Skip to main content

Home/ Internetni praktikum/ Group items tagged home

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Maj Krek

Google and Skyhook: the internet privacy invasion | openDemocracy - 1 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...ok-internet-privacy-invasion-0

google privacy surveillance wi-fi internet

shared by Maj Krek on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • every v isitor
  • “Location Based Browsing
  • Location Based Browsing”,
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • address of every visitor
  • “Location Based Browsing
  • most governments are unaware that a second American company, Skyhook, is driving around
  • Google, Microsoft and Firefox all claim we can switch off Location Based Browsing
  • ensure every website
  • most governments are unaware that a second American company, Skyhook, is driving around the world’s streets
  • we can switch off Location Based Browsing
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody.
  • most governments are unaware that a second American company, Skyhook, is driving around the world’s streets , including Britain’s, gathering wi-fi data from people’s homes and businesses.
  • To ensure every website in the world can contact Google and ask the home address of every visitor to any page on their website
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody.
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody.
  • address of
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody.
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybod
  • website
  • Location Based Browsing
  • their
  • Location Based Browsing
  • Street View project
  • every website
  • in the world can
  • contact Google and ask
  • the home
  • To ensure every
  • most governments are unaware that a second American company, Skyhook, is driving around
  • isitor to any page on their website. Websites can have a little piece of software (known as XSS) installed to grab our router’s MAC address from our browser if we visit any page on their site. This software is undetectable to the user, the browser does not warn us what is happening and has no setting to prevent it. The website owner can then send your MAC address to Google Location Services. At this point, without verifying that you have given permission, Google can provide your home address.
inesmag

Home Network Vulnerabilities: Spam, Cookies, Pop-Ups, Spyware, and Scams > Spam - 0 views

www.ciscopress.com/...article.asp

network vulnerabilities spam cookies spyware scams

shared by inesmag on 05 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Home Network Vulnerabilities: Spam, Cookies, Pop-Ups, Spyware, and Scams
  • Spam is the common name for unsolicited e-mail and it is a problem that is rampant on the Internet today.
  • Spammers do their dirty work by purchasing or creating giant e-mail lists and automated mailing tools called spambots. The lists are usually compiled from web pages where people provide their e-mail address as part of a registration process.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • How to Block Spam There is a good chance that your ISP has some sort of spam-blocking feature available and, if spam is a problem for you, we suggest starting there.
  • replying to a spam e-mail does not stop it from coming
Jan Keček

Internet Marketing - Home Business Online Internet Marketing Techniques - 0 views

homebusiness.about.com/...IMarketing101.htm

Marketing internet internetnipraktikum praktikum ipraktikum networking www

shared by Jan Keček on 10 Apr 13 - Cached
  • What is Internet Marketing? Depending on whom you ask, the term Internet marketing can mean a variety of things. At one time, Internet marketing consisted mostly of having a website or placing banner ads on other websites. On the other end of the spectrum, there are loads of companies telling you that you can make a fortune overnight on the Internet and who try to sell you some form of "Internet marketing program".
  • Online press releases, which involve placing a newsworthy story about a company, its website, its people, and/or its products/services with on online wire service
  • Internet Marketing and Home Business
Janja Petek

Forty years of the internet: how the world changed for ever | Technology | The Guardian - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...internet-40-history-arpanet

