Pedro's Blog

How Geospatial Web Apps changed our lives

2009-04-10T19:41:00.001-07:00

Ever since Geospatial web applications became available to the general public, our lives have been changed. When is the last time that you used a regular paper map for directions during your travel? Atleast for me, it's been a couple of years.

I fell in love with mapping applications the first moment i started using them. They are a great and effective tool which makes everybody's lives easier when they are on the road. The introduction of portable GPS systems does take a bit away from web applications but nothing beats the price of a free web application.

Such applications like Google Maps, Google Earth, Live Search Maps and others have proven themselves to be essential in day to day activities. From finding the best route to the kid's next soccer game to finding the nearest italian restaurant, seeing a neighborhood and all its areas (Using Google's StreetView) and feeling like you were there, right now the possibilities of these applications is endeless and the developers keep surprising us with their ideas all the time.

View exotic locales like Maui and Paris, as well as points of interest such as local restaurants, hospitals, and schools. These applications combine satellite imagery, and maps to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips. With Google Earth you can fly from space to your neighborhood, just type in an address and zoom right in, search for schools, parks, restaurants, and hotels. Get driving directions, tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings, save and share your searches and favorites and even add your own annotations.

These applications are not limited to your computer, you can access most of them from you celullar phone also, making it easy to get directions on the road. The benefits of these applications are great, but they also bring privacy concerns.

These privacy concerns are mostly raised because of the information and imagery displayed in these web applications. Google has been constantly sued since the release of Streetview due to the images it displays. These images include detailed pictures of surroundings of people homes, office building and sometimes embarassing moments that are captured by Google's cameras.

Personally I do beleive that the advantages that these web applications bring are great but some of the information displayed should be regulated. The information displayed in these applications could be potentially used by a would be predator, robber, murderer, etc in order to commit a crimes and plan their escape. It is also common for stalkers to use this information to verify where people live, where they work, etc.

This is why I beleive that although these applications are great, some sort of control needs to be put on the information that they are able to display.

Below is an image of the UMass Lowell Campus as seen from Google Earth.

Week 5 Assignment

2009-04-10T09:58:00.000-07:00

This is just a sample image uploaded to my blog :)

This is a sample video :)

And now comes the music :)

Future of the Internet

2009-03-04T18:53:00.000-08:00

Since the creation of the Internet, it has been changing constantly. The main focus and capitalization around it right now is advertising. All this advertising causes privacy issues as it becomes targeted to specific markets, households, individuals, etc. As of right now, Google is the biggest player in the search engine game. With over 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) web pages indexed and search algorithms that everybody else envies, they have mastered the search engine market.

Google is by far the biggest search engine on the internet with over 65% of the market. With new projects like Google Latitude and the Android mobile operating system Google has shown that it is always on the leading edge of technology and that it is not afraid to enter new types of markets.

My honest opinion is that Google needs no second act. The way they are going and all the different projects that they are developing, their act is a continuous work in progress which evolves at the pace that Googler's decide.

The major player that Google should be worried about is Microsoft. They are out to redeem their Live Search product which is still to prove itself. This is one of the main reasons it is beleived that Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo, it would be a very quick way to increase their Internet Search share and advertisement revenues.

Search engine companies have also started indexing the "Deep Web" which are web sites that had never been indexed before. This is being done, as always, to add more volume to their indexed sites and by that adding internet share percentage but most importantly to increase advertisement revenue which is the most important revenue for any search engine company.

If your intellectual property concerns you with all these changes, you are right to be worried. Some companies are trying to grab as much property as they can from their users. A very recent example of this is Facebook. Facebook's Terms Of Service was changed so they could basically do "Anything they wanted" with the content their users posted on their site. This outraged their users to the point that Facebook had to retract the changes to their TOS and now plans to run every futur change by their users before making it official.

Thankfully Facebook users noticed the change and were able to complaint before Facebook could benefit from their intellectual property. This is one of the reasons why Internet users should always be aware of the Terms Of Service for services that they sign up for.

Another issue is censorship on the internet. Many countries are now censoring what their citizens can and cannot see on the internet. These efforts were first started by China but now have been propagated to other countries such as Egypt. This "Internet Repression" is used to prevent free specch in countries and have more control of what their citizens can read from situations in other parts of the world. This is also expanding to limit the free speech of Bloggers in other parts of the world which makes it equally difficult to learn unaltered information about other countries.

