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Change name to escape cyber past Trends Prof Yash
Pal THIS UNIVERSE Afghan archaeologists find Buddhist site as war rages Ocean waves can power Australia’s future US aerospace companies boost technical education |
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Change name to escape cyber past ERIC SCHMIDT, the chief executive of Google, has issued a stark warning over the amount of personal data people leave on the Internet and suggested that many of them will be forced one day to change their names in order to escape their cyber past. In a startling admission from a man whose company has made billions by perfecting the art of hoarding, storing and retrieving information on us, Mr Schmidt suggested that the enormous quantity of detail we leave online may not be such a good thing after all. In an interview that has generated no small amount of mirth on Web forums, the man who—alongside Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page—runs the world’s largest search engine has said young people will need to go as far as changing their identities if they are to truly erase what they have left online. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “I mean we really have to think about these things as a society.” For a man whose company is built on the ability to store information and retrieve it again, Mr Schmidt’s admission revealed a surprising concern among Google’s leadership over the importance of data privacy. But it has also provoked a wider debate on the sheer amount of information we give away about ourselves online and how most of that data is virtually un-erasable. Perhaps more than any other company Google has helped created a world where we willingly deposit vast amounts of personal data into the public domain — information that might previously have taken months of investigative work by professionals to find. Google has made billions from storing data on its customers’ browsing habits so that it can use that data to target them with personalised adverts. It also runs the kind of websites that have pioneered the open sharing of information online. The Californian internet giant owns You Tube, the world’s largest video sharing website; it handles billions of our emails through Gmail; and — if you live in a big city — chances are that a Google Street View car has photographed your front door. A series of recent acquisitions also suggests it is hoping to move into the social networking market, the area of the Internet that most concerns privacy campaigners. Thanks to the global popularity of social networking — an estimated 600 million people have personal online profiles — friends, prospective employers and enemies alike are able to access photographs, videos and blogs that we may have long forgotten with a few simple clicks of a mouse. Recently, one columnist in the New York Times went so far as to describe our current world as an age defined by “the impossibility of erasing your posted past and moving on”. Many websites have picked up on the apparent disconnect between Mr Schmidt’s comments and his company’s ethos. Chris Williams, of the online tech news website The Register, said: “Recording everything and making it knowable by everyone all the time is Google’s stated mission, and it is profiting handsomely from the fact that society doesn’t understand the consequences.” Other blogs remarked that one previous instance when Mr Schmidt had admitted concerns over the amount of personal information stored online was in 2005 when Google blacklisted the online technology magazine Cnet for an entire year. In an article discussing privacy concerns generated by Google’s data mining capabilities, Cnet’s reporters published Mr Schmidt’s salary, named the neighbourhood where he lives, some of his hobbies and political donations. All the information had been gleaned from Google searches. But while bloggers and Web forums reacted with tangible scepticism to Mr Schmidt’s comments, others welcomed his frankness. “His comments are a little ironic but they are also timely,” said Dylan Sharpe from Big Brother Watch, which has campaigned against Google collecting wifi data on Web users while taking photographs with its Street View cars. He added: “Google is a company that specialises in knowing where you are, what you are doing and who you are talking to. That’s a scary prospect even though Google’s users sign up to this sort of data collection willingly. “But Mr Schmidt is completely right on how much information we are giving away online. Right now there are millions of young kids and teenagers who, when they apply for jobs in 10 years’ time, will find that there is so much embarrassing stuff about them online that they cannot take down.” Those who wish to delete what they have put up online, meanwhile, may find it next to impossible to entirely erase their cyber past. “What many people do not realise is that as soon as you put something up online you lose possession and control of that information immediately,” said Rik Fergusson, a cyber security expert at Trend Micro. “Anyone can download, store and distribute that information, it’s out of your hands.” Privacy campaigners say more needs to be done to stop young people in particular depositing information online that may come back to haunt them. “I think we need to change people’s mindsets through education rather than legislation but it’s definitely something that we need to talk to our children about,” said Mr Sharpe. Mr Fergusson, meanwhile, believes Web users will increasingly demand better levels of data privacy over the coming decade. “What would be ideal is some sort of technology where you as an end user would be able to assign the right to use, copy or distribute information about yourself to people of your own choosing,” he said. “That sort of technology is already used in encrypted emails. I’m sure people will soon start asking for some form of encrypted social networking and companies will respond to that demand.” — By arrangement with The Independent