history web changed world

shared by Janja Petek on 06 Mar 13 - Cached
pina bitenc liked it
  • In October 1969, a student typed 'LO' on a computer - and the internet was born
  • Towards the end of the summer of 1969
  • a large grey metal box was delivered to the office of Leonard Kleinrock, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • At 10.30pm, as Kleinrock's fellow professors and students crowded around, a computer was connected to the IMP, which made contact with a second IMP, attached to a second computer, several hundred miles away at the Stanford Research Institute, and an undergraduate named Charley Kline tapped out a message.
  • It's impossible to say for certain when the internet began, mainly because nobody can agree on what, precisely, the internet is.
  • It's interesting to compare how much has changed in computing and the internet since 1969 with, say, how much has changed in world politics.
  • On the other hand, the breakthrough accomplished that night in 1969 was a decidedly down-to-earth one
  • Twelve years after Charley Kline's first message on the Arpanet, as it was then known, there were still only 213 computers on the network; but 14 years after that, 16 million people were online, and email was beginning to change the world; the first really usable web browser wasn't launched until 1993, but by 1995 we had Amazon, by 1998 Google, and by 2001, Wikipedia, at which point there were 513 million people online. Today the figure is more like 1.7 billion.
  • on New Year's Day 1994 – only yesterday, in other words – there were an estimated 623 websites.
  • On the one hand, they were there because of the Russian Sputnik satellite launch, in 1957, which panicked the American defence establishment, prompting Eisenhower to channel millions of dollars into scientific research, and establishing Arpa, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to try to win the arms technology race. The idea was "that we would not get surprised again,"
  • "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face," they declared.
  • The few outsiders who knew of the box's existence couldn't even get its name right: it was an IMP, or "interface message processor"
  • It was already possible to link computers by telephone lines, but it was glacially slow, and every computer in the network had to be connected, by a dedicated line, to every other computer, which meant you couldn't connect more than a handful of machines without everything becoming monstrously complex and costly.
  • The solution, called "packet switching" – which owed its existence to the work of a British physicist, Donald Davies – involved breaking data down into blocks that could be routed around any part of the network that happened to be free, before getting reassembled at the other end.
  • Still, Kleinrock recalls a tangible sense of excitement that night as Kline sat down at the SDS Sigma 7 computer, connected to the IMP, and at the same time made telephone contact with his opposite number at Stanford. As his colleagues watched, he typed the letter L, to begin the word LOGIN.
  • One of the most intriguing things about the growth of the internet is this: to a select group of technological thinkers, the surprise wasn't how quickly it spread across the world, remaking business, culture and politics – but that it took so long to get off the ground.
  • In 1945, the American presidential science adviser, Vannevar Bush, was already imagining the "memex", a device in which "an individual stores all his books, records, and communications", which would be linked to each other by "a mesh of associative trails", like weblinks.
  • And in 1946, an astonishingly complete vision of the future appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. In a story entitled A Logic Named Joe, the author Murray Leinster envisioned a world in which every home was equipped with a tabletop box that he called a "logic":
  • Instead of smothering their research in the utmost secrecy – as you might expect of a cold war project aimed at winning a technological battle against Moscow – they made public every step of their thinking, in documents known as Requests For Comments.
  • Deliberately or not, they helped encourage a vibrant culture of hobbyists on the fringes of academia – students and rank amateurs who built their own electronic bulletin-board systems and eventually FidoNet, a network to connect them to each other.
  • n argument can be made that these unofficial tinkerings did as much to create the public internet as did the Arpanet. Well into the 90s, by the time the Arpanet had been replaced by NSFNet, a larger government-funded network,
  • It was the hobbyists, making unofficial connections into the main system, who first opened the internet up to allcomers.
  • This was the software known as TCP/IP, which made it possible for networks to connect to other networks, creating a "network of networks", capable of expanding virtually infinitely
  • Nevertheless, by July 1992, an Essex-born businessman named Cliff Stanford had opened Demon Internet, Britain's first commercial internet service provider.
  • After a year or so, Demon had between 2,000 and 3,000 users,
  • the @ symbol was introduced in 1971, and the first message, according to the programmer who sent it, Ray Tomlinson, was "something like QWERTYUIOP".
  • A couple of years later I got my first mobile phone, which came with two batteries: a very large one, for normal use, and an extremely large one, for those occasions on which you might actually want a few hours of power
  • For most of us, though, the web is in effect synonymous with the internet, even if we grasp that in technical terms that's inaccurate: the web is simply a system that sits on top of the internet, making it greatly easier to navigate the information there, and to use it as a medium of sharing and communication.
  • The first ever website was his own, at CERN: info.cern.ch.
  • The idea that a network of computers might enable a specific new way of thinking about information, instead of just allowing people to access the data on each other's terminals, had been around for as long as the idea of the network itself: it's there in Vannevar Bush's memex, and Murray Leinster's logics.
  • Web browsers crossed the border into mainstream use far more rapidly than had been the case with the internet itself: Mosaic launched in 1993 and Netscape followed soon after, though it was an embarrassingly long time before Microsoft realised the commercial necessity of getting involved at all. Amazon and eBay were online by 1995. And in 1998 came Google, offering a powerful new way to search the proliferating mass of information on the web.
  • Google, and others, saw that the key to the web's future would be helping users exclude almost everything on any given topic, restricting search results to the most relevant pages.
  • It is absurd – though also unavoidable here – to compact the whole of what happened from then onwards into a few sentences: the dotcom boom, the historically unprecedented dotcom bust, the growing "digital divide", and then the hugely significant flourishing, over the last seven years, of what became known as Web 2.0.
  • The most confounding thing of all is that in a few years' time, all this stupendous change will probably seem like not very much change at all.
  • Will you remember when the web was something you accessed primarily via a computer? Will you remember when there were places you couldn't get a wireless connection? Will you remember when "being on the web" was still a distinct concept, something that described only a part of your life, instead of permeating all of it? Will you remember Google?
Gabrijela Vrbnjak