Sources used for this post:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web#Future
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6724531.stm
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9838695-16.html
http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever

Cyber-Warfare in the 21st Century

2009-02-22T14:16:00.000-08:00

What have we learned about cyber-warefare? It is a very difficult task to prove who performed the attack. With cyber-warfare there are numerous ways to hide the attackers identity. This is mostly done by using botnet's of "zombie" computers distributed around the World. The owners of these computers have no idea that they are being used to attack web sites that they might never even visit. This is the most common and known way of cyber-warfare. Using these botnets the attackers can cause Distributed Denial of Service Attacks which can interrupt access to web sites and other services that rely on an internet connection. Attackers can also spoof IP addresses which hide the origin of the attack.

It is reported that China is at the forefront of cyber-warfare but McAffee reports that over 120 countries are studying different ways and techniques of cyber-warfare. This can be called virtual "arms race" in which the forerunners are China, Russia and the United States.
It is very important to be ready for cyber-warfare. Although cyber-warfare leaves no trace of physical damages (i.e. destroyed buildings, homes, etc), it can impact every aspect of our livelihood. This can be from such complicated systems as Air Travel to more simple things like Cable TV. It all depends on the purpose that the attackers have and most of the time it is to cause panic and chaos on their victims.

According to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal the US infrastructure is still vulnerable to cyber-warfare. As recently as in 2007 the US was a victim of cyber attacks that compromised computers located at the US Department of State and including the Secretary of Defense Robert Gate's email. The report states and I quote "A known vulnerability is America's power grid, which could be disrupted for months by a sophisticated cyber attack, experts say. In telecommunications, banking and transportation, it's harder to predict how great the damage would be."

One of the most recent events involving cyber-warfare was the Georgian-Russian conflict. Georgia has accused Russia of trying to disrupt communications of official web sites such as the Georgian Ministry of Defense web site among others. These attacks have been called a sort of "cybersiege" on the Georgian government. It is also beleived that the hackers used cloned web sites to replace the real Georgian web sites in order to obtain more information from people who accessed them regularly (i.e. government officials).

A recent Pentagon report states that China's PLA (People's Liberation Army) has stated that they are preparing to have "electronic dominance" over each of their global rivals by 2050. Their ambitions extend to crippling their enemy's financial, military and communications capabilities. The report also state that China has increased their Cyber attacks. It is also reported that China is winning the virtual "arms race". A US Congress panel reports "China is aggressively developing its power to wage cyber warfare and is now in a position to delay or disrupt the deployment of America's military forces around the world, potentially giving it the upper hand in any conflict".

