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Low Yunying

China's Green Dam Internet Filter - 6 views

Article: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/06/30/china.green.dam/index.html Summary: China has passed a mandate requiring all personal computers sold in the country to be accompanied by a contro...

China pornography filter

started by Low Yunying on 02 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Chen Guo Lim

Anti plagiarism is (un)ethical - 20 views

I think there is a need to investigate the motivation behind using these softwares. Suppose a writer has recently come across an article that seemingly have plagiarised, thus using the software to ...

Turnitin plagiarism

started by Weiye Loh on 21 Aug 09 4 follow-ups, last by Chen Guo Lim on 26 Aug 09
Reseena Abdullah

China Requires Censorship Software on New PCs - 3 views

The article talks about the software that the Chinese government has legislated to be installed on all PCs from July 1st onwards. The software is designed to "filter out pornography and other 'unhe...

censorship surveillance

started by Reseena Abdullah on 07 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Weiman Kow

Think you're a good employee? Office snooping software can tell - CNN.com - 1 views

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

office surveillance

shared by Weiman Kow on 27 Sep 09 - Cached
  • More than that, Killock believes using such software can have a negative psychological impact on a workplace. "It is a powerful signal that you do not fully trust the people you are paying or perhaps don't invest the time and care to properly manage them," he says.
    • Weiman Kow
      Weiman Kow on 27 Sep 09
       
      the presentation group brought up this point.. =)
  • Ultimately, true privacy only begins outside the workplace -- and the law supports that. In the United States, at least all email and other electronic content created on the employer's equipment belongs to the employer, not the employee. Slackers would do well to remember that.
  • But Charnock is keen to stress Cataphora isn't only about bosses spying on their team -- it works both ways.
    • Weiman Kow
      Weiman Kow on 27 Sep 09
       
      Is that really true?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Our software builds a multi-dimensional model of normal behavior,
  • the emails they send, the calls they make and the documents they write.
  • [We can tell] who is really being consulted by other employees, and on which topics; who is really making decisions
  • The software began as a tool to assist lawyers with the huge corporate databases often subpoenaed as evidence in trials but has now moved into human resources.
  • We do have extensive filters to try to weed out people who are highly productive in areas such as sports banter and knowledge of local bars,
  • Weiman Kow on 27 Sep 09
     
    Just a link on advances in extensive office surveillance - this program is supposed to "separate the good employees from the bad by analyzing workers 'electronic footprints' -- the emails they send, the calls they make and the documents they write"
Meenatchi

China jails Windows software pirates - 8 views

Case Summary: The article is about an intellectual property infringement that took place in China. A court in Eastern China has sentenced four people to up to three-and-a-half years in prison for ...

Intellectual property rights software piracy

started by Meenatchi on 25 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

McKinsey & Company - Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business tren... - 0 views