BBC News - Web code weakness allows data dump on PCs - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...technology-21628622

clevercode html5 browser bug

shared by Gabrijela Vrbnjak on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The loophole exploits a feature of HTML 5 which defines how websites are made and what they can do.
  • Developer Feross Aboukhadijeh found the bug and set up a demo page that fills visitors' hard drives with pictures of cartoon cats. In one demo, Mr Aboukhadijeh managed to dump one gigabyte of data every 16 seconds onto a vulnerable Macbook. Clever code Most major browsers, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari, were found to be vulnerable to the bug, said Mr Aboukhadijeh. While most websites are currently built using version 4 of the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), that code is gradually being superseded by the newer version 5. One big change brought in with HTML 5 lets websites store more data locally on visitors' PCs. Safeguards built into the "local storage" specification should limit how much data can be stored. Different browsers allow different limits but all allow at least 2.5 megabytes to be stored. However, Mr Aboukhadijeh found a way round this cap by creating lots of temporary websites linked to the one a person actually visited. He found that each one of these associated sites was allowed to store up to the limit of data because browser makers had not written code to stop this happening. By endlessly creating new, linked websites the bug can be used to siphon huge amounts of data onto target PCs. Only Mozilla's Firefox capped storage at 5MB and was not vulnerable, he found. "Cleverly coded websites have effectively unlimited storage space on visitor's computers," wrote Mr Aboukhadijeh in a blogpost about the bug. Code to exploit the bug has been released by Mr Aboukhadijeh and he set up a website, called Filldisk that, on vulnerable PCs, dumps lots of images of cats on to the hard drive. So far, no malicious use of the exploits has been observed. In a bid to solve the problem, bug reports about the exploit have been filed with major browser makers. More on This Story .related-links-list li { position: relative; } .related-links-list .gvl3-icon { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; } Related Stories Firefox smartphone partners revealed 24 FEBRUARY 2013, TECHNOLOGY Flash Player exits Android store 15 AUGUST 2012, TECHNOLOGY HTML 5 target for cybercriminals 02 DECEMBER 2011, TECHNOLOGY $render("page-see-also","ID"); $render("page-newstracker","ID"); Related Internet links Feross Aboukhadijeh The BBC is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites $render("page-related-items","ID"); Share this pageShare this page1.4KShareFacebookTwitter Email Print In association with $render("advert","advert-sponsor-module","page-bookmark-links"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); More Technology stories RSS Computer glitch hits Mars rover Nasa's Curiosity Mars rover is put into "safe mode" after a computer glitch caused by corrupted files. US plans small-ship drone launches Hackers breach Evernote security $render("advert","advert-mpu-high"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); Top Stories http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/6618
  • found the bug and set up a demo page that fills visitors' hard drives with pictures of cartoon cats.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • because browser makers had not written code to stop this happening. By endlessly creating new, linked websites the bug can be used to siphon huge amounts of data onto target PCs.
  • found a way round this cap by creating lots of temporary websites linked to the one a person actually visited
  • Most major browsers, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari, were found to be vulnerable to the bug
  • was not vulnerable
  • Mozilla's Firefox
  • bug reports about the exploit have been filed with major browser makers.
Rebeka Aščerič

BBC News - Children 'switching from TV to mobile internet' - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...education-16475278

internet ipraktikum children mobile phones television

shared by Rebeka Aščerič on 05 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Television is being pushed aside by mobile internet gadgets, a UK survey of young people's technology suggests.
  • Among seven to 16 year olds, 61% have a mobile phone with internet access.
  • Talking, texting and accessing the internet are now reached through the mobile - with more than three-quarters of secondary-age pupils now using mobiles to get online.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • When children are reading at home, it is more likely to be through a screen rather than a book or a magazine.
  • Mobile phones and the internet each occupy about an hour and a half on average per day - but television viewing on average still accounts for two and half hours.
donnamariee

BBC News - How the cloud helps firms cope with ups and downs of IT - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...business-18514586

cloud it tech

shared by donnamariee on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Imagine running a business where most of your customers arrive during two weeks of the year.
  • Welcome to the world of Doug Clark, the IBM executive responsible for the infrastructure that runs the website of the Wimbledon tennis championships.
  • Spikiness is a common problem in the information technology world. It refers to the surges in demand for computing power and information storage. Retailers suffer from spikiness. They expect their website to be swamped in the run-up to Christmas.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Instead of buying huge amounts of computing power and storage that may be unused for most of the year, companies can get what they need in a more flexible way.
  • IBM has allotted enough computing resources to cope with the surge during the tournament.
  • Cloud computing has another useful feature. Instead of being locked into long contracts, firms can buy their IT over much shorter time frames. It can even be metered. This is extremely useful for companies that are launching one-off projects or perhaps start-up firms that are not sure how successful they are going to be. Extra capacity can be bought online and paid for as needed. Zoopla is a UK property website which allows users to search for homes.
  • Zoopla uses Amazon Web Services (AWS), which launched in 2006 and is the biggest player in cloud computing.
  • Analysts at Tier1 Research estimate that just 2% of total spending on information technology is on cloud services. Daniel Beazer, a hosting and cloud analyst at Tier1 Research, said: "Most companies have been around for a lot longer than the internet and have systems that are decades old." "Mostly what they have works, just about, so why bother shifting it? The savings from virtualisation and the cloud aren't currently big enough to justify it," he said.
Meta Arcon

