科技新聞

第一季

2004/03/05

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- Old pay phones are selling like they're going out of style.

Collectors have made an online rush to buy BellSouth's boxy old pay phones that have been refurbished for home use, after the Atlanta-based company decided to pull out of a coin-operated phone business that had withered in the wireless age.

"It's a novelty. You just don't usually see pay phones in people's homes," said Hugh Bowen, a retired Atlanta police officer who bought one of the 30-pound phones. "I thought it was so neat and I always wanted one. When I saw this opportunity I jumped on it."

About 500 orders for the $135 phones were filled in the two months they've been for sale, and now there's a waiting list of about 300 more people.

Cell phones have increasingly pushed aside the once-ubiquitous pay phones.

More than six out of 10 Americans now own cell phones, said Patrick Comack, an analyst with Guzman & Co. in Miami. Pay phones have lost so much market share to wireless, it's no longer a moneymaking business, he said.

So the big phones are going the way of rotary phones, crank phones and early model brick-sized cell phones.

When BellSouth became the first major phone company to shutter its languishing pay phone business two years ago, volunteers with the phone company decided to refurbish the phones for home use and resell them to raise money for charity. The phones were rewired so they can plug into a wall outlet and to work without coins.

About $18,000 has been raised from the $35 in profit from each phone, which will go toward groups like Habitat for Humanity and the American Red Cross.

Other companies will continue to operate some pay phones, but their numbers will continue to decrease. The total number of pay phones nationwide has dropped 29.5 percent in the last five years, including a 32.9 percent drop in pay phones operated by local phone companies, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

"My grandchildren and great-grandchildren won't know what it is," said Bill Ray, who bought one of the pay phones and keeps it atop a filing cabinet in his Memphis, Tennessee, BellSouth office. "I thought I'd get it for the nostalgia, and it will be a conversation piece for years to come."

2004/03/12

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Simple misrepresentation of facts on a resume is passe. Lying convincingly is in.

As companies, via background searches, try to call the bluff of less-than-honest job seekers, candidates are resorting to more complex, sometimes hi-tech means to hoodwink potential employers.

Some applicants are providing employers with toll-free phone numbers, which are answered by operators of Web sites that not only offer phony academic degrees, but also "verify" a job seeker's education.

And, in an effort to put more credibility into embellishing their resume, some candidates are paying hackers to plug their names into a class list database of a university they claim to have attended.

"Candidates are allegedly breaking the law to get a particular job or promotion, and that is pretty much going to the full extent of the limit," said Scott Pustizzi, vice president at The Human Equation, Florida-based human resources consultants.

People could be charged with a felony for hacking into a university's database, according to criminal lawyers. And if a false degree leads to higher pay for a job candidate, he or she could be accused of criminal fraud by the employer.

While the uncertain employment market is pushing job hunters to such convoluted extremes, inadequate security for database systems and a long list of Web sites offering fake degrees only serve to facilitate resume fraud.

The background search firm ADP Screening and Selection Services, in a 2003 study, found that more than 50 percent of the people on whom it conducted employment and education checks had submitted false information, compared with about 40 percent in 2002.

This has prompted an increasing number of companies to do more thorough background checks of candidates.

A 2003 survey of more than 200 companies by Virginia-based Society for Human Resource Management revealed that 80 percent of them made reference and criminal checks on their employees.

Still, some applicants continue to get smarter and slicker at defrauding employers and are crossing legal limits to snatch jobs away from otherwise equally qualified honest candidates.

Companies seeking to get a clearer picture of a candidate's qualifications via background checks are uncovering other new forms of deception.

"In the past, people just lied," said Charles Wardell, managing director at executive search firm Korn/Ferry International. "Now, what they are doing is they are hacking into a class of a university and putting their name on the class list."

Wardell said he has come across cases where some candidates are paying hackers to break into the databases of universities. If recruiting firms called the university to check the candidate's degree, the school would confirm it because the applicant's name would indeed appear on the list.

Breaking into a database is relatively easy because most database servers are not password protected, said Alfred Huger, director of engineering at anti-virus company Symantec.

So, Korn/Ferry has started requesting degrees and, in some cases, even grades from potential candidates as proof of their academic claims.

