Internet Freedom Fighters Build a Shadow Web

Governments and corporations have more control over the Internet than ever. Now digital activists want to build an alternative network that can never be blocked, filtered or shut down.

 

Just after midnight on January 28, 2011, the government of Egypt, rocked by three straight days of massive antiregime protests organized in part through Facebook and other online social networks, did something unprecedented in the history of 21st-century telecommunications: it turned off the Internet. Exactly how it did this remains unclear, but the evidence suggests that five well-placed phone calls—one to each of the country’s biggest Internet service providers (ISPs)—may have been all it took. At 12:12 a.m. Cairo time, network routing records show, the leading ISP, Telecom Egypt, began shutting down its customers’ connections to the rest of the Internet, and in the course of the next 13 minutes, four other providers followed suit. By 12:40 a.m. the operation was complete. An estimated 93 percent of the Egyptian Internet was now unreachable. When the sun rose the next morning, the protesters made their way to Tahrir Square in almost total digital darkness.

Both strategically and tactically, the Internet blackout accomplished little—the crowds that day were the biggest yet, and in the end, the demonstrators prevailed. But as an object lesson in the Internet’s vulnerability to top-down control, the shutdown was alarmingly instructive and perhaps long overdue.

 

 

  brief description:-

• The Internet was designed to be a decentralized system: every node should connect to many others. This design helped to make the system resistant to censorship or outside attack.

• Yet in practice, most individual users exist at the edges of the network, connected to others only through their Internet service provider (ISP). Block this link, and Internet access disappears.

• An alternative option is beginning to emerge in the form of wireless mesh networks, simple systems that connect end users to one another and automatically route around blocks and censors.

• Yet any mesh network needs to hit a critical mass of users before it functions well; developers must convince potential users to trade off ease of use for added freedom and privacy.

Could the Internet Ever Be Destroyed?

The coming threats to the global Internet could take many forms

 

The raging battle over SOPA and PIPA, the proposed anti-piracy laws, is looking more and more likely to end in favor of Internet freedom — but it won't be the last battle of its kind. Although, ethereal as it is, the Internet seems destined to survive in some form or another, experts warn that there are many threats to its status quo existence, and there is much about it that could be ruined or lost.

Physical destruction

A vast behemoth that can route around outages and self-heal, the Internet has grown physically invulnerable to destruction by bombs, fires or natural disasters — within countries, at least. It's "very richly interconnected," said David Clark, a computer scientist at MIT who was a leader in the development of the Internet during the 1970s. "You would have to work real hard to find a small number of places where you could seriously disrupt connectivity." On 9/11, for example, the destruction of the major switching center in south Manhattan disrupted service locally. But service was restored about 15 minutes later when the center "healed" as the built-in protocols routed users and information around the outage.

However, while it's essentially impossible to cripple connectivity internally in a country, Clark said it is conceivable that one country could block another's access to its share of the Internet cloud; this could be done by severing the actual cables that carry Internet data between the two countries. Thousands of miles of undersea fiber-optic cables that convey data from continent to continent rise out of the ocean in only a few dozen locations, branching out from those hubs to connect to millions of computers. But if someone were to blow up one of these hubs — the station in Miami, for example, which handles some 90 percent of the Internet traffic between North America and Latin America — the Internet connection between the two would be severely hampered until the infrastructure was repaired.

Such a move would be "an act of cyberwar," Clark told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.

Content cache

Even an extreme disruption of international connectivity would not seriously threaten the survival of Web content itself. A "hard" copy of most data is stored in nonvolatile memory, which sticks around with or without power, and whether you have Internet access to it or not. Furthermore, according to William Lehr, an MIT economist who studies the economics and regulatory policy of the Internet-infrastructure industries, the corporate data centers that harbor Web content — everything from your emails to this article — have sophisticated ways to back up and diversely store the data, including simply storing copies in multiple locations.

Google even stores cached copies of all Wikipedia pages; these were accessible on Jan. 18 when Wikipedia took its own versions of the pages offline in protest of SOPA and PIPA.

This diversified storage plan keeps the content itself safe, but it also offers some protection against loss of access to any one copy of the data in the event of a cyberwar. For example, if power were cut to a server, you may be unable to reach a website on its home server, but you mayfind a cached version of the content stored on another, accessible server. Or, "If you wanted data that was not available from a server in country X, you may be able to get substantively the same data from a server in country Y," Lehr said.

