How UC Drove Sales, Rescued Customers From Voicemail Hell

Ask your average CIO about his business case for unified communications (UC), and the likely answer will come down to cost reduction or avoidance--savings generated by voice-over-IP (VoIP) networks, bills lowered using instant messaging instead of toll calls.

But the real value in UC--improved communications among employees and with customers--is rarely best expressed in dollars and cents.

When Richard Buss began exploring UC in 2010, his goals were straightforward: simplify his telecom infrastructure, cut costs, harden his networks and reduce network redundancy. At the time, the vice president of technology for environmental testing company EMSL Analytical was managing a hodgepodge of phone systems scattered around the company's 43 sites.

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Wall Street Beat: Tech shares up for Q3, but face uncertainty

Tech companies end the quarter on a weak note 

Shares of technology companies finished up for the third quarter Friday, but face economic uncertainty for the rest of the year.

The Nasdaq Computer Index closed Friday at 1,675.51 compared to 1,580.13 at the end of June. However, they were down by 16.53 points for the day, amid reports of European protests over austerity measures and concerns about the impending "fiscal cliff" in the U.S. -- a series of drastic government cuts set to be enacted starting next year if Republicans and Democrats cannot reach a budget compromise.

Tech share losses outweighed gains Friday. For example Apple, which last week hit a record closing price of $702.10 over euphoria about the just-released iPhone 5, slipped by US$14.22 Friday to close at $667.10. Though iPhone sales of 5 million units broke records, analysts said that they missed forecasts, and worried that problems in the iOS 6 mapping function could be a sign that Apple's vaunted quality control is slipping a year after Steve Jobs' death.

Tech companies reporting quarterly financials this week offered mixed results.

Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat Monday reported that sales for the quarter ended Aug. 31 rose 15 percent year-over-year to $322.6 million, as subscription revenue increased 17 percent. Enterprise software has been a bright spot this year as consumer PC sales have slumped. However, Red Hat's net income dropped year over year by $5 million to $35 million.

Company officials ascribed the income drop in part due to an increase in investments in the company's storage business as well as small technology acquisitions, but otherwise were upbeat.

"Our business model and offerings continue to appeal to customers despite the global economic malaise," said company CFO Charlie Peters.

Memory maker Micron Technology on Thursday said that for the quarter ending in August, its loss narrowed compared to the same quarter a year ago. The quarterly loss was $243 million compared to $320 million a year earlier.

Analysts stressed the positive. Micron "reported a better than feared AugQ in line with consensus," noted SterneAgee analyst Vijay Rakesh.

Though DRAM pricing has been weak recently, Micron has reported that memory inventories are much lower, suggesting that there will be some upward pressure on prices later this quarter, Rakesh noted.

Meanwhile demand for DRAM may surge. The average amount of DRAM in each smartphone shipped worldwide is expected to jump by nearly 50 percent this year, as they gain greater functionality, according to an IHS iSuppli report this week.

"As smartphones become more sophisticated, memory usage in the devices continues to rise -- not only to satisfy user wants and needs but also to accommodate demands made by ever-more powerful processors and increasingly refined LCD screens," said Clifford Leimbach, analyst for memory demand forecasting at IHS, in a report.

Beleaguered smartphone maker Research in Motion reported its quarterly earnings Thursday, saying revenue fell year over year to $2.9 billion, compared with $4.2 billion.

The company's sales, however, edged out the consensus estimate of analyst polled by Thomson Reuters, of $2.5 billion. RIM's loss of $235 million was better than the $518 million loss in the prior quarter.

Though market analysts have cut forecasts for global IT spending this year, they still expect overall increases. Forrester earlier this month estimated that 2012 IT spending growth would be 3.6 percent, lower than its January prediction of 5.3 percent.

IDC said that it forecasts worldwide IT spending to increase 6 percent this year in constant currency, just under last year's 7 percent rise. (The difference between the figures from different research companies lies mainly in how they define various categories of IT, notably software, services and communications.)

The overall jump in tech shares in the third quarter, however, likely has more to do with moves on the part of central bankers in the U.S. and Europe to spur their respective economies, than it does with the performance of any particular tech vendor. The tech-heavy Nasdaq, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, representing large companies, and the broad-based S&P 500 all closed Friday up for the quarter.

