Category: Science &Technology

{The United States and its leading Western allies, known as the “Five Eyes,” planned to hack into smartphones through their links to Google and Samsung’s app stores, CBC News and The Intercept reported.}

They wanted to infect apps with spyware and find ways to send misinformation to targets, according to documents released to the media by National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

The intelligence agencies also apparently began targeting the mobile browser UC Browser in late 2011, after discovering it leaked revealing details about its users.

UC Browser runs on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Java ME and Symbian.

Owned by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, UC Browser is the world’s leading third-party mobile browser, accounting for nearly 13 percent of the market in March, according to Sitepoint.

It’s widely used in China and India, and is gaining ground strongly in emerging regions. It had 500 million users as of March 2014.

Facebook teamed up with UC Browser earlier this year to allow Facebook notifications in the app.

{{ Gunning for Foreigners? }}

The app store project reportedly was motivated in part by concerns about the possibility of another Arab Spring.

The Five Eyes apparently agreed not to spy on each other’s citizens and focused their efforts instead on Africa, especially Senegal, Sudan and the Congo, where Muslim populations have been restive.

However, Samsung’s and Google’s mobile app servers were located in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Cuba, Morocco, the Bahamas and Russia.

The intelligence services reportedly found one country’s military unit using UC Browser for covert communications about its operations in Western countries.

“It should come as no comfort that these agencies haven’t yet used these techniques against their own people,” remarked Dave Bullas, director of pre-sales engineering at Stealthbits. “Any developer will tell you that the best way to build a tool that works is to get it working in one place before using it somewhere else.”

It’s not clear whether these attacks were a test run for a wider surveillance effort, Bullas told TechNewsWorld, “but evidence suggests that once the Five Eyes have a tool that works in one place, they’re not shy about using it elsewhere.”

{{ { What the Five Eyes Did } }}

The agencies held a series of workshops in Australia and Canada in late 2011 and early 2012 on finding new ways to exploit smartphone technology for surveillance, The Intercept reported.

They used the NSA-developed Xkeyscore system to identify smartphone traffic on the Internet, then track down the smartphones’ connections to Samsung’s and Google’s app marketplace servers.

The agencies apparently set up a pilot project codenamed “Irritant Horn,” under which they developed a way to hack and hijack phone users’ connections to app stores, so they could send malicious implants to targeted devices. The implants would be used to collect data covertly from the smartphones.

The agencies reportedly also planned to harvest data about phone users from the app store servers.

{{ The Need for Strategic Thinking }}

“Let’s step back from intent — just because the Five Eyes agreed not to spy on each other doesn’t mean they themselves can’t be hacked or their methods used by others, both domestic and foreign, who are not a part of this arrangement,” said Rob Enderle, principal at the Enderle Group.

“Once a methodology like this is established and validated,” he told TechNewsWorld, “the idea could … migrate worldwide.”
The Enemy May Be Us

Americans and citizens of the other Five Eyes countries may well be at risk of being targeted.

The CIA for years has been trying to hack iOS, and FBI director James Comey has been urging Congress to approve encryption backdoors, and fighting the plans of Apple, Google and others to implement strong encryption in their mobile OSes.

In exchange for making a few criminals vulnerable to investigation, law enforcement “is making everyone vulnerable to a variety of attacks, ranging from illegal stalking to identity theft, burglary and violence,” Enderle said.

“When law enforcement starts arguing they need to behave criminally to catch criminals,” he observed, “it’s generally a really bad thing.”

{{KT PRESS}}-{Every hour, about 120 Rwandans subscribe to internet, according to the country’s ICT sector survey of 2014, which is yet to be made public. }

Between 2013 and 2014, about 1,043,813 Rwandans subscribed to internet, meaning on average, 120 Rwandans subscribed per hour.

The survey, of which KT Press has obtained a copy, was conducted by the Ministry of ICT and found out that the number of Rwandans with a Sim for data and voice services grew to 3,111,992 in 2014 grew from 2,068,179 in 2013.

The increase, the report says, is due to stiff competition between local telecom operators (Tigo,MTN,Airtel).

Rwanda intends to increase internet usage to 95% by 2017. ICT accounts for 4% ($301 million) of Rwanda’s GDP ($7.5 billion).

The alliance for affordable internet (A4AI) ranks Rwanda among the top three African countries including; Nigeria and Morocco.

Rwandans pay $6 for one gigabyte (1GB) of internet. This has pushed internet penetration to 26% and as a result, 35.6% of Rwandans are hooked to internet through various devices.

Mobile subscribers increased by 6.5%, representing a jump from 6,689,158 in 2013 to 7,747,019 subscribers by December 2014. Active subscribers are at 70% compared to 63.5% in 2013.

In 2014 about 6.5 million Mobile Money subscribers made transactions worth Rwf 691.5 billion compared to Rwf 330.4 billion in 2013. Now government allows businesses to clear taxes via mobile money.

