voz de Aztlan must be quite a threat to
the Zionists for them to go to such extents to destroy us. We are
deeply sympathetic of Mr. Mel Gibson for the immense tribulations he
went through due to his film "The Passion of the Christ". The same
Zionists that went after Gibson and his father are the same ones that
are going after La Voz de Aztlan. Shame on PayPal for bowing down to
these sinister characters."
[The Internet is the last bastion of democracy and free
speech at any meaningful level. The Jewish Lobby has created
"filters" to censor the Web, but it knows it must devise a broader
way (legislation, etc.) to censor it ALL, lest people read material
beyond their censorial control. Below, Jews want the system to bend
to their censorial interests, as always.]
Jewish
Groups Concerned Over Google Results,
WebProNews
"Searching the term “Jew” on Google has brought up some
disturbing lead results. The number one listing is the anti-Semitic
site, JewWatch.com.
This news comes as a surprise to David Krane, director of corporate
communications at Google. But, the search engine has no plans to
manually change the listing. Krane stated in an article on
TheJewishJournal.com that, “Google merely reflects what
is on the Web and does its best to algorithmically rank pages. Unless
[a Web page] violates a country or local law, we don’t
make any tweaks.” When asked how the hate
site can garner the number one position, Krane pointed to
Google’s ranking algorithm that bases rankings on site
relevancy, which is determined by the number of forwarding links to
the site. While the ranking for the word “Jew” will not be
manually changed, Krane stated that he would
alert Google’s engineers to further refine the search algorithm,
which might alter the results for the word."
Venture
capital invests in Israeli techs. Recovering from recession, country
ranks behind only Boston, Silicon Valley in attracting cash for
startups,
by Matthew Kalman, San Francisco
Chronicle, April 2, 2004
"Israel's technology industry is doing better than you might think.
Just days after the Bank of Israel declared that the country's
recession had technically ended, a group of leading California
venture capitalists predicted the renaissance of Silicon Wadi,
Israel's impressive high-tech sector. "It's
starting to happen in Israel again," said Harry Kellogg, vice
chairman of Silicon Valley Bank and president of its merchant banking
operation, which has invested in eight Israeli
funds so far. "Last year, about $1.1
billion was invested in Israel, ranking it No. 3 in the world after
Silicon Valley and Boston," said Kellogg, who visited Israel
last month along with 40 other major California investors. "More
money is coming into startups here than is going into Shanghai or
India. It's one of the key markets in the world as far as Silicon
Valley Bank is concerned," he said. Despite the optimism of venture
capitalists and government banks, there's no denying Israel remains
mired in political strife that makes it difficult for the
long-standing technology industry to stay strong and grow. Just the
same, Israel's tech sector, nurtured from
academic and military roots, is showing that it's up to
the task, thanks in large part to money coming
from U. S. venture capitalists ... Already,
Israel has more companies traded on the Nasdaq
than any other country outside North America. Moreover, annual
foreign investment in Israeli startups has
consistently outstripped any European country, according to
the Israel Venture Capital Association, even
though Israel has a population of only 6 million.
Sequoia Capital, one of the first Silicon
Valley venture capital firms, has only one office outside the United
States -- in Israel. Benchmark Capital's two foreign
bases are London and Tel Aviv. Siemens venture capital has said it
will open an Israel office -- its only branch outside Europe and the
United States. Israeli companies excel in security technologies,
semiconductors and communications. Israeli tech firms include
Checkpoint, a leading firewall firm; Amdocs, which makes billing
systems for telecoms; Comverse, a big voice-mail company; and Mercury
Software, which measures software performance. Last month, investors
at VentureWire Network Outlook 2004, an annual trade conference of
the U.S. venture capital industry, voted three non-U.S. companies
among the 10 startups most likely to succeed.
All three were Israeli: Actelis
Networks, BitBand and P-Cube. Among the recent deals was an
investment of $20 million by Grove Street Advisors in Pitango Venture
Capital on behalf of the California Public
Employees' Retirement System. Grove Street Advisors manages
$2.8 billion invested by CalPERS in 80 venture capital funds.
