Margaret Walsh

Hewlett-Packard is building collaboration software with video, application-sharing and 3-D graphics support into several of its workstation models, giving the high-definition conferencing market an option well below the cost and scale of telepresence. It needs only an Internet connection of 400Kb per second, plus a VPN (virtual private network) to connect to systems outside an enterprise firewall. The HP SkyRoom software, which was set to be announced on Tuesday, works on systems with a fairly modest set of requirements, starting with a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or equivalent processor.

With the software, users can click on the name of a contact to start up a SkyRoom session with them. Multiple users can join in to these sessions and see the host presenter's desktop as if they were using their own machines. With another click, they can share rich media or what's happening on their desktops. The software supports display of any type of application on a Windows XP or Vista PC, including streaming video, according to HP. HP says SkyRoom is based on video and image compression algorithms it developed over the course of three years. SkyRoom saves work by updating only changes in screen appearance, not the whole screen, HP said.

It can deliver a high level of performance on relatively modest systems and networks by compressing and encrypting data before it's sent to participants. The company named digital content teams, animation production houses and global financial teams running live economic models as possible users of the software. It's another thing to describe it over video," Germanow said. The software should be an ideal tool for teams that design physical things, because it will let one designer show others what's wrong with the item, such as a corner that's too sharp, said IDC analyst Abner Germanow. "It's one thing to describe a design problem over e-mail. Telepresence, which typically involves dedicated rooms or purpose-built systems, would be overkill for these kinds of sessions, he said. SkyRoom is available worldwide as a free, preinstalled feature of HP Z800, Z600, Z400 and xw4600 workstations.

SkyRoom is strictly software, with lower network requirements and no special service fees, and engineers may use it for all-day sessions, he said. Some premium business PCs and laptops coming from HP in the next few months will offer the software on a 90-day trial basis. In addition to the Core 2 Duo or equivalent processor, those systems will need at least 2GB of RAM, a webcam and XP or Vista. The software is also available for purchase for an estimated U.S. street price of US$149 and can be used on workstations and PCs from Dell, Lenovo and Sun, HP said. HP is also offering the HP SkyRoom Accessory Kit, which includes a high-resolution webcam and headphones or speakers, for $119.

Fund Formed for Chinese Start-ups BEIJING - Kai-Fu Lee, who resigned as president of Google Inc.'s China operation earlier this month, has founded an angel investment fund and plans to help out three to five new Chinese high-tech companies annually. Steve Chen, a co-founder of YouTube Inc., is also an investor in Innovation Works. The fund, dubbed Innovation Works, launched with some $115 million (U.S.) provided by several IT vendors, including Taipei-based Foxconn Electronics Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd. The new company said the funds will be used to train young entrepreneurs and help them build Internet, mobile Internet and cloud computing companies. - Owen Fletcher, IDG News Service Telecom Firms Plan Joint Venture LONDON - Deutsche Telekom AG and France Telecom SA plan to form a joint venture that would oversee their respective U.K. mobile communications networks - T-Mobile U.K. and Orange U.K. The combined company would have about 28.4 million customers, or 37% of U.K. mobile subscribers, leapfrogging current market leader O2 U.K. Ltd., which reported 20.7 million customers at the end of June, the companies said.

Ombudsman P. Nikiforos Diamandouros said he will rule on the complaint later this month. - Agam Shah, IDG News Service The venture is expected to realize overall savings of more than £3.5 billion ($5.7 billion U.S.) by, among other things, closing some stores and "optimizing" the companies' customer service staffs. - Peter Sayer, IDG News Service Briefly Noted The European Union has confirmed that its ombudsman received a complaint from Intel Corp. in July alleging that "procedural errors" were made by the European Commission during an antitrust investigation that led to a record fine of €1.06 billion ($1.44 billion U.S.) against the chip maker.

Cybercriminals worldwide are amassing domain names to keep their botnet and phishing operations a step ahead of authorities America's 10 most-wanted botnets To obscure their tracks, the criminals register the domain names using phony information, pay with stolen credit cards and hack into legitimate domain-name accounts. The target is usually "a consumer in America." Accredited by ICANN for the .info generic top-level domain (gTLD), Afilias helped organize the Registry Internet Safety Group to find ways to improve security. Adding to the problem of domain-name abuse, some rogue registrars often look the other way as the money rolls in. (See related story, "Domain-name abuse proliferates; rogue registrars turn a blind eye")  Today's cosmopolitan criminals might use "a registrar in China and a Web-hosting company in Russia and a registry in Ireland," says Ram Mohan, CTO at Dublin-based registry services provider Afilias. Mohan says Afilias has seen about 250,000 domain names taken down in the past 2.5 years because they were deemed to be maliciously used.

