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How Technology has Impacted the Workplace

Posted by yourtechguy on Mar 21, 2011 in Articles | 0 comments

Tech­nol­ogy in the Past

Tech­nol­ogy is a resource com­pris­ing knowl­edge, skills, and the means of using and con­trol­ling fac­tors of pro­duc­tion for the pur­pose of pro­duc­ing, deliv­er­ing to users, and main­tain­ing goods and ser­vices, for which there is an eco­nomic and/or social demand.

Ever since the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion (1780s), the impact of tech­nol­ogy has been sub­ject to debate over its effect on employ­ment does it cause unem­ploy­ment or does it under­lie the huge increases in stan­dards of liv­ing? The out­put of an indi­vid­ual laborer increased dra­mat­i­cally with the new machines, though they were seen as a threat to the labor force, and early inno­va­tors were attacked and their inven­tions destroyed.

The rela­tion­ship between tech­nol­ogy and employ­ment is not clear all the time, what can be said with any cer­tainty is that tech­nol­ogy advances have the abil­ity to cre­ate eco­nomic and social changes. We need to look at the con­se­quences of tech­no­log­i­cal tran­si­tions in the areas of social, eco­nomic, polit­i­cal, and culture.

The rela­tion­ship between tech­nol­ogy and employ­ment can be volatile. Dur­ing the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, a man named Ned Ludd destroyed fac­tory equip­ment to protest changes in the work­place brought about by labor-saving tech­nol­ogy. The term Lud­dite was coined to describe mind­less machine-breaking. The Lud­dites were skilled cloth-weavers who believed that tech­nol­ogy would destroy their liveli­hood and oppor­tu­ni­ties for work. They were opposed to the loss of their trade, so they resorted to destroy­ing the new machines. Stiff gov­ern­ment enforce­ment against the Lud­dites resulted in tri­als which lead to many hang­ings and banishments.

His­tor­i­cally the impact of tech­nol­ogy has been to increase pro­duc­tiv­ity in spe­cific areas. The long-term effect released work­ers and cre­ated oppor­tu­ni­ties for work expan­sion in other areas. Inno­va­tions in tech­nol­ogy have grown at such a rapid pace that they have pro­duced what has become known as indus­trial rev­o­lu­tions. Between 1750 and 1830, Great Britain was trans­formed from a largely rural pop­u­la­tion mak­ing a liv­ing almost entirely from agri­cul­ture to a town-centered soci­ety engaged in manufacturing.

Tech­nol­ogy Jobs Today

Over the past decade, U.S. man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs have declined by more than 11 per­cent. Tech­nol­ogy is tak­ing more jobs than it is cre­at­ing, thus lead­ing the world to cat­a­strophic global unem­ploy­ment. Through automa­tion, through improved pro­duc­tiv­ity, the num­ber of jobs is on global decline. Japan’s man­u­fac­tur­ing employ­ment base has dropped by 16 per­cent and Brazil has declined by 20 per­cent. The grow­ing use of automa­tion is hold­ing down man­u­fac­tur­ing job growth despite the large amount of out­sourc­ing work that is flow­ing to the coun­try. It is find that out­sourc­ing in the U.S. has actu­ally cost jobs, though in the long term, it will prob­a­bly have a pos­i­tive effect on employ­ment. Tech­nol­ogy is cre­at­ing lim­ited jobs for a small, select core of sci­en­tist, com­puter pro­gram­mers, con­sul­tants and entre­pre­neurs, this elite group being those who are for­mally edu­cated and pro­fes­sion­ally trained. Tra­di­tional white and blue col­lar jobs are being lost to tech­nol­ogy at a fright­en­ing rate. Gov­ern­ments world­wide are fight­ing a loos­ing bat­tle to find jobs for mil­lions of dis­placed work­ers by the tech­no­log­i­cal advancements.

