EU may take action on Deep Packet Inspection Technologies

At last the European Union is investigate so-called "deep packet inspection" technologies (as provided by the likes of Phorm) on the grounds that consumer profiling by online advertising companies based on the technology will breach consumer's "basic rights in terms of transparency, control and risk", writes Martyn Warwick.

There is growing unease over deep packet inspection (or "deep and secret
snooping into an individual's web browsing habits" as it should more properly be called) mainly because the technology can continue to track and record web activity by an individual subscriber even after cookies have been disabled.

The idea behind deep packet inspection system such as that from Phorm is that by tracking a web users browsing proclivities advertisers can send closely targeted ads to individuals based on their particular Internet histories and preferences. In other words, it's all about making more money.

In the UK, BT has controversially trialed the Phorm technology and Virgin Media and Talk Talk believed to be considering doing the same.
ISP's across the rest of the European Union and elsewhere have also evinced considerable enthusiasm for the technology but many users have complained about the sneaky intrusiveness of systems like Phorm's.

The growing groundswell of concern has had little effect on the UK's Labour administration and the government has declined to mount any serious investigation into the implications of deep packet inspection and its possible compromising of an individual's right to privacy.

However, Meglena Kuneva, the EU's Commissioner of Consumer Affairs and
Protection is in the vanguard of European resistance to the spread of deep packet inspection. She is Bulgarian by birth (June 1957) and having lived there when it was a communist state knows a thing or two about an imposed and institutionalised lack of privacy. Ms Kuneva says that the small print of the interminable and usually indecipherable "Terms and Conditions" that web users routinely (have to) accept to surf commercial websites are often in direct contravention of privacy legislation.

She says that the vast majority of Europeans have no idea what personal data is being collected, how it is being collected, how safely it is being stored, who has access to it and how it is used for commercial purposes. They are also unaware that, as things presently stand, even when individuals believe they have opted out of deep packet inspection, the myriad of technological (and invisible) hurdles placed in front of them means that may well have not actually done so.

Later on this week Ms. Kuneva will give a presentation outlining the EU's intent to gather evidence from both users and the broadband industry on exactly what information is being collected and manipulated by ISPs and advertisers.

The intent is to determine whether or not new regulations and controls are necessary. There can be little doubt about that.

In her upcoming speech Ms. Kuneva will say, “Consumers are in fact paying for services with their personal data and their exposure to advertising. This amounts to a new kind of commercial exchange. We need to investigate this quickly, we cannot afford foot-dragging. If we fail to see an adequate response to consumers’ concerns on the issue of data collection and profiling, we will not shy away from our duties.”

The news of the potential regulation of deep packet inspection comes after the European Commission (EC) sent a third letter to the British government demanding to know the details of and legal justification for the secret trials of the Phorm system that were carried out by BT.

Experts in Internet law at the Foundation for Information Policy Research, an independent think tank based at Cambridge University, have long said that Phorm and the incumbent UK telco were in breach of the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations as well as national laws.
BT though maintains it took legal advice prior to running the trials secretly and without informing individual subscribers that their web-browsing habits were being spied upon. However, despite many requests the carrier has declined to make public the legal advice it says it obtained.

Meanwhile, the UK government has stated publicly that any future deployments of deep packet inspection technologies "would be legal", but has refused several requests made under the aegis of the Freedom of Information Act to release the full text of its response to the EC.

It seems likely though that things are now on the move. When the national governments of individual Member States of the European Union do not implement implement European law, the EC has full recourse to the independent European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

It now seems more likely than ever that Deep Packet Inspection could find itself in the dock there and fighting for its parasitic life in the months to come.

US and UK Governments Adopt Openness and Lead Collaborations, Not Mandates

In the Age of Crises the Government of President Barrack Obama of the United States of America and the UK Government had been trying to find new ways to reduce government costs and overheads, among others is in the area of computer operating system and application software to improve productivity. It’s not often you hear a business executive say that government is pushing the envelope on technology. This happened the first time in our 25 years of experience.

