InformationWeek

If you didn't want crowds of people seeing you have sex, why did you do it on the beach with other people around? OK, I can't leave it at one sentence, so here's a little more.

The Associated Press has an intriguing description of the user interface and software that comes with the One Laptop Per Child $100 laptop. It abandons the application-document-folder-desktop metaphor that's been used for PCs since the original Apple Macintosh in 1984, instead arranging files chronologically, in a "journal."

Earlier this week, futurist and technology guru Mark Anderson hosted his annual SNS New York dinner, a high-level gathering of VCs, investment bankers, journalists, technology entrepreneurs, and others, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

A prestigious U.K. copyright committee has handed down its recommendations, advocating breathing common sense into U.K. copyright law: The committee, headed up by Andrew Gowers, former head of the Financial Times, recommends striking down the law that makes it illegal for consumers to rip CDs to iPods, or perform other "format-shifting" -- but only for CDs created after the law goes into effect.

JASRAC, a Japanese media organization, decided the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act is "too much trouble" and wants YouTube to cooperate in preemptively filtering pirated videos from being uploaded: "While such a system is being implemented, JASRAC wants YouTube to take three provisional measures: 1) post a Japanese-language notice on the "top page of the YouTube website" warning about copyright infringement, 2) keep track of the names and addresses of users making uploads, 3) terminate the accounts of anyone who uploads material that JASRAC claims is under copyright."

In other words, JASRAC thinks the 21st Century is a mighty inconvenient place to live, and wants YouTube to turn back the clock to 1974, and also assume that every one of its users is a criminal. Outrageous demands like JASRAC's make use realize that, bad as the DMCA is, it could be a lot worse.

Ars Technica is the source of this article, and the authors of that piece make a very common error: They refer in the first paragraph to "copyrighted" videos. In fact videos on YouTube are copyrighted. Copyright isn't enjoyed only by people lucky enough to sell their work to corporations who have enough money to hire lawyers, it adheres to all creative work: This blog post, your unpublished novel, and your Christmas letter.

The U.S. military completed a round of testing of the Active Denial System, a weapon that inflicts searing pain at a distance -- but (according to the military) produces no injury. It motivates targets to run away -- and fast. It's been certified for use in Iraq.

The ADS shoots a beam of millimeters waves, which are longer in wavelength than x-rays but shorter than microwaves -- 94 GHz (= 3 mm wavelength) compared to 2.45 GHz (= 12 cm wavelength) in a standard microwave oven.

The longer waves are thought to limit the effects of the radiation. If used properly, ADS will produce no lasting adverse affects, the military argues.

Documents acquired for Wired News using the Freedom of Information Act claim that most of the radiation (83 percent) is instantly absorbed by the top layer of the skin, heating it rapidly.

The beam produces what experimenters call the "Goodbye effect," or "prompt and highly motivated escape behavior." In human tests, most subjects reached their pain threshold within 3 seconds, and none of the subjects could endure more than 5 seconds.

Boing Boing worries the weapon will be used for torture.

Legal action in Italy raises the question of whether Web 2.0 sites should be held legally liable for content posted to them by users. Italian authorities are investigating Google executives in connection with a segment on Google Video showing students at a Turin school bullying an autistic student. The executives are being scrutinized for violating Italian law on appropriate content. "In the US, sites like Google Video, SoapBox, and YouTube are generally protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants 'safe harbor' to the sites so long as they are not the 'publishers' of any illegal material and take it down immediately when requested," Ars Technica notes.

How do you say, "Never mind" in Chinese? Censors in China blocked Wikipedia again, according to the blog Danwei.. But apparently there's a tool called the Gollum Wikipedia browser that allows you to circumvent the Chinese censors and access Wikipedia articles. (Via Boing Boing)

Ars Technica says:

At this time, it is not known whether this is an official government effort to nudge Wikipedia out of the reach of Chinese citizens, or whether other issues are causing the site to be unreachable. China has a history of exercising a high degree of control over its citizens' Internet habits, with the so-called Great Firewall of China blocking access to sites deemed inappropriate by the government.

