Eideard

A small group of Internet security specialists gathered in Singapore this week to start up a global system to make e-mail and e-commerce more secure, end the proliferation of passwords and raise the bar significantly for Internet scam artists, spies and troublemakers.

“It won’t matter where you are in the world or who you are in the world, you’re going to be able to authenticate everyone and everything,” said Dan Kaminsky, an independent network security researcher who is one of the engineers involved in the project.

The Singapore event included an elaborate technical ceremony to create and then securely store numerical keys that will be kept in three hardened data centers there, in Zurich and in San Jose, Calif. The keys and data centers are working parts of a technology known as Secure DNS, or DNSSEC. DNS refers to the Domain Name System, which is a directory that connects names to numerical Internet addresses. Preliminary work on the security system had been going on for more than a year, but this was the first time the system went into operation, even though it is not quite complete.

The three centers are fortresses made up of five layers of physical, electronic and cryptographic security, making it virtually impossible to tamper with the system. Four layers are active now. The fifth, a physical barrier, is being built inside the data center…

Internet security specialists said the new security protocol would initially affect Web traffic and e-mail. Most users should be mostly protected by the end of the year, but the effectiveness for a user depends on the participation of the government, Internet providers and organizations and businesses visited online. Eventually the system is expected to have a broad effect on all kinds of communications, including voice calls that travel over the Internet, known as voice-over-Internet protocol…

The deployment of Secure DNS will significantly lower the cost of adding a layer of security, making it more likely that services built on the technology will be widely available, according to computer network security specialists. It will also potentially serve as a foundation technology for an ambitious United States government effort begun this spring to create a system to ensure “trusted identities” in cyberspace.

RTFA for the wherefores and whys. Here’s a link for the how. Adding more and especially better security, authentication is overdue for the Web. Too many people concentrated on making a buck from the phenomenon. Not enough working at making it safe for every user.

1965

Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore, said on Saturday he was leaving the cabinet, the first time he will not be part of the government of the wealthy city state since independence in 1965.

Lee and Goh Chok Tong, who succeeded him as prime minister in 1990, announced in a joint statement that they were opting out of government since last week’s general election signaled the emergence of a new generation. Both men were returned to parliament in the poll.

“We have made our contributions to the development of Singapore,” the two said. “The time has come for a younger generation to carry Singapore forward in a more difficult and complex situation.

“After a watershed general election, we have decided to leave the cabinet and have a completely younger team of ministers to connect to and engage with this young generation in shaping the future of our Singapore…”

The long-ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), co-founded by Lee Kuan Yew, won the May 7 election with 81 of 87 seats, but took only about 60 percent of the popular vote, its lowest ever since independence.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Lee Kuan Yew’s son, said after the election there had been a distinct shift in the political landscape.

“Many (Singaporeans) wish for the government to adopt a different style and approach,” he said at a news conference last week. “Many desire to see more opposition voices in parliament to check the PAP government.”

This election was remarkable for the stridency of anti-government rhetoric both at opposition rallies and on the Internet.

The PAP-led government has transformed Singapore from a third world backwater to a first world financial center, but critics say decisions are not taken in an inclusive manner, and dissent is muzzled.

That’s putting it gently.

It appears that the shifting dialectic of democracy is on the upsurge, once again, and taking a leading role in the future of Singapore. Welcomed, of course, by those who fought at all levels – and there were many – to get to this day without destroying the dynamic growth of the city-state’s economy and standard of living.

Singapore topped the Networked Society City Index… The NSCI Index [.pdf] looks at how 25 major cities are using technologies to grow and manage themselves. The index shows that cities which put technology to use more effectively are the ones that have a better grip on “environmental management, infrastructure, public security, health-care quality and education.”

The study lauds Brazil’s Sao Paulo as an up-and-coming city that has used technology very effectively. The impact of mobile too cannot be underscored, the study finds.

They improve access to people, in particular family and relatives, but also help people make and save money. Mobile services, particularly in low-earning segments, enable people to become more entrepreneurial. They can increase profits by, for instance, cutting out middlemen when selling their harvests, and save money by avoiding lengthy travel…

It is part of a larger trend of putting technology to work outside the realm of corporations. The productivity revolution’s first beneficiaries were big companies, and now we beginning to see schools, consumers and even governments start to think about technology as a productivity enhancement tool.