The U.S. Federal Reserve's announcement earlier this month that it would launch the so-called "QE3," a third round of "quantitative easing," was widely perceived as fueling a general run up in stocks. The Fed said it would buy bonds and possibly other assets until the unemployment rate eases.

Meanwhile, the European Central Bank has promised to buy the bonds of debt-ridden nations in return for budget-cutting austerity measures.

But protests over European austerity measures in recent days in Spain and Greece raise questions about whether politicians will be able to push through budget cuts, raising uncertainty about the rest of the year.

Meanwhile, a slump in the markets this week was widely ascribed to actions of investors cashing in shares to take profits before the U.S. economy hits the fiscal cliff. The S&P 500 index, for example, has declined eight of the last nine days, dropping by 6.48 to close at 1,440.67 Friday.

U.S. government economic reports have been mixed. Orders for durable goods dropped 13.2 percent in August while a new report showed that the U.S. economic output grew at an annual rate of 1.3 percent between April and June, down from the previously reported 1.7 percent gain.

Delivering Value Beyond Technology

As a leader, I know I can create and deliver value in many ways. Right now, the opportunity to do that is through technology, and there are so many possibilities open to us in healthcare. But I don't want to stop there.

I set out to get my doctorate in health administration because I've been thinking for a long time about how I can make the biggest impact on families and patients. Sometimes that means making it easier for people to access resources they already have, other times it can mean using technology to make something entirely new possible. But anything that I do as a leader, I've always wanted to produce the greatest potential benefit by learning to take my strengths and apply them to making people's lives better.

I didn't come up through technology, but I've always gravitated toward it and eventually recognized that it provides a wealth of opportunities for the future of healthcare. Recently, that has been clearer than ever.

At one end of the spectrum, information is key in healthcare, but it's often fragmented, with owners across the system. To create solutions within Le Bonheur Children's Hospital, such as our Center for Knowledge Informatics and Decision Support (KIDS), my IT team had to go beyond applying business intelligence to a single data set. Understanding the daily lives of analysts from across the hospital system, and how all the pieces fit together, meant that we could develop KIDS to assist all our leaders in making important strategic, clinical and administrative decisions.

There are also the projects that technology enables where the patient impact is obvious and direct, like our interoperative MRI (iMRI). We are one of only a handful of hospitals in the United States with this tool, which allows physicians to collect high-resolution images before, during and after an operation. Technology also allows neuroradiologists to read these images while the operation is in progress, consulting with the physicians in real time and cutting down on--or even removing the need for--follow-up visits or surgeries. This obviously lightens the resource load on the hospital, but the end game is that it means less physical and emotional wear on the patient and the family. That's the kind of impact that I've known is possible.

Gaining that understanding of the wide-reaching benefits that technology-savvy leaders can create in the healthcare space is an ongoing effort. I've always had great support from the people above me. Some have served as personal mentors, while others have provided professional support and guidance that has allowed me to stretch in my job.

The doctorate takes me one step further, giving me the tools to see the big picture and understand how everything comes together--starting with healthcare law, and extending to the needs of payers and patients. Frankly, it allows me to think more like a CEO.

If I want to take full advantage of the opportunities that are out there, I know I need to strengthen my abilities as a well-rounded leader. Technology is critical to the future of healthcare, and by taking responsibility for my own growth, I can translate my experience into greater value for myself and others.

Kathleen Healy-Collier is administrative director at Le Bonheur Children's Hospital and a member of the CIO Executive Council.

Read more about cio role in CIO's CIO Role Drilldown.

Start Recruiting IT Talent Now

Here's a paradox: Your need to hire great technologists is at an all-time high, but the talent pool is shrinking. Computer science enrollments are down, young people are not interested in IT, and "experienced mobile architect" is an oxymoron.

The traditional keys to the IT talent paradox--great recruiting and retention--will be ineffective as long as the tech products industry is booming. Why would a smart technologist work at your insurance firm when she can get a job at Google?

