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Offshoring and Outsourcing India

Indian IT firms need to look at emerging economies and newer verticals like health and transportation to continue its growth momentum, in the wake of slowdown in traditional markets like the US and Europe, a senior Nasscom official today said. "The Indian IT (sector) has been doing phenomenally well and will continue to attract some attractive bunch of people. But we can't rest on the laurels. "Today, we have just 15-20 per cent of the global market and I think we can be a much bigger player," Nasscom Chief Economist and Director-General, Policy Outreach, Anupam Khanna told PTI. He said emerging areas include verticals like health and transportation. 



 






"There is still a lot of room for growth today. There are uncertainties and pressure, but there is still a lot of hope. This is also a time when people look at how to do things better, so there are opportunities as well," Khanna said. He further said that in the long run, the growth dynamic of the world is such that the centre of economic gravity is shifting and emerging markets, especially Asia, are going to be big players. "So, certainly we should be looking at them harder," he added

Asked if the economic slowdown in the West could trigger a knee-jerk reaction from political classes and lead to ban on outsourcing, he said, "I think the world has moved beyond that...offshoring and outsourcing is happening...what happens in crisis is that adjustment becomes a little more painful ...if you see there has been no growth in protectionist measures." "I am not saying there are not pressures, but I am not sure if people at this stage would be heavily protectionist. 





 


There will be pressures and the industry needs to educate people," he added. Rising rates of unemployment in the US had sparked a debate on whether outsourcing should be banned to create more jobs in the US. The fears of resurgence of global economic slowdown has compelled the US D 70 billion Indian IT industry to focus more on the domestic market and expand to newer geographies. The domestic market is witnessing strong demand from sectors such as banking, telecommunications, insurance, government and utilities. "Domestic market offers a huge opportunity. The government has huge plans for e-governance, which opens up more opportunities for firms," Khanna said.

Source: The Economic Times

Tokyo based United Nations University (UNU) and the Campaign

The internet is transforming public diplomacy around the world and has spurred popular involvement in key global issues such as accountable governance, climate change and terrorism, say experts and diplomats. A two-day conference on "The Internet and a Changing World", held at the Sonepat-based Jindal School of International Affairs (JSIA) of O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU), highlighted the increasing use and effectiveness of worldwide web in advancing discourse on a range of issues. Cyber experts, policymakers, academics and diplomats participated in the conference which ended Saturday. The JSIA, the Tokyo-based United Nations University (UNU) and the Campaign for a UN Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA) jointly organised the conference with support of the Public Diplomacy Division of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). "The Internet and especially Web 2.0 have brought a new dimension to diplomacy," said Navdeep Suri, joint secretary in charge of Public Diplomacy Division. "The Public Diplomacy Division of the Ministry of External Affairs has actively embraced Web 2.0 tools so that it can engage with the widest cross-section of people in India and the around the world.

"We have also found social media a powerful medium to expand our outreach amongst younger audiences," he said, while alluding to the increasing use of new social media, including Facebook and YouTube, to project India's stance on global issues. "The conference comes at a time when governing the Internet and harnessing its potential for general good are central issues of our time," said Vesselin Popovski, senior academic programme officer of the UNU. "This is a truly historic conference because it brings together policymakers, academics, civil society activists, intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations, think- tanks and media persons around the spread of the Internet and how it is changing our ways of thinking and acting in multiple spheres," said C. Raj Kumar, vice chancellor of JGU. "The internet has brought institutions of global governance such as UN closer to people and has the potential to further transform it," said a press release by the organisers of the conference. "Today, cyber war can be far more devastating than any country or economy could achieve through traditional warfare," it said.

