ALKHOBAR, 20 July 2004 — Alert! Alert! Visitors to Gitex Dubai 2004 should make hotel and flight reservations immediately. Even though the event is still more than two months away, hotels are filling up fast. Due to the closure of the World Trade Center Hotel for renovation, rooms in the immediate vicinity of Gitex are in short supply. The Crowne Plaza, Fairmont, Emirates Towers and Rotana Towers were nearly fully booked as of last week. Other four and five star hotels with rooms available are offering “special rates” for the period Oct. 2-7, 2004. By the way, special means much more expensive than their regular rates — usually more than SR1,000 per night!
Last year transportation from the show in the afternoon was a horror. It might sound unbelievable for a high-tech conference but many Gitex attendees had to walk at least part of the way back to their hotels everyday. This year Gitex is being held earlier so temperatures are sure to be higher. This means that getting a taxi at the end of each show day will be even more challenging. When booking a room reservation ask if the hotel will be providing transportation to and from the event. It’s a big plus.
Visitor registration for fast-track admission to Gitex has just begun. Register online though gitex.com/visitors/register.html. The Dubai World Trade Center (DWTC), organizers of Gitex 2004, emphasize that online registration is only for IT trade visitors. University students who wish to attend the exhibition must show their IDs and pay their fees at the event. DWTC claims that last year a total of 82,183 visitors attended Gitex. For this year, DWTC has announced that exhibitors’ space at Gitex 2004 is sold out.
While online, registering for the Gitex exhibition, Ali Al-Kamali, managing director, Datamatix, asks that everyone take a moment to have a look at the agenda for the Datamatix Gitex 2004 conferences (www.datamatix-dubai.com). These sessions provide technical knowledge, practical advice and information exchange for IT professionals from government and business organizations in the Middle East. Note that the online publicity material for the event makes it appear necessary to register for all six days of the conference, when in reality it is possible to register for individual days.
Immediately following Gitex, the Saudi Society for Technology Development and Transfer (SSTDT) will be sponsoring a workshop titled “Technology Roadmaps: A Strategic R&D Planning Tool for Industry.” To be held in Jeddah at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry from Oct. 9-11, 2004, the workshop is targeting scientists, engineers, researchers and managers from technology-oriented organizations in all sectors — government, university and industry.
Speaking on behalf of the society, Hitham O. Hemmat said the workshop has several goals. “It aims to highlight the importance of strategic technology planning for building competitive advantages at the industrial and enterprise levels,” Hemmat said. “It will also present the important role of technology roadmapping as an effective tool for technology planning. Additionally, the workshop will show the importance of collaborative research and development projects and R&D consortiums, and their effect on raising the technical capability and success factors for industry as a whole. Attendees at the workshop will receive instruction in the process of creating a technology roadmap.”
For more information or to register for the workshop, go to sstdt.org.sa.
So while it appears that Fall 2004 will be a busy time in the Middle East, last week some of the Middle East’s decision-makers went on the road. A high-level delegation from the region took part in the Fourth Annual Brainstorm Conference held in Aspen, Colorado, USA. Hosted jointly by Fortune magazine and the Aspen Institute at Aspen Meadows, Brainstorm is a global forum featuring leaders in business, technology and world affairs.
Sheikha Lubna Al-Qasimi, CEO of Tejari, the region’s online business-to-business marketplace, was at the event to share her perspective on the elements that the Middle East is contributing to the global economy from both a technology and a business perspective. With the Brainstorm agenda focused around how technology has furthered the evolution of politics, energy, trade, employment, science and medicine, Tejari’s CEO drew on real-life examples from the region.
“The goal behind Brainstorm is to find new approaches to tackling some of the world’s most complex social and business issues. It was refreshing that a number of perspectives from the Middle East were sought to contribute to this objective,” said Sheikha Lubna. “There is a wealth of positive examples of how technology has helped further development and engineer change in the Middle East, including Tejari itself. Brainstorm provided a forum in which to showcase, to some of the world’s leading thinkers and decision-makers, the real advances that we are making as a region.”
Other women representing the Middle East at Brainstorm 2004 included Jordan’s Queen Noor and Lubna Olayan, CEO of Olayan Financing Company, who is ranked among Fortune’s top 50 most powerful women outside the US.
Since we’re engaging in some name dropping here, let’s continue on and congratulate Tim Berners-Lee who was dubbed a Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II during an Investiture in London on Friday. Berners-Lee, 49, a British citizen who lives in the US, will now be known as “Sir.” He was knighted in recognition for his “services to the global development of the Internet” through his invention of the World Wide Web.
Berners-Lee coined the name “World Wide Web,” wrote the first World Wide Web server, “httpd,” and the first client program (a browser and editor), “WorldWideWeb,” in October 1990. He wrote the first version of the document formatting language with the capability for hypertext links, known as HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). His initial specifications for URLs, HTTP, and HTML were refined and discussed in larger circles as web technology spread.
“I am humbled by this great honor,” said Sir Timothy, currently director of the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org/). “The web came about through an ongoing collaboration with my fellow inventors and developers worldwide. Everyone in the Internet community should be recognized by this honor.
“The web must remain a universal medium, open to all and not biasing the information it conveys. As the technology becomes ever more powerful and available, using more kinds of devices, I hope we learn how to use it as a medium for working together and resolving misunderstandings on every scale.”
Well, back in 1990, Sir Timothy probably never imagined how much havoc malicious code writers would wreak using the World Wide Web and I nearly was caught myself this week. Normally I don’t meet up with any of the viruses and worms that populate the Internet because my Internet service provider and my network administrator do their best to dispose of those nasties before they even reach my machine.
This week though I received an e-mail claiming to come from my network team informing me that my e-mail account had been temporary disabled because of unauthorized access. I was advised that for more information I should see the attached file. I almost clicked on the file, but I was saved from certain catastrophe when I noticed the file name “first_part.pif.” Pif files are notorious for containing malicious code, so I didn’t open it. I forwarded the mail to my e-mail administrator who came back with the following comment: “There is a Trojan in the attached file, very cleverly disguised. It is really difficult for an ordinary person not to fall in this trap. You were lucky.”
According to an article in Saudi Aramco Week (saudiaramco.com) titled “Saudi Aramco Proactive in Fighting IT Viruses,” incidents of spam and virus outbreaks are expected to increase. The article quoted releases from MessageLabs, which claimed that “spam now represents more than 50 percent of corporate e-mail and virus propagation has increased by about 47 percent in the course of a month.”
The focus of the article was Saudi Aramco’s Information Protection Center (IPC) which in less than a year has become Saudi Aramco’s first line of defense against Internet plagues. IPC provides the company with a centralized management facility for all IT security functions and protects the security of workflow processes. It also allows uninterrupted monitoring of all critical data and resources. According to the article, recent statistics showed that on average, every day, Saudi Aramco has blocked more than 15,000 virus attacks and more than 30,000 spam messages.
The article’s author, Mariam Katkhouda wrote, “Saudi Aramco maintains an aggressive zero-tolerance policy on spam and virus outbreaks. In line with Microsoft policies, Saudi Aramco also asserts that patch management, antivirus software and desktop security are the cornerstones of secure operations.”
Patches and antivirus programs are definitely necessary tools in the fight against malicious code. But as my experience this week illustrates, in the end nothing beats good common sense in the ongoing struggle against the Internet’s forces of evil.
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