[risks] Risks Digest 22.97

From: RISKS List Owner (risko@private)
Date: Thu Oct 23 2003 - 15:13:57 PDT

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    RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest  Thursday 23 October 2003  Volume 22 : Issue 97
    
       FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
       ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator
    
    ***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. *****
    This issue is archived at http://www.risks.org as
      http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/22.97.html
    The current issue can be found at
      http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt
    
      Contents:
    Computers may be bad for your health (NewsScan)
    Recent London power outage (Peter Amey)
    Justice Department e-censorship error (Kevin Poulsen via jones-gill)
    RISKS Offshore: A tough lesson on medical privacy (David Lazarus via
      Scott Miller)
    "Victoria's Secret Reaches a Data Privacy Settlement" (Drew Dean)
    First DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN, and now YANKEES LOSE! (Mark Brader)
    Discover cancels 60,000 accounts (Charlie Shub)
    Nokia and mobile-phone battery explosions (Monty Solomon)
    Teen rides Trojan Horse defense (Keith Rhodes)
    Feds admit error in hacking conviction (Robert Lemos via ikanal)
    Digital signatures: When will they learn? (Jeremy Epstein)
    Senate votes to can spam (NewsScan)
    Re: Difficulties with Census Bureau income data (Patrick J. Kobly)
    Re: Fun with stolen credit-card numbers (Dimitri Maziuk)
    Re: And I thought I had it bad... (Anthony W Youngman)
    Re: The Joy of Good Design (Debora Weber-Wulff)
    Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)
    
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    
    Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 09:39:21 -0700
    From: "NewsScan" <newsscan@private>
    Subject: Computers may be bad for your health 
    
    Nine out of 10 computer users are stressed out by such regular occurrences
    as performance slowdown, spam overload and lost files, and the time wasted
    fixing problems just makes it worse, according to security firm Symantec.
    Anger management experts say computer stress must be alleviated before it
    affects productivity and human-to-human interactions. "If you are suffering
    from stress, the best thing to do is to breathe deeply, and remind yourself
    to keep your cool," says Mike Fisher, of the British Association of Anger
    Management. The top five stress triggers, according to Symantec, are: 1)
    Slow performance and system crashes; 2) Spam, scams and e-mail overload; 3)
    Pop-up ads; 4) Viruses; and 5) Lost or deleted files. Men tend to freak out
    over viruses, spam and general information pollution, while crashing systems
    and sluggish performance really irk women. More than a third of both sexes
    will resort to extreme behavior during computer-related meltdown, including
    violence, swearing, showing and desperately hitting random keys. The good
    news is that 40% will actually try to fix the problem, often asking someone
    else for help. Symantec's Kevin Chapman suggests a few ways to reduce the
    potential for problems: "For example, don't download lots of large files and
    applications, and remove the clutter left behind by long periods on the
    Internet. To avoid spam, don't sign up for lots of mailing lists, and if you
    do receive spam-mail, never reply to it asking to be removed from the list
    as this will confirm your e-mail address." [Eds. Note: NewsScan never, ever
    shares your e-mail addresses with *anyone*, so we hope you'll stay on *our*
    list.]  [BBC News 23 Oct 2003; NewsScan Daily, 23 Oct 2003]
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3204719.stm
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 09:49:36 +0100
    From: "Peter Amey" <peter.amey@praxis-cs.co.uk>
    Subject: Recent London power outage
    
    The London power cut that followed shortly after the great New York
    blackout, was quickly blamed on an unforeseeable chain of events including
    the fitting of an incorrect valued relay (widely reported as a "fuse").  It
    has now emerged that the root cause, the one which led to reliance on the
    incorrect relay and the power loss, was simple, old-fashioned poor
    maintenance.
    
    The chain of events started when a sub-station transformer alarm sounded.
    The problem at this transformer turns out to have been an oil leak which had
    been noticed and reported but not dealt with.  A power company spokesman
    said on the BBC news that they couldn't necessarily take a transformer out
    of service as soon as a problem like this was found but, instead, had a
    system of managing the leak until it was convenient to correct the problem
    permanently.  The problem in this case was that the leak wasn't managed (the
    request having passed into a planning centre described by one contributor as
    a "black hole"), the oil ran out, the alarm sounded, the transformer was
    switched out and the incorrect relay failed.
    
    The risk I think is the rush to blame unforeseeable chains of events and
    freak failures rather than to admit to failures of basic preventive
    maintenance.
    