www.mckinsey.com/...ten_of_the_best.asp

Cloud Computing Crowd-Sourcing Data

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • 1. Distributed cocreation moves into the mainstreamIn the past few years, the ability to organise communities of Web participants to develop, market, and support products and services has moved from the margins of business practice to the mainstream. Wikipedia and a handful of open-source software developers were the pioneers. But in signs of the steady march forward, 70 per cent of the executives we recently surveyed said that their companies regularly created value through Web communities. Similarly, more than 68m bloggers post reviews and recommendations about products and services.
  • for every success in tapping communities to create value, there are still many failures. Some companies neglect the up-front research needed to identify potential participants who have the right skill sets and will be motivated to participate over the longer term. Since cocreation is a two-way process, companies must also provide feedback to stimulate continuing participation and commitment. Getting incentives right is important as well: cocreators often value reputation more than money. Finally, an organisation must gain a high level of trust within a Web community to earn the engagement of top participants.
  • 2. Making the network the organisation In earlier research, we noted that the Web was starting to force open the boundaries of organisations, allowing nonemployees to offer their expertise in novel ways. We called this phenomenon "tapping into a world of talent." Now many companies are pushing substantially beyond that starting point, building and managing flexible networks that extend across internal and often even external borders. The recession underscored the value of such flexibility in managing volatility. We believe that the more porous, networked organisations of the future will need to organise work around critical tasks rather than molding it to constraints imposed by corporate structures.
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  • 3. Collaboration at scale Across many economies, the number of people who undertake knowledge work has grown much more quickly than the number of production or transactions workers. Knowledge workers typically are paid more than others, so increasing their productivity is critical. As a result, there is broad interest in collaboration technologies that promise to improve these workers' efficiency and effectiveness. While the body of knowledge around the best use of such technologies is still developing, a number of companies have conducted experiments, as we see in the rapid growth rates of video and Web conferencing, expected to top 20 per cent annually during the next few years.
  • 4. The growing ‘Internet of Things' The adoption of RFID (radio-frequency identification) and related technologies was the basis of a trend we first recognised as "expanding the frontiers of automation." But these methods are rudimentary compared with what emerges when assets themselves become elements of an information system, with the ability to capture, compute, communicate, and collaborate around information—something that has come to be known as the "Internet of Things." Embedded with sensors, actuators, and communications capabilities, such objects will soon be able to absorb and transmit information on a massive scale and, in some cases, to adapt and react to changes in the environment automatically. These "smart" assets can make processes more efficient, give products new capabilities, and spark novel business models. Auto insurers in Europe and the United States are testing these waters with offers to install sensors in customers' vehicles. The result is new pricing models that base charges for risk on driving behavior rather than on a driver's demographic characteristics. Luxury-auto manufacturers are equipping vehicles with networked sensors that can automatically take evasive action when accidents are about to happen. In medicine, sensors embedded in or worn by patients continuously report changes in health conditions to physicians, who can adjust treatments when necessary. Sensors in manufacturing lines for products as diverse as computer chips and pulp and paper take detailed readings on process conditions and automatically make adjustments to reduce waste, downtime, and costly human interventions.
  • 5. Experimentation and big data Could the enterprise become a full-time laboratory? What if you could analyse every transaction, capture insights from every customer interaction, and didn't have to wait for months to get data from the field? What if…? Data are flooding in at rates never seen before—doubling every 18 months—as a result of greater access to customer data from public, proprietary, and purchased sources, as well as new information gathered from Web communities and newly deployed smart assets. These trends are broadly known as "big data." Technology for capturing and analysing information is widely available at ever-lower price points. But many companies are taking data use to new levels, using IT to support rigorous, constant business experimentation that guides decisions and to test new products, business models, and innovations in customer experience. In some cases, the new approaches help companies make decisions in real time. This trend has the potential to drive a radical transformation in research, innovation, and marketing.
  • Using experimentation and big data as essential components of management decision making requires new capabilities, as well as organisational and cultural change. Most companies are far from accessing all the available data. Some haven't even mastered the technologies needed to capture and analyse the valuable information they can access. More commonly, they don't have the right talent and processes to design experiments and extract business value from big data, which require changes in the way many executives now make decisions: trusting instincts and experience over experimentation and rigorous analysis. To get managers at all echelons to accept the value of experimentation, senior leaders must buy into a "test and learn" mind-set and then serve as role models for their teams.
  • 6. Wiring for a sustainable world Even as regulatory frameworks continue to evolve, environmental stewardship and sustainability clearly are C-level agenda topics. What's more, sustainability is fast becoming an important corporate-performance metric—one that stakeholders, outside influencers, and even financial markets have begun to track. Information technology plays a dual role in this debate: it is both a significant source of environmental emissions and a key enabler of many strategies to mitigate environmental damage. At present, information technology's share of the world's environmental footprint is growing because of the ever-increasing demand for IT capacity and services. Electricity produced to power the world's data centers generates greenhouse gases on the scale of countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands, and these emissions could increase fourfold by 2020. McKinsey research has shown, however, that the use of IT in areas such as smart power grids, efficient buildings, and better logistics planning could eliminate five times the carbon emissions that the IT industry produces.
  • 7. Imagining anything as a service Technology now enables companies to monitor, measure, customise, and bill for asset use at a much more fine-grained level than ever before. Asset owners can therefore create services around what have traditionally been sold as products. Business-to-business (B2B) customers like these service offerings because they allow companies to purchase units of a service and to account for them as a variable cost rather than undertake large capital investments. Consumers also like this "paying only for what you use" model, which helps them avoid large expenditures, as well as the hassles of buying and maintaining a product.
  • In the IT industry, the growth of "cloud computing" (accessing computer resources provided through networks rather than running software or storing data on a local computer) exemplifies this shift. Consumer acceptance of Web-based cloud services for everything from e-mail to video is of course becoming universal, and companies are following suit. Software as a service (SaaS), which enables organisations to access services such as customer relationship management, is growing at a 17 per cent annual rate. The biotechnology company Genentech, for example, uses Google Apps for e-mail and to create documents and spreadsheets, bypassing capital investments in servers and software licenses. This development has created a wave of computing capabilities delivered as a service, including infrastructure, platform, applications, and content. And vendors are competing, with innovation and new business models, to match the needs of different customers.
  • 8. The age of the multisided business model Multisided business models create value through interactions among multiple players rather than traditional one-on-one transactions or information exchanges. In the media industry, advertising is a classic example of how these models work. Newspapers, magasines, and television stations offer content to their audiences while generating a significant portion of their revenues from third parties: advertisers. Other revenue, often through subscriptions, comes directly from consumers. More recently, this advertising-supported model has proliferated on the Internet, underwriting Web content sites, as well as services such as search and e-mail (see trend number seven, "Imagining anything as a service," earlier in this article). It is now spreading to new markets, such as enterprise software: Spiceworks offers IT-management applications to 950,000 users at no cost, while it collects advertising from B2B companies that want access to IT professionals.
  • 9. Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid The adoption of technology is a global phenomenon, and the intensity of its usage is particularly impressive in emerging markets. Our research has shown that disruptive business models arise when technology combines with extreme market conditions, such as customer demand for very low price points, poor infrastructure, hard-to-access suppliers, and low cost curves for talent. With an economic recovery beginning to take hold in some parts of the world, high rates of growth have resumed in many developing nations, and we're seeing companies built around the new models emerging as global players. Many multinationals, meanwhile, are only starting to think about developing markets as wellsprings of technology-enabled innovation rather than as traditional manufacturing hubs.
  • 10. Producing public good on the grid The role of governments in shaping global economic policy will expand in coming years. Technology will be an important factor in this evolution by facilitating the creation of new types of public goods while helping to manage them more effectively. This last trend is broad in scope and draws upon many of the other trends described above.
Weiye Loh

