Software piracy is on the increase in Canada because employees are often installing their own unauthorized software at work, according to a new survey.

“About 35 per cent of all software sold in Canada is piracy,” said Alan Steel, acting president of the Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft [CAAST], in a telephone interview on Monday.

“In most cases, if a person has their own personal copy [even when bought legally], and then puts it on a company computer, it’s illegal. The employer has no idea, and can be held accountable. People loading something should understand the issues at hand.”

According to a Decima Research survey commissioned by CAAST, one in 11 Canadians who use computers at work are installing unauthorized software.

The survey suggests that one in nine British Columbians have installed unauthorized software, compared to just four per cent of workers in Atlantic Canada. Ontario rated the highest, at 12 per cent.

According to the survey, which was conducted in August and released by CAAST on Monday, 37 per cent of the 1,083 respondents felt there was nothing wrong with installing personal software on company computers, while 26 per cent simply felt it was more convenient than going through proper channels to acquire the software.

Nearly half, 42 per cent, said they had not been briefed about their company’s policies regarding downloading, installing or using unlicensed software. And 27 per cent said they weren’t sure of their employer’s position on the issue.

Steel said a company’s reputation, as well as the integrity and security of its computer systems, can be put at risk by using unauthorized software.

CAAST said in a news release that unlicensed software — whether illegally copied, purchased or downloaded — can result in legal liability for companies, security risks and viruses. Under Canadian copyright law, each copied software program can result in damages of up to $20,000, and businesses can be held liable for the actions of their employees.

Steel said he was shocked by the results of the survey.

“It did shock us that 42 per cent said that they’d never been briefed about the usage of software at a company. And we’re really surprised by the number of people who said they really didn’t know.”

Earlier this year, a North Vancouver robotics firm, Braintech Inc., agreed to pay more than $140,000 to CAAST for using unlicensed copies of programs.

After an internal audit, Braintech — which specializes in vision-guided automation for manufacturing — discovered it was using unlicensed copies of Adobe, Internet Security Systems, Macromedia, Microsoft and Symantec software programs.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

Cyber attackers are gearing up to launch a new assault on the Internet, exploiting a flaw in the handling of a popular graphics format to deliver viruses and Trojan horses to computers around the world.

Hackers were scrambling to take advantage of the flaw after a code to exploit it was created and posted online Wednesday. Sample programs published on the Internet indicate the flaw could allow outsiders to take over machines, adding to their vast armies of remotely controlled robot computers. It could also be used to launch denial of service and other cyber attacks.

Security experts say the threat, which centres around the opening of jpegs, a graphics format in widespread use, is of particular concern because it can be spread in a number of ways — including simply through the viewing of web pages. In e-mail, it can be triggered even if users don’t open attachments in their mailboxes.

The flaw can be fixed through the Windows operating system Service Pack 2, but Symantec Corp., which specializes in information security, warns the vulnerability can also show up in other third-party software.

“It is a serious threat,” said Dee Liebenstein, product manager for Symantec’s DeepSight Threat Management System. “One of our concerns is that it can be used over and over again.

“You can patch your operating system, but this component is actually used in many different applications, not only by Microsoft, so there is a risk that you will patch your Microsoft operating system and later install a different application that has this same vulnerability.”

Liebenstein said the flaw has also elicited a particularly rapid reaction from hackers. The lag time between the release of the vulnerability and the release of a code to take advantage of it was barely two days, down from an average of six days.

“We saw this exploit code come out within a couple of days of the vulnerability being exposed,” said Liebenstein. “It happened very fast.

“It is one of the faster ones, and that is one of the reasons it is a big concern for everyone,” said Ryan Purita, senior security consultant with Vancouver‘s Totally Connected Security. Purita said that while the Windows Service Pack2 is available, there can be a lag time before corporate users install the update. The quick turnaround time between the release of the vulnerability and the code to exploit it puts corporations at even more risk.

“With corporations, it could be months before they roll it out and properly test it,” Purita said of the software update.

“This forces people to update almost immediately or they’ll get exploited.”

Purita said it is the first time he is aware of JPEGs being used to transport malicious code.

“I’ve never heard of a JPEG [Joint Photographic Experts Group] being able to carry a virus,” he said.

Purita said while some network administrators block JPEGs if their company doesn’t have any need for the format, virus writers have demonstrated they are able to get around that measure simply by changing the name of the file to any format that includes an image viewer. That could be something as innocuous as a Word file.

JPEGs can also be transmitted in the text of messages and Purita said attackers could make the JPEGs transparent, so a reader, on opening an e-mail, wouldn’t even be aware that a JPEG file had been activated and the rogue program installed on the computer.

“This is going to be a nasty one because is so simple,” said Purita.

Liebenstein said computer users who adopt the following best practices considerably reduce their risk:

– Update your computer with any patches that are available for the software applications you are running. Windows operating systems have an update button under the Start menu to take you to the Windows update website, or you can find a link to it through www.microsoft.com.

– Turn off HTML in your e-mail so your e-mail won’t be able to open JPEGs files within the text of a message.

– Update your anti-virus checker and firewall.

