Translate this Blog

Traduisez , Übersetzen Sie, Traduca , Traduza , Traduzca , 翻訳しなさい , 번역하다 , 翻译 , يترجم

Friday, May 28, 2010

The World's Top 10 airlines announced at the 2010 World Airline Awards

Asiana Airlines won the prestige Airline of the Year award at the 2010 World Airline Awards, that took place in Hamburg. 

Asiana Airlines was named winner of the Airline of the Year 2010 title, ahead of Singapore Airlines (2nd) and Qatar Airways in 3rd place. 

Some 40 different airlines from around the world assembled to receive their accolades, which were handed out by Mr Edward Plaisted, Chairman of Skytrax. The award winners are selected by the airline industry's most important audience, it's customers. 


 


More than 17.9 million air travellers from over 100 different nationalities took part in the 10 month survey, between July 2009 and April 2010. The awards are respected and recognised around the world for being the only truly global, independent passenger survey of airline standards, and are known as "the Passenger's Choice". 

Commenting on the Airline of the Year 2010 award received by Asiana Airlines, Mr Plaisted said: "this is a fantastic achievement for Asiana Airlines to be named winner of this top Airline of the Year Award, and Asiana Airlines are clearly meeting and exceeding their customer's expectations. This award represents a true recognition of the front-line product and service that Asiana Airlines is delivering to it's customers, and the award slogan of 'The Passenger's Choice' underlines the fact that Asiana Airlines are succeeding in satisfying the hardest critics - their users." 

Asiana Airlines President and CEO, Mr Young-Doo Yoon, said : "We would like to express our most heartfelt appreciation to our customers who voted us for Skytrax 2010 Airline of the Year Award. Asiana Airlines is extremely honored to be recognized as the world's top airline by our customers and to be awarded our industry's highly esteemed accolade from Skytrax. To be the winner of the 2010 Airline of the Year Award is even more special and holds greater meaning, as it is 'The Passenger's Choice'." 


The final top 10 places in the Airline of the Year were: 

1.  Asiana Airlines
2.  Singapore Airlines
3.  Qatar Airways
4.  Cathay Pacific
5.  Air New Zealand
6.  Etihad Airways
7.  Qantas Airways
8.  Emirates
9.  Thai Airways
10. Malaysia Airlines



THE 2010 AWARDS SUMMARY IS LISTED BELOW: 

Airline of the Year
WINNER: Asiana Airlines 

Best Low-Cost Airline Worldwide
WINNER: Air Asia 

Most Improved Airline
WINNER: Garuda Indonesia 

Best Regional Airline
WINNER: Dragonair 

Best Leisure / Charter Airline
WINNER: Thomson Airways 

Best Cabin Staff
WINNER: Singapore Airlines 

Best Inflight Entertainment
WINNER: Emirates 

Best Airport Services
WINNER: Thai Airways 

Best Economy Class
WINNER: Malaysia Airlines 

Best Premium Economy Class
WINNER: Qantas 

Best Business Class
WINNER: Qatar Airways 

Best First Class
WINNER: Etihad Airways 

Best Airline : Transatlantic
WINNER: Virgin Atlantic 

Best Airline : Transpacific
WINNER: Cathay Pacific 

Best Airline : Africa
WINNER: South African Airways 

Best Airline : Asia
WINNER: Asiana Airlines 

Best Airline : Australia/Pacific
WINNER: Air New Zealand 

Best Airline : C America/Caribbean
WINNER: TACA Airlines 

Best Airline : China
WINNER: Hainan Airlines 

Best Airline : Eastern Europe
WINNER: Malev Hiungarian Airlines 

Best Airline : Europe
WINNER: Lufthansa 

Best Airline : India/Central Asia
WINNER: Kingfisher Airlines 

Best Airline : Middle East
WINNER: Qatar Airways 

Best Airline : North America
WINNER: Air Canada 

Best Airline : Northern Europe
WINNER: Finnair 

Best Airline : South America
WINNER: LAN Airlines 

Best Airline : South East Asia
WINNER: Singapore Airlines 

Best Airline : Southern Europe
WINNER: Turkish Airlines 

Best Airline : Western Europe
WINNER: Lufthansa 

Best Airline Alliance
WINNER: Oneworld Alliance 

Best Airline Lounge - Business Class
WINNER: Virgin Atlantic 

Best Airline Lounge - First Class
WINNER: Thai Airways 

Best Airline Seat - Business Class
WINNER: Singapore Airlines 

Best Airline Seat - Economy Class
WINNER: Kingfisher Airlines 

Best Airline Seat - First Class
WINNER: Etihad Airways 

Best Airline Seat - Premium Economy Class
WINNER: Qantas Airways 

Best Low-Cost Airline Africa
WINNER: Kulula 

Best Low-Cost Airline Asia
WINNER: Air Asia 

Best Low-Cost Airline Australia/Pacific
WINNER: Virgin Blue 

Best Low-Cost Airline Europe
WINNER: Air Berlin 

Best Low-Cost Airline India
WINNER: IndiGo 

Best Low-Cost Airline Middle East
WINNER: Air Arabia 

Best Low-Cost Airline North America
WINNER: Virgin America 

Best Low-Cost Airline South America
WINNER: GOL 

Best Onboard Catering - Business Class
WINNER: Qatar Airways 

Best Onboard Catering - Economy Class
WINNER: Turkish Airlines 

Best Onboard Catering - First Class
WINNER: Etihad Airways 

Staff Service Excellence Award - Africa
WINNER: South African Airways 

Staff Service Excellence Award - Asia
WINNER: Malaysia Airlines 

Staff Service Excellence Award - Australia/Pacific
WINNER: Air New Zealand 

Staff Service Excellence Award - C America/Caribbean
WINNER: TACA Airlines 

Staff Service Excellence Award - China
WINNER: Hainan Airlines 

Staff Service Excellence Award - Europe
WINNER: Swiss Int'l Airlines 

Staff Service Excellence Award - India/Central Asia
WINNER: Kingfisher Airlines 

Staff Service Excellence Award - Middle East
WINNER: Qatar Airways 

Staff Service Excellence Award - North America
WINNER: WestJet 

Staff Service Excellence Award - South America
WINNER: LAN Airlines 


 


 


 

THE SKYTRAX 2010 WORLD AIRLINE AWARDS

Over 40 airlines from around the world assembled at the World Airline Awards in Hamburg  to receive their accolades. The award winners are selected by the airline industry's most important audience - it's customers. 

More than 17.9 million air travellers from over 100 different nationalities took part in the 10 month survey, July 2009 to April 2010. The awards are respected and recognised around the world for being the only truly global, independent passenger survey of airline standards. The World Airline Awards were established in 1999, and are known across the globe as "the Passenger's Choice" awards. The 2009/2010 Survey included over 200 airlines, from largest international airlines to domestic carriers. 

The survey measures over 38 items of airline product and service standards. Assessing the customer experience across Airport and Onboard environments - check-in to boarding - onboard seat comfort, cabin cleanliness, food, beverages, IFE and  staff service.

