For some drivers, smart cars do connect

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“The car is an island, isolating its user,” said Claudio San Pedro, senior vice president of the Fiat Business Line, Fiat Auto, in Italy. “To change that, we are aligning our cars with technology as used in homes and offices.” Owners of Fiat’s Stilo model, a moderately priced hatchback, can use the optional Connect service to make phone calls and either listen to a voice recite their e-mail messages or read them directly on a screen. “Even while driving, you can also look at the Web, but we do not recommend it,” San Pedro said.

That option and other features available in Europe and Japan make auto executives in the United States shudder. They say they must worry about lawsuits rather than whether their customers can order from Amazon while driving. “In the United States, driver distraction is a bigger thing than in Europe,” said Norbert Seitner, head of product planning for Audi North America. “People in America tend to sue companies very easily,” he added, if something goes wrong with the technology.

That is why many car navigation systems in the United States display terms and conditions on the screen before they can be used, a requirement not found in other markets.

Safety first Besides nervousness over lawsuits, the American auto market has also been more cautious in offering features like television or karaoke, which are widely available in other countries. Some features will probably not be available here for years, if ever.

Executives contend that most American drivers are more interested in advanced safety systems than in entertainment options.

In Europe, TV fanatics do not have to worry about missing their favorite shows. In many Audi models sold there, drivers can use the same screen that powers the navigation system to watch broadcast television. Yet even with a feature that shuts off the video once a car moves faster than three miles an hour, Audi has no intention of offering it here.

Fear of legal action has also stopped Toyota from offering its Intelligent Parking Assist feature, which is now available on the hybrid gas-electric Prius model sold in Japan. This device automatically parks the car, maneuvering the Prius backward and into the space. To activate it, the driver first pulls alongside the forward vehicle, then drags a picture of a flag marker and parking triangle on the car’s touch-screen display, until they are positioned where the vehicle should wind up. But the system cannot respond to changing conditions, like the vehicle in front suddenly backing into the space the Prius is about to enter. Nor can the system respond to unexpected road obstacles–a soccer ball rolling into the gutter or a child running in the way.

While the system seems ideal for congested streets like New York’s, “we have no plans for the U.S.,” said Jon Bucci, corporate manager for advanced technology at Toyota Motor Sales.

It is not just fear of lawsuits that prompts different gear for different markets. Terrorism has also created a switch in what consumers deem to be necessary equipment as they drive. It is the ability to communicate, not to be entertained, that seems to matter most to Americans, some industry officials have concluded.

“Safety and security are our winning features,” said Terry Sullivan, vice president of communications for OnStar, the communications system owned by General Motors and available on 50 of its models as well as those of other manufacturers. “While customers can hear their e-mail using OnStar’s Virtual Advisor service, the number that do is minuscule, in the low thousands,” Sullivan said. “More telling is that 80 percent of its 2.7 million customers buy the air-bag notification system, which sends a signal to a central office when a car’s air bag is deployed, to dispatch emergency services.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1040_22-5428711.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdnet

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Cisco upgrades IP telephony security

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The company announced that it has added new privacy features to its CallManager product, which maps phone numbers to IP addresses and keeps track of phone calls. Specifically, CallManager 4.1 extends encryption support to include its new and already installed 7940G and 7960G IP phones. Cisco also enhanced support for a protocol that will help customers link their existing telephone systems to its IP telephony products.

Security is a significant issue with any IP application. Like other packet-based applications, voice networks can suffer from denial-of-service attacks, which are caused when a hacker floods a network with packets until the switches and routers directing traffic throughout the network are frozen. Hackers also could tap into IP telephony calls to eavesdrop on conversations or break into corporate voice mails. As a result, some companies have hesitated in replacing their existing phone networks with one based on IP.

Cisco hopes that the new enhancements to CallManager can ease security concerns. By encrypting the voice traffic starting from the actual telephones, Cisco can help ensure that conversations are kept private and that no one is able to tamper with telephone signalling packets. Previously, Cisco only offered encryption on its high-end phones. Now the company is extending support to include its less expensive phones, too.

Customers will be able to take advantage of the new encryption features through a free software upgrade.

In addition, Cisco enhanced its Cisco Unity unified messaging product to provide better security to voice mail messages. The company also extended the interoperability of a protocol called Q.SIG, which is used to communicate between private branch exchanges from different vendors. The enhancement should help Cisco customers connect more securely between their new IP telephony network and their existing telephone infrastructure.

IP telephony is an important emerging market for Cisco.

