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Jernej Prodnik

Amazon unpacked - FT.com - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • 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
Katja Jerman

Letters: Big data and big problems for personal information | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

  • describes a new product to collect and mine user data online
  • PII is a predetermined list of attributes that could identify an individual
  • personally identifiable information?
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  • Identifiably personal information (IPI, if you must) is any set of data which by inspection could lead to the identification of an individual from a group, with a given level of confidence in a given time
  • is based on solid academic work on differential privacy and security threat modelling.
  • could turn data science into data surveillance.
  • Data mining by many businesses seeks to predict trends in purchasing behaviour, monitor customer response to service delivery and assess their marketing strategy against those of their rivals.
  • The real power of social media mining is establishing a "pattern of life" from which anomalies might stand out
sergeja perklič

Who owns the content you upload online? | Money | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • The outrage over Instagram's announcement that it is changing its terms and conditions has turned the spotlight on the relationship between websites and users who upload content, whether it is photos, video, blogs or even games.
  • A survey of UK consumers suggested just 7% read online terms and conditions before they signed up for products and services, and other research has put it even lower.
  • Twitter: You retain your rights to any content you post on Twitter, but you grant the website a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence (with the right to sublicense) "to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" your content.
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  • However, when you use Facebook you give it the right to use information "in connection with the services and features we provide to you and other users like your friends, our partners, the advertisers that purchase ads on the site, and the developers that build the games, applications, and websites you use".
inesmag

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

  • 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.
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  • 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
donnamariee

Firefox OS won't magically succeed just because it's open source - see webOS | Technolo... - 0 views

  • Firefox OS won't magically succeed just because it's open source - see webOS The siren song of open source means some people think Firefox OS could take the smartphone market by storm - but that's what they thought about webOS
  • Open source" operating systems are the siren call of the internet. For years, we were promised, Linux was going to be the Next Big Thing on the desktop; the tired old empires of Windows and MacOS were going to be pushed aside, and everyone was going to embrace Linux (though quite which distro wasn't clear). From infants to grannies, they would all see the light, and install software that was built with the user in mind - as long as the user was someone who could hold the idea of the concentric circles of file ownership (root/wheel/std) in their head
  • Despite the fevered imaginings of a fair number at the time, there was simply no chance that webOS was going to go anywhere without direct help from HP; and HP wasn't going to give it that help, since it had plenty of troubles of its own.
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  • LG has indicated that it will be using webOS in its Smart TV line (which, in passing, suggests that Google's hopes of having a multi-manufacturer-pronged assault on the living room with Google TV are being chipped away; Samsung has gone its own way, Sony offers a mixture of Google and its own smart TV offerings, and now it looks like LG isn't exactly all-in). Though that might, in time, become something that it uses on phones or tablets, you'd be crazy to bet on it. LG is smart enough to know that TVs are a world away from phones and tablets, both in terms of the user interaction experience, and the demands that they make for user acceptance.
  • But the siren song of open source OSs becomes deafening when you look at the other announcement to come out of Mobile World Congress, in which Mozilla is touting its Firefox OS as the anathema to the world's ills - or at least those afflicting the smartphone industry. What does Moziila chief executive Gary Kovacs think is going to be the unique selling point of the Firefox OS phones that he expects to see in 2014? "Our goal is to level the playing field and usher in an explosion of content and services that will meet the diverse needs of the next two billion people online," he said in Barcelona, adding "We're not trying to get in the middle of an operating system fight; what we are trying to do is be the catalyst to drive more development around the open web."
  • The problem for Firefox OS is that it doesn't have a dedicated hardware backer. Sure, Sony has said that it will make some phones using it. ZTE and Alcatel say they will build hardware that will run it. And Kovacs points to the fact that Firefox OS will run HTML5 apps - not "native" apps (in the sense that iOS or Android apps run natively). That might put a questionmark over whether, by some analysts' measure, the FFOS phone is truly a "smartphone", since their definition for that includes "running apps on a native API". (That's why Gartner and IDC don't class Nokia's Asha phones as smartphones.)
  • So how did Android succeed? Three things. First, Google get a vibrant app ecosystem going even before there was a single phone: it had competitions for apps, with a $10m fund to seed developer ideas. By April 2008 there were almost 2,000 Android applications; two-third came from outside the US. Among the offerings: photo-enhanced driving, on-the-fly party mashups with maps, maintaining passive surveillance on your family's whereabouts. (Some things never change.) Second, it was able to go to Verizon, which was looking enviously at how AT&T was able to offer the iPhone, and suggest that Android phones - when they came along - could be the answer to that competitive challenge. And third, it was Google - the gigantic search-engine-and-everything-else company with the international reputation. If Google was doing a new generation of smartphone software (and if Apple had validated the idea), then it looked like a good deal for everyone. And handset manufacturers were eager to find an alternative to Microsoft.
  • Android is gigantic - some version of it might be on a billion phones this year - meaning there's no obvious need for another open source OS. What, after all, is FFOS actually going to do that Android doesn't, or that iOS or Windows Phone or BlackBerry can't? Yes, we've heard that the target isn't the west, but the developing world; that still doesn't explain why a Chinese handset manufacturer would deploy FFOS rather than Android, whether the Google version or a forked one that could connect to a local app store.
  • Even worse, FFOS is at an immediate competitive disadvantage because the principal browser on smartphones now is based on WebKit. Chrome uses it, MobileSafari uses it, BlackBerry uses it, and Opera uses it too now. That leaves only Internet Explorer on Windows Phone standing alone. Developers writing HTML5 apps will naturally write for compatibility with WebKit, which is always going to behave slightly differently from Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. For FFOS's sake, you have to hope the differences aren't big.
  • That's the trouble with the magical thinking that often attaches to open source projects. Making webOS open source didn't solve its problems; it simply shoved them off into a siding. Having an open source mobile OS didn't guarantee Android's success; the efforts of Google, and the timing in the market, did that.
  • Perhaps for that reason, people have high expectations for the Ubuntu OS and phone, with its fabulously complex array of gestures for control. Bad news, dreamers: it's going to fail in the market too if Canonical attempts to market it as a hardware-software combination - that is, sells Ubuntu phones at retail.
Mirna Čorak

