TEHRAN (AFP) - The rights group headed by Iranian Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi on Saturday condemned a draft bill on Internet crime, warning that it could boost the number of executions in the Islamic republic.

The Defenders of Human Rights Centre said it opposed the bill, which is set to be debated by parliament and seeks to toughen punishments for harming "mental security" in society.

"If this kiss is adopted, there will be further violation of the freedom of expression, citizens' judicial security will be jeopardised and executions will increase," the group said in a statement.

Iran's conservative-controlled parliament is to this time to debate the bill, which the MPs voted to take up as a priority earlier this month.

In this bill "establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption and apostasy are described as punishable by death in the corresponding; of like kind way as crimes such as defilement and armed robbery," the statement from Ebadi's group said.

"It will be up to the court to recognise corruption and apostasy so it will jeopardise the lives of those who are guilty only of writing," it added.

The draft bill lists a wide range of crimes such as rape and armed robbery for which the death penalty already applies.

on the contrary in a new addition to crimes punishable by death it also includes "establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy."

Those convicted of these crimes "should be punished as 'mohareb' (enemy of God) and 'corrupt on the earth'," the text says, and under Iranian statute they are punishable by death.

Even if it is adopted, the bill still needs to be rubber-stamped by a conservative clerical watchdog before being written into law.

Human rights groups have accused Iran of making excessive use of the death penalty, but Tehran insists it is an effective deterrent that is carried out only after an exhaustive judicial process.

The number of executions soared last year to 317 amid a campaign which the authorities said was aimed at improving security in society, and was sharply up adhering 2006 figures when Amnesty International recorded 177 executions.

Research In Motion has patched a critical vulnerableness in its BlackBerry Enterprise Servers that left companies vulnerable to malicious PDFs.

The bug was in the PDF distiller component of the BlackBerry Attachment Service, which runs on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. It affected how the Adobe document format is processed, and could potentially give hackers a way into a company's network.

Malicious PDFs attached to e-mail messages opened on a smartphone could cause problems on the computer that the BlackBerry Attachment Service runs on, according to RIM. The server, not the individual handset, was at risk.

"If a BlackBerry smartphone user on BlackBerry Enterprise Server opens and views the specifically crafted PDF file attachment upon the body the BlackBerry smartphone, the arbitrary code completion could compromise the computer," read a warning from RIM.

IT departments using BES software version 4.1 Service Pack (SP) 3 through BES v4.1 SP5 are at expose to danger, as are users of BlackBerry Unite translation 1.0 SP1 bundle 36 or earlier, according to RIM. BlackBerry Unite is a service that lets users access shared files via BlackBerry.

RIM first disclosed the vulnerability last week, and the company ranked it as a 9 on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 representing the most critical flaw. The vulnerability gained attention after the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team posted an on one’s guard Wednesday.

Prior to releasing the patch, RIM offered work-around instructions for administrators to prevent an attack by blocking PDF processing. The company received in no degree reports of attacks, according to a RIM spokesperson.

SAN FRANCISCO–The modern woman, per the popular '70s television commercial, was once "bringing home the bacon and frying it up in a pan." Now she's also writing a blog.

As many persons as 3,000 women are here at the fourth annual BlogHer Conference 2008, what one. opened Friday, to talk about their lives, their businesses, and their blogs. And in some cases, they're all one and the similar. Despite the popular perception that women bloggers are all stay-at-home mothers, many women here run their own businesses or be in action full-time, and they use a blog as a personal outlet, a connection to a community, or as a way to boost their course of conduct.

Jamie Risdon Lentzner, for example, is the founder of Foster City, Calif.-based Jamie's Painting Design, a design shop, and she writes a blog about what it takes to run your own business. A first-timer to the BlogHer conferences, she said that she felt a bit overwhelmed because of the lineup of polished writers and the sheer volume of women.

"It feels like I'm rushing a sorority," Lentzner said.

