Tech News Wrap Up For The Week Of February 12, 2007
Webcams broadcast Israeli dig near Jerusalem shrine
Israel has installed Internet cameras near an archaeological excavation close to a Jerusalem shrine that had sparked Muslim protests, in a bid to show the work does not harm the holy site, officials said on Thursday.
Streaming video of several angles of the dig site were seen on Israel’s Antiquities Authority’s Web site (http://www.antiquities.org.il).
“The Antiquities Authority invites the public in the country and in the world to monitor the excavations up close and to see what is being done on the ground at any given time,” the group’s spokeswoman, Osnat Goaz, said in a statement.
The dig is meant to clear the way for the construction of a walkway to the complex known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif and to Jews as Temple Mount. Officials say the archaeological work is likely to take at least eight months to complete.
The excavations near the compound began last week and touched off protests and stone-throwing by Palestinians and raised Muslim fears al-Aqsa mosque at the compound would be harmed.
Israel denies any harm would come to the mosque or the Dome of the Rock that stand on the site of two destroyed biblical Jewish Temples.
The way we track time is changing with the times.
Market researchers say more people are carrying electronic devices that also tell time, whether a phone, an iPod or a BlackBerry. They’re also finding that young people, in particular, are more interested in spending their money on other kinds of accessories, such as shoes and hand bags.
In a survey last fall, investment bank Piper Jaffray & Co. found that nearly two-thirds of teens never wear a watch — and only about one in 10 wears one every day. Experian Simmons Research also discovered that, while Americans spent more than $5.9 billion on watches in 2006, that figure was down 17 percent when compared with five years earlier.
In response, some watchmakers have begun to add more functions to their time pieces, with models that have everything from heart rate monitors to GPS trackers. Luxury watches, such as Rolex, remain popular. But even then, the watch is often more about fashion than function, says Max Kilger of Experian Simmons.
“It really is an anchor point — and that’s the end of it,” says Kilger, the research firm’s chief behavioral scientist. “A cell phone is one step up from that; it begins to help you manage your time. And a BlackBerry is one level up from that.” Before she joined the ranks of telecommuters and stopped wearing a watch, 35-year-old working mom Jeannine Fallon Anckaitis also thought of her watch as “a handcuff” that she’d immediately remove when returning home.
“Even if I went out to dinner straight from work, I’d dump the watch into my purse to free my wrist,” says Anckaitis, who lives in Swarthmore, Pa., and now works from home for an online auto site. “Taking off the watch symbolized being done with the pressure-filled commitments of the day, and settling into a pace where the time matters far less.”
Indeed, the watch is a symbol of stress for many people. But it’s not really time itself that’s the problem, says historian James Hoopes. “It’s that we live in an increasingly synchronized world,” says Hoopes, a professor in the division of history and society at Babson College in Massachusetts.
“You don’t really relieve all the stress unless you get out of the world where time synchronization is so important.”
Enterprises are uncertain about mobile security
Uncertainty about how to secure mobile phones in the face of increasing threats is slowing enterprise adoption of mobile applications, experts exhibiting at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona this week said.
Over two-thirds of mobile operators in Europe that took part in a survey said that they detected more than 100 incidents involving mobile viruses or mobile spyware in 2006, according to a study by conducted by Informa for security software developer McAfee. The number of European operators reporting more than 1,000 such incidents more than doubled in 2006 compared to the previous year, the report said.
IT administrators, uncertain how to protect their users from such attacks, are unwilling to enable mobile access to applications for workers. “Enterprise security professionals haven’t really worked this out yet,” said Lorcan Burke, CEO of AdaptiveMobile. Companies such as banks, with strict security requirements, simply block access to any service, including Internet access, that could open doors to security issues, he said.
At the recent RSA Conference in San Francisco, some of the most crowded events were those tackling mobile security issues, said Simeon Coney, vice president of marketing for AdaptiveMobile. That was an indication that IT administrators are trying to find out how serious mobile security problems are and how to address them, he said. Mobile services can be secured in the application, the network or in hardware or software on the device. Among operators responding to the McAfee study, most found that virus protection was most important at application and device levels, although more of them had deployed network-level security systems than the other options. Over 200 respondents from the operator community took part in the study.
AdaptiveMobile makes network-level security products for operators, including a system for filtering viruses in e-mail, SMS (Short Message Service), MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) traffic. Beyond viruses, AdaptiveMobile can also control content, so it can stop phishing and other fraudulent attacks, or limit the types of content end users can access. If an operator has deployed AdaptiveMobile’s platform, an IT administrator in a company can set and manage such controls down to the level of individual users.
For the mass market, AdaptiveMobile’s product allows operators to notify a user by text message if their phone becomes infected with a virus and offer a download, either for free or for a fee, to disinfect the device. Without such software, operators will replace a user’s device or ask them to send it off for disinfection, both costly propositions.
A network-based security mechanism offers some advantages over anti-virus software that sits on the handset, Burke said. Handset software doesn’t prevent phishing and other nonviral scams. In addition, anti-virus software isn’t compatible with all phones, making it logistically difficult for the software developers to tweak their products for each version of every phone and make sure to sell the proper software to end users. He calls anti-virus software on the handset “the minimum acceptable response. It’s a tick in the box to make people feel comfortable.”
Some developers also sell security mechanisms that sit in the phone’s hardware. Such solutions are ideal for organizations with very strict security requirements, such as government users, Burke said. One downside to the hardware-based solutions is that they take about two years to make it into a handset, he noted.
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