Cyberactivists obtain Latvian State Revenue Service data

A purported group of cyberactivists has obtained around 7.4 million records from a database linked to the web-based service for filing income tax returns and other information with Latvia's State Revenue Service (Valsts Ieņēmuma dienests/VID). According to Latvian Television's investigative program DeFacto, at least 1000 state and municipal agencies and companies had their data copied, including the Postal Service

The leak or defect in the Electronic Declaration System (EDS) had been present for several months, allowing the cyberactivists, who call themselves the Fourth Awakening People's Army (Ceturtās Atmodas Tautas Armija/4.ATA). The name refers to times in Latvian history when there were historic changes in Latvia's national consciousness, the first "Atmoda" being the formation of a national awareness in the 1850s, followed by more radical social and political movements in the late 1800s, the founding of the first independent Latvian state in 1918, and the movement to regain independence starting in the late 1980s. More information here.

According to 4.ATA spokesperson Neo, who has electronically chatted with some journalists and recently opened a Twitter account, the group hopes to expose government waste, unjust wage differentials and possible corruption by analyzing data filed by state agencies and public sector. It has already published, using online file storage and sharing sites, a sanitized list of salaries and other remuneration for what is said to be the Riga public transport agency Rīgas Satiksme(RS).

Public transport costs have risen recently and the transport company has announced it wants to limit the number of trips that can be made on a full-price "unlimited" monthly ticket. This has caused public outrage. The figures seem to indicated that top management of RS make four-figure salaries with some, apparently retiring or dismissed board members, getting one-off compensation payments of LVL 25 000 (USD 50 000).

Neo also announced that data from the Riga District Heating company Rīgas Siltums would soon be released.

The leaks from the Revenue Service had caused a public uproar with all parties -- the Revenue Service, the designers of the EDS system, data security auditors and others blaming each other. Apparently several audits and tests of the system, which was designed and implemented by Exigen Services failed to notice the defect that allowed copying of the EDS data base with very simple methods.

Apparently, the site did not need to be "hacked", leading to a bizarre excuse by the Revenue Service that what happened was not a "cybercrime" as defined by existing protocol, therefore it did not officially call Latvia's Computer Security Incidents Response Unit (Datoru drošības incidentu reaģēšanas vienība), but did make an anonymous phone call to the agency, only to be told to call the police.

According to this blogger's sources, VID was warned of generally poor data security practices at the agency, but top management never coped with the issue, saying it was a matter for " the IT department". The agency is also said to keep its back-up data base in the same building as its main servers, though, when asked, it said, in general terms, that its IT resources were " dispersed". According to one source, the main server room of the Revenue Service is near the entrance to its offices and more exposed to intrusion than if it were at the end of a back-hallway.

IT security circles in Latvia hope this will be the cyber-security "killer incident" that will finally raise awareness of the need to make security policy an executive level concern. At the same time, it appears that the already compromised data will be used by 4.ATA to discredit the political and economic elite in Latvia during an election year.

4.ATA say they are based in Britain and Ireland and thereby harder for Latvian authorities to pinpoint and capture, if located.

TeliaSonera honcho Kenneth Karlberg speaks

About a week ago, I was in Stockholm and had a chance to sit down for a video interview with Kenneth Karlberg, the head of TeliaSonera's Mobility unit and still (after all these years) the main man in talks with the Latvian government about privatizing the rest of Lattelecom and mobile operator LMT. Kenneth also talked about 4G and how things would be better for Estonia's Elion, now that it is 100 % owned by the Swedish group.

Latvia officially launches digital terrestrial TV

After broadcasting under test conditions since late December (in Riga since last summer), digital terrestrial TV was launched as a commercial-quality service in Latvia. Free-to-air and pay channels are being packaged by fixed-network telco Lattelecom, while the new digital network has been set up and operated by the Latvian State Radio and Television Center (LVRTC). Latvia's analog broadcast network will be shut down in two steps -- in Riga and environs (a roughly 70 km radius) on April 1, and on June 1 in the rest of the country.

