LG announces G Flex with curved 6-inch display and 'self-healing' back cover!!!

Several weeks ago we got the first glance at LG's first curved-screen device, and today the company made it official. The LG G Flex includes most of the specifications we were expecting, such as a vertically-curved six-inch 720p OLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC with a 2.26 GHz quad-core CPU, 2 GB of RAM and a 13-megapixel camera.

The entire design of the phone is impressively curved, with the signature rear buttons from the LG G2 seen just below the camera module. At its thickest point, the G Flex is 8.7mm thick, hiding a 3,500 mAh battery; necessary for powering such a large display.

One of the most interesting features of the G Flex is a "self-healing" back cover, which LG likens to the healing capabilities of Wolverine from X-Men. The technology sees the back cover coated with a special protective film, which is apparently able to remove minor scratches within minutes. Unfortunately, LG refrained from mentioning exactly what the protective film is made from, or how it works.

Also like the G2, the G Flex will come with a software suite that includes windowed applications, high-fidelity audio playback, tap-to-wake and a new set of lockscreen animations.

If you're interested in picking up the ergonomically-curved smartphone, you'll be disappointed to hear that LG will only be releasing the device in South Korea (on all three major carriers) at this stage. Similar to Samsung with their curved-screen Galaxy Round, it appears LG is testing the new form factor in its home country before embarking on an international launch.

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SoapUI - Client side cert - Burp

Many of you who've Googled around for SoapUi - Burp would have seen my earlier post on it, and also a cooler post here.

This time I also had a JKS client certificate that I needed to send to invoke a web-service method. Turns out that while Burp accepts certificates..it doesn't directly accept JKS certs - you need to convert it into PKCS12 instead.

You can easily convert a JKS cert into a PKCS12 cert using the keytool utility that comes along with JDK. Here is the exact command that you need to run to do that.

keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore -srcstorepass -destkeystore -srcstoretype JKS -deststoretype PKCS12 -deststorepass

Make sure that you use this exact command. That's coz there's plenty of other interactive variants to this..but using any of those turn up with a number of weird errors related to incorrect passwords or padding or something else while attempting to import the cert.

Once you have the PKCS12 file, navigate to Options - SSL - Client SSL certificates and add your certificate there.

Configure SoapUI to talk to Burp now as per this or this.. and you should be all set. Have fun :)

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The Unthinkable Risks of the Cloud!!!

By mid-2013 – meaning now — cloud computing will be in use by about 80 percent of about 600 companies with at least 500 employees each,  according to a 2012 TNS Infratest survey. The trend is undeniable:  Data management and storage are moving offsite to cloud computing vendors on a vast scale.

Touting cloud computing as a way to eliminate the costs of buying and maintaining on-site information-technology assets, vendors offer it in the form of software as a service (SAAS), a distribution model in which software applications are delivered to clients over a web-based network. 

Offered in comprehensive, fully-integrated form, SAAS can serve the needs of entire companies through huge, web-based platforms.  As cloud computing rapidly becomes the delivery channel for software developers of all shapes and sizes to get their products to market, offering applications in a cloud is now the rule, not the exception.

A relatively small number of vendors have the service capacity to offer SaaS to big companies that want company-wide cloud computing.  The barriers to entry are formidable; only the best-capitalized vendors need apply.  Although market-share statistics are hard to come by, the list of companies large enough to offer cloud computing on this scale is short: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Rackspace and not many others.

The concentration of data and virtual computing in the hands of relatively few vendors raises an important risk for their clients.  If the Internet-based systems of any one vendor are hacked, the result could be security breaches and invasions of privacy across entire industries in which their clients do business, creating liabilities on an almost unthinkable scale.

Can this small cadre of cloud-computing vendors adequately respond to the needs of their clients to quickly fix such a breach, restore services and, most importantly, cut off the damage to these clients’ own customers?

Can the balance sheet of any one of these vendors protect its clients from such losses and liabilities?

Could a company like Microsoft eliminate the risk of a virus being planted by a hacker in its Azure cloud computing product?  

If it can’t, will its balance sheet – as vast as it is – be enough to protect its clients against wholesale desertion by their customers? 

