In a world of 6 billion people, fame means having only one name: Ronaldo, Madonna, Obama, Diana. Second names are used only to differentiate between identical forenames: Mel C and Mel B. I think technology will change all that. Here’s why. Everything we do is going up into the cloud, and once it’s there, it no longer belongs to us. People don’t care now, but they will in a few years’ time.

One of my favourite programs a few years ago was Evernote, which collected, organised and made searchable all sorts of information, from web clips to PDFs and quickly typed scribblings. Even handwritten notes could be scanned, and so could the text in mobile phone photographs. The only snag was that it was difficult to keep two copies of the program in sync between my laptop and my desktop. When version 3 came out, it promised to make it possible to sync all kinds of devices - not just PCs, but Macs, and soon iPhones as well. But you had to do it through the company’s servers, not through your own machines. I wouldn’t - and I won’t.

I don’t want to pass all my private thoughts through someone else’s computers. The fact that Evernote is such an excellent collector of all sorts of information only increases my reluctance to use it. The more that I put into a program like that, the less I want to share it with the world, anonymously or not.

Few people seem to share my sensitivity about this kind of privacy right now. But I think that almost everyone will in a few years’ time. I actually quit Facebook, or tried to, and I certainly stopped using it when I realised that the real value of the company was in the information it may sell to advertisers. That gesture doesn’t seem to have started a mass movement, or even any sort of movement. But eventually the business model of apparently free services in exchange for information that can be used to sell stuff will hit limits on the net, just as it has hit them in the world outside.

The model is normally understood as an exchange of privacy for money. But I don’t think that gets it quite right. The difference is quite simple. My private life can be defined as the things that I know about myself that I don’t want to share with the world. But the information that Facebook - or Google, or even Evernote - collect is different because it’s not made up of things that we already consciously know about ourselves. It is, in a sense, private even from me.

This is fairly obvious in the case of knowledge collection programs such as Evernote: by collecting and concentrating knowledge, they also create it, just as diaries and commonplace books once did. If I already knew and could remember everything that I was interested in, I wouldn’t need a program to help me organise and display it.

But Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and, most of all, Google, can know things about me (or, if I’m Jacqui Smith, my husband) that I don’t know are there to be known. And, unlike the explicit knowledge-collecting programs, they hold it in ways to which I don’t have access. The real information is not what I said or wrote, but who I said or wrote it to, and who they in turn were connected to; how my queries ran on one from another: how I thought. That is tightly locked up within the databases of the big social networking companies. That is what they are selling on.

So what can we practically do? A life without Google is hard to imagine. So I predict that, increasingly, people will turn to second identities - forenames, if you like - which are shared only in private among our real friends. We all do this with email already. It’s the only thing that makes it manageable. But soon it will be happening with all our online identities.

And the more we may be public figures, the more of these pseudo-names we will need. In 20 years’ time, the mark of a significant person will be to have nearly as many names at their disposal as Henry Charles Albert David Windsor (Prince Harry to you and me). And, as any journalist who has dealt - however fleetingly - with any celebrity will tell you, we know nearly nothing about their real private selves. Those are concealed in the names the public never knows.

In five years’ time there will be no such thing as a multiplayer mode. That isn’t a prophecy of startling revisionism: we’re not all going to go back to playing alone. It’s just that games will stop making any kind of distinction between the “main” single-player mode, and the cordoned-off multiplayer options. It was never really a satisfactory arrangement - as soon as you annex an option you reduce the potential audience, and many gamers are wary of the multiplayer tag as they envisage a deathmatch nightmare zone filled with savage strangers. It doesn’t have to be that way.

A few excellent titles are already pointing us in the right direction. Open-world driving games such as Test Drive Unlimited and Burnout Paradise let you enter an online race whenever you feel like it from the confines of the singleplayer world. And GTA IV gives you easy access to all the online stuff via the main game’s virtual mobile phone. Ubisoft’s Shaun White Snowboarding mixes things up even more - here, you can complete single-player objectives within an online environment populated by other players.

