Internet Censorship: no success expected

Farewell Statements

Efforts by countries like China to restrict the exchange of information on the Internet are ultimately doomed to failure, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told an audience of Stanford University students recently. "I don't see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet," he said. "You cannot control the Internet."

China has grappled with the issue of Internet censorship in recent years and Microsoft, along with several other US companies, has come under fire for aiding in this effort.

In the long run, however, free speech will win out, Gates said. Thatís because of business requirements. Restrictions on free speech will curtail business activity and so commercial forces will work against censorship, Gates endorsed. "If your country wants to have a developed economy... you basically have to open up the Internet," he added.

Gates made the comments following a talk on Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Giving Back, which focused mainly on his two favorite topics: the future of technology and the philanthropic goals he has set for himself following his retirement from day to day work at the company he founded in 1975. -IDG News Service

Diminished role for today's keyboards

PITTSBURGH: People will increasingly interact with computers using speech or touch screens rather than keyboards, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said. "It's one of the big bets we're making," he said during the final stop of a farewell tour before he withdraws from the company's daily operations in July.

In five years, Microsoft expects more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard, Gates told about 1,200 students and faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University.

Gates also said the software that is proliferating in various branches of science, including biology and astronomy must become even more advanced. "They're dealing with so much information that the need for machine learning to figure out what's going on with that data is absolutely essential," he said.

"Microsoft is trying to establish ties not only with university computer science departments  throughout United States and Europe but also with researchers in other scientific areas to help us understand where new inventions are necessary," Gates added.

In context of Gate's forthcoming departure each of his statement is being taken as 'golden words' in the IT arena all over the globe.

Online Hobbies: choose new or enhance an existing one

Finding a hobby is a great way to spend time, to be creative, and to exercise your brain. Some hobbies are a great way to relax after a hectic day. The Web is a useful resource either to find a new hobby or expand your knowledge with a current one. Here are several sites that might inspire you to find a hobby also.

Radio Operators

Long before the internet was created, the amateur radio network was the way people from all over the world could connect. Amateur radio operators created vast social networks by talking long distances to other radio enthusiasts, making distant friends and exchanging calling cards. It is this linkage of radio enthusiasts that is ready to help communication flow in case of a disaster or weather emergency. The National Association for Amateur Radio has an informative website with lots of news and information, plus info on getting started or finding a chapter in your area: www.arrl.org.

Collectors

Are you a collector? Perhaps it is toy trains or salt shakers; maybe it is baseball cards or matchbox cars, fishing lures or old postcards. Collectors.org is a great website to get collecting information. The siteís primary purpose is to provide free information for collecting clubs, collectors and the antiques, art and collectibles industry: collectors.org.

Quilters

This is a great site for a quilter. If you need some ideas, or perhaps you are looking for a new block pattern, this is a no-frills site with hundreds of free block patterns and directions. I visit here often to get inspiration and new ideas: www.quilterscache.com.

Knitters

Knitting is having a revival right now, there are several magazines on the topic. If you have forgotten how to knit and want to take up the hobby again there are several websites that will give you illustrated instructions and lots of free projects that are easy to start like www.learntoknit.com/ or www.craftown.com.

Bird Watchers

All of us enjoy getting out in the country to breath the fresh air; adding bird watching to this activity might be fun. To get started all you need is a small pair of inexpensive binoculars for just those times you see something interesting fly by through the back yard or on a hike. When you are driving it is fun to stop, look at the view and try to find a few birds flying about. There are lots of great sites, books and even software for your PDA to carry with you, a good place to start is www.audubon.org.

Gardeners

Most of us have a back yard or a deck we can put a few flower pots on. Perhaps you would like a few more indoor plants. It is relaxing to plant something green and watch it grow. At the website www.garden.org you can find the zone you live in and all types of advice and resources to find plants that do well in your zone plus get ideas about adding more greenery to your life.

Whatever your interest or hobby is, you will be able to find information about it and more on the internet. The Web is a great source of information, instruction and inspiration for both finding a new hobby or enhancing an existing one. And who knows; you might find a social network or create your own blog, make new friends, start a group, or share your knowledge with others along the way. -Rasheed Ahmad Abbasi, Houston, Texas

DigiTales
IT Minister assured PCA for tax exemption on computers

ISLAMABAD: Caretaker Federal Minister of Information Technology, Abdullah Riarhas said that his ministry will send a summary to Federal Board of Revenue to eliminate the sales tax (ST) on computer products from the next budget.            

The minister expressed these views here during a meeting with a delegation of Pakistan Computer Association (PCA) headed by its president and senior vice president of Islamabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry Munawar Iqbal. The Minister further added that Prime Minister Mohammad Mian Soomroo has also agreed for the elimination of GST. -PPI

Japan launches high-speed Internet satellite

TOKYO: Japan successfully launched an experimental satellite aimed at providing high-speed Internet access across Asia, even when terrestrial infrastructure goes down, the space agency said.

