Web metrics
Many ways to skin a cat
Nov 29th 2007 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition
Such a lot of data, so little information
IMAGINE you are an advertiser, you want to place your banners on the most popular website, and you want to know how much to pay. Globally, the leading site is Google, which has the most “page views”. Or is it Microsoft, whose various sites have, in the jargon, the most “time spent”? Or should you go by unique users, duration, hits, click-through, impressions, queries, sessions, streams, or engagement? Whether or not there is truth in advertising, there is certainly none for online advertisers, at least none that is immediately obvious and simple. Bob Ivins, who is in charge of all non-American business for comScore, a big web-measurement firm, says that the web produces data as “a fire-hose shoots water”, and that working out what those data mean is rather like “putting a straw into the fire hose to take a sip”. Get the angle even slightly wrong, and you are blown away.
Take, for instance, the case of page views, the most widely used measure for much of the past decade. It is the number of times web surfers call up web pages on a given site. Page views became popular in the late 1990s, because they were far superior to the existing measure of “hits”, also known as “file requests”. Hits are confusing because every graphic on a page, as well as the page itself, counts as a hit. If a site owner puts more graphics on his pages, he gets more hits, even if visitors, clicks and everything else stay the same. “We produced hits numbers because we could, not because it was useful,” says one old-timer in the industry.
By comparison, page views do actually mean something, and are easy to comprehend by analogy to the offline world to boot—many advertisers are still used to counting pagination in magazines. So everybody started paying attention to page views. But then something odd happened. Page views at certain kinds of websites, especially the more sophisticated sort, began to decline, even though the site appeared otherwise healthy and popular.
The explanation has to do with “Web 2.0”, and more specifically with a constituent technology called “asynchronous JavaScript and XML”, or AJAX. This is a method that lets web pages update parts of themselves—a share-price ticker or an e-mail inbox, say—without having to reload and redraw the rest of the page, resulting in web pages that behave less like documents and more like pieces of software. But this means that a user of an AJAX page, such as Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Finance, can spend the entire day working on the same page, and this activity counts as only a single page view.
Perhaps advertisers should therefore ditch page views in favour of “user sessions”, since that promises to count actual people, and show how many of them use a site. Except that it doesn't, because this measure counts browsers rather than humans. So 2m sessions could mean, theoretically, that 2m people visited a site once, that 1m people visited twice, or that one astonishing individual visited 2m times. People tend to check their favourite pages in the office, at home, and even from their mobile phones, which leads to an overestimate of the number of users. Conversely, sometimes several people watch YouTube clips when gathered around the same screen, which leads to an underestimate of the number of users. Nobody looking at user sessions would ever know.
As websites, and especially those using AJAX, become more interactive, advertisers are therefore interested in other measures. “Duration” and “time spent”, for instance, suggest how long one or more people were interacting with a page, which in turn hints at how “engaged”, or alert, they were. Using these criteria, social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace (part of Fox Interactive Media in the chart) suddenly look attractive.
In the old days of traditional media, measures may have been simpler, but they were also dumber, says Randall Rothenberg, the boss of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association. In broadcast television or radio, firms such as Nielsen or Arbitron traditionally give gadgets to samples of volunteers that measure what their televisions or radios are tuned to; or they ask people to fill out diaries describing their reading, listening and viewing habits. Both methods produce notoriously unreliable estimates.
The web is an open book compared with those old media. Search advertisements, the text links on the results pages of search engines, charge advertisers only when a user actually clicks, thus expressing an interest. “Pre-roll” advertisements that run at the start of a web video report back exactly how many times they were viewed. But when it comes to banner advertising, says Mr Rothenberg, advertisers just have to consider all these new measures as they would a pointillist painting by George Seurat: looking at one dot is no fun; taking them all in can be rewarding.
mardi 4 décembre 2007
One of the world’s most prominent cryptographers issued a warning on Friday
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 16 — One of the world’s most prominent cryptographers issued a warning on Friday about a hypothetical incident in which a math error in a widely used computing chip places the security of the global electronic commerce system at risk.
Skip to next paragraph
Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Adi Shamir, a cryptographer and professor in Israel.
Adi Shamir, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, circulated a research note about the problem to a small group of colleagues. He wrote that the increasing complexity of modern microprocessor chips is almost certain to lead to undetected errors.
Historically, the risk has been demonstrated in incidents like the discovery of an obscure division bug in Intel’s Pentium microprocessor in 1994 and, more recently, in a multiplication bug in Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet program, he wrote.
A subtle math error would make it possible for an attacker to break the protection afforded to some electronic messages by a popular technique known as public key cryptography.
Using this approach, a message can be scrambled using a publicly known number and then unscrambled with a secret, privately held number.
The technology makes it possible for two people who have never met to exchange information securely, and it is the basis for all kinds of electronic transactions.
Mr. Shamir wrote that if an intelligence organization discovered a math error in a widely used chip, then security software on a PC with that chip could be “trivially broken with a single chosen message.”
Executing the attack would require only knowledge of the math flaw and the ability to send a “poisoned” encrypted message to a protected computer, he wrote. It would then be possible to compute the value of the secret key used by the targeted system.
With this approach, “millions of PC’s can be attacked simultaneously, without having to manipulate the operating environment of each one of them individually,” Mr. Shamir wrote.
The research note is significant, cryptographers said, in part because of Mr. Shamir’s role in designing the RSA public key algorithm, software that is widely used to protect e-commerce transactions from hackers.
“The remarkable thing about this note is that Adi Shamir is saying that RSA is potentially vulnerable,” said Jean-Jacques Quisquater, a professor and cryptographic researcher at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium.
Mr. Shamir is the S in RSA; he, Ronald Rivest and Leonard Adleman developed it in 1977.
Because the exact workings of microprocessor chips are protected by laws governing trade secrets, it is difficult, if not impossible, to verify that they have been correctly designed, Mr. Shamir wrote.
“Even if we assume that Intel had learned its lesson and meticulously verified the correctness of its multipliers,” he said, “there are many smaller manufacturers of microprocessors who may be less careful with their design.”
The class of problem that Mr. Shamir described has been deeply explored by cryptography experts, said Paul Kocher, who is president of Cryptography Research, a consulting and design firm in San Francisco. However, he added that it illustrated how small flaws could subvert even the strongest security.
An Intel spokesman noted that the flaw was a theoretical one and something that required a lot of contingencies.
“We appreciate these and we look at everything,” said George Alfs, an Intel spokesman.
In e-mail correspondence after he sent the note, Mr. Shamir said he had no evidence that anyone is using an attack like the one he described.
Skip to next paragraph
Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Adi Shamir, a cryptographer and professor in Israel.
Adi Shamir, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, circulated a research note about the problem to a small group of colleagues. He wrote that the increasing complexity of modern microprocessor chips is almost certain to lead to undetected errors.
Historically, the risk has been demonstrated in incidents like the discovery of an obscure division bug in Intel’s Pentium microprocessor in 1994 and, more recently, in a multiplication bug in Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet program, he wrote.
A subtle math error would make it possible for an attacker to break the protection afforded to some electronic messages by a popular technique known as public key cryptography.
Using this approach, a message can be scrambled using a publicly known number and then unscrambled with a secret, privately held number.
The technology makes it possible for two people who have never met to exchange information securely, and it is the basis for all kinds of electronic transactions.
Mr. Shamir wrote that if an intelligence organization discovered a math error in a widely used chip, then security software on a PC with that chip could be “trivially broken with a single chosen message.”
Executing the attack would require only knowledge of the math flaw and the ability to send a “poisoned” encrypted message to a protected computer, he wrote. It would then be possible to compute the value of the secret key used by the targeted system.
With this approach, “millions of PC’s can be attacked simultaneously, without having to manipulate the operating environment of each one of them individually,” Mr. Shamir wrote.
The research note is significant, cryptographers said, in part because of Mr. Shamir’s role in designing the RSA public key algorithm, software that is widely used to protect e-commerce transactions from hackers.
“The remarkable thing about this note is that Adi Shamir is saying that RSA is potentially vulnerable,” said Jean-Jacques Quisquater, a professor and cryptographic researcher at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium.
Mr. Shamir is the S in RSA; he, Ronald Rivest and Leonard Adleman developed it in 1977.
Because the exact workings of microprocessor chips are protected by laws governing trade secrets, it is difficult, if not impossible, to verify that they have been correctly designed, Mr. Shamir wrote.
“Even if we assume that Intel had learned its lesson and meticulously verified the correctness of its multipliers,” he said, “there are many smaller manufacturers of microprocessors who may be less careful with their design.”
The class of problem that Mr. Shamir described has been deeply explored by cryptography experts, said Paul Kocher, who is president of Cryptography Research, a consulting and design firm in San Francisco. However, he added that it illustrated how small flaws could subvert even the strongest security.
An Intel spokesman noted that the flaw was a theoretical one and something that required a lot of contingencies.
“We appreciate these and we look at everything,” said George Alfs, an Intel spokesman.
In e-mail correspondence after he sent the note, Mr. Shamir said he had no evidence that anyone is using an attack like the one he described.
lundi 3 décembre 2007
Privacy is key to new social networking site, Kaioo
By Doreen Carvajal
Published: December 2, 2007
PARIS: As rebel cries go, Kaioo rolls off the tongue more like a yodel than a war whoop.
But the nonprofit organization - registered as a tax-exempt charity - is one of the newest members in the growing revolt against social networking sites that rummage through the personal information of members and turn it over to advertisers.
Kaioo, an invented name inspired by the Greek word for "you," is incubating a new sort of social network from a funky outpost of a former parking garage in Germany, which boasts some of the strictest data protection regulations in the world.
The founders pledge that its mission is to create an international haven from networks like Facebook and MySpace, where advertising and the sales pitch are becoming as elemental a social ritual as flirting. And Kaioo says all the profit it might make from limited advertising will be donated to charity.
"Users want to have an independent, democratic system that they feel is theirs," said Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, chief executive of the music giant Sony BMG, who is financing the initial start-up of Kaioo out of his own pocket with €500,000, or $730,000. "The biggest asset that we have is credibility and this platform can only grow if users feel that this is real and totally independent."
Today in Technology & Media
Small merchants gain large presence on Web
AP to reorganize work and accent multimedia
France leads crackdown to end illegal file sharing
The November start of its online network, www.kaioo.com, coincided with an autumn backlash against Facebook. The fast-growing social network last week bowed to a petition drive of thousands of users demanding easy controls to opt out of new behavior targeting systems that track their off-site shopping and enable advertisers to alert friends on their network about the purchases - essentially turning members into pitchmen.
In the United States, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy are both preparing complaints about the practice for the Federal Trade Commission. In Britain - where Facebook attracted more than eight million unique users in October - government data protection authorities are investigating a user's complaint that it is impossible to completely delete accounts because the system permits only "deactivation," meaning profiles linger on the servers.
"Most people on social network sites are not aware of the audience that their data is available to," said Giles Hogben, who is editor of a report on the phenomenon for the European Network and Information Security Agency, or Enisa, advisers to the European Commission. "They encourage people to feel that they're among an intimate set of friends when in fact there could be millions of people reading what they do."
In October, the agency urged an update of European privacy regulations to take into account the emergence of social networks as huge digital warehouses of private information.
A European Commission panel of national privacy experts, headed by the German data protection commissioner, Peter Schaar, are meeting Tuesday in Brussels to settle on its agenda for the next two years. A review of sophisticated data gathering systems or behavioral targeting developed by Facebook and MySpace is likely, according to Hans Tischler, a spokesman for Schaar. "This is only a recent development and it's a very sophisticated way of advertising," said Tischler, who noted that it was too early to say how and when the group would deal with the issue, "but this topic is too important to ignore."
American privacy groups are actually pressing to influence the European panel because they believe they stand a better chance of shaping more aggressive regulations that ultimately could have a global effect.
"What most people don't realize is that a very powerful mechanism - a kind of stealth infrastructure - has been placed at the heart of the digital media experience," said Jeffrey Chester, founder and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington. "It's a system to collect a huge amount of data about each and every one of us, to track us wherever we go and to target us."
The backlash against these emerging systems is manifesting itself in different ways. Thousands of Facebook users have signed a petition criticizing behavioral marketing and consumer groups are pressing for a "do-not-track" list for Internet users who want to end monitoring of their online activities to exploit personal endorsements for products.
But those personal recommendations remain highly seductive to advertisers. A November survey of 4,000 consumers in four European countries - Germany, Italy, Spain and France - underlines the impact. Personal recommendations are worth five times the value of advertising, according to the survey conducted by Weber Shandwick and Paul Marsden, because half of the time people follow through on individual endorsements and make purchases.
(Page 2 of 2)
With computer users becoming unwitting cogs in a virtual advertising machine, organizers of Kaioo decided that the time was right to start an alternative social networking site. On the site's home page, the founders make an emphatic promise: "User data will not be shared with third parties!" And they make another unusual pledge: "All advertising money goes to charity!"
The project, based in Hamburg, is the brainchild of Thomas Kreye, who approached Schmidt-Holtz this year with the idea while he was still a business development executive at the German media company Bertelsmann, a partner in the Sony BMG joint venture.
The project started last month in German and English versions. Schmidt-Holtz said his ambition was global though, and versions in five other languages, including Spanish and French, are in the works.
Schmidt-Holtz said he was talking to potential advertisers and lining up musical acts for interviews, live streaming music or free song downloads. But he underlines that he is recruiting a broad group of artists from different companies so that the project is not considered the preserve of Sony BMG.
"We are independent," Schmidt-Holtz said. "Privacy and protection of data are some of our highest goals."
Those declarations are steps forward, according to privacy advocates, but they say that more could be done.
Hogben, of Enisa, praised Kaioo "because it provides a lot more transparency." Still, his agency is pressing for even more freedom: a system of "portable data" that would allow users to shift data profiles from one social network to another.
In the meantime, about 5,000 users have signed up to Kaioo in its first weeks of life, most of them in Germany. Schmidt-Holtz remains heartened by the response. "The bloggers are normally critical people and they don't like anything," he said. "But we even have people who want to work with us. It's really amazing."
Published: December 2, 2007
PARIS: As rebel cries go, Kaioo rolls off the tongue more like a yodel than a war whoop.
But the nonprofit organization - registered as a tax-exempt charity - is one of the newest members in the growing revolt against social networking sites that rummage through the personal information of members and turn it over to advertisers.
Kaioo, an invented name inspired by the Greek word for "you," is incubating a new sort of social network from a funky outpost of a former parking garage in Germany, which boasts some of the strictest data protection regulations in the world.
The founders pledge that its mission is to create an international haven from networks like Facebook and MySpace, where advertising and the sales pitch are becoming as elemental a social ritual as flirting. And Kaioo says all the profit it might make from limited advertising will be donated to charity.
"Users want to have an independent, democratic system that they feel is theirs," said Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, chief executive of the music giant Sony BMG, who is financing the initial start-up of Kaioo out of his own pocket with €500,000, or $730,000. "The biggest asset that we have is credibility and this platform can only grow if users feel that this is real and totally independent."
Today in Technology & Media
Small merchants gain large presence on Web
AP to reorganize work and accent multimedia
France leads crackdown to end illegal file sharing
The November start of its online network, www.kaioo.com, coincided with an autumn backlash against Facebook. The fast-growing social network last week bowed to a petition drive of thousands of users demanding easy controls to opt out of new behavior targeting systems that track their off-site shopping and enable advertisers to alert friends on their network about the purchases - essentially turning members into pitchmen.
In the United States, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy are both preparing complaints about the practice for the Federal Trade Commission. In Britain - where Facebook attracted more than eight million unique users in October - government data protection authorities are investigating a user's complaint that it is impossible to completely delete accounts because the system permits only "deactivation," meaning profiles linger on the servers.
"Most people on social network sites are not aware of the audience that their data is available to," said Giles Hogben, who is editor of a report on the phenomenon for the European Network and Information Security Agency, or Enisa, advisers to the European Commission. "They encourage people to feel that they're among an intimate set of friends when in fact there could be millions of people reading what they do."
In October, the agency urged an update of European privacy regulations to take into account the emergence of social networks as huge digital warehouses of private information.
