Farewell, EDS

Hewlett-Packard erased one of the most storied names in the government and commercial markets this year when it dropped the EDS brand in favor of HP Enterprise Services, Washington Technology reported.

EDS, known originally as Electronic Data Systems, was one of the creators of the market for outsourced IT services, particularly data centers. The name survived for 47 years, including a stint of ownership by General Motors.

But there are a lot of reasons for the change, such as creating a single company culture and presenting a single face to the market.

Dropping the name EDS also signaled that integration of the acquisition was over. It's now time for the billions spent to start paying off.

And that's not going to be easy.

From Paul Boutin's article at VentureBeat, before the World Wide Web, working for Ross Perot’s IT outsourcing firm EDS was one of the most prized and prestigious jobs in tech. EDS, which Perot founded in 1962, defined the outsourcing business and made Perot a hero to both businessmen and techies.

Perot resigned in 1986, but his brash, I-always-win style continued as part of EDS’s professional brand. Perot ran for president as an independent candidate in 1992 and won over an impossible 39 percent of voters in polls, before dropping from the race.

Last year, HP acquired EDS and its 137,000 worldwide employees for $13.9 billion. Now, some of the acquired staffers have told NBC Bay Area reporter Randy McIlwain that HP has slashed salaries from 29 to 47 percent among the people from whom McIlwain got numbers. HP has made several rounds of cuts since the purchase.

Blackberry Holiday Outages

Reaserch in Motion (RIM) just can't seem to catch a break. Just five short days after the BlackBerry Internet Service went down for several hours, North and South American users found themselves again without e-mail. This time, the outage lasted for nearly eight hours and, according to some reports, even caused problems for some European and Asian customers.

In a statement e-mailed to some users and news services, RIM said that "based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger." RIM has issued a fix for the versions believed to have caused the issue -- 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56 -- but the company was careful to explain it was still investigating the root cause.

RIM apologized for the inconvenience, but refused to comment further, leaving plenty of questions unanswered. For one, with outages becoming more and more frequent (Is this the third or fourth in the last two months?), does the company have an actionable plan to prevent future disruptions? Are the recent spate of outages connected in any way? And how does it plan to stave off pressure from Apple and Google when it can't even keep its mobile e-mail service (its supposed strong suit) up and running?

For more information visit RIM, PC World, Canada.com, Wall Street Journal, or PC Magazine.

USAF Confirms Sentinel In Afghanistan

Air Force officials confirmed Dec. 4 the existence of a high-altitude, unmanned aerial vehicle that incorporates stealth design characteristics which has been sighted in Afghanistan in recent years, report David Fulghum and Bill Sweetman in Aviation Week’s Ares blog.

The jet-powered UAV, which features a tailless flying wing with sensor pods built into the surface of each wing, is known as the RQ-170 Sentinel. Several photos purported to show the RQ-170 have been posted on the Web.

“The Air Force “is developing a stealthy unmanned aircraft system to provide reconnaissance and surveillance support to forward deployed Combat Forces,” Air Force officials said in a statement e-mailed to journalists and reproduced in full text in an article by Stephen Trimble at Flight Global. The RQ-170 was built by Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Program, the officials said.

Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, as the Advanced Development Program is also known, designed such revolutionary reconnaissance and fighter aircraft as the U-2, SR-71, F-117 and F-22.



For more details, visit Defense Systems.

Cisco Phone In 4-Hour Replacement Arena

Cisco is still extremely keen on the small business market one year after dropping $100 million into a new unit specializing in pitching product to companies with fewer than 100 employees.

To go along with the one-year milestone, the network giant is trotting out a fresh stable of small business-oriented products and upgrades — along with some additional support programs for the army of resellers that Cisco relies upon to reach baby biz customers.

Beginning on the hardware side, Cisco is debuting what it claims to be the industry's first 802.11n dual-band clustering access point built for small businesses (and we suppose those qualifications are specific enough to be true). The clustering kit allows for easier setup and installation of wireless access points when there's multiple units involved, explains Andrew Sage, veep of Cisco's small business worldwide sales.

Earlier incarnations of Cisco's access points require individual configuration for each unit or alternatively, moving to a more expensive, controller-based technology better suited for the mid-to-enterprise, he said. The AP 541N lets users configure just one access point, then add up to 10 other units that draw upon the configuration of the existing access point to expand the network.

The AP 541N has a US list price of $500. The device is currently available in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

Next up, Cisco's SPA 525G IP phones are receiving a firmware update that allows easy tele-snooping over its LCD display, plus an instant connection to a company's VoIP network no matter where the phone is plugged in.

