George Ayotte

Threats of cyberwar and a story of real violence rubbed shoulders at a news conference to mark the opening of the ITU Telecom World exhibition and forum in Geneva on Monday. "The next world war could begin in cyberspace," warned Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations agency that organized the event. That's why the ITU is pushing an ambitious worldwide program for cybersecurity and peace. "By the end of next year, we will broker a global agreement with every country to protect its citizens online, not to harbor cyberterrorists, and not to start an online attack," he said. The beginnings of such an unconventional war could be out of the control of conventional diplomacy, he said, because in cyberspace "there is no such thing as a superpower: Every citizen is a superpower." With an army of "bots," or compromised computers, at their command, almost anyone could wield great power in a virtual battle, as a number of recent denial-of-service attacks against targets around the world have shown. "We know from conventional wars that the best way to win is not to start," Touré said. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon began by expressing his sorrow at news of an all-too-real attack, the suicide bombing earlier in the day of the Islamabad, Afghanistan, office of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, which left several people dead.

Encouraging the participation of "our youth, drivers of innovation and change," is vital if those divisions are to be eradicated, he said. Returning to the theme of the conference, he highlighted "a world divided," those with access to information on one side, and those without on the other. Investment in infrastructure and services must be encouraged too in order to eliminate the technology divide - but the motive should be profit, not charity, Touré said. "In our strategy of connecting the world, we have no need for charity: It's pure business. The telecommunications industry will always have investment, because it's a profitable industry, he said. If you have the right business plan, you will have investment," he said.

That's turning out to be the case in Rwanda, said President Paul Kagame, where state infrastructure projects have attracted investment from Chinese network equipment manufacturers. "The availability of capital for everything is getting more and more scarce, but in our country there is a strong partnership between public and private sectors," he said. In the company's home market, revenue from international calls is down 20 percent because of a reduction in tourism and manufacturing exports, he said. China continues to invest internationally, despite the impact of the global economic crisis and the attraction of the untapped potential of its home market, said Wang Jianzhou, chairman and chief executive officer of China Mobile, also present at the news conference. "We have still got challenges from the international financial crisis," he said.

IBM has launched LotusLive iNotes, an on-demand e-mail, calendaring and contact management system meant to compete with the likes of Gmail and Microsoft Exchange, the company said Friday. IBM is aiming the software at large enterprises that want to migrate an on-premise e-mail system to SaaS (software as a service), particularly for users who aren't tied to a desk, such as retail workers. Pricing starts at US$3 per user per month, undercutting Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 per user per year. It is also hoping to win business from smaller companies interested in on-demand software but with concerns about security and service outages, such as those suffered by Gmail in recent months.

While alluding to Google's service outages, Poulley acknowledged that no company can guarantee 100 percent uptime for on-demand applications. LotusLive iNotes is based on technology IBM purchased from the Hong Kong company Outblaze. "What we brought to Outblaze and to the marketplace is what you'd expect from IBM in terms of security, reliability and privacy," said Sean Poulley, vice president of online collaboration. But IBM has a long-standing track record of running "the world's mission-critical systems," he said. Overall, the main point of interest in IBM's announcement is price, said Gartner analyst Matt Cain. "Outblaze always sold low-cost mailboxes and that's what this is," he said. "Google's long been in it, Microsoft's long been in it. IBM will also have an opportunity to win customers from Microsoft who aren't ready to migrate to the upcoming Exchange 2010 release, given the headaches and investments involved, Poulley said.

Now IBM's in it." However, that's not to say IBM's brand on the software isn't of some value, Cain added. ."From an enterprise perspective, you'd rather buy e-mail from IBM than a company called Outblaze." It's unlikely that IBM's pricing strategy will cause competitors to lower fees for their offerings, according to Cain. For one thing, Microsoft already has a $2 per month Exchange Online option called "Deskless Worker," Cain noted.

It turns out that Apple's iPhone 3.1 OS fix of a serious security issue - falsely reporting to Exchange servers that pre-3G S iPhones and iPod Touches had on-device encryption - wasn't the first such policy falsehood that Apple has quietly fixed in an OS upgrade. Before that update, the iPhone falsely reported its adherence to VPN policies, specifically those that confirm the device is not saving the VPN password (so users are forced to enter it manually). Until the iPhone 3.0 OS update, users could save VPN passwords on their Apple devices, yet the iPhone OS would report to the VPN server that the passwords were not being saved. It fixed a similar lie in its June iPhone OS 3.0 update.

