Want a Better Internet?

DARPA does. The US military research arm thinks its 30-something-year-old invention needs an upgrade.

The Internet began as a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency experiment back in the 1970s, when DARPA was ARPA and the Internet was ARPANET. Many of today’s Internet protocols date from those days, when memory and processing power were limiting factors. Now that memory and processing power are more available, DARPA says, it’s time “to rethink and potentially redesign some of the basic concepts that have shaped today's Internet technology.”

There’s no funding for this effort yet, but there may be if DARPA sees some proposals it likes. If you think you have the kind of “revolutionary ideas” DARPA is looking for, read their Request for Information.

Another Use for Biometric Authentication

Biometric technologies aren’t used just to keep intruders from wrecking your business. Businesses are also using them to improve customer service.

Take the Central Bank of India, for example. Many of its poor customers are also illiterate, which means they cannot write their names on a check to withdraw money from their accounts. They had to go to the bank in person. For customers like Mahendra Sahni, a fish farmer in the Vaishali district of Bihar, walking to the bank and standing in line to withdraw his monthly wages took nearly a day.

Now, though, Sahni simply goes to a nearby cash machine. It’s a biometric cash machine, and he uses a biometric cash card in which his thumbprint is stored. When he inserts the card, a recorded voice tells him to place his thumb on a scanner. When the machine verifies his identity by comparing his thumbprint to the one stored on the card, it gives him his cash.

Seventy percent of the bank’s customers live in villages like Sahni’s, and the biometric cash machines will make banking much easier for them. The federal government likes the machines, too, and announced that everybody in Vaishali employed under its ambitious new National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme will get their wages through these new cash machines. 

Source: Amarnath Tewary, “Biometric Cash Machines Bring Joy,” BBC News

US Business Is Welcome in Unexpected Places — and Not So Welcome in Expected Ones

Probably no one was surprised when the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that most of the people in Jordan (78 percent), Lebanon (52 percent), and Egypt (78 percent) had unfavorable opinions of the United States. So it must have come as a surprise when majorities in some of those same countries — 51 percent in Jordan and 63 percent in Lebanon — said they “like American ways of doing business,” and that nearly half of Egyptians (48 percent) felt the same way. On the other hand, majorities in most Western European countries and in Canada were far less positive about US business. The most negative opinions came from Germany (64 percent) and France (75 percent).

What about that other economic powerhouse, China? Most Jordanians (57 percent) and Lebanese (61 percent) also thought that China’s growing economy was “a good thing” for their countries. Exactly half of Egyptians felt the same way. And most people in France and Germany (64 percent and 55 percent, respectively) thought it was “a bad thing” for their countries.

The outlook for US business was also bright in South and East Asia, where majorities in India (51 percent), Malaysia (53 percent), and South Korea (61 percent) said they liked American ways of doing business. Malaysians were positively bullish about China (84 percent) but most South Koreans (60 percent) thought China’s economic growth was a bad thing, and a plurality of Indians (48 percent) agreed.

Source: Pew Global Attitudes Project: Spring 2007 Survey (Questions 16a, 27, and 64)