3 Technology Link |
- The Internet Is People
- 60beat iPad Gaming Accessory Could Be The iOS Missing Link
- Spammers propel India to junk-mail top spot
- BlackBerry’s annus horribilis in Indonesia
- Japan developing cyber weapon: report
| Posted: 01 Jan 2012 03:54 PM PST The Internet Is People
There's always been a tension on the Internet between humans and algorithms. In the early days, Yahoo was a human-curated index, remember? But humans couldn't keep up, and the algorithms took over. Today, the human factor is rising in importance once again with Facebook, Twitter, and countless mobile applications like Instagram. Everything is social. The tension today is between social and search—humans versus computers. Except that it isn't so simple. The Internet is not just billions of linked pages, databases, and (increasingly) mobile apps. The Internet is people. It's you and me. A web page is only as interesting as the last time somebody linked to it. We are the ones who create all of the data that feeds the Internet. Even Google's search engine—the ultimate algorithm making sense of it all—determines what is important based on what we do. The pages we link to and visit the most are the ones which tend to show up at the top of search results. Yes, social threatens the primacy of search in that it replaces the search engine's algorithm with links from people we trust as a way to discover new information. But social sharing becomes just another set of signals to put into the algorithm. Google may not have total access to all the sharing occurring on Facebook or Twitter, but that is why it launched Google+. The value of the social stream is in the data. The Internet makes us smarter, but we also make the Internet smarter. Information flows back and forth. What is emerging is a division of labor where humans do the things we are better at doing and the Internet—as the vast, global, computing resource available to everyone—does the information tasks that it is better at doing. We are programing the Internet every day. But the relationship goes two ways. It is also programming us. VC Bryce Roberts calls this notion "programmable people," which he defines as:
Amazon's Mechanical Turk is the best known example of human labor being used as a computing input. But, lately, more services are popping up which essentially use the Internet is efficiently distribute labor and other resources. Think of services like Skillshare, TaskRabbit or Zaarly which both create new demand for human labor and spread work around using the Internet as a routing mechanism. Or even peer-to-peer marketplaces such Airbnb, Etsy, and Kickstarter. Bryce explains:
These are just early examples. The concept of programmable people goes beyond these limited cases. We are an Internet of people. The algorithms which make the Internet run smoothly become better the more we use the Internet. They get smarter because we tell them, either explicitly or through our actions, what to focus on. Some futurists have a notion of computers one day surpassing human intelligence—the so-called Singularity. If this ever does occur, it won't be any single computer but the Internet itself—a network of computers—which achieves that super-intelligence. But it won't be just the computers that get smarter. It will be us as well. The only question is what the interface will be between man and machine. We started with screens and keyboards. Now we are moving to touch and voice. The more these machines can do, the more humanlike they become. And vice versa. Share and Enjoy• Facebook • Twitter • LinkedIn • Digg • Delicious • StumbleUpon • Reddit • Google Buzz • FriendFeed • MySpace • Add to favorites • Email • Print • PDF |
| 60beat iPad Gaming Accessory Could Be The iOS Missing Link Posted: 01 Jan 2012 03:46 PM PST 60beat iPad Gaming Accessory Could Be The iOS Missing Link
Because it is portable it won't bog down your baggage like the iCade accessory and it should be trivial for games makers to add support in future titles. $50 is a little pricey, but it might mean the difference between fun and failure when it comes to run and jump classics like Mega Man on the iPad. Share and Enjoy• Facebook • Twitter • LinkedIn • Digg • Delicious • StumbleUpon • Reddit • Google Buzz • FriendFeed • MySpace • Add to favorites • Email • Print • PDF |
| Spammers propel India to junk-mail top spot Posted: 01 Jan 2012 03:34 PM PST Spammers propel India to junk-mail top spot
A recent report by Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based global Internet security firm, says more spam was sent from the south Asian giant than anywhere else in the world in the third quarter of the year. An average of 79.8 percent of email traffic in the three months to the end of September was junk. Of that, 14.8 percent originated in India, 10.6 percent came from Indonesia, and 9.7 percent from Brazil. Darya Gudkova, a spam analyst at Kaspersky, said the statistics reflect a growing trend for spam to be sent from computers in Asian and Latin America countries. India’s dubious top spot was attributed to lack of awareness about Internet security and anti-spam laws, which had effectively given spammers free reign, she added. Vijay Mukhi, an Internet security specialist in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, said