Don’t think such things can’t happen.  If hackers can penetrate the Department of Defense, the risk that they will penetrate Microsoft or Google cannot be ruled out.  Compromise of just one of these vendors – even one with a modest market share – conceivably could shut down, at least temporarily, a sizable slice of the U.S. economy.

Risk Aggregation
With such potential losses at stake, corporations are bound to think about hedging their exposures via cyber insurance. Yet even as insurance companies rush to meet the demand for cyber loss and liability insurance products, they worry about aggregation, the excessive exposure of a single insurer to a single catastrophic event, as Erich Bublitz recently pointed out in Carrier Management.

If the catastrophic event is a breakdown in just one of the handful of large cloud-computing vendors serving Corporate America, it is likely that no single cyber insurance tower could fully protect all of its clients.  

A vendor would have to buy staggering amounts of insurance limits to cover all data security and privacy liability exposure to its customers.  Cyber insurers and reinsurers worry about aggregation because a single catastrophic cyber breach at a single cloud-computing vendor could wipe out an entire tower (a layer of coverage above a company’s primary insurance policy) of cyber coverage, much like a superstorm can wipe out a whole region in its wake. 

The aftermath of such a crisis would not be pretty. Some of the biggest companies in the nation might be pitted against each other in competition for the vendor’s meager (compared to the scope of the loss) insurance proceeds — and, ultimately, its balance sheet. 

Shouldering the Burden Alone
To adequately manage risk, the clients of these vendors must recognize that as a practical matter, there probably isn’t enough cyber loss and liability insurance capacity available to cloud-computing service providers to fully protect their clients in such a scenario.

CFOs and risk managers can continue to request indemnity agreements from their vendors to gain faster access to their assets in the event of a catastrophic liability, but with a giant like Microsoft, this often isn’t an option.  Are there solutions available to one of the 80 percent of companies that has migrated to cloud computing but wishes to guard its business and its assets against a 100-year-flood cyber loss or liability event?

The short answer is this:  The cloud-computing client must shoulder the burden, largely alone, of protecting itself from liability to its own customers resulting from a vendor’s security breach or confidential data disclosure. 

The company may or may not be able to pass this expense on to the vendor in a service agreement.  Good cyber insurance is not inexpensive.  Buying cut-rate coverage from an insurance company inexperienced in this space, however, can lead to nasty surprises when the insurer ends up learning how to adjust a catastrophic cyber claim on the fly. 

To protect itself effectively against this kind of claim, companies need to create a coordinated effort between the risk and legal departments.  Consider these recommendations: 

Choose a cloud-computing vendor carefully.  The willingness and ability of the vendor to stand behind its products and services should be just as important as the functionality of those products and services. 

Engage a broker that has special expertise in cyber insurance.  Ask to meet the broker’s cyber risk team, and look for former underwriters of cyber loss and liability programs coming out of insurance companies known for competency in this field.

Evaluate the cyber catastrophe exposures exceeding a vendor’s and the company’s own insurance programs. That’s a vital part of enterprise risk management.  

Can the small cadre of cloud-computing vendors respond to the needs of their clients quickly enough to fix a breach?

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Yahoo Tops Google In Web Traffic Again!!!

NEW YORK (AP) — For the third month in a row, more Americans visited Yahoo's websites than Google's, according to comScore Inc.'s Internet traffic data for September.

The research firm said Monday that Yahoo Inc.'s websites had 197.8 million unique U.S. visitors last month, while Google's had 191.4 million. Yahoo was ahead of Google in July and August, too. The last time that Yahoo was ahead of Google before that was in May 2011.

That said, Yahoo is still far behind Google in making money from the people who visit its websites. Research firm eMarketer estimates that Google will generate $38.83 billion in worldwide digital ad revenue this year, more than any other company. Facebook Inc. is at No. 2 with an estimated $5.89 billion, while Yahoo is No. 3 with $3.63 billion expected.

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Yahoo Is Now Actually Beating Google In Traffic. Here's How!!!

Recently, when people have paid any attention to Yahoo at all, they've really just been talking about its headline-grabbing CEO, Marissa Mayer. But her year-long tenure trying to turn around the aging Internet behemoth has gained her more than just fawning personal profiles: Yahoo is actually getting a ton of Internet traffic.

