There's no such thing as being too careful

Virus, just like its name, is one hell of a parasite. Last week’s session discussed about virus and cyber crime. First of all, I’d like to share something about virus. I usually do not bother much on this issue years ago, when I was in my first and second year. I knew that the “world” out there is as much dangerous as the real world where we live now, but I never had a thought about what hazard a virus might cause. Until few weeks ago. After reformatting my laptop for annual maintenance, I plugged in the LAN cable to connect to the Internet to download Windows update. While waiting for the download to finish, a pop-up window appeared on my screen telling me that my dial up connection was not detected. I was quite puzzled as such thing has never occured to me before, and I was pretty much sure that I had never set the dial-up connection to turn on automatically.

It turned out that this pop-up window came from a virus or spyware (I forgot its name) who can use a dial-up connection to make a long distance phone call. And boy, that only happened after I just visited Windows update website! I’ve heard someone said that even though the connection in NTU is considered secure, it’s not guaranteed that virus attack won’t happen. Well, now I have proven myself. And to quote what community poster says, “Low Crime Doesn’t Mean No Crime”. There are no such thing as being too careful. And just this morning, I received an email from IT Team from my school warning about a possible virus/spyware attack in NTU.

When Prof Gilbert discussed about Cyber Crime, particularly phishing, I remembered that I have encountered such cases before. Even though it’s not as dangerous as credit card phishing, it can still leave you with an unpleasant experience. How unpleasant might it be? Well, if you accidentally keyed in your credit card number just to check whether “someone has deducted $$$ from your card”, then you shouldn’t be surprised if few days after you “check” your card, someone did actually steal from it. In my case, things weren’t that serious. If you wish to know what form of phishing I’ve encountered, then you might be interested in clicking the following address: here and here. (WARNING: Potential spyware attack from 2^nd link. You might want to access it from a computer with powerful anti-virus or anti-spyware)

From first link, you will see that in order to help “your friend” winning a Banana Republic voucher, all you need to do is just entering your email address and the password for your email account. You can just pass if you do not wish to, but what is the harm of letting someone “importing address book” from your account to somewhere else anyway?

Second link is more hilarious to me. You will see that as “the LARGEST dating community on Earth”, Tubely offers me to import my contacts from my email accounts in Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo with just keying in my email accounts and their respective passwords. Isn’t that lovely?? (apologize for being indiscreet about my friend’s name, but you see that since this link also provide my name and my email address, discretion is something that is out of context)

Although these kind of promotions could be considered not as a phishing (since you can just “pass” anyway), I still regard this as a cyber crime. Why? Because how will you know that they won’t just break into your account and use it inappropriately? How can you be so sure that they won’t change your password so that you won’t be able to access it anymore? There is no way you can find out about this.

Podcasting is cool

This session discussed about the podcast. Though I’ve heard it before, I didn’t particularly understand about the technical concept. Here, Prof. Gilbert explained deeper on how it’s being used by major companies to promote their product. One thing I found it interesting from his lecture is the concept that podcast enables people from any walk of life to learn about something at different times and places. Imagine a situation where every participant of a society do not have a common spare time or is impossible to arrange a session to meet with each other. A class in Open University might be a good example.

When a lecture or an issue needs to be delivered by the lecturer to the students who are not all possible to attend the class, there are many methods to do this. One may suggest to send the material in a printed form. Or it might be good to send them a recorded form of the lecture series in a CD. But all these so-called conservative ways require a very high investment, particularly , a financial one.

And here comes our “hero”: the Podcasting. By recording the lectures into several tapes, and uploading them into the Internet, the lecturer has now saved several dollars from the University budget. Students can go to the lecturer’s website to subscribe his lecture in a form of podcasting. This will help them to choose which lectures they would like to hear (for many reasons, such as they might find some lectures are easy to follow so that a quick read from the notes is sufficient). Students also don’t have to be worried of losing their notes or CDs because all study materials are available online. All they need to do is just subscribing to the podcast, download it, and save it into their MP3 player or computer. They can listen to it at their convenient time, and more importantly, it doesn’t cost as much as printed textbooks.

As for me, I have been subscribing for several podcasting such as: Desperate Housewives’ and Ugly Betty’s (my two favorite shows) Podcast, as well as Ong and Liong (Alternative characters of Daniel Ong and Mr. Young) Podcast from 987FM. It keeps me updated on what is going on on the show or just simply helps me to smile after listening to lawyer's stereotype joke by Dan and Young.