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Trends CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: A pair of spacewalking astronauts revived the International Space Station's cooling system during a third outing to replace a failed pump. Station flight engineers Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson slipped outside the orbital complex for the third time in 10 days to try to resolve a problem that took out half the station's cooling lines. Afghan archaeologists find Buddhist site as war rages KABUL: Archaeologists in Afghanistan, where Taliban Islamists are fighting the Western-backed government, have uncovered Buddhist-era remains in an area south of Kabul, an official said. "There is a temple, stupas, beautiful rooms, big and small statues, two with the length of seven and nine meters, colourful frescos ornamented with gold and some coins," said Mohammad Nader Rasouli, head of the Afghan Archaeological Department. Ocean waves can power Australia’s future SINGAPORE: Waves crashing on to Australia's southern shores each year contain enough energy to power the country three times over, scientists said in a study that underscores the scale of Australia's green energy. The research, in the latest issue of the journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, comes as the nation is struggling to wean itself of years of using cheap, polluting coal to power the economy and to put a price on carbon emissions. US aerospace companies boost technical education ATLANTA: US aerospace and defence companies are stepping up support for educational programs in hope of encouraging students to pursue technical careers to help replace an expected flood of worker retirements. Companies are sponsoring student robotics competitions, forming partnerships with technical schools and calling for higher national education standards in an effort to bring new urgency to the coming US shortage of workers trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. — Reuters
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THIS UNIVERSE Does photosynthesis take place in a branch even after it detaches from a tree? I am not sure I have the right answer, but I will still share my thoughts with you. If the leaves are green and not yet dried up, there is sunlight and moisture available, therefore, chlorophyll might still work and some photosynthesis might go on. After all, a detached branch can start growing when planted in proper soil. It seems to me that photosynthesis is not a centrally controlled operation of a plant, say like the digestive system of an animal. We cannot take a chopped up person and start growing it but we do take cuttings from plants to make new trees. I hope I have not dispensed nonsense. If so, do let me know. Why do moving charges produce magnetism? You have asked a rather deep question. Perhaps some discoveries of new forces can be made when we already have a nearly complete theory of natural laws. Even now we do not, even though we seem to be close to that situation. Many advances were already made in the 19th century when several laws of electricity and magnetism were discovered. The fact that electric current moves the needle of a magnetic compass was a fresh discovery. One also learnt that a direct current could be used to magnetise an iron nail; one discovered the forces that could be generated through interaction of electric current and magnetised material, also that a coil carrying electric current acted like a magnet. Many of these discoveries led to a conviction that there was a deep relation between electric and magnetic phenomenon. This lead to several other discoveries and finally to theories through which electric and magnetic phenomena were joined together, being considered as manifestations of a single behavioural feature fundamental to existence of space and time and Nature. This was studied as a single discipline called electromagnetism. Therefore, I doubt that there was someone wise enough a few centuries ago who could have predicted magnetism just after discovering the existence of electric charge or electric current, without doing experiments, or through other chance observations and discoveries. I hope this answer satisfies you and your friend.
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ERIC SCHMIDT, the chief executive of
Google, has issued a stark warning over the amount of personal data people leave on the Internet and suggested that many of them will be forced one day to change their names in order to escape their cyber past.
In a startling admission from a man whose company has made billions by perfecting the art of hoarding, storing and retrieving information on us, Mr Schmidt suggested that the enormous quantity of detail.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: A pair of spacewalking astronauts revived the International Space Station's cooling system during a third outing to replace a failed pump. Station flight engineers Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson slipped outside the orbital complex for the third time in 10 days to try to resolve a problem that took out half the station's cooling lines.