On Wednesday, comScore, an independent web analytics company, released a reportindicating that Yahoo's slew of websites -- everything from Flickr to Yahoo Finance -- actually got more web traffic than Google. In aggregate, 197 million people visited Yahoo's sites in the month of July. Gmail, Google's search engine and rest of Google's sites received 192 million unique visitors during that same period.

A Yahoo spokesperson told the Huffington Post that the company does not comment on third-party metrics.

The first two questions you probably have to the news is: Yahoo? Really? To those who switched from Yahoo long ago, it's hard to see how it's actually gaining relevance. (Tumblr was not included in last month's numbers for Yahoo.) Let's pin down a few reasons for the boost.

Yahoo actually was never that far behind

Looking back at comScore data from the past year, you can see that Google was barely edging out Yahoo for the better part of 2013. Though it's perceived as a backwater, Yahoo has been getting a ton of traffic for a long time. Marketing Land,the blog that first pointed out the data, reports that Yahoo previously beat Google in May 2011 and March 2008 -- both before Mayer came on as chief executive.

We're not looking at the most important category

As AllThingsD notes, traffic from mobile phones -- an increasingly popular device for surfing the web -- is not included in this batch of data. Mobile has been where nearly every Internet company -- Yahoo and Google included -- have focused, and Mayer recognizes that Yahoo has a hill to climb. As she has reiterated in interview afterinterview, Mayer is focusing the company on apps, throwing $200 million at hiring a mobile team.

Maybe Yahoo's websites are -- gasp -- actually getting better

Mayer's first major product makeover was Yahoo Mail in December. Yahoo's main homepage went through a major, Facebook-esque redesign in February. Flickr got an overhaul in May. The critics, with perhaps the exception of several photo buffs using Flickr, have been warm to the redesigns. It's hard to pin down which members of Yahoo's bevy of sites is actually responsible for the boost seen in comScore's data. Obviously correlation is not causation, but in the chart above, we do see traffic inch up as these revamps were rolling out.


This post has been updated with comment from Yahoo.

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The Decline of Wikipedia!!!

The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-­ranking quality scores.The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

When Wikipedians achieved their most impressive feat of leaderless collective organization, they unwittingly set in motion the decline in participation that troubles their project today.

In response, the Wikimedia Foundation, the 187-person nonprofit that pays for the legal and technical infrastructure supporting Wikipedia, is staging a kind of rescue mission. The foundation can’t order the volunteer community to change the way it operates. But by tweaking Wikipedia’s website and software, it hopes to steer the encyclopedia onto a more sustainable path.The foundation’s campaign will bring the first major changes in years to a site that is a time capsule from the Web’s earlier, clunkier days, far removed from the easy-to-use social and commercial sites that dominate today. “Everything that Wikipedia is was utterly appropriate in 2001 and it’s become increasingly out of date since,” says Sue Gardner, executive director of the foundation, which is housed on two drab floors of a downtown San Francisco building with a faulty elevator. “This is very much our attempt to get caught up.” She and Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, say the project needs to attract a new crowd to make progress. “The biggest issue is editor diversity,” says Wales. He hopes to “grow the number of editors in topics that need work.”

Whether that can happen depends on whether enough people still believe in the notion of online collaboration for the greater good—the ideal that propelled Wikipedia in the beginning. But the attempt is crucial; Wikipedia matters to many more people than its editors and students who didn’t make time to read their assigned books. More of us than ever use the information found there, both directly and via other services. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has either killed off the alternatives or pushed them down the Google search results. In 2009 Microsoft closed Encarta, which was based on content from several storied encyclopedias. Encyclopaedia Britannica, which charges $70 a year for online access to its 120,000 articles, offers just a handful of free entries plastered with banner and pop-up ads.

Newcomers UnwelcomeWhen Wikipedia launched in 2001, it wasn’t intended to be an information source in its own right. Wales, a financial trader turned Internet entrepreneur, and Larry Sanger, a freshly minted philosophy PhD, started the site to boost Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia started by Wales that relied on contributions from experts. After a year, Nupedia offered a strange collection of only 13 articles on such topics as Virgil and the Donegal fiddle tradition. Sanger and Wales hoped Wikipedia, where anyone could start or modify an entry, would rapidly generate new articles that experts could then finish up.