New to the SPA 525G is the ability to use the phone to display a live video feed from any Cisco small business security camera. Apparently this function works nicely when attaching a camera at the front door of an office so any phone on the network can get an eyeful of arriving visitors. The phone even has a feature to open a door's deadbolt remotely, said Sage. What haunted house is complete without one?

The IP phone is also being outfitted with integrated VPN technology. The new functionality allows a worker to connect to a company's private branch exchange (PBX) securely over almost any broadband network.

"You can take the phone, plunk it down on a desk, connect it to any broadband connection, and it will find its way back to your main office PBX and become an extension on that PBX system — for all intents and purposes as if you were local to it," said Sage.

Cisco is also rolling out four-hour hardware replacement service and 24-hour technical support that covers all of the company's Small Business Pro products, not just the phones.

For more of this article, visit The Register.

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Hacking: Delta Airlines Sued

The executive director of The Coalition for an Airline Passenger's Bill of Rights alleges in a federal lawsuit that Delta Airlines obtained hacked emails and sabotaged her organization's efforts to support pro-consumer legislation in Congress, according to The Gibson Law Firm. Kate Hanni, the executive director and founder of the coalition, which is also known as FlyersRights.org, sued the airline and Metron Aviation, Inc., of Dulles, Virginia, after her emails and those of at least two reported, including one from USA Today, were obtained by the defendants.

Hanni said she learned from America Online that her personal email files were redirected to an unknown location, along with donor lists, spreadsheets and other data. The lawsuit alleges that the email hacking began in 2008 and continued this year while Hanni was communicationg with an airline industry consultant who analyzed airline delays for the federal government. For more information, visit The Gibson Law Firm. This post is excerpted from the Travel Pulse article, Flyer's Rights Advocate Sues Delta Over Hacked Emails, October 14th, 2009.

ODIN Off To Slow Start

A year ago, the U.S. military promised to bring a lethal network of drones and helicopters and intelligence analysts to Afghanistan, to stop the rise of improvised bombs there. That network, Task Force ODIN-Afghanistan, is now up - but only barely so. The U.S. Army unit has just two Predator-like drones flying at a time. And “so far, the unmanned assets of Task Force ODIN-Afghanistan have only brought lethal fire to bear on one target — successfully eliminating three insurgents in an engagement in August,” Paul McLeary reports for Aviation Week.

From February 2007 to January 2008, the original ODIN, based in Iraq, helped take out more than 2,400 enemy bombers. Many credit the group with being one of the decisive forces in drastically reducing what had been a horrific roadside explosive campaign in Iraq. ODIN brought together IT gurus, image analysts, and drone pilots with attack helicopter forces charged. The networked operation was able to spot bomb planters, transmit the coordinates quickly, and strike.

So expectations were high, when ODIN-Afghanistan was announced last year. But for now, at least ODIN hasn’t yet become a major push in Afghanistan - despite a huge uptick in the number of improvised bombs. Last month, the jury-rigged weapons killed 36 coalition troops.

This post comes from the Wired article, Bomb-stopping drone team off to slow start in Afghanistan, by Noah Shactman, October 13th, 2009. To find out more visit The Danger Room.

Online Crime: Up 600%

Bogus security software applications are among the types of electronic crimes that grew 585 percent over the first half of this year, according to a new study.

The Anti Phishing Working Group's (APWG) latest report shows that rogue anti-malware programs, infected computers and crimeware broke new records in the first half of 2009. The report shows that criminals are innovative and have "apparently unchecked ambition" with crimeware designed to target financial institutions' customers.

Most disturbing for financial institutions are the attacks against corporate bank accounts, says APWG's Chairman Dave Jevans. "These attacks target the CFOs and then attempt, sometimes successfully, to take over the corporation's online banking credentials to make corporate wire transfers."

This attack trend has grown to the level that industry associations, including the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) and NACHA along with banking regulators, sent out alerts to their financial services members this summer.

"Before this, phishers targeted individual users, not corporate accounts," Jevans says.

The report also shows:

• The number of unique phishing websites detected in June rose to 49,084 -- the highest since April, 2007's record of 55,643, and the second-highest recorded since APWG began reporting this measurement.


• The number of hijacked brands ascended to an all-time high of 310 in March and remained at an elevated level to the close of the half in June.


• The total number of infected computers rose more than 66 percent to 11,937,944 - now more than 54 percent of the total sample of scanned computers.


• Payment Services became phishing's most targeted sector, displacing Financial Services. Jevans notes that institutions' customers still are a primary target of electronic criminals.