Android software piracy rampant despite Google's efforts to curb - Computerworld - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...spite_Google_s_efforts_to_curb

Piracy Open Source Android

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Some have argued that piracy is rampant in those countries where the online Android Market is not yet available. But a recent KeyesLabs research project suggests that may not be true. KeyesLabs created a rough methodology to track total downloads of its apps, determine which ones were pirated, and the location of the end users. The results were posted in August, along with a “heat map” showing pirate activity. 
  • In July 2010, Google announced the Google Licensing Service, available via Android Market. Applications can include the new License Verification Library (LVL). “At run time, with the inclusion of a set of libraries provided by us, your application can query the Android Market licensing server to determine the license status of your users,” according to a blog post by Android engineer Eric Chu. “It returns information on whether your users are authorized to use the app based on stored sales records.”
  • Justin Case, at the Android Police Web site, dissected the LVL. “A minor patch to an application employing this official, Google-recommended protection system will render it completely worthless,” he concluded.
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  • In response, Google has promised continued improvements and outlined a multipronged strategy around the new licensing service to make piracy much harder. “A determined attacker who’s willing to disassemble and reassemble code can eventually hack around the service,” acknowledged Android engineer Trevor Johns in a recent blog post.  But developers can make their work much harder by combining a cluster of techniques, he counsels: obfuscating code, modifying the licensing library to protect against common cracking techniques, designing the app to be tamper-resistant, and offloading license validation to a trusted server.
  • Gareau isn’t quite as convinced of the benefits of code obfuscation, though he does make use of it. He’s taken several other steps to protect his software work. One is providing a free trial version, which allows only a limited amount of data but is otherwise fully-featured. The idea: Let customers prove that the app will do everything they want, and they may be more willing to pay for it. He also provides a way to detect whether the app has been tampered with, for example, by removing the licensing checks. If yes, the app can be structured to stop working or behave erratically.
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Sep 10
     
    Android software piracy rampant despite Google's efforts to curb
Weiye Loh

Android software piracy rampant despite Google's efforts to curb - Computerworld - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...spite_Google_s_efforts_to_curb

Priacy Open Source Android

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • lot of Android applications are being pirated. The openness of the platform has made it easy for people to steal applications without paying for them.
  • growing popularity of the OS with enterprise users and developers is creating greater urgency, as pirated code robs developers of revenue and the incentive to remain committed Android. (See Android Set to Rule Over Apple and RIM Operating Systems.)
  • Network World's Android Angle blogger, Mark Murphy, bluntly noted a year ago that “Right now, it is very straightforward — if you publish on Android Market, your application will be made available for free download outside of the Market.” He added, “This is part and parcel of having an open environment like Android.” The then-current Android Market copy protection mechanisms “have been demonstrated to be ineffective.”
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  • What’s especially galling to professional developers is watching sales plunge as piracy rates soar. “The current issue we face with Android is rampant piracy, and we’re working to provide hacking counter measures, a difficult task,” says Jean Gareau, founder of VidaOne, an Austin, Texas, software company that specializes in health and fitness applications for a variety of operating systems.
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Sep 10
     
