The Indian Merchants' Chamber held its 5th international conference on communications convergence on 16-17 March 2007 in Mumbai, focusing on the theme: new technologies, new business horizons (webcast).

Speakers included, among others, J. Patil (Minister for Finance and Planning), S. Pitroda, V. Bhatkar (Chairman, ETH Research Lab), R.A. Mashelkar (Former Director-General, CSIR), N. Rupani (Chairman, Enkay Technologies), R. Patel (Chairman, Bombay Stock Exchange Ltd), S. Chowdury (CIO, Reliance Communications Ltd), K. Goyal (Chief General Manager, BSNL) and K. Dasgupta (CEO, Sony Entertainment Television Pvt. Ltd).

ITU's Lara Srivastava delivered a talk in the plenary session entitled "communications convergence and the new global village". Her presentation is available here.

The WSIS Stocktaking is a continuous process and the database remains open for all new submissions. During the WSIS process, stakeholders expressed their wishes that this publicy-accessible database of WSIS-related implementation activities should be further maintained (see Tunis Agenda, para 120). It should become an effective tool for the exchange of  information on the projects fostering development of the information society, structured according to the 11 WSIS action lines. All WSIS stakeholders were encouraged to continue to contribute information to this public database.  

As part of this stocktaking exercise of WSIS-related activities, especially regarding implementation of the WSIS Plan of Action, Dr. Hamadoun Toure, the ITU Secretary-General, has just sent out a letter and a questionnaire to all stakeholders inviting them to share the information on the implementation activities and projects. The information collated from the WSIS Stocktaking questionnaire is archived in the database of WSIS Stocktaking activities.

In order to submit new project or make an up-date, please click one of the following shortcuts: NEW PROJECT / UP-DATE

To search the WSIS Stocktaking database, please click here.

The first steps towards a globally harmonized approach to identity management (IdM) have been taken during a meeting of the ITU Focus Group on Identity Management (FG IdM) bringing together, for the first time, the world’s key players in the IdM space.

IdM promises to reduce the need for multiple user names and passwords for each service used, while maintaining privacy of personal information. A global IdM solution will help diminish identity theft and fraud. Further, IdM is one of the key enablers for a simplified and secure interaction between customers and services such as e-commerce. Experts at the meeting concurred that interoperability between existing IdM solutions will provide significant benefits such as increased trust by users of on-line services as well as cybersecurity, reduction of spam and seamless "nomadic” roaming between services worldwide. Abbie Barbir, chairman of the Focus Group on Identity Management: "Our main focus is on how to achieve the common goals of the telecommunication and IdM communities. Nobody can go it alone in this space, an IdM system must have global acceptance. There was a very positive feeling at the meeting that we can achieve this and crucially we saw a great level of participation from all key players."

The meeting of the FG IdM brought together developers, software vendors, standards forums, manufacturers, telcos, solutions providers and academia from around the world to share their knowledge and coordinate their IdM efforts. Interoperability among solutions so far has been minimal. One conclusion of attendees is that cooperation is crucial and that players cannot exist in isolation.

The spirit of the meeting was that everyone will gain by providing an open mechanism that will allow different IdM solutions to communicate even as each IdM solution continues to evolve. Such a "trust metric" does not exist today experts say. Work will continue online and during Focus Group meetings in April, May, and July 2007. An analysis of what IdM is used for will be followed by a gap analysis between existing IdM frameworks now being developed by industry fora and consortiums. These gaps should be addressed before the interworking and interoperability between the various solutions can be achieved. The aim is to provide the basis for a framework which can then be conveyed to the relevant standard bodies including ITU-T Study Groups. The document will include details on the requirements for the additional functionality needed within next generation networks. ITU has a long history of innovation in this field, with key work on trusted, interoperable identity framework standards including Recommendation X.509 that today serves as the primary "public key" technical mechanism for communications security across all telecom and internet infrastructures.

See more information on the Focus Group on Identity Management (FG IdM) website.

Kaspersky Lab, a developer of secure content management solutions, recently announced its annual report on malware and spam evolution. The report, authored by Kaspersky Lab analysts, surveys the trends of 2006 and looks at what 2007 may bring.

Malware Evolution: 2006. The report provides an overview of the most important incidents in the malware world, highlights the main trends, and examines how the situation will evolve. Particular stress is laid on the continuing increase in the number of Trojan programs, particularly those designed to steal online gaming account data; the first viruses and worms for MacOS; and Trojans for J2ME, which are designed to steal funds from mobile user accounts. The number of new malicious programs was up 41% on 2005. As for the future evolution of malicious programs, Kaspersky Lab virus analysts believe that virus writers and spammers will work ever more closely together; the number of Trojans will continue to increase; and that virus writers will be on the lookout for exploitable vulnerabilities in Vista.

