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Games companies here are scrambling to adjust to the new online gaming restrictions soon to be imposed on young hardcore gamers. And it appears that many of them are putting more focus on games played on mobile phones to compensate for the expected loss in revenue from their personal computer (PC) products.
Despite fierce resistance from the games industry, the government has been moving to introduce strict limits on how much time youngsters can spend playing their favorite online computer games to combat addiction.
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The Maldives Child Helpline represents a great achievement for the country after a year of operation, says Amrita Singh, Program Manager Asia Pacific Region for Child Helpline International (CHI).
South Korea's government is close to adopting a "Cinderella" law to ban youngsters from playing online games past midnight amid growing concerns about Internet addiction, officials said Thursday.
A bill to be submitted to parliament as early as this month will require South Korean online game companies to cut off services at midnight for users registered as younger than 16, the culture and family ministries said.
"The thing about online games is, once you are in it, it is extremely hard to get out of it, especially if you are a young kid," Jo Rin, a ministry official in charge of the law, told AFP.
"A lot of kids play games all night long and have trouble studying at school and going about their normal lives during daytime. We believe the law is necessary to ensure their health and a right to sleep."
ITU released in November 2010 a report which is the worlds first attempt to provide the overall statistical framework related to the measurement of child online protection with a particular emphasis on measures that are suitable for international comparison.
On 17 November 2010, the Child Online Protection (COP) Global Initiative was launched in San José, by the ITU Secretary- General, Hamadoun Touré, together with the new Patron of COP, H.E. Laura Chinchilla, President of Costa Rica.
The COP Global Initiative aims to shift COP Guidelines, developed by ITU and partners from industry, civil society, governments, UN agencies and other stakeholders, into concrete activities by leveraging the active support from COP members.
The gap in facilities between research hospitals in central Nairobi and clinics around the rest of Kenya is vast, but need not be unbridgeable. Reporting for CNN World View, UNTVs Andrew Martin explains how relatively simple, low-cost technology is making a difference to a remote rural clinic in Eastern Kenya.
Guidebook by Anne Collier and Larry Magid of COnnectSafely.org is published in partnership with the iKeepSafe Coalition.
ConnectSafely.org and the iKeepSafe Coalition are pleased to announce the publication of A Parents' Guide to Facebook. The 35-page booklet and online resource available for reading and printing at www.connectsafely.org/fbparents provides parents with the perspective and how-to information they need to help their teens optimize their privacy and safety on Facebook. Magid and Collier had earlier co-authored MySpace Unraveled: A Parents' Guide to Teen Social Networking (Peachpit Press, 2006).
The guide features hands-on, step-by-step instructions and illustrations, as well as parenting points on safety, privacy, and reputation protection. It covers both cellphone- and computer-based use of Facebook and the site's newest features, including Places, Groups, and the latest privacy updates.
Delegates approve Financial and Strategic plans, reinforce Unions mandate in development, standards-making and global management of radio frequency resources
Guadalajara, Mexico, 22 October 2010 ITUs 18th ITU Plenipotentiary Conference draws to a close today with delegates agreeing on ITUs essential role in several key areas. ITUs mandate has been strengthened in bridging the digital divide, strategies to accelerate broadband roll-out, and implementing the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society, and extending its involvement in areas such as better use of information and communication technologies to manage climate change and disaster response; conformance and interoperability; and accessibility for persons with disabilities.
A last minute compromise saw consensus on a number of key Resolutions on Internet issues. The agreements strengthen and underline ITUs commitment to work with the Internet community and extend the benefits of the Internet to all global citizens.
The Conference also agreed on ITUs Strategic Plan 2012-2015, and adopted the Financial Plan for the same period. Both will help the Union implement the decisions of the conference during the next four years until the 2014 Plenipotentiary.
ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré told delegates that the Guadalajara conference had been one of the most challenging in the Unions 145-year history: I came to this 18th Plenipotentiary Conference with news of the extraordinary progress that had been made in ICT development in the space of just four years, he said. I am absolutely confident that when we meet again, in four years time, I will be able to report even more dramatic progress. And that this progress will be very much due to the work that has been done here, by you, in Guadalajara.
ITU will continue to work with our Member States and Sector Members − and indeed stakeholders across the broader ICT sector − to face the changes in the ICT environment; to cooperate with our membership; and to protect the all-important principle of multilateralism and cooperation among the international community in the modern world, he said.
For full text of press release, see: http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/41.aspx
The Plenipotentiary Conference is the key event at which ITU member States decide on the future role of the organization, thereby determining the organization's ability to influence and affect the development of Information and Communication Technologies-ICTs- worldwide. During the plenary session, Jamaica's Minister of State in the Prime -Minister's office Clive Mullings said that Jamaica is committed to the use of information, communication and technology to drive development, increase knowledge and meet the challenges of our time.
He noted that since becoming a member State of the ITU in 1963, Jamaica has been committed to the best use of information and communications technologies for the advancement of Jamaicans and the peoples of the world.
To listen to the full UN Radio report: http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/detail/104600.html
Hasan Mahmood Delwar, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission
Shi Yuchun, Ministry of Industry & Information Technology, China
Dr Ali Naser Al-khwildi, Communications & Media Commission, Iraq
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-Policy statements from a total of 93 Member State delegations.
-Over 2,500 delegates registered from 167 countries at the conference, with over 2,000 delegates coming to Guadalajara including 130 Ministers, Deputy Ministers and Ambassadors.
-545 meetings held onsite in Guadalajara Expo, dealing with a total of 528 proposals from members during the Conference.
-Over 800 local staff assisting with the event, along with more than 250 ITU staff, including over 70 interpreters.
-More than a thousand shuttle bus journeys have conveyed staff and delegates to and from their hotels.
-Over 35,000 pictures have been taken by ITU photographers, with almost 2,000 being published online and available for download by delegates. Over 100,000 photo views on Flickr.
-28 videos produced which have been watched over 4,000 times on YouTube as well as being broadcast here in Guadalajara Expo. While PP-10 has been on, ITUs YouTube channel as a whole has just passed a quarter of a million video views.
-Over 1,500 media clippings from Angola to Venezuela and from Armenia to Zambia.
-Over 75,000 visits to the PP-10 website over the past two and a half weeks, and almost half a million page views.
-Over 90,000 hours spent on the Wi-Fi network by almost 2,000 unique Wi-Fi client devices, and over 1,500 unique wired LAN devices.
-Over 200 hours of live broadcast webcasts, representing well over a thousand hours of audio/video archives, considering the six languages used.
-1,500 hours of interpretation and almost six thousand pages of translated documents.
-Less paper than ever before used saving an estimated printing of just over a million pages!. In terms of greenhouse gases saved, this amounts to over 5 tonnes, or the equivalent of running a typical family car for a whole year.
-15,000 gifts were distributed to PP-10 participants.
Los aparatos actuales pueden ser utilizados por cualquier tipo de usuario sin importar sus capacidades. Ya perfeccionan en Alemania técnica para manipular computadoras y celulares con la mente.
Guadalajara.- El mercado del equipo tecnológico elaborado específicamente para personas con discapacidad está en declive debido a la accesibilidad que hoy ofrecen los dispositivos de tecnología. Desde pantallas touchscreen que ofrecen respuesta auditiva y táctil hasta aparatos que pueden ser controlados por el pensamiento humano, los nuevos productos han borrado la línea que divide al mercado especializado del regular.
Así lo aseguró Reinhard Scholl, de la oficina de Estandarización de Telecomunicaciones de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT), quien fue el principal promotor del uso extendido de la tecnología especializada en la Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios de la UIT.
El especialista explicó que la expansión del mercado de los dispositivos enfocados a las personas con discapacidad puede favorecer al total de la humanidad, según estudios de Estados Unidos, 10 por ciento de la población del mundo tiene algún tipo de discapacidad, pero este porcentaje aumenta debido a que cualquier persona, con el paso del tiempo, sufrirá de discapacidades y afectaciones ocasionadas por la edad. En este contexto, consideró que los costos de los dispositivos disminuirán.
Lea el texto completo en: http://www.milenio.com/node/559121
The conference noted that the dates for the next Radiocommunication Assembly (RA) have been set for 16‑20 January 2012, and those for the next World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) for 23 January - 17 February 2012. It agreed on the schedule of future conferences, assemblies and forums for the years 2011-2014 as shown below:
-World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA): November 2012;-World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT): November 2012;-World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC): March-April 2014;-Plenipotentiary Conference (PP-14): to be held in Korea (Republic of).
These events should be held within the periods. However, the precise dates and places, where not already decided, will be set by the Council after consultation of the Member States, leaving sufficient time between the various conferences. Their exact duration will be decided by the Council after their agendas have been established. The conference emphasized that the dates and durations of RA‑12 and WRC-12, for which the agendas have been established must not be modified.
This new resolution seeks to establish a sound basis for ITUs work surrounding the role of telecommunications/ICT in climate change and the protection of the environment. Recognizing existing Council and World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC) resolutions on ICTs and climate change, it acknowledges that ICTs contribute to greenhousegGas (GHG) emissions, but also play an important role in tackling climate change and protecting the environment.
The resolution notes the body of existing work carried out by ITU-T on methodologies for evaluating the energy efficiency of ICT equipment and monitoring their impact and effects on climate change. It also acknowledges ITU-Rs leadership in studying the use of radiocommunication systems and remote sensing applications to improve climate monitoring, disaster prediction and relief, as well as the work done by ITU-D in this domain.
ITU is called upon to continue demonstrating its leadership and developing its activities in this area, including through workshops, seminars, training courses and best practice guidelines. ITU should promote awareness of the environmental issues surrounding telecommunication/ICT equipment and encourage energy efficiency in the design and manufacture of such equipment to promote a clean and safe environment. The Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB) should continue its work on evaluation methodologies for energy efficiency and the GHG emissions of ICTs. ITU should also provide assistance to developing countries to strengthen their human and institutional capacity for tackling and adapting to climate change, including disaster management planning.
The Resolution invites ITUs membership - its Member States, Sector Members and Associates to contribute to the work of ITU as well as the broader UN process on climate change. It asks ITUs broader membership to take the necessary measures to reduce the effects of climate change by developing and using more energy-efficient ICT devices, applications and networks and to promote recycling and the reuse of ICT equipment. It also calls upon them to continue or initiate public and private programmes including ICTs and climate change, while giving due consideration to relevant ITU initiatives. It is hoped that this Resolution will help pave the way for ITUs work in the area of ICTs and climate change, one of the biggest challenges facing mankind, and indeed the planet, today.
In response to considerable concern about how best to protect vulnerable children and youth online, this new resolution seeks to establish a mandate for ITUs work and activities in this area, pursuant to the existing ITU Council resolutions. It recognizes the diverse nature of access to ICTs and the increasingly widespread use of ICTs by children, at times without control or guidance. It acknowledges the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) outcome documents, which recognized the role of ICTs in enhancing the development of children and as a tool to achieve international development goals, such as the Millennium Development Goals.
The Resolution encourages ITU to continue its Child Online Protection (COP) initiative as a platform to raise awareness and educate stakeholders in this vital issue. It also requests the ITU Council to continue its Council Working Group on child online protection - in the discussions relating to this resolution, a large number of Member States indicated their support for the continuation of the Council Working Group. It encourages the ITU Secretary-General to coordinate ITU activities with other initiatives at the national, regional and international levels, as well as bringing this resolution to the attention of the UN Secretary-General with the aim of increasing the commitment of the UN system in child online protection.
This resolution seeks to establish a clear basis for ITUs activities to help bridge the standardization gap. It acknowledges that technological realities and needs vary from country to country and region to region. However, persistent concerns have arisen over developing countries ability to participate in ITUs standardization activities, and it notes that major disparities in knowledge and management of standards remain between developed and developing countries. The resolution suggests that this standardization and knowledge gap may potentially arise through lack of awareness of standardization activities, difficulties in accessing information, lack of training or lack of financial resources to engage in travel.
In order to help overcome divides in participation, knowledge and management of standards, the resolution asks the ITU Secretary-General and the Directors of the three ITU Bureaux to work closely with each other on this issue and to step up actions to reduce the standardization gap. It resolves that close coordination should be maintained among the three Sectors at the regional level, involving ITUs regional offices. ITU is encouraged to identify means and support for the participation of representatives of developing countries in its meetings and to report on its follow-up. ITU Member States and Sector Members are invited to make both financial and in-kind contributions to support ITUs actions and help boost the fund for bridging the standardization gap. This resolution provides a sound basis for helping boost the participation of developing countries in ITUs standardization activities.
The conference carefully examined the proposals from Member States with regard to the free on-line access policy on ITU publications. They considered this as an issue of high importance. The decision reached on 21 October is not only of a financial nature, but also more of a strategic dimension for ITUs work, the conference underlined. In his report to the conference, Bruce Gracie, who chaired Committee 6, where the issue was widely debated , said: The adverse impact on ITUs revenue has to balance with the increased visibility that the free online policy is providing. Free access to ITU-T Recommendations was recognized as being an outstanding achievement for international telecommunications, and members advocated for the adoption of a symmetrical approach across ITU. The ITU secretariat had explained, during the debates, that the estimated loss over a four-year period would be CHF 1.2 million. According to the new decision, free online access will be provided for ITU-R Recommendations, ITU-R Reports, the Basic Texts of the Union and the Final Acts of Plenipotentiary Conferences to the general public on a permanent basis. The Decision also instructs the Secretary-General to prepare a report on the revenue of sales of ITU Publications, software and databases, and to present this report to Council 2011.
The ITU Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) and the ITU Telecommunications Sector (ITU-T) are collaborating with other expert organizations in work relating to human exposure to electromagnetic fields. ITU has expertise in calculating and measuring the field strength and power density of radio signals, while WHO and the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) have specialized health expertise and competence to assess the impact of radio waves on the human body.
Today the Plenipotentiary Conference adopted a new resolution that will spur ITU work in this area to assist national administrations, particularly in developing countries. ITU will collect and disseminate information on exposure to electromagnetic fields, and on methods of measuring exposure.
Regional seminars and workshops will be held to build human capacity, and Member States are expected to share their expertise and resources. The Council and the next Plenipotentiary Conference will get reports on the matter.
Guidelines on limits of exposure to electromagnetic fields have been established by ICNIRP, the International Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC). The new resolution sets out a complementary role for ITU in supporting Member States in measuring exposure and in related capacity-building.
The conference decided that ITU will continue to implement Resolution 76 of the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (Johannesburg, 2008) and Resolution 47 (Rev. Hyderabad, 2010), along with the recommendations of the Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau ( TSB), endorsed by the Council at its 2009 session, regarding:
-a conformity assessment programme;-an interoperability events programme;-a human resources capacity building; -recommendations to assist in the establishment of test facilities in developing countries.
This is the thrust of a new resolution just adopted on conformance and interoperability. The resolution emphasizes that this programme of work be implemented in parallel without any delay. The Director TSB is asked to prepare a business plan for the long-term implementation of this resolution. The programme of work includes building up a pilot database into a fully functioning conformity database. The implementation of the conformity database will take into consideration the outcome and effect on Member States, Sector Members and stakeholders, how it will help bridge the standardization gap, potential liability issues, and the results of the regional ITU conformity and interoperability consultations.
A major part of the programme will be to assist developing countries to establish regional or subregional conformity and interoperability centres that can carry out interoperability testing.
Malcolm Johnson, who was recently re-elected Director of TSB with an overwhelming majority, is called upon to study the possibility of a future ITU Mark programme. This would be a voluntary programme permitting manufacturers and service providers to make a visible declaration that their equipment conforms to ITU-T Recommendations.
The Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT) is expected to collaborate with the Director of TSB and Director of BR to advance the implementation of Resolution 47 (Rev. Hyderabad, 2010) and to assist Member States in dealing with the problem of counterfeit equipment. Developing countries, in particular, are worried about counterfeit equipment because it may negatively affect the quality of their telecommunication infrastructure.
Resolution 76 (Johannesburg, 2008) deals with studies related to conformance and interoperability testing, assistance to developing countries, and a possible future ITU Mark programme.
ITUs ability to assess and recognize conformity and interoperability will be a driver for raising awareness and building capacity in developing countries. BDT will be the focal point for this activity through its global and regional initiatives, including the centres of excellence.
Presenting the report of the Director of TSB to the Working Group of the Plenary where agreement was first reached on the new resolution, R. Scholl said that a major concern raised at WTSA-08 was the lack of conformance and interoperability of equipment being placed on the market, especially in developing countries. To respond to that concern, TSB has developed a pilot conformity database, which is currently available only to ITU members. Entry in the database is voluntary and free of charge. Details of products and services that have been recognized by ITU as being in conformity with ITU-T Recommendations can be listed in the database. Subject to testing, a vendor is entitled to claim recognition of conformity.
ITUs Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) held two interoperability events - in July and in September 2010 - to test its IPTV suites of standards, and a third event will take place in December. These events are generating a lot of interest. Also, the mood evident during three regional ITU consultation meetings on conformance assessment and interoperability was of considerable support for Resolution 76 of WTSA-08. The overall consensus was that it would benefit both developing and developed countries if this resolution was implemented without further delay. In this regard, the resolution adopted in Guadalajara represents an important milestone.
The resolution updates and sets out the role of ITU in relation to the role of administrations of Member States in the management of internationalized domain names (IDNs). It recognizes the need to promote the use of internationalized domain names in order to overcome linguistic barriers to Internet access and recalls previous standardization work done by ITU-T in non-Latin character sets for data transfer globally. Noting that the current domain name system does not fully reflect the diverse and growing language needs of all users and that IDNs should be widely accessible, it instructs the ITU Secretary-General and Directors of the three Bureaux to take an active part in international discussions, initiatives and activities on the deployment and management of internationalized Internet domain names, in cooperation with relevant organizations, including WIPO and UNESCO. It calls upon ITU elected officials to take action to ensure the sovereignty of ITU Member States with regard to ITU-T Recommendation E.164 numbering plans (in whichever application they are used) and to promote the role of the ITU membership in the internationalization of domain names in different language scripts using their specific character sets. Again, it also calls for greater collaboration and coordination between ITU and relevant organizations (including, but not limited to ICANN, the RIRs, the IETF, ISOC and W3C on a reciprocity basis) and awareness-raising at the national and regional levels among interested parties.
This updated resolution complements existing ITU resolutions on ITUs role in public policy issues (for example, Council Resolution 1305 approved at its 2009 Session). It describes ITUs role with regard to international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet and recognizes that ITU deals with both technical and policy issues related to IP-based networks, including the existing Internet, future Internet and the evolution to NGN.. According to the Resolution, significant effort has been put in by ITU on ENUM, .int, internationalized domain name (IDN), and country code top-level domain (ccTLD) issues through workshops and standardization activities.
The resolution also emphasizes that ITUs Dedicated Group on Internet-related public policy issues should continue its work. It notes that the Dedicated Group would be more efficient if it became autonomous and directly responsible to the ITU Council, with all three Sectors contributing to its work. On this basis, the Resolution asks that Council makes the Dedicated Group a Council Working Group enjoying open consultation to all stakeholders. (This suggestion remains subject to Councils approval and endorsement following PP-10).
The resolution instructs the Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB) to continue performing its role in technical issues and to liaise and cooperate with appropriate entities on issues related to the management of Internet domain names and addresses and other Internet resources (such as IPv6, ENUM and IDNs). It further instructs the Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT) to organize international and regional forums to discuss policy, operational and technical issues on the management of Internet domain names and addresses and other Internet resources.
This resolution calls for ITU to continue to play a facilitating role in the coordination of international Internet-related public policy issues. Again, significantly, it calls for greater collaboration and coordination between ITU and relevant organizations (including, but not limited to ICANN, the RIRs, the IETF, ISOC and W3C on a reciprocity basis). It instructs the ITU Secretary-General to take a significant role in international discussions and initiatives on the management of Internet domain names and addresses and other Internet resources and for ITU to continue to play a facilitating role in the coordination of international Internet-related public policy issues. It invites ITU membership to participate in discussions in this field, to cooperate with relevant organizations and to contribute to the Dedicated Group and ITU Study Groups on related matters.
This Resolution revised and updates an existing resolution from Antalya (2006). It considers recent advances in global information infrastructure, including the development of Internet Protocol (IP)-based networks and the Internet, as well as future IP developments and new applications. It also acknowledges various challenges with regard to quality of service, uncertainty of origin (of IP traffic) and the high cost of international connectivity. It recognizes ITU-Ts work on IP‑based network issues, including service interoperability with other telecommunication networks, numbering, signalling requirements and protocol aspects, security and infrastructure component costs, and issues associated with the evolution to next-generation networks (NGN).
The Resolution requests all three Sectors to consider their future work programmes on IP-based networks and on migration to NGN and future networks. It asks ITU-T to continue its collaborative activities with ISOC/IETF and other relevant organizations, in respect of interconnectivity and migration to NGN. It asks ITU to fully embrace the opportunities for telecommunication/ICT development arising from the growth of IP-based services, and to continue its study of international Internet connectivity as an urgent matter. It also encourages ITU to identify clearly the range of Internet-related issues falling within its responsibilities according to its basic texts and the WSIS outcome documents. The Resolution calls on ITU membership to raise awareness at the national, regional and international levels. However, the most significant item in this resolution lies in its call for greater collaboration and coordination between ITU and relevant organizations (including, but not limited to ICANN, the RIRs, the IETF, ISOC and W3C on a reciprocity basis), as well as UNESCO and the Broadband Commission for Digital Development.
This new resolution is ITUs first Plenipotentiary resolution focused on IPv6, and breaks new ground for ITU as it seeks to modernize and adapt its work to Internet Protocol (IP)-based next-generation networks. Considering the imminent exhaustion of IPv4 addresses and that specific actions must be defined for the transition to IPv6, it recognizes the opportunities opened up for the development of ICTs by IPv6 and that the early adoption of IPv6 is the best way forward to avoid scarcity of IP addresses and the follow-on effects of IPv4 address exhaustion.
The resolution seeks to step up the exchange of experiences and information regarding the adoption of IPv6 with all stakeholders and create opportunities for collaborative efforts to support the transition to IPv6. It seeks to assist Member States which require support in the management and allocation of IPv6 resources. It notes the work of the existing IPv6 working group set up by the 2009 Session of Council and asks it to undertake detailed studies of IP address allocation for both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. It also calls for ITU to study and monitor current allocation mechanisms, identify any flaws arising and communicate proposals for changes to existing policies, if appropriate. It invites Member States to develop specific initiatives at the national level fostering interaction between governmental, private and academic entities and civil society.
More Decisions
For a summary of the new and updated Resolutions plus those that have been abrogated by the Plenipotentiary Conference, up until 20 October, see Issue no. 9 of the Highlights: http://bit.ly/dpUTtt
Logra el respaldo de 119 países de los 161 miembros, ocupando así, el sexto puesto de la Unión Internacional de Naciones Unidas el cual se realiza en México del 04 al 22 de octubre / La Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones es el organismo encargado de coordinar con los gobiernos y el sector privado el desarollo de comunicaciones
La República Bolivariana de Venezuela quedó reelecta como miembro del Consejo "Región A - América" de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT), durante la realización de la Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios.
La Delegación venezolana logra el respaldo de 119 países de los 161 miembros, ocupando así, el sexto (6) puesto de la Unión Internacional de Naciones Unidas (ONU) el cual se realiza en la ciudad de Guadalajara, México del 04 al 22 de octubre.
El embajador Trino Díaz durante su intervención presentó la "Declaración Política", en el cual enunció los avances que Venezuela ha alcanzado en materia de "acceso y democratización de las telecomunicaciones" desde 1998, con el "propósito de asegurar el uso de las Tecnologías de la información y comunicación (TIC) como herramientas habilitadoras de conocimiento que han permitido la participación protagónica de nuestra población en su desarrollo socio-económico".
Lea el texto completo en: http://www.vtv.gov.ve/noticias-ciencia-y-salud/46748
This new resolution recalls ITUs role in implementing the WSIS outcomes, as outlined in Resolution 140 (Rev. Guadalajara, 2010). It also cites Paragraph 111 of the Tunis Agenda, which requested the United Nations General Assembly to make an overall review of the implementation of WSIS outcomes in 2015. In response to that request, the United Nations General Assembly, in its Resolution 60/252, decided to conduct an overall review of the implementation of the Summit outcomes in 2015.
The new resolution instructs the ITU Secretary-General to initiate consultations with the United Nations Chief Executives Board for Coordination (CEB) in order to prepare the overall review of implementation of WSIS outcomes in 2015, including the possibility of holding a high-level event in 2014 or 2015. He is also instructed to propose to CEB to make the necessary preparations based on the multi-stakeholder approach; pursue efficient and effective coordination with all stakeholders in preparing the overall review; and report to the Council on the results of this process, for its consideration and decision. For its part, the Council is instructed, in the light of the results of the Secretary-Generals consultation, to:
- consider and decide on ITU's role in, and contribution to, the overall review process; - examine ways and means to enhance ITUs lead role in any relevant preparatory process;- request the Secretary-General, under the preparatory process, to coordinate with all stakeholders and provide mechanisms, including the possibility of holding open consultations; - evaluate, at its 2011 session, the financial burden for ITU that might result from its contribution to the preparatory process;- report to the next Plenipotentiary Conference on preparations for final overall review of the implementation of the WSIS outcomes and formulate proposals for further activities.
After negotiations led by the Chairman of the Conference, Fernando Borjón, and ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun I. Touré and with the active participation of the parties concerned, a compromise was reached with regard to revisions to Resolutions 99 (Rev. Antalya, 2006) on the status of Palestine and 125 (Rev. Marrakesh, 2002) on assistance and support to Palestine for rebuilding its telecommunication networks.
Resolution 99 has been updated and resolves that, pending any further change in the current status of Palestine as observer in ITU, Palestine shall participate in all ITU conferences, assemblies and meetings and in treaty-making conferences with the following additional rights to what they already have:
-the right to raise points of order;-the right to co-sponsor proposals;
Palestine shall have the right to attend the Heads of Delegation meetings. It shall also have the right to request the verbatim insertion of any declaration made during the course of a debate.
Assistance and support to Palestine for rebuilding its telecommunication networks Resolution 125 (Rev. Guadalajara, 2010) first recalls the decision of the United Nations General Assembly to use the designation "Palestine" in the United Nations system. The update considers that the international community has an important role in assisting Palestine to develop a modern and reliable telecommunication network. It states that a large part of the Palestinian telecommunication infrastructure has been significantly damaged in recent years. Other changes to the resolution call upon Member States to make every effort with a view, among other things, to providing all forms of assistance and support to Palestine, bilaterally or through executive measures taken by ITU, in rebuilding, restoring and developing its telecommunication network. In this regard, the Council is invited to allocate the necessary funds, within available resources, to implement the updated resolution. The Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT) is instructed to take appropriate measures, within the mandate of BDT, to facilitate the establishment of international access networks, including terrestrial and satellite stations, submarine cables, optical fibre and microwave systems.
The State of the Worlds Indigenous Peoples (2010) report contains alarming statistical data on this group in such areas as health, human rights, education and employment. Committee 6 examined the Inter-American proposal on this subject, and requested, following a debate that the proposal be reviewed with a view to improving the Unions mechanism for granting fellowships. It was argued that the state of indigenous people places them in a situation similar to that of least developed countries, despite the fact that some of them live in developed countries.
ITU is encouraged, through a new resolution entitled "facilitating digital inclusion initiatives for indigenous peoples", to make it easier to grant fellowships to indigenous people as part of the Digital Inclusion Initiative of ITUs Telecommunication Development Sector (ITU-D). The aim is to allow indigenous people to attend workshops, seminars, events, and other types of capacity-building events organized by ITU. But the resolution adds the caveat that Member States will have the authority to consider the requests of indigenous people, if and when the country is eligible for fellowship grants. The new resolution also cites Resolution 68 of the World Telecommunication Development Conference (Hyderabad, 2010) on the inclusion of indigenous people in the activities of BDT, requesting ITU to recognize and encourage indigenous people to participate in ITU's work.
A new resolution notes the vulnerability of critical national infrastructure and its increasing dependence on information and communication technologies and the threats resulting from the illicit use of these technologies. It says that Illicit use of ICT could have a detrimental impact on a countrys infrastructure, national security, and economic development. The resolution is entitled ITU's role with regard to international public policy issues relating to the risk of illicit use of information and communication technologies. It instructs the Secretary-General to take the necessary measures to:
- raise awareness of Member States regarding the adverse impact that may result from the illicit use of information and communication resources.
- maintain the role of ITU to cooperate within its mandate with other United Nations bodies in combating the illicit use of ICT.
The resolution underlines the importance of the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). It resolves that ITU in its capacity as facilitator of WSIS Action Line C5 on building confidence and security in the use of ICT, will organize meetings of Member States and relevant ICT stakeholders, including geospatial and information service providers, to discuss alternative approaches to solutions in order to address and prevent the illicit application of ICT, while taking into consideration the overall interests of the ICT industry.
The Secretary-General is instructed to collect best practices from Member States on their actions taken to prevent the illicit use of ICT, and provide assistance to those who need it .
Member States and relevant ICT stakeholders are invited to pursue their dialogue at the regional and national levels in order to find mutually acceptable solutions. They should also provide the support needed to implement this resolution.
A new resolution sets out ways for ITU to mainstream people with disabilities in all its work. Entitled Telecommunication/information and communication technology accessibility for persons with disabilities, including age-related disabilities, the resolution recognizes a number of international agreements. These include the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which requires States Parties to adopt appropriate measures to provide access for persons with disabilities - on an equal basis with others - to ICT, emergency services and Internet service; Resolution 70 of the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (Johannesburg, 2008), Resolution 58 of the World Telecommunication Development Conference (Hyderabad, 2010); the Tunis Commitment, made at the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (Tunis, 2005), and the Phuket Declaration on Tsunami Preparedness for Persons with Disabilities.
The World Health Organization estimates that ten per cent of the world's population (more than 650 million people) are people with disabilities. This percentage may increase because of the greater availability of medical treatment, enabling sick or injured people live longer. Increased life expectancy in general means that there are more elderly people with the disabilities that come with age. Also, people may acquire disabilities through accidents, wars and the circumstances of poverty.
ITU is already collaborating with external entities and bodies concerned with this subject, and adopt a comprehensive action plan to extend access to telecommunication/ICT to people with disabilities. The experiences, views and opinions of people with disabilities have to be taken on board when developing and progressing ITU work.
The Secretary-General and Directors of the Bureaux will have to coordinate accessibility-related activities between the ITU-T, ITU-R, ITU-D, and ensure that the needs of persons with disabilities are taken into account. Of course, the financial implications of providing access will need to be considered. Within ITU, it may be possible to expand the fellowship programme to enable delegates with disabilities to participate in the work of the Union. Another useful step will be to identify, document and disseminate examples of best practices among ITU Member States and Sector Members.
Member States and Sector Members can help by developing guidelines to enhance the accessibility, compatibility and usability of telecommunication/ICT services, products and terminals. They can also introduce telecommunication/ICT services that are appropriate for people with disabilities, both in terms of technology and cost.
Reports on this matter will be submitted to the ITU Council and to the next Plenipotentiary Conference. A special trust fund has been set up by ITU to support activities relating to this resolution, and Member States and Sector Members are invited to contribute.
Le Directeur-élu du BDT de lUIT, Brahima Sanou, aborde les principaux défis qui devra relever le Bureau de développement des télécommunications. Il souhaite souligner limportance de linvestissement, partager les bonnes pratiques et lexpérience http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
Director-elect for ITU's Radiocommunication Bureau, François Rancy, outlines the main challenges for the radiocommunication sector and discusses the attraction of the UHF band: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
With the re-election in Guadalajara of myself as Secretary-General, Houlin Zhao as Deputy Secretary-General and Malcolm Johnson as Director of TSB, and the fresh election of François Rancy as Director of BR and Brahima Sanou as Director of BDT, we now have a powerful management team in place to carry out the Unions work from 2011 to 2014.
We have a strong mandate from membership, and we have much to achieve over the next four years. We will therefore be counting on the continuing efforts of each and every member of ITU staff, as well as our Sector and Associate Members, to deliver on the promises made at the Plenipotentiary Conference in Guadalajara.
We will need to be productive, efficient and effective in our daily work if we are to meet our goals, and I am confident that the spirit of cooperation and partnership which has seen our great Union stay proud through the past 145 years will see us chart our way safely through the coming four years.
For full text plus video interview, see: http://www.itu.int/en/osg/focus/Pages/four-years.aspx
Next-generation networks (NGN) are important - indeed essential - for all countries, especially the developing ones, as proposals to the Guadalajara Conference underlined. Resolution 137 (Rev. Guadalajara, 2010) on next-generation network deployment in developing countries has been revised to reflect the outcomes of the World Telecommunication Development Conference, held in Hyderabad, India, in May-June 2010 (WTDC-10); the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly, held in Johannesburg , South Africa, in 2008 (WTSA-08); and the work of ITU-T Study Group 13 Focus Group on future networks. The revisions also include reference to WSIS Action Lines 2 (information and infrastructure) and 6 (an enabling environment).