"The Internet has never been more dangerous," Jevans says. "In the first half of 2009, phishing escalated to some of the highest levels we've ever seen."

Of even greater concern is the skyrocketing sophistication and proliferation of malicious software designed to steal online passwords and user names. The number of banking trojan/password-stealing crimeware infections detected increased more than 186 percent. "New malicious software such as the Zeus trojan exhibit a level of sophistication that would make the best software programmers envious," he says.

This post is excerpted from the BankInfoSecurity article, Online crime up nearly 600% in '09, by Linda McGlasson, October 5th, 2009.

Lack of eHealth Standards Costing Lives

Mining electronic patient data to discover health trends and automate life-saving health alerts for patients and their doctors will be the greatest benefit of electronic medical records (EMR), but a survey released today finds a lack of standards, privacy concerns by hospitals and patients and technology limitations is holding back progress.

Hundreds of billions of gigabytes of health information are now being collected in EMRs, and three-quarters (76%) of more than 700 healthcare executives recently surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP agree that mining that information will be their organization's greatest asset over the next five years, both for saving patient lives and saving money.

The executives surveyed cited "legal implications" as their greatest concern when it came to their organizations' use of secondary data, followed by privacy implications and public relations ramifications. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of executives surveyed agreed that individual and/or identifiable data can be re-used if it is in the best interest of the patient.

When asked about the barriers to secondary use of EMR data, the majority of those surveyed cited problems surrounding data, including access to electronic health records, transparency, quality and management. Fewer than half of providers, for example, have fully implemented all but the most basic functions of electronic health record.

An insufficient level of detail and integration tied with data timeliness were cited as the next two biggest problems in using secondary data. Variability in data entry makes many stakeholders, especially doctors, question the quality of the information being generated by the IT system.

While the portability of electronic patient data is most often hyped as the greatest benefit to implementing EMR systems, mining healthcare databases to track national health trends as well as to alert physicians to a particular patient's pending health problems will not only save lives, but cut long-term costs by catching diseases and infections early. By catching them early, the impact can either be negated all together or minimized.

For example, since implementing a sepsis alert system more two years ago, about 4,000 lives have potentially been saved through the efforts at Methodist North Hospital (MNH) in Memphis. The hospital's EMR system alerts doctors and nurses to patients suffering from the sepsis an often deadly systemic infection that can be very difficult to diagnose in its early stages. Methodist Healthcare system, includes three adult-care facilities that also use the sepsis alert system.

This post is excerpted from the NetworkWorld article, Report: Lack of eHealth standards privacy concerns costing lives, by Lucas Mearian, October 2nd, 2009. To read the article in its entirety, visit NetworkWorld.

Alcatel-Lucent First To 100Pbps

Alcatel-Lucent researchers say they have figured out how to multiply the speed of the fastest undersea cables by a factor of 10.

The telecomms and networking equipment vendor says researchers at a Bell Labs facility in Villarceaux, France, became the first to achieve the speed of "100 petabits per second.kilometer".

The measurement takes into account both speed and the ability to maintain it over distance, by multiplying the network's speed by its distance in kilometres. In this case, a network with an aggregate speed of 15.5T bits per second (Tbit/s) was able to maintain that speed over a distance of 7,000 kilometers (4,349 miles). One petabit is equal to about 1 million gigabits.

Because signals can degrade, the highest network speeds are possible over the shortest distances. But part of the requirements of a carrier network technology is reach. The longest lines in service-provider networks often need to move the most data, because they gather up traffic from entire countries and regions for transport around the world.

The Bell Labs team achieved its speed using 155 lasers, each transmitting data at 100Gbit/s over a different wavelength. They also used DSPs (digital signal processors) with a new technology called coherent detection, which allows the DSPs to look at more properties of light than the current method, called direct detection, Alcatel says in a press release. With coherent detection, the team was able to use more light sources on a fibre and still separate out the various wavelengths at the other end.

Alcatel didn't achieve this speed by using more repeaters along the way to amplify the signals. On the network, repeaters for sustaining signal strength were spread 90 km apart, 20 percent farther than in typical optical networks, even though lightwave "noise" tends to increase with speed, Alcatel says.

The need for speed on international connections such as trans-oceanic cables has continued to grow even in a weak global economy. International Internet traffic grew 79 percent between mid-2008 and mid-2009, research company Telegeography reported earlier this month. That was faster than the growth rate during the prior 12 months.

This post is excerpted from the Computerworld article, Alcatel-Lucent claims cable speed breakthrough, by Steven Lawson, Sptember 29th, 2009.