Silencios cubanos/ Leonardo Padura

El Nuevo Dia.com/

evidenciascubanas.blogspot.com

Por la llamada “intranet” cubana, compuesta por varios sitios y un sistema que da acceso de correo electrónico sin comunicación a Internet, han circulado en las últimas semanas la caricatura del hombre que se presenta en las oficinas de inmigración pretendiendo que le validen el pasaporte para viajar “por la libre” al extranjero. Pero el cubano de la caricatura no conseguirá su propósito pues, en realidad, ha sido víctima de la suma de una esperanza y de una confusión: la esperanza de que la anunciada reforma de la ley migratoria cubana al fin había sido ejecutada, como varias veces lo ha anunciado el gobierno de la isla, y la confusión de la palabra “sal” (el común cloruro sódico) con la acción de “salir”…

Como parte de la llamada “actualización del modelo económico cubano” emprendido por el actual gobierno presidido por Raúl Castro, se ha contemplado la probabilidad de una “flexibilización” de las condiciones que se le exigen a la mayoría de los cubanos para viajar. Aunque la flexibilización ha sido anunciada como una modificación “con reservas”, es decir, cambios parciales y no totales, lo cual equivaldrá (supongo) a ciudadanos que sí podrán viajar y otros que no, su puesta en práctica se ha visto dilatada.

Un reflejo de esa preocupación por migrar ha sido también el grupo de cartas circuladas por esa misma “intranet”, a partir de la que escribiera el director de una importante revista socio-cultural a un hipotético pero muy abundante joven cubano que quiere emigrar, la cual ha sido respondida por cartas de jóvenes concretos que han emigrado, que quieren emigrar y hasta que no quieren emigrar, en las que estos miembros de las más recientes generaciones exponen los diversos argumentos e inconformidades que los han llevado, los llevarán o pudieran llevarlos a abandonar el país.

El hecho de que la circulación de estas cartas y caricaturas se produzca por la “intranet” cubana sigue siendo el resultado de la dificultad o imposibilidad que representa para la mayoría de los habitantes del país el acceso a Internet.

Lo complicado en la situación actual es que se supone que desde hace meses debería estar operativo el cable de fibra óptica tendido desde Venezuela hasta Cuba, el cual multiplicaría por varios miles la capacidad y velocidad de las conexiones a la red. Pero del estado de ese cable, o de la decisión gubernamental de cómo será o sería su utilización, tampoco se ha comentado nada en los medios oficiales. Como si el cable, más que tendido en el mar, hubiese sido devorado por el mar.

Mientras, a propósito de la nueva ley de aduanas, vigente desde el pasado 3 de septiembre, que limita o encarece la capacidad de importación de los viajeros o de los bultos enviados por mensajería desde el extranjero, tampoco se ha hablado demasiado, a no ser para comentar que las nuevas medidas agilizarán los trámites aduaneros.

Sin embargo, muchas personas consideran que la ley los afectará de muy concretas maneras, pues casi todo lo que antes importaban a precios más bajos, ahora se encarecerá cuando tenga que ser pagado en moneda fuerte, es decir, una moneda a la cual tiene muy difícil o ningún acceso la mayor parte de la población de un país en donde el salario promedio es de 440 pesos (unos 16 euros) y el kilogramo de lo importado o recibido por encima de las cotas ahora establecidas, puede ser cobrado a 9 euros el kilo.

Igual silencio ronda alrededor de la nueva ley tributaria aprobada por el parlamento cubano hace unos dos meses y de la cual ni siquiera los funcionarios de las oficinas tributarias tienen una idea clara de su contenido, pues ha sido ratificada pero aun no publicada.

No es casual, en este ambiente de silencios oficiales con respecto a leyes, medidas, inversiones que afectan a la mayoría de la población cubana y de las cuales solo nos llegan rumores, que un sociólogo del país haya puesto a circular por esa misma “intranet” un comentario en que él califica a la prensa oficial de la isla de deficiente, esquemática, secretista e insípida (en lo cual coincide con un juicio emitido por el mismo presidente Raúl Castro).

