A European parliamentary committee investigating the US-led electronic spying system known as Echelon has urged European citizens and companies to routinely encrypt their emails to prevent them being read by the secretive eavesdropping network. In a draft resolution, made public last week, it said there "is no more doubt" as to the existence of the global system of intercepting communications used by the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and it "seems likely" it is called Echelon. The existence of Echelon has never been officially confirmed.
The EU committee called on all European institutions and government offices to "systematically" encrypt their emails. It said companies could not be safe from industrial espionage unless they protected all the means of electronic communications used to transmit sensitive information. The parliamentary committee added that while it had no proof that Echelon was used for industrial espionage, such an eventuality would be "intolerable".
In an apparent warning to Britain, the committee said an EU member state would be violating EU law if it was using such a system to gain a competitive advantage for its companies, adding that Britain's involvement could constitute a "breach of human rights".
US officials have repeatedly denied allegations that they have a system that conducts industrial espionage against Europe. The document is to be submitted for a vote by the members of the committee at the end of June before being discussed and voted on by the European parliament.
Intel's bad news: Intel is offering its Irish employees two weeks' unpaid leave as part of on-going cost-cutting measures at the chip manufacturer. The 3,300 full-time workers at Intel's Leixlip plant are being offered two weeks' unpaid leave to offset the current slump in demand for microprocessors. An Intel spokeswoman said it was a voluntary programme introduced to cut discretionary spending.
Intel's good news: After nearly a decade of development and two years of delays, Intel and Hewlett-Packard have launched the first in a new generation of microprocessors they hope will dominate the next era of computing. The Itanium processor, developed by both companies, is designed for workstations and servers. As prices in its core PC business slide, Intel hopes Itanium will capture a slice of the high-end server and workstation market dominated by Sun Microsystems and IBM.
Here at last, almost: The world's first super-fast, next-generation mobile phone service has been launched in Japan - although only as a limited issue of 3,300 handsets in the Tokyo area. Eager gadget fans, chosen from 147,000 applicants, lined up at an office of NTT DoCoMo to be the first to own a new handset. It did not seem to matter that the most glamorous of the new phones, the video-phone, had been delayed for up to a month due to software glitches. The only models available were an upgraded, speedier version of NTT DoCoMo's current Netlinking i-mode phones and a computer-card model for data transmission.
500 million: A new report says world-wide sales of mobile phones are expected to hit 500 million this year. The figure given by research firm Gartner Dataquest is higher than the forecasts given by leading handset manufacturers last month. Faced with a slowing economy and high penetration rates, mobile phone makers have significantly lowered sales predictions for 2001.
Anything you wand: McDonald's is trying to use technology to make fast food even faster. The restaurant chain is testing a tiny plastic wand that allows patrons to pay for meals with 2,000 people in 26 US locations in Boise, Idaho . They just wave the wand in front of an electronic sensor to pay for a meal removing the need for calorie-burning fumbling for loose change or looking for smaller bills.
Lawmaker retires: Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, has announced his retirement from the company's board. Moore, a former Intel CEO, is credited with creating "Moore's Law" in 1965. That rule of thumb stated that the number of transistors that can be etched onto a computer chip will double each year. Transistor count is the benchmark for computer chip power, and Moore's law correctly tracked the power of, and decline in price, of computer chips over the years. He revised his namesake rule in 1995 to state that the transistor count would double once every two years.
Blair's business buddy: The British Labour Party has been accused of having an unhealthy relationship with big business following a visit to the headquarters of Microsoft in the UK. Tony Blair launched Labour's business manifesto at the company's HQ in Reading where both he and his wife were given a demonstration of Windows XP. The Tories fumed against Labour endorsing a commercial product and in what could be viewed as a serious case of the pot and the kettle and some degree of blackness, they said it showed Labour's "unhealthy relationship" with big business.
In brief: Merger talks between French telecommunications giant Alcatel and Lucent Technologies have been called off after intense negotiations failed to yield an agreement.
Diary
June 19th/20th: Conference entitled Launching Innovative Products - A Project Management Perspective takes place in the University of Limerick. More info - www.innovationconfernece.ul.ie Modem World
www.secretplaces.com Excellent site offering an interactive travel guide to exceptional hotels and lodgings in Spain, Portugal and the islands.
www.directski.com While you may be thinking about the sun, the good people at directski.com are already thinking about the snow. Directski has just launched its 2001/2002 programme and has added to the functionality and navigability of the website.
www.cornafean.com Cornafean, Co Cavan has launched its community website featuring over 40 pages of coverage of local news, history, traditions and other items.
www.dit.ie/arttrail/ Site promoting the BA Fine Art Graduate Exhibition, of the School of Art, Design and Printing; Faculty of Applied Arts; Dublin Institute of Technology.
Text Bites
"From our perspective, there's been a price war in the PC industry since we opened for business in 1985... so we're veterans of this - in fact, we love it." - Gateway founder Ted Waitt in typically combative form last week. "Competitor gimmicks will not deter Dell from providing the best value to our customers the industry has to offer." - John Hamlin, vice president of Dell's consumer group, in response.