Developing countries are still facing major challenges, exacerbated by shortages of resources, experience and capacity building in planning and deploying networks, especially next-generation networks. The conference also noted the delay in implementing and adopting these networks in developed countries. It recognized that the existing digital divide could get worse with the emergence of new technologies, including post-NGNs, if developing countries are not able to introduce these networks in a universal and timely manner. The revisions make reference to Resolution 143 (Rev. Guadalajara, 2010), which calls for the provisions in all ITU documents relating to developing countries to be extended to apply adequately to the least developed countries, small island developing States, landlocked developing countries and countries with economies in transition.
The Directors of the three ITU Bureaux are instructed, among other things, to continuously consolidate their efforts in studies and standards-development activities on the deployment of NGN and future networks, especially those designed for rural areas and for bridging the digital divide and the development divide. In addition, the Directors are to coordinate studies and programmes under ITU-Ts Next-Generation Network Global Standards Initiative (NGN-GSI) and ITU-Ds Global Network Planning Initiatives (GNPi), as well as coordinate ongoing work in study groups and through relevant programmes defined in the Hyderabad Action Plan of WTDC-10. They will also seek solutions to speed up the deployment of affordable NGN in rural areas, using the success stories of developing countries that have migrated to such networks and benefit from their experience.
The Council is instructed to consider the reports and proposals made by the Secretary-General and the three Bureaux on implementing this resolution, making the appropriate linkage with the operative part of WTSA Resolution 44 (Rev. Johannesburg, 2008). It should also take appropriate action to ensure that the Union continues to pay attention to addressing the needs of developing countries.
Member States and Sector Members are called upon to strengthen cooperation between developed and developing countries, and among developing countries themselves, in improving national, regional and international capabilities to implement NGNs in a way that will enable them to handle future networks, especially in rural areas.
Reliable public broadcasting and telecommunication systems are indispensable for promoting the socio-economic development of countries - notably those having suffered from natural disasters, domestic conflicts or war. Serbia is one such country. The conference has updated Resolution 126 (Rev. Guadalajara, 2010) on assistance and support to the Republic of Serbia for rebuilding its destroyed public broadcasting system. ITUs key role in rebuilding that country's telecommunication sector has been widely recognized.
The resolution underlines that the newly established public broadcasting facility in Serbia, public entity Broadcast Multiplex and Network Operator (ETV) formerly a part of the Radio Television of Serbia has been severely damaged. The damage to public broadcasting in Serbia, as the conference recognized, should be a matter of concern to the whole international community, in particular ITU. As public broadcaster, ETV is a public entity, which should start broadcasting digital television programmes on 4 April 2012. However, under the present conditions and in the foreseeable future, Serbia will not be able to bring its public broadcasting system and the digital switch-over process up to an acceptable level without help from the international community, provided bilaterally or through international organizations. The resolution, as updated, calls upon Member States to offer all possible assistance. It instructs the Council to allocate the necessary funds, within available resources. It instructs the Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau to use the necessary funds (also, within available resources), in order to continue appropriate action. The Secretary-General will coordinate the activities carried out by the ITU Sectors to ensure that the Unions action in favour of Serbia is as effective as possible. He will report on the matter to the Council.
Gender equality and womens empowerment can be advanced in several ways through information and communication technologies (ICT). Encouraging girls to choose a career in the field of ICT, and fostering the use of ICT for the social and economic empowerment of women and girls, are obvious examples. The growing number of women in the ICT field with decision-making could push the work of ITU in this direction. The revised resolution encourages Member States and Sector Members to facilitate the employment of women and men equally in the ICT/telecommunication field, including at senior levels of responsibility, and to increase opportunities for women and girls in ICT careers during elementary, secondary and higher education. One way to do this would be by establishing an international Girls in ICT day, to be celebrated annually on every fourth Thursday of April. This would provide an occasion for ICT companies, other companies with ICT departments, ICT training institutions, universities, research centres, and all ICT-related institutions to organize an open day for girls. Another way would be to support the work of the Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT) and of a Global Network of women ICT decision-makers. In this regard, the ITU Secretary-General is instructed to encourage the launch of such a network.
A gender perspective will be incorporated in the implementation of the ITU strategic plan and financial plan for 2012-2015, as well as in the operational plans of the Unions three Bureaux and the General Secretariat. According to the resolution, the Council has the responsibility of expanding on the ITU initiatives of the past four years, to accelerate the gender mainstreaming process in ITU as a whole, within existing budgetary resources, so as to ensure capacity building and promotion of women at senior-level positions. In the resolution, the Council is instructed to consider selecting the theme Women and Girls in ICT to mark World Telecommunication and Information Society Day in 2012.
To implement the resolution, the Secretary-General is instructed to announce a year-long Call to Action with a focus on the theme Women and Girls in ICT, while the Director of BDT is to bring to the attention of other UN agencies the need to increase the interest and opportunities for girls and young women in ICT careers. The resolution invites Member States and Sector Members to establish and observe annually and internationally Girls in ICT day.
As we go to press with this issue of the Highlights, the Plenary is holding its first night session and has just confirmed the decisions taken at its meeting on 18 October. These decisions are reported here.
Conference approves Strategic Plan for ITU for the years 2012-2015 The conference has approved a new Strategic Plan for ITU for the years 2012-2015. This new plan highlights the central role of telecommunications in our modern lives and the profound changes now taking place in the industry that are bound to have far-reaching consequences for us all. The spread of Internet Protocol (IP)-based next-generation networks, convergence in devices and networks, and the rise of social networks mean that information and communication technologies (ICT) are responding to the changing needs of todays consumers in a transformed communications landscape.
ITU, with its vision to connect the world in order to safeguard everyones fundamental right to communicate, needs a strong and effective strategic plan both to respond to the changing needs of its members and to prove its ongoing relevance in an all-IP world. Approving the plan, the conference expressed gratitude to Fabio Bigi of Italy for chairing the Working Group of the Council that developed a robust plan for the Union.
For full text, see: http://bit.ly/dpUTtt
H.E. Jaime Guerrero, Minister of Telecommunications & Information Society, talks of the obstacles of rolling out telecommunications in Ecuador and their efforts to overcome these: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
NEW DELHI: The former Wireless Adviser to the Government, P K Garg, has been elected to represent Asia on the Radio Regulations Board of the International Telecommunication Union.The other two members elected are Yasuhiko Ito from Japan who took 120 votes and Ali R. Ebadi from Malaysia (93 votes). Garg received 78 votes. Members are elected to represent Region E, Asia, and Australasia.
India was also elected among the 13 members on the ITU Council, getting 119 of the 161 votes. The other members are Indonesia, China, Japan, Malaysia, Republic of Korea, Bangladesh, Thailand, Australia, India, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines.
The elections took place at the ongoing ITUs 18th Plenipotentiary conference at Mexico. This meet takes place every four years.
Its no mean feat, thats for sure. ITUs simultaneous interpretation team, who provide feeds to the multilingual conferencing system in the rooms in each of the Unions six official languages Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish is absolutely indispensable.
PP-10 has a team of 73 interpreters in total, representing many different nationalities and able to handle all six UN languages plus quite a few others too. Some of these talented linguists can even work in four official UN languages or more (but only one at a time!) and 100% attention is vital.
Ensconced in individual booths so that they can focus exclusively on the audio feed coming from the floor with no distractions or interruptions, interpreters for each of the six languages alternate with a colleague handling the same language every 30-minutes, so intense is the level of concentration needed to instantly communicate complex and often quite technical discussions into their assigned language.
The sheer size and breadth of the team of interpreters on duty at P-10 is a testament to ITUs reach and strength, says Ewandro Magalhaes, Head of ITUs Interpretation Section. Few organizations can claim to rely on so large a team of interpreters for so long a conference. Plus, ITU interpreters are known to be among the most skilled, given the specialized jargon they have to handle.
A draft new Resolution was approved this afternoon, permitting academia, universities and their associated research establishments concerned with the development of telecommunications/ICT to join ITU and participate in work of the 3 Sectors.
The financial contribution for such participation has been set at one-sixteenth of the value of a contributory unit for Sector Members from developed countries (3975 CHF) and one-thirty two of the value of the contributory unit for Sector Members for organizations from developing countries (1987.5 CHF).
Acceptance of applications for participation shall be conditional on the support of the Member States of the Union to which the bodies belong.
Keith Besgrove, First Assistant Secretary for the Digital Economy Services Division of the Australian Department of Broadband, Communications & the Digital Economy, discusses the impact of the National Broadband Network and National Disability Strategy on enhancing lives of persons with disabilities and the aboriginal community: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
SA has again secured a seat on the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) council at the plenipotentiary conference in Mexico, the department of communications said on Friday.
The appointment of SA to the ITU is a testimony that confirms member states confidence in the countrys contribution to the body of knowledge in the three sectors of the union and the ICT matter in general, said department spokeswoman Busiswa Mlandu.
The three sectors of the union were telecommunications development, standardisation and radiocommunications.
SA was elected to the seat on October 10 after it obtained 105 of the 158 members votes.
Also scoring a victory for Africa, Hamadoun Touré from Mali was elected as the ITU secretary general and Brahima Sanou from Burkina Faso was elected as director of the telecoms development sector.
As a member of the council, SA would be responsible for assisting the ITU in implementing its constitution and any other decisions made at the plenipotentiary conference.
It would also be responsible for providing support and strategic direction to the secretary general and the directors of the three sectors. Sapa
Desde hace unos años para acá Paraguay viene dejando atrás, con mucho esfuerzo, un escenario de importante atraso en lo referente a todos los servicios de telecomunicaciones. Incluso dentro de América Latina, región que no se caracteriza precisamente por estar a la vanguardia de las telecomunicaciones, el país se mostraba entre el pelotón de los mercados rezagados, muy por detrás de algunos como Argentina, Brasil y Chile. Uno de los motivos que impiden a Paraguay seguir el ritmo de evolución de telecomunicaciones que muestran otros países latinoamericanos es la falta de un backhaul de fibra óptica amplio y extendido en todo el país; y a su vez, acceso a la fibra óptica internacional, algo que su posición geográfica dificulta.Y es justamente esto lo que reclamó el presidente de la Comisión Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (Conatel), Jorge Seall Sasiain, ante la Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT), que se celebra en Guadalajara, México, del 4 al 22 de octubre. Lo que busca el número uno del regulador local es que la UIT apoye en forma especial a los países mediterráneos para que puedan acceder a la fibra óptica internacional en forma directa o preferencial. Es sabido que aquellas naciones sin salida al mar presentan mayores complicaciones a la hora de conectarse a las diferentes redes de cable submarino internacional, con los sabidos problemas de costos y retraso que esto acarrea. En Sudamérica, los grandes exponentes de esta problemática son el propio Paraguay y Bolivia.Durante su presentación en la Conferencia, Seall destacó el avance de los servicios de telefonía celular en Paraguay, y aseguró que el servicio cuenta con una penetración de alrededor del 95 por ciento, con una cobertura territorial del 60 por ciento. Los números son importantes si se tiene en cuenta que se trata de un país con índices de pobreza que rondan el 35 por ciento de la población. Según indicó el ejecutivo, los avances en algunos sectores de las telecomunicaciones no se han debido sólo a las decisiones adoptadas por la entidad reguladora, sino también a la gestión de empresas y profesionales nacionales y extranjeros, que conjuntamente invierten y compiten en igualdad de condiciones en el mercado paraguayo.
Lea el texto completo en: http://www.telesemana.com/analisis/detalle.php?id=4740
Don't miss your chance to win one of 3 iPad Wi-Fi enabled tablet computers! Our competition is open to all registered PP-10 delegates and observers.
To enter, simply visit the PP-10 website at www.itu.int/plenipotentiary and click on Competition. Youll be asked to answer one simple question, after which your name will be automatically entered in the prize draw, which will take place on Thursday, 21 November.
All delegates/observers are encouraged to participate, even if not present through until the end of the conference. Prizes will be shipped to winners should they not be able to collect their iPad.
Sponsored by:
Week two of the Guadalajara conference ends with debates going on in earnest
With the elections over, the conference has switched gear to deal with policy and strategic issues that will shape the future of telecommunications and information and communication technologies. A number of ad hoc and drafting groups have been set up by the various substantive Committees and by the Working Group of the Plenary to lead negotiations. As Highlights only cover plenary meetings where all decisions of the conference are taken, conclusions reached on issues under negotiation will be reported on in the third week of the conference. Meanwhile, this issue of the Highlights covers the discussion in the plenary meeting of 14 October, along with the side events organized during week two of the conference.
Mr Valery Timofeev, Director of the ITU Radiocommunication BureauMr Houlin Zhao, ITU Deputy Secretary-GeneralMr Aboubakar Zourmba, Cameroon, Laureate of the ITU Medal and CertificateMr Hassan Lebbadi, Morocco, Laureate of the ITU Medal and CertificateDr Hamadoun Touré, ITU Secretary-GeneralMr Sami Al Basheer, Director of the ITU Telecommunication Development BureauMr Shola Taylor, Nigeria, Laureate of the ITU Medal and CertificateMr Malcolm Johnson, Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau
Additional RRB members, not present, will receive their ITU Medal and Certificate by mail:Shahzada Alam Malik, PakistanRobert W. Jones, CanadaMartine Limodin, FranceWladyslaw Moron, Poland
La idea es facilitar el acceso a las telecomunicaciones para reducir el margen de desigualdad
For statement and video clip from the Plenary session, see: http://bit.ly/bkumwg
GUADALAJARA, JALISCO (BI).- El secretario general de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT), Dr. Hamadoun Touré, el Dr. Javier Elguea Solís, representante de Fundación Carlos Slim y el Secretario de Educación de Jalisco, Ing. Antonio Gloria Morales, pusieron en operación el Aula Digital Fundación Carlos Slim-UIT en la escuela primaria Ricardo Flores Magón.El Aula, que se inauguró en el marco de la Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones que se celebra en esta ciudad, está dotada con 36 equipos de cómputo de escritorio y portátiles, proyector de video, cámaras fotográficas y de video, impresora, escanner, microscopio biológico monocular, globo terráqueo con lápiz interactivo; además del mobiliario requerido para su eficiente operación.El Dr. Touré comentó: Nosotros apoyamos en la UIT plenamente a las escuelas para alcanzar las metas del Milenio para la sociedad de la información en el 2015, por ello nos es relevante conectar a las escuelas con banda ancha, conectar a una escuela, conectar a una comunidad es sumamente importante y ese es nuestro objetivo. Por esta razón estamos sumamente complacidos de asociarnos con la Fundación Carlos Slim este día para conectar a esta escuela, porque los niños son nuestro futuro.Lea el texto completo: http://www.periodicoelsur.com/noticia.aspx?idnoticia=51782
Nuestro país fue distinguido como uno de los nueve miembros americanos del Consejo de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT), tras obtener 91 votos de los 191 plenipotenciarios de esta organización de Naciones Unidas.
La elección se realizó el pasado 11 de octubre en la ciudad de Guadalajara, México. De esta forma, nuestro país ocupará uno de los 47 escaños del Consejo al igual que otros países americanos como Argentina, Brasil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Estados Unidos, México y Venezuela. Esta fue la primera vez que el Paraguay presentó su candidatura.
La UIT cumple la función de coordinador mundial de los gobiernos y sector privado, prestadoras del servicio de telecomunicaciones, atendiendo tres factores fundamentales: radiocomunicación, normalización y desarrollo.
En representación de Paraguay estuvo el titular de la Comisión Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (CONATEL), Jorge Seall Sasiain, quien calificó este resultado como un gran compromiso pues como país mediterráneo se debe redoblar los empeños y esfuerzos por mantener y ampliar su conectividad con el mundo, refiere el informe remitido a la Dirección General de Información Presidencial.
Ghana maintained its seat on the 48-member council of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) at the 18th Plenipotentiary Conference of the union in Guadalajara, Mexico.Ghana was elected among 13 countries from region D, made up of African countries. From the region of 21 countries vying for the 13 slots, Egypt, Kenya, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa, Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal and Cameroun were the other countries which were elected to the council.Ghanas delegation to the conference, which was led by the Minister of Communications, Mr Haruna Iddrisu, included a former Minister of Communications and incumbent Second Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Professor Mike Oquaye; Ghanas Ambassador to the United States and Mexico, Mr Ohene Agyekum; the Director-General of the National Communications Authority (NCA), Mr Paarock VanPercy, and the Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Communications, Mr Twumasi Appiah.Other members of the delegation were Mr Fritz Baffour, Member of the Parliamentary Select Committee; Alhaji Gamal A. Razak, Managing Director of Abrar International, and senior officials from the Ministry of Communications.Mr Iddrisu told the Daily Graphic that the performance of Ghana was a testimony to the positive moves by the country to implement various policies as part of efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
For full text, see: http://www.graphic.com.gh/news/page.php?news=9730
UIT analiza tránsito al nuevo protocolo IPv6
La discusión en torno a la migración de las direcciones de Internet, del protocolo actual IPv4 al nuevo IPv6, continúa en los salones de la Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT). La mayoría de las propuestas de los países miembros solicitan apoyo y capacitación para que los países menos desarrollados logren la transición.
Durante una sesión de trabajo, representantes de diversos países solicitaron que la UIT intervenga en la designación de direcciones de Internet IPv6 con el fin de evitar lo sucedido con el protocolo IPv4, que presentó saturación de direcciones.
Lea el texto completo en: http://impreso.milenio.com/node/8848194
ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun Touré was made an Honorary Citizen of the City of Guadalajara and awarded the Keys of the City by the Mayor of Guadalajara, Mr Jorge Aristóteles Sandoval, in a ceremony held at the citys gracious Palacio Municipal at midday today.
Dr Touré praised the warmth, professionalism and indomitable spirit of the people of Guadalajara, which, he said, had all contributed to making PP-10 such a tremendous success. He also complemented the city on its cultural richness, its varied cuisine, and its passionate commitment to ICTs, which have helped it quickly position itself as the Mexican Silicon Valley.
Guadalajara will hold a very special place in my heart for the rest of my days, he said.
ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun Touré found himself exuberantly mobbed by hundreds of small children this morning, as he assisted in the inauguration of a new Digital Classroom at the Ricardo Flores Magón primary school in the colonia of Santa Eduwiges, just a few minutes from Guadalajara Expo centre.
Bangladesh has been elected council member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for the period 2010-2014 in the Asia and Australasia region.Bangladesh has secured the 6th position out of 13 seats in this region and has obtained 123 votes, said Major M A Kashem (Rtd), consultant of Bangladesh Telecommunication and Regulatory Commission (BTRC), (Submarine Cable System). The election was held in Guadalajara in Mexico Monday. Bangladesh achieved such a huge success at its first participation and hence it can be described as a great achievement of the nation, Mr Kashem said.From now on Bangladesh can take part in making decision regarding the ITU regulations as well as in the policy making process in relation to telecommunication, he said.This success will encourage Bangladesh not only to play a vital role but also to play the role of a pioneer for the least developed countries, which will help us a lot to build up Digital Bangladesh, he said.The Bangladesh delegation was lead by Post and Telecommunication Minister Raziuddin Ahmed Raju, Chairman of the parliamentary committee on the ministry Hasanul Huq Inu, Secretary Sunil Kanti Bose, BTRC Chairman Zia Ahmed and members of the parliamentary committee.
JAKARTA - Indonesia has been reelected as a member of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) for the 2010-2014 period, a Communication Ministry spokesman said."The reelection of Indonesia as a member of ITU was the result of the work hard of Indonesian delegates in conducting lobbying during the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference being held from October 4 to 22," Gatot S Dewa Broto, head of human relations affairs of the the Ministry of Communications and Informatics, said here on Tuesday.He said that Indonesia had an interest in being reelected member of the Union because it had a large telecommunications market which was developing rapidly with progressive development activities.Gatot said that Indonesia had taken an active part in the ITU Council's forums during its membership periods of 2002 - 2006 and 2006 - 2010.With its reelection as a member of ITU for the 2010 - 2014 period, Indonesia would be able to fight for the interest of developing nations in the industrial field, particularly regarding Indonesia's interest in telecommunications, radio frequencies and satellite orbits, he said.
Por primera vez el país está presente en el organismo más importante de las Naciones Unidas en lo que concierne a las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación
Es un privilegio y un orgullo que Costa Rica haya sido elegido como miembro del Consejo de la UIT. Una de las prioridades de Costa Rica será la de promover un desarrollo de las telecomunicaciones de forma sostenible, incentivando el uso de tecnologías con calidad ambiental. Recordando que ambos propósitos no son incompatibles, expresó el jerarca. Según expresa un comunicado emitido por la Rectoría de Telecomunicaciones del Viceministerio de Telecomunicaciones el Consejo de la UIT está integrado por 47 países, donde están representadas las regiones de América, Europa Occidental, Europa Oriental, África y Asia-Australasia.
Lea el texto completo en: http://www.prensalibre.cr/pl/internacional/33584-costa-rica-promovera-telecomunicaciones-sostenibles-en-la-uit.html
KIGALI - Rwanda has been elected to The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Council, during the ongoing ITUs Plenipotentiary Conference in Guadalajara, Mexico.
The ITU is an agency of the United Nations responsible for coordinating effective development and use of telecommunications globally.
Its core activities involve management of international frequency spectrum, satellite orbit resources and making of telecommunications standards that govern telecommunications industry. It also promotes the ICT growth and development globally.
The ITU council, composed of 46 member states, is responsible for smooth running of the union and setting broad policies that govern telecommunications at a global level.
Rwandas delegation at the campaign in Mexico was headed by Dr. Ignace Gatare, the Minister in the Presidents Office in charge of Information and Communications Technology.
Rwandas election to the ITU council is a major milestone in the countrys ICT development, and a recognition of the global role President Paul Kagame continues to play in ensuring that ICT is developed and accessible to address some of the worlds challenges, said David Kanamugire, the Permanent Secretary in the ICT Ministry.
For full text, see: http://www.newtimes.co.rw/index.php?issue=14412&article=34530
GUADALAJARA, Mexico, Oct 13 - It was a double success for Kenya on Tuesday as the country was elected to two key positions in a specialised United Nations Agency. Kenya was picked to the International Telecommunication Unions (ITU) Council and the Radio Regulation Board (RRB) during the ongoing ITUs 18th Plenipotentiary Conference in Guadalajara, Mexico. The country, which has served in the Council since her first election in 1982, garnered 119 votes out of 161 eligible voting Member States, to return the second highest tally behind Egypt in Region D (Africa).Kenya is headed for great things and by supporting each other and working as a team we can achieve anything we put our mind to, Information and Communications Minister Samuel Poghisio said while congratulating the members.For full text, see: http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/business/Kenyabusiness/Kenya-sways-Mexico-ITU-meet-4826.html#ixzz12GnXEi6M
España seguirá formando parte del consejo de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT) --organismo de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas encargado de regular las telecomunicaciones a nivel internacional-- cuyas elecciones se celebran cada cuatro años.
Así, tras la votación llevada a cabo el pasado día 11 en Guadalajara (México), España, que quedó en tercera posición, integrará una vez más el consejo de la UIT dentro de la región B, correspondiente a Europa Occidental.
El Consejo está formado por 48 estados miembros, de los 192 que integran la UIT. De los 48 puestos, 8 corresponden a la región de Europa occidental. La función del organismo es examinar asuntos generales de política de las telecomunicaciones para garantizar que las actividades, políticas y estrategias de la Unión responden al entorno actual de las telecomunicaciones.
En las elecciones al consejo estuvo presente el secretario de Estado de Telecomunicaciones, Bernardo Lorenzo, según indicaron a Europa Press fuentes de la Secretaria de Estado de Telecomunicaciones y para la Sociedad de la Información (Setsi).
Lea el texto completo en: http://www.europapress.es/economia/noticia-economia-telecos-espana-seguira-formando-parte-consejo-union-internacional-telecomunicaciones-uit-20101013141815.html
La Tunisie a été élue, lundi, membre du Conseil d'administration de l'Union internationale des télécommunications (UIT), lors de la conférence des plénipotentiaires de l'UIT qui se tient du 4 au 22 octobre, dans la ville mexicaine de Guadalajara.L'élection de la Tunisie pour un mandat de quatre ans (2011-2014) intervient en témoignage de reconnaissance pour le rôle d'avant-garde de la Tunisie ainsi que pour les percées qu'elle a réalisées à l'échelle régionale et internationale dans le domaine des technologies de la communication.
El secretario general de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT), Hamadoun Touré, dijo que México va en el camino correcto para lograr la modernización de las telecomunicaciones.
Luego de calificar como "normales" las batallas legales de los operadores contra el gobierno para conseguir más concesiones del espectro, Touré minimizó el rezago actual de México en algunos rubros, pues se trata, dijo, de áreas que están dejando de ser relevantes.
En entrevista con EL FINANCIERO, el secretario general de la UIT reconoció que si bien México está un poco más abajo que otros países de Latinoamérica en la penetración de servicios de telefonía fija y móvil, en servicio de Internet su promedio es similar a los demás, mientras en banda ancha está más avanzado.
"El futuro es la banda ancha, de manera que yo le doy muy alta calificación a México", señaló el máximo representante del organismo dependiente de la ONU.
Lea el texto completo en: http://www.opemedios.com.mx/archivos/multimedia/755267MEXICOPASAFIANNCIERO.PDF
The second PP10 side event focused on ICTs and climate change.
Speakers included Malcolm Johnson, Director, Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB), ITU; Kevin Grose presenting remotely from UNFCCC Bonn; Sechwyo Nzima, Ministry of Comms and Transport, Zambia; Javier Camargo, Ericsson; Alejandro Vidal, Telefonica and Chae-Sub Lee, Chairman of ITU-T Study Group 13.
Johnsons introductory speech noted that when ITU first started work in the field people were sceptical about the link between ICTs and climate change. He noted that ITUs many initiatives have helped to raise awareness of the issue to the extent that there is now widespread understanding of the power of ICTs to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions across all industry sectors.
He cited CO2 savings of some 108 tonnes in 2007, as consequence of distributing ITU-T standards (ITU-T Recommendations) online compared to on paper as an example of how the secretariat is working to become greener.
Johnson also announced that ITU is working with Ghana to develop a country assessment on how ICTs can help to combat climate change in accordance with UNFCCC guidelines.
Kevin Grose of UNFCCC which holds its COP16 meeting in Cancun, Mexico in December gave his remote presentation focusing in part on the need for mitigation actions to be reflected in the developing world. He highlighted accounting standards, partnerships and technology transfer as necessary to boost the ICT industrys efforts to green itself and help towards general GHG mitigation.
ITU will participate in various activities at COP16, including organizing a side event with UNIDO, UNDESA, and WIPO; speaking at a side-event organized by WMO, UN-Habitat and WHO. In addition, the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) is organizing a Tech Fair to be held in Cancun (5-8 December) in which ITU will participate.
Chae-Sub Lee of ITU-Ts Future Networks Study Group (Study Group 13) showed how next generation networks (NGNs) being deployed around the world are more energy efficient by an estimated 40 per cent than previous public switched telephone networks (PSTNs).
El mundo está avanzando hacia el apagón analógico y el salto a la televisión digital. Sin embargo, apenas 20 países han completado el proceso, según dijo Francois Rancy, director de la Oficina de Radiocomunicaciones de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT).
La mayor parte de los países de Europa, Asia y África han propuesto al año 2015 como fecha límite para completar el apagón, al igual que México, sin embargo, hay naciones que atrasaron el límite hasta 2020.
América se mantiene en la media, buscando terminar el salto en 2015, pero algunos países desafían el plazo imponiendo el servicio antes del tiempo previsto.
En México se planea lograr por completo el cambio a la televisión digital en 2015, iniciando por los estados al Norte del país y continuando paulatinamente hacia el resto del territorio. (Público, 4 de octubre de 2010)
El apagón ha generado incertidumbre en algunos países, pero el secretario general de la UIT, Hamadoun Touré, aseguró que lejos de generar desempleo o impactos negativos, la transición hacia la digitalización representa oportunidades para la industria de la televisión y la radiodifusión.
Guadalajara. Miriana Moro/ Patricia Romo Sahagún
El presidente mexicano Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, anunció que 3 dispositivos satelitales serán puestos en órbita para operaciones de seguridad y aprovechamiento de la Banda L.
(ElectronicosOnline.com Magazine / Oswaldo Barajas).- La décimo octava (18) Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT 2010) inaugurada el pasado lunes 4 de octubre en la ciudad de Guadalajara, Jalisco, sirvió de plataforma para anunciar la iniciativa del gobierno mexicano en la inversión de 3 nuevos satélites para tareas de seguridad y fortalecimiento de bandas de comunicación. La inauguración de este importante evento de Telecomunicaciones -que por primera vez se realiza en México- corrió a cargo del presidente de México, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, quien aprovechó la oportunidad para anunciar la inversión de 1,500 millones de dólares para poner en órbita 3 satélites que servirán para labores de seguridad pública y engrandecimiento de la banda de comunicación L, la cual permitirá expandir los servicios a comunidades marginadas y mejorar la calidad de señal en dispositivos de enlace. El Gobierno de México trabaja para que quienes menos tienen puedan tener acceso a las telecomunicaciones, puedan tener acceso, en condiciones equitativas, no sólo a la televisión, la radio, a la telefonía, sino, desde luego al Internet, y que puedan participar en su desarrollo personal y en el del país con las tecnologías de la información y de la comunicación (
), dijo el primer mandatario mexicano, a través del comunicado de prensa vertido en el portal oficial del Gobierno de México.
Lea texto el completo en: http://electronicosonline.com/noticias/notas.php?id=A5479_0_1_0_M
The UAE has been re-elected on the International Telecommunications Unions Council to hold the position on the policy-making body for the next four years at the 18th ITU Plenipotentiary Conference at Guadalajara in Mexico.
The UAE was re-nominated to the policy-making body last month and the re-election took place last week.
The body sets the Union's general policies, adopts four-year strategic and financial plans for the three main sectors of the ITU (Radio-communications, Standardization and Development) and elects the ITU management team.
The last Plenipotentiary conference was held in the Turkish city of Antalya in 2006, where the UAE was elected for the membership of the ITU Council for the first time. The ITU council comprises 46 countries from the 192 member states of the International Telecommunication Union.
The successful election of the UAE came as a result of the great efforts made by the UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA), said a statement.
This endeavour reflects the international community's confidence in the UAE, highlighting the efficient contributions the UAE has made during international forums and organizations affiliated with telecommunications and information, said a statement.
Quito (Pichincha).- El Ministerio de Telecomunicaciones y de la Sociedad de la Información MINTEL, como órgano rector del sector de Telecomunicaciones en el país promueve la postulación de la República del Ecuador al Consejo de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT), con el fin de impulsar políticas prioritarias de acceso tecnológico que garanticen el avance del país hacia la Sociedad de la Información.
La Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones es la organización más importante de las Naciones Unidas con relación a tecnologías de la información y comunicación. Ecuador es miembro de este organismo desde abril de 1920, es decir, desde hace 90 años. La administración ecuatoriana de telecomunicaciones se suma a los esfuerzos de la organización para que todos los ciudadanos accedan y generen información y conocimiento, mediante el uso efectivo de las tecnologías.
Lea el texto completo en: http://www.elciudadano.gob.ec/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=17525:ecuador-presente-en-cumbre-de-union-internacional-de-telecomunicaciones-uit-en-mexico&catid=1:actualidad&Itemid=42
H.E. Mr Lyonpo Nandalal Rai, Bhutan's Minister of Information & Communications, talks of why their Gross Happiness Index was conceived, how it is measured and it's link to the national development programme: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
Conference wraps up elections having elected members to the Radio Regulations Board and Member States to serve on the ITU Council for the next four years
On 11 October 2010, the Guadalajara Conference elected members of the Radio Regulations Board (RRB), an important body in ITU, as well as Member States to serve on the Council for the next four years. These elections conclude one of the key agenda items of the Guadalajara Conference.
Buenos Aires, 11 de octubre (Télam).- Argentina logró la reelección como representante de las Américas en el Consejo de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT), en el marco de la Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios que concluye hoy en Guadalajara.
En tanto, el Secretario de la UIT, Hamadoun Touré (Malí), y el vicesecretario Houlin Zhao (China), fueron reelectos por cuatro años más para ejercer la conducción del organismo internacional.
Al mismo tiempo que la delegación argentina, encabezada por Héctor Carril actual integrante del Consejo de la UIT, lograba la reelección, por primera vez en la historia, un representante argentino fue elegido para integrar la Junta de Reglamento de Radiocomunicaciones.
