ITU is publishing a major new Report on the impact of the financial crisis on the ICT industry, "Confronting the Crisis: Its Impact on the ICT Industry", on Monday 16 February 2009, when the ITU Secretary-General Dr. Toure is due to speak at GSMA Barcelona on this subject.

The Report covers the major impact of the financial crisis on investment & financing, consumer demand, regulation and changing telco strategies in response to the crisis. It also examines the impact of the crisis on different technologies, including mobile telephony, WiMAX and Long Term Evolution (LTE), broadband Internet and NGN and the satellite industry.

The Report features invited insights from leading experts from the World Bank, OECD and UNCTAD, as well as industry analysts including Informa, Analysys Mason, Deloitte & Touche TMT Predictions, Point Topic and Maravedis. The leading trade associations, the GSMA and the WiMAX Forum, also contributed insights on the outlook for the mobile and WiMAX industry respectively.  On 16 February 2009, ITU will launch a website to coincide with Dr. Toure's speech featuring all these invited contributions and more, including perspectives on the regional impact from Balancing Act Africa and the Arab Advisors Group.

This Report will be available soon - for further information, please contact pressinfo@itu.int.

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.

It is available at http://code.google.com/p/browsersec/wiki/Main

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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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.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/01/22/internet-2008-in-numbers/

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. 

A new internet watchdog has been launched to help protect children from "harmful" web content, such as cyber-bullying and violent video games.

The UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) brings together social networking sites and technology firms.

It aims to teach children about web dangers, target harmful net content and establish a code of conduct for sites featuring material uploaded by users.

Gordon Brown said the move was a "landmark" in child protection.

'Minimum restrictions'

The prime minister said the growing importance of the internet in young people's lives meant the task for government and society was to strike a balance between safety and freedoms on the web.

"The challenge for us is to make sure young people can use the internet safely and do so with the minimum of restrictions but the maximum of opportunities," he said.

He went on to say the internet offered "a world of entertainment, of opportunity and knowledge" to children.

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Children suffering abuse will soon be able to contact the NSPCC's ChildLine via text messages and the internet.

The NSPCC hopes to reach more at-risk children by making use of the technology that youngsters are comfortable and familiar with.

Early trials by the NSPCC show that boys and girls seek help with family problems in very different ways.

The improved access to ChildLine - 0800 1111 - comes as the NSPCC bids to recruit more people to answer calls.

Helping hand

Although thousands of people contact the NSPCC via ChildLine every day the organisation still struggles to answer every call. Currently about 67% of calls get answered and just 40% of children who need counselling receive it.

"At the moment, we've got a real problem about not being able to reach every child who wants help," said Dame Mary Marsh, director and chief executive of the NSPCC which took over ChildLine in 2006.

"The rate that children can get through is just not good enough, so part of the process is to give different channels of access so there is going to be some way they can get some help," she said.

Help to expand the NSPCC services is coming from Microsoft in the shape of a £1.3m donation of software and services from Microsoft. Also included in the donation is space on the MSN homepage through which children will be able to contact ChildLine.

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London taxi passengers have left more than 60,000 hand-held devices in the back of black cabs during the past six months, a survey has found.

Some 55,843 mobile phones and 6,193 other devices, such as laptops, were forgotten, Credant Technologies found.

The data protection company, which surveyed 300 taxi drivers, warned users to password-protect equipment amid rising fears of identity theft.

Fraud experts said such devices could give criminals crucial data.

New devices - including mobiles, MP3 players and memory sticks - have the capacity to store tens of thousands of documents or pictures and millions of contacts and emails, making them a target for identity theft criminals and hackers.

A survey by credit reference agency Equifax in April suggested 16% of its customers put PIN numbers on their mobile devices while 24% recorded birthday dates.

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Nation not secure

By Dan Goodin

Posted in Security, 17th September 2008 23:26 GMT

Internet addresses corresponding to recent bank mergers are already being hoarded and sold online.

In "cybersquatting", likely addresses are bought cheaply in the hope of selling to the businesses involved, or as a medium for advertising.

Domain names for the merged Bank of America/Merrill Lynch as well as for Lloyds TSB/HBOS have been snapped up.

In one case, the domain name has already been listed on eBay, with the site directing visitors to the auction.

As reports of Lehman Brothers' intent to sell itself first surfaced last Friday, cybersquatters had already spotted Barclays, HSBC and Bank of America as potential buyers.

Accordingly, barclayslehman.com, hsbclehman.com, hsbclehmanbrothers.com and bofalehman.com had been acquired.

With the acquisition of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America this week, cybersquatters registered bankofamericamerrilllynch.com and bofaml.com.

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European court clears injunction, washes hands of hacker case.

The European Court of Human Rights has refused to intervene in preventing the US extradition of accused Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon.

The ruling by the seven judge court, made Thursday, kills off McKinnon's last hope to avoid extradition to the US to face charges of hacking into US military and NASA systems, following the rejection of his appeal by the House of Lords last month.

McKinnon's lawyers appealed to the court on the grounds that his condition of detention if extradited and convicted in the US would be degrading. However, the court decided on Thursday not to allow the case to proceed, clearing an injunction that prevented McKinnon's extradition.

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More evidence that the intertubes are fundamentally broken has been served up by Wired.com in an article laying out a technique to surreptitiously hijack huge chunks of the internet and monitor or even modify unencrypted traffic before it reaches its intended destination.

The exploit of the routing protocol known as BGP, short for Border Gateway Protocol, is akin to the poor man's traffic intercept employed by intelligence agencies throughout the world. Like the recently discovered domain name system cache poisoning bug, the exploit is notable because it highlights weaknesses in some of the net's core underpinnings.