The Perils of Perfection - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • LivesOn, a soon-to-launch service that promises to tweet on your behalf even after you die. By analyzing your earlier tweets
  • Seesaw, the app lets you run instant polls of your friends and ask for advice on anything: what wedding dress to buy, what latte drink to order and soon, perhaps, what political candidate to support.
  • Take Google Glass, the company’s overhyped “smart glasses,” which can automatically snap photos of everything we see and store them for posterity.
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  • Jim Gemmell, “Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.”
  • All these efforts to ease the torments of existence might sound like paradise to Silicon Valley. But for the rest of us, they will be hell.
  • SUCH predisposition makes it harder to notice that not all problems are problems
  • After all, saving the world might be a price worth paying for destroying everyone’s privacy, while a larger-than-life mission might convince young and idealistic employees that they are not wasting their lives tricking gullible consumers to click on ads for pointless products.
Nuša Gregoršanec

BBC NEWS | UK | Online networking 'harms health' - 0 views

  • Online networking 'harms health'
  • Online networking 'harms health'
  • Dr Aric Sigman says websites such as Facebook set out to enrich social lives, but end up keeping people apart.
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  • A lack of "real" social networking, involving personal interaction, may have biological effects, he suggests. He also says that evidence suggests that a lack of face-to-face networking could alter the way genes work, upset immune responses, hormone levels, the function of arteries, and influence mental performance.
  • This, he claims, could increase the risk of health problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease, and dementia.
  • Dr Sigman says that there is research that suggests the number of hours people spend interacting face-to-face has fallen dramatically since 1987, as the use of electronic media has increased.
  • Dr Sigman also argues using electronic media undermines people's social skills and their ability to read body language.
Kaja Horvat

Online Shopping: More Popular (Yet Less Satisfying) Than Ever | TIME.com - 0 views

  • consumers are increasingly content to turn to the web to get their holiday shopping done.
  • Yet as more consumers turn to online shopping before and after the holidays, more critics are voicing their dissatisfaction with e-retail. The biggest argument in favor of online shopping is that it eliminates the hassle of having to go to a store, but still, online shopping is hardly without hassles.
  • Among the problems: Purchased items were shipped to the wrong people; presents that were supposed to be gift-wrapped never were; cards alerting the recipients where the goods came from were buried deep inside packages or weren’t included at all; and, of course, clearing up these matters with customer service was a maddening, time-consuming process. Among the larger problems that Ephron, and surely many others, have with online shopping is this:
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  • On a 100-point satisfaction scale, e-retail as a whole received a score of 78, down from 80 in the 2011 holiday season
  • for the eight year in a row, Amazon received the highest overall customer satisfaction rating in ForeSee’s study.
nensic

