How did Canadian authorities figure out that suspected terrorist Khurram Sher auditioned for Canadian Idol in 2008? Possibly an alert Youtube viewer picked up on the image (you don’t get many Idol auditioners in full Muslim dress; it was a pretty unforgettable image). But if that was the case, we would definitely have heard from the person who uncovered the video – recognizing a terrorist on a TV show via Youtube would be the perfect ticket to 15 minutes of fame these days.
So in the absence of any claim to fame, we can assume that the connection was made using internet face recognition technology – like that developed by Israel’s Face.com. Face.com’s application checks Facebook photos, comparing photos in different accounts to identify unknown people on user pages. The application analyzes photos with tags, associates the tag with the person in the photo, and then searches for the same image in untagged photos in other Facebook accounts. In other words, Face.com can compare photos and determine identities based on information in other photos that are already a know quantity.
I interviewed Gil Hirsch, CEO of Face.com., last year, and wrote
While Face.com’s technology sounds like it could be developed into a fantastic security application as well, Hirsch says that the company is concentrating on the consumer market for now. “Our next step is to expand our presence in Facebook, and over the next year we will be rolling out more services on other sites.”
Face.com has expanded since I did that interview – and is now available to developers for use with other platforms. Interestingly, in this story from August of this year, Hirsch is quoted as saying that
You can basically search for people in any photo. You could search for family members on Flickr, in newspapers, or in videos on YouTube.
So could technology developed by Israel’s Face.com have been used to find the “singing terrorist?” Could be!
The word is out – Israel, despite all the talk of it being the target of Turkish and Arab hackers, is far safer online than most of the “first world” (and it’s pretty safe offline too, with crime stats per capita far lower than that of the U.S. and other countries). Israel, the most open country in the Middle East, is also the safest country in the region for internet users; Israelis have a one in 211 chance of experiencing an internet attack, far better than the world average, in which computer users were attacked online one in every 73 times they used the internet.
Israel also compared favorably to the rest of the Middle East, where there is a 1 in 119 chance of getting attacked. Jordanians had a 1 in 98 chance of getting attacked Syrians a 1 in 198 chance, and in Turkey – the world leader in internet riskiness – there was a 1 in 10 chance of getting hacked when you went online!
Not only that – Israel beats nearly all of Europe and the U.S.: In Australia, you have a 1 in 75 chance of getting attacked, while in the UK the chances were 1 in 63(!). In the rest of Europe, the chances of attack were 1 in 72, while in North America, the chances of getting hacked while online were a pathetic 1 in 51 – with the US a sad 1 in 48 (ahead of the US, counting up to the dubious number 1 spot occupied by Turkey, are: Portugal, Vietnam, Laos, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Russia). Come on America – you can do better than Bangladesh and Russia!
The statistics were compiled by anti-virus specialists AVG, makers of AVG and AVG Free applications (FAR better, imho, than the “commercial” anti-virus apps like McAffee and Symantec). The information was compiled during July, so, the company says, the stats may change. Yeah, but not radically – which means that Israel will continue to be much safer online than any of its neighbors.
Considering that the internet is far more open in Israel (as is society in general), and considering that Israel is the prime target for the hackers who have made internet surfing hell in Turkey, it’s surprising that Israel is so safe. Chalk it up (again!) to Israel’s hi-tech prowess; as usual, Israel has to work twice as hard as everyone else to survive, and in the end manages to live better than any of its neighbors. It’s a phenomenon we see repeated over and over, in many different areas of society.
It’s too bad about Turkey; they burned their bridges with Israel, so we’re unlikely (hopefully) to be offering them any knowhow on building a safe internet. And without a safe internet, Turks are going to be locked out of the future hi-tech world. Well, they wanted to be part of (lead) the “great Muslim Ummah,” aping the lifestyles of hi-tech jewels like Syria and Egypt. And it certainly seems like their wish is coming true!