When they saw how enthusiastically people embraced the notion of an encyclopedia that anyone could edit, Wales and Sanger quickly made Wikipedia their main project. By the end of its first year it had more than 20,000 articles in 18 languages, and its growth was accelerating fast. In 2003, Wales formed the Wikimedia Foundation to operate the servers and software that run Wikipedia and raise money to support them. But control of the site’s content remained with the community dubbed Wikipedians, who over the next few years compiled an encyclopedia larger than any before. Without any traditional power structure, they developed sophisticated workflows and guidelines for producing and maintaining entries. Their only real nod to hierarchy was electing a small group of “administrators” who could wield special powers such as deleting articles or temporarily banning other editors. (There are now 635 active admins on the English Wikipedia.)

The project seemed laughable or shocking to many. Wikipedia inherited and embraced the cultural expectations that an encyclopedia ought to be authoritative, comprehensive, and underpinned by the rational spirit of the Enlightenment. But it threw out centuries of accepted methods for attaining that. In the established model, advisory boards, editors, and contributors selected from society’s highest intellectual echelons drew up a list of everything worth knowing, then created the necessary entries. Wikipedia eschewed central planning and didn’t solicit conventional expertise. In fact, its rules effectively discouraged experts from contributing, given that their work, like anyone else’s, could be overwritten within minutes. Wikipedia was propelled instead by the notion that articles should pile up quickly, in the hope that one Borgesian day the collection would have covered everything in the world.

Progress was swift. The English-language Wikipedia alone had about 750,000 entries by late 2005, when a boom in media coverage and a spike in participation pushed the project across the line from Internet oddity to part of everyday life. Around that time, Wikipedians achieved their most impressive feat of leaderless collective organization—one, it turns out, that set in motion the decline in participation that troubles their project today. At some time in 2006, the established editors began to feel control of the site slipping from their grasp. As the number of new contributions—well-meaning and otherwise—was growing, the task of policing them all for quality began to feel impossible. Because of Wikipedia’s higher public profile and commitment to letting anyone contribute even anonymously, many updates were pure vandalism. High-profile incidents such as the posting of a defamatory hoax article about the journalist John Seigenthaler raised serious questions about whether crowdsourcing an encyclopedia, or anything else, could ever work.

As is typical with Wikipedians, a response emerged from a mixture of cordial discussions, tedious arguments, and online wrestling matches—but it was sophisticated. The project’s most active volunteers introduced a raft of new editing tools and bureaucratic procedures intended to combat the bad edits. They created software that allowed fellow editors to quickly survey recent changes and reject them or admonish their authors with a single mouse click. They set loose automated “bots” that could reverse any incorrectly formatted changes or those that were likely to be vandalism and dispatch warning messages to the offending editors.

The tough new measures worked. Vandalism was brought under control, and hoaxes and scandals became less common. Newly stabilized, and still growing in scope and quality, the encyclopedia became embedded in the firmament of the Web. Today the English Wikipedia has 4.4 million articles; there are 23.1 million more in 286 other languages. But those tougher rules and the more suspicious atmosphere that came along with them had an unintended consequence. Newcomers to Wikipedia making their first, tentative edits—and the inevitable mistakes—became less likely to stick around. Being steamrollered by the newly efficient, impersonal editing machine was no fun. The number of active editors on the English-language Wikipedia peaked in 2007 at more than 51,000 and has been declining ever since as the supply of new ones got choked off. This past summer only 31,000 people could be considered active editors.

“I categorize from 2007 until now as the decline phase of Wikipedia,” says Aaron Halfaker, a grad student at the University of Minnesota who has worked for the Wikimedia Foundation as a contractor and this year published the most detailed assessment of the problem. “It looks like Wikipedia is strangling itself for this resource of new editors.”

Halfaker’s study, which he conducted with a Minnesota colleague and researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, analyzed Wikipedia’s public activity logs. The results paint a numerical picture of a community dominated by bureaucracy. Since 2007, when the new controls began to bite, the likelihood of a new participant’s edit being immediately deleted has steadily climbed. Over the same period, the proportion of those deletions made by automated tools rather than humans grew. Unsurprisingly, the data also indicate that well-intentioned newcomers are far less likely to still be editing Wikipedia two months after their first try.

In their paper on those findings, the researchers suggest updating Wikipedia’s motto, “The encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Their version reads: “The encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit.”