Source: The Economic Times

India as a political and military partner country

Faced with a common cyber security threat from Chinese hackers, NATO is eyeing India as an ally in securing its computers that hold sensitive information and data against malwares and Trojan viruses. With US already signing a cyber security collaboration pact with India this July, the 28-nation American-led political and military alliance is of the view that it can collaborate with the South Asian information technology superpower in protecting the cyber world, one of the global commons. "You have one of the most advanced cyber industries in the world...and information technology industries. The issue of cyber security is one that affects the United States, NATO and India no matter whether we are aligned or non-aligned," a senior NATO official told IANS at the alliance's headquarters here. "The cyber world doesn't recognise alignments. It only recognises switches and servers. As a result, we are in this cyber world together, whether we like it or not. "We better figure out a way to cooperate, particularly since it does matter that you have a neighbour (country) next door, which is pretty much involved in cyber issues, even far away. Because in the cyber world, we are equally close," the official, who did not want to be identified because of the organisation's rules, said.

Although he did not name any of India's neighbours, it was clear he was referring to China, which is suspected of being behind spy software attacks on American, NATO, Indian and Tibetan computers in the last half-a-decade, stealing highly classified military and security data. In 2009, an investigation by Information Warfare Monitor (IWM) comprising researchers from Ottawa-based think-tank, SecDev Group, and the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had blamed a spy network of Chinese hackers, called GhostNet, to have breached the firewalls of computers of NATO and other countries, including that of Tibetan leader Dalai Lama. Their 2010 report claimed that major Indian defence establishments, including the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, National Security Council Secretariat, National Maritime Foundation, and armed forces units were targeted and secret presentations on weapons systems stolen by Chinese hackers. A cyber security report earlier this year had suggested that the worldwide web-based attacks in 2010 were up 93 percent from 2009. As recently as July this year, 'anomymous' hackers had targeted NATO in a cyber attack. Just a month ahead of the latest attack, NATO had decided to create a special task force to detect and respond to such attacks by beefing up its cyber defence capabilities. Its 2010 summit in Lisbon too recognised the growing sophistication of cyber attacks and set policies for the alliance to cooperation with partner countries. NATO has already spelt out its intention of having India as a political and military partner country, considering its growing stature as a regional power.

Source: CIOL Bureau

Bangalore based software professional

Researchers warn against random downloads, advise using security software. Malware attacks on mobile devices, especially on Google Inc’s USA Android operating system, have surged in recent times, says computer security researchers. According to Trend Micro, a global cloud security leader, there has been a 14-fold increase of malware targeting Android smartphone users in the last six months alone. Another report from McAfee, a security solutions company, estimates that the malware targeted at Android devices jumped 76 per cent since the last quarter, making it the most attacked mobile operating system. Sample this: Bangalore based software professional Swetosuvro Ghosh had started using an Andriod smartphone but was soon forced to move back to his BlackBerry device. “There was a virus attack and the phone would dial automatically. After a number of complaints from my colleagues and friends, I shifted back to my old BlackBerry.” And, Bangalore based software professional Swetosuvro Ghoshis not the odd man out. Reseachers say Andriod is fast becoming the hotbed for malware and rogue apps. In the past year, Trend Micro reports that they have recorded cases of mobile malware infection and exploitation plague users straight from the shelf.

For example, Vodafone was blamed for shipping 3,000 worm-laden HTC Android smartphones. Trend Micro believes that it was an infected computer in the production line that had caused the problem. Samsung was another company that had inadvertently distributed malware along with its new S8500 Wave smartphones. The worm attempted to infect a user’s PC when the phone was connected to it. In comparison, Apple’s iOS’ was found to be among the safest of all mobile platforms, according to Symantec. “There has been unprecedented growth of non-PC devices in recent years, as consumers rely on these new devices to communicate and store their private information. From streaming their favourite music station, getting the high score hurling birds through the air and filing their taxes online, consumers deserve to feel confident regardless of what they do on their mobile phone,” notes Gaurav Kanwal, country sales manager, (Consumer Products and Solutions), Symantec India. Symantec says, Android offers no built-in, default level encryption, and instead rely on isolation and permissions to safeguard data. “Thus, a simple jailbreak of an Android phone or theft of the device’s SD card can lead to data loss. As with Apple iOS, Android has no mechanism to prevent social engineering attacks.”