Figuring out the future of online privacy - CNN.com - 1 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

future online privacy cnn

shared by Meta Arcon on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • They may not be paying for the services directly, but customers still have a lot of power -- and companies know that they need to listen.
  • "We can't just sit back and allow the industry to just continue to ignore a core component of the user experience online," said Alex Fowler, Mozilla's global privacy and public policy leader.
  • The more devices that connect to the Internet, from smart cars to home thermostats, the more data there are about a person to collect.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Free versions come with ads, but for a price, people can upgrade to the ad-free experience.
  • It's also possible that over the next five to 10 years, people's attitudes toward privacy and their data will change, and they'll be willing to share more personal information
  • Not everyone will want the same level of privacy,
  • "Do not track" seems like a clear, smart option to give consumers
  • Companies that provide free services, such as search engines or social networks, have to strike the right balance between respecting their customers' privacy concerns and serving advertisers.
  • It's also possible that over the next five to 10 years, people's attitudes toward privacy and their data will change, and they'll be willing to share more personal information, attached to their real-world identity, in exchange for more heavily customized computing experiences.
Nuša Gregoršanec

BBC News - Child safety measures to protect against internet threats - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...technology-16305561

safety internet threats children parental supervision

shared by Nuša Gregoršanec on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Child safety measures to protect against internet threats
  • In a poll of over 19,000 parents and children conducted by security firm Norton, 7% of UK parents said they had absolutely no idea what their kids were up to on their computers and phones.
  • Even more worryingly, 30% (39% worldwide) said they had suffered a "serious" negative experience. This included, among other things, invitations to meet online "friends" in real life and exposure to indecent pictures of someone they did not know.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The ever-growing adoption of social networks, instant messages and mobile communication leaves the door open to more subtle attacks - both of a technological and psychological nature.
  • "Parents must realise that technology alone can't keep children safe online," Deborah Preston, the company's internet security advocate.
  • "To be truly safe it requires not only technology, but also a combination of open and ongoing dialogue and education between parents and children."
  • On social networks, account hijacking - where a child's account is accessed for a practical joke or more sinister purposes - can cause considerable distress.
  • A poll by Virgin Media suggests that 38% of parents whose children have suffered from cyberbullying feel unable to protect them due to a lack of knowledge and understanding of how the online world works.
  • This, Mr Abdul argued, could only be solved through greater education and a more honest understanding from parents about how real and damaging the effects of online bullying could be.
  • Mr Abdul added, the correct software, education and parental supervision means children can also be protected both at home and away.
Maj Krek

The Enduring Myth of the 'Free' Internet - Peter Osnos - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...273515

internet myth free accessofinformation

shared by Maj Krek on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The Enduring Myth of the 'Free' Internet
  • The mantra of a "free" Internet has shaped the prevailing view of how we access information and entertainment in the digital age.
  • the role of the broadband Internet is reaching a stage where anything less than total availability at minimal prices is a matter that deserves far more attention than it is currently getting.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • But access to this "free" information on the Internet, as everyone acknowledges as soon as it is pointed out, is not gratis.
  • The leading beneficiaries of all these charges are the big multi-platform companies, the pipes for content and digital services
  • the devices that connect us to search engines, countless websites, social media, and e-mail bring us vast amounts of content for which we do not pay separately.
  • 100 million Americans do not have high speed Internet at home, largely because of high costs and the lack of available infrastructure.
  • the Internet is the key to economic growth in the 21st century
  • One promising initiative, at least as it applies to speed and access, comes from Google Fiber. This is a project the company is developing in Kansas City as a trial of what would be a far faster broadband network using fiber-optic communication.
  • No other company can match Google's projected speed, but the price it is planning to charge for that service so far is higher than slower providers
  • For all the progress in delivering information and entertainment in the Internet era, Americans deserve and should demand something closer to the ideal of what is possible with our technology.
Urška Cerar

What Does Google Do If the Government Comes Looking for Your Emails? - Rebecca J. Rosen... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...272591

google law enforcement request

shared by Urška Cerar on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Every single day, dozens of requests from law-enforcement officials, courts, and other government agencies pour into Google's offices, requesting that Google hand over different pieces of information its users have amassed
  • many of these requests are legitimate
  • It's important for law enforcement agencies to pursue illegal activity and keep the public safe.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • once a request has been deemed valid, Google will notify users when possible.
  • Google says, "When we receive such a request, our team reviews the request to make sure it satisfies legal requirements and Google's policies.
  • Google will not provide a user's search-query information or the contents of a user's account (email content, pictures, documents, etc.) without a warrant.
  • Google has advocated for updating ECPA, "so the same protections that apply to your personal documents that you keep in your home also apply to your email and online documents."
  • If Google can establish clear practices now that somehow balance the competing needs of law-enforcement agencies and private users, that effort will pay off
Katja Kotnik

BBC - WebWise - Internet Basics - Internet basics - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...internet-basics

shared by Katja Kotnik on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • internet is a worldwide network of computers
  • you can find almost anything
  • library
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • our mobile phone company, home phone, cable television provider, or even your local supermarket chain can offer you an internet connection.
  • one that allows you to access the internet quickly and view large files, such as watching television programmes or listening to the radio through your computer.
Janja Petek