Once Wikipedia became reachable from within the borders of China, many wondered how long the access would last. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told the Observer in September that the reasons for the ban were unclear to him. "We have internal rules about neutrality and deleting personal attacks [and] we're far from being a haven for dissidents or a protest site," said Wales. At the same time, Wales promised that Wikipedia would not give in to any government efforts to censor it.

Two British security experts were able to read encrypted data off a supposedly highly secure U.K. RFID-equipped passport using equipment priced under £250, according to the Guardian..

But is that an impressive hack? The UK government thinks not:

While China opened access to Wikipedia, it's still blocking some topics selectively:

In removing restrictions on Wikipedia, the Chinese government appears to be choosing to rely instead on keyword filters that block specific material on all sites, including Wikipedia. Subjects that are still off-limits on Wikipedia include high-level politics, the suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Falun Gong movement and historical events like the Communist revolution.

China lifted its ban on Wikipedia and popularity is over the moon, with more than 1,200 users registering to contribute to the site every day.

Authorities had been blocking both the Chinese and the English versions of Wikipedia steadily since October 2005. The sites previously had been blocked in China only intermittently. The lengthy ban drew criticism from some intellectuals in China who pointed out that it hindered the ability to add Chinese perspective to articles on the encyclopedia sites. Last month, the block on the English site was suddenly lifted, without explanation.

Unblocking the site makes it accessible to China's more than 120 million Internet users.

The first 200 units in the low-cost One Laptop Per Child project rolled off the assembly line. Full mass production is due to start in the second quarter of 2007,

The OLPC laptop features a 2.6.19 Linux kernel, and an integrated user environment called Sugar that includes a web browser, a chat system, a simple word processor, and other basic software components. Additional applications will be available for download from an official Internet repository.

Previous coverage of OLPC referred to a $100 purchase price, but that's not included in the article linked to above. I don't know why.

"It’s not the fastest little machine in the world, but it definitely has personality and I find myself falling in love with it," says developer Christopher Blizzard, who's involved in the project.

Rory Cowan, CEO of Lionbridge Technologies, describes how Chinese is likely to overtake English as the main language of the Internet. Lionbridge employs more than 5,000 independent translators that use Internet technology to translate tech materials into dozens of foreign languages.

Listen to the latest InformationWeek podcast about IT in China with Editor-at-Large Aaron Ricadela, reporting live from Beijing. Today I talk with Aaron about the InformationWeek China Conference, managing IT in the fast-growing Chinese economy, China's effort to avoid becoming dependent on foreign companies, including operating systems vendors, and China's business threats and opportunities to American IT.

Listen to the latest InformationWeek podcast about IT in China with Editor-at-Large Aaron Ricadela, reporting live from Beijing. Today I talk with Aaron about IBM's and Microsoft's research centers in China, the culture barrier between Chinese and American researchers that creates a hurdle for collaboration, natural language recognition research, and how to make Bill Gates smile like a baby.

Chip makers Intel and AMD face off against each other from across half the country back in their home market. Here in China, they share an office building.

Listen to the latest InformationWeek podcast about IT in China with Editor-at-Large Aaron Ricadela, reporting live from Beijing. Today I talk with Aaron about traditional Chinese lunch and modern Chinese dinner, Hewlett-Packard's Enterprise Data Warehouse Initiative, Tsinghua and Peking universities, which were recently voted among the top 20 in the world, and more. The latest installment of Aaron's travel journal is here: "In Search Of The Chinese Cell-Phone/TV/Broadband Junkie."

One of the exciting things about life as an American here in the 21st century is the emergence of developing nations as economic and cultural powerhouses. For most of my life--for most of the 20th century--most Asian nations and other countries in the developing world fell into two categories: military threats, such as Japan, North Vietnam, and North Korea; and objects of pity and charity, such as India, Bangladesh, and China.

