Published in September 12th, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO: In the annals of perks enjoyed by American corporate executives, the founders of Google may have set a new standard: an un-crowded, federally-managed runway for their private jet that is as close as can be to being in the company's own backyard.
It is a perk that is likely to turn other Silicon Valley tycoons green with envy, but one that may not sit well with a community that generally considers itself proud to have Google in its midst.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration confirmed earlier this week that H211, a limited liability company that counts Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, as one of its principals, had secured rights to operate a refurbished wide-body Boeing 767-200 out of Moffett Field, an airport that is run by NASA and is generally closed to private aircraft.
The Google founders and billionaires, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, through another limited liability company, own just such a plane, which is unusually large and rare by private jet standards.
Moffett Field is nearly adjacent to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, and the four-mile, or 6.5 kilometer, drive between the two facilities takes just seven minutes, according to Google Maps. Other Silicon Valley executives have to make do with space for their jets at San Francisco or San Jose international airports.
How did the two billionaires get such a coveted parking place? Officials at NASA Ames Research Center said the space agency signed an agreement signed last month that allowed it to place instruments and scientists on planes owned by principals of H211, which in addition to the Boeing 767-200 includes two Gulfstream Vs, to collect scientific data on some flights. In exchange, NASA will receive about $1.3 million in annual fees for being host to the plane at Moffett, said Steven Zornetzer, associate director for institutions and research at NASA Ames Research Center.
“It was an opportunity for us to defray some of the fixed costs we have to maintain the airfield as well as to have flights of opportunity for our science missions,” Zornetzer said. “It seemed like a win-win situation.”
NASA said it had already run one mission on one of the Gulfstream Vs to observe the Aurigid meteor shower Aug. 31.
Still, the agreement is raising questions from local officials and community activists, who have a long history of opposing the expansion of flights at Moffett Field, a historic airport that was once under the supervision of the United States Navy, but was transferred to NASA in 1994.
“The Google flights represent the possibility that the camel's nose is under the tent, and that NASA is looking at opening up the use of the runways to help pay for it,” said Lenny Siegel, director of the Pacific Studies Center, a local non-profit group that over the years has opposed various proposed expansions of civilian flights at Moffett Field. “The majority of the people in the community are against that.”
Siegel said he was hoping NASA would provide clear answers about the agreement. “If they are doing science missions, that's O.K.,” Siegel said. “If they are doing it just because they are rich and popular, it is not O.K.”
Google and Ames Research Center have other agreements to collaborate on research, as well as a preliminary plan for Google to build as much as a million square feet, or 93,000 square meters, of space at Ames. But Zornetzer said the deal with H211 was unrelated to the Google agreements.
Google, for its part, says that this is a personal matter involving the founders, who would not comment.
“This is not a new issue,” said Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, a Democrat, whose district includes Moffett. “You have to live with your neighbors. You are not out in the middle of the desert. You are in the heart of Silicon Valley.”
Eshoo said she sent a letter Tuesday to NASA Ames director S. Pete Worden asking him to provide further details.
The plane's presence at Moffett Field was first reported last week by the technology gossip blog Valleywag. According to FlightAware, a flight tracking service, a Boeing 767-200 took off last Wednesday from Moffett Field for Seville, Spain, where Google happened to have a meeting of its European staff.
The Google founders' jet has been the talk of Silicon Valley since 2005, when the pair purchased the plane, which in a normal configuration can hold 180 passengers. A year later, talk about the plane intensified after The Wall Street Journal wrote about a legal dispute between the owners and a contractor who was charged with refurbishing the plane. In the article, the contractor described requests for modifying the plane to include California king size beds for the founders. At one point, the founders asked whether hammocks could be hung from the ceiling. The contractor said that Schmidt had described the jet as “party plane.”
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Published in September 12th, 2007
MOSCOW: Vimpelcom, the No. 2 mobile phone operator in Russia, after Mobile TeleSystems, will invest as much as $1 billion in a mobile services venture in Vietnam that could become the center of its Asian operations, its chief executive said Wednesday.
