Stuxnet the first digital weapon

Radio New Zealand National had a great interview with Kim Zetter who has written a book about Stuxnet, the worlds first digital weapon. You can listen to the interview here or read about Stuxnet in chapter 12 of my book The Universal Machine. Its certainly true that quietly over the last few years we have crossed into a new age where cyberwar is now a reality.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

Put the internet to work for you.

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An experiment in digital citizenry

You may already conduct a lot of your life online, but few countries have totally embraced the concept of online citizenship. the small European country of Estonia has been conducting an interesting experiment making all their population "e-Residents". The Register has just published an interesting article on its reach and impact. This was brought to my attention by my colleague Mark Wilson.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

Put the internet to work for you.

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Paper to Digital in 200 languages

Posted by Dmitriy Genzel and Ashok Popat, Research Scientists and Dhyanesh Narayanan, Product Manager

Many of the world’s important sources of information - books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and historical documents - are not digital. Unlike digital documents, these paper-based sources of information are difficult to search through or edit, or worse, completely inaccessible to some people. Part of the solution is scanning, getting a digital image of the page, but raw image pixels aren’t yet recognized as textual content from the computer’s point of view.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology aims to turn pictures of text into computer text that can be indexed, searched, and edited. For some time, Google Drive has provided OCR capabilities. Recently, we expanded this state-of-the-art technology to support all of the world’s major languages - that’s over 200 languages in more than 25 writing systems. This technology is available to users in 2 easy steps:

1. Upload a scanned document in its current form (say, as an image or PDF). The example below shows a scanned document in Hindi uploaded to a user’s Drive account as a PNG.

2. Right-click on the document in the Drive interface, and select ‘Open with’ -> ‘Google Docs’.

This opens a Google document with the original image followed by the extracted text.

You don’t even need to specify which language the document is in; the system will determine that automatically. Or, you can use the Google Drive API for more explicit control over the language detection in documents. For example, here is an invocation of the Drive API in Python:

The OCR capability in Drive is also available in the Drive App for Android.

To make this possible, engineering teams across Google pursued an approach to OCR focused on broad language coverage, with a goal of designing an architecture that could potentially work with all existing languages and writing systems. We do this in part by using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to make sense of the input as a whole sequence, rather than first trying to break it apart into pieces. This is similar to how modern speech recognition systems recognize audio input.

OCR and speech recognition share some challenges - like dealing with background “noise,” different languages, and low-quality inputs. But some challenges are specific to OCR: the variety of typefaces, the different types of scanners and cameras, and the need to work on older material that may contain archaic orthographic and linguistic elements. In addition to utilizing HMMs, we leveraged many of the same technologies used in the Google Handwriting Input app to allow automatic learning of features and to give preference to more likely output, as well as minimum-error-rate training to allow effective combination of multiple sources of information, and modern methods in machine learning to minimize manual design and maximize use of data. We also take advantage of advances in internationalization and typesetting, by using synthetic data in our training.

Currently, the OCR works best on cleanly scanned, high-resolution documents in the most commonly used typefaces. We are working to improve performance on poor quality scans and challenging text layouts. Give it a try and let us know how it works for you.

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A PPT Presentation on Digital Cash e Commerce

Hey friends!!!
Again back with another ppt on Digital Cash submitted by Jamsheer Kutty of KC College, Mumbai.
Nice topic and Nice content. Download and enjoy!!!

Few Points which are covered in this PPT are as fallows:

• What is E-commerce ?
• What is Digital Cash ?
• Relation between e commerce and digital cash
• Key Properties of Digital Cash
• Digital cash VS Credit Card
• The Online Model
• Pros And Cons of the online model
• The Offline Model
• Pros And Cons of the offline model
• Traceable Signature Protocol and it’s problem
• A typical coin
• How can we catch the user
• Reusability
• Advantages
• Global disadvantages
• Legal Issues with Digital cash

Submitted by : Jamsheer Kutty
College : KC College, Mumbai

Team Members :

• Jamsheer kutty
• Satyam Dwivedi
• Gaurav Sharma
• Ganesh Balraj

Download the presentation file below:

• digital_cash_ecommerce_ppt.zip

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