Web 're-defining' human identity says chief scientist

Social networks such as Facebook and on-line gaming are changing people's view of who they are and their place in the world, according to a report for the government's chief scientist.

The report, published by Prof Sir John Beddington, says that traditional ideas of identity will be less meaningful.

One consequence could be communities becoming less cohesive.
This change could be harnessed to bring positive changes or if ignored could fuel social exclusion, says the study.

"This can be a positive force, exemplified by the solidarity seen in the London 2012 Olympics or a destructive force, for example the 2011 riots," says the report.

"Due to the development of smart phones, social networks and the trend towards (greater) connectivity disparate groups can be more easily mobilised where their interests temporarily coincide."

"For example," it says, "a 'flash mob' can be mobilised between people who have not previously met".

The report, entitled "Future Identities," says that near continuous access to the internet, termed "hyper-connectivity", will drive profound changes to society over the next 10 years.
'Hyper-connectivity' Prof Beddington commissioned the study as part of the Government Office for Science's Foresight programme - the influential Foresight reports look ahead to highlight emerging trends in science and technology with a view to informing policies across government departments.

 

"The most dynamic trend (in determining identity) is hyper-connectivity," Prof Beddington told BBC News.

"The collection and use of data by government and the private sector, the balancing of individual rights and liberties against privacy and security and the issue of how to tackle social exclusion, will be affected by these trends," he said. "I hope the evidence in today's report will contribute to the policy making process."

This latest report on identity undertook 20 separate reviews in which leading UK and international experts assessed research in computer science, criminology and social sciences.

It states that the changing nature of identities will have substantial implications for what is meant by communities and by social integration. The study shows that traditional elements that shape a person's identity, such as their religion, ethnicity, job and age are less important than they once were.
Instead, particularly among younger people, their view of themselves is shaped increasingly by on-line interactions of social networks and on online role playing games.

The study found that far from creating superficial or fantasy identities that some critics suggest, in many cases it allowed people to escape the preconceptions of those immediately around them and find their "true" identity. This is especially true of disabled people who told researchers that online gaming enabled them to socialise on an equal footing with others.

  Social networks also helped people organise during riots in 2011

 

"The internet can allow many people to realise their identities more fully, " the authors write. "Some people who have been shy or lonely or feel less attractive discover they can socialise more successfully and express themselves more freely online".

The report points out that in 2011, 60% of internet users were members of a social network site, a huge surge in usage, up 43% from 2007. Consequently, it says that there may greater political activism using these networks as was seen in the revolution in Tunisia and the mobilisation of dissent in Egypt and Libya.

There will also be a blurring of work and social identities as photos and details of people's personal lives become increasingly public on social networking sites. The report cites a hypothetical example of how a young person was denied promotion because her employer found drunken photos of her from her university days.

The report says that as the distinction between online and real world identities diminishes criminals are likely to try and exploit the many new forms of interlinked data relating people's identities and from social media and professional and financial websites in order to steal identities.

Read the full story here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21084945 or contact the IT Support Specialist at Click Networks with any questions about anything you have read here. Please visit our website: http://www.clicknetworks.co.uk

Facebook Launch Rival to Google Search

Social-media giant wants new tool to keep users on site and grab a slice of sizeable advertising revenue tied to search.

Facebook wants each journey on the web to begin and end on its site. Its first significant move into search is designed to provide all the answers to users' questions: which of my friends like Rihanna? How many of my friends speak German? Which TV shows are my colleagues watching?

Graph Search, which was announced by Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, is a clear statement of intent. It is designed for the age of the social web, when internet users spend more time on Facebook or Twitter than they do searching the outside web.

How does it work? Users can search their friends, based on the information they have given Facebook permission to publish. For example, users will be able to quickly find "photos of my friends taken in Paris, France" or "Restaurants liked by friends in London".

Zuckerberg described Graph Search, in typical start-up fashion, as the "beta of version one". But he also described it as the "third pillar" of Facebook, after the news feed and timeline. He later said Graph Search could be a business in its own right – a remark that will prompt anxiety among Google executives.

