India Ranked Third on the List of Spam Spewing Nation in the World

India ranked third on list of countries which distribute spam all over the world, after US and China, as per the new report of SophosLabs. SophosLabs is the Sophos’s global network of threat analysis centres.

In the study, US was single highest ranking country, but Asia ranked at number 1 position in the list of the continents with 36.6 percent of overall spam of the world. US sent 18.3 percent of the junk emails overall in the world. In last few months of 2012, India topped the spam spewing nations’ list, but eventually fell back to the third position. Second position was held by China.

In the study, the spam sent from December 2012 to February 2013 was tracked. China and India took second and third positions respectively with 8.2 percent and 4.2 percent of the spam of the world.

Other countries which ranked high included South Korea, France, Italy and Peru. Peru was ranked at fourth position with 4.0 percent of the spam. With 3.4 percent each, France, South Korea and Italy ranked fifth. Russia and Taiwan shared eighth position with 2.9 percent. At tenth, eleventh and twelfth position were Spain (2.8 percent), Germany (2.7 percent) and Iran (2.6 percent).

In order to prevent spamming, the PC users can keep the anti-virus software updated and regularly run the malware checks. Apart from this, updating passwords regularly can also help.

Google fast replacing grandparents as 'advice guru'

Modern-day kids are increasingly turning to the Internet to solve queries about simple chores rather than seeking advice from their experienced grandparents, a new UK survey has claimed.

Older generations are being replaced by Google, Wikipedia and YouTube, with their grandchildren searching online to solve queries about basic chores, researchers found.

Less than one in four grandparents said they have been asked for advice on basic domestic chores such as washing clothes, learning to cook a family recipe or sewing a button.

Just a third of those surveyed said they had been asked "what was it like when you were young?".

Ninety-six per cent said they asked far more questions of their grandparents when they were young, The Telegraph reported.

The survey of 1,500 grandparents found that children are instead increasingly using the Internet to answer simple questions.

It found almost two thirds of grandparents feel their traditional role is becoming less and less important in modern family life.

"Grandparents believe they are being sidelined by Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and the huge resource of advice available on the internet," said Susan Fermor, of cleaning specialist Dr Beckmann, which commissioned the research.

"They are aware that their grandchildren already with their noses buried in a laptop, tablet computer or smartphone find it much easier to search the Internet for instant advice," Fermor said.

"Previous generations of grandparents haven't experienced this phenomena because the internet is still very much in its infancy and is less than a generation old in real terms," Fermor added.

Web observatory for cybergazing

Web Observatory is about how people use data and behave on the Web

How right is it to put your content on the Web behind paywalls when there is no fee for posting information on the Web? “Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s [inventor of the World Wide Web] thesis is Web has to be free… either everybody uses it or nobody uses it,” said Prof. Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of Physical and Applied Sciences at the University of Southampton. “Because the Web is free, people are using it.” Prof. Hall was recently in Chennai to attend the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference.

After all, the world would have been very different today had Sir. Berners-Lee tried making money out of the Web. “We can’t revisit his experiment. We can’t rerun it. But we can kill the way it works at the moment,” she said emphatically. After all, the Web can work efficiently only if many use it and in order to make that happen, it has to be given free.

She cites the example of the Times which went behind paywall in mid 2010. It does make money from the sizeable subscribers. But the consequence is that the number of people reading it is very limited. “The model is wrong,” Prof. Hall said. “It doesn’t mean there aren’t ways of making money.”

“To me, having a newspaper behind paywall is just nonsense,” she said. “Analytics is the answer to make money with news.” The trick is to track users who tweet news items that appear in the paper, and suddenly marketing goes global. “That’s what newspapers should be doing and not charge for access,” she added. And for that newspapers must be putting up their content for free.

In another context she noted how the Web started with no data and then how people and organisations posted their data. “That’s why people are so very important. It’s not just about technology.”

Prof. Hall must know best as she has been a part of the Web revolution. She was a member of the team that digitised photos, videos and audio content. She was at the centre of the multimedia and hypermedia revolution. She is also the President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the first person to become one outside North America.

One of her pet projects is the Web observatory. According to her, it is akin to astronomers looking at the sky to understand how the universe started and how the planets evolved. “The Web Observatory is a big analytics platform. It is not about data, but how people are using the data and behaving on the Web,” she explained.

“Our thesis is, in order to study the Web, you need to observe what happens on the Web. To do this one has to study it every day to understand the “dynamics of the Web and the interaction with technology, and what people do with it.” It is basically to do with analysing the data to find out how things evolve. The classic example is the twitter — on who is influencing who and how things evolve in the microblog.