The government was observed to adopt collaboration methodologies, open development, and community sourcing to build software that results in lower cost development and deployments, higher quality code and the transparency that we all expect in our applications today.

The indicators that government is beginning to lead in a collaborative approach to building technology are multiple:

The appointment of our first federal CIO Vivek Kundra, an amazing professional dedicated to openness and with years of experience that include successes in both the executive suite and the public office.

• The incredible response and support we’ve received from the Open Letter to President Obama tells us that this is an industry movement, not a handful of companies, that will bring open development to the steps of local, state and federal governments around the world. More than 100 individuals have signed the letter to date.

• Most recently, the UK’s decision to enact a 10-point action plan to encourage greater use of open source software speaks volumes about the benefits of openness in the public sector.

The switch toward the use of open source software was not directly a mandatory. It’s important for software vendors, users and developers to keep things in perspective. One size does not fit all. And, “open” doesn’t have to explicitly translate to mean open source software. There has never been a question in our mind whether IT environments should include only open source software or only proprietary software. A combination is reality, and that reality is achieved through collaboration.

Collaborative methodologies and community sourcing are paving the way for how applications are being developed today and will be developed in the future. A reference is given here for the CSI-sponsored open source project TriSano, because it’s one of the best current examples of collaboration in government. It’s a collaborative effort among government, public health professionals, and software developers that is resulting in a surveillance and outbreak management system built and deployed at a fraction of the cost of alternative solutions. We see the possibility of replicating this process across government departments and divisions. So, as government continues to push the envelope, there is so much opportunity for collaboration, open development and community sourcing. Let’s not sell ourselves short. If we think in absolutes, such as “all software must be open source or all software must be closed,” we belittle our industry as we represent it to government.

Thus a correct steps in reducing costs and at the same time still maintaining work efficiency and productivity is as shown by the two example governments of the USA and UK by taking leadership and collaboration in the application and development of open source software as much as possible for the government and public sectors, without having it as a mandatory requirement.

Revenue Model for Creating Business from Free OS Software

Revenue models for creating a product from FOSS:

1. Per-unit royalties. Who said open source was free? While the Linux kernel may be accessible to anyone with a web browser (subject to GPL terms), there is a huge leap between a kernel and a fully integrated, optimised, customised, certified and stable operating system. That’s why vendors like Azingo, ALP, Purple Labs and Mizi Research do charge royalties for the Linux-based software stacks.

2. NREs (non-recurring engineering fees) for integration & productisation. Most open source projects are designed to be 90% complete.. but the remaining 10% of pushing a project to ’shrink-wrap’ product status requires an entity with commercial interests to the deliver the project to the finishing line. As such, system integrators and software vendors such as MontaVista and WindRiver will happily engage in integration and productisation project for Linux-based OSes, in exchange for professional services or NRE fees.

3. Subscriptions for product updates & support. This revenue model is common with dual-licensed open-source products, where the product is branched into a version that’s available under GPL non-commercial terms and one that’s available under commercial non-copyleft terms. Companies like Funambol, Volantis, and Trolltech offer paid-for subscriptions to product updates as a service to customers of the commercial product branch and an incentive to move from trying the GPL branch to to buying/licensing the commercial branch. This revenue model presents a growing opportunity for any system integrator involved in the mobile industry, as both device-side and network-side software products based on open source are becoming increasingly used, while at the same time lacking support contracts and service level agreements (SLAs) that customers have come to rely on.

4. Certification and compliance testing fees. In the case where open-source-based products need to be certified or pass a compliance test - as is the case with Java JSRs - an additional fee may be leveraged for undergoing these tests - as is the case with the TCKs for Sun-owned JSRs, specifically the phoneME MIDP2 implementation.

5. Hardware sales. A more subtle revenue model is that of making the software available for free, but charging for the hardware. Taiwanese manufacturer FIC practices this model for OpenMoko, the distribution which is almost 100% open source. Here customers have a reason to go to FIC to build OpenMoko-based devices for them, so as to leverage from the product know-how and hardware integration expertise that the manufacturer has on OpenMoko.

