Malware Threat Emanates from Growing Unemployed Ranks

Looking at the statistics, February was a positively brutal month for workers being idled. There were 2,769 mass layoff actions putting throwing 295,477 out of work. Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the ugly numbers.

That's 542 mass layoff actions more than January and 57,575 laid off. The BLS only obliquely breaks out what could represent IT workers as "professional and technical services." Not surprisingly, manufacturing bore the brunt of February's layoffs accounting for 47% of the unemployment claims, but IT folks could represent a small piece in all the 19 industry sectors that BLS follows. I wondered how many of those were IT people and what percentage might turn to cyber crime. Suffice it to say there's plenty of IT folks with little or nothing to do. The story explores how idled workers in China are turning to cyber crime.

That out of work IT professionals turn to cyber crime should come as no surprise so the headline China becoming the world's malware factory on top of an IDG News service is to be expected. Everyone needs to be vigilant (but not turn into vigilantes). Indeed, a story at Chief Security Officer cites a Symantec study that says 98 percent of organizations suffer "tangible loss" as the result of cyber crime (more than a little self-interest on Symantec's part should be noted). With the third variant of the Conficker worm set to strike on April 1, take the message of vigilance to heart (let's hope it's as tepid as Y2K). By the way, the BBC reported this morning that the U.K. Government is monitoring social networking sites like Facebook to "tackle criminal gangs and terrorists." That's vigilance of a controversial nature. It's obvious: the latter. Is this just another day in the cyber jungle or is the cyber crime problem exacerbated by the expanding ranks of the idled? So if you want to freshen up your knowledge of malware, check out the many primers on the subject. I like Wikipedia's or check out the Chief Security Officer web site.

Crowdsourcing takes center stage at DEMOfall ’09

One unmistakable trend at this year's DEMOfall show is the number of Web sites and applications that rely to some degree on crowdsourcing. 13 hot products from DEMOfall '09 Crowdsourcing – a buzzword loosely defined as giving large crowds of users the ability to collaboratively create or change content on Web sites or applications – was made popular by open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia and has since become a staple of Web 2.0 applications. So why does crowdsourcing have such an appeal for developers? "With all due respect it's because developers are lazy," laughs Micello founder and CEO Ankit Agarwal. "When I crowdsource it means that I don't have to do the work to get data myself." But crowdsourcing does have perks beyond getting other people to do your work for you. Among the new crowdsourcing technologies to debut at DEMO this fall are Article One Partners' AOP Patent Studies, an open-source enterprise service that employs an online community of patent advisors to research patent claims; Waze, a mobile application that can be used to update traffic conditions in real time; TrafficTalk, a mobile application that is similar to Waze but also lets users provide traffic updates simply using their voice rather than typing into their mobile phone; Micello, a mobile app that aims to be the Google Maps of indoor spaces; and Answers.com, a Web site that combines established reference resources and crowdsourcing to create a comprehensive information database. Some crowdsourcing developers say if you can create an application that meets a common need and gives people a real stake for getting involved, then it can go a long way toward growing your product's popularity.

It's a shared pain of being frustrated by traffic jams and the like, but our goal is to resolve that pain and to minimize the wait during commutes." Greenfield says that while larger crowds are obviously better for an application such as TrafficTalk, the application can be relatively successful even if only two people who trust each other are using it. TrafficTalk founder Larry Greenfield, whose product is still currently in its alpha testing phase, says that he has found fertile crowdsourcing ground in the form of frustrated commuters during tests he has run of his software. "For us, crowdsourcing has to create a sense of community among our users," he says. "There has to be something that binds people together. After all, he notes, if one friend who shares a commute route with another friend can notify that friend of a traffic accident using TrafficTalk, the application will have served its purpose. Demo's biggest stars of all time Answers.com, on the other hand, is a Web site that really does require massive participation if it is to meet its lofty goal of becoming a central hub for people seeking answers to their queries. Even so, he says the application needs around a dozen or so people to really reach its potential.

Right now, the Web site lets users ask questions whose answers are partially provided by information culled from licensed professional encyclopedias and dictionaries and partially provided by user-generated Wiki-style content. This past August, for instance, Answers.com got around 45 million unique visitors. "Crowdsourcing for us really starts to work when you get to a certain scale," he explains. "Right now we get 45,000 new questions asked each day and then about one third of those are answered every day. Answers Corp. founder and CEO Robert Rosenschein says that as the Wiki portion of the Web site has grown over the past year, participation has snowballed to the point where the company doesn't have to work as hard to promote itself. Those answers are the most valuable thing we have even though some are more detailed and some less so… When you start to get that sort of scale it just sort of happens. As Rosenschein acknowledges, crowdsourced answers are far more likely to contain factual errors than are answers taken from professional sources. The more new questions you get, the more new answers you get." Of course, the paradox of success is that the more popular your crowdsourcing site is, the more likely it will become the target of vandals.