Zračenja iz mobitela i antena uništavaju našu DNK i stvaraju rak | 2012 Trans... - 0 views

  • Za sve one koji negativni utjecaj iz elektroničkih uređaja smatraju običnom teorijom zavjere bez ikakve veze s istinom donosimo najnovija znanstvena otkrića koja pokazuju vezu između novootkrivenih svojstava deoksiribonukleinske kiseline i bežičnih tehnologija.
  • DNK ima dvije strukturalne karakteristike fraktalnih antena: elektroničku kondukciju i samo-simetriju.
  • Kada se DNK našla u doticaju s EMF-om i RF-om, prvo su se pojavili visoki nivoi stresnih proteina u heliskima DNK, a nakon toga su znanstvenici promatrali kako se spirale DNK razdvajaju i raspadaju. Drugim riječima ne-ionizrajuće zračenje uništava ljudsku DNK.
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  • Ljudska DNK je najburnije reagirala na ELF-ove (extreme low frequencies) ili radio valove ekstremno niske frekvencije, iako su efekti slični kao i s drugim oblicima RF i EMF zračenja, u slučaju ELF-ova reakcije su postajale puno kompleksnije.
  • povećanje različitih vrsta zračenja siguran razlog u povećanju kancerogene epidemiologije
  • povećanje broja kancerogenih oboljenja možemo zahvaliti različitim zračenjima iz okoliša koja su oštetila i još uvijek oštećuju našu DNK.
  • za 40% povećava rizik od dobivanja raka mozga u slučaju da korisnici provedu telefonirajući više od 1640 sati. U neovisnom istraživanju iz 2007., godine, koje je obavio tim iz Švedske je otkriveno kako se za 540% povećava rizik od dobivanja raka ako se mobilni telefoni koriste više od 2000 sati.
  • Svijet se treba osloboditi od mobilne telefonije, ne samo da je ova tehnologija opasna, ona je smrtonosna. Biološki učinak mobilnih telefona na ljudsko tijelo ne leži u jakosti signala već u njegovoj eratičnoj prirodi koja uništava rezonancu DNK i njenu mogućnost obnavljanja. Ovo je i najjednostavniji razlog zašto mobilna tehnologija stvara kancerogena oboljenja.
  • Izraelski znanstvenici su preko 30 godina istraživali povećanje tumora na parotidnoj žlijezdi, između 1970-te i 2006-te godine broj tumora se povećao za 400%.
  • dr. Siegal Sadetcki, glavni istražitelj senata SAD-a, je uspio identificirati glavnog krivca za tumore zaušne žlijezde. U njegovom izvješću stoji kako su mobilni telefoni glavni i najčešći krivci za: 34% povećanja rizika od tumora zaušne žlijezde ako se mobilni telefon koristi na regularnoj bazi u vremenu od pet godina. 58% povećanja rizika od tumora zaušne žlijezde ako se mobilni telefon koristi s više od 5500 poziva za vrijeme ljudskog života. 49% povećanja rizika od tumora zaušne žlijezde ako se mobilni telefon koristi za više od 266,3 sata za vrijeme ljudskog života.
  • 03.05.2011., godine, WHO i IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) ili Internacionalna agencija za istraživanja raka, su priznale kako mobilna telefonija zaista uzrokuje rak, te su zračenje iz mobilnih telefona stavili u 2B rizičnu skupinu za ljude.
  • U istraživanju koje je objavljeno 2008., godine je otkriveno kako su trudnice i njihova nerođena djeca posebno osjetljiva na zračenje iz mobitela. Znanstvenici su analizirali 13 tisuća djece i otkrili su kako je zračenje iz bežične tehnologije uzrokovalo brojne probleme za vrijeme trudnoće te da je na koncu povećalo rizik od poremećaja koji izazivaju hiperaktivnost, nedostatak pažnje, probleme s emocijama, stvaranjem i održavanjem veza s ljudima i druge bihevioralne anomalije. Rizik je postajao još veći ako su djeca koristila mobilne telefone prije navršene sedme godine života. Sve trudnice koje su koristile mobilne telefone su imale 54% povećan rizik od različitih fizičkih i psihičkih anomalija u zdravlju i razvoju njihove djece.
  • U nedavnim istraživanjima se potvrdilo kako su djeca, pa čak i ona nerođena u najvećoj opasnosti od zračenja uzrokovanog bežičnom tehnologijom i mobilnim telefonima.
  • osobe koje su počele koristiti mobitel kao tinejdžeri imaju 400-500% veću mogućnost od razvijanja raka mozga u dobi od 20-te do 30-te godine.
  • U znanstvenom istraživanju koje je objavljeno 2009., godine se pokazalo kako nošenje mobitela u džepu hlača uništava kosti karlice, točnije stvara osteoporozu. Muškarci koji su nosili mobitele okačene o opasač ili unutar džepa od hlača su unutar šest godina ove prakse izgubili gustoću kostiju karlice.
  • RF-EMR (radio frekvencije i elektromagnetsko zračenje) bez obzira na jakost i frekvenciju mobilnih telefona, uništava mitohondrijsku generaciju kisika unutar ljudskih spermija, na taj se način smanjuje njihova pokretljivost, dok s druge strane uništava DNK i fragmentira je. Ovo istraživanje ima jasnu implikaciju o tome koliko je opasno korištenje mobilnih telefona za muškarce koji imaju namjeru imati djecu. Mobiteli potencijalno utječu na plodnost muškaraca i zdravlje njihovih potomaka.
anonymous

