The draft directive requires EU countries to set their maximum terms of imprisonment at not less than two years for the crimes of illegally accessing or interfering with information systems, illegally interfering with data, illegally intercepting communications or intentionally producing and selling tools used to commit these offences. “Minor” cases are excluded, but it is up to each country to determine what constitutes a “minor” case.

The text sets up a penalty of at least three years’ imprisonment for using “botnets”, i.e. establishing remote control over a significant number of computers by infecting them with malicious software.

Attacks against “critical infrastructure”, such as power plants, transport networks and government networks, can lead to a five-year prison sentence. The same applies if an attack is committed by a criminal organisation or if it causes serious damage.

Member states will be required to respond quickly to urgent requests for help in the event of cyber attacks, so as to render police cooperation more effective. They will have to make better use of the existing 24/7 network of contact points to respond to urgent requests within eight hours.

Legal persons, such as firms, would be liable for offences committed for their benefit (e.g. for hiring a hacker to get access to a competitor’s database). Penalties could include exclusion from entitlement to public benefits or closure of establishments.

The text, adopted by 541 votes to 91, with 9 abstentions, is expected to be formally adopted by the Council very shortly. The new directive builds on rules that have been in force since 2005. Once adopted, member states will have two years to transpose it into national law.

Photo: Neelie Kroes, Catherine Ashton and Cecilia Malmström (from left to right)

In his opening statement, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon encouraged participants to be “global citizens” and to help the Organizations rise to the challenges such as insecurity, climate change and unemployment by finding their own mission in life.

“Be part of creating a new vision. It is not only about telling us what kind of world you want. It is about partnering with us to realize a better future,” he told participants at the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Youth Forum in New York.

The forum’s theme focuses on leveraging science, technology, innovation and culture to improve societies. Participants are ‘tomorrow’s innovators’, including youth representatives from Member States, students and young entrepreneurs with science and technology backgrounds and youth-led non-governmental organizations.

Ban noted that working with youth is one of his top priorities because “young leaders have the energy and ideas we need to change our world.”

He stressed the essential role of education, adding a personal note about the power of education as he was growing up in the Republic of Korea.

“When we give children and youth the education they deserve, they will help transform the world,” he said. He also noted his new initiative, Education First, a $1.5 billion initiative to achieve universal education.

Also speaking at the opening of the forum, ECOSOC President Néstor Osorio reiterated the need to overcome obstacles on education and employment, particularly among women and girls.

Young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults and more than 75 million youth worldwide are looking for work, according to the UN International Labour Organization (ILO). In Europe and the Middle East, more than half of 15 to 24 year olds are without jobs.

Osorio noted the new opportunities for young entrepreneurs through start-up companies in arts, technology and advertising businesses.

Social networking sites, he noted, played an important role in promoting the so-called Arab Spring by “giving the youth a voice and making them an important player in the transformation of the region.” In addition, mobile phones are pushing development by allowing users to browse the Internet and transfer money wirelessly.

“Young people need economic opportunity. Young people want the full enjoyment of their political and civil rights and freedoms. Speaking their minds; participating in politics; practicing the religion of their choice; and living their lives without any form of discrimination are some of their legitimate aspirations,” Mr. Osorio said.

“Meaningful participation, openness, inclusion and accountability can be improved by using technology, science, and culture. They all can serve as a vital engine for positive change,” he added.

Among the youth addressing participants was 15-year-old World Food Programme Youth Representative Adora Svitak, who encouraged young people to change history with their tremendous audacity and imagination.

Some people think kids and power is a dangerous combination, Ms. Svitak said, “but the only danger is transformational change.”

She said young people are instrumental in supporting and encouraging their peers, and creating change online by toppling regimes and shifting attitudes.

Also, the Secretary-General’s Envoy for Youth, Ahmad Alhendawi, said that engaging young people in addressing global challenges is important because they are at the very fore in both using and developing tools in the field of science, technology and innovation.

“Young people are engines of growth and human development,” he said in a statement.

