In a bid to beef up counterterrorism, the European Commission Tuesday proposed rules allowing authorities easier access to the databases of Internet service providers, and a system of vetting air passengers entering and leaving the European Union.The move comes days after a report by British intelligence service, MI5, warned that the threat of another attack by radical Islamist groups such as Al Qaida is growing. London's transport network was attacked by suicide bombers in 2005, causing 52 deaths. A year earlier 191 people died in a terrorist attack in the Spanish capital, Madrid.Franco Frattini, the European commissioner for justice, freedom and security said more can be done at the E.U. level to prevent such carnage in the 27 country bloc. He wants to crack down on Web sites that spread extremist propaganda or share information about terrorist methods. At a press conference Tuesday he proposed making incitement to carry out a terrorist attack a criminal act."Terrorism remains a threat to the political foundations of the European Union as well as to the life and well-being of our citizens," he said.The legislation he has proposed "will make it easier for law enforcement authorities to get cooperation from Internet service providers, to prevent crimes and identify criminals," Frattini said.The move follows the passing of a controversial data retention law at the end of 2005 that forces all telecom companies to hold on to details about people's private phone calls, faxes and e-mail communications, in order to help investigators track terrorists. Under that law details about phone calls must be held for a minimum two years, while details about e-mails have to be retained for at least six months.Frattini's plan to collect air passenger name records is almost identical to the system in the U.S., with which Europe agreed to cooperate at the beginning of this year. In February, the E.U. agreed to allow American authorities to demand 19 pieces of information about passengers flying from Europe to the U.S. -- including name, credit-card details and travel itinerary -- ahead of the departure of their flight. The information would be held for 15 years and can be accessed by any federal agency.Frattini also wants airlines to hand over 19 pieces of data on all passengers travelling into or out of the E.U., 24 hours before departure. He proposes that the information be kept on file for 13 years.The latest attempt to extend the powers of counterterrorism services has already sparked fierce resistance from lawmakers and civil-rights groups."The Commission's proposal raises serious doubts about the EU's respect for the freedom of expression," civil liberties group Statewatch said in a statement."We are weakening the position of the individual citizen vis-a-vis the authorities," E.U. lawmaker Sophia in 't Veld, a Dutch member of the European Parliament said, adding: "That is very worrying."Frattini insisted that his ideas will respect citizens' rights. "Our goal remains preserving the right balance between the fundamental right to security of citizens, the right to life and the other fundamental rights of individuals, including privacy and procedural rights," he said.The Commissioner's proposals must be on agreed unanimously by all 27 countries in the E.U. before becoming law.

Featured links from the CNET Blog Network SMS texts: The way forward, especially in a natural disaster made easier on the iPhone--SMS texting in the aftermath of the Bay Area trembler was a better way of communicating as cell phone networks were jammed up. Mystery phone: The Haier Sterling--The latest in a line of jewelry-class phones, the mystery is how to get one. Conquering your fear of public speaking--People fear public speaking more than anything else. The anxiety can be debilitating. It can also affect your career, especially in high-tech. Here are some tips for conquering your fear. British Telecom devotes a day to open source--Open source at BT? Here's what they have to say.

