About this Issue

With this issue of Interface we move to our summer publishing schedule. Our student assistants are, by and large, graduated or recreating prior to another year of school, with the critical exception of Heather Hawkins, our hardworking webmaster. Our administrative assistant and strong right arm, Theresa Floyd, is recovering from elective surgery. She is temporarily being replaced by Sharon Spence. Sharon, and the rest of us, are painfully learning just how much it is that Theresa has done at the Berglund Center as we try to fill in for her.

But despite these many distractions, we think that we have a rich edition of Interface to present to you. If there is any single motif to the issue, it is primarily one of security, always a major concern in electronic communication, and secondarily, electronic education.

Our legal editor, Leonard Duboff, leads off with "WARNING! Trademark Licenses Must Have Quality Standards Associated With Them" <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/05/duboff.php> This piece tells us how to properly protect our business assets via trademark licensing.

One of our on-line education editors, Kristy Smolenski, tells us how to learn about distance education by taking a course in "Getting Educated about Online Education" <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/05/smolenski.php>

Kristy's article might usefully be read together with our review of a related book, Robins and Webster's The Virtual University? <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/05/robins.php>

Also in the educational vein, our returning Grants Editor, Mark Smolensky, writes on "La Familia Network" <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/05/grants.php>

Our Pacific University Webmaster, Ken Westin, discusses newer (CSS) standards for creating WWW sites in "Separation of Content & Design Part II: Why Won't This CD Play In My 8-Track?" <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/05/westin.php>

In this issue's editorial, "Financial transactions on the Internet, Part II" I follow up my painful attempts to learn more about the circumstances in which my credit card was "compromised" during an electronic transaction. <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/05/edit.php>

This editorial is related to our second book review, The Art of Deception, written by the arch-hacker Kevin Mitnick. <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/05/mitnick.php> If you want to better understand the difficulties of protecting computer systems, you should read this book.

On a more relaxed summer note, one of our tech editors, Matt Ernst's piece, "Music On the Move " <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/05/tech.php> covers the various means of encoding music files for personal use in portable devices. Matt, we are pleased to announce, will be going onto do graduate work at Washington State University this fall in Computer Science.

We hope that you are having a pleasant summer. And, as always, we trust that you will find this issue of Interface useful and interesting.

Jeffrey Barlow
Editor, Interface.