LONDON -- A consumer group in the U.K. is urging residents to renew their passports this month in order to avoid being listed in a national identity registry for the next 10 years.
The London-based group, called No2ID, is campaigning against the planned adoption of national ID cards because of concerns that the security of personal data could be put at risk in the ID card system.
Under the Identity Cards Act, which was approved by Parliament this year, the passport application and renewal process will be used to collect biometric data and other information that will be stored on cards and in the national registry.
Phil Booth, national coordinator for No2ID, said that since the registry hasn't been set up yet, renewing now would allow citizens to avoid being included in the registry's database for the 10 years their passports will be valid.
No date has been set for starting to collect data for the ID cards, said a spokeswoman for the U.K. government's Home Office. Use of the identity registry is scheduled to begin in 2008, she added.
U.S. firm buys stake in Deutsche Telekom
BONN -- The Blackstone Group, a New York-based private equity firm, has agreed to pay about 2.7 billion euros (US$3.3 billion) to buy a 4.5 percent stake in Deutsche Telekom AG from KfW Bankengruppe, a bank that's owned jointly by Germany's federal and state governments.
Frankfurt-based KfW's ownership stake in Deutsche Telekom will shrink to 17.3 percent once the sale closes. But the bank will continue to be the Bonn-based telecommunications company's largest shareholder; the German government holds a separate 15.2 percent share.
The addition of Blackstone as an investor comes as Deutsche Telekom CEO Kai-Uwe Ricke is moving to cut operating costs by reducing the company's workforce. At the same time, the company plans to spend 3 billion euros to build a high-speed fiber-optic network that will operate in 50 German cities.
Survey shows rise in cost of U.K. breaches
LONDON -- The overall cost of security breaches at large U.K. companies rose by about 50 percent between 2004 and 2005, according to a study that was commissioned by the U.K. government and released last week at the Infosecurity Europe 2006 conference here.
However, the biannual survey of 1,000 companies of varying sizes also found that the number of breaches reported by large businesses in the U.K. dropped by about half from year to year because of increased security budgets.
Overall, the percentage of companies that reported having security incidents dropped from 74 percent to 64 percent. "That's good news," said Alun Michael, the U.K.'s minister of state for industry and regional economies. "But it's no cause for complacency."
Briefly noted
Intel Corp. has opened a research and development center for multicore processors at its lab in Braunschweig, Germany. The chip maker had said last year that it would shift the Braunschweig facility's focus from designing chips for optical networks to developing "many-core" processors and related software.
Microsoft Corp. has agreed to spend $900 million over the next five years to promote the growth of the IT industry in China, according to a statement released by the company and China's National Development and Reform Committee. Microsoft plans to buy $700 million worth of hardware from Chinese vendors and invest $200 million in Chinese software vendors.
Malmo Aviation, an airline in Malmo, Sweden, has awarded a five-year IT operations management contract worth 24 million Swedish crowns to Unisys Corp. Under the deal, Unisys will manage the airline's business applications and help desk and provide on-site technical support. Malmo Aviation's servers will be moved to a Unisys facility in Alings's, Sweden.
Global fact
$90.9B
The projected size of the market for IT outsourcing services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2009.
Source: Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn.