An interesting game that people have come to play is to search their name on Google and other search engines to see what results come up. There can be little to nothing in the results, maybe a facebook or MySpace page, if you have them. Perhaps something of note you did that was written about on the net somewhere. If you have your resume floating around online, it may come up on sites other than the ones you submitted it to.
The goal of most websites out there is to collect your information in addition to your business. And once they have your information, they store it for their own market research or some places sell it to their partners. Their intentions are usually laid out in the company’s “Privacy Policy” and sometimes the “Terms of Use”. And even if they say they don’t sell or share your personal information, you never really know. I still get random mail on occasion and wonder whose list I got on.
The great fear of course is potential identity theft. Thieves can get a good amount of information on someone from just their online presence. And if they do not have much of a presence, information can still be obtained from the few websites that do have it. This is why you always hear about user account information being compromised by attacks on the websites. Thieves are seeking the company database to get names, account numbers, social security numbers, etc. And with all of the services out there trying to merge with other services, the problems will probably just increase. It shouldn’t stop you from living your life normally, but just be mindful of what information you share on the internet. As private and secure you may think it is, it isn’t always.
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Cybersecurity Measures On The Rise
Companies and Big corporations are often face potential cyber based attacks to their websites and data holdings. From time to time you hear about such attacks in the news. Somebody got into the system and stole a bunch of financial records of company clients, or a similar story. People working in the cybersecurity field are there to find flaws in the systems, before they can be exploited. With our ever-changing technology, this is a never ending task.
To aide in the prevention of future cyber attacks to government and corporate forces, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a Cybersecurity Research Bill. The focus of the bill is to allow the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create a program that will educate companies and government offices about the attacks on computers they will face, and the best ways to prevent them.
In addition to training current staff, the bill is also to outline scholarship programs for students pursuing careers in cybersecurity.
The concern for cybersecurity has been re-heightened by the recent attack on Google’s network from what are believed to be forces inside of China. It is also been released that Google is now in talks with the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to help them examine their latest attack and develop methods to prevent future attacks.
Billions of dollars are spent each year by the U.S. Government on cybersecurity measures for their offices and infrastructure.
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Is There Any Point of Trying To Censor The Internet Anymore?
Censorship has always been a subject for debate. It forms have grown over time from its beginnings to a protester on the street, to newspapers, from the start of film, the rise of television, and the worldwide phenomena of the internet. In whatever century you look back at, the people in charge assumed the power of telling people what they should and shouldn’t look at, read, and in general what knowledge they should be privy too. Even though it sounds like a conspiracy theory, it is true. Corporations own the media outlets we get our news from, so anything that is against the company’s interest may not make it to your evening news.
China has been back in the news lately for their censorship issues they are having with Google. Mainly Google doesn’t want to deal with it anymore, especially after they got hacked by forces within China. The Chinese government is known for greatly censoring what information its citizens are allowed to view. Google would probably hate to break business ties with such a large consumer market, but it looks like they may have reached that point.
Also popping up in the news with an Internet censorship plan is Australia. If this plan goes through, the Australian government will be allowed to ban whatever websites and content they like without explanation.
Again we see more example of over parenting by government forces. It always starts out with lines such, as it is to protect the children or to preserve common decency. But the end result is the government using that as an excuse to hide whatever they want from the people.
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“GO” is the name of the new open source object oriented programming language released by Google. It is still in the experimental stages, but being open source will allow it to be tested and improved by the masses. “GO” is aimed as being a mix of the benefits of dynamic languages like JavaScript and python with the benefits of more traditional programming languages as C and C++.
“GO” is designed to take advantage of new computer technology, such as multi-core machines. Many functions are more automatic, such as garbage collection and memory management. The programs are said to run in about the same time as C/C++ programs, but compile at much faster rates.
Time will tell if “GO” catches on to the mainstream environments. Almost everything Google does is pretty popular, so it might. Google is not using “GO” for their own development yet, but once they do I guess we will all have to learn it to use their applications.
Check it out here: GO
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The next step in the cloud will be in the form of software such as the Google Native Client. The Native Client is still in testing, but in result it will allow web applications to run directly on a user’s machine. This would greatly speed up the user experience, if web applications could run directly on computer hardware and not rely on going through the browser in JavaScript or Flash.
Security has been the main concern so far. Allowing programs to directly access your computer has always been a security risk. After numerous amounts of security testing, Google claims it is ready, and will be starting to include it in their Google Chrome browser. The Native Client is built to inspect software before running it in order to not execute malicious code or other illegal actions.
It will be an optional feature in the Chrome browser, so users will not have to use it.This is still a new technology, so we will have to wait and see how its lifecycle unfolds.
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Today Google has announced and launched their new SideWiki feature that will be added to the Google Toolbar application. Right now it is optimized to work with Firefox and Internet Explorer, with more browsers to follow.
People will be able to post little notes and comments about topics related to the websites they are on. These notes will be viewable by anyone with SideWiki that wants to view other visitor’s comments. This can be beneficial for people that are researching the same or similar topics. And furthermore the comment may be spread across other websites that are related to the same topic and fall under the same search criteria.
The SideWiki will appear as a browser sidebar on the left-hand side of the screen. The quality of the content to be shown will be determined by a ranking algorithm, much like their search engine. People will be able to rate the entries, which will also affect the viewing rank the comment gets.
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