Iran: Student and Civil Unrest provokes Internet Censorship, Journalists confined to quarters

As the rain poured down, Government opponents shouted "Allahu Akbar" and "Death to the Dictator" from Tehran's rooftops on the eve of student demonstrations planned for Monday.

Authorities choked off Iran's Internet access and have given severe warnings to journalists working for foreign media, to stay in their offices for the next three days. Journalists working for foreign media organisations are banned from covering Monday's protests. They were told by the Culture Ministry that their press cards would be suspended for three days starting Monday.

Thousands of riot police and Revolutionary Guard members armed with tear gas, batons and firearms were deployed Monday outside Tehran University to prevent student demonstrations backed by the opposition. Witnesses said police were conducting ID checks on anyone entering the campus to prevent opposition activists from joining the students.

The measures were aimed at depriving the opposition of its key means of mobilising the masses as Iran's clerical rulers keep a tight lid on dissent.

Government opponents are seeking, nonetheless, to get large numbers of demonstrators to turn out on the streets on Monday and show their movement still has a potent momentum.

Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi threw his support behind the student demonstrations and declared that his movement is still alive. A statement posted on his Web site said the fundamental clerical establishment cannot silence students, free speech and was losing legitimacy in the minds of the Iranian people.

China Web Sites Seeking Users' Names

China Web Sites Seeking Users' Names - NYTimes.com

BEIJING - News Web sites in China, complying with secret government orders, are requiring that new users log on under their true identities to post comments.

This is the latest shift in policy that the country's Internet users and media have fiercely opposed in the past.

Until recently, users could weigh in on news items on many of the affected sites more anonymously, often without registering at all, though the sites were obligated to screen all posts, and the posts could still be traced via Internet protocol addresses.

But in early August, without notification of a change, news portals like Sina, Netease, Sohu and scores of other sites began asking unregistered users to sign in under their real names and identification numbers, said top editors at two of the major portals affected. A Sina staff member also confirmed the change.

The editors said the sites were putting into effect a confidential directive issued in late July by the State Council Information Office, one of the main government bodies responsible for supervising the Internet in China.

The new step is not foolproof, the editors acknowledged. It was possible for a reporter to register successfully on several major sites under falsified names and ID and cellphone numbers.

But the requirement adds a critical new layer of surveillance to mainstream sites in China, which were already heavily policed. Further regulations of the same nature also appeared to be in the pipeline.

And while the authorities called the measure part of a drive to forge greater 'social responsibility' and 'civility' among users, they moved forward surreptitiously and suppressed reports about it, said the editors and others in the media industry familiar with the measure, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid putting their jobs at risk.

Asked why the policy was pushed through unannounced, the chief editor of one site said, 'The influence of public opinion on the Net is still too big.'

Google's Chief Executive in China Resigns his Post

In what is likely to be seen as a blow to Google’s ambitions in China, Kai-Fu Lee, the prominent head of the company’s operations there, is leaving for an unspecified new venture.

Google said in a news release early Friday in Beijing that Mr. Lee, who was president of Google Greater China and vice president for engineering, would leave the company in mid-September. Two current executives will take over Mr. Lee’s engineering and sales roles. Boon-Lock Yeo, currently director of Google’s Shanghai engineering office, will take over engineering responsibilities for Google China, and John Liu, vice president of sales and operations, will assume business and operational responsibilities.

Mr. Lee’s tenure began tumultuously. Shortly after he was hired as Google’s first employee in China in 2005, Mr. Lee’s former employer, Microsoft, sued Google, claiming that Mr. Lee had an agreement that precluded him from working for a competitor. The suit, which gained wide attention, was settled a few months later. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

Google credited Mr. Lee with bolstering its operations in China, releasing Google.cn, the company’s Chinese-language search engine, and hiring a team of top-notch engineers and scientists.

“Kai-Fu has made an enormous contribution to Google over the last four years — helping dramatically to improve the quality and range of services that we offer in China and ensuring that we continue to innovate on the Web for the benefit of users and advertisers,” Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering, said in a statement.

But Google has struggled in China, where it has lagged far behind the home-grown search engine Baidu. It has also come under criticism from human rights groups and has had its services intermittently blocked by the Chinese government.

Old Timer IT Terms That You should Never Use: Stay Cool!

"I don't need a cloak to become invisible, Harry."

Do you know, or can you name, the one referred to as 'Dumbledore', in your office? No! Then I guess it's probably you!