While productivity in the business sense is about maximizing profits, productivity from a civic perspective is about better resource management. As we become more networked and our devices can generate data, we can start to look at a future where technology tries to reduce waste.

The process is a dialectic – or can become one when more than one side of the equation participates. There is a PBS special starting to appear this weekend which compares existing broadband in the Netherlands, the UK and the United States – and what the next directions of growth will be. Where there is the political will.

So, how fast are speeds growing in your neck of the prairie? What are your friendly neighborhood politicians doing to hasten access to really big internet pipes? Do they even mention expansion of business opportunities derived from real broadband?

Downtown Brisbane, Australia
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Insurers are struggling to assess the risks from climate change, industry officials say, with the floods in Australia and Brazil highlighting the potential losses from greater extremes of weather.

Scientists say a warmer world will cause more intense drought, floods, cyclones as well as rising sea levels and the insurance industry says the number of weather-related disasters has already soared over the past several decades.

Adding to the risks is a growing human population, more people moving into cities, particularly in Asia, and more property in the path of increasingly volatile weather.

This makes it harder to tease out a direct climate change link in ever rising losses, experts say. Lack of long-term weather data in some parts of the world is also clouding the picture.

Another problem is the narrow time horizon insurers typically focus on. Reinsurers, for instance, renew their contracts annually based on past losses, meaning they aren’t so concerned about trends decades in the future…

“Ignoring global warming will risk an increasing exposure and therefore insured losses will escalate,” said Scott Ryrie, CEO of Allianz SE Reinsurance Asia-Pacific in Singapore.

“I believe climate change will add something to the losses we see already but I don’t believe losses will be dramatically changing. It’s just going to make the losses worse,” he told a climate change and insurance conference in Singapore…

“In some regions of the world, we have already seen changes in the patterns in terms of frequency and intensity of these events,” said Ernst Rauch of global reinsurer Munich Re.

While climate deniers may blather all day long – insurance companies have to face realities involving bills coming due.

Those with long-term outlooks do the most to secure long-term business success. Just as they rely on modern medical science to develop actuarial tables on sickness and health, they use the same methodologies to develop profitable analyses of property and commerce they insure. Wholly apart from the foolishness of know-nothing climate ideology.

Squeaky-clean Singapore needs cleaner toilets and public awareness is one way to achieve this, a civic group said at the launch of the latest stage of its LOO campaign — Let’s Observe Ourselves.

The city-state has 30,000 public restrooms and is pushing to make 70 percent of them at least “three-star” clean by 2013.

But a survey by the Restroom Association (Singapore) (RAS) found that only some 500 of the island’s public toilets overall were up to its standards of working facilities, lack of litter and odor, and the provision of basic amenities such as hand soap and toilet paper.

“For us, toilet etiquette reflects Singaporeans’ culture. It tells people how civilized we are,” RAS President Tan Puay Hoon told reporters on Thursday, when the association unveiled its 70-page report on public restrooms as part of a campaign to improve island-wide toilet cleanliness.

“We are a First World country and we want a gracious society to reflect that.”

Under the RAS Happy Toilet Programme, toilets are rated from three to five stars. A four-star toilet should have a diaper changing station or urinal for children and a five-star should have eco-friendly features such as water-saving taps…

The LOO Campaign began in 2008. The RAS has also conducted the Happy Toilet School Education program and is a founding member of the World Toilet Organization and the Keep Singapore Beautiful Movement.

I hope no one ever lets these kind folks know what public toilets in Western First World nations are really like.

Would you buy a used car from either of these clowns?

Denmark, Singapore and New Zealand formed a three-way tie as the least corrupt countries in the 2010 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, while Somalia was rated the most corrupt and the U.S score declined.

Those three countries were the leaders last year as well, though in 2009 New Zealand was first, with Denmark and Singapore closely behind. The index, developed for at least the last 15 years by the Berlin-based international anti-corruption group, is widely used by business, civil society groups and others when determining corruption risk across the globe.

