United Nations agency ‘hacked’
29 November 2011
Last updated at 20:58
The United Nations Development Programme says it is “in the process of validating this claim”
A group of hackers has posted more than 100 email addresses and login details which it claimed to have extracted from the United Nations.
Many of the emails involved appear to belong to members of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The group, which identified itself as Teampoison, attacked the UN’s behaviour and called it a “fraud”.
A spokeswoman for the UNDP said the agency believed “an old server which contains old data” had been targeted.
“The UNDP found [the] compromised server and took it offline,” said Sausan Ghosheh.
“The server goes back to 2007. There are no active passwords listed for those accounts.
“Please note that UNDP.org was not compromised.”
‘Leak’
The details were posted on the website Pastebin under the Teampoison logo.
The message preceding the login details accused the UN of acting to “facilitate the introduction of a New World Order” and asked “United Nations, why didn’t you expect us?”
Many of the email addresses given end in undp.org, but others appear to belong to members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The poster noted that several of the accounts had “no passwords”.
The message ended with the taunt: “The question now is how? We will let the so called ‘security experts’ over at the UN figure that out… Have a Nice Day.”
The poster claimed the usernames and passwords had been sourced from the UN
Credit card attacks
The security company Sophos noted that Teampoison hackers had previously attacked the maker of the Blackberry smartphone’s website and had published private information about former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.
“Teampoison recently announced they were joining forces with Anonymous on a new initiative dubbed ‘Operation Robin Hood’, targeting banks and financial institutions,” the firm’s senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley wrote on Sophos’s blog.
The groups said at the time that their operation aimed to take money from credit cards and donate it to individuals and charities.
They said people would not be harmed as the banks had to refund fraudulent charges.
Teampoison added a “shoutout” to Anonymous in its UN attack posting, adding a link to a Youtube video with more information about its banking attack plan.
These latest moves serve as a reminder that so-called hacktivists are skilled and willing to collaborate to take down their targets, according to Professor Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey’s department of computing.
“One of the big problems is that there is so much data around that people forget about their older systems that still have valuable data on them,” he said.
“The lesson here is that anything that holds any data of any value must be protected.”
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/technology-15951883
Samsung gets a win in Oz patent battle
Samsung has been handed a rare win in its patent battle with Apple, with Australia’s Federal Court deciding to overturn the injunction that prevents it from selling its Galaxy 10.1 tablet in Australia.
Originally, a single judge of the court, Justice Annabelle Barrett, had granted Apple’s request for an injunction against the sale of the fondleslab, triggering a complaint from Samsung that it would miss the opportunity for Christmas sales of the product.
However, in a full bench sitting, Justices Dowser, Foster and Yates have decided the device can hit the stores after all – although it’s not known to The Register how long Samsung will need to get shipments into the country and in front of punters.
Apple and Samsung are involved in an increasingly-bitter – and spreading – battle over fondleslab patents, with each accusing the other of patent violations. Apple says the Galaxy 10.1 is a slavish copy of the iPhone, while Samsung is focussing on the internals, dragging in patents covering wireless technologies that are part of the 3G standard.
Samsung’s strategy has been criticized as widening the row far beyond Australia, drawing European authorities into the spat and leading to an EU investigation into whether the row is stifling competition.
Apple is seeking a stay on the decision until next Monday.
More on the judgement will be posted as it comes to hand. ®
Update: The score seems to have ended up one-all: Apple didn’t get its preferred stay until Monday, but Justice Foster, who handed down the full bench decision, agreed to stay the order lifting the injunction until Friday, 2 December, at 4pm. He warned Apple that if it were to seek a further extension of the stay, it would need to do so in the High Court. ®
Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/30/apple_samsung_injunction/
Float could value Facebook at $100bn
Facebook, the world’s largest social network, is preparing for a public stock offering next spring which could raise up to $10bn, according to sources.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday night that the company is hoping that the IPO, which has been long rumoured, would value the company at around $100bn.
Facebook’s chief financial officer, David Ebersman, had discussed a public float with Silicon Valley bankers, but founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg had not decided on any terms and his plans could change, the Journal said.
The social network, which now claims more than 800 million members worldwide after seven years of explosive growth, has not selected bankers to manage what would be a very closely watched IPO.