If you liked this post, Dont forget to BOOKMARK it for others as well. Please CLICK your favorite SOCIAL BOOKMARKING ELEMENT:

StumpleUpon Ma.gnolia DiggIt! Del.icio.us Blinklist Yahoo Furl Technorati Simpy Spurl Reddit Google

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg Broke Into A Facebook User's Private Email Account

This is the story of how, in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg hacked into the email accounts of two Harvard Crimson reporters using data obtained from TheFacebook.com's logs. The details are drawn from a broader investigation of the origins of Facebook, the sourcing of which is described here.

Facebook CEO and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg now runs a site that 400 million people visit each month.

But back in May 2004, he was a 19-year-old finishing up his sophomore year at Harvard.

He was also the acclaimed founder and creator of an increasingly popular Web site called TheFacebook.com, which had launched in February 2004.

As we've reported in detail in a separate story, the launch of TheFacebook.com was not without controversy. Just six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Mark of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product.

After Mark launched TheFacebook.com, Cameron, Tyler and Divya hired a series of developers to build HarvardConnection -- the site Mark Zuckerberg had told them he would build but did not. By mid-May, the trio had a site ready for launch. By then the site's name had changed from HarvardConnection to ConnectU.

Sometime during the 14 days leading up to May 28 -- the editors at Harvard's student newspaper, the Crimson, received an email in the their "tips" inbox from Cameron Winklevoss, one of the founders of ConnectU.

This email presented the argument Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divvya Narenda had already brought to Harvard's Administration Board and to Mark Zuckerberg -- that TheFacebook.com was the product of Mark Zuckerberg's fraud against the ConnectU team.

Since the Winklevoss brothers were best known at Harvard for being exceptional rowers, the story was assigned toCrimson sports writer Tim McGinn. After a phone call, Tim hosted Tyler, Cameron, and Divya in his office at theCrimson. The four of them went over emails between Cameron and Mark.

After the ConnectU team left, the Crimson invited Mark into its offices to defend himself. 

When Mark arrived at the Crimson, he asked Tim and Elisabeth Theodore, an editor helping with the story, to sign a non-disclosure agreement so that he could show them the work he'd done on HarvardConnection. Per Crimson policy, Tim and Elisabeth refused to sign the NDA.

Mark lingered around the office, evidently hoping they would change their mind. Finally, Mark agreed to forgo the NDA.

On a Crimson computer, Mark brought up what he described as the work he did on HarvardConnection.  He gave Tim and Elisabeth a guided tour of the site. Mark's goal seemed to have been to show Tim and Elizabeth, the Crimson reporter and editor, that, other than the ways in which social networks are all the same, there were no features or designs in the work he did on HarvardConnection.com that ended up in theFacebook.com.

Mark's demonstration was successful: After he left, theCrimson decided not to run a story.  Tim emailed Tyler, Cameron, and Divya to tell them that the story would not run. He contacted Mark to say the the same thing.

But then, perhaps a day or so later, the Winklevoss brothers reached out to Tim McGinn again, this time to tell him that another Harvard rower -- one named John Thomson -- had told them that Mark had stolen something for TheFacebook from him, too. They told Tim that John's claim was that Mark Zuckerberg stole from him the idea for a TheFacebook feature called "Visualize Your Buddy." 

With a new accusation at hand, the Crimson decided to re-open its investigation.  Tim McGinn called Mark and told him about about John's claim and gave him a chance to deny it. Mark denied the claim and got very upset -- apparently because he felt he had been promised there would be no story.

For the rest of that night and into the next morning, Tim and his editor Elisabeth Theodore attempted to follow-up with John Thomson. After they finally reached him, John told them that he made the whole Mark Zuckerberg anecdote up in order to impress the Winklevoss brothers, who were important members of the rowing team. [As an aside, kudos to the journalism at the Crimson!]

Tim and Elisabeth decided to drop John's claims from the story. But, this time, they decided to go ahead and publish a story on ConnectU's claims against Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg was not content to wait until the morning to find out if the Crimson would include John's accusations in its story.

Instead, he decided to access the email accounts of Crimson editors and review their emails.  How did he do this?  Here's how Mark described his hack to a friend:

Mark used his site, TheFacebook.com, to look up members of the site who identified themselves as members of theCrimson.  Then he examined a log of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com.  If the cases in which they had entered failed logins, Mark tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts.  He successfully accessed two of them.

In other words, Mark appears to have used private login data from TheFacebook to hack into the separate email accounts of some TheFacebook users.

In one account he accessed, Mark saw an email fromCrimson writer Tim McGinn to Cameron, Tyler, and Divya. Another email Mark read was this one, from Crimsonmanaging editor Elisabeth Theodore to Tim McGinn:

From: Elisabeth Susan Theodore
To: Timothy John McGinn
Subject: Re: Follow-up

OK, he did seem very sleazy. And I thought that some of his answers to the questions were not very direct or open. I also thought that his reactiont o the website was very very weird. But, even if it's true so what? It's an [redacted] thing ot od but it's not illegal, right?

We reached out to Tim McGinn and Elisabeth Theodore for comment.  Both declined to comment.

When we reviewed the details of this story with Facebook, the company had this comment:

"We're not going to debate the disgruntled litigants and anonymous sources who seek to rewrite Facebook's early history or embarrass Mark Zuckerberg with dated allegations. The unquestioned fact is that since leaving Harvard for Silicon Valley nearly six years ago, Mark has led Facebook's growth from a college website to a global service playing an important role in the lives of over 400 million people."

We're certainly not questioning the latter fact: Facebook's success has been awe-inspiring.  Given the significant concerns about privacy online in general and at Facebook in particular, however, it seems reasonable to ask what the company's reaction -- and Mark's reaction -- is to the reported behavior above.

In the past, Facebook has told us: "Facebook respects user privacy and access to site usage and profile information is restricted at the company. Any Facebook employees found to be engaged in improper access to user data will be disciplined or terminated."

It is clear that the events described above would be a direct violation of Facebook's current policy, which has now been in place for several years. The policy was not in place at the time of the events described above.

A source close to the company suggests that it was the fallout from early privacy violations like this one -- fallout that has included reputational damage to Mark Zuckerberg and expensive and prolonged litigation with ConnectU -- that has shaped Facebook's current privacy policies and made Mark the CEO he is today.

If you liked this post, Dont forget to BOOKMARK it for others as well. Please CLICK your favorite SOCIAL BOOKMARKING ELEMENT:

StumpleUpon Ma.gnolia DiggIt! Del.icio.us Blinklist Yahoo Furl Technorati Simpy Spurl Reddit Google

Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook

Via Gizmodo 

Facebook privacy policies keep going down the drain. That's enough reason for many to abandon it. Here you will find nine more: 
After some reflection, I've decided to delete my account on Facebook. I'd like to encourage you to do the same. This is part altruism and part selfish. The altruism part is that I think Facebook, as a company, is unethical. The selfish part is that I'd like my own social network to migrate away from Facebook so that I'm not missing anything. In any event, here's my "Top Ten" reasons for why you should join me and many others and delete your account.