But as corporate investigations company Kroll Inc. points out, documents such as scholastic degrees and grades can also be concocted with the help of numerous Web sites that provide such services.

Web sites such as fakedegrees.com help job hunters cook the facts and even lists out-service enhancements. "Transcripts -- Coming Soon" says one promotion on that site.

Other sites go a step further and offer verification service.

"You can select the parchment paper, the insignia and the type of degree," said Bob Schlossnagle, president of Kroll's background screening division. "And one of the things they [Web sites] are now doing to enhance their service is they will give you a 1-800 number to give your potential employer. And when employers call they will actually confirm the degree."

Background search firms admit their job is getting harder with the increasing level of sophistication in resume fraud.

"A good liar understands that you have to have some basis and facts to pull off a scam," said Lester Rosen, president of California-based Employment Screening Resources. "But it's even more dangerous when employers unknowingly hire a fraud, thief or a crook."

2004/03/14

BARSTOW, California (AP) -- A $1 million race across the Mojave Desert by driverless robots ended Saturday after all 15 entries either broke down or withdrew, a race official said.

Two of the entries covered about seven miles of the roughly 150-mile course while eight failed to make it to the one-mile mark. Others crashed seconds after starting.

The race ended just before 11 a.m. after the final four competitors were disabled, said Col. Jose Negron, race program manager.

Competitors suffered a variety of problems that included stuck brakes, broken axles, rollovers and malfunctioning satellite navigation equipment.

One six-wheeled robot built by a Louisiana team was disqualified after it became entangled in barbed wire.

"It's a tough challenge -- it's a grand challenge -- you can always bet that it's not doable. But if you don't push the limits, you can't learn," said Ensco Inc. engineer Venkatesh Vasudevan, shortly after his company's entry rolled onto its side several hundred yards from the starting gate.

The Pentagon's research and development agency planned to award $1 million to the first team whose microcircuit-and-sensor-studded vehicle could cover the roughly 150-mile course in less than 10 hours.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was sponsoring the Grand Challenge to foster development of autonomous vehicles that could be used in combat.

Defense officials foresee using the driverless, remote control-free robots to ferry supplies in war zones.

2004/03/16

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Show us the profits, the skeptics shout.

Nanotechnology will amount to nanoprofits, they worry as they tick off a list of technologies from artificial intelligence to virtual reality that looked cool in the lab but have foundered commercially.

Such voices were all but drowned out this month at Nanotech 2004, the industry's largest conference.

And why not? The economy is rebounding, investors are interested and last year President Bush signed a bill to invest nearly $3.7 billion for nanotech research in the coming years.

Attendance tripled over last year, organizers said, reflecting a maturing industry. The inaugural conference seven years ago was a small gathering of lab rats; now it's as much a trade show as a science meeting, with real companies setting up booths.

"If you listen to a lot of the VCs (venture capitalists), they'll say (nanotechnology) is still a science project," said Steven Currall, director of a Rice University program that supports business activities by researchers. "A lot of them say it's 10 years in the future. They're nuts. It's not 10 years."

Nanotechnology is the science of manipulating the tiniest units of matter, and making use of the unusual properties many substances exhibit at these almost incomprehensible scales: no larger than a billionth of a meter, or 1/100,000th the diameter of a hair.

Groundwork for future

Researchers in chemistry, physics and biology are already touting progress on projects that could someday lead to highly affordable solar energy or microscopic robots that attack bacteria and cancer cells.

But a closer look at the conference also revealed why some are still skeptical -- at least in the short run.

The 90 companies that bought booths at the conference trade show was a threefold increase in just three years. But many of the companies make the instruments that nanotechnology labs use to do other things -- "pick and shovels for the miners in the gold rush" in the words of one venture capitalist.

Many attention-getting companies in the field are still laying the groundwork for the future.

Richardson, Texas-based Zyvex is researching ways to build materials from single molecules, but for now makes instruments and materials. Inmat, of Hillsborough, New Jersey, hopes its nanocomposite coating will eventually be used in tires and chemical defense products, but for now it's being used to add bounce to Wilson tennis balls.

Mass production questions

Another big challenge: manufacturing what the researchers invent.

"It's one thing to be able to do this in a lab where you're just pushing molecules around," said Donald Bansleben, a program manager with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which will be partly responsible for handing out federal research grants.