Lo curioso es que por esa misma vía digital local, otras voces se alcen para considerar que quienes escriben sobre los problemas del país, le hacen el juego al “enemigo”. Esta reivindicación de la actitud de trincheras y el lenguaje de guerra, que llega a la acusación de mercenarismo, procura descalificar cualquier inconformidad por parte de quienes (a mi juicio) tienen el derecho, cuando menos, de sentirse inconformes, y, si pueden, expresar mínimamente los motivos de su insatisfacción con los modos en que se aplican (o no se aplican, o se dilatan) las reglas de juego con que debemos convivir todos los que, por la razón que fuere, hemos decidido “no emigrar” y pensamos que deberíamos tener derecho a estar mejor informados sobre lo que mucho nos concierne… Aunque sea por la “intranet”.

Cryptoparty: privacy goes viral

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Don Tapscott on The Theory of Wikinomics: Rethinking Civilization for an Age of Networked Intelligence

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Just Be Evil: The unauthorized history of Google

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Twitter CEO: Don't Worry About Our Business

ForaTv

‘Big data’ from social media, elsewhere online redefines trend-watching

WP/ By Ariana Eunjung Cha

From a trading desk in London, Paul Hawtin monitors the fire hose of more than 340 million Twitter posts flying around the world each day to try to assess the collective mood of the populace.

The computer program he uses generates a global sentiment score from 1 to 50 based on how pessimistic or optimistic people seem to be from their online conversations. Hawtin, chief executive of Derwent Capital Markets, buys and trades millions of dollars of stocks for private investors based on that number: When everyone appears happy, he generally buys. When anxiety runs high, he sells short. 

Hawtin has seen a gain of more than 7 percent in the first quarter of this year, and his method shows the advantage individuals, companies and governments are gaining as they take hold of the unprecedented amount of data online. Traders such as Hawtin say analyzing mathematical trends on the Web delivers insights and news faster than traditional investment approaches.

The explosion in the use of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other services has resulted in the generation of some 2.5 quintillion bytes each day, according to IBM.

“Big data,” as it has been dubbed by researchers, has become so valuable that the World Economic Forum, in a report published last year, deemed it a new class of economic asset, like oil.

“Business boundaries are being redrawn,” the report said. Companies with the ability to mine the data are becoming the most powerful, it added.

While the human brain cannot comprehend that much information at once, advances in computer power and analytics have made it possible for machines to tease out patterns in topics of conversation, calling habits, purchasing trends, use of language, popularity of sports, spread of disease and other expressions of daily life.

“This is changing the world in a big way. It enables us to watch changes in society in real time and make decisions in a way we haven’t been able to ever before,” said Gary King, a social science professor at Harvard University and a co-founder of Crimson Hexagon, a data analysis firm based in Boston.

The Obama campaign employs rows of people manning computers that monitor Twitter sentiment about the candidates in key states. Google scientists are working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track the spread of flu around the world by analyzing what people are typing in to search. And the United Nations is measuring inflation through computers that analyze the price of bread advertised in online supermarkets across Latin America.

Many questions about big data remain unanswered. Concerns are being raised about personal privacy and how consumers can ensure that their information is being used fairly. Some worry that savvy technologists could use Twitter or Google to create false trends and manipulate markets.

Even so, sociologists, software engineers, economists, policy analysts and others in nearly every field are jumping into the fray. And nowhere has big data been as transformative as it has been in finance. More >>

The third industrial revolution begins: 3D printers

EconomistMagazine

In Cuba , mystery shrouds fate of Internet cable

HAVANA –  It was all sunshine, smiles and celebratory speeches as officials marked the arrival of an undersea fiber-optic cable they promised would end Cuba's Internet isolation and boost web capacity 3,000-fold. Even a retired Fidel Castro had hailed the dawn of a new cyber-age on the island.

