Life after death goes online

December 3, 2010 Last updated at 15: 39 GMT by Dave Lee, BBC World Service the machine Timecard save a Flickr account to keep safe for many years, that the death of a close relative, the elderly often can mean a gloomy weekend or two going through old things, sorting through photos, donating old clothes to charity.

But in an age when so much of our lives online, little thought was given to how to handle digital world of a person when they are no longer with us.

By the time that the "generation Facebook" become old and grey, throughout their lives can be poured with a million updates on Twitter, thousands of photos on Flickr, hours and hours of videos on YouTube and maybe your website too.

As a person dies, their online presence should terminate too? What happens to personal information in all this?

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the main story In the past we might have worried about love letters coming through those physical and when you're going through things of your grandfather and be upset by it. "

End quote Abigail Sellen Microsoft Research Richard banks believes he may have the solution. He is an interaction designer for Microsoft and his team, based in Cambridge, worked on the concept of digital memories-and how, even if a person is no longer with us, their digital car can still be enjoyed.

He told BBC Radio 4 's all in the mind as the death of his grandfather, a few years ago I was thinking about the future of mourning.

"After his death, became the recipient of a suitcase full of photos of his life.

"Inside there was about 200 shots of different periods of his life, all the old analog photos, printed, stored away in envelopes.

"Got me thinking about what would be the difference, now with my photographic practices and the type of things that I could leave for my children."

He created several devices that run independently from any computer or other internet device acts as a traditional box of images and memories.

Rather than physical photos, however, displays the images of this device via an interactive touchscreen.

"If you touch one of those photos at any time, so I am taken to a timeline," explained Mr Banks.

"What is then a whole series of photos spread over time.

"Suddenly is a way of thinking we can begin to exploit the digital quality of some of these content, so that we can begin to make the objects that represent perhaps the life of a person, or perhaps give a sense of their evolution over time, or where they spent time at different points in their lives."

Mr banks hopes that its devices would mean digital memories would be far outlive the technology that were created on-as the old photographs in case of his grandfather.

The cloud

This task is made easier by our increasing dependence on "the cloud" for hosting our information-instead of physical storage such as floppy disks, hard drives.

The boxes are designed to function independently, so don't rely on keeping some hardware

"I think we tend to think of the physical limitations of digital things through objects like floppy disks, DVDs and CDs that we have stored our content on.

"I believe that some of these physical limitations are going to go away as we begin to store more and more content online. We'll put them in places and they will pretty much just stay there ".

This, however, is another matter. There are simply too much data? If these systems Save every utterance, the suitcase of 200 valuable images could become suddenly a huge collection of useless data.

"I think that sense of overwhelming numbers and quantity of content is more difficult to manage," says Mr. Banks.

"I think there are ways to tackle that computationally-always a sense of when the photos were taken or that might be the photo and those kinds of things."

Secrets beyond the Tomb

Our online personas can offer a look Back at life people Candido of giving glimpses into the personality and friendships. But with it comes a risk sharing too.

Abigail Sellen is also part of the team working on the project. She says that we can, while we're still alive, we must consider what might be left behind when we pass away.

"A lot of those materials can be quite sensitive or personal information.

Continue reading the main story exploring the limits and potential of the human is broadcast on mindIt Tuesday to 2100GMT and repeated on Wednesday 1630GMT to "So if you leave all that behind someone who interests you, is that the person will be comfortable going through them all?"

MS Sellen says that finding secrets left behind from a deceased relative is nothing new, but it could be interpreted in the archives of e-mail and other information.

"In the past we might have worried about love letters coming through those physical and when you're going through things of your grandfather and be upset by it.

"At least in this case, you know that they have kept them for a reason, and maybe it was important to them."

In future, it might be that how we write our will and perhaps even burn our secret letters, we may have to also spend time cleaning our lives online, ready to be put on display in those closest to us.