Google, Facebook and Twitter ordered to delete photos of James Bulger killers | Media |... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...google-facebook-twitter

google facebook twitter

shared by Janja Petek on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Google, Facebook and Twitter have been ordered by the police to remove photographs purporting to show one of James Bulger's killers.
  • Police served the three web giants with the injunction that bans the purported identification of Venables and Robert Thompson
  • A spokeswoman for the attorney general's office said police had requested that Twitter, Facebook and Google "assist with the removal of material in breach of the terms of the order" and that the process was ongoing.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The photographs are believed to have begun circulating online
  • Twitter broke its silence about the issue in a Commons home affairs select committee hearing on Tuesday afternoon.
  • what is illegal offline is illegal online."
donnamariee

How Social Networking Has Changed Society | PCWorld - 0 views

www.pcworld.com/...social_networks.html

shared by donnamariee on 17 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • How Social Networking Has Changed Society
  • Those who are chained to a company desk often use (or sneak onto) Twitter or Facebook to stay in touch with friends outside of work
  • ork and home life are quickly becoming blurred and social networks had better be prepared to keep up
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • social networking tools are just the beginning of something, that they could lead to ways of finding and interacting with one another we never imagined, but whatever happens, you can't dismiss these tools easily. They are taking us somewhere exciting, but we have to work out how we deal with the fading boundaries these tools have left in their wake and that means rewriting our social rules as we go along
  • expand the pool of people we have the opportunity to meet to near limitless possibilities. We're no longer restricted to or rely on people in our neighborhood, church, or workplace to provide the interaction we desire
  • donnamariee on 17 Mar 13
     
    essay theme 3
donnamariee

How social networks have changed our world | Techi.com - 0 views

www.techi.com/...etworks-have-changed-our-world

shared by donnamariee on 17 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • How social networks have changed our world
  • social networks have evolved from simple communication hubs to veritable agents of change; galvanizing thousands of people over political discourse, creating and changing industries, and all in all, transforming people’s lives
  • Today, more than 600 million users worldwide are active on this website. Approximately 200 million people are active on twitter
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • None of these social networks even excited at the beginning of the decade. While these figures may be mere numbers for many people, the impact of social network goes far and deep. Here are a few areas in which social networks have had lasting and arguably permanent effects.
  • social networks have altered the operational model of politics and public service
  • Facebook
  • touchstone for how non-profit organizations, environmental activities, and political factions reach out to thousands of potential volunteers and donors
  • Twitter is being used by almost all progressive politicians to promote their causes. Thanks to the social networks, politics is no longer limited to the political elites; people voice their opinions, share their ideas, and even communicate with politicians on a one-on-one basis. It’s a technology lesson that progressive politicians have to learn or else, risk losing to the tech savvy youth of today.
    • donnamariee
      donnamariee on 17 Mar 13
       
      Twitter is being used by almost all progressive politicians to promote their causes. Thanks to the social networks, politics is no longer limited to the political elites; people voice their opinions, share their ideas, and even communicate with politicians on a one-on-one basis. It's a technology lesson that progressive politicians have to learn or else, risk losing to the tech savvy youth of today.
  • Marketing and advertising are transforming themselves from industries reliant on mass market channels to those that must embrace the power of the customer, and attempt to engage in conversations with them. Often, a “middle man” (such as news paper reporter) ultimately determined that what was written or said. The ability to bypass gatekeepers and facilitate direct interactions with consumers and communities is very important.
  • Some news websites already present visitors with a list of stories recommended by their friends because they realize an endorsement from ‘someone you know’ carries extra weight
  • From traffic updates, to natural riots, anyone and everyone who has access to social networking sites can report his/her version of such events. Sifting through the humongous amount of news, speculations and analysis are abilities that a New Media user must now possess.
  • It is not uncommon to see small or home grow businesses that operate solely through their Facebook accounts. In fact, for businesses, interaction via social network has almost become a yardstick to test out their customer service
  • With Google+ being launched recently, it is clear that all technology giants have realized the critical role that social networks will lay in shaping our lives. It is no longer about implementing the latest, cutting edge technology; it is about how seamlessly and organically a social network merges in our lives, and affects every aspect of it. The lines between real and virtual lives have now blurred to the extent of becoming invisible
  • donnamariee on 17 Mar 13
     
    essay theme 2
Jernej Prodnik

Amazon unpacked - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html

amazon political economy of the internet political economy of communication labour conditions