Ricardo Terán, de la Secretaría de Comunicaciones, fue el más votado por los especialistas en normativas de telecomunicaciones para integrar el organismo que define políticas para sugerir su aplicación en los diferentes países que integran la UIT, informaron a Télam fuentes de la delegación nacional.
Lea el texto completo en: http://www.elpatagonico.net/index.php?item=viewlast&ref=ultimas&id=153329&sec=eco
Le Maroc a été réélu avec une majorité confortable pour un nouveau mandat de quatre ans (2011-2014), a-t-on indiqué auprès de la délégation marocaine participant à cette conférence de Plénipotentiaires de l'UIT, ouverte le 4 octobre et devant prendre fin le 22 courant.
Cette réélection "vient couronner le travail mené par le Maroc au sein de ce conseil depuis son élection pour la première fois en 1962''. Elle confirme également "le soutien et l'appui de la communauté internationale aux différents chantiers menés par le Royaume dans le secteur des télécommunications grâce à sa politique de libéralisation du secteur'', a-t-on ajouté de même source.
Le Maroc a été également élu membre du Comité du Règlement des Radiocommunications de l'UIT en la personne de M. Mustapha Bessi, Ingénieur en télécommunications à l'Agence Nationale de Règlementation des Télécommunications (ANRT).
Es uno de los 48 miembros que integran el Consejo de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones, para el periodo 2010-2014
México fue reelecto este miércoles como uno de los 48 miembros que integran el Consejo de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT), para el periodo 2010-2014, informó la Cancillería mexicana en un comunicado.
Las elecciones se realizaron durante la Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios de la UIT, que se desarrolla en Guadalajara, Jalisco, desde el 4 y hasta el 22 de octubre de 2010.
La Cancillería destacó que México obtuvo 143 votos de 158 presentes y votantes, el mayor número de votos entre los 48 miembros electos y el que ha obtenido más votos en toda la historia del organismo especializado del Sistema de las Naciones Unidas.
Lea el texto completo en: http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/715478.html
First and final round of the elections: Monday, 11 October, 9.30 hours (Guadalajara time): http://www.itu.int/plenipotentiary/2010/elections/results/index.html#rrb
REGION A, THE AMERICAS (2 seats) - Total number of votes: 160Ricardo Luis TERÁN (Argentine Republic) : 154Julie NAPIER ZOLLER (United States) : 145
REGION B, WESTERN EUROPE (2 seats) - Total number of votes: 160Alfredo MAGENTA (Italy) : 98 Mindaugas ZILINSKAS (Lithuania) : 89 Peter MAJOR (Hungary) : 81 Vassilios G. CASSAPOGLOU (Greece) : 35
REGION C, EASTERN EUROPE & NORTHERN ASIA (2 seats) - Total number of votes: 160Victor STRELETS (Russian Federation) : 102 Baiysh NURMATOV (Kyrgyz Republic) : 71 Momcilo SIMIC (Serbia) : 70 Aurelian Sorinel CALINCIUC (Romania) : 61
REGION D, AFRICA (3 seats) - Total number of votes: 160Stanley Kaige KIBE (Kenya) : 142 Mustapha BESSI (Morocco) : 124 Simon KOFFI (Côte d'Ivoire) : 119 Haroun Mahamat BADAOUY (Chad) : 60
REGION E, ASIA & AUSTRALASIA (3 seats) - Total number of votes: 160Yasuhiko ITO (Japan) : 120 Ali R. EBADI (Malaysia) : 93 P. K. GARG (India) : 78 Nasser BIN HAMMAD (United Arab Emirates) : 69 Alireza DARVISHI (Iran) : 49 Mian Muhammad JAVED (Pakistan) : 44 Nader Shah ARIAN (Afghanistan) : 8
GUADALAJARA, México, 11 octubre. Cuba fue reelecta hoy por sexta vez consecutiva miembro del Consejo de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT), durante la XVIII Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios, que sesiona desde el pasado día 4 en esta ciudad.
Con 125 votos de los países participantes, Cuba obtuvo una de las nueve plazas asignadas al continente americano, con una votación superior a las elecciones anteriores.
Además, por América también fueron elegidos miembros del Consejo de la UIT Argentina, Brasil, Canadá, Costa Rica, Estados Unidos, México, Paraguay y Venezuela.
La delegación cubana que asiste a la Conferencia de la UIT, la cual sesiona cada cuatro años, consideró un éxito para su país y para la integración regional, el formar parte nuevamente de ese órgano, el cual consta de 48 estados miembros, informa PL.
Con su reelección Cuba adquiere el compromiso de trabajar a favor de la cooperación, la solidaridad internacional y con pleno respeto a la soberanía de los países en el intercambio de las telecomunicaciones.
Lea el texto completo en: http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/2010/10/11/cubamundo/artic03.html
Watch our video feature on emergency telecommunications to find out more on ITU's work in this area: http://bit.ly/bUyp3X
H.E. Mr Haruna Iddrisu (MP), Minister of Communications talks of the negative impacts of dumping redundant equipment in developing countries and asks for technology that is sent to be appropropriate and effective. Dealing with cybercrime in Ghana and across borders also discussed: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
Ciudad de México.- El titular de la Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transportes (SCT), Juan Francisco Molinar Horcasitas, y el ministro de Telecomunicación y de Comunicación de Masas de la Federación Rusa, Igor Shchegoglev, suscribieron un memorándum de entendimiento para el intercambio de información en materia de telecomunicaciones, en el que se promueve la regulación de las telecomunicaciones y el uso eficiente del espacio radioeléctrico, entre otros temas.El acuerdo se llevó a cabo durante las actividades de la 18 Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT), realizada en Jalisco, ya que la experiencia de Rusia es amplia en materia de telecomunicaciones y, además, es pionera en tecnología satelital. Estos conocimientos pueden ser de gran beneficio para México, aseguró el titular de la SCT al término de la formalización del convenio.
Lea el texto completo en: http://bit.ly/a8oUvu
First and final round of the elections: Monday, 11 October, 9.30 hours (Guadalajara time):http://www.itu.int/plenipotentiary/2010/elections/results/index.html#council
REGION A, THE AMERICAS (9 seats) - Total number of votes: 161Mexico (143)Brazil (135) Canada (135) Argentina (131) Cuba (125) Venezuela (119) United States (114) Costa Rica (93) Paraguay (91) Colombia (89) Ecuador (75) Jamaica (70) REGION B, WESTERN EUROPE (8 seats) - Total number of votes: 161Switzerland (141) Spain (138) Italy (136) France (135) Germany (130) Sweden (126) Turkey (125) Greece (109) Portugal (102) REGION C, EASTERN EUROPE & NORTHERN ASIA (5 seats) - Total number of votes: 161Russian Federation (123) Bulgaria (116) Romania (114) Poland (107) Czech Republic (93) Ukraine (91)Azerbaijan (76) REGION D, AFRICA (13 seats) - Total number of votes: 161Egypt (122) Kenya (119) Algeria (114) Morocco (114) Ghana (112) Tunisia (111) South Africa (105) Mali (101) Burkina Faso (97) Nigeria (95) Rwanda (93) Senegal (93) Cameroon (83) Uganda (79) Mauritius (78) Tanzania (76) Côte d'Ivoire (71) Sudan (57) Malawi (41) Chad (28) REGION E, ASIA & AUSTRALASIA (13 seats) - Total number of votes: 161Indonesia (135) China (134) Japan (133) Malaysia (127) Korea (Rep. of) (125) Bangladesh (123) Thailand (121) Australia (119) India (119) United Arab Emirates (114) Kuwait (108) Saudi Arabia (105) Philippines (97) Pakistan (93) Sri Lanka (79) Lebanon (75)
SANTO DOMINGO (R. Dominicana).- El Instituto Dominicano de las Telecomunicaciones (INDOTELl) y la Agencia Nacional de Frecuencias (ANFR), de Francia, se comprometieron a intercambiar informaciones y experiencias sobre controles administrativos y técnicos de las frecuencias radioeléctricas.
El convenio fue firmado por el presidente de Indotel, David Pérez Taveras, y el representante de la ANFR, Francois Rancy, durante la Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios 2010, de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT) celebradas en México.
Lea el texto completo en: http://bit.ly/c54OPS
ITUs top management team for the next four years is now complete
Conference elects François Rancy of France as Director of the Radiocommunication Bureau and Brahima Sanou of Burkina Faso as Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau
On Friday evening (8 October 2010), the conference completed the elections for ITUs five top jobs. This issue of the Highlights gives the election results of the two posts, for which the first round of voting started on 7 October 2010 - the post of Director of the Radiocommunication Bureau (BR) and the post of Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT) (see also Issue No.4 of the Highlights).
For full text, see: http://bit.ly/dpUTtt
ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun Touré communicated a personal message to schoolchildren in a remote location high in the Bolivian Andes through a satellite link powered by SATMEX. Using the Ku band transmitter of the SATMEX 6 satellite, the SG emphasized the importance of connectivity to social and economic development of all communities, no matter how remote.
SATMEX CEO Patricio Northland is a strong proponent of 'connecting the unconnected' right across the entire Latin American continent. Under his the leadership, SATMEX has been partnering with ITUs Radiocommunication and Development Sectors to help connect isolated schools and communities, offering broadband access and social applications like e-health and e-government.
En 2013, 4.1 millones de jaliscienses formarán parte del proyecto: gobernador.
El programa tendrá un costo de 450 mdp; la primera etapa prevé tener conectados a 42 municipios en diciembre
En diciembre próximo, 6,322 escuelas públicas, hospitales y oficinas de gobierno en 42 de los 125 municipios de Jalisco formarán parte de la red digital estatal con servicio de banda ancha.
Con la red digital, las escuelas públicas podrán tomar alguna clase a distancia y los maestros podrán recibir capacitación, y en el caso de los hospitales, un paciente podrá tener un diagnóstico de un especialista médico que se encuentre en otra ciudad, informó el gobernador, Emilio González Márquez, al presentar el programa en el marco de la Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT).
Lea el texto completo en: http://impreso.milenio.com/node/8844639
Interview with Commission on ICTs Chairman, H.E. Mr Ivan John Uy, see: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
3rd round of voting scheduled for Friday, 8 October at 16:45.
For more information on the elections, see:http://www.itu.int/plenipotentiary/2010/elections/results/index.html
Guadalajara (México), 8 de octubre de 2010 La UIT dio hoy la bienvenida a los nuevos Directores de sus Oficinas de Radiocomunicaciones y de Desarrollo de las Telecomunicaciones. El Sr. François Rancy (Francia) y el Sr. Brahima Sanou (Burkina Faso) fueron elegidos por la Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios que se celebra en Guadalajara (México). El Sr. Rancy ganó las elecciones con 90 votos de 157 países presentes, mientras que el Sr. Sanou obtuvo 81 votos.
El Sr. Malcolm Johnson (Reino Unido) fue reelegido ayer Director de la Oficina de Normalización de las Telecomunicaciones (TSB). Era el único candidato al cargo y fue elegido con 152 votos.
Lea el texto completo en: http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/38-es.aspx
Frédéric Riehl discusses the work of Committee 5 at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2010: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
Interview with Poland's Undersecretary of State responsible for telecommunication, Ministry of Infrastructure, Ms Magdalena Gaj, see: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
Interview with Australian Minister for Broadband, Communications & the Digital Economy and Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Stephen Conroy, see: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
H.E. Mr Liu Lihua, Member of the Leadership of the Ministry of Industry & Information Technology, Director General of the General Office of MIIT at PP-10 today.
Check http://bit.ly/bkumwg for statements and video clips from the Plenary sessions.
2nd round of elections scheduled for Friday, 8 October at 09:00.
Elections got under way on 7 October 2010, with the conference re-electing Dr Hamadoun Touré as Secretary-General of ITU; Houlin Zhao as Deputy Secretary-General; and Malcolm Johnson as Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB). All three were first elected to these posts at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Antalya, Turkey, in November 2006 and took office on 1 January 2007.
Elections will continue on 8 October for the other two top posts of Director of the Radiocommunication Bureau (BR) and of Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT). Both posts have three contenders as follows: Fabio Leite (Brazil); François Rancy (France) and Dr Veena Rawat (Canada). Contenders for the post of BDT Director are: Sami Al Basheer Al Morshid (Saudi Arabia), who holds the post since 2007; Héctor Olavarría-Tapia (Mexico); and Brahima Sanou (Burkina Faso).
Addiction counsellors have told Newsbeat they're seeing more cases of people worried about being hooked on playing video games. There are now calls for the gaming industry to offer more support to people who can't switch off. Technology or computer addiction isn't officially recognised as a clinical condition. But the group representing games companies admits there needs to be more research into the problem.
"Most of the people that are getting into difficulties tend to be in their teenage years and early 20s. "As that generation moves through and others come on behind, I think the problem is going to get bigger."
(Source: BBC)
Full story
500 million users worldwide and still growing, Facebook is now ubiquitous. Because of its popularity, minors have jumped onto the social media bandwagon, too, and they use networking the same way adults do--to share pictures, connect with friends, organize events, and play social games. And that can be a problem.
For the most part, Facebook provides a fun and safe way for users of all ages to communicate with their pals. But because kids and teens are, well, kids and teens, they're the ones most at risk of falling victim to the dangers of Facebook. With a bit of strategic parental guidance, you can educate your kids about the potential hazards of social media and give them the tools they need to protect themselves from online predators, guard their personal information, preserve their online reputation, and avoid suspicious downloads that could harm your PC.
(Source: PC World)
PC World
Interview with H.E. Mr Philip L. Verveer, Ambassador, United States Coordinator, International Communications & Information Policy, United States Department of State: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
H.E. Prof Geoffrey LUNGWANGWA, Minister, Ministry of Communications & Transport for Zambia at PP-10 today.
Guadalajara (México), 7 de octubre de 2010 Los Estados Miembros de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones eligieron hoy al Dr. Hamadoun I. Touré de Malí para desempeñar el cargo de Secretario General de la UIT durante un segundo periodo de cuatro años. La elección tuvo lugar en Guadalajara (México), durante la Sesión Plenaria matutina de la 18ª Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios de la UIT. El Dr. Touré, único candidato que se presentaba, fue declarado ganador con 151 votos en un proceso de elección en que estuvieron presentes y votaron los representantes de 157 países.
Dirigiéndose a los participantes en la Conferencia después de conocerse los resultados de la votación, el Dr. Touré dijo a los 1 500 delegados procedentes de todo el mundo que "prestará atención especial al acceso en banda ancha y se asegurará de que la ciberseguridad sea uno de los puntos prioritarios para todos". El Dr. Touré también ha prometido velar por que se tomen en consideración especial los pequeños Estados insulares en desarrollo y los países sin litoral.
Lea el texto completa en: http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/37-es.aspx
On 6 October 2010, the conference approved the report of the Council on the activities of the Union for the period 2007-2010 (see Document PP-10/20). This report gives an overview of the main activities of the Union since the last Plenipotentiary Conference in Antalya in 2006, and summarizes progress in the implementation of the Strategic Plan for the years 2008-2011.
Offer accepted by universal acclamation during PP-10. For statement, see: http://bit.ly/bkumwg
Interview with Korea Communications Commission Chairman, Mr See Joong Choi, see: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
Bruce Gracie discusses the work of Committee 6 at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2010: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
Policy statement from Comoros at PP-10. Check http://bit.ly/bkumwg for statements and video clips from the Plenary sessions.
H.E. Ms Judith Macgregor, UK Ambassador to Mexico at PP-10 today. Check http://bit.ly/bkumwg for statements and video clips from the Plenary sessions.
The 4th Thursday of April to be set as Girls Day to encourage girls to pursue ICT careers.
For statement, see: http://bit.ly/bkumwg
Interview with H.E. Mrs Jasna MATIC, Minister, Ministry of Telecommunications & Information Society, see: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
ITUs main sources of income are the contributions from its Member States, Sector Members and Associates, made under a free choice system. A key task for the Plenipotentiary Conference in Guadalajara is to approve ITUs Financial Plan for 2012-2015, covering two biennial budget periods. Fundamental to the preparation of the Financial Plan is the determination in Swiss Francs of the contributory unit payable by Member States. At its annual session in April 2010, the Council fixed the provisional amount of the contributory unit at CHF 318 000 (or zero nominal growth) for the period 20122015.
Addressing the Plenary on Tuesday morning, ITU Secretary-General, proposed that the amount of the contributory unit should be fixed at CHF 318 000, maintaining a status quo. I would like to ensure that we leave this Plenipotentiary Conference with a balanced financial Plan. The key to a robust financial Plan is a realistic revenue forecast, Dr Touré stressed. I believe that we can here and now take the decision to set the definitive upper limit, in order to facilitate our ability to forecast revenue for the period 2012 2015, Dr Touré added.
For full text, see: http://bit.ly/bMko5W
A new online community for professional women in ICT: http://www.fcc.gov/ib/wisenet/data/ announced by the US Federal Communications Commission at the Womens Breakfast held during the Plenipotentiary Conference.
Timor-Leste delighted to be ITUs 192nd member and will be bringing world-class ICT services to its people. For the full statement and video, check: http://bit.ly/bkumwg
It was a moment of pride for ITU as Mexicos President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa opened the Unions 18th Plenipotentiary Conference on Monday, 4 October 2010. Some 2400 participants from 190 Member States, Sector Members and observer organizations, including over 80 ministers, 40 deputy ministers, and 40 ambassadors attended the opening ceremony at the Guadalajara EXPO Center. The conference kicked off with a video entitled Mexico in your Senses, taking participants on a fascinating virtual tour of a fabulous country...For full text, see: http://bit.ly/cEadhK
Guadalajara, Jalisco.- En el mundo se contabilizan cinco mil millones de personas con acceso a la telefonía celular, mientras que dos mil millones más están conectados por Internet; sin embargo, a pesar de la importancia que tienen los progresos realizados todavía resta mucho por hacer, precisó Houlin Zhao, vicesecretario general de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT), al dar lectura al mensaje del secretario general de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas, Ban Ki-Moon.Al celebrarse la inauguración de la conferencia de los Plenipotenciarios donde participaron alrededor de 120 funcionarios de la UIT, además del presidente de México, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa; Ban Ki-moon añadió que en 145 años, la UIT ha desempeñado un papel crucial en el desarrollo de los sistemas de comunicaciones mundiales."Durante los últimos 60 años, la UIT ha sido un miembro insigne de la familia de las Naciones Unidas... ya que el progreso va desde el correo al telégrafo, de la radio a la televisión y de las comunicaciones satelitales al Internet".
Lea el texto completo en: http://www.oem.com.mx/eloccidental/notas/n1806324.htm
Guadalajara, Mexico, 4 October 2010 - ITUs 18th Plenipotentiary Conference opened with a call by ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun Touré for delegates to be bold and visionary in reaching agreements that will provide a sound platform for the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and services for the decade ahead.
ITUs Plenipotentiary is the quadrennial global conference that decides strategy for ITU, the UN agency for ICTs responsible for allocating global radio spectrum, creating the technical standards that fuel all ICT networks, and developing and implementing strategies to bridge the digital divide.
Topics such as cybersecurity, Internet addressing, the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), broadband access and ICTs and climate change will be high on the conference agenda.
Dr Touré urged delegates to imagine, to innovate, and to create a bright, long-term future for the ICT sector.
I cannot over-emphasize the importance of the work we will undertake here in Guadalajara, he said. We are here to shape the future. Not just the future of the ITU, but the future of the ICT sector − which now influences every other business sector worldwide, and which now reaches into the lives of almost everyone on the planet. And the future − to quote the great Mahatma Gandhi − depends on what we do in the present.
The event, which is taking place at the Guadalajara Expo centre from 4-22 October, is hosted by Mexicos Ministry of Communications and Transport. It will welcome around 2,000 participants from some 190 ITU Member States, Sector Members and observer organizations, including over 80 Ministers, 40 Deputy Ministers, and 40 ambassadors.
For full text, see: http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/36.aspx
Read more via the policy statement from H.E. Mr Sachin Pilot, Honable Minister of State for Communications & IT, Government of India: http://bit.ly/bkumwg
Host city Guadalajara treated PP-10 delegates to a Mexican extravaganza at the opening night cocktail reception on Monday 4 October. The city transformed the park area next to The Arches monument into an outdoor salon featuring living dioramas of tequila making, a sensory tunnel taking guests on a virtual voyage through Jalisco state, and the chance to sample local food, beer, tequila, and - naturalmente - margharitas! More than 1,000 delegates were beguiled by the balmy weather, an arresting Mexican music and dance spectacle and a stunning light show, topped off by a firework display culminating in a shower of Mexicos national colours. Not to mention the worlds most charming and friendly team of waiters and young support staff, who bent over backwards to make sure everyone had a wonderful time.
El presidente dijo que el proceso beneficia a la competencia en el sector de telecomunicaciones; el Estado mexicano recibirá casi 5,000 mdd por la concesión del espectro radioeléctrico, destacó.
GUADALAJARA (Notimex) El presidente Felipe Calderón destacó la apertura para cerrar la brecha digital en el país que ha promovido la Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transportes (SCT) con las licitaciones de espectro radioeléctrico de 1.7 y 1.9 Gigahertz.
"La principal (estrategia), avalada por la Comisión Federal de Competencia (CFC), es el fortalecimiento del mercado, de la competencia y el rompimiento de barreras de entrada en la competencia por telecomunicaciones en México", mencionó el titular del Ejecutivo.
Calderón mencionó que este proceso ha dejado al país 5,000 millones de dólares para las arcas públicas. Asimismo, se ha puesto a disposición en el mercado casi 70% más que el espectro que se estaba utilizando en los servicios de telefonía móvil.
Lea el texto completo en: http://www.cnnexpansion.com/economia/2010/10/04/licitacion-espectro-calderon-cnnexpansio
The Minister of Communications, Mr Haruna Iddrisu, has called on the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to critically consider ways of preventing developed countries from dumping e-waste in developing countries such as Ghana.According to him, with the advent of digital broadcasting, there was the likelihood of such rich countries shipping their analogue television sets to the developing countries to aggravate the already precarious situation as far as the dumping of used computers among others is concerned.Mr Iddrisu, who is also the immediate past President of the ITU Council, made the call in a contribution to discussions at the last meeting of the 2010 council meeting to finally close the session.The call comes at a time when reports from the market already indicate a growing number of used television sets hitting the market from Europe and America at rock bottom prices following their migration from analogue to digital broadcasting by the close of 2015...
For full text, see: http://www.graphic.com.gh/business/page.php?news=9575
4 de octubre, 13:00-13:30, Sala G Jalisco. Participantes: Dr Hamadoun Touré, Presidente de la PP10, S.E. Juan Molinar, S.E. Emilio González...http://bit.ly/by1rt8
Full playlist of PP-10 videos available from: http://bit.ly/9mTs9f
El hotel Presidente Intercontinental se volvió un escenario multicultural, repleto de personas de diferentes partes del mundo que participarán en la Conferencia de Plenipotenciarios de la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones (UIT), que se realizará en Guadalajara del 4 al 22 de octubre... Milenio.com http://bit.ly/9kNqdS
Mexicos President Felipe Calderón will open the 18th ITU Plenipotentiary Conference joined by the Minister of Communication & Transport, Mr Juan Francisco Molinar, and the Governor of the State of Jalisco, Mr Emilio González, alongside ITUs five elected officials and the Mayor of Guadalajara city, Mr Jorge Aristóteles Sandoval...http://bit.ly/9jbRif
Accredit now to cover our Plenipotentiary Conference in Mexico #PP10 http://bit.ly/d3oHnL
See our latest backgrounder ahead of #PP10: http://bit.ly/cJxAft Tues 28 Sept 14:21 via TweetDeck
See: http://bit.ly/9fG0C0 #PP10
@ferlop89 Ver: http://bit.ly/bLdo2Z #PP10
b3forum RT @ITU_News: RT POR @informador. Ver: http://bit.ly/cENF7y #mexico #PP10
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russia should undertake joint information-warfare exercises so the two countries can better protect critical digital infrastructure, policy wonks at an international group said.
The proposal, which was included in a32-page report released Wednesday by the EastWest Institute, would help the US and Russia achieve mutual goals in much the way that previous collaborations in the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have, its authors argued.
The GSMA and NTT DOCOMO's Mobile Society Research Institute (MSRI) recently announced the details of a comparative study into the use of mobile phones by children in six countries (Japan, Korea, China, India, Mexico and Cyprus) and the effect that this has on them. Approximately 6,000 pairs of respondents were interviewed, each consisting of a child aged between eight and 18 and his or her parent or guardian.
Download the Full Report
Sometimes it's a story of a grown woman who has chosen prostitution as a path to a better life. More often, it's a story of a woman being forced to sell her body by a pimp. And then there are the children, and the mothers that miss them.
"They told me to look on Craigslist and it almost blew my mind," the mother of one missing 12-year-old told CNN. "She was there with a wig on. She was there in a purple negligee. The same day the woman spoke to CNN, her daughter was rescued by police at a seedy hotel near Washington where she was being sold for sex. And she's not alone. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's website contains thousands of posters of missing children. Many are girls, classified as "endangered runaways," and the center says more than fifty of them have been pushed into the sex trade. But that's just a snapshot, a tiny indicator of the true scale of the problem.
(Source: CNN)
When everyone in the world is your customer, you can't go it alone...
ITU Telecom World 2011 is much more than a talking shop, or an exhibition. It's a forum for change. It's a place where the world's telecommunications leaders come together to map out and shape the future of the industry, to make the right decisions with significant impacts on our world.
ITU Telecom World 2011 is attended by governments, industry leaders and regulators. Through the many close networking opportunities we offer, you can influence and shape the dynamic world of ICT & telecommunications. No other event offers this opportunity.
ITU and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have announced this week that they will co-organize a side event at the next UN Climate Change Conference, which will be held in Tianjin, China, from Monday 4 to Saturday, October 2010.
The event The Effective Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the Intellectual Property (IP) System for Mitigating Climate Change, which will take place on Thursday 7th October 2010, will provide a platform where top decision-makers from governments, and experts from international organizations and the private sector can debate the potential role and impact that ICTs and the IP system can have in promoting innovation and the evolution of new technologies, and encourage/advocate broader access to those technologies for the purpose of preventing further climate change.
Additional information on the event can be found at:
More about ITU´s activities on climate change and green ICTs:
More about WIPO´s activities on climate change:
Wired Magazine, August 17, 2010
Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services think apps are less about the searching and more about the getting.
Leo Hickman and the Guardian deserve to be congratulated for drawing attention to the emergence of a whole raft of internet-based personal location services (How I became a Foursquare cyberstalker, G2, 23 July). As Hickman showed, this new breed of online applications has the potential to be truly spooky.
Anyone collecting or broadcasting data about someone else's physical whereabouts should be obliged to observe the very highest standards of data security, yet Hickman's piece reveals some extremely slipshod work. However, the otherwise excellent story overlooked one angle. Because every location service I know of, including Foursquare, is paid for by advertising it means the apps are free to the end user, available for download by anyone who can click a mouse. That includes children. Ofcom's research has shown that around one in five children between the ages of eight and 12 are already getting away with lying about their age to create profiles on Facebook, MySpace or Bebo. Can we look forward to one in five children blithely linking location services to their social networking profiles, adding yet another and qualitatively new layer of risk? I suspect other stalkers who will surely follow in Hickman's steps will not have the same benign intent.
Just because a thing becomes technically possible it does not mean every online business should stampede towards it, and indeed some are not doing so. More credit to them. There is or ought to be an ethical dimension to business. Google and Yahoo should give a lead and immediately drop their personal location products (Latitude and FireEagle) and promise not to reintroduce them until they have a way of keeping kids off the premises.
Washington (CNN)-- A computer hacker responsible for creating and operating a massive scam that infected as many as 12 million computers worldwide has been identified and arrested, authorities said Wednesday.
The FBI said in a news statement a 23-year-old Slovene known as "Iserdo" was arrested last week for his role in a cyber scam that stole passwords from websites and financial institutions. Authorities believe the Slovenian citizen is responsible for creating and selling the Mariposa botnet.
Botnets are a network of computers infected with a malicious kind of robot software which allow remote access, often without the owner's knowledge.
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International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats (IMPACT) received double honours from (ISC)²s fourth annual Asia-Pacific Information Security Leadership Achievements (ISLA) Program for its efforts to build capacity against cyber threats among partner countries especially in the developing nations. Mr. Philip Victor, Director, Training, Skills Development and Outreach, IMPACT has been selected as an Honouree in the Senior Information Security Professional category and the contribution of Mr. Sivanathan Subramaniam, Manager, GRC Profressional Services, IMPACT has been recognised in the Information Security Practitioner category. The award giving ceremony will take place at the ISLA Gala Dinner and Ceremony on the evening of 26th July 2010, held at The Ritz-Carlton, Millenia in Singapore.
[US] Girl Scout Dominique Napolitano testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Healthy Families and Communities Subcommittee on the issue of cyberbullying on Thursday, June 24, providing legislators a teenager's perspective on the increasingly widespread practice.
"Cyberbullying is not just a phase or behavior in which kids will be kids," Napolitano told the panel chaired by U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY). "Cyberbullying poses serious consequences to the health and safety of all children."
Dominique was among a core group of Girl Scouts who helped develop LMK (http://lmk.girlscouts.org), a leading online safety Web site developed by Girl Scouts in collaboration with Microsoft's Windows division. The site is unique because it is designed to cover such topics as cyberbullying, online sexual predators and cybersecurity from the perspective of young people. Twenty-three Girl Scouts working with Internet safety expert Parry Aftab have developed the online safety tips and advice for parents and young boys and girls.
CTO Conference, London on 17-18 June 2010 - A two-day international forum on Cybersecurity- aimed to identify, outline and set in motion effective to crimes that take place in the cyber world. The forum was organised by the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO) in conjunction with the UK Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the UK Cabinet Office of Cyber Security (OCS).
At the conference , ITU Global Cybersecurity Agenda (GCA) - A Framework for International Cooperation in Cybersecurity, Initiative was presented and very much welcomed by CTO participants.
Delivering the key note address, Rt Hon Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, Minister of State for Security and Counter-Terrorism, spoke of her commitment to tackling the complex issues surrounding cyber security, including Cyber-crime and Cyber-espionage. She also stressed the critical importance of international cooperation by like-minded countries and the vital role of International organisations such as the UN-sponsored Internet Governance Forum, the International Telecommunications Union and the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation itself.
Dr Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, the Chief Executive Office of the CTO echoed these sentiments and added that the CTO is always keen to collaborate with sister agencies such as ITU in order to develop the capacity of its members to manage and develop their ICT sectors. ICT enabling governance and society brings along with it associated risks requiring innovative strategies of which Cybersecurity is a key element. That was the primary reason for the CTO to organise this forum and the number of participants and the engagement of organsiations from both public and private sectors justifies the CTO's decision to undertake the organising of such an event.
ITU's activities on Cybersecurity can be found here.
The sentence was announced by United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein, Special Agent in Charge Richard A. McFeely of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Chief James W. Johnson of the Baltimore County Police Department; and Baltimore County States Attorney Scott Shellenberger.
This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by United States Attorneys Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to better locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims.
(Source: Baltimore FBI)
Baltimore FBI
Internet security firm Sophos has warned Facebook users to be on the alert for a scam which sends a spam message to all of their friends on the social network. Sophos, in a pair of blog posts late Monday, said "hundreds of thousands" of Facebook users have fallen for the scam which it dubbed "likejacking." It said some Facebook users had received a message such as "This man takes a picture of himself EVERYDAY for 8 YEARS!!" and were encouraged to click on a link. "This of course posts a message to your newsfeed, your friends see it and click on it, and so it spreads," Sophos said.
That followed a similar scam that spread on Facebook the week before involving a fake posting tagged as the "sexiest video ever," according to Sophos.
(Source: AFP)
Thousands of people have paid tribute on Facebook to an Australian teenager allegedly lured to her death by a man she met on the social networking site. The body of Nona Belomesoff was found two days after she went on a trip with the man, who told her they were going to rescue injured animals, police say. A 20-year-old man has been charged with Ms Belomesoff's murder at a creek south of Sydney.
Detectives say the case reinforces the need for vigilance when using Facebook. Ms Belomesoff, 18, is believed to have befriended Christopher James Dannevig, who police say set up a fake Facebook profile in which he claimed to work for an animal welfare group.
The term "cyberwar" has been bandied about in recent years as a catchall term for the hackers stealing credit card numbers or spreading spam, but also much more nefarious schemes such as breaking into a electricity grid. At a recent cybersecurity conference, one Microsoft security executive said we might need global rules on how to fight such threats.
Scott Charney, vice president of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group, spoke at the Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit in Dallas last week and said there needs to be a distinction between cybercriminals merely stealing money and cyberwar, possibly conducted by nation-states, that is aimed at crippling a target in another country, such as a power grid or an oil pipeline. An Associated Press report on the conference, which was picked up by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, quotes Charney as saying that international treaties designed to fight cyberwar are difficult to establish because of the murky nature of what "cyberwar" is.
