Seminar Eleven Cyber Security

In this seminar, Prof Gilbert drew our attention to the cyber crime which would be the next biggest crime source in the near future. I was interested in the video clip showed at the very beginning. There are a lot of ATM card stealing cases in China. But I have not heard about the "mechanism" before.
We also looked at the high tech crime. The terminology is quite complicated: there are different names for different cyber criminals:
Spammer:
People who abuse electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, which are generally undesired. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.
Hacker:
A person who specializes in work with the security mechanisms for computer and network systems. While including those who endeavor to strengthen such mechanisms, it is more often used by the mass media and popular culture to refer to those who seek access despite them.
Phisher:
People who attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out using email or an instant message,and often directs users to a website, although phone contact has been used as well.

So the security for cyber is quite difficult to maintain. Now criminals are high IQ people. The fight between good and bad is a fight in intelligence. I am worried if the pay for phishing, hacking or spamming is much much higher than our security warriors, warriors may turn their back to security.

From a cyber user's point of view, it is better to stop the criminals. From a cyber guard point of view, it is wiser to prevent crimes. The scenario is like gaming, such as chess. The essential ability is to forecast and predict future trend. This principle was also illustrated in our in-class activity: Cyberwar. If I did not understand wrongly, this should be the hint that Prof Gilbert wanted to give us. ^_^

Another surprising knowledge to me is the content about Russian mafia. So I searched a bit on its history. From Wikipedia:
Despite seeming to arise during the Fall of the Soviet Union, organized crime had existed throughout the imperial and communist eras as a form of open rebellion against the systems in the form of the "Thief's World". During this time organized crime was fiercely honor-based and often attacked and killed traitors among their ranks. Nevertheless, during World War II, many enlisted in the Russian Army resulting in the Suka Wars, which killed many of the thieves who were branded as government allies as well as the original thief underworld during Stalin's reign. The criminals, seeking a new survival strategy, began to ally with the elite in the Soviet Union as a means of survival, creating a powerful Russian black market.
The real breakthrough for criminal organizations occurred during the economic disaster of the 1990s that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Desperate for money, many former government workers turned to crime and the Mafia became a natural extension of this trend. According to official estimates, some 100,000 Russians are committed mobsters, with a large but unknown number engaging in these criminal practices on and off.
Between 1992 and 1994 the Russian Mafia targeted the commercial centers of power, seizing control of the nation’s fragile banking system. At first the criminal gangs were content to merely “park” their large cash holdings in legitimate institutions, but soon they realized that the next step was the easiest of all: direct ownership of the bank itself.
Banking executives, reform-minded business leaders, even investigative journalists, were systematically assassinated or kidnapped. In 1993 alone, members of the eight criminal gangs that control the Moscow underworld murdered 10 local bankers. Calling themselves “Thieves in Law” (vori v zakone), Russian gangsters have murdered ninety-five bankers in the last five years.
Since the mid-90s the Russians have been trying to expand into America, most often via the trafficking of drugs and illegal weapons. This has led to some brutal wars with the organizations already present, including the Italian Mafia, Chinese Triads and the Yakuza. The group is believed to have links to Colombian drug smugglers and many smaller gangs as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union. Some also believe they are at the heart of gangs smuggling illegal workers west to the European Union and often Britain, though no proof has been offered for this at this time. The home of the Russian Mafia in America is in the Brighton Beach (dubbed by Russians "Little Odessa") neighborhood in New York.
Over the last few years, the FBI and Russian security services have tried to crack down on the Mafia, though the impact of this has yet to be measured.

Its history does not mention a lot on cyber crime. However, this will be the next big thing in recent years to mafia.

Seminar Ten Business Plan and Storytelling Skill

In this seminar, we focused mainly on the business plan which was closely related to our final project.
A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.
Based on my searching results, there are a lot of business plan templates available online. To my big surprise, some websites even provide the service to construct customized plans for people. However, I will not try that because I can not trust them to make the right plan for me. ^_^
There are several components essential to a business plan:
1 Executive Summary
2 Organizational Background
2.1 Mission Statement
2.2 Current Status
2.3 History
2.4 Management Team
3 Product Portfolio
4 Marketing Plan
4.1 Market Size and Structure
4.2 Competitive analysis: Existing Markets
4.3 Competitive analysis: New Markets
4.4 Pricing
4.5 Demand Management
4.6 Distribution
4.7 Promotion and Brand Development
5 Operational Plan
5.1 Current Product/project status
5.2 Research and development plan
5.3 Manufacturing/Deployment plan
5.4 Information and Communications Technology Plan
5.5 Staffing Plan
5.5.1 Staffing Needs
5.5.2 Union issues
5.5.3 Training Requirements
5.5.4 Hiring Time Table
5.5.5 Staffing Budget
5.6 Business Process Outsourcing Plan
6 Asset Development Plan
6.1 Intellectual Property Plan
6.1.1 Intellectual Property Inventory
6.1.2 Portfolio Development Plan
6.2 Acquisition Plan
6.3 Organizational Learning Plan
7 Cost Allocation Model
8 Financial Plan
8.1 Current Financing
8.2 Funding Needs
8.3 Funding Plan
8.4 Financial History
8.5 Financial Forecasts
8.6 Valuation
9 Risk analysis
9.1 Risk Evaluation
9.2 Risk Management Plan
10 Decision Making Criteria

We are now working on our mobile food guide business plan. At the same time, I continue reading the text book of Mobile Web 2.0. There are some points I feel quite useful to our case, and yet we still not think about it.
1. The triangulation is based on the cell. The cells are not uniform. They are usually bigger in country side than that in urban region.
2. The needs to mobile food guide may need to be reconsidered. If the rate is a bit high, potential users will not choose to search by phone but just simply look around!