In a plan for change outlined by Ban, the Youth Envoy’s role encompassed four principles: participation, advocacy, partnerships and harmonization.

Fully endorsing the plan, Mr. Ban encouraged young people to communicate with the UN through the meeting places and cyberspace, such as by following the UN on Twitter (@UN) and to tweet the Envoy directly at @AhmadAlhendawi.

Meanwhile, ECOSOC is today launching a major online campaign, ‘Innovate Your Future.’ The online forum allows youth between the ages of 15 and 40 to write in their ideas and thoughts on how science, technology, innovation and culture can help shape a sustainable world.

For example, one person suggests “to come up with a solar-powered irrigation system” while another advocates “designing homes that consume less power.”

The concerns and recommendations brought forward on the site, along with the ideas from today’s forum, will be presented at the ECOSOC High-level Segment in Geneva this July for ministers from Member States.

Initiated in June 2012, the Cairo TApp has engaged technologists on transport challenges ranging from harassment and other personal safety issues to encouraging shared rides and car-pooling, increasing effective traffic enforcement, and improving driver behavior. Egyptian technology specialists worked alongside stakeholders and experts in transport and urban development to develop 23 new mobile applications, or apps. The competition was organized in a collaboration between the World Bank, the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, the Egyptian Ministry of Transport, and Egypt’s active technology community. The participants in the first ever Cairo TApp were recognized at an Award Event on Saturday in the Smart Village near Cairo.

The partners for the Cairo TApp Award Event are Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Ministry of Transport, Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, Vodafone Egypt, Orange, Google, TA Telecom, Microsoft, Alashanek Ya Balady, Green Arm, Bey2ollak, Arabnet, Wamda, dotopen.

“The Cairo Transport App is an opportunity for young Egyptians to invent and innovate in a bid to contribute to addressing the current social and economic challenges, and to stimulate and develop the spirit of entrepreneurship. We are investing seriously in the development of technological human resources and we have programs and projects that enable our youth to compete globally,” said H.E. Minister Atef Helmy, Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology.

Cairo faces many critical urban transport, traffic management, and environmental issues. These include an overcrowded and unreliable public transport system; aggravated traffic congestion, with serious economic consequences; poor road safety, with at least 1,000 residents dying each year in motor vehicle crashes, more than half of them pedestrians; institutional fragmentation and insufficient financial resources for transport facilities; and high levels of air and noise pollution, aggravated by the large number of aging microbuses, minibuses, and taxis in the city.

Conversely, the use of mobile phones has exploded in Egypt and mobile applications now provide an accessible platform to improve service delivery and help tackle problems such as those facing Egypt’s capital. Egyptian technologists already participated in the first Water Hackathon, organized by the World Bank in 2011 in Cairo and other locations worldwide, which developed apps for improving delivery of water services.

“The Cairo TApp is a great example of bottom-up, local innovation that can complement the more traditional lending operations supported by the World Bank,” said Hartwig Schafer, World Bank Country Director Egypt, Yemen and Djibouti. “We are very impressed by the creativity and dedication of the young technology specialists who took part, and the energy they bring to solving the everyday problems faced by Egyptians.”

The Cairo TApp began with a workshop held at Egypt’s Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center (TIEC) in September 2012, which resulted in more than 24 application submissions. Out of these, 10 finalists were selected through online voting (for one popular app) and by mentors and experts.

The winning app, Beliaa, is a “mobile car mechanic” designed to assist car owners. It is the first mobile application for road assistance and car maintenance in Egypt, using GPS location to help drivers locate road assistance centers and sending car maintenance requests with the required service, date, and time to authorized car workshops. The app is also integrated with the General Department for Traffic to provide quick and reliable traffic updates. The Beliaa team won US$3,000 and a nomination to an international mobile application competition at the 2013 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

“Women tend to be overrepresented in the humanities and social sciences, and underrepresented in science and technology,” said an official from the world body’s International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Bureau for Workers’ Activities, Claude Akpokavie. “Measures need to be put in place to redress this imbalance.”