– Visit only websites that you know to be reputable.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

LONDON — Imagine the scene. You’re walking through a crowded shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon and your cell phone bleeps. You get your phone out and read the screenNULL”Umm, nice shoes, buddy!”

“Who sent that?” you wonder frantically, while gazing paranoically at your shiny new loafers. You click to see who the message came from, but no number shows up.

Then another message comes through. It says: “Ha, ha! Congratulations! You’ve just been Bluejacked.” At this point, if you scan 360 degrees, you might just see two or more teenagers running away in hysterics.

The ability to be confused with intrusive, anonymous texts from pesky kids is one of the dubious advantages of having a cell phone enabled with Bluetooth, the short-wave radio technology.

The technology allows the sender’s phone to search for other Bluetooth-enabled devices within a range of about 10 metres and send messages to all other devices that have the technology switched on. For kids, who know more about how this stuff works than you, Bluejacking is the modern version of knocking on doors and running away, offering a similar degree of frisson with less risk of getting caught. It’s a growing craze.

Some more sinister types are using the technology to peep into the contacts books in other people’s mobiles. Some tech-savvy adults are even putting the “Blue” back into “Bluejacking” by using anonymous texts to engineer brief encounters with strangers on trains.

Sadly for cell-phone operators, none of these phenomena offers any revenue because all of this mischief can be made for free over short distances between devices, without the need to use the operator’s own network.

It is just one reason why Bluetooth has had its day as a developing technology.

Earlier this month Ericsson revealed that it was to stop developing new chip designs using Bluetooth. It’s a significant move because the Swedish mobile giant invented the standard just a decade ago.

It named it after the 10th century Danish King Harald Bluetooth who ended generations of national strife by uniting the country and turning it to Christianity.

In the early days Ericsson had similarly crusading hopes for the new technology and hyped it to high heaven. Bluetooth was going to free us from the garish snake-pit of wires that ran around our homes connecting our various electronic devices — TVs, video players, computers, printers, stereos, speakers.

Unfortunately, the club that Ericsson formed with other companies to develop the technology didn’t bother to do much work on standardization and thus left gaps in the standard for manufacturers to fill in.

The electronics giants couldn’t agree how to fill them and so most Bluetooth gizmos, such as wireless speakers and computer keyboards failed to take off. Little wonder that the wirelessly networked home remains a pipe dream for most of us.

Bluetooth’s biggest success came by accident as a result of legislation banning the use of handheld mobiles in the car. It led to a rush for Bluetooth hands-free kits and headsets.

However, car-makers remain unhappy with the Bluetooth community, which has been unable to develop the technology further to allow reliable synchronization between car kits and handsets for applications such as phone directory.

But despite Ericsson’s decision not to develop the technology further, other supporters remain convinced that Bluetooth can still change our lives. Chief among them is BT. Along with Vodafone and Motorola it is trying to develop a product called the Bluephone: a mobile that, when used in the home, uses short-wave radio to connect automatically to the home phone line, offering cheaper calls.

It could just be the product that helps BT to offset the plunging revenues in its traditional businesses. But don’t bet on it. Mobile operator MmO2 did trials with a similar service and encountered several problems, not least that its version couldn’t work through walls.

Little wonder then that BT has quietly put the project back several months.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

Your credit card information is coming under more frequent attack on the Internet than ever before.

A study released on Monday by Symantec Corp. says electronic commerce has become the favourite target of computer hackers.

Increasing numbers of international hackers are searching for people’s bank account and credit card details, instead of trying to infiltrate corporate and government systems or cause other mischief.

Attacks against the e-commerce industry worldwide have increased four-fold in the six months ending in June this year, compared to the previous six months, according to the study by Symantec, which specializes in security and anti-virus software.

It took a Vancouver Sun reporter just 30 seconds on Monday to crack an online shopping cart program with the help of a computer security consultant and pick up credit card numbers and other personal information.

The Sun didn’t hack into the program because it’s illegal to do so.

Chatting online, however, is not against the law and it took just another five minutes in a hacker chat room to acquire the name, street address, e-mail, credit card number, expiry date and security code for the combination debit/credit card belonging to a woman in California. Contacted at home, the woman said she still had the card in her wallet and had no idea everything needed to access her bank and credit accounts was freely available on the Internet.

Despite the efforts of security specialists and companies to protect against online attacks, this experiment by The Sun shows it is easy to come up with a so-called “fresh” credit-card number.

Ryan Purita, a senior security consultant with Totally Connected Security, demonstrated how simple it is to hack into the data files of a company involved in electronic commerce. He quickly guided The Sun through the process of uncovering vulnerable software, determining what companies were using that software, picking up the code online and exploiting the vulnerability.

Hackers are getting more efficient, narrowing the time frame between the announcement of vulnerability in software and the emergence of code to exploit the weakness. You can now find code to crack vulnerable systems just 5.8 days, on average, after the vulnerability is announced. That’s down from the last six months of 2003, when it would take a week. And the code is no further away than your Internet browser.

The Symantec study also found a rise in unauthorized “bot” networks — vast armies of computers that are being remotely controlled without their owners’ knowledge.