The United Nations last month rejected a Russian proposal for a new cybercrime treaty, leaving in place a 2001 treaty that Russia opposes because it gives foreign governments too much leeway to pursue cybercriminals across borders.
"Lots of times, there's confusion in these treaty negotiations because of lack of clarity about which problems they're trying to solve," Charney said.
In a paper that accompanied his talk, Charney also wrote that if the concern is that countries need to brace for a cybersecurity "Pearl Harbor," that it needs to be made clear on what type of attacks governments can respond. "If the concern is an electronic Pearl Harbor, perhaps part of the response is an electronic `Geneva Convention' that protects the rights of noncombatants."
The notion of an electronic Pearl Harbor has come up before on this blog. I wrote about it after attending the RSA Conference 2010 in San Francisco in March. There a panel of cybersecurity experts warned that a cyberattack could occur that could cripple U.S. infrastructure if we're not prepared for it. Richard Clarke, a national security advisor to the previous three U.S. presidents, also proposed a cyber security treaty, but lumped together criminal cyber attacks and state-sponsored attacks.
eNACSO launches its Agenda for Action at the international conference Protecting Children Online on 6th May 2010. The eNACSO Agenda for Action includes recommendations to governments, industry and other stakeholders on how to create a safer online environment for children and young people.
Download the Agenda for Action here.
Purveyors of fake anti-virus or scareware programs have aggressively stepped up their game to evade detection by legitimate anti-virus programs, according to new data from Google.
In a report being released today, Google said that between January 2009 and the end of January 2010, its malware detection infrastructure found some 11,000 malicious or hacked Web pages that attempted to foist fake anti-virus on visitors. The search giant discovered that as 2009 wore on, scareware peddlers dramatically increased both the number of unique strains of malware designed to install fake anti-virus as well as the frequency with which they deployed hacked or malicious sites set up to force the software on visitors.
Fake anti-virus attacks use misleading pop-ups and videos to scare users into thinking their computers are infected and offer a free download to scan for malware. The bogus scanning programs then claim to find oodles of infected files, and victims who fall for the ruse often are compelled to register the fake anti-virus software for a fee in order to make the incessant malware warnings disappear. Worse still, fake anti-virus programs frequently are bundled with other malware. Whats more, victims end up handing their credit or debit card information over to the people most likely to defraud them.
Wednesday was a busy day at the [U.S.] Federal Communications Commission, with National Broadband Plan related notices on the CableCard, Universal Service Fund, and roaming access issues out the door. Another interesting item was a Notice of Inquiry on whether the agency should launch a voluntary cybersecurity certification program.
In a nutshell, the proposed program's private sector auditors or the FCC would periodically run security evaluations of various telecommunications services. Companies that passed the program's muster could then market their networks as FCC cyber security compliant.
It's not hard to make a pitch for these kind of programs, given all the cybersecurity horror stories. The agency's Notice outlines what's at stake:
"In todays interconnected world, an increasingly greater amount of the nations daily business depends on our rapidly growing broadband communications infrastructure. Banking, investment and commercial interests routinely rely on the durability and security of IP-based networks to move capital and to track goods and services around the globe. To put this development in perspective, while our nations total GDP was just over $14T last year, two banks in New York move over $7T per day in transactions. . . ."
But the open-ended questions that the FCC asks in its inquiry suggest that the Commission knows that the case for this kind of project isn't open and shut. Would the program "create a significant incentive for providers to increase the security of their systems and improve their cybersecurity practices?" the NOI asks. And it also wonders if "public knowledge of providers' cybersecurity practices would contribute to broader implementation by industry."
Another question the FCC might want to ask is, should individual government agencies coordinate this kind of activity, or should a broader cross-industry certification program be established? The probe comes in tandem with an inquiry on the survivability of the nation's broadband networks.
Police hunting a hacker who had attacked a US school's systems found themselves cornering a "very intelligent" 9 year old instead, it has emerged. When passwords for teachers at Spring Hill Elementary, Virginia, were changed without authorisation the school board initially thought a hacker had broken into the school district's Blackboard system. Police were called in to investigate in mid-March and were quickly able to trace the incident back to a PC at the home of a 9 year-old school student.
The youngster's mother was initially chief suspect in the hack but after speaking to her and and her son police came to the surprising conclusion that they were dealing with a 'kindergarden' hacker.
(Source: The Register)
The Register
Is it cyberbullying if kids post mean comments and then say they were just joking? Is it wrong for a boy to pressure his girlfriend to send racy text messages? For teenagers, these questions dont necessarily have clear answers. Associated Press MTV is trying to get teens themselves to support each other in standing up to behavior that crosses over into digital abuse use of technologies such as texting and social networking to bully, harass and intimidate people. The network introduced a new online tool called Over the Line this week that allows young people to post about their problem and have peers say whether the behavior is acceptable. The posts and comments are moderated, to make sure bullying doesnt become a problem in the tool itself.
(Source: The Wall Street Journal)
The Wall Street Journal
The report, from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania, is among the first quantitative studies looking at young people's attitudes toward privacy as government officials and corporate executives alike increasingly grapple with such issues.
Among the findings:
Most people 86 percent believe that anyone who posts a photo or video of them on the Internet should get their permission first, even if that photo was taken in public. Among young adults 18 to 24, 84 percent agreed not far from the 90 percent among those 45 to 54.
Forty percent of adults ages 18 to 24 believe executives should face jail time if their company uses someone's personal information illegally the same as the response among those 35 to 44 years old.
(Source: AP)
Cell phones, texting, IM, e-mail, Facebook, MySpace -- kids are interconnected today in ways hardly imagined two decades ago. But these technology-based communication platforms also enable new forms of an age-old parenting strategy: monitoring your kids.
Is it any easier to put the proper measures in place to ensure your child's security since you already have an expertise in this area? Or do you go overboard because of you are hyperattuned to risk? And what is the right balance of freedom and guidance to provide for kids? Turns out it was tricky issue before social networking, and remains tricky now. Here are views and strategies collected from an array of security professionals.
(Source: ComputerWorld)
The US President directed a 60-day, comprehensive, clean-slate review to assess U.S. policies and structures for cybersecurity. Cybersecurity policy includes strategy, policy, and standards regarding the security of and operations in cyberspace, and encompasses the full range of threat reduction, vulnerability reduction, deterrence, international engagement, incident response, resiliency, and recovery policies and activities, including computer network operations, information assurance, law enforcement, diplomacy, military, and intelligence missions as they relate to the security and stability of the global information and communications infrastructure.
The Presidents cybersecurity policy official should, working with departments and agencies, strengthen and integrate interagency processes to formulate and coordinate international cybersecurity-related positions. In addition, the Federal governmentcontinuing the long-term history of collaboration with the private sectorshould develop a proactive engagement plan for use with international standards bodies. This would include taking stock of current policies and coordinating the development, refinement, or reaffirmation of positions to ensure that the full range of cybersecurity-related economic, national security, public safety, and privacy interests are taken into account.
The US Cyberspace Policy Review can be found here
Congress, back this week from spring break, isn't wasting time tackling some key cybersecurity and IT security-related initiatives.
Within the next few weeks, Congressional committees will hold sessions to tackle some of the hottest infosec-related items, including the confirmation hearing on Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander to be military cyber commander, markup sessions on bills to fund cybersecurity research and development and realign the National Institute of Standards and Technology's laboratories and a hearing on combating cyber crime and identity theft.
Alexander Confirmation Hearing
Thursday's Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing comes nearly 10 months after Alexander was nominated by President Obama to be the first military cyber commander. If confirmed, he would retain his current job, director of the National Security Agency, and be promoted to full general. No one is suggesting that Alexander won't be confirmed, but concerns have been raised that having the same officer overseeing the cyber command and NSA poses potential conflicts: Should the top spy also be the general in charge of protecting the computer systems and networks employed to support the nation's warfighters?
Indeed, it's been questions about that dual role that has delayed the confirmation process. As we reported last month, the committee sent a questionnaire to Alexander on March 6 seeking answers about how he would balance the two jobs. Though the NSA is a DoD agency, it works with civilian agencies to secure federal IT, raising additional concerns about potential military involvement in civilian matters. "They are working through some of the hard problems and that is what the reason for the delay is," James Lewis, senior fellow at the Center for International and Strategic Studies and expert on government and military cybersecurity policy, told GovInfoSecurity.com.
The case of a teenager in Massachusetts who killed herself after a relentless, months-long bullying campaign shows how the common schoolyard behavior is evolving in dangerous new ways online.
Six students face felony charges in the death of Phoebe Prince, 15, who hanged herself in January after being subjected to verbal assault and threats of physical harm. Some harassment occurred online on Facebook, in text messages and in other high-tech forms, a contemporary development in the age-old practice, experts said.
(Source: Reuters)
A British child protection agency said it has pressed Facebook to add "panic buttons" to its pages after the murder of a teenager was linked to the site. Jim Gamble, chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), said the social networking giant did not agree to his demands outright at a meeting in Washington but he felt they were moving in the right direction. Speaking after a four-hour meeting Monday, Gamble said Facebook was close to "doing the right thing" but urged the website to turn "words into action."
Calls have since grown for the inclusion of the buttons -- which allow youngsters who feel threatened online to quickly contact a number of sources of help, such as CEOP or anti-bullying helplines. Politicians, police and anti-bullying groups have voiced outrage that the online giant will not bow to demands to include the system.
WASHINGTON, D.C. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) today introduced legislation that will strengthen the ability of the United States to develop a clear and coordinated strategy for international cyberspace and cybersecurity policy. The bill will create the framework for coordinating our efforts with other countries to defend against cyberattacks that threaten our power stations, telecommunications systems and financial markets.
The International Cyberspace and Cybersecurity Coordination Act of 2010 will authorize the creation of a senior coordinator at the State Department, with the rank and status of Ambassador at Large. This person will be the principal advisor to the Secretary of State on international cyberspace and cybersecurity issues. The coordinator will provide strategic direction for United States government policy and programs aimed at addressing cyberspace and cybersecurity issues overseas. The bill will ensure the Administration develops a clear and coordinated strategy for international cyber engagement, including considering the utility of negotiating a multilateral framework that would provide internationally acceptable principles to mitigate cyberwarfare.
"Just as the physical safety of America is under constant threat from those who would do us harm, we are also engaged in a battle over the control of information in cyberspace and need to build better defenses against potential attacks on our infrastructure," said Chairman Kerry. "We must do everything we can to forestall the possibility of cyberwarfare and create a multilateral framework that will persuade countries to cooperate on pressing cyber issues. This bill is the first step to better organize U.S. efforts to develop a coordinated strategic approach to international cyberspace and cybersecurity issues by designating a single diplomat responsible for U.S. cyber policy overseas."
Watch out for silicon cockroaches. Network operators should prepare for an infestation of silicon cockroaches, a term used to describe Internet-connected devices such as mobile sensors, bio-medical systems and RFID-powered asset trackers that operate without human administration. Aaron Falk, chair of the Internet Research Task Force, listed silicon cockroaches as a key factor in the Internet becoming a network of things, rather than a network of computers, in the future. Falk said 15 billion devices could be hooked up to the Internet by 2015, a figure that will be "orders of magnitude bigger" than the number of Internet-connected people. Silicon cockroaches pose several threats to network operators, including naming, security and management headaches that require additional research, Falk said.
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A study conducted by RIPE Labs indicates that about 1.89% of spam are received over IPv6.
"With the increased deployment of IPv6, we were curious to see how much the amount of spam sent over IPv6 increases. We looked at the e-mail system of the RIPE NCC and produced some statistics that could be seen as an indication for the overall trend of spam sent over IPv6," says RIPE in a blog post explaining the analysis. Group also notes that the study was based on one weeks worth of data and that it excluded messages already rejected by blacklisting and greylisting.
RIPE Labs: Spam over IPv6
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International police agency Interpol launched Monday a "most wanted" site for suspected child sex offenders across the Group of Eight (G8) most industrialised nations. The "G8 Wanted Child Sex Offender" site, accessible via Interpol's homepage (www.interpol.int), draws together information from G8 members the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia.
It includes photographs of people wanted on charges of abuse and enables the public to access to information about how to report missing sex offenders who may have crossed borders.
The expansion of internet domain names as proposed is worrying to trademark owners as a significant number cybersquatting cases continue to be filed in the World Intellectual Property Organization dispute resolution system, WIPO said this week. Meanwhile internet intermediaries should play a bigger role in the fight against trademark infringement, WIPO officials said.
Complaints filed with the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) in 2009 decreased by 9.5 percent compared to the previous year. WIPO is the recipient of over half of global internet domain dispute cases, it said. However, complaints filed at WIPO in 2009, though down, covered the highest number of individual domain names in a given year, as opposed to collective filings, WIPO Director General Francis Gurry said during an 18 March press conference at the United Nations.
In a bid to cut down on fraud and inappropriate content, the organization responsible for administering Russia's .ru top-level domain names is tightening its procedures.
Starting April 1, anyone who registers a .ru domain will need to provide a copy of their passport or, for businesses, legal registration papers. Right now, domains can be set up with no verification - a practice that has allowed scammers to quickly set up .ru domains under bogus names. The changes will help Russia align its rules with international best practices, said Olga Ermakova, informational projects manager with the Coordination Center for the .ru top-level domain, in an e-mail interview. The .ru administrators care about the "cleanness" of the domain, she added. "We don't need negative content, and such content is often [created] by unknown users."
Loopholes in the domain name system help spammers, scammers and operators of pornographic Web sites to avoid detection on the Internet by concealing their identity. Criminals often play a cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement and security experts, popping up on different domains as soon as their malicious servers are identified.
Criminals in eastern Europe have used .ru domains for a while, registering domain names under fake identities and using them to send spam or set up command-and-control servers to send instructions to networks of hacked computers. With the new domain registration requirements, it will be more difficult for criminals to continue with business as usual. At the very least, the requirement that registrants must submit paper documents will make setting up domains a more costly and time-consuming process.
Researchers at RSA have identified the network framework that endows some of the worlds most notorious botnets with always-on connections that are virtually immune from takedowns.
At the network's heart are the servers that shepherd tens of thousands of infected PCs so they continue to send spam, spread malware, and stay updated with the latest bot software. By maintaining multiple conduits between these master control channels and the outside world, malware gangs are able to create highly redundant networks that are extremely difficult for authorities and whitehats to shut down.
Egypt has begun enforcing a ban on international calls made through mobile internet connections, the head of the telcoms regulator told Reuters on Tuesday, potentially boosting voice revenues at landline monopoly Telecom Egypt. The ban will apply to the three mobile operators in Egypt -- Mobinil, Etisalat Egypt and Vodafone Egypt -- who offer internet access for computers via USB and other mobile modems, as well as via mobile phone.
"The ban is on Skype on mobile internet, not on fixed, and this is due to the fact it is against the law since it bypasses the legal gateway," said Amr Badawy, the executive president of the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA).
The internet is among a record 237 individuals and organisations nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
The number of nominations surpasses last year's record of 205 nominations. The internet's nomination has been championed by the Italian version of Wired magazine for helping advance "dialogue, debate and consensus". The director of the Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, told BBC News that the organisation had received "thousands of nominations" for the coveted prize.
Find out more about the ITU's Child Online Protection Initiative
To coincide with Safer Internet Day, the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) has launched its new public awareness campaign: Click Clever, Click Safe.
The campaign highlights a new online green cross code: Zip it, Block it, Flag it to help parents, children and young people understand the behaviours that will enable them to enjoy the internet safely. To help children enjoy the internet safely, the Code is designed to act as an everyday reminder of simple good behaviours, to help children and young people avoid common risks online as well as to help parents talk to your children about the internet.
Find out more about the ITU's Child Online Protection Initiative
Find out more about ITU's Child Online Protection Initiative
Some 17,000 culture vultures registered to the UK's National Theatre website need to reset their passwords after the site was hacked.
The 20 February attack hit systems storing the logins of 17,000 (or around three per cent) of the 500,000 plus registered with the site. Only email, password, name and contact information was disclosed by the hack. Motives and perpetrators remain unidentified. A spokeswoman emphasised that database systems holding credit and debit card details were not affected by the hack. The NT has sent out email alerts (copy below) to affected customers on Monday apologising for the security snafu.
Germany's highest court on Tuesday overturned a law allowing authorities to retain data on telephone calls and e-mail traffic for help in tracking criminal networks.
A law ordering data on calls made from mobile or landline telephones and e-mail exchanges be retained for six months for possible use by criminal authorities violated Germans' constitutional right to private correspondence, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled. In its ruling, the court said the law failed to sufficiently balance the need for personal privacy against that for providing security.
The disputed instructions neither provided a sufficient level of data security, nor sufficiently limited the possible uses of the data, the court said.
The US governments policy of leaving the Internet alone is over, according to Obamas top official at the Department of Commerce.
Instead, an Internet Policy 3.0 approach will see policy discussions between government agencies, foreign governments, and key Internet constituencies, according to Assistant Secretary Larry Strickling, with those discussions covering issues such as privacy, child protection, cybersecurity, copyright protection, and Internet governance.
The outcomes of such discussions will be flexible but may result in recommendations for legislation or regulation, Strickling said in a speech at the Media Institute in Washington this week. The new approach is a far cry from a US government that consciously decided not to intrude into the internets functioning and growth and in so doing allowed an academic network to turn into a global communications phenomenon.
Microsoft has won a court-issued take-down order against scores of domains associated with controlling the spam-spewing Waledac botnet.
The software giant's order allows the temporary cut-off of traffic to 277 Internet domains that form command and control nodes for the network of compromised machines. Infected (zombie) machines are programmed to regularly poll these control points for instructions and spam templates.
The .com domains, registered in China, will be sin-binned by VeriSign, at least temporarily decapitating the network. Microsoft estimates that Waledac was one of the 10 largest botnets in the US and a major distributor of spam for online (unlicensed) pharmacies, knock-off goods and other tat, as explained in a blog posting by its legal team.
"Waledac is estimated to have infected hundreds of thousands of computers around the world and, prior to this action, was believed to have the capacity to send over 1.5 billion spam emails per day. In a recent analysis, Microsoft found that between December 3-21, 2009, approximately 651 million spam emails attributable to Waledac were directed to Hotmail accounts alone, including offers and scams related to online pharmacies, imitation goods, jobs, penny stocks and more."
Shopping comparison site Foundem this week fired the opening shots in the coming Google antitrust battle, with a complaint to the European Commission and a filing with the US Federal Communications Commission accusing Google of posing "an immediate threat to competition and innovation." The US filing is in response to the FCC's net neutrality enquiry, and seeks to have search neutrality included in FCC rule-making.
German shopping site Ciao, which has been owned by Microsoft since 2008, and French legal search service ejustice.fr have also filed complaints with Europe. The data in the filing has also been passed to the Commission, Foundem co-founder Shivaun Raff told The Register. In it, with the help of data commissioned from ComScore, Foundem seeks to show that what Google calls "Universal Search" places Google services in prominent and preferential positions within its search results, giving the company an unassailable competitive advantage. "They're turning an ostensibly neutral search engine into an incredibly powerful marketing channel for their own services," said Raff.
A plan to create a specific area of the Internet for pornography has been given a reprieve by a distinguished panel of judges.
The panelists - who included a former International Court of Justice judge - told Internet overseeing body ICANN in a majority decision that it was wrong to reject an application for the top-level domain dot-xxx three years ago.
That decision made by ICANNs Board in March 2007 was not consistent with the application of neutral, objective, and fair documented policy, the panel concluded. It also decided in favor of the company behind the dot-xxx application, ICM Registry, in three of the remaining four issues under dispute and ordered ICANN to pick up fees and expenses totaling $475,000. As a result of the panels declaration, the ICANN Board will now reconsider the dot-xxx application and decision at its meeting in Nairobi next month, opening the way for dot-xxxs possible inclusion into the Internets root.
New domain name registrations in the fourth quarter of 2009 reached 3.7 million domain name registrations per month totaling close to 11 million new domain name registrations across all of the Top-Level Domains (TLDs) in the last quarter of 2009, according the latest Domain Name Brief by VeriSign. "The base of country code Top-Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) rose to 78.6 million domain names, a three percent increase quarter over quarter and a 10 percent increase year over year. In terms of total registrations, .com continues to have the highest base followed by .cn (China), .de (Germany), .net and .uk (United Kingdom)."
The VeriSign Domain Report (Feb. 2010)
A digital attack against the UK causing even minor damage would have a "catastrophic" effect on public confidence in the government, GCHQ has privately warned Whitehall.
The Cheltenham spy agency's new Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) makes the prediction in a document prepared for Cabinet Office and seen by The Register. Growing reliance on the internet to deliver public services will "quickly reach a point of no return", meaning "any interruption of broadband access becomes intolerable and will have serious impacts on the the economy and public well being", CSOC says.
"A successful cyber attack against public services would have a catastrophic impact on public confidence in the government, even if the actual damage caused by the attack were minimal," it adds.
.Info registry Afilias is asking ICANN to approve a plan to offer one and two character .info domain names for registration. As with other newer gTLDs, ICANN originally reserved all one and two character domains from being registered.
Afilias is modeling its plan after Neustars launch of one and two character .biz domain names. There will be a three step process:
1. Requests for Proposal, where anyone can submit a proposal for developing a particular name. Afilias will award domains to RFPs that meet its goal of broadening awareness of .info.
2. Auction of any domain not given during the RFP
3. Open registration
During Neustars one character auction, the top sale was e.biz for $66,001. Many other one character .biz domains sold for $5,000-$15,000. It is still running two character auctions, with most sales under $1,000. The biggest deal to come out of the RFP process was Overstock.com, which picked up O.biz.
Criminal hackers have penetrated the networks of almost 2,500 companies and government agencies in a coordinated campaign that began 18 months ago and continues to steal email passwords, login credentials, and other sensitive data to this day, a computer security company said.
The infections by a variant of the Zeus botnet began in late 2008 and have turned more than 74,000 PCs into remote spying platforms that have siphoned highly proprietary information out of at least 10 federal agencies and thousands of companies, according to research from NetWitness, a Herndon, Virginia-based network forensics firm. Many of the victims are Fortune 500 firms in the financial, energy, and high technology industries.
Google is in court later today New York to face critics of its agreement with US publishers to digitise the world's books.
Judge Denny Chin will hear evidence from 26 critics of the deal. These include Amazon and Microsoft, along with several publishers. France and Germany will also give evidence, the Beeb reports. The case is seen by some as granting Google an effective monopoly on the world's literature.
The search giant's massive book scanning scheme is also under investigation from Department of Justice and European regulators.
Computer experts from some 30 organizations worldwide have once again compiled a list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors along with a novel way to prevent them: by drafting contracts that hold developers responsible when bugs creep into applications.
The list for 2010 bears a striking resemblance to last year's list, which was the first time a broad cross section of the world's computer scientists reached formal agreement on the most common programming pitfalls. The effort is designed to shift attention to the underlying mistakes that allow vulnerabilities to happen in the first place.
An incredible 77 per cent of internet domains - nearly 90 million internet addresses - are registered with false, incomplete, or unverifiable information.
An extensive review of 1,419 representative domain names conducted by overseeing body ICANN, including direct contact with over 500 individual domain owners, produced some startling results (PDF). Example: only 23 per cent of domain registrations display the owner's correct name and physical address.
Worse, an extraordinary 29 per cent of domains are registered with patently false or suspicious information - a shady sign of online criminalty. The remaining 48 per cent of faulty registrations are in a grey area where people are either unaware or unwilling to hand over their identifying details.
Google has quietly turned on IPv6 support for its YouTube video streaming Web site, sending a spike of IPv6 traffic across the Internet that has continued from last Thursday until Monday. IPv6: The Essential Guide
Industry observers say YouTube appeared to be supporting IPv6 in production mode, as opposed to running a test of the next-generation Internet protocol.
"On Thursday, midday California time, we saw a large amount of inbound IPv6 traffic, which we knew came from Google," says Martin Levy, Director of IPv6 Strategy at Hurricane Electric, a Fremont, Calif., ISP that runs one of the world's largest IPv6 backbone networks.
"IPv6 traffic came into ISPs from all over the world when Google turned up its IPv6 traffic on YouTube," Levy says. "IPv6 is being supported at many different Google data centers. We're talking about a traffic spike that is 30-to-1 type ratios. In other words, 30 times more IPv6 traffic is coming out of Google's data centers than before."
Most country code top-level domains on the Internet represent areas with millions of people, such as .uk (United Kingdom), .ca (Canada), .de (Germany), .se (Sweden), and so on, but there a places where the population isnt counted in the millions, or even thousands, that still have their very own top-level domain on the Internet. Some of them arent even inhabited.
IANA, the organization that administers the domain name system, bases its allocation of country code top-level domains on the standard country code list in ISO 3166-1 which defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest.
ccTLDs for 10 places with tiny populations
Scams which attempt to trick users into volunteering personal credentials in return for free pornography have moved over onto social networks.
More than nine out of ten (92 per cent) of such adult phishing scams recorded in January took place on social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo, according to the latest monthly security report from Symantec. Once fraudsters have snaffled personal credentials, surfers are often redirected to sites punting scareware scams rather than smut.
Scareware scams more commonly rely on manipulating search engine results for search terms in the news, such as the death of an athlete practising for the luge event at the winter Olympics. These results are poisoned so that surfers looking for videos of this tragedy (as explained by Sophos here) are instead redirected to anti-virus scan scam portals, which warn of non-existent malware risks in a bid to trick users into buying worthless scamware.
The UK government has launched a specialist cyber-enforcement team and allocated extra funding for Trading Standards as part of a campaign designed to clamp down on online scams.
OFT figures suggest online scams claim 3 million UK marks every year and result in losses of £3.5bn. Approaches most often arrive in the form of scam emails. The government is investing £4.3m over three years in a bid to clamp down on this growing source of crime. The money will allow the training and appointment of specialist trading standards enforcers in every region of England and in Scotland and Wales and the establishment of local computer labs.
50% of European teenagers give out personal information on the web according to an EU study which can remain online forever and can be seen by anybody. Today, Safer Internet Day, the European Commission is passing a message to teenagers: "Think before you post!" It welcomed actions to protect children using social networking websites taken by the 20 companies who signed the Safer Social Networking Principles last year (IP/09/232 ).
Most of these companies have empowered minors to tackle online risks by making it easier to change privacy settings, block users or delete unwanted comments and content. Yet more needs to be done to protect children online, the Commission says. Less than half of social networking companies (40%) make profiles of under-18 users visible only to their friends by default and only one third replied to user reports asking for help.
(Source: Europa)
Persistent illegal downloaders face having their internet links disconnected under a secret trade deal being negotiated by developed nations this week, according to activists and industry groups.
Leaked drafts of the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement say the worlds biggest developed nations want internet service providers to be more responsible for the content they distribute and even cut off repeat infringers of copyright legislation.
Analysts say the agreement, if ratified, would transform copyright law in the US and European Union. So-called three strike laws have been contentious in the US and EU, in spite of aggressive lobbying from copyright holders such as record companies and film studios for countries to adopt them in order to curb illegal downloading.
What happened with the Internet in 2009?
How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.
We have used a wide variety of sources from around the Web. A full list of source references is available at the bottom of the post for those interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get even more numbers to show you.
It is estimated that in three years time the addresses available for connecting to the Internet under the current protocol will be depleted. Faced with this situation, LACNIC is taking measures for supporting and promoting the adoption of IP version 6 within the region.
As a response to the forecasts prepared by several investigators indicating that by the year 2011 the central pool of version 4 (IPv4) Internet addresses could be completely depleted, LACNIC announces it is launching a regional campaign so that all the region's networks will be adapted to the new version 6 of the protocol (IPv6) before January 1st, 2011.
.ORG, The Public Interest Registry extends our deepest condolences to the millions of families, friends and neighbors affected by the horrific tragedy in Haiti. As we learn the extent of the earthquake's devastation and continue with emergency assistance, the need for our continued support and humanitarian efforts is critical. If you would like to make a donation or learn more about how you can help with the relief efforts, we recommend visiting the .ORG community, including sites such as http://www.redcross.org/, http://www.globalgiving.org/ and http://www.directrelief.org/.
Safer Internet Day: institutions, social networks, companies and the voluntary sector, all working together on the Use Your Head When Posting Online Campaign.
The Zero Assoluto messages, advice and a video also broadcast by channel La7 to convince youngsters and adults to think twice before circulating personal pictures or posting suggestive photos
More people know you than you would imagine. They look at your photos, they talk about you, and would like to meet you. Find out why This is the headline board message that has been circulating online the past few days through which promoters of the Think before you post campaign that will try to bring hundreds of thousands of young internet users to land at the www.sicurinrete.it web site. Here, the words of the Zero Assoulto, a video and key messages will invite those who people social networks to use their heads when posting online! That is, to think carefully before putting their or others privacy at risk by publishing online personal data and pictures, maybe even ones that are suggestive or alluring, as is the case with sexting , a phenomenon which has by now become quite widespread even among Italian adolescents.
The cause of all this commotion on the Net is the Safer Internet Day. It will be celebrated tomorrow, a day established by the European Commission as a part of the Safer Internet programme that aims to promote safe and responsible use of the Internet and new technologies by younger users. In Italy, Save the Children and Adiconsum jointly administer this programme.
In line with the ITU (International telecommunication Union) Child Online Protection Initiative goals, 19 are the actors who have joined together for the first time to launch, on this day, the Think before you post: the very ample sign shows all side by side institutions, social networks, companies and organizers from the voluntary sector, in fact all the principal actors, each with their own levels and functions, that are concerned with the Internet, new media and minors: the Ministry for Equal Opportunity, the Ministry for Economic Development, International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the National Centre for the fight against Child abuse images on the Internet run by the Postal and Communications Police, the Observatory for the fight against paedophilia and child pornography, the Protection of Privacy Watchdog, Save the Children, Adiconsum, the Italian Internet Provider Association (AIIP), Telecom Italia, Vodafone, Facebook, MySpace, Netlog, Virgilio, Google, Microsofts Windows Live, Skuola.net, and the La7 television channel.
New technologies have transformed internet users and especially the youngest ones into potential editors of information, pictures, films, etc. Photographs and videos can be shot and easily circulated by mobile phones, sent to a list of contacts, and loaded onto a blog or a social networking profile in no time.
Thanks to the possibility of posting personal pictures or information online offered by social networks, it has become much easier to trace a person through their photos, just as it is now easier to reconstruct his/her curriculum or aspects of his/her life. Its also become possible to manage ones online identity so as to be able to transform ones self into a kind of celebrity.
All this can represent an opportunity for socialising, having fun, and even a means of forming new work relations. Many internet users, including many youngsters, do not always realise that whatever is published online, stays online and ends up being outside their control. A photo, maybe even one thats suggestive, can be retrieved years later by a potential employer. The personal information contained within social networking profiles can be used for illegal purposes by unscrupulous persons.
The Use Your Head When Posting Online Campaign, which be found online at www.sicurinrete.it until the 12th of February, aims to sensitise youngsters and adults about the need to treat their personal data with greater care.
Maybe you dont even realise it, but when you chat, post, or publish online
your data becomes accessible and not just by you
at times, also by those you dont want having access to it, an Absolute Zero, for example, reminds the Nets so many young users through an enjoyable video published on the campaign sites home.
A photo is forever! (and were not talking about diamonds
) So, do think twice before publishing anything online is the message that emerges when the big gift parcel on the home page is clicked on. Or, by clicking on another parcel, youll see You want to use a sexy picture to provoke someone? The problem is what you might actually provoke
And there is also no shortage of advice and questions for adults: When you publish something online you lose control over it. Always keep that in mind. The Internet is a public place like any other. Always ask yourself: and if the children should pass by?
In the case of each of the messages it is therefore possible to reach a deeper level, with further ideas for reflection, as well as advice about how to best safeguard ones privacy without having to give up the pleasures of the online community.
The Use Your Head When You Post Online Campaign also makes use of the TV spot produced by the European Commission for Safer Internet Day. It will be broadcast throughout Italy all day today by La7 within its daily programme schedule.
The Las Vegas City Council will debate today whether to strike a deal with an Internet entrepreneur who seeks to use the Internet suffix .vegas over the objections of Clark County officials and one local company who say the city is jumping the gun and in the process likely shortchanging Las Vegas and county taxpayers.
The council will consider endorsing a proposal by Dot Vegas Inc., to create the top-level Internet domain .vegas a new suffix that could be used in addition to the familiar .com, .net, .gov or .org suffixes that end most Web addresses.The citys interest is its bottom line: Every time someone registered a .vegas Web site name, they would pay a fee to the domain owner, who, in turn, would pay the city a portion of that fee. Dot Vegas is offering the city 75 cents per registration, or 10 percent of the gross revenues from future registrations.
