More Indian women using smartphones for personal safety

With virtual bodyguards, panic buttons and maps to pinpoint harassment blackspots, women in urban India are using their smartphones for protection after a notorious gang-rape in New Delhi. 

Interest in safety apps and websites has surged since the fatal December attack, in which a 23-year-old student was set upon by a drunken gang on her way home from a cinema in the Indian capital. 

After outrage and protests erupted, four businesswomen set up Safecity.in, a website for victims of harassment to channel their anger. 

The site encourages them to "Pin the Creeps" by reporting incidents of harassment and abuse -- ranging from catcalling to rape -- which are added to an online map and sent to those requesting alerts. 

Mumbai-based Elsa D'Silva, a founder of the site, said social media had allowed women to speak out and warn others of dangerous areas, even if they are reluctant to give their name or make a complaint to the police. 

"Now you feel more empowered to do something about it, even if it's just sharing your experience," said D'Silva. "We're not going to keep quiet any more." 

The website has linked up with new mobile app SafeTrac, developed by tech firm KritiLabs and downloadable for free, which has an SOS button to alert emergency contacts and lets relatives or friends track the user's journey. 

It joins a host of similar apps designed to reassure women, especially those working late and travelling alone -- that is, if they can afford mobile internet access. 

The first such Indian app was FightBack, launched by non-profit trust Whypoll a year before the Delhi attack, since when it has gone free of charge and seen a flurry of downloads. 

Whypoll founder Hindol Sengupta said they were now working on a "next generation" app that will include guidance for reporting abuse. 

"Women often don't know their legal rights when they go to the police station and they can be further violated there," he said. 

"The kind of people who have reached out to us for information has astounded me." 

Such developments are being encouraged. India's IT trade body Nasscom has opened a contest to find the best app for women's safety. Separately, free app Stipator (Latin for "bodyguard") won an award for social innovation last month from Nasscom. 

A government commission, set up to prevent sex crimes after the Delhi attack, recommended the development of mobile phone apps for sending distress signals to the police. 

Even in Mumbai, considered one of India's safest cities, police launched their own ICE (In Case of Emergency) app in January and say they have seen thousands of downloads, although its practicality has been criticised. 

A piece in the DNA newspaper pointed out that many women in India cannot afford a basic mobile phone, let alone the Android device required. 

"Also, when in distress, how often do we get time to take the phone out of our bag, unlock it and open an application to let people know we are in trouble?" it asked. 

Technology clearly has its limits: it cannot fulfil the need for decent law enforcement, or change attitudes towards women. 

And while the Indian smartphone market is rising rapidly -- expected to soon become the world's third largest -- it still accounts for a fraction of about 700 million active mobile subscriptions in the country. 

Most safety apps require GPS capabilities that standard mobile phones do not have, although some developers offer emergency texting services. 

The creators of Stipator, Ratnesh Desai and three fellow Microsoft employees in Hyderabad city, are also working on a "lipstick-sized" safety device for women without phones. 

Techies and activists hope that if their tools catch on, they might one day act as a deterrent to abuse. 

"If word gets out there are such apps, people wanting to molest someone will have to be more careful," said Desai.

The 9 Top Threats Facing Cloud Computing

Cybercriminals and the mayhem they can cause have become the leading concern of security experts in cloud computing. That's the takeaway from the Cloud Security Alliance's latest poll on the top nine threats the industry faces.

 

Changes In Security Priorities

The nonprofit's latest survey found a reshuffling of security priorities pointing to the growing danger posed by cyberattacks aimed at stealing corporate data. Data breaches and account hijackings that were in the middle of CSA's 2010 list of top threats rose to the number one and three spots, respectively, this year. At the same time, denial of service attacks made their debut as the fifth most worrisome threat.

The CSA report is meant to give cloud service providers and their customers a snapshot of what experts see as the greatest dangers to storing data and conducting business with customers in the cloud. Fueling fears is a steady stream of break-ins at service providers and Web sites owned by businesses, government and educational institutions.

So far this year, 28 breaches attributed to hackers have been made public, resulting in the loss of 117,000 data records, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Service providers hacked included Zendesk and Twitter. In 2012 there were 230 publicly disclosed breaches for a loss 9 million records. Service providers that suffered breaches included Yahoo, eHarmony and LinkedIn.

Experts agree that no organization doing business on the Internet is immune from a break-in, particularly as the quality of software tools available to hackers through the underground development community continues to grow in sophistication.