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3199594.stm
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3199784.stm
    
    Peter Amey, Principal Consultant, Praxis Critical Systems, 20, Manvers St.
    Bath, BA1 1PX UK   +44 (0)1225 466991  www.praxis-cs.co.uk  www.sparkada.com
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 06:19:33 -0000 (GMT)
    From: <jonesgill@jones-gill.co.uk>
    Subject: Justice Department e-censorship error (Kevin Poulsen)
    
    Justice e-censorship gaffe sparks controversy
    By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus
    Posted: 23/10/2003 at 09:37 GMT
    Taken from www.theregister.co.uk
    (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/33549.html)
    
    A government watchdog group Wednesday accused the Justice Department of
    improperly censoring portions of a key report on internal workplace
    diversity, after online activists successfully unmasked the blacked-out
    portions of an electronic copy of the document.
    
    The 186-page report was released to the public under the Freedom of
    Information Act last week and posted to Justice Department's Web site in
    Adobe's "Portable Document File" (PDF) format. But the department blacked
    out vast portions of the document's text, citing an exemption to FOIA that
    permits agencies to keep internal policy deliberations private.
    
    The text didn't stay concealed for long. On Tuesday a Web site called the
    Memory Hole, dedicated to preserving endangered documents, published a
    complete version of the report, with the opaque black rectangles that once
    covered half of it completely removed. Memory Hole publisher Russ Kick won't
    say how he unmasked it, but experimentation shows that the concealed text
    could be selected and copied using nothing more than Adobe's free Acrobat
    Reader. Once copied, the text is easily pasted into another document and
    read.
    
    It turns out the report began its life as a Microsoft Word document, and
    whoever was in charge of sanitizing it for public release did so by using
    Word's highlight tool, with the highlight color set to black, according to
    an analysis by Tim Sullivan, CEO of activePDF, a maker of server-side PDF
    tools. The simple and convenient technique would have been perfectly
    effective had the end product been a printed document, but it was all but
    useless for an electronic one. "Using Acrobat, I'm actually able to move the
    black boxes around," says Sullivan. "The text is still there."
    
    In 2000, *The New York Times* made a similar error in publishing on its
    Web site a classified CIA file documenting American and British officials'
    engineering of the 1953 coup that overthrew Iran's elected leadership.
    Before releasing the document as a PDF file, the paper blacked out the names
    of Iranians who helped with the plot. But online intelligence archivist John
    Young published an unsanitized version of the report after discovering that
    the opaque black lines and boxes concealing the names could easily be
    removed.
    
    Both cases demonstrate that what you see is not always what you get in
    electronic documents. Censors could have more effectively eliminated the
    text by deleting it, rather than painting it over. Additionally, commercial
    software is available that's designed specifically to help government
    agencies redact PDF files for release under FOIA and the Privacy
    Act. Pennsylvania-based Appligent even sells its "Redax" Acrobat plug-in to
    the Justice Department. "The amazing thing is that there are different
    divisions in the Department of Justice that are using our software, so it's
    a little shocking that they would do this in Word," says company president
    Virginia Gavin.
    
    Denuded of its censorious kludgework, the report -- produced last year by
    KPMG -- reveals much about the Justice Department's gender and ethnic
    diversity issues. But, significantly, it also shows that the department is
    overly aggressive in cutting documents for public release, according to the
    Federation of American Scientists (FAS). On Wednesday FAS wrote a letter to
    the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General -- the DoJ's
    internal investigators -- urging a full investigation into officials'
    "unauthorized withholding of information."
    
    "Too much information was withheld," says FAS's Steven Aftergood.
    "Information that was purely factual was censored as if it were
    deliberative...  We want agencies to be able to discuss different policy
    options and to make recommendations outside of a charged political
    environment, and the deliberative exemption allows them to do that. But the
    exemption does not apply to factual material."
    
    For example, a section of the text notes, "sexual harassment is not
    perceived by attorneys to be a problem in the Department, but racial
    harassment is." That should never have been cut from the public version,
    says Aftergood. "That's something that ought to be made publicly available."
    