In a single day over the six-month reporting period ending in June, 75,000 remotely controlled computers were added to the number of monitored bots. The average number rose from under 2,000 to 30,000 a day during the first six months of this year.

Once a computer is remotely controlled, it can be used to launch denial-of-service attacks; it can also provide personal information that can be sold and traded and otherwise disrupt online service and commerce.

Vulnerabilities are outpacing the ability of many businesses to cope, with organizations facing more than seven new vulnerabilities a day — a significant percentage of which Symantec reports could result in “a partial or complete compromise of the targeted system.”

Companies that are highly security conscious and those that have large tech security departments, or outsource their security to experts, are the ones likely to plug those vulnerabilities quickly. However, that leaves a huge number of companies that don’t have the resources or the knowledge to keep their security systems current.

Stolen credit cards are not necessarily ones that have been used online. Hackers can use the techniques to try to get into the data files of any company that uses the Internet. So even if you have never bought online, you could still find yourself the victim of a hacking attack if you used a credit card to buy from a company — say a pizza shop — that uses the Internet in its business.

While hacking tools are making it easier for even the technologically inept to wreak havoc online, the criminally inclined don’t even need to hack to come up with lucrative credit-card numbers and other valuable information.

The Sun signed into an online chat room, and with Purita as guide, was able to link up with someone offering fresh credit cards.

“I have cc fresh with cvv2 … i need cc full info ssn … etc … pm me for trade,” was the offer made in the chat room, which at the time had about 75 people signed on.

Following Purita’s careful instructions to write in chat-room style (any hacker will recognize a novice who doesn’t speak the jargon), The Sun claimed to have credit cards “w/SSN.”

That piqued the interest of our online contact, who asked if the SSN was working, and once convinced of that, agreed to send one of his CCs for a test.

At that point, Purita said, a trader seriously engaged in the transaction would test the card by making a small donation to an online charity. If it worked, the parties could agree to a deal to defraud hundreds or thousands of credit cards.

“You don’t need to be a good hacker to steal credit cards,” said Purita, who demonstrated this by posting his own credit card number in the chat room. He instantly received the number on the back of his card, which is supposed to ensure the card’s security, plus the news that he had a $1,000 limit on the card.

This made it a less desirable target than the 1,000 high-limit cards which were for sale at the time in the room.

“The most credit cards I’ve seen scrolled was over 10,000 in three days,” said Purita. As for online shopping cart software, Purita said it is rife with vulnerabilities.

“Shopping cart programs are riddled with holes and they have been since day one,” he said.

The little lock you see in the corner of your screen on a secure site isn’t a guarantee your personal information won’t end up in the wrong hands. Purita said once the information is in a company’s database, it is vulnerable to a hacker breaking in and stealing it.

“They aren’t looking to steal one credit-card number, they are stealing 50,000 numbers from a database,” he said.

Michael Murphy, general manager of Symantec Canada, said “phishing” and spywork scams are most popular today.

Phishing, an online version of a criminal fishing expedition, is a scam in which a computer user is presented with a request for personal and financial information — ranging from account numbers to passwords — from someone posing as a reputable organization, such as the user’s bank. While security software like that offered by Symantec includes safeguards against releasing such information, there is no way to prevent a user from answering the request if they are fooled into thinking it is legitimate.

“Phone the bank and they will tell you, ‘We do not conduct business this way,’ and no reputable business will,” Murphy said.

Murphy said the rise in online attacks can be attributed to a desire by the attackers to make money.

“Once an attacker can monetize their efforts, that’s what they are going after,” he said. “Before that, it was peer acceptance, bragging rights. Today, groups of attackers are more organized, more sophisticated. It is no surprise e-commerce and web-related industries are the target. Clearly it is an economics-driven thing.”

Murphy pointed to stats showing that in 2003, U.S. banks and credit-card companies estimated phishing resulted in close to $1.2 billion US in damages, with 1.78 million individuals falling victim to the scam.

“Phishing scams have become the modern-day phone scams,” said Murphy, referring to fraud rackets in which the elderly and other victims were talked into opening their bank accounts or credit cards to unscrupulous phone solicitors.

Staff-Sgt. Bruce Imrie of the RCMP’s technological crime unit said consumers and businesses must be security savvy and take the time to understand and implement online security measures.

“In the industry as a whole, it is a continuation of a trend. It is not a new trend, but perhaps there has been an exponential increase,” he said. “Phishing has increased tremendously.”

Imrie said should consumers should not only ensure they are dealing with reputable online businesses, but also that the business’ security is sound.

“I would hesitate to say all e-commerce sites are that vulnerable, but certainly there will be vulnerable e-commerce sites,” he said. “There are vendors who are not right up to date.”

Imrie said computer users must also be aware of the vulnerability of their own computers to attack, even if they don’t shop online.

While it used to take opening an attachment to trigger a Trojan horse or worm that could take over your computer, today you don’t even have to do that to unwittingly allow an outsider to infiltrate your computer system.

Irmie urged consumers to:

– Update their software, including the operating system, regularly and as soon as updates become available.

