LinkedIn has confirmed that some of its users' passwords have been compromised and said it is continung to investigate claims that a member of a Russian online forum hacked the popular networking site and uploaded close to 6.5 million passwords to the internet.
In a blog post issued late Wednesday afternoon, LinkedIn said the passwords of users whose data had been compromised would no longer work, and they would be sent emails advising them how to change them. It would not say how many passwords had been leaked.
The passwords were allegedly uploaded encrypted and without usernames since the hacker's aim seems to have been to demonstrate that the LinkedIn site is not secure rather than to use the personal information of its users.
But according to The Verge technology news website, which broke the news, the encryption used is not foolproof, leaving open the possibility that the passwords could be accessed by someone else.
The Verge reported that some LinkedIn users have found hashed versions of their passwords on the uploaded list and recommended that all LinkedIn users change their passwords as a precaution.
The company itself included a reminder about best practices with regard to passwords in a blog post about its investigation of the possible password leak.
"One of the best ways to protect your privacy and security online is to craft a strong password, to change it frequently (at least once a quarter or every few months) and to not use the same password on multiple sites," LinkedIn product manager Vicente Silveira wrote.
"Use this as an opportunity to review all of your account settings on LinkedIn and on other sites, too."
LinkedIn is a popular site where professionals post profiles in order to network with others in their field, look for jobs or as a way of advertising themselves to potential employers. As of November 2011, it had 131 million users and more than one million groups.
2nd security headache this week
The latest news comes just as the company is addressing security concerns about its mobile app for iPhones and Android smartphones, which syncs information in your phone calendar with LinkedIn profiles to provide details about people you are meeting at events listed in your calendar.
Earlier this week, it was reported that the app was collecting all of the details entered into the phone's calendar functions, including passcodes, emails, meeting notes or private phone numbers for teleconferences that were never intended to be shared, and transmitting the information to the company's servers. Concerns were raised that this might violate users' privacy.
The company responded by saying the calendar sync function is an opt-in feature that users have to agree to and that the information is transmitted securely and never stored or shared. Nevertheless, it did alter the app and will now no longer send data from the meeting notes section of calendar events to its servers during the syncing process.
Globally, there are some 700 cities, each with population exceeding 500,000 and are growing faster than the average growth rate of cities. This opens up the market for industry players to grow their business in new and emerging smart cities. The infrastructure investment for these cities is forecasted to be $30 trillion to $40 trillion, cumulatively, over the next 20 years.
With growing emphasis on reducing carbon emission and the fact that conventional cities form a major source of CO2 emission, planning a smart city becomes a viable option for governments and municipal authorities. Deploying technologies such as smart grids, smart metering for energy management; electric vehicle and traffic management with smart transportation and smart security are high growth areas within smart cities.
The overall smart cities market, valued at $526.3 billion in 2011, is forecasted to grow double fold to $1,023.4 billion by 2016, at a CAGR of 14.2% for the period 2011 to 2016. Among all application segments, we observe smart energy or energy management market to be the fastest growing market with an impressive CAGR of 28.7%, growing to $80.7 billion by 2016.
In addition to market sizes and forecasts, the report also provides a detailed analysis of the market trends and factors influencing market growth, offering in-depth geographic analyses of the smart cities market in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and ROW.
Along with the special coverage of 18 ongoing key smart cities project, the report also draws the competitive landscape of the smart cities market, providing an in-depth comparative analysis of the technological and marketing strategies that the key players are adopting in order to gain an edge over their competitors.
The BlackBerry phone maker moves forward with a big international push with plans to open retail shops in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and possibly Africa.
With slumping sales in the West, Research In Motion has plans to go to the East. The BlackBerry maker is in the process of opening retail stores throughout the Middle East starting in Dubai, according to Bloomberg.
"We're getting the first one up and running and then we'll be looking at other cities across the Middle East -- Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar," Sandeep Saihgal, the managing director of RIM's Middle East business, told Bloomberg in an interview earlier this week.