According to ILO, the gap between men and women in the scientific and technological fields is linked to pervasive gender roles and attitudes in different societies – visible in both developed and developing countries – which encourage girls to pursue ‘softer’ subjects.

Over the past few months, recent stories have emerged revealing stark gender discrepancies in a number of countries around the world, which are hindering women’s participation in science and technology both at school and at work, the agency noted.

In the United States, for example, a Yale University study found that women science graduates are discriminated against when applying for research posts. In Iran, the Government recently announced that women will be excluded from a wide range of university studies, including nuclear physics and electrical engineering. In China, several universities require women to obtain higher entry grades than men for science courses.

“Girls are far less likely than boys to study engineering or computer or physical sciences,” said the Director of ILO’s Bureau for Gender Equality, Jane Hodges. “Stereotypes of girls represent them as less interested or capable in certain subjects – such as mathematics and science. This inevitably reduces their access to jobs with better pay or labour markets that may offer better opportunities.”

However, when encouraged, girls do excel in scientific subjects, she added.

With an estimated 500 million people entering the global workforce over the next decade, Ms. Hodges stressed that it is crucial that women in science and technology jobs are not left working at the lowest levels.

“Even though women hold more than 60 per cent of information and communication technology-related jobs in OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, only 10 to 20 per cent are computer programmers, engineers, systems analysts or designers,” she said. “Education and skills training – and a change in attitudes – are vital to ensure women are not left behind.”

While the human world is busy over social, political, and scientific issues that seem not to give our lives a minute of peace; as we go about our business and rage over the new iPad, or think over the last meeting of the day, extraordinary things are happening and we do not see them.

One of these events caught the attention of Discovery News, and has been called the Great Chimp Tech Boom. Nowadays, our primate cousins are at the height of a revolution maybe hard to understand but very impressive from a cultural point of view. Poking at ants with a stick hardly seems like a top-of-the-line technological feat, but for chimpanzees a development in behaviour that is specific to a community rather than a species as a whole, is more important than we would expect. In fact, it testifies the appearance of clear “cultural variations” similar to what started to differentiate a human tribe from another.

According to British anthropologist Jane Goodall, technology among chimpanzees is improving and being adopted rapidly.

A team of evolutionary anthropologists and other animal behaviour researchers, including Goodall, have identified at least 39 community-specific behaviours within different groups of chimps, which range from methods of swatting flies  to variations on simple tools, like using stones to crack open nuts versus smashing them against the ground with a heavy piece of wood.

Poking at ants with a stick, ant fishing, is an amazing example of cultural variation for a couple of reasons. First, it requires a tool, which is used to retrieve ants and termites from their nests. The tool, once a simple stick, has now seen improvements; in 2009 a group of chimps were observed fraying the ends of their sticks to allow more surface area for catching ants and termites. Second, poking at ants is the first novel adaptation outside of captivity that we have witnessed moving from one group into another. According to a new report in the latest issue of Current Anthropology, ant fishing is really catching on, and it’s all thanks to a chimp named Trezia.

Trezia is a wild chimpanzee who lives in Gombe Stream National Park, amongst the Kasekela chimpanzee community. When Trezia was transferred to the Kasekela group from the separate Mitumba community, Trezia didn’t stop fishing for ants just because she lived in a new group. For her  poking at ants was an everyday behaviour, in fact in 1982 ant fishing was declared a customary behaviour within Trezia’s Mitumba home group. After Trezia’s relocation, it appeared in the Kaseleka group, and since 2010 it has become customary there as well.

It’s unsurprising that chimpanzees exhibit the highest rate of cultural variation of any non-human species. Chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than any other living species; so much so that in 2003 a team of biologists suggested moving chimps to the human branch of the family tree.

Of course, chimps are not the only primates to surprise observers with their technological artistry. A Japanese macaque named Imo figured out that washing the grit off of sweet potatoes made them better to eat, and taught an entire population of macaques to wash their food. Gorillas have recently been spotted dismantling snare traps left by poachers, a development that is marvellous. In Brazil, a group of Capuchin monkeys cracks palm nuts with stones but chooses the optimal stones for the job, by testing the rocks for sturdiness and weight, before wasting any time using them as hammers.

