Can the internet prevent government corruption? You’re probably never going to meet an entirely honest politician, but according to a statistical study by US researchers of 170 countries the internet could provide the tools necessary to reduce corruption significantly.

Martha García-Murillo of the School of Information Studies, at Syracuse University, New York, modeled political, economic and technological factors. She found that “red tape”, good governance and freedom of the press all had a greater effect on whether or not there was apparent corruption within a particular government.

According to García-Murillo:

Corruption is a problem that needs to be controlled, if not completely eliminated. Because of the multiple causes of corruption, it is advisable that governments use the internet as one of the many tools available to them to fight corruption.

Conversely, the internet gives power to the people allowing activists and independent lobbyists to hook up and campaign more easily, it allows information regarding dodgy deals and instances of corruption to reach the public domain much more readily, and can provide an open access route to government.

There are three ways in which the internet can directly reduce corruption, according to García-Murillo. Through electronic government initiatives, processes and procedures can be implemented to improve the manner in which state officials interact with the private sector and the public at large. These automated or semi-automated processes can limit the opportunities that government employees have to extort money.

Secondly, electronic government initiatives can also support the democratic process by allowing people to know more about their government representatives and, in the long term, by facilitating participation in elections.

These first two components of reducing corruption rely to some extent on the corruption being localized within government rather than being a government-wide issue. If the latter problem exists, then one would suspect that there are much deeper issues to address within a particular society than whether or not “voters” have the opportunity to send email to their government representatives.

However, García-Murillo’s third point regarding how the internet might reduce government corruption emerges from the fact that the internet has become just as important, if not more so, than the traditional media, the press, radio, and TV. Politicians may feel more restrained from engaging in corrupt activities if their every move is tweeted or blogged instantaneously. And, once a mal-fact about them is out there, it will remain permanently visible. On the internet no one can ever forgive and forget.

Martha García-Murillo (2010). The effect of internet access on government corruption Electronic Government, An International Journal, 7 (1), 22-40

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Internet against government corruption

I just received a spam email from someone going by the likely name of J Hunt. Apparently he had some used equipment to sell. Unfortunately, its use seems to have proved fatal to his father:

“My father purchased an Ilco 040 Performance Series Automatic Duplicator Key Machine in 2001. He used it twice, then died. I would like to resell it but don’t know what it’s worth. It’s in really good condition (looks new).”

I suspect Mr Hunt will get few offers to buy for this lethal contraption…

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Lethal machinery

A mobile malware epidemic could render phone networks useless within two to three years, if public awareness of the issue and network security experts don’t take control out of the hands of hackers.

If you’re intelligent enough to be reading the Sciencetext blog, then it’s unlikely that you’re going to be taken in by an email phishing scam or be running a security-compromised web browser. You’re never going to follow a suggestion in a Twitter direct message or run an unknown Facebook app, are you? But, what about your mobile devices, malware on these is relatively rare, but the novelty of the smart generation of devices also means that even the most clued-up user may be unaware of the perils and pitfalls.

According to US researchers writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Computer Aided Engineering and Technology, the growth in popularity of mobile computing, smart phones, and the internet in general has created an ever-moving target that entices hackers, crackers, social engineers and common or garden criminals. While there are millions of computer viruses, worms, Trojans, and other malware out there (and yes there are ones for Linux and Mac, which means iPhones, too), there are a mere few hundred mobile viruses today. However, the prevalence of mobile viruses is at its tipping point, says Juil Martin of the Department of Systems and Computer Science, at Howard University, in Washington, DC.

The first cellphone virus in the US was Cabir way back in 2004. However, Martin and colleagues have described how easy it is for phones running Symbian, J2ME, and the Windows Mobile operating systems to become infected through various channels, including Bluetooth and 802.11 wireless (wi-fi).

Martin’s team has investigated how fast mobile malware can spread in a typical commercial/urban environment, such as Washington, DC. They have data from 2004 to the present and have then extrapolated this to 2012. The aim of the study is to raise awareness and help cell phone users prepare for a future mobile malware epidemic and to offer some preventative measures.

So, if a mobile malware epidemic is on the way, what might you do to protect yourself? Are their virtual facemasks and vaccinations you could use?