Facebook Workers Try to Spend Less Than 1 Second Determining Whether Content Is 'Approp... - 0 views

  • Facebook
  • safer
  • Woodrow Wilson
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • online bullying
  • Internet
  • Facebook
  • ATLANTIC
  • she traveled to Facebook headquarters to see how they dealt with so-called "third party" reports of about inappropriate content.
  • how long he might spend deciding if a page should stay up or come down.
  • they "optimize for half a second." Half a second!
  • Middle- and high-schoolers are all on Facebook and that means all their drama is on Facebook, too.
  • reports
  • Facebook's
  • come up with some remarkable tools for managing conflict on its site.
  • they claim to have ways of handling problems like this, which serves as a defense to the suggestion that perhaps a government agency should try to regulate them, especially around minors' use of the service.
  • It costs money
  • they'll catch most baldly inappropriate content if they give their reviewers half a second to look at each page.
Blaž Gobec

Google's Eric Schmidt: drone wars, virtual kidnaps and privacy for kids | Technology | ... - 0 views

  • Google's Eric Schmidt: drone wars, virtual kidnaps and privacy for kids
  • and parents explain online privacy to their children long before the subject of sex
  • Dark side of the web
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "We could see virtual kidnappings – ransoming your ID for real money," Schmidt said.
  • Schmidt said the problems could go further as other technologies become cheaper
  • However, he held out hopes that the rise of connectivity, especially through mobile phones with data services, would reduce corruption and undermine repressive regimes.
  • In each, he said, the need to be connected, first through a mobile phone and then to the internet, became apparent.
Gabrijela Vrbnjak

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

  • 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.
Jan Majdič

The trouble with Facebook | Dan Kennedy | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk - 1 views

  • When I joined, five years ago, it was because I wanted an easy way to check on whether my journalism students were correctly spelling the names of classmates they were quoting in their news stories. To this day, that's pretty much my peak Facebook experience.
  • Founded by Zuckerberg and several other Harvard students in 2003, the site laboured for several years behind MySpace, the social-networking phenomenon of mid-decade
  • Indeed, Zuckerberg himself gave away the game back in January, telling a live audience that if he had it to do over again, he never would have allowed users to keep their information private.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Anything is possible, and no one would bet against Facebook's one day giving way to something else. But the problem for those seeking an alternative is that, at the moment, there isn't a something else. Several years ago, all those MySpace users could switch to Facebook. But where would Facebook users go in 2010?
mancamikulic

Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy? | Technology | The Guardian - 1 views

