Some articles from the NYTImes...
Jun. 28th, 2005 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on language difficulties in the classroom.
Unclear on American Campus: What the Foreign Teacher Said
By ALAN FINDER
Correction Appended
Valerie Serrin still remembers vividly her anger and the feeling of helplessness. After getting a C on a lab report in an introductory chemistry course, she went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done for a better grade.
The teaching assistant, a graduate student from China, possessed a finely honed mind. But he also had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Ms. Serrin, a freshman at the time, what her report had lacked.
"He would just say, 'It's easy, it's easy,' " said Ms. Serrin, who recently completed her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley. "But it wasn't easy. He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but he couldn't communicate in English."
Ms. Serrin's experience is hardly unique. With a steep rise in the number of foreign graduate students in the last two decades, undergraduates at large research universities often find themselves in classes and laboratories run by graduate teaching assistants whose mastery of English is less than complete.
The issue is particularly acute in subjects like engineering, where 50 percent of graduate students are foreign born, and math and the physical sciences, where 41 percent of graduate students are, according to a survey by the Council of Graduate Schools, an association of 450 schools. This is despite a modest decline in the number of international students enrolling in American graduate programs since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The encounters have prompted legislation in at least 22 states requiring universities to make sure that teachers are proficient in spoken English. In January, Bette B. Grande, a Republican state representative from Fargo, N.D., tried to go even further after her son Alec complained of his experiences at North Dakota State University. Mrs. Grande introduced legislation that would allow students in state universities to drop courses without penalty and be reimbursed if they could not understand the English of a teaching assistant or a professor.
"If a student has paid tuition to be in that classroom," she said, "he should receive what he paid for."
State lawmakers, however, balked, instead ordering education officials to assess how well state universities were training teaching assistants.
Many universities are trying to minimize the problem by creating programs to assess the English skills of international graduate students who are prospective teaching assistants and offering courses as needed.
But interviews with dozens of undergraduates at six universities over the last few weeks indicate that the problem remains acute, in some cases even influencing decisions about what majors to pursue.
Ms. Serrin said that she went to Berkeley thinking she might go to medical school but that she was now majoring in economics, in part because of freshman chemistry.
Myles Sullivan, a University of Massachusetts senior, twice dropped courses, once in astronomy and once in linguistics, because he could not decipher his teaching assistant.
"Both were brilliant men, but the language barrier was just too much for me," Mr. Sullivan said.
Some students end up spending hundreds of dollars to conquer the language barrier. Loyda Martinez, a senior at the University of Massachusetts, started subscribing to an online service that provides copies of notes from previous courses at the university when she had a hard time understanding teaching assistants in math, science and psychology classes. The service cost $20 to $75 a course, Ms. Martinez said.
Others in the academic world believe that the complaints are not entirely about the shortcomings of foreign-born teaching assistants.
"Is there some low-level carping? Absolutely," said Dudley Doane, director of the Center for American English Language and Culture at the University of Virginia. "Is it justified? At times it may be. However, we have some students who aren't used to stretching."
It is a point echoed by some foreign teaching assistants who, in addition to their own studies and the rigors of grading papers, overseeing labs and leading discussions, must deal with what they sometimes consider intolerant undergraduates.
"I had students come into my class mimicking the accent of a friend of mine, who is a teaching assistant in math," said Atreyee Phukan, a graduate student in comparative literature at Rutgers University who was born in India and raised in Bahrain and has a slight accent. "They thought it was hilarious to make fun of his accent."
But Ms. Phukan also thinks the university should consider requiring more graduate students to take rigorous classes in spoken English.
Many public and private universities have created programs in recent years to assess and train international graduate students. Most research universities require international applicants to pass a standardized test in written English for admission to graduate school. Many also set standards in spoken English for prospective teaching assistants.
Virtually every major graduate school has made a concerted effort to make sure that international teaching assistants have the language skills they need, said Debra Stewart, the president of the Council of Graduate Schools, but that does not guarantee that there will not be problems.
"American students are living in a global world, and there is value in making an effort to understand people who sound different from you," Ms. Stewart said. "That said, it is also an obligation of those of us in education, that if we put someone in front of students, reasonable people will be able to understand them."
