The Pentagon is set to publish a report on measures to tackle and respond to cyber warfare.
A cyber-attack last month targeting U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin has hastened the Pentagon’s steps on the cyber-warfare plans. A report, due in a matter of weeks, is expected to deem cyber-attacks as an act of war, and to suggest whatever measures necessary to defend the country’s infrastructure.
“A response to a cyber-incident or attack on the US would not necessarily be a cyber-response. All appropriate options would be on the table,” Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan told reporters on Tuesday.
Areas of great concern include the already-strained power grid in the U.S., or systems that emergency response networks rely on. Attacks against systems particularly in urban areas could have devastating consequences for the civilian populations in the worst case.
“We reserve the right to use all necessary means - diplomatic, informational, military, and economic - as appropriate and consistent with applicable international law, in order to defend our nation, our allies, our partners and our interests,” states a White House statement put out on May 16.
The United States is not alone in its feelings toward cyber-warfare either.
In 2007, the nation of Estonia came under a heavy denial of service attack in a dispute over the movement of a Soviet-era war monument. The attacks, believed to have come from Russia (though the Kremlin stresses there was no official involvement), targeted the government and financial services of the state, with harsh consequences for citizens in a country that relies heavily on digital transactions and other electronic services.
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Twitter may be ready to introduce its own photo-sharing service as early as this week, say multiple reports.
The service will be announced tomorrow at the D9 Conference in California, with CEO Dick Costolo as keynote speaker.
Currently, there are a number of competing photo services for Twitter, with the most popular being TwitPic, Lockerz and Yfrog.
The new service shouldn’t be anything too mind blowing, but will be likely integrated into Twitter’s official Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Web apps/sites.
Twitter recently acquired popular client TweetDeck for $40 million.
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Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom predicts that Microsoft will capitalize on its $8.5 billion acquisition of the service.
“Skype’s full potential hasn’t been realized yet,” he said in an interview at the e-G8 forum underway in Paris. He suggests that Microsoft could push Skype into higher places if they expand it more into the mobile territory and if they make dramatic improvements to the quality of video calling on the Internet.
“I think that Microsoft has a huge opportunity to integrate it into a lot of their different services,” Zennstrom said. “Of course they have so many different assets. If they do a good job integrating Skype, the company can grow even more.”
Zennstrom will sell all of his shares in Skype once the Microsoft deal closes, and will no longer retain a management role at the company which he founded with Janus Friis in 2003. Skype has grown a lot since then, and touts 145 million users per month. eBay also owned Skype from 2005 until a consortium (of which Zennstrom was a part) bought it back in in 2009.
Microsoft can combine Skype services with many of its own existing products and services. One possibility is integrating it to the popular Outlook application so to provide video conferencing for business users. It will likely use Skype to boost its position in the mobile space however, after making several moves in the territory recently, such as partnering with Nokia.
“We still all travel a lot for meetings because you can’t match the intimate experience of seeing someone in person, even with Skype video calling,” he said. “There is a lot more work to do on the core technology to improve quality of video calls.”