Internet arms race

The redundancy of so much online content and of connectivity routes makes the Internet resilient to physical attacks, but a much more serious threat to its status quo existence is government regulation or censorship. In the early days of Egypt's Arab Spring uprising, the government of Hosni Mubarak attempted to shut down the country's Internet in order to cripple protesters' ability to organize; it did this by ordering the state-controlled Internet Service Provider (ISP), which grants Internet access to customers, to cut service.

Intel first Smartphone "Xolo X900" Lands in India

Intel and Lava International are launching the first smartphone powered by one of the chip maker's Atom processors next week in India. The 3G-enabled Xolo X900 running Android will go on sale in the country on April 23 and cost 22,000 Indian rupees, or about $425, without a cellphone plan, Lava announced Thursday.

The phone is based on a reference design developed by Intel and uses a Medfield-class System-on-a-Chip (SoC), the Atom Z2460, which combines a single-core, hypterthreading-enabled 1.6GHz central processor with a 400MHz graphics core and a wireless networking radio. Intel and India-based Lava announced a technology partnership at the Mobile World Congress in February.

The Xolo X900 has a 4.03-inch LCD capacitive multi-touch screen with 1024-by-600 resolution and protected by Corning Gorilla Glass, dedicated HDMI output, full HD 1080p playback, and dual speakers, as well as an 8-megapixel rear camera and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera.

The only available model has 16GB of internal storage and 1GB of RAM, according to the tech specs posted on Lava's dedicated Xolo X900 website.

The Intel-based smartphone runs Google's Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS but is upgradeable to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, according to the phone manufacturer.

Intel has struggled to penetrate an exploding mobile device market that largely relies on processors using the ARM instruction set instead of the chip giant's x86-based products which have long dominated larger computing platforms like desktops and laptops. But the company has been adamant in pronouncing that 2012 is the year that Intel-based smartphones will finally take off.

Medfield, Intel's fourth-generation platform for what the company calls mobile Internet devices (MIDs), is tipped to be the first Atom SoC with the combination of processing strengths, wireless networking, and a low enough power draw to make it an alternative to ARM chips for smartphones and other mobile devices.

"We finally have a very competitive product for smartphones," Jeff Ross, director of Intel's Marketing for Mobile and Communications Group, told Wired this week. "We have a high-performance part that can compete with products in the market, and those coming out to the market. It's not just about the performance, but also about the energy efficiency. There are number of performance factors that we'll be the best at."

Intel has also partnered with Motorola, Lenovo, Orange, and ZTE on Atom-based smartphones that are expected to be released in various markets in the coming months.

TCS planning to hire 50,000 in FY13

MUMBAI: Software major Tata Consultancy Services(TCS) today said it is planning to hire 50,000 people in FY 13.

"TCS is well prepared to achieve balanced growth across industries and markets it operates in FY 13. In view of good momentum, we are targeting to hire 50,000 people this year," TCS CEO and MD N Chandrasekaran told reporters here.

In view of excellent growth in North American and UK markets, we will continue hiring in the overseas markets, he said.

"We are hiring employees in the USA, including trainees. We will be visiting campuses in the USA during the fall semester," Executive Vice President, Head, Global Human Resources Ajoy Mukherjee said.

Commenting on wage hike, Chandrasekaran said the company has gone ahead with wage increase and employees will get hike of 8 percent on an average depending on their grades.

He also said that though there is a dip in volume growth in Europe, this is expected to pick up in the next quarter. The company had successfully undertaken the largest ever hiring effort in its history by adding and integrating 70,400 professionals during 2011-12.

"With business demand continuing to be robust, we have made 43,600 offers on campuses for trainees to join us from the second quarter of this fiscal year. Our efforts to increase retention by engaging with our employees and offering them a progressive career path are paying dividends with attrition rates falling further to 12.2 per cent," Mukherjee said.

The company has maintained high utilisation rates in the fourth quarter with utilisation excluding trainees at 80.6 per cent, while utilisation including trainees was at 71.3 per cent. The overall attrition rate was lower at 12.2 percent with IT attrition at a low of 11.05 per cent and BPO attrition at 21.6 percent.