Tech­nol­ogy has suc­ceeded in pro­duc­ing fewer peo­ple required in many areas of the work force, thus greatly reduc­ing the avail­abil­ity of work. Tech­nol­ogy is rapidly chang­ing and recon­struct­ing the work places on a global scale caus­ing insta­bil­ity in the job mar­ket. Con­se­quently, when work­ers are dis­placed by new tech­nol­ogy, there is sub­stan­tial costs in retrain­ing and edu­cat­ing them for other jobs One of the prob­lems posed by rapidly chang­ing tech­nol­ogy then, is that peo­ple do not have the required skills to gain employ­ment and although there may be jobs out there, the prob­lem is not demand for labor, but the qual­ity of labor sup­plied. The oppor­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple being re-employed with­out the appro­pri­ate skills are min­i­mal and sub­se­quently, they fall on soci­ety for wel­fare, unem­ploy­ment and retrain­ing. Soci­ety is con­fronted with these adverse out­comes from tech­no­log­i­cal advancements.

What has Happened?

Com­put­er­ized tech­nol­ogy has changed the nature of work, soci­ety, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and per­sonal expe­ri­ence. Since the late 1970s, com­put­ing has impacted the com­mu­ni­ca­tions, man­u­fac­tur­ing, med­i­cine, research, admin­is­tra­tion, edu­ca­tion, tourism and enter­tain­ment indus­tries. These tech­nolo­gies have been embraced by peo­ple rather rejected like the Lud­dites. Improv­ing the stan­dard of liv­ing, increas­ing pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tor pro­duc­tiv­ity, cre­at­ing new indus­tries and improv­ing pub­lic ser­vices, com­puter tech­nolo­gies have trans­formed the way we see the world today. Despite promises of high skills and high wages, most work­ers will tell you that with com­put­er­i­za­tion and work restruc­tur­ing, their jobs are becom­ing less skilled and they are becom­ing more replace­able. Com­put­ers gather infor­ma­tion on how the job is done, and then use that infor­ma­tion to stan­dard­ize and con­trol the work process. Auto­mated teller machines lead to auto­mated check-in at the air­port and auto­mated check-out at the super­mar­ket, with fewer work­ers doing more work con­trolled by more machines.

With the devel­op­ment of com­put­er­ized sys­tems the threat of iden­tity theft has increased dra­mat­i­cally. There have been seri­ous impli­ca­tions for pri­vacy and secu­rity with con­trol of cen­tral­ized infor­ma­tion on per­sonal credit, health, edu­ca­tional, bank­ing and insur­ance records. Recent inno­va­tions such as the Inter­net and other tech­nolo­gies have caused wide­spread con­cerns regard­ing their effects on lib­erty, pri­vacy, indi­vid­u­al­ity and qual­ity of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Despite all the inno­va­tions it is hard to ignore or pre­vent tech­nol­ogy form chang­ing the way in which peo­ple live and work.

Protect the Screen of that New Gadget

Posted by yourtechguy on Mar 14, 2011 in Articles, Reviews | 0 comments

I have owned and used portable elec­tronic devices since their  incep­tion and the screens have always been prone to scratch­ing.  Whether it was from slid­ing in and out of my pock­ets or using a  sty­lus, the screens always seemed to get a few scratches. Screen pro­tec­tors are usu­ally the first thing I look for when I am  con­sid­er­ing a new elec­tronic device. This is espe­cially true  nowa­days when new phones and gad­gets cost a few hun­dred dol­lars. A  cou­ple of years ago I came across ZAGG’s invis­i­bleShield.  A “mil­i­tary grade screen pro­tec­tor”, well that is what their  web­site claimed. I was a lit­tle skep­ti­cal and the intim­i­dat­ing  $20 price made me think twice, but when I pur­chased my HTC Aria Android phone I decided to get one and try it. ZAGG’s invis­i­bleShield  is cre­ated from an ultra-tough, patented film exclu­sive to ZAGG.  Trans­par­ent and amaz­ingly thin, it is designed to pre­cisely match  the con­tours of your device, pro­vid­ing unbeat­able scratch  pro­tec­tion. ZAGG’s invis­i­bleShield  is the worlds first and best clear device pro­tec­tion. Nano-Memory™ Tech­nol­ogy The authen­tic film fea­tures Nano-Memory tech­nol­ogy, which is vis­i­ble as a very sub­tle tex­ture in the sur­face of the film. This supe­rior com­po­nent of the ZAGG’s invis­i­bleShield offers four main com­pet­i­tive benefits:

• Dura­bil­ity — Self-healing prop­er­ties offer unbe­liev­able  resis­tance to scratches and dam­age, and will extend the life of your  device
• Cov­er­age — Greater pli­a­bil­ity and flex­i­bil­ity allows the     designs to cover the cor­ners and curves of your device bet­ter than the competition.
• Ease of Install — The improved pli­a­bil­ity also facil­i­tates eas­ier installation
• Drop Resis­tant — Improved grip makes it eas­ier to hang onto your expen­sive gadgets

What’s in the box:

• You get a  invis­i­bleShield for your device
• A squeegee  or plas­tic card for air bub­ble removal
• A bot­tle of SHIELDSpray
• Instructions

Zagg rec­om­mends that you acti­vate your life­time war­ranty before apply­ing the shield.   The worst part of installing a screen pro­tec­tor is get­ting all the  air bub­bles out. You also need to be care­ful in not get­ting  fin­ger­prints on the screen pro­tec­tor too. The oil from your   fin­gers is real hard to get off.  ZAGG’s instruc­tions for putting on the screen pro­tec­tor are fairly straight for­ward. The first thing you want to do is wash your hands and fin­ger­tips thor­oughly. Next spray your fin­ger­tips with their SHIELD­Spray before han­dling the  shield  to avoid putting fin­ger­prints on it. This really does work. Now peel off the shield and spray both sides with the solu­tion. Being care­ful not to touch the sticky side, place the  shield on your device with adhe­sive side down. The shield should still be mov­able for a few min­utes if you are hav­ing trou­ble posi­tion­ing. Take the fur­nished squeegee or plas­tic card and begin to work the  air bub­bles out. Start at the cen­ter and work your way to the edges.  Use a paper towel or a lint free cloth to soak up any excess solu­tion.  There will be some micro-bubbles and imper­fec­tions, but they will work  them­selves out in two to three days. The man­u­fac­turer rec­om­mends let­ting your device sit overnight before turn­ing it back on to allow the shield to set. This entire process may take you 10 to 15 min­utes. Do not try to rush trough the instal­la­tion, you will only regret it later. I have used ZAGG’s invis­i­bleShield for sev­eral months now on mul­ti­ple devices and have been extremely  pleased. It is a bit more expen­sive than other screen pro­tec­tors, but  it is def­i­nitely worth the expense con­sid­er­ing the cost of these  new gad­gets today.  Other advan­tages include hid­ing fin­ger­prints,  smudges and pro­vid­ing a lit­tle bit of grip tex­ture. This is  espe­cially true of the com­plete body wrap ver­sions. It also doesn’t  seem to scratch. Zagg makes invis­i­bleSHIELDs for just about any device you can think  of like  iPod, iPhone, iPad, game sys­tems, lap­tops and for just about  any cell phone out there. For the amount of pro­tec­tion the pro­vides, you will not be disappointed.

To get your own invis­i­bleShield just click this link.

Cryptography in Media : Where the Technology is Going

Posted by yourlocaltechguy on Mar 7, 2011 in Articles | 0 comments

In the third and final part of the series we will dis­cuss cryp­tog­ra­phy in media and where the tech­nol­ogy might be going. Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ment uses dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies to pro­tect copy­rights to movies, music and soft­ware.  In 1998, Bill Clin­ton signed the Dig­i­tal Mil­len­nium Copy­right Act (DMCA), which crim­i­nal­ized the pro­duc­tion, dis­sem­i­na­tion, and use of cer­tain crypt­an­a­lytic tech­niques and tech­nol­ogy; specif­i­cally, those that could be used to cir­cum­vent DRM tech­no­log­i­cal schemes. Dig­i­tal Mil­len­nium Copy­right Act DRM is one of the most con­tro­ver­sial uses of cryp­tol­ogy today. Peo­ple argue that they should have the right to copy the media that they pur­chased legally to some other form. This could be copy­ing a CD to an mp3 player or back­ing up a DVD to pro­tect against lose or damage.