  • glasses that can shoot video, take pictures, and broadcast what you're seeing to the world
  • They weren't due to get them until last Friday
  • Google Glass is the most hotly anticipated new arrival in "wearable computing"
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • from "mainframe" computers
  • Google's idea is that you need only speak to operate it
  • "OK, Glass, take video!"
  • The only other way to get that point of view is to strap a camera to your head.
  • And yet people are already beginning to fret about the social implications of Glass
  • the question of privacy
  • how will we behave in groups
  • David Yee, the chief technology officer at a company called Editorially
  • Yee's worry was that the young person might be filming everything
  • Joshua Topolsky
  • have tried out Google Glass
  • This is the company that has repeatedly breached the boundaries of what we think is "private".
  • forgetting that sometimes deadly enemies have mutual friends
  • use of personal data without an individual's clear consent.
  • So how comfortable – or uneasy – should we feel about the possibility that what we're doing in a public or semi-public place (or even somewhere private) might get slurped up and assimilated by Google?
  • Oliver Stokes
  • ou could inadvertently become part of somebody else's data collection – that could be quite alarming
  • Now it's going to be able to compute what it is you're looking at.
  • Song Chaoming
  • nalysing mobile phone records
  • how your smartphone is able to show where you are on an onscreen map
  • Social media
  • Where the five million are the wearers of Glass – and the one monitor is Google
  • Google probably knows what you're going to do before you do.
  • Twitter
  • we're more used to the snatched photo or video that tells a story
  • Google doesn't want to discuss these issues.
  • this is a live issue,
  • One of the reasons they're doing Explorers is to get feedback on these things
  • how will we behave with each other?
  • hows data such as your speed, altitude, and even ski-resort maps
  • Concentrating on what was in front of me wasn't hard
  • they do it without letting others realise you are doing anything
  • we get too deeply involved with our technology
  • she pointed out how smartphones change us:
  • Topolsky
  • It brought something new into view
  • the more I used Glass the more it made sense to me; the more I wanted it."
  • how text messages or phone calls would just appear as alerts
  • Glass makes you feel more powerful
  • Hurst
  • is likely to be annoying
  • here's where the problems really start – you don't know if they're taking a video of you.
  • body language change
  • model seems to require voice control
  • how much are we going to share with others
donnamariee

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

  • 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.
inesmag

How to keep your privacy online | Ask Jack | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 2 views

  • I would like my browsing and Google searches to be private. I don't want targeted advertising and I don't want to feel that anonymous companies are harvesting my clicks to learn all about me.
  • When the web was young, and a lot less shiny, web pages were fixed (static) and – barring browser quirks – everybody saw much the same thing. Today, much of the web is dynamic, which means that what you see has been adapted or possibly constructed on the fly just for you.
  • From your point of view, the advantage is that the websites you visit will be personalised to suit your needs and tastes. From the website's point of view, the advantage is that it can also personalise its prices and advertising to try to suit your needs and tastes, and increase your propensity to click and buy.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • On the web, the rule is: if you're not paying, then you are what's being sold.
  • Probably the simplest way to reduce personalisation is to use an anonymising service. Instead of accessing the web directly, you access it via a third-party proxy server, so your that requests are mixed in with thousands of others. These services usually allow you to control cookies, turn JavaScript on and off, withhold "referrer details" and so on.
  • Nonetheless, it's often useful to have access to an anonymous proxy service, and everybody should find one they like. Examples include The Cloak, Megaproxy, Proxify and ID Zap. There are also networked open source privacy systems such as Tor and I2P.
  • Google also tracks your progress across hundreds of thousands of websites via Google Analytics. To opt out of this, install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on (Beta), which Google offers for Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera. However, some sites use different analytics software or track visitors in other ways you will be unaware of. Ghostery may help reduce these.
  • Finally, Facebook Connect is a potential privacy problem because it "allows users to 'connect' their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site".
  • In general, the more you do online – social networking, cloud computing etc – the more your privacy and security are at risk. Reducing that risk involves effort and inconvenience, so it's up to you to find an acceptable compromise
Katja Saje

Readers' privacy is under threat in the digital age | Books | The Guardian - 1 views

  • Every time you read a newspaper on your computer or buy an ebook, you can leave an electronic trail behind you. That trail is potentially lucrative for business, and is a new source of surveillance for government and law enforcement.
  • Retailers and search engines, most notably Amazon and Google, can now gather an astonishingly detailed portrait of our book-reading habits: what we buy, what we browse, the amount of time we spend on a page and even the annotations we make in an ebook.
  • Amazon also reserves the right to disclose information when it "believes release is appropriate to comply with the law". A stronger protection for our privacy should require a warrant before personal data is released.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Awareness of the problem is growing, from Google's catastrophic launch of its social network Buzz in 2010, which shared users' contacts without their permission, to the revelation last year that Facebook was still tracking users' browsing information after they had logged out.
  • The new possibilities for surveillance undermine the fundamental privacy of the act of reading.
Maj Krek