Of course, Japan emerged from that threat-or-victim trap after World War II. And now we see many other developing countries, including China, India, and Korea, emerging to stand side-by-side with the U.S. and Europe as equals and competitors. It's a little bit scary--in the future, I think I'll find my job is as much in danger of outsourcing as any of yours. But mostly it's exciting. It's the dawn of a great era. It's not a clash of civilizations, as we're seeing with some regimes in the Middle East, but rather a meeting of civilizations in cooperation and competition. Asian countries have different cultures, different economic and political systems, and thousands of years of history that's mostly independent of the West. That gives us lots of opportunities to explore and learn from each other.

This week, InformationWeek is doing some exploring of this strange new world, as Editor-at-Large Aaron Ricadela spends some quality time in Beijing soaking up information about the IT industry in China and reporting it back home. Our package of coverage is growing daily all week. It includes:

Listen to the latest InformationWeek podcast about IT in China with Editor-at-Large Aaron Ricadela, reporting live from Beijing. Today I talk with Aaron about the travel experience, comparison with his earlier trip to India, China's higher education system, getting Internet access, government censorship of the Internet, and former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt's perspective on what the U.S. needs to do to compete with China. Links: The first two installments of Aaron's travel journal: "Friendship, Peace, Cooperation, Development" and "Sliced Duck And Sharp Views With Reed Hundt." Read Aaron's January report from India: "Inside India." Listen to the first podcast interview with Aaron: "Special Podcast: Get A Sneak Peek At Our Upcoming Special Report On China." Also: "India's Bangalore Changes Name To Bengalooru."

It's winding toward late evening around a large, circular table in the first-floor restaurant of one of Beijing's ritziest hotels, and Reed Hundt's Chinese associates are bustling to fill his needs. The former FCC chairman got into town four hours late after a series of airline mishaps in Chicago.

In the heart of Beijing this week, it's hard to escape Africa. Leaders of 48 African countries descended on China's capital this weekend--as did I--though we're here for quite different missions.

Would more Americans pursue technology careers if those students got their college educations for free? The Programmers Guild, an advocacy group for U.S. tech professionals, thinks so.

In fact, the guild is about to announce a new proposal advocating that the U.S. government provide "100% subsidies" of tuition and expenses for American students enrolled in degree programs in computer science, engineering, and other fields where there are U.S. skill shortages.

How would the U.S. pay for such a program, you ask? One source for funding could come from hiking government fees that U.S. companies pay to employ foreign H-1B visa holders to $5,000 per worker, per year.

A few IT body shops seem to be coercing their H-1B visa-holding employees from quitting with the threat of legal action.

In today's daily news podcast, our top story focuses on Microsoft and Vista--we now know the time and place of the event to officially launch the operating system that's the Redmond giant's future. Breaking news includes Palm's answer to RIM's latest, a worm that's found in some of Apple's iPods, and the latest report on how well the federal government is securing personal information stored on its computers.

The In Depth report looks at the latest round of financial results from some leading hardware and software vendors, and the editorial is on education, learning, and the technological fate of nations.

Your host for today is Curtis Franklin Jr.

In case you haven't been following the news, a United States federal judge for the Northern District of Illinois recently issued a proposed order that instructs ICANN to place a hold on the domain name of The Spamhaus Project, a nonprofit firm based in England. The international political ramifications of such an order, should it be enforced, are obviously quite severe and are the cause of much valid concern. But while the judge is stretching the bounds of reason and temperance with this order, he also left an "out" for Spamhaus, which the organization blithely chose not to take. If we are to avoid an international incident here, Spamhaus is probably the one that should blink.

Was it chutzpah or ignorance behind an ad posted on Dice specifically seeking H-1B visa holders to fill IT jobs in metropolitan Atlanta?