But it had drafted an internal prospectus and was ready at any moment to go for a flotation, the Journal said, citing “people familiar with the matter” – a standard form of words for insiders at the company.
At $100bn valuation, the company started by Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room would have double the valuation of Hewlett-Packard.
A formal S-1 filing could come before the end of the year, though nothing was decided, the Journal added.
A Facebook representative declined to comment.
One matter which could force Facebook’s hand is the number of people – especially employees – who have received stock options as an incentive for working at the startup. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says that “a company must file financial and other information with the SEC 120 days after the close of the year in which the company reaches $10m in assets and/or 500 shareholders, including people with stock options”.
Google was forced to file for an IPO in 2004 after it passed the 500 shareholder figure. It is unclear how many of Facebook’s 3,000 staff are shareholders, but the company said in January that it will exceed 500 shareholders this year, and that in accordance with SEC regulations, it will file public financial reports no later than 30 April 2012. That will be obligatory even if it does not file for an IPO.
Facebook does not disclose its financial results, but a source told Reuters earlier this year that the company’s revenue in the first six months of 2011 doubled year-on-year to $1.6bn (£1bn).
If it does debut in 2012, Facebook’s IPO would dwarf that of any other dotcom waiting to go public.
Farmville creator Zynga has filed for an IPO of up to $1bn. In November, the daily deals service Groupon debuted with much fanfare – only to plunge below its IPO price within weeks. It is now one of the worst-performing technology flotations ever.
LinkedIn and Pandora, which also floated this year, are now also trading significantly below the levels their stocks reached during their public debuts.
Facebook has become one of the world’s most popular online destinations, challenging established companies such as Google and Yahoo for consumers’ time and for advertising dollars.
Eric Feng, a former partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers who now runs social-networking site Erly.com, said that the cash Facebook will get in an IPO would allow it to make more acquisitions and refine or work on new projects, such as a rumoured Facebook phone or a netbook.
Having tradeable stock will also allow Facebook to attract more engineering talent who might have been more attracted to the company in earlier days when it was growing faster but now perhaps might be attracted to other companies. “It’ll be a powerful bullet for them,” Feng said.
Investors have been increasingly eager to buy shares of Facebook and other fast-growing but privately-held internet social networking companies on special, secondary-market exchanges.
Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/29/facebook-float-value-100bn
200-year old press papers online
29 November 2011
Last updated at 05:18
Some 8,000 newspaper pages have been scanned in by the British Library
Four million pages of newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries have been made available online by the British Library.
The public will now be able to scan the content of 200 titles from around the UK and Ireland.
These will include historic events such as the wedding of Victoria and Albert and the rise of the railways.
Ed King, the British Library’s head of newspapers, said it opened up the collection “as never before”.
The archive is free to search, but there is a charge for accessing the pages themselves.
Other stories contained within the scanned pages include reporting on the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Mr King said: “Rather than having to view the items on site at the Library, turning each page, people across the UK and around the world will be able to explore for themselves the goldmine of stories and information contained in these pages.
“The ability to search across millions of articles will yield results for each user that might previously have been the work of weeks or months, in a matter of seconds and the click of a mouse.”
Included in the project are pages from the Aberdeen Journal, Belfast Newsletter, Western Mail and Manchester Evening News.
A team has spent a year at the British Library’s newspaper library at Colindale, north London, digitising up to 8,000 pages a day.
They expect to scan up to 40m pages over the next 10 years.
Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, said the archive was “a rich and hugely exciting resource”.
He added: “I searched for my own constituency of Wantage and within seconds had 42,000 results – an indication of the breadth and variety of material featured.”
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/uk-15932683
Facebook IPO said to set value at $100bn
Facebook is planning to go public sometime between April and June of next year in an IPO that would value the company at over $100bn.
So say The Wall Street Journal‘s ever-chatty “people familiar with the matter”.
The same worthies told the WSJ that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t yet finalized the IPO, that the date for a possible SEC filing hadn’t yet been nailed down, but that the company had “crafted an internal prospectus” and is thus ready to pull the trigger when the time is right.
