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Falun Gong Practitioners Sue Cisco Over ‘Golden Shield’ Firewall Scandal

By
Ejiofor Agada
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0

While the architect of China’s infamous Internet Firewall was pelted with a shoe by a citizen, a lawsuit was being filed in San Francisco against Cisco for its alleged part in it. Practitioners of a religion known as Falun Gong filed the complaint on recently against Cisco, its CEO John Chambers, two of its China executives, and others. The suit claims that Cisco helped design the Chinese Internet surveillance/censorship system known as the Golden Shield.

 

A lawsuit filed in US federal court in the northern California city of San Jose calls for the computer networking gear giant to pay damages and stop helping China find Falungong supporters. Cisco “designed, supplied and helped maintain a censorship and surveillance network known as Golden Shield” used by Chinese officials to identify Falungong practitioners who were detained, tortured and sometimes killed, a lawyer for the group said in court documents filed last week.

 

It also accuses Cisco of using inflammatory language in order to convince Chinese officials to purchase its products, of helping to design the system and as a result, Falun Gong were found, tortured and killed. Cisco denies the validity of the suit, saying in a statement, “There is no basis for these allegations against Cisco, and we intend to vigorously defend against them.  Cisco does not operate networks in China or elsewhere, nor does Cisco customize our products in any way that would facilitate censorship or repression.  Cisco builds equipment to global standards which facilitate free exchange of information, and we sell the same equipment in China that we sell in other nations worldwide in strict compliance with US government regulations.”

 

The civil lawsuit seeks unnamed financial damages from Cisco. In a 52-page court document, the suit says:

 

“Cisco refers to the Golden Shield system in its internal literature as ‘Policenet.’ As a direct result of the Defendants’ creation, development, and maintenance of the Golden Shield technology with Chinese authorities, Plaintiffs, Falun Gong practitioners, have suffered severe and gross abuses, including false imprisonment, torture, cruel assault, battery, and wrongful death, for which judicial relief is warranted in the form of compensatory and punitive damages. “

 

 

The Golden Shield, and the role of Cisco and other U.S. tech giants in it, has been an ongoing battle for years. The Foundation for Defense of Democracy hosts a transcript from a Congressional hearing on the matter from April 19, 2006, given by a former consultant to American corporations operating in China and a former vice-chair of the Government Relations Committee for the American Chamber of Commerce Beijing. The transcript says:

 

“Three companies were competing for the Chinanet contracts in 1997: Bay Networks, Sun Microsystems, and Cisco Systems. Cisco prevailed by selling the authorities a “firewall box” at a significant discount, which would allow the Chinese authorities to block the forbidden web. Cisco’s General Counsel denies selling any special configuration.

 

Chinese engineers who actually worked on the firewall project are equally adamant that it was custom-made. Either way, as early as 1998, any industry-wide restraints on the transfer of censorship technologies were already being weighed against Cisco’s capture of 80% of the China router market, an unprecedented success story. Yet Cisco’s success may be more closely linked to a Cisco manager’s statement that ‘We have the capability to look deeply into the packets.'”

 

In 2008, a Cisco marketing PowerPoint presentation surfaced. On slide #57 of the 90-slide PowerPoint, created in 2002, during a section where the slides were covering the Golden Shield project, it described the project’s three purposes …To crack down on Internet crimes, To ensure the security of public Internet services, and To combat the Falun Gong cult and other hostiles.

 

Cisco distanced itself from the slides at the time, saying they were to help educate its employees about the Chinese landscape. So then, why the lawsuit now? Perhaps because in the past few months, the country’s censorship has escalated as online protests threatening revolution have. In March, Google said the Chinese government was blocking Gmail access. VPNs were also reportedly blocked.

 

If Cisco knew the Chinese government would be using this technology to ultimately hunt down and hurt its citizens, how much responsibility does it have in the matter? Cisco clearly understood the reality of Chinese censorship.

The Nature of Student Undergraduate Projects in Nigeria

By
James T Collins
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1


I have a real problem with the Nigerian educational system’s approach to student undergraduate project. The basic truth is this, the aim for the student is simply to graduate, and the aim for some lecturers is simply to maximize their last chance to frustrate the student, while for others it’s just the student’s last assignment on campus.

 

Now I strongly believe this has to change.

 

Solution Based projects

The fundamental technologies that brought about the creation of the semiconductor industry at Stanford University many years ago were the result of student works. If the industry is to collaborate with the institutions, the work cannot be left to the lecturers, it must be the students who transform industrial challenges to project works. Projects need to be selected based on relevance to industry and the community, basically they must be solution based.

 

Project Continuity

We know things are not at their best in our educational sector, equipments are not sufficient, and students don’t have access to all the information and knowledge they need. Due to this, a real solution based project will most likely be too much for a student or group in one session to start and finish; but if the essence of the project shifts from “finishing at all cost” to making a significant contribution to the work, it no longer becomes a problem to finish the task, simply do your best to get a significant head way, and leave the rest of the work to the next set of students coming in the following year.