Increasing heat and power consumption within data centers is contributing to global warming and leading to inevitable legislation that could place mandated restrictions on businesses in the near future, according to recent research by Gartner.

In this video podcast, Induslogic CEO Peter Harrison explains why he thinks companies like his--which employs hundreds of IT specialists in India and the Ukraine to help develop products for American software companies--help the American IT worker. Does his explanation make sense, or is it one more excuse business leaders make to justify offshore outsourcing? Let us know what you think by filling out the form below. Click here to view the podcast.

Looks like I got back from Black Hat just in time. Less than a week after my JetBlue flight touched down at JFK, all hell broke loose at the airports, forcing passengers to dump such cherished items as hair gel, ChapStick, and even books. Books? Living in New York, one doesn't need much of a reminder that we live in a dangerous world. This summer must have set some sort of record for subway cars breaking down and stranding riders in un-air-conditioned hell. And those subway cars usually don't smell too good to begin with. Can technology rescue us from danger in these uncertain times?

Why pay tens of thousands of dollars on a firewall or other network security device when you can get comparable protection from one at a fraction of the cost? That's the promise behind security system-on-chip technology that embeds virtual private network, firewall, and other capabilities into network appliances at the silicon level, eliminating the need for the software and integrated circuits that make security appliances more expensive and generate more heat in your data center.

Should the U.S. Dept. of Labor provide public access to a government database that purportedly contains information about employers planning to hire H-1B workers for fiscal 2007, which starts on Oct. 1, 2006?

Kim Berry, president of advocate group Programmers Guild, says he wants U.S. tech workers to have the chance to more fairly compete for jobs that might otherwise go to foreigners.

U.S. workers should have the opportunity right now to look at requests employers have made to the DOL to fill IT positions with H-1B visa holders--before the foreign workers can legally begin the jobs starting on Oct. 1, says Berry.

If American workers can check out which employers are hiring for which jobs and at what wages, well, then maybe some interested (or out-of-work) American techies will have a shot to apply for those jobs before they're filled by foreigners.

Foreign tech workers who enter the U.S. with H-1B visas are paid about $25,000 a year less than American workers with the same skills, according to the Programmers Guild, an advocate organization for U.S. tech professionals.

And the guild's president, Kim Berry, is hoping that Congress will "correct" current wage rules that are supposed to keep the pay playing field level between American professionals and H-1B visa holders, but aren't.

Current regulations have loopholes that allow employers to hire H-1B workers at wages 25% or more lower than Americans earn for the same jobs, says Berry. And that's one of the big factors that make hiring H-1B workers so attractive, he says.

A tip of the hat to all the InformationWeek readers who participated in this year's Global Security Survey. In this week's issue, I wrote a story analyzing the survey's results and drilling down beyond the numbers by speaking with a few of you who took the survey and other security pros who likewise had interesting things to say. The data and interviews were insightful. Here are the five biggest surprises I encountered while covering the survey:

In the movies, hacking is glamorous. A few lines of code, a little pen testing, and you're in. You don't need to cast Angelina Jolie (Hackers) or Hugh Jackman (Swordfish) to portray hacking as it truly is: a game of patience and persistence that's mostly trial and error, heavy emphasis on the "error."

Assuming no prior knowledge of a system an attacker seeks to penetrate, hacking is done in stages. The attacker is a digital gumshoe pounding the electronic pavement in search of any clues he can find about his mark, until a weak link is discovered, the chains are broken, and the castle gate is dropped across the moat. The smart defender will look to confound his nemesis at every turn, and there are several open-source tools available to make sure you find your weaknesses before your opponent does. It's a matter of who gets there first.