Now it's time for all good CIOs to come to the aid of their industries. Get out of your office and visit high schools and colleges. Tell young people about the joy of IT, its importance, and the money that comes with it. (Definitely don't forget about the money.)

Michael Gabriel, CIO of HBO, is doing his part. Working with parent company Time Warner, HBO has produced "IT is It!" a video that features young people extolling the excitement of a career in IT.

"Most young people have no idea what IT jobs are really like," says Gabriel. "There are TV shows about careers in law and medicine, but not about technology. Everyone thinks we fix PCs and that IT jobs are all offshore."

To change that perception, Gabriel approached the CIO Executive Council, which suggested producing the video. (Watch it at http://council.cio.com/youth.) The video is a way to attract young people to the IT industry, but it's also good for Time Warner.

"Young people know us for Time, HBO, CNN and Warner Bros. Now they will also know us as a technologically advanced company focused on distribution via mobile devices and Internet-connected TVs," Gabriel says.

So get out there and make a movie! Or do what Bill Blausey, CIO of Eaton, did--use the Time Warner video to further the efforts you already have underway. "We put the video on our RITE [Regional IT Engagement] website," he says. "We need to tell kids IT can be exciting in companies other than Oracle and Apple."

Blausey and other IT, business and higher-education leaders formed RITE at the urging of the Ohio Board of Regents to address concern about the IT talent crisis. The goal is to engage the local student population. "We approach our mission as we would any marketing initiative: We pick our targets, craft our message, and go after them."

RITE members also work with local colleges to conduct evening workshops that educate high-school students and their parents about IT. "We have a panel of CIOs and some cool technology around the room," Blausey says.

Keeping good tech talent local is an issue across the United States. "Students graduate from the University of Texas at Austin and move to Silicon Valley," says Eric Hungate, CIO of the Texas Association of School Boards. "But there are tons of jobs in Austin." To engage students, Hungate works with Campus2Careers, which helps companies build intern programs and manages InternInAustin, a city-sponsored event aimed at retaining and attracting talent to central Texas.

If there's nothing like InternInAustin in your region, you may have to be more innovative. "Reach out to your local chamber of commerce and see what they are doing to retain talent in your region," suggests Hungate. "Get together with local professional IT association chapters; collect a roster of CIOs and visit high schools, community colleges and universities," he says.

And once you have your first speaking gig, don't blow it. "When you speak to students, lead with jobs," he says. "Tell them right off the bat that they can make a lot of money. And I would push passion. I was IT director for Robert Mondavi when my passion was wine."

Martha Heller is the author of the upcoming book The CIO Paradox and she is president of Heller Search Associates, a CIO and senior IT executive recruiting firm. Follow her on Twitter: @marthaheller.

Read more about hiring in CIO's Hiring Drilldown.

FCC moves forward on incentive spectrum auctions

The commission approves a proposal to auction some TV spectrum to mobile carriers

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission took the first step Friday toward groundbreaking auctions of television spectrum to mobile carriers faced with skyrocketing bandwidth demands from their customers.

The FCC approved a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that lays out proposed rules and asks for public comment on so-called incentive auctions, in which U.S. television stations would voluntarily give up their spectrum in exchange for proceeds from auctions of that spectrum. The NPRM is the first step in a long process at the FCC, with the agency projecting that auctions to mobile carriers would happen in 2014.

With the FCC moving forward on the world's first incentive auctions, "this is a big deal," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said. "The world is watching."

The auctions will involve a complicated three-step process, with television stations offering their spectrum in a reverse auction, the FCC reconfiguring the remaining TV spectrum to gain efficiency, and finally, the FCC auctioning the available spectrum to mobile carriers.

The incentive auctions will address a coming spectrum crunch and will help carriers provide better mobile service, with fewer dropped calls and fewer spinning pinwheels on mobile browsers, Genachowski said.

The auctions would also give the U.S. a "strategic bandwidth advantage," in a global race, he added. "Success will unleash waves of innovation that will go a long way toward determining who leads our global economy in the 21st century."

The commission's two Republican members raised a number of questions about the proposal, including whether it would leave too much spectrum unsold for unlicensed uses. The proposal would create a nationwide swath of unlicensed spectrum.