The announcement – the first since Facebook's disastrous initial public offering in May last year – was strategically timed, ahead of its fourth-quarter earnings call on 30 January. Facebook has already succeeded in lifting its share price above $30. The announcement of Graph Search also comes as Facebook faces questions about whether its growth to 1bn users is petering out. Facebook's UK user total dropped by 600,000 in December, according to data from SocialBakers, a social-media monitoring company.

Nate Elliot, a social-media analyst at Forrester Research, said the graph search announcement was part of Facebook's ambition to keep users coming back to its site.

"Facebook's worst nightmare is a static social graph," he said. "If users aren't adding very many new friends or connections, then their personal network becomes less and less active over time. Terrifyingly for Facebook, that threat is very real. We haven't seen significant growth in the average number of friends per user recently.

"Graph Search seems designed to encourage users to add more friends more quickly. If it means users' personal networks change more frequently, and become more active, then that keeps them coming back to the site – which is vital to Facebook's success. If Facebook and Bing can bring elements of Graph Search to Facebook's web search tool, then that's great. But it's not the point; the point is to keep Facebook users more active within the site."

Facebook was quick to rebut many of the privacy questions that it expects to be raised about Graph Search, which essentially helps to surface photographs or other data which before may have been buried. Graph Search does not make public any information that was not previously public, so users need not rush to change their privacy settings. But some users may be surprised to be presented with photos that they did not know they had been tagged in.

Zuckerberg, a man whose past tangles with privacy still make him visibly nervous on stage, spent longer talking about privacy safeguards than at any other Facebook announcement I have seen. That may be a symptom of Facebook becoming a public company, or it could simply be a sign that it is simply growing up.

Whatever the cause, the prize for getting graph search right first time is very real: search makes up the largest portion of digital advertising spending in the US, up from $15.1bn in 2011 to $17.58bn in 2012. And which company commands 74.5% of that $17.58bn ad spend? Google.

Read the full article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/15/facebook-graph-search-google-user-decline or contact the IT Support Experts at Click Networks today, visit our website: http://www.clicknetworks.co.uk/  

Whats new from Click Networks in 2013

Happy New Year from everyone at Click Networks
New for 2013 - Professional IT Support without hidden costs

Why choose Click Networks to support your IT
Quite simply, we have been around long enough to understand what our clients want and what they expect to pay for. Therefore we have listened and are proud to be different from most other IT companies.

It is very common practice in our industry for most IT companies to charge anything from £95- £115 per hr to install a single PC, Printer or even a smartphone!!

Click Networks do not charge our managed service clients for installing new Printers, PC's, or even migrating data from their old PC's to the new ones. This could save you £100's each time you add or replace some PC's.

We even offer our managed service clients a free configuration service to set up their Smartphones, Ipad's Tablets and similar devices. This costs us time and money, but we believe it demonstrates our total commitment to providing a unique managed IT Service.

If you want to save money in 2013 with your IT Support and associated services, call our sales team today on 0141 530 9116 and see how much we could save you.

Google aims to lure '90% of Microsoft Office users'

Google is looking to lure 90 per cent of all Microsoft Office users to its Google Docs offering.
In an interview with AllThingsD, Google vice president and head of enterprise, Amit Singh (pictured), said that Google will step up its pursuit of business users.

"Our goal is to get to the 90 per cent of users who don't need to have the most advanced features of Office," he said.

The remaining 10 per cent of "advanced" users will continue to use the desktop version, he suggested.
Singh went on to explain that although Google Docs already coexists with Microsoft Office, the company is working hard to improve integration.

"In Q3, if you import from Excel into Sheets, you won't be able to tell the difference in Sheets. We know the gaps between our features and [Microsoft's]. We're improving them week by week," he explained.

Singh claimed that Microsoft's approach to its cloud offering was to increase the cost to its customers. He also claimed that Microsoft's overall market share had declined.

