Indian Railways are now becoming more technologied with e-ticketing, online and with SMS

A more efficient and people sensitive Railway Services system is being rolled out with Next Generation technology, which would make e-ticketing possible through mobile phones as also provide SMS alerts on reservation status.

Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal said that by the end of calendar year, Railways would put in place a Next Generation e-ticketing system which would bring about a "paradigm shift in internet rail ticketing".

Mr Bansal announced in the Lok Sabha that a project of SMS alerts to passengers providing updates on reservation status is being rolled out.

The Minister said this is being done as a follow up to the overwhelming response to the Indian Railway website and Integrated Train Enquiry Service under '139'.

The Railways also plans to cover larger number of trains under Real Time Information System (RTIS), whereby rail users would be able to access information through nominated websites and mobile phones.

The Minister said he had some discussion on potential applications of Aadhar with UIDAI chief Nandan Nilekani.

"Today, I look forward expectedly to the use of Aadhar scheme by Indian Railways. The database generated can be extensively and efficiently used by railways not only to render more user friendly services such as booking of tickets, validation of genuine passengers with GPS enabled handheld gadgets in trains," Mr Bansal said.

This would also provide a better interface to the Railways with its employees in regard to their salaries, pension and allowances, he said.

Railways would also extend the facility of internet ticketing from 0030 hours to 2330 hours.

Mr Bansal also listed measures taken to curb malpractices in reserved tickets including Tatkal, such as mandatory carrying of ID cards for passengers and rigorous drive leading to prosecution of more than 1,800 touts in the current year.

Mr Bansal said that the Next Generation technology would significantly improve the e-ticketing system through end user experience in respect of ease of use, response time as well as capacity.

The system shall be able to support 7,200 tickets per minute as against 2,000 tickets per minute today. It would also support 1,20,000 simultaneous users at any point in time against the present capacity of 40,000 users with capability to easily scale up as demand increases in future.

"The system will make use of advanced fraud control and security management tools thereby further improving fairness and transparency in disbursal of tickets," the Minister said.

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Top universities are in race to offer free online courses

More top universities outside the United States are joining the rush to offer "massive open online courses" that are broadening access to higher education.

Coursera and edX, two leading providers of so-called MOOCs, announced major expansions that will roughly double the number of university partners offering free online classes through their websites.

Mountain View, California-based Coursera said it will add 29 institutions, including 16 outside the US Over the next several months, they will offer about 90 new courses, including some taught in French, Spanish, Italian and Chinese.

"Having courses taught in other languages will enable more students to take our classes," said Andrew Ng, a Stanford University professor who co-founded Coursera.

Coursera currently offers 220 courses from 33 institutions and has nearly 2.8 million registered users who have signed up for nearly 10 million courses, Ng said.

The new partners include Chinese University of Hong Kong, Technical University of Denmark, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico as well as the universities of Copenhagen, Geneva and Toyko.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based edX said it's adding six new institutions, including five outside the US, which will provide at least 25 courses.

EdX, which was launched in May by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, currently offers 25 courses from six universities and has 700,000 registered students.

The new partners are Australian National University, Delft University of Technology, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, McGill University, Rice University and the University of Toronto.

Delft University in the Netherlands will be the first edX partner to provide courses as "open content," which means other universities are free to incorporate the materials into their classes, said edX President Anant Agarwal.

"People can reuse it and remix it," Agarwal said. "It enables courses to get better and better over time by allowing people to share content."

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Why 3D printing is becoming more promising

These printers can produce objects, even rather intricate ones, by printing thin layer after layer of plastic, metal, ceramics or other materials. And the products they make can be highly customized.

Will the future be printed in 3D?

At first glance, looking at past predictions about the future of technology, prognosticators got a whole lot wrong. The Web is a garbage dump of inaccurate guesses about the year 2000, 2010 and beyond. Flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs still are nowhere near a reality.

Yet the prediction that 3D printers will become a part of our daily lives is happening much sooner than anyone anticipated. These printers can produce objects, even rather intricate ones, by printing thin layer after layer of plastic, metal, ceramics or other materials. And the products they make can be highly customized.

Last week, President Barack Obama cited this nascent technology during his State of the Union address - as if everyone already knew what the technology was.

He expressed hope that it was a way to rejuvenate US manufacturing. "A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the art lab where new workers are mastering the 3D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything," Obama said.