The world after Wikileaks

December 16, 2010 Last updated at 11: 46 GMT Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has caused protests by the Governments of the world, things will be different after Wikileaks, but not in ways that we could wait, says regular commentator Bill Thompson.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange might not be Time Magazine Person of the Year for 2010-the distinction went to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg-but certainly managed to dominate the global conversation the past few weeks.

You feel the reverberations of Wikileaks publishes many documents confidential and secret for many years and he has attracted a large band of supporters, but support for Assange is as much about your personal situation as it is an expression of support for what Wikileaks or proposing to do.

To properly understand the philosophy that underpins its activities or its long-term objectives, people should read interesting analysis by Aaron Bady Assange's policy, as posted on the blog zunguzungu.

Bady uses a narrow reading of an essay by Assange status and terrorist conspiracies that Assange sees modern governance as a conspiracy than those with the power that goes against the interests and wishes of the governed and that Wikileaks exists in order to weaken the ability of Governments to communicate secretly and decrease the power of authoritarian States.

By doing this, he believes, will be opening force and lead to more progressive forms of Government-or, at least, less repressive ones.

Also, inevitably, will lead to a response from the targeted institutions and in recent weeks we have seen what happens when a State feels threatened.

Although it is neither pleasant surprise: Governments, like other complex systems, will act to preserve themselves and try to hurt or neutralize the opposition, and nothing to the United States or other Governments have done so far is exceptional.

NET conflict

In a statement made to his mother, from his prison cell, Assange said "we now know that the Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and others are tools of u.s. foreign policy," referring to the way in which these large companies had decided not to provide the service of Wikileaks.

But anyone who has observed the growth of the internet might have been surprised by this.

Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu wrote about this back in 2006 in their excellent book that rules the Internet, where they stressed that the Government will always go after gatekeeper and choke points in their attempt to regulate the online activities.

In that same year, Visa and Mastercard refused to pass the funds to the .com site allofmp3 download music, even if the site has been legal in Russia, but attracted little attention because it was cheap and not music freedom of expression.

Now we face a different type of conflict, and seems to be that shape the political landscape in the years to come.

The ending of the movie Ghostbusters heroes eponymous founders are obliged to defy God Gozer, but before he looks that are said to be "choose the shape of your destructor."

Gozer, they realize, will result in any form monstrous imagine and Venkman tells others don't display anything. Unfortunately, it's too late-Ray has already thought of "but which could, something that would never hurt me"-to the point that a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow man appears and proceeds to destroy New York City.

Something similar is behind the emergence of Wikileaks. Over the past two decades we have built the internet and the web and completed a process of digitization that has transformed most of the world's operational data in electronic form, from banking to love letters to diplomatic cables.

Status quo

We called away at the age of the network and still practiced in our daily lives as though nothing has really changed.

As a result we made this moment inevitable, even if it was impossible to predict the shape that would take our "destructor".

Wikileaks will inaugurate a new era of control, Bill Thompson wonders

Now it is materialized as a stateless person, formless "new media non-profit international organization that publishes observations of documents otherwise available from anonymous sources and leaks," as Wikipedia describes it.

This organisation is under threat from the outside by some of the world's most powerful States, whose action capacity is enormous. It is also challenged from within, as internal mail and documents, made available online on the website reveal the Cryptome.

But what really matters is that the disruptive power of the internet has been conclusively demonstrated, and the old order has been caused to respond.

This is the Napster of democracy, where the forms of Government that have evolved over 200 years of industrial society eager to demonstrate network, just as the business models of the recording industry were swept away by the ease with which the internet could make perfect digital copies of music file compressed.

Napster was castrated by court action in the United States, but his failure inspired-to-peer services that were much more difficult to control. Sharing of music, now is unstoppable and Wikileaks and organisations that come after will ensure that the same is true of secrets.

Of course we must never underestimate the power of the State, to reinvent itself, as well as modern capitalism and constitutional monarchy seem able to do.