    Android software piracy rampant despite Google's efforts to curb
Weiye Loh

Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...e-story-of-the-hbgary-hack.ars

hacktivism Anonymous Wikileaks Internet Computer Security

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • It has been an embarrassing week for security firm HBGary and its HBGary Federal offshoot. HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr thought he had unmasked the hacker hordes of Anonymous and was preparing to name and shame those responsible for co-ordinating the group's actions, including the denial-of-service attacks that hit MasterCard, Visa, and other perceived enemies of WikiLeaks late last year.
  • When Barr told one of those he believed to be an Anonymous ringleader about his forthcoming exposé, the Anonymous response was swift and humiliating. HBGary's servers were broken into, its e-mails pillaged and published to the world, its data destroyed, and its website defaced. As an added bonus, a second site owned and operated by Greg Hoglund, owner of HBGary, was taken offline and the user registration database published.
  • HBGary and HBGary Federal position themselves as experts in computer security. The companies offer both software and services to both the public and private sectors. On the software side, HBGary has a range of computer forensics and malware analysis tools to enable the detection, isolation, and analysis of worms, viruses, and trojans. On the services side, it offers expertise in implementing intrusion detection systems and secure networking, and performs vulnerability assessment and penetration testing of systems and software. A variety of three letter agencies, including the NSA, appeared to be in regular contact with the HBGary companies, as did Interpol, and HBGary also worked with well-known security firm McAfee. At one time, even Apple expressed an interest in the company's products or services.
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  • One might think that such an esteemed organization would prove an insurmountable challenge for a bunch of disaffected kids to hack. World-renowned, government-recognized experts against Anonymous? HBGary should be able to take their efforts in stride. Unfortunately for HBGary, neither the characterization of Anonymous nor the assumption of competence on the security company's part are accurate, as the story of how HBGary was hacked will make clear. Anonymous is a diverse bunch: though they tend to be younger rather than older, their age group spans decades. Some may still be in school, but many others are gainfully employed office-workers, software developers, or IT support technicians, among other things. With that diversity in age and experience comes a diversity of expertise and ability.
Weiye Loh

Eben Moglen Is Reshaping Internet With a Freedom Box - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...16about.html

Internet Net Neutrality Decentralized Crowd-Sourcing Cloud Computing

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke in Washington about the Internet and human liberty, a Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers.
  • The list begins with “cheap, small, low-power plug servers,” Mr. Moglen said. “A small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low-power chip. You plug it into the wall and forget about it.”
  • Almost anyone could have one of these tiny servers, which are now produced for limited purposes but could be adapted to a full range of Internet applications, he said. “They will get very cheap, very quick,” Mr. Moglen said. “They’re $99; they will go to $69. Once everyone is getting them, they will cost $29.”
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  • The missing ingredients are software packages, which are available at no cost but have to be made easy to use. “You would have a whole system with privacy and security built in for the civil world we are living in,” he said. “It stores everything you care about.” Put free software into the little plug server in the wall, and you would have a Freedom Box that would decentralize information and power, Mr. Moglen said. This month, he created the Freedom Box Foundation to organize the software.
  • In the first days of the personal computer era, many scoffed at the idea that free software could have an important place in the modern world. Today, it is the digital genome for millions of phones, printers, cameras, MP3 players, televisions, the Pentagon, the New York Stock Exchange and the computers that underpin Google’s empire.
  • Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.”
  • investors were said to have put a value of about $50 billion on Facebook, the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg. If revolutions for freedom rest on the shoulders of Facebook, Mr. Moglen said, the revolutionaries will have to count on individuals who have huge stakes in keeping the powerful happy.
  • “It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg, to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse,” Mr. Moglen said. By contrast, with tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers, there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading “subversive” material.
Weiye Loh

