April 17, 2000– Newsletter #76

Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors,

Did you see the iWon.com commercials? Well, that 10 million
bucks was given away on an episode of the Leeza Gibbons Show
on April 15th. There were three other winners of smaller
prizes.

Did you hear…

I wrote a newsletter not too long ago about Amazom.com
getting patents on their One-click technology and sharing web
users. Well, it’s happening again. Did you know that
CoolSavings.com has a patent on online coupons? They do. Now
Catalina Marketing, which owns ValuePage.com, has asked the
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to reconsider the patent.
I think that’s a good idea.

Have you seen the Microsoft public relations advertisements
with Bill Gates yet? They’re not bad, actually. Microsoft has
become a punching bag for a lot of people. I watched a show
on early morning television where a guy played the accordion
and sang against Bill Gates. There’s high quality programming
at that time of the morning, let me tell you.

I’m in favor of the spots myself. Microsoft had to do
something. Anybody who’s anybody got their chance to go on
the air and speak out against the company. Microsoft didn’t
think it was getting a fair shake on any news programs, so
it went this route.

Guess who made a million by investing in a dot-com? Queen
Elizabeth! Really. She bought a stake, pre-IPO, in a site
called Getmapping.com, which is taking aerial photographs of
the whole of Britain. She put in 100,000 pounds, the site
went public, and she made a profit valued at 1.5 million
U.S. dollars. Cool.

Now onto today’s topic…

I remember when the movie “Enemy of the State” came out. I
went to see it the weekend it opened. I thought it was a
pretty good film, well worth the $3.50 matinee price. The
film revolved around the government using high-tech methods
to covertly track a person’s movements . It was a little
far-fetched in parts, but it was a movie, so that was fine.

There’s a scene where Gene Hackman’s and Will Smith’s
characters talk about the government’s capacity to tap the
nation’s phone calls. Hackman said that, in the 60s,
government agencies had computers that could “listen” for
certain phrases that suggested the caller posed a threat to
the national security or the President. The idea was that if
that was done back then, imagine what could be done now.

I may not be remembering the scene exactly right, but that
was the gist of it. Government computers could listen for
specific words and alert agents when someone had made a
provocative statement.

Now, I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I thought the
idea was somewhat plausible, at least for a film. Would it
work in real life? Maybe, but voice recognition is difficult
simply because people speak in so many different voices,
accents, and volume levels, not to mention the fact that a
telephone line would only carry the mid-range frequencies
of the voice.

I brought up the movie because the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed a method of checking
for fraud that works much the same way.

SEC chairman Arthur Levitt has suggested that a series of
servers be set up to continually search the Web for phrases
like “get rich quick”, or “buy low, sell high”. The concept
is to get a jump on people committing stock fraud.

See the parallel with the movie? Computers would constantly
search for sites with certain phrases and return the site’s
URL to the Feds, who could then decide if a case should be
built. The SEC claims the process is only to free up people.
He’s right. No individual person could search anywhere near
as fast as a series of servers with an up-to-date database.

Of course, once a site was found, then a human being would
take over. He or she would make the decision if the site
should be brought under investigation for stock fraud. It’s
a good idea, right?

I guess, but I don’t think it quite hits the mark. I don’t
know about you, but the vast majority of the seemingly phony
stock pitches I get aren’t on the Web, but rather through my
email, and, oh man, do I get a lot of them.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) doesn’t like the
plan at all, for many of the same reasons that make me wonder
if it’ll work at all. They suggest that the only way for this
system to succeed is to start looking at email.

“No, we won’t,” says the SEC. They claim that their proposal
is like someone searching for a newspaper article. In fact,
the only real difference between a human doing this and a
computer doing it is that we’d have to pay a person. The
server will use search engines and a database to automate
the search. Who could be against that?

Two members of Congress, for one…er…two. Mike Oxley and
Edolphus Towns, both senior members of the U.S. House Commerce
Committee, have posed some questions to the SEC and say they
might call for public hearings.

Then, just to add insult to injury, the SEC is also under
pressure from the government to step up their stock fraud
investigations. Right now, the SEC has filed over 125 cases
over the past 18 months.

Maybe I’m missing the ACLU argument here. They don’t seem to
have a problem with a human sitting and searching the Web for
stock fraud cases, but they do have a problem with a computer
doing it. I don’t get that. The server would do a far more
complete job of searching than would a human. The searchable
database for the server would be made up only of pages already
in the public realm of the Web.

What IS the problem??? (Capitalization and Extra question
marks added for emphasis. If you read last week’s letter,
you’ll get this.)

The problem has to be just what I said way up at the top of
this letter: searching Web pages simply won’t garnish enough
fraud cases to garner success. Public hearings will alert bad
guys that practicing stock fraud on the Web will get them
caught. Now that this plan is out in the open, they might as
well drop it. It’s a dead issue. If I were committing stock
fraud, I’d pull off the Web and go to the area that the SEC
said they wouldn’t attack: email.

Again, it is my opinion that the majority of stock fraud
items arrive over email or some other form of person-to-person
contact. But the SEC can’t delve into email, right?

Well, what if the email was sent directly to them?

Instead of setting up servers to search the Web, set them up
to subscribe to every newsletter out there. Have them
download every piece of software they can get their hands on.
Buy at least one item from every online store they can find.
Divulge all the information requested. If there’s a little
box that asks if your personal information can be shared with
others, click YES! with glee.

Of course you don’t identify yourself as the SEC and use a
mailing address in Washington, DC. You sign up as someone who
fits the profile of a person that a stock fraud artist would
want to go after. Say you live in a small town somewhere in
the Midwest. Make yourself a retiree with a nice nest egg.

The purpose is to get every spam mailing possible. Now have
a server search through the messages to look for the words
“stock,” “bond,” “get rich quick”.

Is that illegal? Might the ACLU claim that’s entrapment? I
don’t know, but doesn’t that sound like the way to go? I
bet you’d find more fraud in one day of checking email than
you would in a week of searching the Web.

Maybe this is already being done. Maybe the SEC is doing it
and just not telling anyone. Hopefully they are, and
hopefully they won’t tell anyone. If they do, maybe email
fraud will dry up too.

Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

That’s that. Joe “Friday” Burns signing off. Just
the facts, ma’am.

Joe Burns, Ph.D.

Last week I wrote about poor English and grammar use in email
letters. Many of you took the opportunity to inform me that
I had made my own error in grammar. I wrote:

“I would think that the emails sent
to those in a position of power would have less typos.”

For the sentence to be correct, the final two words should
have read “fewer typos”. My book on grammar (which I need to
return to more often) states:

“Use ‘fewer’ when referring to the number of items or persons.
Use ‘less’ when referring to a single amount”.

For instance: There was less space [a single amount] on the
floor, yet there were fewer [number of persons] dancers.

Never let it be said that I could care less about “fewer”!