Because Wikipedia has failed to replenish its supply of editors, its skew toward technical, Western, and male-dominated subject matter has persisted. In 2011, researchers from the University of Minnesota and three other schools showed that articles worked on mostly by female editors—which presumably were more likely to be of interest to women—were significantly shorter than those worked on mostly by male editors or by men and women equally. Another 2011 study, from the University of Oxford, found that 84 percent of entries tagged with a location were about Europe or North America. Antarctica had more entries than any nation in Africa or South America.

The UpgradeWhen asked about the decline in the number of editors, Gardner carefully explains that she is addressing it only as a precaution, because there’s no proof it is harming Wikipedia. But after a few minutes discussing the issue, it is clear that she believes Wikipedia needs help. A career journalist who headed the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s online operations before taking her current position, Gardner reaches for an analogy from the newsroom to explain why the trend matters. “The Wikipedians remind me of the crusty old desk guy who knows the style guide backwards,” she says. “But where are the eager cub reporters? You don’t get the crusty old desk guy out at three in the morning to cover a fire. That’s for the new guy, who’s got a lot of energy and potential. At Wikipedia we don’t have a sufficient influx of cub reporters.”

In 2012 Gardner formed two teams—now called Growth and Core Features—to try to reverse the decline by making changes to Wikipedia’s website. One idea from the researchers, software engineers, and designers in these groups was the “Thank” button, Wikipedia’s answer to Facebook’s ubiquitous “Like.” Since May, editors have been able to click the Thank button to quickly acknowledge good contributions by others. It’s the first time they have been given a tool designed solely to deliver positive feedback for individual edits, says Steven Walling, product manager on the Growth team. “There have always been one-button-push tools to react to negative edits,” he says. “But there’s never been a way to just be, like, ‘Well, that was pretty good, thanks.’” ­Walling’s group has focused much of its work on making life easier for new editors. One idea being tested offers newcomers suggestions about what to work on, steering them toward easy tasks such as copyediting articles that need it. The hope is this will give people time to gain confidence before they break a rule and experience the tough side of Wikipedia.

These might seem like small changes, but it is all but impossible for the foundation to get the community to support bigger adjustments. Nothing exemplifies this better than the effort to introduce the text editing approach that most people are familiar with: the one found in everyday word processing programs.

Since Wikipedia began, editing has required using “wikitext,” a markup language painful to the untrained eye. It makes the first sentence of Wikipedia’s entry for the United States look like this:

The ”’United States of America”’ (”’USA”’ or ”’U.S.A.”’), commonly referred to as the ”’United States”’ (”’US”’ or ”’U.S.”’) and ”’America”’, is a [[federal republic]]<ref>{{cite book |title=The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge, Second Edition: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind |year=2007 |publisher=St. Martin’s Press |isbn=978-0312376598 |page=632}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Onuf|first=Peter S.|title=The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775–1787|year=1983|publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press |location= Philadelphia |isbn=978-0812211672}}</ref> consisting of 50 [[U.S. state|states]] and a [[Federal district (United States)|federal district]].

After years of planning, the foundation finally unveiled Visual Editor, an interface that hides the wikitext and offers “what you see is what you get” editing. It rolled out in a site-wide trial in July, with the expectation that it would soon become a permanent fixture.

But in the topsy-turvy world of the encyclopedia anyone can edit, it’s not a fringe opinion that making editing easier is a waste of time. The characteristics of a dedicated volunteer editor—Gardner lists “fussy,” “persnickety,” and “intellectually self-confident”—are not those that urge the acceptance of changes like Visual Editor. 

After the foundation made Visual Editor the default way to edit entries, Wikipedians rebelled and complained of bugs in the software. In September, a Request for Comment, a survey of the community, concluded that the new interface should be hidden by default. The foundation initially refused, but in September a community–elected administrator released a modification to Wikipedia’s code to hide Visual Editor. The foundation gave in. It made Visual Editor opt-in rather than opt-out—meaning that the flagship project to help newcomers is in fact invisible to newcomers, unless they dig through account settings to switch the new interface on.

