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Hackers Sell Stolen Information in Chat Rooms; IBM Develops Device to Bridge Cultural Gaps; Iceland Looks For Clean Source of Energy
Aired April 06, 2002 - 13:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANNOUNCER: Today on NEXT@CNN, Internet chat room, popular places to share interests, including stolen personal information, maybe yours.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You should assume that right now in your wallet is a credit card that has been stolen off the net.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: We'll show you a smorgasbord for hackers.
Have foreign languages ever left you clueless? A researcher is working on a solution.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All I'm doing is literally pointing and I hit capture.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: Translation at the touch of a finger. And Iceland, it's more than just a pretty face. There's power beneath that dramatic scenery.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are already producing most electricity per capita in the world.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: We'll take you to a country setting, an example for the rest of the world, all that and more on NEXT.
JAMES HATTORI, CNN ANCHOR: Hi everybody and welcome to NEXT@CNN. I'm James Hattori, this week from Metrion, a popular gathering spot to catch the latest in entertainment and technology in San Francisco.
Big public places and boisterous crowds aren't everyone's scene. Some prefer the virtual equivalent, the Internet chat room. We all know chat rooms let you share special interests, like hobbies, but they're also becoming the next big hunting ground for malicious hackers. As Renay San Miguel reports, hackers are using chat rooms to swap and sell personal information, information that may have been stolen from you.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHAD HARRINGTON, COMPUTER SECURITY EXPERT: So this is an Internet relay chat room?
RENAY SAN MIGUEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Computer security expert Chad Harrington is surfing Internet relay chat, one of the oldest chat technologies on the web. The IRC networks have names like Bow Net (ph) and EF Net, but you could call them something else, Ebay for hackers.
HARRINGTON: Once a hacker or someone in the underworld has information, personal information, credit card, social security numbers, addresses, whatever it may be, has that information and wants to sell it, often they'll go to a hacker chat room, a place on the web, using the Internet relay chat, which provides them some anonymity and allows them to mention that they have these personal information and they want to trade them.
SAN MIGUEL: The ability for hackers to go on the Internet and chat up fellow hackers is as old as the Internet itself. But with identity theft becoming a very popular form of fraud, more attention is being paid to chat rooms that serve as flea markets for hackers.
BRUCE SCHNIER: We know that credit card numbers are bought and sold over the Internet, because they have no cash value. A lot of the credit numbers are stolen and never used. You should assume that right now, in your wallet is a credit card number that has been stolen off the net.
SAN MIGUEL: Both Bruce Schnier, a pioneer in network security and Intercept Security Technology's Harrington say that your stolen personal information can be swapped or sold in other web venues.
But IRC is largely unregulated, a wild, wild west of chat that has a special appeal for hackers.
HARRINGTON: Hackers obviously want anonymity when they're looking to trade personal information that they're obtain via identity theft. So Internet relay chat is a commonly used mechanism.
BRUCE SCHNIER: It's older. It's not tied to Microsoft or AOL or a big company. It's one of the Internet protocols. So if you're running Windows or Linux or Macintosh or another flavor of Unix, you can use it. So it's not that it's more suitable for hackers to use, it's just a more basic service.
SAN MIGUEL: That same aspect of IRC also makes it a tough digital obstacle for law enforcement. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In the electronic world of the Internet, it's such a vast landscape and there's no way that the FBI or the CIA or any law enforcement agency can be involved in watching over the shoulder of every Internet user, and unfortunately that's probably what it would have to take to prevent this sort of fraud.
SAN MIGUEL (on camera): Sometimes the FBI gets lucky. The Feds were able to track down the hacker known as Mafia Boy, after he was caught bragging about his exploits in chat rooms.
And while the FBI's national infrastructure protection center did not give NEXT@CNN any statements regarding what goes on in Internet relay chat, one security expert says it's a matter of law enforcement manpower and simply trying to track down hackers in a very crowded and loud chat room.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HATTORI: While abuses of technology are unavoidable, the pale compared to all the constructive things technology has brought us, like helping bridge cultural boundaries. One case in point, a device IBM is developing that could help visitors feel a little less like strangers in a foreign land.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HATTORI (voice-over): Parts of San Francisco's China Town seem as exotic as central Hong Kong, including the language.