A European Commission panel of national privacy experts, headed by the German data protection commissioner, Peter Schaar, are meeting Tuesday in Brussels to settle on its agenda for the next two years. A review of sophisticated data gathering systems or behavioral targeting developed by Facebook and MySpace is likely, according to Hans Tischler, a spokesman for Schaar. "This is only a recent development and it's a very sophisticated way of advertising," said Tischler, who noted that it was too early to say how and when the group would deal with the issue, "but this topic is too important to ignore."
American privacy groups are actually pressing to influence the European panel because they believe they stand a better chance of shaping more aggressive regulations that ultimately could have a global effect.
"What most people don't realize is that a very powerful mechanism - a kind of stealth infrastructure - has been placed at the heart of the digital media experience," said Jeffrey Chester, founder and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington. "It's a system to collect a huge amount of data about each and every one of us, to track us wherever we go and to target us."
The backlash against these emerging systems is manifesting itself in different ways. Thousands of Facebook users have signed a petition criticizing behavioral marketing and consumer groups are pressing for a "do-not-track" list for Internet users who want to end monitoring of their online activities to exploit personal endorsements for products.
But those personal recommendations remain highly seductive to advertisers. A November survey of 4,000 consumers in four European countries - Germany, Italy, Spain and France - underlines the impact. Personal recommendations are worth five times the value of advertising, according to the survey conducted by Weber Shandwick and Paul Marsden, because half of the time people follow through on individual endorsements and make purchases.
(Page 2 of 2)
With computer users becoming unwitting cogs in a virtual advertising machine, organizers of Kaioo decided that the time was right to start an alternative social networking site. On the site's home page, the founders make an emphatic promise: "User data will not be shared with third parties!" And they make another unusual pledge: "All advertising money goes to charity!"
The project, based in Hamburg, is the brainchild of Thomas Kreye, who approached Schmidt-Holtz this year with the idea while he was still a business development executive at the German media company Bertelsmann, a partner in the Sony BMG joint venture.
The project started last month in German and English versions. Schmidt-Holtz said his ambition was global though, and versions in five other languages, including Spanish and French, are in the works.
Schmidt-Holtz said he was talking to potential advertisers and lining up musical acts for interviews, live streaming music or free song downloads. But he underlines that he is recruiting a broad group of artists from different companies so that the project is not considered the preserve of Sony BMG.
"We are independent," Schmidt-Holtz said. "Privacy and protection of data are some of our highest goals."
Those declarations are steps forward, according to privacy advocates, but they say that more could be done.
Hogben, of Enisa, praised Kaioo "because it provides a lot more transparency." Still, his agency is pressing for even more freedom: a system of "portable data" that would allow users to shift data profiles from one social network to another.
In the meantime, about 5,000 users have signed up to Kaioo in its first weeks of life, most of them in Germany. Schmidt-Holtz remains heartened by the response. "The bloggers are normally critical people and they don't like anything," he said. "But we even have people who want to work with us. It's really amazing."
jeudi 29 novembre 2007
WISekey y OISTE organizan una reunión en Ginebra de una delegación Española con la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones UIT
WISekey y OISTE organizan una reunión en Ginebra de una delegación Española con la Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones UIT y las autoridades de la ciudad de Ginebra para discutir el EURO-Africa Hub.
La delegación está constituida por:
Francisco Salas
Concejal de Nuevas Tecnologías, Ayuntamiento de Málaga, Spain
Miguel Pérez Subías
Présidente, Asociación de Usuarios de Internet, Spain
Organizer:
Carlos Moreira, Founder & President
WISeKey SA
Delegation:
Luís Sanz Gadea, Jefe de Relaciones Internacionales
Ministerio de Industria, Turismo y Comercio, Spain
Jesus Serrano Gimeno
Director Oficina de Programas, British Telecom, Spain
Jenaro García, Director, IBER-X, Spain
Victor Canivell, CEO, Wisekey ELA (Spain & Latin America)
Rosa Delgado, OISTE & Wisekey SA
10:00 - 12:30 Trabajo de Coordinación
- Presentaciones
EuroÁfrica: Miguel Pérez Subías (15 min.)
WISeKey & Latam Hub: Carlos Moreira (15 min.)
WISeKey Spain: Victor Canivell (10 min.)
OISTE: Rosa Delgado (10 min.)
- Presentaciones – quién? y cómo?
Jueves: CERN
Viernes: UIT, Ville de Genève
- Press release de la visita a Ginebra?
- Proponer una visita a Málaga en 2008 - Parque tecnológico. Fechas las más adecuadas. Quienes?
- EuroAfrican HUB MoU:
- El MoU para EuroAfrica que fue aprobado por AUI, OISTE, WISeKey
- Revisar el MOU con los otros miembros potenciales???
14:30 – 15:00 Visita del Bunker de WISeKey SA
16:30 – 18:00 Sr. Maximilian Metzger, Secretario General, CERN
Viernes 30 Noviembre
10:00 – 12:00 Sr. H. Touré, Secretario General de la UIT
Quien habla sobre el EuroAfrican Hub?
15:30 – 17:00 Sr. Pierre Maudet, Jefe « Département del'environnement urbain et de la sécurité" (DEUS), Ville de Genève
Rosa y Miguel son esperados en el Palais Eynard (15:00). El resto a las 15:20 5min a pie del restaurante donde almorzaremos
Nota: Un reporte y plan de acciones será preparada por Rosa
La delegación está constituida por:
Francisco Salas
Concejal de Nuevas Tecnologías, Ayuntamiento de Málaga, Spain
Miguel Pérez Subías
Présidente, Asociación de Usuarios de Internet, Spain
Organizer:
Carlos Moreira, Founder & President
WISeKey SA
Delegation:
Luís Sanz Gadea, Jefe de Relaciones Internacionales
Ministerio de Industria, Turismo y Comercio, Spain
Jesus Serrano Gimeno
Director Oficina de Programas, British Telecom, Spain
Jenaro García, Director, IBER-X, Spain
Victor Canivell, CEO, Wisekey ELA (Spain & Latin America)
Rosa Delgado, OISTE & Wisekey SA
10:00 - 12:30 Trabajo de Coordinación
- Presentaciones
EuroÁfrica: Miguel Pérez Subías (15 min.)
WISeKey & Latam Hub: Carlos Moreira (15 min.)
WISeKey Spain: Victor Canivell (10 min.)
OISTE: Rosa Delgado (10 min.)
- Presentaciones – quién? y cómo?
Jueves: CERN
Viernes: UIT, Ville de Genève
- Press release de la visita a Ginebra?
- Proponer una visita a Málaga en 2008 - Parque tecnológico. Fechas las más adecuadas. Quienes?
- EuroAfrican HUB MoU:
- El MoU para EuroAfrica que fue aprobado por AUI, OISTE, WISeKey
- Revisar el MOU con los otros miembros potenciales???
14:30 – 15:00 Visita del Bunker de WISeKey SA
16:30 – 18:00 Sr. Maximilian Metzger, Secretario General, CERN
Viernes 30 Noviembre
10:00 – 12:00 Sr. H. Touré, Secretario General de la UIT
Quien habla sobre el EuroAfrican Hub?
15:30 – 17:00 Sr. Pierre Maudet, Jefe « Département del'environnement urbain et de la sécurité" (DEUS), Ville de Genève
Rosa y Miguel son esperados en el Palais Eynard (15:00). El resto a las 15:20 5min a pie del restaurante donde almorzaremos
Nota: Un reporte y plan de acciones será preparada por Rosa
The future of online identity and trust
The future of online identity and trust
The Augmented Social Network
The Internet is a communications platform made from software. This distinguishes it from all previous media, which were determined by the physical characteristics of their materials. Software, by its very nature, is programmable — which means that the Internet is far more malleable than its predecessors such as the telegraph, the telephone, print, and film. To a significant extent, software can do what we ask of it. It can enable the behaviors we demand from it, as long as we are able to write the necessary code, and that code can be supported by the appropriate hardware.
Online community tools have proven to be extremely effective at connecting people to one another, and helping them to share information. But shouldn’t we ask: Can these tools be extended to make them even more powerful, in order to further enhance public discourse? Could they be improved to more effectively advance the values of engaged citizenship and democracy? Could the Internet be better at helping us to:
Find others with whom we share affinities?
Share relevant information and media with one another?
Self-organize, and more easily form alliances to engage constructively with our neighbors, our fellow citizens, and our representatives in government?
In recent decades, globalization has transformed traditional power relationships in society by eroding geographic borders, challenging the sovereignty of the nation-state, and centralizing control of mass media in increasingly few hands. Most of these changes have been driven by commercial interests, with little consideration given to their effect on democracy. The democratic institutions we have were not conceived to work under such conditions, and are straining under new pressures. There is a growing risk that citizens will become alienated from the process of democratic governance, and feel ill equipped to challenge global elites and corporate interests in areas such as the environment, poverty, health, or sustainable development. Might a "next generation Internet" help to reinvigorate democracy by providing a platform that makes it easier for citizens to inform themselves about public policy debates, self-organize, and participate in the process of governance? more http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_8/jordan/#j1
The Augmented Social Network
The Internet is a communications platform made from software. This distinguishes it from all previous media, which were determined by the physical characteristics of their materials. Software, by its very nature, is programmable — which means that the Internet is far more malleable than its predecessors such as the telegraph, the telephone, print, and film. To a significant extent, software can do what we ask of it. It can enable the behaviors we demand from it, as long as we are able to write the necessary code, and that code can be supported by the appropriate hardware.
Online community tools have proven to be extremely effective at connecting people to one another, and helping them to share information. But shouldn’t we ask: Can these tools be extended to make them even more powerful, in order to further enhance public discourse? Could they be improved to more effectively advance the values of engaged citizenship and democracy? Could the Internet be better at helping us to:
Find others with whom we share affinities?
Share relevant information and media with one another?
Self-organize, and more easily form alliances to engage constructively with our neighbors, our fellow citizens, and our representatives in government?
In recent decades, globalization has transformed traditional power relationships in society by eroding geographic borders, challenging the sovereignty of the nation-state, and centralizing control of mass media in increasingly few hands. Most of these changes have been driven by commercial interests, with little consideration given to their effect on democracy. The democratic institutions we have were not conceived to work under such conditions, and are straining under new pressures. There is a growing risk that citizens will become alienated from the process of democratic governance, and feel ill equipped to challenge global elites and corporate interests in areas such as the environment, poverty, health, or sustainable development. Might a "next generation Internet" help to reinvigorate democracy by providing a platform that makes it easier for citizens to inform themselves about public policy debates, self-organize, and participate in the process of governance? more http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_8/jordan/#j1
Leonard H. Schrank, Former CEO of SWIFT Joins WISEkey's Strategy Committee
International Business Leaders to Guide WISeKey's Strategy as Leonard H. Schrank, Former CEO of SWIFT Joins the Strategy Committee
November 26, 2007
GENEVA, November 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Today WISeKey, the leading Internet Trust and Digital Identification company, announced it had appointed some of the leading business figures as members of its Strategy Committee. The committee Chaired by Patrick De Smedt, former Chairman of Microsoft EMEA, provides advice to the WISekey board of directors and senior management regarding matters of strategic business development and future revenue growth for WISeKey. The new members originate from a wide variety of sectors, from banking to financial services to IT which will be of critical importance to drive WISeKey's strategy:
- Carlos Esteve (CEO of Heritage Bank)
- Fernando Chico Pardo (President of Promecap)
- Mario Garnero (President Brazil Invest and President Forum das Americas)
- Lenny Schrank (CEO and Chairman of ACT3 Technologies, LLC and former CEO of SWIFT)
- Ali Karacan (Founder and Chairman of the Number One Media Group)
- Eric Pellaton (Co-Founder and Former Chairman Ismeca)
- Doug Hurst (Managing Director SMH Capital USA)
"I am delighted that this group of prestigious leaders accepted my invitation to join our Strategy Commitee," said Carlos Moreira, Founder and CEO of WISeKey. "These leaders bring their extensive experience and knowledge of the business community to WISeKey, and will help us set the right strategy for future growth. We already retain membership from a number of business luminaries and each of them brings vast experience in a variety of businesses from all around the globe."
"Understanding the security challenges and market opportunities that face corporations, today and in the future, is critical to the success of WISeKey's business," said Patrick De Smedt as he announced the new members of the strategy committee.
Leonard Schrank commented: "We need a more mature Internet and WISeKey is providing technologies, products and services to provide Internet users with secure identity and more commercially reliable products. This will be to everyone's benefit."
Read more: http://www.wisekey.com
Further information:
Daniel Ybarra,
VP Corporate Communications,
dybarra@wisekey.com,
+41-225943000.
SOURCE WISeKey SA
/CONTACT: Further information: Daniel Ybarra, VP Corporate Communications, dybarra@wisekey.com, +41-225943000.
(END)
URL for this article:
http://www.smartmoney.com/news/pr/index.cfm?story=PR-20071126-000549-0801
November 26, 2007
GENEVA, November 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Today WISeKey, the leading Internet Trust and Digital Identification company, announced it had appointed some of the leading business figures as members of its Strategy Committee. The committee Chaired by Patrick De Smedt, former Chairman of Microsoft EMEA, provides advice to the WISekey board of directors and senior management regarding matters of strategic business development and future revenue growth for WISeKey. The new members originate from a wide variety of sectors, from banking to financial services to IT which will be of critical importance to drive WISeKey's strategy:
- Carlos Esteve (CEO of Heritage Bank)
- Fernando Chico Pardo (President of Promecap)
- Mario Garnero (President Brazil Invest and President Forum das Americas)
- Lenny Schrank (CEO and Chairman of ACT3 Technologies, LLC and former CEO of SWIFT)
- Ali Karacan (Founder and Chairman of the Number One Media Group)
- Eric Pellaton (Co-Founder and Former Chairman Ismeca)
- Doug Hurst (Managing Director SMH Capital USA)
"I am delighted that this group of prestigious leaders accepted my invitation to join our Strategy Commitee," said Carlos Moreira, Founder and CEO of WISeKey. "These leaders bring their extensive experience and knowledge of the business community to WISeKey, and will help us set the right strategy for future growth. We already retain membership from a number of business luminaries and each of them brings vast experience in a variety of businesses from all around the globe."
"Understanding the security challenges and market opportunities that face corporations, today and in the future, is critical to the success of WISeKey's business," said Patrick De Smedt as he announced the new members of the strategy committee.
Leonard Schrank commented: "We need a more mature Internet and WISeKey is providing technologies, products and services to provide Internet users with secure identity and more commercially reliable products. This will be to everyone's benefit."
Read more: http://www.wisekey.com
Further information:
Daniel Ybarra,
VP Corporate Communications,
dybarra@wisekey.com,
+41-225943000.
SOURCE WISeKey SA
/CONTACT: Further information: Daniel Ybarra, VP Corporate Communications, dybarra@wisekey.com, +41-225943000.
(END)
URL for this article:
http://www.smartmoney.com/news/pr/index.cfm?story=PR-20071126-000549-0801
mardi 20 novembre 2007
UN launches Millennium Development Goals Minitor
The MDG Monitor is designed as a one-stop-shop for information on progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), globally and at the country level. It is intended as a tool for policymakers, development practitioners, journalists, students and others interested in learning about the Goals and tracking progress toward them.
The MDG Monitor has been created by the UN Development Programme in partnership with the Statistics Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), Relief Web of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Funding and in-kind support were provided by Google and Cisco.
The MDG Monitor will be continually updated as new data becomes available. Subsequent versions of the tool will also be available in multiple languages. The principal country-level data is currently available in Google Earth accessible via the MDG Monitor home page of http://www.mdgmonitor.org.
About the MDGs
In September 2000, the largest-ever gathering of world leaders ushered in the new millennium by adopting the Millennium Declaration. The Declaration, endorsed by 189 countries, was then translated into a roadmap setting out goals to be reached by 2015.
The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) build on agreements made at United Nations conferences in the 1990s and represent commitments by all countries to reduce poverty and hunger, and to tackle ill-health, gender inequality, lack of education, lack of access to clean water and environmental degradation.
The MDGs are framed as a compact, which recognizes both the efforts that must be undertaken by developing countries, and the contribution that developed countries can make through trade, development assistance, debt relief, access to essential medicines and technology transfer.