At Stanford, for instance, about 200 foreign graduate students take a standardized test each year to assess their ability to speak English. About 30 of these students are required to take English classes, and others are encouraged to do so, said Philip Hubbard, director of the English for Foreign Students program there.
"I can't say there's no problem out there," Mr. Hubbard said. "It wouldn't be fair. But there hasn't been any significant problem here for a number of years."
At the University of Virginia each year, about 120 foreign-born graduate students who are prospective teaching assistants take a test in spoken English; those who need to improve are offered courses.
But many students said that despite such efforts the problems remained. They said they had adopted myriad strategies to get by, not all of them successful.
Alison Monrose, a junior at Rutgers, said she began sitting in the front of the classroom to "lip read." Ms. Serrin at Berkeley formed a study group with other students. Jacqueem Winston, a junior at Rutgers, decided he would just ask questions in class until he did understand. "You can't be shy," Mr. Winston said.
But Mohammed Islam, who is also a junior at Rutgers, simply stopped going to his discussion section in a physics course. The professor who lectured to the large class was excellent, Mr. Islam said, but the teaching assistant who oversaw his small weekly discussion section "didn't speak English at all."
Mr. Islam, a ceramic engineering major from Brooklyn, paid a price for his decision. Homework, which counted for 25 percent of his grade, was supposed to be turned in to the teaching assistant. But since Mr. Islam had stopped going to the discussion section, he did not hand in any homework. He still managed to get a B-plus in the course, he said: "I broke the curve on the final."
Geoff Young, a junior at Rutgers, said he had not had problems understanding his teaching assistants. But he said many of his friends at Rutgers had struggled mightily.
"I've heard a lot of people complain about that," Mr. Young said, "saying things like, 'How many languages other than English have you learned while you were here?' "
Even dealing with the problem caused anxiety for some students.
"You don't want to be rude and say, 'Your English is no good,' " said Rhyshonda Singletary, a senior at the University of Massachusetts. "But you also don't want to suffer."
One on "zombie attacks".
An Army of Soulless 1's and 0's
By STEPHEN LABATON
WASHINGTON, June 23 - For thousands of Internet users, the offer seemed all too alluring: revealing pictures of Jennifer Lopez, available at a mere click of the mouse.
But the pictures never appeared. The offer was a ruse, and the click downloaded software code that turned the user's computer into a launching pad for Internet warfare.
On the instructions of a remote master, the software could deploy an army of commandeered computers - known as zombies - that simultaneously bombarded a target Web site with so many requests for pages that it would be impossible for others to gain access to the site.
And all for the sake of selling a few more sports jerseys.
The facts of the case, as given by law enforcement officials, may seem trivial: a small-time Internet merchant enlisting a fellow teenager, in exchange for some sneakers and a watch, to disable the sites of two rivals in the athletic jersey trade. But the method was far from rare.
Experts say hundreds of thousands of computers each week are being added to the ranks of zombies, infected with software that makes them susceptible to remote deployment for a variety of illicit purposes, from overwhelming a Web site with traffic - a so-called denial-of-service attack - to cracking complicated security codes. In most instances, the user of a zombie computer is never aware that it has been commandeered.
The networks of zombie computers are used for a variety of purposes, from attacking Web sites of companies and government agencies to generating huge batches of spam e-mail. In some cases, experts say, the spam messages are used by fraud artists, known as phishers, to try to trick computer users into giving confidential information, like bank-account passwords and Social Security numbers.
Officials at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department say their inquiries on the zombie networks are exposing serious vulnerabilities in the Internet that could be exploited more widely by saboteurs to bring down Web sites or online messaging systems. One case under investigation, officials say, may involve as many as 300,000 zombie computers.
While the use of zombie computers to launch attacks is not new, such episodes are on the rise, and investigators say they are devoting more resources to such cases. Many investigations remain confidential, they say, because companies are hesitant to acknowledge they have been targets, fearful of undermining their customers' confidence.
In one recent case, a small British online payment processing company, Protx, was shut down after being bombarded in a zombie attack and warned that problems would continue unless a $10,000 payment was made, the company said. It is not known whether the authorities ever arrested anyone in that case.
Zombie attacks have tried to block access to Web sites including those of Microsoft, Al Jazeera and the White House. In October 2002, a huge but ultimately unsuccessful attack was mounted against the domain-name servers that manage Internet traffic. The attackers were never caught.