"Enterprise is the place where they are holding on. People are showing up at the office and bringing their own devices and expecting their employers to support them. And with Windows RT, there is no backward compatibility with all the apps. That's the first time that has happened in Windows. The Windows 8 move, they have done what they need to do, but it's fairly disruptive. SkyDrive is coming. SharePoint needs to integrate with Yammer. So, change is coming whether you like it or not," he said.
Google's rivalry with Microsoft in this area ramped up in 2012, with both vying for enterprise customers with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings in Compute Engine and Azure. Google had introduced Drive to enable users to store documents in the cloud and in response, Microsoft launched a similar service dubbed SkyDrive.

In late September, Google said that it would stop allowing users to save and export Google Docs files created using older 1997 to 2003 Microsoft Office formats from October 2012.

But due to a backlash, it subsequently gave users until 31 January 2013 to make the transition.
Google then announced that Google Apps, which includes Docs, would no longer be offered free to enterprise users. This suggested that users would have to make a choice between paying for either Microsoft Office or Google Apps.

Most recently, Google revealed that it had no plans to develop dedicated apps for Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 for its business products such as Gmail or Drive – even though the firm remains committed to improving and updating its iOS products.

Read more: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2233437/google-aims-to-lure-90-per-cent-of-microsoft-office-users#ixzz2HHK5JP6g
Computing - Insight for IT leaders

How hackers exploit social media

The phenomenon of "social engineering" is behind the vast majority of successful hacking.

This isn't the high tech wizardry of Hollywood but is a good, old-fashioned confidence trick.
It's been updated for the modern age, and although modern terms such as "phishing" and "smishing" are used to describe the specific tricks used, they all rely upon a set of human characteristics which, with due respect to Hieronymus Bosch, you might picture as the "seven deadly sins" of social engineering.

Apathy:

To fall for a confidence trick, or worse, we assume others "must" have taken the necessary steps to keep us secure.

Sadly this leads to a lack of awareness, and in the world of the hacker that is fatal. When we stay in a hotel and we programme our random number into the room safe to keep our belongings secure, how many of us check to see if the manufacturers override code has been left in the safe?
It's nearly always 0000 or 1234 so try it next time.

Curiosity:

Humans are curious by nature. However, naive and uninformed curiosity has caused many casualties. Criminals know we're curious and they will try to lure us in. If we see an unfamiliar door appear in a building we frequent, we all wonder where it leads. 

We might be tempted to open it and find out, but in the online world that might just be a trap waiting for an innocent user to spring it. A colleague built a website that contained a button that said Do Not Press, and was astonished to find that the majority of people actually pressed it.
Be curious, but exercise a healthy degree of suspicion.

Gullibility: It is often thought of as a derogatory term, but we all suffer from this sin. We make assumptions.
We take others at face value, especially outside of our areas of expertise. Put a uniform on someone and we assume they have authority.

Give an email an official appearance by using the correct logo and apparently coming from the correct email address, and we might just assume it's real, regardless of how silly its instructions might be.

All of this can be easily forged online, so make no assumptions.

Courtesy: We quite rightly all teach our children to be polite. However, politeness does not mean you should not discriminate.

If you do not know something, or you feel something doesn't feel quite right, ask. This principle is truer than ever in the online world, where we are asked to interact with people and systems in ways with which we are quite unfamiliar.

If someone phones you out of the blue and says they are from your bank do you believe them?

No. Phone them back. 

And by the way, use a mobile phone as landlines can remain connected to the person who made the call in the first place and so whilst you might think you're phoning the bank on a valid number you're just talking to the person who called you.

Greed: Despite what we'd like to think we are all susceptible to greed even though it might not feel like greed.

Since its inception, the very culture of the web has been to share items for free.
Initially this was academic research, but as the internet was commercialised in the mid-1990s, we were left with the impression that we could still find something for nothing.

Nothing is ever truly free online. You have to remember that if you're not the paying customer, you're very likely to be the product. In the worst case, you might find that you have taken something onto your machine that is far from what you bargained for.