At a press conference, Lattelecom CEO Juris Gulbis also announced that digital terrestrial paid channels would be available as a pre-paid service that could be filled up at Narvesen or Plus Punkts kiosks, on the internet and later, at large supermarket chains (negotiations are still in progress). To watch pre-paid digital broadcast TV, customers can buy a starter kit for LVL 44.50, which includes a decoder and smart card to be activated by a code purchased by buying credit for the length of time and program packet one wants to watch. The model is similar to that for prepaid mobile services, where once the customer has a SIM card (in this case, the decoder smart card), all that is needed is to top-off the available credit.

Gulbis said that he estimates more than 50 000 households are already watching digital terrestrial TV, of which 21 000 have subscribed to paid services. Public television Latvijas televizija's two channels, and commercial broadcasters LNT and TV 5 will be part of the free-to-air offering. Swedish Modern Times Group (MTG) owned TV3 has been a hold-out, saying it intends to continue broadcasting on the analog network at least until the end of this year. The LVRTC has indicated it will simply cut off service to TV3, since it is unreasonable to expect the company to pay the full cost of the entire analog network, which is estimated around LVL 2 million.

Kaspars Ozoliņš, who heads MTG's television operations in the Baltics, says the Lattelecom-LVRTC project's costs for broadcasters are excessive compared to neighboring Estonia and Lithuania, where digitalization is further advanced. There have been hints that the stand-off could end in litigation, though Ozoliņš insists he is defending the interests of low-income viewers and trying to save money for program production, rather than paying broadcasting costs.

Bad experience with Telia Mobile

My wife, son and I traveled to the US from Latvia via London, where we spent the night at hotel near Paddington Station. While packing to leave, my wife apparently left behind a Samsung Duo phone with a Swedish Telia SIM card in it (for certain reasons, she often keeps the phone with a Latvian and Swedish Sim card in it). Fortunately, she had moved the Latvian LMT card to another phone.

Upon arrival in Boston on December 28, she discovered that her other phone was missing. First, we thought it had been stolen from her baggage. She tried repeatedly to reach Telia through its single customer service number and was either cut off or put into a seemingly endless phone queue paying international roaming rates on her LMT phone.

Then, a day later, while driving in Massachusetts, she got a call on her Latvian phone (she had tried calling the Swedish number to figure out what had happened) from a person at the hotel where she stayed who said she had found the phone. My wife still wanted to lock down her SIM card, just to be sure. It was only on December 31 that she got through to Telia and had the card shut down.

The scary part about this is that this is exactly the kind of worst-case scenario where you want a very fast way to secure your phone and SIM card -- the phone is lost in one country, the operator is in Sweden, and the phone owner is in yet another country. In this regard, Telia totally failed us, and my wife still doesn't know what happened with her SIM card over the three days before it was locked down. There should be some kind of secure, fast-track process for shutting down a SIM card, preferably on the internet.

Happy Holidays to all

I must admit that I have been working like a mad dog (to translate a bizarre Latvian phrase I often use recently) at my day job. We're all reporters now, with me covering telecoms in the broadest sense, including postal services (often a disaster in Latvia), so I get asked to go to some pretty strange events (Santa Claus at a Riga post office).

Anyway, it is only now that I get around to wishing all my readers a Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanza and belated Happy Hanukkah (this lunar/?/ calendar thing of Jewish holidays shifting around always confuses me). Also, all the best for the New Year and new decade (or is it?).

As for me, I am taking a break from the "running of the mad dogs" (skrienam kā traki suņi) to go to the US via London on Sunday (Monday -- to the States). I will spend a few (maybe too few) days near Boston at my mom's place and visit my brother and nephews/son's cousins (my wife and son are also flying). Then we go to Orlando for around a week (for the warm weather) and back to Latvia via London again.

I hope to get into a groove again despite my different workload and write more often for this blog in the New Year. Consider it a resolution with, perhaps, the same fate as most...:)

TeliaSonera honcho on the 4G launch

I happened to be in Stockholm on December 14, when TeliaSonera announced it was launching the first commercial LTE network in the Swedish capital (and its Norwegian subsidiary NetCom was doing the same in Oslo). TeliaSonera's Mobility Services honcho Kenneth Karlberg spoke to this blogger just after the launch press conference. The video has bilingual English/Latvian titles, as it also appears on my Latvian-language blog for my "day job".