Another spin on this idea of seamless integration is drop-in co-op, where friends are able to turn up in someone else’s game and start playing beside them. Gears of War 2, for example, will let a novice plop themselves into a campaign with a pal who’s playing on the hardest difficulty: the game simply tweaks the new guy’s damage and weapon accuracy stats so they can make a useful impact on the action. Similarly, in the forthcoming action RPG Sacred 2, you’ll be able to nip out of your single-player quest, go online, help a mate through a tricky battle, then whiz back into your own game. Later this year, Aliens: Colonial Marines will feature four-player drop-in, drop-out co-op, which means groups of friends can nip in and out without having to commit to a whole evening of alien-blasting.

Released this week, EA’s The Godfather II tie-in takes an extremely interesting angle. Here, in-game money that you earn in the multiplayer mode is transferred into the single-player quest, where it can be used to buy new weapons and thugs-for-hire. Also, you can take your AI-controlled “family members” out of the single-player experience and use them in online battles, thereby improving their stats. When you drop them back into the “main” game, they’re much more powerful allies.

What the Wii has taught us is that, to garner true mainstream acceptance, the machinery of game design must be as invisible as possible. The whole concept of “game modes” - the provision of options even before you start playing - is anathema to most people. It’s like having to decide the sort of programme you want to watch before switching on the TV. It’s just not human nature.

HackersBlog reports that an SQL injection attack has enabled “full acces to ALL the databases of this famous newspaper”

The Daily Telegraph’s web site has been compromised using an SQL injection attack, according to HackersBlog. It says:

“Latest news, business, sport, comment, lifestyle and culture plus content from the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers and video from Telegraph” and an SQLi that allows full acces to ALL the databases of this famous newspaper.

Unfortunately, this has compromised “hundreds of thousands of subscriber email addresses and more worryingly, passwords in clear text,” according to Rik Ferguson on Trend Micro’s security blog. If that means you, you should change your password on that and perhaps other sites. His post adds:

Recently published research showed that 61% of people use the same password for multiple sites, so this kind of compromise represents real risk for many people.

The story was picked up by SoftPedia, which says:

The several SQL injection flaw affecting one of the website’s sections was discovered by a Romanian self-confessed ethical hacker going by the online handle of “unu” (someone). “Unu” is a member of HackersBlog and has recently disclosed similar vulnerabilities in popular websites belonging to The International Herald, UK’s National Lottery, Kaspersky Labs, Bitdefender Antivirus, or Symantec.

A British physicist has revealed his plan to launch a new internet search engine so powerful that one expert has suggested it “could be as important as Google”.

London-born scientist Stephen Wolfram says that his company, Wolfram Research, is preparing to unveil the system in two months’ time.

Known as Wolfram Alpha, the site is an attempt to address some of the deficiencies of current web search by understanding people’s questions and answering them directly.

“Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things … and that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question and have it compute the answer,” he wrote on the Wolfram Research website.

“But it didn’t work out that way … I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realised that I was finally in a position to try and do it.”

According to its creator, the system understands questions that users input and then calculates the answers based on its extensive mathematical and scientific engine.

Natural language processing – the ability to determine – has long been a holy grail for computer scientists, who believe for interacting with machines in an instinctive way. And that, says Wolfram, is part of the code that Alpha has cracked.

“The way humans normally communicate is through natural language – and when one’s dealing with the whole spectrum of knowledge, I think that’s the only realistic option for communicating with computers too,” he wrote.

“Of course, getting computers to deal with natural language has turned out to be incredibly difficult. And, for example, we’re still very far away from having computers systematically understand large volumes of natural language text on the web.”

Other search engines, such as Google, compare search terms against billions of documents stored on its servers, before pointing to the pages on which the correct answer is probably kept.

Although this method has proved phenomenally successful, many computer scientists have continued trying to create a system that can understand human language.

One of the most recent to claim a breakthrough was Powerset, which raised $12.5m (£8.9m) in funding and was under development for several years – but only released a limited search engine for Wikipedia before being bought by Microsoft for $100m last year.