Many pieces of malware are actively downloaded by owners unaware that the "free" product contains a nasty payload, even if it also appears to do what you expected of it.
 
Diffidence:
People are reluctant to ask strangers for ID, and in the online world it is more important than ever to establish the credentials of those whom you entrust with your sensitive information.

Do not let circumstances lead you to make assumptions about ID.
For example, if someone from "IT support" calls you and asks for your password so they can help fix your problem, how do you know they haven't called everyone else in the building first until they found you who has really got a problem?

This is a well-known attack. If someone has a problem with proving who they are, you should immediately be suspicious.

Thoughtlessness:
 Thinking before you act is possibly the most effective means of protecting yourself online. It is all too easy to click that link.
Stop.

How many of us when reading an apparently valid link in an email would bother to check whether the link is actually valid or whether instead it takes you to a malicious site.
It's horribly easy to make links look valid so try hovering your cursor over the link for a few seconds before clicking to see what the real link is: the true link pops up if you give it a moment.
As cynical as it may sound, the only answer is to practise your A-B-C:

• Assume nothing
• Believe no one
• Check everything

With more Christmas shopping expected to be done online this year than ever before, you should watch out for those that would exploit the deadly sins.
Don't give criminals the chance to ruin your holiday season, and remember that a little bit of paranoia goes a long way online.

View the whole story here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20717773

For more information about staying safe online contact the IT support experts at Click Networks today on 0141 530 9116 or email us at info@clicknetworks.co.uk today!

What tablet to buy this Christmas?

We start with Microsofts Surface’s 1366 x 768, 10.6in IPS LCD screen which may only boast a pixel density of 148dpi but its 16:9 aspect ratio is shared with most laptops and TVs so you feel right at home from the off. This is a tablet that unashamedly delivers a PC experience, which I take to be A Good Thing. With an Nvidia Tegra 3 under the bonnet, a choice of clever attachable keyboards-cum-covers, a built-in kickstand, a proper USB port and an SD slot good for cards up to 64GB, it’s a device both powerful and versatile.

And don’t forget, the Surface comes with Microsoft Office pre-loaded. That’s the sort of productivity offering you just don’t get with Android or iOS.

On the downside, at £400 it’s not cheap; the OS takes up a huge chunk of the advertised storage space; both the Touch and Type keyboards are optional extras; there’s no GPS; and the Windows RT app store is close to empty at the moment.

Even the most devout fan of Android would have to concede that it has failed to repeat its smartphone success in the tablet arena but in the second half of the year Google came out swinging to try and fix that.

In the summer, it launched a Tegra 3-based 7in, 1280 x 800 tablet at a staggeringly low price. The Google Nexus 7 immediately won friends thanks to it’s powerful quad-core processor, excellent IPS LCD screen and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS, which debuted on the new tablet.

Just last month, the 16GB version dropped to £159 replacing the 8GB model yours truly bought, while a 32GB 3G device was also introduced at a very reasonable £239. The price changes have made something that was already very attractive even more so.

Being a Nexus 7 owner I’ll admit to a bit of bias here, but for gaming, e-book reading, web browsing, watching HD video - the stuff most of us do on our tablets most of the time - the Nexus 7 is hard if not impossible to beat.

How to trump that? Easy. Launch a 10in version with a screamingly fast dual-core Cortex A15 chip, a higher than hi-def screen and charge £319 for the 16GB version. That would be the Samsung-made Google Nexus 10 then.

The standout feature of the Nexus 10 is the 2560 x 1600, 300dpi screen, which clobbers even the “retina” 264dpi Apple iPad 4 in the pixel density stakes. I defy anyone to gaze at the Nexus 10’s screen, or listen to the sound from its front-facing stereo speakers, and not be thoroughly impressed.

It’s lighter and thinner than the iPad 4 too and more pleasant to hold thanks to it’s rounded shape. Probably harder to sue, too, for that same reason. If you want a 10in tablet for media consumption, this is the one you should buy.