In addition, the proposal's cap on the amount of spectrum that one carrier can buy could result in the auction not raising the US$7 billion the U.S. Congress has targeted for a nationwide public safety network, said Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell.

McDowell urged the commission to be open to alternative ideas. "This being literally, as I've said before, the most complex spectrum auction in world history, I think we should keep all our options open," he said.

Genachowski and other commission Democrats defended the unlicensed spectrum plans. WiFi, television remote control devices and garage door openers all use unlicensed spectrum, said Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. "Good spectrum policy" has room both licensed and unlicensed spectrum, she said.

"This is a time to be embracing and extending WiFi-like uses of spectrum," Genachowski said. "Unlicensed spectrum has a powerful record of driving innovation, driving investment and economic growth."

Several companies and trade groups praised the FCC for its vote.

The vote is "a big step in the right direction," Mary Brown, director of government affairs for Cisco Systems, said in a statement. "The FCC invented the spectrum auction and perfected it. We have every confidence that the commission will do the same for incentive auctions."

The auction, along with an FCC proposal approved Friday to look at spectrum holding limit policy, will help carries meet "soaring consumer demand for mobile Internet services," Joan Marsh, AT&T's vice president for federal regulatory affairs, wrote in a blog post.

Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. Grant's e-mail address is grant_gross@idg.com.

Sophos rolls out mobile apps for anti-malware and encryption

Sophos today announced a free anti-virus defense app for Google Android devices which works via the Sophos cloud-based service. Separately Sophos also made available Android and Apple iOS apps for securing files held in the cloud file-storage service Dropbox.

The Sophos anti-virus app for Android devices will be available for free through November, at which time it will be integrated into The Sophos mobile-device management software Sophos Mobile Control. However, a standalone free version is still expected to be made available after November. "It acts as a scanner and looks for malicious apps and malware," says Payal Mehrotra, Sophos mobile product manager.

NEWS: Cybercrime-fest targets mobile devices

MORE: The 10 most common mobile security problems and how you can fight them

With regard to the encryption for mobile, the Sophos Mobile Encryption apps for Android or iOS devices are intended to work in conjunction with another product from Sophos called SafeGuard Enterprise, which can be used to ensure files stored in cloud-based services are encrypted.

The first version of the Sophos Mobile Encryption apps allows user access to encrypted files stored in the Dropbox cloud-based file storage. Future versions will be available for other services, including Egnyte and Google Drive, says Mehrotra.

There are free and paid versions of Sophos Mobile Encryption, with the paid versions (ranging from $2.99 for Apple iOS to $9.99 for the Android version) being more feature-rich to allow offline access to encrypted files when connectivity isn't available, says Mehrotra.

The Google apps are available here from Google Play, and the Sophos Mobile Encryption app is availablehere for Apple iOS devices.

Ellen Messmer is senior editor at Network World, an IDG publication and website, where she covers news and technology trends related to information security. Twitter: MessmerE. E-mail: emessmer@nww.com.

Read more about wide area network in Network World's Wide Area Network section.

USSD attack not limited to Samsung Android devices, can also kill SIM cards

The story, "USSD attack not limited to Samsung Android devices, can also kill SIM cards," posted on the wire on Thursday, wrongly stated the dates at paragraphs 12 and 16.

The story has been corrected on the wire and the paragraphs now read:

Paragraph 12

This is possible because of a MMI code that allows changing a SIM card's PIN (Personal Identity Number) number using the PUK (Personal Unblocking Key), Collin Mulliner, a mobile security researcher who works in the SECLAB at Northeastern University in Boston, said Wednesday via email.(

Paragraph 16

Samsung has already fixed the USSD/MMI code execution issue for Galaxy S III devices. "We would like to assure customers that the recent security issue affecting the Galaxy S III has already been addressed in a software update," Samsung said Wednesday in a statement via email. "We believe this issue was isolated to early production devices, and devices currently available are not affected by this issue. To ensure customers are fully protected, Samsung advises checking for software updates through the 'Settings: About device: Software update' menu. We are in the process of evaluating other Galaxy models."