The MDG Monitor has been created by the UN Development Programme in partnership with the Statistics Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), Relief Web of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Funding and in-kind support were provided by Google and Cisco.
The MDG Monitor will be continually updated as new data becomes available. Subsequent versions of the tool will also be available in multiple languages. The principal country-level data is currently available in Google Earth accessible via the MDG Monitor home page of http://www.mdgmonitor.org.
About the MDGs
In September 2000, the largest-ever gathering of world leaders ushered in the new millennium by adopting the Millennium Declaration. The Declaration, endorsed by 189 countries, was then translated into a roadmap setting out goals to be reached by 2015.
The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) build on agreements made at United Nations conferences in the 1990s and represent commitments by all countries to reduce poverty and hunger, and to tackle ill-health, gender inequality, lack of education, lack of access to clean water and environmental degradation.
The MDGs are framed as a compact, which recognizes both the efforts that must be undertaken by developing countries, and the contribution that developed countries can make through trade, development assistance, debt relief, access to essential medicines and technology transfer.
Mobile advertising The next big thing
Marketers hail the mobile phone as advertising's promised land
Get article background
ADVERTISING on mobile phones is a tiny business. Last year spending on mobile ads was $871m worldwide according to Informa Telecoms & Media, a research firm, compared with $24 billion spent on internet advertising and $450 billion spent on all advertising. But marketing wizards are beginning to talk about it with the sort of hyperbole they normally reserve for products they are paid to sell. It is destined, some say, to supplant not only internet advertising, the latest fad, but also television, radio, print and billboards, the four traditional pillars of the business.
At the moment, most mobile advertising takes the form of text messages. But telecoms firms are also beginning to deliver ads to handsets alongside video clips, web pages, and music and game downloads, through mobiles that are nifty enough to permit such things. Informa forecasts that annual expenditure will reach $11.4 billion by 2011. Other analysts predict the market will be as big as $20 billion by then.
The 2.5 billion mobile phones around the world can potentially reach a much bigger audience than the planet's billion or so personal computers. The number of mobile phones in use is also growing much faster than the number of computers, especially in poorer countries. Better yet, most people carry their mobile with them everywhere—something that cannot be said of television or computers.
Yet the biggest selling point of mobile ads is what marketing types call “relevance”. Advertisers believe that about half of all traditional advertising does not reach the right audience. Less effort (and money) is wasted with online advertising: half of it is sold on a “pay-per-click” basis, which means advertisers pay only when consumers click on an ad. But mobile advertising through text messages is the most focused: if marketers use mobile firms' profiles of their customers cleverly enough, they can tailor their advertisements to match each subscriber's habits.
In September Blyk, a new mobile operator, launched a service in Britain that aims to do just that. It offers subscribers 217 free text messages and 43 free minutes of voice calls per month as long as they agree to receive six advertisements by text message every day. To sign up for the service, customers must fill out a questionnaire about their hobbies and habits. So advertisers can target their messages very precisely. “Britain is the largest, but also the trickiest European ad market, so if it works here it will work everywhere,” says Pekka Ala-Pietila, chief executive and one of the founders of Blyk.
Last year America's Virgin Mobile tried something similar with its “Sugar Mama” programme, which offers subscribers the choice between receiving an ad via text message or viewing a 45-second advertisement when browsing the internet in exchange for one free minute of talk time. Those who spend five minutes filling out a questionnaire online get five more minutes. Sugar Mama is proving popular: at the end of August Ultramercial, the company that manages the scheme, reported that Virgin Mobile had given away more than 10m free minutes.
Vodafone, a big mobile operator based in Britain, sees mobile advertising as a potentially lucrative source of additional income. For the time being, most of the ads on its network are still text messages, although it has begun displaying ads on Vodafone live!, its mobile internet homepage, through which subscribers access the internet and download videos and music. Vodafone is also running several pilots, says Richard Saggers, the head of its mobile advertising unit, in which subscribers receive free content in exchange for viewing ads. Earlier this year, subscribers in Britain were given the option of downloading footage from “Big Brother”, a reality-TV show, in exchange for viewing a promotional video clip. The firm has also offered free video games punctuated with ads to customers in Greece, and free text messages to Czech students who agree to accept ads in the same format.
Most mobile advertising strategies now rely on text messages, since few customers have taken to more elaborate services that allow them to download music, games and videos and to surf the web. Only 12% of subscribers in America and western Europe used their mobiles to access the internet at the end of 2006. Most people think mobile screens are too small for watching TV programmes or playing games, although newer models, such as Apple's iPhone, boast bigger and brighter screens.
That is not the only problem. While consumers are used to ads on television and radio, they consider their mobiles a more personal device. A flood of advertising might offend its audience, and thus undermine its own value. Tolerance of advertising also differs from one market to another. In the Middle East, for example, unsolicited text messages are quite common, and do not prompt many complaints. But subscribers might not prove so open-minded in Europe or America.
Another hitch, says Nicky Walton-Flynn of Informa, is that operators have lots of databases with information about their clients' habits that would be of great interest to advertisers. But privacy laws may prevent them from sharing it. Moreover, advertisers, operators and middlemen have not agreed a common format for this information, nor worked out how to share the revenue it might yield.
Some think these obstacles will confine mobile advertising to a niche for years to come. But others see a whole new world of possibilities, as more people use their phones to access the internet and consumers grow used to the intrusion. Mobile phones, some of which are now equipped with satellite-positioning technology (see article), could be used to alert people to the charms of stores or restaurants they are walking or driving past.
Tying ads to online searches from mobile phones is another potential goldmine. A subscriber typing in “pizza” for instance, could receive ads for nearby pizza parlours along with his generic search results. Such a customer, mobile operators hope, is likely to be more grateful than annoyed by the intrusion. What could be more relevant than that?
dimanche 11 novembre 2007
• Switzerland remains among the best performers in the Global Competitiveness Index, at second position overall.
GCR Country Profile Highlights 2007/2008
• The United States is assessed this year as the world’s most competitive economy. The country is endowed with a winning combination of highly sophisticated and innovative companies operating in very efficient factor markets. This is buttressed by an excellent university system and strong collaboration between the educational and business sectors in research and development. These characteristics, combined with the scale opportunities afforded by the sheer size of its domestic economy, come together to make the United States arguably the country with the most productive and innovative potential in the world. However, a number of weaknesses in more basic areas, particularly related to macroeconomic imbalances and some aspects of the institutional environment, continue to pose a risk to the country’s overall competitiveness potential. These areas require attention from the government to ensure that the country maintains its competitive edge in the future.
• Switzerland remains among the best performers in the Global Competitiveness Index, at second position overall. The country is characterized by an excellent capacity for innovation and a very sophisticated business culture, ranked first overall in this area. Similar to the United States, Switzerland is endowed with top-notch scientific research institutions and high spending on research and development particularly impressive given the country’s small size. Strong collaboration between the academic and business sectors ensures that much of its basic research is translated into useful products and processes on the market, buttressed by strong intellectual property protection. Innovation is reflected in the high rate of patenting in the country, for which Switzerland ranks sixth worldwide on a per capita basis.
• The Nordic countries continue to hold privileged positions in the rankings. Denmark ranks third, with Sweden and Finland following closely at fourth and sixth places, respectively. In a number of areas the Nordics outperform the United States and Switzerland. For example, they receive among the best marks worldwide for their macroeconomic environments, as they have been running budget surpluses and have very low levels of public indebtedness. Finland and Denmark have the most efficient institutions in the world (ranked first and second, respectively), followed very closely by Sweden, ranked sixth in this area. Finland, Denmark and Sweden also occupy the top three positions in the higher education and training pillar, with Finland ranked first in this indicator for several years in a row.
• Germany and the United Kingdom retain their places among the most competitive economies in the world, ranked fifth and ninth, respectively. Both countries receive excellent scores for the quality of their infrastructure (particularly Germany, ranked number one). In the context of the large market size available to both countries, another common strength is the efficiency of their goods and financial markets, with the United Kingdom receiving a particularly outstanding evaluation in the latter (second). On the other hand, the United Kingdom’s flexible labour market (10th) stands in contrast to Germany’s (115th) where the determination of wages and the cost of firing have strongly hindered job creation. Both countries are also well assessed in the more complex innovation and business sophistication indicators, with Germany in particular ranking first out of 131 economies in the sophistication of its business sector.
• France ranks 18th in this year’s Global Competitiveness Index. The country’s status among the top 20 most competitive economies in the world rests on a number of features that contribute to its excellent business environment. The country’s infrastructure is among the best in the world (ranked second), with outstanding transport links, energy infrastructure and communications. The high degree of sophistication of its business culture (10th in the business sophistication pillar) and its leadership in the area of technological innovation (17th in the innovation pillar) are important attributes that have helped boost the France’s growth potential. On the other hand, a number of weaknesses are hindering the country from unleashing all of its competitive potential. France’s labour market ranks a low 129th third to last out of all countries for its lack of flexibility, and 114th for red tape. Another area of concern is the macroeconomic environment, with the government budget deficit and the related public sector debt ratio still remaining high.
• Estonia (ranked 27th) continues to be, by a significant margin, the most competitive economy among the 12 countries that joined the European Union (EU) in 2004. The efficiency of Estonia’s government institutions (22nd), the excellent management of public finances and its aggressiveness in adopting new technologies (19th) outshine the performance of many of the “old-time” members of the EU. This is in contrast to Poland (ranked 51st) with poor marks for its institutional environment and low public trust in politicians, against the backdrop of weak and deteriorating public finances.
• Italy ranks 46th with strengths in some areas balanced by weaknesses in others. Italy is relatively well assessed in more complex areas measured by the Global Competitiveness Index, particularly the sophistication of the businesses environment. However, the country’s overall competitiveness performance is held back by some structural weaknesses in the economy. Among the most problematic areas are weak public finances and extremely high levels of public indebtedness (ranked 118th in this indicator), the inefficient use of public resources, a weak institutional environment (ranked 71st), with low levels of accountability and transparency, and a perceived lack of independence within the judicial system, all of which increase business costs and undermine investor confidence. Source WEF
• The United States is assessed this year as the world’s most competitive economy. The country is endowed with a winning combination of highly sophisticated and innovative companies operating in very efficient factor markets. This is buttressed by an excellent university system and strong collaboration between the educational and business sectors in research and development. These characteristics, combined with the scale opportunities afforded by the sheer size of its domestic economy, come together to make the United States arguably the country with the most productive and innovative potential in the world. However, a number of weaknesses in more basic areas, particularly related to macroeconomic imbalances and some aspects of the institutional environment, continue to pose a risk to the country’s overall competitiveness potential. These areas require attention from the government to ensure that the country maintains its competitive edge in the future.
• Switzerland remains among the best performers in the Global Competitiveness Index, at second position overall. The country is characterized by an excellent capacity for innovation and a very sophisticated business culture, ranked first overall in this area. Similar to the United States, Switzerland is endowed with top-notch scientific research institutions and high spending on research and development particularly impressive given the country’s small size. Strong collaboration between the academic and business sectors ensures that much of its basic research is translated into useful products and processes on the market, buttressed by strong intellectual property protection. Innovation is reflected in the high rate of patenting in the country, for which Switzerland ranks sixth worldwide on a per capita basis.
• The Nordic countries continue to hold privileged positions in the rankings. Denmark ranks third, with Sweden and Finland following closely at fourth and sixth places, respectively. In a number of areas the Nordics outperform the United States and Switzerland. For example, they receive among the best marks worldwide for their macroeconomic environments, as they have been running budget surpluses and have very low levels of public indebtedness. Finland and Denmark have the most efficient institutions in the world (ranked first and second, respectively), followed very closely by Sweden, ranked sixth in this area. Finland, Denmark and Sweden also occupy the top three positions in the higher education and training pillar, with Finland ranked first in this indicator for several years in a row.
• Germany and the United Kingdom retain their places among the most competitive economies in the world, ranked fifth and ninth, respectively. Both countries receive excellent scores for the quality of their infrastructure (particularly Germany, ranked number one). In the context of the large market size available to both countries, another common strength is the efficiency of their goods and financial markets, with the United Kingdom receiving a particularly outstanding evaluation in the latter (second). On the other hand, the United Kingdom’s flexible labour market (10th) stands in contrast to Germany’s (115th) where the determination of wages and the cost of firing have strongly hindered job creation. Both countries are also well assessed in the more complex innovation and business sophistication indicators, with Germany in particular ranking first out of 131 economies in the sophistication of its business sector.
• France ranks 18th in this year’s Global Competitiveness Index. The country’s status among the top 20 most competitive economies in the world rests on a number of features that contribute to its excellent business environment. The country’s infrastructure is among the best in the world (ranked second), with outstanding transport links, energy infrastructure and communications. The high degree of sophistication of its business culture (10th in the business sophistication pillar) and its leadership in the area of technological innovation (17th in the innovation pillar) are important attributes that have helped boost the France’s growth potential. On the other hand, a number of weaknesses are hindering the country from unleashing all of its competitive potential. France’s labour market ranks a low 129th third to last out of all countries for its lack of flexibility, and 114th for red tape. Another area of concern is the macroeconomic environment, with the government budget deficit and the related public sector debt ratio still remaining high.
• Estonia (ranked 27th) continues to be, by a significant margin, the most competitive economy among the 12 countries that joined the European Union (EU) in 2004. The efficiency of Estonia’s government institutions (22nd), the excellent management of public finances and its aggressiveness in adopting new technologies (19th) outshine the performance of many of the “old-time” members of the EU. This is in contrast to Poland (ranked 51st) with poor marks for its institutional environment and low public trust in politicians, against the backdrop of weak and deteriorating public finances.
• Italy ranks 46th with strengths in some areas balanced by weaknesses in others. Italy is relatively well assessed in more complex areas measured by the Global Competitiveness Index, particularly the sophistication of the businesses environment. However, the country’s overall competitiveness performance is held back by some structural weaknesses in the economy. Among the most problematic areas are weak public finances and extremely high levels of public indebtedness (ranked 118th in this indicator), the inefficient use of public resources, a weak institutional environment (ranked 71st), with low levels of accountability and transparency, and a perceived lack of independence within the judicial system, all of which increase business costs and undermine investor confidence. Source WEF
dimanche 4 novembre 2007
Mobile Banking
The poor people’s lack of access to credit has been one of the major obstacles to the development of impoverished rural areas in developing nations. Although there have been establishments of subsidized government lending schemes and rural co-operatives, none such endeavors have been fruitful in overcoming the various problems that restrict their access to the formal financial sector, thus leaving this particular segment ‘un-banked’.
Increasing popularity of remittance services and emergence of various microfinance programs coupled with the proliferation of mobile services in developing countries seem to have created a unique potential to provide financial services to the ‘un-banked’ segment over the mobile network, and at the same time, streamline operations and reduce operational overheads.
Mobile Banking in Developing Countries – An Opportunity
Over the past few years, mobile and wireless market has been one of the fastest growing markets in the world, especially in Asian countries such as China, Indonesia, India, and Philippines where the mobile infrastructure is comparatively much better than the fixed-line infrastructure. Saturation of the mobile subscriber growth and commoditization of voice services has led Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to consider alternative revenue diversification streams. Mobile commerce, which can be defined as "the delivery of trusted transaction services over mobile devices for the exchange of goods and services between consumers and merchants and financial institutions", has emerged as one of such options. The Asia Pacific region is expected to account for more than a third of the $80 billion revenues that the total global Mobile Commerce market is likely to bring in 2009.
Mobile banking or M-Banking, which is a type of financial services offered as a part of mobile commerce, will be a major driver for the adoption of wireless technology in rural areas in developing countries. The service refers to the provisioning and availability of banking and financial services through the mobile technology and the scope of offered services may include facilities to conduct bank and stock market transactions, as well as enabling users to access customized information. Mobile Remittances, Micro-finance and Micro-payments services are likely to fuel the growth of M-banking in the developing countries especially amongst the un-banked segment.
Opportunities
For Users – It facilitates and reduces the cost of remittances, and enables financial transactions without the costs and risks associated with the use of cash, including theft and cost of travel to pay-in-person
For Banks – Banks have extensive knowledge of financial models and a good reach worldwide. Mobile Commerce provides the banks with an opportunity to further enhance their customer reach by migrating customers upward in the use of banking services - move the "un-banked" community toward the "banked" status.