There’s only so much you can put in a newspaper article (like the one I wrote on Google’s ‘courageous’ stance on China’s human rights offenses), I find – I’m often forced to leave out the juiciest nuggets. Like this week, when I wrote about how Google, so courageous when it pursues China for hacking into its accounts, somehow loses its nerves when it comes to net abuses in the Arab countries.
As my article points out, the Arab countries are far more obsessive in their censorship of web usage – and far more vengeful against those who violate the rules. Offenders who post information that displeases the various dictatorships they live in run the risk of jail time (think “Midnight Express” prison, not the Allenwood federal pen) – or worse, like torture. Is China any better? No; it’s just as repressive a society. But at least China strives to improve material living standards for its billions of citizens – unlike most Arab countries, where residents are expected to toil without complaint, making the barons and sheikhs who run their countries richer.
If Google had pinned its decision to “reconsider” doing business in China on Beijing’s oppression against human right activists – a claim that rings very hollow, given the company’s lack of backbone on Arab country’s rights abuses. Google’s complaints would be a lot more believable if they pinned their complaints on China’s industrial espionage or some other business motive. But human rights abuses? That claim only opens Google up to charges of hypocrisy.
Not that you can blame them for not wanting to start up with the Muslim world, given its reactions to images and words that “offend” Islam. No doubt they would say that they don’t want to “offend” the “culture” of the countries gracious enough to host their search engines and services. But the company has no problem taking on the “yellow peril.” Meaning that Google is more afraid of the Arabs than the Chinese – clear proof that the Chinese have a far lighter touch than the Arabs, imho.
And here, it seems to me, is the definitive proof: There is only one image in the world that Google Earth displays in a different format than anywhere else. The entire world as rendered by GE shows hills and dales, lakes and rivers, buildings, houses and cars. From an aerial view, you can look down and see the actual topography of the world – natural and man-made. Except for one spot: The Ka’aba, the center of Muslim worship, in Mecca. According to the Google Sightseeing blog post for this photo, the photo used is a Digitalglobe satellite photo, the only one used on GE. Why?
It took me awhile to figure out, since there doesn’t seem to be a ban on photographing or taking video of the place (you can watch Muslims praying there five times a day on many satellite TV stations in the Arab world). But then I saw the following on this web site, discussing the direction Muslims must bow when they pray: “As one is not permitted to take a GPS reading from on top or inside the Kaaba, an estimate must be made from various positions around the Kaaba.” That photo may have been taken by a Digitalglobe satellite, but it looks suspiciously like a pencil drawing (as you can see from the photo below; note the contrast with the buildings to the south) – something Google decided to put in out of “respect” to Islam, which probably would have frowned on (or, more likely, “strenuously” protested) inclusion of an aerial photo of the Kaaba in GE. Can’t say I blame Google for wanting to avoid trouble. But at least they could drop the pretense of standing up for “morality” when it comes to China.
Chalk up another successful export industry Israel is a player in: Satellites. Earlier this year, Israel’s first communication satellite, Amos-1, was sold to Intelsat, one of the largest operators of communication satellites in the world. Amos 1 will now be known as Intelsat 24, and will be used for communications in East Asia – meaning that Iranians watching channels like India’s Star TV may be getting their shows from an Israeli-made satellite!
According Amitzur Rosenfeld, director of MicroSat Israel (a joint venture between IAI and Rafael to build micro-satellites), Intelsat is directing eastward Amos-1, which is still in orbit. Speaking recently at a scientific conference in Tel Aviv, Rosenfeld said the original plan had been to use whatever fuel was left on the old Amos-1 (launched in 1996) and fire it out of the earth’s orbit, to make room for new satellites. By doing so, Israel was being a good world citizen; according to NASA, there are over 9,000 (!) satellites and/or other “artificial objects” orbiting the earth, so things can get crowded up there!
