FCC PROBES WIRELESS INDUSTRY

By K.C.Bishoppe

The FCC has launched numerous inquiries into the wireless industry. The inquires come after consumer groups and users said that exclusive smartphone deals and other industry practices are unfairly boosting wireless practices.

Actual complaints filed with the FCC rose 47% between 2007 and 2008. That percentage is considered significant.

A notice of inquiry generally is the first step in the process of creating new FCC policy. At the meeting where the inquiries were approved, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said that the FCC was at a pivotal moment in the history of the mobile industry where transitioning from a voice-centric world to a world of ubiquitous, mobile Internet access is taking place.

Consumer groups complain that wireless carriers are charging more but not improving service. They also note that all of the carriers charge approximately the same amount and raise and lower their prices in unison. They hope to discourage simultaneous price increases and create more stability if the federal government injects more competition into the wireless market.

ARE SMARTPHONES SAFE?

By D.E.Levine

The recent Cisco 2009 Midyear Security Report states that the criminal underworld works together to understand and take advantage of the evolving behaviors of the very demographic they are trying to undermine and fleece.

By working together criminals are adapting to the new economy and are continually finding new ways to exploit people with mobile phones, through social networks and text messaging. As part of their strategy criminals often seize upon current events to dupe people into phishing scams or to spam advertising.

Also noted in the report, was the use of SMS text messages as an attack vector. Since the beginning of 2009 at least two to three new campaigns targeting mobile devices have surfaced every week. Cisco says that users have not learned to be wary of audio scams and frequently fall prey to them.

While SMS attacks are new in the U.S. they are more common in other countries such as Japan. This is because the technology has been popular in those countries much longer and is more pervasive.

A new technique called "smishing" is predicted to increase in the future. During a smishing attack, a phishing link is sent to a smartphone that is sophisticated enough to allow the recipient to click on the link contained in the text message. Evidently, this area is a irresistible to criminals and they find it challenging enough to expend considerable time and energy into developing new scams.

GMAIL PLAQUED BY OUTAGES

By M.S.Welles

Gmail has become increasingly popular and its widespread use has been adopted within the corporate structure.

There have been a number of outages that are adversely affecting the use of Gmail. It's to be expected that as Google Apps like Gmail become prevalent and garner more notoriety, any and all outages will attract more negative attention.

As a result many corporate managers are now re-evaluating whether or not to allow G-mail to be used for corporate business.

Because e-mail is mission critical for business users, if users feel that G-mail isn't reliable, they won't adopt it for use within the corporate structure. A worldwide outage in late August caused inconvenience, frustration and drew a lot of negative publicity to the application.

According to Google's official Gmail blog, the outage was caused by a server traffic jam. Due to an underestimation of load, a few request routers became overloaded and told the rest of the system to stop sending messages. Within a few minutes nearly all of the request routers became overloaded.

Google officials commented that they've turned their full attention to making certain this type of thing doesn't reoccur.

Analysts suggested that a separation of corporate and consumer Gmail to separate infrastructure may avoid this problem in the future. The standard for most email services is 99.9% uptime, so it's essential that Google show consumer and commercial services are largely independent of each other.

According to Google's blog, within seconds of the outage Google engineers were alerted to the outage and brought additional request routers online restoring 99.9% availability to users within 100 minutes.

But this outage follows other widely felt and publicized outages in February and May which have brought a great deal of adverse publicity to both Google and the application.

U.S. PURSUES H-1B CASE

By D.E.Levine

The U.S. government is seeking $4.9 million from a New Jersey IT firm that it claims is fraudulently using H-1B visas.

South Plainfield, N.J.-based Vision Systems Group, Inc. is alleged to have paid its H-1B workers in multiple states based on low rates in Iowa, through the creation of shell businesses in Iowa.

Charging that the practices used by Vision have deprived U.S. citizens of employment, the initial indictment, part of Operation Pacific Vision, a government investigation that led to the arrest of 11 people in six states on H-1B fraud charges, is the largest H-1B fraud case ever brought by the government.

Vision Systems denies the charges and is fighting in U.S. District Court in Iowa claiming that workers are paid at or above the prevailing wage rates of the places they are working.

