Cisco, Huawei step up legal battle

Plus: Verizon deploys two new services for wireless data; fooling spammers; new president for ICANN and more.

• Cisco furthered its intellectual property lawsuit against Chinese rival Huawei Technologies last week by filing court declarations purporting to support its claims, including one from a former Huawei subsidiary employee who said the company tried several times to hire away Cisco employees to duplicate their Cisco projects. Former human resources manager Chad Reynolds, laid off from Huawei subsidiary FutureWei Technologies in December, said he was asked at least twice to locate and hire Cisco employees who had worked on projects FutureWei hoped to mimic. Reynolds said his overtures led to talks between FutureWei and a Cisco engineer who initially showed interest in the proffered job but withdrew from negotiations after becoming uncomfortable with what he perceived as a request for confidential information. Huawei responded with a lengthy filing denying many of Cisco’s charges and challenging the company’s legal status to bring others. Huawei also filed several counterclaims against Cisco.
• Verizon last week moved to broaden its wireless data plans by supporting two new services. In the third quarter, the service provider is expected to launch a “data only” service trial based on the 1xEV-DO specification in Washington, D.C., and San Diego. This specification supports mobile data transmission rates up to 2.4M bit/sec. The service provider says it also will offer 802.11b Wi-Fi wireless LAN services through an agreement with Wayport. Verizon Wireless says its Wi-Fi services will be available in the third quarter. Verizon also announced last week that it now has FCC approval to offer long-distance services in all of its territory. The service provider most recently received approval for Maryland, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.
• It’s easy to fool e-mail harvesting software , even though the primary source for spammers’ lists are addresses on public Web sites, according to a six-month experiment from the Center for Democracy and Technology. The center set up 250 dummy e-mail addresses, and during the test those addresses received a combined 8,842 pieces of spam. But about 97% of that spam – 8,609 messages – were received by six e-mail addresses listed at three Web sites: GetNetWise.org, ConsumerPrivacyGuide.org and CDT.org. Usenet newsgroup postings were the second-largest source of spam, but e-mail addresses registered at e-commerce sites, posted to online discussions on Web sites, or listed as the contact for domains in the WHOIS database generated little spam, according to the study.
• Paul Twomey later this month will replace Stuart Lynn as president and CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers . Named by the ICANN board of directors, the Australian national, who will take over March 27, will be the first non-U.S. citizen to head the global Internet oversight body, established in 1998. ICANN oversees global Internet domain name administration.
• After more than a year of declining revenue, VPN equipment vendor SonicWall has shaken up its leadership, appointing a new chairman, and a new president and CEO. Chuck Kissner, who has been on the board since July 2000, replaced founder Sreekanth Ravi as chairman of the board. Former Phillips Electronics Components executive Matt Medeiros becomes SonicWall’s new president and CEO, at a time when the company’s revenue has been falling for more than a year. Its profits finally dipped into the red during the last quarter of 2002. Medeiros replaces Bill Roach, who served as interim president and CEO since last summer.
• The Internet Engineering Task Force took a hard look in the mirror during its meeting last week in San Francisco. Members were presented with a list of problems within the organization that might be throwing a wrench into the process of how standards are developed and finalized. The Problem Working Group, formed last November after members aired concerns about the internal operations of the IETF, presented a draft statement outlining a number of problematic issues to the entire IETF. The next step is for the Problem Working Group to modify its draft statement, and ultimately submit a document detailing specific problems and how best to address them.