6. Insurance for product liability and indemnification. This is a straightforward insurance service that software vendors often provide as a premium, which indemnifies or insures the customer of an open-source software product against liabilities.

7. Sharing development costs. Last and certainly not least, open source licensing can be used as a modern approach to shaving costs off software development, by pooling that development effort across multiple industry participants. Companies participating for example in Eclipse, Webkit, Maemo and Android projects seek to share their development costs of a commoditising software base with other peers (even competitors), while leveraging on that base to build essential value add.

BlackBerry Niagara a new must have device

A major summer showdown is shaping up for the smartphone market. Currently, the must-have device of the forthcoming summer is Palm's Pre. However, rumors are also swirling about an iPhone refresh from Apple and now word comes that Research in Motion is planning to toss the BlackBerry Niagara into the ring as soon as May.

Expected to be bigger than the Curve, but smaller than the Bold, Niagara will feature a QWERTY keyboard, EV-DO Rev. A, GPS, a 3.2 megapixel camera and BES support, ChannelWeb reports. PDA Blast speculates that the device could arrive via Verizon in May and possibly with Sprint during Q3.

The Boy Genius Report calls the Niagara the best BlackBerry ever.

Hadoop, a Free Software Program, Finds Uses Beyond Search Engines

By ASHLEE VANCE

BURLINGAME, Calif. — In the span of just a couple of years, Hadoop, a free software program named after a toy elephant, has taken over some of the world’s biggest Web sites. It controls the top search engines and determines the ads displayed next to the results. It decides what people see on Yahoo’s homepage and finds long-lost friends on Facebook.

It has achieved this by making it easier and cheaper than ever to analyze and access the unprecedented volumes of data churned out by the Internet. By mapping information spread across thousands of cheap computers and by creating an easier means for writing analytical queries, engineers no longer have to solve a grand computer science challenge every time they want to dig into data. Instead, they simply ask a question.

“It’s a breakthrough,” said Mark Seager, head of advanced computing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “I think this type of technology will solve a whole new class of problems and open new services.”

Three top engineers from Google, Yahoo and Facebook, along with a former executive from Oracle, are betting it will. They announced a start-up Monday called Cloudera, based in Burlingame, Calif., that will try to bring Hadoop’s capabilities to industries as far afield as genomics, retailing and finance.

The core concepts behind the software were nurtured at Google.

By 2003, Google found it increasingly difficult to ingest and index the entire Internet on a regular basis. Adding to these woes, Google lacked a relatively easy to use means of analyzing its vast stores of information to figure out the quality of search results and how people behaved across its numerous online services.

To address those issues, a pair of Google engineers invented a technology called MapReduce that, when paired with the intricate file management technology the company uses to index and catalog the Web, solved the problem.

The MapReduce technology makes it possible to break large sets of data into little chunks, spread that information across thousands of computers, ask the computers questions and receive cohesive answers. Google rewrote its entire search index system to take advantage of MapReduce’s ability to analyze all of this information and its ability to keep complex jobs working even when lots of computers die.

MapReduce represented a couple of breakthroughs. The technology has allowed Google’s search software to run faster on cheaper, less-reliable computers, which means lower capital costs. In addition, it makes manipulating the data Google collects so much easier that more engineers can hunt for secrets about how people use the company’s technology instead of worrying about keeping computers up and running.

“It’s a really big hammer,” said Christophe Bisciglia, 28, a former Google engineer and a founder of Cloudera. “When you have a really big hammer, everything becomes a nail.”

The technology opened the possibility of asking a question about Google’s data — like what did all the people search for before they searched for BMW — and it began ascertaining more and more about the relationships between groups of Web sites, pictures and documents. In short, Google got smarter.

The MapReduce technology helps do grunt work, too. For example, it grabs huge quantities of images — like satellite photos — from many sources and assembles that information into one picture. The result is improved versions of products like Google Maps and Google Earth.

Google has kept the inner workings of MapReduce and related file management software a secret, but it did publish papers on some of the underlying techniques. That bit of information was enough for Doug Cutting, who had been working as a software consultant, to create his own version of the technology, called Hadoop. (The name came from his son’s plush toy elephant, which has since been banished to a sock drawer.)