The world around us is developing, and our planet’s co-inhabitants are running their own extraordinary evolution, to pay attention cast a bright new light on how our lives are at times narrow-minded, and on how much we are actually missing out.

The two-day ‘Women with the Wave’ forum in Seoul, Republic of Korea, urged media industry leaders, governments and international organizations to “work harder to promote greater female representation” in industry workplaces and on the airwaves, according to a joint news release today from the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Asia Broadcasting Union (ABU), a non-profit, non-government, professional association that aims to advance broadcasting in the region.

The gathering identified the need for a “gender-inclusive” environment in all occupational groups to encourage women and girls to seek on- and off-screen communications and technology jobs, the release said.

The forum also called for women to be given greater access to technological and digital platforms, and argued for a positive, non-stereotypical and balanced portrayal of women and girls across all forms of media and technological platforms.

US actress Geena Davis, who was recently appointed ITU’s Special Envoy for Women and Girls, set the tone for the gathering’s final statement with her endorsement of its aims in her keynote address on the first day of the 10-11 October conference.

“The time for change is now, and all of you in this room are powerful agents of change,” said the Oscar-winning actress. “I’d like to applaud Asian broadcasters, filmmakers, Internet stakeholders, academics and others in taking the lead to change the image of women and girls in ICTs.”

Referring to the televised dramas of the Republic of Korea, and India’s Hindi-language film industry, Ms. Davis added, “From Korea’s famous K-dramas to Bollywood musicals, we need the characters that will inspire tomorrow’s tech-centred professionals.”

ITU’s Secretary-General, Dr. Hamadoun I. Touré, highlighted the agency’s commitment to harnessing ICTs to empower women, citing various initiatives, including ITU’s ‘Tech Needs Girls’ campaign and the new annual ‘Tech Needs Girls Prize,’ which targets girls aged 9-18 “at the time when they are forming opinions and making career choices.”

“Together, the campaign and prize aim to help them see a connection between tech and their daily lives, gain confidence in their skills and find fun in ICT,” Dr. Touré said. He also spoke of the agency’s ‘Girls in ICT Portal,’ saying the “comprehensive, multilingual” site “highlights tech scholarships, training opportunities and mentorship programmes for girls and women around the world.”

Delegates identified ITU, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia-Pacific (ESCAP), UNESCO and UN Women among international organizations in a position to help advance the forum’s goals as their final statement called on “all who can assist to recognize the digital wave now sweeping the world and to join us in supporting the preparation of women and girls for the opportunities and benefits which the knowledge society is now bringing to families worldwide.”

The forum was one of several events ahead of the 49th ABU General Assembly in the Republic of Korean capital, Seoul.

It concluded as ITU announced from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, two new initiatives aimed at achieving sustainable development by harnessing smart ICT, in particular mobile broadband.

The initiatives – m-Powering Development and Smart Sustainable Development Model – were launched on the Saving Lives Platform at ITU Telecom World 2012 in Dubai.

M-Powering Development seeks to act as a catalyst to achieve sustainability, according to an ITU press release. The Smart Sustainable Development Model seeks to demonstrate that linking ICT for Development with ICT for Disaster Management leads to “increased sustainable development and optimal resource use without additional financial investment,” according to ITU.

“In a world increasingly threatened by natural disasters brought on by global climate change, we have to seize the opportunities available to us through smart, cutting edge technologies to swing the tide towards achieving sustainable development,” said Dr. Touré. “The deployment of mobile broadband goes beyond merely making a phone call; it brings about a paradigm shift in social and economic empowerment and development. It is truly m-Powering!”

Global roll out of the initiatives, which will be steered by ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau, is expected by April 2014.

In the last five years (2007-2011) an increase was recorded in PC use, by 35.1%, and Internet access, by 54.8%. The average annual growth rate for the same period is 7.9% for computer use and 11.6% for Internet access.