For Network Operators – MNOs have a unique advantageous position, as they are the first-point contact with the customers, to tap the growing subscriber base with new offerings providing consumers a strong value proposition. Thus, MNOs should be looking at M-banking as an important source of revenue. As the core competence of the MNOs lies in delivering mobility solutions to their customers, it is prudent for them to partner with a financial Institution in order to gain access to credit facilities, credit payment management and other financial services.
Micropayments
In the more affluent economies, a good infrastructure for a cashless environment is already prevalent and most people have bank accounts and access to both debit and credit facilities. On the contrary, in the developing economies, a very large population segment has to rely heavily on cash-based transactions for all their day-to-day expenses. Such need for cash requires adequate cash-handling facilities, which comes at a cost. Furthermore, the particular segment, being neglected by the banking sector, remains un-banked. These factors are incentives in the developing countries to move the population at large away from cash with introductions of low cost solutions such as micro-payments to further efficiency gains.
Recognizing the potential that M-banking holds in strengthening the socioeconomic position of those currently lacking access to banking, especially the rural poor, the two leading mobile operators in the Philippines (SMART and GLOBE) have both become facilitators of banking through the mobiles. Their respective services, SMART Money and GCash, enable users to send and receive money, pay bills and taxes, and purchase items in shops through simple SMS-based services.
SMART Money
The service was launched in December 2000 in co-operation with First E-Bank, which has since been acquired by Banco de Oro, and MasterCard, one of the world’s leading payment services providers. According to SMART, SMART Money was the world’s first re-loadable electronic cash wallet, linked together by their cellular network. Once cash has been transferred to the SMART Money account, it can be used in thousands of shops and restaurants. The cash value can also be used to load airtime, pay utility bills, or transfer money from one SMART Money card to another. Among the Filipino OFWs working overseas, over a million are using the service to transfer almost US$50 million per month into the Philippines economy1.
G-Cash
The service was launched in October 2004, with an initial set of three anchor services; international and domestic remittance, P2P (phone-to-phone or person-to-person) transfers and payments for retail purchases. With G-Cash, all of GLOBE’s subscribers are m-Commerce-enabled. As users do not need to have a card or bank account to be part of the service, G-Cash is able to provide M-Commerce capability to a previously underserved segment of the market, including those who currently do not do banking. Unlike SMART’s approach whereby it operates the service jointly with BDO, GLOBE on its own maintains records of all transactions and arranges settlement between the retailers and the G-Cash customers. G-Cash provides services through close to 4,900 retail outlets nationwide and more than 500 G-Cash partners.
Mobile Remittance
Migrant remittances, which are personal flows from migrants to their friends and families, have become a major source of external development finance, and in the process, play an effective role in reducing poverty. There has been a rising demand of providing such financial services over the mobile network. Capitalizing on the benefits of such a system, remittance services can become cheaper and more convenient, thus improving financial access of migrants, their beneficiaries and the financial intermediaries in the origin countries.
To explore the demand of mobile remittance, let us at first take a look at how big the remittance market is. According to the World Bank, recorded remittances sent home by migrants from developing countries exceeded $200 billion in 2006, up from $193 billion in 2005 and more than double the amount in 2001. The true size of remittances, including unrecorded flows through formal and informal channels, may be even larger. As the chart below portrays, remittances was the second largest source of external finance for developing nations after foreign direct investment (FDI) and more than twice as large as official development assistance (ODA) received by developing countries. Considering that, on an average, banks impose around five percent remittance fee, the market is worth $10 billion, indeed a very lucrative one for mobile operators to tap.
The Philippines - A Case in Point
In 2005, the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) spent $519 million (24,896 Pesos) as remittance fee. According to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), this is equal to almost five percent of the $10.7 billion-worth of remittances received by the Philippines the same year through bank channels.
For instance, there are currently close to 153,000 OFWs in Hong Kong, who make it the fifth biggest source of remittances for the Philippines, next to the United States, Saudi Arabia, Italy, and Japan. According to a study by the World Bank, the OFWs in Hong Kong remitted a total of $338.9 million in 2005, almost $65 million higher than $273.9 million remitted in 2004. Most of them remit at least once a month, sending home an average of $268 per transaction.
Recognizing the immense opportunity that remittance holds, Smart Communications, Inc (Smart), the Philippines' largest wireless service provider, has developed an m-commerce platform, the Smart Services Hub, to provide cash remittance and other financial services and products. Through this platform, migrant workers can send remittances to the Philippines at more affordable rates and, at the speed of a text message, any amount can be remitted from anywhere at any time.
According to the company, the service is part of the global money transfer program of the GSM Association - the program, supported by 19 of the world's leading operators, aims to create a money transfer solution that will take advantage of the pervasiveness of mobile phone networks worldwide in order to lower the cost of remittances.
Through the Smart Services Hub, mobile operators at the sending country are able to offer menu-based services that enable migrant subscribers to use their mobile phones to remit funds drawn from accounts in a partner bank in the sending country. After going though through authorization, clearance and settlement processes, the transaction is completed with the fund having being deposited in an account of the partner bank in the receiving country or in an electronic wallet linked to the recipient's mobile phone.
The Development Bank of the Philippines has also recently formed a strategic partnership with Smart to promote the use of m-commerce in delivering financial services to small and medium-scale enterprises, overseas workers and microfinance institutions.
Microfinance
In the recent past, microfinance programs have become one of the more promising ways to use scarce development funds to achieve the objectives of poverty alleviation.
Traditionally, banks and lending institutions would not lend money to low-income individuals due to various reasons, which include the lack of information about clients, the lack of acceptable collateral, and the high transaction cost of processing small loans. While countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam rely on a large microenterprise sector to fuel the economy, not many financial institutions, including rural banks, until recently, were enthusiastic and well equipped to service their needs. However, currently, the scenario is changing and there has been a growing market in east and south Asia for lending services provided by mostly non-governmental organizations. The rapid growth during the recent years coupled with government encouragement, is likely to create an enormous demand for such services in the near future.
Microfinance through Mobile Technology
Currently, a major constraint to microfinance is the high cost of operating in remote areas. Many institutions are now working toward low-cost delivery options such as Internet banking and cashless transactions to help the rural poor. In fact, it may not be the Internet, but the mobile devices that could be a more efficient tool for such transactions. For people in such rural areas, using computers is often a problem due to faulty Internet connections and frequent power failures. Hence, providing microcredits through a mobile platform (SMS-based) could be the best way to reach out to the poor.
In order to improve efficiency in the delivery of microfinance services, Kenya’s leading mobile operator, Safaricom Ltd, has collaborated with the Commercial Bank of Africa and a microfinance company, Faulu Uganda Limited, to design and test a micro-payment platform called M-PESA. In Kenya, where the banking system is not well developed, such a system will be able to utilize the existing large network of airtime dealers, shops, and kiosks, where cash can be collected and paid in. The micropayment platform, currently being tested, and the pilot study extended to 1,000 users, is likely to benefit both the customer and the service provider, for example, by reducing the time needed to make or process loan repayments.
Conclusion
While it can be argued that M-banking may not be the most necessary factor for an improved banking service in developing countries, it is, however, certain that traditional banking service alone may not result in any significant improvement in providing the un-banked community with access to the financial sector. The speed and efficiency with which money can be transferred and monitored, through such mobile platforms, is likely to be far greater and higher as compared to a cash-based system. Apart from extending customer reach, financial institutions will be able to reduce operational costs, which would have otherwise incurred on disbursement and loan collection. By leveraging operator's retail ecosystem comprising distributors, retailers, and street resellers, they will be able to streamline operations. The customers will also benefit by having better access to loans and lower borrowing costs.
Shaker Ibne Amin is a research analyst at Frost & Sullivan. He focuses on the mobile and wireless sector in Asia-Pacific, covering services, content and applications.
Contact
Media Queries - ANZ: sharmin.jassal@frost.com
Media Queries - Rest of APAC: letticia.leopold@frost.com
All Other Queries: yi.ling@frost.com
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(1 IFC Infodev Report, Micro-Payment Systems and their application to mobile networks, January 2006)
Increasing popularity of remittance services and emergence of various microfinance programs coupled with the proliferation of mobile services in developing countries seem to have created a unique potential to provide financial services to the ‘un-banked’ segment over the mobile network, and at the same time, streamline operations and reduce operational overheads.
Mobile Banking in Developing Countries – An Opportunity
Over the past few years, mobile and wireless market has been one of the fastest growing markets in the world, especially in Asian countries such as China, Indonesia, India, and Philippines where the mobile infrastructure is comparatively much better than the fixed-line infrastructure. Saturation of the mobile subscriber growth and commoditization of voice services has led Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to consider alternative revenue diversification streams. Mobile commerce, which can be defined as "the delivery of trusted transaction services over mobile devices for the exchange of goods and services between consumers and merchants and financial institutions", has emerged as one of such options. The Asia Pacific region is expected to account for more than a third of the $80 billion revenues that the total global Mobile Commerce market is likely to bring in 2009.
Mobile banking or M-Banking, which is a type of financial services offered as a part of mobile commerce, will be a major driver for the adoption of wireless technology in rural areas in developing countries. The service refers to the provisioning and availability of banking and financial services through the mobile technology and the scope of offered services may include facilities to conduct bank and stock market transactions, as well as enabling users to access customized information. Mobile Remittances, Micro-finance and Micro-payments services are likely to fuel the growth of M-banking in the developing countries especially amongst the un-banked segment.
Opportunities
For Users – It facilitates and reduces the cost of remittances, and enables financial transactions without the costs and risks associated with the use of cash, including theft and cost of travel to pay-in-person
For Banks – Banks have extensive knowledge of financial models and a good reach worldwide. Mobile Commerce provides the banks with an opportunity to further enhance their customer reach by migrating customers upward in the use of banking services - move the "un-banked" community toward the "banked" status.
For Network Operators – MNOs have a unique advantageous position, as they are the first-point contact with the customers, to tap the growing subscriber base with new offerings providing consumers a strong value proposition. Thus, MNOs should be looking at M-banking as an important source of revenue. As the core competence of the MNOs lies in delivering mobility solutions to their customers, it is prudent for them to partner with a financial Institution in order to gain access to credit facilities, credit payment management and other financial services.
Micropayments
In the more affluent economies, a good infrastructure for a cashless environment is already prevalent and most people have bank accounts and access to both debit and credit facilities. On the contrary, in the developing economies, a very large population segment has to rely heavily on cash-based transactions for all their day-to-day expenses. Such need for cash requires adequate cash-handling facilities, which comes at a cost. Furthermore, the particular segment, being neglected by the banking sector, remains un-banked. These factors are incentives in the developing countries to move the population at large away from cash with introductions of low cost solutions such as micro-payments to further efficiency gains.
Recognizing the potential that M-banking holds in strengthening the socioeconomic position of those currently lacking access to banking, especially the rural poor, the two leading mobile operators in the Philippines (SMART and GLOBE) have both become facilitators of banking through the mobiles. Their respective services, SMART Money and GCash, enable users to send and receive money, pay bills and taxes, and purchase items in shops through simple SMS-based services.
SMART Money
The service was launched in December 2000 in co-operation with First E-Bank, which has since been acquired by Banco de Oro, and MasterCard, one of the world’s leading payment services providers. According to SMART, SMART Money was the world’s first re-loadable electronic cash wallet, linked together by their cellular network. Once cash has been transferred to the SMART Money account, it can be used in thousands of shops and restaurants. The cash value can also be used to load airtime, pay utility bills, or transfer money from one SMART Money card to another. Among the Filipino OFWs working overseas, over a million are using the service to transfer almost US$50 million per month into the Philippines economy1.
G-Cash
The service was launched in October 2004, with an initial set of three anchor services; international and domestic remittance, P2P (phone-to-phone or person-to-person) transfers and payments for retail purchases. With G-Cash, all of GLOBE’s subscribers are m-Commerce-enabled. As users do not need to have a card or bank account to be part of the service, G-Cash is able to provide M-Commerce capability to a previously underserved segment of the market, including those who currently do not do banking. Unlike SMART’s approach whereby it operates the service jointly with BDO, GLOBE on its own maintains records of all transactions and arranges settlement between the retailers and the G-Cash customers. G-Cash provides services through close to 4,900 retail outlets nationwide and more than 500 G-Cash partners.
Mobile Remittance
Migrant remittances, which are personal flows from migrants to their friends and families, have become a major source of external development finance, and in the process, play an effective role in reducing poverty. There has been a rising demand of providing such financial services over the mobile network. Capitalizing on the benefits of such a system, remittance services can become cheaper and more convenient, thus improving financial access of migrants, their beneficiaries and the financial intermediaries in the origin countries.
To explore the demand of mobile remittance, let us at first take a look at how big the remittance market is. According to the World Bank, recorded remittances sent home by migrants from developing countries exceeded $200 billion in 2006, up from $193 billion in 2005 and more than double the amount in 2001. The true size of remittances, including unrecorded flows through formal and informal channels, may be even larger. As the chart below portrays, remittances was the second largest source of external finance for developing nations after foreign direct investment (FDI) and more than twice as large as official development assistance (ODA) received by developing countries. Considering that, on an average, banks impose around five percent remittance fee, the market is worth $10 billion, indeed a very lucrative one for mobile operators to tap.
The Philippines - A Case in Point
In 2005, the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) spent $519 million (24,896 Pesos) as remittance fee. According to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), this is equal to almost five percent of the $10.7 billion-worth of remittances received by the Philippines the same year through bank channels.
For instance, there are currently close to 153,000 OFWs in Hong Kong, who make it the fifth biggest source of remittances for the Philippines, next to the United States, Saudi Arabia, Italy, and Japan. According to a study by the World Bank, the OFWs in Hong Kong remitted a total of $338.9 million in 2005, almost $65 million higher than $273.9 million remitted in 2004. Most of them remit at least once a month, sending home an average of $268 per transaction.
Recognizing the immense opportunity that remittance holds, Smart Communications, Inc (Smart), the Philippines' largest wireless service provider, has developed an m-commerce platform, the Smart Services Hub, to provide cash remittance and other financial services and products. Through this platform, migrant workers can send remittances to the Philippines at more affordable rates and, at the speed of a text message, any amount can be remitted from anywhere at any time.
According to the company, the service is part of the global money transfer program of the GSM Association - the program, supported by 19 of the world's leading operators, aims to create a money transfer solution that will take advantage of the pervasiveness of mobile phone networks worldwide in order to lower the cost of remittances.
Through the Smart Services Hub, mobile operators at the sending country are able to offer menu-based services that enable migrant subscribers to use their mobile phones to remit funds drawn from accounts in a partner bank in the sending country. After going though through authorization, clearance and settlement processes, the transaction is completed with the fund having being deposited in an account of the partner bank in the receiving country or in an electronic wallet linked to the recipient's mobile phone.
The Development Bank of the Philippines has also recently formed a strategic partnership with Smart to promote the use of m-commerce in delivering financial services to small and medium-scale enterprises, overseas workers and microfinance institutions.
Microfinance
In the recent past, microfinance programs have become one of the more promising ways to use scarce development funds to achieve the objectives of poverty alleviation.
Traditionally, banks and lending institutions would not lend money to low-income individuals due to various reasons, which include the lack of information about clients, the lack of acceptable collateral, and the high transaction cost of processing small loans. While countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam rely on a large microenterprise sector to fuel the economy, not many financial institutions, including rural banks, until recently, were enthusiastic and well equipped to service their needs. However, currently, the scenario is changing and there has been a growing market in east and south Asia for lending services provided by mostly non-governmental organizations. The rapid growth during the recent years coupled with government encouragement, is likely to create an enormous demand for such services in the near future.
Microfinance through Mobile Technology
Currently, a major constraint to microfinance is the high cost of operating in remote areas. Many institutions are now working toward low-cost delivery options such as Internet banking and cashless transactions to help the rural poor. In fact, it may not be the Internet, but the mobile devices that could be a more efficient tool for such transactions. For people in such rural areas, using computers is often a problem due to faulty Internet connections and frequent power failures. Hence, providing microcredits through a mobile platform (SMS-based) could be the best way to reach out to the poor.
