BREAKING NEWS

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority is putting the final touches on proposed bylaws
for a nonprofit corporation that will assume much of the management responsibility for the
Internet’s Domain Name System.

IANA holds a government contract to coordinate the numeric IP addresses that route
Internet traffic. Under a National Science Foundation contract that ends this month,
Network Solutions Inc. of Herndon, Va., handles the top-level domain names that map to IP
addresses.

Network Solutions will turn over many of its functions to the new corporation, which
will manage the Internet’s transition from government to commercial control by Oct.
1, 2000.

IANA released the third version of the draft bylaws late last month. IANA head Jon
Postel said the bylaws are essentially in final form. Details of the proposed bylaws are
on the Web at http://www.iana.org.

The General Accounting Office this month rejected a protest of the Army Military
Traffic Management Command’s May award of the $263.7 million Defense Travel System
contract to TRW Inc.

Following the GAO decision, the command lifted a stop-work order and directed TRW to
begin work on the paperless travel system for the Defense Department. Under the contract,
BDM International Inc., a TRW subsidiary, will build and deploy DTS in Defense Travel
Region 6, which includes 11 midwestern states and covers 200,000 DOD employees.

The protester, Electronic Data Systems Corp., had charged that the Army failed to
follow the requirements of the request for proposals, misled EDS during discussions,
failed to conduct meaningful discussions, failed to conduct proper cost and technical
evaluations, and failed to consider material information in EDS’ proposal.

Defense expects to save about $300 million a year in travel costs by outsourcing its
travel services and processing travel requests through a central system.

Dell Computer Corp. demonstrated a 16-node PowerEdge server cluster at the Comdex
Enterprise trade show in San Francisco.

The 16-node cluster had 64 Intel Corp. 400-MHz Pentium II Xeon processors and hosted a
3-terabyte IBM DB2 Universal Database Extended Enterprise Edition data warehouse running
under Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Edition.

The recent Comdex demo highlighted, among other things, the capabilities of the Virtual
Interconnect Architecture specification promoted by Microsoft Corp., Compaq Computer Corp.
and Intel. GigaNet Inc. of Concord, Mass., supplied the 1.2-gigabit/sec clustering
interconnect components, said Resa Rooholamini, Dell development manager for cluster
products.

The year 2000 problem could weaken security in many systems, warned John A. Koskinen,
chairman of the President’s Council on the Year 2000 Conversion. But bad date code
could hide the problem, he said.

In many ways, the year 2000 problem is a good example of how far-reaching a cyberattack
could be, he said during a speech in Washington. The difference is that with faulty date
code, everyone knows what the threat is, Koskinen said. People know how to fix it, and
they can see it coming, he said. It is unlikely that there would be advanced warning if
hackers tried to destroy systems.

The National Security Council met with Koskinen earlier this month to discuss
cyberthreats because of faulty date code.

“I think we’ll learn a lot in the year 2000 process that will be useful in
broader, longer-term issues,” Koskinen said.

Besides the type of networking products and servers sold under SMC-II, IS-1 will offer
installation services, PC and network management products, and site surveys, said Lee
Harvey, division chief at the Communications-Electronics Command’s Acquisition
Center-Washington (CAC-W).

“We hope to have a full enterprise turnkey solution,” he said. IS-1 products
will come with minimum four-year warranties.

The single-award, one-year contract will have five one-year options, Harvey said. CAC-W
has valued IS-1, which the Army originally called Infrastructure Architecture Solutions 1,
at $365 million.

Bidders include Electronic Data Systems Corp., Government Technology Services Inc. of
Chantilly, Va., Litton PRC Inc. and Telos Corp. of Ashburn, Va., according to industry
sources. Telos is the incumbent contractor for SMC-II, which expires at the end of this
month.

SAP America Public Sector Inc., a U.S. unit of the German software company, has
received a General Services Administration Information Technology Schedule contract for
SAP R/3 System financial software.

SAP also holds a contract on GSA’s Financial Management System Software Schedule,
said John K. Greaney Jr., director of the unit’s enterprise center in Washington.
Agencies already ordering R/3 through the FMSS contract cannot buy the financial product
through the IT Schedule.

R/3 “gathers information once at the source and then coordinates it across
functions,” he said.

Contact SAP America Public Sector at 202-312-3531.

NASA’s Ames Research Center will help Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital in
California develop and launch a virtual hospital by January.

Using a high-bandwidth network, the virtual hospital will transmit 3-D images to
doctors at remote sites in real time, NASA officials said.

NASA’s Center of Excellence for Information Technology, Ames in Moffett Field,
Calif., will install a workstation at the Salinas hospital capable of handling 3-D images
of the human body. The hospital will transmit diagnostic data to Ames over NASA’s
Research and Education Network.

Hospital medical teams using the system will send 3-D images during operations, for
example, so doctors a continent away can follow the procedure, NASA officials said.

The teams also will give NASA feedback on image quality and network efficiency.

The Postal Service has chosen Metanetics Corp., a subsidiary of Telxon Corp. of Akron,
Ohio, to supply as many as 4,000 handheld bar code readers for the Information-Based
Indicia Program.

Through IBIP, the Postal Service plans to sell electronic postage, over the Internet or
through dial-up links to vendors. Customers will print out postage as bar codes on labels
or envelopes at their own printers. The codes will appear in place of stamps or
metered postage.

USPS will use Metanetics’ product, IR-2000, to read the 2-D bar codes. So far, the
service has spent about $250,000 on 300 readers.

Each electronic-postage bar code will include information about the postage amount,
user’s license, origination and destination ZIP codes, and date and time of postage
printing.

Bill Murray, Mark Kellner, Frank Tiboni, Merry Mayer, William Jackson, Gregory
Slabodkin, Florence Olsen and Christopher J. Dorobek.