Of that total, $25 million already is invested
in six Israeli funds: Pitango, Gemini Israel Funds, Israel
Seed Partners, Jerusalem Venture Partners, Apax Partners and Carmel
Ventures. Last week, the Israeli retail comparison site Shopping.com
announced plans to file for the first Nasdaq IPO by an Israeli
company in two years. Grove Street Advisors founder and managing
partner Clinton Harris said he has been investing in Israel since
1991 and has returned because now is "a good time to invest." "We
have $500 million earmarked for startups and set aside 5 to 10
percent of that amount for Israel," said Harris.
"Apart from Israel, we have almost nothing
invested outside the U.S." ... U.S. investors say Israel
offers a unique mix of entrepreneurial and technological skill,
backed by a discipline and frugality that they
ascribe to the influence of the army. "They don't need as much
money to get things off the ground here in Israel as they do in the
U.S.," said Kellogg of Silicon Valley Bank. "Fear of failure is not
an issue here like it is in other parts of the world. If you fail,
it's not a bad thing like it is certainly in Europe and in Asia."
Isaac Applebaum of Lightspeed Venture Partners said he has
invested in six Israeli companies and is beginning to see the
emergence of serial entrepreneurs. "It's the only place like it,"
said Applebaum. "I think it's going to get a lot better because
there's a lot of new money coming in. These guys work day and they
work night, and they deliver."
[So let's see. Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, is
Jewish. As is Google corporate spokesman, David Krane. The other
Google co-founder, Larry Page, is Jewish too.]
Anti-Semitic
site riles Jews during Passover holiday,
BY DAVE MUNDAY, Charleston Post and
Courier (North Carolina), April 6, 2004
"A few hours before Passover, Jerri Chaplin of Charleston was
shocked to learn that people looking on the Internet for information
about Jews are likely to end up at a Web site denying the Holocaust
and portraying Jews as a threat to the American way of life. Google
is the world's most popular Internet search engine. Type in the word
"Jew," hit Web search, and the resultant list is topped by a site
called Jew
Watch. Jew Watch promotes the belief that
Jews control American newspapers, the movie
industry, the banking system and the military for their own
interests. "I was shocked," said Chaplin, a Jewish
poet. "When I actually saw it (the Web site), it was pretty scary
stuff." Site operator Frank Weltner, a retired librarian who lives in
St. Louis, defended the site Monday in a telephone interview.
"They (Jews) own the media; they own the
banks," Weltner said. "This is a democracy, and in a democracy,
minorities should not rule. But Jews don't feel that way; they feel
that they should rule this country, and I object to that. I want my
country back." That's a sample of the tone of the site, and
it's causing Jews to wonder why Google features it so prominently.
Chaplin heard about it from an e-mail that's apparently
circulating around the world. The controversy was featured a couple
of days ago in The Jerusalem Post. Google's operators have said they
are in no way against Jews but can't remove Jew Watch from its search
engine. "The way that Google decides to rank and order Web pages is
done completely automatically, using (computer) software,"
corporate spokesman David Krane
said Monday. "This ranking criterion is essentially
representative of popular opinion on the Internet." Even when people
don't like the results, Google operators never interfere with the
computer program, said Krane, who
identified himself as a Jew who will be observing
Passover."That's the promise that Google has made to its users for
more than six years," Krane said. "We guarantee an objective,
tamper-free search experience." The search program analyzes 4 billion
Web pages and sorts more than 100 factors to decide how to rank
them, Krane said. A big factor is how many high-volume Web
pages have links to the site. Also, the fact that the Web site
happens to contain the word "Jew" tilts the computer program in its
favor. For instance, Jew Watch doesn't even come up as an option when
somebody types in "Jews" or "Jewish" or "Judaism." Jew Watch was
still No. 1 on Google when Jew was the search word Monday evening. It
came up No. 18 on Yahoo, the second most popular search engine. A
number of Jews are trying another strategy to knock Jew Watch from
the top of the list. They're putting links to the online dictionary
Wikipedia's reference to "Jew" on their Web sites and encouraging
people to click away. "I decided to issue a call to arms on my Web
site," Daniel Sieradski, who runs a brassy, youth-oriented
site called Jewschool, told the Jerusalem newspaper. The Wikipedia
entry had risen from not even listed to No. 3 by Monday evening. Jew
Watch's archives include the allegation that Jews are living out "The
Protocols of The Elders of Zion," an anti-semitic document Jewish
scholars label a forgery. Local Jewish scholars were not available to
comment Monday because of Passover preparations."
