D-Tools and Dove Net Technologies Announce Integration Solution for Accounting and Inventory Management

D-Tools’ award-winning software solution now compatible with Dove Net, making it possible for Integrators to integrate with various accounting solutions and manage inventory control. LAS VEGAS, NV– INFOCOMM – JUNE 13, 2012 – D-Tools, Inc., the worldwide leader in system integration software announced today that Dove Net Technologies., developer of The Project System Project Management software, has developed an integration that allows for the import of D-Tools System Integrator 5.5 project files to manage inventory with The Project System and provide a bridge to third party accounting systems.    ### About Dove Net Technologies, LLC.  Dove Net Technologies was started in 1993. It’s original company was Nasca Systems, Inc. of Virginia, USA, a Systems Integration Company, started in 1978.  Deliver excellent Estimating and Project Management software that helps improve an organization’s efficiencies and effectiveness that then enables them to be more profitable.  We have an intricate knowledge of the working systems that contractors use and we apply that knowledge to our product solutions. We develop tools and systems specific to related industries.  For more information please visit http://www.dovenet.com.  About D-Tools, Inc.  D-Tools, founded in 1998 and based in Concord, California, is a worldwide leader in accessible, highly accurate system design and documentation software. The company’s flagship product, System Integrator™ (SI), is a total design solution that utilizes Autodesk® AutoCAD and Microsoft® Visio for comprehensive system design, documentation and project management. D-Tools SI allows residential and commercial integrators to streamline their business processes to increase overall revenues while reducing the time and costs associated with the installation and integration of low-voltage systems. Over 3,000 leading companies use D-Tools software to reduce time and costs and streamline the system integration process.

Free Wi-Fi, but Speed Costs

As airlines try to persuade passengers to pay for Internet access at cruising altitudes, more airports and hotels are offering it free on the ground.

Half of the busiest airports in the United States now have free Wi-Fi, including Denver, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Phoenix and Houston. Dallas/Fort Worth plans to join that list in September, teaming with AT&T in a service that will give travelers 40 minutes of free Wi-Fi in exchange for viewing a 30-second advertisement.

That type of sponsored access is one way airports are balancing consumer pressure for free access to Facebook, Twitter and e-mail accounts with the cost of providing a bigger pipe for growing data needs. As devices demanding Wi-Fi proliferate, airports and hotels are also turning to tiered pricing models: offering limited Internet access free and a faster premium service to customers willing to pay.

Denver International Airport, which has offered free advertiser-supported Wi-Fi since 2007, is switching to a tiered pricing model this week. Working with Boingo Wireless, the airport is upgrading its network to give travelers free basic Internet service or more bandwidth for a $7.95 day pass (for a laptop) or $4.95 an hour (for a smartphone).

A business traveler sending a large file to a client is the type of customer who may opt for the premium speed.

“If you don’t see it going fast enough, you’d have that option of upgrading to the paid service,” said John Ackerman, the airport’s chief commercial officer. “Is your time or your money more important to you? That’s a personal choice we’re going to allow you to make.”

While the free service will still require viewing a 15- to 30-second commercial every half-hour, Mr. Ackerman said passengers should see improvements in the speed of the complimentary service, which has been a source of complaints.

The Boingo contract guarantees the Denver airport a minimum share of the Wi-Fi revenue — more than $500,000 over three years for the airport — with the potential for higher earnings as advertising opportunities evolve.

“We could have somebody walking down the concourse and serve them an ad saying, ‘There’s a Starbucks 200 yards up and to the right — stop in and have a cup of coffee for 50 cents off,’ ” Mr. Ackerman said.

With flight cutbacks decreasing the income airports receive from landing fees, non-airline revenue has become more critical to airports, which have also been lobbying the government to raise the passenger tax that helps pay for airport facilities. So these types of Wi-Fi deals help balance budgets while remaining competitive in an era when passengers can choose to fly from or connect through an airport with better amenities or prices.

Jim Sullivan, founder of WiFiFreespot.com, a directory of airports, hotels and retailers that offer free Wi-Fi, said more regional airports had joined the list in recent years.

“It’s more of a competitive situation there,” he said. “It’s definitely an amenity they can offer to try to get more traffic.”

Some notable larger airports have also embraced free Wi-Fi, including Reagan National and Dulles airports in Washington. By July 2, Raleigh-Durham International airport in North Carolina plans to introduce a tiered Wi-Fi service, with 45 minutes of free advertiser-sponsored access.

Christian Gunning, a spokesman for Boingo Wireless, which operates free, paid and tiered Wi-Fi networks at more than 60 airports worldwide, said the hotel industry had led the way as Internet pricing models evolved.

“Ten years ago, pretty much every airport was pay and pretty much every hotel was pay,” he said. “Some of the midtier hotels started to go free, then everybody did it, and it was a race to the bottom.”