(InfoWorld) - Zimbra customers appalled at the company's planned acquisition by Yahoo are speaking out, saying they are vexed by the deal and upset over its possible negative consequences. Skeptical about Yahoo's capacity to serve enterprise customers and suspicious about Yahoo's plans for the Zimbra collaboration and messaging suite, these IT professionals express pessimism about the deal announced Monday and expected to close next month. A collective feeling of alarm and dismay emanates from a discussion forum thread Zimbra created to obtain feedback from its customers. Already 9 pages long, the thread contains mostly negative impressions. Zimbra organized a conference call this week open to all customers so that the company's top executives could answer questions and address concerns. Neither that call, held Tuesday, nor reassuring messages from Zimbra employees in the forum have calmed customers IDG News Service interviewed on Thursday. "There is a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt regarding Zimbra at the moment, and it's not unwarranted," said Matthew Day, IT Manager at Langs Building Supplies in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Just over a year ago, Day began researching collaboration suites for Langs and chose Zimbra Collaboration Suite over Microsoft's Exchange and Xandos's Scalix. Currently, 400 Langs employees use Zimbra's suite. However, his misgivings about the Yahoo deal prompted him to scratch plans to renew Langs' Zimbra contract for three years, opting instead for a one-year agreement. Day has too many questions that Zimbra and Yahoo haven't answered to his satisfaction. Chief among them: Does Yahoo, whose online services are heavily focused on consumers, understand the needs of business customers? "As an IT Manager, I would not have expected to ever see a Yahoo product in one of my production environments," he said. "I am concerned about how the culture of Yahoo will deal with the requirements of commercial users and the support they expect." Day also worries that Yahoo's influence may negatively affect future development of the Zimbra suite, a concern shared by Dan Phillips, IT Manager at Other World Computing, in Woodstock, Illinois. "Before the acquisition, Zimbra had only one purpose: To make a better product. Zimbra now has a different purpose, and that is to ensure Yahoo's agendas are fulfilled," Phillips said. Among his first tasks after getting hired six months ago was picking a new messaging platform for Other World. The Zimbra rollout was completed barely three weeks ago. He picked the Open Source Edition of the suite, which also comes in a commercial option called Network Edition. The news of the Yahoo deal left him aghast. "I am certain I was not the only IT decision maker who felt disgust and despair after reading about Yahoo's [planned] acquisition of Zimbra," Phillips said. Also deeply pessimistic is Dominic Ijichi, a Belfast-based Unix supercomputer administrator for a large bank, who in his spare time manages the Zimbra suite for a small finance company whose chairman is a friend of his. He predicts Yahoo will disassemble the suite and plug its pieces into Yahoo Mail. "I believe [Zimbra's suite] will be killed off as a separate product," he said. Jim Hutchinson, IT Manager at Richmond Systems in Olympia, Washington, is scratching his head over Yahoo's motivation. "What are they going to get for their $350 million?" he said. "I can't see how Zimbra fits into the way Yahoo makes money." In addition to downloadable, server-based versions of the suite meant to be installed in customers' premises, it is also available as SaaS (software as a service) from third-party hosting providers. Keepnet, a U.K. provider of hosted IT services, recently developed a new Zimbra-based hosted service, but the company isn't feeling too hot about it now, said director Kevin Dontenville. "We are disappointed that this acquisition throws many of the knowns out of the window. We need to decide whether to continue and risk losses that are significant to us or to change direction ... and find a new route forward for our new business," he said. Andy Armagost, systems administrator at Brigham Oil & Gas, in Austin, Texas, is also conflicted about the deal, which he believes would have given his company pause for reflection when deciding for Zimbra, but the suite is partially rolled out already at Brigham. While he shares many of his peers' concerns, he also sees a silver lining: That Zimbra will become more financially secure and able to access Yahoo resources. "I hope this deal works out well for all of us," he said. Those interviewed generally believe that the best-case scenario would be for Yahoo to interfere as little as possible with the Zimbra team and technology while providing a strong backup. Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra's co-founder and CEO, understands that acquisitions often worry customers but said the concerns are unwarranted in this case. "I already know my budget for the next five years, in which there is a continued commitment to growing this business," Dharmaraj said in an interview with IDG News Service. For starters, Yahoo will not dismantle Zimbra to boost Yahoo Mail. "If Yahoo wanted the people and the technology to bolster the Yahoo consumer mail group, $350 million is a lot to pay," Dharmaraj said. "We're going to be kept whole as a business unit, and we'll execute on our current strategy," he added. Likewise, it's illogical to think Yahoo will rip out its Yahoo Mail infrastructure, which supports about 250 million consumers, and swap in the Zimbra technology, designed mostly for businesses. "Those are paranoid fears," Dharmaraj said. Zimbra's team will help