RIM developer faithful find hope in BlackBerry 10 revival

BlackBerry app developers see turnaround for RIM, thanks to upcoming UI improvements and new development options

Mobile pioneer Research in Motion is fast approaching a crossroads on its long-term prospects. Due early next year, the company's BlackBerry 10 OS and related devices are a potential savior for the platform, and developers vested in BlackBerry expressed faith this week that BlackBerry 10 could indeed provide the much-needed revival.

That's good news for RIM, considering the developer purgatory its platform had become in the face of chief rivals Google Android and Apple iOS.

[ Learn how to work smarter, not harder with InfoWorld's roundup of all the tips and trends programmers need to know in the Developers' Survival Guide. Download the PDF today! | Keep up with the latest developer news with InfoWorld's Developer World newsletter. ]

"They're reinventing their platform," said Mauricio Angulo, a user experience consultant for Tesseract Space, which builds applications for the publishing industry. "The old platform wasn't going anywhere."

But the question is whether UI improvements, multiple development options, and good old-fashioned marketing will be enough to keep RIM in the game. "I hope it's not too late for them because this product is great," said Mobtapp's Sean Green, who has built a shopping application for BlackBerry.

UI, dev flexibility key to revival Topping the list of positive improvements is BlackBerry 10's emphasis on graphically oriented apps.

"[The release] makes them relevant again because they've been falling behind," said John Arthur Lowe, a software developer at Jaloweplays, referring to BlackBerry 10's graphical emphasis.

Based on the QNX real-time OS, BlackBerry 10's "Peek" touch interaction, which allows users to get a quick peek at their online activities with a simple gesture, also received a thumbs-up from developers. "The Peek functionality is real cool," says Angulo. "I like the fact that they somehow managed to keep the experience local to whatever activity the user is doing," Green added.

Peek is part of a deeper UI paradigm in BlackBerry 10 called Flow, which is designed for single-handed use, controlled mainly by your thumb. In Flow, you don't switch among apps through a home screen -- though you do have a home screen to launch apps when desired -- but instead thumb through active apps and services by thumbing through them.

The Peek feature lets you use a thumb gesture to reveal alerts and updates in your current apps, such as seeing what new emails have come in while reading a specific email. The Cover approach has the BlackBerry Hub at its base level, which aggregates all your status and messages in one place. You can always peek at the Hub to see what's new globally, and then switch back to what you were doing. And you can open the Hub and use it as a launching point for whatever update is of interest.

The BlackBerry 10 UI is highly tuned to "hyperactive" users who want to quickly check on what's new without interrupting their main focus, said Vivek Bhardwaj, RIM's head of software portfolio. It's an approach modeled on the common BlackBerry users' behavior of keeping the BlackBerry in view under a table while in meetings while the user surreptitiously remains connected. That behavior relies on being able to hold the device in one hand and navigate it through the same hand's thumb, which is why the Cover UI and functions like Peak use thumb-based gestures.

Bhardwaj also said the UI favors communication-style activities that have long formed the backbone of what people use a BlackBerry for, compared to the more general-purpose iOS and Android, where individual apps are the focus and you manipulate them with one hand while holding the device in another. He said that this orientation to the dominant psychographic segment of the BlackBerry user base should both appeal to the 80 million current BlackBerry subscribers and provide a meaningful UI differentiation from iOS and Android.

BlackBerry 10's accommodations for multiple development options -- including native C++, HTML5, recompiled Android, and Adobe AIR -- is also a boon. "If there was any move that was going to save them, it was to have a real-time OS like QNX underneath everything they did that had tool chains for all the different approaches that people like to program in," said Dennis Gearon, co-founder of Kwince. "I have to say I'm absolutely amazed that they supported already as many platforms as they do."

Adobe AIR backing is critical for Green, who also likes the other development options. "The support for Adobe AIR is big for me. The HTML5, the JavaScript libraries -- it's great that they're supporting all those platforms," he said.

