On October 29 of that year, for perhaps the first time, a message was sent over the network that would eventually become the Web. Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science at the University of California-Los Angeles, connected the school’s host computer to one at Stanford Research Institute, a former arm of Stanford University.

Forty years ago today, the Internet may have uttered its first word.

Twenty years later, Kleinrock chaired a group whose report on building a national computer network influenced Congress in helping develop the modern Internet. Kleinrock holds more than a dozen patents and was awarded the National Medal of Science last year by President Bush.

In an interview with CNN, the 75-year-old looks back on his achievements and peers into the exciting and sometimes scary future of the Web he helped create.

CNN: In basic terms, what happened on October 29, 1969, and what was its importance to the Internet as we know it today?

Kleinrock: Millions of people helped create this Internet. I basically supervised the creation of the Internet at the first node, both in the first connection and the very first message. We had just by then connected the first two host computers to the Internet. The first one was on September 2, 1969, when UCLA connected its host computer to the first packet switcher, the first router if you will, ever on the Internet.

But there was no other computer to talk to. So a month later, Stanford Research Institute received its interface message processor, or IMP, connected it to their host computer, and we created the first piece of the backbone network when a 50-kilobit-per-second line was connected between UCLA and SRI.

What we wanted to do was send a message essentially from UCLA to SRI’s host. And frankly, all we wanted to do was log in — to type an l-o-g, and the remote time-sharing system knows what you’re trying to do.

So we typed the “l,” and we asked over the phone, “Did you get the ‘l?’ ” And the response came back, “Yep, we got the ‘l.’ ” We typed the “o.” “Got the ‘o?’ ” ” ‘Yep, got the ‘o.’ ” Typed the ‘g.’ “You get the ‘g?’ ” Crash! SRI’s host crashed at that point. So the very first message ever on the Internet was the very simple, very prophetic “lo,” as in lo and behold.

And, you know, we weren’t aware that this was a significant event that would be recorded in history. We did not have a very effective message like “What hath God wrought” or “Come here, Watson, I need you.” Or “One giant leap for mankind.” We just weren’t that smart.

When the host computers talked to each other, I like to say the Internet uttered its first words on that day.

CNN: Before October 29, 1969, was no computer talking to any other computer?

Kleinrock: Well, typically not over a data connection, no. What was going on at that time was that many users sitting at terminals were connected to time-sharing systems with a local connection. But that was just connecting to a single computer.

CNN: UCLA sent a press release about your work in July of 1969, just a few months before your October breakthrough. At the time, did you have any idea how far-reaching all this was?

Kleinrock: Basically, I said the Internet will be always on, always available, [and that] everybody with any device could connect to the Internet from any time and any location, and it would be as invisible as electricity. What I missed was the social aspect, namely that my 99-year-old mother would be on the Internet, as she was until she passed away two years ago. And by the way, at the same time, my preschool granddaughter would be on the Internet.

CNN: What is feature shock?

Kleinrock: Feature shock is a term I coined some years ago. Systems [such as Windows or Safari] contain an enormous number of features, each one of which may be valuable by itself, but no one is really able to use all the features. However, because you’ve essentially paid for all those features, you feel guilty if you don’t exploit them. So you spend time learning to use them.

I’m a power user of PowerPoint. I spend thousands of hours learning how to use it effectively. If someone came along with a new version of PowerPoint that has a different interface than the one I’m used to, and [even] if it were twice as good as PowerPoint, I wouldn’t bother installing it.

We’re overwhelmed by [features]; we don’t know how to use them. It slows down the rate at which new applications and features are accepted by the public because of this investment they have in their thousands of hours of learning.

And I consider that a good thing. It allows a little more mature thinking in how we start hopping around in technologies and thereby losing the experience and history we had before. There’s a kind of a measured way in which people will adopt new technology, and I think that’s helpful.

CNN: What are you up to these days in the development of the Internet?

Kleinrock: I’m working on what we call smart spaces, whereby the cyberspace comes out from behind the [computer] screen, where most people consider it residing, and moves out into your physical space so that there will be intelligence and embedded technology in the walls of your room, in your desk, in your fingernails, in your eyeglasses, in your automobile, in your hotel rooms all across the world as you move around.

CNN: If computers will be doing so much of our thinking for us, does that mean our brains will get less of a workout?