The Dubai store in the United Arab Emirates will be the flagship shop and Bloomberg reports it will be in a 1,500-square-foot space. Additional stores partnering with a local company -- Axiom Telecom -- are also planned across the region.
The relationship between RIM and the UAE has a slightly rocky past. In 2010, during a drawn-out saga, the Middle Eastern government said it would block e-mail, instant messaging, and Web browsing on BlackBerry devices unless RIM came in line with UAE telecommunications regulations. Days before the ban was to be enforced, the two parties reached an agreement.
RIM is reportedly looking to venture into other international regions besides the Middle East, including Asia and Africa, according to Bloomberg. The company announced in February that it was planning to open 4,000 retail outlets in Indonesia and possibly more across Southeast Asia.
There is a much higher demand for BlackBerry phones in these regions than in the West, according to Bloomberg. Shipments of the device to the Middle East and Africa more than doubled in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared with a year prior.
For all the talk of the Apple [AAPL] adventures in mobile and the consumer product focus of the iDevice/iTunes combo, it's dead easy to neglect some of the more world-changing implementations of mobile technology. In tandem with the nascent Machine-to-machine (M2M) industry and the drive to smart cities, smartphones are already changing the world.
iPhone in Agriculture
Look at that video above. It dates from 2009 and shows LoadOut Technologies' iPhone-based grain-loading controls in action. The iPhone here is controlling just how much grain is loaded onto those big trucks. Which is cool in a "look at me I've got a robot" kind of a way, but there's more.
In South Korea this year, melon farmers are installing monitoring systems in 1,000 geographically-dispersed greenhouses. These monitoring systems can be controlled remotely and allow farmers to control feed, watch growth, water plants and more. Greenhouses can be many miles away from a farmer's HQ, so these systems -- accessible via a smartphone or PC -- will deliver real productivity advantages. Or at least give early-rising agriculturalists the chance to take a nap.
A firm called Trimble produces a range of remotely-controlled devices which allow farmers centralized monitoring of seeding systems. These controls aren't just about casting your seed, they're also keeping an eye on growth and more. And because they can be controlled via a Web interface, an iPhone (or other device) suddenly becomes a tool for making the food you eat. I think that's pretty interesting, and hope you do, too.
These are all fascinating solutions as machine-to -machine technologies impact agriculture. These solutions are especially useful in developing economies, where mobile phone use extends to maybe 50 percent of the population (ITU) while fixed broadband and telephony reaches a fraction of that.
This is why 3G networks are springing up across these territories, as infrastructure managers recognize the potential for mobile broadband to deliver significant savings in terms of the cost of installation of fixed systems.
It's good for farmers, too, who, let's face it, are under constant pressure by the big supermarket brands to deliver crops at prices they can't afford to deliver them at. Perhaps, just perhaps, such productivity improvements will help some independent farmers resist the inevitable move toward completely centralized control of food production.
iPhone in Medicine
The iPhone's impact on healthcare's pretty widely-known. There's already over 12,000 health-related apps for Apple devices (Mobile Health News). And hospitals across the planet are installing intelligent patient monitoring systems, including 159 of 164 Houston Healthcare hospitals. Such systems offer real-time machine test read-outs to monitoring stations, allow patient access to multimedia, entertainment and up-to-the minute patient records.
It goes much further: In the UK, City University and The Stroke Association are testing iPad/Wii apps to allow stroke victims suffering aphasia (which affects 250,000 in the UK) to communicate with gestures.
There's a few other interesting nuggets I've come across while researching this little slice of "we're already in the Jetsons" prose:
-- 98 percent of US physicians already use mobile solutions (Spyglass).
-- 79 percent of doctors prefer the iPad (Aptilon).
The end result?
The installed base of M2M-connected healthcare devices will exceed 774 million by 2020. (Machina Research). And there's a pretty good chance, given the medical industry preference for the secure walled garden offered by Apple products, that iPhones (and iPads, obviously) will be part of this mix. One system I read about consists of a watch, worn by the patient, that on the press of a single help button will send emails, voice calls and SMS messages to an entire medical team, escalating the contacts reached to scale with the severity of the emergency. These solutions can boost response times to patient emergency and save lives.