Also garnering approval was RIM's Cascade UI development framework. "Cascade is very powerful," says Martin Goulet, software developer at Macadamian Technologies, which is focused on the usability of software and is porting a Windows 8 app to BlackBerry 10. (Windows 8, Microsoft's upcoming OS with an orientation for tablets, presents another competitive challenge for RIM.)

Marketing, developer outreach vital But RIM's prospects with BlackBerry 10 may come down to marketing.

Kwince's Gearon, for one, sees marketing as an imperative for drumming up excitement about the platform. "There's a good chance they can increase market share," said Gearon, who describes himself as an Android fan who nonetheless sees an opportunity for BlackBerry. "Every Android implementation I've seen has been a little bit jerky. I know enough about QNX, which is probably one of the premier OSes to build real-time things on and a phone is a real-time app."

Developer outreach will be critical, added Ravi Mishra, vice president of business development at software development firm Reliable Coders. "They really need to engage developers," Mishra said. "We are the people who are out there who are influencing the market."

RIM, for its part, has been doing just that, giving developers BlackBerry 10 prototypes as well as BlackBerry PlayBook tablets and holding events like this week's BlackBerry Jam Americas conference in Silicon Valley.

The big test for RIM will occur next year, when users can add BlackBerry 10 to the list of mobile computing options.

InfoWorld Executive Editor Galen Gruman contributed to this report.

This article, "RIM developer faithful find hope in BlackBerry 10 revival," was originally published atInfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

Read more about application development in InfoWorld's Application Development Channel.

Wind energy beat iPod in U.S. job creation

Google gives wind energy a boost, but tax credit expiration could deliver a major wind industry setback 

You remember the iPod. The iPod created jobs, but a majority of those jobs were overseas. Electronics manufacturing jobs are mostly overseas, which helps to keep one million workers at China's Foxconn plants busy.

In contrast, the majority of wind energy jobs are in the U.S., say researchers in a study by the Personal Computing Industry Center (PCIC), an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Center.

In the study, the PCIC researchers applied a methodology similar to what they used to measure the job impact of the iPod. A working paper by PCIC found that the wind industry creates a larger share of total employment in the U.S. than the iPod did in 2006, 74% versus 34%.

But as many as half of the wind energy jobs may disappear if a tax credit is allowed to expire at year-end, say the PCIC paper and the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA).

It has become an election issue. President Barack Obama has favored extending the credit, and Republican nominee Mitt Romney is opposing its extension. The tax credit costs about $1 billion a year.

The wind industry is already seeing layoffs in expectation that Congress will fail to renew the credit. That is happening even as Google, for instance, announced today its plans to buy 48 MW of wind power to helpsupply its data center in Mayes County, Okla.

The PCIC researchers found that the U.S. wind industry has created nearly 27,000 direct jobs, and 9,250 non-U.S. jobs.

By contrast, the iPod, the PCIC researchers found, created nearly 14,000 U.S. jobs and 27,250 non-U.S. jobs in 2006.

High-tech manufacturing employment has declined by 28% since 2000, or about 687,000 jobs, the National Science Foundation said in a report this year.

This wind energy job count number for the U.S. may grow to as much as 30,000 to 35,000 as research continues, said Jason Dedrick, an associate professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, and one of the people on the project.

Source: From working paper, "Should the U.S. Support the Wind Energy Industry?" by the Personal Computing Industry Center.

There are differing estimates on the wind industry's impact on job creation.

The American Wind Energy Association has put the number of wind jobs at 75,000. Its methodology is based on its database of nearly 500 facilities in all aspects of manufacturing. They estimate at least 30,000 jobs in manufacturing alone.

The balance of jobs in AWEA's estimate is made up of people who develop wind projects, maintain and run them. It includes anyone involved with the project, including wind financing specialist at banks, and people who prepare environmental studies, said Elizabeth Salerno, AWEA's Director of Industry Data & Analysis.

Assange claims US erecting a regime of secrecy and obfuscation

Assange gave a statement via videoconference to a forum at the UN sponsored by Ecuador

The U.S. is trying to erect a national regime of secrecy and obfuscation where any government employee revealing sensitive information to a media organization can be sentenced to death, life imprisonment, or for espionage, and the journalists from a media organization with them, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told a U.N. forum through a video link from the Ecuador embassy in London on Wednesday.