According to Nova Spivack, the founder of another intelligent web service, Twine, Alpha is far more impressive than what has gone before.

“Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain,” he wrote. “It provides extremely impressive and thorough questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers – it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.”

The plan is already gaining media attention, but the 49-year-old is used to getting noticed for his exploits. After studying at Eton and Oxford, Wolfram went on to receive his PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology at the age of 20 .

As a result he was awarded a Macarthur genius grant in 1981, and later generated a mixture of applause and opprobrium with his famous book, A New Kind of Science. In it, he suggested that simple algorithms, rather than complex rules and structures, could be at the root of all science.

Reaction to the idea – which Wolfram said could boil down to a computer program consisting of just “three or four lines of code” – was mixed.

Some critics felt that Wolfram unfairly refused to submit his theories to peer review in the decade that he worked on the book, while others claimed he courted publicity by building up the image of a reclusive genius.

Whatever the outcome of Wolfram’s audacious claims, however, his track record is strong. One of his previous creations, the computer program Mathematica, is now used by many scientists to help them with their work.

Meeting Asus last week, I had a look at a scaled-up Asus S101 – the gorgeous one with the discreet Swarovski crystals – with a 12in screen instead of the 10in version. Wasn’t the S121 pushing it for a netbook, I wondered? “People want to buy bigger screens,” replied Asus’s Hailuen Ling.

Asus gets credit for starting the netbook market in 2007 with the Eee PC 700, which had a 7in screen and was initially targeted at the schools market. RM introduced it to the UK as the MiniBook, running Linux. The idea was that it would be a consumer appliance, like a CD player or TV set: no support would be needed, beyond a reset to factory condition.

This sort of netbook was clearly different from a notebook PC. It saved money by having a small screen, no hard drive, and no Microsoft Windows — though at the time, RM said Windows and hard drives would be offered in later models. Since then, netbook screens have grown through 8.9in and 10.2in versions to the latest 12in models, and hard drives have gone from 40GB through 80GB to 160GB. Also, most netbooks now run Windows XP, thanks partly to a cut-price deal from Microsoft.

So in most respects, the only real difference between a netbook and a notebook is the use of an Intel Atom processor. This is smaller, cheaper and a lot less powerful than a Celeron, Pentium or Core chip, but it also runs cooler and provides much better battery life. There are some PCs with Atom chips that the suppliers say are not netbooks — examples include the Asus N10 and Sony’s pocketable Vaio P-Series — but generally the distinction holds.

Another difference is that netbooks leave out the CD/DVD drive, encouraging users to download applications or use web-based alternatives. However, there have been plenty of notebook PCs without CD/DVD drives, going back more than a decade. Examples include Toshiba’s Libretto and Portégé ranges, and IBM’s ThinkPad X series. But still, as the hardware specifications improve, netbooks are getting bigger and more expensive — more like notebook PCs, in fact.

There will be some differentiation when Windows 7 arrives. Netbook suppliers will have the option of loading the cheapest Starter version, which is limited to running three applications at a time. As it’s an image-based installation, users to will able to buy an in-place upgrade to a more powerful version of the operating system, if they want one.

Also, netbooks are still 32-bit systems, whereas notebooks are moving to 64-bit version of Windows. (Microsoft says giant US retailer Best Buy has already switched.) Netbooks will typically have 2GB of memory whereas 64-bit notebooks will have 4GB, 8GB, 16GB or more. The question is, how competitive will Intel make the Atom? Will it promote cheap 64-bit multi-core designs? The Atom’s very power-efficient Bonnell architecture was developed to help get Intel into new markets for what it calls MIDs (mobile internet devices), and when the Sodaville “system on a chip” version arrives, consumer electronics products. It’s intended to slow the advance of ARM-based chips such as the Cortex A8 and A9, which are also aimed at the MIDs/netbook market.

But the way things are going, Atom chips look like displacing sales of more expensive Core 2 processors. This could hit Intel’s revenue and, perhaps, its profits. When faced with a similar challenge, Microsoft opted to sell cheap copies of XP rather than expensive copies of Vista. It hurt, but it helped stop Linux from taking over the netbook market. Will Intel take a similar line?