10. Facebook's Terms Of Service are completely one-sided

Let's start with the basics. Facebook's Terms Of Service state that not only do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don't keep it up to date and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section 14). You could argue that the terms are just protecting Facebook's interests, and are not in practice enforced, but in the context of their other activities, this defense is pretty weak. As you'll see, there's no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, they see their customers as unpaid employees for crowd-sourcing ad-targeting data.

9. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior

From the very beginning of Facebook's existence, there are questions about Zuckerberg's ethics. According to BusinessInsider.com, he used Facebook user data to guess email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his rivals. These allegations, albeit unproven and somewhat dated, nonetheless raise troubling questions about the ethics of the CEO of the world's largest social network. They're particularly compelling given that Facebook chose to fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for Facebook.

8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy

Founder and CEO of Facebook, in defense of Facebook's privacy changes last January: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time." More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: "... the default is now social." Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except that ...

7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch

At the same time that they're telling developers how to access your data with new APIs, they are relatively quiet about explaining the implications of that to members. What this amounts to is a bait-and-switch. Facebook gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share, and then they make it publicly available. Since they are in the business of monetizing information about you for advertising purposes, this amounts to tricking their users into giving advertisers information about themselves. This is why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter in this regard: Twitter has made only the simplest (and thus, more credible) privacy claims and their customers know up front that all their tweets are public. It's also why the FTC is getting involved, and people are suing them (and winning).
Check out this excellent timeline from the EFF documenting the changes to Facebook's privacy policy.

6. Facebook is a bully

When Pete Warden demonstrated just how this bait-and-switch works(by crawling all the data that Facebook's privacy settings changes had inadvertently made public) they sued him. Keep in mind, this happened just before they announced the Open Graph API and stated that the "default is now social." So why sue an independent software developer and fledgling entrepreneur for making data publicly available when you're actually already planning to do that yourself? Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don't want their membership to know how much data is really available. It's one thing to talk to developers about how great all this sharing is going to be; quite another to actually see what that means in the form of files anyone can download and load into MatLab.

5. Even your private data is shared with applications

At this point, all your data is shared with applications that you install. Which means now you're not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about keeping your data secure. And some of whom might be even more ethically challenged than Facebook. In practice, what this means is that all your data - all of it - must be effectively considered public, unless you simply never use any Facebook applications at all. Coupled with the OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting Facebook, but the Facebook ecosystem.

4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted

Even if we weren't talking about ethical issues here, I can't trust Facebook's technical competence to make sure my data isn't hijacked. For example, their recent introduction of their "Like" button makes it rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social network. Or how about this gem for harvesting profile data? These are just the latest of a series of Keystone Kops mistakes, such as accidentally making users' profiles completely public, or the cross-site scripting hole that took them over two weeks to fix. They either don't care too much about your privacy or don't really have very good engineers, or perhaps both.

3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account

It's one thing to make data public or even mislead users about doing so; but where I really draw the line is that, once you decide you've had enough, it's pretty tricky to really delete your account. They make no promises about deleting your data and every application you've used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion is incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your account settings, you're given an option to deactivate your account, which turns out not to be the same thing as deleting it. Deactivating means you can still be tagged in photos and be spammed by Facebook (you actually have to opt out of getting emails as part of the deactivation, an incredibly easy detail to overlook, since you think you're deleting your account). Finally, the moment you log back in, you're back like nothing ever happened! In fact, it's really not much different from not logging in for awhile. To actually delete your account, you have to find a link buried in the on-line help (by "buried" I mean it takes five clicks to get there). Or you can just click here. Basically, Facebook is trying to trick their users into allowing them to keep their data even after they've "deleted" their account.

2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web

The so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its fundamentally closed nature. It's bad enough that the idea here is that we all pitch in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about you. It's bad enough that most consumers will have no idea that this data is basically public. It's bad enough that they claim to own this data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they are disingenuous enough to call it "open," when, in fact, it is completely proprietary to Facebook. You can't use this feature unless you're on Facebook. A truly open implementation would work with whichever social network we prefer, and it would look something like OpenLike. Similarly, they implement just enough of OpenID to claim they support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary alternative, Facebook Connect.

1. The Facebook application itself sucks

Between the farms and the mafia wars and the "top news" (which always guesses wrong - is that configurable somehow?) and the myriad privacy settings and the annoying ads (with all that data about me, the best they can apparently do is promote dating sites, because, uh, I'm single) and the thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost completely useless to me at this point. Yes, I could probably customize it better, but the navigation is ridiculous, so I don't bother. (And, yet, somehow, I can't even change colors or apply themes or do anything to make my page look personalized.) Let's not even get into how slowly your feed page loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is more annoying than anything else.

Facebook is clearly determined to add every feature of every competing social network in an attempt to take over the Web (this is a never-ending quest that goes back to AOL and those damn CDs that were practically falling out of the sky). While Twitter isn't the most usable thing in the world, at least they've tried to stay focused and aren't trying to be everything to everyone.
I often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were some sort of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren't. They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws. (And keep in mind, even those criteria are pretty murky when it comes to social networking.) But that doesn't mean we have to actually put up with them. Furthermore, their long-term success is by no means guaranteed - have we all forgotten MySpace? Oh, right, we have. Regardless of the hype, the fact remains that Sergei Brin or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could personally acquire a majority stake in Facebook without even straining their bank account. And Facebook's revenue remains more or less a rounding error for more established tech companies.

While social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn't the only game in town. I don't like their application nor how they do business and so I've made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.

Dan Yoder is a serial entrepreneur and the VP of Engineering at Border Stylo, a Hollywood-based social media startup. He can be reached on Twitter as @dyoder.
Disclosure by Dan Yoder: I'm the VP of Engineering for a Hollywood-based social media startup, BorderStylo. The opinions expressed here are purely my own and are not in any way endorsed by my employer. While I do not see our applications as directly competitive to Facebook, nor have I presented them as such, it would be disingenuous not to mention this.

The author of this post can be contacted at tips@gizmodo.com

If you liked this post, Dont forget to BOOKMARK it for others as well. Please CLICK your favorite SOCIAL BOOKMARKING ELEMENT:

StumpleUpon Ma.gnolia DiggIt! Del.icio.us Blinklist Yahoo Furl Technorati Simpy Spurl Reddit Google

Sunday, May 23, 2010

10 Ways to Write a Stronger Résumé

By Selena Dehne, JIST Publishing

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Nearly one-in-four human resources managers said they receive, on average, more than 75 résumés for each open position, according to a nationwide survey by Careerbuilder.com.

When a job posting's response is that overwhelming, human resource managers often struggle to distinguish one candidate from another -- particularly since most of them spend only a minute or two assessing each candidate's résumé. That's why job seekers have to be savvy about their résumé's content and presentation.

Unfortunately, even the most talented, qualified candidates sometimes write weak résumés. Whether they're in a hurry, lack writing skills or are unsure how to market themselves to employers, they fail to score interviews because their résumés don't immediately demonstrate what return on investment they offer employers.

To sidestep this dilemma, consider Susan Britton Whitcomb's 10 tips for writing great résumé copy, excerpted from her book, "Résumé Magic":

1.     Know your audience before you begin to write. What skills and competencies are they looking for? What knowledge do they require? What trends are they capitalizing on? What opportunities are they interested in tapping? What problems do they need fixed? What projects can you help them move forward?

