Do you want to pay e-auction tax?

Would you want to sell your products in the e-auction if the government is going to tax you for the profit on the product sold?
How government is going to monitor the collection of the tax on the e-auction sale?

What is your opinion?

Read this for more information - The Online Auction Tax Debate (www.ecommercetimes.com)

RFID - Latest applications and success stories

This article provides a list of applications of RFID in various fields namely:

• Supply chain management - used in the tracking of assets and production pallets along the manufacturing supply chain
  
• Manufacturing and warehousing - tracking usage and location of materials and equipments during the manufacturing process
  
• Retail operations - helps retailers reduce labor and manual costs beside curbs shoplifting and boosts store productivity.
• Food industry
• Livestock - identification of the animals
  
• Healthcare - used in hospitals and on patients
  
• Security tracking
• Parcel and parts monitoring - DHL and airport baggage handling
  
• Pharmaceutical industry - Drug industry in US need to deploy RFID label in 2007
  
• Gaming Industries - used to prevent cheating on the gambling table by putting RFID on the chips
• Libraries - helps the books loan and providing real time inventory information
  

Read more here - Emerging Signs of an RFID Payoff (www.ecommercetimes.com, 18th Nov 2006)

An ethical issue - LAWYER Blogging & get customers

The marketing potential from blogging which may helps to generate income/potential clients to the blogging lawyers may cause some ethical discussion.

• Should lawyer be prohibited from blogging due to the nature of blogging which may contain some elements of marketing?
• Can we stop lawyers from expressing their personal opinion on the blog?

Putting up comments and blog can be translated into advice or advertising. These can be considered as breaching of the professional code of ethics. This is a dilemma faced by lawyers in this new tech-internet environment.

This long article can be obtained here - Blogging Lawyers: The Ethics Debate (www.ecommercetimes.com, 19th Nov 2006)

Selling four pirated DVD online - fined RM8,000.

TheStar online reported that an IT expert was fined RM8,000 under the Copyright Act 1987 for selling four pirated DVDs in the Internet.

I believe this also apply to the selling of photocopied books over the Internet. This is one of the legal issue related to e-commerce.

IT expert fined RM8,000 for offering to sell four pirated DVDs
Friday November 17, 2006

By ANTHONY TAN

PENANG: An IT expert was fined RM8,000 after he pleaded guilty in the Sessions Court here to three counts of offering to sell four pirated DVDs over the Internet.

Poh Wee Leng, 30, from Petaling Jaya, was fined RM2,000 for each infringing copy while his friend, Huan Su Ling, 25, who was jointly charged with him, was freed after the prosecution withdrew the charges against her.

Poh, who is currently pursuing a Masters Degree in Business Administration, admitted on Friday to committing the offences at a house at Solok Tembaga Dua in Island Park here at about 1pm on Oct 12.

He and Huan had claimed trial when they were first charged on Oct 17.

The four titles of the pirated DVDs were Garfield: Tale of Two Kitties, Garfield, The Da Vinci Code and Mean Girl.

The two Garfield titles were stated in the first charge.

The offence under the Copyright Act 1987 carries a fine of RM2,000 to RM20,000 per copy or maximum five years jail or both.

Judge Hadhariah Syed Ismail ordered Poh to serve a total jail term of 18 months if he failed to pay the fine.

Poh, who was represented by R.S.N. Rayer, paid up.

Poh was funded by Malaysia Venture Capital Management Bhd (MAVCAP) in 2004 to develop a portal for ROOMMART that allowed users to find roommates and accommodation.

MAVCAP is wholly owned by the Ministry of Finance Inc.

Huan, who is pursuing a Masters in Computer Science at Universiti Sains Malaysia here, was given a discharge not amounting to an acquittal after the prosecution withdrew the charges against her.

She had represented Malaysia at the Imagine Cup in Brazil in 2004 which was organised by Microsoft.

Imagine Cup is the world’s premier student technology competition with more than 65,000 students from 100 countries entering this year’s event.

4 seconds - That is what I need ........

4 seconds - That's what I need to wait for a website to load.

I will stay if the website can be downloaded within 4 seconds. If it takes more than 4 seconds, I will leave. So, it is important for website designers and owners to ensure that their website can be downloaded within this time frame.

This is a finding disclosed in a recent survey conducted by Akamai.

• This is the outcome from 75% of the 1058 web shopper surveyed.
• 4 seconds is half of the previous surveyed time in the early days of online shopping.
• 30% of the respondents, beside leaving the website, will at the same time spread and share the negative experiences through viral marketing - words of mouth.

Reading link is available here - Websites face four-second cut-off (news.bbc.co.uk)

Unauthorised tapping into home WIFI - Teenager is facing a jail term

Imagine tapping into the other's home wireless network (WiFi) connection using your laptop to access Internet. You may end up in the jail.

A Singaporean teenager is the first person to be charged in Singapore under the new law - Computer Misuse Act - for tapping to gain unauthorise access) into other's home WiFi. The affected neighbour has made a police report on the incident against him.