Kleinrock: It’s always been the goal and desire of we technologists that as we provide capability that computers are good at — number crunching, file storage, massive databases that can be searched — that it would free us up to do the things that humans do so well, like pattern recognition and putting thoughts together, intuition and innovation.

So it may relieve us of some of the mundane things that we don’t do well. On the other hand, I personally regret that the youth of today are depending so much for their simple arithmetic calculations on these handheld calculators or wristwatch calculators that they don’t know how to make change in the supermarkets anymore.

CNN: What other dangers could be ahead?

Kleinrock: There’s a very dark side to the Internet, which we’re all familiar with. It started with a worm in 1988, and it became spam in 1994, and now we have pornography, we have denial of service [attacks], we have identity theft, we have fraud, we have things like botnets [pieces of software that cyberthieves use to remotely and secretly control your computer], which really worry me.

One of the problems of the Internet is that we didn’t install what I like to call strong user authentication or strong file authentication. We didn’t anticipate the level of the dark side we see today. The culture of the early Internet was one of trust of all the users.

I knew every user on the Internet in those early days. It was an open culture. We shared everything we did. We got our gratification by putting things out there, which people could use. And there was an etiquette — net etiquette if you will, which people behaved.

CNN: What about privacy? Is it dead?

Kleinrock: Yes, in a word. Yes.

And it was voluntarily given up in many cases. I mean, when someone lists their telephone number or uses their credit card or makes a cell phone call or even carries around a cell phone, that’s an awful lot of info about where you are, what you’re doing and some of your private matters.

There are cameras all over the place, and they’re increasing in number. I like to say the only privacy we can expect is to go to the edge of the ocean, strip down and jump in and hope there’s no sonar down there tracking you, by the way, which there will be soon.

CNN: Do you like to play video games over the Internet?

By Philip Rosenbaum, CNN

Business process outsourcing (BPO) companies are finding it difficult to assure foreign clients of security of information and data due to the gray areas in ICT regulation in Kenya

As a result, players in the nascent sub-sector are investing heavily in internal systems to ensure security and integrity of information.

“This calls for very stringent internal controls by a call centre to ensure that employees do no abuse the information,” says Mr Nicholas Nesbitt, chief executive office of KenCall, Kenya’s pioneer call centre based in Nairobi.

Because of the nature of their business, call centres are required to maintain high levels of integrity to win clients’ confidence. Some of the information and data are critical financial details that would make or break a company or organisation.

However, Kenya is yet to enact serious laws that safeguard against cyber crimes, which are expected to rise with the landing of the fibre optic cables.

“We are engaging the government and its agencies on this and we expect that something will come out soon. This will be an advantage to operators as we shall have passed the credibility test,” Mr Nesbitt said in an interview at his office.

Regulations bordering on technology have been underscored as key to unlocking Kenya’s BPO potential in the global market. Economic zones like the European Union have set basic standards that for call centres that handle clients from their member states.

Call centre businesses has been growing in Kenya over the past six years. While a number of BPO firms have fallen by the wayside, few remain and are hoping to gain from new laws and the arrival of fast-speed internet.

“About five years ago when we started business, there were about 30 players in the sector. However, today very few have survived the times,” says Mr Nesbitt.

The sub-sector continues to face challenges, the latest being large corporates that are establishing their own contact centres. This has resulted in low volumes as well as high turnover of staff between companies.

Kenya’s call centre market earned Sh450 million in 2007 and this is projected to more than triple by 2014 to reach Sh1.4 billion, according to a Frost and Sullivan 2008 analysis .

The low margins had been blamed on prohibitively high bandwidth costs but this will be salvaged by the use of fibre optic cables.

“We are excited about it and personally I believe that business will grow by about 300 per cent. We are receiving lots of requests from the international market,” says Mr Nesbitt.

While outsourcing centres have remained an emerging business across the globe, it is yet to pick locally as firms often rely more on foreign clients.

“There is also a general lack of a call centre culture in Kenya, with customers preferring face-to-face service,” says Frost and Sullivan, the research firm.

“This aspect has limited the growth of the domestic market, with companies unable to justify the setting up of contact centres due to the limited uptake of the services.”