Federal officials say the case involving the athletic jerseys was solved after some college computers in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were found to be infected with software code traced to a user whose Internet name was pherk. That hacker, a high school student in New Jersey, told investigators that he was acting at the behest of a merchant - the owner of www.jerseydomain.com.
The merchant, an 18-year-old Michigan college student, could face trial later this year in a federal court in Newark. The case offers a rare glimpse both into the use of zombie computers and into the way that law enforcement officials are trying to combat the problem.
More than 170,000 computers every day are being added to the ranks of zombies, according to Dmitri Alperovitch, a research engineer at CipherTrust, a company based in Georgia that sells products to make e-mail and messaging safer.
"What this points out is that even though critical infrastructure is fairly well secured, the real vulnerability of the Internet are those home users that are individually vulnerable and don't have the knowledge to protect themselves," Mr. Alperovitch said. "They pose a threat to all the rest of us."
Mr. Alperovitch said that CipherTrust had detected a sharp rise in zombie computers in recent months, from a daily average of 143,000 newly commandeered computers in March to 157,000 in April to 172,000 last month.
He said that the increase was attributable to two trends: the rising number of computers in Asia, particularly China, which do not use software to protect against zombies and the worldwide proliferation of high-speed Internet connections.
Aside from the use of tools like CipherTrust's within businesses, experts say consumers can largely make their computers off limits to zombie activity by using up-to-date antivirus and antispam software.
One factor helping those seeking to create zombie networks, known as botnets, is the increasing use of high-speed Internet connections in the home. Aside from being able to handle (and generate) more traffic, such households are more inclined to leave computers running - the computers recruited as zombies need to be on when called by the master.
Eric H. Jaso, an assistant United States attorney in Newark who is prosecuting the New Jersey case, said the zombie cases often wind up damaging more than just the target.
"The effects of these attacks on the Internet itself are far ranging and highly damaging to innocent parties," he said. "The ripple effect is that when one server is attacked, other servers are affected and damaged. Web sites crash. Backup systems become unavailable often to entities like hospitals and banks that are part of the critical infrastructure of the country."
The overall damage in the New Jersey case is estimated by the authorities at $2 million.
That investigation began last July 7, when an online sports-apparel merchant, Gary Chiacco, told federal authorities that traffic to his site, jersey-joe.com, had been disrupted for several days, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost sales. When customers tried to gain access to the site, they would be greeted with an error message.
The attacks continued through the fall of last year and became so severe that they affected service to other customers of the Web-site hosting company used by Jersey Joe.
The host company ultimately told Jersey Joe to go elsewhere, as did two other companies that it then tried to use and that suffered problems from the zombie attacks.
Federal and state investigators say the case was cracked through a combination of luck and sleuthing. While the F.B.I. continued to monitor the attacks on Jersey Joe, student computers at colleges in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were found to be infected with the software that converted them into zombies.
Hackers "find computers on colleges to be particularly attractive because they have a larger bandwidth and are able to send more packets of data," said Kenneth R. Sharpe, a deputy attorney general in New Jersey involved in prosecuting the case.
A close examination of those computers disclosed the software had been trying to communicate with a user named pherk. Investigators traced the name and an Internet computer address to a 17-year-old high school student from Edison, N.J., named Jasmine Singh.
Confronted by law-enforcement authorities, Mr. Singh acknowledged his involvement and said it was at the behest of an 18-year-old businessman, Jason Arabo, whom he had met through a mutual friend. Mr. Arabo ran a sports jersey business from his home, selling online at www.customleader.com and www.jerseydomain.com.
Investigators determined that Mr. Singh had spread the rogue software through file-sharing networks like Kazaa, using the Jennifer Lopez come-on, and instructed the zombie computers to attack two of Mr. Arabo's competitors - Jersey Joe and another online shirt company, Distant Replays of Atlanta. His compensation, he said, was three pairs of sneakers and a watch.
The F.B.I. then set up a sting operation against Mr. Arabo. According to court papers, an undercover investigator held a series of instant-messaging chats with Mr. Arabo on America Online in December. Mr. Arabo told the undercover agent that he had previously recruited Mr. Singh and that those attacks had not done enough harm to keep his rivals offline, the court papers assert.
