September 2004 Archives

By Peter R. Savage -

High-tech blood analysis tools, fuel cells, radio tracking devices for racehorses, financial modeling software, cardboard soft-drink cans—these are just some of the varied and unique technologies brought to market by a British company that has just about the most unremarkable name ever, The Generics Group. Generics not only brings technology created by its own 200-strong research team to market, but it has a knack for helping other R&D operations exploit good ideas that don't fit into their regular business models.

By Jeffrey Sparshott -

Greg Booth says as many Zippo lighters are made in China as are made in Bradford, Pa., the company's hometown.

The problem is, Zippo Manufacturing makes its iconic, rectangular lighters only in Pennsylvania. The Chinese-made products with the Zippo name are cheaper, tinnier knockoffs riding on the reputation and markets built up by the American company during the past 72 years.

"It's illegal. And it takes sales and jobs away from us, from our workers," said Mr. Booth, Zippo's president and chief executive officer.

Zippo's problem is far from unique.

By Fred von Lohmann - Senior Intellectual Property Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation -

I. What this is, and who should read it.

The future of peer-to-peer file-sharing is entwined, for better or worse, with copyright law. Copyright owners have already targeted not only the makers of file-sharing clients like Napster, Scour, Audiogalaxy, Aimster and Kazaa, and Morpheus, but also companies that provide products that rely on or add value to public P2P networks, such as MP3Board.com, which provided a web-based search interface for the gnutella network.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Dennemeyer & Company today announced the availability of its next generation, web-based Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) System - DIAMS-XE. Designed to support the full IP lifecycle, DIAMS-XE offers corporate IP departments and law firms an advanced workflow-based software package built on Microsoft's .NET platform.

DIAMS-XE supports all intellectual assets and related activities, including inventions, patents, trademarks, domain names, general matter management and IP licensing.

As companies demand greater functionality from their IP systems, Dennemeyer has shifted the technology paradigm for the industry. "DIAMS-XE continues our history of providing leading-edge technology to the IP industry," said Paul Dennemeyer. "We are excited to offer our customers the industry's first truly integrated approach to IAM."

By Patrick Gray -

If you're lucky enough to be the majority share-holder in a midsize security services company, there's a good chance you'll be sunning yourself on the deck of your new yacht this time next year, scoffing caviar from a diamond studded, solid gold plate.

The Foundstone guys are probably doing that right now. And let's face it, when you're company gets picked up for a lazy US$86 million by McAfee, it's time to hit the water. The team at @Stake, which was formed by the hacking crew l0pht, also looks set to sail, after last week's announcement that the big yellow box, Symantec, would buy the midsize consulting group for an undisclosed figure thought to be around US$50 million.

WHILE Singapore is gearing up to become a major hub and provider of high-end business process outsourcing (BPO) and shared services, analysts differ on their perception of how much success the country can have as a BPO destination.

The Economic Development Board (EDB) of Singapore believes the country is well on its way to becoming a destination of choice for offshore services and is well-positioned to ride the offshoring wave just as it did the manufacturing wave in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

However, Arno Franz, partner and Asia Pacific managing director of Technology Partners International (TPI), remains sceptical of Singapore's ability to become a major offshoring destination. He feels Singapore's cost structure is simply too high for it to become a major player in outsourcing. He points out that the country had lost a lot of its IT business to China over the past few years due to cost issues.

by Deirdre McArdle -

The merged company CyberTrust will service 4,000 clients worldwide and says it expects to have annual revenues of USD160 million. The firm will also employ 1,000 people globally, including 49 in Dublin in its identity management division. Staff in Dublin will continue to develop intellectual property (IP) based on Baltimore Technologies' PKI (public key infrastructure) technology, UniCert, which Betrusted purchase during Baltimore's fall from grace.

CyberTrust expects the deal to close within 45 days, depending on regulatory and shareholder approval. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

TUALATIN, Ore. --(Business Wire)-- Sept. 21, 2004 -- ABC Television Network (ABC), a unit of The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS), has reached agreement with London-based Teletrax(TM), a subsidiary of MediaLink Worldwide Incorporated (Nasdaq:MDLK), to electronically track the U.S. television airings of its TV promotions, including promotions for "Alias", "NYPD Blue" and "The Bachelor." The announcement can be viewed at: www.teletrax.tv.