The primary security flaw in Android devices is the lack of an approval system on its app store, according to McAfee. Today, over 3,00,000 apps are available on the Android app store and the total number of downloads is estimated to be around three billion, making it an ideal place for cybercriminals to target devices. This security hole has been well protected by Apple, which has notoriously stiff criteria that must be met by developers before their applications can be allowed on its App Store. Pune-based Preksha Bhadodia, an interior designer, bought the HTC Thunderbolt, using the Android platform in March this year. “Since this was my first Android device, I downloaded hundreds of free apps to my smartphone without really checking the apps.” Later, Bhadodia received an email notification from Google informing her about some malicious apps on her device. “Google informed me that an update will be automatically pushed to my device – an Android Market security update – that will undo exploits caused by the malicious applications that were removed from the Android Market on March 1,” she says, adding that she would have never figured the presence of rogue apps out of the 150+ apps that she had on her handset.

Google used remote security control to push a Android Market security tool that bulldozed a malware called DroidDream off Bhadodia’s phone that had been identified in the Android Market earlier this year. Vinoo Thomas, technical product manager of McAfee, says compromised Android phones can be easily used to send SMSes to premium numbers automatically. “The malware writer can remotely control the device, leading to an inflated phone bill for the user,” he lists. Further the cybercriminals can also copy contents such as calendar entries, contact list, e-mails, text messages, pictures and private videos from mobile devices once their security is breached. Given the many mobile phone risks, experts prescribe users to practice caution to avoid malware infection, including downloading apps from trusted sites, avoiding unsecure browsing, utilising built-in security features of the phone and installing security software offered by security providers. Norton Mobile Security has launched a security system for Android 2.0, and McAfee too has released a product called McAfee Mobile Security, which works on BlackBerry, Android, Windows as well as Symbian devices.

Source: Business Standard 

Training

University of California at Riverside to translate its theoretical work into a computing device

U S Reserchers Developer Group : Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) researchers have been awarded research grants totalling Rs.7.85 crore ($1.75 million) by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative of Semiconductor Research Corp.

 






to develop a battery-less CPU that can harness its own energy. The research, based on a paper published by the VCU research team in the August issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters, replaces transistors with special tiny nanomagnets that can also process digital information, theoretically reducing the heat dissipation by one 1,000 to 10,000 times, according to VCU. The team, led by researchers at the VCU School of Engineering, is working with colleagues from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of California at Riverside to translate its theoretical work into a computing device.



 





 "The purpose of this work is to establish a new paradigm for digital computing which will be extremely energy-efficient and hopefully allow us to pack more and more computing devices on a chip without having to worry about excessive heat generation," said Supriyo Bandyopadhyay, co-principal investigator for the study at VCU and professor of electrical and computer engineering in the VCU School of Engineering.


 






"This will allow us to increase the computational prowess of computers beyond what is available today." As engineers have shrunk the size of processors in accordance with Moore's Law, packing more and more transistors onto a chip, it has created a challenge in efficiently removing the heat that the transistors generate.



 







Reducing the price of heat dissipated when the transistor switches is considered to be the best approach to alleviating this problem. According to Bandyopadhyay and Jayasimha Atulasimha, an assistant professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering in the VCU School of Engineering who serves as co-principal investigator on the project, this research could lead to a type of digital computing system ideal for medical devices such as processors implanted in an epileptic patient's brain that monitor brain signals to warn of impending seizures. This processor would run by harvesting energy only from the patient's head movements, without requiring a battery, they said.

Source: EE Times

IMS Research finds a rapid migration from paper

E-Passport IMS Research finds a rapid migration from paper or machine readable passports to smart card-based passports (complying with the ICAO standard for e-Passports) started in 2007, leading to nearly half of all passports now in use being e-Passports. Within five years 90 per cent of passport holders will be using e-passports that integrate a smart card IC chip, according to IMS Research in its report titled, "Electronic Government and Health Care ID Cards – World – 2011." "This trend is set to continue" stated the report author Alex Green. "There are still a few countries around the world that are not yet issuing e-passports. However, most have started and with the typical five to ten year replacement rates for passports, it is only a matter of time before all passports in circulation are e-Passports." The report goes on to explore to what extent biometrics are being recorded on these e-passports. Interestingly, even for passports issued in 2010, in the majority of cases no biometric data is held on these secure ICs except for a digital image of the holders face. IMS Research forecast that this will change. "By 2014, the situation is forecast to have been reversed" states Green. "By this time the majority of passports being issued will also include additional biometric data such a one or more finger print, iris scans, etc." The e-passport market is examined for 40 countries in IMS Research's report. Similar analysis is also provided for the national ID cards, healthcare cards, electronic driver's licenses and a number of other government related card types.