According to the court papers, Mr. Arabo asked the agent to mount denial-of-service attacks against rivals in exchange for sports apparel and watches. In later chats that month, he asked the agent to "take down" Jersey Joe's server and redirect its Internet traffic to a pornographic site, the court papers say, and repeatedly asked the agent to "hit them hard."
Mr. Arabo, a student at a community college in a Detroit suburb, was arrested in March and charged in a federal criminal complaint with conspiracy to use malicious programs to damage computers used in interstate commerce. He remains free on $50,000 bail and the condition that he stay off computers and the Internet. (The jerseydomain.com site now carries the notice "Under New Management.") He faces a maximum sentence of five years.
His lawyer, Stacey Biancamano, did not respond to several messages seeking comment.
For his part, Mr. Singh pleaded guilty last month in New Jersey Superior Court to charges of computer theft. Under a plea agreement, he faces a maximum sentence of five years at a youth correction center when he is sentenced in August, but the state prosecutor's office says it will not object to probation.
Mr. Sharpe, the New Jersey prosecutor in the case, said that Mr. Singh had boasted to his high school friends about his ability to create the zombie networks. "It was an ego thing," Mr. Sharpe said. "Hacking in its purest form is not about compensation or about wrecking a Web site. Hacking in its pure form is to show what you can do."
An editorial on Bush and this war.
The War President
By PAUL KRUGMAN
VIENNA
In this former imperial capital, every square seems to contain a giant statue of a Habsburg on horseback, posing as a conquering hero.
America's founders knew all too well how war appeals to the vanity of rulers and their thirst for glory. That's why they took care to deny presidents the kingly privilege of making war at their own discretion.
But after 9/11 President Bush, with obvious relish, declared himself a "war president." And he kept the nation focused on martial matters by morphing the pursuit of Al Qaeda into a war against Saddam Hussein.
In November 2002, Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent, told an audience, "I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war" - but she made it clear that Mr. Bush was the exception. And she was right.
Leading the nation wrongfully into war strikes at the heart of democracy. It would have been an unprecedented abuse of power even if the war hadn't turned into a military and moral quagmire. And we won't be able to get out of that quagmire until we face up to the reality of how we got in.
Let me talk briefly about what we now know about the decision to invade Iraq, then focus on why it matters.
The administration has prevented any official inquiry into whether it hyped the case for war. But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it did.
And then there's the Downing Street Memo - actually the minutes of a prime minister's meeting in July 2002 - in which the chief of British overseas intelligence briefed his colleagues about his recent trip to Washington.
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam," says the memo, "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." It doesn't get much clearer than that.
The U.S. news media largely ignored the memo for five weeks after it was released in The Times of London. Then some asserted that it was "old news" that Mr. Bush wanted war in the summer of 2002, and that W.M.D. were just an excuse. No, it isn't. Media insiders may have suspected as much, but they didn't inform their readers, viewers and listeners. And they have never held Mr. Bush accountable for his repeated declarations that he viewed war as a last resort.
Still, some of my colleagues insist that we should let bygones be bygones. The question, they say, is what we do now. But they're wrong: it's crucial that those responsible for the war be held to account.
Let me explain. The United States will soon have to start reducing force levels in Iraq, or risk seeing the volunteer Army collapse. Yet the administration and its supporters have effectively prevented any adult discussion of the need to get out.
On one side, the people who sold this war, unable to face up to the fact that their fantasies of a splendid little war have led to disaster, are still peddling illusions: the insurgency is in its "last throes," says Dick Cheney. On the other, they still have moderates and even liberals intimidated: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.
We need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism.
The good news is that the public seems ready to hear that message - readier than the media are to deliver it. Major media organizations still act as if only a small, left-wing fringe believes that we were misled into war, but that "fringe" now comprises much if not most of the population.
In a Gallup poll taken in early April - that is, before the release of the Downing Street Memo - 50 percent of those polled agreed with the proposition that the administration "deliberately misled the American public" about Iraq's W.M.D. In a new Rasmussen poll, 49 percent said that Mr. Bush was more responsible for the war than Saddam Hussein, versus 44 percent who blamed Saddam.