The average age of a TCS employee is 28 yrs and 62.4 percent of the workforce has more than 3 yrs experience while 31.6 percent of the workforce comprised of women.

Now a 7-inch tablet 'Attitude Daksha' in competition with government's "Aakash tablet"

 THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Giving competition to the government's Aakash tablet, Telmoco Development Labs Pvt. has come out with a Tablet PC - Attitude Daksha - a 7-inch tablet variant for Rs.5,399 inclusive of all taxes.

Attitude Daksha, touted as the most powerful 7-inch tablet computer for students and professionals, was launched here Tuesday.

Technopark Technology Business Incubator (T-TBIC) incubated Telmoco plans to compete in the low-cost tablet PC market where the government-launched Aakash tablet is prominent.

Daksha features Capacitive 5 point touch screen with 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor with 512 MB DDR3 RAM. It has a HDMI port, Micro SD slot, 3.5 mm audio out, Micro USB port and having OTG connector for 3G Dongle and RJ 45lAN cable.

Daksha is capable of 1080p full HD video streaming and has dedicated 400 MHzGPU for advanced flash Apps, Interactive Apps and full HD videos. Daksha is powered by 3,800 mAh li-Pol battery which gives a back up of over 6 hours with WiFi on.

"Even though the Indian media tablets market witnessed high decibel launches by the world's leading vendors, the Tablet PC market in India is a niche market that is quickly picking up the pace in terms of adoption," said C.R. Nijesh, chairman and executive director, Telmoco at the launch.

Telmoco Development labs Pvt ltd is a company initiated in electronics research and mobile technologies.

Attitude Daksha is initially set off to launch at schools, professional institutions, and corporate houses and will be available in the market from May 15. It can be ordered online from Telmoco website.

How Controlling Robots With Your Thoughts

Over recent months, in José del R. Millán’s computer science lab in Switzerland, a little round robot, similar to a Roomba with a laptop mounted on it (right), bumped its way through an office space filled with furniture and people. Nothing special, except the robot was being controlled from a clinic more than 60 miles away—and not with a joystick or keyboard, but with the brain waves of a paralyzed patient.
The robot’s journey was an experiment in shared control, a type of brain-machine interface that merges conscious thought and algorithms to give disabled patients finer mental control over devices that help them communicate or retrieve objects. If the user experiences a mental misfire, Millán’s software can step in to help. Instead of crashing down the stairs, for instance, the robot would recalculate to find the door.
Such technology is a potential life changer for the tens of thousands of people suffering from locked-in syndrome, a type of paralysis that leaves patients with only the ability to blink. The condition is usually incurable, but Millán’s research could make it more bearable, allowing patients to engage the world through a robotic proxy. “The last 10 years have been like a proof of concept,” says Justin Sanchez, director of the Neuro­prosthetics Research Group at the University of Miami, who is also studying shared control. “But the research is moving fast. Now there is a big push to get these devices to people who need them for everyday life.”

How Robots Invent Their Own Language

Australian scientists have invented a new breed of robots called Lingodroids, programmed to make, use, and share language. The bots can coin words to describe places they have been, places they want to go, and plans for getting there. “When they need a new word, they invent one,” says , a cognitive scientist at the University of Queensland who leads an interdisciplinary team on the project.
The rolling chatterboxes “see” using 360-degree cameras, laser range finders, and sonar. A microphone functions as their ears, and a speaker acts as a voice box, emitting the familiar beeps of a touch-tone phone. As for brains, Wiles outfitted each Lingodroid with an alphabet of beeps that correspond to letters. Then she programmed them to play a series of games in which they paired the letters into nonsensical combinations like “ja” or “ku” and joined those syllables to coin neologisms as needed. For example, in one game two robots roamed through a course and met in an unfamiliar part of it. The meeting triggered one robot to name the spot “jaya” and share the new word with its partner, who then added the word to its lexicon. In this way the robots slowly built a new language to describe their travels [pdf] and eventually even learned to communicate and understand directions.
Wiles notes that although the language may seem simple, for robots, grasping spatial information is incredibly complex. “We don’t realize how sophisticated our use of language to describe the world around us is,” she says. Ultimately, she hopes to teach her robots to chat up humans, paving the way for robotic caregivers, companions, and butlers