Google preferred co, IT top course for engineering grads

The Information Technology sector is the most preferred choice for India's engineering students, with Google, Microsoft and Infosys emerging as the top three most desired employers among them, according to a survey by market insights and information provider Nielsen.

As per the Nielsen's Campus Track Technology School survey 2012, the Class of 2013 is looking at a starting salary of over Rs 11 lakh per annum, a 20 per cent rise from the previous batch, where the average expected starting salary was Rs 9.3 lakh.

"The IT story in India is going strong, and with the increasing focus on personal technology, the sector and its different specialisations are still favoured by students," Nielsen India executive director Dinesh Kapoor said in a statement.

There is also a resurgence of interest in core sectors like power and energy that has been observed which is also a good indicator for the economy, he added.

According to the survey, the top five preferences of engineering students were IT Services (35 per cent), followed by IT products (28 per cent), energy (21 per cent), automobile and ancillary sector (20 per cent) and IT semiconductor (19 per cent).

Some of the other sectors that were highlighted are telecom (18 percent), power (18 per cent) and management consultancy (17 per cent), it added.

The survey took responses of over 2,500 students in July-August 2012 across in 73 technology colleges in India to measure and monitor their attitudes and perceptions towards career preferences and potential recruiters.

As far as employer of choice was concerned among the engineering students, Google topped the list, with Microsoft in 2nd and Infosys 3rd, the survey said.

Tata Consultancy Services was placed 4th and IBM came 5th. Social networking website Facebook featured at number 6, followed by recruiters in the core sectors of energy and power -- BHEL (7th), L&T (8th) and NTPC (10th).

When it came to salaries, the current students had higher expectations.

"Students today are very focused from the moment they enter college, and have a view on their long term goals and career aspirations. With the increasing options now available, aspirants want to go beyond the immediate boundaries of their courses, and explore opportunities that might not have been available to them some years ago," Kapoor said.

More than half of the respondents from the batch of 2013 have expressed an intent to move out of their first job within three years of joining, for further studies, or other career opportunities, the survey said.

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US plans to scan private sector employees’ emails

The US government is expanding a cybersecurity programme that scans internet traffic headed into and out of defense contractors to include far more of the country's private, civilian-run infrastructure.

As a result, more private sector employees than ever before, including those at big banks, utilities and key transportation companies, will have their emails and web surfing scanned as a precaution against cyberattacks.

Under last month's White House executive order on cybersecurity, the scans will be driven by classified information provided by US intelligence agencies - including data from the National Security Agency (NSA) - on new or especially serious espionage threats and other hacking attempts. US spy chiefs said on March 12 that cyberattacks have supplanted terrorism as the top threat to the country.

The Department of Homeland Security will gather the secret data and pass it to a small group of telecommunication companies and cybersecurity providers that have employees holding security clearances, government and industry officials said. Those companies will then offer to process email and other internet transmissions for critical infrastructure customers that choose to participate in the programme.

By using DHS as the middleman, the Obama administration hopes to bring the formidable overseas intelligence-gathering of the NSA closer to ordinary US residents without triggering an outcry from privacy advocates who have long been leery of the spy agency's eavesdropping.

The telecom companies will not report back to the government on what they see, except in aggregate statistics, a senior DHS official said in an interview granted on condition he not be identified.

"That allows us to provide more sensitive information," the official said. "We will provide the information to the security service providers that they need to perform this function." Procedures are to be established within six months of the order.

In written Senate testimony this month, DHS secretary Janet Napolitano said the indicators of attacks given to the commercial companies would be the same as those used to protect the federal government's own networks, so that the security services offered to their infrastructure customers sector should be comparable.

The administration is separately seeking legislation that would give incentives to private companies, including communications carriers, to disclose more to the government. NSA director general Keith Alexander said last week that NSA did not want personal data but internet service providers could inform the government about malicious software they find and the Internet Protocol addresses they were sent to and from.

"There is a way to do this that ensures civil liberties and privacy and does ensure the protection of the country," Alexander told a congressional hearing.

Sensitive information sharing

In the past, internet traffic-scanning efforts were mainly limited to government networks and Defense Department contractors, which have long been targets of foreign espionage.