DAN RUSSELL, IBM: My lab has been doing some work on how we can augment human perception.
HATTORI: A challenging testing ground for IBM's Dan Russell, and a translation technology under development at his lab in Silicon Valley, called Infoscope. How hard it is for a computer to translate a foreign language?
RUSSELL: It's a tough problem, particularly with something like Chinese, where it's a sophisticated language, a lot of sort of interesting idiomatic expressions.
HATTORI: IBM researchers took an off-the-shelf PDA with a small camera attachment and loaded it with custom software.
RUSSELL: So we have a sign right here. I'm not quite sure what this means. I can imagine.
HATTORI: He aims the camera at the Chinese characters.
RUSSELL: It says, "touch and capture those characters."
HATTORI: The PDA stores the picture. The software highlights the characters and they're send wirelessly via cell phone to a big server computer.
RUSSELL: The server does all the optical image processing, does the character extraction, looks it up in the dictionary, then sends the notably small byte stream back to this device.
HATTORI: Phone service wasn't available in this location, so Dan used a laptop to do the translating instead. So what are the possible uses for this commercially?
RUSSELL: Commercially, well there's the obvious thing, the foreign traveler going to another land. I go to Japan. I have no clue what that sign says. I pull out my PDA, which I have with me anyway, point, shoot, translate.
HATTORI: So how did Infoscope do, reading the bank sign? As for two of the four characters...
RUSSELL: Well, it translated it into money bin, which is close enough.
HATTORI: The other two weren't so close.
RUSSELL: I just tried them together and it says "a gateway of the Great Wall," an interesting expression, not what I would have thought of.
HATTORI: So Bank of American, money bin, gateway of the Great Wall?
RUSSELL: Yes, that's the translation we're getting right now.
HATTORI: So it's not perfect.
RUSSELL: It's not perfect. We're still working on some of those more difficult expressions.
HATTORI: Return to a local human translator for another try.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: May.
HATTORI: May.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That word means pretty.
HATTORI: Pretty.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And that one, pretty country.
HATTORI: Pretty country. America.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Uh huh, and money.
HATTORI: Money.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Bank.
HATTORI: Bank. Pretty, country, money, bank.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Right.
HATTORI: Russell says Infoscope does better with German, French and Spanish, but will it ever be perfect?
RUSSELL: We're not going to translate great literature, but we are able to translate, for example, technical manuals, restaurant menus. It also gives you a sense for the difficult and richness of language.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HATTORI: IBM says Infoscope isn't ready to go on the market. I think we saw that, but could be within a couple of years.
ANNOUNCER: Ahead on NEXT@CNN, one of the ugliest fish in the sea has a special way with the ladies. Now scientists have uncovered the sexy secret. Find out what they want to do with that discovery. And later, it's springtime when a golfer (UNINTELLIGIBLE) lightly turns to thoughts of lowering his score. Bruce Burkhardt reviews a gadget designed to do just that. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HATTORI: A new genetic discovery could help feed the world. Scientists have isolated the genetic code for two varieties of rice, a breakthrough that could eventually mean bigger and better rice crops.
Rice is the main source of food for more than one-third of the world's population, sequencing the plant's genome is likely to lead to new strains that are more nutritious or more resistant to pests and diseases.
It was no easy feat. A rice plant has about 50,000 genes, while a human being has 30,000 to 40,000. The researchers reported in this week's "Science Magazine."
Also in science this week, researchers have isolated a fishy, thermo that could help them control an environmental invader in the Great Lakes. Sea lampreys are supposed to live in the ocean, but they've moved into fresh water lakes where they maim and kill native fish like trout.
The new discovery involves a chemical that male lampreys release in the water to attract females. It gets their attention up to 200 feet away. Researchers have now figured out how to duplicate that compound and hope to use it to lure the lampreys away from the local fish.