This year, the index found that three-quarters of the 178 countries scored below 5 on a Zero-to-10 scale, indicating serious corruption problems. A country’s perceived corruption decreases as its score increases. Denmark, Singapore and New Zealand each scored a 9.3, whereas Somalia scored a 1.1 and the U.S. saw its score drop to 7.1 in 2010 from 7.5 a year ago…

“We need to see more enforcement of existing rules and laws. There should be nowhere to hide for the corrupt or their money,” said Huguette Labelle, chair of Transparency International, in the statement.

Of the hundreds of sources covering the release of this report, I chose the Wall Street Journal – just to peep the conservative moneyboys perception of corruption. The result was predictable – scant mention that the United States continues in decline. BTW, the USA was 14th before George W’s election. Now, we’re 22nd.

Wow. What a wonderful world of choice. Here in New Mexico we have one reasonably courageous senator and one matching congressman [not in my district - so, I don't get to vote for him]. The rest are the same old, lame old story – running against a stereotypical slate of Republicans whose only claim to fame is that they’re presently unemployed in government.

For decades the United States attracted more than a quarter of all foreign students in college or graduate education. Recently that has begun to change. While the continuing boom in study overseas — an explosion largely unaffected by the economic downturn — means that the number of foreign students going to the United States has continued to grow, the U.S. share of the foreign student market has fallen to just 18.7 percent, according to the most recent report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Meanwhile countries like Australia, Russia and New Zealand have all seen their share of the market rise sharply.

But behind the numbers and the winners and losers lies a more complex story of a rapidly changing international landscape in which the old pattern of a “brain drain,” in which rich countries skim off the talent from the rest of the world, is giving way to a “brain exchange,” in which students complete part of their education at home and part abroad, often working overseas as well before ultimately returning home.

“Increasingly the difference is that the traffic works both ways,” said Jamil Salmi, an official who follows education issues at the World Bank. “In the past you had a clear hierarchy of sending and receiving countries. Now the flows are more complex, going in many directions…”

In more recent times the United States and Britain have long been dominant. “Partly because of quality,” said Andreas Schleicher, head of the analysis in the education directorate at the O.E.C.D. “But also because they were the first movers in this market. Now there is quite a lot of competition…”

Rising prosperity is another contributor to what Ben Wildavsky calls “the globalization of knowledge.” He points to “China and South Korea, who are trying very hard to build world-class universities. Those are both countries that traditionally sent a lot of students to the U.S. And they still do.”

Thanks in part to massive government investment in elite institutions like Tsinghua University in Beijing and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, “China now receives more foreign students than they send overseas,” Mr. Wildavsky said…

There are immediate economic benefits to the winners in this global competition. “Full-pay students also make a significant contribution to a country’s educational bottom line,” said Mr. Wildavsky. Education is now Australia’s third-largest export, directly behind coal and iron ore. But in the long term, Mr. Wildavsky said, the spread of high-quality education, and the creation of new knowledge, should benefit everyone. “Chinese research may well provide the material for innovation by American entrepreneurs — or those from other nations,” he said.

Globalization of education will be one more nail in the coffin of parochial politics, nationalist concepts which often misdirect learning into temporal and sectarian dead ends.

Another reason, I guess, for reactionaries, even some conservatives – to fear the Internet and free access to information on a global scale.

Franklin Lakes, NJ — By the time they get to kindergarten, children in this well-to-do suburb already know their numbers, so their teachers worried that a new math program was too easy when it covered just 1 and 2 — for a whole week.

“Talk about the number 1 for 45 minutes?” said Chris Covello, who teaches 16 students ages 5 and 6. “I was like, I don’t know. But then I found you really could. Before, we had a lot of ground to cover, and now it’s more open-ended and gets kids thinking.”