“Vietnam is a very attractive market with a growing population of approximately 85 million people and mobile penetration of approximately 32 percent,” the chief executive, Alexander Izosimov, said.
Vimpelcom said its investment in a global system for mobile communications based in Vietnam would be made over the next few years.
Izosimov said he hoped the joint venture, to be called GTel Mobile, could be established within the next several months.
Vimpelcom said its partners would be a company owned by the Ministry of Public Security of Vietnam and U.S. Millennium Global Solutions Group.
“I can't disclose details but can say that everything has been undertaken to allow us to get a considerable minority stake,” Izosimov said.
“I think it will be more than a blocking stake.”
Under Vietnamese law, Vimpelcom would only hold minority voting rights in the venture, but under the deal the Russian company will be entitled to the majority of profits.
Vimpelcom, which operates under the Beeline brand, is 44 percent controlled by Altimo, the telecommunications arm of Alfa Group. Telenor of Norway owns 29.9 percent of the company.
Vimpelcom has repeatedly said it is interested in acquiring foreign assets that could lead to the creation of “geographical clusters,” rather than buying separate telecom companies.
“It is natural that Vietnam is an organizing market,” Izosimov said. “At a later stage it will be easier to join neighboring smaller markets to a structure which will be created.”
In August, Altimo acquired 90 percent of the Cambodian mobile operator Sotelco. Analysts said Altimo might sell Sotelco to Vimpelcom, but Izosimov played down the speculation.
“Nobody has ever offered us to buy Sotelco,” he said.
The Vietnamese venture will be the first move by a Russian telecommunications company outside the 12 former Soviet countries known as the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Vimpelcom operates in seven of those countries, including Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, but is looking to diversify at a time when those markets are close to saturation.
Altimo's Kyrgyz unit for sale
Altimo, the telecommunications unit of the Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman, is auctioning its Kyrgyz phone company amid a dispute over ownership of the asset, Bloomberg News reported from Moscow.
Mobile TeleSystems, or MTS, the largest Russian mobile phone company, has been invited by Morgan Stanley to bid for the Kyrgyz unit, Sky Mobile, an MTS spokeswoman, Yelena Kokhanovskaya, said.
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Published in September 12th, 2007
EDS offers packages
NEW YORK: Electronic Data Systems said Wednesday that it had offered early retirement packages to about 12,000 U.S. employees and expected a charge of $70 million to $130 million in the fourth quarter.
EDS, the second-largest U.S. technology services provider after IBM, has been cutting costs to improve profit. The company, which has about 136,000 employees worldwide, cut 5,000 jobs last year.
EDS gave employees until Oct. 30 to accept the offer, according to a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Alcatel-Lucent agrees with unions on job cuts
PARIS: Alcatel-Lucent's unions agreed to job-reduction plans by the company, the world's biggest maker of telecommunications equipment.
The Confederation Française Democratique du Travail said the company, based in Paris, had agreed in return to create 324 new jobs, more than originally envisioned, and to pay an acceptable severance. Alcatel said in February it planned to cut 1,468 jobs in France by the end of next year.
Sun and Microsoft expand their entente
SEATTLE: Sun Microsystems will sell server computers with Microsoft's Windows, the world's most popular operating system, as Sun adds lower-cost machines for running networks.
Sun is adding cheaper options to its original line of servers, which run the Solaris version of the Unix operating system. The company already sells a Linux server and a less-expensive Solaris machine.
The agreement with Microsoft expands a relationship forged in 2004 between the former rivals, a truce meant to help Sun stem losses and address customer complaints.
SK Telekom in deal for mobile broadcasting
SEOUL: SK Telecom, the largest mobile operator in South Korea, said it had reached a preliminary deal with T-Systems, a unit of Deutsche Telekom, to enter the mobile broadcasting market in Europe and Asia.
SK Telecom has been looking to overseas markets for growth. Almost 9 in 10 South Koreans already have a mobile phone and there is little room for domestic expansion.
