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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (10851)	3/15/2002 8:31:00 PM
From: Bill Harmond	Respond to of 57684

>>So fundamentally ecommerce is sill delivering, people confuse the stock price malaise with fundamental performance, imo. Ain't that the truth... Speaking of ecommerce, Digital Insight the eBanking enabler, is my strongest performer.

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (10851)	3/15/2002 8:48:10 PM
From: techanalyst1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 57684

Toys R Us is a turnaround. I don't really know if they tried to come up with their own site under this ceo or not. If you go to their site it automatically goes to the Amazon site. I've bought toys from them on line but I prefer to buy at the store due to the shipping costs and because I have a store close to me anyway. Only reason I buy toys online is for someone that I have to ship to anyway. I really doubt that Amazon has to even partner with a toy company. Seems to me that Amazon can partner with a general retailer (walmart, target) to sell toys and baby products (how hard is it to sell toys online? It's just a matter of having all the products in stock. However, Toys R Us carries more products as well as proprietary products than Walmart or Target). If amazon were to go with someone else, don't you think they'd ask for concessions if Toy was losing money (which they are)? And if they had to give a better deal to someone else, then what's the point to switching vendors? There aren't any other toy retailers left that could take Toys R Us's place, so they'd have to go with a general retailer. The telecoms are renegotiating their deals. I know my sweetie's company is having to renegotiate contracts with their customers (the likes of Sony which is not exactly in poor shape themselves... they just know they can so they are), even homebuilders are offering incentives to close deals. It's a dog eat dog world out there. Why should it be surprising to hear that amazon's partners are wanting to renegotiate? If Toys R Us determined that selling on line at their own site would lose more money than thru amazon, I doubt they'd even attempt it. And if they determine that selling through amazon is going to be eternally a losing operation, I think they'll try to end the whole alliance. End of story. This ceo is out to make money, not gain market share for the purpose of gaining share. He's made that crystal clear. Whether he can renegotiate the deal or get out of it, is open to question. TA

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (10851)	3/17/2002 2:22:34 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 57684

Musings on 'The Security Presumption.' -From The Harrow Technology Report / March 18, 2002 We "know" that the information we transmit via Email is not secure. Unless you use special software such as PGP to encrypt a message's contents, it's possible (if not straightforward) for anyone on your LAN, or at your ISP, or at any of the servers that your message's packets traverse on the way to their destination, or at the destination ISP, or on your recipient's LAN, to read some if not all of your message. We all "know" this. And it probably doesn't matter much if you're sending a note to Aunt Millie. In fact, most of us never give this a second thought. Yet as Email becomes evermore a part of how we conduct our personal and business affairs, this presumption of security in a known insecure environment can lead to problems. And not just the obvious ones regarding things financial. For one example, as an increasing number of physicians have begun using Email to answer patient questions, and perhaps to prescribe medication, an intercepted Email message could illuminate things you probably didn't want to be public knowledge. And a modified Email message could be downright dangerous. Most of us have grown up in a written communications environment, the "mail" or "post," were the presumption of security carried the force of law. In the U.S. and in many other countries, the sanctity of first class mail is protected by laws that carry stringent penalties for anyone tampering with a letter; which in a manner of speaking "encrypts" the contents of the envelop, even though it isn't normally practical to actually encrypt the words. But with Email, Instant Messaging, and other forms of electronic messages, their contents don't (currently) enjoy similar legal protection. This becomes even more of a potential problem when any aspect of an Internet connection "goes wireless," because at that point an interloper no longer needs physical access to your or your ISP's physical wires -- they can just pluck your messages out of thin air. For example, the March 11 eWeek (http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s=712&a=23806,00.asp) describes how someone can pick up a few parts at Radio Shack, and some free software from the Internet, and capture messages thumbed into many cellular phones or into the increasingly popular "BlackBerry Internet Edition," a wireless Email device from Research In Motion (RIM) that uses the wireless Mobitex network.) We might expect that once such an "opening" was discovered, the vendor would rush to close the gap. Yet the security researcher who demonstrated this security hole, Joe Grand, explains why that isn't going to happen: "The problem is, this isn't a bug. Its part of the spec that data is transmitted in the clear... The risk depends on who is using the network and when and what data they're sending." "Executives at RIM said they don't see the attack as a problem because they have never touted the Internet Edition devices as being secure." Indeed, Research In Motion CEO Jim Balsillie points out that, "Internet traffic isn't supposed to be secure." The problem, in my opinion, is that it should be. When the Internet was born, non-trivial encryption was beyond the ability of typical hardware. But thanks to enhanced end-to-end encryption and authentication schemes, and the results of Moore's Law on processing power, we can now easily encrypt our messages with the computational horsepower available to any of us; our PCs can encrypt and decrypt without missing a beat. I'm not a security expert, and so I wouldn't presume to suggest the best ways for protecting our Internet-borne missives. But I do strongly believe that the time, and the technology, and our society's growing use of electronic messaging, have all have reached a point where we can and should "change the rules" to make our casual although incorrect presumption of security, real. It could only make the Internet a better, and safer, and more empowering place for individuals and businesses and commerce.