That bottom is an experience familiar to anyone who has tried to log on to a free network — or even a paid one — and waited through most of an airport layover or room service delivery time for a few dozen e-mails to download.

“No one wants to pay for anything, but everything needs to be state-of-the-art or people complain,” Mr. Gunning said.

But travelers who are already paying high monthly bills for their smartphones can now rely on cellular networks to check their e-mail or flight status, and may have little incentive to pay additional fees for Wi-Fi at the airport, or even at their hotel.

Even with its free service, Denver International airport has about 10,000 daily Wi-Fi users — double the number in 2008 but still less than 10 percent of the travelers who pass through the airport each day.

While providers cite increased data demands as a justification for charging for Internet access, travelers often balk at the fees and at having to pay separate charges for every device they carry.

HotelChatter, a Web site that follows the hotel industry, found in its latest annual Wi-Fi report that although more hotels were offering free or tiered pricing, the ones that did impose a fee charged $13.95 a day. The report estimates that the cost to provide Internet service for a 250-room hotel ranges from $2.50 to $4.50 per room, per month.

For such a hotel, “the average yearly revenue that we ballparked was around $200,000,” said Mark Johnson, HotelChatter’s founder.

Mr. Johnson has tracked hotel Wi-Fi for eight years and has found that even some luxury brands are testing the waters of a free option.

“This year, in particular, we saw a lot of luxury hotels offering some sort of free Wi-Fi,” he said, mentioning Peninsula Hotels as one example of a luxury brand that offers free Internet to all guests.

Sometimes it’s a perk given to members of the hotel’s loyalty program. Platinum-level members of Starwood’s Preferred Guest program, for instance, receive free Internet access, and as of March, gold-level members can choose free Internet service as one of several benefits when they check in. Fairmont offers free Internet access to all members of its President’s Club loyalty program, which anyone can join.

In other cases, the free service is available only in the hotel’s public areas — preserving fees from guests who prefer to log on in their rooms.

“They’re still going to get revenue from business travelers who aren’t going to work out of the lobby,” Mr. Johnson said.

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obamasecretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.

These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical, noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional enrichment.

Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute. The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though there is evidence that some remnants of it continue.

Iran initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last year, the nation announced that it had begun its own military cyberunit, and Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared “to fight our enemies” in “cyberspace and Internet warfare.” But there has been scant evidence that it has begun to strike back.

The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and sophistication.

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University in April. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about who was responsible.

A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of another cyberweapon calledFlame that was recently discovered to have attacked the computers of Iranian officials, sweeping up information from those machines. But the computer code appears to be at least five years old, and American officials say that it was not part of Olympic Games. They have declined to say whether the United States was responsible for the Flame attack

NYtimes

Apple says 4G labeling is legit

Apple is defending its decision to market the latest iPad as a 4G-compatible device, answering a complaint from the Australian government’s consumer watchdog.

The company said Thursday in an Australian federal court that its decision to tout the tablet as 4G was not deceptive, the Australian reported. The tablet, which is compatible with 4G networks in the United States, does not work on Australian 4G networks. Apple has offered refunds to Australian consumers who felt they were misled by Apple’s marketing.

Apple has said that it was clear from before the launch of the iPad that its tablet would not work with the 4G networks in Australia.

Apple’s Australian Web site says that its iPad works on the country’s “HSPA, HSPA+ and DC-HSPA” networks, without mentioning the “Ultrafast 4G LTE” that it promotes on its Web pages in America and Canada — the only countries where the iPad is 4G LTE-compatible.

The dispute over the iPad touches on another point of contention on the labeling of the world’s mobile networks — namely what exactly is 4G. Apple is running into problems because the LTE frequencies of U.S. and Australian networks aren’t compatible.

The International Telecommunications Union, a standards-setting body for telecommunications services, identifies just two technologies as “true” 4G networks: LTE Advanced and WiMax Release 2, which aren’t as widely deployed.

But, technically, carriers can (and do) apply the 4G branding to LTE networks, WiMax networks and HSPA+ networks with the blessing of the ITU because they provide a “substantial level of improvement in performance…with respect to the initial third-generation systems now deployed.”

That’s why U.S. carriers all advertise 4G networks, though each is running a slightly different flavor: Verizon’s 4G network is an LTE network; AT&T’s is a mix of LTE and HSPA+; T-Mobile runs an HSPA+ network. Sprint is the odd man out on the WiMax standard but is building LTE infrastructure.

Via Washington Post

The web’s new world order (The Times)

The British people fought wars and went through a great deal of civil strife to construct the form of democracy we currently have. Thus there is nothing wrong with our government seeking to ensure that within its national boundaries activity in cyberspace conforms with its laws. The alternative proposition, that the law of the internet is coterminous with the decisions of the US supreme court, is unacceptable everywhere except the US.