'All the vulnerabilities and security issues that on-premise, non-virtualized and non-cloud deployments have still remain in the cloud,' Lawrence Pingree, analyst for Gartner, said. 'All that cloud and virtualization does is enhance the potential risks by introducing virtualization software and potentially mass data breach issues, if an entire cloud provider’s infrastructure is breached.'

Hackers Not The Only Threat

Surprisingly, the second greatest threat in CSA's latest list is data loss not from cybercriminals, but from cloud service providers themselves. Accidental deletion happens more often than a lot of people may think.

In a survey released in January of 3,200 organizations, Symantec found that more than four in 10 had lost data in the cloud and have had to recover it through backups. 'It's really kind of astounding,' Dave Elliott, a cloud-marketing manager at the storage and security company, told Investor's Business Daily.

Whether from hackers or a service provider SNAFU, the loss of data is damaging to the reputation of all parties involved – customer and service provider -- no matter who is to blame, Luciano 'J.R.' Santos, global research director for the CSA, said. The potential financial impact from losing customer trust is why data loss is so high on the threats list.

'It's your reputation,' Santos said. 'A lot of folks are saying these are the things that if it happened to me or if it happened to me as a provider, they would have the most impact to the business.'

The fourth top threat according to the CSA marks an improvement in internal security. In 2010, insecure application programming interfaces was the second greatest threat listed by experts.

APIs are what customers use to connect on premise applications with cloud services, as well as to manage the latter. While the technology is improving, the fact that it remains on the list indicates that cloud service providers still have a ways to go in locking down their APIs.

The Bottom Four

The remaining top threats, starting in order with number six, are malicious insiders, abuse of cloud services, insufficient planning on how to use cloud services and the vulnerabilities that may exist as a result of the way a cloud provider architects its infrastructure, so it can be shared among many customers.

Abuse of cloud services refers to hackers who rent time on the servers of cloud computing providers to perform a variety of nefarious acts, such as launching denial of service attacks and distributing spam. This along with the other bottom four threats was higher in 2010.

Overall, I see this year's list as a mixed bag for cloud security. While some areas show improvement, data protection needs to get a lot better. Gartner predicts public cloud services will reach $206.6 billion in 2016 from $91.4 billion in 2011. That much growth won't happen unless businesses are comfortable with data security.

The Notorious Nine: Cloud Computing Top Threats in 2013

1. Data Breaches
2. Data Loss
3. Account Hijacking
4. Insecure APIs
5. Denial of Service
6. Malicious Insiders
7. Abuse of Cloud Services
8. Insufficient Due Diligence
9. Shared Technology Issues

Microsoft launches Office 365 in India

Software giant Microsoft launched its Office 365 for businesses in India, which will provide seamless sharing of data across PCs and mobiles using cloud computing technology. 

"Office 365 unlocks social and mobility scenarios that will allow businesses and individuals to take full advantage of cloud computing. It gives them the freedom to do things, when, where and how they want," Microsoft India Chairman Bhaskar Pramanik said. 

Since the solutions are cloud-based, users can access their mails and files through a variety of devices like desktops, laptops and mobile phones and work on projects while on the move, he added. 

Cloud computing facilitates sharing of technological resources, software and digital information. Since it is internet-based, data and solutions can be accessed from anywhere using a browser. 

With the suite of solutions, companies can use Office 365 for $6-22 (about Rs 330-1,200) per user per month and it can be installed on up to five devices for a single user under the Office 365 licensing. 

"After 18 months, one in five of Microsoft's enterprise customers worldwide use the paid service, up from one in seven a year ago," Microsoft India General Manager (Customer and Partner Experience) Ramkumar Pichai said on the growing user base of Office 365. 

It is one of the fastest growing businesses globally for Microsoft, since it was launched in 2011, he added. 

Elaborating on the features of Office 365, Microsoft India Director (Office & Cloud) Sukhvinder Ahuja said "This service is more social, like SharePoint integrates with Yammer and Lync to provide a social platform that brings people and teams together to collaborate and share organisational knowledge and information." 

The seamless capability of the suite across multiple devices -- tablets, PCs, phones -- makes its value all the more compelling, he added. 

The launch is a part of Microsoft's comprehensive cloud services strategy. Microsoft 365 provides all the enterprise solutions on a flexible usage and payment model, along with security and simplified IT management. 

Enterprises like Lupin, Godrej, Tata Communications, AEGON Religare, Tata Elxsi, FICCI, SIRO Clinpharm, Unilog, Dabur India, Adhunik Group, Infiniti Retail, etc, are already using the Office 365.