The government claims that Vision Systems told its H-1B hires that green cards could be more rapidly obtained through U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) offices outside of New Jersey. It's anticipated that Vision Systems may claim using the faster service at the Iowa ICE offices as a recruiting tool for H-1B workers.

GOOGLE AND CRM

By K.C.Bishoppe

For those of you who think of Google as merely a search engine, it's time to realize that Google has a grander vision and is actively pursuing it as it expands and deploys additional services. Initially, analysts thought Google was merely challenging Microsoft. As the company rolls out more and more services from office-productivity applications to Web analytics, Google is moving steadily into the CRM space which has a growing market.

Google Wave, unveiled in May, may very well cause significant upheaval in the cloud-computing space. What is Google Wave? It's a next generation collaboration platform capable of uniting e-mail, instant messaging, blogs and wiki, and perhaps integration Google Voice voicemails into a single conversation.

Analysts writing about the Google phenomenon anticipate that Google Wave will reach enterprise workforces without the need for a technology department.

It's true that right now Google is only promising great changes for businesses, regardless of their size. However, Google already has all the pieces up and functioning and now it's simply a matter of integrating them into the application that can impact businesses, especially small businesses, in a huge way,

TRANSIT SYSTEMS RECEIVE FINANCIAL BOOST

By M.S.Welles

Janet Napolitano recently announced the Department of Homeland Security designated $78 toward the enhancement of security on mass transit systems across the nation. The funds will directly impact 15 major cities' transit systems.

The money came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment (ARRA) Act Transit Security Grant Program and will be targeted towards the prevention of terrorism.

Three terrorism prevention techniques including the establishment of antiterrorism teams, the establishment of explosive detection canine teams, and the establishment of mobile explosives detection screening teams will be targeted.

The funds being allocated will contribute to the impacted agencies being properly equipped, staffed and educated.

Included in the disbursement the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority received $35.9 million, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority received $9.56 million, the Chicago Transit Authority received $4.869 million, the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority received $4.458 million and AMTRAK received $6.34 million.

CORPORATE SOFTWARE PIRACY - PART 1

By D.E. Levine

Despite a concentrated effort begun about 15 years ago to eliminate software piracy, currently about a fifth of corporate employees are using pirated software, according to industry statistics.

Sometimes, firm employees aren't even aware that they're using pirated software. However, it's not unusual for the small and medium companies' management to buy either one license or a few copies and install the software on multiple computers. Frequently, this software is used by thousands of employees.

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) was started after I got into computer security. I remember when the largest (by revenue) software makers banded together to form the BSA in the hopes it would be able to implement policies, procedures and penalties that discouraged and/or caught software pirates.

No industry or organization is immune to software piracy. In fact, IDC and BSA issued a report in May that stated global software piracy in 2008 accounted for 41% of installed PC software. If you convert that to lost revenues, it's a $53 billion loss to software makers. In the United States, which has the lowest software piracy rate, the 2008 rate was 20% or $9.1 billion.

I have an original BSA VHS, made to explain software piracy and copyright infringement. The BSA is still actively providing education about piracy, sample software asset management policies, and online tools (free) for corporate self-diagnosis and dealing with piracy issues.

BSA receives thousands of leads regarding piracy, from corporate IT employees and managers. With a small group of piracy investigators, the BSA actually follows up on these leads. There's a regular process for tracking software pirates and for prosecuting them once they are found.

IS THE INTERNET LIMITLESS?

By K.C. Bishope

September 2009 marked the 40th birthday of the Internet. Billions of people receive e-mail, e-commerce, instant messaging and a variety of entertainment options on a daily basis.

Has the Internet grown to its full capacity? Experts say absolutely no. In fact, although the Internet began on September 2, 1969 when the first network connection was created between two University of California computers, experts say it's only just reaching its teenage years.

It's expected that in its next phase the Internet will bring additional, very significant, and as yet unclear changes to daily life. Within the last few years the Internet has become a megaspot for social networking. Experts aren't sure what's going to happen next, but they are sure something big is going to happen.