Back in 2005 Sony tried to use a method of copy pro­tec­tion that was sim­i­lar to spy­ware found on the web. Once a CD was placed in the com­puter, a license is pre­sented, once agreed too, a copy pro­tec­tion rootkit was installed. A rootkit is a set soft­ware util­i­ties that con­ceals itself and remains unde­tected from the user, thus allow­ing Sony to limit the num­ber of copies made and pre­vent mp3s from being made. Once the pub­lic found out about this Sony removed the soft­ware and recalled all CD’s that used it. This also opened up a way for virus writ­ers to be able to use the rootkit to take over computers.

Com­puter pass­words and net­work secu­rity are another area that uses cryp­tol­ogy exten­sively. With­out cryp­tol­ogy ATM machines would not exist, online bank­ing and other com­puter resources would be open to attack. Pass­words and net­work secu­rity have been around as long as com­put­ers them­selves. One form of password/authentication usage would be when a user is trav­el­ing and needs to access the cor­po­rate net­work. They need to be able to do this in a secure man­ner. This called hard­ware authen­ti­ca­tion by a secu­rity token. A user car­ries a key fob, a device that gen­er­ates a one time use code that can be authen­ti­cated on the other end by a spe­cial server. Cryp­tog­ra­phy is used in the con­nec­tions that are made between com­puter sys­tems by routers and var­i­ous other telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment. This helps us to build trusted networks.

Cryp­tog­ra­phy offers a wide range of jobs from soft­ware engi­neer­ing to Depart­ment of Defense work. Work can be found in a research cen­ters or in col­lege insti­tu­tions teach­ing. There will always be a never end­ing bat­tle between the cryp­tog­ra­pher and the crypt­an­a­lyst. Iden­tity theft is one area were strong encryp­tion will be vital to our pro­tec­tion. Does every aspect of our per­sonal infor­ma­tion need to be encrypted? Cryp­tol­ogy will always remain with us as long as we have things that we want to keep secret.

Modern Uses of Cryptography

Posted by yourlocaltechguy on Feb 28, 2011 in Articles | 0 comments

Mod­ern uses of cryp­tol­ogy dates back to World War I where the US was help­ing the British cap­ture and deci­pher mes­sages from Ger­many. At this point in the war the US had remained neu­tral. Then a telegram was inter­cepted (The Zim­mer­mann telegram) from Ger­many to Mex­ico. Basi­cally what it said was that Ger­many would divide up the US with Mex­ico if they would help in the war effort. The US ended its posi­tion of neu­tral­ity soon after.

In World War II, there were many uses of cryp­tol­ogy. The infa­mous Enigma machine used by the Ger­man mil­i­tary was one of the more famous ones. This was an electro-mechanical, portable cipher machine. It was able to encrypt and decrypt mes­sages. The Enigma machine was a com­bi­na­tion of keys, plugs and rotors cre­at­ing a com­plex mechan­i­cal machine. The Enigma was first com­mer­cial avail­able in the 1920’s. Gov­ern­ments and mil­i­tary of many nations adopted this type of cryp­tog­ra­phy. A British math­e­mati­cian, Alan Tur­ing, was able to crack the code which helped in the Allied vic­tory.  The US was also suc­cess­ful in break­ing many of the Japan­ese codes too. This lead to a win at Mid­way Island, turn­ing the war in the Pacific. Another mes­sage that was inter­cepted lead to the death of Admi­ral Yamamoto. He was sched­uled to visit a naval base in the Solomon Islands, as his plane approached it was ambushed and shot down. The US was not the only coun­try able to break codes. The Japan­ese were also able to break US codes, with the excep­tion of one. <!–more–>The Navajo lan­guage was used as a code. The lan­guage was per­fect for code because it was an unwrit­ten lan­guage and had no alpha­bet. The idea came from the use of Native Amer­i­can lan­guages in World War I. The Japan­ese were never able to crack Navajo lan­guage code. You might remem­ber the movie Windtalkers.