If you’re old enough to remember the rise of silicon based technology, then you may need a refresher course when it comes to talking about "today's" technology.

Techie Term Checklist
You have here a short list of outdated techie terms, phrases that you shouldn’t be using at work anymore because they will make you seem old and a practioner of the ancient 'black' arts. This is especially true if you’re looking for a new job and on the interview trail. You should be talking about "cloud computing," not "ASPs" even though they are basically the same thing.

This list is also useful for you young whipper-snappers too. Now, when your elders and betters in the office use one of these terms, you can still laugh at them but at least you'll know what their talking about.

1. The Intranet

Popular in the mid-90s, the term "intranet" referred to a private network running the Internet Protocol and other Internet standards such as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It was also used to describe an internal Web site that was hosted behind a firewall and was accessible only to employees. Today, every private network runs IP. So you can just use the term virtual private network or VPN to describe a private IP-based network.

2. Company based Extranets

An "extranet" referred to private network connections based on Internet standards such as IP and HTTP that extended outside an organisation, such as between business partners. Extranets often replaced point-to-point electronic data interchange (EDI) connections that used standards such as X12. Today, companies provide suppliers, resellers and other members of their supply chain with access to their VPNs.

3. Web Surfing

When is the last time you heard someone talk about surfing the Web? You know the term is out of date when your kids don’t know what it means. To teens and tweens, the Internet and the World Wide Web are one and the same thing. So it’s better to use the term "browsing" the Web if you want to be understood. Or you can just say "Google" since everyone uses that term as a verb.

4. Push Technology

The debate over the merits of "push" versus "pull" technology came to a head in 1996 with the release of the PointCast Network, a Web service that sent a steady stream of news to subscribers. However, PointCast and other push technology services required too much network bandwidth. Eventually, push technology evolved into RSS feeds, which remain the preferred method for publishing information to subscribers of the Internet. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

5. Application Service Provider (ASPs)

During this decade, the term "Application Service Provider" evolved into "Software-as-a-Service." Both terms refer to a vendor hosting a software application and providing access to it over the Web. Customers buy the software on a subscription basis, rather than having to own and operate it themselves. ASP was a hot term prior to the dot-com bust. Then it was replaced by "SaaS." Now it’s cool to talk about "cloud computing."

6. Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)

Coined by former Apple CEO John Sculley back in 1992 when he unveiled the Apple Newton, the term "personal digital assistant" referred to a handheld computer. PDA was still in use in 1996, when the Palm Pilot was the hottest handheld in corporate America. Today, the preferred generic term for a handheld like a Blackberry or an iPhone is a "smartphone".

7. Internet Telephony

You need to purge the term "Internet telephony" from your vocabulary and switch to VoIP, for Voice over IP. Even the term VoIP is getting old-fashioned because pretty soon all telephone calls will be routed over the Internet rather than the Public Switched Telephone Network. It’s probably time to stop referring to the PSTN, too, because it is headed for the history books as all voice, data and video traffic is carried on the Internet.

8. Weblog

A blog is a shortened version of "Weblog," a term that emerged in the late 1990s to describe commentary that an individual publishes online. It spawned many words still in use such as "blogger" and "blogosphere." Nowadays, few people have time to blog so they are "microblogging," which is another word that’s heading out the door as people turn Twitter into a generic term for blasting out 140-character observations or opinions.

9. Thin Client

You have to give Larry Ellison credit for seeing many of the flaws in the client/server computing architecture and for popularizing the term "thin client" to refer to Oracle’s alternative terminal-like approach. In 1993, Ellison was touting thin clients as a way for large organizations to improve network security and manageability. Although thin clients never replaced PCs, the concept is similar to "virtual desktops" that are gaining popularity today as a way of supporting mobile workers.

10. World Wide Web

Nobody talks about the "World Wide Web" anymore, or the "Information Superhighway," for that matter. It’s just the Internet. It’s a distinction that Steve Czaban, the popular Fox Sports Radio talk show host, likes to mock when he refers to the "Worldwide Interweb." Nothing dates you more than pulling out one of those old-fashioned ways of referring to the Internet such as "infobahn" or "electronic highway."

China Continues Persecution of Internet Teenagers

Another 14-year-old boy allegedly beaten at a boot camp in China for young Internet addicts was in critical condition Thursday, less than three weeks after a youth at a different camp died, Chinese state media reported.

People sit at a wireless cafe in Beijing, using their laptop computers.