SONY said it planned to sell four Blu-ray disc recorders in Japan starting Nov. 8, stepping up competition with Toshiba's HD DVD format. The models are expected to cost ¥140,000 to ¥200,000, or $1,228 to $1,758, Sony said.
NOKIA SIEMENS cannot sell two telecommunications plants in Italy, the Italian Industry Ministry said. The plants that Nokia Siemens is seeking to sell are in Marcianise and Cassina de Pecchi, the ministry said.
BITKOM, the German industry association, cut its forecast for German IT and telecom growth to 1.3 percent from 2 percent because of price declines.
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Published in September 12th, 2007
NEW YORK - Motorola rode high for a while on sales of its slim, stylish Razr phone. When its competitive edge started to dull, the company set its hopes on the Q, a BlackBerry-like e-mail phone, which it initially thought would sell as well as the Razr.
ADVERTISEMENTNow, with Motorola’s position as the world’s No. 2 cell-phone maker in jeopardy, it has brought out a thoroughly reworked Razr, and jazzed up its Q with more music-oriented features.
Unfortunately for Motorola, neither of the new phones feels like a winner that’s going to bolster the company’s stock price, which is down 35 percent from its high of $26.30 set last year.
I tested samples of the MotoRazr2 and Moto Q music 9m for a few weeks, taking help from colleagues who were or are users of the original Razr, which was launched in 2004. Overall, we weren’t seriously tempted with either of the new phones, though some improvements are noticeable.
We started out with one Razr2 from each of the three largest carriers: AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. AT&T charges $300 for the phone with a 2-year contract, the others charge $50 less.
The Razr2 is thinner than its ancestor, but slightly longer. One former Razr user said it felt “too big,” but this is mostly an illusion. It’s created by the Razr2’s sturdy feel, which is reinforced by heavy-duty metal hinge and by its heft. It weighs 4.6 ounces, about an ounce more than the Razr, depending on the model.
Overall, it does feel slightly less pocketable than the Razr, and it’s harder to flip it open elegantly with one hand.
The other immediately noticeable difference is the large color LCD screen on the outside of the clamshell. At 2 inches diagonal, it’s just slightly smaller than the inside screen. It’s not exactly a touch screen, but it does have three touch-sensitive areas, with different functions depending on the carrier-specific model. For instance, the Sprint phone has buttons for the mobile TV, music player and camera functions.
Sadly, the outside screen is a mostly wasted feature, though one of us liked it for controlling music. The touch-sensitive buttons are vexing to use, and poorly programmed. For instance, you can activate the 2-megapixel camera and take pictures, but only of yourself, because both the screen and the lens will be facing you. And then you can’t get out of camera mode using the outside screen — you have to open the phone and hit a button.
And what is it we like about clamshell phones anyway? That’s right — that we don’t have to lock their keypads before slipping them in our pockets or bags. With the Razr2, you do have to lock the buttons on the outside screen (by pressing and holding a button), at least if you were playing music before closing up the phone. On several occasions, a closed phone started serenading our pockets before we figured this out.
The rest of the interface is clunky, but works. We didn’t really take to the TV and music-downloading features that rely on the carriers’ cellular broadband networks. The video clips are still small and jerky, and the music selections hard to navigate.
The best part of the Razr2 may be CrystalTalk, a technology that improves incoming and outgoing sound quality in noisy areas like restaurants and trains. Another nice feature: you don’t need to teach the phone to recognize specific phrases for voice-activated dialing — just read out a phone number or say the name of a contact.
The rated standby time for the Razr2 is 330 hours, or two weeks. That might be true under the best of circumstances — in light use, we recharged the phones every four days. The Verizon Wireless model, however, wouldn’t hold a charge for more than a few hours, so we got a replacement. It only held a charge for 24 hours. This is worrisome, but it appears to be a fluke — neither Motorola nor Verizon said they had heard reports of power problems. Certainly, if a brand new phone acts like this, return it to the store.