2.     Pack your résumé with keywords -- those words that describe your title, knowledge base, skill set, impressive "name-brand" companies or Fortune 500 employers, prestigious universities attended, degrees,  licensing, software experience, affiliations and so on.

3.     Find keywords by reviewing relevant job postings online or detailed classified ads in newspapers, reading job descriptions or content at your target companies' Web sites, reading your association's newsletter or trade journals, conducting informational interviews with industry contacts and so on.

4.     Position critical information at the "visual center" of the page. Weave keywords throughout your Qualifications Summary and Professional Experience sections, as well as in your cover letter. Create a Keyword Summary section for electronic versions of your résumé.

5.     Resist the temptation to outsmart applicant-screening software by, for instance, planting the keyword "project manager" nine times throughout the résumé when you might have minimal experience as a project manager.

6.     When writing job descriptions, try to keep your paragraph to around five lines. Summarize any redundant statements and present the material with an emphasis on transferable skills. Always highlight your accomplishments.

7.     If you're writing a functional or skills-based résumé, focus on three to five skill areas and lean toward occupational skills (such as event planningmarketing or project coordination) instead of personal skills (such as analytical skills, problem-solving skills or organizational talents) for category subheadings. After you have selected your subheadings, develop two to five sentences, along with specific accomplishments that encapsulate your range of experience for each subheading.

8.     New graduates with limited professional experience will normally place their Education section near the top of the résumé, after the Objective/Focus or Qualifications Summary.

9.     For categories such as affiliations, publications, presentations or awards and honors, consider presenting information in a bulleted list or two-column format to save space and add visual appeal.

10.  Think like an advertising copywriter: Be concise, but give enough data to create interest and a desire to meet you.

Selena Dehne is a career writer for JIST Publishing who shares the latest occupational, career and job search information available with job seekers and career changers. She is also the author of JIST's Job Search and Career Blog (http://jistjobsearchandcareer.blogspot.com/). Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/SelenaDehne.

If you liked this post, Dont forget to BOOKMARK it for others as well. Please CLICK your favorite SOCIAL BOOKMARKING ELEMENT:

StumpleUpon Ma.gnolia DiggIt! Del.icio.us Blinklist Yahoo Furl Technorati Simpy Spurl Reddit Google

Guardian: US appoints first cyber warfare general

Pentagon creates specialist online unit to counter cyber attack amid growing fears of militarisation of the internet

The US military has appointed its first senior general to direct cyber warfare – despite fears that the move marks another stage in the militarisation of cyberspace.
The newly promoted four-star general, Keith Alexander, takes charge of the Pentagon's ambitious and controversial new Cyber Command, designed to conduct virtual combat across the world's computer networks. He was appointed on Friday afternoon in a low-key ceremony at Fort Meade, in Maryland.
The creation of America's most senior cyber warrior comes just days after the US air force disclosed that some 30,000 of its troops had been re-assigned from technical support "to the frontlines of cyber warfare".
The creation of Cyber Command is in response to increasing anxiety over the vulnerability of the US's military and other networks to a cyber attack.
James Miller, the deputy under-secretary of defence for policy, has hinted that the US might consider a conventional military response to certain kinds of online attack.
Although Alexander pledged during his confirmation hearings before the Senate committee on armed services last month that Cyber Command would not contribute to the militarisation of cyberspace, the committee's chairman, Senator Carl Levin expressed concern that both Pentagon doctrine, and the legal framework for online operations, had failed to keep pace with rapid advances in cyber warfare.
In particular Levin voiced concern that US cyber operations to combat online threats to the US, routed through neutral third countries, "could have broad and damaging consequences" to wider American interests.
Plans for Cyber Command were originally conceived under President George W Bush. Since taking office Barack Obama has embraced the theme of cyber security, describing it last year as "one of the most serious economic and national security challenges [the US faces] as a nation".
During his confirmation hearing, Alexander said that the Pentagon's networks were being targeted by "hundreds of thousands of probes every day" adding that he had "been alarmed by the increase, especially in this year".
Cyber warfare has increased rapidly in scale and sophistication with China accused of being at the forefront of prominent recent attacks, including the targeting of Google and 20 other companies last year as well as "Titan Rain" in 2003 – a series of coordinated attacks on US networks. Russian and North Korean hackers have also been accused of large-scale attacks.
Moscow was accused of being behind a massive cyber assault on Estonia in 2007 – the second largest cyber warfare operation ever conducted.
While Alexander has tried to play down the offensive aspects of his command, the Pentagon has been more explicit, stating on Friday that Cyber Command will "direct the operations and defence of specified Department of Defense information networks [involving some 90,000 military personnel] and prepare to, when directed, conduct full-spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, [to] ensure US allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries."
The complex issues facing Cyber Command were thrown into relief earlier this year when the Washington Postrevealed details of a so-called "dot-mil" operation by Fort Meade's cyber warfare unit, backed by Alexander, to shut down a "honeytrap website" set up by the Saudis and the CIA to target Islamist extremists planning attacks in Saudi Arabia.
The Pentagon became convinced that the forum was being used to co-ordinate the entry of jihadi fighters into Iraq.
Despite the strong objections of the CIA, the site was attacked by the Fort Meade cyber warfare unit. As a result, some 300 other servers in the Saudi kingdom, Germany and Texas also were inadvertently shut down.
Of equally concern to those who had opposed the operation, it was conducted without informing key members of the Saudi royal family, who were reported to be "furious" that a counter-terrorism tool had been shut down.
The issue of cyber warfare – and how to combat it – has become an increasingly fraught one.
The need to have electronic warfare capabilities, say those who support them, has been proven repeatedly by the apparent success of hostile attacks on government networks, including last year's massive denial of service assault on networks in both the US and Korea.
Last year, hackers also accessed large amounts of sensitive data concerning the Pentagon's Joint Strike Fighter programme.
The difficulties facing the new command were underlined in March by former CIA director Michael V Hayden, who said that the Saudi operation had demonstrated that cyber warfare techniques were evolving so rapidly that they were now outpacing the government's ability to develop coherent policies to guide its use.
"Cyber was moving so fast that we were always in danger of building up precedent before we built up policy," Hayden said.

Posted by Silve

If you liked this post, Dont forget to BOOKMARK it for others as well. Please CLICK your favorite SOCIAL BOOKMARKING ELEMENT:

StumpleUpon Ma.gnolia DiggIt! Del.icio.us Blinklist Yahoo Furl Technorati Simpy Spurl Reddit Google

Drawing a line: Pakistan’s jihad against the Internet

By Urooj Zia

A couple of months ago, when self-styled 'security analyst' Zaid Hamid's anti-India vitriol started getting out of hand, a group of Pakistanis got together on Facebook to condemn his hate speech and calls for war against 'Hindu Zionists'. There were jokes about 'Jihad-e-Facebook' and 'Ghazwa-e-YouTube' because, like former dictator Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf, that's where an overwhelming majority of Hamid's supporters were anyway. No one could have thought at the point that an organ of the state would declare jihad against Facebook, but that is exactly what has happened. On 19 May, on a petition filed by a group calling itself the Islamic Lawyers Movement, the Lahore High Court ordered the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to block Facebook in response to the perceived blasphemy of a single page about 'Draw Muhammad Day'.