– Use virus protection.

– Install both hardware and software firewalls.

– Be careful about sharing your credit-card information online and ensure you are dealing with sites that will safeguard the information and consider if you shop online, using a card for only that.

HER DATA ON NET LEAVES SHOPPER IN SHOCK, FEAR:

Colleen Ginsberg’s combination credit/debt card was stowed safely in her wallet when she got the call from The Vancouver Sun saying everything from her card number and expiry home address were being freely offered on the Internet.

“That’s horrible,” gasped Ginsberg. That isn’t her real name, but since she is already facing a security nightmare, cancelling her cards and trying to safeguard her bank accounts, we have chosen not to identify her.

“I’m hyperventilating right now.”

At first Ginsberg was mystified by the call from a Vancouver Sun reporter. This isn’t a crank call, she was assured, but you may want to know your credit card information has been compromised and you should cancel it.

The Sun gave her the credit card number, complete with expiry date, along with her home phone number, address and e-mail address. She couldn’t believe it. She also had several cards and didn’t know which it was. In minutes, she was back on the phone, even more aghast.

“It’s really scary because that was my debit card linked to my entire bank account,” she said. “We use that to check our balance online, to check our company balance, transfer money and stuff.

“I’m debating whether I should cancel all my credit cards.”

Ginsberg buys online regularly, but she uses more than one card and the last time she remembers using the card that appeared online was a month or two ago.

“I’m thinking I should change my phone number. I’m scared now.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

CREDIT: Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun Debi Parsons (above), a computer specialist from London Drugs, shows some of the photo software and digital cameras that are available. Software firms are paying more attention to programs that help archive and organize digital photos.

It’s your daughter’s birthday party. She’s blowing out the candles. She’s so darn cute. Soon there will be smudges of cake on her face. It’s a digital moment.

So you fire up the camera and click away. The images — hey, we don’t call them photos any more — pile up.

Half an hour later you have maybe 60 shots. No film, no sweat over cost.

Digital cameras — 15.3 million are expected to be shipped this year — make things easy, right? Otherwise why would 23 per cent of Canadian homes have them, with that expected to double again by the end of 2004.

Just connect up the camera or memory card and, whoosh, those birthday memories have been sucked into your computer.

Yep, now they’re there, along with the 93 images you shot in Arizona last summer, the 46 from Aunt Trish’s wedding in Port Alberni in March, the five you took of that incredible sunset a week ago and some 500 more you’ve loaded into your computer since you got the camera a year ago.

Sure you’ve printed a few. And maybe fiddled with editing some others, but most of them are, well, not quite lost, but not quite found either.

“When people get a digital camera, they’re not necessarily thinking immediately about what they can do with their digital photos,” said Microsoft Canada marketing manager Lisa Webber. “So, it’s not until six months or maybe a year after they’ve purchased the camera that they start to think about things like organization.”

Which means that a lot of us are starting to ponder the problem.

Unsurprisingly, major software companies, such as Apple with its iPhoto application, which now comes as part of the iLife package, are there ahead of us — along with some smaller one’s like Victoria‘s ACD Systems International with its ACDSee products.

Recently for example, Microsoft came out with its Digital Image Suite 10, which contains a revamped version of its Digital Image Library.

And Adobe has just announced that the new 3.0 version of Photoshop Elements for Windows will also have added features for those looking to keep track of their photos.

And Adobe’s Mac version of Photoshop Elements 3.0 will integrate more closely with iPhoto.

ACD — which already has 20 million users worldwide of ACDSee, according to company CEO Douglas Vandekerkhove — will be launching version 7.0 of its software, aimed at high-end amateurs and those who need industrial-strength organizing, within the next few weeks.

Software companies try to anticipate users’ needs, but often those of us who are piling up the digital images for the first time — including more and more women — aren’t quite sure how they want to keep them catalogued.

“I wouldn’t say that digital camera users are looking for something specific, it’s more that they know they need help organizing,” said Webber. “So what we do is provide a ton of flexibility because people think in all kinds of different ways about how they would store photos.”

Perhaps the most common of these is to sort by exact date taken or by month or by year.

“They’ll also do things by event,” said Webber. “And enthusiasts, especially on the higher end, might think about doing it by file size, because they understand certain of their photos are big.”

Or they could store by file type or format like .tiff or .jpeg.

As well, programs often allow people to assign key words to photographs.

“I have nephews, so I assign a category that is Adrian and Anthony, for example, because those are my nephews’ names,” said Webber. “So whenever I download a photo from my camera that includes Adrian and Anthony in it I assign that keyword to that photography.

“Then I can filter on Adrian and Anthony and come up with a whole list of what I have for them. That makes it your own interactive filing system.”

At the high amateur and professional end, with products like ACDSee, searches can be done on such things as camera make or model, exposure, flash, focal length, shutter speed, etc.

“Our product is not geared for the entry-level users, although it’s extremely easy to use and we have a lot of those users,” said Vandekerkhove.

“It’s geared to advanced hobbyists and enthusiasts who have acquired thousands of images and would like to do more with them.