And it doesn’t take the WSJ‘s pfwtm to guess what’s holding up a final decision, what with the stomach-churning roller coaster that the US stock market is currently riding, coupled with the “We’re all going to die!” fiscal terror that’s roiling the eurozone these days.
If the planets align, however, the IPO – which the pfwtm say will be structured to generate $10bn in cash for Facebook – should set Facebook’s value at comfortably over $100bn.
To put that figure in perspective, at the close of trading on Monday chip giant Intel was worth $115.6bn, Cisco was valued at $93.5bn, and HP’s market valuation was a mere $51.2bn – and those three companies actually manufacture products.
But in a world in which a coupon peddler’s IPO can set its value at around $15bn, a $100bn valuation for Facebook doesn’t seem out of the question.
Insanely bubbly, possibly, but not unimaginable. ®
Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/29/facebook_ipo/
iPhone sales in UK triple in October
Pent-up UK demand for the new iPhone 4S meant that Apple sold more than three times as many phones in October as in any of the three previous months, eclipsing the rival Google platform, according to data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.
Data released by the research company show Apple’s iPhone took 42.8% of UK smartphone sales in October alone, ahead of all Android phones, which took 35% in the same period. The figures from ComTech also show the UK market is shifting dramatically towards smartphones: sales of smartphones grew by 43% in October, but the overall phone market dropped by 4% in October as “feature phone” sales nearly halved.
Smartphones made up 69.8% of sales over the three months, meaning 44.8% of the British population now owns a smartphone. But it also leaves 29 million adults in the UK not yet using a smartphone – representing a huge opportunity for rival brands.
The research company says the October boost meant that for the 12 weeks to the end of October, Apple’s market share of UK smartphone sales was 27.8%, compared to 25% in the same period a year before. The Android platform continued to increase its overall lead, powering 46% of smartphones in the 12-week period, compared to 34.2% a year ago.
The Guardian’s calculations suggest that Apple’s sales jumped nearly fourfold in October as the iPhone 4S was released. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, complained that ahead of the launch, sales had slowed down substantially as people waited for the expected launch of the new iPhone – which many expected to be called the “iPhone 5″. For those three months, ComTech’s figures showed the iPhone’s share of sales dropping to just 18.5%. Android phones made up 49%.
Despite looking the same as the iPhone 4, which was released in summer 2010, the iPhone 4S has clearly boosted Apple’s fortunes in the UK. Dominic Sunnebo, global insight director at ComTech, noted that 75% of sales of iPhones in the period went to people who already owned one – indicating strong brand loyalty among existing customers, but equally that Apple may not be growing its market as quickly as it might want, as the overall smartphone market grew faster than that 25%.
The rapid expansion of Android sales suggests it is reaching new users who have not previously used the platform or even a smartphone.
Other data from ComTech showed that for the three-month period, Nokia’s now-deprecated Symbian OS made just 3.9% of sales, down by 10.2%, and the Windows Mobile platform – officially all but discontinued – almost vanished, making just 0.5% of sales. BlackBerry maker RIM also saw its share fall, to 19.6% from 20.9%.
Microsoft’s new Windows Phone platform saw a small uptick in sales, to 1% of the market from 0.2% a year ago, when it had just been launched. The ComTech figures predate the launch of Nokia’s Lumia range, which are expected to boost Windows Phone’s share noticeably.
Sunnebo said: “The October launch of the hugely anticipated iPhone 4S has catapulted Apple into second place among operating systems based on the last 12 weeks of sales. However, if you just look at the month of October, Apple took a whopping share of all smartphone sales, giving it a significant lead over Android – a feat many thought was impossible.
“With nearly a year and a half between iPhone launches there has been huge pent-up demand for a new Apple device. We have previously seen that Apple customers tend to be very loyal to the brand. However, it is still astonishing that 75% of new iPhone 4S owners previously owned an iPhone. Most of these loyalists tended to own previous generation devices such as the 3G or 3GS models. However, 14% previously owned an iPhone 4, demonstrating that quite a few people bought themselves out of their contracts to get hold of the 4S. Clearly the upgraded processor, camera and unveiling of Siri assistant was enough to generate excitement among the Apple community.”
