-John Ribeiro

Other Nations Moving Up on U.S. IT Industry

The U.S. has the world's best environment for a competitive IT industry but other countries are catching up, according to a study sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

The U.S. retains its number-one ranking from a year ago, and it ranks in the top five in all six categories that the Economist Intelligence Unit used to evaluate countries' IT environments. But U.S. broadband infrastructure, including broadband penetration, ranks behind many countries in Western Europe and East Asia, and the U.S. is facing a shortage of skilled tech workers, the study said.

U.S. lawmakers must focus on the nation's IT needs for it to remain the IT innovation leader, says Robert Holleyman, the BSA's president and CEO. The U.S. score, based on a 100-point scale, fell between 2007 and 2008, from 77.4 to 74.6.

"A deterioration in U.S. performance is possible should tougher immigration controls have a negative impact on the pool of IT talent and the skills base," the study said. "And as the U.S. and Western European economies endure a downturn, the impacts of a heavier regulatory touch and slower growth of technology spending cannot be discounted."

Taiwan, the U.K., Sweden, Denmark and Canada all moved up in the rankings from 2007, with Taiwan jumping from number six to number two. Japan, ranked second last year, fell to number 12; South Korea fell from third to eighth. The study ranks overall business environment, IT infrastructure, human capital, legal environment, research and development environment, and support for IT industry development.

-Grant Gross

How Snoops Can Snag Your Keystrokes

Computer keystrokes can be snooped from afar by detecting the slight electromagnetic radiation emitted when a key is pressed, according to new research.

Other security experts have theorized that keyboards were vulnerable to such detection, wrote Sylvain Pasini and Martin Vuagnoux, both doctorate students with the Security and Cryptography Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

But Vuagnoux and Pasini believe that theirs is the first set of experiments showing such spying is feasible. They faulted cost pressures on keyboard manufacturers for not making keyboards more snoop proof. Keyboards "are not safe to transmit sensitive information," they wrote in an entry on the school's website. "No doubt that our attacks can be significantly improved since we used relatively inexpensive equipment."

They tested 11 different wired keyboard models produced between 2001 and 2008, including some with USB connectors and keyboards embedded in laptops. All were vulnerable to one of four surveillance methods.