First, it’s useful to know how mobile malware can spread, here’s Martin’s list of the main propagation routes and what the malware does that might one day lead to an epidemic:

• Malware spread by Bluetooth or SMS – Mosquit, Red Browser, Cabir, Lasco, CommonWarrior, Pbstealer, and StealWar
• Viruses transmitted using MMS – StealWar and CommorWarrior
• Malware spread by infecting files – Duts, Lasco, and CommonWarrior
• Virus providing remote network access – Brador
• Viruses or Trojans affecting functionality of cellphone by replacing files, or icons, or system applications – Skuller, Dampig, Hobble, Appdisabler, Doombot, Romride, and Mobler
• Malware transmitted by installing corrupted applications, damaged applications, viruses, malicious programs or disables system functions – Locknut, Skudoo, Bottom, Cardtrap, Singlejump, and Dropper
• Viruses which replace antivirus application loaders or replaces font files – Drever, Fontal, and Blankfont
• Malware which deletes antivirus applications, delete files or copy its body to other devices – Cardtrap, Cxover, and Mobler
• Viruses which spread via memory cards – Mobler, Cardtrap, and Cardblock
• Viruses which steal personal data – Flexispy, Stealwar, and Pbstealer
• Malware that spreads via e-mail – MSIL.Letum

“Although mobile viruses are not as prevalent as desktop e-mail viruses, there is the potential for a large-scale outbreak, as development of new features on mobile devices makes them more vulnerable to attack. Unlike e-mail viruses, which are restricted to one channel for propagation, mobile viruses can propagate over various channels, including e-mail, SMS, MMS, downloaded software, 802.11 wireless, Infrared Data Association (IrDA), and Bluetooth etc.

So, here’s Martin’s basic advice for preventing a malware epidemic and it’s not surprisingly very similar to the non-mobile advice:

• Install the latest antivirus software
• Turn off and remove any unneeded services, such as Bluetooth
• Do not open e-mail attachments unless they are expected
• Do not install applications from illegal file-sharing networks
• Enable the lock feature and create a password for phone access in case it is stolen and returned with malware enabled.

Intriguingly, as I was writing this, news came in that Georgia Tech computer science faculty members had received an NSF grant ($450,000) to develop tools that improve the security of mobile devices and the telecommunications networks on which they operate. Good luck with that!

Juil C. Martin, Legand L. Burge III, Joseph I. Gill, Alicia N. Washington, & Marcus Alfred (2010). Modelling the spread of mobile malware Int. J. Computer Aided Engineering and Technology, 2 (1), 3-14

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Mobile malware epidemic on the way

Having moved its Lists feature out of beta recently, the social media service, Twitter is currently beta testing a new way for users to see who’s talking about their tweets.

The new ReTweet, or RT, features appear only for a select few users but add a handy icon to tweets that have already been retweeted and the option to view only retweets for a particular tweet made by people you follow.

They’re headlining the new service as “Retweet to Share Tweets”, which is the basic ethic underlying the retweet system in which one Twitter user duplicates someone else’s tweet and adds “RT @othertwitter” to the front of the retweet so that these special tweets gain added value for @othertwitter.

Twitter says about the new retweet system:

We’re still working out the final details, but let’s say you follow @2020science, @sciencebase (that’s me), and @DrRemy but you don’t follow @biz. However, I do follow @biz and his recent breakfast choice announcement was so momentous that I retweeted it to all my followers.

You’d see @ev’s tweet on your timeline even though you don’t follow him because you follow me and I really wanted you to have the information that I have. (Star, reply, and retweet options would only show up when you hover over a row on Twitter.com which is why you don’t see them all the time.) But, if you find these retweets annoying, you’d be able to turn them off easily.

Are you in the retweet to share tweets beta? What do you think of it?

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Twitter retweet to share tweets

When did you last check your blog’s subscriber numbers? It’s been quite a while for me. But, this week, I decided to take a quick look at my Feedburner stats. Seems that Sciencetext, SciScoop, and Sciencebase are all doing rather well. In fact, the former two are doing a lot better than expected…

…which was worrying. Visitor rates had not changed much. Traffic has gradually climbed over the last few months and individual posts occasionally get retweeted or bookmarked on various social media sites. However, the leap for Sciencetext specifically since the last time I checked was enormous – a doubling, in fact. Was this simply another example of the Feedburner feedcount myth, yet another example of Google’s shoddy handling of the system since it took over or something else?

Well, it appears that Feedburner now takes FriendFeed subscribers into account when totting up your subscriber numbers. Now, so Sciencetext, SciScoop, and Sciencebase all seem to benefiting from subscribers who follow me as “sciencebase” on FriendFeed. But, those are all the same subscribers, so if I were to add up the individuals following all three blogs, would I simple have a massively overlapped Venn diagram? I suspect so…rather disheartening, really. I wish I’d never looked.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Feedburner Feedcount

I’m a Facebook slut. I keep LinkedIn for parallel monogamous business connections but will friend almost anyone on Facebook. It’s all about reaching out, after all. I want as many friends as possible on Facebook, I want to share and poke and comment on their walls and I want them to reciprocate. You got a problem with that?