Longitudinally, growth rates were decreasing until 2010, while in 2011 an opposite trend is recorded

Demographic factors, namely gender, age and education influence internet users. Results showed that males engage more in internet activities (52.4%) than females (47.6%). When looking at age groups, age group 25-34 years old is the largest comprising 29.8% of total internet users, while age group 45-54 comprises 15.7% and age group 55-74 7.1%. Regarding formal education, users of medium educational level (upper secondary education, vocational training institutes) are the most numerous with 45.6% while users of low educational level (no formal education completed, primary or lower secondary education) are less with 12.5%.

Concerning the educational level, only 2 out of 10 individuals of low educational level accessed the internet in the A’ quarter of 2011, while the respective ratios for individuals with medium and high educational level are 6 out of 10 and 8 out of 10, respectively.

The indicator of internet regular users was included in the set of key performance targets of the Digital Agenda for Europe. In the first quarter of 2011, 72.0% of the respondents who used the internet did so on a daily basis, which is slightly higher than the percentage for 2010, while 91.8% made regular use -at least once a week- but not every day.

Main place of internet access remains the home with 87.7%. Increase by 10.4%, compared to 2010, has been recorded in access from other places, with internet cafes still in the first place with 61.9%, therefore recording a large decrease (by 21%, approximately).

According to the survey results, internet access, away from home or work, via mobile devices –mobile or smart phone, laptop, notebook, netbook or tablet computer/i-pad or other mobile device like palmtop, PDA, etc.– continued to increase (increasing by 74.8%), while at the same time, the percentage of users accessing the internet via non-mobile devices continued to decline (decreasing by approximately 13% in comparison with 2010).

46.4% of the users, who access the internet away from home or work via mobile or smart phone, use public Wifi and WiMax networks for wireless internet access. The corresponding percentage for individuals accessing the internet away from home or work from portable computer reaches 62.3%.

Compared with 2010, a significant increase is observed in the percentages of individuals making ubiquitous internet access, away from home or work: Via mobile phone (increase by 48,6%), either mobile phone GPRS, 3G, 3G+ or smart phone and via portable computer (increase by 157,9%) including laptops, notebooks, netbooks or tablet computers /i-pad.

The Internet Protocol is the key by which data is addressed and routed in small packets across networks. This protocol makes Internet and World Wide Web browsing a relatively seamless experience. The final IPv4 addresses allocated to Europe (out of a total of 4.3 billion globally) will be handed out this month. Therefore updating the protocol is essential to ensure there are enough internet addresses for all the computers, mobiles and other devices people need to connect to Internet, and to ensure higher levels of security. IPv6 makes available a practically unlimited number of addresses (340 trillions of trillions of trillions).

IPv6 offers many technical advantages such as the simplified deployment of IP security, standard routing, and the plug & play capability. However, according to the IPv6 indicator in the Digital Agenda Scoreboard, less than 3% of all websites in the EU27 are IPv6-compatible.

All computers and electronic devices that connect to the Internet need an InternetProtocol (IP) address to identify themselves and communicate with other computers or devices. The first versions of the Internet Protocol appeared in the 1970s, but by 1984, Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) had become a global standard. However, the number of IP addresses available using IPv4, based on 32-bit addresses, is limited to around 4 billion, with most of them now attributed. The improved version that has been developed, IPv6, would overcome this problem and brings other advantages.

IPv6 provide:

- a massive increase in address space – as it is based on 128 bit addresses, IPv6 allows for a virtually unlimited number of addresses – enough for every citizen, network operator or organisation to have as many IP addresses as they need to connect every conceivable device and network to the Internet;

- a basis for developing and deploying applications that may be too complicated or too costly in today’s crowded IPv4 environment;

- users with the possibility to have their own networks that can be connected directly to the Internet;

- Network security is integrated in the design of IPv6. Compared to IPv4 which was designed without taking account of cyber security issues, IPv6 mandates automatic encryption services (this was optional in IPv4). This will ensure safer data communication exchange.