Spam Evolution: 2006. Data provided by the Kaspersky Spam Lab shows that in 2006, between 70% and 80% of mail traffic on the Russian Internet was spam. The majority of spam sent to Russian users originates in Russia, the U.S.A. and China. Spammers actively used graphics in order to evade spam filters. They are also continued to send spam masquerading as personal correspondence in order to get the recipient to read the whole message and then act as the spammers intended, whether by calling a designated number or clicking on a link. The report on spam evolution also highlights how mass mailings differ from each other according to language: most Russian language spam offers education and training, and a wide range of goods ranging from busts of the Russian president to a device which will 'translate' a dog's bark. English language spam, on the other hand, tends to focus on advertising for stocks and shares, viagra and cheap software. The report also notes that spam became increasingly criminalized in 2006, with spammers actively using SMS to spread spam.

The company's analysts believe that technologies currently in use will continue to evolve in 2007, together with further development of graphical spam, and increased criminalization of mass mailings.

Read the executive summaries here: Malware Evolution: 2006 and Spam Evolution: 2006.
The full annual report can be found here.  

This news item was accessed through Russia Newswire.

ITU-T Study Group 2’s February meeting saw work continue on harmonizing numbering resources for child helplines. Study Group 2 is looking at the issue following a request from Child Helpline International (CHI). CHI is a global network of telephone helplines and outreach services for children and young people.

Specifically Study Group 2 is looking at the logistics of providing a global number. It previously conducted a survey which discovered that a wide range of numbers are in use globally and that there is support in many countries for studying a more harmonized solution. A review process will be an initial assessment of all of the various options for introducing childrens’ helplines. The fundamental question is whether a single number can be deployed worldwide. Other issues include how regulators will handle migration from existing services and who pays for the services.

See the Study Group 2 website and ITU-T Newslog for further information.

On 21 February 2007, MTN South Africa reduced rates on its broadband data contracts and data bundles by as much as 20%. MTN customers can now also pay as little as 20c per MB when buying the 1GB data contract or data bundle. The offer applies to both contract and Pay as you Go customers on extended 24-month contracts.  With this price reduction, MTN "aims to bring mobile data within reach of a larger portion of our population”, according to MTN's marketing manager, Mr. Donovan Smith. MTN has also added a 500 MB bundle to its packages and now offers 10MB, 100MB, 350MB, 500 MB and 1GB bundles.

Broadband service providers in South Africa are innovating with a greater range of packages, pay-as-you-go or contract options, extended contracts and 'shaped' or 'unshaped' offers (by Telkom, offering prioritisation of certain protocols in traffic over others).  It is hoped that this will do more to boost the number of broadband subscribers in South Africa, which was second to Morocco in 2005 and 2006, from near equality in the total number of broadband subscribers at the end of 2004.

For more information, please see here.

The SHA-1 algorithm, which has been widely used in many of today's mainstream security products since 1995, was significantly compromised in February 2005 by a team of researchers led by Xiaoyun Wang based at China’s Shandong University. (This team had already undertaken attacks against the MD5 and SHA: hash functions previously, prior to their attack on SHA-1).

Their success prompted calls for a replacement algorithm. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology had already announced that they planned to phase out the use of SHA-1 by 2010 in favour of the SHA-2 variants. The need for a replacement algorithm has now led NIST to launch a contest to devise a successor on 27 January 2007. The competition is to begin in the fall of 2008, and continue until 2011, with full completion and approval by 2012. Contests like this one have a promising history in cryptography. Notably, the Advanced Encryption Standard (devised as a more secure replacement to the prior Data Encryption Standard) was devised through an open competition between fifteen teams of cryptographers between 1997-2000.

The 2007 ITU Young Minds in Telecoms Competition has just been launched.

The ITU Young Minds in Telecoms Competition is open to graduate students and recent graduates in economics, political science, law, literature, telecommunications, computer science, information systems and related fields. The objective of the ITU Young Minds Programme is to give young people valuable exposure to the international telecommunication environment and to the work of the ITU. The first Young Minds in Telecoms Competition was launched by the ITU Strategy and Policy Unit (SPU) in 2005. Information on the winners and runner-ups for the 2005 and 2006 competitions are available on the Young Minds in Telecoms website. One of the main criteria for evaluation is the submission of an essay and those essays that were highly-ranked in the evaluation process have been made available on the Young Minds in Telecoms site.