More than a year after the February 2011 ceremony on Siboney Beach in eastern Cuba, and 10 months after the system was supposed to have gone online, the government never mentions the cable anymore, and Internet here remains the slowest in the hemisphere. People talk quietly about embezzlement torpedoing the project and the arrest of more than a half-dozen senior telecom officials.

Perhaps most maddening, nobody has explained what happened to the much-ballyhooed $70 million project.

"They did some photo-op ... and then that scandal came out, and then it just disappeared from human consciousness," said Larry Press, a professor of information systems at California State University, Dominguez Hills, who studies Cuba, referring to foreign media reports and whispers by diplomats that several executives at state phone company Etecsa and the two senior officials in the Telecommunications Ministry were arrested last year.

The cable was strung from Venezuela with the help of key ally Hugo Chavez. Government officials said from the start that the bandwidth boon would be prioritized for hospitals, universities and other usage deemed in service of the common good; the legions of Cubans with little or no access to the Internet from their homes would have to wait.

But a dozen employees of public institutions interviewed by The Associated Press said they have seen no noticeable improvement in their work connections. If anything, they say, download speeds have even gotten a little slower.

Going online in Cuba will try the patience of anyone who's ever had a taste of high-speed DSL connections.

The problem is that connection speeds here are still Web 1.0, while the world has moved on to fancier, bandwidth-hogging platforms like Flash. YouTube is irrelevant on Cuban dial-up, and barely useable on the rare broadband connections. Want to watch the latest episode of "Mad Men?" At 3-5 kilobytes-per-second dial-up transfer speeds, a 500-megabyte video file would theoretically take somewhere between 28 and 46 hours to download from iTunes.

Artists and photographers say it's nearly impossible to view others' work online. People swap digital pictures in person on memory sticks rather than simply sending them as email attachments. Students have difficulty accessing research databases.

One doctor in Havana said she only has access to Cuba's domestic intranet, a bare-bones internal network of island-hosted sites that also lets users get email. Moreover, her institution recently began cracking down on the few who do have full Internet access, ordering them not to use sites like Facebook under threat of punishment.

"I had high hopes, great expectations for the cable. ... For me, doing a postgraduate degree, (the intranet) is no good. It's too basic and poor for our needs," she said. "They haven't given us any explanation."

She and the others spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of getting into trouble with their state employers.

Multiple attempts to get Cuban and Venezuelan government officials to comment were unsuccessful.

The Venezuela branch of Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent, which was contracted to lay the cable, referred questions to the Cuban-Venezuelan joint venture Telecomunicaciones Gran Caribe, where an official said he would need approval from Venezuela's science and technology ministry to talk about the project. The ministry did not respond to requests to interview officials.

Diplomats in Havana privately tell consistent stories of reported corner-cutting on the project that let corrupt officials skim millions of dollars from its budget.

A senior French official told AP that Alcatel had upheld its part of the contract and whatever problems exist must be on land with the network it was meant to be attached to.

"The cable must be connected to something or it won't work," said the official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the politically sensitive project.

The lack of transparency is not unusual for Cuba, where all media is state-run and tightly controlled. But it flies in the face of Fidel Castro's own enthusiastic words about the cable and the transformational power of the Internet.

"Secrets are over. ... We are facing the most powerful weapon that has ever existed, which is communication," Castro told Mexican daily La Jornada in an August 2010 interview in which he hailed the coming cable.

While some hold out hope that faster Internet has merely been delayed, others interpret the government's long silence as a sign Cuba's broadband dreams will be the latest grand pronouncement to end in disappointment.

"I have no expectations for the cable," said Marlene Blanco, a 25-year-old independent worker. "Nothing is going to change for ordinary Cubans. So why talk about it?"

According to government statistics, 16 percent of islanders were online in some capacity in 2011, mostly through work or school, and often just to the intranet. The National Statistics Office said last year that just 2.9 percent reported having direct Internet access, though outside experts estimate the real figure is likely 5 to 10 percent accounting for black market sales of dial-up minutes. For a variety of reasons including the 50-year-old U.S. economic embargo, Cuba is the last country in the Western Hemisphere to get a fiber-optic connection to the outside world, and has relied instead on costly and slow satellite linkups.