 

This is how student projects should be handled, why don’t we handle them that way here?

 

I know this is happening in some quarters, like my company is in collaboration in a number of institutions in Lagos, having students work on projects in the energy sector that are significant to the transformation in that sector that we are. We need a whole lot more of it, and we need it FAST!

 

In Q1, Excessive Inventory Mitigated Japan Disaster In The Global Semiconductor Sector

By
Tekedia Editors
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0

Usually the problem is having excessive inventory especially in this era  of Just In Time which was popularized by the Japanese. Yet, that excessive inventory was the key fact that saved the semiconductor industry from the supply shock after the Japan disaster  in the last few months, IHS iSuppli research indicates. The key point is that days of inventory stood at 80.3 in Q1 of 2011 and that was able to keep the world semi moving without undue disruption from the aftermath of the earth quake.

“Efforts by suppliers to build inventory during the seasonally slow period from the fourth quarter of 2010 through the first quarter of 2011 proved to be fortuitous,” said Sharon Stiefel, analyst for semiconductor market intelligence at IHS. “These efforts resulted in a two- to-four-week cushion of raw materials, work-in-process goods and finished products, which came in handy when chip supplies were disrupted by the Japan disaster. While a large inventory overhang can be a negative development for the semiconductor industry—fueling excess supply, dampening pricing and reducing profits—it turned out to be a positive factor during the first quarter as the overall industry contended with supply shortages.”

And because the Japan disaster occurred so late in the first quarter, with the quake hitting on March 11, the number of weeks of direct disruption to the supply chain was limited during the first quarter, Stiefel added.

The report continues:

The second quarter may also experience a more muted effect from the Japan disaster than previously thought. Many semiconductor manufacturing facilities initially damaged or affected by lack of steady electricity supply have returned to normal operations, narrowing the negative impact on semiconductor revenue during the second quarter. And in cases where damage was severe, manufacturing has been transferred to other company facilities or to outside foundries.

Notice that the Days of inventory (DOI) among chip suppliers—excluding memory companies—was 80.3 days in the plot at the end of Q1, about 1.1% up from Q4 of 2010 which was 79.4%. This inventory which was close to record high was enough to mitigate the supply chain disruption from Japan disaster.

Apple Is The King of Chip Purchase, Says IHS iSuppli

By
Tekedia Editors
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0

IHS iSuppli has ranked Apple as the top chip buyer in the year 2010. They moved past HP which is second in the table now. Apple spent $17.5 billion in 2010 and is projected to improve that to $22.4 billion in 2011. If that holds, it will widen the gap between it and HP which spent $15.2 billion and projected to decline to $14.8 billion.

 

Apple spent more than 61% of its 2010 semiconductor budget on chips for wirelessly  devices like iPhones and iPads while HP spent 82% of its 2010 chip-buying budget on chips for notebooks, desktop and server computers. But since smartphone and tablets are doing better than notebooks, Apple will have the upper hand in coming years.  Smartphone shipments increased 62% in 2010 and tablet grew 900%, driven by iPad. Meanwhile global PC shipments, not counting tablets, grew by 14.2 percent in 2010, said IHS in the report.

 

“Apple’s surge to leadership in semiconductor spending in 2010 was driven by the overwhelming success of its wireless products, namely the iPhone and the iPad,” said Wenlie Ye, Analyst for IHS, in a statement. “These products consume enormous quantities of NAND flash memory, which is also found in the Apple iPod. Because of this, Apple in 2010 was the world’s number one purchaser of NAND flash.”

Smarter Cities IT To Become A $57 Billion Market In Three Years – Estimates IDC Government Insights

By
Tekedia Editors
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0

IDC Government Insights has estimated that  Smarter Cities information technology market opportunity is  will be a $34 billion market in 2011, increasing more than 18 percent per year to $57 billion by 2014.

 

In a press release, IBM noted that smarter cities are important for the global redesign we are experiencing in the world.

 

All cities are made up of a complex system of systems that are all inextricably linked The Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities recognizes the behavior of the city as a whole, thus providing more coordinated and timely decision-making based on deep insights into how each city system will react to a given situation.

 

With more than 2,000 smarter cities engagements worldwide, we are now applying best practices and solutions that can be scaled to cities of all sizes around the globe.

Anne Altman, general manager for Global Public Sector at IBM, said.

 

As the majority of the world’s population repatriates to metropolitan areas, key city systems such as water, power and transportation, IBM said, are being strained to breaking point. For citizens, a smarter city can mean automatically finding the fastest way to get to work, electricity and drinking water that can be counted on, and safer streets, to start with.

 

As city governments put their resources to manage these problems which IBM pioneered as a business sector, IBM will surely see huge business opportunities. They created the market and they are reaping benefits from it. If the trend continues with the green movement, IBM can even move this beyond the $57 billion market IDC has projected for 2014.

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