Source: EE Times

study's information was taken from a range of sources including the US government

Feeding a supercomputer with news stories could help predict major world events, according to US research. A study, based on millions of articles, charted deteriorating national sentiment ahead of the recent revolutions in Libya and Egypt. While the analysis was carried out retrospectively, scientists say the same processes could be used to anticipate upcoming conflict. The system also picked up early clues about Osama Bin Laden's location. Kalev Leetaru, from the University of Illinois' Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science, presented his findings in the journal First Monday.

Mood and location
The study's information was taken from a range of sources including the US government-run Open Source Centre, and the Summary of World Broadcasts (now known as BBC Monitoring), both of which monitor local media output around the world. News outlets which published online versions were also analysed, as was the New York Times' archive, going back to 1945. In total, Mr Leetaru gathered more than 100 million articles. Reports were analysed for two main types of information: mood - whether the article represented good news or bad news, and location - where events were happening and the location of other participants in the story. Mood detection, or "automated sentiment mining" searched for words such as "terrible", "horrific" or "nice". Location, or "geocoding" took mentions of specific places, such as "Cairo" and converted them in to coordinates that could be plotted on a map. Analysis of story elements was used to create an interconnected web of 100 trillion relationships.
Predicting trouble
Data was fed into an SGI Altix supercomputer, known as Nautilus, based at the University of Tennessee. The machine's 1024 Intel Nehalem cores have a total processing power of 8.2 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second). Based on specific queries, Nautilus generated graphs for different countries which experienced the "Arab Spring". In each case, the aggregated results of thousands of news stories showed a notable dip in sentiment ahead of time - both inside the country, and as reported from outside. For Egypt, the tone of media coverage in the month before President Hosni Mubarak's resignation had fallen to a low only seen twice before in the preceding 30 years. Previous dips coincided with the 1991 US aerial bombardment of Iraqi troops in Kuwait and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Mr Leetaru said that his system appeared to generate better intelligence than the US government was working with at the time. "The mere fact that the US President
 




stood in support of Mubarak suggests very strongly that that even the highest level analysis suggested that Mubarak was going to stay there," he told BBC News. "That is likely because you have these area experts who have been studying Egypt for 30 years, and in 30 years nothing has happened to Mubarak. The Egypt graph, said Mr Leetaru, suggested that something unprecedented was happening this time. "If you look at this tonal curve it would tell you the world is darkening so fast and so strongly against him that it doesn't seem possible he could survive." Similar drops were seen ahead of the revolution in Libya and the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s. Saudi Arabia, which has thus far resisted a popular uprising, had experienced fluctuations, but not to the same extent as some other states where leaders were eventually overthrown.

Mapping Bin Laden
In his report, Mr Leetaru suggests that analysis of global media reports about Osama Bin Laden would have yielded important clues about his location. While many believed the al-Qaeda leader to be hiding in Afghanistan, geographic information extracted from media reports consistently identified him with Northern Pakistan. Only one report mentioned the town of Abbottabad prior to Bin Laden's discovery by US forces in April 2011. However, the geo-analysis narrowed him down to within 200km, said Mr Leetaru.

Real time analysis
The computer event analysis model appears to give forewarning of major events, based on dete riorating sentiment. However, in the case of this study, its analysis is applied to things that have already happened. According to Kalev Leetaru, such a system could easily be adapted to work in real time, giving an element of foresight. "That's the next stage," said Mr Leetaru, who is already working on developing the technology. "It looks like a stock ticker in many regards and you know what direction it has been heading the last few minutes and you want to know where it is heading in the next few. "It is very similar to what economic forecasting algorithms do." Mr Leetaru said he also hoped to improve the resolution of analysis, especially in relation to geographic location. "The next iteration is going to city level and beyond and looking at individual groups and how they interact. "I liken it to weather forecasting. It's never perfect, but we do better than random guessing."

Source: BBC News

company has posted a video showing a test system booting

Windows 8 will have much faster boot-up times, the divisional chief Steven Sinofsky has promised in a new blogpost on Microsoft's developer blog s. To prove that Microsoft is serious about speeding up the process of restarting the machine from a "cold" state – which it says data retrieved from systems shows is used by 45% of laptop users, and 57% of all Windows 7 users – the company has posted a video showing a test system booting up in just two seconds. While the system in the demonstration is highly optimized, and relies on a solid-state disk (SSD) to help increase the speed at which data is read off the disk, the new posting shows that the Windows team is determined to cut the time spent by most users waiting for their machines to become usable. "When it comes to talking about "fundamentals" we want to start with boot time – no feature gets talked about and measured more," Sinofsky noted. "We designed Windows 8 so that you shouldn't have to boot all that often (and we are always going to work on reducing the number of required restarts due to patching running code). But when you do boot we want it to be as fast as possible." The data gathered by Microsoft also shows that 45% of Windows 7 laptop users and 42% of all Windows 7 desktop users put their machines to sleep (a state where RAM is still powered via a trickle from the battery, which allows for a near-instant return to use) and 11% of laptop users but just 1% of desktop Windows 7 users use "hibernate", in which the content of RAM is written to disk and then read back in when the machine is activated.

There are a lot of people who aren't clear about what "hibernate" actually does, since the Windows team notes that "people say they prefer to shut down because they want to have their PC completely 'off' so that it uses no power – either to preserve battery life or to reduce their energy use. Hibernate is also a good option for this since it similarly has no power draw, and many people really like it." Indeed – Hibernate is the sensible zero-power option. "However, it's clearly not for everyone, since one of the other things we've heard is that many people want to turn their PCs on and have it be a 'fresh start' rather than running all of the stuff from their previous session," writes Gabe Aul from the Windows development team at the blog. This is another way in which Microsoft and Apple are diverging in their approach to what they think people want. Apple's Lion offers a "Resume" function which will take you all the way back to where you were – same programs, same windows, everything – when you invoke it. As Matt Gemmell said in the review: " Resume does exactly what it says: when you log back in, or even restart your machine, your session will resume exactly as it was before – right down to the apps and windows that were open, as if you'd never left. We've become somewhat used to this on iOS, but it really is a novelty on a desktop OS. Even current selections are preserved within documents. Extremely useful, and a feature quickly missed if you use another operating system or even an older version of OS X."

Clearly, the Windows 8 team isn't expecting people to want a Resume function; instead the expectation is that people will want that "clean start". At which one pauses and asks "why do people want a 'clean start'? Clean of what?" To which the suspicion is that the answer is "cruft". Earlier versions of Windows would gradually bog down as their uptime grew, and the answer was to reboot. But newer versions aren't like that. However, theirs not to reason why, so the developers at Microsoft are offering a faster boot-up system: "Our solution is a new fast startup mode which is a hybrid of traditional cold boot and resuming from hibernate." The key difference is that the kernel session (the code at the heart of the OS) isn't discontinued; instead that is put into hibernation. Restarting then means that the whole system doesn't have to initialised (there are more details on quite what initialisation involves at the post; it's a lot). You also get an indication of why you shouldn't trust demonstrations, and especially carefully managed videos put out to massage expectations: "resuming the hibernated system session is comparatively less work than doing a full system initialisation, but it's also faster because we added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents". Translation: the video on the site is a multi-core desktop machine (probably eight cores) reading an SSD. If you're looking to run Windows 8 on your dual-core laptop with a spinning hard drive, the change in your boot up time is probably not going to be anything like as dramatic.