In the past, standard contracts between ICANN and registrars didn't address domain-name abuse head-on. (Mohan estimates there about 2,000 registrars and retail channels for domain names globally today.) But Afilias successfully lobbied to have the standard contracts amended so that stringent actions against domain-name abuse could be taken, he says. At first the registrars Afilias works with were not too happy to see domain names suspended, but many have come around to see the wisdom in taking action to stop perceived criminal activity, he says. Registry services provider Neustar (accredited by ICANN for the .biz gTLD) is also a big believer in tackling domain-name abuse, which after all, hurts the bottom line. Under its contracts with registrars and ICANN, Neustar can proactively say to a registrar, with a full report, "you have 12 hours to take down that domain name or we will do it," he says. Three years ago, Neustar hired a legal team to handle domain abuse questions and set up an internal, isolated networking lab to make determinations to a "near certainty" about a domain name being used for objectionable purposes, says Jeff Neuman, vice president of law and policy at Neustar. ICANN has a more informal process for trying to curb domain-name abuse, but that may eventually change, Neuman believes.

For instance, .cn, the country-code domain for the People's Republic of China, has emerged as a popular choice for domain-name abuse. Many security researchers today are inclined to blame a lot of domain-name abuse on "rogue registrars" around the world that are said to look the other way when dealing with criminals. For country-code top-level domains, each country through a designated organization directly accredits registrars for the ccTLD, though those registrars may also be accredited by ICANN for gTLDs like .com and .info. ICANN says complaints it received related to inaccurate or missing Whois database information and Beijing Innovative - which initially failed to respond to ICANN inquiries in a timely manner - led ICANN to issue the Chinese registrar a "notice of breach" decision last September, and a remediation plan. Two ICANN-accredited registrars, Beijing-based Xin Net Technology Corp. and Beijing Innovative Linkage, among other registrars based in China, have gained reputations in some circles as rogue registrars because of the large amount of malicious domains being traced to them over the past year.

Mohan says it's important do the analysis to understand the source of domain-name abuse, but critics should also consider evidence that Chinese registrars are being targeted because there's a lot of growth in China and "criminals are hiding in that growth." Mohan was in Beijing just a month ago discussing cybercrime for three hours with Mao Wei, the director of China Internet Network Information Center, the state-run registry for .cn, which is under the control of the Ministry of Information Industry. Just this week, McAfee touched on the China question in a report about e-mail spam that found high-volume, Chinese URL-based "Canadian Pharmacy" spam has started getting blocked amazingly fast, something McAfee never saw happen before. Mohan also spent time with Chinese registrars. "The Chinese government is very strongly aware of this problem," Mohan says. This newsletter-looking spam has used about 1,235 domains on .cn each day in fast-flux mode, but it's "getting black-holed as soon as they come in," says Adam Wosotowsky, principal engineer in messaging tactical response at McAfee. Nonetheless, some say it's hard to escape the impression that around the world, there are places where registrars and others providing domain names look the other way. This countermeasure makes the spam dead-on-arrival with no Web URL to use. "We're guessing it's Chinese government influence," Wosotowsky says, adding he thinks the pharmacy spam is being used to sell pharmaceutical knock-offs out of Hong Kong.

Even governments may be ignoring it, as money changes hands in the lucrative domain-name business. "The moment the bad guys find out something is going on, they move from Estonia to Ukraine,'" says Mohan by way of example. "The kingpins aren't identified. There must be advance notice going to these criminals, or compromised law enforcement." It's big money, big business.

BP has awarded contracts in the area of application development and maintenance to IBM, Accenture, and three top Indian outsourcers.

BP was earlier outsourcing these services to 40 service providers, and decided to rationalize the number to five, a BP spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

The five providers selected were already offering services to BP, she added.

The total contract value is £1.5 billion (US$2.5 billion) over five years, which was 500 million pounds lower than BP had budgeted for the contract.

IBM and the three Indian outsourcers - Wipro, Infosys Technologies, and Tata Consultancy Services -said separately on Wednesday that they had been selected by BP for five-year contracts, for an undisclosed amount.

IBM said it had bagged the largest among the contracts awarded by BP at the end of a 12 month program by the British oil and gas company to consolidate its application development and maintenance vendors. The BP spokeswoman declined to discuss the share of each vendor in the total contract value.

Like its Indian competitors, IBM is likely to deliver a significant portion of the work for BP from its Indian operations, according to informed sources. This strategy would have enabled IBM to compete on price with Indian providers, the sources said.

An IBM spokesman in India declined to comment beyond the company statement.

Indian outsourcers have a dominant share of about 40 percent of the global market for outsourced application development and maintenance services, Siddharth Pai, a partner at outsourcing consultancy, Technology Partners International (TPI), said on Wednesday.

Indian outsourcers have been increasingly focusing on the European market to reduce their dependence on the U.S. market.