U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley E. Manning, who was arrested in 2010 for allegedly passing classified documents to WikiLeaks, was charged with a death penalty offence as the U.S. tried "to break him" into testifying against Assange and WikiLeaks, Assange said.

In June, Assange sought protection and requested political asylum from the Ecuador government, to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning in connection with alleged sexual misconduct. He was granted asylum last month.

The forum, focused on diplomatic asylum, was organized by Ecuador's permanent mission at the U.N., and was led by Ecuador's foreign minister Ricardo Patiño.

Assange also criticized what he described as U.S. attempts to take credit for pro-democracy movements in the Middle East, popularly referred to as the Arab Spring, and claimed WikiLeaks played a role in exposing the U.S. role.

Tunisian protester Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi did not set himself on fire so that Barack Obama could be reelected, Assange said. "The world knew, after reading WikiLeaks publications, that the Ben Ali regime and its government had for long years enjoyed the indifference, if not the support, of the United States - in full knowledge of its excesses and its crimes," he added.

"It must come as a surprise to the Egyptian teenagers who washed American teargas out of their eyes that the US administration supported change in Egypt," said Assange who accused U.S president Barack Obama of trying to exploit the reforms of the Arab Spring for his re-election campaign in footage of the speech provided by Russian news channel RT.

WikiLeaks has published leaked diplomatic cables and other information that embarrassed several governments and international businesses.

Assange could not travel to New York as he cannot step out of the embassy without being arrested by British police who surround the building. The U.K. has refused to grant him passage to Quito stating that the government is under obligation to comply with court rulings and send him to Stockholm. But Assange's supporters fear that from Sweden, he could be transferred to the U.S. to face charges under the country's Espionage Act.

AMD's new desktop chips make overclocking affordable

AMD's new A10 and A8 chips that can be overclocked are priced between $100 and $150, lower than Intel's competitive offerings

Advanced Micro Devices' latest A-series quad-core desktop processors balance the need for speed with price -- they run at up to 4.2GHz, but can be overclocked to 6.5GHz with liquid nitrogen cooling, the company said.

The company is offering two quad-core chips, the A10-5800K and the A8-5600K, that can be unlocked. The processors are faster and cheaper than competitive Intel chips, said AMD desktop products manager Adam Kozak during a conference call to discuss the new chips.

The new chips will allow manufacturers to build cheaper desktops with features such as overclocking and upgradability not usually available in processors in the US$100 to $150 price range, Kozak said. Intel's unlockable processors start at $216, according to a Sept. 2 price list.

Chip makers in the past decade have reverted to adding more cores instead of cranking up clock speed to balance system performance and power consumption. But Intel and AMD are still consistently trying to claim the performance crown by offering chips that can be overclocked. AMD last year broke a processor speed world record by clocking a high-end FX-series chip to 8.429GHz in a system cooled by tanks of liquid helium, and the feat was noted by Guinness World Records.

AMD is targeting budget desktops and Kozak said the chips are available with integrated graphics processors or can be paired with external graphics processors. The chips can be unlocked to crank up CPU and graphics processor clock speeds, which is especially handy for enthusiasts seeking improved application and graphics performance.

The chips are based on the Piledriver microarchitecture, which is also used in the latest laptop processors code-named Trinity released by AMD starting in the middle of this year. AMD's internal benchmarks revealed the new chips provide 25 percent to 37 percent overall faster system performance than the older desktop chips code-named Llano, which were released last year.

The unlockable chips have 4MB of cache, consume 100 watts of power and are identifiable by the K moniker. The A10-5800K has a maximum CPU clock speed of 4.2GHz and 384 graphics cores with 800MHz GPU clock speed. The A8-5600K has a maximum clock speed of 3.9GHz and 256 graphics cores with 760MHz GPU clock speed.

The new products announced also include chips that cannot be unlocked. The quad-core A10-5700 runs at up to 4GHz and the A8-5500 runs at a clock speed of up to 3.7GHz. The chips draw 65 watts of power and have 4MB cache.