There's also an indication that the already-complicated options for "turning off" your Windows machine – immortalised by former Microsoftie Joel Spolsky as The Windows Shutdown Crapfest – is going to get just that little bit more complicated: "Of course, there are times where you may want to perform a complete shutdown – for example, if you're opening the system to add or change some hardware. We have an option in the UI to revert back to the Windows 7 shutdown/cold boot behavior, or since that's likely a fairly infrequent thing, you can use the new /full switch on shutdown.exe. From a cmd prompt, run: shutdown /s /full / t 0 to invoke an immediate full shutdown. Also, choosing Restart from the UI will do a full shutdown, followed by a cold boot." No mention of whether Windows Updates will still force-restart your machine while you're in the middle of work. But at least it should come back faster. No mention either of what is viewed as the most interesting and important change in Windows 8: that there will be a version that runs on chips using the ARM achitecture, rather than Intel architecture. How will the boot interface for that look? Possibly the answers will come next week with Microsoft's BUILD conference. So, now: will this make any difference to your life? Are you an off again/on again person? A hibernator? A sleeper? Let us know.

Source: The Guardian, UK

Google Inc usa is advising its Gmail email service customers in Iran

Google Inc usa is advising its Gmail email service customers in Iran to change their passwords in the wake of a cyberattack that has affected a major swath of the country. Google itself was not compromised, but the attackers may have been able to break into the link between Gmail and a person’s computer, essentially. As such the attack was the latest illustration of the difficulty and complexity of securing the Web. “We learned last week that the compromise of a Dutch company involved with verifying the authenticity of websites could have put the Internet communications of many Iranians at risk, including their Gmail,” Google said in a post on its official blog on Thursday. “While Google’s internal systems were not compromised, we are directly contacting possibly affected users and providing similar information below because our top priority is to protect the privacy and security of our users,” Google said. A certificate guarantees that a Web surfer is securely connected with a website and not being monitored by someone else. In mid-July, Dutch Information Technology company DigiNotar’s systems were hacked and security certificates were stolen for a number of domains, DigiNotar and its owner, U.S.-listed VASCO Data Security International, said on Aug. 30. The stolen certificates were immediately revoked after detection of the theft but one, for the site Google.com, was only “recently” revoked after a warning from the Dutch government, DigiNotar and VASCO said. Google, which alerted users to the threat last week, recommended on Thursday that all users in Iran follow a series of steps to protect themselves, including changing their Gmail passwords and verifying their account recovery options.

Source: Financial Post, Canada

email services, which hit users from the Asia-Pacific to Europe

Microsoft's Hotmail, Office 365, and Live services are gradually being restored after an embarrassing major outage this afternoon that impacted on as many as 364 million users. The outage affected Microsoft Live and cloud services and began around 1pm AEST. "We are investigating service interruption. Will update as soon as more details are available or within hour," the official Office 365 Twitter feed (@Office365) said. The official Windows Inside Live blog confirmed other services also had failed. "If you've been trying to use Hotmail, SkyDrive, or our other Live properties in the last couple of hours you may have noticed problems accessing our services," the blog said. "We're aware of these issues and actively working to resolve them. We apologise for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience." Services appear slowly to be coming back online late this afternoon. "We believe we have restored service for all customers at this time," the blog said around 2.45 pm AEST. But reports of services being unavailable continued for more than an hour later.

Microsoft said it would still take time for services to come back online due to the time required for DNS configuration changes. The outage has impacted business and educational institutions around Australia linked to Microsoft's new Office 365 cloud-based email services. Australian broadcaster SBS was among those impacted. "SBS, which recently moved to Microsoft, was amongst many affected clients which saw a total outtage in email services, which hit users from the Asia-Pacific to Europe," SBS reported on its website. An online site monitoring tool showed Microsoft's Hotmail service as heavily impacted about 4.50pm AEST. Windows Live Hotmail is reported to have nearly 364 million users worldwide. The failure comes one day after a brief, 30-minute outage of Google cloud apps. Both are likely to highlight the risk organisations have, should they become dependent on cloud services.

Source: The Australian