It all started in April, when the creators of the animated TV series South Park decided to take a stand in favour of free speech in their 200th episode, which showed, among other things, Jesus watching porn, the Buddha smoking pot, and the Prophet Muhammad in a teddy-bear costume. Comedy Central, the series' broadcaster, censured the bits with Muhammad and bleeped-out parts that mentioned his name; but unedited versions of the episode quickly made their way around the Internet. The creators were not happy with the additional censoring when they had, in their opinion, taken care not to depict any picture of Muhammad, per se – only the teddy-bear costume.

In the opinion of jihadis, however, the South Park team wasn't 'careful' enough. RevolutionMuslim.com (an American jihadi website, which, incidentally, is still accessible in Pakistan, as is almost every other webpage of the same genre) reacted by issuing dire threats to the creators and producers of the series. 'We have to warn Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker] that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show,' a post on the website claimed. Gogh was a Dutch filmmaker who was killed in 2004 by a Muslim for a movie that he had made that said that Islam condoned violence against women. As if the warning post weren't bad enough, it was also accompanied by a graphic photo of Van Gogh, along with a link to a news article with details of a mansion in Colorado that Parker and Stone are said to own – 'we know where to find you' style.

RevolutionMuslim's Younus Abdullah Muhammad, however, is quick to defend himself, basing his innocence on the claim that he did not 'send anyone' to the Colorado mansion to 'conduct violence', and that he was not worried that his post would incite violence against the South Park team. 'How is that a threat? Showing a case study right there of what happened to another individual who conducted himself in a very similar manner? It's just evidence,' he claimed in an interview with Reuters.

Irritated with Comedy Central's censorship and the ensuing threats, American cartoonist Molly Norris decided to take a stand of her own. She came up with a cartoon poster on behalf of a fictitious group – Citizens against Citizens against Humour – declaring 20 May as Draw Muhammad Day. The idea caught on and a website sprang up, as well as a Facebook event and 'Everybody Draw Muhammad Day', though they went unnoticed for a while. The group's stated purpose was to stand against censorship in all forms. Their aim, according to one of the creators, Andy, was 'not anti-Muslim, [but] pro-free speech and public discourse and art and satire'. The group, Andy says, has 'no intention to offend moderate Muslims, but to defend the rights for everyone to express themselves as they want, without being silenced by death threats.'

Ban them all!

Thousands of miles away, in Pakistan, sources say that the conservative Islamic Lawyers Movement (ILM) first approached the PTA to try and get the website banned; the latter refused, instead only blocking specific pages related to Everybody Draw Muhammad Day. Not satisfied, the ILM filed a petition with the Lahore High Court, seeking a blanket ban. To their credit, when PTA representatives were called into court, they defended their initial stance on grounds that a blanket ban would result in major monetary losses for Pakistani businesses, particular small and medium-sized ones, which use Facebook for advertising and redirecting customers to their respective websites and stores.

The High Court was having none of it, and ordered a ban on Facebook. The PTA complied, but did not stop there. Within hours and over the following days, the ban was extended unilaterally to YouTube, then to around 400 websites, then approximately 850 specific links, and then, at last count, to around 1100 links. The photo-sharing website Flickr came under the axe as well, as did Wikipedia, Twitter, google.com.pk and Gmail, though only sporadically; and while the PTA had initially promised to leave 'media websites' alone, the left-leaning Huffington Post, and some CNN and Washington Post blogs, among many others, were also blocked. These websites, it should be noted, were not hosting 'blasphemous' content, but were merely discussing the general issue.

Blackberry services, meanwhile, were also suspended for almost 24 hours, only to be restored without the web browser and Blackberry Facebook application, while GPRS and EDGE services remained unreliable for almost as long. 'Anything which is deemed blasphemous will be blocked,' PTA public-relations director Khurram Mehran declared. 'Blasphemy is serious business. It is against our religion and the Constitution, and we have our orders from the [Lahore High Court]. We do not make decisions; our job is to simply implement them.'



This trend of banning websites began in 2006, under Gen Musharraf's government, when the Danish cartoon controversy arose. As a result, Blogspot and WordPress, two popular blogging sites, remained inaccessible in Pakistan for several months. Many other bans followed, most notably in 2007 during the lawyers' movement, and particularly after a state of emergency was declared on 3 November of that year. The PTA, in its tendency towards hasty banning, has in the past committed major blunders. Most recently, while trying to ban YouTube in February 2008, PTA and some ISPs together managed not only to choke Pakistan's Internet backbone, but also to bring down the entire YouTube website worldwide – making the PTA the first government organisation ever to nuke a website.

This time around too, armed with the High Court's orders, the PTA swung into action, again without much planning. A 'crisis cell' was set up with a toll-free number and a dedicated e-mail address, which anyone could use to report 'blasphemous' websites. While Mehran refused to divulge the number of personnel dedicated to the crisis cell, or the procedure in place to vet URLs posted by complainants, other sources at the PTA said that only three people were working at the cell. Whatever procedure is in place, it seems far more reactive than proactive, which is alarming seeing as how charges of blasphemy carry a death sentence in Pakistan. 'We know what we're doing, and our staff are very technically sound,' was all Mehran would say. 'We look into content, but if mistakes are made, or if someone reports a non-blasphemous website out of malafide intent, you can tell us about it and we'll take steps to correct them.'

Mehran's claims don't carry much substance, however, given the fact that, out of the nearly 1100 links that had been blocked since 19 May, many had nothing to do with 'blasphemy'. According to some reports, even the Let Us Build Pakistan page, which had, last week, broken the story of TV anchor Hamid Mir's alleged conversation with a member of the Punjabi Taliban, leading to the death of a former ISI operative, was also blocked for some hours. Mehran also denied the existence of any specific list of websites and links that are to be blocked. Other sources within the PTA, however, conceded that a list had been handed down (they refused to say by whom), and that new websites and links were being added to it constantly.

In the meantime, the Jamaat-e-Islami (which got less than five percent of the total votes cast during the February 2008 elections) and other religious parties organised protests in various cities. These protests received favourable coverage from much of the local media, a large chunk of which has historically stood extremely right of centre. Interestingly, most of the participants at these protests did not have access to the Internet, have never heard of Facebook, and have no concept of a 'social networking' website. Many television reporters and desk editors apparently fall in the technologically illiterate category as well, became clear by the many breathless proclamations on news broadcasts about how 'a website, Facebook, had organised a competition to make blasphemous caricatures of Prophet Muhammad (Pbuh).'

Opposing the ban openly, however, can still land one in a sticky situation, as one group of activists found out the hard way. On the evening of 20 May, the group called a press conference at the Karachi Press Club, condemning the ban on Facebook and calling for a rational discussion. At the same time, a group of Sunni Muslim hardliners was protesting outside the Press Club against Facebook. Somehow, word about the press conference got reached the protestors outside, and the moment the anti-censorship advocates stepped out of the building they were attacked. They were eventually saved by some journalists who pulled them back into the press club, called the police, and sent them home with a police escort.

