WASHINGTON--Embedding electronic tags in containers of food and supplies--and even in workers' identification documents--will "revolutionize" the way the United Nations doles out relief in the aftermath of the next tsunami, civil war or disease outbreak, a senior organization official said Wednesday.
David Nabarro, U.N.'s bird flu coordinator
(Credit: United Nations)When U.N. workers descend on distressed locales, they often encounter logjams at airport tarmacs and confusion over what exactly is in this or that box, said David Nabarro, who's chiefly in charge of coordinating responses to bird and human influenza for the U.N. Development Group.
Nabarro said he envisions his organization one day going the way of the military and companies like Wal-Mart, using radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips to track and trace those critical goods.
And ideally, even smarter chips could be used to send out signals that indicate what's happening inside a container--for instance, whether a box has been tampered with, knocked around in transit or subjected to high temperatures that could make food go sour.
"Effective RFI tracking and good inventory management software would make a huge difference in our ability to deal with relief (operations)," Nabarro told a group of U.S. bureaucrats and company representatives at an RFID event hosted here by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (A number of companies, including SAP America, that sell RFID-related products, sponsored the event, so not surprisingly, it emitted a decidedly pro-RFID aura.)
The advent of RFID-laced passports and other travel documents could also provide U.N. managers with a way to track staffers and other key non-U.N. personnel helping out on the scene, "particularly if they are sick and incapacitated," Nabarro added. (It wasn't exactly clear how this would work in practice, however, since RFID chips tend to have a finite zone in which they can be read remotely.)
Still, there are a number of obstacles to carrying out such a plan, Nabarro said. Because relief operations often occur in "worse than unspeakable" conditions (read: poor communications networks, nowhere to sleep or get food and nowhere to keep items cold or dry), it's risky to rely on anything that requires electricity, computers, dry conditions or clean air, he said. And in the case of a flu outbreak or other incident that puts lots of personnel out of commission, the systems must not be burdensome to use.
That means whatever RFID chips and readers are selected must be "incredibly robust" and simply designed. Oh, and inexpensive, of course.
"What I'm looking for," Nabarro told the audience, perhaps only half-joking, "is someone who can come and offer to us at exceedingly low cost...10,000 RFID tags and 100 scanners."
If you happened to visit the official Web site for United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during the weekend, you may have found its signature list of news releases swapped for an antiwar message in red capital letters.
"Hacked By kerem125 M0sted and Gsy That is CyberProtest Hey Ysrail and Usa dont kill children and other people Peace for ever No war" was the line repeating itself over and over on the affected pages, according to published reports and screenshots taken by bloggers. The perpetrators appear to have used a well-known and highly preventable technique called SQL injection, which takes advantage of flawed database programming to activate malicious lines of code.
Hackers apparently exploited security holes in the SQL code at the U.N. secretary-general's main Web site over the weekend.
(Credit: Giorgio Maone, hackademix.net)The defacements, which affected the front page of the secretary-general's site and pages containing statements by the secretary-general and press conference summaries, occurred sometime early Sunday morning, UN spokesman Alex Cerniglia told CNET News.com on Monday. The sites were "cleaned up" by about 9 a.m. PST on Sunday, he said.
But if you tune into a discussion among security experts at the blog Hackademix, you'll find that the fixes the U.N. has made so far may be little more than window dressing.
In an e-mail message to News.com on Monday morning, Giorgio Maone, an Italian software developer who runs the site, confirmed that "the U.N. staff just deployed a cosmetic patch, which hides it from the most obvious tests, but it cannot prevent an attack."
Maone said he couldn't go into more details than that, out of fear of tipping off the "script kiddies" out there. He said he has alerted the U.N.'s information security department to the continued problems and offered his assistance.
It wasn't immediately clear as of press time how U.N. officials would respond. "We definitely are upgrading security, and we'll continue to look at ways to prevent this from happening," Cerniglia said, adding that the agency welcomes input from security specialists like Maone.
The U.N. is also continuing to investigate the source of the attacks, Cerniglia said. A quick Internet search of the names present in the messages indicates a team of hackers, who appear to have at least some Turkish members and call themselves the "Byond Crew Hack Team," is taking responsibility for the activity.
At the Web site M0sted.org, there's a list of sites that have allegedly been hacked by the group before in the name of "cyberprotest," including Harvard and other universities, Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital in the United Kingdom, and some international Web outposts of Michelin, Toyota and Nestle.
A subset of the U.N.'s environmental arm also appears to be infected even now, though the main Web site shows no signs of distress.
Wind power #1 renewable energy investment
(Credit: United Nations)Money is pouring into renewable energy. And it's a global trend. The United Nations on Wednesday reported that $100 billion went into renewable energy and efficiency technologies last year. That's a record--up $20 billion from 2005. Indications are 2007 will set another record. You can read a summary of the United Nations report here.
Once dominated by North America and Europe, renewable energy investments are spreading out. Last year, 9 percent went into China. Investors from India were active in acquisitions.
Money's coming from stock markets, venture capital investments and private individuals. Publicly traded renewable energy stocks rose more than 60 percent during the recent 15 months including the first quarter of 2007. That fuels even more investor interest.
Among the types of renewable energy, wind is most popular with investors. It's followed by solar and biofuels. High petroleum prices are given some of the credit for the strength of renewable energy investment, along with concern over climate change.
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