    Much, if not most, of the scores of blacked out pages should have been
    released under law, Aftergood says. He credits the PDF blunder with exposing
    a systemic problem in the Justice Department's FOIA compliance, and he hopes
    an internal review will result in an overhaul of the system.  A Justice
    Department spokesman declined to comment on the matter, and the
    almost-censored document disappeared from the department's Web site Wednesday
    afternoon.  oops!
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 11:56:32 -0400
    From: Scott Miller <SMiller@private>
    Subject: RISKS Offshore: A tough lesson on medical privacy (David Lazarus)
    
    "Lazarus at large", David Lazarus, *San Francisco Chronicle*, 22 Oct 2003
    
    "Your patient records are out in the open... so you better track that
    person and make him pay my dues."
    
    A woman in Pakistan doing cut-rate clerical work for UCSF Medical Center
    threatened to post patients' confidential files on the Internet unless she
    was paid more money.To show she was serious, the woman sent UCSF an e-mail
    earlier this month with actual patients' records attached.
    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/22/MNGCO2FN8G1.DTL
    
      [Just one of the risks of outsourcing.  PGN]
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 14:37:41 -0700 (PDT)
    From: Drew Dean <ddean@private>
    Subject: "Victoria's Secret Reaches a Data Privacy Settlement"
    
    That fabulous headline appeared in *The New York Times* online.  Quick
    summary: Their Web site had a security problem where by anyone could check on
    the status of anyone else's order, although they could _not_ get credit card
    information.  Given the nature of the store, this is even more problematic
    than usual.  Victoria's Secret paid a fine ($50K) without admitting guilt.
    Interestingly enough, this happened under consumer protection laws, because
    Victoria's Secret violated their own privacy policy.  Two good quotes -- the
    opening line: "There's private, and then there's private." and "'The core of
    it is, what do people expect will be kept secret? And of course when you're
    dealing with Victoria's Secret, you expect that a lot will be kept secret.'"
    
    Full story: 
      http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/technology/21priv.html
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 16:57:06 -0400 (EDT)
    From: msb@private (Mark Brader)
    Subject: First DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN, and now YANKEES LOSE!
    
    The morning after the New York Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox to win the
    2003 American League baseball pennant, early editions of the *New York Post*
    included an editorial bemoaning that the Yankees had lost.  Apparently TWO
    versions of the editorial had been prepared, one for each eventuality, and
    the wrong one was published -- reportedly because someone hit "the wrong
    button."  The AP item in the *NYTimes* began with ``The curse of the Bambino
    [Babe Ruth, erstwhile Red Sox pitcher, for non-baseball fans!] struck the
    *New York Post*, too.''  ["NY Post Editorial Says Yankees Lost", 17 Oct
    2003; PGN-ed]
      http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Post-Yankees-Editorial.html
      ?ex=1067422908&ei=1&en=97f6f670437f48ef
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 13:07:19 -0600 (MDT)
    From: Charlie Shub <cdash@private>
    Subject: Discover cancels 60,000 accounts
    
    On 15 Oct 2003, I received an e-mail from discover saying
      Your Discover(R) Card account is part of a group of accounts whose
      information may have been illegally obtained by unauthorized persons. As a
      protective measure, we will be issuing you a new account number. We
      believe this proactive step is necessary to protect your account from
      potential fraud activity.
    
    After a heated conversation with the people at the other end of their 800
    number, they agreed to keep my particular card active through the weekend as
    I was leaving on a trip early the following morning.  They also assured me
    that in the interval between when the account was turned off and the new
    cards arrived, they would be able to authorize individual purchases via a
    manual override process.  That statement proved to be false.
    
    charlie shub   University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
    cdash@private  http://cs.uccs.edu/~cdash  1-719-262-3492
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 08:00:47 -0400
    From: Monty Solomon <monty@private>
    Subject: Nokia and mobile-phone battery explosions
    
         Nokia Recommends Using Only Original Batteries with Nokia
         Products; All Investigated Mobile Phone Battery Explosions Caused
         by Non-Original Batteries
         - Oct 17, 2003 07:23 AM (BusinessWire)
    
    Recently, in the Netherlands a battery used in a Nokia 7210 mobile phone
    exploded.  An investigation by Nokia experts clearly proved that the battery
    involved in the incident was not a Nokia battery.
    
    Over the past months, cases have been reported of non-original mobile-phone
    batteries exploding, causing damage to both batteries and phones. In all the
    reported cases, the battery has been a non-original battery. Nokia offers
    its cooperation to authorities in taking legal measures available against
    those who sell and distribute poor quality non-original mobile phone
    enhancements compatible to Nokia products.
    