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Anyone who has a blog has probably seen blog spam; comments to the blog that simply try to entice people to go to some other site. Most of the time the site being advertised is simply trying to boost its search engine rankings to generate more ad revenue.

The more links there are to a site, the more popular the search engines figure it is, and the higher up in the search results it ends up. Blog spam, therefore, is frequently thought to be a good way to boost the search engine rankings. In some cases this turns malicious. Some sites engage in wholesale intellectual property theft to boost their rankings.

A few of weeks ago, however, I started noticing something far more insidious. I moderate all comments to my blog. This is something I started years ago to keep the blog somewhat family friendly, and to avoid propagating malicious content. Recently I also completely disabled trackbacks to avoid boosting the search engine rankings for sites that steal my work. This means I see every comment that comes into my blog. The other day I noticed one that contained nothing more than a link to a fake Google site: google-images.google-us.info/index.html.

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The Mobile Marketing Association has published its guidelines for advertising pushed over Bluetooth connections, and considers anyone who hasn't opted out to be fair game for spammers.

The guidelines are now available for public review until 26 September, and take a distinct step beyond the UK's Direct Marketing Association (DMA) rules in that they consider any handset left in "discoverable" mode to be implicitly giving permission for pushed adverts - something the DMA explicitly rejects.

The document (pdf) has been produced by the "Proximity Committee", a part of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), and is mostly concerned with an explanation of what Bluetooth is and how it can effectively be used. It says that IMS Research reckons that in the US more than 60 per cent of handsets sport Bluetooth and 70 per cent in Europe, making it an attractive channel for pushed advertising.

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A computer virus is alive and well on the International Space Station (ISS).

Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG.

The worm was first detected on earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games.

Nasa said it was not the first time computer viruses had travelled into space and it was investigating how the machines were infected.

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eBay and PayPal have linked up with Gmail to roll out technology designed to block fraudulent emails and phishing attacks.

DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) email authentication technology is being used to prevent the delivery of bogus messages posing as emails from eBay and PayPal into Gmail users' inboxes.

DomainKeys technology is designed to verify both the DNS domain of an email sender and the integrity of a message. DKIM is an enhanced protocol that also adds aspects of Identified Internet Mail to the mix.

Both approaches are geared to uncover spoofing of source addresses in emails, a tactic commonly used by phishers.

However, there are limitations. If an email messages comes from an eBay or PayPal domain and fails to include a proper signature, then the message will not be delivered. Additionally, PayPal scams that claim to come from other domains may fall though the net.

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The mobile web has reached a "critical mass" of users this year, according to a report by analysts Nielsen Mobile.

The US is the most tech savvy nation with nearly 40 million Americans - 16% of all US mobile users - using their handset to browse on the move.

The UK and then Italy come a close second and third in the 16 countries surveyed by the analyst firm.

Indonesia has the lowest take-up with just 1.1% of mobile subscribers using their handsets for surfing the web.

The firm believes the growth of the mobile web is a combination of increasing numbers of user friendly handsets, higher speed networks and unlimited data packages.

"The adoption and the experience are improving at an impressive rate," said Nic Covey, Nielsen Mobile's director of insights.

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Businesses are missing out on the huge potential that social networks present, a leading information technology company has warned.

Researchers for Gartner found that huge opportunities for improving the management of large firms exist.

"Businesses which harness how employees use these sites stand to increase savings, productivity and profits," said Gartner researcher Jeffrey Mann.

He told the BBC the challenge was how to apply this to the corporate world.

The Gartner survey discovered that social networking sites, instant messaging email, chat and file sharing are attracting significant levels of interest online.

Their work was undertaken across 18 countries and territories between October and December of last year. It found that 38% of more than 4,000 PC and mobile phone users connect to sites like MySpace and Facebook via PCs.

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Hackers have turned the harvesting of personal information from Monster.com and other large US jobsites into a lucrative black market business

A Russian gang called Phreak has created an online tool that extracts personal details from CVs posted onto sites including Monster.com, AOL Jobs, Ajcjobs.com, Careerbuilder.com, Careermag.com, Computerjobs.com, Hotjobs.com, Jobcontrolcenter.com, Jobvertise.com and Militaryhire.com. As a result the personal information (names, email addresses, home addresses and current employers) on hundreds of thousands of jobseakers has been placed at risk, according to net security firm PrevX.

Phreak has begun selling its "identity harvesting services" to fraudsters, charging $600 for data that might be applied to targeted phishing attacks, ID fraud or other nefarious purposes. Would-be clients are able to contact the gang on ICQ. For a fee the gang will filter its database for entries that refer to a particular country or particular employer.

Jacques Erasmus, director of research at PrevX, explained that he came across adverts for the tool in an underground forum. The PHP-based utility uses built-in recruiter IDs to trawl jobsites and return results in a handy web form, he explained.

"This is way beyond email harvesting tools. The utility is quite sophisticated and attempts to make sense of the data format found in CVs, extracting only useful information," Erasmus told The Register. "Phreak is selling its services to people running higher-end [targeted] spear phishing attacks."

Jobsites have been a target for data sniffing attack for some time. PrevX said the latest attack is distinct from one carried out by a Trojan horse program last year.

This time around the attack affects far more sites than Monster.com alone. Also the attack involves a harvesting engine, rather than the use of malware.

Job sites might be able to guard against the latest assault on user data by limiting the number of searches a "recruiter" can carry out or by applying CAPTCHAs, Erasmus explained.

A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test designed to distinguish between requests from an automated program and a human. The approach typically asks a user to identify the letter in an image before allowing a request, such as an attempt to sign up to a web-mail service.

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