In order to improve efficiency in the delivery of microfinance services, Kenya’s leading mobile operator, Safaricom Ltd, has collaborated with the Commercial Bank of Africa and a microfinance company, Faulu Uganda Limited, to design and test a micro-payment platform called M-PESA. In Kenya, where the banking system is not well developed, such a system will be able to utilize the existing large network of airtime dealers, shops, and kiosks, where cash can be collected and paid in. The micropayment platform, currently being tested, and the pilot study extended to 1,000 users, is likely to benefit both the customer and the service provider, for example, by reducing the time needed to make or process loan repayments.
Conclusion
While it can be argued that M-banking may not be the most necessary factor for an improved banking service in developing countries, it is, however, certain that traditional banking service alone may not result in any significant improvement in providing the un-banked community with access to the financial sector. The speed and efficiency with which money can be transferred and monitored, through such mobile platforms, is likely to be far greater and higher as compared to a cash-based system. Apart from extending customer reach, financial institutions will be able to reduce operational costs, which would have otherwise incurred on disbursement and loan collection. By leveraging operator's retail ecosystem comprising distributors, retailers, and street resellers, they will be able to streamline operations. The customers will also benefit by having better access to loans and lower borrowing costs.
Shaker Ibne Amin is a research analyst at Frost & Sullivan. He focuses on the mobile and wireless sector in Asia-Pacific, covering services, content and applications.
Contact
Media Queries - ANZ: sharmin.jassal@frost.com
Media Queries - Rest of APAC: letticia.leopold@frost.com
All Other Queries: yi.ling@frost.com
About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company, has been partnering with clients to support the development of innovative strategies for more than 40 years. The company's industry expertise integrates growth consulting, growth partnership services, and corporate management training to identify and develop opportunities. Frost & Sullivan serves an extensive clientele that includes Global 1000 companies, emerging companies, and the investment community by providing comprehensive industry coverage that reflects a unique global perspective and combines ongoing analysis of markets, technologies, econometrics, and demographics. For more information, visit www.frost.com
(1 IFC Infodev Report, Micro-Payment Systems and their application to mobile networks, January 2006)
samedi 3 novembre 2007
Carlos Creus Moreira Launches the EuroHub in Malaga
OISTE and Malaga Valley Group today signed an agreement to use WISeKey’s Common Global Root and scalable PKI hierarchy to establish a Euro-African Hub
Malaga, Spain and Geneva, Switzerland October 22, 2007
OISTE will help the government of Malaga become the new Euro-African Hub, with the aim of optimizing economic-social-cultural relations between Europe and Africa. This will be accomplished using the infrastructure of the Technology Park of Malaga and Malaga Valley and its unique geopolitical location. The project will be financed by the private sector, the European Union (EU) and the Spanish government.
Spain is eager to increase support to its continental neighbour, and the establishment of a Euro-African Hub is a logical and essential step. The Hub will become both a super-platform for optimizing commercial, technological and cultural links between the European Union and Africa, and also meeting-point and a place for research and study. Its location in Malaga is the work of the International Organization for the Security of Electronic Transactions (OISTE), the provincial government and the local business sector. The Hub is a natural step following the significant investments already deployed to convert Malaga into a leader of Euro-African initiatives. The provincial government of Malaga, with the help of Madrid and Brussels, has the firm objective to instantiate this new Hub as one of the major superhighways of Information Technology and Worldwide Communications (ICT).
To make the most of the potential of this project, the signatories intend to transform Malaga with this important technological Hub, which includes Internet technologies, and the new generation of mobile technologies, to provide sustainable electronic solutions, where security barriers and trust related to the use of public networks can be discussed. The identification of requirements for security services and the cost effective and the profitable aspect of this platform will ensure the provision of highly innovative services.
The Euro-African Hub will operate in a first phase from Geneva, in the highly protected buildings of WISeKey. The subsequent transfer to Malaga will take place once the on-site infrastructure is fully operational. This innovative system will combine multiple physical and electronic security systems utilizing PKI solutions within a “zero risk” secure environment, thanks to the extensive use of VPN (private data network) systems.
The global growth of the Internet is leading the world of business in unimaginable directions. Maintaining data privacy and confidentiality is a huge cost for companies, and the greater the geographic scope, the more complex and expensive are its communications.
"This initiative is an evolution of the agreement signed during the TELECOM'99 ITU in Geneva in November 1999, based on a partnership between WISeKey and the ITU to establish certification authorities in developing countries. Thanks to OISTE and WISeKey, 198 member countries of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) understand the need for a global PKI structure under a shared common ROOT as it has been developed for OISTE and operated by WISeKey," said Philippe Doubre, president of OISTE, (http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/e-strategy/ecdc/ra/introduction.html)"
"WISeKey is currently mobilizing the public and private sectors in the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) to support the deployment of NETeID, a comprehensive system of electronic payment through Internet-based digital identification. It is hoped that the Hub of Malaga Valley can also join this ambitious project," said Carlos Moreira.
"The creation of a Euro-African Hub will give a clear and effective answer to all cooperation activities between African and European countries. Technology will allow us to build that sort of bridges that will contribute to the development of Africa by bringing knowledge to people, and thus by an initiative leaded also by Civil Society, where the Asociacion de Usuarios de Internet (AUI) is proud of being a protagonist in this project," affirmed Miguel Perez Subias, President of AUI and promoter of the HUB during the Malaga Valley meeting.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Members
Francisco de la Torre
ALCALDE DE MÁLAGA Abad, Fernando
Secretario General
GECOPI – Asociación de Empresas Gestoras de Cooperativas y Proyectos Inmobiliarios
Alarcón, Ginés
Consejero Delegado
TSYSTEM Alierta, Cesar
Presidente
TELEFONICA
Alvarez, Luis
Presidente
BT GLOBAL SERVICES Arranz Soler, Cesar
Presidente Ejecutivo
NEOSKY
Badía, Enrique
Miembro del Consejo Asesor
CREMADES & CALVO – SOTELO Bautista García, Eduardo
Presidente del Consejo de Dirección
SGAE
Bergareche, José Mª
Consejero Delegado
GRUPO VOCENTO Bernad Bonilla, Carlos
Director General Sur de Europa
ENVAC IBERIA
Casajoana, Xavier
Presidente
VOZ TELECOM SISTEMAS, S.L Cebrián Echarre, Juan Luís
Consejero Delegado
GRUPO PRISA
Cortés, Santiago
Presidente
HP Cortés, Miguel Ángel
Diputado del PP
Consejero
CREMADES & CALVO-SOTELO
Cremades, Javier
Presidente
CREMADES & CALVO – SOTELO de Benito, Ignacio
Director General
AEDE – Asociación de Editores de Diarios Españoles
de Jong, Rene
Presidente
INTERNET ADVENTAGE, S.L. de la Calle Martín, Adelaida
Rectora
UNIVERSIDAD DE MÁLAGA
del Rivero, Marieta
Consejera Delegada
NOKIA Del Sol Moreno, Francisco
Director General
MOBILE 365
Estrada Fernández, José
Director Gerente
Empresa Municipal de Iniciativas y Actividades Empresariales de Málaga, S.A. PROMALAGA Fernández Pujals, Leopoldo
Presidente
JAZZTEL
Fischer, Alexander
Director General
ZIELTRAFFIC Fuentes López, Mª José
Country Manager
GRUPO BUSCPERSON TELECOMUNICACIONES, S.L. A BRIGHTPOINT COMPANY
Galdón Brugaroles, Eugenio
Presidente
ONO Gamero del Castillo, Pedro
Presidente
TESTA
Gandarias Carmona, Manuel
Presidente
LIVE IN SPAIN García, Belarmino
Consejero Delegado
FRANCE TELECOM ESPAÑA
Genaro González, Martín
Presidente
GOWEX Hatchwell, Mauricio
Presidente
GRUPO EXCEM
Hylander, Gustavo
Director de Relaciones Institucionales
FUJITSU MANUFACTURING ESPAÑA Lázaro, J. Pablo
Presidente
FEDERACIÓN DE COMERCIO ELECTRÓNICO Y MARKETING DIRECTO
Llorente, Alejandro
Presidente
COLLOSA – Construcciones y Obras Llorente, S.A Linares Palacios, Abel
Consejero Delegado
IT – DEUSTO
Lozano Egea, Fermín
Consejero Delegado
11811 NUEVA INFORMACIÓN TELEFÓNICA, S.A.U Marqueño, José
Presidente
CONSEJO GENERAL DEL NOTARIADO
Mateos, Petra
Presidenta
HISPASAT Mazagatos, Alberto
Director General
CISCO
Medel Cámara, Braulio
Presidente
UNICAJA Medina Muñoz, José Javier
Decano
COITT
Moraleda, Amparo
Presidenta
IBM ESPAÑA S.A. Moreira, Carlos
Presidente
WISEKEY
Moreno, José Mª
Consejero Delegado
NEXTEL ENGINEERING Muñoz Ballesta, Juan Luis
Director Gerente
CEMI – Centro Municipal de Informática/ Ayuntamiento de Málaga
Moulet, Antonio
Presidente
NEC IBÉRICA, S.A.U. Ontiveros Baeza, Emilio
Consejero Delegado
ANALISTAS FINANCIEROS INTERNACIONALES
Paraja Tuero, Roberto
/ Presidente
SOCIEDAD PROMOTORA DE LAS TELECOMUNICACIONES EN ASTURIAS, S.A. CAJASTUR Pérez, Martín
Presidente
ASIMELEC
Pérez Subías, Miguel
Presidente
ASOCIACION DE USUARIOS DE INTERNET Puerta Notario, Antonio
Decano
ESCUELA TÉCNICA SUPERIOR DE INGENIEROS DE TELECOMUNICACIONES
Ramiro, Javier
Presidente
PHILIPS IBERICA, S.A. Ramos Chaves, Isla
Directora General
LENOVO
Redondo Iglesias, Alfredo
Consejero Delegado
ALCATEL-LUCENT Rivas-Micoud, Alejandro
Presidente
ALÓ COMUNICACIONES
Rodríguez Carro, Vicente
CEO INTEGROMICS Rodríguez Cepeda, Eugenio
Decano
COLEGIO DE REGISTRADORES DE LA PROPIEDAD
Rodríguez Zapatero, Javier
Presidente
YAHOO! IBERIA Rodríguez, Fernando
Consejero Delegado
OPTIMEDIA
Román, Francisco
Consejero Delegado
VODAFONE ESPAÑA Romera Lubias, Felipe
Director General
PARQUE TECNOLÓGICO DE ANDALUCÍA
Ruiz Padilla, José Miguel
Decano
COLEGIO OFICIAL DE INGENIEROS DE TELECOMUNICACIONES. DEMARCACION ANDALUCIA ORIENTAL Y MELILLA Salas Márquez, Francisco José
Concejal Delegado de Nuevas Tecnologías
AYUNTAMIENTO DE MÁLAGA
Sánchez, Gilberto
Presidente
CLEARWIRE Sánchez Ortega, Manuel
Presidente
TELVENT
Soto Serrano, Juan
Presidente de honor de Hewlett Packard España
Presidente Comisión de Estudio para el Desarrollo de la Sociedad de la Información
HP
COMISIÓN DE ESTUDIO PARA EL DESARROLLO DE LA SOCIEDAD DE LA INFORMACIÓN Steinberg, Victor
Consejero Delegado
VICTOR STEINBERG Y ASOCIADOS
Tripero, Rafael
Director General
GRUPO BEM ESPAÑA Ulibarri, José Luis
Presidente
ASODAL
Varsavsky, Martín
Presidente
FON Vázquez Quintana, José María
Velázquez-Gaztelu, Cándido Vidal-Quadras, Alejo
Vicepresidente
PARLAMENTO EUROPEO
Ybarra Zubiria, Álvaro
Presidente
ISOFOTON
Contact:
WISeKey SA:
Daniel Ybarra, VP Corporate Communication
Tel: +41-22-594-30-00
Email: dybarra@wisekey.com
lundi 29 octobre 2007
Europau^sur.com "Con perseverancia y vocación siempre llegan los resultados"
"Con perseverancia y vocación siempre llegan los resultados"
MENU VERTICAL
La Línea
Detalle Noticia
28/10/2007 02:54 ESTRELLA BLANCO ENTREVISTA
LA LÍNEA.¿Cómo se le ocurrió la idea de crear Wisekey?
-Wisekey nació como resultado de mis años en la Universidad de RMIT en Australia donde supervisaba un proyecto en el área de criptografía y seguridad de las transacciones electrónicas. Durante ese periodo dirigía un laboratorio de las Naciones Unidas que formaba a responsables de seguridad gubernamental informática, a administradores de redes y otros profesionales de las nuevas tecnologías de la información.
En RMIT empecé a diseñar lo que luego más tarde se convirtió en Wisekey. En esa época tuve la oportunidad de trabajar con expertos que en ese momento estaban creando la www. Me di cuenta de que la web es muy insegura y que pronto la seguridad se iba a convertir en un elemento esencial para el desarrollo de la misma, por eso desarrollé con mis expertos en Wisekey las tecnologías necesarias para permitir a la web ser más segura.
Wisekey fue en su creación y sigue siendo una compañía única mezclando tecnologías de alta seguridad, respetando la independencia y confianza para que las personas puedan utilizar internet sin tener que perder el control de su identidad digital.
-¿Qué han supuesto estos sistemas de seguridad para internet?
-La seguridad en internet ha traído cosas buenas y malas. Existe actualmente en los Estados Unidos un debate continuo entre los que defienden el derecho ilimitado de libre expresión y los que quieren garantizar que los niños no tengan acceso a materiales pornográficos, por ejemplo.
Wisekey resuelve un problema esencial de seguridad en internet que es la identificación de las personas que lo utilizan. Ésto permite a cada persona poder, a través de una llave, acceder a puertas en internet donde ellos son los únicos autorizados.
-Wisekey garantiza la seguridad en la red. ¿Qué ofrece esta compañía en concreto?
-Acceso a una capa segura en internet a través de nuestro servicio de alta seguridad, donde todos los participantes están certificados y la interacción tiene lugar a escala mundial. En este entorno, todas las etapas requeridas para adelantar una transacción, desde la negociación del contrato hasta la firma, están determinadas y pueden ser archivadas, si así se solicita. Ofrecemos sistemas racionalizados y simples, para una fácil instalación a costo reducido. Además Wisekeypermite que las entidades de todo el globo interactúen y negocien con seguridad en internet.
Por medio de la interconexión de los centros principales de comercio electrónico a través del planeta, la red de infraestructura de autoridades de registro y certificación de Wisekey establecerá nuevas perspectivas para el crecimiento económico y contribuirá a colmar la brecha digital, gracias al desarrollo de nuevos servicios en línea tanto en los países en desarrollo como en los desarrollados.
-¿Ha sido difícil llegar al lugar en el que está?
-Como todo en la vida, la perseverancia y la vocación siempre nos hacen llegar a resultados. Lo más difícil fue luchar contra la ignorancia de las personas en el tema de la seguridad en internet y sus peligros.
-¿Esperaba recibir la distinción de Hombre del Año 2007 de la publicación L'Agefi? ¿Cómo la recibió?
-No lo esperaba pues esta distinción es muy prestigiosa en Suiza y los otros hombres del año fueron el presidente del banco de inversión UBS, Peter A. Wuffli, y Ernesto Bertarelli, fundador del equipo de vela de la Sociedad Náutica de Ginebra, Alinghi.
El hecho de que me la dieran a mí fue un orgullo para mi equipo pues en Wisekey, aunque yo sea la figura pública, el trabajo se hace colectivamente y todos merecemos este reconocimiento. Yo sólo vinculo la energía que todos ponemos en desarrollar Wisekey.
-¿Qué vinculación mantiene con La Línea de la Concepción? ¿Su familia sigue aquí? ¿Visita el municipio?
-La Línea de la Concepción está en mi corazón y en mi memoria y la visito de vez en cuando, de hecho voy para la Feria algunas veces. Me gusta llevar a mis seis hijos para que vean de donde vengo. Ellos son suizos pero están muy interesados en la cultura andaluza. Tengo todavía tíos y primos allí que también vienen a visitarme de vez en cuando articulo
MENU VERTICAL
La Línea
Detalle Noticia
28/10/2007 02:54 ESTRELLA BLANCO ENTREVISTA
LA LÍNEA.¿Cómo se le ocurrió la idea de crear Wisekey?