shared by Jernej Prodnik on 24 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • February 8, 2013 12:30 pm Amazon unpacked By Sarah O’Connor The online giant is creating thousands of UK jobs, so why are some employees less than happy?
  • Between a sooty power station and a brown canal on the edge of a small English town, there is a building that seems as if it should be somewhere else. An enormous long blue box, it looks like a smear of summer sky on the damp industrial landscape. Inside, hundreds of people in orange vests are pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle – the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time. They might each walk between seven and 15 miles today. It is almost Christmas and the people working in this building, together with those in seven others like it across the country, are dispatching a truck filled with parcels every three minutes or so. Before they can go home at the end of their eight-hour shift, or go to the canteen for their 30-minute break, they must walk through a set of airport-style security scanners to prove they are not stealing anything. They also walk past a life-sized cardboard image of a cheery blonde woman in an orange vest. “This is the best job I have ever had!” says a speech bubble near her head.
  • If you could slice the world in half right here, you could read the history of this town called Rugeley in the layers. Below the ground are the shafts and tunnels of the coal mine that fed the power station and was once the local economy’s beating heart. Above the ground are the trolleys and computers of Amazon, the global online retailer that has taken its place. As online shopping explodes in Britain, helping to push traditional retailers such as HMV out of business, more and more jobs are moving from high-street shops into warehouses like this one. Under pressure from politicians and the public over its tax arrangements, Amazon has tried to stress how many jobs it is creating across the country at a time of economic malaise. The undisputed behemoth of the online retail world has invested more than £1bn in its UK operations and announced last year that it would open another three warehouses over the next two years and create 2,000 more permanent jobs. Amazon even had a quote from David Cameron, the prime minister, in its September press release. “This is great news, not only for those individuals who will find work, but for the UK economy,” he said.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Workers in Amazon’s warehouses – or “associates in Amazon’s fulfilment centres” as the company would put it – are divided into four main groups. There are the people on the “receive lines” and the “pack lines”: they either unpack, check and scan every product arriving from around the world, or they pack up customers’ orders at the other end of the process. Another group stows away suppliers’ products somewhere in the warehouse. They put things wherever there’s a free space – in Rugeley, there are inflatable palm trees next to milk frothers and protein powder next to kettles. Only Amazon’s vast computer brain knows where everything is, because the workers use their handheld computers to scan both the item they are stowing away and a barcode on the spot on the shelf where they put it. The last group, the “pickers”, push trolleys around and pick out customers’ orders from the aisles. Amazon’s software calculates the most efficient walking route to collect all the items to fill a trolley, and then simply directs the worker from one shelf space to the next via instructions on the screen of the handheld satnav device. Even with these efficient routes, there’s a lot of walking. One of the new Rugeley “pickers” lost almost half a stone in his first three shifts. “You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form,” said the Amazon manager. “It’s human automation, if you like.” Amazon recently bought a robot company, but says it still expects to keep plenty of humans around because they are so much better at coping with the vast array of differently shaped products the company sells.
  • The unassuming efficiency of these warehouses is what enables Amazon to put parcels on customers’ doorsteps so quickly, even when it is receiving 35 orders a second. Every warehouse has its own “continuous improvement manager” who uses “kaizen” techniques pioneered by Japanese car company Toyota to improve prod­uctivity. Marc Onetto, the senior vice-president of worldwide operations, told a business school class at the University of Virginia a few years ago: “We use a bunch of Japanese guys, they are not consultants, they are insultants, they are really not nice … They’re samurais, the real last samurais, the guys from the Toyota plants.” In Rugeley, the person with the kaizen job is a friendly, bald man called Matt Pedersen, who has a “black belt” in “Six Sigma”, the Motorola-developed method of operational improvement, most famously embraced by Jack Welch at General Electric. Every day, the managers in Rugeley take a “genba walk”, which roughly means “go to the place” in Japanese, Pedersen says as he accompanies the FT on a tour of the warehouse. “We go to the associates and find out what’s stopping them from performing today, how we can make their day better.” Some people also patrol the warehouse pushing tall little desks on wheels with laptops on them – they are “mobile problem solvers” looking for any hitches that could be slowing down the operation.
  • . . . What did the people of Rugeley make of all this? For many, it has been a culture shock. “The feedback we’re getting is it’s like being in a slave camp,” said Brian Garner, the dapper chairman of the Lea Hall Miners Welfare Centre and Social Club, still a popular drinking spot. One of the first complaints to spread through the town was that employees were getting blisters from the safety boots some were given to wear, which workers said were either too cheap or the wrong sizes. One former shop-floor manager, who did not want to be named, said he always told new workers to smear their bare feet with Vaseline. “Then put your socks on and your boots on, because I know for a fact these boots are going to rub and cause blisters and sores.” ©Ben RobertsAmazon workers in Rugeley process ordersOthers found the pressure intense. Several former workers said the handheld computers, which look like clunky scientific calculators with handles and big screens, gave them a real-time indication of whether they were running behind or ahead of their target and by how much. Managers could also send text messages to these devices to tell workers to speed up, they said. “People were constantly warned about talking to one another by the management, who were keen to eliminate any form of time-wasting,” one former worker added.
  • Watson said Amazon was supposed to send the council employment data every six months, but it had not done so. “We had no idea Amazon were going to be as indifferent to these issues as they have been, it’s come as a shock to us how intransigent they are,” he said. Inside the warehouse, Amazon employees wear blue badges and the workers supplied by the agencies wear green badges. In the most basic roles they perform the same tasks as each other for the same pay of £6.20 an hour or so (the minimum adult wage is £6.19), but the Amazon workers also receive a pension and shares. A former agency worker said the prospect of winning a blue badge, “like a carrot, was dangled constantly in front of us by management in return for meeting shift targets”. Amazon’s Darwinian culture comes from the top. Jeff Bezos, its chief executive, told Forbes magazine last year (when it named him “number one CEO in America”): “Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove, we’ll settle for intense.”