The controversy over diverting Klamath River irrigation water has apparently ebbed, at least for this year. Last week, officials opened the head gates, freeing water into irrigation systems. Oregon farmers raised a ruckus last year when the flow was cut off during a drought because of concerns about endangered fish in the river.
Tuesday, President Bush's chief environmental policy adviser announced a new initiative to balance demands on the Klamath, so both fish and farmers can thrive.
Also on Tuesday, an environmental group released its annual list of the most endangered rivers in the U.S. No surprise, the Klamath was right up there in third place. Natalie Pawelski reports on which other rivers made the list and why.
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NATALIE PAWELSKI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): One of the nation's longest waterways, the Missouri, tops this year's list of endangered rivers.
REBECCCA WOODERS: The Corps of Engineers has managed it for decades in a way that is just draining the life out of this river.
PAWELSKI: Of course the Corps in question, the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates dams on the river, disagrees.
LT. GEN. ROBERT B. FLOWERS, U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS: The Missouri River is critical to the life of the people in the Midwest, and we work very hard to balance the competing interests of the river.
PAWELSKI: The Corps of Engineers is also blamed for threatening the number two river on the list, the Big Sun Flower in Mississippi, at issue the proposed Yazoo (ph) pumps flood control project.
WOODERS: They would destroy 200,000 acres of wetlands in this one project.
FLOWERS: The Yazoo project will provide flood relief for those people in the Delta.
PAWELSKI: Since it builds and operates dams and changes how rivers run, the Army Corps of Engineers is a longstanding target for environmental groups like American Rivers, which compiles the annual endangered rivers list.
But there are other issues highlighted in this year's report too. Take the number three river, the Klaamath. Farmers and wildlife advocates are battling over who gets water in times of drought. Agricultural pollution lands the Kansas River on the list. Another Army Corps of Engineers proposal, an irrigation project earns Arkansas' White River a spot.
A natural gas drilling boom is at issue for Wyoming's Powder River and growth and development may threaten Georgia's Alzmaha (ph).
WOODERS: Between the kind of pollution that comes off of our streets and our fields and the kinds of demands that we're putting on our rivers for more and more water, for more and more power, I think the trend lines are not good.
PAWELSKI: Maine's Alagash (ph) may lose its designation as a wild and scenic river. In Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, drilling plans could affect the Canning River (ph). Developers are trying to divert water from Texas' Guadalupe River. And for Florida's Appalachiacola (ph), yet another Army Corps of Engineers dredging project is stirring debate. (on camera): Another problem for the Appalachiacola, American River says. Growing demands for water, far upstream here in Atlanta, a reminder that when it comes to rivers no matter where you all, we all live downstream.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HATTORI: All the way downstream in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists are trying to solve an ecological mystery. Environmentalists and people who fish for a living are nervously awaiting answers. Mark Potter now on the murky story of Florida's black water.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MARK POTTER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): The first alert something may be wrong in the Gulf of Mexico same from commercial fisherman. Tim Daniels has fished near Florida all his life, and in late January, flew his plane to try to spot kingfish schools. Instead, he found that hundreds of miles of Gulf coast water had turned black, and all the fish were gone.
TIM DANIELS, FISHERMAN: I flew for two or three hours looking at black water. All our traditional fishing grounds was black water. I don't know what it is but black water's took us over out there and there's not a fish anywhere.
POTTER: Satellite images confirmed what Daniels had seen. The dark water first appeared off shore late last year, and by February had blossomed into an area bigger than Lake Ochachobee (ph), as it drifted southward along the west Florida coast. Fisherman returning with their catches said the water looked like sewage.
GARY BURRIS: The only term they could use in two men in one day said the ocean is sick. The ocean's sick.
POTTER: Scientists from around the state then began their investigation, testing the water, trying to determine the cause and the impact.
ERICH MUELLER: Let's go ahead and hit that and then we'll go off into that other water.
POTTER: Near Key West, the dark water can still be seen, although now it is greenish brown, not black. Based on preliminary data, scientists suspect it is an algae bloom, a natural and common event, although this one is much bigger than any other in the last 100 years.