But as fears grow of a destructive cyberattack on core, non-military assets, and more sweeping security legislation remained stalled, the Obama administration opted to widen the programme.

Last month's presidential order calls for commercial providers of "enhanced cybersecurity services" to extend their offerings to critical infrastructure companies. What constitutes critical infrastructure is still being refined, but it would include utilities, banks and transportation such as trains and highways.

Under the programme, critical infrastructure companies will pay the providers, which will use the classified information to block attacks before they reach the customers. The classified information involves suspect web addresses, strings of characters, email sender names and the like.

Not all the cybersecurity providers will be telecom companies, though AT&T is one. Raytheon Co said this month it had agreed with DHS to become a provider, and a spokesman said that customers could route their traffic to Raytheon after receiving it from their communications company.

As the new set-up takes shape, DHS officials and industry executives said some security equipment makers were working on hardware that could take classified rules about blocking traffic and act on them without the operator being able to reverse-engineer the codes. That way, people wouldn't need a security clearance to use the equipment.

Deep packet inspection?

The issue of scanning everything headed to a utility or a bank still has civil liberties implications, even if each company is a voluntary participant.

Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that the executive order did not weaken existing privacy laws, but any time a machine acting on classified information is processing private communications, it raises questions about the possibility of secret extra functions that are unlikely to be answered definitively.

"You have to wonder what else that box does," Tien said.

One technique for examining email and other electronic packets en route, called deep packet inspection, has stirred controversy for years, and some cybersecurity providers said they would not be using that. In deep packet inspection, communication companies or others with network access can examine all the elements of a transmission, including the content of emails.

"The signatures provided by DHS do not require deep packet inspection," said Steve Hawkins, vice president at Raytheon's Intelligence and Information Systems division, referring further questions to DHS.

The DHS official said the government is still in conversations with the telecom operators on the issue.

The official said the government had no plans to roll out any such form of government-guided close examination of internet traffic into the communications companies serving the general public.

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Aakash: Government admits ‘failure‘ in production

The fate of the much touted low-cost computing device Aakash looks uncertain with the government conceding that there has been a "failure" in its production.

Concerned over the tardy progress, the HRD ministry has written to IIT Bombay (the executing body) to ensure the vendor (Datawind) meets the terms and conditions and the supply order by March 31 in letter and spirit, failing which action could be initiated against it.

The ministry is also awaiting a report from a committee headed by Rajendra Pawar before taking a call about the prospects of the device on which many students had pinned their hope.

"... the other challenge is productionising it. That is where the failure has come. If the productionisation had happened on time, students would have accessed to it. The product exists but we are not able to productionise it as much as required," HRD Minister M M Pallam Raju told reporters here.

The tablet was promised to be made available to students at a subsidised rate of Rs 1,130. Datawind was asked to supply one lakh pieces initially, which never happened.

Raju, though, maintained that the project has created an environment for similar other devices in the market which a students as well can go for instead of being too "obsessed" with the device.

"Aakash is a tablet which will enable you to access the content. But there are others who have come up...students will pick up whatever serves the purpose better and affordable. We will continue to work on the product as long as development of the product is concerned," he said, when asked if the tablet should be opened to market force which can determine which product can survive in the rather than focussing on it solely.

He hoped in due course, other vendors could also chip developing the device.

Raju said the ultimate aim should be to enable a student to access content at an affordable price through enabling environment and exploiting the 'National Mission on Education using ICT' platform.

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How technology is redefining etiquette

Some people are so rude. Really, who sends an email or text message that just says "Thank you"? Who leaves a voice mail message when you don't answer, rather than texting you? Who asks for a fact easily found on Google?

Don't these people realize that they are wasting your time?

Of course, some people might think me the rude one for not appreciating life's little courtesies. But many social norms just don't make sense to people drowning in digital communication.

Take the "thank you" message. Daniel Post Senning, a great-great-grandson of Emily Post and a co-author of the 18th edition of "Emily Post's Etiquette," asked: "At what point does appreciation and showing appreciation outweigh the cost?"

Senning sees it as part of the evolution of etiquette, with the younger generation creating new norms as technology changes, often to the objections of the older generation.

That said, he added, "it gives the impression that digital natives can't be bothered to nurture relationships, and there's balance to be found."