Last year, the country launched the 4G LTE, pushing over five times of data capacity of up to 100Mbps of speed.

ICT Minister, Jean Philbert Nsengimana told KT Press, “deployment of high-speed internet will accelerate Rwanda’s economic growth; facilitating business, creating jobs and social progress”.

Landlocked Rwanda with 11 million people, mostly subsistence farmers, plans to transform into a knowledge-based economy and regional ICT hub.

The country has laid 3,000km of fibre optic network worth $130 million, connecting 97 government agencies in the capital Kigali and 226 agencies in districts. It links 36 main nodes in both Kigali and all the 30 districts.

To establish 21st century learning skills, over 250,000 laptops have been distributed in 407 primary schools enabling 2.5 million children to access computers, making it the 3rd largest deployment in the world after Peru and Uruguay-under the ‘One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project.

{In what marks a significant step forward for artificial intelligence, researchers at UC Santa Barbara have demonstrated the functionality of a simple artificial neural circuit. For the first time, a circuit of about 100 artificial synapses was proved to perform a simple version of a typical human task: image classification.}

“It’s a small, but important step,” said Dmitri Strukov, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. With time and further progress, the circuitry may eventually be expanded and scaled to approach something like the human brain’s, which has 1015 (one quadrillion) synaptic connections.

For all its errors and potential for faultiness, the human brain remains a model of computational power and efficiency for engineers like Strukov and his colleagues, Mirko Prezioso, Farnood Merrikh-Bayat, Brian Hoskins and Gina Adam. That’s because the brain can accomplish certain functions in a fraction of a second what computers would require far more time and energy to perform.

What are these functions? Well, you’re performing some of them right now. As you read this, your brain is making countless split-second decisions about the letters and symbols you see, classifying their shapes and relative positions to each other and deriving different levels of meaning through many channels of context, in as little time as it takes you to scan over this print. Change the font, or even the orientation of the letters, and it’s likely you would still be able to read this and derive the same meaning.

In the researchers’ demonstration, the circuit implementing the rudimentary artificial neural network was able to successfully classify three letters (“z,” “v” and “n”) by their images, each letter stylized in different ways or saturated with “noise.” In a process similar to how we humans pick our friends out from a crowd, or find the right key from a ring of similar keys, the simple neural circuitry was able to correctly classify the simple images.

“While the circuit was very small compared to practical networks, it is big enough to prove the concept of practicality,” said Merrikh-Bayat. According to Gina Adam, as interest grows in the technology, so will research momentum.

“And, as more solutions to the technological challenges are proposed the technology will be able to make it to the market sooner,” she said.

Key to this technology is the memristor (a combination of “memory” and “resistor”), an electronic component whose resistance changes depending on the direction of the flow of the electrical charge. Unlike conventional transistors, which rely on the drift and diffusion of electrons and their holes through semiconducting material, memristor operation is based on ionic movement, similar to the way human neural cells generate neural electrical signals.

“The memory state is stored as a specific concentration profile of defects that can be moved back and forth within the memristor,” said Strukov. The ionic memory mechanism brings several advantages over purely electron-based memories, which makes it very attractive for artificial neural network implementation, he added.

“For example, many different configurations of ionic profiles result in a continuum of memory states and hence analog memory functionality,” he said. “Ions are also much heavier than electrons and do not tunnel easily, which permits aggressive scaling of memristors without sacrificing analog properties.”

This is where analog memory trumps digital memory: In order to create the same human brain-type functionality with conventional technology, the resulting device would have to be enormous — loaded with multitudes of transistors that would require far more energy.

“Classical computers will always find an ineluctable limit to efficient brain-like computation in their very architecture,” said lead researcher Prezioso. “This memristor-based technology relies on a completely different way inspired by biological brain to carry on computation.”

To be able to approach functionality of the human brain, however, many more memristors would be required to build more complex neural networks to do the same kinds of things we can do with barely any effort and energy, such as identify different versions of the same thing or infer the presence or identity of an object not based on the object itself but on other things in a scene.

Potential applications already exist for this emerging technology, such as medical imaging, the improvement of navigation systems or even for searches based on images rather than on text. The energy-efficient compact circuitry the researchers are striving to create would also go a long way toward creating the kind of high-performance computers and memory storage devices users will continue to seek long after the proliferation of digital transistors predicted by Moore’s Law becomes too unwieldy for conventional electronics.

“The exciting thing is that, unlike more exotic solutions, it is not difficult to imagine this technology integrated into common processing units and giving a serious boost to future computers,” said Prezioso.

In the meantime, the researchers will continue to improve the performance of the memristors, scaling the complexity of circuits and enriching the functionality of the artificial neural network. The very next step would be to integrate a memristor neural network with conventional semiconductor technology, which will enable more complex demonstrations and allow this early artificial brain to do more complicated and nuanced things. Ideally, according to materials scientist Hoskins, this brain would consist of trillions of these type of devices vertically integrated on top of each other.