Some speculate that the Internet-fueled Arab Spring revolts, which began months before the cable's arrival in Cuba, could have altered the government's plan or at least made officials rethink the wisdom of making it widely available.

"They're afraid of it. They don't want a 'Cuban Spring,' so to speak," Press said.

President Raul Castro's administration has warned of a supposed plot by enemies in the United States to wage a "cyberwar" to destabilize the Communist-run government. In 2011, a Cuban court sentenced U.S. subcontractor Alan Gross to 15 years after convicting him of crimes against the state for importing restricted communications equipment that he insists was only meant to help the island's Jewish community gain better Internet access.

The official silence over the fiber-optic cable has given rise to other rumors: that the cable is operational but being used selectively. A pro-government blogger known as Yohandry Fontana wrote at the end of 2011 that people who attended a closed forum on social networks reported it was working fine.

"Here's a brief summary: 1. The cable has no problem, it is working. 2. Public Internet spaces will open on the island. 3. Costs for public connection will go down. Note: I am seeking more information," Fontana said.

Cuban-born economist Arturo Lopez-Levy said Havana has badly bungled the whole affair, and if it's true that corruption killed the cable, officials should "make heads roll over the scandal" and give an open accounting of what went wrong.

"The Cuban government failure to achieve this goal is one of the worst-managed situations," said Lopez-Levy, a lecturer at the University of Denver, "aggravated by an even worse public relations fiasco to address it."

___

Associated Press writers Peter Orsi, Paul Haven and Anne-Marie Garcia in Havana contributed to this report.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/05/21/in-cuba-mystery-shrouds-fate-internet-cable/#ixzz1vXcaQjKX

Web of Hate [Documentary]

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In February 2012, Melbourne schoolgirl Catherine Bernard took her life, after suffering depression and falling prey to cyber-bullying. Catherine is not the first victim. According to a recent global poll, Australia rates number one in the world for bullying on social networks like Facebook, with nine in 10 families reporting a child’s brush with bullies online.

The surge in cyber-bullying takes harassment from the playground directly into victims’ bedrooms, becoming an incessant and ongoing form of public humiliation that for victims seems impossible to escape.

 

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Anonymous attacks 'alarming,' says security adviser

Michael Isikoff , NBC News/

The  vigilante group known as  Anonymous has claimed credit for yet another of its weekly cyber  attacks, fueling high level concerns among U.S. national security officials that the so-called “hackivists” are posing an increasing threat to government and private sector websites and computer systems.

“What we’ve seen from Anonymous is alarming,” Michael Leiter, the former director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center and a member of a US. Government advisory board on cybersecurity, said in an interview. “Their  ability to repeatedly take down government websites and potentially penetrate those websites shows that the group is quite committed — and growing in its ability to perpetrate cyber attacks.”

In keeping with its pledge to launch cyber attacks every Friday, hackers associated with Anonymous today took credit for defacing a website associated with InfraGard, an organization that partners with the FBI to share information about potential cybersecurity threats.

“We broke into their webserver, perused their assorted presentation materials, and finally deleted everything and vandalized their website,” according to a statement posted on the Ohio chapter of InfraGard. The group describes itself as an association of businesses, academic institutions and law enforcement agencies that shares intelligence “to prevent hostile acts against the United States.” The hackers in their statement called InfraGard  a “sinister alliance between law enforcement, corporations, and white hat wannabees.” (InfraGard did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.)

The attack is the latest in a series of weekly strikes  that appear to have confounded U.S.  cyber security officials and prompted an ever expanding probe by the FBI. These have included temporarily shutting down the CIA’s public web site, penetrating a transatlantic FBI conference call with Scotland Yard about ongoing  investigations into hackers, taking down  the Federal Trade Commission’s website and penetrating the computers of a Washingto area law firm and dumping thousands of its private emails — including some with members of Congress onto the Internet.