Internet use has skyrocketed in China, especially among teens and Chinese parents have turned to hundreds of training camps that offer to wean their children -- mostly teenagers -- from excessive Internet use.

There are at least 400 private rehabilitation clinics or camps in the country, according to a recent survey by the China Youth Internet Association, adding that China has 10 million teenage Web addicts but the Chinese Ministry of Health says none of the private rehab clinics are legally registered.

The parents of Pu Liang, the injured teen, had sent him to a camp called the Anti-traditional Education Training Center on August 4 near Chengdu, capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan, Chinese media reported.

Pu allegedly was beaten three times between August 4 and August 11. Police discovered the boy in solitary confinement last week and he was taken to a hospital, according to media reports.

His parents accused a counselor at the camp and Pu's peers of repeatedly hitting him, Chinese media said, adding that particular camp has been closed.

"He is suffering from water on the lungs (pneumonia) and kidney failure," Pu's father, Pu Shiwei, told the publication China View on Wednesday. "All injuries were done by the people at the camp."

The training cenere denied that a counselor beat the youth, contending Pu was hit by other campers because he couldn't get along with them, China View reported.

Authorities in Zhongjiang county, where the camp is located, said they detained the counselor after a report of alleged abuse from the parents of another child.

The man who established the military-style camp, Wu Yongjing, admitted to the BBC that youngsters were sometimes subjected to "physical punishment."

"Physical punishment is an effective way to educate children -- as long as it can be controlled," he said in an online story Wednesday.

The injured youth's mother told Chinese media that her son "got addicted to online games and frequented Internet cafes ... at the end of last semester, my son said he didn't want to go to school."

The mother, Li Shubing, saw an ad for the training camp and hoped her son could be helped, she told China Daily. The parents signed a contract with the center and paid 5,000 yuan (about $730), she said.

In a separate incident, 15-year-old Deng Senshan died after his parents sent him to a summer training camp for his Internet addiction, according to Chinese news agency Xinhua. That camp was in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Chinese Government Backdown on Censorship Software

In a previous blog we reported on the Chinese Government IT ministry's order to compulsory install censorship software on every computer in China.

Thankfully, this order has now been withdraw and the Chinese Government has climbed down and put the legislation on hold.

Advocates of free-speech and human rights said that the program was a clear attempt by the Chinese government to extend its control and censorship of political opinions, from public places into people’s living rooms.

The contentious order was first issued last May 19, and had stirred an outcry from Chinese Internet users and foreign computer manufacturers alike, arguing that the software ran counter to China’s proclaimed goal of creating an information-based society.

Although the government insists that the program is meant to shield children from online pornography and paedophiles, its filter is automatically updated by the government and targeted many topics with political overtones.

From a comercial viewpoint, the United States also warned China that the installation requirement would be seen as a violation of world trade regulations.

Green Dam Software
The information ministry previously had suspended the Green Dam pre-installation mandate on June 30, one day before it was to take effect, saying that computer makers needed more time to accommodate it as a pre-installed package in their manufacturing process.

Pre-installed on new computers
The statement by Mr. Li appeared to make that initial suspension, more permanent. Mr. Li said the government would neither require the program to come pre-installed on new computers or force computer makers to include the program on a CD with other optional software.

Lenovo, Acer and Sony
A few Asian computer manufacturers, led by China-based Lenovo, Taiwan’s Acer, and Japan's Sony, nevertheless, include the software on computers sold in China for fear of being barred from a lucrative market.

Filtering remains Mandatory for Public Internet Users
Although Mr. Li’s concession is a step backward for the Green Dam program, the software remains mandatory in schools, Internet cafes and other sites used by scores of millions of people.

The government already takes extraordinary steps to monitor computer use in Internet cafes, which remain common in a nation where owning a computer remains a comparative luxury.

Only 25% of Chinese people have access to a computer and the Internet. This number is equal to the entire population of the US and is growing.

Twitter and Facebook attacked by the DoS Bots: Who was affected?

The recent outages to Twitter and Facebook were allegedly directed at a Georgian 'dissident', in an attempt to censor what he was broadcasting.

The wider questions concern Twitter and the silent majority who are using the service, the ones who were hardest hit by the outage.

I hesitate to say users or people because the short answer is; that the most frequent users of Twitter are the News Streams and Info Bots. Followed rapidly by the Marketeers!