[Note: as of
April 14, it looks like Jewish swarming has succeeded. Wikipedia's
"Jew" comes up first in Google. But so what? Now Jew
Watch is second on the list. Big deal. The amount of advertising
Jew Watch has been afforded is incredible. Quite like the way
The Passion of the Christ was shot to fame and attention by
the Jewish Lobby. Even The
Times of India has a story on Jewish effortst to ban
Jew Watch, for God's sake! Jewish swarming can be absurdly
counter-productive to their censorial interests.]
[More Judeocentric Internet meddling. Better than a
lobotomy. Channeling what you think into proper forms, especially per
"hating" Jewish racism and brutal Israel.]
Trend
Watching, Incorporated. Trendum's analytical technology determines
public opinion by tracking Internet chatter on everything from market
trends to anti-Semitism. It even knew why Britney Spears decided to
lower her profile. Here's why Time Warner, Estee Lauder, CNN, HBO --
and the UN -- are asking for its help,
Jewsweek, September 7, 2004
"Want to keep on top of the trends and fads, instead of reading about
them in Entertainment Weekly and People weeks later? An Israeli
startup called Trendum has developed an analytical tool that monitors
information flow on the Internet to determine market trends and
popularity, and how people on the Internet are thinking about
everything -- from pop stars to politics to ideology. Trendum was
founded four years ago with the general idea to develop tools based
on advanced technology that could provide information by analyzing
discussion groups, forums, communities, chat rooms, blogs, and online
responses. Specializing in online media analysis, Trendum's
proprietary Media Mining solutions have created a new way of
listening, understanding and reacting to consumers' opinions and the
media. Trendum delivers actionable marketing insights from what
millions of consumers and journalists are saying. Trendum online "We
realized that millions of people talk about products, brands,
programs and stars, constituting a huge source group that no one knew
how to mine for information," said Ori Levy, who founded the
company with his father -- Gallup Israel founder Jacob Levy
... According to Levy, Trendum examines millions of opinions
on specific Web sites, and look for content clusters, which they then
analyze. He said that despite forum users often not being open about
their identity, Trendum can still determine the
makeup of the user. "Our tool can understand different users
in-depth, because the technology engine also examines the speaker's
style, and not just the words and conjugation. We can figure out if
it's a man or a woman, and the person's age group. The engine
recognizes style and expressions characteristic of age groups.
Furthermore, the communities' members don't answer every question put
to them. Each community has its own language, and they very quickly
identify intruders," he said ... Trendum's software has another
application: the Global Hatred Index,
Jacob Levy's pride and joy. He
has already presented the index at a U.N. conference on dismantling
sources of intolerance. "We examined two million messages, which the
hatred index analyzed. We tried to decode the components of
anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic hatred in
the U.S.," said Jacob Levy. "Not only could we examine the
power of hatred, we could provide insights into people's opinions.
The hatred index showed us that much of the antipathy toward the U.S.
was due to President George W. Bush, as well as the Iraq War.
The index can help design programs for changing
public perceptions." Globes reported that the U.N. has already
notified Trendum that it is ready to hire its services.
[Experts
at monitoring and regimenting citizens and herding Arabs, an
Israeli-based company gets the new contract for American "know
everything about you" passports.]
SuperCom
Wins Tender For The Integration Of The United States Smart
Passport,
Yahoo, October 11, 2004
"NEW YORK, and RA'ANANA, Israel ----
SuperCom, Ltd. a leading smart card and eID technology integrator and
solutions provider serving governmental and commercial markets,
announced today that the United States Government Printing Office
(GPO) has informed that the Company's proposal as a prime contractor
for the integration of smart card technology in the US new electronic
passports has been accepted for award. In
addition, SuperCom's proposal as a sub-contractor with a
leading American system integrator corporation has also been accepted
for award in this project. This project is considered to be the
largest and most advanced smart passport project in the world to
date. The US authorities have announced multiple awards for the
implementation of the project that will include the production of
smart inlay for the new passports with a
sophisticated chip containing personal identification such as
biometric data. This type of passport will be difficult to
forge and will replace the traditional passport that contained a
printed personal photograph and was considered to be easy to falsify.