In a statement last week, hackers calling themselves AntiSec — an Anonymous affiliate — vowed to  keep up the strikes. “Yes, each and every Friday, we will be launching attacks ... with the specific purpose of wiping as many corrupt corporate and government systems off our Internet,” the group stated.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, recently privately warned White House officials that Anonymous hackers could have the ability to cause a limited power outage within the two years through a cyber attack on the U.S. electrical grid. The warnings were reportedly conveyed in a meeting chaired by John Brennan, President Obama’s chief homeland security advisor. (A White House spokeswoman said in an email  she could not discuss “interagency deliberations” but that the “the Administration has made cybersecurity a top priority and we are working tirelessly to protect ourselves from the threats we face.”) More >>

Post-WikiLeaks Network Monitoring Takes Shape

Secrecy News/ by Steven Aftergood

The heightened surveillance of classified government information networks that was a predictable response to the unauthorized disclosures published by WikiLeaks is becoming more clearly discernible.

“USSTRATCOM/USCYBERCOM is monitoring use of the SIPRNet and now has a mechanism for reporting certain anomalous behaviors for appropriate remediation,” said Thomas A. Ferguson, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Intelligence) and Teresa Takai, DoD Chief Information Officer.

“We have established the first formal security oversight and assessment program to determine levels of compliance” with rules of access to classified networks,” they said in response to questions for the record from a March 10, 2011 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on “Information Sharing in the Era of WikiLeaks.”

“Simply understanding that we have this monitoring capability creates deterrence of willful mischief,” they added.

“We will improve our ability to individually track users through enforcement of strong user authentication on classified networks, ensure responsible controls on removable media, and provide strong website authentication for classified fabrics — all to provide greater control over access to classified information,” wrote Corin R. Stone of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in her own answers to questions for the record from the same hearing.

“The FBI and CIA have robust insider threat programs in place for tracking the specific information accessed by users of their systems and detecting, to varying degrees, suspicious user behavior (e.g., excessive file accesses or data downloads) and alerting security personnel to take action.  Several agencies (e.g., NGA, NSA, NRO) are maturing their audit and insider threat capabilities, while others still lag behind,” Ms. Stone wrote.

“The WikiLeaks disclosures highlighted the need to ‘raise the bar’ in terms of these capabilities,” she wrote.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess said that “The potential for trusted US Government and contractor insiders using their authorized access to personnel, facilities, information, equipment, networks or information systems in order to cause great harm is becoming an increasingly serious threat to national security.”

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Why Facebook’s IPO Matters

Getty Images/ Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

 

business.time.com/ Justin Sullivan

Facebook’s initial public offering later this spring will create a billion-dollar windfall for its founders and early investors, so it’s easy to be cynical and view the IPO as another example of insiders cashing in on the latest web phenomenon. But the significance — and symbolism  — of Facebook’s IPO goes much deeper. Facebook’s astonishing rise is an apt metaphor for the emergence over the last two decades of the Internet itself as a tool for individual self-expression and collective organization. It’s also a dramatic example of a generational shift taking place among the entrepreneurial class, one that elevates social change as a priority along with commercial success. Perhaps most importantly, Facebook’s success is a powerful argument to the transformational impact that a free, open Internet can have on society and commerce.

Facebook’s IPO — the largest in Internet history — is a once-in-a-generation milestone in the evolution of the web. It represents a coming-of-age moment for the second major phase in the development of the Internet as a widespread platform: the rise of the social web. In the initial phase, large portals such as America Online and Yahoo established the web as a repository for vast amounts of information. It wasn’t until Google indexed the web with its search engine that this phase reached maturity, allowing users to quickly find information across the Internet, beyond the borders of these centralized communities. But even as Google democratized the web by enabling ordinary people to exercise their voices and become accessible to the broader online world, the Internet remained a largely individualized experience.