SAP regional honcho on sustainability solutions

Karen Nilsen, SAP's regional CEO for the Nordic region and the Baltic States, talked to this blogger ahead of the Copenhagen global climate conference about SAP's solutions for sustainability management. Basically, it is a matter of extending the functions of the ERP system to gather and analyze data relevant to such matters as carbon emissions and other environmental factors. So there is no new rocket science involved. The leaders in adoption of SAP's and competing technologies are the Nordic countries with their long history of environmental awareness, according to Nilsen.

Coordinating telecoms innovation at Kista Science City

Continuing my series of videos from a recent visit to Stockholm, here is an interview with Annica Englund, head of communications for Kista Science City, a cluster of several hundred IT and telecommunications-related companies in and around the Stockholm suburb of Kista, which some call Sweden's SiliconValley.

Swedish media getting a grip on mobile and multimedia?

Tomas Bennich, who runs the Swedish Mobile & Multimedia Showcase, formerly known as the Swedish Mobile & Broadband Showcase, formerly known as the Swedish Mobile Showcase (a mere three years? ago), talks about how the business is changing, how Swedish big media are taking the new seamless mobile/broadband/always-connected world seriously, as well as about the special entrepreneurial climate in which new solutions are created. Oh yes -- you probably knew that Spotify and Voddler are Swedish innovations?

Lattelecom looking to LTE for its mobile side?

Lattelecom, the Latvian fixed network operator owned 49 % by Sweden's TeliaSonera, may be looking in the medium term to build out a 4G or LTE (Long-Term Evolution) mobile internet network (with voice capability).
With the future of telecoms privatization in Latvia stalled and highly politicized, there is a good chance that in the next three to five years, Lattelecom could end up sold or owned seperately from its distant sister company, mobile operator LMT. Both companies have done little or no cross-selling or integration of their products.
Without some kind of mobile business, any modern telco operator that doesn't want to be a mere ISP (and even an ISP with national coverage) is hobbled. In the medium term, LTE, which hasn't even been allocated frequencies in Latvia, is a viable option. Latvia's mobile operators -- Bite and Tele2 -- have indicated they will go for LTE and its up to 100 Mbps internet speed at some point. Tele2 in Sweden is launching LTE next year together with Telenor, as is LMT's parent TeliaSonera.
Lattelecom is already cooperating with wireless/mobile internet provider Triatel (the mobile internet offering is still in the works) which runs an EV DO network countrywide and offers an unspectacular download speed of 3.6 Mbps (compared to 3.6 Mbps on the GSM/UMTS operators HSDPA networks, with 14.4 Mbps promised soon by Bite).
The Latvian government has yet to allocate frequencies for LTE, but this will happen in 2010. As far as Lattelecom and LMT goes, it still remains for the Latvian government to (as I wrote to the great amusement of a high executive in the Nordic telecoms industry) to unfuck itself on the issue of privatization (i.e. a sale to TeliaSonera of at least all of LMT). With 2010 an election year, this is unlikely, but in 2011, with yet another round of drastic budget cuts upcoming, Latvia may be ready for anyone tossing coins into its begging bowl.

Reflections on IOD 2009 and the Babylonian Sheep

IBM's conference Information on Demand 2009 (IOD 2009) took the IOD story a step further with considerable attention paid to predictive analytics. No surprise, as IBM just completed the acquisition of SPSS, a Chicago-based predictive analytics company.

Indeed, the IOD sequence has gone from gathering and grooming data (a single, hopefully truthful view of the company/customer base), making it all accessible (de-siloing), finding hidden gems (data mining and analysis) to using the data to look into future trends and developments (predictive analytics or wild guessing with lots of numbers/??/).

Common to all of this is that we have a large global base of electronic data that various smart spiders can zip through and give us the answers we need. But that sort of presumes that this vast electronic data base, growing by exobytes every year, will still be fully searchable and subject to analysis in 50 or 100 years.