  • Ransdtad said it supplied a number of clients with “onsite-flexible workforce solutions”. It added: “The number of workers required by these clients fluctuates in response to supply and demand. When demand for clients’ products or services is high (for example during the Christmas period) the Randstad partnership allows local people to benefit from short-term work on a temporary contract, to help supplement our clients’ permanent workforce and deliver against order requirements.” Certainly, not everyone in Rugeley is upset about Amazon. A group of workers having a pint on a picnic table outside The Colliers pub near the warehouse gates said they liked their jobs, albeit as their managers hovered nervously in the background. One young agency worker said he was earning about £220 a week, compared with the £54 he had been receiving in jobless benefits. He had bought a car and moved out of his mum’s house and into a rented flat with his girlfriend, who he had met at work. “I’m doing pretty well for myself,” he said with a shy grin. “There’s always opportunities to improve yourself there.” Across the table, an older man, wagging two fingers with a cigarette pinched between them, said slowly: “It gives you your pride back, that’s what it gives you. Your pride back.” Many in the town, however, have mixed feelings. They are grateful for the jobs Amazon has created but they are also sad and angry about the quality of them. Timothy Jones, a barrister and parish councillor, summed up the mood. “I very much want them to stay, but equally I would like some of the worst employment practices to end.”
  • For Watson, the big question is whether these new jobs can support sustainable economic growth. In Rugeley, it is hard not to look back to the coal mine for an example of how one big employer could transform a place. . . . The Lea Hall Colliery opened officially on a soggy Tuesday in July 1960. Miners and their families huddled under marquees to eat their packed lunches and when the first coal was wound to the surface, three bands played an overture specially written for the occasion. It was the first mine planned and sunk by the Coal Board, the body set up after the second world war to run Britain’s newly nationalised coal industry, and the Central Electricity Generating Board was building a coal-fired power station right next door. It was a defiant demonstration of confidence in coal at a time of increasing competition from oil. “King Coal is not yet dead, as many would have it, but is going to be with us for many years to come,” the regional secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers told the crowd.
  • Soon, miners from all over the country were swarming to the modern new mine. The Coal Board and the local council built housing estates and schools to cope with the exploding population. “Peartree estate was built for the Geordies, the Springfield estate was built for the Scots and the Welsh,” remembered Brian Garner, who helped to build the mine when he was 16. “It was unbelievable, it was buzzing in the town, there was that much money about then. I could leave my job at 10 o’clock in the morning and start at five past 10 on another.” On Friday and Saturday nights, the queue outside the Lea Hall Miners’ Welfare Centre and Social Club would wrap right around the building. Rugeley’s mine was soon the most productive in the country. It was a “young man’s pit” with all the latest machines and techniques, says Ken Edwards, who started there at 25 as an electrician. The work was still dirty and dangerous, though. In 1972, a local reporter took a tour. “All is silent except for the movement of conveyor belts which carry the coal and the murmur of the air pumps. The blackness is relieved only by narrow shafts of light coming from each person’s headlamp,” she wrote. It took her two days to remove the black dust from her nails, ears, nose and hair.
  • The good times didn’t last. By the time the pit closed, four days before Christmas in 1990, a spokesman for British Coal told Reuters it was losing £300,000 a week. More than 800 people lost jobs that paid the equivalent of between £380 and £900 a week in today’s money. The town council’s chairman tried desperately to say something reassuring. “It has come as such a shock,” he told the local paper. “[But] we have got to do what many have done and look for new areas, particularly information technology and high technology. We have a lot of expertise and a wonderful geographical spot. There’s no reason why it should be the end for Rugeley.” From behind her desk in Vision estate agents, all purple paint and fairy lights, Dawn Goodwin sucks the air in through her teeth at the mention of Amazon. “We all thought it was going to be the making of the town,” she says. She expected an influx of people, including well-to-do managers, looking to buy or rent houses. But she hasn’t had any extra business at all. People are cautious because they don’t know how long their agency jobs with Amazon will last, she says. One of her tenants, a single young woman, got a job there but lost it again after she became ill halfway through a shift. She struggled to pay her rent for three months while she waited for her jobseeker’s benefits to be reinstated. “It’s leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouths,” Goodwin says with a frown. Even the little “Unit 9” café next to the Amazon warehouse hasn’t had a boost in trade. The women who run it reckon the employees don’t have enough time in their 30-minute break to get through security, come and eat something, and then go back in again.
  • In a cramped upstairs office at the Citizens Advice Bureau, Gillian Astbury and Angela Jones have turned to statistics to try to identify Amazon’s effect on the area. They haven’t had an increase in the number of people asking about employment problems or unfair dismissal, but nor has there been any improvement in the community’s problems with debt and homelessness. Their best guess is that people haven’t had enough sustained work to make much of a difference. Astbury says employment agencies are a “necessary evil”, but stresses it is hardly ideal for people to be bouncing in and out of temporary work, particularly when a job ends abruptly and they are left with no income at all until their benefits are reinstated. Workers leaving Amazon have had a particular problem with this, prompting the parish council to submit a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Work and Pensions to find out exactly how long local people are being made to wait for their social security payments to come through.
  • Far from the CAB’s little office in Rugeley, Britain’s economists are also puzzling over why the economy remains moribund even though more and more people are in work. There are still about half a million fewer people working as full-time employees than there were before the 2008 crash, but the number of people in some sort of employment has surpassed the previous peak. Economists think the rise in insecure temporary, self-employed and part-time work, while a testament to the British labour market’s flexibility, helps to explain why economic growth remains elusive. Angi Cooney, who runs C Residential, the biggest estate agent in Rugeley, thinks the nature of employment is changing permanently and people should stop pining for the past. It’s “bloody great” that a company like Amazon chose to come to “this little old place”, she says fiercely, looking as if she’d like to take the town by the shoulders and give it a shake. “People expect a job for life, but the world isn’t like that any more, is it?” Sarah O’Connor is the FT’s economics correspondent
Jernej Prodnik