Also, deployment of IPv6 will make it easier for companies to make new technological developments available to the public. Examples include: auto-configuration, or easy “plug and play” networking of a large number of devices; peer-to-peer applications, including those involving Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and IP-TV, will be easier to implement and more powerful; IPv6 can be a key enabler for the introduction of new mobile/wireless applications and services that might be less feasible in a constrained IPv4 environment.

“So.cl combines search and social networking for the purpose of learning and is the latest experiment from FUSE Labs,” according to Microsoft.

The features and apps in this new Microsoft So.cl are quite similar to Pinterest and Google+, in terms of design and populating the links. Strangely, it posts search request on a news feed so it is better to avoid any kind of explicit activity that might cause potential embarrassment, writes Arabiangazette.com.

The social network offer users to share rich information that contains images, videos and links. A standout feature of So.cl (pronounced ‘social’) is the ability to create “video parties” that allow users to search for and assemble videos they can share with other users.

“We expect students to continue using products such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other existing social networks, as well as Bing, Google and other search tools,” said Microsoft in its FAQ section, adding, “We hope to encourage students to reimagine how our everyday communication and learning tools can be improved, by researching, learning and sharing in their everyday lives.”

“In its December 2011 report, Microsoft asserted the site is not meant to compete with Facebook or search engines, but to allow students to share materials for academic purposes,” as reported by Mashable.

The new social networking site, earlier blogged as “experimental research project,” was made available to information and design schools at the University of Washington, Syracuse University and New York University, according to Arabiangazette.com.

During a high-level dialogue, leading figures in gender empowerment and technology debated and defined a roadmap for more successful approaches to attract school-age girls to the technology field, and agreed to work together to change attitudes that make this area of study unpopular among young women.

The debate brought together leading international figures and champions of gender empowerment including Melanne Verveer, United States Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues; Lakshmi Puri, Deputy Executive Director, UN Women; Mignon Clyburn, Commissioner with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC); Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission and Commissioner for the Digital Agenda; and Jasna Matić, State Secretary for Digital Agenda in Serbia.

It also featured lively discussion from industry leaders including Alethea Lodge-Clarke, Programme Manager of Public Private Partnerships for Microsoft; Monique Morrow, CTO Asia Pacific with Cisco Systems; Juliana Rotich, Ushahidi’s pioneering Executive Director; and Sarah Wynn-Williams, Manager of Global Public Policy for Facebook.

“Over the coming decade, there are expected to be two million more information and communications technology (ICT) jobs than there are professionals to fill them. This is an extraordinary opportunity for girls and young women – in a world where there are over 70 million unemployed young people,” said the ITU Secretary-General, Hamadoun Touré. He emphasized the need to cast aside outdated attitudes that are keeping young girls from considering technology as a career option. “ICT careers are not ‘too hard’ for girls. ICT careers are not unfeminine. And ICT careers are certainly not boring,” he added. “Encouraging girls into the technology industry will create a positive feedback look – in turn creating inspiring new role models for the next generation.”

The debate was one of many events organized in more than 70 countries around the world to mark Girls in ICT Day, which is celebrated every year on the fourth Thursday in April. Many events extended invitations to teenage girls and university students to spend the day at the offices of ICT companies, government agencies or academic institutions and to meet with female role models working in the technology field, so they could obtain a better appreciation of what it is like to work in the ICT sector.

The event also featured very special guest Joanne O’ Riordan, one of only seven people in the world with Total Amelia, a congenital birth condition causing the absence of all four limbs. ITU flew Joanne to New York from her native Cork in Ireland to take part in the event, so that she could give her perspective on the vital role of accessible technology in personal empowerment. In an inspirational speech, the 16-year-old, who celebrated her birthday in NY just prior to the event, told the audience her motto in life had always been ‘no limbs, no limits’.

“I use technology in all aspects of my life . . .  I was just one year old when I first began to explore the use of technology with our old computer. I figured out how to use it by simply moving my ‘hand’ and chin at a faster speed. Today I can type 36 words a minute and for someone with no limbs, I think that’s an incredible achievement,” she said.

Girls in ICT website