The scope of the project based on the RFP is estimated at 50 million
passports over the following five years. In this project, SuperCom
will supply the smart card technology that it has developed over the
recent years including the smart chip with an operating system and
antenna that is embedded in the passport ... SuperCom, Ltd. is
engaged in research, development and marketing of advanced
technologies and products for smart-card solutions and government
e-ID projects. SuperCom offers a wide range of standard and
customized smart card-based solutions for physical and logical
security, education, corrections facilities and air & seaports.
SuperCom is also a leader in the manufacturing of secure and durable
documents such as national identity cards, passports, visas, drivers'
licenses and vehicle registration. Together with its subsidiaries,
SuperCom offers advanced, innovative and flexible solutions in
contact and contactless smart-card technologies.
Headquartered in Israel, SuperCom has
subsidiaries in the US and Hong Kong."
Yoran
abruptly resigns as U.S. cybesecurity czar,
Search Security, October 1, 2004,
"The nation's cybersecurity chief quit Friday, a week after House
Republicans backed off from moving cybersecurity functions from the
Department of Homeland Security to the White House budget office.
Amit Yoran resigned Thursday, giving one day's
notice, according to the Associated Press. Yoran
said Friday he left to pursue other opportunities. But, the
AP reported, he'd confided to colleagues in the tech industry he was
frustrated by the lack of attention the DHS had given cybersecurity
issues ... Yoran held the top national cybersecurity
job for a year and previously served as a Symantec Corp. software
executive after selling his company, Riptech, to Symantec for $145
million in July 2002. Within the DHS, Yoran's
division included 60 employees and an $80 million budget to carry out
recommendations within the president's National Strategy to Secure
Cyberspace. Lobbyists for the tech industry had tried unsuccessfully
to elevate Yoran's position and standing within the
DHS in the hopes of garnering more resources and visibility. "
[Who better to protect the State of Liberty than those
who really own own it and have redefined its meaning? Who better to
monitor visitors to the American icon of "liberty?" Who leads in the
world hi-tech business of spying on people? The symbology of this --
an Israeli "security" company monitoring visitors at the State of
Liberty -- is poignant. America and its raped principles of free
speech and liberty have become a censored appendage of world Zionism
and the Jewish state.]
Nice
Systems provides security at Statue of Liberty,
by Avi Krawitz, THE JERUSALEM
POST, Sep. 28, 2004 "Nice Systems is helping to secure the newly
reopened Statue of Liberty complex using its smart video solutions, the
Ra'anana [Israel] based company said Tuesday. The company has
been working with the United States Park Police in charge of
protecting the statue, and installed its solutions in the complex in
time for its opening on August 3, 2004. The company would not
disclose the value of the contract. The Nice
solution uses IT-grade video networking and management and delivers
images and advanced analytic applications to the park police to help
protect the 117-year-old national monument. The Statue was closed to
tourists after the events of September 11, 2001 and was reopened
amidst warnings of further terror attacks on strategic buildings and
monuments in New York and Washington DC. It was opened with tightened
security measures in place including a new bomb-detection device that
blows a blast of air into clothing and then checks for particles of
explosive residue. Nice provides solutions and consulting services to
more than 15,000 customers in over 100 countries, enabling them to
extract value from multimedia interactions."
More censorial Jewish fascism. What's
a "terrorist?" In many Jewish minds, probably an
"anti-Semite."]