The secure voice-messaging feature in Cisco Unity 4.04 comes at no additional cost and can be upgraded on existing products for free.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/networks/0,39020345,39171359,00.htm

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‘Secure cloud’ on the horizon for Microsoft

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An announcement from Redmond on Tuesday indicated that its Live Communications Server 2005 software will let companies encrypt their instant-messaging communications internally and link IM systems between companies so that suppliers and other business partners can share secure IM connections. Additionally, Live Communications Server, or LCS, will include an option for letting companies link to public instant-messaging networks from Microsoft, America Online and Yahoo, so that employees can chat with users on the Big Three IM services.

LCS has become a cornerstone of Microsoft’s efforts to expand its Office line beyond a collection of productivity applications. By integrating LCS into Office, Microsoft hopes to imbue a variety of applications — especially its Outlook email software — with “presence”, or the ability to intelligently route communications based on a worker’s location or availability.

Presence works by using information in people’s applications to know their whereabouts. For example, if Outlook’s calendar shows that a person is in a meeting, it can route voice calls to that person’s cell phone. Or if someone sends an IM to a user, the software can then prompt a Net phone call and record a voice message.

Microsoft said the new release of LCS will also improve secure remote access to presence and instant-messaging capabilities, using standard firewall ports instead of virtual private network, or VPN, connections.

Last week, Microsoft announced new corporate instant-messaging client software, code-named Istanbul. The software resembles the Windows Messenger software that’s currently found in Windows XP. The difference is that, with Istanbul, a user’s IM information is synchronised with Outlook’s calendar and scheduling information. Istanbul also connects to desk phones and serves up an alert when someone calls.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,39020375,39171537,00.htm

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Mind those IMs–your cubicle’s walls have eyes

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But now employers are going further than ever, thanks to technology that can capture e-mail and instant messaging conversations, or record a worker’s every keystroke. Websense, a maker of Internet monitoring tools, has seen its stock price nearly double in the last year, though it saw some gains erased late last week. Other top players in the market include SurfControl and Secure Computing.

“I think all these companies are seeing great demand,” said Katherine Egbert, an analyst with Jefferies & Co. “Lately, regulatory compliance issues, and deadlines for meeting those regulations, have been driving sales.” The regulatory factors include financial reporting rules under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and health care privacy mandates set forth in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA. Liability concerns regarding employee e-mails and IMs are also on the rise, as lawyers increasingly turn to computer records as evidence in sexual harassment suits and other legal actions involving the workplace.

Even tech luminaries, such as Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, have used corporate networks to send e-mail that proved embarrassing in court.

“Productivity is a concern; loss of confidential information is still a concern; security breaches are a concern. Employers are afraid of being sued,” said Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute, which, together with the American Management Association (AMA), recently published a survey on e-mail and IM surveillance in the workplace. “In almost every workplace lawsuit being filed today, e-mail is being subpoenaed as evidence,” Flynn said.

“IM will soon be subpoenaed on a regular basis as well.”

Aiming at IM According to the ePolicy-AMA survey, 60 percent of U.S. companies now use software to monitor incoming and outgoing external e-mail, while 27 percent of employers use software to track internal e-mail between employees. By contrast, employers have been relatively slow to monitor instant messaging, with just 10 percent of companies surveyed indicating they have taken steps to listen in on desktop chat. “Employers think IM is an emerging technology and they don’t have to monitor it yet,” Flynn said. “But if they have employees in their 20s, chances are (those employees) probably have been using IM since high school and view it as old technology.

And if a company doesn’t provide enterprise IM, (workers will) probably go out on the Internet and download a free version.”

IM giants America Online and Yahoo launched plans two years ago to offer corporate versions of their IM products, promising better security, along with regulatory compliance features not found in their free versions. Both have since scaled back those plans, but other companies have stepped in to fill the void, including industry titans such as Sun Microsystems and IBM, which are embedding their own IM products into their existing applications, and smaller companies such as IMLogic, FaceTime Communications and Akonix.

“Industry estimates say that by the end of 2005, IM in the workplace will surpass e-mail in the workplace,” Flynn said. “IM is coming on fast, and given that, employers need to take the necessary steps now with their policies and monitoring software.”

Monitoring software downloads is a top issue as well, industry observers and legal experts say.

In 2002, an Arizona company paid $1 million to settle a lawsuit with the recording industry that charged copyright violations involving MP3s stored on the company’s computer systems.

Customers such as PepsiCo and Ford Motor use Websense software to track and report employee Internet usage, block access to some Web pages, and set temporary access windows that limit the times some sites are available. Many corporations have adopted policies banning file-swapping software in the office and installed network traffic management software to track down potential violators.

Despite hot prospects, the industry has not seen a flood of new players. Instead, it has seen a rise in consolidation, particularly this year, Jeffries analyst Egbert said. Among recent deals, Blue Coat purchased Cerberian, CyberGuard acquired Webwasher, and Internet Security Systems bought Cobion.