This is why, he says, it's so important to foster a tight community that takes pride in keeping the site accurate and will work quickly to clean up any vandalism. Because the service uses its online community to research the validity of patent claims – a time-consuming task if there ever was one – it pays money to users who are the first to come up with a correct solution to whether a patent is valid or not. For AOP Patent Studies, developing a sense of community is also important, but it's not the only incentive it uses to push its users toward greater accuracy. It basically works like this: a company comes to AOP Patent Studies and pays them to look into a patent claim. The first two people to get results get paid a portion of the money. The Web site then throws the case to its online community for research.

Still, Article One Partners CEO Cheryl Milone thinks that monetary incentive can't help your crowdsourcing site if you don't first develop a strong sense of cooperation among users. "There really has to be a sense of camaraderie and loyalty," she says. "Whether people are brought to the site because they know a lot about a particular technology or because they feel strongly that the patent system needs to be strengthened, it's the feedback they get from the community that keeps them coming back and is in itself compensation for their efforts."

ICANN freed from US gov't oversight

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has reached a new agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce allowing the nonprofit greater independence, while giving more countries oversight of the organization. The DOC will continue to be involved in ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee, but the new agreement recognizes ICANN as a global "private-sector led organization." The new agreement is a "huge moment not just for ICANN but for the Internet," said Paul Levins, vice president at ICANN. "This really vital resource was being overseen by one government." The U.S. government will have "one seat at the table" for the three-year reviews, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said in a video on the organization's site. "What it really means is we're going global," he said. "All the reviews and all the work done will be submitted for public comment to the world. The new agreement, called an Affirmation of Commitments, sets up reviews of ICANN's performance every three years, with members of ICANN advisory committees, the Department of Commerce (DOC), independent experts and others serving on the review teams.

But there's no separate or unique or separate reporting to the United States government. The new agreement won praise from critics who have complained that the U.S. governmenthas had too much control over ICANN, which manages the Internet's DNS (domain name system). The new agreement should allow ICANN to become more open and accountable to users worldwide, said Viviane Reding, the European Union's commissioner for information society and media. All the reporting is to the world; that's the real change." The new agreement was announced Wednesday, the same day that an 11-year series of memorandums of understanding between ICANN and the DOC expired. The new agreement ends "unilateral" review of ICANN by the DOC and sets up independent review panels, she said in a statement. "I welcome the U.S. administration's decision to adapt ICANN's key role in internet governance to the reality of the 21st century and of a globalized world," Reding said in her statement. "If effectively and transparently implemented, this reform can find broad acceptance among civil society, businesses and governments alike." The challenge, she said, will be to make ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee more effective, as it has a major role in appointing the review panels. "Independence and accountability for ICANN now look much better on paper," she said. "Let's work together to ensure that they also work in practice." The new agreement commits ICANN to a "multi-stakeholder, private sector led, bottom-up policy development model for DNS technical coordination." It also requires ICANN to "adhere to transparent and accountable budgeting processes, fact-based policy development, cross-community deliberations, and responsive consultation procedures that provide detailed explanations of the basis for decisions." ICANN will publish annual reports that measure the organization's progress and it will provide a "thorough and reasoned explanation of decisions taken, the rationale thereof and the sources of data and information" on which it relied. The Internet Society, a nonprofit organization focused Internet-related standards, education, and policy, also praised the new agreement, saying it emphasizes ICANN's obligation to "act in the public interest as the steward of a vital shared global resource." The new agreement doesn't change the DOC's contract with ICANN to perform the functions of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which is responsible for the global coordination of the DNS Root, IP addressing, and other Internet protocol resources. While the expiration of the old agreement with the DOC "threatened to open an accountability gap" for ICANN, the new agreement should resolve that concern, added Steve DelBianco, executive director of e-commerce trade group NetChoice. "The Commerce Department has crafted an arrangement here that delivers what the global Internet community has clamored for: permanent accountability mechanisms to guide ICANN in the post-transition world," he said. "These reviews should help ICANN stay focused on security, choice and consumer trust, with an added emphasis on interests of global Internet users - especially those who can't yet use their native language in domain names or e-mail addresses."" The new agreement addresses an issue that's been missing at ICANN, "a balanced way to bring all governments into the oversight process alongside private sector stakeholders, with a sharpened focus on security and serving global internet users," he added.