People at Yahoo had read the same papers as Mr. Cutting, and thought they needed to even the playing field with their search and advertising competitor. So Yahoo hired Mr. Cutting and set to work.

“The thinking was if we had a big team of guys, we could really make this rock,” Mr. Cutting said. “Within six months, Hadoop was a critical part of Yahoo and within a year or two it became supercritical.”

A Hadoop-powered analysis also determines what 300 million people a month see. Yahoo tracks peoples’ behavior to gauge what types of stories and other content they like and tries to alter its homepage accordingly. Similar software tries to match ads with certain types of stories. And the better the ad, the more Yahoo can charge for it.

Yahoo is estimated to have spent tens of millions of dollars developing Hadoop, which remains open-source software that anyone can use or modify.

It then began to spread through Silicon Valley and tech companies beyond.

Microsoft became a Hadoop fan when it bought a start-up called Powerset to improve its search system. Historically hostile to open-source software, Microsoft nevertheless altered internal policies to let members of the Powerset team continue developing Hadoop.

“We are realizing that we have real problems to solve that affect businesses, and business intelligence and data analytics is a huge part of that,” said Sam Ramji, the senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft.

Facebook uses it to manage the 40 billion photos it stores. “It’s how Facebook figures out how closely you are linked to every other person,” said Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook engineer and a co-founder of Cloudera.

Eyealike, a start-up, relies on Hadoop for performing facial recognition on photos while Fox Interactive Media mines data with it. Google and I.B.M. have financed a program to teach Hadoop to university students.

Autodesk, a maker of design software, used it to create an online catalog of products like sinks, gutters and toilets to help builders plan projects.. The company looks to make money by tapping Hadoop for analysis on how popular certain items are and selling that detailed information to manufacturers.

These types of applications drew the Cloudera founders toward starting a business around Hadoop.

“What if Google decided to sell the ability to do amazing things with data instead of selling advertising?” Mr. Hammerbacher asked.

Mr. Hammerbacher and Mr. Bisciglia were joined by Amr Awadallah, a former Yahoo engineer, and Michael Olson, the company’s chief executive, who sold a an open-source software company to Oracle in 2006.

The company has just released its own version of Hadoop. The software remains free, but Cloudera hopes to make money selling support and consulting services for the software. It has only a few customers, but it wants to attract biotech, oil and gas, retail and insurance customers to the idea of making more out of their information for less.

The executives point out that things like data copies of the human genome, oil reservoirs and sales data require immense storage systems.

Indonesia Form a New Directorate for Investigation of Copyright Infringement

Director General of Intellectual Property Rights of the Ministry of Law and Human Rights said on Tuesday, March 10, 2009 in Medan, North Sumatra that his Department will form a new Directorate for Investigation of Copyrights Infringement to help tackle the copyrights infringements in Indonesia. He said this in response of the information from the Business Software Alliance that Indonesia is placed again by the US Trade Reprsentative office to be on "Watch List" country.

He hoped that the new Directorate for Investigation of Copyrights Infringement can in the future assist the Directorate General of Import Tax and Fees to detect imported pirated software arriving at Indonesian Airports and Harbours, so as to prevent the incoming illegal goods from abroad.

But some people argued that the practice now is to manufacture pirated software from within the Indonesian Territory, instead of transporting the illegal goods via air or sea. It was considered as more cost efficient, effective and faster acquisition of the illegal goods. Thus the plan to form a new Directorate for Copyright Infringement and trying to block the entry of illegal goods via the Indonesian ports will not be effective, and in addition it will only make the flow of goods via the Indonesian ports slowed down and will certainly slow down the Indonesian economic and trade activities, besides more manpower, energy and money to be spent by the Government.

A more elegant way of reducing the level of Proprietary Software Piracy is proposed by the Chairwoman of the Indonesian Open Source Association, Ms. Betti Alsjahbana, that a more extensive socialization of the use of Legal Software including the Open Source Software that is now getting more extensive use by students, ordinary people and many organizations and corporations in Indonesia. The advantage of this approach is that less of corporations and people will be prosecuted, because they have the option of using sophisticated Open Source Apllication Softwares at a minimal cost as compared to the Proprietary Softwares. As time passby, more and more people in Indonesia will choose Open Source instead of Illegal Proprietary Softwares to avoid heavy fines and long jail terms.