Once the media catch up with the public, we'll be able to start talking seriously about how to get out of Iraq.
Unclear on American Campus: What the Foreign Teacher Said
By ALAN FINDER
Correction Appended
Valerie Serrin still remembers vividly her anger and the feeling of helplessness. After getting a C on a lab report in an introductory chemistry course, she went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done for a better grade.
The teaching assistant, a graduate student from China, possessed a finely honed mind. But he also had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Ms. Serrin, a freshman at the time, what her report had lacked.
"He would just say, 'It's easy, it's easy,' " said Ms. Serrin, who recently completed her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley. "But it wasn't easy. He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but he couldn't communicate in English."
Ms. Serrin's experience is hardly unique. With a steep rise in the number of foreign graduate students in the last two decades, undergraduates at large research universities often find themselves in classes and laboratories run by graduate teaching assistants whose mastery of English is less than complete.
The issue is particularly acute in subjects like engineering, where 50 percent of graduate students are foreign born, and math and the physical sciences, where 41 percent of graduate students are, according to a survey by the Council of Graduate Schools, an association of 450 schools. This is despite a modest decline in the number of international students enrolling in American graduate programs since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The encounters have prompted legislation in at least 22 states requiring universities to make sure that teachers are proficient in spoken English. In January, Bette B. Grande, a Republican state representative from Fargo, N.D., tried to go even further after her son Alec complained of his experiences at North Dakota State University. Mrs. Grande introduced legislation that would allow students in state universities to drop courses without penalty and be reimbursed if they could not understand the English of a teaching assistant or a professor.
"If a student has paid tuition to be in that classroom," she said, "he should receive what he paid for."
State lawmakers, however, balked, instead ordering education officials to assess how well state universities were training teaching assistants.
Many universities are trying to minimize the problem by creating programs to assess the English skills of international graduate students who are prospective teaching assistants and offering courses as needed.
But interviews with dozens of undergraduates at six universities over the last few weeks indicate that the problem remains acute, in some cases even influencing decisions about what majors to pursue.
Ms. Serrin said that she went to Berkeley thinking she might go to medical school but that she was now majoring in economics, in part because of freshman chemistry.
Myles Sullivan, a University of Massachusetts senior, twice dropped courses, once in astronomy and once in linguistics, because he could not decipher his teaching assistant.
"Both were brilliant men, but the language barrier was just too much for me," Mr. Sullivan said.
Some students end up spending hundreds of dollars to conquer the language barrier. Loyda Martinez, a senior at the University of Massachusetts, started subscribing to an online service that provides copies of notes from previous courses at the university when she had a hard time understanding teaching assistants in math, science and psychology classes. The service cost $20 to $75 a course, Ms. Martinez said.
Others in the academic world believe that the complaints are not entirely about the shortcomings of foreign-born teaching assistants.
"Is there some low-level carping? Absolutely," said Dudley Doane, director of the Center for American English Language and Culture at the University of Virginia. "Is it justified? At times it may be. However, we have some students who aren't used to stretching."
It is a point echoed by some foreign teaching assistants who, in addition to their own studies and the rigors of grading papers, overseeing labs and leading discussions, must deal with what they sometimes consider intolerant undergraduates.
"I had students come into my class mimicking the accent of a friend of mine, who is a teaching assistant in math," said Atreyee Phukan, a graduate student in comparative literature at Rutgers University who was born in India and raised in Bahrain and has a slight accent. "They thought it was hilarious to make fun of his accent."
But Ms. Phukan also thinks the university should consider requiring more graduate students to take rigorous classes in spoken English.
Many public and private universities have created programs in recent years to assess and train international graduate students. Most research universities require international applicants to pass a standardized test in written English for admission to graduate school. Many also set standards in spoken English for prospective teaching assistants.
Virtually every major graduate school has made a concerted effort to make sure that international teaching assistants have the language skills they need, said Debra Stewart, the president of the Council of Graduate Schools, but that does not guarantee that there will not be problems.
"American students are living in a global world, and there is value in making an effort to understand people who sound different from you," Ms. Stewart said. "That said, it is also an obligation of those of us in education, that if we put someone in front of students, reasonable people will be able to understand them."
