The government of the United Kingdom is planning to clean the airway of child sexual abuse images online by inducing, together with the police and internet companies, a campaign to purse both the publishers and those who access the material.

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, anticipated international partnership between police and internet companies to track child abusers and those who viewed images and video online.

He held that from the end of this year all new computers sold would have filters switched on by default; but admitted that the government had first to resolve the problem of  how households with one internet connection but multiple devices could balance the internet browsing choices of adults with restricting access to children.

“There is a triangle. We have to stop the people putting up the images, stop those accessing it and ask the internet companies to do better in stopping access to them,” he said.

The prime minister added that the police will be able to monitor peer-to-peer file sharing, where content is harder to track. Live streaming of abuse has also been identified as a developing problem.

Cameron appreciated consumer’s internet companies for increasing efforts to identify and remove links to offensive material and introducing flash warnings to users who may involuntarily be clicking through to illegal material.

The UK Prime Minister admitted to a row with internet service providers who, he said, were objecting to the plans of filtering content. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency (CEOP) had been given more powers and Cameron stated that he had sub-contracted someone from GCHQ to work in his office to help in understanding how best to use the technology to stop this.

He added that he had not seen images of child sexual abuse during the drafting of the plans but had had some material, which he described as evidence of a crime scene, described to him.

Cisco, an international company that designs, manufactures and sells networking equipment is set to acquire Sourcefire, a leader in intelligent cyber security solutions in a move that will make the cloud more secure for users.

The two organizations will merge their exquisite products, technologies and research teams to offer a nonstop and persistent advances threat protection across the entire attack range, which will cater for before, during and after an attack; and form any device to any cloud.

Mobility, cloud and the development of the “Internet of Everything” are significantly changing today’s IT security setting, making traditional contrasting products insufficient to protect organizations from dynamic threats.

Sourcefire delivers innovative, highly automated security through continuous awareness, threat detection and protection across its industry-leading portfolio, including next-generation intrusion prevention systems, next-generation firewalls, and advanced malware protection.

Now that Cisco has gotten hold of Sourcefire it will add a team with a deep security DNA to Cisco and will speed up delivery of Cisco’s security strategy of defending, discovering, and remediating advanced threats. With an up-standard research teams, increased intelligence and expanded threat protection, customers will gain from continuous security in more places across the network.

According to the agreed terms, Cisco is required to pay USD 76 per share in cash in exchange for each share of Sourcefire and assume outstanding equity awards for a collective purchase price of approximately USD 2.7 billion, including retention-based incentives. The acquisition has been approved by the board of directors of each company.

The acquisition process is believed to be completed by the end of this year after which Sourcefire employees will join the Cisco Security Group.

The Customs Service of Nigeria has unveiled an android and windows App which is meant to digitize the import and export sector.

The Nigeria Trade Hub (NTH) app was initiated and developed by the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) partnering with West Blue Nigeria. This app was to assist in reducing time and cost of doing trade and business in the country.

NTH provides information about all the Nigerian Regulatory Agencies, processing times, documents, contact details, processes as well as fees that an Importer or Exporter will need to liaise with in order to obtain the obligatory import permits and certificates that required ensuring fulfillment.

The app, in addition, has a searchable Document Library providing all the necessary documents that should be downloaded and are relevant to trade in Nigeria, from Regulatory Documents to Official Publications, Legal Information and Customs Procedures.

The Nigerian Trade Hub app tools include the HS Code Classification Tool; this is a sensitive tool that assists the Importer with the correct classification of their products for both import and export.

Once the trader has obtained the correct HS Code for an importation product, the tool will therefore provide the necessary regulatory information about the product including Regulating Agencies, Control Measures, Prohibition Status, ETLS status depending on the Country of Origin, Document Requirements, Related Duties and Fees and Processing times.

As for export products, the exporter on selection of the Country of Export is presented with the Exportation Country’s Market Access information which includes the relevant HS Code and the rates of duty it will attract upon entry.

Other useful tools include a Duty and Fees Calculator, CPC Code Directory and a Currency Converter. 

SEACOM today celebrated its fourth anniversary by reaching out to communities across Africa.

Dubbed as SEACOM’s Foundation Day is about genuine partnership with the community and not just donating money.

SEACOM Mozambique provided a computer lab to the Orfanato de Boane orphanage.

