The Hindu Business Line : Caution on Cyburbia

From fewer than a hundred jihadi sites that existed prior to September 11, 2001, there are now nearly five thousand, observes James Harkin in Cyburbia: The dangerous idea that’s changing how we live and who we are ( www.hachettelivre.co.uk). The biggest single venue for the recruitment of Western youth into violent radical Islam is not the mosque but the desktop computer, he says, citing an expert on mil itant Islam.

“Just like those music file-sharing sites that are so good at dodging the authority of the music industry, the great advantage of the Internet for radical Islamists is that it bypasses the authority of the local imam and puts angry young militants into direct communication with their peers.”

How does technology work in the hands of conventional armed forces such as those of the US or Israel? When they tried to zap themselves into the information age by hitching their troops too tightly to electronic information, the result was often to make those troops jumpy and confused, notes Harkin. “Even worse, paying too much attention to the demands of that information loop could surrender the leadership and objectives of military organisations, leaving them rudderless but in constant touch with one another.”

In contrast, when there was little organisation at all to speak of, surrendering one’s purpose to an electronic information loop and hoping for the best wasn’t a bad kind of military strategy, he finds. The weak electronic ties that join together radical young Muslims sitting bored at their desktops are enough to throw up a host of fruitful new connections and send extremist propaganda hurtling through Cyburbia, the author cautions. “The result has all the makings of a new kind of online terror network, a kind of jihadi Facebook.”

No wonder, therefore, that anti-terrorist officers from all the major security services ‘now spend much of their time with their ear to electronic chatter in order to map terror networks and predict when an attack might be in the offing.’

For starters, the preface describes Cyburbia as ‘the place we go when we spend too much time hooked up to other people via a continuous loop of electronic information… the state of limbo induced by living in thrall to this information loop.’

Suggested study.

Countering corruption

Can we combat corruption in public services? Yes, with the help of technology, assures Subhash Bhatnagar in Unlocking E-Government Potential: Concepts, cases and practical insights ( www.sagepublications.com). Take, for example, OPEN — or the ‘online procedures enhancement’ for civil applications in the Seoul Municipality, South Korea — which educates citizens on rules and procedures and enables real-time monitoring of progress of an application for a permit or licence.

The focus of the anti-corruption programme was not on IT (information technology) but on simplification or regulation and procedures, re-engineering of work practices, transparency in procedures and effective communication with the citizens, explains a snatch from the World Bank documentation quoted in the book.

“The learning emerges that in order for anti-corruption efforts to be effective, reformers must look beyond individual instances of corrupt behaviour and focus on the structural factors that allow corruption to develop.”

Corruption often reflects the power distance between the civil servants and the citizens, especially the poor, illiterate and ignorant citizens in remote areas, the author rues. By providing an alternative to a departmental channel for service delivery, e-government introduces competition which improves service levels and lowers corruption, he reasons. “Publishing government information on the web builds accountability by providing documentation to citizens to substantiate their complaints against corrupt practices.”

Required read.

Catch as many defects as early as possible

Improving quality means improving everything you do from start to finish, says Dave Ingram in Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development ( www.wileyindia.com). This means ensuring that what comes out of the construction activities is fit for purpose, and the software is passed on to the test team for further testing and verification with the minimum amount of fuss, issues, and rework, he describes.

“You don’t want your test activities to be defect bound, meaning that there are either too many issues to continue or there are show-stopping issues. However, you don’t want to push the development out so far that it balloons the costs and timescales of the project.”

Your mission should be to catch as many defects as early as possible and assess/fix them accordingly, Ingram insists. “To achieve this goal, you will need to put some industrial-strength processes and tools in place, while balancing them against budgets and timescales.”

When assessing code quality, techniques such as ‘mark one eyeball’ and peer review can be helpful. The former is ‘a basic military term that refers to visual reconnaissance instead of using any high-tech means when on manoeuvres or out searching.’

And the latter, that is, the peer reviews, can uncover many different issues, Ingram recommends. Peer reviews should be performed throughout the development process, and should focus on all areas, not just code, he advises.

“Peer reviews should cover unit test plans and data, integration test plans and data, source code, and other artefacts, as well as release readiness reports… Peer review comments should be documented thoroughly and managed appropriately.”

Mandatory addition to the techies’ shelf.

Certification coach

To those who are intent on cracking the certification, Dreamtech presents SCJP: Sun Certified Programmer for Java 6 – Exam 310-065 (Kogent). Here is a ‘scenario’ from one of the early chapters: “You are a faculty in the XYZ institute and your students want you to explain the concept of inheritance with the help of a real life scenario. Now you decided to explain the concept by declaring the Vehicle class as the superclass and the subclasses such as Car and Bike.”

Then? “These subclasses override the methods declared in the Vehicle superclass. Apart from overriding the superclass methods, you also want to tell the students that a new method can also be declared in a subclass. You also decide to create an instance of the superclass and subclass to explain to the students that depending upon the instance the relevant method is invoked.”

Within 30 minutes, you must successfully compile and execute the Car and Bike classes, the exercise instructs.

A handy book for those who are hands-on, not those who would like to urgently get out of the class and ride a bike after reading the scenario.

Tailpiece

“We integrated our HR package with an astrology program…”

“To predict who will leave when?”

“No, to find who will protest if we stopped paying salary!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in