Wikileaks has exposed weaknesses in the way their internal flow of information control of Governments and organizations dedicated to transparency and disclosure will observe the tactics used to shut it down and adapt accordingly. But the State may learn too and have the resources to implement what you learn.

I fear that Wikileaks is likely to usher in an era of more effective control as is to sweep away the authoritarian regimes that opposes Julian Assange.

He can look at a day when the conspiratorial power state has declined, but I think we are more likely to see new forms of governance emerge that take advantage of the features of the network age to ensure that their power is intact.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service Digital Planet. Is currently working with the BBC on its draft archive.

After all this, good thing the fix was free

Sysadmin pilot fish Gets a call from one of his one-level support techs. Fish, "says that a PC is the only boot on a screen that displays a series of zeros that flash in sequence and then move the screen every few seconds," he says.

"I suggest that it is probably a problem with the hard and suggest running a Linux boot disk to repair it".

Tech invokes a little later: the hard disk and memory, then check out the video must be integrated on the motherboard, you say.

It takes the emails from different vendors to find the part to this ageing PC, but the motherboard is finally ordered, delivered and installed by tech--and doesn't solve the problem.

Probably the processor, so tech suggests; have had some peaks in this site.

The processor is ordered and installed--and the problem is not resolved yet.

Maybe you should double check the hard disk, suggest fish. A few hours later, he receives a call back from tech: "you know what, I think there is something wrong with this hard drive".

Fish sighs, "technology checks the disk with a Linux boot disk and an XP repair installation finally solves the problem. The technology is calling me back and forwards its success.

"I replied," A Linux boot disk? You don't say. Which Linux boot disk you try, initially, rental or Ultimate? ' "Oh, well, it doesn't look like the hard drive to me so that I didn't think I had to run it. '"

first things first: Sharky needs your true tale of life in IT. Send it to me at sharky@computerworld.com. You'll score a shark shirt strong if you use it. Add your comments below, and read some great old Sharkives stories in.

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Alibaba.com CEO and COO to resign after fraud investigation

The head of Alibaba.com, an operator of e-commerce and more in China, has resigned following an internal investigation has found that an increase in fraudulent transactions at the company.

CEO David Wei has resigned from Alibaba.com, Business-to-business commercial platform group Alibaba Chinese e-commerce giant. Replacement of Wei will be Jonathan Lu, CEO of the largest online retailer, Taobao.com, China's Alibaba. Alibaba.com also chief operating officer Elvis Lee has resigned.

The investigation established that Wei and Lee were not involved in any fraudulent activity.

From resignation, Wei Lee wanted to take responsibility for fraudulent activities carried out by users on the site.

Monday, Alibaba released a statement saying that the senior management at the company had noticed an increase in claims of fraud by buyers against its customers China Gold supplier.

Fraud had begun at the end of 2009 and continued throughout the year. The number of suppliers engaged in fraud including 1219 who had signed in 2009 and 1107 who had signed in 2010. The company has taken steps to end the virtual shop suppliers.

"In general, the sites offered the high consumer demand at very interesting prices, minimum order quantity and less reliable methods of transferring payment." Alibaba said in a statement. "The average value per claim by buyers against fraudulent vendors was less than US $ 1, 200".

Sales of about 100 people, a number of sales managers and supervisors had allowed fraud to circumvent the measures of control of the company intentionally or negligently, Alibaba added. Fraudulent activities had no "material financial impact on society.

Under the leadership of Wei, Alibaba.com had worked to expand its services globally. Last year the company had made acquisitions of two e-commerce company, and in the United States. The objective was to use them to help pave the way for U.S. small businesses source their products through the resources of the e-commerce Alibaba.

India Cancel Deal satellite spectrum after a dispute

India has decided to cancel the agreement at issue to lease satellite spectrum of a private company, claiming that needs s-band spectrum for national purposes, including the defence.