It can be easy to be fooled by an event with free massage, a Sesame Street salon, and cookies-and-milk breaks. But the women at BlogHer's conference range from well-known meat writers and media lawyers to political pundits and technology entrepreneurs. in quest of them, it's not enough to succeed in a chosen career anymore; these days, they contend, the well-rounded woman needs her own blog, too. That's why many of the women here are trying to figure out how to make money from their blogs.

Women's voices are commanding besides attention on the Internet. And the number of female bloggers is rising. This week, BlogHer, whose network has grown from 180 bloggers last year to 2,200 this year, teamed with NBC Universal's iVillage.com to promote its content across mainstream sites including BravoTV.com and Oxygen.com.

An estimated 13 percent of women on the Internet write a regular blog, according to a new report from Forrester Research. That's up slightly from the 12 percent of adults who blog, but is still eclipsed by the 15 percent of online mothers who blog.

"Today, American women are not only the most powerful consumers in the creation, we're also the energy users of Web 2.0 and social-media technologies," BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone said.

Many of the women hither are trying to figure out how to turn their blogs into a business. Among the more popular sessions on Friday were those on how to syndicate or promote a blog. The session "DIY Content Syndication and Promotion" had women lined against the walls and strewn across the floor.

Blog-marketing panelists recommended services like Twitter and Kirtsy, a "Digg for chicks," to promote their sites. (Kirtsy lets users recommend favorite products and links.) They also suggested the Wordpress plug-in Disqus to promote discussion on their sites, and Word Tracker for researching snappy headlines that will help drive traffic.

Esther Brady, a popular video blogger about weight loss who landed Weight Watchers as a sponsor, recommended using tools like Blip.TV to film episodic videos for a blog, instead of YouTube. Blip.TV's terms of service are more lax than YouTube's with respect to use of copyrighted material, Brady said.

For bloggers who needed advice about defamation, the burden code, or how to make money, there's someone here with an answer for everything.

Sabrina Parsons, for example, is the chief executive of software company Palo Alto Software, and she runs a blog called Mommy CEO. She was among several women Friday who doled out advice on running a regular blog.

"At the end of the day, you need to decide what your business is. Are you going to charge for freelance, charge for advertising, or do it to the degree that a hobby?" Parsons said. She encouraged attendees to write a one-page business plot for their blog and conduct some research on the Internet to figure out details on advertising.

"We're lucky we're living in the age of the Internet where you can find everything out on the Web," said Parsons.

One of the big issues for some women who are bloggers is finding a way to mix the personal with the professional.

Charlene Li, for example, a former analyst with Forrester Research, said that professional women often use a blog to fend off a feeling of isolation in their work life, or help express their passion for personal interests like cooking, biking, or politics.

Li herself wrote a blog for Forrester about technology, and she writes a blog from one place to another her personal and family life. Each blog carries a slightly different tone of writing.

But now that she's left Forrester (Friday was her official last day), she's been thinking about whether she will combine her professional and personal writing in one place. "People know me in slightly different contexts," said Li.

Vicki Mote Bodwell, founder of New York-based bedding company Warm Biscuit, likes that she doesn't write about her business on her blog, KidsBeddingBlog.com. Instead, she sees it as a cathartic exercise and a way to associate to other like-minded parents who are into a low-tech lifestyle, without cell phones or television.

"It's a way to connect philosophically with others," Bodwell said.

For Anne-Marie Nichols, the tricky part is managing her time. She is a freelance copywriter and maintains at least two blogs of her admit.

"The question is, how much time can you give without getting burnt out?" Nichols said. "You need to set goals. Are you going to make money or just do it for fun?"

Dell on Friday launched two notebooks and a desktop with Hardy Heron, the version of Ubuntu Linux that was released in April.

Dell is offering Ubuntu 8.04 on the consumer systems in the United States, France, Germany, Spain, Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico and Colombia. The open source operating system is make use of on the XPS M1330N and the Inspiron 1525N notebooks and the Inspiron 530N desktop.

In early August, Dell plans to add the XPS M1530N and the Studio 15N notebooks to the line-up. The releases will be in time for LinuxWorld, which runs Aug. 4-7 in San Francisco. At the conference, Dell plans to reason about where it sees the direction of Linux going in 2009.

