Half of Europeans subscribing to ultra-high-speed broadband by 2020, bringing an end to the phenomenon of ‘digital virgins’ and the creation of a European cyber-attack rapid response system – these are just some of the ambitious goals contained in the EU’s five-year plan for the online world, unveiled on Wednesday (19 May).

Anxious that the US, Japan and South Korea – still in parts classified as a developing country – are stealing a march on the old continent, where almost a third of people have still never accessed the worldwide web, the European Commission says it is time for a digital revolution.

While today, just one percent of Europeans are signed up to fast fibre-based internet, 12 percent of Japanese have such connections and 15 percent of South Koreans.

“Can you imagine that there are still some 30 percent of Europeans who have never used the internet? Digital virgins, so to say,” Dutch commissioner Neelie Kroes said in announcing the wide-ranging plans. “We want to ensure they all have the opportunity to discover the wonders of the digital world.”

By 2013, Brussels wants all Europeans to have basic broadband and by 2020, for everyone to have access high-speed broadband above 30Mbps, with 50 percent of Europeans able to subscribe to ultra-high-speed rates of above 100Mbps.

via Europe Sets Five-Year Internet Strategy – BusinessWeek.

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Italy has started an investigation into Google Inc’s Street View web service, a local watchdog said on Wednesday following the U.S. group’s announcement it had accidentally collected personal data over wireless networks.

Google said last week its fleets of cars which have been photographing streets around the world had for several years accidentally collected personal information — which a security expert said could include e-mail messages and passwords.

Italy’s privacy regulator said it would verify whether Google treated correctly the data acquired by Street View, which allows users to navigate around a 360-degree view of city streets using pictures taken by Google’s camera vehicles.

The regulator said Google Italy had admitted it collected pictures but also “data regarding the presence of wireless networks … as well as electronic communications, eventually transmitted by users via unprotected wireless networks.”

via Italy investigates Google’s Street View | Reuters.

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Founded in Stockholm, Sweden, the now San Francisco-based GIPS develops real-time voice and video processing software for IP networks. Its customers including some major names like Yahoo, Nortel, Samsung, and AOL.

Google is also on the customer roster, but apparently that’s not enough. Why? Well, GIPS offers high-definition and one-way video conferencing/chat cababilities for iPhone, iPad, and most recently, Android developers. Transfer that technology over to Google, and, well, you’ve got what we’re betting is going to be a flood of video conversations over IP networks and mobile devices.

“The Web is evolving quickly as a development platform, and real-time video and audio communication over the Internet are becoming important new tools for users,” said Rian Liebenberg, engineering director at Google. Buttressing Liebenerg’s statement is some recent action from Skype. The platform’s latest beta of Skype 5.0 adds goup video chat for Windows users.

“Group video calling is just one in a set of new premium features you’ll see us roll out during 2010,” said Peter Parkes of Skype. ”We haven’t set prices for these premium features yet, but rest assured that we’re still absolutely committed to bringing you free voice and two-way video calling.”

via Google Bids on VoIP, Mobile Video Conferencing Imminent?.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is frequently described as the ACLU of the Internet, looking out for the little guy in the face of digital snooping and other bad, Big Brotherish behavior.

But EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohman had a cameo appearance of a very different nature in this week’s federal court ruling smacking LimeWire for copyright infringement. The order, issued Wednesday, granted summary judgment to 13 RIAA-represented record labels who in 2006 sued LimeWire for copyright infringement and related infractions.

On page 14 of the 59-page order, U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood suggests that von Lohman advised LimeWire COO/CTO Greg Bildson and others to destroy potentially embarrassing evidence.

Referring to LimeWire’s founding chairman, Mark Gorton, Wood writes:

“Gorton states that another attorney, Federick [sic] Von Lohman, gave LW, including Bildson, confidential legal advice regarding the need to establish a document retention program to purge incriminating information about LimeWire users’ activities.”

Reached by telephone Thursday afternoon, von Lohman said he hadn’t yet read Wood’s order.

But, he added: “To the extent that the second half of that sentence suggests that I advised LimeWire to do anything unethical or would violate their obligations, I would take issue with that.”

via The Purge Urge: When Does a Document Retention Chat Cross the Line? – Law Blog – WSJ.