The domestically developed H-2A rocket carrying the Kizuna satellite was launched at 0855 GMT on last Saturday with no glitches from the Space Centre on Tanegashima off the southern tip of Kyushu Island, southern Japan.

The communications satellite, expected to be in use for five years, separated from the rocket approximately 35 minutes after the launch. The 342 million dollar-Kizuna will allow super-high speed data communications of up to 1.2 Gbps, which would make it the fastest in the world. That rate would translate to 150 times that of the average high-speed ADSL connection rate of 8 Mbps, or 12 times the speed of a fibre-optic communication delivery to a personís premises (FTTP).

The Kizuna, which also means ìbondî in Japanese, is expected to begin transmitting and receiving data with terrestrial infrastructure in July after completing preparations and confirming the satelliteís safety.

Japan is looking to use the satellite to allow communication when a ground-based network is severed by a disaster in any Asian country, in which case it would be used to transmit data to crisis management offices.

The agency is hoping it can also be used as an educational or medical tool to reach people in remote or mountainous areas. The Internet is now an integral part of our lives; but its infrastructure levels vary. The satellite will enable students in Asian countries to communicate smoothly and with no time lag among one another, as if they were in the same classroom, it said. The expected life of the satellite is five years, an agency spokeswoman said. -AFP

Brain-reading Headset

NEW YORK: Hands cramping up from too many video games? How about controlling games with your thoughts instead? Later this year, Emotiv Systems Inc. plans to start selling the $299 EPOC neuro-headset to let you do just that.

The headset's sensors are designed to detect conscious thoughts and expressions as well as 'non-conscious emotions' by reading electrical signals around the brain, says the company, which demonstrated the wireless gadget at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The company unveiled a prototype last year that can detect emotions such as anger, excitement and tension, as well as facial expressions and cognitive actions like pushing and pulling objects.

The headset will be sold with a game developed by Emotiv, but it can also be made to work with existing PC games, the company claims. Users will also be able to access an online portal to play more games, chat or upload their own content such as music or photos. Emotiv plans to work with IBM Corp. to explore applications beyond video gaming. The ìbrain computer interfaceî technology could transform not only gaming, but how humans and computers interact, said Paul Ledak, vice president of IBM's Digital Convergence business.

Besides Talking: top cell phone uses

More than a third of mobile phone owners in China - the worldís largest mobile market - use their handsets to listen to music, more than in Britain or the United States, a study showed.

Music

Some 34.8 percent reported they listened to mobile music every month compared with 20 percent in Spain, 18.9 percent in Britain and 5.7 percent in the United States, according to M:Metrics, a research firm that monitors mobile media usage. M:Metrics was founded in 2004. It collects data from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. The study surveyed 5,163 Chinese mobile subscribers aged 13-54 via telephone in seven major cities of the country. Compared with users in the United States and Europe, Chinese consumers use their phones much less to check on their email or to send photos and videos.

Photo Sharing

Over 30 percent in Italy, Spain and Britain use their phones to send or receive photos and videos, and only half as many do so in China.

Users in the United States lead the poll in email usage with 11.6 percent compared with nine percent in Spain and Britain, but only 2.5 percent in China. The firm also found that while some 30 percent of those polled owned Nokia handsets, giving the company a substantial lead in the Chinese market, owners of Sony Ericsson handsets were a driving force in using mobile media. M:Metrics said global handset brands such as Motorola , Nokia and Samsung significantly surpassed native brands such as China Mobile in terms of being used to get mobile content.

China is expected to issue 3G licenses before the Olympics this year, but some predict licenses will not be handed out until 2009, as kinks in its homegrown 3G standard, TD-SCDMA, are smoothed out.

Young Users

Just like in the European and US markets, 18-34 year-olds are the biggest consumers of mobile content in China, accounting for 64.6 percent of those who accessed news and information via their mobile browser, M:Metrics said.

 
 Computer memory vulnerable to hacking

AmazingLoopholes

SAN FRANCISCO: Want to break into a computerís encrypted hard drive? Just blast the machineís memory chip with a burst of cold air.

That's the conclusion of new research out of Princeton University demonstrating a novel, low-tech way hackers can access even the most well-protected computers, provided they have physical access to the machines.

The Princeton report shows how encryption, long considered a vital shield against hacker attacks, can be defeated by manipulating the way memory chips work. The researchers say the ease of their attack raises fears about the security of laptop computers increasingly used to store sensitive information, from personal banking data, to company trade secrets, to national security documents.

Freezing a dynamic random access memory, or DRAM chip, the most common type of memory chip in personal computers, causes it to retain data for minutes or even hours after the machine loses power, the report found. That data includes the keys to unlock encryption. Without freezing, the chip loses its contents within seconds.

Hackers can steal information stored in memory by rebooting the compromised machine with a simple program designed to copy the memory contents - before the computer has a chance to purge sensitive data, according to the report.

Laptops left in hibernation or sleep mode, or simply not turned off at all, are the most vulnerable to the new type of attack.