The race online: Obama, rivals bring Internet campaigning to new level

2009-02-01T19:50:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama's ascendancy comes with a popular affirmation: "Yes we can." Maybe it should be "Yes we click," as his presidential campaign takes online politics to new levels.
Obama became the front-runner for the Democratic nomination this month after a string of primary and caucus victories, and his inspirational appeal and effective campaign organization are getting most of the credit for his stunning success.
But there is another major factor: smart use of new technology, from record-breaking fundraising to Facebook widgets attracting new supporters and mass texting to keep his backers connected.
While every candidate in this year's presidential contest has used the Internet far more effectively than anyone who ran in 2004, Obama is so far ahead of other candidates in Web traffic, social networking and user-generated video that he's in a class by himself.
"Barack Obama is successful because he is Barack Obama, and his message is spot-on with Democrats," said David All, a Republican strategist specializing in new media. "But he is leveraging that with the most effective, comprehensive online strategy of any campaign. He's using the tools that help you find and mobilize new voters."
Andrew Rasiej, a leading analyst of online politics, said the Obama campaign "has come the closest to achieving the Holy Grail of politics on the Internet - converting online enthusiasm to offline action."
Other candidates also have struck gold on the Web this election cycle: Obama's lone remaining Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, has mobilized an army of social-networking contacts into an outreach campaign of cell phone callers. Democrat John Edwards developed a fervent following in the liberal blogosphere, and was one of the first candidates to hire popular bloggers.
'Money bombs'
Republican Ron Paul's backers pioneered "money bombs," and set a one-day mark with a fundraising haul online of $6 million last year. Republican Mike Huckabee, on a shoestring budget, generated high Web traffic on his site by welcoming user-generated videos, many of them inspired by Huckabee's tongue-in-cheek Internet ad with Chuck Norris.
And John McCain, the likely GOP nominee who showed how online fundraising could fuel a campaign in 2000, has been a leader in search advertising. His campaign bought thousands of keywords on Google and Yahoo portals designed to lure users to McCain's Web site. Eric Frenchman, an Internet strategist for McCain, estimated the campaign brought in $3 to $4 for every $1 spent on search ads.
But the extent of Obama's online fundraising prowess - $28 million in January, with signs that total will be exceeded this month - has outstripped all competitors and stunned many political analysts. About 90 percent of that money came in donations of $100 or less, allowing donors to give again every few weeks - up to the limit of $2,300 each for the primary and general elections.
GOP strategist All said he knew Obama was onto something during a summer visit last year to a friend in Ohio who planned to contribute $10 or $15 a month to Obama. "That campaign understood ahead of everyone else that you don't need to rely on megabucks and bundlers, and I'm afraid some Republicans still don't get that," All said.
Obama's huge donor base, now approaching 1 million, allowed a long-shot campaign to grow into a national force, outspending Clinton in state after state. And it freed up Obama to campaign while Clinton had to spend time with fundraising events.
"This is a wonderful, new development," said Zephyr Teachout, a leader of the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, which raised a total of $27 million online over many months. "Instead of calling rich people for money, you can concentrate on your campaign."
The campaign invested early in Internet infrastructure, spending $2 million in 2007 on software and hardware. Some of Obama's new-media leaders, such as Joe Rospars, came from the Dean campaign and Blue State Digital, a consulting firm.
Tech-savvy backers
Steve Westly, a former eBay executive and California co-chair for Obama, said the campaign counted on tech-savvy supporters to "put together the very best online fundraising tools," which really kicked in as Obama gained momentum.
In California, the Obama campaign used the Web-management tools of Central Desktop to organize its field operation. But the Clinton campaign, using online networking and more traditional campaigning, relied on its army of cell phone users to make 2 million calls in the weekend before the primary. Clinton won California by 9 percentage points.
The Obama campaign has gone beyond fundraising in its use of other new technologies. The goal is to foster a community that does more than give money - writing e-mails and letters to superdelegates, attending house parties and other events, making phone calls and going door to door.
It helps that many supporters are younger voters who are digital natives. They helped make Obama speech clips and a "Yes We Can" music video as popular as Britney Spears on YouTube. Internet activists were also attracted to Obama's early support for the free use of video content such as TV networks' campaign debate clips.
"Friends" of Obama on Facebook get automatic news feeds from the campaign sent to their profiles, which are then seen by other friends. The campaign mass-texts news updates ("CNN just projected Obama wins Wisconsin") and reminders of where to vote in upcoming primaries.
"The use of texting is a big thing, a very effective way to communicate and give people a way to take action," said Julie Germany, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet.
A survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project last month found 27 percent of those under 30 had received campaign news through social-networking sites. Rasiej and All said many campaigns are just discovering the value of social networks.
"A primary means of political persuasion has always been people talking to each other - at the dinner table, over the water cooler," Rasiej said. "Now with these tools it's like having conversations on steroids."
Traffic leader
The Obama campaign Web site, www.barackobama.com, has attracted more traffic than others, according to several surveys, and makes an effort to keep supporters engaged.
Amy Fried, a political science professor at the University of Maine, conducted an experiment last year, signing up with the Obama and Clinton campaigns online. "There was a higher volume of messages from the Obama campaign, and they were doing more," Fried said.
That's a reflection of the Obama campaign's efforts at meshing online and offline activities. A quick survey by Micah Sifry, Rasiej's colleague at the techPresident Web site (www.techpresident.com), showed there were many more locally organized house parties and other events for Obama than the other two Democrats. One example from mid-January: 189 in San Francisco for Obama, 29 for Edwards and nine for Clinton.
Teachout, the Dean campaign veteran who has done some volunteer work for Obama, said Obama's organizers learned from both the Dean and the George W. Bush campaigns of 2004 about ways to use the Internet to supplement field organizations.
One Dean veteran who competed fiercely with the Obama campaign - Joe Trippi, chief strategist for Edwards - praised Obama for building the best Internet-driven, "bottom-up" campaign he has seen in politics.
"We were like the Wright Brothers (in 2004), a flimsy little thing with propellers," Trippi told a New Democrat Network gathering last week in Washington. "Just four years later, they're landing on the moon."

Hello everybody!

2009-02-01T18:01:00.001-08:00

This is my first blog post for my Exploring The Internet class. I will be updating my blog regularly :)