The company did not return a call to the Sun for comment; the companys attorney, Jay Brown, would not comment. Some Clark County officials question the citys right to exclusively benefit from a .vegas domain. Because city limits end at Sahara Avenue and dont include the Strip the landmark commercial district that most people recognize as Las Vegas some county officials say their government should share in any profits from the name.
Despite the prevalence and popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, almost a third of respondents said that they preferred to meet friends face-to-face, although 44 percent said the internet made it easier to keep in touch with them. More than seven in 10 children said their most common use of the Internet was for gaming, while 59 percent said that they used the worldwide web in the course of doing their homework. The youngsters from Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Poland also expressed a strong sense of social responsibility, with 90 percent saying it was important to look after the planet, and 74 percent saying they recycled regularly.
They've never known a world without the Internet, but they still prefer to meet their friends offline.
Thanks to efforts from Microsoft Research, criminals involved in child-exploitation will have less places to hide, especially when it comes down to the nooks and crannies of the Internet. Ernie Allen, president and CEO of National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) notes that while the Internet has created new opportunities for pedophiles to access content in the privacy of their own homes, and to expose themselves less to the risks associated with their illegal activities, work has been done to identify them and bring them to justice. At the same time, PhotoDNA is designed to help stop the distribution of child-exploitation images across the web.
NCMEC will be using a technology donated by Microsoft in order to produce blueprints of known images of children abuse.
(Source: Softpedia)
Forty years after it was invented, the Internet is straining under the weight of cyber attacks, multimedia content and new mobile applications. In response, U.S. computer scientists are re-thinking every aspect of the Internet's architecture, from IP addresses to routing tables (see main story: 2020 Vision: Why you won't recognize the 'Net in 10 years) to overall Internet security. There are many views about how to fix the Internet's architecture, but there's widespread agreement about many aspects of the future Internet. Here's our list of 11 surefire bets for what the Internet will look like in a decade.
1. More people will use the Internet.
2. The Internet will be more geographically dispersed.
3. The Internet will be a network of things, not computers.
4. The Internet will carry exabytes perhaps zettabytes of content.
5. The Internet will be wireless.
6. More services will be in the cloud.
7. The Internet will be greener.
8. Network management will be more automated.
9. The Internet won't rely on always-on connectivity.
10. The Internet will attract more hackers.
Thirty percent of 17-year-olds with cell phones have received sexting photos or videos, while eight percent have sent them, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. What's more, four percent of 12- to 17-year-olds admit they have texted sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of themselves to someone else. Another 15 percent said they have received such images.
Meanwhile, laws and law-enforcement practices have emerged around sexting. The Pew report notes that some law-enforcement officers and district attorneys have begun prosecuting teens who create and share such images under laws generally reserved for producers and distributors of child pornography.
(Source: News Factor)
News Factor
Lessons in using the internet safely are set to become a compulsory part of the curriculum for primary school children in England from 2011.
The lessons are one element of a new government strategy being unveiled called "Click Clever, Click Safe". Children will also be encouraged to follow an online "Green Cross Code" and block and report inappropriate content. The measures have been drawn up by the UK Council on Child Internet Safety, a new body comprising 140 organisations. The campaign intends to encourage children to not give out personal information on the web, block unwanted messages on social networks and report any inappropriate behaviour to the appropriate bodies, which may include the website, teachers or even police.
The 2009 exhibition of the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will focus on how information and communication technologies (ICTs) are helping to increase awareness and to support concrete action on climate change in both developing and developed countries.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is contributing a special programme of daily "business talks" by leaders in the ICT sector from both developing and developed countries which will be held every day from 13.00 to 14.00 hours from 7 to 18 December 2009.
More information on the ITU programme can be found at: http://www.itu.int/themes/climate/events/ict-kiosk-cop15.html
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) organized a joint side-event with World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on "The effective use of ICTs and the IP system for mitigating climate change" where top decision-makers from governments, international organizations and industry shared their views and solutions on how ICTs can help to adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change and debated over the potential role and impact of the intellectual property (IP) system in promoting the development of new technologies, and in leveraging access to technology.
More information on the programme can be found at: http://www.itu.int/themes/climate/events/itu-wipo-cop15.html
More information on the ITU programme at the IseeTKiosk @ COP15 can be found at: http://www.itu.int/themes/climate/events/ict-kiosk-cop15.html
ITU and Climate Change
Australias Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has announced that the countrys A$43 billion high-speed broadband network now under construction - will reduce his country's carbon emissions by five per cent. It seems, the role that information and communication technologies (ICT) can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions has been accepted by at least one world leader, if not by many others.
The stand-up-and-be-counted guy is the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd who will be attending the global climate change meeting in Copenhagen this week. Speaking to a broadband conference in Sydney earlier today Mr. Rudd said the reduction in travel costs made possible by the use of telepresence video conferencing technology and the facilitation of smart metering energy usage monitoring are two reasons why the countrys National Broadband Network (NBN) will be successful in reducing the countrys carbon emissions by an impressive five per cent. Together, the NBN and CPRS (carbon pollution reduction scheme) are critical to Australia's efforts to address climate change, he said.
"It is also essential for many of the technologies that will help us reduce carbon emissions, improve health services, create a world class education system and improve opportunities for all Australians, no matter where they live, he added.
Full article
COPENHAGEN One of the major topics at the Copenhagen climate summit this week has been how can governments monitor and reduce deforestation, given that the removal of forests contributes to a fifth of the worlds global greenhouse gas emissions. The UN has suggested the REDD framework (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) and negotiators have been deliberating over variations like REDD+ and REDD++ (sounds like a computer language).
Well, at the Copenhagen event on Thursday Google showed off a tool that helps collect and manage deforestation data, and which could come in very handy for groups backing these different forestry frameworks. Heres how it works: Google takes the type of satellite data that it uses for its Google Earth mapping service in this case satellite photos of forests over time and marries it with measurement software developed by Greg Asner of Carnegie Institution for Science and Carlos Souza of Imazon. Google says Asner and Souzas forest monitoring software tool, and others like it, have been hampered by lack of access to satellite imagery data and computational resources for processing.
Google then throws this all together into a tool that sits in Googles cloud cloud computing is distributed, on demand, scalable computing and offers it up to researchers and policy makers via the web. That means researchers that might not have the resources to access this type of data and measurement tools, can access terabytes of satellite imagery and thousands of computers via Googles prototype tool. Google says the deforestation measurement tool, which isnt available to the public yet, will provide this valuable deforestation information more quickly, more easily, more cheaply, with increased security and privacy (hello climategate) and with a much larger impact on fighting climate change than has been previously available. And since its coming out of Google.org it will be a not-for-profit product. T
he idea highlights the role that information and communication technology can play in fighting climate change. At an event at the Copenhagen summit this afternoon, Microsofts sustainability officer Rob Bernard emphasized the role that ICT can play in providing research and collaboration among scientists. ICT is about unearthing and managing data, and that data can be used to make crucial decisions in reducing the worlds greenhouse gas emissions, explained Bernard. Both Microsoft and Google have a large presence, in terms of IT companies, at COP15.
More information on the ITU programme at the IseeTKiosk @ COP15 can be found at: http://www.itu.int/themes/climate/events/ict-kiosk-cop15.html
The 13-year-old Florida girl sent a topless photo of herself to a boy in hope of gaining his attention. Instead, she got the attention of her school, as well as the high school nearby. The incessant bullying by classmates that followed when the photo spread put an emotional weight upon Hope that she ultimately could not bear.
Her death is only the second known case of a suicide linked to bullying after sexting the practice of transmitting sexual messages or images electronically. In March, 18-year-old Jesse Logan killed herself in the face of a barrage of taunts when an ex-boyfriend forwarded explicit photos of her following their split. As far as training them on the Internet and what to look at and what not to look at, yeah, we talked about it,
(Source: MSNBC)
The European Unions first dedicated NGO Alliance for Child Safety Online (eNACSO) launched its Digital Manifesto on 14 November 2009 during the Internet Governance Forum(IGF) in Egypt. The global nature of the internet places a particular responsibility on international institutions and governments to take action at national and international level to ensure children are safe online says Dieter Carstensen, eNACSO Chair.
The Digital Manifesto will form part of eNACSOs Agenda for Action document which will be launched in Brussels in May 2010.
(Source: eNACSO)
That television set you discourage your children from watching may not be the greatest threat to their wellbeing. Instead, the mobile phone is the gateway in introducing children to the world of cyberspace, posing a great risk to their safety, a lobby group said Tuesday.
According to The Cradle, the unmonitored use of technology is increasingly exposing youngsters to the risk of harm and violence. "Only 24 per cent of children in the study reported to their parents or an authority of online or cell phone harassment, Cradle programme manager Brian Weke told journalists. The study also revealed that 77 out of the 96, who had the incidences reported to them, took no action and ignored the seriousness of the matter.
(Source: Daily Nation)
Daily Nation
The fifth-annual survey of domain name servers (DNS) on the public Internetcalled a "Pandora's box of both frightening and hopeful results"was released today by The Measurement Factory in partnership with Infoblox.
Cricket Liu, Vice President of Architecture at Infoblox and author of O'Reilly & Associates' DNS and BIND, DNS & BIND Cookbook says: "Of particular interest is the enormous growth in the number of Internet-connected name servers, largely attributable to the introduction by carriers of customer premises equipment (CPE) with embedded DNS functionality. This equipment represents a significant risk to the rest of the Internet, as without proper access controls, it facilitates enormous DDoS attacks."
Reported today on BBC:"Police chiefs are urging people looking for work during the recession to be alert to online scams that trick them into laundering money. The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) says websites are currently being used to recruit 'money mules'. The 'mules are ordinary people who send and receive payments through their bank accounts to facilitate business."
Neil Schwartzman has also informed us of a related report by RSA FraudAction Research Lab based on several months of tracking various reshipping scams engineered by online fraudsters.
Nearly half of England's 14-year-olds have been a victim of bullying and cyber-bullying is now the joint most common form, according to new research.
The Government-commissioned research, conducted by the National Centre for Social Research, analysed bullying among more than 10,000 secondary school pupils in England aged 14-16. The initial findings show that 47 per cent of young people report being bullied at the age of 14. After cyberbullying - where children face taunts, threats and insults via the internet and mobile phones - and name calling, the most common type of bullying was teenagers being threatened with violence, being excluded by their friends and facing actual violence.
(Source: Telegraph)
It's time to mobilise locally available resources to implement continental ICT priority projects, says SA's communications minister.
African ICT and communications ministers again called for the bridging of the digital divide, during a ministerial conference held in Johannesburg this week. The conference was in preparation of the African Union Heads of State and Government Summit, to be held in Addis Ababa, in January next year. The conference involved most of the 53 African Union member states, providing a platform for ministers to discuss and seek resolution to ICT challenges on the continent.
Pedophiles can exploit virus-infected PCs to remotely store and view their stash without fear they'll get caught. Pranksters or someone trying to frame you can tap viruses to make it appear that you surf illegal Web sites. Whatever the motivation, you get child porn on your computer and might not realize it until police knock at your door.
An Associated Press investigation found cases in which innocent people have been branded as pedophiles after their co-workers or loved ones stumbled upon child porn placed on a PC through a virus. It can cost victims hundreds of thousands of dollars to prove their innocence.
Spain says Internet-related child pornography has risen tenfold in the past five years. Francisco Villanueva of the Interior Ministry says the number of cases has gone from 108 in 2004 to 1,024 last year. Other Internet-related crimes also rose.
Villanueva said Thursday that hacking has risen from 92 to 447 cases, and that bank fraud has more than doubled in the same period, from 509 cases to 1,954. He says piracy of intellectual property decreased slightly from 330 to 298 cases, but that if more resources are not dedicated to policing piracy, Spain could lose up to 300,000 jobs. Villanueva says Spain's cyber crime levels are similar to those of neighboring European countries.
According to a report released today by Nominet, UK's domain name registry, 77% of British consumers prefer to use a .uk rather than a .com when searching for information on the Internet. The report also indicates that despite the current economic climate, the global domain name industry has seen an 8% growth with 187.6 million domain names registered worldwide. "Generic top level domains (gTLDs), such as .org and .com, have grown on average by 6% whilst the country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) including .uk and .de (the German registry) fared slightly better and together generated a 10% average growth in registrations," says Nominet.
The Nominet Domain Name Industry Report 2009
The 17-year-olds body was dumped in a ditch after she sneaked out of her home on Sunday night to meet a boy she thought was 16, but who turned out to be 32. Her mother, Andrea Hall urged, Tell your kids to be careful on the internet. Don't trust anybody and don't put your children on Facebook or other sites if they are under age. All we ask now is that people help the police in any way they can. We don't want any other child to be a victim.
A 32-year-old man, of no fixed abode was due to appear at Newton Aycliffe Magistrates Court on Wednesday, charged with manslaughter and kidnap. The convicted sex offender was also charged with failing to notify a new address as required for sex offenders under the Sexual Offences Act 2003.
Twitter warned users Tuesday of a new phishing scam on the social networking site. It's the latest in a series of scams that have plagued the site over the past year, designed to trick victims into giving up their user names and passwords.
"We've seen a few phishing attempts today, if you've received a strange DM and it takes you to a Twitter login page, don't do it!," Twitter wrote on its Spam message page. The message reads, "hi. this you on here?" and includes a link to a fake Web site designed to look like a Twitter log-in page. After entering a user name and password, victims enter an empty blogspot page belonging to someone named NetMeg99.
A man is being questioned after the body of a teenager he is believed to have met on the internet was discovered in a field in County Durham.
Det Ch Insp Paul Harker said the case highlighted the dangers of meeting people on the internet, and urged parents to monitor their children's online habits. He said: "This is a very, very unusual event. My message in terms of meeting people from the internet is 'please do not do it unless you are absolutely certain it is safe'." He added: "Speak to them about it, speak to their friends, let them know the dangers of the internet."
DOHA: Aviation industry leaders meeting here for three days from today will discuss a possible roadmap for Green Aviation to influence policymakers at the forthcoming Copenhagen climate summit.
The crucial Doha Aviation Summit will also discuss the public-private partnership in ensuring a carbon-free future and formulate a green agenda for the aviation industry. IATA has been calling on governments to adopt a sectoral approach to emission reductions for long. The industry has committed to some tough targets, including carbon-neutral growth from 2020. At the Doha summit, Quentin Browell, Assistant Director, Aviation Environment, at IATA, will explain why each government needs to think globally to finetune the aviation industrys strategy to fight climate change ...
U.S. ISPs are requesting more IPv6 addresses and fewer IPv4 addresses than ever before -- a sign that carriers are investing in the future amidst one of the deepest recessions in modern history.
The shift in IP address requests shows that North American carriers are getting ready for the long-anticipated upgrade of the Internet's main communications protocol from IPv4, the current standard, to the next-generation IPv6.
[What U.S. businesses are missing in their slow move to IPv6. | Despite businesses' faint interest, the shift to IPv6 is seen as an inevitable | Keep up on the latest networking news with our Technology: Networking newsletter. ]
A 15-year-old girl who posted her profile on a vampire website was allegedly murdered by two men who created a "fictional internet alter-ego" a court heard.
Carly Ryan's body was found by a swimmer on an Australian beach in 2007. Yesterday a father and son appeared before the South Australian supreme court accused of setting a trap that led to her alleged murder. The girl posted personal details and photographs of herself on the Gothic website www.vampirefreaks.com and soon began an internet romance with a fictitious teenager called Brandon.
According to a newsletter published by the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) Deployment Coordination Initiative, Thailand's ".th"became the first country code top-level domain (ccTLD) in Asia to adopt the securiy protocol.
DNSSEC introduces security at the infrastructure level, encrypting DNS records using cryptographic signatures. The protocol has been established for years, but came into the spotlight again last year when security researcher Dan Kaminsky identified a fundamental flaw in the DNS. At that time, Cambridge University security expert Richard Clayton said the use of the encrypted protocol is one way to mediate the security loophole.
Today's announcement that the City of New York will seek the .NYC web address makes New York the first U.S. city to seek a top-level domain. dotNYC LLC, a private company that for the last year has been meeting with city officials about the plan for the .NYC web address, is applying to become the city's operating partner.
Former Mayor Ed Koch, who supports the dotNYC effort to operate .NYC on the city's behalf, said: ".NYC is the best real estate deal since the Dutch bought Manhattan."
See more Video of Mayor Koch and Full Story
As of 1 July 2010 1 Mbit Internet connection will be defined as a universal service.
This means that telecom operators defined as universal service providers must be able to provide every permanent residence and business office with access to a reasonably priced and high-quality connection with a downstream rate of at least 1 Mbit/s.
The length of the transition period before the universal service obligation starts has been reduced by six months from the previous plan.
A decree of Finlands Ministry of Transport and Communications states that by the end of 2009 the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority will determine the telecom operators that will be imposed a universal service obligation. The service providers may decide the technology they wish to use for the service.
Its the F word question that all parents now dread. Can I go on Facebook? your eleven year-old bullies you over dinner, declaring that absolutely everybody else in her class is not only on Facebook, but also on Twitter as well as Bebo and Orkut and other peculiarly named social networks.
So how should parents in todays social media age deal with the F word question? Is social networking bad for childrens brains? Should we allow our kids to freely expose their identities on the Internet?
According to sources we have inside the Swedish web hosting industry, the .se zone, the central record for the .se top-level domain, broke at 21:19 21:45 local time and was not returned to normal until 22:43 local time.
However, since DNS lookups are cached externally by Internet service providers (ISPs) and web hosting companies, the problems remained even after that. It wasnt until around 23:30 local time last night that the major Swedish ISPs had flushed their own DNS caches, meaning that they cleared away the broken results so that new DNS lookups could start working properly again. If they had not done this the problem would have remained for a full 24 hours.
There are still a large number of smaller ISPs that have not yet fixed the problem. It is also likely that ISPs outside of Sweden is not aware of the incident, so the effects of the problem may remain there as well.
dotMobi, the company behind the .mobi top-level Internet domain, today announced the availability of its one-of-a-kind mobile keyword and .mobi domain bundle for Chinese brands and businesses, offered in partnership with China-based mobile keyword vendor Huarui.
Currently, more than 50% of China's 1.3 billion citizens are estimated to be mobile subscribersa figure that will quickly grow with the advent of 3G networks, which are just now arriving in China. And as with other countries, 3G mobile network speeds will drive the growth of mobile Web use. dotMobi's unique mobile keyword and .mobi domain bundle is designed to meet the needs of businesses in that burgeoning mobile Web environment.
Trey Harvin, CEO of dotMobi, said, "The packaging of mobile keywords and .mobi domains is a global first. This gives Chinese site owners the flexibility of using the .mobi domain to help ensure successful discovery by search engines, while using both the .mobi domain and matching keyword in advertising efforts."
A survey of 16 to 24 year olds has found that 75% of them feel they "couldn't live" without the internet. The report, published by online charity YouthNet, also found that four out of five young people used the web to look for advice.
About one third added that they felt no need to talk to a person face to face about their problems because of the resources available online. The survey looked at how the web influences the well-being of people aged between 16 and 24.
The founder of lastminute.com, Martha Lane Fox, has unveiled an ambitious policy to get everyone in Britain online by 2012, backed by a study that says it would save the government up to £1bn annually in customer service costs and boost the economy by more than £20bn.
Lane Fox, who is now chair of the government-created Digital Inclusion Task Force, says that getting the 10m Britons who have never used the internet to go online could generate at least £22.6bn in economic benefit including at least £10.6bn over the lifetimes of the 1.6m children who have never used it.
(Source: Guardian)
Internet users in the North East of England have the most nervous attitude towards the web, according to research that highlights the country's "digital divide".
Online engagement will soon replace social class as the most powerful determiner of economic success, damaging the career prospects of internet refuseniks, according to the social anthologist who analysed the survey. Nearly one-third (31 per cent) of in the North East are reluctant to use the internet for anything more than sending email and occasional browsing, higher than the national average of 23 per cent.
Twitter users should refrain from changing their log-in data until further notice or else risk getting locked out of their accounts. Twitter is investigating instances of users who have lost access to their accounts after modifying their usernames, passwords or e-mail addresses, the microblogging company said on Tuesday.
Until the problem is resolved, Twitter users shouldn't modify their log-in data, according to an official posting on Twitter's Status Web site. "This seems to affect new users as well as long term users," the note reads.
1. There's always a friend's computer. 2. They're a form of censorship. 3. They give you a false sense of security. 4. Kids resent them -- and you. 5. Kids can defeat them. 6. They catch too much. 7. They don't catch everything.
Most parental control programs use a combination of filtering techniques to block access to unwanted sites. But each method is vulnerable, and none promises 100% accuracy. Text-based filters can't really determine the context of words or phrases, so they can block access to perfectly acceptable sites. Words like "sucking," for example, might get caught in the filter and prevent your kid from researching, say, mosquitoes.
(Source: Common Sense)
Common Sense
"We were at a restaurant for my mom's birthday. I looked over and there are my daughter and my oldest son texting, holding their phones under the table," said the mom of four in Lewiston, Idaho. "I just came unglued. I was like, `Are you kidding? You're at your grandma's birthday party. Put those phones away now!'"
We all know teens love their gadgets more for texting than talking. But the devices are posing some new challenges for parents. How can they teach their tech-savvy kids some electronic etiquette? So far, parents are learning on the fly, imposing new rules for their young offenders such as "no texting at dinner."
It's your birthday. And thanks to your Facebook profile, everybody knows that. Your wall fills up with well wishes from hundreds of "friends." Sure, it's nice to be noticed. But security experts are skeptical about whether sharing information, such as birthdays, with a broad audience is a bright idea. "It's all about providing the bad guy with intelligence," said Robert Siciliano, CEO of IDtheftsecurity.com.
Many people use their birthdate in passwords and personal identification numbers, and security questions often ask for it to resend a lost password. So broadcasting a birthdate could help cybercriminals pose as others as they log on to various Web sites, experts warned.
Web surfing is no longer a solo affair. Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks have quickly become an integral part of the online culture, and with them comes a whole new array of potential security threats.
Social networking is built on the idea of sharing information openly and fostering a sense of community. Unfortunately, an online network of individuals actively sharing their experiences and seeking connections with other like-minded people can be easy prey for hackers bent on social-engineering and phishing attacks. It's important to be aware of the threats, and to maintain a healthy skepticism in your online interactions.
Weak Economic Conditions a Factor Says Report
VeriSign today released its second quarter 2009 Domain Name Industry Brief where it reports that the total base of domain name registrations across all of the Top-Level Domains [TLDs] has now reached 184 million. However the report also indicates that there has been a 15% decline compared to the same quarter last year. From the report:
"Around nine million new domain names were registered across all of the TLDs in the second quarter of 2009. This reflects a reduction in new registrations with a 14 percent decline from the first quarter 2009 and a 15 percent decline from the same quarter in the previous year. As seen in past years, there is seasonality in domain name registrations with the second quarter of the year dropping from the first quarter. In second quarter 2009, the impact of seasonality as well as the overall weak economic conditions impacted the number of new registrations for both gTLD [generic Top-Level Domains] and ccTLD [country code Top-Level Domains] registrations, though the ccTLD decline was much larger."
Read more
For the past decade America has delegated some of its authority over the internet to a non-profit organisation called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)an arrangement other countries have complained about, both because they have little say in it and because ICANNs management has occasionally proved erratic. ICANNs latest mandate is due to expire on September 30th. The day before, a new accord is planned to come into effect, whereby America will pass some of its authority over ICANN to the internet community of businesses, individual users and other governments.
Previous agreements had maintained close American oversight over ICANN and imposed detailed reforms, but the latest document, called an affirmation of commitments, is only four pages long. It gives ICANN the autonomy to manage its own affairs. Whereas prior agreements had to be renewed every few years, the new one has no fixed term.
(Source: Economist)
Full story
Teens and texting is a subject that's often discussed in pathological terms. They're texting in class! They're sexting! They need thumb therapy! But texting isn't always bad. In some families, it's become a primary form of communication between parents and children. In fact, one of my favorite texts from kids is the earth-shattering query "Wuz4dina?"
Psychologist Thomas W. Phelan says one of the biggest problems with teens is getting them to communicate at all, so if they're willing to text their parents, we should embrace the trend. "Instead of seeing the whole text thing as an enemy, see it as an ally."
A third of Web users under 25 claim they don't care about their "digital tattoo" and the items they post online, says Symantec. Symantec said a "digital tattoo" is created by all the personal information web users post online and can easily be found through search engines by a potential or current employer, friends and acquaintances, or anyone who has malicious intent.
The security firm revealed that nearly two-thirds of all those surveyed had uploaded personal photographs, while 79 percent had at least part of their address online and nearly half had their mobile phone numbers online.
(Source: PCWorld)
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is convening a Summit on Climate Change to focus Heads of State and Government on the need for urgent action, and to mobilize the highest level political will needed to reach a fair, effective and scientifically ambitious global climate deal at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December.
Read more
Find out more on ITU's activities on climate change
South Korea aims to build the world's first nationwide smart grid system to reduce its emissions by monitoring energy use more carefully.
Unlike conventional "dumb" electricity grids, smart grids allow two-way communication between electricity suppliers and consumers, as well as enabling more dispersed generation and storage of power.
The grid, to be set up by 2030, is part of the country's $103bn initiative to increase its generation of green energy from the current 2.4 per cent of total power to 11 per cent in the next two decades. According to a government-led committee, South Korea could lower its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 million tonnes annually with a national smart grid.
Between 1980 and 2005, over 7,000 natural disasters worldwide took the lives of more than 2 million people and produced economic losses estimated at over 1.2 trillion US dollars. Ninety per cent of these natural disasters, 72 per cent of casualties and 75 per cent of economic losses were caused by weather-, climate- and water-related hazards, such as droughts, floods, severe storms and tropical cyclones. For this reason, climate change monitoring and disaster prediction mechanisms are increasingly vital for our personal safety and economic wellbeing. Currently, radio-based applications such as remote sensors are the main source of information about the Earth´s atmosphere and surface.
For 135 years, there has been excellent collaboration and partnership between WMO and ITU. Whilst WMO focuses its efforts on meeting the needs for environmental information and the corresponding radio frequency spectrum resources, ITU, as international steward of the spectrum, allocates the necessary radio frequencies to allow the interference-free operation of radio-based applications and radiocommunication systems (terrestrial and space) used for climate monitoring and prediction, weather forecasting and disaster early warning and detection.
This seminar is organized as an open forum for discussion of the ITU and WMO roles in the use of radio spectrum, space orbits and radio-based meteorological tools and systems for monitoring, mitigation and adaptation to climate change.
The primary goal of this seminar is to provide information and exchange of the experience National Meteorological and Radio-Frequency Spectrum Management Services/Authorities have on the use and further development of radio-based space and terrestrial systems and applications employed for weather, water and climate monitoring and the relevant radio-frequency spectrum management activities.
The main issues proposed for discussion are as follows: The role of information communication technologies (ICTs) in general, and radio-based technologies in particular, in monitoring climate change - general overview; WMO and ITU roles in development, use and effective operation of systems and applications for monitoring of the environment, prediction, detection of natural disasters and mitigation of negative effects of disasters initiated by climate change; Current status and development of radio-based systems and applications for weather, water and climate monitoring and prediction; Operation of meteorological systems and quality of meteorological measurements; Activities of other national and international organizations in climate monitoring and disaster prediction, detection and mitigation of negative effects of disasters.
The seminar will be conducted in English.
More information on the seminar can be found here
In 2008, The Climate Change Groups Smart 2020 report recognized the ICT (information communications technology) industrys potential clout in the global battle against climate change. Smart 2020 estimated ICT as a whole could save 15% of predicted greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, with wireless applications playing a significant part.
The projected 15% reduction in emissions stems from energy savings worth 600 billion. Savings that are especially important as they are five times the industrys own footprint. In the new report Carbon Connections: Quantifying mobile's role in tackling climate change, published by Accenture and Vodafone, 13 wireless telecommunications opportunities are identified that have the potential to reduce carbon emissions by 113 Mt CO2e a year and cut associated energy costs by 43 billion across the EU-25 countries in 2020.
Spurred by this new report, Ethical Corporation has teamed up with Vodafone to host an online Live Debate on September 30th 2009 to provide the platform for a robust and challenging discussion on how mobile can enable a low carbon economy.
Ericsson said that the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector is crucial to creating a low-carbon 21st century infrastructure. Using today's communications infrastructure in a smart way can maintain economic development while dramatically reducing emissions.
Giving a keynote address at the Broadband World Forum in Paris today, Ericsson CFO and incoming CEO Hans Vestberg said: "For too long the need for CO2 reductions has been seen as a trade off between economic development and care for the planet. This does not have to be the case. Because the ICT sector can reduce CO2emissions substantially, government representatives have an opportunity to bring ICT onto the agenda for the upcoming United Nations framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen (COP15) in December." Vestberg continued: "Studies show that ICT can reduce global CO2emissions by 15% by 2020. Ericsson believes that with an innovation-driven climate agenda, reductions could be even greater.
Modern ICT solutions, ranging from education and information services, health as well as transport, can give access to vital services all over the world, without sacrificing our environment."
ITU's contribution to the UNFCCC negotiations can be found here
President Barack Obama warned American teenagers on Tuesday of the dangers of putting too much personal information on Internet social networking sites, saying it could come back to haunt them in later life. "Well, let me give you some very practical tips. First of all, I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life," Obama said.
The presidential words of advice follow recent studies that suggest U.S. employers are increasingly turning to sites such as Facebook and News Corp's MySpace to conduct background checks on job applicants.
(Source: Reuter)
Web sites that collect information about visitors in order to target advertising on their own pages would be required to prominently disclose what information they gather. Web sites that share user information with outside advertising networks, which place ads on sites all over the Internet, would be required to obtain user approval before collecting data. Web sites that deal with sensitive personal information, such as medical and financial data, sexual orientation, Social Security numbers and other ID numbers, would be subject to the opt-in rule.
Rep. Rick Boucher, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, hopes to put in a bill governing Internet advertising.
The rise in ATM-related crime has prompted a EU security agency to urge consumers to be more careful about withdrawing money from cash machines. ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency) estimates that annual cash machine losses in Europe have increased to around 500m, a 149 per cent increase year-on-year. ENISA blames more sophisticated attacks and fraud alongside the rapid growth in the number of ATMs for the increase.
A paper by ENISA entitled ATM Crime: Overview of the European situation and golden rules on how to avoid it contains tips on choosing which ATMs to use and other precautions. Many of Europe's 400,000 ATMs (up six per cent since last year) are located in convenience stores, airports and petrol stations where they are at greater risk of tampering than those within banks or shopping malls. The UK, Spain, Germany, France and Italy collectively account for 72 per cent of these ATMs.
Fraudsters obtain card details and PINs using a wide range of tactics ranging from "shoulder surfing" to hardware skimmers. Other tactics include trapping and then retrieving users' cards. More recently the use of malware has been implicated in these scams. During 2008, a total of 10,302 skimming incidents were reported in Europe, ENISA reports.
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ITU Global Cybersecurity Agenda
In an age in which instant news and constant life streams from Facebook and Twitter change the way we communicate, the rules of etiquette surrounding these interactions are still evolving. What happens when I expected a phone call about something and read about it in a status update instead? What's the polite response to a distant friend posting bad news on Facebook? What to do with sensitive information?
Good etiquette on Facebook might not apply on Twitter or in an e-mail. These days, milestones like marriage, pregnancy, breakups and divorce are being described over more forms of communications than ever. Because it's so new, there is sort of a gray area of what the manners are,"
Police investigating a complex online fraud which scammed more than a million pounds from taxpayers have arrested a man in London. The 32-year-old's home in Poplar, east London was raided in the early hours of Thursday. He was taken to Bethnal Green police station on suspicion of fraud and money laundering.
The arrest follows HMRC's discovery in June of "an e-crime attack" on its self-assessment system. The attack was part of a tax repayment claim fraud. The Met's recently-formed Police Central e-Crime Unit (PceU) said with HMRC it is now looking into "a criminal network" thought to be behind the attack.
A US woman has been stung for $4,000 via a fraudulent Facebook "friend in peril" scam. Jayne Scherrman, a pediatric dentist from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, wired the money via Western Union to what she thought was her friend Grace Parry in response to requests for help via Facebook. The messages claimed that Grace and her husband had lost everything after being robbed while on holiday in London and requested $600 in order to resolve their difficulties.
Attackers have begun actively targeting an unpatched hole in Microsoft's Internet Information Services webserver using new exploit code that greatly expands the number of systems that are vulnerable to the bug.