Sunnebo continues: “While unwavering loyalty is clearly great news for Apple, it is likely to be a relief for other smartphone operators. With Apple predominantly driving sales from within its existing customer base, it leaves the field wide open for the likes of Nokia, BlackBerry, Samsung and HTC to focus on converting the remaining 29 million adults who don’t yet have a smartphone to their brand.”
Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/28/iphone-sales-triple-october
‘Promising step’ to cybersecurity
25 November 2011
Last updated at 15:27
The UK government plans “unprecedented co-operation” with businesses to improve cybersecurity
The UK government has today released its 2011 Cyber Security Strategy.
With an increased focus on cybercrime, and renewed focus on cyberspace as an engine of economic and social prosperity, the strategy continues to hone Whitehall’s understanding of this vibrant, complex and increasingly global domain.
Many of the strategy objectives - in particular those related to securing critical infrastructure – will require close engagement with the private sector.
These public-private partnerships are essential, and, as noted in a recent Chatham House report on critical national infrastructure, they require awareness, engagement and trust among senior decision makers on all sides.
This is not an easy process and requires a keen understanding of the incentives that guide actions in the public and private sectors.
Links to business
The government will also have to balance the tension between building a more secure environment – which requires standards and regulation – and encouraging businesses to set up shop in the UK.
However there are signs that Whitehall is aware of these complexities and the need to experiment with potential solutions.
One new initiative is a three-month pilot scheme among five business sectors: defence, finance, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and energy.
It will exchange “actionable information on cyber threats”, “analyse new trends” and work to “strengthen and link up our collective cyber security capabilities”.
The strategy also supports existing independent initiatives such as Get Safe Online (raising awareness of cyber threats) and Cyber Security Challenge UK (searching for new talent), both of which have taken a good idea and implemented it in a simple and straightforward manner.
Risks
Cybercrime is topic that receives significant focus, in particular for the damage it does to the financial and social fabric of the country.
One primary initiative will create a “national cyber crime capability as part of the new National Crime Agency by 2013″.
Another will create, by the end of 2011, a “single reporting system for citizens and small businesses to report cyber crime”.
These are all encouraging steps that will require patience and persistence but which are essential.
One idea that looks slightly riskier is a “government-sponsored venture capital model to unlock innovation on cyber security in SMEs” (small and medium enterprises).
The appetite for risk varies widely between Silicon Roundabout and Whitehall, and government experimentation with venture capitalism has often produced mixed results. For example the US government’s $535m (£345m) loan to Solyndra – the now-bankrupt solar panel manufacturer.
First steps
The new strategy is more detailed than the 2009 version, and in many ways reads more like a cyber and economic security strategy.
It continues the process set in motion by the recent Foreign Office-led London Conference on Cyberspace, which emphasised the economic and social benefits of a secure cyberspace and called for development of “rules of the road”.
The introduction to the strategy notes that the government will report back in 2012 on progress made toward these objectives.
This strategy is a promising step and has ambitiously laid out a task list of dozens of actions.
The real challenge will be to prioritise and deliver in a climate of financial austerity.
David Clemente is a research assistant specialising in international security, at the Chatham House think tank.
He is the co-author off the organisation’s recent report “Cyber security and the UK’s critical national infrastructure”.
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/technology-15893773
How Apple beat IBM in Steve Jobs’ first retail war
The Golden Age of Computer Sales surely must have been Christmas 1984. The Macintosh had just been released, Compaq and IBM offered powerful new CPUs, but the real action was a massive Christmas sales battle between the Apple//c and the IBM PCjr. I remember it well, I was working at ComputerLand in Los Angeles, and I was at the very center of the battle.
The ’84 Christmas season would be an inversion of our usual high-end sales efforts. Professional computers from IBM and Compaq were too expensive for the seasonal retail market, and the Macintosh was too new and little software was available. ComputerLand was always intensely busy in December, handling christmas shoppers as well as large corporate customers who had to spend their budgets before December 31. Amidst all this flurry of year-end sales activity, Apple and IBM decided to fight it out in the low end consumer market. The Apple//c was a pretty darn good computer. It was inexpensive, with nice peripherals including a mouse, which had just made its debut on the Macintosh. The //c and the Mac casings were produced by Frog Design, so consumers got some of the cachet of the Mac even if they could only afford a //c.
