“The best we can do is to manage the risks: employ technological and procedural mitigation while at the same time allowing businesses to thrive,” they argue.

Stating that software vendors have little economic incentive to churn out a secure product in the current marketplace, the authors suggest that customers should start holding software vendors liable for not making their products secure. “Any fractional incremental effort by a software vendor to make the product secure is worth an effort since it can make a significant reduction in cost of ownership for the customer.”

Khare and Srivastava assure that you can prevent almost 90 per cent of your security problems without spending loads of money, because “the biggest threat to your computer security is not an evil empire of hackers ready to swoop down and steal all your corporate secrets, rather it’s your users.”

Important read.

The GPRS (general packet radio services) core network has two types of entities, viz. databases (or registers) and routers, says 2.5G Mobile Networks: GPRS and EDGE by Sumit Kasera, Nishit Narang, and A.P. Priyanka ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

They explain how “GPRS emerged as the first genuine packet-based wireless technology,” by reserving RR (radio resources) only when data is sent, in services such as Internet access. An important advantage of GPRS, the authors observe, is that it provides a migration step towards 3G (third generation) networks.

Returning to the ‘entities’ discussion, it may be handy to know that databases are used for managing and providing information about subscription, authentication and equipment identity, while routers are used for routing packets between mobile station (MS) and packet data networks (PDN).

For the nuts-and-bolts knowledge seeker.

The facility to access the Internet in a wireless mode, possibly without charge and in a mobile mode, using systems such as WiFi and WiMAX, holds the promise of bringing broadband communications to rural areas in developing countries, says Mohan Sundara Rajan in Wireless: The latest telecom story ( www.nbtindia.org.in).

A revolution that he sees coming is the wiping out of the traditional high-cost telephone business by telephone services over the Net.

“A worldwide competition is under way to provide voice over the Internet protocol. You would be able to place calls from the PCs to virtually any telephone in the world, including mobiles. “An optimistic forecast is that telephone calls through the Internet may become too cheap to meter.”

Educative material, written in an easy style.

At $64 billion today, the Indian IT-BPO market (including domestic and export revenues across hardware, software, IT services, BPO and engineering services) accounts for less than 3 per cent of the worldwide spends, notes Strategic Review 2008: The IT-BPO sector in India ( www.nasscom.in).

With the global sourcing penetration estimated to be growing at nearly four times the rate of worldwide software and services spends, the report sees immense opportunities for the rapid growth of the Indian share of the pie.

Also, “by 2015, the Indian IT-BPO exports sector could reach $120-180 billion, more than doubling its contribution to the national GDP and direct employment,” the report foresees. It urges Indian IT companies to address some of the larger developmental challenges faced by the country.

“Indian IT-BPO, with its exposure to global best practices across a range of sectors, can well take the lead in helping drive efficiency and productivity gains across the spectrum of Indian industries,” suggests Nasscom.

Useful reference.

If you regularly eat and drink at your desk, it may shock you to know that the desk on average “has 50 times more bacteria per square centimetre than a toilet seat.” This, in essence, was the finding of a study conducted in August 2001 by Dr Charles Gerba, a microbiologist from the University of Arizona, and his team.

They looked for five different types of bacteria, viz. E. coli, Klebsiella pneumonia, Streptococcus, Salmonella, and Staphylococcus aureus, recounts Dr Karl Kruszelnicki in Great Myth Conceptions ( www.harpercollins.co.in).

Of the 12 surfaces (desktop, telephone receiver, computer mouse, computer keyboard, microwave door button, elevator button, photocopier start button, photocopier surface, toilet seat, fax machine, refrigerator door handle and water fountain handle), the filthiest was the telephone receiver, with 25,127 bacteria.

“This was followed by the desktop at 20,961; the computer keyboard at 3,295 and the computer mouse at 1,676. The least contaminated surface was the toilet seat with only 49 bacteria per square inch — making it about 400 times cleaner than the desktop.” According to Gerba, the desk is really ‘the laptop of luxury’ for bacteria. “They can feast all day from breakfast to lunch and even dinner.”

Amazing collection of facts.

As employers of people with increasingly diverse backgrounds, it is necessary that our companies, more so the ones in the IT sector, ensure that work environments are free from stereotypes.

A stereotype, for starters, is “a negative, unpleasant value-laden judgment that we often form of another individual or a group that we see as being ‘different’ from ours,” as Pittu D. Laungani defines in Understanding Cross-Cultural Psychology ( www.sagepublications.com).

“Some differences are quite obvious: skin colour, age, mode of dress, physical appearance, patterns of speech, and so on; others are more subtle, such as a person’s social class, education, learning, manners, and so forth.”

Sadly, when we resort to stereotypes, we tend to divide people into in-groups and out-groups. “It is then assumed that members of ‘in-groups’ (that is, the groups to which we belong or aspire to belong) possess positive, desirable and praiseworthy qualities. ‘Out-groups’ on the other hand are seen as possessing negative qualities ranging from indolence and stupidity to cruelty and savagery.”

Despite being widely shared, stereotypes have little or no basis in reality, says the author. Eerily, these notions have their origins in our initial impressions and intuitions, hearsay, prevalent beliefs, be they ‘imagined, baseless, or fantasised.’

Having placed a person in a particular category, such as bad, or mad, or primitive, or stupid, or lazy, or superstitious, or evil, it becomes easier to justify our own behaviours towards them, bemoans Laungani.

“We may despise them, avoid them, keep away from them, segregate them, discriminate against them, deny them equal rights and opportunities, banish them…”

Vital insights.

Tailpiece

“You know 3G?”

“You mean Nehruji, Indiraji, and Soniaji?”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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