FreedomBox Foundation - 0 views

www.freedomboxfoundation.org

Internet Net Neutrality Capitalism Cloud Computing

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Freedom Box is the name we give to a personal server running a free software operating system, with free applications designed to create and preserve personal privacy. Freedom Box software is particularly tailored to run in "plug servers," which are compact computers that are no larger than power adapters for electronic appliances. Located in people's homes or offices such inexpensive servers can provide privacy in normal life, and safe communications for people seeking to preserve their freedom in oppressive regimes.
  • Because social networking and digital communications technologies are now critical to people fighting to make freedom in their societies or simply trying to preserve their privacy where the Web and other parts of the Net are intensively surveilled by profit-seekers and government agencies. Because smartphones, mobile tablets, and other common forms of consumer electronics are being built as "platforms" to control their users and monitor their activity. Freedom Box exists to counter these unfree "platform" technologies that threaten political freedom. Freedom Box exists to provide people with privacy-respecting technology alternatives in normal times, and to offer ways to collaborate safely and securely with others in building social networks of protest, demonstration, and mobilization for political change in the not-so-normal times. Freedom Box software is built to run on hardware that already exists, and will soon become much more widely available and much more inexpensive. "Plug servers" and other compact devices are going to become ubiquitous in the next few years, serving as "media centers," "communications centers," "wireless routers," and many other familiar and not-so-familiar roles in office and home. Freedom Box software images will turn all sorts of such devices into privacy appliances. Taken together, these appliances will afford people around the world options for communicating, publishing, and collaborating that will resist state intervention or disruption. People owning these appliances will be able to restore anonymity in the Net, despite efforts of despotic regimes to keep track of who reads what and who communicates with whom. For a list of specific Freedom Box capabilities, check out our Goals page.
Weiye Loh

Android phones record user-locations according to research | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...d-phones-record-user-locations

Location Android Apple Privacy

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • The discovery that Android devices - which are quickly becoming the best-selling products in the smartphone space - also collect location data indicates how essential such information has become to their effective operation. "Location services", which can help place a user on a map, are increasingly seen as important for providing enhanced services including advertising - which forms the basis of Google's business.
  • Smartphones running Google's Android software collect data about the user's movements in almost exactly the same way as the iPhone, according to an examination of files they contain. The discovery, made by a Swedish researcher, comes as the Democratic senator Al Franken has written to Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs demanding to know why iPhones keep a secret file recording the location of their users as they move around, as the Guardian revealed this week.
  • Magnus Eriksson, a Swedish programmer, has shown that Android phones – now the bestselling smartphones – do the same, though for a shorter period. According to files discovered by Android devices keep a record of the locations and unique IDs of the last 50 mobile masts that it has communicated with, and the last 200 Wi-Fi networks that it has "seen". These are overwritten, oldest first, when the relevant list is full. It is not yet known whether the lists are sent to Google. That differs from Apple, where the data is stored for up to a year.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In addition, the file is not easily accessible to users: it requires some computer skills to extract the data. By contrast, the Apple file is easily extracted directly from the computer or phone.
  • Senator Franken has asked Jobs to explain the purpose and extent of the iPhone's tracking. "The existence of this information - stored in an unencrypted format - raises serious privacy concerns," Franken writes in his letter to Jobs. "Anyone who gains access to this single file could likely determine the location of a user's home, the businesses he frequents, the doctors he visits, the schools his children attend, and the trips he has taken - over the past months or even a year."
  • Franken points out that a stolen or lost iPhone or iPad could be used to map out its owner's precise movements "for months at a time" and that it is not limited by age, meaning that it could track the movements of users who are under 13
  • security researcher, Alex Levinson, says that he discovered the file inside the iPhone last year, and that it has been used in the US by the police in a number of cases. He says that its purpose is simply to help the phone determine its location, and that he has seen no evidence that it is sent back to Apple. However documents lodged by Apple with the US Congress suggest that it does use the data if the user agrees to give the company "diagnostic information" from their iPhone or iPad.
Weiye Loh