Some people like soccer. Some people like spending money. But if you're someone who likes soccer and spending money, you're in luck. A new wristwatch is on the way in honor of the upcoming FIFA World Cup in Germany that will let fans buy small-ticket items by waving the watch over a MasterCard reader, similar to the way MasterCard PayPass smartcards and tokens work. The skeptic in me says this will boost transaction fraud like nobody's business. But my more curious side wants one of these timepieces in a way I haven't felt since that clunky watch I had 20 years ago that played primitive video games and weighed about 5 pounds.

Comes now that a French MEP is proposing a tax on SMS and e-mail messages as a way to partly supplement the European Union's general fund. Every time I hear one of these proposals, I have to wonder if people have even done the math on this stuff.

If news of the recent theft of a Veterans Affairs laptop containing records of 26.5 million vets and their spouses has you feeling insecure, here's something you'll really like: marketplaces where this stolen information can be bought and sold so that criminals can not only steal your identity, but gain access to all that your identity provides. While these marketplaces aren't new, I recently sat down with a couple of RSA Security Inc. anti-fraud researchers to learn how these marketplaces operate.

A recent report by the European Commission says investment by EU member states in Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) research and job-creation efforts is falling short. According to the press release that accompanied the report last week, "Europe continues to lag behind its competitors, investing about half as much as the US." Furthermore, "ICT [investments] are today contributing less to European productivity growth than they did 10 years ago," despite a commitment in 2005 by EU member states to increase their funding efforts.

The report and additional materials are available at the i2010 Web site.

Katherine Albrecht doesn't much care for RFID technology. She's the author of Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with RFID (Nelson Current) and the founder of CASPIAN, Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, a group that's either pro-privacy or anti-business, depending on your preferred flavor of spin.

Even so, my jaw dropped when I read today's press release from her organization claiming that the head of VeriChip Corporation wants to put RFID tracking chips in immigrants.

Can anyone be that clueless?

The fastest way to obscurity in the security market is to worry about yesterday's problems. Check Point Software Technologies is looking to put its aborted bid to buy Sourcefire behind it. Once the deal came under the scrutiny of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, both companies would have been wrapped up in red tape for months. Unacceptable in the fast-moving world of IT security.

Companies touting DRM technology claim it's intended to protect data from unauthorized copying. But Apple's angry response to a French plan for iTunes interoperability has let the truth slip out: DRM is designed to lock in customers, not lock down data.

The word "outsourcing" has long caused many technology professionals to shudder. But 10 or 15 years ago, outsourcing still mostly meant moving your IT job from the payroll of one U.S. company to another American firm, like when Dupont in 1997 signed a megadeal to outsource 2,600 jobs to Computer Sciences Corp.

And for those people who transferred to IT outsourcing firms, the move frequently--although not always--provided a boost to the career. Often, the tech services firms not only invested more in training and professional development than the old employer, but the move also sometimes led to promotions, interesting new gigs working for other clients, fatter paychecks, and nice perks.

In June, Frank Robertson could be sentenced to spend the next 15 years in a New Jersey state prison as punishment for his role in one of the biggest payment-card frauds pulled off to date. Robertson and 13 other men were arrested in December in connection with a heist that stretches across the U.S. and into Eastern Europe, with more than $3 million in goods stolen along the way, mostly high-end electronics. The repercussions of this crime will ripple throughout the financial services, retail, and IT industries long after Robertson is put away.

Remember the good old days, when your only concern about issuing and managing cell phones and PDAs was that someone would leave theirs in a taxi or on an airplane? Now viruses and mobile malware have reared their ugly heads, further convincing IT departments that BlackBerrys, cell phones, laptops, and PDAs must be locked down with as much vigor as back-end systems. The result is a slew of mobile data security options that include mobile encryption and even a kill switch for data should it fall into the wrong hands.