The fact of the iPhones' false reporting of their adherence to Exchange and VPN policies has caused some organizations to revoke or suspend plans for iPhone support, several readers who did not want their names or agencies identified told InfoWorld. Worse, it revealed that Apple's iconic devices have been unknowingly violating such policies for more than a year. "My guess is the original decision to emulate hardware encryption was made at a level where there wasn't much awareness of enterprise IT standards. One reader at a large government agency describes the IT leader there as "being bitten by the change," after taking a risk to support the popular devices. "I guess we will all have to start distrusting Apple," said another reader at a different agency. [ Apple's snafu on the iPhone OS's policy adherence could kill the iPhone's chances of ever being trusted again by IT, argues InfoWorld's Galen Gruman. ] Last week's iPhone OS 3.1 update began correctly reporting the on-device encryption and VPN password-saving status when queried by Exchange and VPN policy servers, which made thousands of iPhones noncompliant with those policies and thus blocked from their networks. (Only the new iPhone 3G S has on-device encryption.) Apple's document on the iPhone OS 3.1 update's security changes neglected to mention this fix, catching users and IT administrators off-guard. After all, this is a foreign language for Apple," says Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research. "However, once the company realized the problem, it made a spectacularly dumb choice. Instead, it allowed itself to be seen in the worst possible light. The change was necessary and inevitable, but Apple could have earned some points by coming clean at the earliest opportunity.

This is the result of a colossal clash of cultures. Even when it is trying, Apple cannot force itself to think like an enterprise vendor." Apple's advice to users on addressing the Exchange encryption policy issue is to either remove that policy requirement for iPhone users or replace users' devices with the iPhone 3G S. IT organizations can also consider using third-party mobile management tools that enforce security and compliance policies; several now support the iPhone to varying degrees, including those from Good Technology, MobileIron, and Zenprise.

Blue Coat on Monday unveiled new Web gateway security appliances that the company says achieve higher throughput and scalability compared with its earlier products. The Blue Coat ProxySG 9000 Series appliance, used for Web policy enforcement and detecting and blocking Web threats, supports 1Gbps throughput, an improvement over the 400Mbps in its earlier high-end 8100. The ProxySG 9000 Series, which supports up to 60,000 concurrent users, is designed to check for newly-emerging threats using Blue Coat's cloud-based service for obtaining threat intelligence WebPulse, which analyzes URL requests in real time. "Today, WebPulse draws from a 62-million-user base" in addition to using about a dozen other methods to analyze dangerous Web content, says Tom Clare, senior director of product marketing at Blue Coat. Find these products in this week's Products of the week slideshow. Another component of Blue Coat's secure Web gateway consists of antivirus proxies that can be used to filter for viruses and other malware.

Blue Coat competes with McAfee and Cisco, among others, in the secure Web gateway arena. Blue Coat expects to ship updated versions of its ProxyAV appliances next month, the 1400 and 2400, each supporting up to 60,000 concurrent users on a single appliance and boosting scanning performance by 40%. More efficient power supplies are said to reduce power consumption per gigabit by about a third. While Blue Coat's appliances are suited to protecting traditional network infrastructures, the company says it has also begun addressing protection in a virtualized or cloud-based infrastructure. "We are going to move toward a virtualized version," says Clare, adding there isn't likely to be an official announcement about this until next year at the earliest. The Blue Coat ProxySG 9000, available now, starts at $50,000, the ProxyAV 1400 and 2400 Series, expected to ship next month, start at $52,000.

Verizon wasted no time gleefully mocking AT&T after the rival carrier dropped its lawsuit challenging the legitimacy of Verizon's "There's a Map for That" ads. The 25 funniest vintage tech ads In the day since AT&T announced it was dropping the suit, Verizon spokesman Jeffrey Nelson has updated his Twitter account 15 times to reference the failed suit. Priceless!

Typically, Nelson would retweet a comment from another tweeter making fun of AT&T. Prominent examples include "There's An Apology For That: AT&T Dismisses Its Pointless Lawsuit Against Verizon," "Now AT&T can focus on improving their 3G network," and "AT&T to Verizon: We give up, you win the ad war." Additionally, Nelson linked to an speech delivered by Verizon Chief Marketing Officer John Stratton detailing the company's plan to continue ridiculing AT&T throughout the holiday season. The ads then display maps that show the total geographical reach of 3G coverage for each carrier, with Verizon's map showing a far larger area of the country covered by its 3G service. Furthermore, Stratton said that Verizon has scrapped its original holiday ad campaign in favor of producing more ads attacking AT&T. "We tried to do some research to find out where our competitors' 3G coverage actually was, but we couldn't find it, they didn't provide it," he said. "So we went with an industry source, a third-party source who maps roaming for the industry and asked them to map our 3G coverage and map our competitors' 3G coverage… Now, we had already completed our fourth-quarter holiday work at considerable expense, but we have that stuff now sitting on a shelf." Verizon's "There's a Map for That" ads typically show AT&T users struggling to use applications on their mobile devices while Verizon customers happily watch live streaming videos. In its lawsuit, AT&T did not dispute that the maps used by Verizon in its ads were accurate. However, in Verizon's ads the company clearly marks the maps as "AT&T 3G Coverage" and "Verizon Wireless 3G Coverage."

Rather, it accused Verizon of misleading consumers by implying that AT&T has no wireless coverage in large parts of the country, when in reality parts not covered by AT&T's 3G HSPA network are still covered by its 2G EDGE network.