Daily Kos: UPDATED: The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All - 0 views

www.dailykos.com/...ail-That-Should-Concern-Us-All

Persona Software Fake Online New Media Social Media Ethics Simulation

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • HB Gary people are talking about creating "personas", what we would call sockpuppets. This is not new. PR firms have been using fake "people" to promote products and other things for a while now, both online and even in bars and coffee houses.
  • But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA -  whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations,  journalists, and progressive bloggers,  a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet. According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.
  • Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content.  It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona.  For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona.  This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • all of this is for the purposes of infiltration, data mining, and (here's the one that really worries me) ganging up on bloggers, commenters  and otherwise "real" people to smear enemies and distort the truth.
  • CEO of HB Gary's Federal subsidiary, to several of his colleagues to present to clients: To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter,‭ ‬blogs,‭ ‬forums,‭ ‬buzz,‭ ‬and myspace under created names that fit the profile‭ (‬satellitejockey,‭ ‬hack3rman,‭ ‬etc‭)‬.‭  ‬These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds,‭ ‬retweets,‭ ‬and linking together social media commenting between platforms.‭  ‬With a pool of these accounts to choose from,‭ ‬once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name,‭ ‬lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected‭ ‬#‭ ‬of previously created social media accounts,‭ ‬automatically pre-aging the real accounts.
  • one of the team spells out how automation can work so one person can be many personas: Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona.  In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags.  In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example.  There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas
  • It goes far beyond the mere ability for a government stooge, corporation or PR firm to hire people to post on sites like this one. They are talking about creating  the illusion of consensus. And consensus is a powerful persuader. What has more effect, one guy saying BP is not at fault? Or 20 people saying it? For the weak minded, the number can make all the difference.
  • UPDATE: From another email, I found a  government solicitation for this "Persona Management Software". This confirms that in fact, the US Gov. is attempting to use this kind of technology. But it appears from the solicitation it is contracted for use in foreign theaters like Afghanistan and Iraq. I can't imagine why this is posted on an open site. And whenthis was discovered by a couple of HB Gary staffers, they weren't too happy about it either:
Weiye Loh

Report: Piracy a "global pricing problem" with only one solution - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...lem-with-only-one-solution.ars

Piracy Pricing Capitalism Globalization Income Inequality

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Over the last three years, 35 researchers contributed to the Media Piracy Project, released last week by the Social Science Research Council. Their mission was to examine media piracy in emerging economies, which account for most of the world's population, and to find out just how and why piracy operates in places like Russia, Mexico, and India.
  • Their conclusion is not that citizens of such piratical societies are somehow morally deficient or opposed to paying for content. Instead, they write that “high prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. If piracy is ubiquitous in most parts of the world, it is because these conditions are ubiquitous.”
  • When legitimate CDs, DVDs, and computer software are five to ten times higher (relative to local incomes) than they are in the US and Europe, simply ratcheting up copyright enforcement won't do enough to fix the problem. In the view of the report's authors, the only real solution is the creation of local companies that “actively compete on price and services for local customers” as they sell movies, music, and more.
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  • Some markets have local firms that compete on price to offer legitimate content (think the US, which has companies like Hulu, Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft that compete to offer legal video content). But the authors conclude that, in most of the world, legitimate copyrighted goods are only distributed by huge multinational corporations whose dominant goals are not to service a large part of local markets but to “protect the pricing structure in the high-income countries that generate most of their profits.”
  • This might increase profits globally, but it has led to disaster in many developing economies, where piracy may run north of 90 percent. Given access to cheap digital tools, but charged terrific amounts of money for legitimate versions of content, users choose piracy.
  • In Russia, for instance, researchers noted that legal versions of the film The Dark Knight went for $15. That price, akin to what a US buyer would pay, might sound reasonable until you realize that Russians make less money in a year than US workers. As a percentage of their wages, that $15 price is actually equivalent to a US consumer dropping $75 on the film. Pirate versions can be had for one-third the price.
  • Simple crackdowns on pirate behavior won't work in the absence of pricing and other reforms, say the report's authors (who also note that even "developed" economies routinely pirate TV shows and movies that are not made legally available to them for days, weeks, or months after they originally appear elsewhere).
  • The "strong moralization of the debate” makes it difficult to discuss issues beyond enforcement, however, and the authors slam the content companies for lacking any credible "endgame" to their constant requests for more civil and police powers in the War on Piracy.
  • piracy is a “signal of unmet consumer demand.
  • Our studies raise concerns that it may be a long time before such accommodations to reality reach the international policy arena. Hardline enforcement positions may be futile at stemming the tide of piracy, but the United States bears few of the costs of such efforts, and US companies reap most of the modest benefits. This is a recipe for continued US pressure on developing countries, very possibly long after media business models in the United States and other high-income countries have changed.
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Mar 11
     
    A major new report from a consortium of academic researchers concludes that media piracy can't be stopped through "three strikes" Internet disconnections, Web censorship, more police powers, higher statutory damages, or tougher criminal penalties. That's because the piracy of movies, music, video games, and software is "better described as a global pricing problem." And the only way to solve it is by changing the price.
Weiye Loh