Israel, it turns out, is one of the most advanced countries in satellite technology anywhere, because of the launching technology it has developed, along with breakthroughs in imaging. Most of the country’s communication satellites (like the Amoses) have been launched from outside the country (France, India, Russia, etc.), because of the need to fire satellites in an eastward direction, the direction of the earth’s rotation. That works fine in Florida or Texas, but in this part of the world, an eastbound launch might be construed as an attack by Jordan or further neighbors.
And, in addition, Israel’s new TecSAR satellite provides superior imaging capabilities, enabling sensors to pick up what is going on down below even during cloudy weather. Israel and France are developing a satellite that will enable farmers, fishermen and governments to better keep track of the land and sea environment, and according to “informed sources,” NASA is set to build a satellite in Israel using TecSAR technology to be used to map the usually very cloudy planet Venus. Nowadays, here in Israel, “space cadet” is a compliment, not an insult!
We’re all aware of the risks in online shopping and banking, but I think most of us wouldn’t worry too much about supplying a site like Amazon with our credit card information. Similarly, many of us check our bank accounts online, and pay bills at web sites. We all believe (hope) those sites are secure, and that the people running those businesses are taking all the precautions possible to protect our data.
But are we? According to Salem, more people than ever are falling for targeted hacker e-mail, where you respond to a link in a message and are taken to a site where something like a keylogger is installed remotely on your computer. The keylogger sends data back to the hackers, who then analyze your keystrokes looking for the “golden ticket” – your credit card number, Social Security number, or any other bit of information that can help them eventually trick you into revealing that information.
Sooner or later, Salem said, they get what they want, by coming up with a message that is so precise, so suited to your situation, that you really believe it came from your boss, sister in law, or anyone you believe the hackers couldn’t possibly know about. Of course they couldn’t – unless they were able to peer into your e-mail, instant messages, and so on.
And if you think it’s just not worth their time to pursue your info – why, you’re underestimating your true value. It’s certainly worth a couple of hours of work to get enough information on you; after all, even in these days of the dogged dollar, $695 is nothing to sneeze at! Ask Nikolai (you see this video after the risk assessor finishers analyzing you, so you can get an idea of just who would be interested in buying your identity in an online auction!).
Cynics would say it’s about time Microsoft released a free anti-virus program – after all, aren’t most of the viruses that infect Windows systems the result of the all too easy to bust registry?
But we’ll leave aside the politics of the registry for now. What I like about the new, free Microsoft Security Essentials is that it was developed right here in Israel! As of today (June 23), the package is available for download (I found a link for all versions here, but by Wednesday it should be on the official MS security page).
The download is free, and available for now to users in the U.S., Israel, and Brazil. According to a bunch of articles I read, the reasoning is that the U.S. has lots of computers, Israel is where it was developed, and Brazil has lots of infected computers, so the feedback will help MS improve the product. It’s not exactly an anti-virus suite like Norton or the others, but it’s good at nabbing trojans and viruses in e-mail and downloads.
At a press conference, Moshe Lichtman, the director of Microsoft Development in Israel, unveiled not only the antivirus program, but 13 other innovations the Israeli unit came up with, including a new version of Messenger for dual computer/cellphone use, that will display messages on the phone as SMS messages, and as regular Messenger messages on the computer – automatically.
Microsoft’s Israel labs have had a long tradition of innovating killer products for the company. Like – developing much of Windows NT (the precursor of Win2k and XP)! From an article I wrote a couple of years ago, where I tried to ascertain Israel’s role in the creation of Windows:
After lots of Web surfing, I decided to give Microsoft Israel a call. Apparently, they get this question a lot; the very pleasant young lady I spoke with said that “Parts of Windows NT were definitely developed in Israel,” but that she could not specify which ones – other than to say they were “probably” mostly “security related.” Security, of course, was NT’s biggest selling point, so this young lady may have said more than she meant to. Hmm. On the other hand, she seemed to indicate that NT, as all of Microsoft’s products are, was a team effort, with different research groups working on different parts of the program.