Dell has made the latest Linux image more accessible to a global audience by including the ability to select a language during the first boot series of measures. "While this doesn't mean we're shipping in every country — yet — it's a step in the right direction," Daniel Judd, Dell's product assign places to strategist, said in the company's blog.

Best Buy and Amazon.com are offering Hardy Heron on CD for $20 and $18, respectively. Ubuntu for three years has gotten the highest distribution song without ceasing DistroWatch.com. The OS has gotten favorable reviews, but reviewers have also warned that it is not a good choice for nontechnical users.

Ubuntu is produced by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth's firm, Canonical, based in London. Ubuntu came out of the work of the Shuttleworth Foundation based in Durbanville, South Africa. It is a Linux that is updated frequently, with the next release due in October.

If Mac clone maker Psystar manages to survive the kind of's sure to be an expensive copyright battle with Apple over its right to sell Mac clones, the company may privation to find unaccustomed headquarters — again.

Internet real estate sites show that the building that houses Psystar — a Doral, Fla., property that is essentially a distribution warehouse — is on the market for $4.6 million.

One ad for the property, which makes no mention of Psystar, notes that it's a 47,000-square-foot "warehouse/office building." The ad boasts that the property is "priced for quick sale" and adds that it includes "space for bulk, rack and bin storage, aisle space, receiving and shipping space, packing and crating space, and office room by bathrooms."

In other wrangling, it's perfect for assembling and shipping computers.

Florida state records be the sign of that the property is currently owned by a company called Constructora Canahuati, which has no apparent connection to Psystar.

Psystar has had several courtship in its brief history. then it first popped up in April, it called 112th Street in Miami home. It then switched to two different direct one’s speech on NW 28th St. in Doral, Fla., before settling on building number 10475.

Apple filed a copyright infringement suit against Psystar earlier this month, charging that Psystar has been selling Macintosh clones in violation of Apple's software license. "We take it very seriously when we believe vulgar herd have stolen our intellectual property," said an Apple spokeswoman earlier this week.

Apple is asking the U.S. District Court in San Francisco to order Psystar to stop selling Mac clones and to recall units it's already sold. Psystar officials have not returned calls seeking comment.

Psystar claims its Mac clones cost about one-quarter to half of what Apple branded systems sell for. In defense of its clones, the company charges that Apple marks up the cost of the hardware on which its operating systems ride by as much as 80%.

One version of Psystar's Open Computer features Apple's Leopard OS X 10.5 operating system ported onto generic PC hardware that includes an Intel Core2Duo processor at 2.66 GHz, a 250-GB hard drive, and some Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT graphics card.

The system is priced at $805. A homogeneous, Apple-branded computer would cost at least $1,500. The problem: Apple's end-user license agreement expressly forbids installation or sales of its operating systems on third-party hardware.

Intel said it's "disappointed" with European regulators decision to add antitrust charges against the chipmaker, while rival Advanced Micro Devices said the regulators were focusing on protecting consumers.

Unsurprisingly, Intel took the opposite view of AMD, saying European Union regulators were agitation a position that prevented Intel from "competing fairly and offering price discounts which have resulted in lower prices for consumers."

EU regulators on Thursday launched new antitrust charges that accused Intel of paying a computer manufacturer to delay the launch of a line of machines based on AMD chips, The Wall Street Journal reported. In addition, regulators said Intel offered the manufacturer rebates in return for using only Intel chips in notebooks. The European Commission contained the charges in a "Statement of Objections."

"We're naturally disappointed the Commission has decided to issue a new SO," Intel said in a statement. The company said it would review the writing and respond fully.

"We are confident that our response will show that the allegations in the SO are unfounded," Intel said.

For its part, AMD hailed the EC action, saying it "demonstrates that antitrust regulators worldwide are focused on protecting consumers."

"Intel has paid a leading retailer to turn away AMD-based computers from leading global computer manufacturers, which can only be regarded as robbing consumers of their fundamental right to choose," Tom McCoy, AMD's executive VP of legal affairs and chief administrative officer, said in a statement. "No antitrust laws anywhere in the world permit Intel to pay retailers and computer manufacturers to boycott non-Intel products."