Which brings up the Babylonian Sheep Question that I put to a few IBM folks, including Ambuj Goyal, but got no really satisfactory answer. Which is fine, because there probably is none. It is not so much a question as a kind of meta-framework setter.

So what is the Babylonian Sheep Question?

Simply, that if I want to get a rough idea of what the market was like for sheep in Babylon 4000 years ago, much of the data warehouse (clay tablets) are still there. One can drill down to the single transaction record level -- Uruk sold 20 sheep to Gilgamesh for 50 bushels of wheat, or whatever. Since the data warehouse (scattered among various museums) has survived 4000 or more years, I can safely assume it will be around in 200 or 300 years, never mind 50 years down the road (assuming no nuclear holocausts or the like, although that would only bake the clay more...).

Now, as for all those exobytes -- I really don't know what will be accessible in 2030. I certainly can't access some of the floppy disks I still have with stuff I wrote in the 1980s. With the global datasphere growing at petabytes per week (month?) it is clear that we will have to have new data compression and storage technologies. Otherwise we will be replacing the world's forests with forests of blade servers. I can imagine that 10 years from now, most data will be stored holographically in the cloud or in some other extreme volume storage technology. That is a long way from the floppy disk.

Ambuy Goyal, by the way, talked about data decommissioning, which addressed the issue of keeping relevant data around and instantly accessible, while putting historically interesting, but operationally irrevelant data stored elsewhere. Fair enough. But no answer to the Babylonian Sheep question. Because irrelevant as Uruk's sale of 20 sheep is 4000 years later, it is still there and available in printed translation from the cuneiform inscriptions. What will happen to my first American Express purchase records (from 1977 on some mainframe), which may be of some relevance when I am a 80 year old geezer some 20 years from now is another question. It may be solved, probably will be solved. But I am not all that confident that our entire electronic record of the world and daily life will be as durable as those fragmentary records of the Babylonian sheep market that we can still examine and analyze today.

IBM IOD 2009 second day highlights (videoblog)

Here is my video of what I thought were highlights of the second day of IBM's Information on Demand conference (IOD 2009) in Las Vegas. I also shot a lot of footage of Malcom Gladwell's address on the third day, but I may not be able to post that until I am back in Latvia.

A look at SPSS, IBM's new predictive analytics acquisition

I had a chance, while at IBM's IOD 2009, to talk to Jason Verlen, the chief product strategist at SPSS, a predictive analytics company recently acquired by IBM. Here is a video, unfortunately filmed near a source of green light which I did not notice. Did my best to make Jason look less Martian with iMovie :).

Anyone sending an AYPFC? message to Tele2 Latvia?

An AYPFC message is one that starts with " Are you people fucking crazy??" Maybe it should be sent to Tele2, Latvia's biggest mobile operator (it claims) in terms of customer numbers. It was Tele2 that organized the "meteorite falls in Latvia" stunt that got the country its 15 minutes (or more) of underserved international fame. As if a meteor strike on top of a devastating economic crisis was something positive. It was certainly not something that Latvia "caused" by its own activity.

The publicity stunt, which caused underpaid Latvian firemen, police and soldiers to rush to a huge smoking crater outside Mazsalaca, a kind of Latvian Podunk, certainly had no message about mobile telecoms services. It had the unintended and black humor effect of causing some totally batshit* local lady (reputedly a local town councilor, where they don't check if you are batshit or not) to stand in a road selling tickets for 1 LVL apiece to curiousity seekers.

I am beginning to wonder whether Tele2's marketing director Jānis Spoģis has gone off the deep end. Maybe not, because the previous goon-show style Tele2 commercial, with adults skateboarding off rooftops into swimming pools and doing burnouts on a kitchen floor with a motorscooter reputedly came from Sweden, where the Tele2 group is headquartered. So the Vikings are back to eating those mushrooms again...

By contrast, the local Latvian commercials for the Zelta Zivtiņa (Golden Fish) prepaid cards have been charming even when bizarre, such as when the cow Gauja moves into the "Friends" - style apartment with the usual characters. Or when one of the characters sews a huge crocodile for "nothing" -- the price of calls to a circle of friends on the Tele2 network.