Dangerous precedents

Amidst the hullaballoo, many seem to have forgotten that several sects in Islam, including the Shia, actively make pictures and symbolic representations of Muhammad and his family. Such pictures can be found all over rural Iran, for instance, despite attempts by hardline ayatollahs to outlaw them. Moreover, Islamic injunctions that are used to justify a ban on making pictures or depictions of Muhammad and his friends and family also outlaw any and all pictures and sculptures as a pre-emptive protection against idol worship – a fact that many Muslim users of Facebook seem to conveniently forget.

The Lahore High Court is known for maverick, unsubstantiated judgments with little regard to judicial precedents. Some years ago, one judge set aside all evidence – including medico-legal and chemical examinations, statements of witnesses and experts, and relevant laws – in a incest/rape case, with a judgment that claimed that a brother cannot possibly rape his sister, and that the girl was therefore lying. Punjab's reputation as an active hub of Islamic extremism is also substantiated by many Lahore High Court judgments, which seem to quote scripture as much as the law and Constitution.

According to reports, not a single religious scholar or technical expert was called upon to depose before the court in the Facebook matter. The High Court's order, therefore, was based entirely on the petition of the ILM. While the PTA has censured websites for various reasons in the past, this is the first incident of the involvement of an organ of the state in blanket censorship of this sort. Clearly, this sets a dangerous precedent one that the mainstream media now needs to think about as well. If a court can issue orders for censoring a website on the basis of 'heresy', can there be any guarantee that similar steps will not be taken in the future against the local media – print, TV and online – if reports or opinions are perceived to be 'unfavourable'?

Many Muslims also need to realise that questioning or critiquing their religion does not necessarily amount to insult. Islam does not discourage questions, and even the Kalimah (the proclamation of faith), begins with 'La ilaha illallah…' (there is no god…) before proclaiming 'Illallah, wa muhammad gasoolullah' (but god, and Muhammad is His messenger). In the meantime, by banning these websites, the government seems to have forgotten the white portion of the Pakistani flag, indicating the existence of religious minorities in the country. Can one religion's laws be applied forcefully to another religion, especially if it means massive monetary losses for everyone concerned?

The creators of the Everybody Draw Muhammad Day had encouraged members to stick to humour, wit and creativity in their depictions of Muhammad, and not to resort to hate speech. In any large campaign, however, trolls are bound to enter, as they did in this one as well, from both sides of the divide. The relevant Facebook page eventually attracted Islam-bashers, as well as Muslims who tried to prove that their religion was peaceful while abusing others. While a section of Muslims may feel that depictions of their prophet is against Islam, they also need to understand this only means that they cannot draw pictures or make sculptures of Muhammad.

'The overreactions many Muslim extremists showed the world in [the Danish cartoons episode of] 2006 were despicable and cannot be defended by the Quran, Muhammad or Allah,' Andy, one of the campaign's creators, said. 'They use their religion to justify violence – no one has told them to do so; these are their own actions, trying to keep their religion from criticism by appearing in violent and murderous mobs to silence those who dare oppose them. This scare tactic has seemingly worked, and this is part of what we oppose and work against.'

Indefinite ban?
On 21 May, a hacker identifying himself with a Muslim name reportedly broke into Andy's computer and took down the Everybody Draw Muhammad Day Facebook page. New ones sprang up, but Facebook has apparently given in – almost none of them are accessible from Pakistan, even if they exist.

In Pakistan, meanwhile, the ban currently looks like it may well be indefinite, with websites and links blocked and unblocked arbitrarily, causing heavy losses to businesses and entrepreneurs. To proponents of the ban, this holds little meaning: China, they claim, has been 'progressing' quite well without Facebook, YouTube – or free speech, one may add. A society cannot really grow intellectually and socially, however, when members learn to not question anything. A citizenry that has mentally been reduced to a herd of cattle can function in the short run, but closed-mindedness is bound to take a toll, especially in a country such as Pakistan, which is already trying to battle the demons of intolerance and religious extremism.

As the good folks at the wiscatheists blog put it: 'We must all eventually come to the agreement that no religion, person, idea, or sacred cow should be granted immunity from criticism. In a free society, even opinions which the majority may find reprehensible have the right to be heard. Among these is the right to criticise religion and to perform actions considered "blasphemous." When that right is under threat, as is clearly is today, we have a moral obligation to exercise it to ensure that it is not lost. We cannot tolerate limitations to our freedom of expression, whether they come from violence, intimidation, or self-censorship out of political correctness.'

The problem, however, lies at the heart of this divide – for each side, the opponent is an undefined 'other' out to get them. For the protesting Muslims, liberalism and free speech are 'Western' concepts, which encourage 'attacks' on Islam; for proponents of free speech, the offence taken by Muslims, even seemingly moderate ones, is an aberration of secular values and a sign of 'backwardness'. At the end of the day, however, banning an entire population from access to large chunks of the Internet is going to affect only the citizens and businesses of Pakistan. It will not stop 'blasphemous' content, nor will it encourage peaceful, civilised debates and exchange of ideas and culture. One hopes that sanity will prevail on all sides, and the battle lines that have been drawn by ignorance and vested interests will be blurred and eventually erased in favour of pluralism and understanding.

Urooj Zia is a journalist based in Karachi

If you liked this post, Dont forget to BOOKMARK it for others as well. Please CLICK your favorite SOCIAL BOOKMARKING ELEMENT:

StumpleUpon Ma.gnolia DiggIt! Del.icio.us Blinklist Yahoo Furl Technorati Simpy Spurl Reddit Google

Saturday, May 22, 2010

5 Reasons You Should Be Scared of Google

By Robert Evans May 18,


You'd be hard-pressed to find a company more beloved than Google. And why not? They make the Internet easier to use, pamper their employees and foot the bill for YouTube even though it loses money like it's got a gambling problem that's made of cocaine. Unfortunately, much of what is awesome about Google also makes them increasingly terrifying with each passing day.

#5.

Google Has All The Answers (About You)


The Misconception:

Before Google, if you were curious about some weird sexual position or the dangers of sticking glass rods down your pee hole, you had to go to an older sibling or classmate. This would result in either hilarious but ultimately fulfilling sexual misadventure or, if you didn't go to high school in a teen comedy, a mortifying nickname that followed you all the way to college.


Google wasn't the first search engine to take the human interaction out of that process, it was just the best at finding the information you were looking for. And as long as you were sure to delete your search history afterwards, you could read up on any kind of fucked up, degenerate behavior you wanted without another human soul ever knowing.

The Reality:

It turns out, Google records everything you enter into its search engine. The lonely night a few months back when you Googled "how many fists can fit in the butt?" That's stored on Google's servers, correlated with your IP address and a pretty shocking amount of other personal information.


We never knew how far this would go.

But they're not just passively stalking you via your weird ass searches. If you use Google to help you navigate the Web, there's a good chance they've installed a cookie onto your browser that logs every page you visit, every form you fill out and every conversation you have. Google sees it all and stores it for at least nine months.