By JOSEPH BONYO — Nation media group

There are more than 350,000 applications on Facebook. The company says it disables any that violate its terms.

Sure, it’s nice to be noticed. But security experts are skeptical about whether sharing information, such as birthdays, with a broad audience is a bright idea.

“It’s all about providing the bad guy with intelligence,” said Robert Siciliano, CEO of IDtheftsecurity.com. “Back in the day, spy organizations planted someone on the inside to get proprietary data. Social media is the man on the inside. We’re giving away all the intelligence for free.”

Many people use their birthdate in passwords and personal identification numbers, and security questions often ask for it to resend a lost password. So broadcasting a birthdate could help cybercriminals pose as others as they log on to various Web sites, experts warned.

The same goes for pet names and the names of children. If your mother is a Facebook friend, her maiden name (a popular security question) is within reach of an identity thief.

The bad guys’ tactics

Malicious actors have different goals. Some are people who want Web surfers to click on links where they get paid to send people. Others hope computer users will enter passwords or Social Security numbers they can use to steal identities or money. And others would like to take over computers or Facebook identities.

One of the online attackers’ favorite tricks is to send a post to a Facebook wall or Twitter account that looks like it came from a friend. The post contains a link, supposedly to a third-party application. If you take the bait, the scammers can collect your sign-on information and use malicious software to send that link to your friends.

“They are so viral,” said Adam Ostrow, editor-in-chief at Mashable.com, a site that follows social media. “It becomes something that can affect thousands of people.”

The hackers then try the same username and password for other sites to see whether they can break in to your accounts.

Once a user’s account has been compromised, it creates opportunities for new scams. In one, a cybercriminal takes over a Facebook member’s account and pretends to be stranded in another country. The scammer then asks the user’s friends to wire money to them.

This scam has been happening with increasing frequency, wrote Facebook software engineer Alok Menghrajani Tuesday on one of the site’s blogs. Facebook is working with Western Union to identify these schemes and has “improved a number of our automated systems to better handle this unique class of scam,” he wrote.

Another popular ability of Facebook and Twitter, the status update of your current location, could also lead to trouble, Ostrow said. Mashable reported in June that one man in Arizona had tweeted he was going on vacation and came home to find his house burglarized.

Although authorities could not directly link the crime to the Twitter message, experts say it’s clear that someone who tells his online community he is out of town has left himself exposed to criminals.

Who can see your quiz answers?

The American Civil Liberties Union is concerned about the amount of information visible by Facebook quiz makers and other third-party applications.

“They’ll have access to all that information, so they can sell it; they can share it; they can do an awful lot with it,” said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for privacy-related issues with the ACLU.

He said it is not clear that Facebook can do much about it, but the social media site disputed that assertion.

“We require that applications only ask for the data they need to run the application,” Facebook spokesman Simon Axten wrote in an e-mail interview with CNN.com. “We enforce this policy through spot checks and have disabled apps that we’ve found to be in violation. No app can access the most sensitive information like contact info.”

There are more than 350,000 applications active on Facebook, and more than 70 percent of its members use one each month, according to the site.

In August, Facebook announced it would make changes to the site, including “technical changes designed to give people more transparency and control over the information they provide to third-party applications.”

“That doesn’t get to the heart of the question,” Calabrese said, “which is, do you want and should your friends have the ability to share your personal information with third parties?”

His organization hopes to meet with Facebook officials, he said.

Protecting your privacy

Mashable’s Ostrow recommended using the “lists” feature on Facebook and having different privacy settings for each group. For family or close friends, it would be OK to show an address and phone numbers. But consider restricting information access for acquaintances.

Ostrow also said Facebook users should carefully consider friend requests in the first place, a sentiment echoed by Michael Kaiser, the executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance.

“People don’t think about what their goal is in using social media before they start,” Kaiser said. If you want to use it on a personal level, limit the number of people in your network to close friends and family whom you trust.

But, he said, if used as a professional tool with a wide network, reveal less about yourself.

Information on LinkedIn, a professional networking site, is intended for public viewing.

Still, “we really encourage users to connect to users they know and trust,” said Kay Luo, a spokeswoman for the company. “LinkedIn should be the version of yourself that you feel comfortable sharing.”

People often post on the site where they have worked and when, business groups they belong to and when they went to college.

