Tuesday 21 January 2014

Why India is failing in it's war against Cyber Terrorism ?

Cyber Crime in India
Photo Credit - Siliconindia.info
 With the rapid growth of  internet technology, cyber threat has increased more than ever. This unprecedented growth in cyber security threats has forced companies globally to seek the help of more and more cyber security personnel, but this strategy is also failing as firms world wide are facing a shortage of such professionals, a research study by CISCO said.
India especially has become the center of such cyber attacks, according to the ASR (Annual Security Report) 2013 was a "Bad Year " as the total attacks increased by over 14% as compared to 2012! This is a particularly bad percentage, especially considering the fact that India produces more than 7.5 lakh engineers from its 3394 engineering colleges each year, and most of them remain unemployed.

Mr Diwakar Dayal (Cisco Leader Security Business) said, that these attacks are higher than ever. Reports of cyber intrusions were the highest in the last 13 years. An even more embarrassing is the fact is that Indian government websites have been breached over A Thousand Times in the last three years !! The more you think about it, more serious this matter becomes. Is anyone really safe online? Is our information in the government servers safe? These figures don't really inspire confidence. India is facing a shortage of more than 4 lakh cyber soldiers, and the government is not paying any attention to the matter whatsoever.

Photo Credit - topnews.in
Reports also suggested that attacks on web hosting servers and database centers have also increased. Top platforms to be hacked where Androids and Java. Problem with these platforms is that they are opensource with endless iterations, making them an easy target for malicious coders. 99.2% of malicious attacks are against Android platforms.

These reports are based on SIO (Security Intelligence Operations), its critical in cyber threat evaluation and elimination. SIO inspects thirty million network connects, Ninety three billion emails, and Four lakh IP addresses daily.
This matter of cyber security is an important issue which must be dealt immediately. We need to anticipate these complex and sophisticated attacks on our networks and retaliate with precision.Only then we can be sure of our safety online.

Monday 20 January 2014

Why Facebook's New Algorithm for Newsfeed not a good idea!


Facebook's Panda Algorithm
Photo credit - AZwebsiteforsale.com
So, Facebook recently updated it's own News Feed Algorithm. According to the new algorithm, users would see more posts with "High Quality Content" produced by businesses, rather than the useless "Memes & Posters" hosted on some other websites. This might be a good strategy to show the users more prominent and useful data/links but after analyzing the impact of this update on my own news feed, I am forced to say that its not a big improvement at all.
Let's rewind a bit and think why all of us joined Facebook in the first place? Was it to see the "High quality paid links" suggested by facebook? Certainly not! The reason behind most of the people joining facebook was simply to stay connected to friends and family. With this new algorithm all the updates from your family and friends would disappear because their posts won't have enough likes and comments to be deemed "Useful" by the Fb's new algorithm. After detailed analysis on this new algorithm it has been found that only those posts which have many likes and comments on them are visible, in other words only the posts by business pages would be visible, it may even be shown more than once on your newsfeed! But the posts by your friends and others might not be visible at all. Hence, in trying to provide more useful content to its users, Facebook lost its original purpose, which was to help people stay connected. Now with the evolvement of this new algorithm FB's "social connectivity" is decreasing and it is becoming more of a business tool which is used to generate traffic for Big Brands only.

Here's what Facebook has to say about this update - "Why are we doing this? Our surveys show that on average people prefer links to high quality articles about current events, their favorite sports team or shared interests, to the latest meme," says Facebook software engineer Varun Kacholia in a blog post. 
"To complement people's interest in articles, we recently began looking at ways to show people additional articles similar to ones they had just read," Kacholia adds. "Soon, after you click on a link to an article, you may see up to three related articles directly below the News Feed post to help you discover more content you may find interesting."


While this might seem like a valid justification, but in reality its only an excuse to promote business pages and generate more traffic for these business websites. In a nutshell, if you want to share your own stories and stay connected with your friends, without being bothered but business posts, Facebook is no more the place to go. Sad to see the most useful place to socialize has been reduced to nothing more than a paid blog!!