The essay topics for the 2007 ITU Young Minds in Telecoms competition are:

• What do you understand by the concept of technological convergence and what are its key trends?
• In your view, what are (1) the main benefits arising from technological convergence as they relate to the information and communication technologies (ICTs) sector? (e.g. new devices, new applications, new services etc.), and (2) the biggest challenges brought about by technological convergence? (e.g. regulatory challenges, cybersecurity threats, socio-ethical implications etc.).
• How can we ensure that the drawbacks of convergence do not outweigh its benefits?

See details on how to take part in the 2007 Young Minds in Telecoms competition here.

The New York Times has published an article on the early moves by European governments to implement the European Union Data Retention Directive.  The initial programs proposed by the governments of Germany and the Netherlands are more stringent than the directive requires.  The New York Times has noted that some of the people involved in this issue are concerned that these programs may represent a policy shift within Europe, which has traditionally followed a policy of protecting individuals' privacy rights.

More information can be found here.

The New York Times article can be found here.

The European Commission published a Communication entitled "Rapid access to spectrum for wireless electronic communications services through more flexibility".

The Communication builds on the Commission's close cooperation with Member States within the Radio Spectrum Policy Group. It sets out practical steps for a more flexible approach to spectrum management, starting with the identification of several spectrum bands in which current regulatory restrictions need urgent investigation.

More information can be found here.

This summary provides a general discussion of the amended Information Network and Privacy Protection Act (“INPPA”) of Korea. INPPA sets out the minimum procedural requirements for lawful online transmissions in Korea whereby transmissions of advertised materials against recipients’ refusal to accept are strictly prohibited. Although these rules are applicable to unsolicited commercial e-mails via the internet, they were intended to apply to all modes of telecommunication such as cellular phones, facsimiles, etc.

The Korean government has made continuing efforts since 1999 to curb the increase in spam mail and has since been monitoring the effectiveness of the implementation of additional provisions. The new law targets senders of spam mail that are commercial in nature. Consistent with its effort to protect minors from being exposed to obscene and violent materials online, the Korean government has also included a provision in the INPPA that requires senders to label those materials as such.

More information can be found here. 

Telecom Lesotho is seeking to introduce ADSL, on the basis that high-speed access will improve Internet service provision in Lesotho. It has applied to the Lesotho Telecommunications Authority, which has initiated a Public Consultation on its proposed tariffs, closing today. The launch of ADSL in Lesotho would bring the number of African countries with high-speed Internet access (over either DSL or dedicated leased lines) to thirty-five so far this year, up from thirty last year.

For more information, please see here.

An unlicensed model, tradable rights and standards regarding the service and technology neutrality, within a very clear framework, are the key principals for a future European policy on radio spectrum, says the European Parliament in an own-initiative report drafted by Fiona HALL (ALDE, UK) and almost unanimously adopted.

Fiona HALL said: "Creating a more flexible approach to radio spectrum management is essential. European innovation in wireless technology will be held back unless more efficient use is made of spectrum. At the heart of this debate is the Lisbon agenda of growth and jobs. It's important not to get this political commitment mixed up with the technical issue of how such services ought to be delivered. It be a big mistake to ring-fence the frequencies currently used by broadcasting services by insisting on their exclusion from any new approach to spectrum management."

More information can be found here. 

On 3 February 2007, the Afghan Ministry of Communications issued two regional Local Fixed Service Provider (LFSP) licenses, in accordance with the Government's telecommunication and ICT policies. The first license of this kind was issued for seven northern provinces in May 2006 to Wasel Telecom, the Afghani arm of Dubai-based Modern Technologies International. The two further licenses have been issued to Shaheen and Ertebat telecommunication companies. It is hoped that these licenses will stimulate the telecom market, reduce prices and increase subscribers.

For more information, please click here.

High-speed residential Internet access is reaching Africa, with the launch of 2 and 4 Mbps broadband offers in 2006 by the Moroccan ISP Casanet, a 100%-owned subsidiary of Maroc Telecom, through its portal Menara.

Maroc Telecom has just released its annual results for 2006, with around 384,000 ADSL subscribers, the lion's share of Morocco's broadband market. The Moroccan regulator is seeking to partially unbundle the local loop. New entrants such as Meditel and Maroc Connect will be able to use the incumbent's copper cable to offer alternative ADSL services in competition with Maroc Telecom’s offers.

The roll-out of a 4 Mbps offer is just part of the march of higher-speed offers throughout Africa (see graph below).

This analysis is part of the this year's World Information Society Report, to be published on World Information Society Day, 17 May 2007.