You're traveling out of the country, for business or on vacation, and you decide it's time for lunch. You're about to hail a taxi to take you to that fantastic café you passed by this morning, but first you figure you might was well get some cash. No problem, there's even a branch of your local bank nearby. Well, maybe there is a problem. The ATM refuses to give you any money, informing you that your transaction cannot be completed and you should call your bank. You pull out your cell phone, but, it turns out after several minutes of hold music, the customer service representative can't figure out why your transaction was denied, and he can't help you. If this sounds like a realistic scenario, that's because, thanks to a data hack and careless encryption practices, it is for some customers of Citibank, Wells Fargo, and other financial institutions.

Microsoft is escalating its 2-year-old war with Europe's trustbusters, charging in a 16-page complaint that the European Commission schemed with the software giant's rivals in trying to discredit Microsoft's compliance with the EC's 2004 antitrust decision.

Yesterday, on the eve of the 2006 RSA Conference, noted computer virus researcher Eugene Kaspersky stopped by InformationWeek's San Francisco office to chat about security issues. With him were Stephen Orenberg, president of Kaspersky Lab, Inc. in the U.S., and Olga Kobzareva, head of communications for the Kaspersky Lab in Moscow. He had some very interesting things to say.

I recorded the interview, intending to distribute it as a podcast. Unfortunately, the sound quality leaves something to be desired -- my Sony ICD-B7 digital audio recorder isn't exactly pro-leve gear.

Both my colleague Mitch Wagner, and I have been following the Chinese censorship issue that has caught Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Cisco like deer in the headlights, and triggered a firestorm of international criticism. If my email and responses to our blogs are anything to go by - our readers have been avidly following this issue as well, responding with a mix of cynicism, business practicality and a longing idealism.

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have been acting like grownups recently in their decision to cooperate with the Chinese government in censoring Internet comment. You may not agree with their course of action -- you may even condemn what they're doing -- but you have to admit that they've taken responsibility for their actions and decisions, and not tried to claim that the whole thing is beyond their control.

I wish I could say the three companies' critics are also being grownups. It's easy to be outraged by companies that cooperate with oppressive regimes, easy to post angry blog entries and issue impassioned press releases. But it's harder to work for change.

Congressional subcommittees and caucuses are often annoying and self-important, and probably no one attends at least half of their hearings save for the panel members themselves, their staff and the people called before them to testify about whatever.

Nonetheless, in an atmosphere infused with constant references to exporting freedom, democracy and other rights, a report that several internet heavyweights - among them Microsoft and Google - are either refusing or so far ignoring a request from the Congressional Human Rights Caucus to discuss their already publicly acknowledged censorship activities in China, doesn't sit well. At the very least, it seems ill-timed.

Savi Technology Inc., a privately held company that generated revenue of approximately $90 million in 2005, is working with retail companies and ship-vessel operators to build out an international supply chain. This supply chain is enabled by radio frequency identification technology (RFID).

The goal is to gain access to real-time data transmitted from the RFID tags on containers in transit to make split-second decisions that could redirect cargo in transit. The application will become more valuable to U.S. companies as the outsourcing manufacturing trend to China and India continues.

Microsoft's announcement that it will be providing access to some of its source code was a bit of a shock, I must admit. If anyone had asked me 10 years ago what the chances were of this happening, I would have made reference to pigs flying and other unlikely events.

Thanks to the twin wonders of European intractability and modern science, here we are.

We've received quite a bit of feedback to our recent outsourcing coverage, and two of our reporters' trips to India to write firsthand about companies there.

Jim Ball of Ball 5 Enterprises in Olney, Md., set the tone for many indignant readers, writing: "I, along with all of those now unemployed because of outsourcing to India, have absolutely no interest whatsoever in reading about all those folks that are enjoying the jobs we all once held."

It's a bright sunny day in Bangalore, and Microsoft has rolled out the red carpet for its research director, Rick Rashid; the government's minister of science and technology Kapil Sibal; and some of India's top academics for the one-year anniversary of the company's India research lab, which employs 30 scientists and may soon double in size. Sibal, a well-known lawyer, walks up the stairs of the Taj Residency hotel and the press photographers' flashbulbs pop. Hundreds of guests at Microsoft's symposium pack a hotel ballroom.

