RIM Heads To The Cloud

Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM) will take the wraps off of a new cloud-based social music sharing service called BBM Music, as companies begin to bet on entertainment delivered over the Internet that incorporates social networking features.

Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry phones, said select music from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music and EMI would be available for the users.

A closed beta trial of the BBM Music service is starting on today in Canada, the United States and the UK, the company stated.

The music service is expected to be commercially available to customers later this year for a monthly subscription of $4.99 in a number of countries, it said.

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Dish Seeks To Add Cellular Services

Satellite TV provider Dish Network is aiming to build a 4G cellular network, if the U.S. Federal Communications Commission grants its permission, according to a filing the satellite provider made on Monday.

Dish, which earlier this year completed an acquisition of bankrupt satellite mobile operator TerreStar, asked the FCC to transfer TerreStar’s frequency licenses to a Dish subsidiary and to allow Dish to use the spectrum to build a broadband wireless network that it could then use to offer standalone cellular services.

Combined with spectrum Dish acquired in a separate deal to buy DBSD North America, the satellite provider wants to build a network using LTE, the technology of choice for most of the nationwide mobile phone operators, it wrote.

But it needs special permission from the FCC to offer standalone cellular service–as opposed to a service that is integrated with satellite service–and says it is crucial that it be allowed to do so.

“The requirement to make every device dual-mode severely limits a provider’s ability to enter into arrangements with multiple device and equipment manufacturers, thereby limiting consumer choice and severely impairing the business case economics,” Dish wrote.

The company also argued that customers want the choice of a smaller, lighter device with long battery life. Adding satellite capabilities to devices makes them heavier and reduces battery life. “Today, a mobile voice and data provider’s ability to attract customers depends in large measure on its ability to provide its customers with the types of devices that best suit their needs,” it wrote.

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VoIP Ideal Platform For Controlling Botnets

Botnets and their masters can communicate with one other by calling into the same VoIP conference call and exchanging data using touch tones, researchers demonstrated at Defcon.

This gives the botmasters — whose top goals include remaining anonymous — the ability to issue orders from random payphones and disposable cellular phones, say researchers Itzik Kotler and Iftach Ian Amit of security and risk-assessment firm Security Art.

Using phones and the public phone networks eliminates one of the prime tools bot fighters have: taking down the domains of botnets’ command and control servers, the researchers say. If the botmaster isn’t using a command and control server, it can’t be taken down.

In fact, the botmaster can communicate with the zombie machines that make up the botnet without using the Internet at all if the zombies are within a corporate network. So even if a victim company’s VoIP network is segregated from the data network, there is still a connection to the outside world.

In addition to its stealth, the VoIP tactic employs technology that readily pierces corporate firewalls and uses only traffic that is difficult for data loss prevention software to peer into. The traffic is streamed audio, so data loss prevention scanners can’t recognize patterns of data they are supposed to filter, the researchers say.

The downsides of VoIP as a command channel are that it severely limits the number of zombie machines that can be contacted at once, and the rate at which stolen data can be sent out of a corporate network is limited by the phone system. But Kotler and Amit say the connections are plenty big to send commands in.

During their demo at the conference, the pair had an Asterisk open source IP PBX stand in as the corporate PBX. A virtual machine representing a zombie computer on a corporate network called via TCP/IP through the PBX and into a corporate conference call. A BlackBerry, representing the botmaster dialed in over the public phone network to the same conference call.

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Nokia Had Horrible Quarter

Nokia has just posted very disturbing quarterly results this morning. The European smartphone giant outlook appears to be getting worse and CEO Stephen Elop has acknowledged that things will not turn around overnight.

Elop is reporting that Nokia’s operating profit is down 44 percent since Q1 and sales of mobile devices are down 23 percent consecutively. While the overall sales of mobile phones and smartphones are down, along with average selling prices.

Elop labelled the results as “clearly disappointing” and went on to say that competitive pressures are continuing. He tried to paint a somewhat more positive outlook for the rest of the year, thanks to Nokia’s clear strategy and several major product launches.

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Twitter Security Lagging,Says Experts

The fast-growing microblogging site Twitter is lagging behind some other Internet services in using methods to help secure the accounts of users, security experts say.