Sysmos Twitter Analysis

A couple of months ago, social media analytics firm Sysomos closely conducted an analysis of the people on Twitter and how the service was being used. What it found, among other things, was that five percent (5%) of Twitter’s 11.5 million accounts post about 75% of all the tweets. That's an outstanding result and it led the firm to dig deeper into that magical five percent (5%).

The Pareto Principle

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This is clearly not the case with Twitter.

Analysis Results Released
This week, the company released the results of the deeper study and highlighted a few important findings about that elite five percent:

• 32 percent of all tweets made by that active group were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets per day.
• The number of machine-generated tweets is probably greater because many of the bots post fewer than 150 times a day.
• Based on the two reports, it appears that nearly one-quarter (24 percent) of all tweets overall are generated by those active bots.

Twitter Spammer Bots

However, these bots are essential Twitter spammers. These are the automated tweets that comes from valid sources, e.g. news services. Most Technical websites and Blogs will encourgae you to foolow their sites via an automated Twitter feed.

Sysmos CEO

In a blog post, Sysomos co-founder and CEO Nick Koudas said:

"It’s a fascinating exercise to really focus on the most enthusiastic Twitter users, and what they are doing. Our findings, particularly the percentage of tweets contributed by bots, is definitely eye-opening and we hope they shed light on how Twitter is used today and by whom.

We think this is one of the first reports to focus on the most active members of the Twitter community to provide interesting insight and perspective. We will continue our updates with additional analysis of the micro-blogging service."

Note Bene

Also worth noting is that;

• 88 percent of this active group, posts at least once a day. Of that group,
  
• about one-third joined this year, compared to the
  
• 72 percent of all Twitter users are new this year.
  

Keywords
Lastly, the most popular keywords within the bios for those active users included: Internet marketing, music lover, Web designer, video games, and husband/father.

China Detains 13 people: Death At Internet Addiction Camp

Chinese police have detained 13 people for questioning, following the death by beating of a teenager at an Internet addiction camp in southern China.

The Qihang Salvation Training Camp, one of many boot camp-style centers for Internet obsession in China, was 'found to be unlicensed' and closed down on Friday, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Parents of 122 other students took them home from the camp in Guangxi province, whilst police investigate the case.

Deng Senshan killed
A week earlier, a 15-year-old boy Deng Senshan, was allegedly put in solitary confinement, scolded and beaten to death within one day of his arrival at the camp. The boy's father found his bloodied body in a local hospital, where camp staff said they had sent him because of a severe fever.

Family Divisions
Other Internet addiction camps in China are licensed and subsidised by the government. Conservative officials blame hugely popular online games like World of Warcraft for getting teens hooked on the Web, harming their grades in school, creating anti-social behaviour and causing divisions in the family, especially with their parents.

Shock Treatment
Some of the camps have used shock treatment and aversion therapy on students, but China has since banned this practice, last month.

Cybercrime
Separately, China in recent weeks detained two hackers for stealing 450 million won (US$368,000) from South Korean bank accounts, Xinhua said.

The suspects, based in a Chinese city that borders North Korea, had stolen the money from 86 South Korean nationals over more than a year, it said. South Korean police had asked China to help crack the cross-border case, the report said.

Chinese Teenager Killed At Internet Addict Boot Camp

An innocent 15-year-old boy has reportedly been beaten to death by Chinese 'Tutors' hours after arriving at a boot camp for internet addicts in China.

The teenager was declared dead after arriving at hospital in the nearby town of Wuxu. This incident happens only weeks after 'Electirc Shock' treatment is banned.

Deng Senshan was sent to the camp for a month to 'cure' him of his 'addiction'. Police are investigating the incident after Deng Senshan was found with multiple injuries over his body.

They have arrested four trainers from the camp, which attempts to 'cure' youngsters of their web 'addiction' by forcing them to replace hours in front of the computer with gruelling military-style drills.

The boy's father Deng Fei told how he paid 7,000 yuan (£600) to send his son to Guangxi Qihang Survival Training Camp for a month.

He said his son was put in solitary confinement within hours of his arrival and was then beaten to death by staff after they "scolded" him for running too slowly.

"My son was very healthy and was not a criminal. He just had an internet addiction when I left him at the camp," he said. "The police informed us that our child had died. We can't believe our only son was beaten to death."

Our methods are tough but do not include torture or other methods that might damage a child's health. - Guangxi Qihang Survival Training Camp's Mission Statement

China makes Internet Filtering Software Mandatory

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) mandated that everyone must install filtering software known as Green Dam Youth Escort. More of a chaperone or minder than an escort. The Filtering Bully is content-control software.