At Stanford, for instance, about 200 foreign graduate students take a standardized test each year to assess their ability to speak English. About 30 of these students are required to take English classes, and others are encouraged to do so, said Philip Hubbard, director of the English for Foreign Students program there.
"I can't say there's no problem out there," Mr. Hubbard said. "It wouldn't be fair. But there hasn't been any significant problem here for a number of years."
At the University of Virginia each year, about 120 foreign-born graduate students who are prospective teaching assistants take a test in spoken English; those who need to improve are offered courses.
But many students said that despite such efforts the problems remained. They said they had adopted myriad strategies to get by, not all of them successful.
Alison Monrose, a junior at Rutgers, said she began sitting in the front of the classroom to "lip read." Ms. Serrin at Berkeley formed a study group with other students. Jacqueem Winston, a junior at Rutgers, decided he would just ask questions in class until he did understand. "You can't be shy," Mr. Winston said.
But Mohammed Islam, who is also a junior at Rutgers, simply stopped going to his discussion section in a physics course. The professor who lectured to the large class was excellent, Mr. Islam said, but the teaching assistant who oversaw his small weekly discussion section "didn't speak English at all."
Mr. Islam, a ceramic engineering major from Brooklyn, paid a price for his decision. Homework, which counted for 25 percent of his grade, was supposed to be turned in to the teaching assistant. But since Mr. Islam had stopped going to the discussion section, he did not hand in any homework. He still managed to get a B-plus in the course, he said: "I broke the curve on the final."
Geoff Young, a junior at Rutgers, said he had not had problems understanding his teaching assistants. But he said many of his friends at Rutgers had struggled mightily.
"I've heard a lot of people complain about that," Mr. Young said, "saying things like, 'How many languages other than English have you learned while you were here?' "
Even dealing with the problem caused anxiety for some students.
"You don't want to be rude and say, 'Your English is no good,' " said Rhyshonda Singletary, a senior at the University of Massachusetts. "But you also don't want to suffer."
One on "zombie attacks".
An Army of Soulless 1's and 0's
By STEPHEN LABATON
WASHINGTON, June 23 - For thousands of Internet users, the offer seemed all too alluring: revealing pictures of Jennifer Lopez, available at a mere click of the mouse.
But the pictures never appeared. The offer was a ruse, and the click downloaded software code that turned the user's computer into a launching pad for Internet warfare.
On the instructions of a remote master, the software could deploy an army of commandeered computers - known as zombies - that simultaneously bombarded a target Web site with so many requests for pages that it would be impossible for others to gain access to the site.
And all for the sake of selling a few more sports jerseys.
The facts of the case, as given by law enforcement officials, may seem trivial: a small-time Internet merchant enlisting a fellow teenager, in exchange for some sneakers and a watch, to disable the sites of two rivals in the athletic jersey trade. But the method was far from rare.
Experts say hundreds of thousands of computers each week are being added to the ranks of zombies, infected with software that makes them susceptible to remote deployment for a variety of illicit purposes, from overwhelming a Web site with traffic - a so-called denial-of-service attack - to cracking complicated security codes. In most instances, the user of a zombie computer is never aware that it has been commandeered.
The networks of zombie computers are used for a variety of purposes, from attacking Web sites of companies and government agencies to generating huge batches of spam e-mail. In some cases, experts say, the spam messages are used by fraud artists, known as phishers, to try to trick computer users into giving confidential information, like bank-account passwords and Social Security numbers.
Officials at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department say their inquiries on the zombie networks are exposing serious vulnerabilities in the Internet that could be exploited more widely by saboteurs to bring down Web sites or online messaging systems. One case under investigation, officials say, may involve as many as 300,000 zombie computers.
While the use of zombie computers to launch attacks is not new, such episodes are on the rise, and investigators say they are devoting more resources to such cases. Many investigations remain confidential, they say, because companies are hesitant to acknowledge they have been targets, fearful of undermining their customers' confidence.
In one recent case, a small British online payment processing company, Protx, was shut down after being bombarded in a zombie attack and warned that problems would continue unless a $10,000 payment was made, the company said. It is not known whether the authorities ever arrested anyone in that case.
Zombie attacks have tried to block access to Web sites including those of Microsoft, Al Jazeera and the White House. In October 2002, a huge but ultimately unsuccessful attack was mounted against the domain-name servers that manage Internet traffic. The attackers were never caught.