“We have found some interesting similarities and differences of how twitter is evolving in different regions,” Prof. Hall revealed. “It reflects to some extent the culture.”

So when a major event — be it a disaster or an election — happens it is possible to track what the effect of that is. “We are really tracking how these events lead to behavioural changes,” she explained. “They are very long time studies.”

She is also encouraging researchers to deposit their data and not just papers. She does not mean sharing commercially confidential information or those that invade privacy issues.

She is well aware that it is so very difficult to keep information confidential in this digital age.

“It is so easy to identify each individual from a huge set of data. It is impossible to act under 100 per cent anonymity” she warns.

So she is encouraging the idea of sharing data under certain conditions. She is quite confident that companies and people who worry about privacy would join once the concept is worked out.

“It is going to change the world because we won’t be just publishing papers. We will publish the tools and software used for analysing the data,” she noted.

For the love of blogging

How a shared passion for blogging, Chennai and having fun brought together over a 100 people. CBC at their first anniversary get-together.

The Chennai Bloggers Club or CBC as it is fondly called by its members, is an online Facebook (closed and moderated) group for all bloggers with a Chennai connection and is probably the first of its kind in India. At a cozy meet organised by Indiblogger (an online community for all Indian bloggers) in November 2011, the idea for an exclusive group for Chennai bloggers was born.

Common platform:-

Charan Saravana, a professional photographer, was the one who proposed this idea. He says, “It started as an afterthought, post the Indiblogger meet at Hyatt. Indiblogger made people get into groups and talk on specific themes. That’s where we (a bunch of random unknowns and little-knowns) formed a ‘Vetti Group’. We set the ground rules as ‘no theme’ and one could talk on absolutely anything under the sun.

At the end of the day, we finished as one of the joyous groups of the entire lot.” He couldn’t wait for another Indiblogger meet and wanted to have a get together with the famous “Vetti Group”. He shared these thoughts with Gitanjali Naidu, who responded positively and created a Facebook group for Chennai bloggers. What began as a humble association of 10 to 15 people, now has about 155 members.

CBC is unlike other blogging groups on social media, where interactions equate to mere marketing of one ’s own blog. At CBC, every member cherishes a passion for the written word and discusses the blog posts of the other members in the group. Visiting each other’s blogs, commenting on their posts and encouraging new bloggers is the USP of the CBC community.

The discussions at CBC are varied and not restricted to blogging alone. Anything from the Kudankulam Nuclear Project to innovative ways of finding a boyfriend on social media goes. However, like most Facebook groups, the CBC has two administrators, Susan Deborah and Gitanjali Naidu who moderate the interactions at CBC and keep an eye out for any vulgarity or plagiarism.

CBC’s members include college students from various disciplines, engineers, media experts, professors/lecturers, doctors, entrepreneurs, photographers and food stylists among many others, all bound by a passion for blogging and the city.

CBC members also meet as many as four times during a year. The admins of CBC scout for a perfect place in the city and plan the meets in advance. There is a core committee too, which pitches in with innovative plans for every meet. The thrill of meeting old buddies and welcoming new ones into the CBC family over food and mocktails are typical elements of every CBC meet.

Sowmya Sarag, a Chartered Accountant and a new member at CBC, says, “With like-minded friendly, active and enthusiastic people around, there is a sense of belonging with the group.” Ask her about her first CBC Meet and she quickly responds, “I was new to the forum and I haven’t interacted with any, barring a few whom I knew already. I’m a reserved person until I’m comfortable with the people around and as such my expectation was just to meet people whose blogs I've read & to see how they are, nothing more. But in the CBC Anniversary meet, with warm and spontaneous people around, those three hours were awesome.”

Last November, CBC completed a year. To celebrate this milestone, a first anniversary meet was organised comprising 37 bloggers, some of whom met for the first time. The entire restaurant was filled with laughter and chatter, with the bloggers digesting a magnificent European cuisine and catching up with their online buddies. Needless to say, the meet was a huge success and was a memorable day to both veterans and newbies.

Recently, CBC initiated a Blog tag where more than 35 bloggers wrote on the topic, “What Chennai means to me,” day after day for a month and a half. A contest was also organised where many CBCians participated and won prizes which were sponsored by Cuponation, an online portal for shopping. CBC has many plans for the forthcoming years which include a workshop on Social Media, Food Photography and Styling, a blogging mentor programme for beginner bloggers in Chennai and so on. The group also plans to take the plunge into social activism through their leadership and mentoring.

CBC certainly bears testimony to the power of social media and exchange of ideas within a community. So if you are in Chennai and you have a blog, seek out The Chennai Bloggers Club on Facebook and send a request.