Amazon 'used neo-Nazi guards to keep immigrant workforce under control' in Germany - Eu... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ontrol-in-germany-8495843.html

amazon political economy of communication political economy of the internet labour conditions labour work

shared by Jernej Prodnik on 24 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Amazon 'used neo-Nazi guards to keep immigrant workforce under control' in Germany Internet giant investigates abuse claims by foreign workers in its German warehouses Tony Paterson Berlin
  • Amazon is at the centre of a deepening scandal in Germany as the online shopping giant faced claims that it employed security guards with neo-Nazi connections to intimidate its foreign workers. Germany’s ARD television channel made the allegations in a documentary about Amazon’s treatment of more than 5,000 temporary staff from across Europe to work at its German packing and distribution centres.The film showed omnipresent guards from a company named HESS Security wearing black uniforms, boots and with military haircuts. They were employed to keep order at hostels and budget hotels where foreign workers stayed. “Many of the workers are afraid,” the programme-makers said.The documentary provided photographic evidence showing that guards regularly searched the bedrooms and kitchens of foreign staff. “They tell us they are the police here,” a Spanish woman complained. Workers were  allegedly frisked to check they had not walked away with breakfast rolls.
  • Another worker called Maria said she was thrown out of the cramped chalet she shared with five others  because she had dried her wet clothes on a wall heater. She said she was confronted by a muscular, tattooed security man and told to leave. The guards then shone car headlights at her in her chalet while she packed in an apparent attempt to intimidate her.Several guards were shown wearing Thor Steinar clothing – a Berlin-based designer brand synonymous with the far-right in Germany. The Bundesliga football association and the federal parliament have both banned the label because of its neo-Nazi associations. Ironically, Amazon stopped selling the clothing for the same reasons in 2009.ARD suggested that the name “HESS Security” was an allusion to Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. It alleged that its director was a man, named only as Uwe L, who associated with football hooligans and convicted neo-Nazis who were known to police. The programme-makers, who booked in at one of the budget hotels where Amazon staff were housed, said they were arrested by HESS Security guards after being caught using cameras. They were ordered to hand over their film and, when they refused, were held for nearly an hour before police arrived and freed them. The film showed HESS guards scuffling with the camera crew and trying to cover their lenses.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • ARD said Amazon’s temporary staff worked eight-hour shifts packing goods at the company’s logistics centres in Bad Hersfeld, Konstanz and Augsburg. Many walked up to 17 kilometres per shift and all those taken on could be fired at will. On arrival in Germany, most were told their pay had been cut to below the rate promised when they applied for jobs at Amazon.  “They don’t see any way of complaining,” said Heiner Reimann, a spokesman for the United Services Union (Ver.di). “They are all too frightened of being sent home without a job.”Silvina, a Spanish mother of three in her 50s, who lost her job as an art teacher, was featured in the film. She applied for three months’ work with Amazon to earn some badly needed cash. “It’s like being in a machine and we are just a small part in this machine,” she told the programme.HESS Security did not respond to the allegations made by ARD.Amazon employs 7,700 full-time staff at seven distrubution centres in Germany. The accusations led to the company’s Facebook site being inundated with angry complaints.The company said: “Although the security firm was not contracted by Amazon we are, of course, currently examining the allegations concerning the behaviour of security guards and will take the appropriate measures immediately. We do not tolerate discrimination or intimidation.”
1 - 18 of 18
Showing 20▼ items per page