Which would mean that Israel, although perhaps an important contributor, did not necessarily develop “most” of NT or XP. I was ready to take that as the situation, in fact – attributing the statement on the poster to overenthusiastic Israel-loving (not that there’s anything wrong with that) – until I came across this site (http://tinyurl.com/nwe5w), a technical site that made this statement, in the context of a computer show it was covering in Tel Aviv: “Microsoft also announced Windows NT Embedded which is to be released this year and is being developed at Microsoft R&D centre in Haifa, here in Israel.” Well, if they developed NT Embedded, why not NT itself?
While everyone (here, at least) is talking about how Barack Obama “stuck it” to Israel, there were a few lines in his speech that must have unnerved the Islamic radicals. Like the man said – he plans to tell the truth to everyone who needs to hear it, and that includes things like rights for women in the Muslim world, fighting terrorism, and demanding an end to anti-Semitism, especially Holocaust denial. All three of these phenomena are (pardon the term) “sacred cows” for many Muslims (Holocaust denial goes far beyond Iran), and we should expect Obama to lean on Islamic countries and leaders for change in these areas, as much as he appears ready to lean on Israel to make a deal with Mahmoud Abbas and company.
So just how will this “leaning” take place? What could Obama do to convince anti-Israel and anti-Semitic states to change their ways, which have been set in centuries of tradition (long before there was a State of Israel)? He could start with the health situation in the Muslim world, and just how far behind Israel even the more advanced Muslim states, like Iran, really are. For example, Iranians are among the world’s biggest sufferers of diabetes – about one-third of adults in Tehran have disturbed glucose tolerance or diabetes, according to a 9500-person study last year, and the problem is prevalent throughout the country. Many Tehran residents are obese, and there is a history of both Type I (Juvenile) and Type II diabetes in many families.
Israel, on the other hand, is one of the world leaders in diabetes research, and Israeli research has contributed to a number of treatments used to combat diabetes in Iran. For example, Israel’s D-Cure program has been operating for several years, coordinating research efforts at Israel’s top institutions. “In many fields in diabetes research, Israel is leading the world – in looking for islet cells, and alternatives to beta cells,” said D-Cure president Prof. Itamar Raz, who is also president of the Israel Diabetes Association and head of the Diabetes Center at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem. Among the topics researched by D-Cure are cures and treatments related to both Type 1 and II diabetes. An Israeli innovation – the Oramed Insulin Capsule is an orally ingestible soft gel insulin capsule that the company believes will help Type II diabetics reduce the dependency on insulin shots and even prevent them from needing them at a later stage of the disease – is being tested now and will revolutionize treatment for Type II sufferers when approved.
And Israel’s Andromeda Biotech is about to embark on a phase III clinical trial of one of the most promising potential cures for Type I diabetes in the world, DiaPep 277, a synthetic peptide of 24 amino acids derived from the sequence of the human heat shock protein 60 (Hsp60). Heat shock protein therapies are considered among the best possibilities for a diabetes cure, and Iran has conducted its own research in these areas – often treading the ground broken by Israeli scientists! Interestingly, a link describing such research at an Iranian university has been taken down – fortunately, it’s available as Google archive. Was it taken down because the Hsp60 research is so clearly connected to Israel?
When politicians run back and forth overseas to discuss pressing world problems, the press says that there was a “flurry of diplomatic activity.” In the case of Israel and Iran, there are many who believe that “flurry” will turn into a full-blown blizzard (with a subsequent “nuclear winter?”).
Like everything else in our wired world, the business of predicting has been taken over by “the experts” – in this case, the prediction markets, who use “The Wisdom of Crowds” to figure out the future. For example, right now at Intrade, which runs prediction markets for almost anything, from politics to wine vintages, has two Israel-related topics right now: Will Hamas recognize Israel’s right to exist (nobody seems to think so) and if Israel or the US will attack Iran.