The Pentagon is pioneering micro technology for just about every device, from 10g video cameras to tiny atomic clocks on a chip

Wouldn’t it be handy if everything we needed to build the next generation of portable devices and robots were available on a microchip? You could just plug in a navigation system, a radar sensor, cryogenic cooling system, or even a miniature power unit. For laboratory applications, there would be micro versions of everything from mass spectrometers to magnetic sensors. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon’s extreme science wing, aims to provide all this, and more, in handy “matchbook size” electronic packages.

Forty years ago, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, accurately predicted that the cost of processing power would halve every two years. We have come to expect devices to get smaller, cheaper and more powerful over time. Now the revolution is spreading to other types of device. The development of mems (microelectromechanical systems) has already paved the way for “lab-on-a-chip” chemical analysis. Such breakthroughs tend to come from the military rather than industry.

“Darpa was instrumental in helping support much of the initial development of lab-on-a-chip in the early 90s,” says Jon Cooper, Wolfson chair of bioengineering at the University of Glasgow. “The technologies enabled a number of US startup companies to develop miniaturised chips for faster biological analysis, giving them the necessary long-term support to grow.”

Cool runnings

Now Darpa is miniaturising many new devices. Some electronics require very low temperatures, such as superconducting circuits and infra-red sensors, and the entire component is chilled by a bulky cooling system. The low-power micro-cryogenic cooler program will cool only the exact spot needed.

The key element is a “micro-machined thermal isolation structure”, a tiny deep-freeze made of bismuth telluride. This cools by the thermoelectric effect when a current is applied. The micro-cooler will chill a space of about four cubic centimetres down to 200 degrees below zero, using just 0.1 watts.

Lab-on-a-chip devices already use pumps to move gas or liquid. But these pumps are not able to maintain the “hard” vacuum required for devices such as mass detectors for analysing airborne chemicals and bolometers to measure irradiation. The chip-scale vacuum micropumps program aims to produce pumps capable of producing a pressure of one millionth of an atmosphere.

Some items are for specific applications. Microsensors for imaging will deliver an infrared video camera on a chip weighing just 10g; this is specifically for uncrewed aircraft and night-vision goggles. But most of the technology will simply be made available to industry for use in future military electronics. Other programs include an atomic clock on a chip, radar on a chip, gas analysers and other sensors, radio-frequency and photonic devices. Some would have multiple uses, such as the chip-scale atomic sensors program. These tiny, high-resolution sensors can be reconfigured instantly to measure temperature, pressure, magnetic fields or other environmental factors. It’s an ambitious program, but the US defence sector has a record of getting the microtechnology it needs.

In recent years, the possibility of bioterrorism prompted Darpa to provide chip-based analytical tools for homeland security. Cooper cites several developments, including advances in rapid polymerase chain reaction (PCR) used to analyse DNA. This technology now has a much wider use in diagnosing infectious diseases. However, chip-based doesn’t always mean portable.

“The concept of lab-on-a-chip is of an analytical system which benefits from its reduced size, although many instruments are chips-in-a-lab, rather than labs-on-a-chip,” says Cooper. “Often the instrument needs to be plugged into the mains.”

“Truly handheld lab-on-a-chip technology is still elusive,” agrees Matt Mowlem of the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton. “Building stand-alone systems requires integrated systems and solutions to the problematic engineering issues surrounding system design, interconnects between the chips and off-chip systems, packaging and support systems, etc.”

But Darpa wants it all to be self-contained, enthusing in budget documents about “matchbook-size, highly integrated device and micro-system architectures”, including “low-power, small-volume, lightweight microsensors, microrobots and microcommunication systems”. Much of the effort is to integrate different components so that “electronic, mechanical, fluidic, photonic and radio/microwave technologies” all work together on the same chip.

Socket to ‘em

Then there is the need to plug into that wall socket. Darpa is addressing the need for mobile power with tiny heat engines and devices that scavenge energy from the environment. Being military, it also walks where others fear to tread. The micro isotope power source is a tiny atomic battery, occupying less than a cubic centimetre and generating 35 milliwatts.