refine and improve portions of Yahoo Mail on a case-by-case basis. Currently, the only component slated for a Zimbra revamping is Yahoo Calendar, he said. Meanwhile, the downloadable, server-based versions of Zimbra's suite aren't going away, so those customers can rest easy, including those who have signed five-year agreements, he said. Specifically, Zimbra will maintain the same commitment for the open-source version of this downloadable suite, keeping its development on par with the commercial "Network" version. Zimbra, founded in 2003, has an installed base of about 9 million mailboxes in more than 100,000 organizations, although it deals directly with about 1,300 customers and channel partners, he said. Customers include Comcast and New York University. Its core strength is e-mail, and it has commonly been considered an alternative to Exchange, but the suite also includes a word processor and a spreadsheet application. These let users create, share, and collaboratively edit documents. With e-mail, calendar, contacts list, and office applications, it also competes against PC-based suites, such as Microsoft Office, and Web-hosted suites, such as Google's Google Apps. Dharmaraj said Zimbra will sell the suite directly as a hosted service, something for which it had previously relied on hosting partners. As with direct sales of the downloadable versions, Zimbra will sell the hosted suite at a premium over the prices it gives to hosting partners. Also unfounded are fears that Yahoo will force Zimbra to limit its compatibility with Yahoo competitors, he said. Yahoo realizes that a big draw of the Zimbra suite is precisely its open platform, which lets external developers create application mashups called "zimlets." The deal gives Zimbra a financial and resources boost as well as heightened brand credibility with potential enterprise customers that as a 100-employee startup it didn't have, he said. If anything, Zimbra will be able to step up its development efforts. Version 5.0 of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite is due in December, and version 5.5 and beyond will follow, he said. Finally, he said he and the other members of the Zimbra executive team are committed for the long haul. "Zimbra is our baby," he said. "The reason we made this deal is to grow Zimbra." Yahoo's Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president of communications and communities, reiterated Dharmaraj's commitments and challenges the perception that Yahoo only knows how to support consumers. For example, Yahoo provides Web hosting and domain registration-related services to hundreds of thousands of companies, while its advertising business includes a vast network of marketers and publishers, he said. Moreover, it has long-standing partnerships with carriers like AT&T and British Telecom, he added. "Those are very large commitments we have made in our systems that aren't consumer-facing," Garlinghouse said in an interview. Regarding Yahoo's ability to support enterprise customers, he points towards the know-how involved in providing reliable performance at a massive scale for services like Yahoo Mail. "This is a natural extension of what we're incredibly good at with a company, in Zimbra, that also is best-of-breed. We bring the best of both worlds together," Garlinghouse said. Assurances and promises are all good, but concerned customers said the antidote to their misgivings will be concrete actions. "I have no interest in asking simple questions and listening to Yahoo's spin. Only time can answer any question I have," Other World's Phillips said.

(InfoWorld) - In search of new revenue streams to offset declining sales from its tradition telephone business, Dutch telecommunications company Koninklijke KPN has agreed to acquire IT service provider Getronics. The Dutch network operator announced Monday its plans to pay €766 million ($1.04 billion) for Getronics, which provides computer services to enterprises in the Netherlands, Belgium, the U.K., and North America. The move comes among a flurry of consolidation in Europe's highly competitive IT service sector. On Monday, French IT service provider Groupe Steria SCA also agreed to buy U.K. rival Xansa. By acquiring Getronics, which is based in Amsterdam, KPN aims to take advantage of the convergence under way in the telecommunications and IT service sectors, with many enterprises now seeking to purchase all services from a single supplier that can deliver an end-to-end service, KPN said. Getronics's customers are largely manufacturers and financial institutions as well as governments, with the U.S. military being an important client. KPN isn't the first European operator to expand into the market for enterprise computer services. BT Group, Deutsche Telekom, and France Télécom have been operating in the market for several years -- with varying degrees of success. Earlier this year, the Global Services division of BT bought International Network Services  (INS) to extend its enterprise services offering in the U.S. The British operator has one of the largest IT service offerings in the sector. The same can be said of France Télécom's Orange Business Services. But after failing to turn its T-Systems subsidiary into a profitable operation, Deutsche Telekom said earlier this year that it is interested in finding an international partner for its struggling IT service unit. During its first-ever strike last month, Deutsche Telekom also threatened to sell the unit if an agreement with the labor union couldn't be reached over longer working hours without additional pay. Correction: This story as originally posted contained an incorrect conversion of euros to U.S. dollars. The article has been amended.