Consumer advocate group Privacy International says nine months is the best case scenario. Even if you only use a few of Google's free services, "the company retains a large quantity of information about that user, often for an unstated or indefinite length of time, without clear limitation on subsequent use."


Of course, Google is in the business of getting you what you're looking for, and knowing everything about you makes it better at its job. When you type rimjob into your search window, Yahoo! might return a LeBron James highlight reel, but Google knows better. Google's many products work better the more it knows about you.

Plus, it's not like any actual people will ever read all of the dirt they have stored on you. Well, not until they have a reason to ask for it anyways.


In 2009, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt warned users,

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. "

So maybe it's time to stop treating Google like a smarter, more trustworthy older sibling who has all the answers and more like a friend you trusted until you found the notebook where they track all of your bowel movements. No matter how much good advice they offer you, and how many times they claim the drawer full of hair they collected from your shower drain is "just in case," you'll never feel totally comfortable around them again.

#4.

Google Isn't Like Other Companies (Unless You Count Microsoft)


The Misconception:

Everyone knows that corporations can't be taken at their word. If Coca-Cola changed the slogan from "Enjoy" to "Don't Commit Rape," everyone would assume they were dissolving date rape pills in Diet Cokes. But when Google made "Don't Be Evil" its unofficial motto, the media and the public in general pretty much took it at face value. It certainly seemed to check out with all the free shit they kept giving us.


Yes, most of the goodwill purchased by Google over the past dozen or so years can probably be traced to the fact that they create some of the best applications on the Web, and don't ask you to pay for a single damn one of them.

So why shouldn't we treat Google differently? They don't even seem all that interested in making money. They're just here to make our lives easier. They'd probably be a charity if charities weren't so gay.

The Reality:

Google is not a magical fairy cloud of technology that exists purely to help you find information (that's Wikipedia).

Google is a corporation. Their goal is to acquire as much of the world's money as possible. They are not driven by the desire to "not be evil" anymore than Sprite is driven by a desire to be "sublymonal." If they ever even so much as hinted that they were in the business of "not being evil" in a situation where that involved "not making money" whomever dropped that hint would immediately be relieved of their job.

In the words of Scott Cleland, who has made a career of watching Google and ringing the "seriously, I think these people might be vampires" alarm, "Google does not work for users; Google works for advertisers and website publishers, which provide virtually all of Google's revenues." Google Ads are responsible for 97 percent of their billions of dollars of revenues.


Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Talk, Google Reader, Gmail. Everything Google has ever given you for free is funded by those little blue lines of text that appear at the top of your Gmail account, or in the sidebar of your search results. Then, when you use those services, Google collects information about you. It uses what it knows about you to target ads specifically to your personal tastes. That's how Google is able to maintain a near monopoly in online advertising despite never having used a single boob.


It's actually a pretty brilliant business model. The more ads they sell, the more free apps they're able to give you. The more free apps they give you, the more goodwill they generate, the more you use their products and believe that they're not evil and are willing to tell them about yourself. The more they learn about you, the more lucrative their ads become and the more money they make.


It's a brilliant business model, or as the woman who Obama put in charge of Department of Justice's antitrust division calls it, a "repeat of Microsoft." Just like Microsoft in the early 90s, Google is accused of using all those free apps and all that goodwill to stomp out all competition. The European Union has launched an official antitrust inquiry.

Google for its part has responded to the claims by doing a creepily accurate impression of Microsoft in the 90s. They've made a deal with Sony to set Chrome as the default browser on all VAIO computers, and the upcoming Chrome OS will only work with one browser (guess which!). They're using their enormous market share to outspend the competition. Remind you of anyone?

#3.

Google is Big Because They're Smart (And Too Big To Continue to Be Smart)


The Misconception:

Google as a company has managed to do one pretty incredible thing: accrue a scary amount of power without being corrupted by it. If we had the money and influence Google enjoys, you can bet we'd flaunt the shit out of it.


Aw yeah.

You don't hear about Google sweatshop employees or suicides in their Chinese factories or attempts to flood their customers with spyware. If we're going to have a monopoly, it might as well be Google.

The Reality:

Everything we've covered so far, the spying, the advertising networks, have been the result of Google's algorithm working on autopilot. You'll probably be comforted to know that there's not some guy sitting on Google's campus, analyzing what ad to serve based on your uniquely weird taste in music and pornography. All the dirt they've got on you are all just ones and zeroes in a complex equation that works incredibly well.

But things get a lot clumsier when something in the algorithm isn't working, and the humans behind the scenes have to make a decision. Unfortunately, when you control how most of the world interacts with the Internet, there's no such thing as a fair decision.


Which will all change when the Internet overlords come to power.

In February, 2010, DMCA claimed Google deleted a bunch of blogs from their Blogger service even thoughmany of the bloggers didn't do anything. Some of them had deals with record labels and bands. Many of the stricken bloggers received no warning whatsoever, which is in direct violation of Google's own policy.

And it isn't the first (or the only) time Google's done something like this. Remember that preposterous brouhaha between Anonymous and the religion with all the space Nazis and nuclear volcanoes? Google took a side.


They deleted the Anonymous AdSense account and burned the YouTube account of a journalist about to release an expose on the Church. The expose contained no copyrighted material, but Google killed it anyway. They also locked an anti-Scientology website called Xenu.net away from the rest of the Internet.


To be fair; when the Church of Scientology published the names of several members of Anonymous, Google took the right action and banned their YouTube account. Then they re-opened it, right around the same time AdSense was gorged with thousands upon thousands of ads for the Church.

We're not saying Google has become the brainwashed pawn of an evil new-age religion. The CoS has money to spend on advertising and Google is too enormous to make reasonable decision in every corner of its sprawling empire. Of course, we don't have to ask you to imagine if Google actually decided to screw their users. Remember earlier this year when ...

#2.

Google Will Protect Your Data (Until They Feel Threatened)


The Misconception:

Of course, we've yet to give you any real reason to not use their product. The reason people got fed up with Microsoft is that it sucked. Well, nobody's fed up with Google yet because Google has refused to suck. As long as they continue putting out a superior product, we'll keep using them. And as long as we keep trusting them, they have no reason to do anything shady with all that dirt they've got on us. Everyone wins.


The Reality:

That's all correct, so far. But it's easy to be the good guy when you're making so much money that the U.S. government feels the need to step in and essentially say, "No fair!" However, last spring with the launch of Buzz, Google showed us how they might react in the face of a little healthy competition, and it was a panicky pants shitting mess.


Like the rest of us, the folks at Google had been reading that sites like Facebook are starting to usurp Google's place as the "hub" for most people's online lives. Buzz was their attempt to drink Facebook's milkshake. Competition is the life-blood of capitalism, and capitalism is what gives us access to cocaine, the mighty KFC Double Down and advanced heart-valve replacement techniques. If Google had wanted to release their own standalone service or social networking website and try to do Facebook one better, that would have been fine.