spammers, forced to look for new bases after other countries cracked down on the practice, can act with impunity in India. “We have an Information Technology Act that was introduced in 2000. But we don’t have any convictions under it and it’s silent on spam,” he told AFP. “If I’m a spammer, I would rather spam from India to India and the rest of world because nothing will happen to me.” Spam — whose name is derived from the cheap, canned meat product that flooded the market in austere times after the end of World War II — refers to anonymous, unsolicited commercial or bulk emails. These can include political messages, apparent appeals requesting donations from charities, financial scams, chain letters or emails used to spread harmful computer viruses. Spammers run the gamut from legitimate marketing firms and advertisers who have adapted telephone cold-calling techniques to the computer age to “phishers”, who solicit personal data from naive recipients to defraud them. India currently has 112 million internet users, the third-largest number in the world after China and the United States, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI). The industry body estimates that five to seven million new users are being added every month and at the current pace the country will have more users than the US in under two years, deepening the pool of potential spam victims. Experts say that basic Internet security — from the use of anti-virus software or “strong” passwords — is poor among individuals, companies and even the government. Earlier this month, hackers broke into the official web site of India’s ruling Congress Party and defaced the profile page of party president Sonia Gandhi with a pornographic message. In December 2010, a group identifying themselves as the “Pakistan Cyber Army” hacked the web site of India’s top police agency and claimed to have broken in to several other company sites. Kaspersky’s Gudkova said in emailed comments that lack of awareness in India “means that for cyber-criminals, it is much easier to construct the botnets (networks of infected computers)”. India’s booming mobile phone sector, which has recently seen the introduction of third-generation smart phones, also provides a potential open door for spam and malware (malicious software), industry figures say. IT security firm McAfee, part of the Intel Corporation, said in its 2012 Threat Predictions report that the last 12 months saw the highest levels of mobile malware, with the mobile banking sector particularly at risk. Mukhi said individuals and companies needed to take the issue seriously and India’s government has to get tough. Legitimate companies advertise by email or text message and continue to operate, despite a directive from the telecoms regulator banning SMS spam. Government officials and ministers were unlikely to act decisively against the email equivalent while the massive state sector, which is still heavily paper-based, lagged behind private companies in the use of computers, he added. Until that happens “it will get better for spammers. More and more people will start realising that India doesn’t have an anti-spam law”, he said. Share and Enjoy• Facebook • Twitter • LinkedIn • Digg • Delicious • StumbleUpon • Reddit • Google Buzz • FriendFeed • MySpace • Add to favorites • Email • Print • PDF |
| BlackBerry’s annus horribilis in Indonesia Posted: 01 Jan 2012 03:26 PM PST BlackBerry’s annus horribilis in Indonesia
>>>Few companies better understand the difficulties of doing business in Indonesia than BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. The government has had the Canada-based company jumping through hoops for most of the past year, repeatedly threatening to shut down its services unless it met a list of demands not required of its competitors. For RIM, trouble in Indonesia is particularly painful as the country is the world’s fastest-growing major BlackBerry market, according to industry statistics. Subscriptions are expected to almost double from five million to 9.7 million by 2015, RIM says, as sales elsewhere tumble. Demand is driven by Indonesia’s burgeoning middle class, drawn to the BlackBerry for affordable access to the Internet and widely used BlackBerry Messenger texting service. Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s most-populous nation of around 240 million people, is also the region’s biggest economy and is forecast to have grown 6.5 percent in 2011. Indonesians are some of the world’s most active users of social network sites. Of 41 countries surveyed, it had the highest percentage of Internet users accessing Twitter in June 2010, or more than 20 percent of its 45 million online population, online research firm comScore said. Other major smartphone markets, such as the United States, are cooling on the BlackBerry, turning instead to Apple's iPhone and Google's Android device, pushing RIM shares down around 75 percent last year. “Indonesia is a very important market for RIM,” the firm’s Asia-Pacific managing director Gregory Wade told AFP. “We have millions of BlackBerry fans and subscribers throughout Indonesia. So it's our belief that no one loves Indonesia more than RIM.” But the government has so far returned little of the affection.