Netanya, Israel. June 17, 2007- Telkoor Telecom has announced that it has received an order for miniaturized power supplies from a European client, through its British subsidiary Digital Power Ltd., totaling approximately NIS 4 million

AFP - US telecom giant AT&T is not considering a bid for British mobile phone operator Vodafone, but is likely to make smaller acquisitions to better meet the needs of multinational companies, the company's chief executive said in an interview published Tuesday.

(InfoWorld) - Officials with the FBI claim that global law enforcement partnerships are playing a significant role in its ongoing efforts to stomp out botnets and other computer-borne crimes. Security researchers have long maintained that one of the most significant obstacles to shutting down botnets is the distributed global nature of the individuals responsible for operating the networks of zombie PCs. Botnets are banks of computers infected by virus programs that allow them to be secretly used to carry out many forms of electronic attacks. The conventional wisdom has been that U.S. law enforcement officials have struggled to find the budget and manpower necessary to track down cyber-criminals operating on their own turf, let alone find a way to identify and arrest people distributing malware code or operating botnets who are based in foreign nations. However, hot on the heels of its announcement of a round of arrests of U.S.-based botnet herders and the identification of over one million machines infected by the programs, FBI officials said that international cooperation is playing an increasingly important role in helping it stomp out cyber-crime. "We've been successful in building relationships with foreign law enforcement officials and have agents in 60 countries around the globe working full time on cyber-crime along with police departments and other agencies," said Shawn Henry, deputy assistant director of the Cyber Division at the FBI. "We've seen some significant developments over the last few years in that area." While Henry admitted that the very nature of cutting-edge botnet herders can make them hard to find as perpetrators move from one bank of infected machines to another quickly to avoid detection, he said that partnerships with foreign governments in the name of fighting cyber-crime are playing a vital role in aiding the agency's ability to thwart the attacks. "This type of crime can be committed by someone with minimal resources, sometimes using publicly available tools, which makes it a challenge to identify who is responsible, but international cooperation has allowed us to pursue these efforts in many countries, and we are also helping other nations fight operators located in the U.S. as this is a problem that goes both ways," Henry said. Rounded up by the agency in its most recent botnet hunt were Robert Alan Soloway of Seattle, who has been tabbed as one of the nation's leading sources of botnet-driven spam e-mail, along with James C. Brewer of Arlington, Texas, who is alleged to have infected several Chicago-area hospitals with botnet programs, and Jason Michael Downey of Covington, Kentucky, who is charged with running botnets that were used to carry out so-called denial-of-service attacks. Taking such individuals offline has become a task secondary only to fighting terrorists and spies, according to Henry, who said that the FBI's current leadership is very much focused on expanding its ability to battle cyber-criminals. Whereas the perception within the IT security community has been that computer-based attacks are further down the agency's pecking order and that its efforts to stop such crimes lack the same financial backing as its other pursuits, Henry said that the FBI is taking the problem more seriously than ever before. "Cyber crime is our number three priority behind anti-terrorism and counter-intelligence, we devote a lot of resources to it, and Director Mueller sees it as a significant criminal problem and is very supportive of our efforts," said Henry. "We also get ample support from the U.S. Department of Justice and have been successful with the legal tools that are being made available to us." Despite making headway, Henry said that the battle against botnets and other forms of cyber-crime remains an "electronic cat and mouse game" as once law enforcement officials and the security community identify and block one technique being used by schemers, the perpetrators tend to move on to some newer modus operandi. The FBI assistant director said that as part of its effort to stop botnets and other attacks, it is hoping that businesses and consumers will become more vigilant and aggressive in lending a hand by keeping their computers protected with the latest anti-virus programs. The agency is also advising potential victims of cyber-crime to pursue investigation of such activity by contacting their Internet service providers, and the FBI has said publicly that people should report any suspected illegal activity to such companies rather than communicating problems directly to itself or other law enforcement organizations directly. Security industry experts lauded the FBI's work to identify and detain hackers as part of its Operation Bot Roast, which led to the arrests of Soloway, Brewer, and Downey, but at least one authority said that the agency may be creating false expectations of relief for businesses and consumers by telling them to fight crimes via their ISPs. Web access providers, particularly those that cater to residential markets, have minimized help desk support to save overhead costs, and customers may find themselves with little recourse or being asked to pay for additional security services when they call their ISPs to complain, said Danny McPherson, chief research officer at security filtering specialists Arbor Networks. Arbor provides network behavior analysis tools to a number of well-known ISPs, including AT&T, British Telecom, EarthLink, and NTT. In addition to leaving customers unsatisfied with their ability to respond to attacks, and potentially driving ISPs with minimal support budgets out of business, asking the service providers to become the de facto police