In addition of not using illegal software, the above extensive socialization will also reduce the dependency of Indonesia from foreign technology and supply, saving much needed Indonesian Foreign Currency reserve, making the people of Indonesia more innovative and creative using the Open Source Softwares.

New Chairman of Indonesian Infocom Society

The Indonesian Infocom Society (MASTEL) held on Wednesday, 11 March 2009 a National Conference (MUNAS) for the sixth times to elect new officials of the organization. After a fierce campaigning among its candidates, the organization finally elected Mr. Setyanto P Santosa as its new Chairman of the organization, succeeding previous MASTEL Chairman Dr. Giri Suseno Hadihadjono who headed the organization from 2003-2009.

The Conference was attended by 120 registered members of the organization, consisting of individual membership, company members, Infocom associations, non-profit organizations, and honorary members. It was held at PT INDOSAT Auditorium and sponsored by PT INDOSAT, PT TELKOM, PT TELKOMSEL, PT ESIA, Nokia Siemes Networks, PT Lintasarta, PT PSN, Alcatel-Lucent, PT EreshaNet, PT Excelcomindo, and Pt BizNet.

The conference was opened by Minister of Communications and Informatics of the Republic of Indonesia, Dr. Muhammad Nuh, DEA, and a keynote address by former Coordinating Minister of Economics, Professor Dr. Dorodjatun Kuntjoro Jakti.

In his address Dr. Dorodjatun advised the organization to take and Bridging Targets and build an Intelligent Building for the organization as a show case of the use of the most advanced telecommunications facilities as a proof for its use in increasing the nations productivity and work efficiency.

The election of Mr. Setyanto as Chiarman of the organization will be followed by the election of other Vice Chairmen and Secretary general of the organization within a month period. The Team to elect the organization's executives consits of the following:

1. Mr. Setyanto P. Santosa as Team Leader;
2. Mrs. Sylvia Sumarlin as Member;
3. Mr. Tjahjono Surjodibroto as Member;
4. Mrs. Koesmarihati as Member;
5. Mr. Sumitro Roestam as Member; and
6. Mr. Damsiruddin Siregar as Member.

The conference was concluded and agreed on to new targets and programs for the nex three years of the new organization's leadership. It is expected that the new leadership will achieve success in improving the Indonesian ICT development for accelerating the national economic development.

Google to Offer Ads Based on Interests

March 11, 2009

By MIGUEL HELFT

SAN FRANCISCO — Google will begin showing ads on Wednesday to people based on their previous online activities in a form of advertising known as behavioral targeting, which has been embraced by most of its competitors but has drawn criticism from privacy advocates and some members of Congress.

Perhaps to forestall objections to its approach, Google said it planned to offer new ways for users to protect their privacy. Most notably, Google will be the first major company to give users the ability to see and edit the information that it has compiled about their interests for the purposes of behavioral targeting. Like rivals such as Yahoo, it also will give users the choice to opt out from what it calls “interest-based advertising.”

Privacy advocates praised Google’s decision to give users access to their profiles.

Given Google’s position as the No. 1 seller of online ads, its approach is likely to put pressure on other companies to follow suit. Online advertising industry groups said it might help quell calls for government regulation.

But the privacy advocates also said Google needed to do more to notify people that they were being tracked.

“We think more needs to be done on how to educate people and tell them how to opt out,” said Ari Schwartz, chief operating officer of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Google’s foray into behavioral targeting may represent the most visible result so far of the company’s integration of DoubleClick, an advertising technology company that it acquired a year ago. Google bought DoubleClick, which is used by advertisers and publishers to manage their ad campaigns, to extend its advertising empire into display ads, which it sees as the next best hope to reignite its growth.