The internet of course is magical and wonderful. But we should not have to put up with all the bad stuff in order to benefit from the good. By failing to deal with significant levels of online crime, I’m afraid the high priests of the internet industry, of whom Sergey Brin is most certainly one, have created the situation of which he and they now complain (Web freedom under threat – Google founder, 16 April). It may not be too late to halt or reverse some of the processes Brin is anxious about, but time is running out and laissez-faire will not cut it.
John Carr
London

•  I recently replaced a defunct mobile phone and, a week in, find that the new phone’s default settings included backing up “application data, Wi-Fi passwords and other settings to Google servers”. Is Mr Brin a suitably qualified glasshouse stone-thrower, or does the above sit uncomfortably with Google’s previous sniffing for Wi-Fi networks while making photographic surveys?

Internet freedom must rely upon a sea of small providers rather than disproportionate control by nations or global corporations. I will be looking to remove other Google services from my phone.
Mike Brown
Newcastle upon Tyne

• ”Internet freedom” is just a vehicle for transnational corporations such as Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook to impose their ideology of rightwing libertarianism on the world – strident capitalism, no taxes, no government, no community. They are a threat in the same way as Murdoch has proved to be, but for some reason we talk about them as if they were the post office or the library.
Dr Stephen Dorril
University of Huddersfield

• Ai Weiwei‘s comments on the power of the internet to achieve freedom (China’s censorship can never defeat the internet, 16 April) remind me strongly of the prescience of your former Communist affairs correspondent Victor Zorza (died 1996). I recall the characteristic enthusiasm with which he told me, almost certainly as far back as the 1970s, that he was convinced that fledgling information technology would prove to be a death knell for totalitarian regimes. As your other articles demonstrate, however, this is not quite so straightforward a matter, given the partially successful attempts at censorship in today’s authoritarian countries. But the general conclusion still holds, as Ai Weiwei suggests. Once the monopoly of information slips out of the hands of the rulers of such countries, political consequences are bound to follow sooner or later.
Peter Roland
Bognor Regis, West Sussex

• Russia‘s alarming restrictions on internet freedom, including the imprisonment of pro-democracy bloggers (Nervous Kremlin seeks to take back control, 16 April), are inconsistent with its membership of the UN Human Rights Council. When he first became president in 1999, Vladimir Putin promised to defend freedom of speech. When he returns to the post next month, Putin would do well to honour his word – and that of his country.
Hillel C Neuer
Executive director, UN Watch, Geneva

• Re your editorial (14 April), New South Wales police have set up a social media community engagement project called Eyewatch. Each of our 80 local area commands has a Facebook page. Each day, police publish local crime issues and crime prevention tips. We are now formulating neighbourhood watch closed Facebook groups across the state so communities can be in touch with police whenever they want to. Our pages have attracted 93,000 fans and over 30m page impressions. Crime is being solved; communities and police are working together to identify problems and create community solutions. This programme – applying the Peelian principles to the 21st century – could be easily adopted in the UK.
Chief Inspector Josh Maxwell
Manager, Project Eyewatch

Facebook weighs in on cybersecurity legislation (Washington Post)

By Hayley Tsukayama,

Facebook has added its voice to the debate over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), saying it supports aspects of the legislation, but wants to work with lawmakers to address privacy concerns about the bill.

In a company blog post, Facebook’s vice president of public policy, Joel Kaplan first outlined what Facebook supports about the bill.

“A number of bills being considered by Congress, including the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (HR 3523), would make it easier for Facebook and other companies to receive critical threat data from the U.S. government,” Kaplan wrote. “Importantly, HR 3523 would impose no new obligations on us to share data with anyone — and ensures that if we do share data about specific cyber threats, we are able to continue to safeguard our users’ private information, just as we do today.”

CISPA is designed to make it easy for the government to share cyber threat information with private companies and vice versa. But groups such as the Center for Democracy and Technology and theElectronic Frontier Foundation worry that the bill’s language is overly broad.

“The idea is to facilitate detection of and defense against a serious cyber threat, but the definitions in the bill go well beyond that. The language is so broad it could be used as a blunt instrument to attack websites like The Pirate Bay or WikiLeaks,” said the EFF’s activism director Rainey Reitman and senior staff attorney Lee Tien in a post on the non-profit’s Web site. Mention of intellectual property in the bill, they say, could theoretically allow Internet service providers to “block access to websites like The Pirate Bay believed to carry infringing content, or take other measures provided they claimed it was motivated by cybersecurity concerns.”

Many of those who mobilized against anti-piracy bills earlier this year have taken up the call against CISPA because of these worries, hoping to duplicate the movement that all but killed the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP (Intellectual Property) Act. Several of the people who commented on Facebook’s post were skeptical of the company’s intentions in supporting the bill, which they worry violates individual privacy rights.