The Q9m is only available on Verizon, and costs $200, though there’s an additional $50 mail-in rebate available. It has a very tough act to follow: Apple Inc.’s iPhone launched two months ago and, as far as I’m concerned, slapped the smart-phone category silly with its large screen and fantastic interface.
The Q9m does have three things on the iPhone:
• A good hardware QWERTY keyboard, probably the best I’ve seen on a smart phone. The buttons are rubberized and gentle on the fingertips.
• Access to Verizon’s broadband network, with makes for faster e-mail retrieval than AT&T’s poky Edge network from AT&T.
• Since it has Windows software, it’s easier to get work e-mail on it. I was, however, not able to test this.
So as an e-mail device, the Q9m is serviceable, but the main reason Motorola and Verizon updated the original Q — which came out just last year — is to make it more of a music player. It has access to Verizon’s Vcast music store, and there’s a choice of two different top menus, one of which is more music-oriented.
I would much rather have had one top menu that worked really well. The Q9m lacks a touch screen and instead relies on a side-mounted BlackBerry-style scrollwheel. Combined with the sluggish Windows Mobile software, this makes the phone just too slow, clunky, and confusing. Important features are hidden and screen space is wasted.
The best I can say about the Q9m is that if I was issued one for work, it wouldn’t be much of a burden. But after the iPhone, everyone really needs to work a lot harder to impress with a smart phone.
As for the Razr2, if you’re like most people and want a phone mostly to talk on, it’s not a bad choice, though it may be hard to justify paying $200 to $300 more than you would for an original Razr.
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Associated Press Writers Joe Altman, Barbara Ortutay, Dan Scheraga and Seth Sutel contributed to this report.
Published in September 12th, 2007
BOSTON - A sex-discrimination lawsuit by two former female employees of EMC Corp. describes a men’s locker-room atmosphere at the data storage vendor’s sales offices and alleges women were systematically denied equal pay and forced to accompany men on company-paid strip club visits.
ADVERTISEMENTA hearing is scheduled Monday in a bid to include all women who worked in sales at Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC, the largest provider of data storage systems for corporate clients, from 2001 to 2004.
More than 40 women have alleged sex-discrimination by EMC in lawsuits, affidavits or complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said plaintiffs’ attorney Linda D. Friedman.
On Wednesday, after The Wall Street Journal published an article about the discrimination cases, EMC’s top executive sent his more than 33,000 employees a letter defending his company.
Joe Tucci, the president, chairman and chief executive, said EMC “strongly” disputes the allegations and believes they “have no legal basis.
“More importantly, they bear no resemblance to the work environment and broad opportunities that have long existed for EMC employees around the world,” Tucci wrote.
The suit was filed in federal court in Chicago in June 2004 by Tami Remien and Debra Fletcher, formerly of EMC’s Chicago sales office.
Friedman said class-action certification would empower EMC’s female sales workers to collectively press cases against a company that required new sales hires to sign agreements to resolve any individual employment disputes through confidential arbitration rather than through the courts.
“Companies can one-by-one try to knock people out and dispute their stories,” Friedman said Wednesday. “When the cases are joined together, it’s about overall statistics and patterns, rather than the typical he-said-she-said.”
EMC on Wednesday issued a statement calling arbitration an appropriate forum for such disputes that allows relatively quick resolution of cases “without any loss of legal rights or remedies.”
The lawsuit doesn’t specify a damages total being sought. It asks that the women be awarded past and future compensation and benefits they lost, as well as punitive damages and other relief.
At Monday’s hearing, a judge will hear expert testimony related to the class-action question, and a ruling on class-action status isn’t expected immediately, Friedman said.
The complaint alleges female sales employees were denied promotion opportunities and received lower pay than men, who were given the customer accounts with the highest sales potential.
“One of the most telling facts about EMC’s view of women is that it was not until 2001 that EMC issued a formal announcement that the company would no longer reimburse client entertainment expenses for strip clubs,” the lawsuit says. “Women at EMC were often forced to accompany their male co-workers and clients to strip clubs or male-oriented dining establishments like ‘Hooters.’”