Industrial funding is limited. Darpa, which is not looking for profit, can sink money into unlikely schemes.

“As with all blue-sky research there is a high risk of failure,” says Mowlem, “but a small chance of a world-changing discovery.” Darpa is not afraid of failure, and has its eye on world-changing success. After all, it did invent the internet.

A Cambridgeshire college has dropped the traditional register to pilot a facial recognition system, raising concerns for parents

“Ainsley. Babcock. Bland. Carthorse. Dint. Ellsworth-Beast Major. Ellsworth-Beast Minor.” For some of us, Rowan Atkinson’s monologue of a schoolmaster taking the register conjures up the essence of school life. Not at St Neots Community College in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, however, where traditional methods are being abandoned in favour of hi-tech facial recognition technology.

The school has 130 sixth-formers, 128 of whom are taking part in a pilot programme that began in January and will run until July. Students register their details by standing in front of a camera, part of a unit that also includes a processor and a keypad. The camera takes a photograph and establishes a “reference point” for the face, which is the mid-point between the eyes. From that, it takes measurements relating to the nose, upper lip and cheeks, and converts those numbers to a unique biometric, which it then encrypts.

When students check in or out of school, they enter a pin on to the keypad and look at the camera. The measurements from the photograph are matched against the student’s biometric identifier, and the time of arrival (or departure) is stored in the unit’s internal computer. The whole process takes less than two seconds.

But why? After all, the low-tech method of calling the register has worked very well for generations. Scott Preston, deputy principal at St Neots, says the system offers an easy way of gathering accurate data about sixth-form attendance, so students can claim the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) - a government grant for poorer students in post-16 education.

Science lesson

The construction industry has used facial recognition systems for years to prevent employees fraudulently clocking in for colleagues, but the technology has only recently become accurate enough to justify wider use. The key innovation made by Aurora, which supplies the St Neots system, is the use of infrared light when taking the pictures, which means accuracy is unaffected by lighting conditions. “Because it splashes a consistent light over the face, it doesn’t matter whether it’s pitch black or bright sunlight,” says Hugh Carr Archer, Aurora’s chief executive.

While facial recognition doesn’t yet match the accuracy rates of iris recognition (which has a failure rate of one in several million), Carr Archer believes it does far better than most biometric technologies currently on the market. It makes no difference if the subject is wearing glasses or has grown a beard. He claims the technology can even cope with the changing bone structure of growing children, though this has not yet been fully put to the test.

Biometrics technologies are now widespread in schools: an estimated 1 million children have had their fingerprints taken for activities as mundane as borrowing library books or paying for school dinners. This rapid growth is down to the efforts of “enterprising small companies”, according to Simon Fance, project officer at the United Kingdom Biometrics Institute.

Because biometrics are a useful way of controlling access, they are being adopted by other organisations, such as nurseries. At UK borders, passport officials are being replaced by cameras that check travellers’ faces against the image held in their passports. One of the concerns for civil liberties campaigners is the blurry line between access control and surveillance: in Newham, east London, face recognition has been used in conjunction with CCTV as a means of identifying criminals in a crowd.

The dystopia envisaged by campaigners is one where the state holds increasing amounts of data on its citizens, which can then be easily matched to unique biometric identifiers. David Clouter, a parent activist from the pressure group Leave Them Kids Alone, regards the use of biometrics in schools as “a disproportionate response to a nonexistent problem” and believes it is a “giant softening-up exercise for the next generation to accept biometric identity in some form”. Children will get so used to offering their fingerprints or staring into a camera that they won’t challenge it when the state asks them to do it: “Every traffic warden, every minor official, will go round fingerprinting everybody. And people won’t see it as out of the ordinary, which it most certainly is.”