Thought not.

But, something odd is happening. At the time when I had fewer than 100 Facebook friends, it was rare that I’d have any friends in common with new pokers and pokees. Occasionally, a new contact would have one or two mutual friends, but never more than three. Now that I have almost 600 “friends” on Facebook its seems that whenever I look at the new friends suggestions offered up by the system, almost all of them share at least 40 or 50 friends in common.

To me this suggests that Facebook is becoming a closed circle in which almost all my friends and potential friends all know each other. It’s becoming an almost fully interconnected network. Forget six degrees of separation, Facebook looks from this point of view to be two-degrees of separation.

Now, that’s not a good thing, really, is it? It means that your friends are all my friends, and my friends are yours and no one new is joining the inner sanctum, our almost closed circle of acquaintance. Maybe it’s just me, but do you see it too in the putative friends with whom Facebook suggests you connect? I’d be interested to know.

I’d also be interested to know how to break out of this inner circle and take my Facebook promiscuity to the next level. I’ve had enough of this virtual inbreeding, I want fresh blood…

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

On being a Facebook slut

People rarely go shopping together online. Okay, occasionally I’ll show my wife that I can buy some item or other we need cheaper online than at the mall, but that’s usually just to save the car journey.

Online shopping is essentially a solo occupation, as are many other internet activities. Fundamentally, there is none of the social side of window shopping with friends, of trying outfits, of the Stadtbummel Germans apparently enjoy so much, and no opportunities to stop off for a skinny iced cinnamon dolce latte café and check emails at a wi-fi hotspot.

And, apparently, this angst regarding the lack of the social when it comes to ecommerce is the same the world over from Canada to China, according to Khaled Hassanein and Milena Head of DeGroote School of Business, at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario and Chunhua Ju of the Science and Research Office, Zhejiang Gongshang University, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, PR China.

They explain how earlier research studies have shown that website design elements, such as text and pictures, can be manipulated to increase the perception of Social Presence (SP) among online consumers, which can have some impact on perceived trustworthiness, usefulness and overall enjoyment of the online shopping experience. However, they have now found that perceived usefulness and enjoyment are affected by SP the same in Canada and Chine, although trust seems to be a different matter.

“The traditional offline shopping experience includes a wide range of emotions involving various types of social interactions with humans,” the researchers explain, “In contrast, the online shopping experience may be viewed as lacking human warmth and sociability. Online vendors can try to overcome the more impersonal, anonymous and automated stigma of online shopping by making their virtual storefront socially rich.”

How this enrichment is carried out, perhaps by using design elements such as emotive text and socially rich images, and whether it works or not is open to debate, but it is just possible that the ultimate success of ecommerce hinges on this very question.

Khaled Hassanein, Milena Head, & Chunhua Ju (2009). A cross-cultural comparison of the impact of Social Presence on website trust, usefulness and enjoyment Int. J. Electronic Business, 7 (6), 625-641

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Socializing online shopping

A few weeks ago, I heard about a new antispam plugin called Cookies for Comments. After a couple of months of testing, I confess that it’s the most impressive plugin for blocking spam on a Wordpress blog.

I was reluctant to mention it here, for fear of alerting spammers to its existence and offering them insight into how it works and how they might circumvent it, but a few days ago it was publicized more widely, and I reasoned that stealth and obfuscation really isn’t a defense.

Cookies for Comments works by adding a stylesheet to your blog’s html source code. When a browser loads that stylesheet a cookie is dropped. If that user then leaves a comment the cookie is checked. If it doesn’t exist the comment is marked as spam. That means you have to be actually reading the blog post in your browser before you leave a comment, spam bots don’t do that…

You can even add a couple of lines to your Wordpress folder’s .htaccess file that will prevent bots from even getting anywhere near your comment form and so cut down on bandwidth leeches.

You can set Cookies for Comments to drop any spambot comments right into your spam folder or else delete them immediately. It’s so powerful that, to be honest, there’s really no need to run any other antispam plugin. Indeed, I’ve gone out on a limb with Sciencebase and have opened up comments to immediate approval rather than moderation and am yet to see a false positive.

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

Cookies for Comments

Without copyright protection creative types would not create. That, apparently, is one of the defenses put forward by the likes of the RIAA and the MPAA. These organizations chase after file sharers and attempt to gain millions of dollars of recompense each year from people who swap music and movie torrents. But isn’t this defense simply justification for a whole new industry that could outgrow the music and movie industries themselves?

It’s fairly well documented that many recording artists in the past were offered draconian record company contracts and received little compensation for their creativity compared with the company profit lines. There’s also the almost forgotten fact that decades of music charts were hyped as company A&R staff bought up their label’s records to boost chart placements. There’s also the pricing concept associated with a manufactured music disk and accompanying liner notes and the virtual download version of an “album” and how that somehow should cost the same instore and online.