Red-Wine Researcher Charged With 'Photoshop' Fraud - 0 views

www.medscape.com/...756865

Academic Research Wine Alcohol Photoshop

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 12
     
    A University of Connecticut researcher known for touting the health benefits of red wine is guilty of 145 counts of fabricating and falsifying data with image-editing software, according to a 3-year university investigation made public Wednesday. The researcher, Dipak K. Das, PhD, is a director of the university's Cardiovascular Research Center (CRC) and a professor in the Department of Surgery. The university stated in a press release that it has frozen all externally funded research in Dr. Das's lab and turned down $890,000 in federal research grants awarded to him. The process to dismiss Dr. Das from the university is already underway, the university added.
Jiamin Lin

Technological Freedom - 4 views

http://media.www.csucauldron.com/media/storage/paper516/news/2009/09/06/TheMeltingPot/Technological.Freedom-3759993.shtml Digital Rights Management (DRM) or should it be called "Digital Rights Mis...

started by Jiamin Lin on 16 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Jody Poh

Online data privacy - 12 views

I think another question has to be brought up: Is the information meant to be public or private? If the information is public, then users should know they are risking identity theft by putting in...

privacy

started by lee weiting on 06 Sep 09 1 follow-up, last by Jody Poh on 06 Sep 09
Weiye Loh

Does patent/ copyright stifle or promote innovation? - 6 views

From a Critical Ethic perspective, Who do patents and copyrights protect? What kind of ideologies underly such a policy? I would argue that it is the capitalist ideologies, individualist ideolo...

MS Word patent copyright

started by Weiye Loh on 20 Aug 09 1 follow-up, last by Weiye Loh on 20 Aug 09
Weiye Loh

Cancer resembles life 1 billion years ago, say astrobiologists - microbiology, genomics... - 0 views

www.lifescientist.com.au/..._years_ago_say_astrobiologists

Cancer Evolution Life

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • astrobiologists, working with oncologists in the US, have suggested that cancer resembles ancient forms of life that flourished between 600 million and 1 billion years ago.
  • Read more about what this discovery means for cancer research.
  • The genes that controlled the behaviour of these early multicellular organisms still reside within our own cells, managed by more recent genes that keep them in check.It's when these newer controlling genes fail that the older mechanisms take over, and the cell reverts to its earlier behaviours and grows out of control.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The new theory, published in the journal Physical Biology, has been put forward by two leading figures in the world of cosmology and astrobiology: Paul Davies, director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Arizona State University; and Charles Lineweaver, from the Australian National University.
  • According to Lineweaver, this suggests that cancer is an atavism, or an evolutionary throwback.
  • In the paper, they suggest that a close look at cancer shows similarities with early forms of multicellular life.
  • “Unlike bacteria and viruses, cancer has not developed the capacity to evolve into new forms. In fact, cancer is better understood as the reversion of cells to the way they behaved a little over one billion years ago, when humans were nothing more than loose-knit colonies of only partially differentiated cells. “We think that the tumours that develop in cancer patients today take the same form as these simple cellular structures did more than a billion years ago,” he said.
  • One piece of evidence to support this theory is that cancers appear in virtually all metazoans, with the notable exception of the bizarre naked mole rat."This quasi-ubiquity suggests that the mechanisms of cancer are deep-rooted in evolutionary history, a conjecture that receives support from both paleontology and genetics," they write.
  • the genes that controlled this early multi-cellular form of life are like a computer operating system's 'safe mode', and when there are failures or mutations in the more recent genes that manage the way cells specialise and interact to form the complex life of today, then the earlier level of programming takes over.
  • Their notion is in contrast to a prevailing theory that cancer cells are 'rogue' cells that evolve rapidly within the body, overcoming the normal slew of cellular defences.
  • However, Davies and Lineweaver point out that cancer cells are highly cooperative with each other, if competing with the host's cells. This suggests a pre-existing complexity that is reminiscent of early multicellular life.
  • cancers' manifold survival mechanisms are predictable, and unlikely to emerge spontaneously through evolution within each individual in such a consistent way.
  • The good news is that this means combating cancer is not necessarily as complex as if the cancers were rogue cells evolving new and novel defence mechanisms within the body.Instead, because cancers fall back on the same evolved mechanisms that were used by early life, we can expect them to remain predictable, thus if they're susceptible to treatment, it's unlikely they'll evolve new ways to get around it.
  • If the atavism hypothesis is correct, there are new reasons for optimism," they write.
  • Weiye Loh on 17 Feb 11
     