Courts have generally found that employers have the right to monitor equipment that they own on their premises, including telephones and computer systems. Nevertheless, laws surrounding the monitoring of employees’ electronic communications are not as cut-and-dried as they appear, legal experts say. The law, on the face of it, looks like it’s illegal. But the courts have ruled that viewing stored e-mail is not considered a violation of the wiretap laws,” said attorney Philip Gordon, chairman of the privacy practice group for law firm Littler Mendelson. In one U.S. Court of Appeals case, the court further detailed how it is only considered a violation of the Wiretap Act if an e-mail is intercepted while it is traveling through the network pipe and is between two points.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1040_22-5423220.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdnet

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New I.B.M. Report Will Warn of Computer Security Threats

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The report, to be named the Global Business Security Index, is intended to give computing managers early warning of a range of computer vulnerabilities like attacks by malicious hackers, automated softwares, viruses and worms, as well as to gauge the impact of political upheavals and natural disasters.

The index will be generated from data gathered by 2,700 International Business Machines information security employees and a global network of about a half-million sensors – software programs and security hardware distributed to its customers and its own networks in 34 countries.

The index will be released on I.B.M.’s Web site and will be part of a broader service known as the I.B.M. Security Threats and Attack Trends, or STAT, report, which the company offers customers at a cost of about $10,000 a year.

That service is also produced by I.B.M.’s Security Intelligence Services, a group that is part of its managed computing services unit and is based on a corporate campus in Boulder, Colo.

“We alert customers to trends,” said Alfred Huger, Symantec’s senior director. “The security landscape today is totally different,” said David Mackey, a former army intelligence analyst who now directs the company’s Security Intelligence Services.

The I.B.M. security executives said they had also seen a 15 percent increase in the past month in the percentage of network attacks against critical infrastructure providers – computer network sites that government agencies and companies use to provide essential services.

Industry analysts who track the computer security industry said reports like those provided by I.B.M. and Symantec were useful to corporations attempting to protect themselves from attacks over the Internet.

“An early-warning-type system would be a benefit to an organization,” said Allan Carey, a senior research analyst for International Data Corporation, a research firm for the computer industry.

“There is a time gap that occurs, and generally the awareness of a hole is made and all of a sudden it’s a rush against time to fix the hole,” said Gregg Mastoras, a senior security analyst at Sophos, an antivirus and antispam firm.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/technology/25ibm.html?ex=1099281600&en=2cc6057987b06308&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVER

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Microsoft reworks antispam spec to silence critics

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The software giant said that it has rewritten Sender ID–a specification for verifying the authenticity of e-mail with Internet Protocol records–to address criticisms of the spec’s earlier incarnation.

Among other changes, Microsoft removed language in its pending patents for SenderID that could have included claims to Sender Permitted From, or SPF, a widely used system for e-mail authentication that was merged with Microsoft’s CallerID for Email to create Sender ID, according to Microsoft’s Ryan Hamlin.

“We wanted to complete what we started,” said Hamlin, general manager for Microsoft’s safety technology and strategy group.

Microsoft has resubmitted the specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force, a technical standards body.

Last month, the IETF shut down the working group that was charged with building consensus for Sender ID and turning it into an industry standard. Consensus became impossible after some people in the open-source community said Microsoft’s patent claims could enable the software company to eventually charge royalties. Others were critical of the system’s inability to work with previously published records in SPF. As a result, America Online and open-source groups pulled their support of Sender ID. And Meng Wong, the architect of SPF, said he would retrench on his technical specification alone.

Microsoft’s Hamlin said Monday that the company has revised Sender ID by making it backward-compatible with 100,000-plus SPF records already published. He also said Sender ID will give e-mail providers a choice to publish records in SPF, which verifies the “mail-from” address to prevent fraud, or in PRA–purported responsible address. PRA records let an e-mail provider check the “display address” of an e-mail in its headers against the numerical IP address of the sender. That process can prevent so-called phishing attacks by spammers who forge the display address. E-mail providers and senders now have the ability to publish in and check the authenticity of e-mail with both methods in Sender ID.

“We’ve been trying to make it as user-friendly as possible. We’ve got the spec to the point where you only have to publish one record for two purposes. I see that as a little victory,” said Wong.

Still, some people in the open-source community are concerned about Microsoft’s other pending patent over Sender ID, which prevents users of the specification from sublicensing it.

AOL said Monday that it has renewed support for Sender ID in its current form. The IETF has granted Sender ID “experimental” status so that the industry can test it, along with competing e-mail authentification proposals, and build consensus that way.

http://news.com.com/Microsoft+reworks+antispam+spec+to+silence+critics/2100-1032_3-5426045.html?part=rss&tag=5426045&subj=news.1032.5

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