Take, for example, carbon nanotubes. These tiny hexagons have unusual properties and could someday be used in microscopic electronic devices, but making them on a large scale may be a headache as far into the future as can be imagined.

One difficulty is that molecules act strangely at such small scales, which makes them potentially useful but also difficult to manipulate. And the scale is so small that nano-devices will likely have to be made by the billions or trillions to be useful. Normal manufacturing methods will be useless. Nanosystems will have to build themselves.

"You have to use things like replication or evolution or self-assembly or self-repair," said Warren Packard, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who has invested in the field. "We need to figure out how to grow systems versus build systems."

Another big topic this week was the anticipated flood of federal money. Universities are eager to be sure, but several noted that it will mean the United States is only now pulling even with Japan in supporting nanotechnology.

On Wednesday, the California Institute of Technology announced it had received a $7.5 million grant to start a nanoscience center.

Proponents insist that, overall, nanotechnology is too broad, too important and too obviously useful to fail. Commercially, it will be better insured by real products and intellectual property than were previous technology fads.

But they know there will be bumps.

"I'm a near-term optimist and a long-term optimist but a mid-term pessimist," said Lynn Foster, who advises companies in the field. "It's not the next big thing. It's several of the next things after the next big thing."

2004/03/18

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A Utah company launched what it called a digital cable-style subscription television service "for the rest of us" on Tuesday, an alternative that eliminates the coaxial cable and strips basic service to a few essential networks with a price to match.

For $19.95, USDTV gives subscribers in Salt Lake City 32 channels, including local broadcast outlets. ESPN, ESPN2, Disney and Discovery Channel are five of the 10 cable networks currently included in the package, but more may be added.

The service is also available in Albuquerque and is expected to launch in Las Vegas in the next month, and the company hopes to offer service to 30 markets by year's end. About 1,000 customers have signed up in Salt Lake.

USDTV works by collecting feeds from the broadcast stations and cable networks at a single digital transmission tower, which then uses once-idle bandwidth -- bought from the stations -- to spray the signals to standard UHF/VHF antennas.

Customers must buy a $99.95 set-top device to decode the channels. USDTV says a strength of its system is its support for high-definition programming. In the Salt Lake market, six of the local stations broadcast high-definition signals.

Congress has set a goal for all U.S. television broadcasts to be digital by the end of 2006. Two-thirds of the nation's 1,721 television stations are already broadcasting in digital, according to the National Association of Broadcasters.

Because so few consumers have equipment capable of benefiting from the crisper video of high-definition television, those stations currently have plenty of unused spectrum.

"We are definitely taking the low-cost space," USDTV chairman and chief executive Steve Lindsley said after unveiling the service at a New York City news conference.

USDTV, based in suburban Salt Lake City with 26 employees, says its monthly price won't increase until 2006.

The lower cost and cable's reputation for raising prices above the rate of inflation, Lindsley said, "is going to leave open a tremendous opportunity for us to take a group that they leave behind."

Though cheaper, the $19.95 package doesn't approach the channel quantity of standard-tier cable service, which averages about $40 through Comcast in Salt Lake City. But, Lindsley said, the channels picked for USDTV's basic service represent "arguably 80 percent of what the average Utah home watches anyway."

The company, along with another recent startup, the New York state-based Voom network, also touts its high-definition and digital capabilities, services not widely enjoyed by standard-service customers of cable companies.

Both USDTV and Voom will have a "real struggle to be successful," said Phillip Swann, president and publisher of television technology Web site TVPredictions.com.

They are trying to capitalize on the fact that Comcast, Cox Communications or Time-Warner Cable, part of CNN's parent company Time Warner Inc., don't yet have a large lineup of high-definition channels, Swann said, but only because the market has not yet demanded it.

"That's the key. They will have that lineup," Swann said. "By the time people get to know what USDTV or Voom is, it isn't going to matter."

Cablevision Systems launched Voom, a satellite TV service exclusively for high-definition televisions, last fall in a beta test.

Nationwide subscribers pay about $40 a month for 21 high-definition channels and 40 others. For double that amount, you can add 36 premium and other channels, including digital music.

Broadcasters share in USDTV's monthly subscription fees and may share additional revenue generated by on-demand content stored on a hard drive to be incorporated into the USDTV receiver by the end of 2004.