Federal officials say the case involving the athletic jerseys was solved after some college computers in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were found to be infected with software code traced to a user whose Internet name was pherk. That hacker, a high school student in New Jersey, told investigators that he was acting at the behest of a merchant - the owner of www.jerseydomain.com.
The merchant, an 18-year-old Michigan college student, could face trial later this year in a federal court in Newark. The case offers a rare glimpse both into the use of zombie computers and into the way that law enforcement officials are trying to combat the problem.
More than 170,000 computers every day are being added to the ranks of zombies, according to Dmitri Alperovitch, a research engineer at CipherTrust, a company based in Georgia that sells products to make e-mail and messaging safer.
"What this points out is that even though critical infrastructure is fairly well secured, the real vulnerability of the Internet are those home users that are individually vulnerable and don't have the knowledge to protect themselves," Mr. Alperovitch said. "They pose a threat to all the rest of us."
Mr. Alperovitch said that CipherTrust had detected a sharp rise in zombie computers in recent months, from a daily average of 143,000 newly commandeered computers in March to 157,000 in April to 172,000 last month.
He said that the increase was attributable to two trends: the rising number of computers in Asia, particularly China, which do not use software to protect against zombies and the worldwide proliferation of high-speed Internet connections.
Aside from the use of tools like CipherTrust's within businesses, experts say consumers can largely make their computers off limits to zombie activity by using up-to-date antivirus and antispam software.
One factor helping those seeking to create zombie networks, known as botnets, is the increasing use of high-speed Internet connections in the home. Aside from being able to handle (and generate) more traffic, such households are more inclined to leave computers running - the computers recruited as zombies need to be on when called by the master.
Eric H. Jaso, an assistant United States attorney in Newark who is prosecuting the New Jersey case, said the zombie cases often wind up damaging more than just the target.
"The effects of these attacks on the Internet itself are far ranging and highly damaging to innocent parties," he said. "The ripple effect is that when one server is attacked, other servers are affected and damaged. Web sites crash. Backup systems become unavailable often to entities like hospitals and banks that are part of the critical infrastructure of the country."
The overall damage in the New Jersey case is estimated by the authorities at $2 million.
That investigation began last July 7, when an online sports-apparel merchant, Gary Chiacco, told federal authorities that traffic to his site, jersey-joe.com, had been disrupted for several days, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost sales. When customers tried to gain access to the site, they would be greeted with an error message.
The attacks continued through the fall of last year and became so severe that they affected service to other customers of the Web-site hosting company used by Jersey Joe.
The host company ultimately told Jersey Joe to go elsewhere, as did two other companies that it then tried to use and that suffered problems from the zombie attacks.
Federal and state investigators say the case was cracked through a combination of luck and sleuthing. While the F.B.I. continued to monitor the attacks on Jersey Joe, student computers at colleges in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were found to be infected with the software that converted them into zombies.
Hackers "find computers on colleges to be particularly attractive because they have a larger bandwidth and are able to send more packets of data," said Kenneth R. Sharpe, a deputy attorney general in New Jersey involved in prosecuting the case.
A close examination of those computers disclosed the software had been trying to communicate with a user named pherk. Investigators traced the name and an Internet computer address to a 17-year-old high school student from Edison, N.J., named Jasmine Singh.
Confronted by law-enforcement authorities, Mr. Singh acknowledged his involvement and said it was at the behest of an 18-year-old businessman, Jason Arabo, whom he had met through a mutual friend. Mr. Arabo ran a sports jersey business from his home, selling online at www.customleader.com and www.jerseydomain.com.
Investigators determined that Mr. Singh had spread the rogue software through file-sharing networks like Kazaa, using the Jennifer Lopez come-on, and instructed the zombie computers to attack two of Mr. Arabo's competitors - Jersey Joe and another online shirt company, Distant Replays of Atlanta. His compensation, he said, was three pairs of sneakers and a watch.
The F.B.I. then set up a sting operation against Mr. Arabo. According to court papers, an undercover investigator held a series of instant-messaging chats with Mr. Arabo on America Online in December. Mr. Arabo told the undercover agent that he had previously recruited Mr. Singh and that those attacks had not done enough harm to keep his rivals offline, the court papers assert.