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Now that small business users can finally get a look at the full version of Office 2010 following Wednesday’s launch and with the dust starting to settle the real question that business users are going to have to answer is whether they will go for Office 2010, or try economizing by moving to Google Docs.

Given the extent and functionality of Office 2010, for those looking for a full-bodied application Office 2010 would seem to be the only option, and research published by Forrester seems to suggest that most SMBs agree.

Released the day before the launch, the report entitled Enterprises Productivity Plans Include SharePoint 2010 And Office 2010 by Sheri McLeish shows that 81% of companies are running Office 2007 and 78% supporting SharePoint, compared to only 4% using Google Apps.

More significantly, it also show s that close to a third of the 115 US and European enterprise and SMB respondents will be upgrading to Office 2010 in the course of the next year with most looking at installing SharePoint 2010 before turning to Office 2010.

Of those that are using Office competitors, or looking at Office competitors, most said they were using it to complement Office rather than use them as an alternative.

However, if Forrester sees Office 2010 putting its competitors in their place, there is a caveat that Microsoft will need to take heed of in future releases. The Forrester report says:

Common end user barriers to adoption of alternatives include lack of required functionality, third-party integration requirements, user acceptance, lack of seamless interoperability with Office, and legacy content support needs. These gaps will be bridged in the coming years as Google, OpenOffice.org, and others mature.”

In other words, no one out there is going to be sitting on their hands and will spend the next while filling the holes that are currently putting users off.

via SMB Roll-up: Office 2010 vs. Google Docs Debate, Cloud Payment Options.

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The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office‘s recent confirmation of the validity of a patent that netted i4i Limited Partnership a $290 million infringement judgment against Microsoft Corp. means the U.S. Supreme Court is likely Microsoft’s last hope to overturn the judgment.

On Tuesday, i4i announced that the PTO affirmed the patentability of all the claims in its patent for processing and storing information about electronic documents’ structure. In its lawsuit, i4i claimed that Microsoft Word 2007 infringed that patent, and Microsoft had requested a re-examination in the hopes that the PTO would declare the patent invalid. The PTO has yet to issue a formal certificate confirming the patent’s validity, but the agency informed Canadian software company i4i of its notice of intent to issue an ex parte re-examination certificate on April 28.

In an e-mailed statement, Kevin Kutz, Microsoft’s director of public affairs, said that while the company is disappointed, “there still remain important matters of patent law at stake, and we are considering our options to get them addressed, including a petition to the Supreme Court.”

Microsoft’s bid to use its request for a patent office re-examination of i4i’s patent “has failed in a dramatic way,” said i4i’s lawyer for the re-examination, Rob Greene Sterne, founder of Washington-based Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox.

Microsoft filed its PTO re-examination request before the jury verdict but well into the lawsuit, probably as a backup plan in case it lost the lawsuit, Sterne said. “Microsoft, I’m sure, assumed that they would win the re-exam or create significant difficulties for i4i in the re-exam that would drive a better settlement,” he said.

Lawyers say that unless Microsoft finds grounds for a motion for relief from judgment, such as newly discovered evidence or fraud, the U.S. Supreme Court is its last avenue.

Microsoft is “pretty much at the end of their line” unless the Supreme Court takes its case as one of the handful of patent matters the Court hears each year, said Thomas Engellenner, the co-chair of the patent practice group at Boston’s Nutter, McClennen & Fish. Engellenner wasn’t involved in the case.

via Law.com – Microsoft Dealt Major Setback Over $290 Million Infringement Judgment.

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MEPs voted through two resolutions today (5 May) that called for a more limited use of personal data collected by US authorities, fearing the data could be abused.

At issue are two separate transfers of data. One is the so-called Passenger Name Records collected by airlines about passengers on transatlantic flights, which are used by US customs and border control agents to screen people who travel to the US.

The Parliament decided to postpone its approval of a 2007 EU-US accord on the transfer of PNR, and a similar arrangement with Australia. They did so to give Cecilia Malmström, the European commissioner for home affairs, time to draft a new proposal that would answer calls by MEPs for a global agreement setting out how passenger data can be used and what legal redress citizens have over the use of their data.

The MEPs also want a separate effort to negotiate a deal with the US that would cover all data transfer deals between the two sides.