A Committee of Cabinet Security decided to cancel the 2005 agreement between Antrix, the commercial arm of space research organization (ISRO) Indian and Devas Multimedia, Minister of India Veerappa Moily, told reporters at a briefing TV in Delhi on Thursday.

The cancellation is done pursuant to the provisions of the agreement, said Moily. He has not explained why ISRO, an agency of the country under the space, which includes the Office of the Prime Minister, had concluded the agreement in the first place.

Deva, Deutsche Telekom as an investor, was not immediately available for comment.

In a statement on Wednesday, the company said that it expects the Government to fulfil all the obligations of the agreement and will take "strong, including legal action," to protect the rights and interests of the company.

Moily has said that if they should go to Court Devas, it would fail.

After media reports and opposition politicians, earlier this month has questioned the proposed leasing spectrum satellite Devas without an auction, the GOI claimed that the agreement with Devas was already under consideration by December 2009. The controller and Auditor General of India (CAG) is reviewing the deal and has asked the Government because the agreement was finalized without competitive bid, according to reports.

Similar issues were raised in November by the GAC on the decision of the Department of telecommunications to allocate spectrum of 2 G mobile operators on a first come first served basis. The Telecommunications Department allegedly favoured some private operators, not following proper procedures, said the GAC. Central Bureau of Investigation of India has arrested a number of people including telecom ex-Minister of the country, r. Raja, in connection with this controversy.

Devas, a startup at Bangalore, was founded in 2004 to establish a national satellite system for delivering applications for rural development, e-Government, emergency communications, remote connectivity and strategic services, according to the website of the company.

The Department of space in 2000 was authorized to enter into commercial agreements with non-governmental users for spare capacity on its satellites, after meeting the requirement of government agencies. Private companies with foreign participation Indian less than 74% were authorized to establish satellite systems, and the Department may contract to build capacity on its satellites that could be used to provide private companies with commercially to spectrum.

Government officials said earlier this month that the space Department had begun a review of the agreement between Antrix and Devas in December 2009 and recommended that it was canceled in July 2010.

The contract had not been resolved yet because it was a complex process, k. Radhakrishnan, Secretary, Department of space, he told reporters at a briefing earlier this month.

Deva said earlier this month that it had proceeded with the project after having obtained the necessary permissions and approvals from government agencies, including the Commission and the Office space of the Union, and the same it has been confirmed by Antrix in February 2006.

Deva also received approvals to foreign direct investment by Foreign Investment Promotion Board of India and is in full compliance with government regulations, the company said.

Having fulfilled all its obligations towards the 2005 agreement, Devas said it now expects delivery of contracted space segment capacity, which was delayed by more than two years.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and General technology breaking news from India to the IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @ Johnribeiro. E-mail address of John john_ribeiro@idg.com

Shareholders of Nokia plan b give up after 36 hours

Yesterday we reported some shareholders of Nokia offered a plan b for the company who also wrote a long list of suggestions. The Group of nine young Nokia shareholders was planning to challenge the company's strategy and the partnership with Microsoft in the next annual general meeting scheduled for May 3, 2011. After 36 hours, however, the Group withdrew.

The nine wanted to change the current management seriously, which included getting the expulsion of Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop. They argued that Nokia will maintain ownership and control of the level of its software products because the software is where the value of innovation, differentiation and shareholder more easily can be created. They also wanted a renewal in hiring strategy, the Elimination of outdated and bureaucratic R&D practices and at all costs avoid becoming "a poorly differentiated OEM".

Now, all that went out the window. Are cited two reasons: for the moment their plan also came to fruition, the most talented software developers to Nokia would've gone, and institutional investors who own most stocks of Nokia have told them that their fiduciary liability through bars them with an activist. You can read the full decision output, aptly named call closes, below:

After reviewing the feedback we received from investors on our plan B, we decided not to continue with it.