    In general, the reported incidents are due to an internal short circuit. An
    internal short circuit can be caused by careless design, an uncontrolled
    production process or a combination of both. Original Nokia batteries and
    chargers are designed and manufactured adhering to stringent safety and
    quality measures. These include very strict requirements regarding the
    materials and insulation used inside the batteries as well as continuous
    production control and intensive product testing.  ...
    
      http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=36124379
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 09:28:31 -0700 (PDT)
    From: rhodesk@private
    Subject: Teen rides Trojan Horse defense
    
    A UK teen, accused of launching a DDoS attack, was acquitted as a jury
    apparently believed his explanation that a hacker had exploited his computer
    with a Trojan Horse.  [Source: Munir Kotadia, zdnet]
      http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-5092745.html?tag=sas_email
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 06:35:26 -0700 (PDT)
    From: notsp_ikinal@private
    Subject: Feds admit error in hacking conviction
    
    Federal prosecutors asked an appeals court to reverse a computer-crime
    conviction that punished a California man for notifying a company's
    customers of a flaw in its e-mail service.  Bret McDanel had already served
    his 16-month sentence, and is on supervised release with curtailed computer
    access.  The original conviction resulted from McDanel having notified
    customers of Tornado Development (subsequently defunct) that their e-mail
    was susceptible to attack.  An appeal was filed by Jennifer Granick in
    Stanford's Law School.  [Source: Robert Lemos, zdnet, 16 Oct 2003; PGN-ed] 
      http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-5092697.html?tag=sas_email
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 14:20:25 -0700
    From: Jeremy Epstein <jeremy.epstein@private>
    Subject: Digital signatures: When will they learn?
    
    Microsoft has a deal with the US Postal Service for Office 2003 where USPS
    will store a permanent record of a document, so anyone can validate the
    document for the next seven years.  The goal is "to sign and secure
    documents in a way that is legally binding".  The record (which is
    presumably a signed hash) includes "a unique time- and date-stamped record
    based on the file's exact content".  Sounds good... an unbiased third party
    is part of what you need.
    
    However, there are problems:
    
    * WYSMNBWYS: What You Sign May Not Be What You See.  Small fonts, hidden
      data, bits & pieces of deleted stuff lying around, etc.  'nuff said,
      especially given the legacy of examples in RISKS.
    
    * Incompatibility: How often has Microsoft introduced a version of Office
      that was compatible with any other version?  Never!  So why should we
      believe you'll be able to verify one of these signed
      documents... especially for the next seven years?  Or that it'll look like
      the document that was "signed"?  C'mon!
    
    * What safeguards this repository against tampering?  If I can modify the
      document and the repository's view of what was signed, I can change
      history.
    
      http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/
      0,10801,86300,00.html?nas=SEC2-86300
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 09:39:21 -0700
    From: "NewsScan" <newsscan@private>
    Subject: Senate votes to can spam
    
    The U.S. Senate has unanimously approved the "Can Spam" bill, sponsored by
    Sens. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), which would ban the
    sleaziest techniques used by spammers to spew out millions of junk e-mail
    messages each day. Under the provisions of the bill, senders of unsolicited
    e-mail would be prohibited from disguising their purpose by using a fake
    return address or misleading subject line, and would no longer be allowed to
    harvest e-mail addresses off the Web to bulk up their lists. In addition,
    junk e-mail would be required to include a legitimate "opt out" function
    that recipients could use to get off lists. A provision proposed by
    Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) authorizes the Federal Trade Commission to
    establish a "do-not-spam" list, similar to the recently implemented
    "do-not-call" list that blocks telemarketing calls. "Kingpin spammers who
    send out e-mail by the millions are threatening to drown the Internet in a
    sea of trash, and the American people want it stopped," said Wyden, who
    urged foreign countries to adopt similar measures.  [AP 23 Oct 2003;
    NewsScan Daily, 23 Oct 2003]
      http://apnews.excite.com/article/2031023/D7UBQISG0.html
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 17:31:34 -0600
    From: "Patrick J. Kobly" <patrick@private>
    Subject: Re: Difficulties with Census Bureau income data (Lima, RISKS-22.95)
    
    Tony Lima <TonyLima2@private> relayed comments from Dr. Nan Maxwell that:
    
    > The census has always capped income figures (as the article notes) for
    > reasons of confidentiality.--if there are 26 people in the us making
    > over $1 million and you know their gender, race, place of residence,
    > industry, occupation, etc. you can pretty much guess who they are.
    