Ross Anderson and Tyler Moore have published their survey paper on "The Economics of Information Security: A Survey and Open Questions".

Read the full version of the paper, and the shorter version of the paper, which appeared in Science Magazine.

Their presentation at The Economics of the Software and Internet Industries conference in Toulouse, France, 19-20 January 2007, can be found here.

14-15 May 2007 The next annual facilitation meeting for WSIS Action Line C5 has been rescheduled one day earlier and will be held 14-15 May 2007 at ITU in Geneva in conjunction with a cluster of events held 14-25 May around 17 May (World Telecommunication and Information Society Day).  The meeting is open to all participants with an interest in C5 activities. The invitation letter and draft agenda is available here. More details are available will become available on the WSIS C5: Partnerships for Global Cybersecurity website. Enquiries can be directed to cybersecurity@itu.int.

Go to the 14-15 May meeting page to get more information on how to register for the meeting.

The Chairman’s Report from the ITU New Initiatives Programme workshop on "What Rules for IP-enabled NGNs?", held in March 2006 in the ITU Headquarter, is available on the event's web-page.

To download the document, please click here. 

An international conference on the impact of technology on society was held in Geneva, Switzerland, from 7-9 February. LIFT 2007 welcomed more than 40 international speakers, from F. Devouard (Chair, Wikipedia) to Jaewoong Lee (Founder, Daum Communications).

Sessions included, among others: technological overload, digital divide, the social web, post-industrial worlds, from robots to cyborgs, perspectives on ubiquitous computing, technological opportunities for society. In this latter session, ITU's Lara Srivastava gave a presentation on "communication technologies and new forms of social interaction". 

Lara Srivastava also participated as a panelist in the session "Digital Divide: Bringing it Home". Her presentation entitled "digital divide, digital disconnect" is available here.

The conference includes a LIFT + feature, a living and creative platform intended to develop new ideas through the active interaction of participants.

More information about LIFT can be found here.

According to Mark Hall, the Director of the U.S. Defense Department's International Information Assurance Program and co-chair of the National Cyber Response Coordination Group (NCRCG), DOD is about to sign an agreement to share incident and threat information with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT).  NCRCG is the U.S. federal government's incident response coordinator.  It works to defend U.S. cyberspace by providing guidance to federal agencies and working the private sector, state governments, and other countries.  Currently, there are 26 NATO countries and Hall feels that it will be much easier for him to work with NATO rather than each of the countries bilaterally.  Hall was also recently a participant in a panel at RSA Conference 2007 that discussed "Protecting U.S. Cyberspace:  Coordinating National Response to Cyber Attacks." 

For the full article, please go here.

The UK ENUM Consortium has launched the RFP/ITT for the UK Tier 1 Registry and it is possible the UK may go commercial with ENUM sometime this year or in 2008.  Organizations that would like to respond to the ITT should inform the UKEC of their intentions by 7 February and the response must be submitted before noon on 28 February.

The ITT and related documents as well as presentations and details from the 17 January workshop can be found here.

The full article can be found here.

The Chairman’s Report (Version for Comments) from the ITU New Initiatives Programme workshop on The Future of Voice, held January 15-16, 2007 in the ITU Headquarter, has been made available for comments on the event's web-page.

To download the document, please click here. 

All comments and remarks, to be reflected in the final version of the Chairman’s Report should be sent via email to SPUmail@itu.int no later than the 19th February 2007.

Standards that will ease the wide spread rollout of video over IP networks took a step forward in January. IPTV architecture and requirements, two fundamentally important areas in standards work were progressed at a recent meeting of the ITU-T Focus Group on IPTV (FG IPTV). There was general consensus in the meeting that FG IPTV will successfully develop documents which will accelerate introduction of IPTV to the global market. Setting the architecture and requirements in stone allows the rest of the work to continue with greater ease.

Meeting at the Microsoft conference center, Mountain View California, at the invitation of the Alliance for Telecom Industry Standards (ATIS) the group saw a record number of contributions and experts worked often late to keep up with the workload. Nearly 90 documents were dealt with in the fields of architecture and requirements alone. Malcolm Johnson, newly elected Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau said in a message he sent to the event: "The excellent cooperation between ITU-T and ATIS is an example of the spirit of cooperation that I believe now pervades in the standards world... From what I have seen there is a great deal to be satisfied by in terms of the progress that FG IPTV has achieved so far."