“In the old days you had an old shoebox with a few hundred photos in it. Now you’ve got a hard drive with thousands and we think in a year that will be in the tens of thousands.”

Added Vandekerkhove: “So ACDSee is designed to be very fast and efficient at handling that amount of images.”

Vandekerkhove said that his product is also making inroads in the corporate market such as insurance companies, which need to take images for claims purposes.

“What’s happening is that before where they would have had a, say $30,000-a-month film processing budget, which seriously limited how many images they could take. Today the cost of taking thousands of images is very small.”

What these corporations need is tools that can efficiently work with huge amounts of digital information,” said Vandekerkhove.

[email protected]

PHOTO SOFTWARE WITH IMAGE CATALOGUING CAPABILITIES:

ACDSee 6.0 (7.0 out soon) from ACD Systems, $65. Order on the net (www.acdsystems.com) or buy at stores like Staples.

ACDSee PowerPack (contains ACDSee 6.0 plus a photo editor , etc.), $100. Available from London Drugs or online.

Digital Image Suite 10 from Microsoft, $189.95 (but $70 worth of rebates are available). Available at most software outlets.

iPhoto 4 from Apple, comes with Mac computers or as part of iLife ’04, $59. Available at stores that carry Mac software.

Photoshop Elements 2.0 from Adobe (3.0 out soon), $140. Available at most software outlets.

Note, there are many other digital image cataloguing software packages available.

Ran with fact box “Photo Software With Image Cataloguing Capabilities”, which has been appended to the end of the story.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

CREDIT: Sandy Huffakere, Associated Press View of EverNote technology used in cell phones and mobile computers is shown during a technology show in San Diego. Users can synchronize all kinds of notes and data over the Internet and transfer it to their cell phone.

PALO ALTO, Calif. – Have you ever gone online to get driving directions, only to leave the printout behind? Have you made movie plans, but forgot to jot down the show times? Or do you simply need an easy way to feed phone numbers to your cell phone?

A trio of entrepreneurs believe they have a solution.

With cell phones becoming more like computers and people carrying them wherever they go, the founders of Vazu Inc. have developed what they consider an easy way to transfer phone numbers and other data from PCs and the Internet onto handsets.

They quietly released their first product earlier this year for users to transfer contact information from desktop address books without any special cables or software. With little publicity, “Vazu Contacts” won rave reviews and garnered thousands of users in 40 countries.

But cell phones are becoming more of an anchor tool in daily life: Part mobile phone, part personal digital assistant, part camera, part MP3 player — and one day, with the arrival of mobile commerce applications, part wallet as well.

Vazu hopes to capitalize on that trend by creating a channel for folks who want to easily populate their phones with data.

So at this week’s elite DEMOmobile tech show in San Diego, Vazu is launching more ambitious products designed to turn cell phones into even handier reservoirs of information.

Instead of just phone contacts, the new applications promise to deliver any snippet of information from a Web site to a mobile phone with ease, from street addresses to train schedules and driving directions.

“It’s the power of the Web and connecting it to your phone,” said Ramiro Calvo, Vazu’s chief executive and co-founder. “And we’ve gone from personal addresses to searchable content to anything on the Web.”

“Vazu Click” is a free, plug-in application for Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser. It lets users highlight and send Web text to cell phones. It also automatically tags phone numbers on a Web page so users can send the number to their cell phones by simply clicking on the Vazu icon.

With “Vazu Seek,” which is still in a “beta” test mode, users can go to the Vazu Web site, search phone directory listings and send the results to their handsets.

Later, the company aims to feed cell phones with song files and images.

“Contacts is the beachhead, and we’re expanding to other digital content, breathing new life into the phone,” Calvo said.

PocketThis Inc. and Xpherix Corp. have similar PC-to-phone technologies, but sell their services through wireless carriers. Vazu is targeting cell phone users directly, regardless of their mobile provider.

Vazu says its system currently supports all Nokia and Sony Ericsson models and the company is evaluating other phone models. Its system also works with wireless networks using the GSM standard, only one of several used in North America.

With “Vazu Contacts,” users send an e-mail with an attachment containing address book information to an online Vazu account. From there, it is delivered to the cell phone via text messaging. Users can even send data directly to a friend’s Vazu account or cell phone.

Because Vazu keeps a record of what users send, contacts can be transferred to a new handset with just a few keystrokes should an old one get lost or upgraded. No more thumbing in contacts one by one.

The service currently works with address books for Microsoft’s Outlook, Apple Computer Inc.’s Mail and Novell Inc.’s Linux Evolution e-mail programs. All you need is a cell phone that supports text messaging — and most phones do.

“It’s cool,” said James Cox, a British information technology consultant who recommended the service on his Web journal after trying it out. “I uploaded about two dozen phone numbers, and within a minute or so, they were all on my phone.”

Cox had previously used Apple’s iSync software to transfer some of his contact numbers, but complained it didn’t work smoothly. He said he’s looking forward to using Vazu when he gets a new phone, something he does about once a year.

Vazu’s products are free for now, though users still have to pay wireless carriers for text messages. The Palo Alto-based company may later charge either a subscription or usage fee, or possibly for premium services such as restoring archived data. Vazu is also exploring advertising and partnerships with Internet portals and wireless carriers.