On the latter question, the predictions are all over the place, depending on which site you look at. The folks at Hubdub seem to think so, while at Intrade, they’re not so sure. Inkling users are much more optimistic that no war will take place. And at StrategyPage, where the watchword is “many minds make quick work of uncertainty,” the many minds don’t even believe that Iran is anywhere close to obtaining nuclear weapons! (They’re pretty bullish on gold, though – I guess they didn’t read my post questioning the whole gold mania thing).
So, is there wisdom in crowds? Most definitely, say people who know the business – such as Noam Danon of Qmarkets, and Israeli company that provides prediction network technology to small and medium sized businesses. I interviewed Danon last summer for Israeli21C, and he told me about the dozens of large corporations using them to set business policy – very successfully. As he says:
“Over the past four or five years, prediction markets have become a buzzword in many large organizations; Google, HP, Nokia, Siemens, the Best Buy retail chain, and many others use them to get an idea of where they should be investing their time and money. All those companies have large departments that specialize in working out prediction markets within the organization.”
Why would prediction markets give an accurate forecast for businesses, but not for Middle East conflicts? Obviously, money is a big motivator – when you have to decide how and where to invest assets, you are going to take the whole prediction process far more seriously. As far as Israel and Iran are concerned, the speculation either way could indicate that people look at the issue academically – after all, there have been no nuclear attacks since World War II, and it seem inconceivable that anyone would want to go down in history as being behind the next one (even the Iranians, North Koreans and Pakistanis, apparently). That, it seems to me, is the verdict of the crowd – with guaranteed MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) if Iran threatens/attacks Israel and/or vice-versa, both sides are doing a lot of “blustering” (another weather word!). Let’s hope the crowd is right on this one!
I wasn’t looking to become the “poster boy” for Jewish-Arab coexistence when I set out north with my wife last Friday. After 19 years of marriage, we couldn’t resist an invitation from friends celebrating a family event in a Galilee hotel over Shabbat. Our 18 year old daughter, on leave from her National Service job in the Herzl Museum in Jerusalem, was primed to watch our three year old, together with their siblings (15, 14, and 11). Needless to say, we were extremely worried about how “the baby” would take the absence of both parents for the first time in her life (at least one of us had always been with her when the other was traveling or away), but as it turned out, that was to be the least of our worries – the kids, including the youngest, all had a blast.
Other troubles were waiting for us down the road. To get to northern Israel from our part of the country (western Shomron/Sharon), the most efficient route is to take Route 6 north to its current terminus, and then Road 65 east and north. That road, the easternmost within “Green Line” Israel, passes through an area called Wadi Ara, part of a geographic construct called “the triangle.” Its residents are almost exclusively Muslim Arabs, and the centerpiece of the area is a town called Um el-Faham. The most recent news stories about this area came out a couple of months ago, when several Israeli activists got permission to hold an “Israeli flag parade” in the town; the High Court authorized the parade, after police had turned down requests to hold it over and over. It turned out police were right, to some extent; there was minor rioting, and police worked hard to keep the small group of Jews and the much larger group of local residents protesting the parade at bay.
In general, though, Jews – especially people “like us,” observant residents of what some would call a “settlement,” would stay far away from Um el-Faham, and probably never even get within 10 kilometers of the place – if not for Road 65. As it turned out, however, that is where my car decided to break down. What happened and who’s to blame (I have a whole theory about that) are less important than the fact that the car essentially became undriveable an hour and a half before Shabbat – when we still had an hour or so to go to get to our destination!
Kids in yeshivas and day schools – and even secular kids here in Israel – all know the tales of how people sacrifice for the Sabbath, dropping valuable merchandise, money, wallets, etc. in order not to violate the holy day. But in those stories, the traveler always seems to be in a forest or other relatively quiet or calm area, and since in the old days travelers could be on the road for days at a time, they usually carried at least some provisions with them. We, on the other hand, were in the heart of one of the biggest Arab areas in Israel. The date, it’s useful to note, was May 15 – the date Israeli Arabs commemorate as “Nakba Day.”