In an updated advisory published Friday, Microsoft researchers said they are seeing "limited attacks" exploiting the vulnerability, which resides in a file transfer protocol component of IIS. Exploit code publicly released in the past 24 hours is now able to cause vulnerable servers to crash even when users don't have the ability to create their own directories.
Ben Alexander spent nearly every waking minute playing the video game "World of Warcraft." As a result, he flunked out of the University of Iowa. He needed help to break an addiction he calls as destructive as alcohol or drugs.
Internet addiction is not recognized as a separate disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, and treatment is not generally covered by insurance. But there are many such treatment centers in China, South Korea and Taiwan - where Internet addiction is taken very seriously - and many psychiatric experts say it is clear that Internet addiction is real and harmful.
Federal judge George Wu officially overturned the conviction of Lori Drew, who was convicted of cyberbullying 13-year-old Megan Meier to suicide. That conviction was based on the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which makes it a crime to intentionally accessing a computer system with intent to commit a crime or tort.
But that law, the judge found, cannot be stretched so far that it would include mere violations of website terms of service. Something more than violating a TOS is needed. Otherwise, the law would convert a multitude of otherwise innocent Internet users into misdemeanant criminals.
At trial, the jury found Drew guilty of misdemeanor violations of CFAA based on the theory that accessing MySpace with intent to harrass Meier was an unauthorized access of an interstate computer. The verdict drew consternation because it seemed to suggest that merely violating a websites terms of service could be the basis for criminal prosecution.
The hacker accused of orchestrating the largest-known identity theft in US history will serve between 15 to 25 years in prison under a plea deal filed Friday.
Albert "Segvec" Gonzalez is accused of leading a hacking circle that stole 130 million credit and debit card numbers from major retail chains like Barnes and Noble, T.J. Maxx, Sports Authority, and OfficeMax.
Windows users based in the United States are the most likely to benefit from Microsoft's malicious software removal tool, which has removed malware from nearly 2.2 million US machines, more than the other nine top countries combined.
Over the same period, the MSRT has disinfected 383,378 machines in China, 282,152 in Brazil, 278,207 in the UK, and 262,539 in Korea, according to statistics Microsoft published here. In all, 2.18 million US-based machines were cleaned, compared with 1.87 million machines based in the other countries contained on the top-10 list.
Facebook has agreed to make worldwide changes to its privacy policy as a result of negotiations with Canada's privacy commissioner. Last month the social network was found to breach Canadian law by holding on to users' personal data indefinitely.
It will also make it clear that users can deactivate or delete their account. "These changes mean that the privacy of 200 million Facebook users in Canada and around the world will be far better protected," said Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart.
Users of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter could face higher insurance premiums because burglars may be using them to find out their personal details. The Digital Criminal report, which polled 2,000 social network users, found nearly two fifths had posted details of their holiday plans, with nearly two thirds of 16-24 year-olds doing so.
"I call it 'internet shopping for burglars'. It is incredibly easy to use social neyworking sites to target people, and then scope out more information on their actual home using other internet sites like Google Street View, all from the comfort of the sofa."
Computerworld - Hackers using multi-exploit attack "toolkits" take defensive measures of their own against other criminals, a security researcher said today.
"Exploit kit operators do use mainstream browsers, but they're much more likely to use Opera than the average user, because they know that the browser isn't targeted by other hackers," said Paul Royal, a principal security researcher with Atlanta-based Purewire.
While the most generous Web measurements peg Opera, a browser made by Norwegian company Opera Software, at a 2% share of the global market, 26% of the hackers who Purewire identified use the far-from-popular application.
The IEEE has brought together an alliance of anti-virus vendors in an industry group that aims to improve and better organise collaboration, with an initial focus on better standards for malware sample sharing. Vendors including AVG, McAfee, Microsoft, Sophos, Symantec and Trend Micro have signed up to the newly newly-formed Industry Connections Security Group (ICSG). Anti-virus researchers at these firms (and others such as Kaspersky and F-secure yet to sign up to ICSG) have been sharing virus samples for years. What the ICSG wants to bring to the party is better organisation and standardisation to this process, as its mission statement explains:
"While there has been some ad-hoc co-operation in the industry in areas such as malware and phish URL sharing, this co-operation has not been standardized or documented in a format that lends itself to systematic improvement in operational efficiency or visibility and review by people outside the vertical industries. ICSG currently has one Working Group looking at Malware, but expects to add other Working Groups over time."
Adobe Systems has released updates that patch vulnerabilities in two widely used web development applications, several of which let attackers steal sensitive data or take complete control of users' machines.
In all, the patches fix seven flaws in versions 8.0.1 and earlier of ColdFusion and JRun 4.0. The most serious of them are XSS, or cross-site scripting, bugs that allow attackers to execute malicious code on an underlying system by supplying a target with a booby-trapped web link.
An Australian Federal Police boast, on the ABC's Four Corners program, about officers breaking up an underground hacker forum, has backfired after hackers broke into a federal police computer system. Security consultants say police appear to have been using the computer as a honeypot to collect information on members of the forum but the scheme came undone after the officers forgot to set a password. Last Wednesday, federal police officers in co-operation with Victoria Police executed a search warrant on premises in Brighton, Melbourne, connected to the administrator of an underground hacking forum, r00t-y0u.org, which had about 5000 members.
Many details of the investigation were revealed for the first time on Four Corners last night. After the raid, the federal police covertly assumed control of the forum and began using it to gather evidence about members. "We can operate in a covert activity here fairly seamlessly with no harm to our members with continual and actual significant penetration," Neil Gaughan, national manager of the federal police's High Tech Crimes Operation, told Four Corners.
However, what the federal police did not know was that hackers had already cottoned on to their plan. Police were monitoring the forum by logging into the account of the administrator they had raided, but this aroused suspicion among members who knew the raid had taken place. A hacker broke into the federal police's computer system and, according to a source close to the investigation, accessed both police evidence and intelligence about federal police systems such as its IP addresses.
A Missouri woman has become the first person to be charged with felony cyberbullying in that state after she allegedly posted photos and personal information of a teenage girl to the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist.
Prosecutors said Elizabeth A. Thrasher, 40, posted the 17-year-old's picture, cell phone number, email address, and employer to the Craigslist section, which is frequented by adults looking for anonymous, no-strings-attached sex. The girl received lewd emails and calls in response, including pornographic pictures from men she didn't know.
US prosecutors have charged a man with stealing data relating to 130 million credit and debit cards.
Officials say it is the biggest case of identity theft in American history. They say Albert Gonzalez, 28, and two unnamed Russian co-conspirators hacked into the payment systems of retailers, including the 7-Eleven chain. Prosecutors say they aimed to sell the data on. If convicted, Mr Gonzalez faces up to 20 years in jail for wire fraud and five years for conspiracy.
He would also have to pay a fine of $250,000 (£150,000) for each of the two charges. Mr Gonzalez used a complicated technique known as an "SQL injection attack" to penetrate networks' firewalls and steal information, the US Department of Justice said. His corporate victims included Heartland Payment Systems - a card payment processor, convenience store 7-Eleven and Hannaford Brothers, a supermarket chain, the DOJ said.
IDG News Service - The cyberattacks against Georgia a year ago were conducted in close connection with Russian criminal gangs, and the attackers likely were tipped off about Russia's intent to invade the country, according to a new technical analysis, much of which remains secret.
The stunning conclusions come from the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, an independent nonprofit research institute that assesses the impact of cyber attacks. A 100-page technical analysis is only being made available to the U.S. government and some cybersecurity professionals, but the organization did release a nine-page summary early Monday.
Half (52 per cent) of new malware strains only stick around for 24 hours or less. The prevalence of short lived variants reflects a tactic by miscreants aimed at overloading security firms so that more damaging strains of malware remain undetected for longer, according to a study by Panda Security.
The security firm, based in Bilbao, Spain, detects an average of 37,000 new viruses, worms, Trojans and other security threats per day. Around an average of 19,240 spread and try to infect users for just 24 hours, after which they become inactive as they are replaced by other, new variants.
Australian police have charged an as yet unnamed 20 year-old man on suspicion of creating a banking Trojan that infected an estimated 3,000 computers worldwide, as well as building up a 74,000 strong botnet of compromised machines.
The name of the suspect will not be revealed until he faces magistrates in Adelaide, South Australia, on 4 September. South Australia state police charged the man with computer crimes offences, including hacking and developing "capabilities to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks with up to 74,000 computers world wide".
For the past couple weeks, Twitter has come under attacks that besieged it with more traffic than it could handle. Now comes evidence that the microblogging website is being used to feed the very types of infected machines that took it out of commission.
That's the conclusion of Jose Nazario, the manager of security research at Arbor Networks. On Thursday, he stumbled upon a Twitter account that was being used as part of an improvised update server for computers that are part of a botnet.
The account, which Twitter promptly suspended, issued tweets containing a single line of text that looked indecipherable to the naked eye. Using what's known as a base64 decoder, however, the dispatches pointed to links where infected computers could receive malware updates.
ITU Global Cyberecurity Agenda
IDG News Service - Why spend millions of dollars campaigning when you can hack an election for less than 100 grand? That's a question raised by university researchers who recently bought a Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine and then used a new hacking technique to circumvent its security. Although they've been hacked before, Sequoia's AVC machines are considered a pretty tough target because they have a special memory-protection mechanism that allows them to only run software they're hardwired to execute in the machine's ROM (read-only memory).
But using a new hacking technique, called a return-oriented programming attack, researchers were able to trick the machine into changing the results of an election, according to Alex Halderman, one of the university researchers behind the work. Halderman is with the University of Michigan, but researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Princeton University were also involved in the project. They presented their results at the Usenix 2009 Electronic Voting Workshop, held in Montreal this week.
IDG News Service - As smartphones become more popular, they're going to get some unwanted attention from criminals, Google Inc.'s head of Android security said today. "The smartphone OS will become a major security target," said Android Security Leader Rich Cannings, speaking at the Usenix Security Symposium. Attackers can already hit millions of victims with a smartphone attack, and soon that number will be even larger. "Personally I think this will become an epiphany to malware authors," he said.
Microsoft's Windows operating system is the prime target of criminal attacks, and hackers have generally steered clear of mobile devices. Security experts say that this is because mobile phones haven't traditionally stored a lot of sensitive data, and because there are so many different devices to attack, it's hard to create a single virus that can infect a large number of users.
A Washington state man who admitted using the LimeWire file-sharing program to steal tax returns and other sensitive documents has been sentenced to more than three years in federal prison.
Frederick Eugene Wood of Seattle was ordered to serve 39 months for a fraud scheme that prosecutors said was a "particularly pernicious and devious one." In it, Wood would search the hard drives of LimeWire users for files that contained words such as "statement," "account" and "tax.pdf." He would then download tax returns, bank statements, and other sensitive documents and use them to forge counterfeit checks and steal the identity of the individuals who filled out the documents.
eBay security officials are requiring members of its developer program to change their passwords following the discovery of a vulnerability that could allow attackers to intercept sensitive account details.
"eBay has recently identified a means by which someone could gain access to eBay Developers Program account information," Kumar Kandaswamy, manager of the eBay Developers Program, wrote in an advisory posted on the auctioneer's website. "Out of an abundance of caution and to help ensure the security of the eBay Developers Program, we are requiring that all developers" change their passwords.
Two weeks after internet overlords warned of a serious vulnerability in one of the most widely used programs for resolving domain names, Apple has updated its Mac OS X operating systems to fix the security bug.
The update, released Wednesday, patches a hole in BIND, the net's most popular domain name system package. It's available for both client and server versions of the Mac OS and follows an update released last week that plugged 18 holes and a separate fix issued on Tuesday for six holes in Apple's Safari browser.
Fraudsters are making approximately $34m per month through scareware attacks, designed to trick surfers into purchasing rogue security packages supposedly needed to deal with non-existent threats. A new study, The Business of Rogueware, by Panda Security researchers Luis Corrons and Sean-Paul Correll, found that scareware distributors are successfully infecting 35 million machines a month.
Social engineering attacks, often featuring social networking sites, that attempt to trick computer users into sites hosting scareware software have become a frequently used technique for distributing scareware. Tactics include manipulating the search engine rank of pages hosting scareware. Panda reckons that there are 200 different families of rogueware, with more new variants coming on stream all the time.
In a decision that could make it harder for internet users to take spammers to court, a federal appeals court has upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit against a company that sent a man more than 13,000 unsolicited emails.
A three-judge panel from the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a lower-court judge that under a federal law that went into effect in 2004, plaintiff James S. Gordon Jr. lacked standing to sue online marketing business Virtumundo. The panel ruled that under the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing, or CAN-SPAM, act, lawsuits can only be brought by select law-enforcement agencies and providers of an IAS, or "internet access service."
Like it or not, the use of Web 2.0 technology use in enterprises is here to stay. Even longstanding enterprise software providers, such as Salesforce.com, have created tools for integrating social networks into the customer support and lead generation process. And youd be hard-pressed to find a Fortune 500 company that doesnt, at the very least, have a corporate blog.
Over the last few weeks, two organizations issued study results focusing on the use of social networking within the enterprise. RSA Conference, in its What Security Issues Are You Currently Facing? report, surveyed nearly 150 C-level executives and professionals charged with directing, managing and engineering security infrastructures within their respective organizations.
Social networking and security was a consideration, however it appears that organizations thus far claim to have been minimally impacted by social network threats. According to the survey, 84 percent of respondents allow Twitter and Facebook in the enterprise, however only 3 percent were seriously affected by the recent Facebook and Twitter phishing attacks.
Updated Security researchers have uncovered critical flaws in open-source software that implements the Extensible Markup Language in a staggering array of applications used by banks, e-commerce websites, and consumers.
The bugs uncovered by researchers at Finland-based Codenomicon were contained in virtually every open-source XML library available, Ari Takanen, CTO of Finland-based security testing firm Codenomicon, told The Register. Many of them could allow attackers to crash machines running applications that use the libraries or even remotely execute malicious code. The Python and Java programming languages and Apache Xerces are already known to be affected, and Takanen said many more could be as well.
Federal prosecutors have accused a Canadian man of laundering more than $350m for offshore internet gambling operations to skirt US laws prohibiting payments to American citizens trying to cash out their winnings.
Douglas Rennick, 34, was charged with three felony counts related to the alleged scheme by the US Attorney's office in Manhattan. Between February 2007 and June 2009, he and several unnamed co-conspirators established sham businesses that provided false information to banks so they could carry out large financial transactions that otherwise would have been barred, according to an indictment filed Thursday.
As Twitter struggled to return to normal Wednesday evening, a trickle of details suggested that the outage that left 30 million users unable to use the micro-blogging service for several hours - at least in part - may have been the result of a spam campaign that targeted a single user who vocally supports the Republic of Georgia.
According to Bill Woodcock, research director at the non-profit Packet Clearing House, the torrent of traffic that brought the site to its knees wasn't the result of a traditional DDoS, or distributed denial of service attack, but rather people who clicked on a link in spam messages that referenced a well-known blogger called Cyxymu.
As spam goes, the emails looked benign enough. One of them carried the subject "Visit my blog" and contained the words "thanks for looking at my blog" in the body. They contained respective links to Cyxymu's accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube, all of which also reported receiving abnormal amounts of traffic on Thursday.
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IDG News Service - A British hacker who broke into U.S. government computer systems seeking evidence of alien life has failed in his latest efforts to block extradition to the U.S. to face trial.
On Friday, the High Court ruled the extradition of Gary McKinnon, whose hacking exploits have drawn high-profile attention from U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and celebrities such as David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, should proceed. Karen Todner, McKinnon's attorney, said they will lodge an appeal within 28 days.
McKinnon's attorneys had asked the court to review a refusal by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) for England and Wales to prosecute the him in the U.K. British prosecutors maintain that the U.S. wants jurisdiction and that most evidence and witnesses are in the U.S.
Defcon If you use cPanel to administer your website or certain Linksys or Netgear devices to route traffic over your wireless network, you're susceptible to web-based attacks that could take complete control of your systems, two security researchers said Saturday.
All three wares contain CSRF, or cross-site request forgery, holes that can be exploited when the user does nothing more than surf to the wrong site. Web-application security experts Russ McRee of HolisticInfoSec.org and Mike Bailey of Skeptikal.org said they've alerted officials at all three companies to the weaknesses and so far all have failed to fix them.
A group of teenagers have reacted to warnings that using sites like Facebook, Bebo and Myspace can leave them traumatised. The Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, says the sites encourage users to value the number rather than quality of friends they have. Hes worried this makes people get too many temporary friends instead of real, genuine ones. He said: Its an all or nothing syndrome that you have to have in an attempt to shore up identity. "Friendship is not a commodity, friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when its right.
But speaking to Newsbeat a group of teenagers mainly rejected what the spiritual leader of the four million Catholics in England and Wales had to say. Ash is 19 and from London. He said: "These sites are just a different way of socialising and I think the nations the friendliest its ever been because of that.
ITU Child Online Protection
The White House's acting cyber-security tsar has resigned from her post, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Melissa Hathaway told the paper she was leaving for "personal reasons" and would return to the private sector. The former strategist was appointed as acting national cyber-adviser in February and was expected to be offered the post of full time. President Barack Obama has made cyber-security a high priority for his administration. In May, the President announced plans for securing American computer networks against cyber attacks.
In recent years, US government and military bodies have reported attempts to infiltrate systems by hackers. He announced the creation of a cyber-security office in the White House, and said he would personally appoint a "cyber-tsar". Ms Hathaway was widely regarded as the person to fill that post after taking on the role as acting senior director for cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils in February. A successor has not yet been named by the White House.
Concerted borderless cooperation is needed to tackle today's cyber-attacks, according to international agencies, the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats (IMPACT) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU). This, in response to recent reports of more than two dozen attacks against prominent government websites in South Korea and the US.
Speaking at IMPACT global headquarters in Malaysia, chairman Datuk Mohd Noor Amin said: "Though the attacks, which included websites belonging to the White House, US Treasury, and the Pentagon, were small in scale and low in sophistication, these attacks could have been more destructive."
"Websites all over the world are constantly targetted by hackers, but increasingly, the number of critical sector websites and systems being attacked has increased," said Amin. "In recent years, large scale attacks on critical infrastructures have started to take place such as the cyber-attack that occurred in Estonia in 2007 that subsequently paralysed the country's entire critical infrastructure for almost two weeks." [Read full article on infoworld...]
ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun I. Touré was last night honoured by the President of the Dominican Republic, Dr Leonel Fernández, when he was accorded the title of Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of Duarte, Sánchez and Mella (Orden al Mérito de Duarte, Sánchez y Mella).
The Order of Merit of Duarte, Sánchez and Mella is the principal Order of the Dominican Republic. It was established in 1931, and is conferred by the Head of State on both civilians and military for distinguished services. Read the information note
Google has announced
they are currently developing an operating system (OS), called Chrome OS,
planned for release in the second half of 2010. Google Chrome OS, designed to be
a "fast and lightweight" operating system, will initially be targeted at
The operating system
is designed "for people who spend most of their time on the web" with a "minimal
user-interface" where "most of the user experience takes place on the web".
Google Chrome OS will be open source which will allow third party developers to
create applications for it: similar to the system behind much of the iPhone's
With Microsoft's
Windows 7 OS set for release later on this year, whether Google's offering can challenge Microsoft's roughly 90% market share remains to be
Secret operations currently carried out by parts of the intelligence and security services will be centralised in Whitehall as part of an ongoing major review of cybersecurity, according to a report.
The Cabinet Office is due to publish the UK's version of Barack Obama's cybersecurity stategy before the summer Parliamentary recess, which begins in late July. The US President last month announced a new "cyber tsar" role and agency to oversee efforts to prepare for and respond to attacks by enemy states and organised criminals.
Canada is considering legislation allowing the country's police and national security agency to readily access the online communications and the personal information of ISP subscribers.
"We must ensure that law enforcement has the necessary tools to catch up to the bad guys and ultimately bring them to justice. Twenty-first century technology calls for 21st-century tools," Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said in announcing two new bills at a press conference in Ottawa, the CBC has reported.
Updated A small army of security and privacy researchers has called on Google to automatically encrypt all data transmitted via its Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar services.
Google already uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (https) encryption to mask login information on this trio of cloud-based web-based applications. And netizens have the option of turning on https for all transmissions. But full-fledged https protection isn't flipped on by default.
"Googles default settings put customers at risk unnecessarily," reads a letter lobbed to Google CEO Eric Schmidt by 37 academics and researchers. "Googles services protect customers usernames and passwords from interception and theft. However, when a user composes email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and calendar plans, this potentially sensitive content is transferred to Googles servers in the clear, allowing anyone with the right tools to steal that information".
Every PC in China could be at risk of being taken over by malicious hackers because of flaws in compulsory government software.
The potential faults were brought to light by Chinese computer experts who said the flaw could lead to a "large-scale disaster". The Chinese government has mandated that all computers in the country must have the screening software installed. It is intended to filter out offensive material from the net.
The Chinese government said that the Green Dam Youth Escort software, as it is known, was intended to push forward the "healthy development of the internet" and "effectively manage harmful material for the public and prevent it from being spread." "We found a series of software flaws," explained Isaac Mao, a blogger and social entrepreneur in China, as well as a research fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Hackers are manipulating a hot topics feature of Twitter to promote malware-infected websites. The gaming of the Twitter Trends feature recalls the manipulation of Google search results using black-hat search engine optimisation techniques.
In the case of the Twitter attack, cyber-criminals created hundreds of accounts and posted multiple messages under the topic "PhishTube Broadcast", a reference to the US rock band Phish, but containing links to a spoof pornographic Web page. The topic appeared in the Trending Topic list, achieving greater visibility and therefore more user traffic to comments made under that category.
Cybercrooks are once again taking advantage of current events to push malware.
Prurient interest in the death of Kill Bill star David Carradine is being used to promote Twitter updates containing links to sites punting rogueware. The attack is the latest in a string of assaults over the last week or so that abuse the Trending Topics feature of Twitter to promote scareware.
Meanwhile, search engine result poisoning is being used so that searches involving the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 off the coast of Brazil point to scareware affiliate websites. The complex attack uses multiple site redirections, as explained in a blog posting by Trend Micro here.
In his address to the Forum, Dr Hamadoun Touré emphasized the power of innovation and how
Dr Touré met His Excellency Dmitry A. Medvedev, President of the Russian Federation, who reconfirmed the commitment of the Russian Federation to ITU. During his visit, he had the opportunity to discuss with Minister Shchegolev and other senior officials key issues related to the Union's objectives, including cybersecurity, climate change and the upcoming Connect CIS Summit.
His visit generated much interest in the planned ITU ICT Exploratorium which is scheduled for opening in 2010.
An EU security agency is calling for greater use of advanced networking technologies - specifically IPv6, DNSSec and MPLS - to improve the resilience of communication networks.
The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) argues that these advanced technologies have the potential to improve the security and resilience of telecom networks from hacking attacks or other forms of disruption. However, knowledge of how to deploy these commercially available next-generation technologies is thin on the ground.
ENISA advocates the pooling of best practice and operational experience as a way to bring everyone up to speed. The agency interviewed 12 network operators in the EU and found that lack of management and coordination between stakeholders, as well as a dearth of operational best practices, were potential potholes on the road to building more secure networks.
The agency carried out two reports. One looked at the benefits of the selected technologies in improving network resilience (here (pdf)) while the other looked into deployment issues and other practical concerns (here (pdf)), drawing its findings largely from interviews with network operators.
A corporate identity theft ring that exploited the identities of local corporations, religious institutions, hospitals and even schools to run a cheque fraud scam has been busted in New York.
Investigators reckon the gang of 18 suspects made millions by impersonating workers from an estimated 350 New York-based organisations. Data purchased from corrupt bank insiders was used to lay the groundwork for the scam, which relied on cashing thousands of counterfeit payroll cheques. The fraudsters also plundered the bank accounts of individual victims, using data obtained from corrupt bank insiders to transfer funds to banks under the control of the gang.
Mules were recruited as payees on the counterfeit cheques, which were forged using scanners, cheque stock, magnetic ink, company logos and specialist software. The scam ran between October 2007 and February 2009. One bank alone lost $1.4m through the scam.
US government investigators are probing breaches of two sensitive Army webservers by suspected Turkish hackers, according to a report by InformationWeek.
One of the servers, located at the Army's McAlester Ammunition Plant in Oklahoma, was penetrated on January 26, according to the publication, which cited investigative records it reviewed. The hack was carried out by a Turkey-based collective known as "m0sted" and caused people attempting to access the site to be redirected to a webpage protesting climate change.
ITU Global Cyberscurity Agenda
A nasty infection that attempts to install a potent malware cocktail on the machines of end users has spread to about 30,000 websites run by businesses, government agencies and other organizations, researchers warned Friday.
The infection sneaks malicious javascript onto the front page of websites, most likely by exploiting a common application that leads to a SQL injection, said Stephan Chenette, manager for security research at security firm Websense. The injected code is designed to look like a Google Analytics script, and it uses obfuscated javascript, so it is hard to spot.
The malicious payload silently redirects visitors of infected sites to servers that analyze the end-user PC. Based on the results, it attempts to exploit one or more of about 10 different unpatched vulnerabilities on the visitor's machine. If none exist, the webserver delivers a popup window that claims the PC is infected in an attempt to trick the person into installing rogue anti-virus software.
The rogue anti-virus software uses polymorphic techniques to constantly alter its digital signature, allowing it to evade detection by the vast majority of legitimate anti-virus programs. Because it uses obfuscation, the javascript is also hard to detect by antivirus programs and impossible to spot using Google searches that scour the web for a common string or variable.
US President Barack Obama will create a new White House post that's responsible for protecting the country's critical computer networks, a step he said was crucial to confronting one of the biggest national security challenges.
For what is likely the first time ever, the leader of the free world spoke publicly about botnets, phishing, malware, and other internet-based attacks that not only threaten millions of individuals, but the country's military and intelligence networks as well. He also recounted his personal brush with cyber espionage, confirming for the first time a report that travel plans, policy papers, and other files were accessed after hackers penetrated his presidential campaign's computer system.
A compromise that is moving virally across websites is making unwitting people who surf to them part of a botnet that redirects Google search results, a security researcher has warned.
During the past week, the number of websites identified as infected have almost tripled, according to researcher Mary Landesman with real-time malware scanning specialist ScanSafe tracking the attacks since March. Normally, web compromises die out after a few weeks, as search engines and anti-virus programs grow wise to them. But that's not happening this time.
Global electricity networks could become smart grids that can help us monitor and control our energy usage, if plans from net firm Cisco take off.
The giant US firm, whose technology helps underpin the net, is building a two-way link into electricity grids. Smart grids would allow devices to communicate with utility firms to give an accurate view of energy use that could cut CO2 emissions by 211m tonnes. Cisco believes the market could be worth up to $20 billion a year. The basic premise is to link different parts of the electrical grid - from a single home to the largest of power stations - using a customised network based on Internet Protocol (IP). Cisco say the proposal would be a "once in a generation capital investment". With the rising cost of electrical power and concerns about how that power is generated - especially when it comes to fossil fuels - a number of other firms are also making a bid to modernise the electrical networks.
Facebook has been working to clean up its site after its 200 million members were targeted by hackers.
Facebook spokesperson Barry Schnitt wouldn't comment on how many accounts had been hit but he did confirm it was blocking any that had been compromised. The hackers used a common "phishing" scam to get hold of users' passwords. After breaking in to people's Facebook accounts they sent out emails to friends of members asking them to click on links to fake websites. The sites are designed to look like legitimate pages from Facebook but have been set up and are controlled by the hackers.
Spreading spam
Then it's a simple case of tricking users into handing over all sorts of details from passwords to e-mail addresses. All of this is done with the overall aim of being able to provide lists of addresses which can then be targeted to help spread spam. It's not the first time Facebook has been attacked like this. Last year a malicious virus called Koobface hit the site, tricking people into downloading it onto their computers by sending links pretending to be from friend's accounts. Security experts say part of the problem is that members are using passwords that are just too weak, ones like family or pet names that are often on a person's homepage and so can be easily guessed.
The United States' top commanding officer for the space and cyber domains told reporters last week that a cyber attack could merit a more conventional military response.
During a press briefing on Thursday, US Air Force General Kevin Chilton, who heads the US Strategic Command, said that top Pentagon advisors would not rule out a physical attack on any force that attacks the United States through the internet. Currently, the military's networks are probed thousands of times a day, but the goal of attackers seems to be espionage, not to take down critical networks, he told reporters.
The newly established Police Central e-crime Unit is unlikely to get increased UK government funding, according to a response to questions in the House by the Home Secretary on Tuesday. The reply by Jacqui Smith is a sign that the present home secretary is less inclined to invest in the nascent unit than her predecessor David Blunkett.
Liberal Democrat MP Chris Huhne asked Jacqui Smith about whether "she will make an assessment of the adequacy of the IT resources provided to Metropolitan Police officers in policing fraud". The Home Secretary responded to this question by suggesting the micro-management of resources was down to the Met Police. She also mentioned the £3.5m granted by central government over three years towards the establishment of a long-awaited central e-crime unit, Hansard reports.
Microsoft has teamed with the US government to refine a locked-down, more secure configuration of Windows XP.
Originally developed by the US Air Force in cooperation with Microsoft, the special XP set-up uses hardened Group Policy Objects (a technology in Microsoft's Active Directory) and images, which the Air Force used as the standard OS image for its desktop Windows machines.
The project evolved into the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (fdcc) recommendations maintained by US standards organisation NIST. Sys admins can download the configuration along with group policy objects.
Earlier reports by Wired suggested that Microsoft has worked with the government to develop a secure configuration of XP for use by the military and that this might be somehow out of reach to the hoi polloi, who are left with a system whose out-of-the-box configuration leaves it open to all manner of worms as soon as it's connected to the net.
Flight simulator site Avsim has been "destroyed" by malicious hackers.
The site, which launched in 1996, covered all aspects of flight simulation, although its main focus was on Microsoft's Flight Simulator.
The attack took down the site's two servers and the owners had not established an external backup system.
The site's founder, Tom Allensworth, said that the site would be down for the foreseeable future and was unsure "if we can come back at all".
"The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from," Mr Allensworth said in a statement.
"AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. "
In a video posted on her website on May 4th, 2009, Viviane Reding (EU- Commissioner for Information Society and Media) called for greater transparency and accountability in Internet Governance as of October 2009. Commissioner Reding outlined a new governance model for the internet and called for the creation of a "G-12 for Internet Governance", an informal group of government representatives that meets at least twice a year and can make, by majority, recommendations to ICANN.
The full transcript of Commissioner Reding's message is available here.
During his visit to the Vatican on 29 April 2009, ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun I. Touré met His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI and presented to him ITU's Child Online Protection initiative (COP). COP has been established as an international collaborative network for action to promote the online protection of children worldwide by providing guidance on safe online behaviour in conjunction with other UN agencies and partners. COP's key objectives are:
More information about COP...
The U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) seeks comment regarding the upcoming expiration of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). This agreement has been in existence since November 25, 1998, and is scheduled to expire on September 30, 2009.
DATES: Comments are due on or before June 8, 2009.
ICT for Development Conference (ICTD 2009 http://ictd2009.org/cfp.html
The ITU Sub-Regional Seminar was held in Belgrade, Republic of Serbia from 27-29 April. Dr Touré met with H.E. Mr Mirko Cvetkovic, Prime Minister of Serbia. As an integral part of the Seminar, the Ministerial Round Table on "Switchover from Analogue to Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting in Central and Eastern Europe" was chaired by H.E. Ms Jasna Matic, Minister of Telecommunications & Information Society, Republic of Serbia and Dr Hamadoun Touré, ITU Secretary-General. This event gathered about 155 high-level participants and gave an opportunity to better understand the complexity of the switchover from analogue to digital as well as facilitated a strategic dialogue aimed at considering the most important technical, regulatory and economical aspects of the process.
Security professionals are being called on to band together to fight the highly organised cyber criminals of the world.
The call was made at a San Francisco conference organised by security firm RSA - the largest event of its kind. RSA President Art Coviello said the online fraudsters "are not bound by any rules of law" and "control massive armies of zombie computers". Recent reports claimed cyber criminals had infiltrated everything from the US power grid to the Pentagon.
In his keynote speech to the conference, Mr Coviello urged the industry not to underestimate the global cyber security threat and the sophistication of criminals. "Our adversaries operate as a true ecosystem that thrives through interdependence and constantly adapts to ensure its growth and survival. Mr Coviello said that meant it was time for the security industry to come together to defeat the criminal element at large. "We must evolve from acting independently to solve discreet information security problems to acting collaboratively to create a common development process.
Almost two million PCs globally, including machines inside UK and US government departments, have been taken over by malicious hackers.