Shutting
Down Cyber-Terror,
by Rachel Ehrenfeld, Front Page magazine, October 21, 2004
"In the War
on Terrorism, the terrorists may have an unusual ally: American
internet service providers (ISPs). U.S.-based ISPs provide
web-hosting for terrorists ranging from Hamas and Hizbullah to
Palestinian Jihad. This cyber-fifth column is illegal, can be
prosecuted, and must be shut down if we hope to stop Islamic
fundamentalists from winning the hearts and minds of a generation of
their young.The
swift action taken last month by the
Zionist
Hackers Strike Indymedia Sites,
Chron Watch, October 25, 2004
"Zionist Hackers attacking the viciously anti-Semitic ''Indeymedia''
sites? Visitors to http://newjersey.indymedia.org/ are
being redirected to http://www.georgebush.com/
As of 1:00 a.m. EST, October 24, visitors to DC IMC are being greeted
with an audio message stating that ''Indymedia hates Jews.''
http://dc.indymedia.org/
The Zionist Jewish Group claiming responsibility for the hacking is
http://forum.protestwarrior.com/viewtopic.php
Throughout, Saturday, October 23, visitors to NYC IMC were being
routed to right wing sites including
http://www.georgebush.com/. Currently, NYC IMC is back on line.
There is a post to the open Newswire on the subject http://nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/128095/index.php
[JTR contributor's note: You may find this
interesting. I recall reading an article that the founders of Intel
and AMD had a blood feud. The article hinted the feud had
anti-semitic overtones."]
No
AMDs allowed in Holy Land. Athlon 64s hard to
sauce,
By Wil Harris, The
Inquirer, November 1, 2004
"Seasoned INQ readers will know that Intel -
and the INQUIRER for that matter - have a very strong presence in
Israel. Intel's Centrino chip design team
is based in that very land, and the very
first design centre outside of the US was set up in Haifa in 1974.
Despite the history, Israeli system builders and consumers are
clamouring for Athlon 64 CPUs - not unreasonably, we might add - but
trying to get hold of one appears to be harder than finding a man
with dry eyes at a bris. A source of ours over in that land tells us
the story of the only official AMD importer in Israel, Aztek, which
decided to stop importing AMD's chips. AMD switched its official
business over to the mighty distributor Tech Data, but it is only
carrying Semprons and Athlon XPs. The company line, according to our
source, is that it doesn't have the special import clearance from US
authorities to bring Athlon 64 chips into the country. Israeli
hardware websites appear to have a dearth of samples [No
different from over here then, Ed.] and the only A64s that find
themselves in the market are grey imports. We contacted AMD about
this story for verification but everyone was unavailable for comment
and huddled in a meeting. Our INQ Israel correspondent, Paul
Hales, tells us that when he was over there last visiting
his wife in Jerusalem, he had to build a Prescott based system
because of the lack of available components."
[Another Jewish Internet Sleazeball
Department. This article is a few months old. But the next
time your computer freezes up with spyware/adware garbage, and it's
impossible to get rid of, tip your hat to the likes of WhenU.com CEO
Avi Naider.]
High-tech
Issue: Rooting Out The Spy In Your Computer,
by John Schwartz and Saul Hansell, The
Financial Express, April 27, 2004
"People came from all over to attend a recent Federal Trade
Commission workshop in Washington on spyware, one more plague of the
digital age. They all agreed on one thing: They could not define
spyware. "Spyware is in the eye of the beholder,” said
Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for
Democracy and Technology, a policy research group in Washington. In
general, spyware - called adware by its proponents - is
software that shows up on a computer unannounced, often because the
owner has signed up for a free service like a file-sharing network or
has agreed to receive messages in return for gaining access to a Web
site. The software usually delivers pop-up ads, but sometimes
performs other actions without the owner
understanding what is going on or how to stop it. The controversy
involves more than consumer inconvenience, technology companies say. Such
software is now the No 1 reason that consumers call Dell for
technical support, Maureen Cushman, legal counsel to Dell’s
consumer division, told a meeting of the trade commission. “It
damages the Dell brand,” she said. The activities of spyware
programs can be relatively benign, obnoxious or even blatantly
illegal. Computer users may be driven to
distraction by pop-up ads, some pornographic, or find that their PCs
become sluggish, laboring under the computing burden of the unwanted
programs. Some programs monitor Internet use or even record
keystrokes, such as password entries. Given its range of activities,
fighting spyware is a minefield for lawmakers and regulators, but
that did not stop one state, Utah, from stepping in. On March 23,
