Terrorists used 'Google' advance Techniques

By Martin J Young & M H Ahssan

The terrorists who attacked several locations in Mumbai last week were reported to have used Google Earth images of the city to coordinate their attacks. Their use of technology did not stop there, according to Indian investigators and police who interviewed the only captured suspect. The attackers approached by sea making use of global positioning systems alongside Blackberrys, mobile phones with multiple SIM cards (reducing the likelihood of their calls being traced), and the CDs containing high-resolution satellite imagery from Google Earth.

The revelations will spark protests by privacy advocates and national security advisors who claim Google provides too much information to civilians. It is not the first time Google Earth has been labeled as a potentially dangerous tool in the hands of terrorists.

Indian and Chinese security agencies are concerned that the free download exposes their defense installations, and the Pentagon has expressed alarm that US military bases have been revealed. Defense department installations have been ordered to ban Google from taking photos of their bases for the Street View application.

Government restrictions have a cap on commercial satellite imagery at a 50-centimeter resolution. Yet despite protests and potential national security risks to innumerable countries, Google is upgrading its satellite image data to even higher resolutions. The search giant’s GeoEye-1 is currently retaking satellite images of the Earth; it can reach up to 41-centimeter resolutions. GeoEye-2, which is planned for launch in 2012, will be able to take imagery at 25-centimeter resolution. So there will be no escaping from Big Brother Google.

Security
Apple received attention this week over a notice on its website that urged Mac owners to use anti-virus software. The note, updated last month on its support pages, stated, "Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult."

The long-standing myth has always been that Macs are immune to viruses. Apple has nurtured this in its sales and marketing spiel so it comes as no surprise that the notice has since been removed following the unwanted media attention. Apple spokesperson Bill Evans stated that the KnowledgeBase article was removed because it was old and inaccurate.

It is true that the lion's share of Internet nasties are aimed at users of Microsoft's Windows systems simply because that software is used by so many more people. However, there have been recent incidents of Macs getting infected by viral code, worms and malware, and this summer saw new infections of the AppleScript.THT Trojan horse, affecting OSX 10.4 and 10.5 users by exploiting a weakness in the Apple Remote Desktop Agent.

Cyber criminals and hackers have moved on from e-mail-borne payloads to ones that trick users into opening or playing Internet media or applications. These usually target security holes in third-party applications such as video players, browsers and document readers. The target is no longer your computer, it's your financial data and money, so the idea that your personal data are safer on a Mac is a weak one. The Internet is still just as dangerous.

The bottom line is that no operating system is 100% secure no matter what it says on the box, so it always pays to be safer than sorry. Anti-virus and anti-malware software are sensible precautions regardless of whether you're using a Mac or a PC.

Industry
Market research firm Net Applications estimates that Windows' market share has dropped to a 15-year low of less than 90%. This is still an impressive figure, though we have to go way back to the days of Windows 3.11 to find a similar share. Windows has been gradually losing popularity for the past five years but past month was the first time it dropped below the 90% mark to 89.62%.

Breaking these figures down shows that Vista has a market share of only 20.45% and XP still dominates the operating system race with 66.31%. The winners from these results are the opposition, with Apple's OSX increasing to an 8.87% share from 6.80% the same time last year and Linux at 0.83%. That still leaves a long way to go to catch the mighty Microsoft.

Internet Explorer has also been suffering market-share losses by falling below 70% to 69.77% last month. That is good news for rivals Firefox, which climbed to 20.78%, and Safari, up to 7.13%. Google’s newcomer, Chrome, has failed to top 1% and recorded a 0.83% market share for last month.

This shuffling of winners and losers continues amid a deepening gloom in the computer industry. Market researcher IDC's latest PC market forecast shows a rapid decline in the demand for computers. They predict 2009 as being the weakest in seven years for PC sales, with a possible near 3% decline in the US. While global sales growth could plunge to 3.8% in 2009 from 12.4% this year, before recovering to 10.9% in 2010.