December 2011

Trust but verify: Ensuring digital identities

Imagine visiting any government website for the first time and immediately accessing services without having to register. Think of it as an online express lane akin to the airport security gates that allow prescreened travelers to whiz through without taking off their shoes and belts. And imagine the money that agencies providing these accounts could save by eliminating duplicative ID verification systems. Federal officials are pushing to turn this fantasy into online reality.

The Obama Administration has handed the private sector a blueprint for building a network similar to the credit card payment system for secure online transactions. But this network would exchange online identities, the currency of the 21st century. The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace has the support of businesses and even wary public interest groups. But protecting online transactions worldwide is expected to take years of negotiations among Internet companies, governments and individuals "Portions of an identity ecosystem exist today, but it's not quite unified in a way that NSTIC envisions it," says Jeremy Grant, who heads the effort as a senior executive adviser at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The framework for "federated identity management" should solve several Internet problems by allowing any site to rely on third parties for issuing and verifying a person's digital credentials. Currently, Internet users must create a new account for every service they want to access online, requiring that they deposit personal information all over the place. Sites must shoulder the costs of setting up and maintaining their own independent ID validation systems, and visitors must remember multiple passwords to interact with each agency or business.

Smartphone Penetration Approaching Tipping Point As PC Usage Declines

Smartphone penetration is slowly approaching the tipping point where it will be more common to have a smartphone than a feature phone among the general population.

Ofcom says the UK and Japan are among the countries leading the way to that milestone as consumers turn away from PC usage—a trend with wider implications for the digital content market as a whole. Some 46 percent of consumers in the UK are using smartphones, giving it the highest smartphone penetration in Europe, with Spain in second position at 45 percent. Japan, meanwhile, can boast that some 93 percent of its consumers are using devices with 3G connections across smartphones and high-end featurephones (that figure is only 48 percent in the UK, since some feature phones will have 3G access but many do not). Given that mobile penetration in the UK is now 130 percent (some people have more than one device), it effectively means that nearly half the population is using a smartphone now.

How Fox News is helping Barack Obama's re-election bid

[Commentary] Even though the US economy is slumped in the doldrums, some of the country's shrewdest commentators make a serious case that President Barack Obama could be heading for a landslide victory in 2012. How to explain such a turnaround? In the United States, at least, there is one compellingly simple, two-word answer: Fox News.

By any normal standards, President Obama should be extremely vulnerable. Not only is the economy in bad shape, he has proved to be a much more hesitant, less commanding White House presence than his supporters longed for. And yet, most surveys put him comfortably ahead of his would-be rivals. That's not a positive judgment on the President – whose approval rating stands at a meager 44% – but an indictment of the dire quality of a Republican field almost comically packed with the scandal-plagued, gaffe-prone and downright flaky. And the finger of blame for this state of affairs points squarely at the studios of Fox News. It's not just usual-suspect lefties and professional Murdoch-haters who say it, mischievously exaggerating the cable TV network's influence. Dick Morris, veteran political operative and Fox regular, noted the phenomenon himself the other day while sitting on the Fox sofa. "This is a phenomenon of this year's election," he said. "You don't win Iowa in Iowa. You win it on this couch. You win it on Fox News." In other words, it is Fox – with the largest cable news audience, representing a huge chunk of the Republican base – that is, in effect, picking the party's nominee to face President Obama next November.

Scientists Set New Internet Speed Record

Scientists announced that they have broken the Internet speed record by transferring data at 186 Gbps between two cities.

The scientists at Caltech collaborated with those at the University of Victoria, the University of Michigan, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) and Florida International University to build an optical network between University of Victoria Computing Centre located in Victoria, British Columbia, and the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. The network achieved a speed that could transfer 100,000 full Blu-ray discs in a day. The network was able to transfer 98 Gbps in one direction and 88 Gbps in the other. The previous record, said Caltech, was set in 2009 with a speed of 119 Gbps.

Should We Fire the First Shot in a Cyberwar?