EMC spokesman Mark Frederickson said EMC has not reimbursed strip club visits for as long as the 28-year-old firm has been able to search back through its records.
He said the company sent employees reminders about entertainment reimbursement policies after a downturn in the technology sector hurt EMC’s business and led the company to more closely monitor such expenses. But there was never any specific announcement about strip club reimbursement, he said.
The complaint says women were underrepresented in EMC’s sales force, which promotes the company’s storage hardware, software and services to businesses worldwide. In the Chicago sales office — one of more than 100 worldwide — about six of 30 employees were female when Remien and Fletcher worked there, the complaint says.
“The composition of EMC’s work force is not the result of chance but is the result of intentional discrimination,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit describes sexual discrimination as being “national in scope” at EMC sales offices.
Frederickson said EMC’s U.S. sales force is now 13.5 percent female.
From 2001 to 2004 — the period covered by the lawsuit — female sales representatives on average were paid about 5 percent more than men, he said.
EMC has several initiatives to help women develop professionally, and has more than doubled the number of women in the company’s vice presidential ranks over the past five years, he said. Employees receive mandatory sexual harassment training.
“These policies are not new — they have long been in place,” he said.
Remien began working at EMC in February 2001, and was forced to resign less than three years later, the complaint says. Fletcher was hired in 1999, and eventually “decided she could not continue to work in such a hostile and discriminatory environment,” the complaint says. She “was constructively discharged” in July 2003.
Friedman, the plaintiff’s lawyer, said she was aware of several other similar lawsuits filed against EMC by female sales employees nationwide. The Wall Street Journal said at least six such cases have been filed since 2003.
Shares of EMC fell 8 cents to $19.42 on Wednesday.
Published in September 12th, 2007
RICHMOND, Va. - Virginia’s law banning the massive distribution of junk e-mail is an unconstitutional barrier to free speech, a lawyer for a former spammer told the state’s highest court Wednesday.
ADVERTISEMENTJeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, N.C., was considered among the top 10 spammers in the world when he was charged in 2003 in the nation’s first felony case against illegal spamming. He was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison.
Prosecutors said Jaynes, using aliases and false Internet addresses, bombarded Web users with junk e-mails peddling sham products and services. He was charged in Virginia because the e-mails went through an AOL server in Loudoun County, where America Online is based.
Almost all 50 states have passed anti-spamming laws.
“There’s absolutely no question spam can be regulated,” Jaynes’ lawyer, Thomas Wolf, told the Virginia Supreme Court. “The problem with Virginia’s statute is that it attaches severe criminal penalties to unsolicited bulk e-mail of a noncommercial nature.”
Wolf said anonymous speech is protected by the First Amendment. A person anywhere in the world sending anonymous political or religious e-mails in bulk could unwittingly break the law because some of the messages almost certainly would pass through servers in Virginia, he said.
But State Solicitor General William E. Thro said the law doesn’t bar speech — it prohibits falsifying Internet routing and transmission information to electronically trespass on a privately owned computer network.
“There is no constitutional right to use the property of others to engage in speech,” Thro said.
He said using unsolicited bulk e-mail to “commandeer” a privately owned computer network is akin to stealing a car to drive to a political rally.
In Jaynes’ case, prosecutors presented evidence of 53,000 illegal e-mails sent over three days in July 2003. However, authorities believe Jaynes was responsible for spewing out 10 million e-mails a day in an enterprise that grossed up to $750,000 per month.
Thro said that on a typical day, about three-fourths of the e-mail sent through AOL is rejected as spam. Customers of AOL and other Internet service providers expect to be protected from spam, and all providers have filters intended to do just that, Thro said. Spammers use false information to try to circumvent the filters.
The Virginia Court of Appeals, the state’s intermediate appellate court, upheld the law and affirmed Jaynes’ conviction last September. In a unanimous ruling, the court said the statute “does not prevent anonymous speech … but prohibits trespassing on private computer networks through intentional misrepresentation, an activity that merits no First Amendment protection.”