Both Nexus tablets offer one sign-in syncing for your Picasa photographs, Google-bought books and movies, Google Docs and Drive content. This is cloud integration second to none. And don’t forget that Google Music has now arrived in the UK so you can upload 20,000 songs into the cloud too. And all for free.

For more information on any of the tablets mentioned in the article please contact our IT experts either call us on 0141 530 9116 or email at info@clicknetworks.co.uk for more IT support in or around Glasgow.

Read the full article here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/

Don't struggle to remember passwords!

Should you be secure and use lots of different passwords? Or is it more convenient and easy to remember just one or two?

Almost everything online needs a password these days: shop accounts social networking sites, university and email logins, banks, credit cards, insurance, savings and more. I don’t know about you – but I suspect I’ve over 50 different accounts and all the passwords for these need remembering somehow – and unless you’re a memory maestro that’s impossible.
Yet not doing it is a nightmare too – we’re constantly nagged to use different passwords. Those who chose convenience and used the same password for their PlayStation Network account as for their bank or other secure code, now know why it’s so important to use different passwords. They need to immediately change the password on their other accounts otherwise the criminal hackers may well have enough of their ID to utilise it (see PlayStation hack news for more on self-protection).

How to marry security and convenience.
Over the years I’ve developed my own personal system for keeping an easy but secure track of my passwords. I’m not saying it’s perfect I just thought it worth jotting down. I’m sure many others do similar things in parallel and I’d love to know your systems. 
I’ve described similar principles to what I do below, though with some details and techniques changed slightly for my own security. It may seem a little complex but actually as it’s developed organically over the years, it’s become an easy natural progression, though I accept it’d be more difficult to do it all in one go.

• Step 1: Establish a number of key words. 
  
  Pick words that mean something to you but aren’t obvious or guessable like relative’s names. The easy way to do this is to start with one or two, then once those are firmly embedded add more. But for the moment let’s say they’re established.  They should all start with different letters, for the sake of the example we’ll say they are:
  Random
  Spank
  Widget
  Acne

• Step 2: Establish a few key numbers.
  
  Try not to have obvious dates such as your date of birth – though something like 1874 (Churchill’s birth year) is fine. So here you have: 1874
  5012
  0191

• Step 3: Create passwords using a combination of both. 
  
  Use the words or numbers forwards or backwards, capitalised or not capitalised. This gives you a very large number of available different passwords even though you only need to remember a few words and numbers. For example: – Spank0191
  – 1874Widget
  – 2105acne
  – modnar5012
  – Random18

• Step 4: Note the password down IN CODE somewhere safe and convenient.
  
  Now just store the password safely in code somewhere in case it’s ever needed – never write the full words or numbers down anywhere, you need to remember those yourself. For example, the above passwords could be stored as… -S0  (ie, the word beginning with S then the numbers beginning with 0)
  -1W
  -Rev5 a  (ie, the numbers beginning with 5 in reverse, then the word beginning with a – but not capitalised)
  -Revr 5
  -R half 1 (ie, word beginning with R then half the numbers beginning with 1)

That’s my way. An alternative is to simply create yourself a grid for each password such as:
A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O…..ETC
3  D  A  F  U 2   1  P  R A  V 9  C   I   F
Here you remember just one key word, for example FAKE and you use that to look up the numbers in the password grid – here you’ll see its 23VU. 
To set this up initially you just need to write the alphabet out then put the code in under your key word and fill in the others with random letters.
This is a bit chunky to do, but it does mean you only need to remember one password to get encoded access to all the others. It’s probably most useful as a way of writing down pin numbers rather than passwords though.
OK those are some techniques, what are your tips? Ensure you don’t compromise your security in your response.

For more information on passwords or how to password protect your business and information contact the experts at Click Networks IT Support Team Glasgow on 0141 530 9116 or visit the website here: http://www.clicknetworks.co.uk/ 

To read the full article please visit: http://blog.moneysavingexpert.com