At Hewlett-Packard's Bangalore, India offices near the Forum, one of the new shopping malls going up around the city, fourteen researchers in a pocket of the building are trying to do something rare in this country's IT industry: develop products that can be used by ordinary Indians. Late in the day on Monday as part of a weeklong reporting trip to Bangalore and Delhi, I visited HP to see what's on those researchers' minds.

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam analyzed the Mona Lisa using advanced emotion-recognition software and figured out why she's smiling. Watch my video commentary (1 min., 32 sec.) WARNING: May induce laughing behavior.

It's not every day that an employee publicly condemns his company as a tool of state-sponsored thuggery and gets to remain employed.

On Tuesday morning, Robert Scoble, technical evangelist at Microsoft and the company's most noted blogger, weighed in about a report posted by blogger and former CNN reporter Rebecca MacKinnon that MSN Spaces on New Year's Eve shut down a blog written by Zhao Jing, aka Michael Anti, a blogger apparently not well loved by Chinese authorities.

"It’s one thing to pull a list of words out of blogs using an algorithm," Scoble wrote. "It’s another thing to become an agent of a government and censor an entire blogger’s work. Yes, I know the consequences. Yes, there are thousands of jobs at stake. Billions of dollars. But, the behavior of my company in this instance is not right."

Collaboration ain't always easy.

Sometimes it takes many months, occasionally more than a year, for IT vendors and university researchers to agree on who owns the intellectual property of industry-funded IT research at some of America's top schools. Such delays have prompted some vendors to direct some of their university-bound R&D funding to universities overseas, institutions less fussy about IP rights. Those concerns are voiced in a video podcast.

While venture capitalists look to China to make a buck, IBM is teaming with VCs through its newly formed Venture Capital Advisory Council to scout out young firms from emerging markets that are developing innovative IT services, which could be exported to the West.

"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you." That aphorism from baseball Hall of Famer and sage Satchel Paige might be sound advice in baseball, but not necessarily for our economic future.

Call me a worrywart.

I'm troubled that reports about offshore outsourcing means many young people don't think they can make a career in IT and related fields, such as engineering. This attitude will damage our competitiveness as the world shrinks, making it more likely that more jobs requiring a high degree of tech know-how will end up overseas.

Enrollments are down at colleges offering many technical fields, and that troubles educators leading many of our top schools.

Recently, I caught up with Kristina Johnson, dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. She feels educators must and can do more to attract talented students to engineering and other technical careers. Globalization is a fact, and programs like Duke's are addressing that reality. Listen to what Johnson says.

Sadly, for many Americans, each death of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is nothing more than a statistic buried on the inside page of the daily newspaper. But an animated map of Iraq helps visitors to a Web site visualize the mounting toll, a small but important reminder of the reality of a war half a world away. The site is further evidence on how the Web puts an individual on the same level as major news organizations in reaching the public with important news.

In this space ordinarily reserved for analysis and commentary on IT topics, every now and again, there comes a news event that has such an impact, that it seems inappropriate not to make mention of it regardless of any link or lack thereof to IT. That's because in these cases, what links us as readers and editors to the story is our humanity.

Fresh off its controversial flip-flopping on support for a gay-rights bill in Washington state comes a news report that Microsoft is cooperating with the Chinese government to censor users of the MSN Spaces section of its MSN China Web portal.

IT will be at the top of his agenda as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff travels this week to Europe.

A group of 10 business executives, consumers, academics, and government officials has spent the past year trying to figure out how best to stop unsolicited E-mail known as spam. The solution: brutalize violators with stiff financial penalties.

One wonders what is going on Over There. On the one hand, Europe has long been ahead of the United States in technology areas as diverse as mobile computing, open systems, and standards in general.

One research firm is suggesting that mobile-phone usage is going to surpass 100% in Europe very soon.