Instead, it has antagonised the company in a long-running row that could put off other foreign investors eyeing a largely untapped mobile phone and Internet market.
The communications and information technology ministry has forced RIM to build dozens of customer service centres in Indonesia, block access to pornography on its devices and help law enforcement agencies intercept encrypted data shared on BlackBerrys. In January, the ministry officially requested RIM build a network aggregator, or data centre, somewhere in the region to lower costs to Indonesian carriers that provide BlackBerry data services. Locating the centre in Indonesia could have given the government greater access to potentially sensitive BlackBerry data, analysts said. But RIM chose Singapore for the centre, prompting communications and information technology minister Tifatul Sembiring to warn laws would soon be crafted to force telecoms companies to set up base in Indonesia. Sembiring denies the new rules are aimed specifically at RIM. “If we pass the law, RIM will have to set up the centre in Indonesia. We may excuse smaller companies, but all large telecommunication companies will have to do the same,” he told AFP. Such threats are nothing new to RIM.
When the company announced it would open a new factory in Malaysia, Indonesia’s industry minister recommended parliament slap an extra tax on “such goods” as the BlackBerry “so that people would choose to invest here instead.”
“It’s strange the government would treat RIM that way,” said Rama Mamuaya of technology blog DailySocial. “RIM invests a lot in training developers in Indonesia, so a lot of people are making money from designing BlackBerry apps. “I don't blame any of these companies for not wanting to do business in Indonesia. Why would RIM want to open a factory or build infrastructure here after the government has made things so difficult?” Tech companies are increasingly locating in Singapore, which topped the World Bank’s survey on the ease of doing business for 2012. Indonesia slipped three rungs to 129, out of 183. But the man who has perhaps learnt the toughest lessons on working in Indonesia is RIM’s outgoing country president Andrew Cobham. Cobham, who narrowly escaped a hotel bombing in 2009, was recently named a suspect by police after a BlackBerry promotional event in November descended into chaos. Scores of BlackBerry fans were injured — many knocked unconscious — when 5,000 people surged through barriers at a Jakarta mall as a half-price sale on new phones began. Exactly why the government has targeted RIM is unclear. Google is gaining ground in Indonesia with millions now using its Android phones, but it has managed to stay on the government’s good side. And it appears that RIM is also tiring of playing the ministry’s punch bag. “Above and beyond everything, we just ask that any regulations applied to us be applied to all smartphone manufacturers so we can continue to operate on a level playing field,” Wade said. “The country is a prime market where we want to invest and grow our business.” Share and Enjoy• Facebook • Twitter • LinkedIn • Digg • Delicious • StumbleUpon • Reddit • Google Buzz • FriendFeed • MySpace • Add to favorites • Email • Print • PDF |
| Japan developing cyber weapon: report Posted: 01 Jan 2012 03:20 PM PST Japan developing cyber weapon: report>>> Japan has been developing a virus that could track down the source of a cyber attack and neutralise its programme, the daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported Sunday. The weapon is the culmination of a 179 million yen ($2.3 million) three-year project entrusted by the government to technology maker Fujitsu Ltd to develop a virus and equipment to monitor and analyse attacks, the daily said. The United States and China are reported to have put so-called cyber weapons into practical use, Yomiuri said. Japan will have to make legal amendments to use a cyber weapon as it could violate the country’s law against the manufacture of a computer virus, the daily said. In November a computer system run by about 200 Japanese local governments was struck. In October, Japan’s parliament came under cyber attack, apparently from the same emails linked to a China-based server that have already hit several lawmakers’ computers. It was also reported that Japanese computers at embassies and consulates in nine countries were infected with viruses in the summer. Currently, the virus is being tested in a “closed environment” to examine its applicable patterns. Share and Enjoy• Facebook • Twitter • LinkedIn • Digg • Delicious • StumbleUpon • Reddit • Google Buzz • FriendFeed • MySpace • Add to favorites • Email • Print • PDF |
Few companies better understand the difficulties of doing business in Indonesia than BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. The government has had the Canada-based company jumping through hoops for most of the past year, repeatedly threatening to shut down its services unless it met a list of demands not required of its competitors.
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