    Feature: Inside DNA vaccines bioMD makes a bid for Andrew Forest's Allied Medical and Coridon Alexion acquires technology for MoCD therapy More > Most Popular Media Releases Cancer resembles life 1 billion years ago, say astrobiologists Feature: The challenge of a herpes simplex vaccine Feature: Proteomics power of pawpaw bioMD makes a bid for Andrew Forest's Allied Medical and Coridon Immune system boosting hormone might lead to HIV cure Biotechnology Directory Company Profile Check out this company's profile and more in the Biotechnology Directory! Biotechnology Directory Find company by name Find company by category Latest Jobs Senior Software Developer / Java Analyst Programm App Support Developer - Java / J2ee Solutions Consultant - VIC Technical Writer Product Manager (Fisheye/Crucible)   BUYING GUIDES Portable Multimedia Players Digital Cameras Digital Video Cameras LATEST PRODUCTS HTC Wildfire S Android phone (preview) Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GH2 digital camera HTC Desire S Android phone (preview) Qld ICT minister Robert Schwarten retires Movie piracy costs Aus economy $1.37 billion in 12 months: AFACT Wireless smartphones essential to e-health: CSIRO Aussie outsourcing CRM budgets to soar in 2011: Ovum Federal government to evaluate education revolution targets Business continuity planning - more than just disaster recovery Proving the value of IT - Part one 5 open source security projects to watch In-memory computing Information security in 2011 EFA shoots down 'unproductive' AFACT movie piracy study In Pictures: IBM hosts Galactic dinner Emerson Network Power launches new infrastructure solutions Consumers not smart enough for smartphones? Google one-ups Apple online media subscription service M2M offerings expand as more machines go online India cancels satellite spectrum deal after controversy Lenovo profit rises in Q3 on strong PC sales in China Taiwan firm to supply touch sensors to Samsung HP regains top position in India's PC market Copyright 20
Weiye Loh

Fake tweets by 'socialbot' fool hundreds of followers - tech - 23 March 2011 - New Scie... - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...ool-hundreds-of-followers.html

Social Media Spam Twitter Bots Persona

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Socialbots 2011, a competition designed to test whether bots can be used to alter the structure of a social network. Each team had a Twitter account controlled by a socialbot. Like regular human users, the bot could follow other Twitter users and send messages. Bots were rewarded for the number of followers they amassed and the number of responses their tweets generated.
  • The socialbots looked at tweets sent by members of a network of Twitter users who shared a particular interest, and then generated a suitable response. In one exchange a bot asks a human user which character they would like to bring back to life from their favourite book. When the human replies "Jesus" it responds: "Honestly? no fracking way. ahahahhaa."
  • When the experiment ended last month, a before-and-after comparison of connections within the target community showed that the bots were "able to heavily shape and distort the structure of the network", according to its organiser, Tim Hwang, founder of the startup company Robot, Robot and Hwang, based in San Francisco. Some members of the community who had not previously been directly connected were now linked, for example. Hwang has not revealed the identities of the entrants, or of the members of the 500-person Twitter network that the bots infiltrated.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The success suggests that socialbots could manipulate social networks on a larger scale, for good or ill. "We could use these bots in the future to encourage social participation or support for humanitarian causes," Hwang claims. He also acknowledges that there is a flip side, if bots were also used to inhibit activism.
  • The military may already be onto the idea. Officials at US Central Command (Centcom), which oversees military activities in the Middle East and central Asia, issued a request last June for an "online persona management service". The details of the request suggest that the military want to create and control 50 fictitious online identities who appear to be real people from Afghanistan and Iraq.
  • It is not clear, however, if any of the management of the fake identities would be delegated to software. A Centcom spokesperson told New Scientist that the contract supports "classified blogging activities on foreign language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US".
  • Hwang has ambitious plans for the next stage of the socialbot project: "We're going to survey and identify two sites of 5000-person unconnected Twitter communities, and over a six-to-12-month period use waves of bots to thread and rivet those clusters together into a directly connected social bridge between those two formerly independent groups," he wrote in a blog post on 3 March. "The bot-driven social 'scaffolding' will then be dropped away, completing the bridge, with swarms of bots being launched to maintain the superstructure as needed," he adds.
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