“There are so many potential applications — it definitely gives us a whole new way of thinking,” he said.

{{Source: Science Daily}}

{Rwanda Utilities and Regulatory Authority (RURA) says sending unsolicited text messages without any ‘unsubscribe’ option contravenes the law relating to electronic messages, electronic signatures and electronic transactions, New Times reported.}

Jean Baptiste Mutabazi, RURA’s head of communication and media regulation says the law is clear, and that each telecommunication service provider sending text messages to clients to advertise or promote products and services should give them the choice to unsubscribe and detail the process involved.

This follows numerous complaints from telecom subscribers about being bombarded with messages they have never subscribed for by telecom firms, and without any unsubscribe option.

MTN Rwanda said the company has started sorting out the problem, noting that the number of random text messages sent to subscribers has been greatly reduced.

{Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has defended the aims of his Internet.org initiative after several Indian firms decided to pull out of the project.}

In a blog post, Mr Zuckerberg argued that Internet.org’s basic free services were not incompatible with net neutrality – the principle that all web services should be equally accessible.

“We fully support net neutrality,” he wrote. “Universal connectivity and net neutrality can and must co-exist.”

But critics were quick to respond.

Writing in the Hindustan Times, India’s Save The Internet coalition maintained that Internet.org is “Zuckerberg’s ambitious project to confuse hundreds of millions of emerging market users into thinking that Facebook and the internet are one and the same.”
Distorting competition?

At the heart of the row is Internet.org’s policy of “zero-rating”, whereby telecoms providers agree not to pass on the costs of handling the data traffic so that consumers can receive services for free.

Critics argue this has a distorting effect on competition, making it difficult for publishers not signed up to Internet.org to reach the hundreds of millions of poorer people in developing economies who have no internet access at all.

But Facebook disagrees, pointing out that joining Internet.org is free for web publishers and app providers.

“We’re open for all mobile operators and we’re not stopping anyone from joining,” says Mr Zuckerberg. “We want as many internet providers to join so as many people as possible can be connected.”

However, India’s leading mobile operator Bharti Airtel has also been applying zero-rating to its Airtel Zero service.

This means that consumers can access certain apps for free because the app provider picks up the data bill.

Smaller developers without the resources to do the same are at a commercial disadvantage.
Better than nothing?

Facebook chooses the services offered by Internet.org after consultation with “local governments and the mobile operators” in each country, says Mr Zuckerberg.

It is this hand-picking process that appears discriminatory to many within the industry.

But Mr Zuckerberg believes that “if someone can’t afford to pay for connectivity, it is always better to have some access than none at all.”

In India, Internet.org has rolled out its free basic services on the Reliance network in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Kerala and Telangana.

And it has also launched in Indonesia on the Indosat network.
Boycott

This week a number of firms, including travel portal Cleartrip.com and media giant Times Group, withdrew from Internet.org, claiming that the service conflicts with the principle of net neutrality.

The issue has certainly galvanised the Indian public – more than 800,000 people have sent emails to India’s telecom regulator, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, demanding a free and fair internet.

Indian telecoms companies have been putting pressure on the government to change the way so-called “over-the-top” mobile apps, such as Skype, WhatsApp, and Instagram, are licensed.

Such apps piggyback on the operators’ networks and have benefited greatly from the proliferation of smartphones and the explosion in mobile content.

Operators want a bigger slice of the pie.

{The five countries of the East African Community (EAC) had 33.61 million households and a household television penetration rate of 23 percent at the end of December 2014, said research firm Dataxis. Kenya is the most developed market in the region with 12.04 million households and a TV household penetration rate of 32 percent. Uganda has 7.35 million households and a TV household penetration rate of 25 percent, followed by Tanzania with 7.35 million households and a home TV penetration rate of 17 percent.}

Pay-TV services accounted for approximately 1.61 million households meaning that free-to-air broadcasting is still the primary access method in over 79 percent of TV households. Tanzania has the largest Pay-TV base in the region with 592,700 users, accounting for 36 percent of the EAC total. Kenya was second with 561,000 users, followed by Uganda with 359,000, Burundi with 62,500 and Rwanda with 38,000.

DTT has an overall 53 percent market share of total Pay-TV users, followed by DTH with 43 percent and the remainder on CATV systems in Kenya and Tanzania. StarTimes edged out MultiChoice in terms of overall market share with 39 percent against 38 percent. The largest single platform was StarTimes DTT with a 34 percent market share, followed by the MultiChoice DSTV satellite offering (20%) and its GOtv DTT service (18%). StarSat, the StarTimes DTH offering, accounted for a further 4 percent.

There were 6.16 million FTA users across the EAC at the end of 2014. Analogue terrestrial was by far the largest access method accounting for 68 percent of total users. DTT had a 26 percent market share, followed by DTH with 6 percent. Rwanda was the only country to have completely turned off analogue, although Tanzania was scheduled to go digital-only in February followed in March by Kenya.

{{Telecompaper}}