Posts Tagged ‘China’

China’s Online Population Rises To 485 Million

Published by pratyushkp on July 20th, 2011 - in Social, Technology
BEIJING, CHINA - DECEMBER 22: Chen Tong, exec...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

China‘s online population soared to 485 million as of the end of June as use of mobile phones to surf the Web spreads, an industry group reported Tuesday.

The number of Chinese Web users, already by far the world’s biggest, rose by 15.5 percent over a year earlier, according to the government-sanctioned China Internet Network Information Center.

As the Jakarta Post notes, “China’s online population already is by far the world’s biggest and more than 50 percent larger than the entire United States population.”

China’s communist government promotes Internet use for business and education but tries to block access to material it considers subversive or pornographic.

The number of people who use mobile phones to surf the Web rose to 318 million, or about 65 percent of the total, CNNIC said. That was up 14.8 percent from a year earlier.

The overall growth rate was down slightly from 2010, when the Internet population grew by 19 percent.

China’s rise in Web use has been driven by rapid economic growth that the World Bank forecasts could reach 9.3 percent this year.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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Google+ Made Unavailable In China

Published by pratyushkp on July 1st, 2011 - in Social, Technology

Image via CrunchBase

Google+, the search giant’s social network, has already been made unavailable in China.

According to Great Firewall of China, a China-based service that checks the availability of sites within the country, Google+ has been made inaccessible just a day after its debut. Sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Foursquare are already blocked in the country, which has a famously restrictive censorship policy over its Internet.

However, China hasn’t completely prevented its citizens from accessing the site. According to Penn-Olson, China is not blocking the site, but is throttling the speed of the site so greatly that it may as well be unavailable.

“Web throttling is a tactic new to China’s Great Firewall, and has been seriously slowing pretty much all overseas internet speeds all year,” Penn-Olson explains. “Gmail particularly has been horribly throttled, to the point were it can take five or ten minutes or more to go from the login page to your inbox. It’s a very underhanded tactic [...] [that is] actually rendering it [the service] nearly useless to its users.”

Outside of China, demand for Google+ has been so great that the service’s invite system was temporarily put on hold Wednesday night.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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Japanese ‘K’ Computer Now Fastest In The World

Published by pratyushkp on June 21st, 2011 - in Social, Technology

Image by CroytaqueCie via Flickr

The world’s most powerful computer is now in Japan.

According to The New York Times, the computer, called “K,” is three times faster than the next fastest computer, a Chinese computer, Tianhe-1A, that previously held the highest spot.

K, built by Fujitsu, can make 8.2 quadrillion calculations each second. “K” stands for “Kei,” meaning 10 quadrillion, or the number of calculations per second researchers hope K will one day be able to perform per second. K’s abilities are the equivalent of linking one million desktop computers.

K is made out of 672 computer racks, with 68,544 computer processing units (CPUs) but the lab plans to raise that number to 800 racks, a move that will make the machine even speedier and more powerful.

Scientists expect that the computer will be used in fields including climate research and disaster prevention, as well as medicine. The machine is scheduled for deployment in 2012.

“Bringing together hundreds of thousands of components to quickly launch such a massive-scale computing system-which would have been nearly impossible using conventional technologies-requires an incredible level of reliability,” wrote Michiyoshi Mazuka, Chairman of Fujitsu Limited in a press release. “I believe that this reliability is truly the pinnacle of Japanese manufacturing.”

The U.S. has five of the world’s ten most powerful computers, with a computer in Oak Ridge, Tennessee coming in third on the overall list.

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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Government officials, activists targeted in Gmail attack

Published by pratyushkp on June 2nd, 2011 - in Social, Technology

Image via CrunchBase

Google has posted to their blog information about a targeted attack against the personal Gmail accounts of US government officials, political activists, military personnel and journalists.

Mila from contagioblog provides much more detailed information about the attacks. The messages appear to be handcrafted and spoofed to seem to be from governmental colleagues of many of the victims.

Normally attachments in Gmail appear with a paper clip and links to view or download the item. The attackers created HTML that used fake attachment links that actually lead to a phishing page designed to look identical to the Gmail login page.

Mila wrote about these attacks in February, but the big news is Google sharing this information publicly. Most organizations prefer to keep security problems to themselves and maintain the illusion that their services are perfectly secure.

While this attack is not specifically a problem with Gmail, it is a widespread security weakness in many cloud services. Google sharing information with the public about how these attacks are executed helps all of us learn from these situations and build better systems.

Google gives some good advice in their post, although it seems strange that they feel the need to push Google Chrome as a solution to all security problems…

How should we respond to this news? We should take a moment to remind our users about best practices when using web-enabled technologies.

If you are ever presented with a login screen in your browser and you didn’t type in the address of the site you are trying to visit, close the window. Only enter your password into pages where you entered in the URL.

Source :- http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/

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