For Canadians using the Bell Mobility or Telus Mobility networks, the Vazu system may not work since they don’t use the GSM standard, which is used universally in European Union countries and many parts of the world.

Vazu says it supports GSM networks in the United States, Canada and Bolivia and are being tested in France, Germany, India and Ireland and the United Kingdom.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

CREDIT: Mark Van Manen, Vancouver Sun Russell Adams, Creo’s North American network and telecom manager, is delighted with the laser-gun data connection results.

The move of 25 telemarketers to an office across the street from the headquarters of Burnaby tech giant Creo Inc. seems as if it should be an easy matter.

After all, the new office was only 600 metres away, so what could be the problem?

Well, for one thing the 4,200-employee firm needed to connect those 25 workers at high speed to its own network and to its phone system. And it had to do this in three weeks.

Fibre optic cable might have worked — if Creo didn’t have to spend time to dig up the street at a minimum estimated cost of $30,000.

That cost was certainly out of line with the fact that the Creo telemarketers would be in the neighbouring Prime Mover Controls (PMC) building for just two years.

Another option looked at and discarded was two T1 lines with a separate PBX switchboard. But this wouldn’t provide the capacity needed.

However, Creo’s North American network and telecom manager Russell Adams came up with another idea.

He’d heard about Richmond-based fSONA’s SONAbeam free space optics (FSO) technology — which uses precisely aligned laser guns to provide a high-speed data connection.

Like fibre, FSO uses lasers to transmit data in ranges from 100 megabits per second to 2.5 gigabits per second, but instead of enclosing the data stream in a glass fibre, it’s transmitted through the air.

Russell knew that SONAbeam technology had been in place at another Burnaby tech firm just down the road.

“Electronic Arts was using it,” said Adams. “They did not have fibre optic lines to their facilities for quite a while. They’d utilized that technology, so it was proven.”

So Adams called in fSONA and installers Lasercomm. They installed a system at about a 10th of the cost of fibre optics.

“Long-story-short is that we had the fSONA laser installed on the top of the PMC building as well as the top of our own building,” said Adams. “And we’re running our network traffic as well as our phone traffic over that link.”

The installation, which runs at 100 megabits per second, took less than a week, said Adams, and most of that time was spent on putting in the mounts for the fSONA devices.

A particularly innovative feature of the installation is that the phone system uses voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology from Nortel rather than requiring a separate PBX in the satellite office.

Fsona’s senior vice-president of marketing Michael Corcoran said that the SONAbeam technology is particularly suited to VoIP because it offers clean bandwidth with no delay, or latency.

By contrast, he said, 802.11-based wireless technologies, even the 801.16 variety, usually called WiMAX, couldn’t deliver the quality that VoIP requires.

“It’s typically fine for data, because data is very forgiving in a TCP/IP environment, but voice is not,” said Corcoran.

Adams said that he’s monitoring the usage of the new fSONA system and that the traffic isn’t even touching the limits of what it could handle.

“I would absolutely recommend it to any other company,” said Adams. “And within our own organization I would see it as a disaster recovery plan.”

Adams said that if Creo lost fibre optics connections between its facilities on its Burnaby campus then he could foresee fSONA’s technology as the way to reconnect temporarily at high speed.

Lasercomm’s Robert Lanz said that the fSONA technology works well in disaster recovery because of its mobility.

“You can pack it up and take it with you to the next location because it’s so quick to deploy,” said Lanz.

Adams said that he was unworried about security because it was unlikely anyone could get into line of sight of the system with the proper equipment to intercept information.

[email protected]

INDY CARS GET FSONA SPEED SOLUTION:

When the cars of the Indy Racing League take to the oval track around North America from now on — including the world famous Indy 500 — they’ll be using fSONA technology to speed information from the timing and scoring tower to the pits.

The SONAbeam 155-E, has been chosen to provide the Indy League (not connected with the Molson Indy in Vancouver) with a last mile solution.

Data is transmitted from the tower to the pit cart, so that crews will always have the latest information during pre-race qualification, practice sessions and on race day.

The SONAbeam technology will even be going to Japan for the Indy Japan 500.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

In many ways, the telephone conversation I had this week with Ron Ferro encapsulated why there is so much excitement about voice over Internet technology.

I called Ferro, a Vancouver-based telecommunications engineer, on his 604-area-code phone number, but he picked up the receiver in his hotel room in New York City. He was actually speaking to me through a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) box that was connected to the hotel’s high-speed Internet connection.

Because he signed up for the service from Comwave, a residential VoIP newcomer in Canada, in Vancouver, all calls to his phone from a 604 exchange are billed as local.

There was a bit of an echo at times, but the sound quality was reasonably clear and certainly better than a lot of cellphone conversations I’ve had. “I’ve been on the service for about a month,” said Ferro, 32, who is self-employed and travels extensively in the U.S. and Europe on business. “I know the wave is going to be IP phones, so I thought I’d try it out myself.

