Bar Camp Phnom Penh 2010
Is this weekend! See you there.
http://barcampphnompenh.org/
Is this weekend! See you there.
http://barcampphnompenh.org/
Tech Crunch says it’s definitely happening. Would you consider buying one? And why?
UPDATE: Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, breaks it down for TechCrunch.
In a direct assault on Facebook, Google has entered the social-networking wars with Google Buzz, a Gmail-integrated social-networking application. According to Google’s Todd Jackson, Buzz’s product manager, Buzz’s main features include:
According to a press release from Google:
The most noticeable advantage to Google Buzz is the way that e-mail comments and media, such as photos and videos, can be shared. Google Buzz automatically ‘follows’ the people who you communicate with most. Rather than broadcasting a passive “status message” like Facebook or “tweet” like Twitter, Google Buzz engages your friends by making the content that you find interesting available to them
Most of the buzz about Buzz centers around its real-time commenting features and its mobile integration, including voice recognition, which allows users to comment with voice only. No keyboard required! For developers, Google provides a Buzz API.
Not everyone, however, is enamored. And privacy issues have already been raised.
The Official Google blog has all the details.
Users in the United States were given access to the Facebook accounts of other people, reports the Associated Press.
“A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: strangers’ accounts with full access to troves of private information,” the story says.
The AP does not explain how the mix up happened, but the problem is not with Facebook, apparently. The glitch, “a routing problem,” occurred between the users’ phone and their Internet service provider, AT&T.
Security experts interviewed for the story said they had never heard of a case like this, where users were given access to the wrong account. It’s unknown whether such a mix up is rare, or just rarely reported. Experts agreed that the same flaw could happen with other applications, such as email or blogging services.
READ IT: Network Flaw Causes Scary Web Error
MORE: Ars Technica provides a not-too-technical explanation of what likely happened, including this pithy synopsis:
“So it looks like AT&T did something wrong—even though I wouldn’t call it a “routing” problem—and the company is in the process of fixing things. But Facebook also shares some blame for this situation. Apparently Facebook, like many other sites, doesn’t think the information tied to a user’s account is important enough to protect with something stronger than a clear text cookie.”
Cambodia’s main international airport first went digital in 2003. The new system multiplied exponentially the amount of time it took to get in or out of the country, as computer-unsavvy airport officials labored to understand the vagaries of Windows.
“We apologize for any delays that are caused by the use of our new computer system,” read little signs posted at each computer terminal.
They were still there two years later.
Even today, Cambodia remains in the very early stages of computer adoption. Most government ministries still keep hand-written records, and the exchange of data between agencies relies on an ad hoc system born of secondhand photocopiers and oil drums of ink. Decrepit phone lines and low computer-literacy rates add to the challenge.
The greatest hurdle of all has been the Cambodian language itself. For as beautiful as it is, there has been no standard way to display it. Until now.
In late December, the government passed a sub-decree requiring the Khmer Unicode font for all government correspondence.
In years past, the choice of typeface was left to the user, and as many as 30 different versions of “Khmer” competed for supremacy. There existed no uniform way to create the same characters across different fonts, which meant typists had to know them all, or stick to the few they did.
If documents arrived with an unknown character, too bad. Though font converters existed, few of them worked well, and translating from one font to another could take days or more.
Even more problematic, the lack of a font standard strangled the development of intra-government computer networks and centralized data storage. How could the government build a nationwide database of criminals, for example, when it could not even agree upon the font to use for data entry.
The move to Khmer Unicode fixes all that, and it provides the government a proper foundation on which to build a modern information system.
Apologies for any delay.
