Showing posts with label Cold War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cold War. Show all posts

Saturday, January 5, 2013

It’s the true world wide ‘web’

Global coordinated action is a huge necessity to tackle cyber crimes

A young man called Jimmy, an Internet hacker, walks discreetly to a Cyber Café in Nigeria to demonstrate his skills of perfidy, fooling perfectly innocent people into his well crafted web of fraudulence. He sends tens of thousands of e-mails congratulating them for winning $6.4 million worth of a sham British lottery. Anybody falling into this trap would be asked to pay ‘fees’ and ‘taxes’ amounting to $5000, which would be pocketed by Jimmy, leaving the respondents in the lurch.

Jimmy is only a tiny fish in the huge ocean of cyber crimes. In UK, internet crime gangs are recruiting students from British universities to join them. Often, these syndicates have developed a cult following among young hackers who are lured by the promise of celebrity status. This kind of recruitment resembles the KGB style of doing things in the heydays of the Cold War. The online fraudulence includes Internet auctions, sweepstakes, lotteries, identity theft and prizes that have despoiled money worth $152 million in the US alone last year. Older people are more susceptible to these crimes; they have being defrauded to the tune of $43 million in 2005. Around 41% of complaints of fraudulence filed by people from the age group of above 50 and received by Federal Trade Commission of US are online crimes. The figure was only 33% in 2002; indicating an alarming increase. As if things were not bad enough for the US, top secret data from Pentagon has been hacked regularly by Russian, Chinese & French hackers, which has kick-started a cyber war with them. Now these hackers are a cause of concern across borders.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
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Friday, December 7, 2012

Lets talk now!

US finally realised it for a change

Well let’s look at it this way. Finally Iran and its intransigence is of some use to the world. At least it’s helping to bring some sanity in the US’s way of looking at the world and solving some key global issues. The US for once realized that Iran is no Iraq and that it cannot solve this issue on its own but would require the help of its erstwhile bete-noire Russia’s help in this case. Obama’s confidential letter to the Russian president Medvedev exemplified that. It was stated in the letter that the US will shelve the interceptor missile system that it plans to install in Poland with a hi-tech radar facility in Czech Republic, provided Russia successfully pursues Iran to shelve some of its nuclear ambitions. While Bush offered it as a direct quid pro quo, Obama on the other hand is trying to involve Russia as a strategic ally not only in the Iran issue, but also in war on terror in Afghanistan. It also talked about renewing arms treaty between the two countries that is expiring this year. However, Russia’s pride and Cold War hangover was instrumental in their refusal to the offer (denying being a second fiddle to the US), albeit expressing desire to talk on missile defense plan with the US. Obama is also considering a Russian proposal (which Bush refused) to install a part of the missile defense system on their own soil, so that it cannot be used against them. He is likely to respect the proposal only if it is effective and affordable.

Time since the Soviet disintegration, Russia has never got the right kind of treatment from the US that it always deserved. Even when Russia was included in G8, a certain antagonism still prevailed. If Obama succeeds in mending the relationship between the US and Russia by giving the latter its due respect, it’s for certain that many of the world’s major predicaments would be solved much more amicably. There are several issues on which Russia and the US do think on similar lines but for the needless turf war between the two, they refuse to accept it.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

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Tuesday, October 16, 2012

WORLD: THE ANATOMY OF NATIONALISM

No surprises; it’s nationalism and not globalization that has created great nations over the years

Incidentally, the way Hitler galvanized a disparate Germany, which was humiliatingly defeated in the First World War, into a reckoning force vindicated the fact of how potent a force the war-cry to resurrect the lost pride of fatherland (or motherland) could be. Nazis became a spent force for good after the defeat of Germany in World War II, but ethnic nationalism continued. Oddly, that the Jewish State succeeded to an extent against all ‘odds’ and emerged as a pioneer in high end technologies is also proof of how nationalism drives the fanatic passion to not only survive, but consolidate and fortify. Had it not been for the ethnic pride and the quest to wipe the humiliation of the past, Japan and Germany wouldn’t have had such incredible resurrections (both economic and political) in just a few decades’ time to become the second and third largest global economies respectively, their decimation in the Second World War notwithstanding.

The advent of Cold War also brought with it a new kind of concept wherein the countries started getting associated with the economic ideology they believed in. In a broader sense, it was ideological nationalism. The world was broadly divided into a capitalist West and a communist East. Countries, in spite of ethnic and cultural differences, were brought together under the umbrella of singular economic ideologies in an attempt to dilute the concept of nationalism. Though this seemed to work in the communist geographies – for example, the slogan to unite workers across the world became more and more prominent in socialist countries that united to present almost a singular (Che) Gueveraish face – a similar thinking did not work in the West, where waves of globalization were sweeping across – for example again, if European football matches were a purveyor of the fervent passion in one’s nationality, then the failure in setting up of the ‘unified’ EU only stamped it further, proving the volcanic resistance in the so called capitalist Europe to forgetting one’s ‘nationality’, be it Turkey’s non-inclusion in the EU or UK’s ad nauseum pound fetish.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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