-Wisekey nació como resultado de mis años en la Universidad de RMIT en Australia donde supervisaba un proyecto en el área de criptografía y seguridad de las transacciones electrónicas. Durante ese periodo dirigía un laboratorio de las Naciones Unidas que formaba a responsables de seguridad gubernamental informática, a administradores de redes y otros profesionales de las nuevas tecnologías de la información.
En RMIT empecé a diseñar lo que luego más tarde se convirtió en Wisekey. En esa época tuve la oportunidad de trabajar con expertos que en ese momento estaban creando la www. Me di cuenta de que la web es muy insegura y que pronto la seguridad se iba a convertir en un elemento esencial para el desarrollo de la misma, por eso desarrollé con mis expertos en Wisekey las tecnologías necesarias para permitir a la web ser más segura.
Wisekey fue en su creación y sigue siendo una compañía única mezclando tecnologías de alta seguridad, respetando la independencia y confianza para que las personas puedan utilizar internet sin tener que perder el control de su identidad digital.
-¿Qué han supuesto estos sistemas de seguridad para internet?
-La seguridad en internet ha traído cosas buenas y malas. Existe actualmente en los Estados Unidos un debate continuo entre los que defienden el derecho ilimitado de libre expresión y los que quieren garantizar que los niños no tengan acceso a materiales pornográficos, por ejemplo.
Wisekey resuelve un problema esencial de seguridad en internet que es la identificación de las personas que lo utilizan. Ésto permite a cada persona poder, a través de una llave, acceder a puertas en internet donde ellos son los únicos autorizados.
-Wisekey garantiza la seguridad en la red. ¿Qué ofrece esta compañía en concreto?
-Acceso a una capa segura en internet a través de nuestro servicio de alta seguridad, donde todos los participantes están certificados y la interacción tiene lugar a escala mundial. En este entorno, todas las etapas requeridas para adelantar una transacción, desde la negociación del contrato hasta la firma, están determinadas y pueden ser archivadas, si así se solicita. Ofrecemos sistemas racionalizados y simples, para una fácil instalación a costo reducido. Además Wisekeypermite que las entidades de todo el globo interactúen y negocien con seguridad en internet.
Por medio de la interconexión de los centros principales de comercio electrónico a través del planeta, la red de infraestructura de autoridades de registro y certificación de Wisekey establecerá nuevas perspectivas para el crecimiento económico y contribuirá a colmar la brecha digital, gracias al desarrollo de nuevos servicios en línea tanto en los países en desarrollo como en los desarrollados.
-¿Ha sido difícil llegar al lugar en el que está?
-Como todo en la vida, la perseverancia y la vocación siempre nos hacen llegar a resultados. Lo más difícil fue luchar contra la ignorancia de las personas en el tema de la seguridad en internet y sus peligros.
-¿Esperaba recibir la distinción de Hombre del Año 2007 de la publicación L'Agefi? ¿Cómo la recibió?
-No lo esperaba pues esta distinción es muy prestigiosa en Suiza y los otros hombres del año fueron el presidente del banco de inversión UBS, Peter A. Wuffli, y Ernesto Bertarelli, fundador del equipo de vela de la Sociedad Náutica de Ginebra, Alinghi.
El hecho de que me la dieran a mí fue un orgullo para mi equipo pues en Wisekey, aunque yo sea la figura pública, el trabajo se hace colectivamente y todos merecemos este reconocimiento. Yo sólo vinculo la energía que todos ponemos en desarrollar Wisekey.
-¿Qué vinculación mantiene con La Línea de la Concepción? ¿Su familia sigue aquí? ¿Visita el municipio?
-La Línea de la Concepción está en mi corazón y en mi memoria y la visito de vez en cuando, de hecho voy para la Feria algunas veces. Me gusta llevar a mis seis hijos para que vean de donde vengo. Ellos son suizos pero están muy interesados en la cultura andaluza. Tengo todavía tíos y primos allí que también vienen a visitarme de vez en cuando articulo
dimanche 28 octobre 2007
ACCESS AND IDENTITY MANAGEMENT SOLUTION ELIMINATES TRADITIONAL PKI ISSUES WITHOUT COMPROMISING ON TRUST
ACCESS AND IDENTITY MANAGEMENT SOLUTION ELIMINATES TRADITIONAL PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) ISSUES WITHOUT COMPROMISING ON TRUST
Simplified, easy-to-integrate CertifyID suite by Wisekey delivers cost-effective security solution in a flexible manner that overcomes traditional infrastructure and operational restrictions
Geneva, Switzerland, Monday 22nd October 2007 - Wisekey - a leading provider of digital security identity authentication and access management solutions - today announced its CertifyID Suite has overcome the traditional roadblocks, which have hindered the uptake of PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) - complexity, cost, and inability to seamlessly integrate with organization’s existing applications - by developing a solution, which is compatible with the commonly used Windows Server Platform. The CertifyID Suite allows for the more creative and flexible use of the PKI technology by enabling a diversity of deployment models to eliminate the limited in-house versus managed digital security and identity management debate; and demystifying the legal issues, which has plagued PKI take up.
By mainstreaming the functionalities of PKI, the technology can be massively applied and easily integrated into organizations, so individual's identity and access rights can be managed by organizations on a wide scale basis. The traditional and complicated approach (which was intended to ensure security no matter what) has had the net result of insecurity – very few organizations have chosen to use the technology and seek much less secure, but practical alternatives instead.
Wisekey has taken a bottom-up approach and built its CertifyID platform based on an organization's traditional behavior – to manage the identity of its organization and the identities of its communities in accordance with customary business practice. For example, companies issue business cards and email accounts to their employees without fear, and they should be able to take the same approach to using PKI for digital identity and access management without having to fear the legal uncertainties that have been voiced by many.
By building its CertifyID suite on a simplified PKI approach, Wisekey has not eliminated the traditional levels of security and reliability that PKI offers. On the contrary, WISeKey has added layers of security and redundancy with a wide variety of modules that form part of a comprehensive PKI suite, such as full data persistence, disaster recovery functionality, CRL Management, and true OCSP validation. This means organizations can simply activate the certification services already in the Windows Server Platform and add the CertifyID Suite which bolsters their security, functionality and their capacity to issue and manage publicly trusted certificates, without having to implement traditional PKI software, or outsourcing to a managed PKI service provider. The modules, which make up the CertifyID suite can also be installed separately for organizations seeking to add some components to the PKI systems they are already operating as a means of enhancing their security and functionality.
"Wisekey’s next challenge is to build PKI technology so seamlessly within its CertifyID suite that organizations won't be aware they are using PKI. Once the technology is at this stage, people will automatically trust their online interactions and appreciate the new improved secure functionalities, without question or fear,” stated Juan Avellan, Deputy CEO, Wisekey. "Although this may be counterintuitive for the PKI specialists, Wisekey believes trust and reliability of communications is what organizations and people interact on (and expect to interact on), on a day-to-day basis.”
Wisekey’s upgraded CertifyID suite, which is easily integrated into existing organization's infrastructure, is being widely deployed by public and private sector organizations, of all sizes, from government and health service organizations through to the automotive, aerospace, financial service, and manufacturing industries.
mercredi 24 octobre 2007
Carlos Moreira announcing the Euro-Africa Hub at the Malaga Valley 2007 gathering
Carlos Moreira with the Malaga Valley representatives.
La organización Málaga Valley busca sede
El 'Club Málaga Valley e-27', formado por las principales empresas del sector de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC), ha dado hoy el visto bueno a la puesta en marcha de un plan estratégico para situar a la ciudad malagueña como la gran capital tecnológica de Europa.
Dentro de este plan, que han aprobado los presidentes de las empresas y entidades en la tercera cumbre del club que se celebra desde su creación, se recogen actuaciones ante la Comisión Europea así como un estudio en profundidad de las posibilidades estratégicas de desarrollo de la ciudad. Uno de los principales objetivos a corto plazo del club Málaga Valley es encontrar una sede en la capital malagueña para la organización.
"Estamos trabajando para crear entre todos el ecosistema de tecnologías de la información más avanzado de Europa", ha señalado el alcalde de Málaga , Francisco de la Torre , en su discurso de apertura de la reunión, en el que ha destacado también que "la ciudad se está convirtiendo en un referente de innovación tecnológica".
El Málaga Valley se creó en octubre del año pasado a iniciativa de un grupo de líderes empresariales relacionados con esta industria y con el objetivo de imitar al Silicon Valley norteamericano para situarse como el centro de la I+D del continente europeo en el sector.
Para uno de los principales promotores de la idea y presidente del bufete de abogados especializado en tecnologías TIC Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo, Javier Cremades, actuaciones como esta "consolidan un proyecto que al principio nos ilusionó a todos pero que tenía difícil encaje en lo que se venía haciendo en el sector".
Ha señalado como otro objetivo a cumplir, además de la puesta en marcha de este plan, que el Málaga Valley cuente con un espacio físico donde desarrollarse -que podría situarse en las inmediaciones del Parque Tecnológico de Andalucía- porque "necesitamos un espacio donde la gente encuentre ese ecosistema para venir y trabajar".
Comité local
Por otra parte, el alcalde de Málaga ha señalado como futuras actuaciones del consistorio la creación de una oficina municipal de recepción "que facilite la búsqueda de vivienda, de colegios y de instalaciones adecuadas para las empresas que se instalen" en la ciudad.
Además ha destacado la creación de un comité local del Málaga Valley, integrado por 27 empresas, para acercar las nuevas tecnologías a las pequeñas y medianas empresas de la capital.
La creación de una red inalámbrica para acceder a Internet en la ciudad -que cuenta ya con más de veinte puntos-, un futuro congreso de radiofrecuencia, la creación de un programa municipal de nuevas tecnologías o la nueva concejalía de comunicación, son algunas de las iniciativas que De la Torre ha señalado también como favorecedoras de este proyecto.
El club Málaga Valley, que se reunirá de nuevo el 8 de abril de 2008, está compuesto por unas setenta empresas de nivel internacional como Telefónica, Vodafone, Philips o Yahoo! y sirve de foro de intercambio y de motor de nuevas propuestas para avanzar en este sector.
jeudi 18 octobre 2007
"Ha llegado un momento en que Google sabe demasiado de nosotros"
"Ha llegado un momento en que Google sabe demasiado de nosotros"
Lo primero que sorprende de Carlos Moreira al oírle hablar, es su acento profundamente suizo bañando un español fluido y casi perfecto. Moreira nació en la Línea de la Concepción (Cádiz) pero de joven se fue a Suiza a estudiar hostelería. Sin embargo le pudo más la diplomacia (en Naciones Unidas) y la tecnología, por este orden. Tras su paso por la ONU, y también a raíz de él, Moreira ideó Wisekey, un proyecto que comenzó siendo una alternativa para que los gobiernos tuvieran páginas web seguras, y que ahora le ha hecho socio preferente de Microsoft en el apartado de confidencialidad de los usuarios del sistema operativo Windows Vista.
Autor: Jordi Sabaté | Fecha de publicación: 18 de octubre de 2007 ¿Qué es exactamente Wisekey?
"Wisekey también proporciona seguridad al internauta mediante la creación de un entorno protegido en el que pueda moverse"
Wisekey es una empresa que hoy en día garantiza la confidencialidad de la identidad digital del usuario a través de un sistema que le permite manejarse por Internet con sus credenciales debidamente encriptadas por él mismo.
Por otro lado, Wisekey también proporciona seguridad al internauta mediante la creación de un entorno protegido en el que pueda moverse, votar a sus representantes ante las instituciones o pagar sus impuestos con total tranquilidad. Este entorno generalmente se comprende como el de las administraciones y servicios del estado al que pertenece el usuario, pero no tiene por qué ser así.
De hecho, en los países más dinámicos, los usuarios quieren trascender a los entornos estatales, lo que nosotros llamamos la raíz, y participar en otros entornos internacionales, lo cual está muy en la lógica de Internet. Wisekey les permite hacerlo mediante la federación de identidades internacionales.
¿Cómo surguió la idea de crear la empresa?
Wisekey comenzó siendo una cosa un poco distinta de lo que hoy día es. Hacia 1999 yo era el director del Área de Comercio Electrónico de la ONU y residía en Ginebra desde hacía años. Allí estaba en permanente contracto con los científicos del CERN, Tim Berners-Lee y Robert Caillau, que habían creado el protocolo Word Wide Web (www), que había abierto la Red a los usuarios.
Por aquel entonces los gobiernos comenzaban a meterse en Internet, pero con muchas cautelas en materia de seguridad. Las empresas de seguridad eran todas americanas, el ICANN, el órgano que regula Internet es americano... Así que desde la ONU se comenzó a pensar en crear un sistema de seguridad para los gobiernos que no crease tanta dependencia de los Estados Unidos.
Fue así como ideamos Wisekey, como una empresa que ofreciera una alternativa que garantizase neutralidad entre los gobiernos en tema de seguridad. Nadie quiere que la llave de su casa la tenga el vecino, ¿no? Pronto comenzamos a trabajar con numerosos gobiernos para crear lo que nosotros llamamos la 'raíz' propia de seguridad de un sistema, que es el entorno seguro del que le hablaba antes, en el que cada estado tiene las llaves de acceso a sus archivos confidenciales.
¿Distingue usted entre seguridad y confidencialidad? ¿Cómo definiría cada una?
"Antes que europeo o español o andaluz soy Carlos Moreira, un individuo que trasciende fronteras, por lo que no quiero que un gobierno tenga las llaves de mi identidad digital"
Precisamente yo distingo ambos aspectos. Para nosotros la seguridad es el entorno, la garantía de que la estructura administrativa en la que te mueves es segura y puede defenderse de ataques externos. Eso es lo que correspondería a la raíz de seguridad de cada estado.
Pero antes que europeo o español o andaluz soy Carlos Moreira, un individuo que trasciende fronteras, por lo que no quiero que un gobierno tenga las llaves de mi identidad digital. Eso es algo personal e intransferible de cada persona, algo que no es equivalente a un pasaporte que dice: "tú has nacido en...".
La identidad digital equivale más bien a la partida de nacimiento, a un papel que dice que, efectivamente, "has nacido". A partir de ahí, el resto de datos son asunto tuyo, y de eso puede encargarse perfectamente Wisekey también. Eso es lo que entendemos por confidencialidad, el que puedas encriptar personalmente tu identidad frente a cualquier intromisión.
"Le estamos dando una neutralidad que Internet no tenía hasta ahora a través de Wisekey" , ha declarado recientemente usted. ¿Han pasado de trabajar por la confidencialidad de grandes entidades y estados a democratizar las posibilidades de proteger la identidad digital de cada individuo? ¿Es decir, que cada usuario pueda controlar sus datos en Internet de modo eficaz, personal y sin la intervención de terceros (administraciones, entidades certificadoras, etc)?
"Regulamos situaciones donde podría producirse un abuso por parte de una entidad superior sobre el usuario"
Efectivamente, como te decía, para nosotros la seguridad es un nivel de entorno, pero la confidencial es una calidad del individuo, es su intimidad digital; sus datos y la seguridad de que puede moverse por la Red con ellos sin el miedo de que el rastro que deja sirva a terceros para poder manipular ya no solamente sus cuentas bancarias, sino sus gustos o el tipo de publicidad que quiere recibir en su correo electrónico.
Es decir, que regulamos situaciones donde podría producirse un abuso por parte de una entidad superior sobre el usuario; ya digo que no necesariamente tiene que ser un uso fraudulento de la identidad digital del individuo, pero sí que éste pueda evitar que de tanto acudir a determinado servicio, éste acabe sabiendo todo sobre él, o que su gobierno acumule datos sobre él que no tiene por qué saber.
Microsoft diseñó una herramienta de encriptación y centralización de datos del usuario, Passport, que resultó un fracaso no por ineficacia, sino porque finalmente los datos encriptados de los usuarios obraban en poder de la empresa. ¿Era realmente arriesgado que una sola empresa centralizase la gestión de los datos de todos sus usuarios?