Brazilian musician Denis Borges Barbosa who recently published a critique of the state of copyright in the world of music, also points out that the prime defense of copyright protecting creativity is a fallacy. In his critique he suggests that we take a look at the plight of composer-musicians stretching back to the Baroque period to see just how ludicrous a claim that is.

Eighteenth century composer Georg Philipp Telemann, for instance, is the most prolific composer in history. A lawyer by training (oh, the irony) he was simultaneously a public servant, a publisher, a concert promoter, a conductor, and a performer, and wrote some 8000 opi. There was no copyright law to protect his works. Likewise, Vivaldi composed over 500 concerti, 43 operas, published 100 opi. Handel (who also started law school) staged 50 of his operas and 23 oratorios. Beethoven produced 849 opi (eight concerti and nine symphonies). Mozart and Bach we incredibly creative and prolific too.

Barbosa suggests that it was the total lack of any copyright protection that made these famous names such workaholics; they had to slave away at their staves simply to keep ahead of the competition. However, by the twentieth century, long after copyright laws had been laid down, the likes of Gershwin and Bernstein received amazing plaudits, awards, and no little reward for much more modest levels of musical output.

Gershwin wrote a mere 19 classical pieces, 35 Broadway shows and contributed to 22 other plays, and seven films, while Bernstein wrote just three symphonies, two operas and five musicals. All amazing stuff, but not the hundreds or thousands of their classical predecessors.

It seems that copyright laws, while protecting vested interests have simply stifled creativity. Looking at the statistics for modern composers Bernstein, Gershwin, and their contemporaries and comparing them with those of just one Telemann or Vivaldi suggests that the public has been massively deprived of the full potential of such composers. A lack of copyright protection may have seen Bernstein et al working even harder and producing an even greater musical legacy.

“The example of the 18th century composers who thrived both in cultural and market terms sheds some doubt on the dogma that without effective copyright the output of symbolic goods would diminish on a significant level,” concludes Barbosa. He suggests that a system that sidesteps intellectual property rights and copyright [Creative Commons, Copyleft, Open Source, for instance] could be more conducive to high levels of creativity.

Of course, such a suggestion would remove the members of the RIAA and MPAA from the equation, leaving the artists and creators with a direct connection to their listening and watching public. Perish the thought that artists might be able to talk direct to their public with no intermediaries to cream off a percentage.

Denis Borges Barbosa (2010). On artefacts and middlemen: a musician’s note on the economics of copyright International Journal of Intellectual Property Management, 4 (1/2), 23-44

Post from: David Bradley's Sciencetext Tech Talk

What’s wrong with copyright?

Some time ago, the NYT’s David Pogue ran a feature with a bunch of tech tips that seemed obvious to him but that he was shocked to discover a lot of people didn’t actually know. Like Control-L taking your cursor straight to your browser address bar, and the space key scrolling down a page at a time…there were lots of tips, so here are a few more highlights:

* An unexpected or badly written e-mail from eBay, Paypal, any bank, Amazon, Google Adwords, or basically any company from whom you wouldn’t expect to receive an incorrectly addressed email with poor grammar is likely to be a phishing scam. There’ll be a dodgy link in the email that tells you that you must click it and verify your details. Don’t. It’s a scam, a “phishing scam” and the sender will use it to steal your username and password. If you must visit a site, type the address in to your browser yourself, never click through from an email, regardless of how genuine it seems.

* Nobody is going to give you half of a multimillion dollar bank deposit to help them liberate the funds of a deceased millionaire in Nigeria or Nice, not in Burundi or Bournemouth, not even from Liberia ir Liverpool, or anywhere else.

* When someone sends you some shocking e-mail alert or emotive charity appeal and suggests that you pass it on, don’t. At least not until you’ve first confirmed that it isn’t just a scam or a chain letter. Best place to check? snopes.com. Snopes is one of the Internet’s best authorities on email myths and online legends. Snopes will help you filter out all those scammy get-rich schemes, Microsoft/AOL cash giveaways, and the stories of infantile cancer victims collecting baseball cards. The child in question never did and he’s 64 now, anyway.

* Unless you and your contact are on some major league uber email system, don’t waste your time trying to send more than one or two email attachments at a time if they’re larger than 1 or 2 megabytes. They’ll just bounce back. Instead, if you want to share photos use iPhoto, Picasa, flickr or a drop box type site for other files. There are big mailers out there too, about which I’ve written in the past. You can even send 500 megabyte emails with some of them.

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You knew that, right?