Vital statistics

The other issue worrying Clouter is that schools hold large quantities of data on children - not only names, addresses and dates of birth, but information on attendance, library-borrowing habits and attainment, raising the possibility that a single biometric could be used to access huge amounts of personal data held on different systems, including ones held by other authorities: “The more biometric information floating around in insecure places like schools, the more chance there is of it being left on memory sticks or sent somewhere on a CD and lost,” he says.

Carr Archer argues that security concerns are misplaced when it comes to the system used by St Neots. Even if the encryption were to be broken, he says, Aurora’s method of taking measurements is proprietary, so the data couldn’t be used elsewhere (although that could of course change if the Aurora technology becomes widely adopted). Preston is equally confident: “The box is a one-stop shop. There is a network connection that enables you to produce reports, but in terms of getting into the data and misusing it, you’d have to take the box off the wall.”

If the St Neots pilot is successful, Aurora will market it to other schools, though they have yet to decide a pricing model. Currently, the units cost a hefty £4,000 each (though St Neots isn’t being charged anything). In the meantime, schools’ enthusiasm for biometric technologies shows no sign of abating. Clouter and his colleagues can expect to be busy for some time yet.

It was the second time of trying to reach Paul Quinn-Judge on his mobile phone. Was there a landline we could use? “The landlines here just don’t work. It would involve many hours of pain,” said the analyst for the International Crisis Group, an NGO that advises governments on conflict resolution. Quinn-Judge lives in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. From 18 January until last weekend, the country had been pummelled by a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Two of its four ISPs had been hit.

Surfing from inside the country, Quinn-Judge, who says that internet access inside the country is poor at the best of times, hadn’t noticed any change. But intelligence experts in the west speaking directly with senior sources in the Kyrgyz ISP community said that the sustained attack had taken as much as 80% of its internet traffic to the west offline.

But who did it, and why? The country, nestled in the mountainous territory between China and oil-rich Kazakhstan, isn’t a major player on the world stage. There’s little oil or natural gas. It isn’t at war with anyone, and its internet infrastructure is limited at best.

Strategic importance

Don Jackson, senior security researcher at the Atlanta-based managed services firm SecureWorks, thinks that the Russian government was behind the attack. Traffic came almost entirely from Russian networks that he says are controlled by former members of the Russian Business Network, which was a St Petersburg-based ISP said to have rented network capacity to cybercriminals without asking questions.

“The RBN, meaning not just the hosting company but its close circle of clients, has been called upon to do this kind of thing by the Russian government in the past,” says Jackson. He asserts that the Russian government sanctions such activities at arm’s length without wanting to be seen as directly involved.

“The fact that [Russia] allows it gives some kind of consent,” agrees Jeffrey Carr, chief executive of GreyLogic, a company providing intelligence on hackers to government clients. “This is a convenient way for any government to include information warfare in their overall operations.”

But why would the Russians want to hammer Kyrgyzstan’s already underdeveloped network? The two countries have been quietly negotiating potential Russian investments in Kyrgyzstan. “The one thing that the Kyrgyz can bargain about is the American airbase just outside Bishkek at Manas,” says Quinn-Judge. Russia wants the US off its doorstep. “The Russians expressed their willingness to write off the Kyrgyz debt to Russia,” he says, “and also to look for investments for a major hydro-electric project.”

The Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, visited Moscow on Tuesday to try to hammer out the investment deal for the cash-strapped country, currently in debt to Russia for around $180m. Meanwhile. Nato envoys were in Kyrgyzstan wooing top officials, proving the strategic importance of the Manas base and surrounding territories to its Afghanistan campaign.

Jackson thinks that the Russians are applying pressure to the Kyrgyz opposition, which has been critical of the suggested Manas closure, by silencing its online voice and leaving westerners unaware of its point of view.

An inside job?

Russia is certainly serious about cyberwarfare. The Russian colonel VI Tsymbal warned in 1995 that the country may use nuclear weapons against sources of cyberwarfare in the future, points out Carr. But he doesn’t buy Jackson’s assertion that the Russian government was behind the recent attack. He thinks that the Kyrgyz leadership hired Russian hackers as a means of quashing its own opposition.