Google will use a cookie, a small piece of text that resides inside a Web browser, to track users as they visit one of the hundreds of thousands of sites that show ads through its AdSense program. Google will assign those users to categories based on the content of the pages they visit. For example, a user may be pegged as a potential car buyer, sports enthusiast or expectant mother.

Google will then use that information to show people ads that are relevant to their interests, regardless of what sites they are visiting. An expectant mother may see an ad about baby products not only on a parenting site but also, for example, on a sports or fashion site that uses AdSense or on YouTube, which is owned by Google.

The program will first be tested with a few dozen advertisers but Google plans to expand it.

Google said the approach could help advertisers reach their audiences more easily and publishers to earn more from their sites. Users will also see ads that are more relevant to their interests, the company said.

Google said that it planned to segment users along 20 categories and nearly 600 subcategories, and would not create categories for certain “sensitive” interests, including race, religion, sexual orientation or certain types of financial or health concerns. It does not plan to associate the cookie of users with search data or with information from other Google services, like Gmail.

Google won’t notify users that it has begun to show them ads based on their behavior, but users who click on the “Ads By Google” link, which appears on thousands of Web pages, will be taken to a site where the technique is explained. There, they will also be able to tap into what Google calls the Ads Preferences Manager, to see and edit the ad categories that have been associated with their browser.

“We had to find some way to open the box,” said Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel. “Users don’t know how many entities pick up data. They don’t know what happens with it. And they don’t know why Cole Haan shows me a given ad. And even if they did know, they can’t control it.”

Mr. Schwartz said that Google’s approach showed that claims by some advertising companies that giving users access to their profiles would be too onerous were not true.

Google’s entry into behavioral targeting could complicate the company’s relationship with Web publishers that use its advertising services. Many publishers are reluctant to hand over information about their users to Google if the company will in turn use it to help advertisers reach those users when they visit other sites. Most advertising networks already do this, but Google’s broad reach makes publishers particularly nervous.

At the same time, if the behavioral targeting system lets publishers get higher-priced ads, they may find it too hard to resist.

“This further extends the schizophrenic nature of the relationship between Google and publishers,” said Rob Norman, chief executive of GroupM Interaction, a unit of ad giant WPP.

Google is allowing publishers to opt out of the program.

Saul Hansell contributed reporting from New York.

Minister Communications and Informatics swore in new BRTI Members

The Minister of Communications and Informatics of the Republic of Indonesia on Monday, February 2, 2009 swore in 7 Indonesian Telecommunication Regulation Board (BRTI) Members, namely:

1. Dr. Basuki Yusuf Iskandar MA, as an ex-officio representing Director General of Posts and Telecommunications, and Head of BRTI,
   
2. Prof. Dr. Ir. Abdullah Alkaff, Minister's Adviser,
3. Ir. Heru Sutadi, MSi, representing the society,
   
4. Danrivanto Budhiyanto, SH, LLM, representing the community,
   
5. Dr. Ir. Iwan Krisnadi, MBA, representing the community,
6. Dr. Ir. M. Ridwan Effendi, Ma.Sc, representing the community,
7. Ir. Nonot Harsono, MT, representing the community.

New tasks awaiting to be executed by the new BRTI Board are as follows:

1. Monitoring and supervision of National Election campaign using ICT technologies, Quality of Service, and Premium Services,
   
2. Drafting on new Minister's decree on Tarif on Non Tax Revenues,
3. Drafting of Convergency Law,
4. Broadband Wireless Tender,
5. Study in the need of additional 3G bands,
6. Dispute resolution.

Welcome to MASTEL 2020 Blog!

Welcome our MASTEL 2020 Blog which is intended to serve the World's Infocom Society toward the year 2020. This Blog was created to fulfill the need of accurate information on the latest development of the Communications and Information Technologies of the World and especially of Indonesia.

The ICT is developing at a very fast pace, so that we can witness these changes right in front of us, new mobile phones appearing every few weeks, new Laptops, new PDAs, new Notebooks, new gadgets, etc.

We hope this Blog will serve the ICT communities well and give satisfaction.

Please donot hesitate to contact us via comments provided in this Blog.

Best regards,