Then there is voice mail, another impolite way of trying to connect with someone. Think of how long it takes to access your voice mail and listen to one of those long-winded messages. "Hi, this is so-and-so... ." In text messages, you don't have to declare who you are, or even say hello.

Email, too, leaves something to be desired, with subject lines and "hi" and "bye," because the communication could happen faster by text. And then there are the worst offenders of all: those who leave a voice mail message and then email to tell you they left a voice mail message.

My father learned this lesson last year after leaving me a dozen voice mail messages, none of which I listened to. Exasperated, he called my sister to complain that I never returned his calls.

"Why are you leaving him voice mails?" my sister asked. "No one listens to voice mail anymore. Just text him."

My mother realized this long ago. Now we communicate mostly through Twitter.

Tom Boellstorff, a professor of digital anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, said part of the problem is that offline and online communications borrow from each other. For example, the email term CC stands for carbon copy, as in the carbon paper used to copy a letter.

But some gestures, like opening an email with "hello" or signing off with "sincerely," are disappearing from the medium.

This is by no means the first conundrum with a new communication technology. In the late 1870s, when the telephone was invented, people didn't know how to greet a caller. Often, there was just silence. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor, suggested that people say "Ahoy!" Others proposed, "What is wanted?" Eventually "Hello" won out, and it hastened its use in face-to-face communications.

Now, with Google and online maps at our fingertips, what was once normal can be seen as uncivilized - like asking someone for directions to a house, restaurant or office, when they can easily be found on Google Maps.

I once asked a friend something easily discovered on the internet, and he responded with a link to lmgtfy.com, which stands for Let Me Google That For You.

In the age of the smartphone, there is no reason to ask once-acceptable questions: the weather forecast, a business phone number, a store's hours. But some people still do. And when you answer them, they respond with a thank-you email.

"I have decreasing amounts of tolerance for unnecessary communication because it is a burden and a cost," said Baratunde Thurston, co-founder of Cultivated Wit, a comedic creative company. "It's almost too easy to not think before we express ourselves because expression is so cheap, yet it often costs the receiver more."

Thurston said he encountered another kind of irksome communication when a friend asked, by text message, about his schedule for the South by Southwest festival. "I don't even know how to respond to that," he said. "The answer would be so long. There's no way I'm going to type out my schedule in a text." 

He said people often asked him on social media where to buy his book, rather than simply Googling the question. You're already on a computer, he exclaimed. "You're on the thing that has the answer to the thing you want to know!"

How to handle these differing standards? Easy: Think of your audience. Some people, especially older ones, appreciate a thank-you message. Others, like me, want no reply. "It is important to think about who the relationship is with," Senning said.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead once said that in traditional societies, the young learn from the old. But in modern societies, the old can also learn from the young. Here's hoping that politeness never goes out of fashion, but that time-wasting forms of communication do.

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Google planning to kill passwords

Web giant Google is researching to build a more secure hardware device which in future can be used to login to a computer or an online account, thus eliminating the need for a password.

Designed in the shape of rings which can be worn on fingers, these hardware devices will aid in logging in to a computer or online account.

The search engine first revealed its plans to put an end to passwords in an academic paper published online in January.

The effort focused on having people plug a small USB key that provides their credentials into a computer.

The possibility of using special jewellery in a similar manner was mentioned in that paper.

According to Google's principal engineer, who specialises in security, Mayank Upadhyay at the RSA security conference in San Francisco last week, "Using personal hardware to log in would remove the dangers of people reusing passwords or writing them down."

"Everyone is familiar with an ATM. What if you could use the same experience with a computer?" Upadhyay said, adding that Google's trial was focused on a slim USB key that performs a cryptographic transaction with an online service to prove the key's validity when it's plugged into a computer.

The key also has a contactless chip inside so that it can be used to log in via mobile devices. Tokens like the ones Google is testing do not contain a static password that could be copied.

The cryptographic key unique to the device is stored inside and is never transmitted.

When the key is plugged in, it proves its validity by correctly responding to a mathematical challenge posed by the online service it is being used to log into, in a way that doesn't produce any information that could be used to log in again.

Google is already talking with other companies to lay the groundwork for using the technology to access different services and websites.

"It's extremely early stages, and we're trying to get more partners," said Upadhyay.

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