Military bureaucracies around the world are likely to see offensive capabilities as increasingly attractive in any cyberwar, suggests the head of the computer research arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Offensive cybertechnology and operations are inherently stronger than defensive operations—that is, offense beats defense in cyberspace, in most cases, and given enough time," says Herbert Lin, chief scientist at the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board at the National Research Council. Lin spoke last week at an MIT workshop on the fast-emerging cyber dimension to international relations. Cyberattacks could damage or disable military networks or civilian infrastructure like power grids, or they could involve the theft of military and corporate secrets. Experts warn that such attacks could occur at light speed and be difficult to trace, especially if data is routed through computers in many different countries. "Since you don't know how to do good defense, you can't prevent offensive dominance. And you can't do good deterrence because effective retaliation is hard, so if you want to take advantage of cyberspace, you will do offensive operations for nondefensive purposes," Lin says. "I'd really like to be wrong about that, but I fear that's where we are going."

Hidden Industry Dupes Social Media Users

A trawl of Chinese crowdsourcing websites -- where people can earn a few pennies for small jobs such as labeling images -- has uncovered a multimillion-dollar industry that pays hundreds of thousands of people to distort interactions in social networks and to post spam.

The report's authors, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also found evidence that crowdsourcing sites in the U.S. are similarly dominated by ethically questionable jobs. They conclude that the rapid growth of this way of making money will make paid shills a serious security problem for websites and those who use them around the world. A paper describing their results is available on the Arxiv pre-print server. Ben Zhao, an associate professor of computer science at UCSB (and a TR35 winner in 2006), started looking into the largely uncharted crowdsourcing industry in China after working closely with RenRen, a social network that is sometimes called the "Facebook of China," to track malicious activity on the site. Zhao was intrigued to see a lot of relatively sophisticated attempts to send spam and promote brands by users that appeared to be working with specific agendas.

Where people get information about restaurants and other local businesses

People looking for information about local restaurants and other businesses say they rely on the internet, especially search engines, ahead of any other source.

Newspapers, both printed copies and the websites of newspaper companies, run second behind the internet as the source that people rely on for news and information about local businesses, including restaurants and bars. And word of mouth, particularly among non-internet users, is also an important source of information about local businesses. Some 55% of adults say they get news and information about local restaurants, bars, and clubs. When they seek such information, here are the sources they say they rely on most.

Apple made Galaxy Tab a 'household name': Samsung

Samsung Australia's mobile chief says that far from killing its Galaxy Tab 10.1, Apple's court case was almost a blessing in disguise that made the product a "household name." Samsung's tablet will arrive in stores this week after a Sydney court denied Apple's request to appeal to the High Court an earlier ruling that reversed the ban on sales of the Galaxy Tab. Some carriers such as Vodafone have already been accepting pre-orders.

More than 100 million EU citizens have never surfed web

Almost a quarter of the European Union's 500 million people have never used the Internet and there is a widening division between the web-savvy north of Europe and the poorer south and east. More than half the population of Romania and just under half of those in Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus and Portugal do not have Internet access at home, according to the figures from Eurostat, the EU's statistical agency. As well as highlighting geographic disparities across one of the world's most-developed regions, the figures underline the lack of opportunity people in poorer communities have to take part in advances such as the Internet that have delivered lower cost goods and service to millions of people.

Asian Carriers Move Away From Unlimited Data Plans

Some of Asia's mobile-phone operators are moving away from offering unlimited data plans as they launch fourth-generation wireless services in an effort to increase revenue and recoup billions of dollars spent to upgrade networks.

Limiting data use and charging subscribers for excessive Web browsing on mobile devices may help boost carriers' return on their investment at a time when many operators in the region have seen their earnings pressured due to falling voice revenue and hefty smartphone subsidies. With the shift to charging subscribers for extra data usage, the region's carriers are hopeful that they can boost their revenue. Currently, most Asian operators offer unlimited data for third-generation mobile services. But as carriers move to offer speedier services on their 4G networks to keep up with a surge in demand for online services such as music and video streaming, excessive data usage has strained their capacity. 4G networks can handle three times more data than current 3G networks.

Benton

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