The DOC, in the new agreement, also doesn't endorse ICANN's efforts to allow an unlimited number of new generic top-level domains, such as .food or .basketball. The controversial plan has met resistance from trademark owners, who say they'd have to register for dozens of new Web sites to protect their brands. "Nothing in this document is an expression of support by DOC of any specific plan or proposal for the implementation of new generic top level domain names or is an expression by DOC of a view that the potential consumer benefits of new gTLDs outweigh the potential costs," the new agreement said.

Tweets rolling in as frozen Twitter thaws out

After freezing up early this afternoon, Twitter is starting to thaw out as frustrated users tweet about the downtime. About half an hour earlier, many users had started reporting that their service was back up and running and tweets were no longer frozen. At about 3:30 p.m. EDT today, Twitter updated users on its status page that the problem that had stymied Twitterers for a few hours today had been repaired. At 1:50 p.m., Twitter had told users that tweets were not reaching the followers of Twitterers and that engineers were starting to deploy fixes.

The Twitter woes started between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. EDT today. By 3 p.m., many users were reporting that their service was back up and running and that their tweets were no longer frozen. Users could post tweets, which would be published on their own stream. Twitter has not disclosed what caused the problem. Updates from their followers weren't showing up on usr streams. The microblogging company did not respond to a request for comment but noted on its Web site that engineers ware deploying fixes.

PRE-FRIENDS days... none of you will get this, but it's WAY TO QUIET in my world!!!! miss you all...," wrote one Twitterer. Once tweets started moving again, users were quick to vent their frustration with the lack of service today. "twitter is frozen..." feels weird!! Another tweeted, "Twitter Is Frozen, which means right now, in offices all around the world, stuff is actually getting done." Another tweet read, "Twitter was frozen in time. I stared at my own updates for 3 hrs," while another said, "Twitter is frozen and y'all bout to lose ya minds. Really weird.

I'd hate to see what y'all would do if Twitter shuts down for good."

Father of fiber-optics snags share of Nobel Physics Prize

Charles Kao, whose work in the 1960s laid the foundation for today's long-distance fiber-optic networks, has won a share of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. More technical details on the prize winners' efforts are outlined in this paper.  Slideshow: Nobel vs. Kao, sometimes referred to as the "father of fiber-optic communications," was formally honored by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication" The Shanghai-born Kao shares the award with Willard Boyle and George Smith, who invented imaging technology using a digital sensor dubbed a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) that makes use of the photoelectric effect theorized by Albert Einstein under which light is transformed into electric signals.

Ig Nobel  Kao's breakthrough discovery in 1966 was to determine how to transmit light over long distances using ultrapure optical glass fibers. The first ultrapure fiber was created in 1970. According to the Nobel organization, if all the glass fibers in the world were put end to end, they would circle the globe more than 25,000 times. This would extend the distance of such transmissions to 62 miles vs. the mere 65 feet allowed under previous technology held back by impurities. Kao accomplished his work while with Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, which eventually became part of Nortel. More recent research into fiber-optics has resulted in such findings as those by Alcatel-Lucent researchers who multiplied the speed of the fastest undersea cables by 10 and by researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology who have come up with a way to use the same sort of fiber-optic cables used for telecom to detect tunnel excavation at depths of more than 60 feet. 

He is now Chairman of ITX Services.

Secret Service probes Obama assassination poll on Facebook

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating a poll posted on Facebook asking people to vote on whether President Barack Obama should be assassinated. He said the poll, which went online Saturday, was taken down Monday morning after the Secret Service alerted Facebook to its presence on the site. Special Agent Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said this afternoon that the agency launched a probe into the matter and currently is looking for the person who posted the poll. The poll asked Should Obama be killed? and gave users the choice of yes; maybe; if he cuts my health care; and no.

A screen shot of the poll , which was posted on the blog, The Political Carnival , shows that at some point at least 387 people had voted. Neither the Secret Service nor Facebook would say how many people voted in the poll and what the results were. Barry Schnitt, a spokesman for Facebook, was quick to point out that this was not a poll that originated from the social networking site itself. A source within law enforcement noted that while posting the poll, in and of itself, is not illegal, federal investigators can t discount the possibility that the person behind the poll has malicious intentions. The third-party application that enabled an individual user to create the offensive poll was brought to our attention this morning, wrote Schnitt in an e-mail to Computerworld . The application was immediately suspended while the inappropriate content could be removed by the developer and until such time as the developer institutes better procedures to monitor their user-generated content. The source said the Secret Service needs to interview the person to gauge his or her ultimate intent.