The internet has transformed the way we live.  It is difficult to remember life without it. Yet its greatest strengths – including unfettered access to information, entertainment and communications - also make us vulnerable to new and unexpected dangers and risks.  There is growing awareness of the need to protect young people from these dangers, but what about their parents, and grandparents?

Yesterday’s annual  Safer Internet Day (SID) aimed to address this, with a national theme of ‘Connecting generations and educating each other.’ This is something our client Kaspersky Lab, an internet security provider, supports wholeheartedly – so over the past few weeks we have been working with them to launch a high profile campaign around this theme.

We targeted media at both ends of the generational spectrum – from parenting blogs to retirement magazines, as well as the nationals and broadcast media.  Kaspersky Lab internet security expert  David Emm spoke live on Hayes FM, BBC Radio Jersey, BBC Radio Oxford and Tower FM about cyber bullying and keeping social media accounts safe from hackers, and pre-recorded an interview on the subject with SID Radio. SID-related statistics published by Kaspersky Lab resulted in coverage in the Daily Telegraph, and a competition to win Kaspersky Lab’s brand new consumer product Kaspersky ONE (which provides internet security for devices such as Android phones and tablets as well as computers) secured loads of coverage – including this one on MadeForMums.

Kaspersky Lab supported other SID activity by publishing a list of essential tips to help everyone stay safe online – whether they were nine or 99-years-old.

By the end of the day, we had secured 22 mentions for the company, and, more importantly, helped to spread the message of how to stay safe online.  Happy surfing!

Yesterday Wikipedia took its English-language site offline as part of protests against proposed anti-piracy laws in the US. I wonder how many people were incovenienced by this…..not that I rely solely on Wikipedia for facts and background info you must understand, but it is the first source that most people turn to. Actually, 400m people a month all over the world use the site as ‘go-to’ source of info…so I am not the only one!

The site carried a banner stating ‘Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge’.  Once I had got over the unnecessary use of capital letters for every word, I did actually start to think about a world without easy access to everyday information. I mean, I use the internet for everything, from finding out what my friends are doing on Twitter or to how to bake a cake (in the run-up to the Berkeley PR bake-off), to understanding the latest technology trends.  Without it I would be stuck.

But it is the reason behind Wikipedia’s decision to shut down for 24 hours that intrigues me. The U.S. Congress is considering legislation that in Wikipedia’s view would ‘fatally damage the free and open Internet’. But the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) protects against online piracy…so surely that is a good thing?!

I understand that the Internet should be an open platform for free speech but surely during these tough economic times the threat of 2.2 million jobs being at risk if the legislation is not imposed might make someone think twice about aggressively opposing it.  

Anyway, what are your thoughts on the subject…I would be interested to hear.

Melanie Johnson

This week has seen two parallel stories running in the media: the glittering technology extravaganza that is the annual, international Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and the plans announced by the Government for an overhaul of IT education in the UK.

The first – CES 2012 –  saw the launch of 20,000 new products, ranging from the amazing and inspirational to the downright strange. They included advanced in-car technology, kitchen tablet computers (complete with recipes),  the latest smartphones and, of course, apps for everything.

Observers have identified the Big Trends (and competitive battle grounds) for 2012 as ultrabooks – incredibly light, slim, powerful laptops; smart, internet-enabled TV – do everything on your TV that you can do on your computer or tablet or smartphone and vice versa; next generation gaming; and the growing use of voice and gesture recognition in TVs and computers (raising the vision of an episode of Downton Abbey being interrupted at a crucial moment by a little person on the sofa waving their arms and shouting ‘Octonauts!’)

20,000 product launches, each created and developed with passion, commitment and, more often than not, some serious technology and software skills.

Yet the second story shows that our education system currently focuses on teaching young people how to fill in a spreadsheet. 

Computer science still exists, but every year fewer people take it, and even fewer go on to study computing-related degrees at university.  If this is allowed to continue – and the hopeful signs are that it won’t be – where will tomorrow’s technology entrepreneurs and innovators come from?

This is not to denigrate the importance of skills in the use of IT.  In today’s digitally-enabled world basic IT user skills are increasingly essential.  It is just a terrible waste of potential. 

This year saw a 20 per cent increase in the number of UK firms exhibiting at CES.  We won’t keep this up if we don’t transform the way we teach young people about IT.  This means developing the fundamental skills and expertise required  - and yes,  computing can be a challenging and demanding subject, just like maths and physics – but also ensuring that the curriculum reflects the excitement and magic  of computing applications to better engage the hearts and minds of young people.

Criminals are profiting from my mobile phone….what? Well it seems that this week Get Safe Online is warning the general public about the increased risk of mobile malware due to the rise in popularity of smartphones and mobile web applications. Computer Weekly reports that these clever but vicious online crooks are now creating malicious versions of legitimate mobile apps which, once installed, generate cash for criminals by sending text messages to premium rate services controlled by the criminals.

Apparently, the victim is usually unaware anything is wrong until they see their phone bill….and then it is too late, you have to pay!

Mobile malware is not a new thing. In fact, the first smartphone ‘worm’ was created back in 2004.  Called ‘Cabir’ it was a proof of concept written to infect Symbian-based devices. In August 2011, the Kaspersky Lab research team highlighted just how big a threat mobile malware had become, discussing with Channel 4’s Ben Cohen how it had identified 2,564 threats in 2011 – compared to 906 different viruses in 2009. Then this week, V3.co.uk’s Security Watchdog reported that recent figures put the growth rate in mobile malware at an astonishing 800 per cent in just four months, wow!

Now, I didn’t have a smartphone back in 2004 (I’m a little late on the PC/phone thing!) but I am genuinely concerned about this. I know how oblivious I am of the security risks when using my mobile phone, so to imagine it is as easy as simply downloading a new app…

Bob Tarzey, an analyst at Quocirca suggested in an IT PRO article that many of the attacks would focus on Android, the most popular mobile OS in the world and one of the easiest to develop for.  And guess which ‘click happy’ mobile user has an Android based smartphone….?  Yes, this one.

So, on that note I will leave it up to Maksym Schipka, director of hosted and streaming technology research at Kaspersky Lab to tell us all about this mobile threat in a Channel 4 news clip: Is your smartphone under threat from hackers?

Melanie Johnson

The annual Web 2.0 Summit has just concluded in California.  As in previous years it brought together leading internet influencers with senior executives from the worlds of technology, media, finance, telecommunications and entertainment to consider the fluid, complex and ever-changing landscape of the internet economy.  The Times entertained readers with double page spreads on the summit that focused mainly on the competitive sniping.

However, for me the most incredible aspect of the summit was – and is: The Map.

The 2011 Web 2.0 Summit focused on data.  The assumption is that whoever makes the best use of data will win, so the Summit set out to explore who is doing what in each of a number of pre-determined ‘Points of Control’: location, mobile platforms, gaming, content, social etc.

The Data Frame Map, which you can see in its full multi-layered glory on the Web 2.0 Summit website, complements this theme.  It seeks to achieve the near-impossible: to visualise the new Internet landscape, highlighting the Points of Control territories and the ongoing battles and overlaps between companies, technologies and applications for the future of the network economy.

If you can overlook some of the grim punning (App-ipelago or PoliSeas anyone?) the Map is thought provoking and enlightening and worth spending some time over.

As a proud representative of the digital generation I have of course printed off a hard copy and pinned it on the wall with a drawing pin.

Tilly Travers