HP upgrades Unix platform with data protection

HP this week unveiled updates to its HP-UX Unix OS and Serviceguard high-availability software, offering capabilities in data protection, data privacy, and business continuity. The software packages run on HP Integrity and HP 900 servers. [ Check out InfoWorld's report on how HP has been looking to lure Sun Solaris Unix users to HP-UX. ] The Unix upgrade offers automated features to reduce maintenance requirements, improve availability, and enhance security, the company said. Update 5 of HP-UX 11i v3 and Serviceguard restore application services in the event of hardware or software failure, HP said. Users can lower operational costs and increase efficiency in such demanding applications as online transaction processing or business intelligence, according to HP. "Comprehensive" data protection is provided through encryption for data in transit and at rest, HP said.

Update 5 provides as much as 99 percent of raw disk performance, enabling reduction in operational costs for large databases and accelerated access to business-critical information. Enhanced data privacy is provided through Bastille, an automated system-hardening tool that configures a system to protect against unauthorized access. Administrator productivity is improved with expanded security bulletin analysis and patch maintenance. Business continuity is improved through minimization of downtime in the OS's Logical Volume Manager. Security issues are identified for as many as 100 systems in a single view when integrated with HP System Insight Manager. Simplified standards compliance is offered through PCI (Payment Card Industry) and Sarbanes-Oxley Act report templates HP Serviceguard, which is part of the HP Virtual Server Environment software suite, is integrated with HP-UX 11i to protect applications from down time, HP said.

Another improvement is elimination of business interruptions with Online Package Maintenance capabilities that run routine maintenance and upgrades while the system is active. Business connectivity is enabled during Serviceguard upgrades through a Dynamic Root Disk tool that reduces server network down time by 75 percent, the company said. Management of server connections is improved with a graphical cluster topology map for administration and configuration.  Also, traffic is coordinated between clustered servers and storage arrays.

Global Dispatches: Ex-Google exec helps Chinese startups

Fund Formed for Chinese Start-ups BEIJING - Kai-Fu Lee, who resigned as president of Google Inc.'s China operation earlier this month, has founded an angel investment fund and plans to help out three to five new Chinese high-tech companies annually. Steve Chen, a co-founder of YouTube Inc., is also an investor in Innovation Works. The fund, dubbed Innovation Works, launched with some $115 million (U.S.) provided by several IT vendors, including Taipei-based Foxconn Electronics Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd. The new company said the funds will be used to train young entrepreneurs and help them build Internet, mobile Internet and cloud computing companies. - Owen Fletcher, IDG News Service Telecom Firms Plan Joint Venture LONDON - Deutsche Telekom AG and France Telecom SA plan to form a joint venture that would oversee their respective U.K. mobile communications networks - T-Mobile U.K. and Orange U.K. The combined company would have about 28.4 million customers, or 37% of U.K. mobile subscribers, leapfrogging current market leader O2 U.K. Ltd., which reported 20.7 million customers at the end of June, the companies said.

Ombudsman P. Nikiforos Diamandouros said he will rule on the complaint later this month. - Agam Shah, IDG News Service The venture is expected to realize overall savings of more than £3.5 billion ($5.7 billion U.S.) by, among other things, closing some stores and "optimizing" the companies' customer service staffs. - Peter Sayer, IDG News Service Briefly Noted The European Union has confirmed that its ombudsman received a complaint from Intel Corp. in July alleging that "procedural errors" were made by the European Commission during an antitrust investigation that led to a record fine of €1.06 billion ($1.44 billion U.S.) against the chip maker.

Perot wins key health-care IT outsourcing deal in India

Perot Systems has bagged a 10-year IT outsourcing contract in India, its first outside the U.S. The win reflects Perot's bid to grow its health-care business in markets other than the U.S., as well as in emerging markets like India, China, Brazil, and Mexico, company executives said on Friday. But only 4.1 percent of the company's revenue from the health-care industry was from outside the U.S., up from 2.5 percent two years ago, said Kevin Fickenscher, executive vice president for International Healthcare at Perot, in a telephone interview. In the second quarter, 48 percent of Perot's revenue came from the health-care industry. Expansion outside the U.S. is a key focus area for Perot, said Raj Asava, Perot's chief strategy officer.