Teletrax's broadcast monitoring solution is based on the Philips Watercast video watermarking system, which is supported by a license to intellectual property from Digimarc Corp. (Nasdaq:DMRC), the leader in digital watermarking technologies and solutions.

By Karen Dearne -

THE US Federal Bureau of Intelligence will create an intellectual property rights database to help defend commercial assets as part of its strategic plan for 2004-09.

Over the next five years, the FBI's cyber division will "focus on theft of proprietary information, particularly computer software" to counteract threats to "US competitiveness and economic viability".

Adding to pressure for China to stop rampant product piracy, two major U.S. business groups complained Thursday that abuses are getting worse and warned that lack of patent and copyright protection is hurting high-tech investment.

The U.S. Chambers of Commerce in China and Shanghai appealed for tougher Chinese penalties to stop the copying of goods that range from software to designer clothes. U.S. officials say such piracy costs companies worldwide as much as US$50 billion (euro 40 billion) a year in lost sales and have threatened China with possible sanctions.

by Bruce Schneier from his Newsletter called CRYPTO-GRAM -

If you watched the Olympic games on television, you saw the unprecedented security surrounding the 2004 Olympics. You saw shots of guards and soldiers, and gunboats and frogmen patrolling the harbors. But there was a lot more security behind the scenes. Olympic press materials state that there was a system of 1,250 infrared and high-resolution surveillance cameras mounted on concrete poles. Additional surveillance data was collected from sensors on 12 patrol boats, 4000 vehicles, 9 helicopters, 4 mobile command centers, and a blimp. It wasn't only images; microphones collected conversations, speech-recognition software converted them to text, and then sophisticated pattern-matching software looked for suspicious patterns. 70,000 people were involved in Olympic security, about seven per athlete or one for every 76 spectators.

AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- InternetPerils Inc, the leading
provider of automated Internet Business Risk Management products for
government, education, insurers, banks, ISPs, and e-Commerce, today announced the addition of Steve Schoenberger to the company's Advisory Board.

Schoenberger (ARe, MBA) is a Technology Insurance Services Account
Executive for Mason & Mason, a Whitman, MA-based insurance brokerage services company. Steve's specialties include professional, intellectual property, and management liability insurance products. He also leads the firm's cyber risk
practice, focusing on the security and privacy risks of networked computers
and the Internet. Prior to joining Mason & Mason, Steve was the Regional
Underwriting Manager for AIG's Technology and Professional Liability Group in
Boston. Schoenberger is also is a member of TechAssure, a leading trade
association focused on the needs of insurance and risk management for the high
tech industry.

TruSecure(R) Corporation, the leading provider of intelligent risk management and compliance products and services, today announced that The Yankee Group named TruSecure as an "early leader in security risk management," a market that's expected to grow to $3.7 billion by 2008. The Yankee Group evaluated more than 25 managed security services providers (MSSPs) and interviewed more than 400 end users before making this determination. A full copy of the July 2004 Managed Security Services Market report is available at www.yankeegroup.com.

"This report confirms what we have been hearing from our customers worldwide--TruSecure possesses the only fully integrated, managed security services on the market. TruSecure's solutions are derived from a unique blend of proactive risk reduction combined with real-time security management, monitoring and response which assures continuous security of critical business information assets," said John Becker, CEO of TruSecure Corp. "We intend to maintain this market leadership position through continued investments in R&D, operations and customer service."

By Robert F. Copple -

In the course of my career as a lawyer, I've searched for old documents in an abandoned Colorado mine shaft, a forgotten building in the Puerto Rican jungle and in the garages of long-retired engineers.

I always found the papers. Now that we have computers, if the morass of digital data is mismanaged, finding information can be harder or impossible. Companies large and small can risk serious legal liability if they can't find something or if they saved something they wish they hadn't.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Attorney General John Ashcroft, Assistant Attorney General Christopher A. Wray, FBI Assistant Director Jana Monroe, Chief Postal Inspector Lee Heath, and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras today announced the arrests or convictions of more than 150 individuals and the return of 117 criminal complaints, indictments, and informations in a collaborative nationwide enforcement operation directed at major forms of online economic crime and other cybercrimes.

The ongoing action, which included arrests of several people earlier today, is known as Operation Web Snare. This initiative involved coordination among 36 U.S. Attorneys’ offices nationwide, the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, 37 of the FBI's 56 field divisions, 13 of the Postal Inspection Service's 18 field divisions, the FTC, together with a variety of other federal, state, local and foreign law enforcement agencies.

The US House Judiciary Committee has approved legislation that would expand the definition of criminal file-trading over the internet.

The Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2004, which now moves to the full House for a vote, potentially expands the number of people who could be charged with criminal copyright violations by expanding the definition of criminal copyright infringement.

In addition to people who "willfully" distribute copyright works such as music files, the expanded definition includes people who "knowingly" distribute copyrighted works "with reckless disregard of the risk for further infringement".

Electronic Laboratory Notebooks Conference 2004

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 8, 2004--David P. Stenhouse, a former special agent in the U.S. Secret Service and one of the nation's foremost authorities in the field of computer evidence discovery, will be a featured speaker later this month at Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELN), a London forum dedicated to current and prospective ELN users.

ELNs are primarily used by pharmaceutical companies and other life sciences companies that rely on extensive scientific research. They are essentially computer systems on which sketches, equations, graphs, research notes and other data are recorded on electronic "notebook" pages. They accept input from a keyboard, sketchpad, digital camera, microphone and even directly from scientific instruments.

By Russell Shaw -

"Changing the main branch of the [Linux] kernel should be hard," says Laura Koetzle of Forrester Research. "Other developers need to review and sign off on kernel changes for both technical merit and open-source license compliance, so that everyone can feel comfortable upgrading."

In theory, the open-source concept is simple, elegant, almost utopian: thousands of developers contributing their skills to continually improve and refine a piece of software for the common good.

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 7, 2004--Universal Guardian Holdings, Inc. (OTCBB:UGHO - News), a full service provider of security products and services to mitigate terrorist, criminal and security threats for governments and businesses worldwide, today announced that Secure Risks Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Universal Guardian, has launched an Intellectual Property (IP) practice focused on mitigating corporate risk with regard to intellectual property theft and infringement.

The theft of Intellectual Property (IP), including piracy and counterfeiting, represents a growing multi-billion loss to businesses globally each year. The trend of outsourcing to overseas manufacturers along with the proliferation of the Internet and telecommunications are further assisting the counterfeiters in their abilities to steal and infringe on companies' intellectual property. This increasing threat requires a systematic and strategic approach to security and risk prevention.

by Mary La Rosa -

Ambiguity: Mordechai Vanunu; a lawyer in Israel representing Dimona employees; two solutions for nuclear waste that give us alternative viable energy; a portable nuclear weapons detection system since 1999; blackmail and extortion; another dead scientist and the closing of the National Lab in Los Alamos

While Mordechai Vanunu awaits further reprisals, perhaps further punishments for what he continues to declare proudly his act of good conscience, a dynamic new company in the same country that does not want him but also does not want to allow him to leave, has acquired a contract to clean up some of the nuclear mess for which Vanunu has sacrificed almost 20 years of his life. This nuclear clean up does not begin in the Negev, but will take place in Chernobyl and is projected to be only the beginning of an enormous projected profit as well as long awaited remedy for that which Vanunu has been trying to get our attention and that which his government has denied exists yet alone has ever acknowledged as a radioactive problem.

By Bill Brenner -

Unable to keep up with security holes, attacks and government regulations, enterprises will turn to outside firms for 90% of their security by 2010, according to Yankee Group. Security companies marketing themselves as vulnerability managers will thrive in this environment.

A new report from the Boston-based research firm noted that more businesses have made security a priority to meet growing threats and comply with laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Enterprises are swallowing some of their ROI concerns and setting aside more cash for outside help, unconvinced they can handle the daunting task on their own.

By Colin C. Haley -

BOSTON -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer believes the software industry will create more positive change in the next 10 years than it did in the previous 10 -- provided that security threats are effectively handled.

"Security is the one issue that could stand in all our ways," Ballmer said in an address to the Massachusetts Software Council today. "To the degree that people don't feel they can rely on [applications] is a major impediment."