Claro que era arriesgado, pero es que además era sospechoso, y lo digo siendo hoy en día el socio preferente de Microsoft en los temas de identidad digital. Pero lo cortés no quita lo valiente, y no era coherente ni bueno que Microsoft poseyera los datos de todos sus usuarios.
Finalmente Passport fue abandonado como proyecto por la presión de los usuarios y ahora los servicios de la empresa funcionan con Wisekey, un sistema descentralizado donde los datos personales son gestionados y conocidos sólo por el propio usuario.
En contraposición, en mi opinión existe un nuevo peligro de concentración de datos de los usuarios en una sola empresa, y me refiero en concreto a Google. Ha llegado un momento en que Google sabe demasiado de nosotros.
"Si buscas en Google, la empresa sabe lo que has buscado. ¿Es seguro? ¿Hasta qué punto puede Google puede garantizar la seguridad de tantos datos?"
Si tienes Gmail, almacenas hasta tres Gigabytes de información personal en los servidores de Google (fotos, archivos, conversaciones, etc); si usas Google Docs pones tus documentos en manos de Google. Si buscas en Google, la empresa sabe lo que has buscado. ¿Es seguro? ¿Hasta qué punto puede Google puede garantizar la seguridad de tantos datos?
Esa es la nueva polémica del momento en cuanto a confidencialidad, y las primeras quejas no han venido de las instituciones o los estados, sino de los individuos que se han dado cuenta de todo el material que Google acumulaba. Por eso recientemente la empresa ha tenido que hacer algunas concesión, como la de limitar el tiempo que conservará los datos del usuario.
¿Es similar Wisekey a otros sistemas de gestión de identidades descentralizados como OpenId?
Es similar y alternativo. OpenId es ahora la herramienta que promociona un fuerte lobby en Estados Unidos detrás del cual están empresas como Sun Microsystems y otras.
¿En qué se distingue Wisekey de los certificados digitales emitidos por entidades homologadas por los estados, o del e-DNI? ¿Aspiran ustedes a sustituirlos?
Aspiramos a colaborar con los estados y a ampliar las posibilidades de actuación de los documentos que me mencionas, pero no a sustituir a los e-DNI o a las certificaciones digitales. En algunos países podemos generar certificados digitales de cara a que el individuo pueda operar con la administración, y en otros generamos identidades digitales que tienen un rango de posibilidades más amplio.
Junto a Steve Ballmer, presidente de Microsoft
Queremos crear identidades digitales que permitan actuar no sólo en un determinado país o administración, sino que tengan ámbito internacional y sirvan para algo más que para hacer gestiones administrativas.
Queremos hacer identidades soberanas, por decirlo de algún modo, que permitan al usuario manejar sus cuentas bancarias desde su navegador, por ejemplo, sin tener que pasar por la página de su banco, donde le cobran comisiones cada vez que hace una transferencia o envía dinero al extranjero.
¿Qué piensa del e-DNI? ¿Se contrapone como documento oficial homolgado por un estado a los posibles certificados personales que pueda general Wisekey?
Creo que el e-DNI es un documento que aunque válido, está limitado en sus posibilidades. Nosotros hemos creado ahora la Wisekey Card, que es el equivalente físico a la identidad digital, y permite al individuo no sólo operar con las administraciones, sino también hacer negocios, pagar en las tiendas, guardar las claves de la puerta de su casa o el código de seguridad de su coche entre otras muchas cosas. Nosotros entendemos que el futuro pasa por aquí, y creemos que nuestro concepto de la identidad digital cambiará muchas cosas.
¿Puede llegar a tener Wisekey problemas de homologación con determinados gobiernos porque choque con sus intenciones de gestionar la confidencialidad administrativa de sus ciudadanos, de controlar actividades delictivas o bien porque el programa permita ciertas actividades de disidencia en países no democráticos?
"Queremos hacer identidades soberanas, por decirlo de algún modo, que permitan al usuario manejar sus cuentas bancarias desde su navegador, por ejemplo, sin tener que pasar por la página de su banco"
Puede llegar a tenerlos en los países no democráticos clásicos, como Corea del Norte u otros. Pero acabamos de llegar a un acuerdo con el gobierno de Vietnam y trabajamos también en China. Es cierto que en estos países nos limitamos a crear, de momento, una raíz de seguridad y no ofrecemos a los usuarios el servicio de la identidad digital, pero tenemos que respetar las normas de cada estado.
Pero hoy mismo venía en los periódicos estadounidenses una propuesta del Pentágono para controlar el espacio digital del mismo modo en que se controla el espacio aéreo. Estoy seguro que tal propuesta no prosperará, pero te muestra que en todas partes cuecen habas.
Wisekey es el sistema de encriptado de datos que ha adoptado Microsoft tanto para su sistema operativo Windows Vista como para su software para servidores a partir de 2008. ¿Cómo surgió la relación con Microsoft? ¿Les ha lanzado a ustedes como la empresa de encriptación más potente actualmente?
El acuerdo nos ha lanzado a la primera división en cuanto a seguridad y encriptación, sin duda; ya nos codeamos con las grandes compañías estadounidenses del sector, puesto que somos el socio preferente de Microsoft para estos temas.
La relación surgió en un congreso sobre seguridad al que acudió Steve Ballmer, el presidente de Microsoft. Él ya tenía muy buena opinión de nosotros porque en 2003 hicimos el sistema de confidencialidad digital para las elecciones suizas y funcionó muy bien.
Ballmer nos alabó en pleno congreso, por lo que me acerqué a él y le ofrecí nuestros servicios. Él me dijo que si hacíamos otra prueba como la de suiza y salía tan bien, haríamos buenos acuerdos. Poco después organizamos la confidencialidad de las votaciones de la corte penal de la Haya y las cosas fueron bien. Así que Ballmer cumplió su palabra. http://www.consumer.es/web/es/tecnologia/internet/2007/10/18/167227.php
Lo primero que sorprende de Carlos Moreira al oírle hablar, es su acento profundamente suizo bañando un español fluido y casi perfecto. Moreira nació en la Línea de la Concepción (Cádiz) pero de joven se fue a Suiza a estudiar hostelería. Sin embargo le pudo más la diplomacia (en Naciones Unidas) y la tecnología, por este orden. Tras su paso por la ONU, y también a raíz de él, Moreira ideó Wisekey, un proyecto que comenzó siendo una alternativa para que los gobiernos tuvieran páginas web seguras, y que ahora le ha hecho socio preferente de Microsoft en el apartado de confidencialidad de los usuarios del sistema operativo Windows Vista.
Autor: Jordi Sabaté | Fecha de publicación: 18 de octubre de 2007 ¿Qué es exactamente Wisekey?
"Wisekey también proporciona seguridad al internauta mediante la creación de un entorno protegido en el que pueda moverse"
Wisekey es una empresa que hoy en día garantiza la confidencialidad de la identidad digital del usuario a través de un sistema que le permite manejarse por Internet con sus credenciales debidamente encriptadas por él mismo.
Por otro lado, Wisekey también proporciona seguridad al internauta mediante la creación de un entorno protegido en el que pueda moverse, votar a sus representantes ante las instituciones o pagar sus impuestos con total tranquilidad. Este entorno generalmente se comprende como el de las administraciones y servicios del estado al que pertenece el usuario, pero no tiene por qué ser así.
De hecho, en los países más dinámicos, los usuarios quieren trascender a los entornos estatales, lo que nosotros llamamos la raíz, y participar en otros entornos internacionales, lo cual está muy en la lógica de Internet. Wisekey les permite hacerlo mediante la federación de identidades internacionales.
¿Cómo surguió la idea de crear la empresa?
Wisekey comenzó siendo una cosa un poco distinta de lo que hoy día es. Hacia 1999 yo era el director del Área de Comercio Electrónico de la ONU y residía en Ginebra desde hacía años. Allí estaba en permanente contracto con los científicos del CERN, Tim Berners-Lee y Robert Caillau, que habían creado el protocolo Word Wide Web (www), que había abierto la Red a los usuarios.
Por aquel entonces los gobiernos comenzaban a meterse en Internet, pero con muchas cautelas en materia de seguridad. Las empresas de seguridad eran todas americanas, el ICANN, el órgano que regula Internet es americano... Así que desde la ONU se comenzó a pensar en crear un sistema de seguridad para los gobiernos que no crease tanta dependencia de los Estados Unidos.
Fue así como ideamos Wisekey, como una empresa que ofreciera una alternativa que garantizase neutralidad entre los gobiernos en tema de seguridad. Nadie quiere que la llave de su casa la tenga el vecino, ¿no? Pronto comenzamos a trabajar con numerosos gobiernos para crear lo que nosotros llamamos la 'raíz' propia de seguridad de un sistema, que es el entorno seguro del que le hablaba antes, en el que cada estado tiene las llaves de acceso a sus archivos confidenciales.
¿Distingue usted entre seguridad y confidencialidad? ¿Cómo definiría cada una?
"Antes que europeo o español o andaluz soy Carlos Moreira, un individuo que trasciende fronteras, por lo que no quiero que un gobierno tenga las llaves de mi identidad digital"
Precisamente yo distingo ambos aspectos. Para nosotros la seguridad es el entorno, la garantía de que la estructura administrativa en la que te mueves es segura y puede defenderse de ataques externos. Eso es lo que correspondería a la raíz de seguridad de cada estado.
Pero antes que europeo o español o andaluz soy Carlos Moreira, un individuo que trasciende fronteras, por lo que no quiero que un gobierno tenga las llaves de mi identidad digital. Eso es algo personal e intransferible de cada persona, algo que no es equivalente a un pasaporte que dice: "tú has nacido en...".
La identidad digital equivale más bien a la partida de nacimiento, a un papel que dice que, efectivamente, "has nacido". A partir de ahí, el resto de datos son asunto tuyo, y de eso puede encargarse perfectamente Wisekey también. Eso es lo que entendemos por confidencialidad, el que puedas encriptar personalmente tu identidad frente a cualquier intromisión.
"Le estamos dando una neutralidad que Internet no tenía hasta ahora a través de Wisekey" , ha declarado recientemente usted. ¿Han pasado de trabajar por la confidencialidad de grandes entidades y estados a democratizar las posibilidades de proteger la identidad digital de cada individuo? ¿Es decir, que cada usuario pueda controlar sus datos en Internet de modo eficaz, personal y sin la intervención de terceros (administraciones, entidades certificadoras, etc)?
"Regulamos situaciones donde podría producirse un abuso por parte de una entidad superior sobre el usuario"
Efectivamente, como te decía, para nosotros la seguridad es un nivel de entorno, pero la confidencial es una calidad del individuo, es su intimidad digital; sus datos y la seguridad de que puede moverse por la Red con ellos sin el miedo de que el rastro que deja sirva a terceros para poder manipular ya no solamente sus cuentas bancarias, sino sus gustos o el tipo de publicidad que quiere recibir en su correo electrónico.
Es decir, que regulamos situaciones donde podría producirse un abuso por parte de una entidad superior sobre el usuario; ya digo que no necesariamente tiene que ser un uso fraudulento de la identidad digital del individuo, pero sí que éste pueda evitar que de tanto acudir a determinado servicio, éste acabe sabiendo todo sobre él, o que su gobierno acumule datos sobre él que no tiene por qué saber.
Microsoft diseñó una herramienta de encriptación y centralización de datos del usuario, Passport, que resultó un fracaso no por ineficacia, sino porque finalmente los datos encriptados de los usuarios obraban en poder de la empresa. ¿Era realmente arriesgado que una sola empresa centralizase la gestión de los datos de todos sus usuarios?
Claro que era arriesgado, pero es que además era sospechoso, y lo digo siendo hoy en día el socio preferente de Microsoft en los temas de identidad digital. Pero lo cortés no quita lo valiente, y no era coherente ni bueno que Microsoft poseyera los datos de todos sus usuarios.
Finalmente Passport fue abandonado como proyecto por la presión de los usuarios y ahora los servicios de la empresa funcionan con Wisekey, un sistema descentralizado donde los datos personales son gestionados y conocidos sólo por el propio usuario.
En contraposición, en mi opinión existe un nuevo peligro de concentración de datos de los usuarios en una sola empresa, y me refiero en concreto a Google. Ha llegado un momento en que Google sabe demasiado de nosotros.
"Si buscas en Google, la empresa sabe lo que has buscado. ¿Es seguro? ¿Hasta qué punto puede Google puede garantizar la seguridad de tantos datos?"
Si tienes Gmail, almacenas hasta tres Gigabytes de información personal en los servidores de Google (fotos, archivos, conversaciones, etc); si usas Google Docs pones tus documentos en manos de Google. Si buscas en Google, la empresa sabe lo que has buscado. ¿Es seguro? ¿Hasta qué punto puede Google puede garantizar la seguridad de tantos datos?
Esa es la nueva polémica del momento en cuanto a confidencialidad, y las primeras quejas no han venido de las instituciones o los estados, sino de los individuos que se han dado cuenta de todo el material que Google acumulaba. Por eso recientemente la empresa ha tenido que hacer algunas concesión, como la de limitar el tiempo que conservará los datos del usuario.
¿Es similar Wisekey a otros sistemas de gestión de identidades descentralizados como OpenId?
Es similar y alternativo. OpenId es ahora la herramienta que promociona un fuerte lobby en Estados Unidos detrás del cual están empresas como Sun Microsystems y otras.
¿En qué se distingue Wisekey de los certificados digitales emitidos por entidades homologadas por los estados, o del e-DNI? ¿Aspiran ustedes a sustituirlos?
Aspiramos a colaborar con los estados y a ampliar las posibilidades de actuación de los documentos que me mencionas, pero no a sustituir a los e-DNI o a las certificaciones digitales. En algunos países podemos generar certificados digitales de cara a que el individuo pueda operar con la administración, y en otros generamos identidades digitales que tienen un rango de posibilidades más amplio.
Junto a Steve Ballmer, presidente de Microsoft
Queremos crear identidades digitales que permitan actuar no sólo en un determinado país o administración, sino que tengan ámbito internacional y sirvan para algo más que para hacer gestiones administrativas.
Queremos hacer identidades soberanas, por decirlo de algún modo, que permitan al usuario manejar sus cuentas bancarias desde su navegador, por ejemplo, sin tener que pasar por la página de su banco, donde le cobran comisiones cada vez que hace una transferencia o envía dinero al extranjero.
¿Qué piensa del e-DNI? ¿Se contrapone como documento oficial homolgado por un estado a los posibles certificados personales que pueda general Wisekey?
Creo que el e-DNI es un documento que aunque válido, está limitado en sus posibilidades. Nosotros hemos creado ahora la Wisekey Card, que es el equivalente físico a la identidad digital, y permite al individuo no sólo operar con las administraciones, sino también hacer negocios, pagar en las tiendas, guardar las claves de la puerta de su casa o el código de seguridad de su coche entre otras muchas cosas. Nosotros entendemos que el futuro pasa por aquí, y creemos que nuestro concepto de la identidad digital cambiará muchas cosas.
¿Puede llegar a tener Wisekey problemas de homologación con determinados gobiernos porque choque con sus intenciones de gestionar la confidencialidad administrativa de sus ciudadanos, de controlar actividades delictivas o bien porque el programa permita ciertas actividades de disidencia en países no democráticos?
"Queremos hacer identidades soberanas, por decirlo de algún modo, que permitan al usuario manejar sus cuentas bancarias desde su navegador, por ejemplo, sin tener que pasar por la página de su banco"
Puede llegar a tenerlos en los países no democráticos clásicos, como Corea del Norte u otros. Pero acabamos de llegar a un acuerdo con el gobierno de Vietnam y trabajamos también en China. Es cierto que en estos países nos limitamos a crear, de momento, una raíz de seguridad y no ofrecemos a los usuarios el servicio de la identidad digital, pero tenemos que respetar las normas de cada estado.
Pero hoy mismo venía en los periódicos estadounidenses una propuesta del Pentágono para controlar el espacio digital del mismo modo en que se controla el espacio aéreo. Estoy seguro que tal propuesta no prosperará, pero te muestra que en todas partes cuecen habas.