The maturing health-care industry in these emerging markets has a big appetite and also funds to invest in technologies such as electronic health records and clinical information systems, Asava said. For its health-care business, the company is targeting emerging markets in the Middle East, China, India, and Latin America, besides more mature markets such as the U.K. and Germany. The contract with Max Healthcare, a large hospital chain in India, has an initial value of US$18 million, but could go up in value as more applications and services are added, Perot said. The deployment will be around the open source VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture) electronic health record and health information system, he added. Besides running the applications already installed at Max, Perot will also deploy an electronic health records system and other IT infrastructure, Fickenscher said. Perot already has a services subsidiary in India with about 9,000 staff that offer outsourcing services to customers in the U.S., Europe, and other parts of the world.

Multinational and Indian service providers are targeting India's growing services market, including in the telecommunications sector where a number of mobile service providers are outsourcing their IT infrastructure. About 60 percent of these staff do work for the health-care industry. The immediate opportunity for vendors of IT targeting the health-care industry is from private sector providers, but government run hospitals will soon follow, Fickenscher said.

Researchers slam fickle iPhone anti-fraud feature

The iPhone's new defense - meant to prevent users from reaching phishing sites - is inconsistent at best, a security researcher said today, with some users getting warnings about dangerous links, while others are allowed to blithely surf to criminal URLs. Other experts said that the fickle feature is worse than no defense at all. But according to Michael Sutton, the vice president of security research at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Zscaler, the new protection is "clearly having issues." At first, said Sutton, the anti-phishing feature was simply not working. "It was blocking nothing," Sutton claimed after testing iPhone 3.1's new tool Wednesday against a list of known fraudulent sites. Apple quietly added an anti-fraud feature to the iPhone's Safari browser with the update to iPhone 3.1 , released Wednesday. By Thursday, things had improved, but just barely. "Yesterday, it started blocking some sites, for some users, but it was inconsistent.

Apple relies on Google 's SafeBrowsing API (application programming interface) for the underlying data used to build anti-phishing and anti-malware blocking lists for the desktop edition of its Safari browser. Some sites are being blocked, others are not." That led Sutton to believe that the feature's functionality wasn't the issue, but how Apple updates users with a "blacklist" of malicious sites. Other browser makers, including Google and Mozilla, also use SafeBrowsing. "It appears some iPhones are getting timely updates [from Apple], but others are not, or are getting different [block list] feeds," Sutton said. "I'm feeling better about the feature than I was Wednesday, but clearly Apple is still have issues. URLs that are blocked by Safari in Mac OS X open and direct users to malicious pages [on the iPhone]." Like Sutton, James reported inconsistencies in the anti-fraud feature's effectiveness. "All we've come up with is that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't," said James. "This is clearly more dangerous than no protection at all, because if users think they are protected, they are less careful about which links they click." The new feature is turned on by default in iPhone 3.1; the option to turn it off is in Settings/Safari/Security, and is listed as "Fraud Warning." Sutton, although willing to concede that Apple overall is improving its security track record, bemoaned the state of mobile security in general, and the iPhone's in particular. "The greater concern to me is that we're making the same mistakes in mobile that we made on the desktop," he said. "On the desktop, security has gotten slowly better, but [with mobile] we have a fresh start. With the [media] coverage of the problem, maybe they're resolving it, or trying to." On Thursday, researchers at Intego, a Mac-only antivirus vendor, echoed Sutton's findings. "This feature should warn users that they may be visiting a known malicious Web site and ask if they wish to continue," said Peter James, a spokesman for Intego who writes the company's Mac security blog . "However, we have extensively tested this feature, tossing dozens of phishing URLs at it, and it simply does not seem to work. I would have thought we would have learned from our mistakes, but there's virtually no protection in mobile browsers." According to research conducted by NSS Labs, which was hired by Microsoft to benchmark different desktop browsers' ability to block malware-laden sites, Safari in Mac OS X and Windows blocked only one-in-five malicious sites . Internet Explorer and Firefox, meanwhile, blocked 80% and 27%, respectively.

Last month, NSS Labs attributed the disparities between Firefox, Safari and Google - all which use SafeBrowsing as the basis for their blacklists, to differences in how each browser tweaked, then applied, the lists. Google's Chrome blocked a paltry 7% of the sites.