“This is more about silencing internal dissent, and eliminating one of the primary communication channels for any dissenting group, which is the internet,” he says. He adds that if the Kyrgyz government - which set up its own cybersecurity initiative earlier in January - really wanted to stop the attacks, it could have.

But Rafal Rohozinski, principal investigator for the OpenNet Initiative, which tries to stop online filtering and surveillance, dismisses both scenarios. “To say who’s responsible is very premature,” he says, arguing that for Russia, economic leverage is more powerful than a DDoS attack. Similarly, the Kyrgyz leadership has more powerful tools at its disposal, he argues. “These include legal measures that can stop the opposition publishing content on the internet that would be questionable by the Kyrgyz government.”

Unknown parties and motives may be at play, argues Rohozinski, who recalls another DDoS attack that he says happened during the 2005 Kyrgyz presidential elections. “It turns out that it may have been a Kyrgyz journalist who sided with the opposition,” he claims. “He ordered these DDoS attacks through Ukrainian hackers, as a way of creating a negative feeling around the government by making out they were attacking the opposition.”

The disagreement about the perpetrator of the Kyrgyz attack demonstrates both the covert nature of such attacks, and the lack of visibility into the cyberspace of some of the more remote parts of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Yet cyberattacks are a more common trait in that part of the world than in other regions, says Rohozinski.

“It’s an interesting combination of political sophistication - a clear understanding of the role of information in politics - and also the fact that you have an awful lot of very tech-savvy people,” he says. “If you look at the size of hacker communities - not just script kiddies but those who write original software and exploits - there’s a big centre of gravity in Russia.”

The area has a long history of cyberwar, says Carr. He also runs Project Grey Goose, a distributed collective of volunteers who gather information from sources as diverse as Russian hacker forums and IP network traffic.

Carr points to Russian cyberattacks on Chechnya in 2002 as the first concrete example. “That was more of a true cyberwar. It combined server attacks with a kinetic force - a military invasion. And that was repeated in the Russian invasion of Georgia, in combination with an early network attack.” He contrasts this with the 2007 attacks on Estonia, which were not accompanied by physical aggression.

That’s one of the problems with cyberwarfare, says Carr. There isn’t a clear, international consensus on what constitutes an act of war in cyberspace. That’s pretty important, given that Russian officials have threatened to nuke those that try it.

One thing that’s clear is that more cyberwar is being crowd-sourced. Grey Goose investigated hacking activity during Russia’s recent conflict with Georgia, which was then fed into analytical software from Palantir Technologies and used for trends analysis. The resulting report, published last October, showed that a hierarchy of hacktivists were responsible for DDoS attacks on Georgia’s computer networks.

This happened in the recent Gaza conflict, too. The hacktivist group The Patriot Team released a downloadable tool that launched DDoS attacks against perceived anti-Israeli sites from willing participants’ computers.

Mobilising cyber propaganda

But DDoS is just one example of a broader set of information warfare techniques, in which rival groups vie to control the message reaching the rest of the world about a conflict. Another downloadable tool used during the Gaza crisis, called Megaphone, was designed to alert users to anti-Israeli editorials, giving users the chance to send rebuttals, in an effort to sway public opinion through the sheer volume of replies.

“What the use of information effects in this particular conflict achieved is that it created a space in time for freedom of action in the kinetic realm,” says Rohozinski of the Gaza conflict. “[Israel] was able to pursue a military operation without being forced to stop before they accomplished its goals.”

As the still-nascent cyberwarfare concept emerges, overt battles on the ground are becoming inextricably linked to an often more covert battle of ideologies that play out in the electronic realm. It’s tempting to think of this in the same way that we thought of the cold war: another battle in which proxy wars and black ops were used to promote conflicting ideas.

What happens as this cyberwar spreads to the west? And has it already happened? The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US thinkthank, recently released a set of recommendations on cybersecurity for the Obama administration. The bottom line? No one is currently in charge, and there is much work to be done. Let’s hope that they finish it before the cyberwar begins to spread.