Many opponents of Visual Editor dispute the idea that it will help Wikipedia. “I don’t think this is the cure the foundation’s looking for,” says Oliver Moran, an Irish software engineer who has made thousands of edits since 2004 and is a top administrator. Like some other vocal Wikipedians, he considers it patronizing to say that wikitext keeps out certain people. “Look at something like Twitter,” he says. “People pick up the hashtags and @ signs straight away.” Much criticism of Visual Editor is also underpinned by a feeling that it proves the foundation is happy to make unilateral changes to a supposedly collaborative project. Moran says Visual Editor was rolled out without enough input from the people providing the voluntary labor Wikipedia is built on.

When asked to identify Wikipedia’s real problem, Moran cites the bureaucratic culture that has formed around the rules and guidelines on contributing, which have become labyrinthine over the years. The page explaining a policy called Neutral Point of View, one of “five pillars” fundamental to Wikipedia, is almost 5,000 words long. “That is the real barrier: policy creep,” he says. But whatever role that plays in Wikipedia’s travails, any effort to prune its bureaucracy is hard to imagine. It would have to be led by Wikipedians, and the most active volunteers have come to rely on bureaucratic incantations. Citing “WP:NPV” (the neutral point of view policy) or threatening to take a matter toARBCOM (the arbitration committee for dispute resolution) in a way that suggests you know a lot about such arcana is easier than having a more substantive discussion.

This is not to say all Wikipedians disagree with the Wikimedia Foundation’s assessment of the site’s problems and its ideas for addressing them. But even grassroots initiatives to help Wikipedia can’t escape the community’s tendency to get bogged down in navel-gazing ­arguments.

In July 2012, some editors started a page called WikiProject Editor Retention with the idea of creating a place to brainstorm ideas about helping newcomers and fostering a friendlier atmosphere. Today the most vibrant parts of that project’s discussion page have gripes about “bullying done by administrators,” debates over whether “Wikipedia has become a bloody madhouse,” and disputes featuring accusations such as “You registered an account today just to have a go at me?”

Public GoodEven though Wikipedia has far fewer active editors than it did in its heyday, the number and length of its articles continue to grow. This means the volunteers who remain have more to do, and Gardner says she can sense the effects: “Anecdotally, the editing community has a sense of feeling a little bit beleaguered and overworked.” A 2011 survey by the Wikimedia Foundation suggested that being an active editor already required a significant time commitment. Of 5,200 Wikipedians from all language editions of the project, 50 percent contributed more than one hour a day, and 20 percent edited for three or more hours a day. Wikipedia’s anti-abuse systems are probably effective enough to keep vandalism in check, says Halfaker, but the more complex work of improving, expanding, and updating articles may suffer: “When there’s fewer people working, less work gets done.”

When the topic of quality comes up, anyone affiliated with Wikipedia often points out that it is “a work in progress.” But such caveats aren’t very meaningful when the project’s content is put to use. When Google’s search engine puts Wikipedia content into a fact box to answer a query, or Apple’s Siri uses it to answer a question, the information is presented as authoritative. Google users are invited to report inaccuracies, but only if they spot and then click an easy-to-miss link to “feedback/more info.” Even then, the feedback goes to Google, not to Wikipedia itself.

Jimmy Wales, now just a regular Wikipedian but still influential with editors and the Wikimedia Foundation, dismisses suggestions that the project will get worse. But he believes it can’t get significantly better without an influx of new editors who have different interests and emphases. “When you look at the article on the USB standard, you see it is really amazing and core to our competency as a tech geek community, but look at an entry about somebody famous in sociology, or Elizabethan poets, and it is quite limited and short and could be improved,” he says. “That’s not likely to happen until we diversify the community.” Wales hopes Visual Editor will do that by attracting people who are similar to those already editing the site but have interests beyond the male- and tech-centric—as he puts it, “geeks who are not computer geeks.” But he admits to worrying that making Wikipedia simpler to edit could instead confirm that the project doesn’t appeal to people who are not computer geeks.