IBM’s competition was a notorious flop, the PCjr. It had just been revamped, the “chiclet” keyboard was replaced with a better model. An inexpensive (but blurry) color monitor was standard. Microsoft produced a “sidecar” with extra memory and its own mouse, and bundled it with primitive apps like PCPaint and PFS:Write. Some of the PCjr’s programs came on ROM cartridges since there was only 1 floppy disk drive, with no room for both programs and data. Naturally, the Apple//c outsold the PCjr, by about 10 to 1.
Despite IBM’s renewed sales push, the PCjr was dying. It was made specifically with the intention of eroding Apple’s lucrative consumer market. IBM desperately wanted to damage Apple by killing their lucrative Apple II cash cow, at a time when investment in the new Macintosh was a heavy drain on Apple’s financial resources (and let’s not even mention the Lisa debacle).
Apple marketing material
Apple did one really brilliant thing. They worked with Frog Design and their ad agency Chiat Day to produce a most excellent point-of-sale retail experience, foreshadowing today’s Apple Stores. And my store in Studio City was a showpiece. Apple produced glossy 4-color packaging for the //c, which had all the sales information written right on the box. We received dozens of empty boxes and we folded them all up and it looked like we had hundreds of computers on display, it reminded me of Andy Warhol’s Brillo box sculptures. Apple claimed that all you had to do to sell the //c was put one of the dummy boxes in the customer’s hand, get them to a demo station, or do anything to get them to touch the product, and they’d fall all over themselves to hand you money.
It worked.
Even better for us salesmen, ComputerLand pulled a trick unheard of in the LA computer market: we negotiated a mass purchase deal so our cost for the //c was $100 lower than any other store in town. We sold the //c at a price $1 less than other dealers’ wholesale cost, we had a lock on the //c market because our competitors had to sell at a loss to match our prices.
But the ComputerLand salesmen wouldn’t go for it, they thought the //c was a huge waste of time. The profit on a //c was only $99 and the sales commission was $8, and nobody wanted to waste time with a sale that would net you $8 when the phone was also ringing off the hook with year-end corporate customers making hundreds of thousands of dollars of year-end purchases. But our store figured out a way to juggle things, and Apple sweetened the deal for the salesmen with “spiffs.”
Spiffs are Sales Person Incentive Forms, but there are many backronyms. For every Apple you sold, you filled out a form and got a bonus. Suddenly everyone got interested in the //c. Apple had no idea we could sell so many computers. The top prize was a //c computer plus a cash bonus, Apple expected a few salesmen would reach the goal by late December, but I had already won the top prize twice over by the end of the first week of December. During the busiest store hours, sometimes a dozen customers would be stacked up at the register, listening to us explain the features of the computer as we wrote up the sales receipts as fast as our pens would write. And Apple forced a time-consuming duty on us, we had to get the customers to fill out the warranty forms and give us a copy for our spiffs. Customers were hesitant to fill out the forms if the machines were purchased as gifts, it was a real problem to get them to do it. But we persisted because that was how we got paid.
You really don’t want a Macintosh. Or a iic.
You want one of these.
Next page: IBM wanted some advice…
Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/25/charles_eicher_christmas_1984/
Zuckerberg says email’s end is nigh. LOL
So email is dead, according to the infant prodigy Mark Zuckerberg, proprietor of Facebook. This news arrived in an email from the editor, where it nestled cosily with the 1,401 other messages that I hadn’t quite got round to reading.
On closer inspection, it turns out that Zuck is not exactly an unbiased source on this topic, because his prediction was made as he launched a new “messaging” service for his 750 million subscribers, which he obviously hopes will supplant a communications medium that’s been around since an engineer named Ray Tomlinson invented it in 1971.
Outbreaks of what the computer scientist John Seely Brown calls “endism” have been rife in discussions about communications technology since the time of Plato, who opined that writing would destroy memory. In the 20th century, it was widely trumpeted that television would be the death of, first, radio and, later, movies.
When the CD-Rom arrived, people predicted the death of the printed book. The explosive growth in text messaging was thought to herald the end of Civilisation As We Know It, or at least of grammar, spelling and punctuation. And so on, ad infinitum, until we reach the current prediction that an explosion of tweets, status updates and messaging on social networking sites heralds the death of email.
