In The News

Ad Agencies Are Booking Passage to India

Geoffrey A. Fowler March 22, 2006
With American auto-insurance, credit cards, and medical x-rays, not to mention software development and IT needs, already managed by trained professionals in India, it was only a matter of time until Indian enterprise asserted itself on the culture of global consumerism. An article in The Wall Street Journal details the outsourcing potential India holds for ad and marketing agencies. Boasting a...

Hacking Made Easy

Brian Krebs March 17, 2006
Russia has a work force that is technologically skilled and underemployed. As a result, some savvy tech workers turn to crime, creating web sites and software aimed to collect financial details from unsuspecting victims in the US, Europe and South America. The Russian internet is home to sites that can break into computers abroad through a security hole in Microsoft's Internet Explorer web...

Exporting Censorship

Xeni Jardin March 15, 2006
Censorship of the internet extends well beyond China and search-engine firms that cooperate. Xeni Jardin, co-editor of BoingBoing.net, recognized massive censorship was underway after receiving dozens of emails from readers who complained they were blocked from the site. A Silicon Valley product called Smart Filter prevented access because BoingBoing.net contained “nudity” – pictures of...

The Wild Web of China: Sex and Drugs, Not Reform

David Barboza March 8, 2006
While China’s internet censors block access to sensitive political subject matter, a booming online industry trades in sex, drugs, and just about anything else legal or illegal that turns a profit. Wall Street analysts predict that China, with its rapid internet growth, could lead in online commerce by 2010. Meanwhile, the Chinese pay en masse for online entertainment, with both criminals and...

China Creates Own Net Domains

Hiawatha Bray March 6, 2006
Many governments around the world resent US control of internet regulation. To bypass that regulation, China has set up a new family of Chinese-language alternatives to .com and .net. The move could lead to greater censorship, or it could simply ease the search for words in Asian characters that go unrecognized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, the US agency...

Is Globalization a Blessing or a Burden on Women?

Rezina Sultana March 6, 2006
Women, accounting for half of the world’s population and two-thirds of the world’s work hours, consistently have fewer resources and less representation at decision-making levels. Some industries, particularly in male-dominated societies, take advantage of eased movement of capital and reduced state controls on trade and investment to reduce wages for the poor, especially women. An example is...

Globalization Rubs Passions Raw

March 3, 2006
Conflict over the Danish cartoon crisis is a result of tension between the process of globalization and the pull of “nativism.” Globalization involves both the movement of people, goods, capital and ideas around the world, and the impact of the changes wrought by this flow. The effects of such exchanges are more immediate because of real-time communications through cell phones and the internet...