enigma cry­to­graph

Open aca­d­e­mic research on cryp­tog­ra­phy has only been around since the mid-1970s with the Stan­dard, a pub­lic spec­i­fi­ca­tion by the NBS, the Diffie-Hellman paper. Since then, cryp­tol­ogy has become the cor­ner­stone to many aspects of com­puter and net­work secu­rity with access con­trol and infor­ma­tion con­fi­den­tial­ity being the most impor­tant uses. Mod­ern cryp­tol­ogy takes on many forms. Dig­i­tal sig­na­tures, elec­tronic com­merce, smart cards, dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment, com­puter pass­words are among the many appli­ca­tions that use cryptology.

Dig­i­tal sig­na­tures have become an impor­tant part of the busi­ness world today. The IRS allows you to dig­i­tally sign your online tax return now instead of print­ing out the forms and mail­ing them back. Dig­i­tal sig­na­tures elim­i­nate the need to have paper copies signed and mailed back to com­pa­nies, thus reduc­ing cost of pro­cess­ing and pur­chas­ing of the paper. Get­ting money from your banks ATM requires you to dig­i­tally sign in with your pin code. (Per­sonal Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion Num­ber) Online col­leges use dig­i­tal sig­na­tures for accept­ing loans and admis­sion. Many times a com­bi­na­tion of your birth­day, social secu­rity num­ber and some other piece of infor­ma­tion is used for verification.

Elec­tronic com­merce or e-commerce has been one of biggest growth areas in the past ten years. It is para­mount that secu­rity be in place for these types of trans­ac­tions. The Secure Sock­ets Lay­ers or SSL is a pro­to­col devel­oped by Netscape. This process uses two keys to encrypt and secure the infor­ma­tion, a pub­lic key known by every­one and a pri­vate key known only to the recip­i­ent. Secure Sock­ets are sup­ported by all stan­dard web browsers today. Another form of secu­rity that works with Secure Sock­ets is HTTPS. HTTPS is like HTTP with a few mod­i­fi­ca­tions. It uses a dif­fer­ent port to trans­mit its data and uses a layer of encryp­tion and authen­ti­ca­tion. Ports are like street signs. Each one has a des­ig­nated place to go, whether it is for web traf­fic going to a web server or a file being trans­ferred by file trans­port pro­to­col. Stan­dard http traf­fic uses port 80, https uses port 443.

Smart cards are sim­i­lar to credit cards and debit cards in looks only.  A smart card has an embed­ded micro chip inside that can be read by a com­puter. Credit cards in the US use mag­netic strip tech­nol­ogy which can be eas­ily read and altered with com­po­nents from stores. In Europe they are used for insur­ance records and med­ical records.  Other uses would include credit cards, wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tions (sim cards in cell phones), satel­lite tele­vi­sion sys­tems, gov­ern­ment id, bank­ing, pay­ing fares for rapid trans­porta­tion sys­tems, bet­ter iden­ti­fi­ca­tion in pass­ports and patient records com­puter secu­rity sys­tems. While reg­is­ter­ing my son for school this past fall we were intro­duced to smart cards. This card is used to open doors to dorms, pur­chase food, use com­puter lab, pur­chas­ing items in the book­store and is his stu­dent pic­ture id. His cam­pus is com­pletely cash free. This intern offers a lower rate of crime on cam­pus. Next week The Future of Cryptology.

Are Traditional Networking and Telecommunication Systems a Dying Breed?