for stopping botnet activity is impractical for a number of reasons, McPherson said. "You tend to see a lot of people, not just law enforcement, calling for quarantines of suspected botnet infected IP addresses, but you can't just start blocking legitimate users who may not know they are involved, what if you stop someone from making a VoIP-based emergency services call?" McPherson questioned. "If someone gets blocked by their ISP, they're going to move to another provider; systems and solutions to automate the security defenses needed to address this problem are being developed, but it will take time, and most infrastructure out there won't natively support that sort of work today." McPherson said that it is encouraging to see cooperation between U.S. law enforcement officials, but he believes that the botnet issue will remain a major problem nonetheless. "It's good to see that there is more global information sharing going on, and that local governments are taking responsibility for cleaning up their own backyards, but with millions of bot hosts and more than 90 percent of those outside the U.S., I think they're still only putting a tiny dent in the problem at his point," said McPherson. Other security industry experts agreed that it will take a lot more effort on the part of the international law enforcement community to have any noticeable impact on botnets and other cyber-criminals. However, efforts such as Bot Roast will succeed in forcing botnet operators to increasingly worry that they may indeed be brought to justice for the crimes they commit, said Alan Paller, director of research for IT security training provider SANS Institute. "At his point, the law enforcement community still can't get much done because so many of the perpetrators are located in so many places where there are no cooperative agreements," he said. "But what they are doing is increasing the risk and raising the cost of committing the crimes, which is just what law enforcement is good at; in the end they can't ever really stop people from trying to rob banks, but they can make it really dangerous and costly, just as they always have tried to."ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from over 800 sessions. Register today!

(InfoWorld) - While many enterprises are still trying to get their arms around just what SOAs (service-oriented architectures) really are, British Telecom is nearing the end of an eight-year effort to move to an entirely SOA-based IT environment, according to W. George Glass, BT's Chief Architect. Glass, speaking to attendees at the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum in New York City on Tuesday, said that the company is on target to have enterprisewide SOA by 2009, capping off a shift to a services-oriented architecture that began with provisioning of the company's mainframe systems in 2001. Glass said that BT's effort is one of the largest SOA implementations in the world and is driven by a confluence of factors: a company decision to divide into separate lines of business to better serve customers, the construction of a $20 billion ubiquitous IP network across the EU, and an offer by U.K. telecom regulators to reduce oversight of the company in exchange for BT opening access to its network. "All three of these required changes to our architecture to support them, and as we went down the road on each, we found the SOA approach satisfied each," Glass said. BT had been experimenting with SOA since 2001, when the company first started using middleware to expose mainframe functionality as Web-based services, Glass said. BT has since expanded that effort across its entire IT infrastructure, which encompasses more than 3,500 core systems, creating something called the Matrix Platform Architecture to support the shift. Matrix ties together 14 platforms with common capabilities that are reusable, and uses standards to streamline engineering and maintenance costs. So far, BT has identified 160 "capabilities" it needs to expose, each with between five and 15 operations. For example, a "manage customer order" capability might collect information such as customer reference numbers, time and date of order, products purchased, and so on. Of those, BT has completed work and deployed 63 capabilities affecting 730 systems in the past two years. When fully complete, the transition will make it much easier for BT to build and introduce new products and services for customers by reusing common components – say, customer identification and revenue collection – allowing BT to focus development resources just on new functionality, Glass said. Developers who create new services rather than reuse existing ones may even risk losing up to a quarter of annual performance bonuses, Glass told InfoWorld. Not that the transition to SOA has always been easy. BT engineers have sometimes failed to grasp the full complexity of different capabilities, requiring them to go back in to enhance capabilities they thought were well defined. BT also encountered wide disparities between its documented business processes and the actual "facts on the ground" in its call centers and product groups. Longtime BT IT employees also struggled with the demands to shift to SOA, fearing that it would make their jobs irrelevant. "We had people who had been in the organization a long time and knew a particular system inside-out. They were valued for that knowledge and we were saying to them 'We don't value your knowledge of that system as much as I value your ability to express that.'" Glass said that the shift to SOA has already produced a 20 percent reduction in IT staff. The company has moved 2,000 IT staff from internal projects to customer-facing and revenue-generating roles. By 2009, BT plans to have enough of its infrastructure shifted to an SOA model to support its core products for all its major customers. In the end, the move to a 100 percent SOA environment will be hard-fought, but positive for the company: reducing the cost of IT, reducing support costs for legacy and redundant applications, and focusing BT on improving business processes rather than technology, Glass said. "I think we're really pioneers in this," Glass said.

