News briefs: Ruling puts BlackBerry service at risk

Network World
October 31, 2005 12:05 AM ET

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The Supreme Court last week denied an emergency appeal by Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, to halt legal proceedings in a patent-infringement case that could cut off sales of the device and shut down the BlackBerry e-mail service. The decision by Chief Justice John Roberts mimics a similar rejection by a U.S. District Court two weeks ago. RIM could avoid a shutdown if it wins the case, or if it agrees to license a patent that intellectual-property holding company NTP owns. RIM says it has a back-up plan should it fail to win the case, making it unlikely BlackBerry users will lose their service. RIM says there are 2.5 million BlackBerry users.
The U.S. government will require nearly all of the passports it issues to have a computer chip containing the passport holder's personal information by October 2006, according to regulations published last week. Starting in early 2006, the State Department will begin issuing passports with 64K-byte RFID chips containing the name, nationality, gender, date of birth, place of birth and digitized photograph of the passport holder. The chip would match the data on the paper portion of the passport and improve security by making it more difficult for criminals to tamper with passports, backers say. After the State Department proposed RFID chips for passports in February, privacy groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, expressed concerns. Some RFID chips can be remotely scanned, allowing for criminals to covertly scan groups of passport holders at airports, the EFF said in April. The State Department says it is taking security precautions.
Microsoft will be retiring Exchange Server 5.5 and support for the product by year-end and is recommending users upgrade to the latest version, the company said last week. Microsoft is urging customers who are still running Exchange 5.5 to upgrade to Exchange Server 2003, a more secure version of the company's messaging and collaboration server product. According to Microsoft, the number of Exchange Server 5.5 users dropped by about 40% over the past year, evidence that customers have been upgrading in anticipation of the product phase-out. Microsoft also reminded customers that Exchange Server 2000 will move out of mainstream support into extended support at the end of this year. Mainstream support includes free incident support, security updates and non-security hot fixes. Once Exchange Server 2000 moves into extended support, customers will have to pay for support and non-security-related hot fixes, according to Microsoft.
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards last week formed a technical committee to develop Web Services Secure Exchange, a proposed standard to enable the trusted exchange of multiple Simple Object Access Protocol messages. The committee will work with a set of specifications based on WS-SecureConversation, WS-SecurityPolicy and WS-Trust. OASIS says the specifications provide customers with the ability to establish trust relationships that span long-running exchanges and provide interoperability for real-world scenarios. Committee members include Actional, Adobe, BMC Software, BEA Systems, Computer Associates, HP, IBM, Iona, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Tibco, VeriSign and webMethods.
Level 3 Communications and Cogent Communications have resolved their differences and will continue to exchange Internet traffic under a new peering agreement announced last Friday. As a result of the new agreement, Level 3 will not disconnect its backbone from Cogent's access network on Nov. 9, as previously announced. The spat between Level 3 and Cogent began Oct. 5, when Level 3 discontinued its peering relationship with Cogent. This resulted in some blocked Internet traffic for customers of the two companies. Level 3 re-established its connection with Cogent on Oct. 7, but warned its customers that it would shut down its connection with Cogent again on Nov. 9 unless Cogent agreed to a new peering contract. Peering is a contractual relationship between ISPs that allows them to exchange Internet traffic over each other's networks.
Security firm Cybertrust last week released results of a study measuring the effect of the Zotob worm, which exploited Microsoft software vulnerabilities in mid-August. According to the study of 700 organizations, about 13% reported at least some adverse impact from Zotob; 6% had a major or moderate impact, with more than $10,000 in damages and at least one critical business system, such as e-mail or Internet connectivity, affected. The study indicates that Zotob has been less of a menace than previous worms, such as Nimba, which affected 60% of organizations or Blaster, which hit more than 30%. On another matter, Cybertrust announced that Carly Fiorina, CEO of HP until being ousted by that company's board of directors in February, has joined Cybertrust's board.