Jaynes’ lawyers also claim the law is unconstitutionally vague and that it impermissibly regulates activity outside Virginia — points that also were rejected by the state appeals court.
Jaynes has remained free while his case is appealed. The Supreme Court likely will issue its ruling in November.
Published in September 12th, 2007
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Sun Microsystems Inc. will begin building servers with one-time foe Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system installed directly inside of them, instead of forcing customers to install the ubiquitous software on their own or defect to a competitor for one-stop shopping.
ADVERTISEMENTThe agreement announced Wednesday is the latest twist in a truce the companies, once bitter rivals, hammered out in 2004, when Sun pocketed $1.95 billion in a settlement payout from Microsoft over antitrust and patent allegations, and both companies vowed to make their products work better together.
Sun will begin incorporating Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 software into its so-called x64 servers, which are corporate computers that run on 64-bit microprocessors from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Servers are the computers in corporate data centers that process large amounts of data such as Internet traffic or financial calculations.
The companies said in a joint statement that Sun’s machines with Windows pre-installed will be available within 90 days.
Although Sun customers have been able to run Microsoft’s operating system on Sun servers for several years, Sun would not install it in the factory. That left customers who wanted Windows in the lurch unless they wanted to install in on their own or already had licensing contracts with Microsoft, in which case Sun would install it.
Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, stands to gain from the agreement because of Sun’s reach in the server world. Sun is the world’s No. 3 server seller with 13 percent of the worldwide market, behind IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co., according to the latest data from market researcher IDC.
The agreement includes a nod from Sun and Microsoft to the momentum surrounding so-called virtualization technology, which allows computers to run more than one operating system, saving hardware and electricity costs while boosting the performance of giant, energy-sapping machines.
Sun and Microsoft vowed to make sure their respective operating systems worked well with one another’s virtualization technologies, a commitment that could help both companies prosper from the trend toward data center consolidation and urgent efforts by technology managers to reduce energy costs.
The further embrace of Microsoft highlights Sun’s attempts to shed its image as that of a quarrelsome startup that in the late 1990s was eager to pick public fights with big rivals. Instead, Sun is becoming a more restrained and inclusive company willing to forge alliances, including the announcement last month of a partnership with longtime rival IBM Corp. that will allow Sun’s Solaris operating system to run on IBM servers.
It’s a crucial element of Sun’s turnaround strategy, and a formula that Sun management said is necessary to ensure the company’s long-term financial success.
A darling during the dotcom heyday that has lost more than $5 billion since the crash, Sun is now broadening its product portfolio as it moves away from selling only proprietary software and servers.
Since then, the company has made its Solaris operating system and Java technology available for free on the Internet.
Sun is hitching its rebound strategy in part to the growing open-source movement in hopes that it will sell more hardware and services as more companies and programmers start using Sun’s free technologies.
Published in September 12th, 2007
BOSTON - Internet access on “smart phones” and other mobile devices can be great, but it’s often limited to what can be found in “walled gardens” of channels selected by the wireless carriers.
ADVERTISEMENTAnd typing search terms or making other queries can be annoying on the gadgets’ cramped keyboards.
Veveo Inc. hopes to tackle both problems.
To expand available content, Veveo (pronounced VIHV-ee-oh) indexes Web video and converts it to a format that can play on most mobile phones. As a result, someone with an iPhone could watch most any video on YouTube, beyond the small subset preselected for Apple Inc.’s device.
The other half of Veveo is a keypad-entry technology that begins running searches and delivering results even before you finish typing a phrase. Because Veveo produces a new set of search results every time a new character is entered, you can find what you’re looking for in minimal keystrokes, which is a blessing on cell phones and other devices that aren’t optimal for typing.
The service, at , is available first for iPhones and devices running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Mobile operating system. Eventually, Veveo expects to support other phones as well.
Veveo is not alone in pursuing these concepts. This month, Kannuu Inc. is expected to launch a mobile service that also anticipates searches based on the user’s initial entries, though it uses on-screen directional arrows for input to avoid phones’ tiny keyboards entirely.