Hopefully, we can have these two points solved during next meeting.

The other part of this seminar is the storytelling skills shared by Prof Gilbert. That was really interesting. Although I am not good at telling a story, I personally think I am good at writing story--but in Chinese. The storytelling skill is important, especially in a business career. I may learn some from Prof during each seminar, because the stories he told in class are really attractive. It is time for me to improve my English.

Seminar Nine Scenario Planning and Case Study

In this seminar, we focused mainly on the scenario planning method from a case-based perspective.

In the scenario about education, there are three key factors: market, knowledge base, and political requirement. As an education provider (polytechnics, universities, etc), our market is the recruiting companies and agencies. By properly sensing the need of talents and skills, we can modify the knowledge base of education. Since education is always in the social circumstances, we should consider the political issues all the time.

In the scenario about technology, the three factors change a bit: market, technology and political requirement. Here I want to elaborate only the political part. For new technology and issues raised by it to be legalized, the period of time is at least one year. It is reasonable for us to generalize that the legalization is always far behind new technology. This means it is not a good idea to solve potential problem after the born of new tech. Instead, there will be some suitable and foreseeing political requirements for new tech to follow. As a new tech provider or consumer, we need to consider these requirements very carefully.

From the search results of Scenario Analysis online, I found an interesting technique based on computing: Visualization of Scenarios, or Morphological Analysis.

Morphological Analysis
Morphological analysis (MA) is a non-quantified modelling method for structuring and analysing technical,organisational and social problem complexes. It is well suited for developing scenarios, and the method is highly appropriate for complex cases where expertise from several areas is required. It is also useful for developing and relating operational and tactical scenarios to force requirements. Using MA for scenario generation and strategy management typically involves workshop sessions supported by computer applications.

Process-data Model of MA This section presents the process-data model explaining the generic concepts and the activities involved in morphological analysis methods, as shown by figure below.



The left figure shows the meta-process model, which is the representation of the activities involved in performing morphological analysis. These activities are explained in more depth in section 2. On the right hand of the figure you see the meta-data model of morphological analysis, which is the presentation of the data that are produced by the activities of the method. Each of these data or concepts is detailed in section 3. The dashed lines in between the two models indicate the relationship between the activities and the produced data. An example of Morphological Analysis project to clarify the application of Morphological Analysis’activities is then presented in section 4. The aim of this example is to perform analysis and explore the possibilities to grow a start up company.

I think this seminar will improve our skill in case study and scenario analyzing, and thus is quite helpful for the final exam. ^_^

Seminar Eight Interaction Design

In this seminar, we first presented our proof-of-concept for the mobile technology product of the final projects. Our group was the first to present the idea. It was a mobile food guide java system implemented in the phone. There are some similar products available in the market, but we have important differentiations from other food guides as our competitive advantages:
1. It is with the phone, unlike others are just available online.
2. It provides an easy grading system to collect the feedback from visitors as well as Singaporeans. This in fact utilize the Web 2.0 idea, the wisdom of crowd.
3. It is ads free. We will try to cover all the eateries and update them based on sourcing group from our company and also recommendations from users of our system.
The suggestions we got in the seminar discussion are the following:
1.Food preference : Hindu, Muslim
2.Language preference (inbuilt)
3.PPT attractiveness
4.Transportation
5.Views and average rating
6.Other restaurant not bound to the location (search for restaurant)

I am also thinking about collecting information based on different country groups. For example, people from India may not like the food loved by Chinese. With this sorting system, visitors can view the ratings of people from their country and also the overall ratings.

Other groups' proof-of-concepts were really fantastic. For our group, we still have a long way to go in terms of technique for creating beautiful flashes.

After all the presentations, we learnt some design issues. There are three levels in design: user interface, telecommunications infrastructure and application domain& service. To connect these phases, we need standards for both software and hardware. After having designed a prototype of a specific product, we need testing. One common practise is the iteration testing: First test design without users, then with different kinds of users. Use analysis from test data in next iteration of design, then retest with different users. Design for multiple user profiles, using a variety of interfaces and adaptive mechanisms.

There is one new information I am quite interested in: the simcard for mobile bank. I found relative knowledge from wikipedia:
SIM Application Toolkit (commonly referred to as STK) is a standard of the GSM system which enables the SIM to initiate actions which can be used for various value added services.
The SIM Application Toolkit consists of a set of commands programmed into the SIM card which define how the SIM should interact directly with the outside world and initiates commands independently of the handset and the network. This enables the SIM to build up an interactive exchange between a network application and the end user and access or control access to the network. The SIM also gives commands to the handset, such as display menu and ask for user input.
STK has been deployed by many mobile operators around the world for many applications, often where a menu-based approach is required, such as mobile banking and content browsing. Designed as a single application environment, STK can be started at the initial power up of the SIM card and is especially suited to low level applications with simple user interfaces.

Advantages of SIM Application Toolkit:
1. Some manufacturers claim that STK enables higher levels of security through identity verification and encryption, which are necessary for secure electronic commerce.
2.STK has been deployed on the largest number of mobile devices.

Limitations of STK:
1.After a SIM has been delivered to the customer it can be difficult to change the STK applications and menus on the SIM. To do so either the SIM must be returned and exchanged for a new one which is costly and inconvenient or in some cases the applications can be updated over the air. This limitation hinders the number and frequency of STK application deployment.
2.No multimedia support (only basic pictures)
3.Poor independent development support