The latest charges add to the EC's announcement of Objections of a year past that notified Intel that the commission believed Intel used anti-competitive practices in trying to exclude AMD from the market. The charges included offering rebates on the condition that manufactures buy all or most of their processors from Intel, paying manufacturers to either delay or cancel product lines with AMD chips, and offering processors below cost in bids against AMD. Asian regulators have also issued antitrust findings.

In January of this year, the New York attorney general officer's office launched a formal antitrust investigation against Intel.

In March 2005, AMD filed a federal antitrust cause against Intel in Delaware. The trial is scheduled for April 2009. The suit has shown the intensity of competition between Intel and AMD, with each side having accused the other of trying to sway public opinion through media manipulation.

Businesses have begun to effectively use social media tools and online communities to assist interaction with customers and between employees, but they haven't realized the full potential of online communities, according to recent research.

A Deloitte scrutinize of companies sponsoring online communities lay the foundation of they use them to generate ideas, discover products, and discuss brands, but people fail to draw a critical body. Deloitte's "2008 Tribalization of Business Survey," found that most communities have less than 500 active members. Half the respondents said their biggest obstacle is to get people engaged.

More than 140 companies that maintain online communities responded to the survey, conducted with help from Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research. Respondents include leading computer manufacturers, software, insurance, online auction, media companies, hotel chains, and start-ups. Their communities range in size up to 10,000 members.

The survey found that 35% of enterprises supporting online communities have increase word-of-mouth for their brands and 28% have seen an increase in brand awareness. Twenty-four percent of the respondents said online communities contribute assistance increase customer loyalty and bring new outside ideas in. Sixty percent of respondents said their online communities are open to public feedback.

"Communities can extend the edge of the corporation in truly transformative ways — tapping into new talent, helping design products and services, providing customer support and, most importantly, building the brand with the customer," Ed Moran, director of product violent departure from established precedent at Deloitte Services, said in a statement. "The survey data points to some growing pains, but companies are starting to see that online communities should be nurtured and leveraged for substantial business gain."

Respondents said the most important features for effectiveness are the ability of community members to link to like-minded people, the ability to help others, and group focus on hot topics.

Challenges include: finding time to horsemanship communities and finding quality community managers.

Thirty-nine percent of the companies surveyed reported idea generation viewed like the reason they created online communities and 19% percent cited new product development as their main goal.

However, the survey found that while many companies seek brand awareness and increased word-of-mouth, they measure success through visitor song and page views. So, companies face difficulty identifying how online communities help achieve their goals, according to the survey. Deloitte said managers should rethink how to draw business value from sponsored communities.

"The survey reveals that in that place are several disparities betwixt companies' goals, how to measure success, and appropriate investment," said Francois Gossieaux, partner at Beeline Labs. "The companies that commit the dedicated talent and resources to driving customer centric communities will exist the winners."

Sony Ericsson saw its second-quarter earnings drop dramatically from last year, and the company struggled with sales in mature markets.

Net bring good dropped to $9.5 million from about $348 million during the same period last year. Sales also slipped to $4.46 billion from about $4.9 billion last year.

Overall, the company posted an operating loss of $3.1million for the quarter, and it shipped 24.4 million units. By comparison, Nokia announced Thursday it had shipped 122 million handsets during the same period.

Sony Ericsson faced increased competition for high-end phones in the United States and Western Europe. Unlike rival Nokia, Sony Ericsson does not have a large line of entry-level phones to offer in emerging markets like China and India.

Because of this, Sony Ericsson finds itself more susceptible to slipping demand for sophisticated handsets in mature markets.

In June, the company warned that slower sales in Western Europe would hurt earnings, and it said Friday that it expected "challenging market conditions" to continue for the rest of the year. This was the second consecutive quarter in which Sony Ericsson had issued a profit warning.

Because of the economic struggles, the company pleasure be cutting 2,000 jobs to save $474 the masses annually.