In opening comments, ATIS President & CEO Susan Miller shared with the 200 meeting attendees that IPTV is serving as a ''change agent" for the industry, and "as both the business case and principal driver for accelerating deployment of the next generation network. "Miller noted that for North American service providers in particular, "IPTV is a critical ingredient to bundled service offerings that encompass television services, mobile services, Internet access, and much more. We have seen in the last decade, enormous investments in broadband, and fiber deployments to the home and to the premise," said Miller. Also important a document outlining terms and definitions in the field was created.

While seemingly mundane this work is crucially important in ensuring consistency of comprehension in an area where many standards outlining different aspects of IPTV will co-exist. Further discussion is expected on whether and how to treat the issue of redistribution of content to a point past an IPTV terminal device, and, in particular, how content protection and content management functions can or should apply in a home network environment. Other issues examined and progressed were accessibility issues for people with disabilities, AV codecs and content format requirements. Output and other documents can be found here.
See also the ITU-T newslog for further information. 

The next meeting of FG IPTV will be held from 7 to 11 May 2007 in Bled, Slovenia.

Almost 40 countries will participate in the fourth edition of Safer Internet Day (SID) which this year takes place on 6 February.

The event is organised by European Schoolnet, coordinator of Insafe, the European safer internet network. Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for the Information Society and Media is once again patron of Safer Internet Day, as in the past two years.

The highlight of the day will once again be a worldwide blogathon, which will reach Australia on 6th February and progress westward through the day to finish up in the USA and Canada. Following the huge success encountered in 2006, this year’s blogathon goes one step further to include the voices of hundreds of youngsters.

In the framework of a competition launched in October 2006, more than 200 schools in 25 countries across the globe have been working in pairs, using technology to cross geographical borders, to create internet safety awareness material on one of three themes: e-privacy, netiquette, and power of image. On Safer Internet Day, all of the projects they have produced will be uploaded to the blogathon. The 4 prize-winning teams in the competition will be announced on 6 February when the blogathon opens to well over 100 organisations waiting on the starting block to add their postings on this year’s theme, Crossing borders.

To find out more about young people’s use of the internet and mobile phones, Insafe has been collecting data over the past two months through an online survey. Preliminary results will be made available on Safer Internet Day along with a wealth of other information tailored to the needs of not only media but also parents, teachers and youngsters in an online media room specially set up at www.saferinternet.org to mark the event.

On Safer Internet Day in the Netherlands, HRH Princess Maxima will be the special guest at an event featuring theatre, music and stories. In Slovenia, young people will showcase art projects and Slovenian national television will broadcast internet safety clips.

Across the globe, hundreds of other events will highlight the growing importance of internet safety in the lives of us all.
For further information see the following links:

Insafe
National nodes of Insafe
Safer Internet Day Blogathon
Safer Internet Programme
eTwinning (partner in the Safer Internet Day competition for schools)

In today's interconnected world of networks, threats can now originate anywhere − our collective cybersecurity depends on the security practices of every connected country, business, and citizen. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a specialized agency within the United Nations system, would like to draw Safer Internet Day participants' interest to a number of information resources dedicated to cybersecurity and spam.

The ITU Cybersecurity Gateway is an easy-to-use online information resource on national and international cybersecurity related initiatives worldwide. A vast number of resources and links are available and organizations are invited to join in partnership with the ITU and other stakeholders to build confidence and security in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs).

The StopSpamAlliance is a joint initiative to gather information and resources on combating spam. This initiative was undertaken by Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the EU's Contact Network of Spam Authorities (CNSA), International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the London Action Plan, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Seoul-Melbourne Anti-Spam group. The StopSpamAlliance.org website contains an overview about each of these organization’s activities in countering spam and related threats.

The outcome documents from the two phases of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) emphasize that building confidence and security in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is a necessary pillar for building a global information society. ITU has been asked to play the main facilitator role for to assist stakeholders in building confidence and security in the use of ICTs. To stress the importance of the multi-stakeholder implementation of this task, ITU has named this the Partnerships for Global Cybersecurity (PGC) initiative.

In commenting on the Safer Internet initiative, newly elected ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure stressed the need for greater cooperation between regulators, government, security firms, communication service providers, and end users in dealing with the challenges to building a safe and secure information society.

The International Telecommunication Union wishes you all a very successful Safer Internet Day 2007!

Enquiries related to ITU activities in the area of cybersecurity can be directed to cybersecurity@itu.int.

About ITU

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is an international organization (specialized agency) within the United Nations System where governments and the private sector coordinate global telecommunication networks and services. Through its standards, development, and policy research activities, ITU has a long-standing track record in security for information and communication systems. There are currently more than seventy ITU recommendations focusing on security.