Category: Network

Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) is still evaluating bids for the pre-qualification tender stage of the standard operating environment of ICT (SOE) for schools and educational institutions, ZDNet Asia has learned. The results were originally scheduled to be unveiled this month.

The Ministry of Education said in May it received four offers, the closing of a pre-qualification bid to favorites potential service providers. Proposals were submitted by Ednovate consortium led by SingTel @ SG, a consortium led by Singapore Technologies Advanced Equipment (ST) Electronics, a Civica-led consortium, and local systems integrator NCS.

At that time, the ministry said the results of the pre-qualification tender would be released in July, with the final offer of April 2009 target.

However, ZDNet Asia understands that the Ministry of Education is still evaluating the proposals and has not made a decision. It is unclear whether the results of the exercise will be released.

When contacted, representatives of ST Electronics and NCS confirmed they have not heard of the Ministry of Education regarding the results of the pre-qualification round. ST Electronics spokesperson said the consortium expects the results “to be announced soon.”

The first phase of the SOE project last year there were two rounds of delay in the announcement of the winning bid for the official bidding. The project was finally awarded to a consortium led by EDS oneMeridian.

The initiative aims to create a government of a common information infrastructure and communications to improve operational efficiency, and will include the standardization of desktop, messaging and network environment across most public sector bodies in Singapore.

The amount of unique malware tracked by security vendor Fortinet, reached an all-time high in January.

Its distinct malware volume soared to over 9,000 last month, more than twice that in December, the company said in a statement Wednesday. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Fortinet collects data from its FortiGate network security appliances and intelligence systems located globally, and compiles monthly threat statistics from the data.

Topping the charts were variants of Bredolab, accounting for more than 40 percent of all malware activity. The Bredolab downloader program, which has assumed the No. 1 position since November 2009, has been associated with the Gumblar attacks, said Fortinet.

Also highlighted in the report was the wave of attacks known as Operation Aurora–a major talking point following Google’s threat last month to pull out of China. Fortinet said the attack, which uses a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, was ranked No. 4 on the list of top 10 attacks for January.

The peak volume of threat activity last month signaled that 2010 will likely be “another action-packed year”, Derek Manky, Fortinet’s project manager for cybersecurity and threat research, said in the statement.

“The amount of malicious code in the wild is increasing…while in-the-wild exploits and emerging zero-day attacks targeting very popular software, like Microsoft IE and Adobe PDF, create a vulnerable environment for users at every point of connectivity,” he noted. “As the monetary gains of these threats continue to prove [valuable] to the criminals creating them, we’ll only continue to see new and creative attacks take form.”

Security specialist Fortinet has agreed to make some of its source code available, following accusations that it violated the GPL, the company said on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, gpl-violations.org founder Harald Welte obtained a court injunction against Fortinet, banning the company from distributing its products until it complied with the conditions of the GPL. The GPL, or GNU General Public License, is used by developers to license products that they want to remain freely available to other programmers, in keeping with the ideals of the free-software movement.

Welte had claimed that Fortinet not only misused GPL-licensed code but that it also tried to hide its use of GPL code by using cryptographic techniques.

Fortinet has agreed to provide the source code of the Linux kernel and other GPL-licensed components to any interested party. The code is available upon request, for the cost of distribution, from the Fortinet Web site. The company has also agreed to modify its licensing agreement to include the GPL licensing terms with all Fortinet shipments. The settlement agreement also states that no Fortinet partners are subject to legal action.

This is the latest in a string of victories for the gpl-violations.org project. Since starting the project in 2004, Welte has negotiated more than 30 out-of-court settlements.

Research in Motion, the BlackBerry maker, is considering a bid for Nortel Networks’ portfolio of wireless technology patents that would exceed Google’s $900 million offer, Bloomberg reported, citing two people familiar with the plans.

One of those sources said that Waterloo, Ontario, Canada-based RIM is considering whether to bid alone for the assets or save money on a joint bid to prevent Google from acquiring all of Nortel’s 6,000 patents and patent applications.

Earlier this month, bankrupt Nortel, which has been selling itself off in pieces, announced entering into a “stalking horse asset sale agreement” with Google to sell roughly 6,000 patents and patent applications covering a range of patent portfolios. Those portfolios include wireless, wireless 4G, data networking, optical, voice, Internet, service provider and semiconductors.

Through the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware and the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Nortel planned to seek to establish bidding procedures for an auction that would allow other qualified bidders to submit higher or better offers than Google’s bid.

Based on its cash reserves, Google appears to have the upper hand in a bidding war with RIM. As of March 31, 2011, the search-engine king had $36.7 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. RIM only has a fraction of that amount: $2.7 billion in cash, cash equivalents, short-term and long-term investments as of Feb. 26, 2011.

Google’s exposure to litigation helps to explain its desire to acquire Nortel’s patents. Google is a defendant in patent, copyright and trademark infringement lawsuits related to its products, services and technologies, such as Android, Google WebSearch and Google AdWords, according to its annual report.

Kent Walker, senior vice president and general counsel of Google, indicated in a blog earlier this month that the acquisition of the Nortel patents could dissuade the company’s competitors from suing Google for patent infringement.

“The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation,” Walker wrote. “Some of these lawsuits have been filed by people or companies that have never actually created anything; others are motivated by a desire to block competing products or profit from the success of a rival’s new technology.”

Google has advocated for patent reform, but today “one of a company’s best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio, as this helps maintain your freedom to develop new products and services,” Walker stated. “Google is a relatively young company, and although we have a growing number of patents, many of our competitors have larger portfolios given their longer histories.”