The decree ensures that, depending on your interpretation, it is provided or installed on every computer sold in China. This applies to all global computer manufacturers and suppliers supplying China with equipment.

The wide spread use of Internet Censorship is an obvious indication of the Chinese government's determined efforts to suppress the growth and freedom of the Chinese people and to prevent the free exchange of news and views with other peoples, countries and cultures.

'Net Users Outraged
The ensuing outrage by Chinese netizens has created a slight back peddling by MIIT on their determined stance and a slight softening of the tone of their mandate. The netizens see it as another barrier to censor and restrict their access to the global village, via the internet.

Government links to software
Whether or not the mandate or the program survives the outcry, is currently a heated subject of debate. However, it is not surprising that the companies involved in producing the software are known to have close government and military ties.

Site License
The government has already paid the equivalent of $6M for the software. This covers a site license for the entire country, a user base that is potentially 4 times the size of the US population.

US Computer Makers Reluctant
US computer manufacturers are dragging their feet on this emotive issue due to moral grounds thinly disguised as ' copyright concerns.'

Sony Capitulates
Japanese manufacturer Sony has reportedly already started to comply, for fear of sanctions against the company and a reduction in revenues from its largest and most aggressive neighbour.

Skype is Declared a Security Risk to Russia: Putin put out

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's most powerful business lobby moved to clamp down on Skype and its peers this week, telling lawmakers that the Internet phone services are a threat to Russian businesses and to national security.

Vladimir Putin v Skype
In partnership with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's political party, the lobby created a working group to draft legal safeguards against what they said were the risks of Skype and other Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services.

Voice Over IP

VoIP software has used the Internet to let hundreds of millions of people talk long-distance for free, or at far cheaper rates than traditional service providers can offer.

Foreign Entities Encroaching

At a meeting of the lobby this week, telecom executives portrayed the most popular VoIP programmes like Skype and Icq as encroaching foreign entities that the government must control.

Government Restrictions

"Without government restrictions, IP telephony causes certain concerns about security," the lobby's press release said. "Most of the service operators working in Russia, such as Skype and Icq, are foreign. It is therefore necessary to protect the native companies in this sector and so forth."

Skype's Response - Busy!

A spokesperson for Skype was not immediately available for comment.

Iran using more Sophisticated Tactics to Block Internet Access for Government Critics

Iran is using a number of new technologies to censor the Web. Some of these Government tools are simplistic and blunt, while others are more precise and surgical. Both are intended to stifle so-called dissidents.

One month after a disputed presidential election sparked widespread unrest in Iran, the country's government has initiated a cyber-crackdown that is challenging hackers across the globe to find new ways to help keep Iranian dissidents connected to the Web.

Iranian Government Strategy step-up
While the government's initial efforts to censor the Internet were crude and consequently ineffective, it has started employing more sophisticated tools to thwart dissidents' attempts to communicate with each other and the outside world. Iranian dissidents are not alone in their struggle, however, as several sympathetic hacker groups have been working to keep them online.

NedaNet
One such group is NedaNet, whose mission is to "help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymisers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organise."

NedaNet project coordinator Morgan Sennhauser, who has just written a paper detailing the Iranian government's latest efforts to thwart hackers, says that the government's actions have been surprisingly robust and have challenged hackers in ways that the Chinese government's efforts at censorship have not.

Chinese Internet censorship: An inside look
"China has several gigabytes per second of traffic to deal with and has a lot more international businesses," he says. "They can't be as heavy-handed with their filtration. The Iranians aren't as concerned about that, so they get to use all these fancy toys that, if the Chinese used them, could cripple their economy."

Here are five of the most commonly-used technologies the Iranian government has been using to stifle dissents, as outlined in Sennhauser's paper.

IP Blocking
IP Blocking is one of the most basic methods that governments such as Iran are using for online censorship. It simply prevents all packets going to or from targeted IP addresses. Sennhauser says that this was how the government banned access to the BBC's Persian news services and how it took down websites that were critical or in any way negative about the election.

While these operations are relatively simple to execute, they don't tackle the problem of individual communications between users, especially if the users have set up multi-hop circuits that, in themselves use multiple servers to create a proxy ring.