Given the number of concerns raised about the bill, Kaplan said, Facebook would like to work with lawmakers to hammer out some of the issues in the legislation.

He wrote that Facebook has no intention of sharing sensitive personal information with the government, saying the “overriding goal of any cybersecurity bill should be to protect the security of networks and private data.”

The bill’s sponsors, Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) , have said their bill is very different from SOPA and PIPA and that they are working with civil liberty and privacy groups to address concerns about the bill.

Call for Applications: Online internships with De Hoeksteen

Now accepting applications for Autumn 2012

De Hoeksteen Live Communications has 7 spots for its fall online internships and it is seeking interns with flawless written english and whose interests coalesce around one or more of these areas:

Cultural Studies

Journalism 

History 

Sociology

Political Science

Library Science

Archivism 

Information Technology

About the Internships

This 3 month internship program is completely online through digital platforms dealing with live multicasting: cable television, streaming, virtual universes, augmented reality,  mobile media and social media.

Interns are expected to work with live and pre-recorded transmission, online archiving, asset management and platform development. Social Media (twitter, facebook, linkedin, wordpress, google +) plays a crucial role on De Hoeksteen’s overall activities and it is part of the internship’s tasks.

About De Hoeksteen

De Hoeksteen was born as a pre-recorded tv program for Salto Amsterdam cable television on 1990. In 1991, the program became a live-12-hour-long cable casting that offered Salto’s public access division a fresh and new concept of real time interactive television covering current affairs, politics, finances, culture and communications. Today, it is a 3 hour long program transmitted the last friday of every month by Amsterdam’s cable network, livestream and Qik mobile. Also, participates and/or covers different industry fairs, cultural festivals and other international events on remote and in some cases, with correspondants and comentarist present at those events.

Applying to the Program

Submit your CV to hksteen@dds.nl adressed to Maria Hernandez until June 1st 2012.

Half a million Mac computers ‘infected with malware’ – BBC News

Its report claims that about 600,000 Macs have installed the malware – potentially allowing them to be hijacked and used as a “botnet”.

The firm, Dr Web, says that more than half that number are based in the US.

Apple has released a security update, but users who have not installed the patch remain exposed.

Flashback was first detected last September when anti-virus researchers flagged up software masquerading itself as a Flash Player update. Once downloaded it deactivated some of the computer’s security software.

Later versions of the malware exploited weaknesses in the Java programming language to allow the code to be installed from bogus sites without the user’s permission.

Remote control

Dr Web said that once the Trojan was installed it sent a message to the intruder’s control server with a unique ID to identify the infected machine.

“By introducing the code criminals are potentially able to control the machine,” the firm’s chief executive Boris Sharov told the BBC.

“We stress the word potential as we have never seen any malicious activity since we hijacked the botnet to take it out of criminals’ hands. However, we know people create viruses to get money.

“The largest amounts of bots – based on the IP addresses we identified – are in the US, Canada, UK and Australia, so it appears to have targeted English-speaking people.”

Dr Web also notes that 274 of the infected computers it detected appeared to be located in Cupertino, California – home to Apple’s headquarters.

Update wait

Java’s developer, Oracle, issued a fix to the vulnerability on 14 February, but this did not work on Macintoshes as Apple manages Java updates to its computers.

Apple released its own “security update” on Wednesday – more than eight weeks later. It can be triggered by clicking on the software update icon in the computer’s system preferences panel.

The security firm F-Secure has also posted detailed instructions abouthow to confirm if a machine is infected and how to remove the Trojan.

Although Apple’s system software limits the actions its computers can take without requesting their users’ permission, some security analysts suggest this latest incident highlights the fact that the machines are not invulnerable.

“People used to say that Apple computers, unlike Windows PCs, can’t ever be infected – but it’s a myth,” said Timur Tsoriev, an analyst at Kaspersky Lab.

Apple could not provide a statement at this time.

De Hoeksteen Live! 2011.04.29

Every last FRIDAY of the month: No-Definition TeleVision

21:00 – 00:00 CEST

[ = 19:00 - 22:00 pm UTC/GMT/Zulu ]

Real-time interactive cross-media  talk show with the usual suspects and surprise guests from the worlds of politics, arts, business, media and more!

Live from The Netherlands Media Art Instititute (NIMk), Amsterdam.

• * AMSTERDAM TV: SALTO 1 (A1) – (UPC cable: Analog UHF 39+ /  Digital 32)
• * LIVE STREAMS webcasting online
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(GSM briefs) Newest Toshiba Netbook Offers Integrated EVDO and HSPA 3G

(Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2010)

Toshiba NB205 netbook owner Hector Gomez leaked some interesting info on a refreshed Toshiba making its way through the FCC.