MUELLER: What triggered it is a complex series of events, water temperature, nutrient availability, light availability, and that's where we really don't understand much about it.
JOHN HUNT: This is truly a detective story. I mean we have had events occur. We're trying to collect information that we can collect today and project back into the past to see what has caused this event.
POTTER: Scientists say although the algae may chase fish away, it does not kill them and doesn't appear dangerous to humans.
BRIAN KELLER: In some ways, it's a little bit like a hurricane, that it's a large natural event that we watch, we monitor, we try to understand, we try to learn from, but we can't prevent.
POTTER: But the size and duration of the bloom have led some to question whether fresh water run-off, fertilizers, and other pollution may be contributing to the explosion of algae.
(on camera): And there is still uncertainty about the exact cause of this event. There is also disagreement over the effects.
(voice over): Fisherman and environmentalists fear this is a major wakeup call and have reported die-offs of sponges and other sea bottom life in areas touched by the dark water bloom.
Scientists say there is no reason for panic, but will continue their testing, and warn that because of the complexities involved, they may never fully solve the mystery of black water.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ANNOUNCER: Later on NEXT@CNN, we'll have the scoop on how and whether to buy a digital video camera.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HATTORI: Do handheld computers qualify as farm implements? Well, they could be the next big thing for farmers in South Korea, as Lian Pek reports, the shouting of bidders at a produce auction has been replaced by the tapping of fingers on keyboards.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
LIAN PEK, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): The incessant shouting, the many hand signals, part and parcel of many a marketplace designed to bring buyers and sellers together. But at the Agricultural Wholesale Auction in Kwangju, South Korea, this decade- old practice is history. (UNINTELLIGIBLE) has finally caught up with the digital age and farmers are picking up their PDAs as comfortably as they do their hose, though this conversion to high tech wasn't easy.
HOWON CHOI, SOUTH KOREA: They were reluctant to use it because of the PDA. They don't know how to use it. The market provides two hour's training a week, and after that farmers and brokers are really satisfied with the system because they can see the real transparency of the trading.
PECK: All they need to do is punch in the prices. The entire bidding process is flashed on an overheard screen over 3Coms wireless local area network or LAN technology. The bidders identity and their bid is kept secret until the very end when the auctioneer hits a large yellow button marked sold.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In the past, auctioneers used to rely on ears. Now they can not only hear, but also see the monitors. We can (UNINTELLIGIBLE) transparency and credibility of the auction company.
PECK: Rooting out manipulation and human error is crucial in a market which handles more than 8,000 tons of produce a month and $2 billion worth of transactions a year, presuming of course the wireless technology is safe. So is it?
CHOI: Much more secure than wire, because you can tap the wire easily. You can get the information. But in the wireless solution, we can use the 128-byte encryption software, so nobody knows.
PECK: While Kwangju is the first of 27 agricultural markets in South Korea to go wireless, at the cost of some $200,000 U.S. dollars, the South Korean government is hoping to hook them all up by year's end. Meanwhile these earlier (UNINTELLIGIBLE) are already dreaming of a more high tech market that promises even smoother trading.
SWANG HYUNG JONG (through translator): The (UNINTELLIGIBLE) can have access to real time bidding online and pick the best produce among many markets. The electronic auction market will make it possible for middlemen to participate in an auction from the Internet.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HATTORI: PDAs are also coming into play these days on the golf course. Bruce Burkhardt hits the links and a few other things to review the latest golf gadget in this week's techno file.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BRUCE BURKHARDT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Golf and gadgets, always a great marriage. Gadget makers know golfers weakness, the undying belief that they can actually get better. The pursuit of the perfect game, or in my case, pursuit of the fairway.
This is so unusual that I'm in the bunker.
(on camera): Now the latest gadget may not keep you from landing in the occasional bunker, but at least you'll know how far you have to go to get over that bunker. It's called the Sky Golf GPS Personal Digital Caddy. By the time you get through saying the name, you'll be penalized for slow play.
But this is all it is and it just hooks on to a Palm PDA or Handspring PDA, just like that, clips on there, and then you can either carry it in a belt clip or you can hook it up to this thing which attaches to your golf cart, and one you get it up and running, those big satellites up in the sky are going to tell you how far your ball is from the green.