Security experts Finjan traced the giant network of remotely-controlled PCs, called a botnet, back to a gang of cyber criminals in Ukraine. Several PCs inside six UK government bodies were compromised by the botnet. Finjan has contacted the Metropolitan Police with details of the government PCs and it is now investigating. A spokesman for the Cabinet Office, which is charged with setting standards for the use of information technology across government, said it would not comment on specific attacks "for security reasons".
The World Telecommunication Policy Forum (WTPF-2009) was preceded by a Special Strategic Dialogue: on the theme "Confronting the Crisis". The outcome of WTPF was the Lisbon Consensus.
Press releases:
SGs Speeches:
The ITU Corporate Annual Report 2008 reviews the activities of the Union for 2008, in the context of its overall Strategic Plan. The Report describes how ITU is fulfilling its seven strategic goals in progress and achievements. The message from the Secretary-General considers how Members' needs are changing and how ITU's work programme has been reviewed, in light of the financial crisis. ITU Corporate Annual Report 2008 is available online free of charge.
Nine suspects in a banking Trojan case have been arrested by specialist cybercops from the UK's new Police Central E-Crime Unit (PCeU). The suspects - four women and five men - were arrested following police raids in south east London. Investigators reckon the group of UK-based eastern European nationals used malware planted on compromised machines to steal login credentials and plunder online banking accounts.
The arrests follow the establishments of a virtual crime force, involving more than 50 officers from the PCeU and the Met's specialist crime directorate. Deputy assistance commissioner Janet Williams, ACPO lead for e-crime, said Wednesday's operation illustrated that the long-awaited national e-crime unit was already up and running Computer Weekly reports.
Interpol plans to distribute a Microsoft DIY computer forensics tool to its 187 member countries under an agreement announced Wednesday. Cofee, short for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a thumb drive containing more than 150 investigative applications police can use to collect digital evidence at crime scenes. When Microsoft announced the free tool last year, it said some 2,000 officers in 15 countries were using it.
The proliferation of cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronics devices means that even old-world crimes such as muggings and burglaries have the potential to be cracked by sifting through digital footprints inadvertently left behind by perpetrators. But collecting that evidence and preserving its integrity so it can be admitted into court trials isn't easy.
Cofee is designed to ease that burden by providing investigators with easy-to-use tools that allows them to collect electronic data on the fly. It also allows them to collect data without necessarily having to lug gear to headquarters first. Not that Cofee has been well received by everyone. Some of the more conspiratorially minded posited that some of the password-cracking features worked by exploiting backdoors secretly built into Windows. Microsoft has insisted Cofee is solely a collection of forensics tools.
The European Commission has started legal action against Britain over the online advertising technology Phorm.
It follows complaints to the EC over how the behavioural advertising service was tested on BT's broadband network without the consent of users.
Last year Britain had said it was happy Phorm conformed to European data laws.
But the commission has said Phorm "intercepted" user data without clear consent and the UK need to look again at its online privacy laws.
In a statement, Phorm said its technology was "fully compliant with UK legislation and relevant EU directives".
It added that it did not believe the Commission's legal action would have "any impact on the company's plans going forwards".
At the heart of the legal action by the EC is whether users have given their consent to have their data intercepted by the advertising system.
A study into spam has blamed it for the production of more than 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year, enough to power more than 2.4m homes.
The Carbon Footprint of e-mail Spam report estimated that 62 trillion spam emails are sent globally every year.
This amounted to emissions of more than 17 million tons of CO2, the research by climate consultants ICF International and anti-virus firm McAfee found.
Searching for legitimate e-mails and deleting spam used some 80% of energy.
The study found that the average business user generates 131kg of CO2 every year, of which 22% is related to spam.
Mr Udo Helmbrecht, President of the Federation Office for Information Security (BSI) paid a visit to Dr Touré, on 14 April The presentations by both BSI and ITU were informative and productive meeting and will lead to further discussions between ITU and ENISA. Future collaboration between ITU, BSI, ENISA and the Federal Government of Germany is envisaged in the domain of cybersecurity. The ENISA Management Board has nominated Mr Udo Helmbrecht as the new Executive Director.
More than 97% of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted, according to a Microsoft security report.
The e-mails are dominated by spam adverts for drugs, and general product pitches and often have malicious attachments.
The report found that the global ratio of infected machines was 8.6 for every 1,000 uninfected machines.
It also found that Office document attachments and PDF files were increasingly being targeted by hackers.
Microsoft said people should not panic about the high levels of unwanted e-mail.
Cliff Evans, head of security and privacy for Microsoft in the UK, told BBC News: "The good news is that the majority of that never hits your inbox although some will get through."
Details of user e-mails, website visits and net phone calls will be stored by internet service providers (ISPs) under an EU directive.
All ISPs in the European Union will have to store the records for a year. An EU directive which requires telecoms firms to hold on to telephone records for 12 months is already in force. The data stored does not include the content of e-mails and websites, nor a recording of a net phone call, but is used to determine connections between individuals.
The IGF secretariat has initiated the process of formal consultation with the IGF Forum participants in accordance with Paragraph 76 of the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society which calls on the Secretary-General to examine the desirability of the continuation of the Forum, in formal consultation with Forum participants. This consultation will be held at the Sharm El Sheikh meeting.
As a first step, the IGF Secretariat has posted an online survey for stakeholders to provide feedback on the IGF process. It's at:
The comments received by April 24th would be put in a synthesis paper, conceived as a rolling document. A first document would be made available for the 13 May Open Consultations and a revised version would be made available for the 16 September Open Consultations. The final version would be submitted to the IGF meeting in Sharm El Sheikh.
During the UN CEB meeting held at UNESCO in Paris, Dr Touré took the opportunity to have extensive talks with French Government officials and industry Leaders, touching upon issues of great importance to both France and ITU: The negative impact of the economic crisis on the ICT sector as well as the solutions and opportunities ICTs present for global economic revival. The promotion of the forthcoming ITU Telecom World 2009 was received positively.
The United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination (CEB) Spring Session was hosted by UNESCO in Paris, 4-5 April 2009. The Final Report is currently under review. The Autumn Session will be hosted by UNIDO in Vienna, Austria, 30-31 October 2009.
Security experts have made a breakthrough in their five-month battle against the Conficker worm, with the discovery that the malware leaves a fingerprint on infected machines that is easy to detect using a variety of off-the-shelf network scanners.
The finding means that, for the first time, administrators around the world have easy-to-use tools to positively identify machines on their networks that are contaminated by the worm. As of mid-Monday, signatures will be available for at least half a dozen network scanning programs, including the open-source Nmap, McAfee's Foundstone Enterprise and Nessus, made by Tenable Network Security.
Up to now there were only two ways to detect Conficker, and neither was easy. One was to monitor outbound connections for each computer on a network, an effort that had already proved difficult for organizations with machines that count into the hundreds of thousands or millions. With the advent of the Conficker C variant, traffic monitoring became a fruitless endeavour because the malware has been programmed to remain dormant until April 1.
US senators have drafted legislation that would give the federal government unprecedented authority over the nation's critical infrastructure, including the power to shut down or limit traffic on private networks during emergencies.
The bill would also establish a broad set of cybersecurity standards that would be imposed on the government and the private sector, including companies that provide software, IT work or other services to networks that are deemed to be critical infrastructure. It would also mandate licenses for all individuals administering to strategically important networks.
The bill, which is being co-sponsored by Senate Commerce Committee chairman John Rockefeller IV and Senator Olympia Snowe, was expected to be referred to a senate committee on Wednesday. Shortly after a working draft of the legislation began circulating, some industry groups lined up to criticize it for giving the government too much control over the internet and the private companies that make it possible.
The chaos predicted by some as the Conficker worm updates itself have so far failed to materialise.
There had been concerns that the worm could trigger poisoned machines to access personal files, send spam, clog networks or crash sites. Many of the infected machines are based in Asia where there have been no reports of unusual PC behaviour. Conficker is believed to have infected up to 15 million computers to date. Those monitoring the progress of the worm as 1 April dawned around the globe said there was no evidence it was doing anything other than modifying itself to be harder to exterminate.
French internet users persisting in illicit downloading of music and films could have the plug pulled on their internet if a controversial new law is approved.
Under plans by the French government, illegal downloaders would be barred from broadband access by their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) after three warnings.
The three-strikes law means alleged wrongdoers will first get a warning e-mail, then a letter through the post, followed by their connection being cut off for up to a year.
A proposed state agency would gather the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of people involved in illegal file-sharing.
Marc Guez, managing director of France's Society of Phonographic Producers (SCPP), said record companies are losing millions in profits to piracy.
He said the internet is "killing all of the creative industries little by little" and that governments must take action against piracy.
20 March 2009
The new state-of-the-art facilities of the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber-Threats (IMPACT) in Cyberjaya will host the ITUs Global Cybersecurity Agenda (GCA), which promotes international cooperation to make cyberspace more secure in an increasingly networked information society.
The joint effort by the ITU and IMPACT an initiative which brings together governments, industry leaders and cybersecurity experts to enhance the global communitys capacity to prevent, defend and respond to cyberthreats aims to provide real-time analysis, aggregation and dissemination of global cyber threat information.
Cybersecurity is one of the most critical issues of our time, said Hamadoun Touré, ITU Secretary-General, noting that the problem demands a truly global approach.
Last September, the heads of ITU and IMPACT signed an agreement to operationalize the GCA at IMPACTs Cyberjaya site.
Although the GCA will be housed at the IMPACT centre, ITU will have a virtual showcase at its headquarters in Geneva of the early warning system, crisis management and real-time analysis of global cyber threats.
Geneva, 20 March 2009 - The global headquarters of the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats (IMPACT) was inaugurated today in Cyberjaya on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The new IMPACT facilities will host ITU's Global Cybersecurity Agenda (GCA), which is an international framework for cooperation aimed at finding strategic solutions to boost confidence and security in an increasingly networked information society.The new IMPACT headquarters was inaugurated by Malaysia's Prime Minister Dato' Seri Abdullah Haji Ahmad Badawi, who is also Chairman of IMPACT's International Advisory Board, and ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun Touré.
The headquarters of the world's first global public-private partnership against cyber threats, IMPACT, was inaugurated on 20 March in Malaysia by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun I. Touré, in the presence of senior government officials including Deputy Prime Minister, Dato' Sri Haji Mohd. Najib Bin Tun Haji Abdul Razak.
IMPACT's headquarters will, through the partnership with ITU, run the operations of the Global Cybersecurity Agenda (GCA) and provide services to interested ITU Member States. The event provided an operational physical home for the GCA and made possible its transition from strategy into operations. This transition is led by Mr. Sami Al-Basheer, Director of ITU's Telecommunication Developpement Bureau. The GCA through its partnership with IMPACT enters a phase of deployment in 20 countries with 50 planned for the next 12 months. During the event, ITU logo was unveiled by ITU Secretary-General, Malaysian Prime Minister and IMPACT's Chairman.
Malicious software may just be a property of the network, says regular contributor Bill Thompson
The Conficker worm will be active again on 1 April, according to an analysis of its most recent variant, Conficker.C, by the net security firm CA.
This malicious piece of software, also known as Downup, Downadup and Kido, spreads among computers running most variants of the Windows operating system and turns them into nodes on a multi-million member "botnet" of zombie computers that can be controlled remotely by the worm's as yet unidentified authors.
Since it first appeared in October 2008 it has apparently infected more than 15 million computers around the internet, though even that number is no more than an educated guess because the worm works very hard to disguise its presence on a PC.
Security researchers from Sophos have discovered sophisticated malware that siphons payment card information out of automatic teller machines made by Diebold and possibly other manufacturers.
Sophos researcher Vanja Svajcer found three samples after combing through VirusTotal and a similar online database earlier this month. If installed, all three trojans contained functions that allowed them to log information recorded by an ATM's magnetic card reader. They also appeared to include routines for encrypting the stolen data and instructions for retrieving the captured passwords using the ATM's printing capabilities. That would allow mules outfitted with the proper codes to fetch the pilfered information from the targeted machines, Svajcer told The Register.
Diebold became aware of the trojans in January, after an incident "isolated in Russia" attempted to use the malware to intercept sensitive information, according to an advisory the company sent its customers. Suspects in the incident have been apprehended, and Diebold is working with authorities "to assist with the investigation into these recent crimes," the advisory added.
British parents grossly underestimate how much time their children spend on the net, suggests a report.
Written by security firm Symantec, it found that UK parents believe their children are online for 18.8 hours per week. The true figure is 43.5 hours.
The report found that British parents were among those with the worst grasp of how long their children are online.
The research also found that in many cases the net was providing a new way for families to communicate.
The Online Living report from Symantec found that 20% of the 6,427 adults questioned had caught their children looking at unsuitable net sites.
Of the British parents questioned, 81% said they were confident that they knew what they children were looking at online.
By contrast, 31% of the UK children in the survey said their parents did not know what they were doing online.
A survey of London commuters suggests that 4.2m Britons store data on their mobiles that could be used in identity theft in the event they are stolen.
Only six in 10 use a password to limit entry into the phones, according to the survey by security firm Credant.
The survey found that 99% of people use their phones for business in some way, despite 26% of them being told not to.
Security experts say that password protection and, where possible, data encryption, is essential.
The advent of smartphones has seen the types of information that pass through handsets proliferate and it is now much more common to store sensitive information and work-related details on handsets.
Her Majesty the Queen of Sweden granted an audience to ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun I. Touré during his visit to Stockholm. In the presence of the Secretary-General and Deputy-Secretary General of the World Childhood Foundation and the Secretary-General of ECPAT, Dr Touré gave an introduction to the goals of ITU's Initiative "Child online Protection". Her Majesty the Queen was invited to become the Patron of the COP Initiative. The mission was marked by a visit to the Swedish Post and Telecom Agency (PTS) and to the Ericsson Group where he had extensive talks with the respective Presidents. Dr Touré also met CEOs of Swedish Sector Members (Ericsson, Teliasonera, Dolby Sweden, Rymdbolaget, Teracom) to lay emphasis on ITU's activities and the opportunities of partnership for the Private Sector.
As part of its effort to combat climate change and drive economic recovery, the European Commission today called on Member States and industry to use information and communications technologies (ICT) to improve energy efficiency.
These technologies are expected to reduce total carbon emissions in Europe by up to 15% by 2020. ICT can not only improve monitoring and management of energy use in factories, offices and in public spaces but above all help make people more aware of how they use energy.
With smart metering in their homes, for example, consumers have been found to reduce their energy consumption by as much as 10%.
A breakthrough technology is holding forth the promise of charging electronic gadgets in minutes, never having to replace a battery again, and dropping the cost of hybrid cars.
Indeed, the technology has the potential to provide an energy storage device ten times more powerful than even the latest batteries in hybrid cars -- while outliving the vehicle itself. The new technology, developed at MIT's Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems, should improve ultracapacitors by swapping in carbon nanotubes, thereby greatly increasing the surface area of electrodes and the ability to store energy.
Read more.
Find out more on ITU's activities on climate change.
A new strain of the Koobface worm is spreading across social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.
The malware posts invitations to the friends of infected users inviting them to view a video. The linked website tries to trick prospective marks into believing they need an updated version of Adobe Flash Player plugin to view the clip. The software offered is, of course, loaded with Windows-specific Trojan code. This malware establishes a back-door on compromised Windows machines.
Software used to control thousands of home computers has been acquired online by the BBC as part of an investigation into global cyber crime.
The technology programme Click has demonstrated just how at risk PCs are of being taken over by hackers. Almost 22,000 computers made up Click's network of hijacked machines, which has now been disabled. The BBC has now warned users that their PCs are infected, and advised them on how to make their systems more secure.
Concerted attack
Click managed to acquire its own low-value botnet - the name given to a network of hijacked computers - after visiting chatrooms on the internet. The programme did not access any personal information on the infected PCs. If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law. But our purpose was to demonstrate botnets' collective power when in the hands of criminals. Click ordered its PCs to send out spam to two specific test e-mail addresses set up by the programme. Within hours, the inboxes started to fill up with thousands of junk messages. But a botnet can also be used to launch a concerted attack on commercial websites to take them out of action.
Online abuse of the world's top brands is rising, according to a report.
Cyber-squatting - in which someone registers a domain name with the aim of selling it on at a later date - remains the most common form of abuse. Cyber-squatting rose by 18% in 2008, to 1,722,133 reported incidents, according to brand specialist MarkMonitor. The study also found that 80% of sites identified in 2007 as "abusive" were still in existence today. The report suggests that brand owners need to take a more aggressive stance against people or companies abusing a trademark, brand or domain name.
"That 80% of sites identified in our study last year remain active today confirms that abuse is economically sustainable for fraudsters," said Frederick Felman, chief marketing officer for MarkMonitor. "We expect attacks to grow both internationally and in complexity, further increasing the threat to organisations' reputations and revenues."
The number of child sex abuse websites in Europe has soared and the violence shown has become more extreme, the European commission and Europol, the European police agency, warned yesterday.
Jacques Barrot, EU commissioner for freedom, justice and security said Europe was facing "an extremely dramatic situation" after the number of child abuse websites increased fourfold between 2004 and 2007. At the launch of an international coalition to disrupt finances of the online child sex trade, he warned that organised criminal gangs were making an "indecent profit" for "horrific crimes against the most vulnerable people - children".
British police who tackle online child abuse and will lead the work of the European Financial Coalition said that up to 300 commercial child abuse websites were available at any one time and earnt well in excess of 30m (£26.8m) a year. Officers at the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) in London processed 1.6m images in the past year alone and identified and rescued 50 children.
German police have arrested several members of a hacking forum linked to the distribution of Trojan horse software that infected 80,000 computers.
The www.codesoft.cc messageboard was being abused by cybercrooks to exchange tips on ways to use malware and other means to create counterfeit credit cards, according to cybercops from the LKA (Landeskriminalamt) internet crime unit (statement in German here [pdf]).
Police have raided the home of an unnamed 22-year-old Swiss man from Lucerne, Switzerland, on suspicion of running the forum. He allegedly used the online alias tr1p0d to flog password-stealing software. Police recovered what's claimed to be a database of codesoft.cc's users and their IP addresses from a raid on the Swiss suspect's home, net security firm Sophos adds.
Concerned that international terrorists are prepping their attacks with help from services like Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and Google Street View, a California lawmaker hopes to airbrush certain structural details from countless public buildings pictured on these web-based virtual landscapes.
San Diego-based Assemblyman Joel Anderson recently introduced a California bill that would bar "online mapping services" from serving up overly-revealing images of schools, hospitals, churches, and government buildings.
"This bill does not impact people's ability to go from one location to another on these services," Anderson tells The Reg. "But the current level of detail invites bad behavior. So we're asking these services to limit the level of detail. There's no reason they need to show where all a school's air ducts are and the elevator shafts and all the entry and exit points...
Through an extensive programme prepared by the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and New Technologies, the Secretary-General of ITU, Dr. Hamadoun I. Touré, was able to visit: HACA (Hautes Autorités de l'Audiovisuel), actively involved in the liberalization of audio-visual communication; CND The National Centre for Documentation, while rendering more dynamic the publics ability to access historical and present day e-information is invested in its main "zero paper" plan; APEBI (Professionnels of Telecoms and Information Technologies), firmly believing in a policy of determination and global information technologies in order to be part of a globalisation dominated by the economy and knowledge; AjialCom The "Maison des Jeunes" in Casablanca, one of many to come; is a regional youth empowerment project initiated by UNDP/ICTDAR in 2004; Dr Touré visited the Lycée Hassan II where he met with the future leaders of Morocco and exposed his vision and shared his views on cyber-space; The Casanearshore (MedZ), the first Moroccan nearshore pole, was by far the most impressive breeding-ground of human resources with an incentive and competitive environment. During this mission, Dr Touré could witness that through the harmonious combining of efforts, the tremendous progress made towards an information society at the national level has propelled Morocco into a country with a leading role in ICT.
Speeches by ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun I. Touré:
The online advertising industry has launched a set of guidelines for a genre of adverts that have been causing controversy.
The code of practice drawn up by the Internet Advertising Bureau looks specifically at behavioural advertising. This form of advertising delivers ads based on people's browsing activity and is therefore far more targeted. UK ISP BT is planning to roll out such advertising developed by US firm Phorm. The guidelines which have been signed by key players including Phorm, AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo agree on three core commitments:
Profits made by peddlers of child sex abuse images are being targeted by a pan-European alliance.
The European Financial Coalition brings together payment firms, law enforcement agencies and child protection groups to disrupt commerce in the images. By tracking cash made by sites selling abuse images, investigators hope to stop the trade and find abusers.
Backers include Mastercard, Visa, Paypal and UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP). Funded by the European Commission, the coalition is intended to serve as a "stark warning" to those involved in the sale and distribution of child sex images.
"It is a reality that the rapid growth of the internet has opened up a market for images of child abuse," said EC vice president Jacques Barrot in a statement. "The European Financial Coalition (EFC) will help identify and protect victims of this horrific crime by following the money trail that takes the police to the offender," he said.
ITU has launched a video contest on YouTube asking young people for their vision on the future of information & communication technologies. Winners will be invited to take part in the upcoming World Telecommunication Policy Forum (WTPF). WTPF is a high-level international event to exchange views on the key policy issues arising from todays fast changing information and communication technology (ICT) environment. WTPF 2009 will take place in Lisbon from 21-24 April
Xbox Live is being targeted by malicious hackers selling services that kick players off the network.
The booting services are proving popular with players who want a way to get revenge on those who beat them in an Xbox Live game. The attackers are employing data flooding tools that have been used against websites for many years. Microsoft is "investigating" the use of the tools and said those caught using them would be banned from Xbox Live. "There's been a definite increase in the amount of people talking about and distributing these things over the last three to four weeks," said Chris Boyd, director of malware research at Facetime Communications.
Children's charities have expressed "serious concerns" many UK households still have access to images showing child sex abuse via their computers.
The government had asked all internet service providers (ISPs) to block illegal websites by the end of 2007. But firms providing 5% of broadband connections have still failed to act. One of them, Zen Internet, said in a statement: "We have not yet implemented the IWF's recommended system because we have concerns over its effectiveness."
It is understood other ISPs have cited the cost of blocking the illegal material as a reason not to participate in the scheme. But the NSPCC's Zoe Hilton said: "Allowing this loophole helps feed the appalling trade in images featuring real children being seriously sexually assaulted." The blocked websites come from a list supplied by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), but some smaller providers refuse to use the list.
The hacker who broke through the Website defenses of two prominent security vendors has claimed a third victim.
According to a posting on hackersblog.com, the Romanian attacker who launched SQL injection attacks on Kaspersky and BitDefender has now successfully penetrated the Web defenses of F-Secure, as well.
"[The F-Secure site is] vulnerable to SQL injection plus cross site scripting," the posting says. "Fortunately, F-Secure doesn't leak sensitive data, just some statistics regarding past virus activity."
An F-Secure spokesman told news reporters the breach occurred on a low-level server that doesn't contain sensitive data, only marketing statistics. "It is slightly embarrassing as a security company that we have had the breach," said F-Secure's David Frazer, in a news report. "We certainly, as a security company, want to ensure that all of our servers are patched to the levels that they should be."
On Monday Kaspersky conceded that a Romanian hacker had launched a SQL injection attack on its newly implemented U.S. customer support site, exposing a potentially data-threatening vulnerability in its Website. The attacker did not publish any sensitive data, even though he could have gained access to it, Kaspersky said.
Criminals in Italy are increasingly making phone calls over the internet in order to avoid getting caught through mobile phone intercepts, police say.
Officers in Milan say organised crime, arms and drugs traffickers, and prostitution rings are turning to Skype in order to frustrate investigators.
The police say Skype's encryption system is a secret which the company refuses to share with the authorities.
Investigators have become increasingly reliant on wiretaps in recent years.
Customs and tax police in Milan have highlighted the Skype issue.
They overheard a suspected cocaine trafficker telling an accomplice to switch to Skype in order to get details of a 2kg (4.4lb) drug consignment.
One of most high-profile trials over copyright infringement in years began today in Sweden. Four men behind The Pirate Bay website which enables people to find others willing to share audio, video, games and other files with them appeared in court in Stockholm to answer the charge that they had assisted in copyright infringement.
The film, music and games industries are saying that the defendants not only encouraged copyright infringement but also profited from it, while the defendants argue that they hosted no shared files and therefore are not responsible for infringement.
The Pirate Bay is a "torrent" tracker, which uses the peer-to-peer file sharing technology called BitTorrent. Trackers don't host the music, video or software files themselves, but allow users to search for and download "torrent" files. Those in turn allow users to find other people who have the file they want, and to share the files amongst themselves. Each BitTorrent user with a copy of the file contributes a piece to others who are downloading it.
Romanian hackers have discovered a security flaw in the website of anti-virus provider BitDefender. They said it was the second time in a week the company has inadvertently exposed a database that is supposed to remain private.
According to an item posted to HackersBlog, BitDefender's main website can be tricked into disclosing database contents by embedding commands into the BitDefender.com URL.
"This parameter gives access to the DB," a hacker by the name of Unu reported. "I will not publish too much now as I am waiting for the problem to be solved."
Unu went on to say he had reported the vulnerability to the site's webmaster but had received no reply. "Therefore, knowing they read our articles, I will let them know here that they have a vulnerable parameter," he wrote.
A BitDefender spokesman confirmed the site had an unchecked parameter that was fixed on Saturday. But he denied the flaw exposed any private information or resulted in an SQL injection.
ITU Secretary-General, Dr Hamadoun I. Touré, participated in the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where he extended cooperation with Telecom Private Sector and chaired the Telecom Board Meeting on 18th February. The GSMA Mobile World Congress (formerly 3GSM World Congress) combines the world's largest exhibition for the mobile industry with a stimulating and insightful congress that brings together prominent leaders and personalities from mobile operators and equipment vendors, as well as Internet and entertainment professionals.
A reward of $250,000 (£172,000) has been offered by Microsoft to find who is behind the Downadup/Conficker virus.
Since it started circulating in October 2008 the Conficker worm has managed to infect millions of computers worldwide.
The software giant is offering the cash reward because it views the Conficker worm as a criminal attack.
"People who write this malware have to be held accountable," said George Stathakopulos, of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group.
He told BBC News the company was "not prepared to sit back and let this kind of activity go unchecked".
"Our message is very clear - whoever wrote this caused significant pain to our customers and we are sending a message that we will do everything we can to help with your arrest," said Mr Stathakopulos.
Arbor Networks said as many as 12 million computers could be affected globally by Conficker/Downadup since it began prowling the web looking for vulnerable machines to infect in October.
A major new report to be published by the ITU on Monday 16 February finds that so far, mobile telephony in developing countries has survived the economic turmoil largely unscathed. The widespread expectation among some leading industry analysts contributing to the report is that the full impact of the financial crisis on mobile telephony has yet to materialize.
Worldwide, ITU statistics reveal that the total number of mobile subscribers grew by nearly 650 million over 2008 to reach nearly 4 billion subscribers in December 2008, representing total growth of 19% or nearly a fifth of total market size. According to the consultancy The Mobile World, Q3 2008 additions represented the fourth-best quarter ever.
These gains were driven mainly by growth in developing markets. In September 2008, India became the first mobile market to add more than ten million customers in one month, before beating its own record with 10.4 million additions in October 2008. The world's biggest mobile operator, China Mobile, added 74 million subscribers in the year to October 2008. In Nigeria, the number of new mobile subscribers has increased in every quarter to September 2008, while Brazil added four million mobile subscribers in October 2008, over twice as many as in October 2007.
Despite an unexpected softening in some markets (e.g. Pakistan and Bangladesh), overall, these results lead to the conclusion that there had still only been a limited impact of the financial crisis on mobile communications in developing countries by the end of last year.
For more information, read here from Monday 16 February 2009.
A new report from the ITU finds that in general, mobile operators are better placed to weather the economic storm. Mobile operators generally enjoy greater flexibility in terms of capex commitments, as capex commitments represent only 20-30% of their total cost base. Mobile operators have invested heavily in 3G networks, but the cost of incremental upgrades (e.g. to those based on high-speed packet access or HSPA) is comparatively low. Mobile operators can also undertake greater network-sharing to limit costs and boost gains in coverage, for only limited amounts of additional capital. ABI Research notes that growth rates in regional mobile capex may slow, but capex will probably not decline on a global basis.
In contrast, investment in NGN may be less discretionary for fixed-line operators, however, competing with new market entrants, capacity resellers and cable TV, as well as increasingly, mobile broadband. Universal service obligations may also prevent fixed carriers from reducing their capex commitments substantially. Several carriers such as AT&T have reported cuts of capex of between 10-15%, but industry analysts Informa find that operators' investment plans have not been 'severely altered' so far, with many operators acknowledging the importance of investment in ensuring that quality of services is maintained.
Read more in ITU's forthcoming report, "Confronting the Crisis: Its Impact on the ICT Industry", which will be published on Monday 16 February 2009.
A new report from the ITU finds that the most immediate impact of the financial crisis on the global ICT industry is on telco investment and financing. A prolonged recession could potentially starve operators of the capital investment needed to upgrade their network infrastructure.
The report finds that investment funds are less readily available, while refinancing costs have rised sharply, with recent telco debt issuance in Europe being secured at spreads of up to 4.75% in late 2008, some 3-4% higher than the situation pre-crisis (with the exact rate depending on individual firms' debt ratings). Where bonds can be refinanced, it is clear that they are incurring higher interest costs. For example, Sprint Nextel recently renegotiated its debt from its original credit line of US$ 6 billion at LIBOR plus 0.75% for a new line of US$ 4 billion at LIBOR plus 4% (depending on the company's debt rating). In their industry strategy paper, "A defensive sector for defensive times", Deutsche Bank estimates that European incumbents alone have some EUR 21 billion of bonds matruing soon in 2009, with a further EUR 26 billion of other financial liabilities, which may need to be refinanced over the coming year.
ITU and the European Commission have joined forces to mark Safer Internet Day. This year, the focus is on protecting children online. Children are among the most active and most vulnerable participants online.
According to recent surveys, over 60 per cent of children and teenagers talk in chat rooms on a daily basis. Three in four children online are willing to share personal information about themselves and their family in exchange for goods and services. One in five children will be targeted by a predator or paedophile each year. Protecting children in cyberspace is, therefore, clearly our duty.
"Children are very resourceful in making the most of online services such as social networking sites and mobile phones," said Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media. "But many still underestimate the hidden risks of using these, from cyber-bullying to sexual grooming online. Today, I call upon all decision-makers, from both the public and the private sector, to listen and learn from children and to improve awareness strategies and tools to protect minors." Ms Reding added: "The Internet binds the whole world together. The safety of children who use it is a concern for everyone. I am therefore very happy that ITU is associated with us in doing this, today on Safer Internet Day, and all year round."
"Child online safety must be on the global agenda," said ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré. "We must ensure that everyone is aware of the dangers for children online. And we want to promote and strengthen the many outstanding efforts that are being made around the world, such as the Safer Internet Programme, to limit these dangers."
This year, the 6th edition of Safer Internet Day includes more than 500 events in 50 countries worldwide. ITU and the European Commission will collaborate on this and future events, such as World Telecommunication and Information Society Day, 17 May 2009, which is dedicated to "Protecting Children in Cyberspace". The European Commissions Directorate General for Information Society and Media has declared its full support for ITUs Child Online Protection (COP) Initiative.
Read full press release.
Find out more information on ITU's Child Online Protection Initiative.
ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun I. Touré participated actively at the last XIII Informática 2009 held in Havana, Cuba from 9-13 February 2009. Dr Touré, spoke about ICTs and the Millennium Development Goals, ICT convergence, and ICTs and climate change. among other important topics.
The Convention Informática is the union of 14 thematic events that are held simultaneously at the same venue being some of its key objectives:
Half of Europe's teenagers browse the web with no parental oversight or supervision, a survey suggests.
The research into the web habits of 20,000 14 to 19-year-olds across Europe found that 51% enjoy unfettered access to any and every website.
The MSN research also found that 29% of the teenagers it quizzed have suffered bullying while using the web.
It comes as the EU marks Safer Internet Day with pledges from 17 social sites to do more to protect younger users.
"We were surprised that it's over 50% without any parental control," said John Mangelaars, head of Microsoft's consumer and online divisions in Europe.
A priority in the national development of Latin American and Caribbean countries has been the inclusion of ICTs in education. It has also been on the agenda of the Regional Action Plan for Information Society eLAC2010. This Seminar was composed of two inter-active discussions panels which reviewed and analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of ICTs in education, identified innovative solutions and aimed at establishing long-term sectoral policies to secure the incorporation of technology.ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun I. Touré pointed out that "...Education is a bridge between generations... With determination, there is no reason why today's children should not inherit an equitable, inclusive and thriving Information Society..."
