1 The spy on the conference table (International Herald Tribune) One afternoon this month, a hacker took a tour of a dozen conference rooms around the globe via equipment that most every company has in those rooms; videoconferencing equipment. With the move of a mouse, he steered a camera around each room. In one room, he zoomed out through a window, across a parking lot and into shrubbery some 50 yards away where a small animal could be seen burrowing underneath a bush. With such equipment, the hacker could have easily eavesdropped on privileged attorney-client conversations or read trade secrets on a report lying on the conference room table. In this case, the hacker was HD Moore, a chief security officer at Rapid 7, a Boston-based company that looks for security holes in computer systems. His latest find: Videoconferencing equipment is often left vulnerable to hackers.
2 Flaunting wealth in China (The Guardian) There was a minor riot in Beijing last week. The Apple store was attacked. Its offence? Not being willing to sell sufficient numbers of the iPhone 4S. Buyers had queued all night and things turned ugly when it became clear that many of those in line had not the faintest idea what an iPhone was. They belonged to teams hired by middlemen who knew that every handset bought was resaleable for an additional £100. In London they riot to steal things. In Beijing, they riot because they cannot buy them. For a first-time visitor to China, the most astonishing aspect of the country is the worship of wealth. The mayor of London may like to be seen riding around on a bicycle. That is not the style of the mayor of Beijing.
It is all surface froth, of course: there will still be 1,299,000,000 Chinese who do not buy an Audi. But it is the flaunting of wealth that is so shocking, because the entire economy floats on a sea of migrant workers willing to go anywhere for a day's pay. Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution sent intellectuals to live as peasants. Embracing capitalism has created a class of urban plutocrats. All the best restaurants have these private rooms, so the rich and powerful do not have their meal spoiled by the offensive sight of their fellow citizens.
The majority of the Chinese people do not yet seem to even have their noses pressed to the windows. They are too busy hoping to get rich, or just trying to make ends meet. But the one-child policy is openly flouted by the rich, who simply pay the fine or arrange for the birth to take place in Hong Kong. Not one young person talked, even in their cups, of revolution. There are too many people doing too well for such thoughts. But it does not take a clairvoyant to ask how long it can last.
3 Youngest circumnavigator (BBC) To sail around the globe alone is as tough a sporting challenge as you can get. But Laura Dekker has achieved just that - at the age of 16. She is the youngest person to complete the feat but it has not earned the Dutch teenager a place in the record books. The Guinness Book of Records does not have a category for "youngest sailor" for fear the accolade would give pushy parents a potentially damaging incentive. Nevertheless with her proud family, eager journalists and St Maarten's prime minister watching, there's no doubt the Dutch schoolgirl's achievement will go down in the history books - ones that were written at sea rather than studied in class.
4 Why China is investing in Thames Water (BBC) Perhaps the most important cause of our economic malaise is that for years as a nation we have been living beyond our means, in deficit with the rest of the world. By contrast China has been consuming far less than it produces, accumulating vast surpluses. So as we work down our debts, the hope of the government has been that the Chinese could be persuaded to invest some of their vast surpluses in our infrastructure, in a way that would ease the pain of our economic slowdown and would yield a decent return to China over the long term.
That's why the Chancellor of the Exchequer was so delighted that China's sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corporation, which controls more than £250bn - has bought a stake of almost 9% in London's water and sewage business, Thames Water. China is buying a small stake in a long established stable business, currently controlled by an Australian investment firm, Macquarie, rather than taking a risk on improving the fabric of the UK.
5 Disrupt or be disrupted (Johannesburg Times) George Eastman was ''not especially gifted'' according to the academic standards of his age. When his father died, he dropped out of high school, aged 14, to support his family. Ten years later, in 1877, he wanted to go on holiday and record the trip. The photographic equipment of the day was a camera the size of a microwave. To learn how to use it cost him $5, or a third of his weekly salary. He never made the holiday trip, but spent the next three years trying to simplify this early photographic process and April 1880 was the genesis of what would become the Eastman Kodak film company.
Photographers loved its Kodachrome film, which Neil Armstrong used to take pictures on the moon; and Paul Simon even wrote a song about it. What's more, Kodak was the first company to make a digital camera, in 1975, nogal. Now, the iconic originator of the "Kodak moment" has filed for bankruptcy. It was killed by its own invention, which it spectacularly failed to capitalise on.
Last week there were other, much more hyped announcements that imperilled other age-old businesses ripe for similar disruptions. The publishing industry is ripe for disruption - and the book publishers especially are on notice, having seen what the self-publishing might of Amazon's Kindle store offers. As the famous maxim goes, "You have to cannibalise your own business before someone else does."
6 Cruise liner’s sunken reality (Khaleej Times) The sinking of the giant Italian-American cruise liner “Costa Concordia” is among the most amazing and bizarre events in modern nautical history. From preliminary findings, it seems Captain Francesco Schettino was guilty of dereliction of duty for steering his 290 metre-long vessel perilously close to the island of Giglio’s rocky coast.
