May 16, 2005 (Computerworld)
South African Nations to Standardize Cyberlaws LUSAKA, ZAMBIA -- The 14 member countries of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) plan to harmonize their cybercrime laws to ease the prosecution of cross-border crimes, according to government officials.
The SADC is an economic bloc, headquartered in Gaborone, Botswana, that also includes countries such as South Africa, Zambia, Mauritius, Malawi, Swaziland and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Abel Chambeshi, Zambia's minister of transport and communications, said last week that all SADC countries have agreed to enact common cybercrime laws by the end of next year. One provision will make it easier to extradite criminals within the SADC region, Chambeshi said. South Africa, Zambia and Mauritius have cybercrime laws that may need to be altered, while other countries, such as Botswana, have no such laws.
One challenge will be agreeing on minimum jail terms, Chambeshi said. For example, Zambia's cybercrime law punishes convicted hackers with up to 25 years in jail, but some IT professionals in the country have argued that such penalties are too harsh.
• Michael Malakata, IDG News Service
German Medical Group Starts Huge BI Project
Berlin-based Kassenarztliche Bundesvereinigung (KBV) -- Germany's equivalent of the American Medical Association -- has selected a team of IT vendors led by QlikTech Inc. for what is being touted as the largest business intelligence project in Germany to date. The contract was announced last week by Raleigh, N.C.-based QlikTech and Intel Corp., one of its partners.
New health care reforms in Germany require the KBV to analyze anonymous patient data and issue quarterly reports about patient outcomes and other performance indicators. Each quarter, the organization's accounting department has to analyze about 2 billion records from physicians, amounting to between 15TB and 20TB of data.
The KBV is using QlikTech's QlikView analytics software running on Hewlett-Packard Integrity servers that are based on Intel's 64-bit Itanium 2 processors. QlikView analyzes massive amounts of data quickly by loading it directly into memory. That capability exploits Intel's 64-bit technology, which eliminates the 4GB addressable memory limit of 32-bit architectures.
British Airways Taps Cisco for VoIP Deal
LONDON -- British Airways PLC, Europe's third-largest airline, has picked Cisco Systems Inc. to build a voice-over-IP telephone system for its 14,000 office and airport workers. Cisco, which announced the contract last week, didn't disclose the financial terms other than to say it's a "multimillion-pound'' deal that's expected to produce a payback within two years.
By next March, London-based British Airways expects to be using 8,500 Cisco IP phones, along with the vendor's CallManager call-processing software and MeetingPlace conferencing application, over an Ethernet network, Cisco said. The project includes replacing a legacy phone system in Terminal 4 at Heathrow Airport just outside of London.
• Laura Rohde, IDG News Service
Compiled by Mitch Betts.
Briefly Noted
Electronic Properties Pty in Parklands, South Africa, has created that country's first online auction site for commercial real estate, including office and retail buildings, industrial properties, and land available for development, according to Frank Reardon, managing director of the company, known as eProp. The new Web site is located at www.propertyauctions.co.za.
• Computing South Africa
Advanced Chatbot Solutions, a division of Daden Ltd. in Birmingham, England, recently announced a Flash application that combines news syndication, speech and avatar technologies to give Web sites a virtual newscaster that can read corporate announcements. The NewsBot, which starts at #500 ($941 U.S.), can read RSS feeds, for example.
Wayport Inc., an Austin-based provider of mobile broadband services, last week announced the acquisition of NetPoint AS, a Copenhagen-based company that offers high-speed Internet access at hotels in Europe and the Middle East. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
GLOBAL FACT
104%
Market penetration of mobile phones in Italy last year; it exceeds 100% because some people have multiple phones.
Source: Analysys Research Ltd., Cambridge, England