According to Marc Weber, founding curator of the Internet History Program at the Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA) the increasing mobility of the Internet will probably drive its growth during the coming decades. He anticipates the mobile Internet showing you things "about where you are" and will enable increasing numbers of consumers to pay for goods.

Since it was started, the Internet has been primarily text-based. Now it's anticipated there will be more growth in graphics, animation and 3-D.

In truth, we're going to have to wait, live our lives and see exactly what happens to the Internet and where it takes us.

SONY TO PREINSTALL GOOGLE BROWSER

By M.S. Welles

Sony has signed an agreement to pre-install Google's Chrome browser on its Vaio line of PCs. Analysts think this is the beginning of a renewed effort by Sony to boost its browser business. It signals an effort by Sony to take a traditional approach to marketing its browser, in effect, copying Microsoft's approach.

Just installing Chrome on Vaios isn't going to be enough for Google. According to spokesmen for the firm, Google is exploring other avenues for getting Chrome onto more than just Sony PCs.

The Sony agreement is important because it signals the fact that Google was able to convince the PC manufacturer that Chrome is a true competitor to Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. In order to provide such proof Sony rigorously tested Chrome so that offering the browser pre-installed wouldn't prove to be an embarrassment or a security risk.

Of course, entering the arena with a new browser is going to be an uphill battle because Internet Explorer has a very large established consumer base. However, Internet Explorer also has flaws that have caused many people to adopt Mozilla's Firefox. There's the real possibility that dissatisfied Internet Explorer users may adopt Chrome in the future.

IS CISCO THREATENED BY COMPETITORS?

By M.S. Welles

Cisco is well known and dominates the enterprise switching market. Now, Cisco may be facing some real competition.

HP and 3Com built compelling product portfolios and value stories and consumers are beginning to notice.

Cisco competitors are cheaper, which in this economic downturn, many companies find appealing. HP and 3Com say port density, power consumption, price and performance are all a better value in their products. 3Com is capitalizing on manufacturing its enterprise equipment in China, bringing down the cost. China uses the equipment to power eight out of 12 national backbones.

It's an uphill competition though since Cisco claims more than 70% of the market and claims that its low total cost of ownership is achievable because of its cohesive, overarching product architecture.

HP and 3Com don't have switches to challenge everything offered by Cisco, but they are definitely taking an aggressive approach to going after business where they do have comparable switches.

CLOUD SECURITY FEARS REVIVED

By D.E. Levine

Twitter Inc's implementation of Google Apps was breached in July and it allowed hackers access to confidential company documents via a hijacked Gmail account of an employee.

This breach resulted in some local law enforcement and public interest groups in Los Angeles to cite potential security concerns since the city plans to replace Novell GroupWise e-mail and Microsoft Office with Google Inc's hosted e-mail and office productivity applications.

L.A. city officials cite a savings of $13 million in software licensing and personnel costs over a 5-year period due to the switch.

However, an advocacy group from Santa Monica, Consumer Watchdog, raised the question of whether Google's offered cloud provides adequate safeguards. The group urged the city councilors to have IT personnel test the Google Apps with a small group of users first, instead of implementing it for 30,000 users.

Consumer Watchdog advocates insisting on appropriate guarantees and significant financial penalties in the event that security is not up to par and any security breach occurs. The World Privacy Forum encourage the city of L.S. to move slowly and cautiously in implementing Google Apps.

But Google officers claim the outcry is based on incomplete information and even suggests moving to Google is a security upgrade, citing lack of familiarity with cloud computing as the reason for the misunderstanding.

As with any migration, it's always suggested that comprehensive risk assessments be done before migrating to any product, especially cloud-based products which are relatively new. As always, there are significant privacy and security issues when using applications hosted off-site by other companies.

NORTEL AUCTION WON BY ERICSSON

By K.C. Bishope

The bidding for bankrupt Nortel Networks Corp.'s wireless assets was won by LM Ericsson Telephone Co. Ericsson agreed to pay $1.13 billion for the CDMA business and LTE access technology.

Additionally, Ericsson will offer at least 2,500 Nortel employees jobs as the acquisition expands Ericsson's North American foothold.