If convicted, he can go to the jail up to 3 years and fined up to S$10,000. This is indeed very expensive as compare to applying and install your own Internet access.

For more reading, refer to TheStar (12th November 2006) and NST (12th November 2006)

Question:
Who's responsibility to secure the home WIFI systems? Owner or Service Provider?

UTAR most visited page - wble.utar.edu.my

Screenshot from www.alexa.com

As displayed in the www.alexa.com, a website that provide traffic ranking for online websites, the most visited page of UTAR is wble.utar.edu.my (41%) instead of the www.utar.edu.my (28%) as voted by students.

Screenshot from www.alexa.com

Screenshot from YahooGroups Poll (UTAR Students votes)

This is mainly due to the extensiveness of the wble (Web-based learning environment) application in some of the faculties in UTAR. Another popular page visited is mail.utar.edu.my (27%) which is the e-mail page for staff which also indicating high usage of email in communication among the staff and students.

You can try this Alexa.com services to search on other websites' traffic rank.

100 million websites

Since a humble beginning of 18,000 websites in August 1995, the Web now has 100 million websites. This milestone was achieved in October this year, according to Netcraft, an Internet monitoring company that has tracked Web growth since 1995.

Here are some interesting facts:

• 54.6 million websites are in US
• 15 million in Germany
• 6 million in UK
• 2.8 million in Canada
• 2.55 million in France

• 47 or 48 million of them are active websites.
• The number increase dramatically for the last 2 years thanks to blogging.
• The United States, Germany, China, South Korea and Japan show the greatest Web site growing spurts.
• When the Web was started in 1989, it was started as a mechanism for sharing high energy particle physics data.
• Web "explosion" took place when businesses realized they could use the Internet to make money.
• In both the business world and the social scene, a Web site is now an identifier almost as common as a phone number or an e-mail address.

Moer reading can be obtained here - Web reaches new milestone: 100 million sites (www.cnn.com) 1st Nov 2006

For more resources on Internet History and evolution, click this link - Online Evolution

Enemies of the Internet

Ever heard of "Enemies of the Internet"?

Its refer to the countries that suppressing the freedom of expression over the Internet (also known as web censorship) especially blogging. For example,

• being prevented from posting news online or writing a blog.
• censor and block online content.
• arrest and detain bloggers.

13 countries has been listed as the enemies of the Internet:

• Belarus
• China
• Cuba
• Egypt
• Iran
• Myanmar
• North Korea
• Saudi Arabia
• Syria
• Tunisia,
  
• Turkmenistan,
  
• Uzbekistan and
  
• Vietnam.

Worldwide, 61 people, 52 in China, are in prison for posting what the countries claimed was "subversive" content.

This news come from 2 sources namely BBC News Technology - 'Enemies of the internet' named and Yahoo!News Tech -13 nations denounced for Web censorship. (Nov 8)

IBM to produce Privacy-Friendly RFID Tags

The current application and usage of RFID tag has generated various concern among the users mainly concentrated on the privacy issues. Why?

• Tagged items carried by the buyers can tracked within 30 feets away, enabled its whereabout to be located.
• This will create the opportunity for thieves with RFID scanners to rob the expensive items and its owners.
• If the tag is removed, then the retailers will find difficult when the product is being returned, will all the data already missing.

With the introduction of clipped tag, the antenna can be easily teared off. This leave only the data in the remaining tag without being tracked.

Though this product is able to address the privacy concern, another area to be looked into will be the cost - cost for item-level tagging is still very high.

Detailed reading is avalable at Yahoo!News - Tech: IBM's Privacy-Friendly RFID Tag Ready For Production

Which page of UTAR website is the most popular?

Want to know which of the following pages of the UTAR website is the most visited page for the past 6 months? What is your guess?

• wble.utar.edu.my
• utar.edu.my
• mail.utar.edu.my
• library.utar.edu.my
• mail2.utar.edu.my
• web2.utar.edu.my

Click here for the voting: YahooGroup Poll http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ubai3013-oct2006/surveys?id=12460402

Polling will be closed on the 12th Nov 2006. Hurry! I will disclose and compare the finding with the polling on the 13th Nov 2006.

YouTube vs Utube.com

Different spelling.......same pronunciation.

YouTube - Online Video Sharing site. Also the Time Invention of the Year 2006. Established since 2004.
Utube.com - Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, industry equipment maker - website established since 1996.

Due to the popularity of YouTube, some users mistakenly treated Utube.com as YouTube.com resulted in dramatic increase of web page request and visits, from 1500 hits per months to as high as 2 million hits per month. This caused the company server to crash a few times.

Now, Utube.com is suing YouTube.com for causing its server to crash as well as causing it losing business and the need to invest in more reliable server. It requested YouTube to change its name or to finance its new rebranding process.

From www.ecommercetimes.com - "Domain-name confusion has been around as long as the World Wide Web. Some have tried to capitalize on the element of human error and confusion, by snatching up like-sounding domains and establishing ad-filled outposts."

More reading can be obtained here - YouTube sued over domain use. (www.ecommercetimes.com)

What do you think? Share you comment:
Who is making the mistake here? Users or YouTube?