(voice over): Using basic GPS technology, the personal caddy can provide reams of information, distances from tee to greens to bunkers or to water hazards. (on camera): Another thing this thing does if you tap marked ball when you're on the tee, it will show the yards as you're walking along, how far it is to your first shot, your drive, so you know exactly how far your drive was in addition to knowing how far it is from this point to the center of the green.
(voice over): Of course, this will only work at courses that have already been mapped and programmed by the Sky Caddy people. So far, more than 2,000 courses are included, with a couple of hundred being added weekly.
To play a particular course, you need to download its information from the Sky Golf Web site. Basic information is free, but more details, such as bunker locations, will cost you $10 a course.
So when you're done with the hole, you can actually tell your whole story of the hole right here. You can tell whether you reached the green in regulation. You can tell the number of pucks, whether you went into a bunker or not. In other words, you've got the story of the hole right there.
And you input that information yourself, so it's still possible to cheat with this thing, which is another nice feature.
(voice over): That's simply a record-keeping function, but what amazes are those satellites, hundreds of miles up in the air, being able to pinpoint me and my ball.
(on camera): This say 440 to the center of the green. They say 441. Can't this thing be accurate?
(voice over): Even with high tech, golf is still golf and when things don't go right, don't blame the technology. I'm Bruce Burkhardt, and that's "Techno File."
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HATTORI: The Sky Golf GPS, not including the PDA, will set you back about 400 big ones. Sounds like Bruce's score after about 18 holes. Well don't you head for the clubhouse yet, we'll be right back after a break and a check of the latest headlines from the CNN newsroom.
ANNOUNCER: Still to come, the power of steam and ice, can it keep an entire country running? Also, better smelling through chemistry.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEANNE MOOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: One in the morning, one at night. It takes two days to kick in.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: A pill that KOs your BO. Those stories and more still ahead. Don't go away. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HATTORI: Welcome back. Imagine a country that relies almost totally on clean and natural sources for its electricity needs -- no coal, no nuclear, no natural gas, very little oil. No, Ralph Nader was not elected president. The country is Iceland. Here's Natalie Pawelski.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
PAWELSKI (voice over): Giant waterfalls, glaciers, geysers, and more hot springs than any other nation on earth, the same geology that makes Iceland's landscapes so dramatic also provide a measure of energy independence.
THORSTEINN HILMARSSON, ELECTRIC COMPANY SPOKESMAN: Iceland is pretty unique in that we are producing all our electricity with renewable methods. We are already producing most electricity per capita in the world.
PAWELSKI: Iceland's power plants use no coal, oil, gas, or nuclear fuel. Instead, they rely on hydroelectric power from rivers roaring off glaciers, and on geothermal power from hot subterranean water.
At this geothermal plant near Reykjavik, steam from the hot water generates electricity, then the water flows on to keep the neighbors warm.
THORSTEINN VONNCE: In my house, I use the hot water for house heating, of course, and then as hot tap water. So, if I want to have instant coffee or tea, I can simply run the hot water, put the cup under it, put the tea bag in, ready for drinking.
PAWELSKI: Also courtesy of leftover water from the geothermal plant, Iceland's biggest tourist attraction, the Blue Lagoon, a hint of the tropics in the world's northernmost capitol.
(on camera): Now Iceland is planning to tap a new source of clean renewable energy, hydrogen. An international consortium has announced a couple of pilot projects that will put hydrogen-powered fuel cells in remote homes and city busses.
(voice over): Transportation is the one part of Iceland's economy that still relies on fossil fuels, but Iceland's government is backing a plan to change that within the next half century by using Iceland's clean electricity and abundant water to produce hydrogen, hydrogen for fuel cells, which would power the country's vehicles and its fishing fleet, backbone of the country's biggest industry.
PROFESSOR BRAGI ARNASON, ICELAND UNIVERSITY: If our ideas can be realized, all the energy used in the country comes from clean, renewable (UNINTELLIGIBLE) sources. There would be no fossil energy used.