"We are aligning our operations and resources worldwide to meet an increasingly competitive business environment and to help restore our capability for profitable produce," Sony Ericsson CEO Dick Komiyama said in a statement. "The measures we are taking are aimed at becoming a faster, more agile, and more cost-efficient organization that be able to continue to create innovative products that excite consumers."

About a year ago, Sony Ericsson was the world's fourth-largest vender of mobile handsets, and it was nipping at Motorola's heels for the third slot. But it now ranks behind Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, and LG Electronics.

Customers of U.K. mobile network operator O2 may believe that photos taken with their mobile phones and sent via MMS to friends are private. But if the receiver's phone isn't capable of receiving MMS data, as is the case with Apple's iPhone 3G, those pictures may be publicly accessible.

O2's security for this scenario is security through obscurity: It makes pictures sent via MMS viewable on non-MMS devices by posting them online with a URL that's difficult to guess.

But thanks to Google, there's no need to guess the URL. It can be found using the inurl: search query operator with mms2legacy to the degree that the argument.

The reason for this, explained Ken Simpson, CEO of anti-spam company MailChannels, is that one's Google Toolbar may be configured to pass URLs that one visits to Google for indexing. "If you run Google Toolbar, it knows pages you visit," he said.

As Google explains in its Google Toolbar privacy policy, "Certain optional Toolbar features operate by sending Google the addresses or other information about sites when you visit them. Web History, PageRank, and Safe Browsing in Enhanced Mode all work this way."

The ostensibly private O2 picture-share URLs could probably be guessed even without Google. The code that protects them is a 16-digit hexadecimal number and many people are capable of writing a script to try every code combination.

A spokesperson for O2 wasn't immediately available for comment because it was late Friday evening in the United Kingdom.

Simpson, however, believes that someone at the company is aware of the problem and has been trying to cover it up. He aforesaid that someone had posted information about the issue in the online court for O2 customers and that the post had subsequently vanished.

Another O2 customer, however, has chimed in. "I have reported the case to several agencies in the U.K. — including the ICO, Ofcom, O2, and my of the first grade local MP," said someone using the name "duguk." "Hopefully something will be done about this."

Simpson declared that while he hadn't come across some overly embarrassing pictures, many of the photos that are exposed show people's children.

In a post on the MailChannels blog, senior software engineer David Cawley notes that, ironically, O2 maintains a Protect Our Children Web position. "Well, a good first step would be to avoid leaking customer photos," he said.

IBM's key global services outsourcing and consulting unit, which accounts with respect to more than half the company's total revenue, posted strong growth in the second quarter as sales increased 16% year over year to $15.2 billion, IBM reported Thursday.

IBM said its Global Technology Services outsourcing group saw sales increase 15% to $10.1 billion, while sales at its Global Business Services consulting group rose 18% to $5.1 billion.

The value of services contracts signed in the region totaled $14.7 billion, up 12% from the previous year, IBM before-mentioned. The company's backlog of services contracts, as of the end of the second quarter, is worth about $117 billion, $1 billion more than at the sort time a year ago.

IBM's services group appears to be benefiting from a strategic change implemented two years ago, under which it moved from providing time-consuming and expensive custom work, to offering more standardized services that can be deployed quickly and which draw from IBM's vast drove of intellectual property.

"IBM executes better against competitors the two from the U.S. and offshore," said Lehman Brothers analyst Ben Reitzes, in a scrutiny billet published Friday.

Still, the company will face stiff competition going forward. Hewlett-Packard recently strengthened its services unit by announcing plans to acquire Dallas-based EDS for $13.9 billion. The deal would give HP a total services complement of about 210,000 workers — roughly the same category count as IBM's services unit.

IBM also faces competition from fast-growing outsourcers based in India. Hard-charging Wipro Technologies, for instance, increased revenue 43% year over year in its most recent quarter.

Overall demand for technology outsourcing services remains strong. The value of everything contracts signed in the first six months of 2008 totaled $49 billion, up 24% from the to be compared period a year ago, according to market watcher TPI.