Shake, rattle and roll UK telco British Telecom has built an add-on for laptops, tablets and ultra-mobile PCs that allows users to control their computer simply by moving it around.…

(InfoWorld) - Mobile phone subscriptions in the European Union outnumber citizens for the first time, the European Commission said Thursday in its 12th annual report on the E.U. telecommunications market.The finding supports conclusions in the report that although much has been done to spread the benefits of telecommunications, more work is needed to create a genuine single telecoms market across the 27 countries in the E.U.With 478.4 million mobile phones in use, penetration in Europe is now at 103 percent of the population, up from 95 percent in 2005, the Commission said. But the level of penetration varies widely from country to country.Penetration is highest in Luxembourg (171 percent), Italy (134 percent) and Lithuania (133 percent). It is lowest in France (82 percent), Malta (83 percent) and Slovakia (86 percent), the Commission said.Broadband Internet access has a similarly varied success rate in different countries. On Oct. 1 last year. E.U.-wide broadband penetration stood at 15.7 percent. The Netherlands and Denmark showed the highest rate of penetration at 29.8 percent and 29.4 percent, respectively, but eight E.U. countries had penetration levels below 10 percent."The opening of telecom markets to competition is certainly one of the E.U.'s success stories as can be seen by the downward trend in tariffs and better services," Viviane Reding, E.U. Commissioner for Telecommunications said at a news conference.However, while 2.3 percent growth of the sector and 5 percent additional investment recorded in 2006 are good "they are not good enough in times when Europe's competitiveness is a stake," she added. The Commission is reforming the E.U.'s telecom rules. It will present a formal proposal midyear. The main aim of the reforms will be to overcome national inconsistencies, Reding said. "In a sector where technology transcends national borders, regulators should pave the way for pan-European economies of scale that are in the interests of both operators and consumers," Reding said. "My aim is to create a true internal market for telecoms in the E.U." Inconsistencies between countries are largely the result of different national telecoms regulators applying Europe-wide rules differently, Reding said. For example, some national regulators, including Germany's, have not made bitstream access widely available. Bitstream access is the provision of DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) services by the incumbent operator to other service providers. "We have been waiting for four years for action from Germany," Reding said. To address the problem. Reding will propose four courses of action: creating an umbrella regulatory body similar to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission; introducing forced structural separation of former incumbent operators' networks from their services; extending regulators' powers to intervene; and strengthening consumer protection in the E.U. "I don't want to abolish national regulators, but I do want them to operate under an E.U. framework. Someone has to hold that framework together," she said. The Commission could play this role, a separate public institution could be set up or a combination of the two, Reding said. Functional separation was introduced in the U.K. in the 1980s. Reding dismissed criticism of the British policy, instead arguing that it has done a lot of good for the British telecoms sector. Market share in broadband Internet access for British Telecommunications PLC, the former U.K. monopoly, has dropped to about 25 percent. It dominated the sector only a few years ago. "Structural separation is one solution to opening markets. It's not a panacea," Reding said. The 12th annual report has been published on the Commission Web site.

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