    This is a red herring.  There really is no (or minimal) privacy risk at the
    data-collection side of things.  These privacy concerns (while very real)
    shouldn't be dealt with with this kind of gross clipping at collection-time,
    but rather with reasoned bucketing schemes at aggregation and reporting
    time.
    
    Once the data is collected, the census bureau then can do bucketing based on
    the character of the data - there is plenty of academic work on this subject
    and market researchers have been doing this for years -- such that we don't
    report on buckets small enough to individually identify people.  There are
    issues that arise, including methods to infer numbers in an intersection of
    two aggregation queries where just requesting the intersection yields
    unreportable (for privacy reasons) numbers, but these issues can be
    addressed with careful analysis.
    
    Even if the data is reported in unaggregated form (ie. some complete
    individual surveys are shown), bucketing of answers can still have an
    anonymizing effect...
    
    There are a number of ways of dealing with confidentiality issues without
    killing the quality of your data.
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 14:33:33 -0500
    From: Dimitri Maziuk <dmaziuk@private>
    Subject: Re: Fun with stolen credit-card numbers (Maziuk, RISKS-22.94)
    
    I received a few e-mail replies to my post and since I'm not subscribed to
    the list I don't know how many replies went there.  Or how many bounced
    because you didn't check my Reply-To address before sending (sorry, too much
    spam).  I think I should clarify a couple of points.
    
    Simplified transaction I described comes from personal experience. I worked
    at a place that had an EFT server supplied by the bank (vendor approved by
    the bank, actually). It talked to the bank via leased line and generally
    worked like an ATM -- sans magnetic card reader.
    
    I wrote the software that talked to EFT server so I know exactly what
    information my software supplied to it: card number and transaction amount.
    
    Different banks/clearing houses mey have different rules, but unless you
    know exactly what the rules are in every particular case, there's no reason
    to assume a particular vendor makes use of anything other than card number.
    (Obviously, they need an address to ship the goods to, but that has nothing
    to do with credit card payment.)
    
    My other point was that none of the other information can be used as 100%
    reliable fraud indicator. Even the signature: I could take my wife's credit
    card, put my signature on the slip, and -- (in theory) our bank should
    honour that transaction. Even though my signature doesn't match the one on
    the back of the card, it's still valid for our joint account.
    
    Ergo, if the vendor decides to do fraud detection they have to deal with
    false positives. Vendor who makes the living from selling stuff has
    financial incentive to assume that the positive was, indeed, false.
    
    The form you signed probably said (in a very small print) that it's your,
    not someone else's, responsibility to check your statement for transactions
    you didn't authorize. So the vendor doesn't have to bother with fraud
    detection at all. (Aside: we ended up building a database of "known
    offenders" and analysing the logs for usage patterns. And I spent more time
    on the phone to fraud agencies than I ever wanted to.)
    
    So the system is insecure by design. As for secure alternatives (and that's
    what keeps coming up in RISKS): there are two ways to authenticate you
    (credit card user, airplane passenger, computer user). It's either something
    you know (PIN, password), or for something you have (fingerprint, barcode
    tattooed into your forearm, face on the photograph on your driver's
    license).  For either way to work reliably, two conditions must be met:
    
    1. Authentication token must be established beforehand using trusted
    channel.  (cf. e-mailing passwords unencrypted. (It's not clear if
    encrypting them does that much good here, as there's no reason to believe
    joe@private account really belongs to John A. Doe of 123 Beltway,
    Washington, DC, but still...))  (Do you want to have to travel to Amazon's
    head office with your driver's license, birth certificate, and two reliable
    witnesses to leave your thumbprint there before they let you buy anything?)
    (Do you want your fingerprints to be instantly available to (potentialy)
    anyone who declares themselves "an on-line vendor"?)
    
    2. Token must be transmitted via trusted channel during the transaction.
    (cf. Web sites that accept your credit card information via non-encrypted
    HTTP connection.)  (With biometrics you have to also verify operation of the
    scanner device and make sure the finger, eye, or what have you is actually
    attached to a living body -- naturally attached, not surgically.)
    
    Of course for a bad guy ther isn't much difference between torturing you to
    learn your PIN and chopping off your thumb to take it to thumbprint reader.
    If they want it bad enough, they'll figure out how defeat the system.
    
    Given a choice between having $1000 stolen and having my thumb chopped off,
    I think maybe existing system is not that bad after all.
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 10:30:32 +0100
    From: "Anthony W Youngman" <Anthony.Youngman@eca-international.com>
    Subject: Re: And I thought I had it bad... (RISKS-22.96)
    
    Take a look at the guff about Demon's mail screwup ... (demon.co.uk,
    demon.net).
    