Kill the Internet-and Other Anti-SOPA Myths | The Nation - 0 views

  • in the wake of protests by dozens of websites and large numbers of their users, as well as a virtually unanimous chorus of criticism from leading progressive voices and outlets, including Michael Moore, Cenk Uygur, Keith Olbermann, Alternet, Daily Kos, MoveOn and many people associated with Occupy Wall Street. Judging by the fervor of the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests, a casual observer might think the advocates of the anti-piracy bills were in the same moral league as the torturers at Abu Ghraib.
  • But before we celebrate this “populist” victory, it’s worth remembering that the defeat of SOPA and PIPA was also a victory for the enormously powerful tech industry, which almost always beats the far smaller creative businesses in legislative disputes. (Google alone generated more than $37 billion in 2011, more than double the revenue of all record companies, major and indie combined.)
  • One example of anti-SOPA rhetorical over-reach was a tendency by some to invent sinister motives for the sponsors. On his usually brilliant show The Young Turks, Uygur said that SOPA’s sponsors were “pushing for a monopoly for the MPAA and to kill their competition on the Internet.” This is untrue. They wanted to kill those entities that steal their movies and make money off them, either directly or indirectly. There really is a difference
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • that stopped allowing children to put up their own drawings of characters like Mickey Mouse because of fear of copyright lawsuits. Examples such as this, or of a theoretical risk of parents being charged for the right to have kids sing “Happy Birthday”, are demagogic. The underlying issue is scale. There is a profound moral difference between loaning a friend a book and posting, without permission, the content of bestsellers for commercial gain—and people and legislators ought to take that distinction into account.
  • since iTunes and Amazon and are surviving, Napster’s original model was legally killed and Kim Dotcom was apprehended, no new laws are needed. The status quo may be what we end up with, but that doesn’t make it inevitable or right. Human beings have created the piracy problem and although, like any kind of crime, society can’t eliminate it entirely, we can decide whether or not to seriously try.  
  • What is good for Google and Facebook is not always going to be what’s best for the 99 percent. (And of course Microsoft and Apple et al. are extremely aggressive when it comes to protecting their intellectual property rights).
  • on the content of some of the Kool-Aid that has recently been served and help swing the pendulum back, if only a little, in a direction in which intellectual property can be nourished. Otherwise, we will be complicit in accelerating the trend of the last decade, in which those who write code get richly rewarded, while those who write the music, poetry, drama and journalism that are being encoded have to get day jobs.
  • To be sure, the legislators who crafted the ill-fated bills and the film industry lobbyists who supported them have little to be proud of.
  • In a widely viewed anti-SOPA/PIPA speech on Ted.com, Internet philosopher Clay Shirky similarly attributed dark motives to the studios. The targets are not Google and Yahoo
  • If he means a friend sharing Marianne Faithfull’s version of “Visions of Johanna” with me on Facebook, then the accusation is absurd.
  • ek in his 25,000-square-foot compound surrounded by a fleet of Merced
nensic