Weaknesses in Twitter’s security became apparent on the U.S. July 4 Independence holiday as a still unidentified hacker took control of a Fox News Twitter account and tweeted falsely claiming that U.S. President Barack Obama was dead.

While the hijacking of Twitter accounts is not new, the false Tweets about Obama generated headlines around the world.

The Secret Service is investigating the matter. Fox News has said does not know how the attacker gained control of its account, but complained that it took Twitter more than five hours to return control of the account to Fox.

“What Twitter needs to do now is to commit to a thorough review of their security practices,” said Daniel Diermeier, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “For Twitter this is a very serious problem.”

Security experts said the attack might have been prevented if Twitter had offered two-factor authentication technology to secure its accounts.

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Visa Digital Wallet Coming

Visa Inc, the world’s largest credit and debit card processing network, is designing a digital wallet that people can use to pay for things on the Internet or with their phones instead of with traditional plastic cards.

The network said on Wednesday it is collaborating with several large U.S. and international banks to create the wallet. Its partners include US Bancorp, PNC Financial Services, Regions Financial, BB&T Corp, Toronto Dominion’s TD Bank and the U.S. arm of Barclays PLC.

The “digital wallet” will store the banks’ customers’ credit and debit card account information, both for Visa cards as well as other cards. People can use the wallet to pay for things online or in stores, Visa said.

The network will also have to convince merchants to put a new “one-click” button on their websites, so that potential customers can use their Visa digital wallets to buy things by clicking the button instead of by manually entering all of their account information every time they want to make an online purchase.

Banks, mobile phone operators and networks like Visa are all trying to gain territory in the small, but high-potential market for U.S. mobile payments. Last week Isis, a separate mobile payments venture run by three of the top four U.S. carriers, said it had modified its initial goals and was now open to working with Visa and MasterCard as it introduces its own mobile wallet.

Jim McCarthy, Visa’s head of global products, told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday that mobile payments in the United States “will more easily take off” from people using their smartphones’ browsers to buy things online.

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EBS Coming To Your Smartphone

In the event of local and/or nationwide disasters, wireless carriers will soon begin alerting the public by sending emergency SMS text messages to mobile phones.

AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless have all agreed to a participate in this new Emergency Broadcast System alert method. It  will initially be rolled  out in New York and Washington, D.C., later this year, and nationwide next year, in April at the earliest.

The emergency text messages will cover public safety threats, Amber Alerts for missing children, and messages from the president, the New York Times reports. Messages will be free for customers, who can opt out of them all except the presidential messages.

We don’t expect the alerts to be frequent,” Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told the Times. “They will be reserved for when they are truly needed, for tornadoes or for disasters like 9/11.”

Genachowski said the emergency texts will look different from ordinary messages, making them more difficult for hackers to infiltrate or fake. They’ll probably appear directly on the screen, along with a special vibration or other signal. No word on how closely they’ll resemble the tone and color bars of the current Emergency Broadcast System for televisions, or whether users can expect “this is a test” messages on a regular basis.

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Panasonic May Boot 40,000 People

Analysts are speculating that Panasonic is planning to cut approximately 40,000 jobs over a couple of years.

Reuters is stating that Panasonic is being forced to take such drastic measures in its restructuring plans in its struggle to cut operating costs.  That said Panasonic is facing stiff competition from other Asian consumer electronics companies in Korea and China and has seen its profits dwindle over the year.

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Hackers Go After WordPress

Mobile Phone Security Threats On The Rise

Mobile phone security threats rose sharply last year as the growing popularity of Internet-enabled mobile devices like smartphones and tablets provided new opportunities for cybercriminals, security software maker McAfee said.

In its fourth-quarter threat report, released on today, McAfee said the number of pieces of new cellphone malware it found in 2010 rose 46 percent over 2009’s level.

“As more users access the Internet from an ever-expanding pool of devices -computer, tablet, smartphone or Internet TV- web-based threats will continue to grow in size and sophistication,” it said.

McAfee, which is being acquired by Intel for $7.68 billion, said it expected PDF and Flash maker Adobe to remain a favorite of cybercriminals this year, after it surpassed Microsoft  in popularity as a target in 2010.

It attributed the trend to Adobe’s greater popularity in mobile devices and non-Microsoft environments, coupled with the ongoing widespread use of PDF document files to transfer malware.  Read More….

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