Posted by yourlocaltechguy on Feb 23, 2011 in Articles | 0 comments

Devel­op­ments in wire­less technologies

The new mil­len­nium has soon proved itself to be one of even more rapid and often trau­matic change than ever before.  For pro­fes­sion­als who are part of the Infor­ma­tion Age this presents a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge.  Sys­tems are needed that would not only serve the cur­rent needs of the client, but also the chang­ing tech­no­log­i­cal needs of vast com­pa­nies and cor­po­ra­tions.  VoIP sys­tems are equipped to pro­vide this kind of ser­vice. Three trends of an ever chang­ing busi­ness world:

• IP tele­phony
• Wire­less LANs
• Inter­net security

It appears that a more favor­able out­look has replaced the neg­a­tive views of net­work­ing and secu­rity issues dur­ing 2001 and 2002.  New devel­op­ments in sev­eral net­work­ing and wire­less tech­nolo­gies have brought about this more pos­i­tive paradigm.

VoIP con­fer­ence call sys­tems for exam­ple have the capa­bil­ity to use pass­word tech­nol­ogy as a secu­rity mea­sure against intrud­ers.  Fur­ther­more fire­wall prod­ucts have been inte­grated in terms of the abil­ity to open ports dynam­i­cally.  VoIP requires more than sta­tic port assign­ments, and of course secu­rity mea­sures must be suf­fi­cient to cover its dynamic nature.  In terms of secu­rity then, the devel­op­ments in the field appear to remain on track with new tech­nol­ogy.  In the future cen­tral­ized man­age­ment pol­icy may form part of secu­rity technology.

In addi­tion to the rapid advance­ment of IP tele­phone sys­tems, the tra­di­tional net­work­ing and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems have been sub­ject to grave insta­bil­ity.  It appears that the new tech­nol­ogy has thus arrived just on time to fill the gap.  It is how­ever also clear that the exist­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems are attempt­ing to adapt, which means com­pe­ti­tion.  Prices will fur­ther decrease and pro­vide the cus­tomer with even more choices than are cur­rently available.

Merg­ing Technologies

The trend to towards merg­ing the tra­di­tional with the new tech­nol­ogy is under enough pres­sure to become a real­ity.  This shows poten­tial for the future in the form of VoIP over WiFi. VoIP over WiFi is the com­bi­na­tion of the IP phone with SIP and mobil­ity.  Indeed, sev­eral com­pa­nies appear to have made pos­i­tive use of this tech­nol­ogy already.  Cisco has for exam­ple imple­mented mobile IP phone prod­ucts, as have sev­eral other com­pa­nies.  It thus appears that VoIP tech­nol­ogy has secured for itself a favor­able posi­tion in the future.

In increas­ing num­ber of mobile tech­nol­ogy is com­bined with IP voice sup­port.  Migra­tion strate­gies should thus be designed for the opti­mal advan­tage of both exist­ing tele­com infra­struc­ture and IP voice devel­op­ments.  New ser­vices in this regard are a key to busi­ness strat­egy.  Specif­i­cally, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions refers to media servers.  These are used for announce­ments, as well as value added ser­vices like the above-mentioned multi-party con­fer­enc­ing and access via speech recognition.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tions sug­gests that the new trend of com­bin­ing exist­ing tech­nol­ogy with VoIP will even­tu­ally lead to an “All-IP media server.  A media gate­way will then be used to con­nect the media server to the cir­cuit net­work, and access and con­trol are pro­vided by IP pro­to­cols, which may include SIP and Voice XML.  An advanced func­tion con­nected to this is “voice groom­ing” and packet-based archi­tec­ture.  Voice groom­ing refers to the func­tion of remov­ing echo from voice-streams, detect tones, and all media are then con­verted to packets.

The ease of geo­graphic dis­tri­b­u­tion is also a dri­ving ele­ment in the future suc­cess of VoIP tech­nol­ogy.  This elim­i­nates the need for a phys­i­cal con­nec­tion of switches within a sin­gle cen­tral office.   Speech recog­ni­tion servers can for exam­ple be located out­side the cen­tral office.  Con­nec­tions then occur via IP, regard­less of phys­i­cal dis­tance.  This saves costs as well as increases the num­ber of con­nec­tions that can be made at one time.