Indian girl has higher IQ than Einstein

A 12-year-old Indian girl has stunned everyone after she was revealed to have an IQ higher than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

Neha Ramu achieved a score of 162 on a Mensa IQ test - the highest score possible, the Telegraph reported.

Despite her young age, the score puts her in the top one percent of brightest people in the UK, which means she is more intelligent than Hawking, Bill Gates and even Einstein, who are all thought to have an IQ of 160.

Ramu's doctor parents, who lived in India before moving to Britain when their daughter was seven, had no idea their daughter was so gifted.

Although she had always performed well at school, it was only when she took an entrance exam for Tiffin Girls', a high-achieving grammar school, and achieved a perfect score of 280/280 that they realised her capabilities.

Two years later, she took the test for Mensa, a society for people with high IQs, and achieved the maximum possible score for someone aged under 18.

"I am so proud of her. Although she's being doing well at these kind of tests for sometime now this is just marvellous. I can't express the feeling," Neha's mother Jayashree said.

The score would be sufficient to get her into any Ivy League university.

Why Wharton cancelled Narendra Modi's lecture

University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) President Amy Gutmann knows both India, and the sense of persecution minorities can experience. Her father had fled Nazi Germany and brought his family to India before eventually settling in the US.

So when the Gutmann-led Ivy League university decided to ask its famed business school, Wharton, to pull the plug on Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi's scheduled address to its students later this month following protests, many senior professors and administrators at the varsity weren't surprised.

But the decision to politely say no to Modi was far from easy. A complex mix of political calculations, hard economics and the university's future plans in India provided the subtext for hectic lobbying and intense debates among alumni, students and the university faculty, eventually leading to the decision to withdraw Modi's name from the list of speakers at the Wharton India Economic Forum (WIEF) in Philadelphia on March 23, multiple interviews with key stakeholders reveal.

Though the WIEF is primarily organized by Wharton students, their selection of Modi was supported by the Adani Group, the principal sponsor of the event, and a conglomerate with massive business interests in Gujarat. Gautam Adani, Chairman of the Adani group, is seen as so close to Modi that when the businessman too announced his withdrawal from the WIEF on Monday, it triggered speculation on whether his decision was a sign of protest against the move to axe Modi's participation - even though the Adani group insisted its chief had taken the decision over a week back. Industrialist Anil Ambani, who recently described Modi as a "king of kings" at the biannual Vibrant Gujarat investment summit, is on the Board of Overseers at Wharton.

But when three Indian-origin professors - Toorjo Ghosh, Ania Loomba and Suvir Kaul - at UPenn wrote a strong letter to Wharton last Thursday, the university leadership felt it could not be ignored. The professors said they were "outraged" that Modi had been invited.

"This is the same politician who was refused a diplomatic visa by the United States State Department on March 18, 2005 on the ground that he, as Chief Minister, did nothing to prevent a series of orchestrated riots that targeted Muslims in Gujarat," they wrote in the letter, that evolved into a petition signed by over 250 people.

Though Modi was to address the conclave only through a videoconference - to circumvent the visa dispute - agreeing to continue with Modi as a speaker once critics had pointed to the State Department position on the Gujarat CM, could have meant upsetting sections of the US administration.

India is also a critical market for the university. After China, India sends most international students to UPenn, at a time when the university - like most other major institutions in the US - are increasingly relying on foreign students.

"There's always a reluctance - rightly so - to be seen as getting involved in internal political spats of other countries, and it's even more so with India, given how critical the country is for us," an administrator at the university said, requesting anonymity.

So, when the matter reached Gutmann's office, the university leadership stepped in to diffuse what it saw as a potentially explosive situation, the sources said.

"Make no mistake, the move to not have Modi was a result of UPenn, not Wharton," a senior Wharton official said, pointing to the fact that not a single Wharton faculty member had signed the petition demanding that the Gujarat CM's speech be scrapped.

Wharton also had a tough balancing task to perform, with its student body clearly in favour of calling Modi, and faculty members keen not to upset a man who could emerge a Prime Ministerial candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

So on Sunday - while announcing that Modi's address had been cancelled - the WIEF organizers tried walking a tightrope. The cancellation was aimed at saving UPenn and Modi from any embarrassment from protestors at the conclave venue, the WIEF statement said, adding however that it stood by its decision to invite Modi.

The organizers also held out an olive branch to Modi - stating that they remained impressed by the Gujarat growth story, and that they hoped to hold an interaction between the BJP strongman and Wharton students soon, without the "distraction" caused by the invitation they had just withdrawn.