“It’s made my life a lot easier. I can be here in New York and my family and customers in Vancouver can call me on a local telephone number.” Ferro has signed up for the $14.99 basic monthly package with Comwave, plus the $5 add-on bundle that gives him features such as call waiting, call display and call forwarding. A keen techie, Ferro kindly agreed to my request to have picture of himself and the Comwave IP device taken with his digital camera.

He then e-mailed the picture to me.

VoIP, for those who aren’t yet familiar with the term, packages voice calls as data and sends them over broadband connections. The technique is less expensive, but more importantly opens up a wide range of new features that aren’t possible on analog copper phone lines.

Although VoIP is still a relatively small blip on the consumer’s radar screen, it has the telecommunications industry bubbling. The technology has been around for a few years in the business world and is just now starting to make modest inroads with consumers. But, due to its radically different nature from traditional landline telephones, it has the potential to rattle the industry to its core.

Michael Powell, chairman of the U.S. regulatory body Federal Communications Commission, has called VoIP “the most important shift in the entire history of modern communications since the invention of the telephone.”

Lofty words indeed, but Felix Narhi, a telecommunications analyst with Vancouver investment firm Odlum Brown and author of a recent report on the industry in Canada, said Powell is not exaggerating. “VoIP unglues the service — in this case, voice — from the actual network,” said Narhi. “In the past, you had the telephone companies that provided voice services and the cable guys who provided television services.

“IP just turns everything into a software application, so it doesn’t matter whose network you run it on. We’re just at the beginning of this, but 10 to 15 years from now the traditional telephone network will be largely marginalized and it will all be IP telephony.”

Besides Comwave, companies such as Primus Canada and U.S.-based Vonage have already entered the Canadian market with residential offerings, with the larger telecom players getting ready to weigh in. Burnaby-based Telus Corp. and Bell Canada — the country’s two largest phone companies — both already offer business VoIP and will soon offer it to consumers, while cable firms Rogers and Shaw have also announced plans for voice-over-Internet service.

Perhaps the most contentious aspect of the VoiP wave is the regulatory environment. Currently, the incumbent telephone companies — notably Telus and Bell Canada — are bound by price regulations for phone service, while other VoIP players aren’t.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is currently in the midst of a policy review regarding VoIP. “The [CRTC’s] preliminary view was that things would not change — the new entrants would be able to price at whatever they want and we’d have the same restrictions,” said Telus spokesman Charlie Fleet.

“This is watershed moment in terms of technology so the commission needs to look at this carefully.”

Expect the big players to compete more on product bundling — TV, with high-speed Internet and phone — than price.

But VoIP has a number of issues to sort out before it becomes a popular consumer phone service. For one, it’s a big jump psychologically to consider abandoning the wireline network that goes back to our grandparents’ time.

But Shaw Cablesystems president Peter Bissonnette doesn’t think that will be an issue once customers experience his company’s residential VoIP service when it is rolled out at the end of this year.

“It’s dial-tone and away you go,” he said. “I think there will be a demand for our service from those customers who may not be enamored with Telus.”

Another hurdle is that you need a broadband connection for VoIP and high-speed Internet is still at about 50-per-cent penetration in Western Canada.

As well, service is only as good as your broadband connection and, because it depends on the regular power grid, if that goes, you have no phone. The traditional phone network has its own power.

© The Vancouver Province 2004

Wall-sized screens displaying gigabytes of digital information let users wallow in scores of programs, sales presentations or work files.

Fans flock to the neighbourhood movie theatre to see digital webcasts of world championship tournaments or Broadway shows in real time.

Enthusiasts from around the globe spend hours together in realtime, playing interactive online games that feature characters from pop songs, books or movies.

They use hundreds of types of platforms, devices and networks, all served by the standardization of digital formatting and realtime language translation.

Now more content is available in more formats than ever, and everybody wants something different from every piece of content.

– An edited version of IBM’s vision of the 2010 media future.

– – –

By 2010 Canadians will be enveloped by digital content. It will surround us and come at us from every angle on devices we know now — video screens, PDAs, cellphones, laptops — and ones that haven’t even been invented yet.

But at least we’ll be in charge. Savvy media companies will stop pushing pre-packaged content at us and make us co-creators and collaborators instead.

As well, we’ll get our entertainment, news and information when we want it and the way we want it.

And we’ll be able to take all those bits and pieces — a song or a news story or a chapter at a time — and package it together ourselves for our own consumption. In other words, say goodbye to passivity.

Media companies that don’t adjust to this will likely die.

At least that’s the way IBM’s Institute for Business Value Future sees it, in a report, Media and Entertainment 2010, released Thursday that outlines what media companies must do to stay ahead of the curve.

“What I think we’re driving at in this report is that consumers want to create their own content and create their own personal view of it,” said Sarah Shortreed, media and entertainment lead with IBM BusinessConsulting Services Canada.

“And people want to buy what they want to buy, when they want to buy it, where they want to buy it.”

Shortreed said we’re starting to see precursors of media co-creation in the fan input into such movies as The Hulk and Lord of the Rings.

“Some of the feedback from those fan clubs directed the course of the movie. Characters were included or excluded or included in scenes or not in others based on that fan club feedback.”