Face… book… Facebook Facebook… Face… book… I just join Facebook over a month ago and i am somehow addicted to it. Is Facebook another typical social networking community? Well… it used to be.

i’ve been getting invites from friends long time ago but i’ve never look into it because i thought … “Ohh.. just another Myspace, Friendster … Most likely i will not be logging into it after i register…”
So i never bother to create an account.

Joining the addictive Facebook

However, recently many of my friends join Facebook and keep telling me that it is fun. With peer influence, i decided to register and just take a peep. Within a few days, i’ve found most of my friends who are in myspace friendster also in facebook! This is crazy. I begin to update my profile and look around… then i was being superpoked, being bitten by vampire, getting gifts, got a fluff pet, confirmed friends details, being nominated for Superlatives, being challenged to a race, got a Ford Mustang, compare movie reviews and ratings, threw some turkeys and sheeps, received virtual iphone, got some growing gifts, received superwall posts…

Now i know why my friends said fun and addictive. Facebook is not just another social networking community to customize your profile, upload photos, join some fan groups and check out friends updates. Facebook is more than that! It integrates fun into your social network. Now you get to play games with your friends, compare score within your friends along with all other features of other social networking community.

Why did facebook suddenly take off so quickly?

Although Facebook’s logo looks simple and plain… but Facebook is not simple at all. The reason why it is becoming successful is due to it opening its development platform to 3rd party application developers. Facebook lets other content providers to integrate innovative applications easily to entertain facebook members. In my opinion, this is the Best Feature of facebook which makes it stands out among the rest.

Google is coming out with OpenSocial to try to fight facebook. I dont think this is going to defeat facebook yet unless Google is planning something else. Before that happens, with many high profile investors (such as Microsoft and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing) pumping funds into Facebook, i think facebook is going to catch up myspace at a fast speed.

Tap Into Facebook Social Networking Power

If you havent join facebook yet, register an account and check it out. If you are running an entertainment-related site, it is time to tap into facebook’s huge social community by developing a facebook app related to your site, creating awareness and branding of your site.

Eg. Freewebs.com develops Warbook, Streetrace, …
Flixster.com develops Movies app.
Rockyou.com develops Super Wall, …

If you are just a developer, you may want to start developing application in facebook platform. With the huge community, there is definitely someone out there going to use your application or play your game. For a developer, the beauty of concentrating your efforts in developing a facebook application rather than a brand new site is… if your application is interesting, it spreads virally like wildfire without the need of tough expensive traditional methods of promoting and advertising of your ‘new site’. When that happens, you can extend to a standalone website with more features.

Facebook Marketplace

Previously facebook developers are having problems monetizing their facebook apps. The following is a list of advertising networks focus and specialize to monetize facebook apps.

Cubics
SocialMedia
Federated Media
Lookery

Both RockYou and VideoEgg develop facebook applications initially and launch their own facebook ad publishing network.

There is also a facebook marketplace for those who wants to be part of the facebook application craze. Buy/sell facebook apps, hire facebook app developers. Recently there are also some facebook applications selling in digitalpoint and sitepoint forums.

Facebook Songs

Before i end, i found some nice facebook videos in youtube and want to share them with you

5 other facebook songs that i think is good.

Facebook Song by Rhett and Link

The Official Cambridge Facebook Song

The Superpoke Facebook Song

Facebook Song by Vince and Ben

Facebook Song by Malcolm and Dennis

After i saw the PPC vs SEO post at Shoemoney, i think it is quite useful. I will embed the video here.

Some of the highlights:

SEO and PPC both should co-exists in marketing campaign instead of Either-Or.

SEO

• Is your SEO bad? Good seo increase traffic and visibility.
• How competitive is your industry sector? Need to know how many sites are competing for the keywords.
• How many sites have similar or identical content?
• What are you doing to stay ahead of your competition?

PPC

• Work to improve quality score as it will lower your ppc cost
• With PPC to provide immediate traffic, it is good for troubleshoot. Use the data to tune your organic seo.
• Paid search is easier to predict.
• You are in control with PPC.

Blogs should try SEO.
e-Commerce / product sales should try PPC.