Instead, Buzz automatically published the contact information for everyone you communicate with on your profile page. "Harriet Jacobs," a blogger with an abusive ex-husband and a history of death threats from Internet crazies, found her entire private life made public to a legion of potential stalkers. The decision to link a service designed for public broadcasting of information to people's private email accounts isn't just a minor brain fart. It's a sign of a major issue with their corporate philosophy. Google was so eager to enter the social media game that no one at Google ever wondered if maybe, just maybe, there were some things people didn't want to share with everyone they'd ever emailed.

Best case scenario, they panicked in the face of competition. Worst case scenario, they knew exactly what they were doing, and just didn't care because they didn't have to care. What are you going to do about it?


"We could do that, but who would photoshop your face onto to every gay porn screen cap on Image Search?"

#1.

Google Stood Up to Chinese Censorship (Because They Are Terrifyingly Powerful and They Know It)


The Misconception:

When Google stood up to China, it was because they'd had enough of that oppressive regime and their censorship policies. Google was a comparatively small company standing up to a nation of billlions. It was a clear cut David and Goliath battle of Good versus Evil.


The Reality:

Google had cooperated with China's censorship policies for years. The thing that motivated the change in Google's policy had nothing to do with Chinese censorship. It was a ballsy move, but one they made to protect their greatest resource: The oceans of information they've been collecting for a decade, and the software they use to get it and make sense of it.


Google is not staffed by wizards.

This makes a lot more sense when you realize what Google realizes: That they are currently as powerful as most nations on the planet. According to Google Watcher Scott Cleland, "In monitoring Google as closely as I do, it has become increasingly clear that Google does not believe it has to obey the rules, standards, regulations and laws, that others routinely obey and respect. Google increasingly operates like a self-declared, virtual sovereign nation, largely unaccountable to the rules and mores of the rest of the world."


While Google doesn't use all that information for evil, it's a nice insurance policy to know that they could if they wanted to. Essentially, Google is in the "get the world by the balls" phase of their business plan, and they're just waiting to see if anyone's going to make them squeeze.

See, Google isn't just keeping data on you and your friends. Over 60 percent of U.S. state governmentshave "Gone Google" and now use one or more Google enterprise apps. Thousands of gigabytes of government data, all held in Google's servers. As security expert Sherri Davidoff puts it, "Google now controls our government's access to its own data."


Google versus China is just the undercard. The really interesting battle will happen if the Justice Department decides to follow through on its plans to make Google this decade's Microsoft. That's when we get the main event: Google vs. U.S. Government. It should be a pretty good fight as long as the Government can get used to being the underdog for once.

Do have an idea in mind that would make a great article? Then sign up for our writers workshop! Know way too much about a random topic? Create a topic page and you could be on the front page of Cracked.com tomorrow!

Make sure you check out the rest of Google's business plan. Or find out why you should be also terrified of Steve Jobs, in 5 Reasons You Should Be Scared of Apple.

And stop by our Top Picks (Updated 05.17.2010) before Google replaces them all with German porn.

Are you up to date on Jennifer Love Hewitt? You really should be.

And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get dick jokes sent straight to your news feed.

If you liked this post, Dont forget to BOOKMARK it for others as well. Please CLICK your favorite SOCIAL BOOKMARKING ELEMENT:

StumpleUpon Ma.gnolia DiggIt! Del.icio.us Blinklist Yahoo Furl Technorati Simpy Spurl Reddit Google

The Devil's Advocate..

I have never been a huge fan of Pervaiz Musharraf. I think most of his policies were woefully short-sighted but if there was one thing he was right about, atleast in his choice of words, that was Enlightened Moderation.

I think of those words today because the last 2 days have been a sad display of how Pakistanis are prone to be extremists in their point of views. 

On one end of a continuum are the pseudo-religious fanatics, for whom the very foundation of religion rested on one's willingness to ban facebook for a day- or two and now till the 31st.

On the other extreme end are those who have really disappointed me- the online community of bloggers and tweeple on whom the intricacies of the decision by the LHC are lost.

I see the Court's decision as a sound Disaster Prevention Plan. The last time when there was a similar outcry against the Danish cartoons, rioting and vandalism had resulted in a huge loss of property as well as lives. When the DMD story first surfaced, I was alarmed. I was afraid of history repeating itself in Pakistan, in the name of love for the Holy Prophet. But as 20th May has passed without incident, I breath a sigh of relief. No loss of lives or property, to punish acts of blasphemy several thousand miles away. And all because Facebook was banned, because despite googling 'D... M... D...', the aforementioned fanatics found nothing. PTA had banned all such content. There were two solutions to respond to the intolerant majorities: Mass Education or Immediate Ban. I have been trying to educate and holding
discussions with a number of them, only to have my faith called into questioned. In the short run, a ban on any material that stepped on their religious nerve could have been of any use.

For me, such a ban was worthwhile if it prevented needless burning of tyres, breaking windows and most importantly loss of lives. A few days without Facebook or all the banned sites should not be such a huge price to pay if the more passionate majorities of Pakistan can erase the existence of any blasphemous content from their short-lived memories.

But, the online community- the educated classes, the last living hope this country has- has perceived this ban as a curtailing of their right to internet freedom. I believe their harsh criticism, nay ridicule, of this decision was unfair. While I understand that many businesses depend heavily on Facebook and other websites, and also that Facebook is only a media and not a content creator; I also realise that these would only have been valid arguments if the first group of extremists didn't exist. Even without a ban, Facebook would have seen a massive dip in number of visitors on the days of the campaign itself, which is why for atleast these 2 days, any Facebook benefits to businesses, NGOs, eventplanners, advertisers, art gallery/restaurant owners would have evaporated automatically. With or without the ban, those who depended on the medium for their day to day activities, that involved reaching out to mass audiences, would have suffered. 

The websites will be back in a few days and our energies should be spent in ensuring that the bans are not prolonged. The government is not being authoritative or taking away anyone's rights,
not with this ban, atleast, and it is a hasty and emotional error on our parts to consider it so. 

While I do concede that the banning of a thousand plus sites and blocking Blackberry services that followed was sloppy work on the part of the regulatory authority, and has caused much inconvenience; it is the benefits of their actions that I greatly appreciate. There has been enough unrest in Karachi on account of political killings in the last few days and I'm glad that the faith brigade hasn't added to this trouble.

For a change, I've decided to look at the silver lining. Those who know me, should know what an aberration that is. But tonight, I just want to be grateful that this day is behind me. 

At the end of this day, I only pray for Moderation and Enlightenment for everyone and myself

From Sidret's Blog

If you liked this post, Dont forget to BOOKMARK it for others as well. Please CLICK your favorite SOCIAL BOOKMARKING ELEMENT:

StumpleUpon Ma.gnolia DiggIt! Del.icio.us Blinklist Yahoo Furl Technorati Simpy Spurl Reddit Google

Contact Me or Subscribe to my posts

Click to Join my FaceBook Blog Group Page

If you want to send a quick message to me, please click

To Subscribe to my posts, please choose:

Search my Blog for posts that are of interest to you...results will be displayed below

Custom Search

Here are the Results, if you seached for a post

Blog Archive

About Me

My photo
Dubai, DXB, United Arab Emirates

Washington, USA

Western Europe Time (GMT)

Dubai

Pakistan

Australia