He has pushed new technologies before, like solar and wind power, as remedies for our nation's problems, and those attempts have only revived the debate about the limitations of government industrial policy.

But this one shows more promise. The question is, can the United States get a foothold in manufacturing, one 3D printer at a time?

Hod Lipson, an associate professor and the director of the Creative Machines Lab at Cornell University, said "3D printing is worming its way into almost every industry, from entertainment, to food, to bio- and medical applications."

It won't necessarily directly create manufacturing jobs, except perhaps for the printers themselves. Lipson, the co-author of "Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing," said that the technology "is not going to simply replace existing manufacturing anytime soon."

But he said he believed that it would give rise to new businesses. "The bigger opportunity in the US is that it opens and creates new business models that are based on this idea of customization."

In addition to the lab that the president mentioned, which is a federally financed manufacturing innovation institute in Youngstown, Ohio, schools are embracing the technology. The University of Virginia has been working to introduce 3-D printers into some programs from kindergarten through 12th grade in Charlottesville to prepare students for a new future in manufacturing.

"We have 3-D printers in classrooms, and in one example, we're teaching kids how to design and print catapults that they then analyze for efficiency," said Glen L. Bull, professor and co-director of the Center for Technology and Teacher Education. "We believe that every school in America could have a 3D printer in the classroom in the next few years."

The education system may want to speed things up. The time between predictions for 3D printers and the reality of what they can accomplish is compressing rapidly.

For example, in 2010, researchers at the University of Southern California said that another decade would pass before we could build a home using a 3-D printer. Yet last week, Softkill Design, a London architecture collective, announced that it planned to make the first such home - which it will assemble in a single day - later this year.

The home isn't that pretty, and will look more like a calcified spider web than a cozy house, but it will show it can be done. The cost of 3D printers has also dropped sharply over the last two years, with machines that once cost $20,000, now going for $1,000 or less.

That's partly because Chinese companies are driving down prices. Yes, China sees the opportunity in these things, even though the technology may undermine some of its manufacturing advantages.

"When it costs you the same amount of manufacturing effort to make advanced robotic parts as it does to manufacture a paperweight, that really changes things in a profound way," Lipson said.

This leaves us with one more question about the future: When will these 3D printers be able to make us flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs?

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Antivirus companies fight criticism more than hacks

Craig Elliott, chief executive officer of Pertino, a cloud-networking start-up, knows that the antivirus software his company uses won't deter all hacking attacks. That won't stop him from using it. "It's a safety blanket," he says. "It's CYA [cover your ass] more than anything else."

That's why the antivirus industry, born in the late 1980s to combat floppy-disk viruses, has staying power, even in this era of sophisticated hacks from China and elsewhere. Although the word virus generally applies to all manner of computer attacks, data security pros no longer just worry about old-style viruses — programmes or pieces of code that replicate and spread from computer to computer, degrading their performance.

The new threat: advanced forms of malicious software, or malware, such as online banking password-stealers and military-grade spying software. Recent incidents like the attack on the New York Times by Chinese hackers, which antivirus software failed to stop, illustrate the challenge facing industry leaders such as Symantec and McAfee.

A weakness of antivirus software is that it's designed to zero in on so called signatures, or identifiable patterns in code. When an antivirus company finds a piece of malicious software, it adds a signature to its database, which is included in software upgrades sent to users. The approach was effective until more sophisticated malware arrived on the scene in the early 2000s. Now identifying a piece of attack software after the fact has limited value because the most advanced malware is custom-built for specific attacks—and never used again.

Today's hackers prefer to infiltrate networks via e-mail and social media, making attacks harder to detect. The Times attack is thought to have begun with infected e-mails sent to employees. After the Times disclosed that Symantec software failed to identify the malware used in the breach, the Mountain View-based company issued a statement saying that antivirus protection alone is not enough to thwart advanced attacks.

Symantec and Santa Clara-based McAfee are upgrading their security software to keep pace with hackers, such as adding blocking features that crunch traffic data to determine whether an unknown e-mail attachment or website is trustworthy.

"The industry will likely change pretty dramatically," says Francis deSouza, Symantec's president of products and services. "We're seeing more malware than we've ever seen before, and we're seeing more custom malware than we've ever seen before. Those trends have profound implications for the antivirus industry." Michael Fey, CTO, McAfee, which is owned by Intel, says "one product is not a silver bullet."

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