German government endorses Cyberterrorism?

Germany’s government was offered to buy records of the Swiss subsidiary of the British HSBC.

These records, which were offered for 2.5 million EUR,  contain data about German citizens who have placed money in Switzerland to avoid taxes.

The database was definitely illegally acquired, supposedly offered by a former IT specialist with HSBC who now lives anonymously in southern France and whose identity is being withheld by French authorities.

France, to which similar data has been offered in the past, denies Switzerland’s request to give up the suspect for prosecution.

Of course withholding taxes is a crime, yet the ethical indifference whether a Government should buy stolen data to profit from it, thus encouraging cyber terrorism is more than worth a thorough discussion.

BOOK MONDAY: Diversifying operational risk of domestic market behavior

Welcome back.

Last week we started with the introduction and are now moving on to the first chapter which is called “Diversifying operation risk of domestic market behavior” from my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle )

E-Business can be the specific thing you have been looking for to make your operation independent if – for instance – your “home-markets” screw up.

While the recent recession struck the US and devastated a vast amount of market segments, other parts of the world remained pretty relatively untouched, some even totally intact.

Before we go on we have to differentiate though because the memory of the masses is pretty widely subjected to Alzheimer’s.

In the 1920s we’ve had a similar situation on the global markets. Back then the governments and banks decided to take money out of the market to stabilize the system which proved to be wrong as we can all see in the history books with awe; the outcome being the great depression.

In 2008 when the situation reoccurred, the governments and banks, which had learned from the devastation they caused in the roaring ’20s, are starting to flood the markets with money in hopes that this will help the world stay out of disaster.

This opposing reaction can be the chance for your business to take off.

More money in the markets means that the buying power of the people is secured. It will of course have an effect on their buying behavior, but will lead to the fact that there will always be money in their pockets for necessities. And this covers the first group, the middle and lower class.

The upper class of course was hardly affected by the recession because they were able to diversify the investment risk through spreading their wealth to several investment channels.

This leads us back to your business.

When I say operational risk this includes a vast variety of factors. Some of which you can influence, most of which you can’t. So let’s be realistic about diversifying your operational risk.

The conclusion of the above mentioned could be to go international which will leverage the risk of a domestic market screw-up significantly.

Meaning, that if you’re a retailer in the US and with your operations limited to that specific region, you will probably be pounded by a market downturn in the US.

The fact that the economic downturn in the US has happened will also lead to a destabilization of the dollar in comparison to other currencies which will make the margin on the products you have in stock even higher.

So let us for a short while, imagine that you would have already made the investment and your website or e-commerce portal available in the other major languages around the world, which are Spanish, French, German, and now: Chinese.

You would instantly have access to the markets speaking those languages because if someone were looking for the products there they would not care where the product they are buying is from if they’re looking to save an extra buck.

Of course you’re right – I only mentioned the retailer in the US but this model can be applied to pretty much every business vertical in these times.

This chapter contains several examples of applied eBusiness models. If you want to read more, please consider buying “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ).

Obama’s secret evacuation routes show up on file sharing sites

Today the pressetext Austria revealed that several top secret documents were found on public file sharing sites.

Amongst these documents are secret evacuation routes of the US chief executive, Barack Obama.

While it is unknown whether the documents are recent or not the question about the capabilities of government is the issue that comes to focus because it’s not the only exceptionally embarrassing failure of e-government and related issues.

A short while back the BBC published an article in which they wrote about an external consultancy who’d lost a memory stick with the data of “thousands of criminals”, and the list of mishaps goes on and on.

I got my personal take on how responsible governments are handling data of their citizens when I ordered my new passport a year ago which required to submit biometrical data, amongst others my fingerprint. When I stood up to put my finger on the reader I caught a glimpse of Microsoft Windows XP Home running on the machine that was obviously going to store my data. If that doesn’t give you a “high security feeling” then I don’t know what does.

In several talks I’ve had with government entities the one thing I’ve learned is that the citizens are very skeptical when it comes to using e-government platforms. And who’s going to blame them considering all of these disasters taking place repeatedly.

The primary issue which all governments should be working on is establishing trust to their platforms, followed by hiring usability consultants because e-government portals in most cases have another major flaw: missing usability and accessibility.

What is your take on applied e-government?

E08: Is the mass media lying about McCain’s percentage?

When it comes to political elections I personally trust no one and – like pretty much always – base my opinion on the independent media sources, which are primarily internet based.

When I was looking into who was going to make the race in the US presidential elections I was upon my search on Google, directed to a German news site of a conceivably free television station.

I was presented with the result that McCain was supposed to have around 46% or the electoral votes as of October 18th.

Having been made aware of the Islandic project “If The World Could Vote“, which is in part managed by my good friend Hjortur Smarason, I also checked there, expecting that the results would be at least similar. The project, by the way, assumes that anyone of the over 6 billion citizens of the world could give their vote, electing the next president in the USA.

Rolling my cursor over the USA revealed a staggering 18,8% of the voters who had given their voice to McCain.

The initial question which arose was whether one of these sources had somehow miscalculated the information because of the massive discrepancy between the results found.

Investigating further sources on the mass media presented similar presentations of the percentages while looking more into the independent media scene showed a clear trend towards McCain’s opponent Obama.

Of course we have to consider that “only” a small minority of the US citizens had voted on the independent platform. Maybe these, apparent internet users, are the more educated because of their web access?

Have a nice weekend

Lars

Will the internet be censored by the Government in 2012?

Depending on what you are more worried about, I would – in that context – like to point out that information is the most valuable good the world economy relies on today. 
I always get a smile on my face when I hear people screeming that some social network has shared their data in some way. Or spied on them. Yet on the other hand the same people are clueless about all the information being collected about them through their shopping behaviour, their credit score, their behaviour while surfing the web (yes, ISPs are in most countries forced to record that – not without a reason), etc. 
In Germany the next step will be that the personal ID card will be equipped with a PIN which has to be entered whenever you buy something on the internet. The proclaimed reason by the corporate media is, that it would make online trade safer. And ideed it does, but it also makes every purchase transparent, thus giving your personal preference away and you make yourself auditable quite easily. 
What I wanted to point out with the example above is that – like always – there are pros and cons. So do I trust a Chinese government to determine which content is available to me? Or is a western, more or less democratic government the better choice? None of them are. In the good old days of the internet there were the lone gunmen, usually referred to as hackers. If inappropriate or even illegal content would pop up somewhere on the web, they would hack the site, destroy the content and be gone. Today, these people have be discrimited and criminalized, are hunted down by the governments we entrust to run, yes to even control the internet, and – above that – are proclaimed to be the evil of the internet which certainly a wide scope of them is not. The only information source left to mankind that has – at least not on a massive scale – not been undercut by the corporate media pools and where sharing knowledge through blogs etc. is not or only minorly controlled is left in the hands of those that we have chosen to be our leaders. Perhaps we should start to dig for the root of evil?