"These risks imply that disk encryption on laptops may do less good than widely believed," according to the report, which was published this week by researchers from Princeton, the Electronic Frontier Foundation digital rights group, and Wind River Systems software company. "Ultimately, it might become necessary to treat DRAM as un-trusted, and to avoid storing sensitive confidential data there, but this will not be feasible until architectures are changed to give software a safe place to keep its keys."

Researchers have known since the 1970s that cooled DRAM chips can retain their contents long after power to them is extinguished, but the researchers said they believe their study is the first security paper to focus on the phenomenon. National security agencies may also have been aware that the types of breaches outlined in the study are possible, the researchers said, but added they weren't able to find evidence of that in any publications.

The attacks were carried out by spraying an upside-down canister of multipurpose duster spray directly onto the memory chips, freezing them to minus 50 degrees Celsius, about minus 60 Fahrenheit.

One challenge faced by the researchers was the threat that booting the system will automatically overwrite some parts of the memory. To make sure the contents were retained, they used small, special-purpose programs known as memory-imaging tools, which can be loaded over a network connection or a USB device, to save images captured from the memory chip. The attacks even work when the DRAM chip is removed and transferred to a machine set up by the hacker. Special programs were then used to correct errors in the recovered memory contents and reconstruct the keys used for encryption.

The researchers said their results suggest that 'this faith in the strength of disk encryption may be misplaced,' arguing that a moderately skilled attacker can bypass many widely used encryption products - including BitLocker with some versions of Windows Vista; Apple's FileVault; open-source TrueCrypt; and dm-crypt - if a laptop is stolen while it is powered on or suspended.

"The use of encryption is not, by itself, necessarily an adequate defense, and data in stolen laptops may be compromised even when encryption is used," the researchers said.

Purchasing a New Computer

By Susan Ayers Walker

Perhaps many of you are currently in the market to purchase a new computer. I am also, and itís been years since I thought seriously about this type of purchase. Computer technology has advanced since the last time I had to think about components, so when I read through ads Iím confronted with an alphabet soup of new brands and terms. Scratching my head, I sat down to get educated on which components would be important for creating the best computer configuration for me.

Laptops are very popular right now. Theyíre sleek and compact and perfect for someone whose office or desk space is limited. They can also be convenient, storing easily in a drawer for quick use at the kitchen table or while youíre lounging in front of the television. Their size and convenience have made them a necessity for those who travel often. But laptops lack the comfort of a large, ergonomically-adjusted keyboard and monitor and are limited on the number of ports available for connecting extra devices like webcams, printers and scanners. For these reasons, I decided to purchase a new desktop computer.

My next decision was determining the best Central Processing Unit (CPU) for my needs. The CPU is like the engine ìunder the hood.î Dual core is the buzz these days. A dual core is basically two processors that share the workload. You can continue surfing the Internet or working on a document while downloading digital pictures or completing a virus scan in background without having the activity of one operation impact the other. A dual core CPU has many advantages over a single CPU and is worth the expense.

Since this will be a Vista machine my attention turned to memory or RAM (Random Access Memory). When my old desktop computer was new, 512MB was more than a sufficient amount of RAM, but after years of operating system service-packs upgrades, not to mention the installation of newer and bigger software applications, 512MB did become sluggish. For Vista, 1GB of memory is the minimum recommended, but Iím going to anticipate that over the next several years 1GB will also slow down. With my new computer purchase, I decided to at least double-up to 2 GB, but may even go for 3GB of memory to ensure optimum operability for the long run.

My digital camera is always busy, and I download lots of music for my MP3 player, so storage is important and I will want to pay attention to the size of my hard drive. The typical desktop computer sold today comes with 80 to 100 gigabyte hard drives. If you own an external hard drive for backup and storage, 100 GB of storage may be sufficient. However, if video editing or downloading DVDs is an important activity for you, you may want to consider a 320GB hard drive or larger.

Now the specifications get a bit tricky with the notorious ìalphabet soupî for read/write CD/DVD drives. I've learned that there are only two choices. If you want full flexibility to read from and write to (the latter is also referred to as 'burn') DVDs or CDs, or to record then later retrieve or play back data, photos or music you stored on CDs, you need a DVD +/- RW drive. The other viable choice is a CD-RW/DVD-ROM (Read-Only Memory) combo which allows you to do all but burn to DVDs. If you select just a CD-RW, CD-ROM or DVD-ROM you will be restricting your options for storing and playing back data and media.

As for monitors, I decided that it was time to move away from the bulky CRT and upgrade to a flat panel display. The prices have come down and there are many choices in monitor size. Unless you're a heavy-duty gamer, the graphic card in most new desktop computers should be adequate.

When you consider buying a new desktop computer, think of it as an investment that should serve your needs for many years. Be willing to pay a bit more for a brand with a consistent reputation for reliability and good service. Like buying a vehicle, you should 'kick the tires,' read reviews, and ask to see a demonstration of the sort of computer you considering. Don't be bashful about talking to others, especially the sales people at electronic stores. The more you know, the more confident you'll be with your decisions - and the more satisfied you'll be with your purchase.