Technology Impacts

When it began it was just a computer game. Now it is seen as a cultural force that sparks love affairs, breaks marriages and creates “sweat shops” to satisfy a black market in virtual goods.

World of Warcraft marks its fifth birthday today as something more than just an online role-playing game where users become wizards, warriors, orcs and elfs.

“It has had an enormous cultural impact,” said Tom Chatfield, author of Fun. Inc, a book about the growth of the games industry. “It has proved that online gaming can make huge profits, making a billion in revenue a year. It has proved that gaming could be for a truly global audience.”

Analysts say that its popularity has paved the way for other blockbuster games. This month Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, made a record-breaking $500 million (£303 million) within 24 hours of its release.

Virtual quests lead to real love and death for World of Warcraft fans - Times Online.

Washington - Securities exchanges have a sound network back-up if a severe pandemic keeps people home and clogging the Internet, but the Homeland Security Department has done little planning, Congressional investigators said on Monday.

The department does not even have a plan to start work on the issue, the General Accountability Office said.

But the Homeland Security Department accused the GAO of having unrealistic expectations of how the Internet could be managed if millions began to telework from home at the same time as bored or sick schoolchildren were playing online, sucking up valuable bandwidth.

via Homeland Security Could Block Websites During Swine Flu Pandemic — Signs of the Times News.

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite the UK gov’t insisting recently that a policy of kicking file sharers off the internet was off the table, a nice dinner between UK Business Secretary Peter Mandelson and Hollywood bigshot David Geffen created a sudden new interest in the subject, which quickly turned into it being right back on the table — creating massive complaints from just about everyone not associated with the RIAA or MPAA. Mandelson has tried to defend the idea, but his reasoning came up short, and demonstrated that he got his talking points direct from Hollywood and that he hasn’t actually spent much time actually understanding the issue at all.

Read the rest of this entry »

China is the world’s most successful Internet censor. While the Great Firewall of China isn’t perfect, it effectively limits information flowing in and out of the country. But now the Chinese government is taking things one step further.

Under a requirement taking effect soon, every computer sold in China will have to contain the Green Dam Youth Escort software package. Ostensibly a pornography filter, it is government spyware that will watch every citizen on the Internet.

Green Dam has many uses. It can police a list of forbidden Web sites. It can monitor a user’s reading habits. It can even enlist the computer in some massive botnet attack, as part of a hypothetical future cyberwar.

China’s actions may be extreme, but they’re not unique. Democratic governments around the world — Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom, for example — are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.

Schneier on Security: Building in Surveillance.

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 »

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 »

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 »

It is a frustrating experience trying to access a website and finding out that you are blocked from it. This is especially true for travelers outside US who want to get connected to their loved ones at home. Just because the country they are in imposes some restrictions, their freedom has been limited.

Another dreadful experience would be finding out that because of your IP address your accounts were intruded. Your log-in data and passwords have been exposed. Your identity has been stolen. Read the rest of this entry »

There will always be times when you don?t want other people to know which sites you?ve been visiting, whatever you use the Internet for. The problem is that we all leave a trail of evidence about our whereabouts and whimsies whenever we open a browser.

To save our blushes, the brand-new version of Internet Explorer ? IE8 ? features a new InPrivate Browsing mode. When it?s activated, Internet Explorer won?t record any URLs, cookies or temporary Internet files, leaving all other users clueless about what you?ve been up to.

While some people are quick to dub InPrivate mode ?porn mode?, Microsoft is keen to point out that there are plenty of legitimate reasons to browse in private. If you sit down at a computer in a hostel, hotel or Internet cafe then it?s not unusual to come across the browsing history, email addresses and sometimes passwords of the previous user. Read the rest of this entry »