Technology Plan - Proof of Concept

This session will discuss about the proof-of-concept of each group’s project. For mine, I and Damar are going to explain the more detailed idea behind the two concepts that we have introduced earlier: PlanUrTrip and TakeMe.2 (Please refer to my post with the title: Learn how to pitch)

PlanUrTrip

A complete list of tourism attractions in Singapore is available on PlanUrTrip’s website. To make the browsing step easier, these places are grouped into several categories based on their main ‘themes’. Among these categories are Natural Reserve (Singapore Zoo, Bukit Timah, Jurong Bird Park, etc), Historical Site (Civilian War Memorial, Old Parliament House, Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall), Shopping Indulgence (Orchard Road, Chinatown, CityLink), and All-You-Need-To-Eat (Lau Pa Sat, Clarke Quay). By grouping these places into categories, we believe that customers, or potential visitors, will find it easy to see which places they want to visit.

Using the list as the reference, the customer can now arrange their trip in a way a student arrange their study through the timetable. A sample of the interface of our service is shown below:

TakeMe.2 (now known as GuideMe)

As explained in my post earlier, TakeMe.2 is a mobile application which enables the customer to have a pocket-size travel guide to make their trip much more enjoyable. TakeMe.2 is a Java application for mobile phone. And as the market reflects, the use of mobile phone which supports Java environment has been increasing over the last year.

Revision and Feedback

After my group’s presentation, Prof. Gilbert gave feedback for our improvement. He mentioned that one of the problems a tourist is likely to have is that the lack of trivial information such as Taxi booking numbers. Sometimes, a tourist find himself trapped among the crowds in a public place who were waiting for the rain to stop. At this situation, Taxi booking number will be very helpful for them. So, in addition to the mobile application that we offer, we could add a feature which display all the important contact numbers needed by a tourist, such as Taxi booking number, hotels, and embassy.

A modern way to stop the disease spread

During this session, Prof Gilbert had a little surprise for everyone of us: it’s an in-class exercise! The exercise is about ASEAN Food Safety Initiative (ASFI). The project aims to overcome the problem currently experienced by livestock industry: the spread of mad cow disease in England and Australia as well as the pig virus and Avian flu in Asia. One of the idea is to introduce a monitoring system based on wireless infrastructure.

The group task is to work out a preliminary design for the information presented to the livestock inspectors working for the Ministry of Agriculture. For the background knowledge, it is identified that there will be five parties involved on this initiative: Farmer, Veterinarian, Transport Storage, Slaughter Butchering and Distribution/Sale.

After discussing for about half an hour, my group came up with the following concept. First, we are organizing the flow into two lines: product flow and information flow. In stage 1 (Farmer), the information collected is about the generic data describing the statistics of each batch of livestock. A specific tag is given for each statistics representing each batch. After carefully inspecting the validity of these sets of data and matching them with the actual field observation, the government agent will submit them to the publicly accessible database maintained by Ministry of Agriculture. One point to note is that in our concept, only those data which are in compliance with the standard set by MoA.

The next stage is Veterinarian. As vets are in charge of giving vaccination and performing routine medical check-up, their records will be needed for database update. Any particular information about the disease infecting the cattle can be monitored in the database.

So far, I only discussed about the information flow, which can only be passed to the next stage upon approval by MoA inspectors. The product flow basically goes the same way. On the Stage 3 (Transport and Storage), when the station receives a market-ready batch of livestock, they must check the tag number on the database to see whether this batch has been inspected by MoA. If the tag number do not appear on the database, it either means that this batch was not approved by MoA or it has not been inspected. Either way, the station must contact the livestock supplier and MoA. In a circumstance where it was actually not approved, the station keeper must immediately dispose the cattle, so that the product flow stop at this stage.

The same procedure applies for the Stage 4 (Slaughterhouse) and Stage 5 (Distribution Sale). By stopping the flow of a “defect” product as early as possible, the goal of AFSI could be achieved. In addition to the product flow management in Stage 4, the information flow management also takes place. During the slaughtering, the slaughterhouse must record the slaughter method they perform on the cattle. These records are then submitted to the database. This will ensure that the information on the database is updated.

And that basically completes our concept for this assignment.