SEACOM Mauritius gave the Mauritius SoS Children’s Village educational material, food, and hosting a fun day for the children under its care and a handover of plants to the 52 children from SoS Children’s Village. SEACOM Mauritius said it will adopt 5 trees in Valley De Ferney for 20 years.

SEACOM Tanzania is set to work with the School to develop a software solution for the hearing impaired while SEACOM Kenya visited S.C.R.E.A.M Africa Orphanage, Nairobi and Linkoni Aids Orphanage, Mombasa with educational material, online tutorials and dry food to each orphanage.

SEACOM South Africa hosted a career day at Tembisa and explained career identification and exploration process, with specific emphasis on learner career assessments.

SEACOM SA also launched The Beehive Youth Life Skills Mxit Portal, an initiative conceived by Tembisa High School learners as part of the SEACOM Solution Quest. The portal aims to bring valuable life skills support and mentoring to disadvantaged youths around South Africa over the next few months.

Etisalat Group today announced strong results for the second quarter of 2013, with an increase of quarterly consolidated revenues and subscribers across its operating markets.

Ahmad Abdulkarim Julfar, the Chief Executive Officer at Etisalat Group, said: “The outstanding performance of Etisalat UAE and the positive performance in Asia are reflected in our Q2 results.”

The telco has operation in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

Below are the firm’s key highlights for Q2 2013:

•          Interim dividend of 35 fils per share, up 40% from the prior year.

•          Revenue grew 20% per cent to AED 9.9 billion

•          Revenue from international operations grew by 50%

•          Aggregate subscribers grew to 143 million;

•          Maintained financial flexibility with net cash balance of AED 10.9 billion.

•          Etisalat launch “Flous” that offers banking for unbanking in Egypt

•          Etisalat obtained Mobile Network Universal Service License in Benin

•          Etisalat Group joined GSMA and Global Mobile Health Community in battle against diabetes;

•          Etisalat awarded best CSR practices award

Etisalat Group reported strong consolidated revenues during the second quarter of FY2013 reached AED 9,882 million representing an increase of 20% in comparison to the same period of last year and an increase of 3% in comparison to the first quarter of 2013. During the quarter, Group consolidated revenues was affected by the changing in the accounting treatment of the operations in Pakistan, which was consolidated with effect from January 1st 2013.

In the UAE, revenues of AED 6,303 million for the quarter were 12% higher than in the second quarter of 2012 and 5% higher than the first quarter of 2012. The quarterly year-over-year growth in revenues was primarily due to customer acquisition, an increase in the revenues of data and handsets sales.

Revenue from international consolidated operations grew by 50% to AED 3,513 million, representing 36% of consolidated revenues.

Etisalat Group’s first six months 2013 revenue increased to AED 19.5 billion compared to last year’s first six months (H1, 2012) where it was AED 16.5 billion.

Via APO

Kenya’s  electoral commission body, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) wants Safaricom, Kenya’s top telco to reconsider transmitting the Makueni by-election results.

The firm transmitted the country’s March 4 General Election results which were disputed.

Safariocm announced July 4 that it had withdrawn services to the IEBC due to the commission’s level of preparedness for the by-election.

IEBC however is still asking the telco do to the job.

IEBC CEO, James Oswago told the media that the commission was  ready.

Osawgo said: “We designed the system ourselves and it was not bound to fail. The system is working and we expect the technical team set up to work with Safaricom will ensure the company comes on board.”

The Makueni by-election will be held on Saturday July 27 and IEBC is confident the equipment will not fail. The March 4 General Elections Kenyans were disappointed when the electronic system the commission was using crashed before final tally, with many citing inside tampering with the systems to favour one of the presidential contestants.

Safaricom, the firm that was transmitting the live results was blamed by Kenyans for being part fo the ploy but the firm reemphasized its stand on integrity saying the it did not run the IEBC voter system.

The African Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) Program has been given a four year funding approval worth $125-million together from the African Development Bank (AfDB).

The Fund for African Private Sector Assistance (FAPA) which aims at supporting micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Africa also granted a $3,98-million technical assistance package.

This programme will provide consistent lines of credit (LoCs), mostly in local currency, and technical assistance to targeted financial institutions, predominantly in low-income countries spread over all five African regions.

