Balanced View of IT is a Must

Monday, July 07, 2008

Twenty five years might be an insignificant period in history, but it's definitely significant for the Indian IT industry. The past twenty five years have seen stupendous growth in the Indian economy, and we should all feel proud that IT has been a key contributor to this. So many technologies emerged and evolved, causing waves in the entire industry-multi-core CPUs, email, laptops, Gigabytes and Terabytes of storage, VoIP, Web 2.0, telecom boom, data center consolidation, and the list goes on.

It's amazing to see the level of innovation emerging out of these technologies, and we from CyberMedia feel proud that we've helped shape this industry by giving our readers the correct perspective on everything. This year, we're celebrating our 25 years of existence, and throughout we've brought you both positive and negative aspects of IT to give you a well-balanced view.

While we gloat over all the successful innovations in IT, we must not forget that there is a dark side to IT as well, and it's also evolving along with the enhancements to technology. Whatever technologies are available for building innovative, useful apps, are also available to people with malicious intent.

Let's take the example of social networking sites. Everybody is going ga-ga over how social networking sites can be used to find jobs, business deals, endorsements, etc. But they're also being used for cybercrime, which itself has taken several forms, be it Cyber Stalking, Cyber harassment, or the latest buzzword-cyber bullying.

If you've been visiting IT news sites lately, then you would have read about the how a 13-year old girl, Megan Meier in the US hung herself in her room's closet because her boyfriend “Josh” on MySpace ditched her. What's more, Josh was created intentionally by a woman, and poor Megan died without ever knowing the truth. There are many similar cases of cyber bullying on the web, and chances are that they will grow unless some laws are put in place.

The other cyber bully in town is made up of mobile phone threats-SMS and call spoofing, SIM cloning, spam calls, etc. Imagine somebody managing to get hold of your phone's SIM, cloning it, and then misusing it. Or maybe somebody sends SMSes, which appear to come from your number. These are all also possible from sites over the Internet. It's a shuddering thought indeed. Our cover story this time talks about the various mobile phone threats, how they operate and what can you do to protect yourself.

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