Governor Olene S Walker signed the nation’s first anti-spyware
law, which prohibits software that is installed without the
user’s consent and programs that send personal information. The
anti-spyware efforts, like the recent federal move to regulate spam,
are following what has become an increasingly familiar pattern in
online technology. In the first phase, after a honeymoon period of
increasing popularity, unpleasant practices emerge: Once a broad
swath of the public had been introduced to the wonders of the
Internet, it found itself bombarded with spam, advertising pop-ups
and full-blown spyware. In the second phase, consumers howl and
politicians get concerned, but the affected industries urge caution,
arguing that regulation will stifle innovation and hurt legitimate
business. Eventually, phase three arrives: States begin to enact laws
against the offending practice. Faced with the prospect of a
patchwork of possibly conflicting legislation, the industry asks
Congress for a uniform, but often less stringent, federal law. Three
other states - California, Iowa and Virginia - are considering
legislation aimed at spyware, so it is no surprise that federal
legislation has been introduced ... Online companies greeted
Utah’s move with apprehension ... The new law was immediately challenged by
WhenU.com, a company based in New York that puts Internet advertising
software on people’s machines. “If the statute goes into
effect it’s going to outlaw what WhenU does,” said
Jeffrey D Neuburger, a lawyer in New York who deals
with high-technology issues but does not represent anybody involved
in the case. Neuburger said that he was no fan of
the practices of WhenU and its chief competitor, the Claria Corp.,
once known as Gator. But he argued that the Utah law was drafted too
broadly and would lead to “frivolous litigation” by
companies that say they have been victimized by adware. The
bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Stephen H Urquhart, said that the
law focused on giving computer owners notice of what was being done
to their machines and the opportunity to refuse the software or
remove it easily. “I’m convinced over 75 per cent of the
people who have this on their computers have no idea it’s
there,” he said ... The chief executive of
WhenU, Avi Z. Naider, said that the issue should be
resolved in Congress, not on a state-by-state basis. He also said
that any law should focus on stopping “rogue behavior,” not
outlawing technologies like his company’s software-based
advertising. He said that WhenU’s software had
been installed on 100 million machines, and was no longer active on
80 million, indicating it was easy to remove.
Naider’s argument is not convincing to Zeidner.
“His business model, and Gator’s business model,”
Zeidner said, “is to put this on computers faster than the
public is being educated and removing it from their
computers.”
[While we're on the subject of Jews
destroying the civil protocols of the Internet to make a buck, here's
another older article. Where do you think "spam" came from?
Surprise!]
The
father of modern spam speaks,
by Sharael Feist, C Net, March 22, 2002
"On April 12, 1994, Laurence Canter and
Martha Siegel, two immigration lawyers from Arizona,
flooded the Internet with a mass mailing promoting their law firm's
advisory services. In doing so, this unknown husband and wife team
changed the Internet with one keystroke. The "Green Card Lottery"
notice they sent out reached thousands of people using Usenet
newsgroups and, on one level, qualified as an unqualified success.
But it also triggered a firestorm of criticism from purists outraged
at a breach of the informal rules prohibiting the
transmission of unsolicited junk mail and advertising over the
Internet. Until then, government and academic researchers used the
Internet to correspond and share information. But with the emergence
of hypertext and Web browsers, the commercial possibilities had
attracted the attention of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
Indeed, for Canter and Siegel, it
was simply business. But along the way, they inadvertently opened a
Pandora's box. Subsequent copycats around the globe seized upon the
example to use--some would say abuse--the Internet to promote
unwanted commercial solicitations. Modern Internet
spam had arrived. Much has changed since then. The spamming duo, who
wrote a book, "How to Make a Fortune on the Internet Superhighway,"
divorced in 1996, and Siegel died in 2000.
Canter was disbarred from
practicing law by the Supreme Court of Tennessee in 1997, partly
because of his e-mail advertising campaign." Canter
hasn't practiced law since 1995. Six years ago, he moved to the San
Francisco Bay Area, where he's been developing software to help
traders analyze stock options. With the eight-year anniversary of
that signal event just over the bend, CNET News.com caught up with
Canter to get his thoughts on the role he played in helping introduce
Internet-based spam into the modern lexicon."