And she said writers are using f (Web logs) online to put together their next books.

“And so the interaction has started and I think there will be more and more of that over time.”

By 2010, said Shortreed, there will be clear winners and losers among media companies.

Those that survive will be more open, will deliver their information (copy protected against piracy, of course) through variable packaging and pricing, will know their customers and business partners intimately and will offer media to consumers on demand and around the clock.

Of course this will come with something of a sociological price. We’ll be monitored — our buying habits, our needs, and even our buzz as never before, so that companies can at least attempt to stay a step ahead of us.

“That kind of business intelligence and know of our customers at a more intimate levels can drive the niche markets,” said Shortreed. “You need to get to know your customers beyond just a number on a ratings page.”

This in-depth customer analysis will also aid media companies, says the report, in arriving at how they package digital media for variable fees. So forget flat pricing.

An identical movie or song or article could be offered on a sliding price scale, depending on such complex variables as age, sales tracking or even the rarity of the material itself.

Shortreed said that in Europe and Asia today the pricing on soft-drink machines is already adjusted to the climate.

“On a hot day your drink is $2 and on a cold day is $1,” said Shortreed. “So these kinds of capabilities are out there to find some driver that would affect price and these things are going to start to come into play in the media industry.”

Shortreed said that the DVD of a movie might, for example, be priced higher if you could buy it in the theatre lobby on the day of the film’s release, rather than months later at the video store.

“I just saw the movie, I’m excited about it and if you offered me that DVD as I stepped out of the movie theatre, would I not pay a premium? Of course this would require the release date to be shortened down to zero, but the trends show that this could happen over the next five years or so.”

One major change will be that — unlike today’s music environment where companies are fighting to keep fees flowing for content — many independent artists and producers will offer content, including music, short movies and videos for free.

They’ll make their money from product tie-ins and product placement, Webcasts of concerts and, naturally, fan merchandise.

“This is another trend we’ve identified, the diversification of income streams,” said Shortreed. “So not all of the income has to come from selling the production or selling the advertising,”

The report also says that fragmentation of media will increase.

“And that’s one of the reasons why you have to target a product at a niche you will know will want to buy it,” said Shortreed.

As well, just as in the sales of MP3s, where people will pay for just one song but don’t want the whole album, consumers will be increasingly paying for smaller and smaller chunks of content.

Among the steps the reports recommends that media companies take are:

– Create or convert all content to digital formats.

– Be open for delivery, in multiple packages, with variable pricing and always-on customer service.

– Open digital doors to let consumers contribute, produce or create dynamic content.

– Manage openly and communicate in real-time through digital infrastructure.

– Use new digital technology to increase business intelligence.

– Become an on-demand business.

Shortreed said that because some of these trends are already under way and the changes will be gradual, by the time we reach 2010 we’ll wonder how people could have ever lived in a time where we took our media just the way it was offered to us.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

In Vancouver yesterday, analyst Timothy Denton predicted fundamental changes coming. CREDIT: Kim Stallknecht, The Province

In the not-too-distant future you may be buying your telephone number from a domain-name registrar instead of being assigned one by the phone company.

So says Timothy Denton, a telecommunications analyst who was in Vancouver yesterday to address the Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority — the non-profit body responsible for operating the dot-ca Internet country code.

Denton, a member of CIRA’s board of directors, believes an emerging communications standard called ENUM will revolutionize the way people keep in touch with each other.

ENUM allows the translation of standard telephone numbers into a format that can retrieve Net-based information and can also be used to route communications over the web.

In essence, ENUM can bridge the gap between the traditional telephone network and the Internet — yielding cost savings and greater flexibility in communications.

“It is the next big thing,” Denton said in an interview before his CIRA address.

“It’s going to change everything at a fundamental technical level. It’ll bring in more services to people who want them. It will unite the two billion telephones with the hundreds of millions of computers there are worldwide.

“It will allow you to get information out of devices that are now not accessible by telephones.”

When ENUM is adopted, phone numbers will become hyperlinks to the Internet.

“It will enable you to connect your phone to span the generation gap between computers and phones,” he said.

“You can punch in a number and other resources become available to you that aren’t just telephony. It’s a way of combining these two worlds in an addressing system that is based on Internet tech, rather than phone technology.”

Currently, Internet telephone calling — technically called Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) — is moving its way through the corporate world and beginning to hit the consumer radar screen.

Eventually, all phone calls will be done through the Internet.

Denton, however, said we can expect to be dealing with the current antiquated phone system for some time to come.

In the meantime, ENUM also would offer complete number portability that has no reference to geography.

How soon might we see this rolling out?

Denton suggested we’re still a few years away.

An industry-government process was started in Canada this spring, with phone companies, cable companies, domain-name registrars and CIRA involved. The U.S. is engaged in the same process.

In North America, a big issue to be resolved is the international country codes. There are 19 countries under +1, including Canada, the U.S. and most of the Caribbean.

Japan, China and Korea are several years ahead of the rest of the world and are currently in testing, Denton said.

© The Vancouver Province 2004