The prediction is buttressed by selective use of ambiguous statistics. On the one hand, it does seem that young people use email less than their elders. According to comScore, a market research firm, for example, the number of emails sent by 12- to 17-year-olds fell by nearly a quarter in 2010, while visits to web-based email sites such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo declined 6% in the same period.
The only thing that’s surprising about this is that people are surprised by it. Most teenagers use technology to communicate with their friends and for that purpose email is, well, too formal. (Apart from anything else, because it’s an asynchronous medium, you don’t know whether someone has read your message.) So kids use synchronous messaging systems such as SMS and social networking tools that provide the required level of immediacy.
But the main reason young people don’t use email is that they haven’t yet joined the world of work. When (or if) they do, a nasty shock awaits them, because organisations are addicted to email. The average employee now-adays receives something like 100 email messages a day and coping with that deluge has become one of the challenges of a working life.
Organisational addiction to email has long since passed the point of dysfunctionality and now borders on the pathological, with employees sending messages to colleagues in nearby cubicles, people covering their backs by cc-ing everyone else and managers carpet-bombing subordinates with attachments. The real problem, in other words, is not that email is dying but that it’s out of control.
Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/27/john-naughton-mark-zuckerberg-email
‘Promising step’ to cybersecurity
25 November 2011
Last updated at 15:27
The UK government plans “unprecedented co-operation” with businesses to improve cybersecurity
The UK government has today released its 2011 Cyber Security Strategy.
With an increased focus on cybercrime, and renewed focus on cyberspace as an engine of economic and social prosperity, the strategy continues to hone Whitehall’s understanding of this vibrant, complex and increasingly global domain.
Many of the strategy objectives - in particular those related to securing critical infrastructure – will require close engagement with the private sector.
These public-private partnerships are essential, and, as noted in a recent Chatham House report on critical national infrastructure, they require awareness, engagement and trust among senior decision makers on all sides.
This is not an easy process and requires a keen understanding of the incentives that guide actions in the public and private sectors.
Links to business
The government will also have to balance the tension between building a more secure environment – which requires standards and regulation – and encouraging businesses to set up shop in the UK.
However there are signs that Whitehall is aware of these complexities and the need to experiment with potential solutions.
One new initiative is a three-month pilot scheme among five business sectors: defence, finance, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and energy.
It will exchange “actionable information on cyber threats”, “analyse new trends” and work to “strengthen and link up our collective cyber security capabilities”.
The strategy also supports existing independent initiatives such as Get Safe Online (raising awareness of cyber threats) and Cyber Security Challenge UK (searching for new talent), both of which have taken a good idea and implemented it in a simple and straightforward manner.
Risks
Cybercrime is topic that receives significant focus, in particular for the damage it does to the financial and social fabric of the country.
One primary initiative will create a “national cyber crime capability as part of the new National Crime Agency by 2013″.
Another will create, by the end of 2011, a “single reporting system for citizens and small businesses to report cyber crime”.
These are all encouraging steps that will require patience and persistence but which are essential.
One idea that looks slightly riskier is a “government-sponsored venture capital model to unlock innovation on cyber security in SMEs” (small and medium enterprises).
The appetite for risk varies widely between Silicon Roundabout and Whitehall, and government experimentation with venture capitalism has often produced mixed results. For example the US government’s $535m (£345m) loan to Solyndra – the now-bankrupt solar panel manufacturer.
First steps
The new strategy is more detailed than the 2009 version, and in many ways reads more like a cyber and economic security strategy.
It continues the process set in motion by the recent Foreign Office-led London Conference on Cyberspace, which emphasised the economic and social benefits of a secure cyberspace and called for development of “rules of the road”.
The introduction to the strategy notes that the government will report back in 2012 on progress made toward these objectives.
This strategy is a promising step and has ambitiously laid out a task list of dozens of actions.
The real challenge will be to prioritise and deliver in a climate of financial austerity.
David Clemente is a research assistant specialising in international security, at the Chatham House think tank.
He is the co-author off the organisation’s recent report “Cyber security and the UK’s critical national infrastructure”.
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/technology-15893773