Individual stations get a percentage of revenues based on the amount of bandwidth provided by the station, multiplied by the number of subscribers.

2004/03/23

SAN JOSE, California (AP) -- Before 8x8 Inc. launched an Internet phone service in late 2002, it drafted a business plan, set up its equipment, posted a Web site and began taking orders from customers. As with most online ventures, U.S. government approval wasn't needed.

That would change if the Department of Justice succeeds at persuading federal regulators to require new online communications services -- such as Internet calling -- to comply with wiretapping laws.

Critics, including some online businesses that are working with authorities to make their services wiretap-capable, say the DOJ proposal isn't just unprecedented and overzealous but also dangerously impractical.

It would chill innovation, they say, invade privacy and drive businesses outside the United States.

"No one in the Internet world is going to support this," said Bryan Martin, chief executive of 8x8, which sells the Packet8 phone service. "It's counter to everything we've done to date in terms of building the Internet as a free, anonymous and creative place."

The Justice Department, FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration are seeking what they call a clarification to an existing wiretap law called the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).

The 1994 law requires telecommunications carriers to ensure equipment is capable of being tapped when there's a lawful order. It did not expand wiretap authority but tried to ensure that new technologies are capable of intercepting calls on par with the regular phone network.

The Justice Department says that, as the very nature of telecommunications changes, it's simply not working.

Without citing examples, the agency's lawyers say some providers of new communications services aren't complying and, as a result, surveillance targets are being lost and investigations hindered.

"These problems are real, not hypothetical, and their impact on the ability of ... law enforcement to protect the public is growing with each passing day," according to a petition sent to the Federal Communications Commission last week signed by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John G. Malcolm and colleagues from the FBI and DEA.

The petition seeks a rule stating that high-speed Internet access providers are covered by the wiretap law -- as well as communications services that displace traditional phone companies.

It argues, in effect, for establishing a government approval process that would be required before any new communications services launch.

"If the FBI had this power all along, would we even have the Internet today?" said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

At the crux of the debate is the fact that communications technologies once tied to telephone carriers' circuit-switched networks are no longer necessarily so.

Critics say the petition violates the spirit of the original law by seeking to broaden the definition of "communications carriers" to include what amount to information service providers.

The law thus could apply not only Internet phone systems but also to voice-enabled instant messaging, email and even gaming consoles -- anything that could replace old fashion phone calls.

Currently, the debate is centered on Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) services, an increasingly popular technology that converts voice calls into data packets and streams them over the Internet.

In some cases, wiretapping simply isn't possible. In others, it appears to be but hasn't been fully tested. In all cases, companies say they don't want to trot out new services through the federal bureaucracy before releasing them.

"Let's just say if I had to get prior approval from this government, I probably would have taken my services to other governments," said Jeff Pulver, founder of Free World Dialup. "If I have an idea, I go for it, I build it up and I do it. Getting permission -- I stopped doing that a long time ago."

Pulver's service, which amounts to a directory service that links callers but doesn't carry the stream of bits from conversations, doesn't support wiretaps. But such calls could be captured by a caller's Internet service provider, he said.

When he gets valid subpoenas or court orders, Pulver said he supplies information to authorities. But companies outside the United States would not have to cooperate.

He mentioned Skype, a peer-to-peer-based telephony service with offices in Estonia and Sweden. Unlike major U.S. providers, Skype scrambles conversations, making it nearly impossible to decipher conversations quickly. Skype spokeswoman Kat James, reached via email, declined to comment.

Even VoIP companies like 8x8 and Vonage that are capable of -- and willing to comply with -- legal wiretap orders say the petition oversteps its bounds.

Justice Department officials declined to comment beyond the filing, which requested and appears to have received expedited review by the FCC. The deadline for the first round of comments is set for April 12.

"It's quite a breathtaking petition, not only in terms of the scope of coverage but also in the ambition of the legal argument," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "They seem to feel that they can get the FCC to give them what they want without having to go back to Congress."

As well, a dangerous precedent would be set by broadening the law so that it keeps up with future technologies before they're created.

"I think you'll start to see applications which have voice components but are not traditionally voice-replacement telephone services," Pulver said. "Does the FBI really want Xbox Live to be tapped?"