Indeed, larger cultural trends will probably make it a challenge to appeal to a broader section of the public. As commercial websites have risen to prominence, online life has moved away from open, self-governed crowdsourcing communities like the one that runs Wikipedia, says Clay Shirky, a professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. Shirky was one of the biggest boosters of an idea, popular during the previous decade, that the Web encouraged strangers to come together and achieve things impossible for a conventional organization. Wikipedia is proof there was some truth to that notion. But today’s Web is dominated by sites such as Facebook and Twitter, where people maintain personal, egocentric feeds. Outside specific settings like massive multiplayer games, relatively few people mingle in shared virtual space. Instead, they use mobile devices that are unsuited to complex creative work and favor neatly self-­contained apps over messier, interconnected Web pages. Shirky, who is an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation, says people steeped in that model will struggle to understand how and why they should contribute to Wikipedia or any project like it. “Facebook is the largest participatory culture today, but their mode of participation is different,” he says. “It’s aggregating rather than collaborating.”

Gardner agrees that today’s Web is hostile to self-organized collective efforts, likening it to a city that has lost its public parks. “Our time is spent on an increasingly small number of increasingly large corporate sites,” she says. “We need more public space online.” In fact, Gardner is leaving the foundation at the end of the year in search of new projects to work on that very problem. She contends that even with all its troubles, Wikipedia is one of the Web’s few public parks that won’t disappear.

She is surely right that Wikipedia isn’t going away. On Gardner’s watch, the funds the Wikimedia Foundation has raised each year to support the site have grown from $4 million to $45 million. Because the encyclopedia has little competition, Web developers will continue to build services that treat its content as fact, and ordinary people will rely on Wikipedia for information.

Yet it may be unable to get much closer to its lofty goal of compiling all human knowledge. Wikipedia’s community built a system and resource unique in the history of civilization. It proved a worthy, perhaps fatal, match for conventional ways of building encyclopedias. But that community also constructed barriers that deter the newcomers needed to finish the job. Perhaps it was too much to expect that a crowd of Internet strangers would truly democratize knowledge. Today’s Wikipedia, even with its middling quality and poor representation of the world’s diversity, could be the best encyclopedia we will get.

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De Blasio Outlines Plans To Curb New York's iPhone Theft Problem!!!

NEW YORK -- Bill de Blasio, the front-runner to become New York City's next mayor, called Monday for new technology and more police officers on the streets to address the growing number of criminals targeting iPhones and iPads.

Speaking at a press conference, de Blasio announced that he was joining a nationwide coalition of officials who are pressing Apple and other smartphone makers to implement technology that renders smartphones inoperable once they are stolen.

De Blasio, currently the city's public advocate, also sent letters Monday to executives at Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Motorola, calling on them to introduce a so-called "kill switch" to make stolen phones useless.

But he added that such a measure "is going to take awhile," and called for putting more emphasis on "community policing" and more "cops on the beat" to reduce thefts in the short-term.

"The intelligence gathering that we need to amplify at NYPD would include identifying the kind of criminals who are committing these crimes," de Blasio told reporters.

The underground trade of stolen phones is now a global market worth an estimated$30 billion a year. It's made up of buyers and sellers around the world.

The rising crime, known as “Apple Picking,” has become especially popular in New York. The city's overall crime rate increased last year due to a spike in stolen Apple devices.

De Blasio said smartphone makers may be reluctant to introduce effective anti-theft technology because it would mean "they may sell fewer of some products."

"But this is about the safety of our people and protecting people's lives and property," he told reporters. "And with this simple change, we could have a much safer city and a much safer country."

This summer, both Apple and Samsung announced new anti-theft features for the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S4 that are designed to lock phones when thieves attempt to use them. An Apple executive in June called the iPhone's new Activation Lock feature “a really powerful theft deterrent.”

But the feature requires consumers to turn it on. On Monday, de Blasio said he was calling on smartphone makers to create additional security measures that work automatically.

De Blasio said officials could also pressure smartphone makers to act in other ways, including reducing pension fund investments in those companies or introducing legislation that bans smartphones that do not include a "kill switch."

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who appeared at the press conference with de Blasio, cited a new law in South Korea that requires smartphones made in that country to feature "kill switch" technology.

Schneiderman said similar laws could be introduced in other countries, including the United States, if companies fail to act. "If you don't work with us on this, you're going to start seeing states and countries passing legislation that you may not like," he said.

The pressure from de Blasio, who holds a sizable lead in the race for New York City mayor, came just days after two New York state lawmakers introduced a bill that would make it illegal for businesses to sell used smartphones without proof of ownership. The bill is aimed at the underground distribution network that serves the thriving black market for stolen phones in New York City
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