Apparently this is not the end of the Viking mescalero (people who chew hallucinogenic cacti) campaign. We will probably see fake sea (lake) monsters rising from a Latvian lake or perhaps UFO-style balloons floating high in the sky (we'll see if Tele2 will be as ready to pay for scrambling NATO F-16s as it was to compensate the fire department). Well, the balloon thing was already done by a family of wackos in America.

I am in Las Vegas as I write, the capital of "unreal" in the US, though at a a very real IBM Information on Demand (IOD2009) conference and the whole meteorite incident seems even beyond building a second Eiffel Tower (where you can get married) which the Vegas folks have done.

* from the urban dictionary :)

batshit insane
	When someone has crossed into extreme insanity.

Highlights of day one at IBM's IOD2009

I am in Las Vegas on assignment from my day job at IBM's Information on Demand (IOD2009) and recorded some highlights of the opening day's presentations by Ambuj Goyal and Frank Kern.

No one first to name a price in Latvian telecoms deal?

NOTE: I got tweeted by an executive at Lattelecom, see below.

The Latvian government seems to have re-opened the seemingly dormant issue of selling its holdings in fixed network operator Lattelecom and mobile operator Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT). During an October 16 television talk show, where this blogger was one of the journalist participants, Minister of Economics Artis Kampars said the government was ready to consider selling its telecom assets, but added that the most eager (and probably only) potential buyer, Sweden's TeliaSonera, had not named a price in talks with the Latvians in early September. By Kampars' account, that meeting was one where the sides got nowhere by saying: "What do you want for the companies?" "No, you tell us what you are ready to pay." "No, you please tell us what you want..." and so on.

Kampars also repeated what he had said publically a few days earlier, that state assets, including Lattelecom and LMT, would not be sold "on the cheap." TeliaSonera recently completed acquisition of all remaining shares in Eesti Telecom (which, unlike Lattelecom and LMT, is a traded company and already had a majority holding by the Swedes). Telia Sonera was less successfully with Lithuania's TEO, failing to get the necessary percentage of shares to delist the company and force the sale of any remaining minority shares.

I haven't been in touch with my Swedish sources about the latest chapter of the neverending story of trying to buy Lattelecom and LMT, but will try to do so before I leave for the States on Wednesday to attend an IBM conference in Las Vegas (October 25 -28).

Latvia is in dire need of any revenues to patch its budget deficit and, considering that telecoms have not suffered too badly in the crisis and against a background of rising stock markets in Europe and the US, the two unlisted companies could probably be sold for a decent price. Of course, Kampars and the Latvian government will never see another LVL 500 million bid by the Swedes, as was made a couple of years back in one of the "fat years" of real-estate bubble and lending frenzy. Interestingly, the sum is exactly as much as international lenders want Latvia to cut from its spending in 2010 and 2011 (for a total of LVL 1 billion). But that chance was blown. Maybe they could try for, say, LVL 400 million and settle for LVL 375 million -- these are just my wild guesses. Even without the deep recession, which I think will last at least until 2014 in Latvia, the value of any fixed-line network will decline as everything goes mobile and 4G networks appear. So the best bid has already been lost -- maybe it is time to seize the opportunity.

From Twitter: A Lattelecom executive tweeted me that he believes the company will gain in value because of broadband, IP TV and content distribution (IP TV, video on demand and the like). Welcome to the new web order :).

Bite honcho talks about mobile broadband, free call business model

Fred Hrenchuk, the CEO and board chairman of mobile operator Bite Group, talks about mobile broadband (a forthcoming jump to 14.4 Mbps), the effects of the economic downturn and the BiFri free calling business model.