Wisekey es el sistema de encriptado de datos que ha adoptado Microsoft tanto para su sistema operativo Windows Vista como para su software para servidores a partir de 2008. ¿Cómo surgió la relación con Microsoft? ¿Les ha lanzado a ustedes como la empresa de encriptación más potente actualmente?
El acuerdo nos ha lanzado a la primera división en cuanto a seguridad y encriptación, sin duda; ya nos codeamos con las grandes compañías estadounidenses del sector, puesto que somos el socio preferente de Microsoft para estos temas.
La relación surgió en un congreso sobre seguridad al que acudió Steve Ballmer, el presidente de Microsoft. Él ya tenía muy buena opinión de nosotros porque en 2003 hicimos el sistema de confidencialidad digital para las elecciones suizas y funcionó muy bien.
Ballmer nos alabó en pleno congreso, por lo que me acerqué a él y le ofrecí nuestros servicios. Él me dijo que si hacíamos otra prueba como la de suiza y salía tan bien, haríamos buenos acuerdos. Poco después organizamos la confidencialidad de las votaciones de la corte penal de la Haya y las cosas fueron bien. Así que Ballmer cumplió su palabra. http://www.consumer.es/web/es/tecnologia/internet/2007/10/18/167227.php
mardi 9 octobre 2007
Data security helped Alinghi retain America's Cup
Switzerland's top sailing team Alinghi have revealed elaborate security helped prevent a Formula One-style spy scandal that could have upset their title defence.
Alinghi employed Swiss electronic security firm Wisekey to stop vital data getting into the wrong hands as the team prepared for the America's Cup in Valencia, Spain.
"The America's Cup is a design contest and a technology race. That's the way the Cup's always been and we're going to keep it that way," Alinghi skipper Brad Butterworth told Yachting World shortly after retaining the trophy in July.
Motor sport's premiere racing event Formula One has been rocked by a recent spy scandal that saw team McLaren stripped of its constructor's points and fined $100 million (SFr117 million) earlier this month.
Alinghi trimmer Nils Frei, a Swiss-born sailor who was part of the 2003 and 2007 winning teams, outlined the importance of data protection during the Security Zone 07 conference held in Zurich last week.
"The basic design of the boats has been the same since 1992 and as they have become more similar the little things have become more crucial," he told swissinfo.
Small talk risk
"We have to be really careful not to give our competitors an advantage by seeing our designs. This goes as far as not hoisting a new sail when we are practising because we know there will be spies watching us.
"We all spy on other teams when they have their boats out, but I have never heard of anything illegal taking place."
But no amount of technical security could protect Alinghi from an insider passing on documents and information, as happened with Formula One teams McLaren and Ferrari.
Frei believes the biggest danger for honest team members is letting information slip by accident.
"The biggest risk is talking to a sailor from another team at a bar. All the technology in the world can't protect against a slip of the tongue after a few beers," he said.
The challenge of keeping data secure was made more difficult by the sheer scale of information being passed between various elements of the Alinghi team, partners such as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, sponsors and supporters.
Wisekey developed a secure identification card with a photograph, personal password and a computer chip that limited access to sensitive areas of the Alinghi website and data bank as well as physical access to the team's camp.
CSI bugbear
"Events such as the America's Cup involve enormous investment so there would be huge repercussions if sensitive information leaves a secure area, as we have seen in other sports," said Kevin Blackman, chief technology officer at Geneva-based Wisekey.
The company plans to heighten security levels even further with biometric data as Alinghi begins preparations for the next America's Cup. The competition among designers will heat up with bigger boats expected in 2011.
But sensitivities surrounding the use of people's biometric data, such as DNA and fingerprints, are holding back the advancement of security, according to Wisekey director Marc Besson.
"Our biggest bugbear is the American television series CSI [Crime Scene Investigation]," he told swissinfo. "When people see biometric material being used to track down criminals they fear their fingerprint on an ID card will be used to incriminate them if they do something wrong.
"However, we only use a partial print for company identification purposes that cannot be used by the police."
swissinfo, Matthew Allen in Zurich
SECURITY COSTS
Phishing, fraudulently obtaining passwords or credit card information online, cost American banks and credit card issuers $1.2 billion (SFr1.4 billion) and UK banks $12 million, according to research.
However other estimates put the cost much lower.
US companies are thought to lose $250 billion in 2004 due to sensitive information falling into the wrong hands, according to Wisekey.
Resetting passwords costs a company between $51 and $147 on each occasion, the Swiss company said.
Source: Swissinfo.ch
dimanche 7 octobre 2007
Carlos Moreira at the E&Y Entrepeneur of the year 2007 event
Zurich, le 11 septembre 2007. Les finalistes du dixième concours Entrepreneur of The Year® sont connus. Pour cette édition anniversaire, 16 personnalités parmi les 45 entreprises nominées ont encore une chance d’être désigné entrepreneur de l’année 2007.
samedi 6 octobre 2007
WISeKey represented by its founder and Chairman Carlos Moreira has joined the Malaga Valley e-27 Club,
WISeKey represented by its founder and Chairman Carlos Moreira has joined the Malaga Valley e-27 Club, one of the initiatives of higher vision and ambition of the IT sector in Spain.
More than 40 Presidents of multinational and technology companies have decided, under the presidency of Javier Cremades, of Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo, to promote the creation in Malaga the biggest area of technology in Europe.
During the second encounter of the Malaga Valley E27 Club, Carlos Moreira proposed 3 initiatives on WISeKey technologies that will allow the acceleration of the Malaga Valley project. This initiatives are (1) establishment of the first European digital identity city combining digital identity technologies with WIFI, WISeKey will donate over 2000 Digital ID, combined to the donation made by FON of over 2000 Foneras (FON's WiFi routers) to Malaga's citizens. (2) WISeKey will work in cooperation with the Malaga Valley technology park to establish a Secure Bunker Infrastructure allowing the Malaga Technology park to provide high secure infrastructure and bunker services and (3) WISeKey will cooperate with Malaga Mundo Internet Congress to organize a seminar around Digital Identification and CyberSecurity.
With these initiatives WISeKey will contribute to the goal of turning out Malaga into a city of reference in the European continent in the field of technology. The strategy will allow the capital of Costa del Sol to compete, within a five year period, with the actual world exponents in this field, situated in the United States and Asia.
"Málaga is proud to support this ambitious initiative in our goal to be a European reference on new technologies and Information Society", quoted D. Francisco de la Torre, Mayor of Malaga.
This are some of the goals of the recently created Malaga Valley E-27 Club, composed of 45 partners, among which are included, inter alia, Telefonica, Grupo Prisa, HP, WISeKey, CISCO, Yahoo, Nokia, ONO, France Telecom, IBM Spain, Philips Iberica, Steinberg Asociados and Vodafone Spain.
Geneva Security Forum
GSF07: Small links, big risks, quantum crypto and other miscellaneous security considerations
The first Geneva Security Forum took place last week. I was moderating several sessions, so no liveblogging. Here are my (scattered and fragmentary) notes.
Alyson Bailes (director SIPRI): "When dealing with risks the human brain is not good at getting priorities right -- that' s why we focus on shorter, more fashionable risks".
How do you prioritize? "People are the answer. A good personal security culture is going to stop a lot of natural and casual risks, and give us a stronger position to deal with man-made ones. Integrated solutions: we should cyber-defend Estonia, but also my personal computer against spam and viruses -- that would make the whole system more secure".
Brian Jenkins (RAND Corp): Since 9/11 in the US we find it difficult to make a distinction between the risk to the community (large-scale threats) and the risk to the individual (the average American has 1/7000 chances of dying in a car accident; 1/18000 of being a victim of a homicide; 1/650000 of being involved in a terrorist attack: "so we are not living in peril, as individuals, as a consequence of terrorism").
There is a change in the way we analyze threats. Traditional analysis is based on an assessment of your enemy's capabilities, which are easily quantifiable. With terrorist networks instead, there is a great deal of uncertainty, so we do vulnerability analysis (how vulnerable are our energy systems, airports, ports, etc), postulate an attack, and then evaluate worst-case scenarios. That's a legitimate form of analysis to evaluate the consequences of an attack and figure out how to respond, but these are not good substitute for assessment. Moreover, the fact that all of this is discussed in public turns politicians into champions of their specific threat, and this starts a competition of threats, leading to a sense of alarm, complicating intelligence, possibly inspiring terrorists, etc. Over time this cranks up in a society irrational levels of fear, and leads to bizarre allocations of security resources.
Today's threats do not match how we have organized our societies politically and economically to do business. Cyberterrorism and epidemics don't know borders. But nobody gives up sovereignty easily. Instead of cooperation, we see proliferation of perimeters, wall building, the recreation of a medieval society, not with castles and towers but with security-driven protections at national frontiers or within nations, an enclavisation of societies within them.
Risk = threat + vulnerability + consequences. But right now we have an overweight on consequences (because they are easier to assess), which makes it difficult to price risks and prioritize.
We should move from the traditional reactive approach (law-enforcement approach) to a proactive approach. But in democracies we don't have a well developed corpus of law for dealing with intent. At what point does intent (to kill, to terrorize) moves out of the realm of free speech and becomes a crime that requires the intervention of the state? The only answer we have now is that of avoiding extrajudicial action, keeping things within the judicial space, having oversight,
Mike Ryan (WHO head of epidemics): The current major epidemic risk is avian flu.
If we look at the history of disasters and wars, most of them are local, geographically identified events, where help can arrive from outside. If you think of a global pandemic, that's a totally different scale. The preparedness/response ot the health impact of a pandemic is one thing; the societal preparedness is something we have never truly dealt with at a global scale (if large numbers of people can't get to work; if politics needs to respond to panic; etc). Ten years ago we believed that having information was an advantage; today everybody has the information, the real challenge is understanding which piece is relevant, is finding sophisticated ways to process it fast: analyze, assess, and respond.
(BG: see INSTEDD; and WHO is working on an early alert system using mobile phones, probably SMS, but many questions are open, such as how to establish the credibility of the source).
Alain Deletroz (VP, International Crisis Group): Five pillars of post-conflict reconstruction and lasting peace-building: 1) a peace agreement that's seen by all parties as accommodating their needs, that can be seen as a starting point and not an ending; 2) very good transition mechanism that inspires confidence to all parties and the international community; 3) a real truth and reconciliation process -- every country has to invent its own process: if you try to get a peace without exposing the facts and the doers, resentment in that society can remain. Best example of course is South-Africa; 4) real commitment from the international community; 5) an ambitious state-rebuilding program (rule of law, security and judiciary reform).
Thomas Tighe (DirectRelief): Markets work when they can work, where there is money to be made. But maybe a third of humans are in places where market forces won't work, so the expectations that the market will come in and develop is false. There are many places where the market fails.
(BG: DirectRelief works on getting medical supplies and drugs to clinics that are "off the grid" -- too far, too isolated, too off-the-market).
Stefan Wolff (University of Nottingham and author): What is emerging as one of the major new security threats: it's not longer just about international terrorism or just about organized crime or just about human security. There is now in many parts of the world an increasing conflagration between these three types of security challenges. This exposes our inability to think more comprehensively about security.
The incapacity to contain ethnic conflicts creates enabling environments for organized crime -- which in turn provides incentives as well as resources for many of the conflicts we see around the world today.
Abdulaziz Sager (Gulf Research Center Dubai): One of the indirect effects of the Irak war: the neighboring countries have been forced to come together (ministers, intelligence agencies) and work together.
Carlos Moreira (Wisekey): "There is an emerging digital identification divide, which is much more serious than just the digital divide. The digital divide was about connectivity. But if you want to participate in the network economy in an active way, you need identification/trust".
Christian Buchs (HEIG) and Oliver Ribaux (UNIL) want to receive more spam. They are working on a tool to track and trace the "Nigerian internet scam" e-mails (the messages you get asking you for help in transferring big sums of money out of a developing country, against a commission) and the online check frauds or other investment frauds. The system will be up and running in October.
Mikko Hypponen (F-Secure): The online population of Asia is currently 389 million (with a penetration of 10%), Europe 313 (39%), North America 232 (69%), so it's gonna be an Asian Internet very soon.
Hackers are turning into attackers, becoming more sophisticated, doing it for money rather than for fame. They want to turn viruses into cash. Many forms: spam, denial-of-service extortion, credit card number/email address/password theft, targeted attacks (industrial espionage). Latest: theft of passwords to poker sites (they steal your password then play -- badly -- against their own account, and of course the latter wins, and it looks as if you lost during a normal game: "the money is good, and nobody gets caught").
"Spam is like cockroaches: you can try to limit the problem, but it will never go away".
"People are still worried that a virus will come and destroy their data. Today that never happens, viruses are not destructive anymore, the last destructive virus we saw was one year ago: there is no money to be made in destroying data".
Where are attackers coming from? Mostly USA, China, Brazil and former URSS.
Kelly Richdale (A4vision), Jurgen Junghanns (Interflex), Philippe Niederhauser (Fastcom), Jean-Pierre Therre (Pictet): At Swiss private bank Pictet in Geneva -- founded in 1805 -- they've implemented a cardless, keyless, pinless security system based on biometrics for their new headquarter (about 2000 employees). The four speakers alternate in explaining the various pieces of the system, which has been "live" for over 8 months now. Pictetbiometrics There are three circles of identification: outdoors/supervised area (parking lots etc) is checked through automatic car plate recognition; indoors/security area, and to segregate access between different areas within the building: 3D face recognition (see picture); indoors/high security area (vaults, data centers etc): iris scanning, combined with anti-tailgating tech (avoid that a second person walks in closely following an authorized person). Key principle: purposeful limitation. Requirements for an ideal biometric system: universality, uniqueness, permanence, collectability, acceptability. On this last point, they have done alot of explaining to employees ("dimistify biometrics"): three most asked questions: is there any health risk in the use of biometrics? Can biometrics detect illnesses or addictions? What's the situation as far as individual privacy is concerned? Pictet is working on extending the system to access to documents and computers. Clients and visitors of course have a separate entrance and reception. Questioned by an auditor, Thierre states that the data about movements of employees within the building are not used to monitor their work.
Patrick Amon (EPFL): Information technology is becoming pervasive, and that has consequences. Because more and more systems are connected to networks and managed via networks, the theoretical risk of losing your Internet connection is morphing into the possibility of losing your water or your electricity. Does anyone still understand the whole complexity of the systems? To a large extent: no.
Nicolas Gisin (University of Geneva): There are two things that everyone should know about quantum physics: 1) this is the only physics that is not deterministic, it is random: we can use this characteristic of nature to produce random numbers. 2) Non-locality: according to quantum physics, the same random event may manifest itself in several places; this is of immediate potential for cryptography, it's like getting a code. The existing encryption techniques are based on mathematics: a code is "unbreakable" because it takes too much computational power to break it. But theoretically, an algorithm to factorize efficiently large numbers could exist, we just don't know it. If someone tomorrow publishes such an algorithm, it would stop the whole world economy immediately (because all data would be wide open). Quantum cryptography is an answer, but quantum computers are a threat: if a quantum computer is developed (order of magnitudes more powerful than current computers) it would be easy to crack current codes. For what we know, criminals may be storing encrypted data that they can't use, waiting for a quantum computer to come along -- in a decade or two? -- to decrypt it all. Conventional cryptology is OK for data with limited value or limited shelf life.
Cédric Renouard (Ilion Security): The attack on the public and private e-infrastructure of Estonia in April and May may have been led by a government, but it was a very simple attack: massive, non-destructive, more a demonstration than an attack from a technical point of view. But still very efficient (there was real disruption - see previous posts). Ilion performs "ethical hacking" -- trying to penetrate sensitive systems such as power plants, financial networks, etc, to spot the weaknesses. Call it "pragmatic risk assessment". "Hackers can break anywhere with time and money". Systems are not well protected, and security holes are often underestimated. He recalls a company where there was separation between the internal network and the Internet, but Ilion found a website that was dynamically updated with information coming from the internal system, he asked their IT people and the reply was: "oh, it's just a small link, it's OK". He tells of a recent trip to Russia where he visited cyberpirates that "are organized like real companies, with big offices and R&D etc, and benefit from significant levels of immunity".
Author Simon Singh closed the conference with a keynote on the history of cryptography.
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