Google fears Arab Internet crackdown

The use of the Web by Arab democracy movements could lead to some states cracking down harder on Internet freedoms, Google's chairman says, according to the BBC.

Speaking at a conference in Ireland, Eric Schmidt said some governments wanted to regulate the Internet the way they regulated television. He also said he feared his colleagues faced a mounting risk of occasional arrest and torture in such countries.

The Internet was widely used during the so-called Arab spring uprising. Protesters used social networking sites to organise rallies and communicate with those outside their own country, such as foreign media, amid tight restrictions on state media.

Anonymous is picking up where the apparently disbanded LulzSec left off, according to Cnet.

The hacking organisation has released information to the Web that came from the Cyberterrorism Defence Initiative's Security and Network Training Initiative and National Education Laboratory (Sentinel) programme.

The Sentinel programme is administered by the US Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to “educate technical personnel in cyber terrorism response and prevention”. Anonymous used its Twitter account to reveal its intention to post data from the programme on the Web.

Mozilla says it has no interest in appealing to the business community after complaints that the firm's new development cycle will cause headaches for IT managers, reports V3.co.uk.

Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler said in response to a blog post by Firefox consultant Mike Kaply the problems this might cause are irrelevant to Mozilla.

“Enterprise has never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus of ours. Until we run out of people who don't have sysadmins and enterprise deployment teams looking out for them, I can't imagine why we'd focus at all [on these environments],” he said.

Universities worldwide are failing to produce graduates skilled in business intelligence (BI) who also understand business issues, according to an international survey conducted by the Business Intelligence Congress, reveals Computing.co.uk.

The body comprises BI professors and industry professionals and meets on an annual basis. The study, entitled “The State of Business Intelligence in Academia 2010”, stated that too often, graduates have a highly technical understanding of BI, without the requisite understanding of commerce required to apply those skills to business needs.

Conversely, graduates who have a broad understanding of business, lack the deep understanding to capably perform BI, according to its authors.