Lattelecom announces jump to 500 Mbps fiber to the home

Lattelecom will start offering upgrades to 500 Mbps of its fiber-to-the-home (office)or FTTH service in the second half of November, Raivis Mackevics, the head of Lattelecom's optical technologies unit told this blogger. The current top speed to its around 2 600 FTTH subscribers is 100 Mbps. Another 700 connections are on order.
Lattelecom says just under 25 % of Riga's households (more that 77 500 housing units) will have access to FTTH by year end, with an FTTH build-out to start in the cities of Jelgava and Daugavpils by year end as well.
The slow uptake of FTTH, which in some package deals is priced under Lattelecom's existing DSL services, may reflect the operator's slow and cautious approach with the new technology. Rival cable TV, telecoms and internet service provider IZZI suffered from a Twitter-driven public uproar earlier this year when its 100 Mbps DOCSIS-based high speed internet suffered glitches.
Also, Lattelecom may see FTTH as the last great hope for its IPTV service, which recently chalked up 30 000 subscribers, compared to well over 100 000 subscribers each at Baltcom TV and IZZI, who offer conventional and digital cable TV. FTTH at 500 Mbps is more than adequate to feed several TV sets watching high-definition programming and Lattelecom says multiple watching of different channels will be enabled with its optical internet.
However, viewing habits may be hard to change -- cable has been around since the 1990s, and Latvian viewers will be reluctant to switch, rip out old cables and set-top boxes and adjust to a new assortment of channels. Also, in times of economic crisis, the number of HD flatscreens owned by households is unlikely to rise rapidly, never mind multi-screen households.
As I put it in my Latvian-language blog, Lattelecom's FTTH "beast" isn't loved by very many people yet. Given the chance, of course, I will get the service as soon as it is offered in my downtown (Center) Rīga building. Lattelecom, however, is prioritizing the so-called bedroom areas of Riga with their large, Soviet-era multi-unit high-rises (9 stories is "high"), which makes sense.

Latvian Railways offers WiFi on Moscow trains

Latvian Railways (Latvijas Dzelzceļš) in cooperation with the wireless telecommunications company Triatel will start offering free wireless internet access from October 1 on its daily trains from Riga to Moscow. The service will be available along the entire route from Riga to the Latvian-Russian border at Zilupe, allowing passengers to surf the internet for just over four hours. WiFi internet is not available once the train crosses into Russia. It is understood the service will also be available on Latvian-operated trains on the return leg of the trip on Latvian territory.

The internet on the train service is apparently provided through Triatel's EV-DO wireless internet network, which offers users speeds of up to 3.1 Mbps on direct connections. Evidently the WiFi on the train will re-route signals from Triatel towers and base stations along the railway right of way allocating adequate bandwidth to each train passanger using the service, rather than sharing a single 3.1 Mbps link to the whole train.

Latvian Railways will be holding a press conference on October 1 at Riga's main train station to explain details of the new service.

The internet-on-a-train is the latest project in which Triatel has teamed up with a major Latvian or international enterprise to co-sell or resell its wireless internet services. Triatel has been cooperating with Lattelecom to provide fixed wireless voice telephony and internet in remote rural locations, it has used the cable television and telecommunications services company IZZI as a reseller of its fixed wireless internet and just teamed up with the satellite TV company Viasat (part of the Swedish Modern Times Group)to offer a combined TV and internet packages (the television by satellite, the internet by EV DO) called Viasat Connect. Triatel is also behind a mobile internet service under development by Lattelecom (with USB plug modems), which are already being sold or leased to direct customers of Triatel and, apparently, as part of the ViaSat Connect package (the internet service is called " mobile").

With HSDPA networks run by the mobile operators in Latvia and offering speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps and possibly 14.4 Mbps in the near future, it may be time for Triatel to move to the next higher-speed generation of EV DO in order to keep up. LTE (promising an unlikely 100 Mbps, but probably a decent two-figure speed) is just around the corner, too, some say. Tele2 is building out in Sweden in 2010 and local sources say the Latvian "little brother" wants the same toys as the Swedes and soon!

A non-reportage (?) from Sweden's Silicon Valley

I spend a long weekend -- Saturday to Monday -- in Stockholm and got a hold of one of my best sources, Tomas Bennich of the Kista Mobile & Broadband Showcase (soon to be called something else). He was too busy to talk on camera, in fact, the whole scene around Kista Science City, the umbrella (not roof, as I say on camera) organization for various high-tech and telecoms related activities seems to be jumping. So here is my take on what is happening: