Gregarius » BetaNews.Com » février 15, 2015

BetaNews.Com (4 non lus)

Are we really in danger of losing our history to the cloud?

Publié: février 15, 2015, 7:20pm CET par Mark Wilson

If Google's vice president is to be believed, we are in danger of losing an entire generation of information to the digital realm. Look to the history books, and you do just that -- look in a real, physical book. Pictorial histories can be found in photo albums. The works of Oscar Wilde, Samuel Pepys, and Charles Dickens are stored in real, tangible formats.

But now just about everything is stored digitally. Photos are rarely, if ever printed; millions of words are published online each day on blogs, online newspapers, and message boards. These are all important social, political, literary, and historical records. There's no guarantee that the sites, apps and technology needed to access all of these records will still be available in 50 years or more. Could our history be lost to the cloud?

Every day we post reams of information to Facebook and Twitter, and it's usually stuff we have no 'backup' of. Upload a photo and there's a high chance that you have a copy stored on your phone, camera or computer, but the same cannot be said of every bon mot penned. It's easy to deride the contents of social networks as material that we should just forget about, but historians in several hundred years' time may well find it difficult to piece together what it meant to be alive in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century.

Google and other companies have quite a propensity for shutting down services willy nilly -- Helpouts is just the latest in a long line of victims. Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Google's VP, Vint Cerf said:

When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets, and all of the world wide web, it's clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history [...]We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future.

We can't be sure that everything we say on Facebook will be accessible next year, let alone in a couple of decades. We have no guarantee that images currently stored as JPEGs will be as easy to open in 2115 as they are in 2015 -- the software horizon is completely unknown. In the relatively short time in which digital documents have become the norm we have already seen a number of once-popular file formats fall by the wayside. Conversion tools are available in many cases, but not in all.

The likes of Word are likely to stick around for longer than any other formats, but there is a danger that we would reach a time when opening certain types of documents requires specialist intervention. Old computer systems and games consoles are consigned to museums. Could the software you are working with at the moment become the Pong of tomorrow?

Storing anything digitally leaves it open to a serious problem -- security. Chuck your data to the cloud, and you're placing a lot of trust in the companies involved to keep your files safe. But if something goes wrong -- from a company closing down, through a hardware failure that wipes out files, to a hack attack -- there is no way of knowing that your cloud-stored information will continue to be available to you.

It's a problem exacerbated by the huge range of mobile apps that are now out there, each storing files in their own unique, often incompatible formats. When it comes to apps for phones and tablets, storing data in the cloud is very much the norm -- it's just the way things are. Too many apps fail to provide a way (or at least an easy or free way) to convert data into another format that would allow it to be used with another piece of software. Patents and IP laws often stand in the way of enterprising programmers from creating their own conversion tools.

This is far from the only concern. The sheer volume of data we all create on a daily basis is staggering

Talking to TechRadar, Mark Whitby, Senior Vice President of Branded Products Group at Seagate Technology, said that our data storage needs are spiralling out of control:

The total amount of digital data generated in 2013 was about 3.5 zettabytes (that's 35 with 20 zeros following). By 2020, we'll be producing, even at a conservative estimate, 44 zettabytes of data annually.

Our data is spiralling out of control. Whether it is stored on hard drives or in the cloud (which ultimately means that it is stored on a hard drive somewhere) we generate countless libraries worth of information every day with no guarantee that it will be accessible in the next century. How much data do you have stored on old 5.25 inch disks, 3.5 inch floppies, or even CD-Rs that are unreadable? It might not just be that you don’t have the drives necessary to read these various types of storage, but that the media is prone to deterioration over time. And this is still where we're relatively in control of it. We have no idea how accessible our cloud data will be further down the line. No idea whatsoever.

CDs we created a few years ago have already become unreadable with age. DVDs and Blu-ray discs will suffer the same fate, and it would be naïve to believe that the hard drives and memory built into so many devices are not prone to the same problem.

The lure of the paperless office means that less and less information is stored on slices of tree, but this is the format that has proved to be one of the most enduring throughout history. Perhaps it's time to dig out the printer, invent in a bunch of ink and start running off hard copies of everything we couldn’t bear to lose.

Right... who's going to print out Wikipedia?

Photo credit: Bruce Rolff / Shutterstock
Kaspersky Lab says malware is used to steal millions of dollars from banks

Publié: février 15, 2015, 5:33pm CET par Mark Wilson

However much money you have flowing through your bank account, you probably take measures to keep it secure. You protect your PIN, you use secure passwords for online banking, and ensure that your computer is free from keyloggers and malware. It's only right that you expect your bank to be similarly eagle-eyed about security... right?

A new report from security firm Kaspersky Lab shows that banks' security is not up to the standard that many would expect. In fact Kaspersky says that sophisticated malware has allowed criminals to help themselves to more than $300 million. Has your bank been hit? The affected financial institutions are now aware of the attacks, but non-disclosure agreements and on-going investigations prevent them from being named.

This is not money that has been taken in a single hit. The report, which has been shown to the New York Times ahead of its official publication, shows that money has been syphoned off since the latter half of 2013. Accounts in the US, Europe, Russia and Japan have been targeted, and a variety of techniques have been used to extract money from more than one hundred banks around the world.

The malware has been used to remotely monitor the day-to-day operations of individual banks and employees. More than this, the malicious software enabled criminals to take remote control of banking computers, and this is when the thefts started to take place. Moving money from one account into another would seem like an obvious way to go about stealing money, and this was one of the methods used. But money transferred in this way is easily traceable, the criminals also used different electronic payment systems to send money to fraudulent accounts in other countries.

Perhaps the most audacious method of theft was to simply send instructions to ATMs to dispense money at particular times. All that's needed then is to have someone in place at the right time to collect the cash and move on to the next ATM.

Other techniques included adding 'virtual money' to an innocent target's account and then withdrawing this cash. The New York Times gives an example in which an account with $1,000 in it is artificially inflated to show a balance of $10,000. Cybercriminals could then withdraw the difference of $9,000 without alerting the account holder.

The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center issued a statement that said:

Our members are aware of this activity. We have disseminated intelligence on this attack to the member... Some briefings were also provided by law enforcement entities.

What will be most worrying to many people, perhaps, is the fact that the attacks have been going on for so long -- and apparently continue to take place. Chris Doggett, managing director of Kaspersky Lab's North American office, said the Carbanak malware helped to keep the attacked under the radar:

This is likely the most sophisticated attack the world has seen to date in terms of the tactics and methods that the cybercriminals have used to remain covert.

Although individual banks have failed to issue statements about the report, President Obama has made a recent call for companies to publicly disclose details of any security breaches that compromises individual's personal or financial information.

Photo credit: Frank11 / Shutterstock
Work with images from Explorer with XnShell

Publié: février 15, 2015, 1:09pm CET par Mike Williams

XnShell is a handy Explorer shell extension which makes it easier to view, process and generally work with images.

The program allows you to preview any picture, in just about any format, directly from its right-click menu. No need to turn on Icon View, enable the preview pane or open the full image (which may not work, anyway, if it's not supported by your default viewer): just right-click, select XnShell, and you'll see a thumbnail in the context menu.

You're able to convert your selected files directly to GIF, BMP, JPG, PNG, PCX, TIF and TGA from the context menu.

A separate "Convert…" option opens a dialog with more formats, resize options, and the ability to set your output folder.

There are simple options to rotate the image by fixed amounts (or according to the EXIF tag), flip it, or edit its IPTC tags.

An Upload tool sends the picture to ImageShack and opens it in a browser window, ready for immediate sharing (no registration required).

Other options can send your selected image to the clipboard, or set it as your wallpaper.

This is all configurable via a detailed Options dialog. In particular, you’re able to customize the program menu to remove features you’ll never use.

XnShell doesn't do anything too surprising, but the value here is all in the shell integration. If you occasionally work with images from Explorer then the program should help make your life a little easier.
How Google and Facebook are breaking net neutrality to game their way into emerging markets

Publié: février 15, 2015, 3:49am CET par Manish Singh

After proving their dominance in developed nations, technology giants are now eyeing emerging markets -- regions where a vast majority of people are yet to access the internet. Earlier this week, Facebook partnered with RCom to launch Internet.org in India to bring free internet access to millions of people who weren’t previously connected to the internet, and now we’re learning of a similar plan by Google. As The Information reports, the Mountain View-based company is working with carriers and developers to lower or eliminate the data usage and data charges in emerging markets like India.

Known in the industry as zero-rating, Google is essentially trying to act as a middleman between carriers and app developers to reduce the data charges as well as other expenses sought by app developers to ensure that the price of using these services by users is minimal. The company would be closely monitoring data usage when a person uses any of the app partner’s app and would pay the carrier the fee.

Interestingly, the report suggests that Google isn’t trying to make access to its own apps free. Google offers all its apps such as Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Keep, and Hangouts for free, but users still have to pay their carriers for the data usage clocked while accessing these services. In the past, however, Google has also favored its own services. The search giant, in the past, had partnered with Airtel to make access to its search engine free to users.

The report further claims that the company will pilot this project on Android One handsets. By reducing the charge to use an app, Google is ultimately aiming to make the dirt cheap Android One handsets more useful and valuable to people. To ensure minimum bandwidth is used while accessing apps, Google could use its own content delivery network infrastructure.

Google has indulged into is very similar methods as the approach Facebook has taken. Through Internet.org, the social network company is allowing users free access to select apps and services. In India, the company has partnered with RCom, a broadband and telecommunications company to offer free access to around three dozens websites to those who are on Reliance network. Google is also trying to bring down the cost of using select apps.

Both Facebook and Google are participating in acts that defy the essence of net neutrality. The companies are favoring one carrier and apps or services developed by partners of that carrier. In the long run, this could entrench powerful monopolies and devastate the competition and ultimately slow down innovation.

Photo Credit: Yuriy Boyko/Shutterstock