According to the court papers, Mr. Arabo asked the agent to mount denial-of-service attacks against rivals in exchange for sports apparel and watches. In later chats that month, he asked the agent to "take down" Jersey Joe's server and redirect its Internet traffic to a pornographic site, the court papers say, and repeatedly asked the agent to "hit them hard."
Mr. Arabo, a student at a community college in a Detroit suburb, was arrested in March and charged in a federal criminal complaint with conspiracy to use malicious programs to damage computers used in interstate commerce. He remains free on $50,000 bail and the condition that he stay off computers and the Internet. (The jerseydomain.com site now carries the notice "Under New Management.") He faces a maximum sentence of five years.
His lawyer, Stacey Biancamano, did not respond to several messages seeking comment.
For his part, Mr. Singh pleaded guilty last month in New Jersey Superior Court to charges of computer theft. Under a plea agreement, he faces a maximum sentence of five years at a youth correction center when he is sentenced in August, but the state prosecutor's office says it will not object to probation.
Mr. Sharpe, the New Jersey prosecutor in the case, said that Mr. Singh had boasted to his high school friends about his ability to create the zombie networks. "It was an ego thing," Mr. Sharpe said. "Hacking in its purest form is not about compensation or about wrecking a Web site. Hacking in its pure form is to show what you can do."
An editorial on Bush and this war.
The War President
By PAUL KRUGMAN
VIENNA
In this former imperial capital, every square seems to contain a giant statue of a Habsburg on horseback, posing as a conquering hero.
America's founders knew all too well how war appeals to the vanity of rulers and their thirst for glory. That's why they took care to deny presidents the kingly privilege of making war at their own discretion.
But after 9/11 President Bush, with obvious relish, declared himself a "war president." And he kept the nation focused on martial matters by morphing the pursuit of Al Qaeda into a war against Saddam Hussein.
In November 2002, Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent, told an audience, "I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war" - but she made it clear that Mr. Bush was the exception. And she was right.
Leading the nation wrongfully into war strikes at the heart of democracy. It would have been an unprecedented abuse of power even if the war hadn't turned into a military and moral quagmire. And we won't be able to get out of that quagmire until we face up to the reality of how we got in.
Let me talk briefly about what we now know about the decision to invade Iraq, then focus on why it matters.
The administration has prevented any official inquiry into whether it hyped the case for war. But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it did.
And then there's the Downing Street Memo - actually the minutes of a prime minister's meeting in July 2002 - in which the chief of British overseas intelligence briefed his colleagues about his recent trip to Washington.
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam," says the memo, "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." It doesn't get much clearer than that.
The U.S. news media largely ignored the memo for five weeks after it was released in The Times of London. Then some asserted that it was "old news" that Mr. Bush wanted war in the summer of 2002, and that W.M.D. were just an excuse. No, it isn't. Media insiders may have suspected as much, but they didn't inform their readers, viewers and listeners. And they have never held Mr. Bush accountable for his repeated declarations that he viewed war as a last resort.
Still, some of my colleagues insist that we should let bygones be bygones. The question, they say, is what we do now. But they're wrong: it's crucial that those responsible for the war be held to account.
Let me explain. The United States will soon have to start reducing force levels in Iraq, or risk seeing the volunteer Army collapse. Yet the administration and its supporters have effectively prevented any adult discussion of the need to get out.
On one side, the people who sold this war, unable to face up to the fact that their fantasies of a splendid little war have led to disaster, are still peddling illusions: the insurgency is in its "last throes," says Dick Cheney. On the other, they still have moderates and even liberals intimidated: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.
We need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism.
The good news is that the public seems ready to hear that message - readier than the media are to deliver it. Major media organizations still act as if only a small, left-wing fringe believes that we were misled into war, but that "fringe" now comprises much if not most of the population.
In a Gallup poll taken in early April - that is, before the release of the Downing Street Memo - 50 percent of those polled agreed with the proposition that the administration "deliberately misled the American public" about Iraq's W.M.D. In a new Rasmussen poll, 49 percent said that Mr. Bush was more responsible for the war than Saddam Hussein, versus 44 percent who blamed Saddam.
Once the media catch up with the public, we'll be able to start talking seriously about how to get out of Iraq.