Under the regime of precarity: bring your own device | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time.
  • At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time. This explains the fierce struggle going on among key market players.
  • Today large communities use devices like smartphones, tablets, e-readers and ultrabooks to navigate this new ecosystem.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • The growing dynamic of mobile internet, today accounting for 12% of all internet traffic,[ii] signals a new ecosystem where living bodies, machines, networks, code, data, territory and time interact.
  • as a way of consolidating their strictly neoliberal economic policy.
  • The hundreds of thousands of apps, available in just a few years, originate from the intersection of two factors:
  • The desire and necessity to have simple, functional and fast devices able to do specific tasks on the go.
  • the operative skills to develop apps for popular mobile platforms such as Iphone Operating System (IOS) or Google Android. 
  • Apps galore
  • Apple likes to play on the ambiguity in a form of propaganda that exalts the “revolutionary” spirit of technological innovation
  • The first iPhone, in 2007, inaugurated the new phase of the cognitive era, just as the PC heralded the decline of the industrial phase. Five years later, Apple no longer has a monopoly: hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets are sold every year and the total number of these active devices will be soon 2 billion. It took the PC thirty years to reach this level of diffusion.
  • War over the immaterial
  • Often these machines play opposite functions: as a tool to create new forms of horizontal communication and social interaction or as bait for a capillary exploitation.
  • A political analysis of mobile devices
  • The PC became a liberating tool for social cooperation in the workplace of a booming third-sector.
  • In the following phase, the spread of the first mobile devices – cellphones and laptops – provided an initial impulse for a blurring of life and work, imposing with mobile calls, emails or SMS a new type of real-time processing, regulating the rhythms of life
  • In the new biohypermedia environment, the key change lies in the combination of miniaturizing and mobilizing these pieces of equipment, allowing them to always be within the body’s reach in any context.
  • they augment physical reality[ix] with every kind of information – commercial, cultural, ecological – and act more and more as biomedical sets for the control, correction and support of our vital biological functions.
  • The PC has a central function as the medium for linguistic and written processes - its typical uses often tied to the logical concatenation of thought and the priority management of sequences over time.
  • But mobile devices concentrate complex perception of stimuli in terms of spatial organization and intervene in emotional responses. PC work in this way occupies our left hemisphere, while the continual interactions of a smartphone engage the right hemisphere.
  • In contemporary neoliberalism, these devices become an essential means of rent and profit, through a fine capture of what we generate by living with them and using them. At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time.
  • Marketing and communication campaigns portray these devices as commodity fetishes, characterizing a new phase of capitalism often described as cognitive because based on knowledge.
  • In the sphere of multinational ICT[x] Corporations a war is being waged over the design and deployment of immaterial enclosures
  • Even though all this is based on freeware and open source, they trick us into believing that the iPhone 5, Windows 8 or Jellybean[xi] are miracles that descend from Mount Olympus and for which we should be grateful as to the gods.
  • Unlike automobiles or, to a lesser degree, PCs, the use value of new mobile devices is no longer determined merely by the initial design but can be moulded by the final user.
  • The innumerable websites, blogs and forums in every language globally blooming and growing are a workshop for worldwide exchange where the digital means are developed that could be used to withdraw workers both from precarity and  from total submission to a life of labour.  
  • Microsoft is no less defensive of its monopoly: with Intel and other accomplices, they introduced a new firmware to boot Windows 8 PCs that, substituting the old BIOS,[xv] makes it impossible or very complicated to install Linux or other operating systems on new laptops.
  • Despite hesitations related to “security” problems, today companies allow or even oblige people to use their own devices
  • So, if you were one of those many who found the latest tablet, smartphone or hybrid touch device under the tree this year, be aware that you won’t be the only one pleased: under the regime of precarity, bring your own device if you want to survive. 
  •  
    "Bring your own device (BYOD) is a business policy whereby employees bring personally owned mobile devices to their place of work and use them to access privileged company resources such as email, file servers and databases as well as their personal applications and data."
nikasvajncer

Kdaj hitri internet tudi v Sloveniji | MLADINA.si - 1 views

  • Kakšna so prihodnja pota interneta? Nedvomno zelo hitra, saj najnovejše tehnologije omogočajo že enormne hitrosti prenosa podatkov po internetnih hrbtiščih. Najnovejša transevropska povezava GEANT, ki so jo z 80 milijoni evrov požegnali tudi evropski komisarji, v katero bo vključeno 30 evropskih držav (med njimi tudi Slovenija), bo delovala s hitrostjo 2,5 Gbit/s, v prihodnosti pa naj bi jo nadgradili kar na 100 Gbit/s.
  • Onstran luže sicer še vedno prevladujejo kabelski modemi, predvsem zaradi ugodne cene neomejenega dostopa do interneta, ki znaša okoli 40 dolarjev na mesec. Toda že v nekaj letih naj bi ADSL postavil kabelske modeme na stranski tir. Toda v Evropi se ga telekomi bolj ali manj otepajo, saj naj bi precej omajal njihove mogočne položaje, ki so jih pridobili z dolgoletnim monopolom.
  • "Kabelski modemi imajo problem, da če se nabere preveč ljudi, začenjajo padati hitrosti. Uporabniki si delijo frekvenčni pas po istem sistemu kot lokalne mreže Ethernet. Iz tega pasu, ki ga lahko da kabel, se izreže neki frekvenčen pas in nanj so vezani "radijski" modemi. Vsi naenkrat, in lahko pride do konfliktov. Hitrosti pri preveliki obremenitvi začnejo padati in ta zadeva ni neomejena. V primerjavi z ISDN pa je zadeva cenovno še precej ugodna, saj si priključen 24 ur dnevno,"
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