News briefs: Gartner urges caution on BlackBerry

By Staff Writers, Network World
December 12, 2005 12:05 AM ET

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Companies should halt business-critical deployments of BlackBerry devices and investments until its maker, Research in Motion, clarifies its legal position with regard to its patent tussle with NTP, Gartner advises. The market research and consulting firm issued its recommendation after a federal judge's decision opened the door to a possible injunction that would stop sales of BlackBerry mobile e-mail devices and shut down BlackBerry service in the United States. Four Gartner analysts published a research brief last week alerting current and prospective enterprise RIM customers to "stop or delay all mission-critical BlackBerry deployments and investments in the platform until RIM's legal position is clarified." Gartner is also advising customers to pressure RIM into making public its work-around plans for preventing disruption to its service while bypassing the patents in question. RIM did not reply to requests for comment.
The standard for broadband wireless technology known as mobile WiMAX has been approved . Mobile WiMAX networks will let customers wirelessly access the Internet anywhere they may be in a city. The IEEE ratified the 802.16e standard, also called mobile WiMAX, according to Roger Marks, chair of the 802.16 working group. The standard should enable vendors to build equipment that interoperates with gear from other vendors. But approval of the standard is only one step in the process of delivering services to customers. "The standard being ratified is one thing, and the WiMAX Forum having tested conforming products is another," says Ian Keene, a research vice president with Gartner. He expects certified mobile WiMAX products to become available near the end of 2006. After that, operators will have to build the networks before customers can take advantage of the service.
Intel is working on a research project that would immediately notify PC users if they inadvertently download a rootkit like the XCP (extended copy protection) software found on certain music CDs shipped by Sony, researchers said last week. Rootkits are pieces of software designed to access a system and make changes or implement policies without being detected by the operating system or anti-virus software. Security experts say malicious hackers might have used Sony's rootkit software to launch undetectable attacks. The idea behind the Intel project is to protect systems from malicious programs that make their way onto a system and attack application software running in the system's memory. The project is tentatively scheduled to become part of Intel's products around 2008 or 2009.
New York has joined the growing list of U.S. states requiring that companies notify their customers whenever private information has been compromised . Last week, the state's Information Security Breach and Notification Act went into effect, according to a spokeswoman for the state's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer. The law, which is similar to California's SB-1386 notification law, requires businesses and state agencies to inform New York residents "whose unencrypted personal information may have been acquired by an unauthorized person." Since California's notification law was passed, it has brought dozens of information security breaches to light and put computer security and privacy in the public spotlight. The first company to disclose a security breach under the California law, information vendor ChoicePoint, recently took a $6 million charge for legal expenses and fees related to the theft of personal information belonging to 145,000 consumers that had been stored in its database.