Strengthening the Symbian platform

In a move that will encourage the creation of a greater number of smart mobile devices and bring down costs of those devices as well, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO have united to establish the Symbian Foundation (www.symbianfoundation.org) to extend the appeal of this unified software platform. To enable the Foundation, Nokia plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola will also contribute technology from UIQ and DOCOMO has indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets. From these components the Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish a complete mobile software offering. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0. The foundation plans to launch operations in the first half of 2009.

The establishment of the foundation should benefit Nokia but will be bad news for other mobile platforms such as Google Android and Microsoft. Commenting on the move, Strategy Analytics Director Neil Mawston said, "We expect Nokia to use royalty-free Symbian software as a loss-leader to drive profitable growth in handsets and services in 2009. This is a good move for Nokia, because cheaper smartphones for the mass-market will eventually drive higher global volumes of Nokia devices and Ovi content." Ovi is the door to Nokia's Internet services.

Strategy Analytics Analyst Bonny Joy added, "Lower costs for the Symbian operating system spell bad news for licensable rivals, such as Google Android and Microsoft Windows Mobile. They will impact Android on volume and Microsoft on value. Symbian will match Android on zero-Dollar pricing, and this diminishes one of its major competitive advantages. For Microsoft, the pressure will surely mount to cut the price of its license fees to handset vendors, which we estimate to be a relatively high $14 per unit worldwide in 2008."

Snooping IT staff

Whiles you sit there working at your computer, little do you realize that some of your colleagues handling the company's IT have been snooping around the network, looking at confidential information such as payroll, e-mail, sales plans and human resources files. Cyber-Ark Software carried out the research at the recent Infosecurity Expo 2008, polling 300 senior IT professionals, mainly from companies employing over 1000+ employees, as part of their annual survey into "Trust, Security and Passwords."

One third of those surveyed admitted to using their positions to access information that is confidential or sensitive by using administrative passwords as a means of peeking at information. Also worrying is the fact that privileged passwords get changed infrequently and often a lot less than user passwords. Thirty percent get changed every quarter and nine percent never get changed, giving access indefinitely to all those who know the passwords, even when they've left the organization.