The other data transfer issue voted on today dealt with information collected on bank transfers from Europe that the US Treasury screens to weed out terrorist financiers. Negotiations on a new so-called Terrorist Tracking Finance Programme between the EU and the US are expected to start later this month. The Parliament rejected an interim deal in February because of concerns that it did no

via MEPs call for improved data security  |  Policies  |  Justice  |  Rights | European Voice.

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The compliance challenges posed by the vigorous pursuit by the US of alleged Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) transgressors have been compounded as other countries, most prominently Germany and the UK, have adopted and begun active enforcement of anti-foreign corruption laws of their own.

On January 19, for example, the US unveiled 22 indictments of individuals, including UK citizen Pankesh Patel, as a result of an undercover operation with FBI agents posing as sales agents offering to corruptly facilitate foreign contracts. Patel and 20 other defendants were handcuffed in front of their peers right on the floor of a Las Vegas trade show.

In his allegedly corrupt pursuit of defence contracts in Africa, Patel had meetings within the US, and sent paperwork in furtherance of the underlying scheme to the US. His indictment is an application of FCPA provisions catching foreign persons that take steps within the US to further overseas corruption.

For Indian companies that are issuers of US securities , no such actions within the US would even be required.

For our hypothetical Belgian marketing company, though not directly subject to the FCPA, it might have FCPA liability if it had corruptly carried out business operations for US companies, or sent dollar-denominated wire transfers for corrupt purposes.

Another trend worth noting for non-US companies is the expectation of active supervision on the part of senior corporate executives.

US enforcers have held executives at headquarters responsible for misconduct occurring in the field, on the basis that the executives failed to supervise far-flung personnel or failed to design internal controls to prevent misconduct.

Other countries are also raising the bar to prevent bribery. In part, this is due to diplomatic pressure from the US but also the efforts of the OECD and the UN, both of whom have sponsored conventions that are now in place mandating that their signatories take certain actions in the fight against corruption. India is party to the UN convention.

The Siemens case in which it paid a record settlement of $800 million in fines and disgorgement of profits was mirrored by a fine of equal magnitude paid to the German regulator.

via Compliance comes calling-Opinion-The Economic Times.

Today’s email posed the question in the title of this post and featured an article from the New York Times by Natasha Singer called ”Shoppers Have No Secrets.”   The article details the technology of “behavioral tracking” by retail and advertising businesses and how the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is playing catch up when it comes to regulating this technology.

Online behavioral tracking has been a hot button issue for both businesses and privacy rights groups for a few years.  Natasha’s article lists several types of new tracking to include:

Cameras that can follow you from the minute you enter a store to the moment you hit the checkout counter, recording every T-shirt you touch, every mannequin you ogle, every time you blow your nose or stop to tie your shoelaces.

Web coupons embedded with bar codes that can identify, and alert retailers to, the search terms you used to find them.

Mobile marketers that can find you near a store clothing rack, and send ads to your cellphone based on your past preferences and behavior.

The article is a very good summary of the issue and has links to advocacy groups on both sides of the debate.  The article also highlights the differences between European and US based privacy laws. In general, the EU is far more advanced and stringent when it comes to personal data protection.

In the US, the FTC publishes guidelines and takes enforcement action under its authority to regulate unfair trade.  There are also the states’ Attorney Generals and class action and individual lawsuits.  Nevertheless, to answer the question I posed in this post, it is clearly a “NO” in the US.   Data protection laws will not catch up to new technology. At least, not anytime soon.

via Will Data Protection Laws Ever Catch Up To New Technology? : Connecticut Business Litigation Blog.

Symantec will acquire encryption specialist PGP and endpoint security vendor GuardianEdge Technologies for US$300 million and $70 million, respectively, the company said on Thursday.

Both are privately held companies. Symantec said the deals are subject to regulatory approval but are expected to close by June.

Symantec said the companies’ combined specialties in standards-based encryption for e-mail, file systems, removable media and smartphones will complement its security offerings, such as its gateway, endpoint security and data-loss prevention software.

Encrypting information offers a higher level of security in case data is lost or stolen. Earlier this month, the U.K. increased the fine under the Data Protection Act for organizations that lose data to a maximum of £500,000 (US$765,000).

via Symantec buys encryption specialist PGP for $300M – BusinessWeek.