“The real issue that comes to mind is listing past contacts and affiliations that someone could use to dig up data to be used in whatever ways imaginable,” Siciliano said. — (CNN)

E-books, such as Sony’s Readers, are less than 3 percent of the total publishing market, but are catching on fast.

“It’s much better for looking things up, since any e-reader’s search function is 10 times better than flipping and looking and searching on my own” in a printed book, said Jessup, an Erie, Pennsylvania-based writer.

He is one of a growing number of bibliophiles, spurred by new reading technologies like Amazon’s Kindle, who are gravitating to the digital realm.

Key developments in displays are improving e-book reading devices, whether it be E Ink’s displays in products like the Sony Reader and the Kindle, or the easy on the eyes organic light emitting diode (OLED) screens being used in netbook computers and smartphones. Up-and-coming technology promises to enhance e-book reading even further.

Low-power, reflective e-paper displays, which can be read in direct sunlight, are expected to hit the market in the next year from companies like Prime View International and Plastic Logic, said Nick Colaneri, director of the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University.

“At first these will be flat and largely indistinguishable from the displays in devices like Amazon’s Kindle,” Colaneri said. “But the availability of a new feature like mechanical flexibility always stimulates the creative energies of designers.”

Truly flexible displays could be available in three to five years, Colaneri said. Electronic readers could become as thin as a sheet of paper and able to contain hundreds of book titles, magazine articles and other content.

Internet connectivity will go hand in hand with these devices, letting consumers download content from just about anywhere using Wi-Fi or mobile phone networks.

In fact, they already can. The Kindle connects wirelessly to Amazon’s store, allowing users to buy and download books to the device within minutes. Not to be outdone, Barnes & Noble recently launched its own e-book store and an e-reader app that allows users to download books to their smartphones.

Last month, Sony announced its first e-book reader with built-in wireless capability. The Reader Daily Edition will sell for $399 when it debuts in December.

Apple also is rumored to be working on a wireless tablet device with a large screen that would be better suited than an iPhone for reading digital content.

It seems the time is right for these advances. E-book sales are seeing a significant upswing, said Hugh McGuire, CEO of Book Oven, an online company that builds Web tools for publishing e-books and print-on-demand titles.

“The U.S. wholesale e-book market was about $50 million in 2008 (retail would be about double), but it’s growing exponentially,” McGuire said, citing figures from the International Digital Publishing Forum, a group that tracks the e-book market. McGuire said that in the first quarter of 2009, the wholesale market was about $25.8 million, an increase of 53 percent over the previous quarter.

McGuire concedes that e-books are only 1 to 3 percent of the overall publishing market. But the success of the Kindle, and moves by Google — who, along with Sony, is offering free titles online — indicate a bright future, he said.

“I would expect 20 percent of book sales to be digital by 2014, but some have predicted an even bigger percentage by then,” he said. “Twenty percent of the current book market is something like $5 billion.”

That raises the question: What will happen to printed books?

“E-books will gain, especially in the indie publishing market, making it far easier for a company or individual to sell a quirky, unique book for little money and see profits almost immediately,” said Jessup, the Pennsylvania author and e-book reader.

Even so, Jessup said he believes print and digital books will coexist for some time. He released his first work, “Open Your Eyes,” as an e-book, but his publisher, Apex Books, lets buyers order the book via print-on-demand. It’s also available on the Espresso Book Machine, an in-store device from On Demand Books that lets customers at independent bookstores print books.

For e-books to reach their full potential, McGuire said, a shift in thinking is in order.

“[Publishers] have long operated in an environment where printing a book was expensive,” he said. “Shipping it around, stocking it in stores and selling it all represented significant costs. They still think in this mindset.”

Publishers need to realize that e-books can get titles to more readers for less money, he said.

“Successful publishers will be those who embrace the benefits of e-books and pay more attention to what their readers want.”

By David Dritsas – CNN

Bing’s “visual search” and Google’s Fast Flip produce search results as images.

Or what if you’re in the market for a new camera? You saw a friend with a credit-card-thin model at a party last weekend. But was that a Canon? A Nikon? A brand you’ve never heard of?

If you’re like many people, you’d turn to the Internet for answers. But you type in “dog breeds” or “digital cameras” into Google and punch enter, and a big list of blue links comes up. You don’t see the dog you want. You don’t find the camera, either — at least not quickly.

