The Ghost Net

News is floating around that a network of cyber espionage has compromised computers in 103 countries and mostly in foreighn ministries and embassies. A Canadian think tank has discovered the existence. they are not absolutely sure it has been organized by the Chinese government. Evidence does point to that though. So this too is a tool in the espionage activities.

As in the real world cat and mouse games espionage, counter-espionage activities will keep growing. What botheres me though is whatever infrasructure we have now, the computers, the operating systems in them, the networks;particularly the Internet were never designed against such things. The Internet was designed to be a open forum for collaboration when it started.

I am sure as things eveolve all these will start becoming robust agains such malpractices. The internet probably would take the most time to make it really secure. Hopefully it too will become totally secure someday!

JTAG is Such a Universal Thing!

JTAG staretd as a means of testing complete systems. The standard has gone through some three revisions. And it has kept growing. Today no complex embedded system can do without it. Not only it is needed for getteing the testing to be done right but it is a major tool during development. his is the interface through which you work during development. Do the compiling of your software on a PC and download through the JTAG. Use your debug tools through the JTAG and make sure it is running properly. Typical development, debug scebnario is a PC connected to the target hardware board through the JTAG cable. This used to be far more complex situation with emulators and sophisticated logic analyzers and may be with disassembly of the bus transactions and so on!

Cisco Acquires Pure Digital

Pure Digital is the maker of Flip Video cameras, very affordable video cameras. They have released a new high definition version too. One of the reason for their popularity besides the low price is that you can directly hook up on USB and upload the video to the sharing sites. Cisco has just completed a deal to acquire the company.

Combine it with the announcement that they are moving into the blade server space with their California offerings and it starts to look like these are bets against the recession by diversifying the portfolio. Thy'll have to go head to head against companies like IBM, Sun and so on. So the product they are going to offer better be good. Not only that, to be able to break into existing market they'll have to offer very clear differentiating features on their products. Interestingly IBM seems to be bent on acquiring Sun for a price of somewhere between $6.5 to $8.x billions!

Both are growth areas despite the recession. Particularly the video segment, the video share segment is growing hugely. Servers also should be growing. There's speculation Cisco is interested in personal/home video conferencing. Let's see how all this plays out!

Smart Passports- Do They Invade Privacy!

There was a news release about smart passports to be issued by the Indian Government. It is now possible to record a lot more information that can uniquely identify a person into thse smart chips used in the passports.

There has been a debat that this ammounts to invasion of privacy. On the one hand all the personal information recorded into the passport will also be available on servers somewhere in the government dungeons and it'll be easy to get at that information if security is compromised somehow. Also that anyboy with an appropriate reader possibly could read this information off the passport too.

That definitely is a difficult boundary to establish. Where does the need for unique identification end and where does the invasion of privace begin! In these days of heightened terrorist activities all over the globe the boundary possibly needs to be pushed back. Need to prevent terrorism by identifying terrorists is for the greater good. That should be the criteria to determione where this boundary move to.

Photo Edits Online-Mostly Free!

CNET recently reviewed 15 such sites. With the trend of everything going onto the web, websites getting published every other minute and then this urge to share everything on some social site; you need a handy photo editor. There are several now available that provide this service, they'll even make transporting the photos to social sites easy.

Most of these are free with some charging you a subscription when you use their premium features. According to the survey they cover a fairly wide range of services. Mostly the feel and the comfort you feel and the exact services that you need will decide which one is the best for you.

Following are the sites. Just add a .com to access them except one as indicated in the list.

• Flauntr
• Fotoflexr
• Lunapic
• Phixr
• Phoenix(www. aviary.com)
• Photoshop.com
• Picnik
• Picture2File
• Pixenate
• Pixer.us
• Pixlr
• Snipshot
• Splashup

Give them a try. They are going to be useful sooner or later.

Kindle, Mobile phone or what!!

Battle for the electronic reader has been going on for a while. The holy grail seems to be a book sized device that offers the same ease of page turning as book. Though Amazon's Kindle has been in the market for some time and there's a second version of it now out, nobody knows for sure if this is waht the readers at large need. Kindle offers additional advantage over a book in the sense that you can download a book anytime you want. It's like acrrying a library with you and picking one to read at any time. That's an advantage over a book. but not everybody is comfortable reading the electronic display however close to printed paper look like. Will electronic paper take over here! The verdict is not in yet. The yonger generation who grew up with electronic displays may look at it differenjtly. they may me far more willing to read a book in the electronic form.

Now with the Google service of making books available on mobiles, iPhone & Andropid phones for the time being, will that compete with Kindle like devices! Mush smaller displays here adds another disadvantage to the book reading on the mobile paradigm. But the comfort is unbeatable. It is available with you all the time. qwe are used to doing a lot of things with these little things. So would we like to read books on them too! Who knows!!

ASP, SaaS and Cloud Computing

Just before the dotcom bust many web businesses came up with this Application Service Provider model. Idea was to take the hassle of keeping the software updated out of the users hands and bring the advantage of use & pay to the end users. That looked like a pretty neat model. However there was quite a bit of resistance on the part of the end users about sending the corporate data onto somebody else's servers. Then came the bust and everybody forgot about it.

In the recent past, it made a come back as Software as a Service (SaaS) avatar. Selling points are the same, advantages/disadvantages are thye same in fact the complete model is the same. It's gaining currency alright. There are several examples already, some of them are quite successful too.

From there the next extension is a small step. What if just do everything on the cloud( the internet cloud) that we do on a PC ! It's something Google would love to do, the WinTel combine loses all the hold! Google has a infrastructure that can serve the model easily. Even Microsoft has visions of it. So is it coming? It definitely is. Questions are when will it become viable! How much of the computing will get done on the cloud versus the desktop/laptop!

It ceratinly feels natural, we already store a lot of things on the cloud and this will be truly convenient. All you need is a device that can provide you network access and a keyboard!(or some other input/gesture device and a display. The concern about data priovacy remains. Let's see how that unflods over time.