PAWELSKI: Comparing Iceland's energy situation to America's is one of those apples and oranges things. Iceland's geology is unique and its population is only one-thousandth that of the United States. But energy experts see Iceland as a laboratory and with the upcoming hydrogen initiative, possibly a window on the world's energy future.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HATTORI: Maybe all those scenic pictures of Iceland have inspired you to see it for yourself. Well, you wouldn't want to go without the right tools to record your visit. Bruce Burkhardt goes shopping for digital video camera with "TIME" magazine technology editor Josh Quittner.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BURKHARDT (voice over): This confuses me. I look at all these cameras, and number one, why would I want the digital camera. What's the main reason for getting a digital camera?
JOSH QUITTNER, TECHNOLOGY EDITOR, TIME MAGAZINE: The main reason to get a digital camera is because you like taking movies of things, and you want to take them home and edit them. If you don't want to edit your stuff, there really isn't a great reason to get a digital camcorder right now.
BURKHARDT: Why is editing so easy?
QUITTNER: Editing is more than half of the fun, because most of us go out with our cameras and we shoot the kid's recital or the ball game and we come back with 45 minutes of unendurable awful stuff. You don't want to watch it. What you can do in the editing box is find the 30 seconds that's just brilliant, that's wonderful, send it as an attachment to e-mail to grandma who will appreciate it and be able to watch it on her computer.
BURKHARDT: But if you're just interested in shooting pictures and having those pictures forever for your kids, and you're not particularly interested in editing, there's no compelling reason to get a digital camera?
QUITTNER: You're going to get a couple of things on a digital camcorder that you're not going to get on your old VHS camera. You're going to get much better quality. I mean you're going to notice that quality. It's going to be really crystal clear. You're going to have some special effects that are fun to do. You're going to get a much smaller package.
I mean you can get a digital camera that's as big as your fist. You can put it in your shirt pocket and take it on vacation. You're also going to et much better battery life.
BURKHARDT: What do you have to spend?
QUITTNER: Well, you can spend, I've seen digital camcorders for as little as $450, and that will buy you something that's perfectly serviceable. If you want to move up, obviously the sky's the limit. BURKHARDT: So when you get to the difference between a starting entry level price, $1,000, $1,500, is it features or is it the quality of the picture that you're talking about that improves?
QUITTNER: It's the features, night vision, a certain amount of editing. You can create, you know, images that look like the person is walking around like the terminator all chromey or a sepia tome so it looks like something out of the old west, or black and white so it looks like something that was shot in the '60s. The real beauty of a digital video camera is you're going to plug it into your computer and that's where the fun starts. So let me say something brilliant.
BURKHARDT: Go ahead.
QUITTNER: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.
BURKHARDT: Did you just think of that yourself?
QUITTNER: I just thought of that. All right, watch what happens. I can come to this point where I said that brilliant thing.
BURKHARDT: Right.
QUITTNER: And then just by putting my cursor here, I can trim the clip and get rid of the part I don't want. Now I can add certain effects, right.
BURKHARDT: It's kind of like "Blair Witch Best Buys."
QUITTNER: Right and then I can do a fadeout.
BURKHARDT: And how long did it take you to learn how to do this?
QUITTNER: It took an hour or two before -- it took me about an hour to make my first movie. The revolutionary part of all this, aside from the fact that we can edit as if we had a $10 million suite of editing tools on a $1,200 computer, you can also make a movie that is good enough to show in a theater, and we're seeing that more and more, these independent filmmakers are making fantastic movies for $100,000 or less.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ANNOUNCER: Coming up on NEXT, how you can program your very own radio station. The power is at your fingertips.
COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HATTORI: Radio has passed its 100-year anniversary and now it's entering a second childhood of sorts on the web. Statistics show the amount of time spent listening to online radio stations has jumped nearly 500 percent since January of last year. Andy Jordan tunes in for this week's "Nothing but Net."
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) ANDY JORDAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Their mantra is more music, less Howard Stern. They're trading their dials for dial- ups and for them. Radio has come of age.