In the last 36 hours we were contacted by hundreds of individual shareholders (anywhere from 10 to 400 000 Nokia shares) with a commitment to support us by voting by proxy or in person by attending the AGM.

However, the responses we received from institutional investors were not encouraging. These institutions have a fiduciary responsibility to their clients and are legally bared by supporting initiatives radicals such as seating a bunch of children on board. If you do not agree with Nokia plans, are better simply transfer and put their money into companies that best fit their investment strategy (which is exactly what they did).

We also understand that by the time that our plan b would kick in, most of the remaining software talent in Nokia would have already left the company, so it really would be an uphill battle to collect things from there.

This is from us. It is up to you what to do with your money. We'll stop short of endorsing NokiaPlanC.com or NokiaPlanX.com, even if we think that they are both excellent ideas.

Oh, he'll get the hang of it after 100 attempts

Management pushes for a new type of printer in the Office of this pilot fish. "One of the keys to get the new printers is a secure print functionality," says. "In this way sensitive documents being sent to a printer, but not actually print until the user enters a PIN code to release the print job.

"This manager talks about how great this feature safe printing will anyone listen to you. After weeks of persuade, we get the new printers.

"Just two weeks after the new printers, we find a review of benefits for an employee that someone has printed and neglected withdraw out of the printer. Obviously someone doesn't understand how print works.

"Who did this? Why, the same handler who wanted to printers because of their print secure! "

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HBGary retires from RSA after embarrassing ' Anonymous ' hack

Daniel Kennedy leads initiatives in politics and in the management of operational safety, conducts the certification strategy and risk assessment and is head of business continuity planning and disaster recovery to the Praetorian security group, LLC.

Praetorian Security Group first, Daniel was the global head of information security at D.B. Zwirn & co where he managed the company's information security. He was specifically responsible for the development, implementation and maintenance of information security policy of the company. Managed security metrics reporting, also the program of awareness raising and education of safety, security incident response, security control and develop the company's strategy for the security technology. In this role he worked closely with the firm's CIO, COO, head of compliance, head of legal, head of infrastructure, head of client services overseas and IT managers.

Before D.B. Zwirn, Daniel was Vice President and program director for the security application program at Pershing LLC, a division of the Bank of New York. Responsibilities of Daniel including management of the firm's application security, coordination of application vulnerability assessments and testing, application security, training, documentation of the secure coding guidelines and application security development firm SDLC penetration. He was the primary liaison for application security concerns among teams as the Information Security Office, Internal Audit, risk of Information Management (IRM) and teams of business and application development. He served on several committees, including the security infrastructure, Workgroup and chartered security architecture and chaired the Security Council of the enterprise application, an interdisciplinary team consisting of application developers and security experts on the subject.

His previous positions include the Pershing and development management positions in systems engineering of web applications creation company to facilitate the online brokerage. He was also employed at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc., a technology analyst for the Treasury.

Daniel Degree Master of Science in information systems from Stevens Institute of Technology, a Master of Science in information assurance from Norwich University and a Bachelor of Science in Information Management and Technology from Syracuse University. He is certified as a CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) of the EC-Council, a CISSP and an NASD Series 7 license.

You can also follow him on Twitter, and the Praetorian Prefect of blog.

Verizon Wireless strikes the price HP Pre 2 $ 149.99 after rebate

Associate Editor

Andrew j. Nusca is an editor for ZDNet and SmartPlanet. As a journalist based in New York City, he has written for Popular Mechanics and men's Vogue and his byline has appeared in New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, New York Daily News, Editor & Publisher, New York Press and many others. He also writes the Editorialiste, a media criticism blog.

He is a graduate of New York University and former editor and columnist of the Washington Square News. He is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was named "Howard Kurtz, Jr." by film critic John Lichman despite not having a relationship with him. A native of Philadelphia, he lives in New York with his girlfriend and his cat, Spats.

Follow him on Twitter.