Read more: http://business.time.com/2012/02/02/why-facebooks-ipo-matters/?iid=biz-main-lede#ixzz1lKUdA9ib

Do you like Google? Announces privacy settings change across products, users can’t opt out

The Washington Post/ Cecilia Kang

Google said Tuesday it will require users to allow the company to follow their activities across e-mail, search, YouTube and other services, a radical shift in strategy that is expected to invite greater scrutiny of its privacy and competitive practices.
The information will enable Google to develop a fuller picture of how people use its growing empire of Web sites. Consumers will have no choice but to accept the changes.

The policy will take effect March 1 and will also impact Android mobile phone users, who are required to log-in to Google accounts when they activate their phones. More >>

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Internet 'may be changing brains'

By Helen Briggs Health editor, BBC News website 

Social network sites may be changing people's brains as well as their social life, research suggests.

Brain scans show a direct link between the number of Facebook friends a person has and the size of certain parts of their brain.

It's not clear whether using social networks boosts grey matter or if those with certain brain structures are good at making friends, say researchers.

The regions involved have roles in social interaction, memory and autism.

The work, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences, looked at 3-D brain scans of 125 university students from London.

 

Grey matter

Researchers counted the number of Facebook friends each volunteer had, as well as assessing the size of their network of real friends.

A strong link was found between the number of Facebook friends a person had and the amount of grey matter in certain parts of their brain.

“Start Quote

We cannot escape the ubiquity of the internet and its impact on our lives, yet we understand little of its impact on the brain, which we know is plastic and can change over time”

Dr John Williams, Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust

The study also showed that the number of Facebook friends a person was in touch with was reflected in the number of "real-world" friends.

"We have found some interesting brain regions that seem to link to the number of friends we have - both 'real' and 'virtual'," said Dr Ryota Kanai, one of the researchers from University College London.

"The exciting question now is whether these structures change over time. This will help us answer the question of whether the internet is changing our brains."

One region involved is the amygdala, which is associated with memory and emotional responses.

Previous research has shown a link between the volume of grey matter in the amygdala and the size and complexity of real world social networks. Grey matter is the brain tissue where mental processing takes place.

Three other areas of the brain were linked with the size of someone's online social network but not their tally of real-world friends.

'Plastic' brain

The right superior temporal sulcus has a role in perception and may be impaired in autism. The left middle temporal gyrus is associated with "reading" social cues, while the third - the right entorhinal complex - is thought to be important in memory and navigation.

The data

• Volunteers were asked questions such as: How many friends are in your phonebook? How many friends have you kept from school and university? How many people would you invite to a party? How many friends do you have on Facebook?
• These questions led to an estimation of someone's social network size

Professor Geraint Rees, from UCL, who led the research, said little is understood about the impact of social networks on the brain, which has led to speculation the internet is somehow bad for us.

"Our study will help us begin to understand how our interactions with the world are mediated through social networks," he said.

"This should allow us to start asking intelligent questions about the relationship between the internet and the brain - scientific questions, not political ones."

Cause and effect

Facebook, the world's most popular social networking site, has more than 800 million active users around the world. The site allows people to keep in touch with friends, from a handful to a thousand or more.

Dr John Williams, Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust, which funded the study, said: "We cannot escape the ubiquity of the internet and its impact on our lives, yet we understand little of its impact on the brain, which we know is plastic and can change over time.

"This new study illustrates how well-designed investigations can help us begin to understand whether or not our brains are evolving as they adapt to the challenges posed by social media."

Although the study found a link between human brain structure and online social network size, it did not test cause and effect.

Dr Heidi Johansen-Berg, reader in Clinical Neurology at the University of Oxford's Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain, said the study found only a weak relationship between the number of Facebook friends and the number of friends in the real world.

"Perhaps the number of Facebook friends you have is more strongly related to how much time you spend on the internet, how old you are, or what mobile phone you have," she said.

"The study cannot tell us whether using the internet is good or bad for our brains."