Technology Impacts

Fali Whale

The Internet is a seemingly endless resource for our watching, listening, and chatting needs. Bandwidth, however, is not. Cisco Systems, the mobile networking company, released a report earlier this week suggesting that global Internet traffic is growing exponentially. Scientific American said that Cisco needed a newer term — zettabyte, or one trillion gigabytes — to measure both the amount of uploading and downloading traffic on the Web and the bandwidth required to accommodate it.

The release has a lot of interesting statistics, including the prediction that the Web will nearly quadruple in size over the next four years. Cisco claims that, by 2013, what amounts to 10 billion DVDs will cross the Internet each month. In other words, it will take over a million years to watch just one month’s worth of Web video traffic. The findings point to “consumer hyperactivity” — that with Web-enabled phones and mobile devices, more powerful computers, and multitasking, growth will only increase. For such a surge in volume, networks must be able to accommodate the growth. Read the rest of this entry »

ID cards could be fitted with chip and pin technology to help combat identity fraud.

The head of the Government agency tasked with producing the cards said there were no “technical obstacles” to adding chips to the cards and handing out pin numbers.

James Hall, chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service said adding chips might allow the cards to be used in ATM machines in the future.

Officials are also looking at chip and pin as a possible way to help combat online fraud and help protect internet shoppers. Read the rest of this entry »

Rakuten Inc., operator of the online retail site Rakuten-ichiba, has been selling customers’ credit card numbers and e-mail addresses–at a charge of 10 yen per name–to retailers selling items to those people, it was learned Friday.

Companies that bought the numbers include Joshin Denki Co., an electrical appliance store based in Naniwa Ward, Osaka, that is listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Rakuten said it had not acted improperly because it makes clear in its privacy policy that the personal data of customers who make purchases may be provided to retailers that appear on the site.

Rakuten selling data on customers Admits passing on credit card, e-mail details : National : DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE The Daily Yomiuri.

The former head of MI6 has hit out at ’striking and disturbing’ invasions of privacy by the Big Brother state.

Sir Richard Dearlove, who led the Secret Intelligence Service from 1999 to 2004, claimed some were an ‘abuse’ of the law.

He attacked the ‘loss of liberties’ caused by expanding surveillance powers and described some police operations as ‘mind-boggling.’

The former spy chief joins a growing number of high-profile critics warning that individual freedom and privacy are being seriously eroded by the Government’s disproportionate efforts to guard against terrorism.

Sir Richard was particularly critical of what he claimed were inadequate laws to regulate some surveillance powers. Read the rest of this entry »

Software to synchronise the movement of a patient’s heart with a surgeon’s eye is being developed to help make cardiac operations far easier to perform.

The technology, which can “still” a beating heart, will allow doctors to operate robotically without the trauma of carrying out a bypass.

Health Minister Lord Ara Darzi of Denham, a keyhole surgery pioneer, is involved in the project, which will be ready for clinical use within 18 months.

Professor Darzi described the advance, which is being developed with a software scientist at Imperial College London, in a discussion on the future of surgery at The Times Cheltenham Science Festival yesterday evening (03.06.09). Read the rest of this entry »

The trial of ID cards for airside workers at City of London and Manchester airports will be a slightly slower process than we imagined.

The cards will only be mandatory for new staff, not for all pilots and staff working at the airports.

The Home Office reckon this was always the case and we remembered wrongly - we bow to their semantics and long memories.

The answer was prized out of immigration minister Phil Woolas in a Written Answer. Read the rest of this entry »

Westminster speculation has raised a new question mark over the future of the government’s flagship identity card scheme, following news of the forthcoming departure of home secretary Jacqui Smith.

Smith was one of the main driving forces behind the ID card policy, fighting off Treasury concerns about cost and rejecting a Treasury-led proposal for a private-sector-led ID system.

But she has been badly tarnished by the row over her husband’s claim for renting a porn video on her expenses and her designation of her main home as a room in her sister’s London house. She is expected to leave the Cabinet in Gordon Brown’s expected reshuffle next week. Read the rest of this entry »

A U.C. Berkeley report shows that most Internet users don’t understand web site privacy policies, and that major online businesses like Google Inc. freely gather data and share it with affiliated businesses via loopholes in those policies.

Using trackers called “web bugs,” third parties collect user data from many popular web sites, and sites often allow this, even though their privacy policies say they don’t share user data with others.

“Web bugs from Google and its subsidiaries were found on 92 of the top 100 Web sites and 88 percent of the approximately 400,000 unique domains examined in the study,” the authors found.

Sites with the most web bugs were for blogging - blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in March, and blogger was No. 4. Google itself was No. 3. Read the rest of this entry »

AN extract of a documentary movie entitled ‘taking liberties’ on freedom showing what could happen with the introduction of ID cards

For a security manager, even a test environment could be too vulnerable when it’s located in the Web-accessible cloud.

Computerworld - What great timing! I had no sooner returned from the RSA Conference, where my focus was on cloud computing, than I was invited to a meeting to discuss our first venture into “the cloud.”

The IT department has decided to contract with an infrastructure-as-a-service provider to host a portion of our development environment. If this trial is successful, some of our production environment could be next. Having read up on the subject in white papers and attended seminars at RSA, I felt informed enough to ask the questions that needed to be answered before I could feel comfortable about an initiative that was going to open new portals to our network and our data.

And there’s no question that this could expose us to new dangers. Read the rest of this entry »