Accessing Internet from your CAR

Now, we can access Internet from our mobile phone from anywhere including while we are driving.
In the near future, we can suft Internet directly from PCs install in our cars.

Imagine doing this while on the road...of course not while you are driving!

• Checking e-mails
• Downloading songs or files
• Placing reservation for restaurant or movie
• Checking road map
• MSN or Skyping
• Doing online banking and lots more.....

PCs are connected through the mobile phone connection or signal.........and WIMAX in the near future.

More reading can be available here (www.ecommercetimes.com) - Web Access in Cars Hits the Road

Online Brokerage Fraud - Millions of dollars loss

2 largest e-brokerage companies in US, namely E-Trade Financial and Ameritrade, reported on a shocking online brokerage fraud through computer criminal hacking which caused millions of dollars losses.

Some of the interesting facts:

• Estimated losses are $4 and $18 million for Ameritrade and E-Trade Financial respectively.
• Much of the fraud occurred overseas while clients were using public computers infected with spyware or wireless connections. User IDs and passwords were stolen.
• Fraud committed against E-Trade customers appeared to be concentrated in Thailand and eastern Europe
• Hackers are increasingly turning their attention to financial services firms.
• Identity theft

Read more here from www.ecommercetimes.com 25th Oct 2006.

Internet Security Threats - Its Changing Faces (Part 2)

This is the part 2 of the Internet Security article from www.ecommercetimes.com

Among the facts:
New Threats:

• New malicious programs increased by 8% with more Trojan applications aims to steal information and e-login.
• The use of rootkit malware that allow a person to hide their malicious activities and programs is also in the rise.
• Another threat is holding data hostage - a program used to modify data on a victim machine and then blackmail the user.

Preventions:

• The need for fast, efficient and unobtrusive protection has led some security systems developers to become managed security service providers (MSSPs) which has broader security management services besides delivering patches and system updates.
• Services are such as internal and external scanning for vulnerabilities; threat intelligence to identify emerging exploits; richer correlation of asset data with vulnerabilities, threats and attacks; and blocking or shielding capabilities to stop attacks

Read more on this article - The Changing Faces of Internet Security Threats, Part 2

Previous entry on Part 1 is available here.

PhishTank .....all the Phish go to the Tank

Introducing a new website PhishTank which is a collaborative clearing house for data and information about phishing on the Internet. It also provides an open API for developers and researchers to integrate anti-phishing data into their applications at no charge.

You can submit the suspected phishing links as well as verify these links in the database too.

If you receive any email or link, well this is the service that you can use to verify it before you continue with the transaction.

Besides, there are also latest news on phishing in this website.

I like their theme - Out of the Net, Into the Tank!

Visit PhishTank at www.phishtank.com

29,549 video files were deleted from YouTube

A total of 29, 549 video files were deleted from YouTube due to the copyright infridgement. Most of these copyrighted files were posted by individual users.

Files involved were copyrighted Japanese television shows, music videos and movies.

Suggestion has been made to introduce a preliminary screening process acting as a filtering systems of the copyrighted material.

At the same time, copyrighted materials with the approval from the copyright holders will be posted in exchange with the advertisment revenue sharing by YouTube.

Source: YouTube Purges Nearly 30,000 Files on Japanese Demand (www.ecommercetimes.com)

Happy Deepavali and Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri

Wishing all of you a happy holiday of Deepavali and Hari Raya.

Don't forget our date on the 4th of November 2006, 2pm.
Have a nice day.

From:
UBAI3013 Teaching Team

Now scientists say Video Games is useful

You can call it a new way of self learning by playing video games.

Scientists reveal that addiction on the video games can actually be converted into serious learning tools in school. Wow...just imagine going to school to play video games during the lectures and tutorials.

Soft-skills such as analytical thinking (how to complete the games with appropriate srategies especially RPG or strategy games), team building (games played in groups), multitasking and problem solving (like CSI investigation game).

Of course we are not talking about the soccer or basketball, car racing type of games but games such as business related (entreprenueurship - which I did played before) can be utilised in education. In fact in some universities, subjects are being taught by using games - specific business games. I will be very happy if there is an opportunity to implement this method into the learning process.

For more reading, click here - Not playing around: Scientists say video games can reshape education (www.cnn.com, 17 October 2006)

E-Filling in Malaysia - Latest updates

Very soon, we can check our income tax records from home by using the e-Filling from next year onwards. (Source: TheStar, 18th October 2006)

Among the available information will be:

• Information on the income tax paid last year, and where and how it was paid, will be available online
• online tax return “form” will have the taxpayer’s personal particulars like identity card number, address and the names of the spouse and children.

A taxpayer will be able to get the PIN and security code online via the IRB website (www.hasil.gov.my) from next year unlike the current year practice which required he/she to collect the PIN from the IRB branches.

E-Filling which was introduced this year did experience some problems such as:

• Some people had Internet access, but lacked the proper software, and the system did not work
• There was also congestion when many taxpayers filed in their tax forms at the same time.

I didn't use it this year but I may want to try it next year.