The SME Programme will avail important longer-term resources to many SMEs which will have contributed to job creation which is 45 percent growth, poverty reduction and inclusive growth on Africa which contributes to more than 33 percent GDP.

Some studies show that more than 70 percent of SMEs lack access to medium-longer-term finance, creating an SME funding gap of more than USD 140 billion in Africa alone.

60 percent of the available loans are for less than a year. Most of the financial institutions do not have enough knowledge and systems to assess and monitor SME projects they relay on collaterals.

The programme will benefit from the Fund for African Private Sector Assistance (FAPA) support that will give USD3.98 million to provide technical support to building capacities of the 25 participating financial institutions to improve their operational efficiencies.

FAPA is a multi-donor thematic trust fund, financed by the Japanese Government, the AfDB, the Austrian Development Bank and the Government of Austria, that provides grant funding for technical assistance and capacity building to support completion of the AfDB’s Private Sector Development Strategy.

This USD 3.98-million FAPA technical assistance grant for the AfDB Africa SME Programme is the highest amount approved in the history of FAPA.

Intel has singled out its policy to renovate its infrastructure which will allow companies and other users to benefit from an increasingly services-oriented, mobile world.

The chip maker corporation has also disclosed other details about its next-generation Intel Atom processor C2000 product family, as well as outlining its roadmap of next-generation 14nm products.

“Data centres are entering a new era of rapid service delivery,” says Diane Bryant, senior vice president and GM of the Data Centre and Connected Systems Group at Intel.“Across network, storage and servers we continue to see significant opportunities for growth. In many cases, it requires a new approach to deliver the scale and efficiency required, and today we are unveiling the near and long-term actions to enable this transformation.”

Bryant pointed out Intel’s Rack Scale Architecture (RSA), an advanced design that promises to majorly increase the operation and flexibility of the data centre to deliver new services.

Rackspace Hosting, an open cloud company, has announced the deployment of new server racks, a step toward reaching Intel’s RSA vision, powered by Intel Xeon processors and Intel Ethernet controllers with storage accelerated by Intel Solid State Drives. The design is the first commercial rack scale implementation.

Intel also introduced Open Network Platform reference designs to help OEMs build and deploy this new generation of networks.

These new products are to deliver four times the energy efficiency and up to seven times more performance than the first generation Intel Atom processor-based server SoCs introduced in December last year.

Intel has been sampling the new Intel Atom processor server product family to customers since April and has already more than twice the number of system designs compared to the generation last.

The company outlined its roadmap of next-generation products based on its forthcoming 14nm process technology planned for 2014 and beyond.

Intel also disclosed a new SoC designed from the ground up for the data centre based on Intel’s next-generation Broadwell microarchitecture that follows today’s industry leading Haswell microarchitecture. This SoC will offer higher levels of performance in high density, extreme energy efficient systems that data centre operators will expect in this increasingly services-oriented, mobile world.

eKitabu, an East African e-book provider in collaboration with Intel Corporation challenged the Kenyan government to prioritize digitizing education in the country.

Danie Steyn, the General Manager of Intel East Africa exhibited a sample of the programs of Math and English subjects that could be inculcated in the school computers. He said that since the world has now gone digital, such programs should be considered in the school curriculum along side the use of text books.

Mr. Lawrence Njagi, chairman of the Kenya Publishers Association (KPA), in agreement with Intel East Africa GM said that digitizing education is now a necessity and no longer a debate. He however said that the e-books publisher should ensure that the programme should make it more local.

“When an illustration is made in the e-book it should show what is available in the country. If an illustration says Matthew slide in snow, the local version should be Kamau, or any other local name, slide in mud. That will make more sense to the Kenyan child because teaching comes from the known to the unknown,” said Njagi.

The Mr. John Temba director of  ICT, Ministry of Education confirmed that the ICT development in the education sector is being worked on.

“we are working n improving the ICT situation in the sector, we have  advised the cabinet secretary though a memo, on how to implement  the software material in the system and are waiting for response which had been delayed by the teachers strike,” he said

Temba added that added that training of the teachers will also enhance ICT growth as well as acquiring the learning resources in the education sector.

Lawrence Njagi also said that ICT growth is beyond laptops for class one but involves computers for each student. This he said will help students to grow intellectually

“Students from such schools in most cases have higher literacy skills as compared to their counterparts with no computers in school,” he said.