AMD did not provide an exact price for the chips, but said they will be in the range of about $120 in units of 1,000. The chip will be available starting Oct. 2 through component channels worldwide.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com

What are DDoS Attacks & How to Deal with them

The internet is abuzz with talks of the recent outage faced by Domain Registrar Godaddy. The outage was suspected to be because of a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (commonly known as a DDoS attack) that targeted Godaddy’s DNS servers, affecting several websites as well as email services. (However, a recent statement by Godaddy mentions that it was an internal network error that caused the interruption in services)

DDoS attacks are a fairly common occurrence on the internet and are something we’ve experienced in the past as well. Here is some more information on DDoS attacks, who they affect and how we mitigate such attacks.

What is a DDoS attack?

A Denial of Service attack aims to make a website unavailable to users by flooding the website’s servers with an extremely high number of requests. These multiple incoming requests can make website resolution exceedingly slow and can even cause servers to crash.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is essentially a DoS attack that originates from multiple sources. Such attacks are usually carried out using thousands of unsuspecting zombie machines known as botnets.

DDoS attacks have traditionally been used by cyber criminals to extort money from website owners that rely on the accessibility of their websites. However ‘Hacktivists’ have also initiated such attacks in the past to bring down company and government websites in protest of certain policies or decisions.

A  popular recent example is anonymous’ attack in protest of the Megaupload Raids that targeted various government and music industry sites.

Who can it affect?

DDoS attacks are difficult to safeguard against completely and can affect large and small websites alike.

Having suffered a DDoS attack on our DNS servers in the past, we understand that such attacks can occur and the best solution is to have systems in place that allow you to mitigate the attack and get systems back online as soon as possible.

Which leads us to – How do we mitigate DDoS attacks?

While there isn’t a lot that can be done to prevent DDoS attacks, there are certain techniques that we employ to mitigate DDoS attacks and restore services.

To help mitigate DDoS attacks we’ve employed the services of Prolexic Technologies that is a global leader in DDoS Protection & Mitigation. While there are multiple ways in which Prolexic helps mitigate DDoS attacks, here is a simplified version of how Prolexic works.

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  • BGP Routing:
  
  

  • With BGP routing, when a DDoS attack occurs, our traffic gets routed through Prolexic’s servers where malicious and legitimate traffic is segregated and legitimate users can continue to access our services.
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  • Advanced Filtering:
  
  

  • As the traffic gets routed through Prolexic’s servers, their filtering technology identifies anomalies which are then “red flagged” by the system. Moreover, research is then conducted by Prolexic engineers to determine whether this activity should be blocked on the network. Once malicious activity has been determined, it is labeled in the system and blocked.

How can you independently mitigate attacks?

As a individual website owner you have limited control over a server but you can useCloudFlare to protect your websites from attacks.

CloudFlare protects your websites by routing traffic through their intelligent global network – a little like what Prolexic does for us 

We already provide CloudFlare on our Hosting servers so Resellers can enable and start using it immediately. More information on how CloudFlare can protect you can be found here - http://www.cloudflare.com/overview

How Web Hosting Providers should deal with a DDoS Attack:

DDoS attacks are a very real threat to website owners and hosts worldwide but like I said before, there is no foolproof way for anyone to really protect themselves against such an attack.

As a Web Hosting provider yourself, I’m sure you’ve come across Customers that consider leaving you in the aftermath of a DDoS attack. You might have felt the same of your upstream provider as well. However, it’s important to remember that anyone can be a target.

An indicator of a good Host isn’t one that hasn’t been attacked yet but one that can effectively restore services and reduce damage.

How Web Hosts handle the situation is also an important indicator. I’ve always seen that the ones that do handle attacks effectively provide detailed information on the following: (This actually applies to most issues/interruption in services)

1. Which services were affected?
2. Are the services back up or how long will it take to restore services?
3. Does the Client need to do anything?
4. Why did this happen i.e. details of the DDoS attack
5. How was the attack mitigated?
6. Can this happen again?
7. Who can Clients contact if they have any concerns?

Being honest and straightforward will go a long way in assuring your Customers that you’re doing everything you can to resolve the issue and they’ll respect you for keeping them in the loop.