But all that was a million miles away from our minds. We were preparing for a fun weekend, our first chance to see how the “other half” (the half whose kids stay home when the parents go away!) live. A/C running, music on the radio, it was like a dream. And then the nightmare began. It started with a “funny noise” (I should know better by now what the noises lead to!). But the car seemed OK, so I ignored it. All of the sudden, a little past a place called (I kid you not) “Al Aryan,” the car started kicking and bucking. Impossible to steer, with the temperature gauge shooting up in seconds, I figured we had to get off the road right away. But where? Fortunately, Road 65 is a major commercial strip, so there are businesses and strip malls every few kilometers. Now I needed a gas station – some place to park the car and check out the problem.
And that’s when I met Musa – the Um el-Faham mechanic who saved the day. Which story I will relate in part two (when I get around to writing it!).
Not to sound racist, but there’s no way a person raised in a Western country can’t feel some consternation when a person of clearly Arabic background gets on a plane. 9/11 was just too much of a shock to the system, and it’s impossible not to do some personal profiling, even if you try not to.
The same applies to Arabic text. If you’re from the United States or Israel (and probably lots of other countries) it’s impossible not to look at a page of Arabic writing and not get “nervous” – as in, “it must be some anti-Israel/anti-Jewish/pro-terrorist screed.” We’ve come to expect it, especially in Israel. And if you live in an area where there is lots of Arabic on the radio (such as Israel), you get the same suspicions listening to broadcasts of speakers who are dramatically intoning – something.
Other than learning to understand Arabic, there’s little you can do about the audio “threat” (one of my daughters more or less taught herself Arabic, so she can make out what goes on in these broadcasts). But for the rest of us who are too lazy/uninterested/incapable of learning a new language at this point in our lives, there’s Google Translations. There are lots of reasons not to like Google (like the people here say), but one amazing thing Google has done, imho, is Google Translate, where you can paste in text or URLs and get them automatically translated between dozens of languages – like English, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as Swedish, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, and of course the more “pedestrian” languages like Italian and French (no offense meant!).
Google Translate has helped me out numerous times – including just this afternoon, as I was writing a feature story on Israeli boxing. As part of the story, I wanted to mention the tragic death of a former Israeli Golden Gloves champ, Karim Nayif Bathish, who was killed a couple of weeks ago in an auto accident. I really wanted a picture of Bathish, but couldn’t find one anywhere – on the English and Hebrew sites, that is. Then I got the bright idea to Google Bathtish’s name in Arabic, seeking out articles about him on Israeli websites in Arabic. As a local hero in Nazareth and Haifa, you’d figure there would be a couple of articles. And indeed there were – complete with picture. The articles were quite factual, and the talkbacks were all what you would expect (mourning for the victim, etc.).
This isn’t the first time I’ve used Google Translate to research an article on Arabic language websites – I actually wrote an article in the JPost about it last year. And of course, I can’t help but check out other stories than the ones I was searching for on these sites. Let’s just say that while some fill the post-9/11 stereotype, most don’t. Believe it or not, “they” are not as obsessed with us as we think they are!
The thrust of my boxing article is how the organization tries to promote co-existence (most of the boxers are Arab or Russian kids). The director of the organization, Dr. Shahade, told me than in 20 years of running the Israel Boxing Association, there hasn’t been one ethnic/religious fight among the boxers! That’s great for kids who are in shape enough to box – but how can the rest of us avoid tension? Maybe Google Translate is the arena for us!
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So just how will this “leaning” take place? What could Obama do to convince anti-Israel and anti-Semitic states to change their ways, which have been set in centuries of tradition (![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=497f52fe-896c-4025-8227-2c20e090fdb2)
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Google Translate has helped me out numerous times – including just this afternoon, as I was writing a feature story on Israeli boxing. As part of the story, I wanted to mention the![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=2d637cf1-d0c6-45d8-9e18-bc7ea78d41bb)
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