Traffic Classification (QoS)
QoS is a much more sophisticated method of blocking traffic than IP blocking, because governments can halt any file sent through a certain type of protocol, such as FTP. They can simply limit the bandwidth available on that port and throttle transfers because the government knows that FTP transfers are most often sent through TCP port 21.

Sennhauser says that this type of traffic shaping practice is the most common one used by governments today, as "it is not too resource intensive and is fairly easy to set up."

Shallow Packet Inspection
Shallow packet inspection is basically a blunter, broader version of the deep packet inspection (DPI) technique that is used to block packets based on their content. 'Shallow packet' inspection makes broad generalities about traffic, based solely on checking out the packet header, unlike DPI, which intercepts packets and inspects their fingerprints, headers and payloads.

Although shallow packet inspection can't provide the Iranian government with the same detailed traffic assessments as DPI, Sennhauser says that it is much better at handling volume than DPI.

Reading the label on the packet
"It's a less refined tool, but it can also deal with a lot more traffic than true DPI." he explains. "Shallow packet inspection is more like judging a book by its cover. If a packet says that it's SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) in the header, then a shallow packet inspector takes it at face value."

However, this is a double-edged sword. If a user disguises their SSL packets as FTP packets in the header, the shallow packet inspector won't be able to tell the difference.

Packet Fingerprinting
This is a slightly more refined method of throttling packets than 'shallow packet' inspection, as it looks not only at the packet header but at its length, frequency of transmission and other characteristics to make a rough determination of its content.

Sennhauser says the government can use this technique to better classify packets and not throttle traffic sent out by key businesses.

Mix 'n Match
"A lot of things don't explicitly say what they are, e.g. a lot of VPN traffic is indistinguishable from SSH traffic, which means that it would be throttled if SSH was," he says. "but what if businesses relied on VPN connections? You'd move the system to fingerprinting, where the two are easily distinguishable."

Deep Packet Inspection / Packet Content Filtering
DPI is the most refined method that the government has for blocking Internet traffic. As mentioned above, deep packet inspectors examine not only a packet's header but also its payload. This gives governments the ability to filter packets at a more surgical level than any of the other techniques discussed so far.

"Viewing a packet's contents doesn't tell you much on its own, especially if it's encrypted," he says. "But combining it with the knowledge gained from fingerprinting and shallow packet inspection, it is usually more than enough to figure out what sort of traffic you're looking at."

DPI Downside
There are downsides to using DPI, of course: it's much more complicated to run and is far more labour-intensive than other traffic-shaping technologies. On the down side, Sennhauser says there is no magic bullet for getting around DPI. Users can usually only temporarily elude it by "finding flaws in their system." and even this won't help for long, as the government can simply correct their system's flaws once they're discovered.

"Once they fix the flaw, you've lost unless you can figure out some real way to circumvent it," Sennhauser notes.

Endgame still unclear
Sennhauser says that the government has employed these technologies very quickly and very smartly, despite being caught flat-footed by the initial furor after the election. Indeed, he thinks the only reason that Iran hasn't yet completely shut down dissidents' communications is that they've had to fight with an army of hackers who tirelessly search for flaws in their system.

"It really is like an arms race," he says. "They create a problem, we circumvent it, they create another, we get around that one. This continues on until the need to do so is removed. The circumstances which will end the competition aren't clear yet."

Sleep Deprivation: Gadgets blamed!

In the good old days evenings were dark, undemanding and quiet. Pastimes were slow moving and relaxing e.g. watching the sun set, playing charades, shadow puppets, card games like bridge and simple activities such as cave-painting, bead-making, etc.

Fast-forward to today. PCs and consumer electronics provide us with a staggering number of things to do at night, all night. Video games, TV, social networking, chatting with friends, editing pictures, writing blogs, catching up on work, etc. These things are compelling and addictive. Getting a good night's sleep has become a challenge and a discipline, something that are not easy and we are not good at.

Poor sleep, or what they call " junk sleep" (sleep compromised by constant waking), is said to affect younger people, teens and twenty-somethings, in particular and who are developing the habit of rarely sleeping well. The truth is that this is the generation brought up on gadgets, global awareness and always-on technology.

Sleep problems hit travelers, too. Jetlag, time zones, unfamiliar /uncomfortable hotel beds /rooms, dodgy drinking water, strange foods that disturb the acid balance of the stomach and other unavoidable realities of travel, can make it very hard to sleep well and rise refreshed, consistently.