JEFFREY O'BRIEN, MUSICMATCH.COM: You're the kind of person who can go from listening to electronica right into country music, and without skipping a beat, you can do that on a music match.
JORDAN: What iTunes software offers for Mac users, musicmatch.com provides for the PC set. For $5 a month, the jukebox software lets users design their own playlists.
JONATHAN GEAR, MUSICMATCH.COM: If you have opted into our personalization system, we'll be monitoring the kind of music you're playing through the music match jukebox, and then when you hit the "My Station" button (UNINTELLIGIBLE) we'll spring back to you all of the music that you've been listening before, but also like some other music that we know you're going to like.
JORDAN: While jukebox software is required for Music Match, most Internet radio sites only require a streaming audio device, like Windows Media or Real Player. Case in point, somafm.com. It does not allow users to customize like Music Match, but does offer a number of streaming music formats to choose from.
RUSTY HODGE, FOUNDER, SOMAFM.COM: I pick a lot of music focusing on a lot of ambient electronica, music that's not mainstream but it's still very enjoyable.
JORDAN: On the downside of Internet radio, reception can be a problem for Mac users, since many webcasters are still trying to work out Mac compatibility issues, and while anyone with a modem can listen to streaming audio online, results can prove disappointing.
GEAR: The good news is that anybody can do it. The bad news is that you're not talking about CD quality music yet.
JORDAN: Yet legislation passed in 1998 and just recently flushed out, allows record companies to collect royalties on copyrighted works played via digital media regardless of the quality, and that puts Internet-only radio stations in a class of their own.
While broadcast stations only have to pay royalties to song composers, they do not have to pay record companies. Webcasters will have to pay both.
HODGE: Our revenues are less than $25,000 a year, and we'd be forced to pay close to $1,000 a day.
JORDAN: The recording industry is already weary from Napster litigation and fears losing money from more digital duplication. Webcasters say the Napster factor does not apply. File swapping is not their business.
HODGE: I know we've had tons of our listeners write and say like, oh you've exposed me to so much new music. Thank you. I went out and bought 30 CDs this weekend because of it. So we know that we're selling a lot of records.
GEAR: It is a different metaphor because you're not, you don't own the music when you're listening to an Internet radio station.
JORDAN: The folks at Music Match are getting around the fees by working out separate agreements with record companies. Still, they worry about smaller stations that can not afford any fees.
O'BRIEN: Cutting down on the amount of new music that people can be exposed to around the world because of all these very niche radio stations will be shut down.
JORDAN: With Internet radio eating into the power the recording industry has traditionally enjoyed over radio music choices, a tug of war for control is well underway. I'm Andy Jordan and that's Nothing but Net.
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HATTORI: For links to several online radio stations and information on other stories in our program, check out our Web site, cnn.com/next.
ANNOUNCER: Up next.
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KELLI LARSON: They're taking over. It's terrorism here.
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ANNOUNCER: Lawns under attack in Washington State, that and more still ahead on NEXT@CNN.
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HATTORI: It's been more than a year since Washington state residents voted to ban fur trapping. Now, they're starting to live with the unintended consequences of that decision. To the surprise of a lot of folks, moles were included in that ban, and as Lillian Kim reports, homeowners are fed up.
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LILLIAN KIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): You don't see them, but the mounds of dirt moles leave behind are everywhere, leaving homeowners in a backyard battle.
LARSON: They're just taking over. It's terrorism here.
KIM: Terror in the lawn that spreads quickly. It's likely a single mole made all these mounds.
LISA VRANEY, HOMEOWNER: And then there was another and another and another and it kept happening like every few days. KIM: Banned from using body gripping traps, homeowners have grown desperate, placing everything from mole choking chewing gun to smoke bombs into the ground.
LARSON: I backed my car up with a vacuum cleaner hose hooked to the back of the exhaust and tried that.
KIM: But nothing seems to work, leaving Washington residents in a deep hole.
KIM (on camera): It doesn't take long for a molehill to appear. The critters work fast, searching for insects and worms to eat deep below the ground, so events like this can pop up practically overnight.