Speaking as an old salt, I find the new, 4,000-6,000-passenger cruise Leviathans far too large for either enjoyment or safety. They ride too high in the water and are top heavy, posing potential problems of stability in high seas. These floating cities pollute in spite of storing garbage and waste, disturb marine life, and swamp small ports with mobs of passengers. However, cruising remains one of the safest modes of transport. But it’s best to avoid tired, third-hand ships with outdated safety systems and cruises run by firms or nations with a poor record for seamanship or maritime responsibility. Like cut-rate airlines, their rock-bottom prices attract the lowest common denominator of maritime passengers.
7 Log off and live life (The Dawn) “I think all this Facebook stuff should just stop!” said Hamza Yusuf, co-founder of Zaytuna College, at a recent Islamic convention. “Live your lives. Go out; take walks amongst trees.” I did a Google search on Facebook and Twitter addictions, and I got so many hits that I decided not to bother backing up claims of widespread social media addiction. Some people can’t seem to get uninterrupted sleep through the night because of their cravings to check Facebook comments and messages and to see how many of their tweets are retweeted and faved.
The first thing people do, including I, when they wake up in the morning is log onto social-media platforms. What’s mind-boggling is that people have to disable social media networks to get their lives back. One tweeter who had to bid farewell to his 25,000 followers late last year wrote in his confession. “What did I get out of it? Certainly not fortune or fame — on Twitter I was, for the most part, anonymous,” wrote Larry Carlart. “But for me, every tweet was a performance.” He was fired from work because of his “performance” on Twitter and a month later he separated from his wife. And it is only fitting to let him tell you where he went wrong: “Instead of tweeting to reflect on my life, tweeting had become my life.”
8 Sri Lanka – Eye donors to the world (The Dawn) This gift of sight is so common here, it’s become an unwritten symbol of pride and culture for Sri Lanka, an island of about 20 million people. Despite recently emerging from a quarter century of civil war, the country is among the world’s largest cornea providers. It donates about 3,000 corneas a year and has provided tissue to 57 countries over nearly a half century, with Pakistan receiving the biggest share, according to the nonprofit Sri Lanka Eye Donation Society. "People ask me, ‘Can we donate our eyes while we are living? Because we have two eyes, can we donate one?”’ said Dr Sisira Liyanage, director of Sri Lanka’s National Eye Hospital in the capital, Colombo, where the new eye bank is based. ”They are giving just because of the willingness to help others. They are not accepting anything.”
The desire to help transcends social and economic barriers. Prime ministers pass on their corneas here along with the poorest tea farmers. Many Sri Lankans, about 67% of whom are Buddhist, believe that surrendering their eyes at death completes an act of ”dana,” or giving, which helps them be reincarnated into a better life.
9 Priyanka’s dressing sincerity questioned (Wall Street Journal) Is Priyanka Vadra, daughter of Sonia Gandhi and sister of Rahul, being insincere when she wears handloom saris every time she visits Amethi, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’s family constituency? Television news anchor Sagarika Ghose recently chastised Ms Vadra for wearing traditional saris when visiting the rural constituency in impoverished Uttar Pradesh, when in Delhi she opts to wear fashionable Western clothes such as trousers, shirts, jeans and t-shirts. Ms Ghose interprets this as a neo-feudal or even neo-colonial gesture on Ms Vadra’s part, “doing a sort of Passage to India routine of ‘mingling easily with the natives,’” as she pungently puts it.
Perhaps what is so jarring is the stark contrast between her Delhi attire and what she wears when she meets the rural poor. Surely this is obvious to everyone, presumably even the rural poor who must have seen television or newspaper pictures of the trendy Ms Vadra back in Delhi. Ms Vadra is no doubt sincere in her affection for India’s rural poor, but the way she signals it through her dress creates the opposite effect.
10 India a superpower or superdunce? (The Economic Times editorial) In the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) international competition for children's learning, India came 72nd out of 73 countries. The Annual Status of Education Report (Aser 2011) reveals that the proportion of Class 5 children able to read a Class 2 text has fallen from 53.7% in 2010 to 48.2% in 2011. The proportion of Class 3students able to do simple subtraction sums is down from 36.3% to 29.9%. India is bidding to be a superdunce rather than superpower.
The government's two flagship programmes, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Right to Education Act, emphasize huge spending on school infrastructure and teacher training. But learning outcomes have not improved at all despite Rs 1trn of extra spending in the last five years. Desperate parents find free government schools so bad that they have shifted massively to private schooling. The proportion of children in private schools is up from 18.7% to 25.6%, with another 26% going for private tuitions. The puzzle is that not even the huge shift to private paid education shows up in improved learning outcomes.
11 Berggruen laments India red-tapism (Financial Chronicle) Global billionaire investor Nicolas Berggruen, founder and President of Berggruen Holdings, has lamented the red-tapism involved in setting up business in India saying it is slowing down investments in the country. "In 2006 we had announced an investment of around $ 300 million, but due to slower pace of growth here, we have been able to invest only half of that amount so far," Berggruen said. The company has invested in hotels under Keys brand, car rental services, real estate and education sector.
"We started operations in India five years back from a scratch. The growth is much slower in here. It takes longer to build businesses here than anywhere else," he said. Taking permissions and other administrative work takes too long in this country, he added. Globally Berggruen Holdings' investments are estimated to exceed $ 3 billion. The company has made than 100 direct investments in over the last 20 years.
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