 Former SA President Nelson Mandela is the first South African to receive the country’s new smart ID’s.

Delivered to him during his birthday last week, Madiba is among the first group of South Africans-over 80 years dubbed the ‘Mandela Generation’ who will receive the smart ID’s in phase one. They will be invited to South Africa’s Home Affairs offices according to their dates of birth. The first phase of the ID’s will be processed in 27 Home Affairs’ regional offices. Other offices  will gradually do so over the next three years.

Madiba’s new Smart ID card was delivered to him on his birthday by his daughter, Zindzi Mandela.

 According to Home Affairs Minister Naledi Pandor the smart ID’s are secure and durable as they are made of tamper-proof quality polycarbonate materials. The smart ID’s also have security features like holograms, laser engraving and personal details which can be seen physically and fingerprint biometrics and biographic data embedded smart ID’ 80KB chip. The physical and logical security features will make the ID’s tamper-proof and extremely difficult to forge.

In 8 years, all South African will have the smart ID’s said the Department of Home Affairs.

Apple’s developer website has been hacked. An email released by Apple informed the registered developers. It said that sensitive emails, names and physical addresses could have been conceded. This had forced them to take down the website on Thursday to stop further damage.

Last week in Thursday, a trespasser tried to protect personal information of Apple’s registered developers from their developer website.

“Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed; however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then,” said Apple.

The multinational corporation company, apple, further said that it will have to do a complete webite renovation in order to prevent a similar security threat from happening again.

The last website shut down was due to a rush on the company’s iOS 7 beta release in early June. This week’s outage, however, was longer-lived – for much of a day – and for a much more damaging reason.

In most Apple hacks that happened previously, have been client –side, often through vulnerabilities in the Java software the company used to ship with OS X, and occasionally via social-engineering attacks on iCloud passwords.

Apple’ worst fear might be that hackers could gain access to its app store or the signing credential technology that certifies iPhone apps as safe, known, and malware-free. Apple does not want its consumers to consider the iOS ecosystem anywhere near as malware-laden as Android sometimes appears to be.

Nigeria’s Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) will build 5,000 base stations in five years.

Maikano Abdullahi, the secretary USPF, a special fund set up to provide telecommunications and ICT services to undeserved communities said last week Thursday at the unveiling of the funds five year strategic plan, 2013-2017 Strategic Management Plan (SMP).

Abdullahi said they will  focus on implementation of connectivity, which is inclusion of connectivity and access to ensure sustainability of the rural access.

USPF secretary said it will facilitate the building of new telecoms base transceiver stations (BTS) in the rural communities of the country. This is in line with  the new Strategic Management Plan (SMP) 2013-2017, where 1,000 BTS are to be built every year, over a period of five years.

Other key targets include the plan to support the deployment of 15, 000 kilometres of fibre optic cables, laying an average of 3,000km every year; and the deployment of Internet Point of Presence (PoPs) in 25 clusters over five years, with an average of five per year under the Fund’s Rural Broadband Internet (RUBI) scheme.

Also, the secretary disclosed that to achieve the new targets, USPF would, in the next two weeks, come up with Requests for Proposals from telecoms operators that would drive the infrastructure deployment, stressing  that the Fund would ensure there is transparency in the bidding process.This could be achieved through new operating model adopted for the current SPM, which focuses on an integrated approach to project strategy and execution  leading:

1.      to increase participation of industry operators;

2.      ensure implementation of well-planned and adaptable projects which suit a variety of ICT schemes;

3.      ensure availability of telecoms infrastructures in unserved and underserved area for universal access.

Speaking earlier, Joseph Tegbe, Partner, KPMG, the consultancy firm working with USPF on the rural access programme  said the SNMP 2007-2001 programmes and projects were well articulated but the USPF encountered some impediments in executing some of them.

Tegbe said: “There were too many projects. Also, projects were designed and defined using a ‘one size fits all’ approach, thus USP intervention, in some cases, did not directly address the specific needs of the beneficiaries, among others challenges.”

Speaking on the occasion, the Director of Telecoms and Postal Services in the Ministry of Communication Technology, John Ayodele, called for serious collaboration between the USPF, the telecoms operators and other necessary stakeholders to ensure the current SMP records appreciable success.