Also: Office 12 to feature XML formats for Word, Excel and more; Intel to show WiMAX base station at Supercomm; McAfee acquires start-up; and more
Yahoo and Cisco last week announced they are combining their anti-spam technologies to create a new e-mail authentication system. Called DomainKeys Identified Mail, it will draw on Yahoo’s DomainKeys authentication technology and Cisco’s Internet Identified Mail. The technology will be offered to other vendors on a royalty-free basis, the companies said. Yahoo’s DomainKeys uses public-key cryptography to authenticate a sender of an e-mail at the domain level. The sending system generates a signature and inserts it in the e-mail header, and the receiving system verifies the signature using a public key published in the DNS. Cisco’s authentication technology also uses cryptography but associates the signature with the message itself.
Microsoft last week said that XML would be the default file format for three applications when it ships Office 12 late next year. The company said its new Microsoft Office Open XML Formats would be supported in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Those three applications will have new file extensions that end with an ‘x’ to designate they are XML-based: .docx, .xlsx and .pptx. The big picture for end users is that Microsoft is trying to take the shackles off its desktop Office applications and use XML to open the data created within those applications to back-end systems, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications, and to inject the data into business process workflows. The XML file formats are the first announced changes related to “The New World of Work” strategy that Microsoft Chief Software Architect Bill Gates laid out last month at his annual CEO Summit.
Intel is expected to show off a prototype for the guts of a WiMAX base station this week at Supercomm in Chicago, aiming to help equipment vendors get started making gear for the high-speed wireless standard. The Glenfield reference design is Intel’s first for network infrastructure for WiMAX, a technology strongly backed by Intel that is expected to start hitting the market by year-end. The board is built around an Intel network processor for media access control functions and a PicoChip Designs physical-layer component. It can be customized by base-station vendors to meet their needs, according to Intel. Glenfield was built using Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA), which Intel has aggressively promoted as a design standard for network equipment. Intel sees ATCA taking carrier gear beyond the usually proprietary architectures of today to modular systems that can be developed more quickly and at lower cost using components from many manufacturers.
McAfee last week acquired start-up Wireless Security for an undisclosed sum, with the intent of offering wireless security services in the future. McAfee said it plans to integrate Wireless Security’s wireless LAN authentication and encryption technologies into McAfee software in order to provide a remotely managed security service for consumers and small businesses via the same network operations centers where McAfee currently provides managed anti-virus services.
Germany has taken a big step in the battle against organized crime and terrorism by unveiling a new passport with a chip that contains biometric data. The country plans to be among the first in Europe to issue biometric passes, starting Nov. 1. The new passport, valid for 10 years, will include an embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that will initially store a digital photo of the passport holder’s face. Starting in March 2007, the holder’s left and right index fingerprints also will be stored on the chip. The reasons for using non-contact RFID chips are twofold: contact points in traditional chip cards are not designed for 10 years of use; and passports don’t fit in present chip-card readers, according to Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security.