    They upgraded their mail systems to cope with the ever-increasing tide of
    spam etc. Unfortunately, due to a config mistake, this made the problem
    worse (I'm guessing their SMTP kick for dial-ups got screwed).
    
    As a result, they ended up backing up and deleting all pending mail on their
    servers, correcting the config blunder, and then feeding it all back in over
    the next few days.
    
    I very nearly got badly stuffed -- I e-mailed some personal work home on the
    Monday to work on. As an exam assignment, it HAD to be delivered to Uni for
    marking by the Friday. The e-mail arrived home Friday evening -- past the
    deadline! Fortunately I didn't need it to be able to carry on working.
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 23:19:31 +0200
    From: Debora Weber-Wulff <weberwu@fhtw-berlin.de>
    Subject: Re: The Joy of Good Design (Don Norman in NewsScan, RISKS-22.96)
    
    > Design guru Don Norman says the way a device looks, feels and gives
    > pleasure is just as important as how it works, and that good design can
    > make up for some -- though not all -- shortcomings. [...] Good emotional
    > design must incorporate all three levels, and Norman cites Apple and Sony
    > as two companies that have managed to do that well.
    > <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3175506.stm>
    
    Yes, but.  It doesn't cover all shortcomings. At least in Europe, Sony has
    just as bad a "hotline service" as the rest of the lot. I'm planning on
    purchasing a new laptop, and I just realized that my Sony Camera wouldn't
    talk to my Sony laptop (and the service center couldn't help) and my Sony
    PDA has flaky battery problems (and the service center couldn't help) that
    seemed to be linked to the Sony Memory Stick (if I take it out, it is less
    flaky). So I asked myself: do I really want another Sony? Of course, they
    are beautiful. My answer: no. Since all of the service centers tested "D" or
    "F" on a school grading scale (4 or 5 on the German scale), why pay more
    just for design?
    
    Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff, FHTW Berlin, FB 4, Treskowallee 8, 10313 Berlin
    Tel: +49-30-5019-2320 http://www.f4.fhtw-berlin.de/people/weberwu/
    
    ------------------------------
    
    Date: 30 May 2003 (LAST-MODIFIED)
    From: RISKS-request@private
    Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)
    
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     which requires your ANSWERing confirmation to majordomo@private .
     If Majordomo balks when you send your accept, please forward to risks.
     [If E-mail address differs from FROM:  subscribe "other-address <x@y>" ;
     this requires PGN's intervention -- but hinders spamming subscriptions, etc.]
     Lower-case only in address may get around a confirmation match glitch.
       INFO     [for unabridged version of RISKS information]
     There seems to be an occasional glitch in the confirmation process, in which
     case send mail to RISKS with a suitable SUBJECT and we'll do it manually.
       .UK users should contact <Lindsay.Marshall@private>.
    => SPAM challenge-responses will not be honored.  Instead, use an alternative 
     address from which you NEVER send mail!
    => The INFO file (submissions, default disclaimers, archive sites,
     copyright policy, PRIVACY digests, etc.) is also obtainable from
     http://www.CSL.sri.com/risksinfo.html  ftp://www.CSL.sri.com/pub/risks.info
     The full info file will appear now and then in future issues.  *** All
     contributors are assumed to have read the full info file for guidelines. ***
    => SUBMISSIONS: to risks@private with meaningful SUBJECT: line.
     *** NEW: Including the string "notsp" at the beginning or end of the subject
     *** line will be very helpful in separating real contributions from spam.
     *** This attention-string may change, so watch this space now and then.
    => ARCHIVES: http://www.sri.com/risks
     http://www.risks.org redirects you to the Lindsay Marshall's Newcastle archive
     http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/VL.IS.html      [i.e., VoLume, ISsue]
       Lindsay has also added to the Newcastle catless site a palmtop version 
       of the most recent RISKS issue and a WAP version that works for many but 
       not all telephones: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/w/r
     http://the.wiretapped.net/security/info/textfiles/risks-digest/ .
     http://www.planetmirror.com/pub/risks/ ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/risks/
    ==> PGN's comprehensive historical Illustrative Risks summary of one liners:
        http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.html for browsing,
        http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.pdf or .ps for printing
    
    ------------------------------
    
    End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 22.97
    ************************
    



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Oct 23 2003 - 15:59:05 PDT