(voice over): Some people have gone high tech, investing hundreds of dollars in sonic devices designed to drive the moles away.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't have time to go out and put Juicy Fruit down every hole.
KIM: Others have taken a more simple approach.
VRANEY: Supposedly the vibrations from the pinwheels spinning would make the moles go away and as you can see, it hasn't worked.
KIM: Leaving homeowners under attack for now, feeling like their molehills are as big as mountains.
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ANNOUNCER: Up next on NEXT, can swallowing a big green pill get rid of body odor and bad breath? Jeannie Moos sniffs out the story.
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HATTORI: Finally this week, the next big thing to combat BO. Imagine a deodorant that works from the inside out, a deodorant that claims to help eliminate every type of body odor. While you don't have to wait for this miracle product with baited breath or baited bad breath as the case may be, CNN's Jeannie Moos reports.
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MOOS (voice over): What do you get when you cross a mouthwash with a deodorant with a breath mint? Introducing Body Mint.
NORA WONG YIM: It helps reduce your breath, underarm, even foot odor.
MOOS: Don't sweat it, two tablets a day are supposed to keep odor away. It was amazingly easy to coax folks into popping Body Mint. One in the morning, one at night, it takes two days to kick in.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And what should we look for?
MOOS: I wouldn't look, I'd sniff. Body Mint is not supposed to make you smell like a mint. It's supposed to neutralize body odor.
KEITH BACON: Do I smell right now then?
MOOS: No, not at all.
BACON: OK.
MOOS: Very fresh. Body Mint consists of a chlorophyll derivative, extracted from plants.
SOPHIA BISHOP: Oh, it's pretty green. Whoa, it's not too pleasing.
MOOS: Smells sort of seaweedy. Doctors have used chlorophyll pills for years to reduce odor in patients after intestinal surgery. It even works on pigs. Authorities in a Chicago suburb called on Dr. Alan Hirsch of the Smell & Taste Foundation to resolve complaints about a smelly pig farm.
DR. ALAN HIRSCH, SMELL & TASTE FOUNDATION: What I suggested is add chlorophyll to the pig chow and it worked. The gases they produced smelled better and everyone was happy.
MOOS: Doctor Hirsch is less certain about chlorophyll's effect on breath, underarms and feet, so we rounded up some human guinea pigs.
BACON: I should stop using deodorant right now.
MOOS: No more deodorant. Body Mint was dreamed up by a couple of lawyers and a businessman who work with biochemists, testing nine formulas over three years.
EDDIE ONOUYE, BODY MINT: We tried it on our friends and relatives. Everybody was dying to try it.
YIM: We have people who told us they didn't want to go out of their homes or they didn't want to take their shoes off and now they're able to just sort of live a carefree life.
MOOS: Body Mint was first marketed in hot and sometimes humid Hawaii. Now it's available through the bodymint.com Web site. It's been selling out at Henry Bendel (ph) in New York.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: People are coming back and they're buying like a six-month supply. They're asking for it, you know, the economy size as well.
MOOS: A one to two-month supply is $20. As for our guinea pigs.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, Body Mint, fresh and clean, no more odor. Body Mint.
MOOS: One whose husband is a dentist reported improved morning breath.
BACON: (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
MOOS: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm just not smelling.
MOOS: Keith Bacon told us he didn't shower, didn't use deodorant, went running and described the smell as pretty good, while Sophia Bishop noted no odor on the treadmill. Just remember, despite its name, it's not a mint.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do I smell better?
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HATTORI: I'm not sure which is harder to take, the pill or the bad breath. Well, that's our program for now. Here's what's coming up next week. Crank phones make a comeback, but this time around, the crank let's you charge your cell phone when there's no wall outlet available. And, a duckling grows in Brooklyn, actually a whole display window full of them. A right of spring becomes a ducky way to learn about nature.
All that and more coming up on NEXT; until then, let us hear from you. You can e-mail us. Our address is next@cnn.com. Thanks so much for joining us this week, and thanks to our friends here at Metrion. For all of us on the sci-tech beat, I'm James Hattori. We'll see you next time.
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