The slower pace is a cornerstone of the district’s new approach to teaching math, which is based on the national math system of Singapore and aims to emulate that country’s success by promoting a deeper understanding of numbers and math concepts. Students in Singapore have repeatedly ranked at or near the top on international math exams since the mid-1990s…

For decades, efforts to improve math skills have driven schools to embrace one math program after another, abandoning a program when it does not work and moving on to something purportedly better…

Singapore math may well be a fad, too, but supporters say it seems to address one of the difficulties in teaching math: all children learn differently. In contrast to the most common math programs in the United States, Singapore math devotes more time to fewer topics, to ensure that children master the material through detailed instruction, questions, problem solving, and visual and hands-on aids like blocks, cards and bar charts. Ideally, they do not move on until they have thoroughly learned a topic.

Principals and teachers say that slowing down the learning process gives students a solid math foundation upon which to build increasingly complex skills, and makes it less likely that they will forget and have to be retaught the same thing in later years.

And with Singapore math, the pace can accelerate by fourth and fifth grades, putting children as much as a year ahead of students in other math programs as they grasp complex problems more quickly…

“All along, people have said it’s too hard, too demanding for teachers,” said Jeffery Thomas, a history teacher who founded SingaporeMath.com with his wife, Dawn, after using the books to tutor their daughter at home in the suburbs of Portland, Ore…

Well, that’s almost the “American” reason for reversing course on any program, isn’t it?

I haven’t read anything about Singapore math. Though “KB” and I have discussed the absence of maths improvement in some of the school systems which have increased success otherwise. Sorry to say, it’s been so long since I learned my basics – I don’t remember how it worked, though it probably was mostly rote. Given my geezer age.

A global supply manager working for Apple has been charged in a US federal grand jury indictment for wire fraud, kickbacks and money laundering, and is also facing a civil suit from Apple itself.

According to a report by the San Jose Mercury News, 37 year old Paul Shin Devine of Sunnyvale, California was named in the 23 count indictment along with Andrew Ang of Singapore.

The charges relate to an alleged fraud scheme that claims Devine used his security clearance at Apple to provide confidential information about upcoming products to Apple’s suppliers, including Ang. The indictment says those suppliers then used the secrets to negotiate favorable contracts with Apple and subsequently paid Devine kickbacks, which he shared with Ang…

The companies involved were not named in the indictment, but include suppliers for iPhone and iPod products and were said to be located in “various countries in Asia,” including China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan…

In addition to the criminal prosecution, Apple is also reportedly bringing a civil suit that claims Devine accepted more than a million dollars in “payments, kickbacks and bribes” over several years…

Apple has long worked hard to maintain secrecy in order to keep competitors guessing and to excite customers with flashy product releases, but the case also highlights threats the company faces in working with its own partners in the lucrative business of supplying parts and assembling new products.

And – as did the folks at Apple Insider – I wonder if this will affect the recent increase of apparently easy leaks on imminent Apple products.

The vendors these two worked with wouldn’t feel bound by the sort of non-disclosure agreements Apple requires – already working with crooks while chasing business.

A device thought to be the largest tidal energy turbine to be built in the world has been described by its developer as “simple and robust”.

Atlantis Resources unveiled its AK-1000 at Invergordon ahead of it being towed on a barge to a European Marine Energy Centre test site off Eday, Orkney…The device has two sets of blades to harness ebb and flood tides.

Mr Cornelius told BBC Scotland that the focus of the marine industry at the moment was making the Pentland Firth a huge success in terms of generating electricity from renewable energy devices…

“It is one of the harshest environments on the planet…In order to get a robust turbine we have had to make what we call ultimately the dumbest, simple but most robust turbine you could possibly put in such a harsh environment.”

The AK-1000′s two sets of blades have also been designed to move slowly underwater and Atlantis said they would not pose a threat to sea life…

Atlantis, which has bases in London and Singapore, has been leading a plan to use tidal energy to power a computer data centre in the far north of Scotland…

The computer data centre would provide services for a number of companies and be powered by tidal energy rather than depend on electricity supplied to the National Grid.

I guess this puts the Brits+Singaporeans – and anyone else putting such projects into play – years ahead of that great industrial and engineering giant, the United States.

Between Republicans who prefer to spend taxpayer dollars on their favorite war contractors and Democrats who are happy enough maintaining bureaucratic sinecures, the United States should regain a leadership position in the global economy – never.