Such quandaries are the driving force behind Bing’s new “visual search” function, which lets Web users troll through image catalogues instead of Web pages when they know what something looks like but can’t put their finger on the name.

The examples are also evidence that the search engine market, once dominated by simple rectangular search bars and the lists of Web pages that follow, is diversifying. People who once were happy with a one-search-fits-all model are finding exceptions, and a number of niche search products are trying to respond to these increasingly diverse needs.

Also this week, Google introduced a test product called Fast Flip, which takes a retro look at Web design by making online news look like something magazine readers will find familiar.

The company has other news products — namely Google Reader and Google News — but is looking for ways to make news content more visual and to share some of the revenue.

The new products come as Microsoft’s Bing continues to elbow for more room in an online search market that Google has dominated for years. In June, 65 percent of all Internet searchers were done through Google sites, according to comScore. Microsoft caught only 8.4 percent of searchers in the same period.

Fast Flip, an experimental feature of Google Labs, is a Web application that allows users to scan news articles from 39 print and online publishers, including The New York Times, Newsweek, TechCrunch and Us magazine.

Users can “flip” through a horizontal stream of screen grabs of articles as they appear on the partners’ Web sites, with layout, design and images intact. You can click once on a story to enlarge the page; a second click takes you to the partner’s site. Users also can browse popular topics (the economy, Taylor Swift) or search for others of their choosing.

Google says the idea behind the new service is to make online news-browsing faster and replicate the reading experience of flipping through a magazine or newspaper.

Unlike Google News, which emphasizes breaking news articles from the past 24 hours, Fast Flip “is more for stories with a longer shelf life,” Google spokesman Chris Gaither said.

“We think there’s a lot of room for innovation in how people consume news articles on the Web,” Gaither said. “The easier it is for people to browse articles quickly, the more they’ll read.”

Loren Baker, editor of Search Engine Journal, says that increases in bandwidth make “visual search” functions more successful today than in previous years, when images would load more slowly.

Baker believes that Google Fast Flip could make it easier for people to scan news articles on their netbooks, tablets or even smartphones.

“I don’t have to sift through my bookmarks. I don’t even have to leave Google,” he said. “It’s almost like a virtual newsstand on my handheld.”

But not everyone is excited about Google’s new product.

“If this is the future of news, I think news is kind of screwed,” said Frederic Lardinois, a writer at ReadWriteWeb, a technology blog. Lardinois said the interface is backward-thinking and is hard to use.

Fast Flip is in a test phase and will incorporate feedback from users, Gaither said. Google also is seeking to expand the roster of Fast Flip partners, he said.

Some tech observers say Bing’s hyper-visual search function gives it a new leg up on Google in terms of functionality.

Nova Spivack, a search expert and founder of Twine, said the most important thing about Bing’s visual search is that users can sort the images into categories.

By creating different kinds of searches and making them sortable, Bing is catering to high-end Internet users — which, soon, will be everyone, he said.

“I think Bing has realized that everybody is becoming a search geek,” he said.

On the dog-breed search example, users can filter the images to include only terriers, or hypoallergenic dogs or toy dogs, or dogs that need a medium level of exercise, so they don’t have to scroll through hundreds of photos to find the dog they’re searching for.

Mary Jo Foley, editor of the All About Microsoft blog at ZDNet, said she personally finds Bing’s visual search useless because she’s not a visually minded person. But she said it’s an example of search engines diversifying, and that’s a good thing for everyone.

“I think the idea for Microsoft and Google and Yahoo is to present things in new ways and say, ‘What if you could do this? Would you want to do it this way?’ ”

She added: “Not all people search in the same way, and not all people want to get their results in the same way.”

There are about 50 galleries of images in the new Bing visual search bin, but more will be added, and eventually the idea will be integrated into the main search site, said Stefan Weitz, director of Bing. Right now, users have to go to a separate page to find the visual searches.

David Coursey, a blogger at PCWorld.com, said the search works like a “visual dictionary.”

“I think Bing is onto something,” he said. “And if they can figure out how to extend Bing’s visual search, it could be very helpful for people who know what something looks like but don’t know what to call it.”

By John D. Sutter and Brandon Griggs
CNN