Current anxiety about the future and the ongoing effects of the recession is also making sleep more challenging. People are lying awake at night with troublesome thoughts about their 401(k)s, layoffs and the other stressful financial realities we all face.

Unfortunately, a lack of sleep or even a lack of uninterrupted quality sleep, can cause serious problems with your health. Bad sleeping practice is not only inconvenient but it harms overall physical and mental performance, and impacts your memory. What's interesting about this is that sufferers are usually blind to the symptoms, and they think they're doing fine. Bad sleep also triggers an insulin reaction similar to eating a lot of sugar, contributing to weight gain, diabetes and obesity. In conjunction with a sedentary lifestyle, this is a very serious situation and can result in life-threatening obesity.

Arguably, gadgets are contributing to this problem but gadgets can help solve it, too. Electronic sleep helpers have been around for quite a while but a new generation of products is claiming to be better than anything that's come before. In honour of the month of May, which has been designated Better Sleep Month (who comes up with these things?), here are some of the newest and most interesting electronic sleep helpers.

New 'Help U Sleep' Gadgets

• Cell phones are actually very nice sleep devices. If calming music helps you sleep, you should know that some phones have the ability to turn themselves off after a while, so you can use your phone to listen to music as you doze off. For example, on the iPhone, you can use the normal timer to " sleep iPhone" instead of setting it to ring an alarm.
• Taking that a step further, there's a new iPhone app called A Good Night's Sleep. You can set a series of sounds, including peaceful music or "nature sounds" like rain or ocean waves, followed by silence. One of the settings is called "Night hypnosis," where a voice hypnotizes you into sleeping. You can set the duration and sound volume of each sound separately. A Good Night's Sleep also has a wake-up feature, where you set wake-up sounds that play in a series.
• Sleeptracker wristwatches monitor and track your sleep patterns. You can upload the data via a USB cable to analyze the quality and quantity of your own sleep. The benefit here is that you can find out if you're getting restful sleep or if you're constantly waking in the night. The watches also come with alarm clocks built in.
• Another newish offering is Pzizz, an application that helps you create personalized sleeping soundtracks on your Mac or PC and then import them to your mobile device so you can listen to them in bed. The makers of Pzizz claim that sleep improves the more you use their product. Pzizz helps you sleep at night and also get a quick-but-satisfying power nap during the day.
• Most of the new high-tech sleep aids involve listening to music or other sounds, but wearing headphones and earbuds probably doesn't help you fall asleep. Regular speakers might work fine. You can also buy pillows with speakers built in, such as the Audio Pillow.
• Makers of the Verilux TwiLight Ultra Blue Light Therapy System claim that their product uses light to convince your body to stop producing a hormone called melatonin. The idea is to regulate your body's circadian rhythms so that when it's time for you to sleep, you do so easily.
  

Of course, the best advice for getting sleep is to be disciplined and establish a good bedtime routine. Optimise your diet, get some exercise and take steps to relieve stress. If that's not enough, these gadgets might be able to help you enjoy all the sleep benefits that people enjoyed 100 years ago.

Do not skimp on replacing old laptops

Your Business may not survive it!
Not replacing laptops can prove very costly. You will need additional service cover against losses and breakdowns, because the warranties have expired, not to mention the lost productivity in using a three year old model. Keep your laptops up to date and in the new budget. If there are cuts to be made then this not the time or the place.

Companies are trying to cope with reduced IT budgets and are postponing the purchase of new laptop computers but they are making a big mistake.

Extending the use of laptops two years beyond the traditional three-year lifetime cost companies an average of $/Euros 1,050 per machine, more than the initial replacement cost.

The additional costs will include a hype in repair costs simply due to old age, normal wear and tear and the end of three-year warranty periods.

For each laptop user that is using the outdated equipment, it costs the company about $/Euros 9,600 in lost worker productivity over the two-year period.

Many companies are keeping a tight control over new purchases because of the recession. Some forward-thinking companies have taken the more positive step of replacing some user laptops with less expensive smartphones or other handheld devices. Such devices can be far more cost-effective for users who are only using laptops to access e-mail.

The replacement of corporate laptops with mobile devices should grow significantly over the next decade. In fact, it is predicted that in less than 10 years, the majority of Internet users will be accessing the Internet via a mobile device instead of a laptop or desktop.

Mobile devices are now being seen as mission critical but organisations are not quite at the point where they are completely confident about replacing laptops with smartphones. They are looking seriously at it and planning to research the potential gains in efficiency.