When most people hear the phrase “search engine,” Google comes to mind. Of course there was a time when Yahoo was top of mind, but Google pretty quickly dispensed with the competition. Now Microsoft wants to challenge Google’s dominance with Bing.
So how is Bing faring? The folks at TechRepublic recently conducted a poll on their blog, asking IT people to name their default search engine. At last count, Google was still scoring 81 percent, with Bing coming in a distant second at 11 percent. Yahoo was the default search engine for only four percent of respondents.
When it comes to unseating the default, the survey also showed that only 14 percent of respondents had recently changed their default search engine, while 86 percent said they had not changed their default in some time.
The good news is that the U.S. is maintaining its top-ranked position in worldwide IT competitiveness, according to the Business Software Alliance’s annual study.
The bad news is that in the area of infrastructure, the U.S. has slipped from second to seventh place because parts of the country still don’t have access to high-speed networks.
BSA’s annual IT study examines factors such as national supplies of skilled workers, technology infrastructure, intellectual-property protection, and governmental support of technology. The U.S. scored points for its large pool of IT workers, strong R&D environment and legal system, according to Denis McCauley, director of global technology research at the Economist Intelligence Unit, which conducted the study.
Countries ranking just below the U.S. include Finland, Sweden, Canada, the Netherlands, the U.K., Australia, Denmark, Singapore and Norway.
Finland’s approach to R&D – the study’s most important category – enabled it to jump from 13th to second place this year, while improved infrastructure helped the Netherlands move from 10th to fifth spot.
Acclaimed marketing guru Seth Godin, author of a dozen international business best-sellers, says the days of the corporate cubicle farm are drawing to a close. Writing in Time magazine, he says the conventional office set-up no longer makes sense due to technology’s advances.
“More and more, the need to actually show up at an office that consists of an anonymous hallway and a farm of cubicles or closed doors is just going to fade away,” Godin writes. “It’s too expensive, and it’s too slow. I’d rather send you a file at the end of my day (when you’re in a very different time zone) and have the information returned to my desktop when I wake up tomorrow. We may never meet, but we’re both doing essential work.”
The Internet makes synchronized team efforts possible, he says, even when members are spread in far-flung locations, and bosses will still be watching when you log in, what you type and what you access.
“Some people will embrace this new high-stress, high-speed, high-flexibility way of work,” he believes. “We’ll go from a few days alone at home, maintaining the status quo, to urgent team sessions, sometimes in person, often online. It will make some people yearn for jobs like those in the old days, when we fought traffic, sat in a cube, typed memos, took a long lunch and then sat in traffic again.”
Still thinking of ways to spend your business’s Stimulus money? How about a new server dedicated solely to tracking every bit of Internet traffic your company does for two years?
That’s the intent of proposed federal legislation requiring all Internet providers and Wi-Fi access points — that means your local coffee shop, your hotel, and yes, even possibly you — to keep records of all Internet traffic so you can turn them over to the police in the event of an investigation.
Bills introduced last week by Republicans in both the House and Senate state: “A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.”
According to CNET, that means anyone with Wi-Fi access points or routers using the standard method of dynamically assigning temporary address (what we know as DHCP). It includes millions of homes as well as the big guys such as Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and the like.
Why even consider such a potentially costly and invasive requirement? One of the Senate bill’s sponsors, U.S. Sen. Johh Cornyn of Texas, said: “While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children.”
If you’re interested, the legislation is Senate Bill 436 and H.R. 1076 in the House. Click here for a CNET News article.
You think crime doesn’t pay? It seems the Internet’s shadow economy is booming, and it’s making life more hazardous for anyone who relies on the web. And that’s just about all of us. The U.S. Treasury Department reports that cybercrime is now bigger than illegal drug trafficking. The feds put it at $105 billion a year and still growing.
A senior architect at IT security provider MessageLabs, Maksym Schipka, recently laid out how so much money can trade hands with just the viruses, spyware and trojans known as malware.
A new malware program sells for upward from $250, and for a mere $25 a month, you can get updates to ensure your new malware avoids detection. The unscrupulous buyer can then use a botnet – a network of infected computers belonging to innocent people – to spam millions of emails or send hundreds of thousands of trojan attacks or host a malicious website. Now the buyer can sit back and watch stolen data and identities roll in.
“A full identity sells for around $5,” Schipka says. “This includes full name and address, a passport or drivers-license scan, credit card numbers and bank account details. Credit card numbers sell for between two and 5 percent of the remaining credit balance on the cards in question.”
All in all, it’s a disturbing picture of an economy complete with division of labor, price competition and marketing, says Schipka’s report, all of it “accelerated to Internet speed and carried out online.”
