CIS 625 Journal Summaries-4

Article 10: AOL is keeping an eye on you

Original source

Summary:

The article is talking about "a recent addition to America Online's privacy policy clears the way for the company to use online tracking tools, including cookies and Web bugs, to compile anonymous data about its members and measure the effectiveness of advertising."

I feel astonished that "AOL and its advertisers may use cookie technology to determine on an anonymous basis which advertisements members have seen and how members responded to them." I had used AOL since Jan,1998. I never realized that. One of my friend told me AT&T Worldnet monitor their subscribers, now come to my ISP. Personally, I have more interested in web bugs than cookies.

Brian Krebs in his article titled 'Web Bugs' Make Cookies Look Good Enough To Eat said "Web bugs," tiny nefarious scripts that Web sites can use to surreptitiously access a visitor's computer and install or copy virtually any program.

Like cookies, web bugs are electronic tags that help Web sites and advertisers track visitors' whereabouts in cyberspace. But Web bugs are invisible on the page and are much smaller in file size, which makes them load quickly. What the web bug do is they send a ping back to the advertiser's server every time we load a page that contains one, and the advertiser records that our computer just loaded that page.

One good news is recently Microsoft's announcement that future versions of Internet Explorer would be able to cut out 3d-party cookies.

Article 11:IBM, Microsoft tapped for medical venture

Original source

Summary:

Pfizer, the world's largest drug company formed an alliance with Microsoft and IBM to set up a new software and services company for doctors. Amicore's homepage said it is a technology company with expertise that will help simplify the work of medical practices.

How do you feeling about the practicing medicine without all the paperwork? I do think it is a great idea and service in the medical area. I have one friend is an OB doctor. He always complaint that there are too many paper works need to be done. Now, with Amicore, everything becomes easy.

It actually is an e-health service. According the company's web page that "Using the Web services associated with .Net, physicians who subscribe to Amicore's service will be able to access files and process paper work from a variety of computing devices such as PCs, cell phones and Microsoft's forthcoming Tablet PC."

Article 12: Have cell phone, will roam--worldwide

Original source

Summary:

Do you like to travel? Now, you may travel all over the world using one cell phone without roaming charge. Bell Labs researchers will make it happen.

Just as mentioned in the article, I had thought that global roaming is impossible because wireless carriers use different types of phone networks that can't communicate with one another and require their own specially made phones. Of course, we are not consider the satellite service here. Domestically, different company has their own phone as well. For example, when I transfer from Sprint PCS to Cingular Wireless, I need to buy a new phone.

But now with Bell Labs' new software language called "Common Operations," or COPS, which wireless service providers would put on their networks and which would allow a wireless user's identifications and passwords to be read by the different network types, global roaming will be possible.

Here are the notes for those sources:

10.Jim Hu, AOL is keeping an eye on you, October 5, 2001, <http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5097903,00.html> (October 11, 2001), ZDNet News

11.Reuters, IBM, Microsoft tapped for medical venture, October 10, 2001,
<http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5098061,00.html?chkpt=zdnn_mh_com>(October 11, 2001),
ZDNet News

12.Ben Charny, Have cell phone, will roam--worldwide, October 9, 2001,
<http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5098039,00.html?chkpt=zdnn_mh_mac>(October 11, 2001), ZDNet News