Despite the competition, CEO Murali Aravamudan, a former Bell Labs researcher, has raised $28 million from investors. Now, he is lining up wireless carriers, which could benefit if users who more easily find content as a result spend more time online.
Analysts say Veveo could also find a home in television sets of the future, helping channel surfers navigate copious video-on-demand offerings.
Published in September 12th, 2007
NEW DELHI - Interpol proposed on Wednesday the creation of global and regional anti-crime centers to fight criminal activity online and respond quickly to emergency cybercrime alerts.
ADVERTISEMENTThe Internet should not be allowed to become a place where criminals have the upper hand and can escape punishment, Interpol Secretary-General Ronald K. Noble told an international cybercrimes conference in New Delhi.
Officials from 37 countries discussed identity theft, online bank fraud, Internet gaming and the risks of online terrorist activity during a two-day conference in the Indian capital. It was organized by France-based Interpol, the world’s largest international police organization, with 186 member countries.
Creating global and regional anti-crime centers “is an ambitious idea, but we are determined to turn (it) into a reality because this problem is too big for even the G-8 and Council of Europe,” Noble said. “It requires a truly global response.”
The centers would help law enforcement around the world with investigations, training and accessing resources from a combined team of police officers and computer experts, he said.
Inaugurating the conference, Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil also called for international cooperation in combating Internet crimes.
Published in September 12th, 2007
If you're fed up with using an iPhone on AT&T's network, you now can download software to unlock your Apple handset. One package, developed by iPhoneSimFree, is now available from resellers in the U.S., the Middle East, and Europe. It'll set you back $99. Once installed, though, the app allows you to use your iPhone with another carrier.
ADVERTISEMENT The world's hackers have been obsessed with unlocking the iPhone from the day it was released. In late August, teenager George Hotz and a team of hackers developed a hardware hack to unlock the phone. In contrast, the iPhoneSimFree product is a pure software solution, the group said on its Web site.
Tuesday night, however, the iPhone Dev Team announced it had developed a free alternative to iPhoneSimFree's product. But the procedure involves downloading several different software packages, executing commands from a shell, and following other instructions. "This unlock is not for everybody!" the team's Web page warned.
Free iPhone Unlock
The free software is not without controversy. A statement on the iPhone Dev Team's site states that David Harrison, known as HaRRo, is distributing the application resulting from "stolen source code." The site advises users who donated to Harrison to contact PayPal for a refund.
Harrison is denying he swiped anything. In an e-mail Wednesday, he wrote: "The[y] claim [I] stole code but yet it was all publicly released last night, [I] was just the first one to actually fix it all up (as it did not work yet) and bundle it into the app working."
According to the Gizmodo and Engadget sites, the iPhone Dev Team's solution uses essentially the same exploit as iPhoneSimFree's, but was independently developed.
Apple Firmware Update
The iPhoneSimFree group and its resellers are taking pains, however, to emphasize that the $99 software does not come with any guarantees that Apple won't disable it with a future update. "We will naturally try to provide our resellers an updated version of our software for each firmware update. It is in our interest. But we do NOT guarantee that we will be able to do so," the group said on its site.
While iPhoneSimFree states that updates will be free, one reseller, Wireless Imports, noted on it Web site, "If your handset becomes locked you will be charged to unlock it again." Wireless Imports' site indicated the reseller was sold out as of Wednesday morning. Another U.S. reseller, iPhone Unlocking Tools, is selling the hack for $59.
Information on resellers' sites specifies that buyers must provide serial and IMEI numbers during the transaction.
Gray Market for Now
Would users really install these solutions, possibly invalidating their warranties? Independent technology analyst Greg Sterling conceded, "It has a 'gray market' quality right now and many mainstream consumers will be hesitant to go with something like this unless it gets blessed by the tech gurus in the mainstream press."
Still he said, "Fundamentally people want to use the phone over their chosen carriers." Depending on the extent of Apple's contractual relationships with AT&T, the company is probably interested in offering an open phone, he added. "They ultimately will deliver such a device to the market. That's part what the iPod touch is about."