And don't even get me started talking about the value of the 'Find My iPhone' feature to families trying to trace the movement of a straying Alzheimer's patient (assuming they're carrying the thing). According to Omnilink systems, 50 percent of Alzheimer's patients will die or become injured if they aren't found within 24-hours.
That's a pretty big ripple effect for the product, don't you think? The potential to help save lives. What else can it do?
iPhone at War
Death they say is life's twin. We all -- to a greater or a lesser extent -- allow our fear of our own mortality to inform our relationships with those around us, ourselves, and the external world.
We can't help ourselves. We're human. We want to be here and in most cases the omnipresence of the great taboo makes us feel a little anxious. And that's alright. We're built that way. But, sadly and in common with the existential truth at the heart of humanity, you can use an iPhone to save lives, and take them, too. I prefer the first use, others see value in the second.
It began small. Way back in May 2009 it was revealed the US Army was using the iPhone and iPod touch as communication/translation devices to help communicate with locals.
At that time the Marine Corps was working on a bunch of app-based iPhone solutions to enable soldiers to upload images of captives to a central database. These things are being used to guide bomb-disabling robots and to view remote video from drones.
Later that year, US defense giant, Raytheon, introduced a range of iPhone apps, such as One Force Tracker (OFT) software lets soldiers track whereabouts of allies and adversaries on maps in real time.
Warfare projects hit a wall of course because defense chiefs want to be able to use iPhones on secured private communication networks (specifically the DOD's Global Information Grid), rather than on those hackable and unreliable consumer networks, which are probably disabled during a warfare situation anyway.
Then last year the Defense Department -- via the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) -- began to authorize the use of Android and iPhone software militarywide, reports the Air Force Times.
Also last year, Boeing and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology commenced development of an iPhone app that may one day be used by the US military to fly unmanned aerial vehicles, InformationWeek reported.
And in future? It isn't so hard to imagine M2M technology being used to control and maneuver battlefield systems en masse, as the age of Robot Wars seems closer each day. (Don't believe me, just look at the video above concerning Tactical Nav, which uses GPS and the iPhone camera to chart coordinates and guide artillery fire.)
So there's three ways the iPhone is changing the way we live today: the food we eat; healing the sick; and making war. These impacts have taken just five years to evolve. This is only a beginning.
Building a better LTE phone will help RIM. But it also stands a good chance of improving its standing outside North America if it applies the right strategy. "We should not forget that RIM is still very strong in some emerging markets -- South Africa, Indonesia, etc.," writes Stela Bokun, an analyst with Pyramid Research .
In Latin America, Bokun points out that RIM had a good year in 2010, but a bad year in 2011. The market is so volatile, she writes, "that one killer app can make … or kill a company."
RIM gained some 10 percentage points of market share in Latin America in 2010, largely on the strength of its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) application. It couldn't sustain that momentum the following year, but Bokun's point is that the possibility does exist that RIM could catch some emerging markets with the right idea at the right time and tremendously improve its business in a very short space of time.
What if, for instance, RIM launched a lower-end, less expensive line of handsets for some Southeast Asian markets and BBM -- or something else -- caught on?
What is clear is that RIM won't win on price alone in those markets. Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. analyst Ittai Kidron recently mentioned, in a note to clients, that "there is increasing risk to RIM's international business in emerging markets as more Android vendors go down the price curve."
Chinese vendors are the most price competitive, Kidron notes, and Android phones in the US$100 to $150 price range offer an "attractive alternative to RIM's value priced Curve 8630, which has been a strong seller internationally for RIM."
So where do we leave this topic? Right back where we found it. "All in all, I don’t think it’s 'game over' for RIM, despite the fact that it doesn’t have too many lives left," Bokun writes.
Posted in: ICT