The vast majority of spam (83 per cent) is linked to sites established through ten domain name registrars, according to a new study. An analysis of junk mail messages by anti-spam firm Knujon ("no junk" spelled backwards) found that while there are 900 accredited domain name registrars, spammers register their spamvertised domains though only a tiny sample. Knujon's study names and shames the registrars who are contributing (unwittingly or not) to the junk mail problem.
Hackers have discovered a new way of duping users onto fraudulent websites: fake parking tickets.
Cars in the US had traffic violation tickets placed on the windscreen, which then directed users to a website. The website claimed to have photos of the alleged parking violation, but then tricks users into downloading a virus. Anti-virus firm McAfee says the Vundo Trojan then gets users to install a fake anti-virus scanner. Vehicles in Grand Forks, North Dakota were the targets for this new type of fraud. Drivers found the following message on the yellow ticket on their windscreen: "PARKING VIOLATION This vehicle is in violation of standard parking regulations". The ticket then instructed drivers to visit a website, where drivers could "view pictures with information about your parking preferences".
Google has lifted the lid on its first major upgrade to its global mapping software, Google Earth. Google Ocean expands this map to include large swathes of the ocean floor and abyssal plain. Users can dive beneath a dynamic water surface to explore the 3D sea floor terrain.
The map also includes 20 content layers, containing information from the world's leading scientists, researchers, and ocean explorers. Al Gore was at the launch event in San Francisco which, Google hopes, will take its mapping software a step closer to total coverage of the entire globe.
For more information, read here from Monday, 16 February 2009.
Using inexpensive off-the-shelf components, an information security expert has built a mobile platform that can clone large numbers of the unique electronic identifiers used in US passport cards and next generation drivers licenses.
The $250 proof-of-concept device - which researcher Chris Paget built in his spare time - operates out of his vehicle and contains everything needed to sniff and then clone RFID, or radio frequency identification, tags. During a recent 20-minute drive in downtown San Francisco, it successfully copied the RFID tags of two passport cards without the knowledge of their owners.
Google's search service has been hit by technical problems, with users unable to access search results.
For a period on Saturday, all search results were flagged as potentially harmful, with users warned that the site "may harm your computer".
Users who clicked on their preferred search result were advised to pick another one.
Google attributed the fault to human error and said most users were affected for about 40 minutes.
Malicious hackers are producing easy to use tools that automate attacks to cash in on a boom in hi-tech crime.
On sale, say security experts, are everything from individual viruses to comprehensive kits that let budding cyber thieves craft their own attacks.
The top hacking tools are being offered for prices ranging up to £500.
Some of the most expensive tools are sold with 12 months of technical support that ensures they stay armed with the latest vulnerabilities.
Tool time
"They are starting to pop up left and right," said Tim Eades from security company Sana, of the sites offering downloadable hacking tools. "It's the classic verticalisation of a market as it starts to mature."
Malicious hackers had evolved over the last few years, he said, and were now selling the tools they used to use to the growing numbers of fledgling cyber thieves.
The threat of cybercrime is rising sharply, experts have warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
They called for a new system to tackle well-organised gangs of cybercriminals.
Online theft costs $1 trillion a year, the number of attacks is rising sharply and too many people do not know how to protect themselves, they said.
The internet was vulnerable, they said, but as it was now part of society's central nervous system, attacks could threaten whole economies.
The past year had seen "more vulnerabilities, more cybercrime, more malicious software than ever before", more than had been seen in the past five years combined, one of the experts reported.
The report of the 36th meeting of the Panel on Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) baseline and monitoring methodologies and its annexes are now available on the CDM website. The meeting convened from 19-23 January 2009, at the UN Campus in Bonn, Germany.
The report outlines the issues considered by the Panel at its 36th meeting, which include: proposed new methodologies; requests for clarification on and revision to approved methodologies; issues of general guidance and tools; and schedule of meetings and rounds of submissions of proposed new methodologies. On the proposed new methodologies, the Panel recommended four for approval and four for non-approval. The Panel could not complete its consideration of some of the methodologies because of some pending and/or unresolved issues.
The Panels recommendations, made to the Executive Board for its consideration, are final and are also published on the CDM website. Regarding the schedule of meetings, the Panel confirmed that its 37th meeting will be held from 2-6 March 2009, as per annex 16 of the report of the 43rd meeting of the Executive Board.
Find out more about ITU's actvities on climate change
The European Commission has released a communication entitled Towards a comprehensive climate change agreement in Copenhagen, which sets out proposals to achieve the EUs objective to ensure that global average temperature does not increase more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
It addresses three key challenges:
Find out more on ITU's actvities on climate change.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today called on the worlds business and other leaders to use the current economic crisis to launch a global Green New Deal that creates jobs and fights climate change by investing in renewable energy and technological development.
Climate change threatens all our goals for development and social progress. Indeed, it is the one true existential threat to the planet, he told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in a speech that drew parallels from the Global Compact of corporate responsibility launched 10 years ago by then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the same hall.
Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work
This white paper from Trend Micro describes web threats, how they function, and their impacts. The paper argues that conventional security practices cannot cope with today's "blended techniques, an explosion of variants, and targeted regional attacks often based on social engineering to defraud users".
The central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan was effectively knocked offline for more than a week by a Russian cybermilitia that continues to flood the country's internet providers with crippling data attacks, a security expert said.
The attacks, which began on January 18, bear the signature of pro-Russian nationalists believed to have launched similar cyber assaults on the republic of Georgia in August, said Don Jackson, a researcher with Atlanta-based security provider SecureWorks. The attacks on Kyrgyzstan were so potent that most net traffic in and out of the country was completely blocked during the first seven days.
Judges have granted a review of the Home Secretary's decision to continue with extradition proceedings against Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon.
The decision - by Lord Justice Maurice Key and Mr Justice Simon - places a judicial block on attempts to haul McKinnon over to the US on hacking offences, irrespective of whether UK prosecutors decide to press charges in Britain. In a statement issued on Friday, McKinnon's lawyers Kaim Todner welcomed the decision, pointing out that even though McKinnon took his appeal against extradition all the way up to the House of Lords, no court has considered the impact of extradition in light of McKinnon's recent diagnosis with Asperger's syndrome.
Since his diagnosis, autism experts have expressed concern over whether the 43-year-old could handle extradition, let alone the likelihood of trial and imprisonment in the US. It's unclear whether the Home Office has obtained promises that McKinnon would be immediately repatriated to the UK after any prospective US trial, assurance obtained at the last minute in the case of the NatWest Three, who were extradited to the US in 2006.
After undermining the usefulness of email, turning newsgroups into a forum for promoting sex sites and filling blog comment sections with adverts for penis pill adverts and get rich quick schemes, spammers have set their sights on a new target - Twitter.
Richard Stiennon of ThreatChaos.com has published an analysis explaining how spammers are lining up to exploit the popular micro-blogging service as a medium for junk mail messages.
An application called TweetTornado takes advantage of the fact most Twitter users permit followers to join their feeds without permission. The application creates a large number of bogus Twitter IDs, each following a large number of users, before posting Tweets with links from a text file.
The non-profit group that oversees the internet's address system is seeking the public's help in deciding what to do about the growing use of a technology known as fast flux, which is used by cybercriminals to thwart take-down efforts, but which can also be used for legitimate purposes as well.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) opened a 20-day comment period on Monday, the same day its Working Group on Fast Flux issued a report saying, essentially, that its members are deadlocked on key questions about how to proceed.
"Some members of the Working Group provided reasons as to why policy development to address fast flux is outside the scope of ICANN's remit, while others disagreed," the interim report (PDF) stated. "Gaining a common appreciation and broad understanding of the motivations behind the employment of fast flux or adaptive networking techniques proved to be a particularly thorny problem for the WG."
Microsoft has beefed up its latest Internet Explorer browser with an "out of the box" feature that it says will protect users against a serious class of attacks that allows maliciously controlled websites to manipulate the links visitors click on.
The new measure, baked into Redmond's first release candidate for IE8, blocks so-called clickjacking attacks, a threat that security researchers warn plagues users of every major browser.
Once lured to a malicious address, a user may think she's clicking on a link that leads to Google - when in fact it takes her to a money transfer page, a banner ad that's part of a click-fraud scheme, or any other destination the attacker chooses. Because it exploits architectural flaws in the internet's core, clickjacking has proved an extremely vexing problem to fix.
The UK's Intellectual Property minister David Lammy has said the government will not force internet service providers to pursue file sharers.
There had been mounting speculation about government legislation on the issue as the music industry steps up its fight against the pirates.
Other countries, such as France, have supported tough action on file-sharers, who cost the industry millions.
But Mr Lammy said legislation would be too complex.
"We can't have a system where we're talking about arresting teenagers in their bedrooms," he told The Times newspaper.
Talk of the government forcing internet service providers to evict file-sharers from their networks grew last year as the British Phonographic Industry adopted a tougher stance.
Bamako's meeting on "Digital Solidarity for Education and Development" took place in Bamako, as a follow-up to the first digital solidarity conference held last November in Lyon. heads of state, government members, national representatives, international organizations and private sector companies participated in a fruitful discussion. Various intiatives were launched at the meeting, such as the "Digital education for all" programme, the "Sankoré" website and the celebration, under the umbrella of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), of the World Digital Solidarity Day on 17 May.
ITU was represented at the meeting by its Secretary-General, Dr Hamadoun I. Touré.
Hackers are believed to have stolen the personal details of millions of people using the online job site Monster.
Users around the world have been affected, including the 4.5 million users of the UK site.
If all are affected it would make it the biggest data theft in the UK since the details of 25 million child benefit claimants went missing last year.
The recruitment giant has advised people to change their passwords and be on the lookout for phishing e-mails.
Recruitment sites have proved rich pickings for criminally-minded hackers in the past and it is not the first time Monster has fallen foul of cyber thieves.
In 2007, 1.3 million details were downloaded to servers based in Ukraine.
What happened with the Internet in 2008? How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many blog posts were published? This very interesting post has answers to those questions and many others with more interesting statistics.
They have used a wide variety of sources from around the Web. A full list of source references is available at the bottom of the post for those interested.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica has unveiled a plan to let readers help keep the reference work up to date. Under the plan, readers and contributing experts will help expand and maintain entries online. Experts will also be enrolled in a reward scheme and given help to promote their command of a subject. However, Britannica said it would not follow Wikipedia in letting a wide range of people make contributions to its encyclopaedia.
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This handbook is meant to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers. Insufficient understanding of these often poorly-documented characteristics is a major contributing factor to the prevalence of several classes of security vulnerabilities.
Available at http://code.google.com/p/browsersec/wiki/Main
Searching for data about the Obama administration should get easier as the Whitehouse.gov website gets overhauled.
Mr Obama's new media team is letting search engines index almost everything on the site. By contrast, after eight years of government the Bush administration was stopping huge swathes of data from being searchable. The move is part of President Obama'
Open rule
Many websites limit what search engines can index by use of what is known as a robots.txt file. The robots.txt file the Bush administration set up for Whitehouse.gov ran to almost 2377 lines and limited the way search engines could log the data found on the site. On the first day of the Barack administration the robots.txt file shrunk to two lines allowing, for the moment, search sites to index everything it contains. The new media team also created a Whitehouse.gov blog that will act as an informal record of events, speeches and decisions.s larger push to make the US government more open and transparent.
The European Commission Conference on ICT for a Global Sustainable Future was held in Brussels on 22-23 January 2009. As one of the keynote speakers ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun I. Touré, offered his views on how ICTs can estimulate economic growth and boost business. He also addressed the issue of Climate Change and how ICTs can be effective in helping reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
The number of Windows computers infected with the new "downadup" worm also known as "Conficker" and "Kido" has exploded to almost 9 million worldwide, from roughly 2.4m last Thursday, according to the computer security company F-Secure.
The growth in the number of infected machines which the company's researchers called "just amazing" makes it one of the worst malware outbreaks of the past five years. The principal targets are corporate Windows servers belonging to small businesses who have not installed security updates released by Microsoft last October. F-Secure estimates that a third of all potentially vulnerable systems have not had the update.
Staff at hospitals across Sheffield are battling a major computer worm outbreak after managers turned off Windows security updates for all 8,000 PCs on the vital network, The Register has learned.
It's been confirmed that more than 800 computers have been infected with self-replicating Conficker code. Insiders at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Trust said they suspect many more machines are affected but have not been reported to IT.
The Trust told The Register it now has the outbreak under control and is engaged in "clearing up" remnants. Non-urgent appointments in the medical imaging department had to be cancelled while its computers were disinfected. A Trust spokeswoman said no other direct impact on patient care was known.
Heartland Payment Systems - a payments processor that serves more than 250,000 US businesses - warned consumers Tuesday that their card data may have been compromised following a security breach of the company's payment system.
The Princeton, New Jersey firm said forensic investigators discovered malicious software on its computer network last week. Executives urged cardholders to closely examine their monthly credit and debit card statements and report any unauthorized charges to the issuers.
A computer security researcher has discovered a new way to inject hostile code directly into the memory of machines running Apple's OS X operating system, a technique that makes it significantly harder for investigators to detect Mac attacks using today's forensics practices.
The technique, which Italian researcher Vincenzo Iozzo plans to detail at the Black Hat security conference in Washington next month, makes it possible to carry out stealthy Mac attacks that until now have not been possible. The in-memory injection approach allows unauthorized software to be installed on a Mac without leaving traces of the attack code or other tell-tale signs that the machine has been compromised.
19-21 January 2009, Bamako (Mali)ITU's Secretray-General, Dr hamadoun I. Touré, participated through a video message at Bamako's International Forum on Multilinguism, organized by MAAYA (World Network for Linguistic Diversity).
Among 34 development-related actions put forward by its Second Committee (Economic and Financial), the UN General Assembly (UNGA) has adopted a number of resolutions reflecting the breadth of the Committees agenda, including consideration of the economic ramifications of climate change, and addressing the need for a more equitable international financial system and to bolster developing countries resilience to financial risk.
Among the climate change-related resolutions, the UNGA: proclaimed 2011 as the International Year of Chemistry, with the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization as the lead agency and focal point for the Year, and emphasized that chemistry education is critical to addressing the challenge of global climate change (document A/63/414); supported international efforts and funding to prevent and manage natural disasters, as well as extreme weather patterns; called upon the international community to step up efforts for full implementation of the Hyogo Declaration and the Hyogo Framework for Action; called upon the international community, the Secretary-General and relevant UN bodies to help strengthen the International Research Centre on El Niño (document A/63/414/Add.3); stressed the need to further advance and implement the Bali Strategic Plan for Technology Support and Capacity-Building (document A/63/414/Add.7); called for urgent global action to address climate change for the benefit of present and future generations, and urged parties to the UNFCCC to continue using the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their work (document A/63/414/Add.4); urged all governments, relevant organizations, UN bodies and the Global Environment Facility to take timely action to effectively follow-up and implement the Strategy and the Mauritius Declaration, and called upon the international community to help Small Island Developing States adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change (document A/63/414/Add.2); encouraged governments to promote sustainable urbanization to improve the living conditions of vulnerable populations, including slum-dwellers and the urban poor, and to help mitigate climate change (UN-Habitat document A/63/415); and reaffirmed its partnership with the Pacific Island Forum through the lens of the serious threats posed to vulnerable island States by climate change and the global economic recession (document A/63/L.56).
UN Press release
Find out more on ITU's actvities on climate change
In his New Years message to Koreans, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the Korean government to take a more active role in global efforts to tackle climate change.
Ban stressed that this is the UN Year of Climate Change, urging Seoul to live up to its growing status in the international community.
Climate change, which is threatening the future of all mankind and the entire globe, is an urgent task that all members of the international community, regardless of ethnicity or national boundaries, must tackle altogether, the former Korean foreign minister said in the message.
So I designated 2009 as the UN Year of Climate Change and expect the Korean government and the international community to participate more actively and offer support for the UNs efforts to tackle the problem.
The global computing industry is starting to rival aviation in its contribution to global warming. The computing sector has come under increasing scrutiny over energy consumption and the carbon emissions of data centers, in particular, as the debate over emissions widens beyond the traditional targets like coal plants, heavy industry and planes.
A prolific new worm has spread to infect more than 3.5m Windows PCs, according to net security firm F-secure. The success of the Conficker (AKA Downadup) worm is explained by its use of multiple attack vectors and new social engineering ruses, designed to hoodwink the unwary into getting infected.
The worm uses a complex algorithm to develop a changing daily list of domains which infected machines attempt to establish contact with. Hackers need only register one of these possible names to establish contact with the botnet established by Conficker. The tactic is designed to frustrate attempts by security watchers to dismantle the command and control network associated with compromised machines.
Canadian man who fell for a 419 scam was taken for $150,000 by advance fee fraudsters who conducted a textbook operation to fleece their victim.
John Rempel of Leamington, Ontario, got an email back in 2007 from "someone claiming to be a lawyer with a client named David Rempel who died in a 2005 bomb attack in London", the Windsor Star reports. The email claimed the "deceased" had left $12.8m, and since he had no family "wanted to leave the money to a Rempel".
An international child pornography ring that traded more than 400,000 illegal images and videos - some depicting pre-pubescent children in sexual and sadistic acts - is the kind of heinous behavior that makes you glad there are strict laws against such things. Seven US men were convicted of the crime on Wednesday.
Then there are the miscarriages of such laws, like the charging this week of six Pennsylvania teens alleged to have sent and received nude or semi-nude pictures of themselves on cell phones. It's the kind of case overzealous prosecutors have begun bringing with alarming frequency over the past year or two.
There's a stark difference between the two sorts of crimes. The first represent the almost unspeakable depravity of adult monsters who prey on the utterly defenseless. The latter threaten to brand individuals who have yet to reach the age of 18 as sex offenders for indiscretions that are largely victimless. [Source: The Register]
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The demise late last year of four of the world's biggest spam botnets was good news for anyone with an email inbox, as spam levels were cut in half - almost overnight. But the vacuum has created opportunities for a new breed of bots, some of which could be much tougher to bring down, several security experts are warning.
New botnets with names like Waledac and Xarvester are filling the void left by the dismantling of Storm and the impairment of Bobax, Rustock, and Srizbi, these researchers say. The new breed of botnets - massive networks of infected Windows machines that spammers use to blast out billions of junk messages - sport some new designs that may make them more immune to current take-down tactics.
Waledac is a good example. It appears to be a complete revision of Storm, that includes the same state-of-the-art peer-to-peer technology and fast-flux hosting found in its predecessor, according to researcher Joe Stewart of Atlanta-based security provider SecureWorks. But it differs from Storm in one significant way: Weak encryption protocols, which proved to be an Achilles Heel that led to its downfall, have been completely revamped.
A school in Ipswich has finally got the internet domain of its own name after a three-year battle.
Instead of directing people to the school, the site has been directing users to online dating which then link to sites advertising "Mature Sex."
Framlingham College first tried to get the site at www.framlinghamcollege.co.uk shut in 2005, but was unsuccessful.
The domain registry Nominet has now ruled in the school's favour on appeal.
A propaganda war is being waged on the internet between supporters of the Israeli and Palestinian sides in the current conflict in the Gaza Strip.
Activists have turned to defacing websites, taking over computers, and shutting down Facebook groups.
US Military sites, Nato, and an Israeli Bank have all been targeted.
Experts have warned users to be on the lookout for phishing emails and webmasters to ensure their servers are secure.
The hacking of security barriers for political or ideological reasons has been branded by some as hacktivism. And it is thought that as use of the internet grows, so too will the number of attacks.
On 7 January, pro-Palestinian hackers defaced several high-profile websites, including a US Army website, and the Nato Parliamentary Assembly's website.
Calling themselves "Agd_Scorp/Peace Crew", they replaced pages with white space and a well-known photograph of a boy throwing stones at an Israeli tank in Gaza, and the Israeli, American and British flags with a red strike through them.
"Stop attacks u israel and usa ! you cursed nations ! one day muslims will clean the world from you!" wrote the hackers.
Dwight Griswold, the Nato Parliamentary Assembly's head of IT, says that the attackers persisted in attempting access for a number of days following the initial attack, adding that the intruders did not gain access to any of the Assembly's internal servers.
Facebook fight
The battle also looms large on social networking site Facebook, where dozens of groups related to the conflict in Gaza have sprung up.
The clash flared up when a group using the logo of the Jewish Internet Defence Force (JIDF) took control of several of these groups.
They removed content and replaced it with statements supporting Israeli policy and criticising the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza, and replaced the groups' images with the JIDF logo.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced a new standard to make sites more accessible to older and disabled people.
Version 2.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) will apply to text, images, audio and video.
It also covers web applications and is said to give developers more flexibility than the old guidelines.
According to the consortium, WCAG 2.0 should also be easier to understand and use.
The guidance is designed to address barriers encountered by people with visual, hearing, physical, cognitive and neurological disabilities and older people with access needs.
Nine in ten emails are now spam with an estimated 200bn junk mail messages a day clogging up the internet, according to a new report by networking and security giant Cisco.
Drive-by download attacks - planting redirection scripts on legitimate sites that lead onto hacker controlled websites full of exploits - have become a popular method for spreading all forms of malware, including botnet clients that turn PCs into spam-churning zombies.
The US is the single biggest source of spam, accounting for 17.2 per cent of junk mail. Other big offenders include Turkey (9.2 per cent), Russia (8 per cent), Canada (4.7 per cent), Brazil (4.1 per cent), India (3.5 per cent), South Korea (3.3 per cent), Germany and the UK (2.9 per cent each).
The latest 2008 edition of Cisco's annual security report notes a 90 percent growth in threats stemming from legitimate domains, nearly double that recorded in 2007. Numerous mainstream websites were loaded with iFrames, malicious scripts that redirect visitors to malware-downloading sites.
Microsoft has issued a rare emergency update for its Internet Explorer browser as miscreants stepped up attacks targeting a vulnerability on hundreds of thousands of webpages.
In many cases, the websites distributing the toxic payload are legitimate destinations that have been commandeered, allowing an attacker to snare victims as they surf to online banks, forums, and other trusted sites. There are at least six distinct versions of attack code circulating in the wild, according to researchers at iDefense, a security lab owned by VeriSign.
A web search showed 233,000 pages containing the string ardoshanghai.com/s.js, just one of many web addresses exploiting a weakness in the way IE's data-binding function works. Most of the attacks silently install keylogging software as soon as a victim surfs to a site carrying the exploit. Once installed, the software steals login credentials for online games.
"The vulnerability is so juicy that we expect it to show up in tool kits fairly shortly," said Rick Howard, intelligence director of iDefense.
The patch was released eight days after reports began circulating that websites were targeting a vulnerability in fully patched versions of IE. This is only the second time in 18 months that Microsoft has issued an unscheduled update. Typically, patches are available on the second Tuesday of each month to allow system administrators time for planning.
Vatican, 17 December 2008: On the ocasion of the Erice Prize Award in Rome, world reknown scientists discuss global cybersecurity perspectives, their legal challenges and the threat of cyberwar. ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun I. Touré speaks on cyber conflict and cyber defence in the framework of ITU's Global Cybersecurity Agenda and sends an invitation to the global negotiating table.
An Australian couple have been served with legal documents via the popular social networking site Facebook.
Mark McCormack, a lawyer in Canberra, persuaded a court to allow him to use the unusual method after other attempts to reach them failed. The couple's home is being repossessed after they reportedly missed payments on a loan of over A$100,000 ($67,000; £44,000). It is believed to be the first time Facebook has been used in this way.
Mr McCormack says he resorted to Facebook to trace the couple after unsuccessful attempts to contact them at their home address and via email, and they failed to attend a court appearance on 3 October. He found the woman's page, and used details listed there such as her date of birth to argue in the Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court that she was the person in question. Her partner was listed as one of her "friends".
In granting permission to use the social networking site, the judge stipulated that the papers be sent via a private email so that other people visiting the page could not read their contents. "It's somewhat novel, however we do see it as a valid method of bringing the matter to the attention of a defendant," Mr McCormack said.
Australian government plans to filter net use have been rebuffed by local internet service providers (ISPs).
Telstra, Australia's largest ISP, has said it will not join trials of the filters and others say they will only back a scaled-down system. The government wants to filter all net traffic and block access to 10,000 sites deemed to hold illegal content. The initial trials of the filtering technology were due to take place before Christmas.
Protest plan
Australian newspaper The Age reports that both Telstra and Internode have declared they will not participate in the trials. iiNet said it wanted to take part to show that the filters do not work and Optus would only work with a scaled back plan. The plan to set up mandatory filters followed research by the Australian Communications and Media Authority which found that existing filters did a poor job of blocking illegal content. Responding to the rebuff by ISPs, Australia's communications minister Stephen Conroy said the initial trials would not be "closed" and involve no actual customers.
The US government has moved to shut down sellers of fake security software.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has won a restraining order that stops several sellers of "scareware" from continuing to trade. Millions of people are thought to have been caught out by the software which, once installed, issues false alerts about viruses and illegal porn. The FTC is pursuing further legal action to win a permanent ban on those peddling the scareware.
Frozen funds
Court papers submitted by the FTC show that the peddlers of the fake security software tricked websites into advertising their products. The companies behind the fake security software won customers via adverts on many popular websites. Anyone clicking on an advert was taken to the webpages run by the fake security firms which then ran a "scan" looking for security problems.
Geneva, 12 December 2008: The ITU World Radiocommunication Seminar 2008 (WRS-08) closed in Geneva today. The week-long meeting dealt with international regulations on the use of the radio-frequency spectrum and satellite orbits. Discussions centred on the application of the ITU Radio Regulations, the treaty which regulates international wireless communications. The Seminar also examined the activities of the ITU Radiocommunication Study Groups and focused on the use of ICT in emergency situations and as a solution to combat climate change.
WRS-08 was opened by ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré and Director of ITUs Radicommunication Bureau Valery Timofeev in the presence of 461 participants, representing 121 countries and 13 organizations. The Chairman of the ITU Radio Regulations Board, Ms Julie Zoller also participated. The European Broadcasting Union, represented by Ms Elena Puigrefagut, presented the challenges and lessons learned by the switchover to digital broadcasting. [Read de full note to the press...]
Australian police have charged at least 19 men with being part of a global child pornography network involving people in 70 countries.
The investigation was prompted by a tip-off from Brazilian police. The men who have been charged include a police officer, a senior lawyer and a childcare worker. Some 500,000 images of child abuse and 15,000 videos were seized, and the Australian Federal Police said more arrests were expected later this week. Some of the seized videos showed victims as young as 12 months old, while others showed children being abused for more than two hours. "These are some of the worst images, I must say, that the Federal Police have ever seen," Australian Federal Police Deputy Commissioner Andrew Colvin told reporters. The Australians said that information supplied by Brazil to the international policing network, Interpol, had helped identify more than 200 suspects in 70 countries. [Source: BBC News]
Read More...
A new variant of the Koobface worm has returned to menace users of Facebook. As before, the malware generates messages to friends of infected users on the social networking website. These messages direct the unwary into visiting websites that supposedly offer video clips. Would-be marks are told they need the latest copy of Adobe Flash to view this content and are prompted to download a file, which actually contains the worm's payload.
If the code executes on a vulnerable Windows PC the user gets infected. The worm's lifecycle then begins anew, ready to target their Facebook friends too. The malware was first spotted in late July.
Identity thieves who claim they stole details of 21 million German bank accounts are offering to sell the data on the black market for 12 million (US$15.3 million), a German magazine reported over the weekend.
To prove they weren't bluffing, the crooks produced the compact disc containing the names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays account numbers, and bank routing numbers of 1.2 million accounts. Two investigative reporters for WirtschaftsWoche say they obtained the CD during a face-to-face meeting at a hotel in Hamburg with two individuals involved with the theft. The journalists were posing as interested buyers working for a gambling operation.
"We took away with us the first delivery, a CD with 1.2 million accounts, that we couldn't imagine," said one of the editors overseeing the investigation. "In the worst case, three out of four German households would have to be afraid that some money could be taken from their checking account without their authorisation, and perhaps even without their realising it," the magazine stated.
The United Nations Climate Change Conference - Poznañ, Poland kicked off Monday, 1 December. The two-week meeting, the fourteenth Conference of the 192 Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the fourth meeting of the 183 Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, is the half-way mark in the negotiations on an ambitious and effective international response to climate change.
The deal is to be clinched in Copenhagen at the end of 2009 and will take effect in 2013, the year after the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol expires. Close to eleven thousand participants, including government delegates from 186 Parties to the UNFCCC and representatives from business and industry, environmental organizations and research institutions, are attending the two-week gathering.
ITU is organizing a side-event on "ICT and Climate Change: Finding Solutions" which will take place on 10 December 2008 from 10.00 to 12.30 hours, Econcern Sustainable Energy Event at The World Trade Center - Conference Room 1, Poznan, Poland.
Information about this side-event can be found here or by contacting Ms. Cristina Bueti at firstname.lastname@example.com
Find out more about ITU's actvities on climate change.
UNFCCC Press release can be found here.
Researchers have identified a new trojan that can tamper with a wide array of devices on a local network, an exploit that sends them to impostor websites even if they are hardened machines that are fully patched or run non-Windows operating systems.
The malware is a new variant of the DNSChanger, a trojan that has long been known to change the domain name system settings of PCs and Macs alike. According to researchers with anti-virus provider McAfee's Avert Labs, the update allows a single infected machine to pollute the DNS settings of potentially hundreds of other devices running on the same local area network by undermining its dynamic host configuration protocol, or DHCP, which dynamically allocates IP addresses.
"Systems that are not infected with the malware can still have the payload of communicating with the rogue DNS servers delivered to them," McAfee's Craig Schmugar writes here of the new variant. "This is achieved without exploiting any security vulnerability."
Six British ISPs are filtering access to Wikipedia after the site was added to an Internet Watch Foundation child-pornography blacklist, according to Wikipedia administrators.
As of Sunday morning UK time, certain British web surfers were unable to view at least one Wikipedia article tagged with ostensible child porn. And, in a roundabout way, the filtering has resulted in Wikipedia admins banning large swaths of the United Kingdom from editing the "free encyclopedia anyone can edit."
On Friday, Wikipedia administrators noticed that Virgin Media, Be Unlimited/O2/Telefonica, EasyNet/UK Online, PlusNet, Demon, and Opal were routing Wikipedia traffic through a small number of transparent proxy servers as a way of blocking access to the encyclopedia's article on Virgin Killer, a mid-1970s record album from German heavy band Scorpions.
At it stands, the article includes an image of the album's original cover, which depicts a naked prepubescent girl. The cover was banned in many countries and replaced by another when the album made its 1976 debut. And apparently, the image is now on a blacklist compiled by the Internet Watch Foundation, a government-backed organization charged with fighting online child pornography in the UK and Europe. [Source: The Register]
ICTs and Climate Change:Finding Solutions Side-event will be held in Poznan (Poland), from 09.00 to 12.30 hours, on Wednesday 10 December 2008.
ICTs are a vital tool in every aspect of our daily lives and they also present the best possible hope we have for combating climate change, and tackling the 98% of emissions produced by sectors other than ICTs.
At ITU, were promoting ICTs as a powerful cross-cutting solution to not only reduce the emissions within its own industry but also significantly reduce the GHG emissions of other sectors.
With ICTs an essential part of the ongoing global discussion, come to our side-event on Wednesday to find out:
-- How ICTs can provide solutions to reduce the GHG emissions produced by other sectors of the economy.
-- How ICTs can help developing countries to adapt to climate change.
-- Why ICTs are essential in measuring climate change.
-- How ICTs can help mitigate disasters and emergencies
-- What cost savings can be leveraged by applying ICTs to global infrastructure and industry.
-- How the ICT industry could help reduce global emissions by as much as 15 per cent by 2020.
Practical information:
What: Side-event on ICTs and Climate Change: Finding Solutions
When: 10.00-12.30, Wednesday 10 December
Where: Conference Room 1, World Trade Center, Poznan, Poland
Organizers: ITU -- the UN specialized agency for ICTs -- in partnership with Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) and the European Business Council for Sustainable Energy (e5)
Website: http://www.itu.int/themes/climate/events/2008-12-10.html
List of speakers:
Mr. Houlin Zhao, Deputy Secretary-General of ITU Mr. Luis Neves, GeSI Chairman Mr. Sebastian Gallehr, Chief Executive Director, e5 European Business Council for Sustainable Energy Mr. Bjorn Stigson, President of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) Dr. Ignacio Campino, Senior Executive Vice President and Representative of the Board of Management for Sustainability and Climate Protection, Deutsche Telekom Dr. Chris Tuppen, Chief Sustainability Officer, BT Group Mr. Joaquim Croca, Corporate Responsibility Executive, Vodafone Mr. Pierre Delforge, Manager, Energy and Climate Strategy, HP Mr. Shailendra Mudgal, Senior Vice President, BIO Intelligence Service Ms. Cristina Bueti, Policy Analyst, ITU
Information about this side event can be found

subset: commoncrawl