Ultimate babysitter? Debate over iPads for kids

George is still two months shy of his second birthday.

But like many toddlers, he's already discovered the wonders of touch-screen technology.

He's using an application for a computerised tablet.

"What he really likes about the iPad is the tactile aspect. It’s very immediate. You put your finger on it and something happens straight away."

From musical instruments to colouring books, the range of apps aimed at children has boomed in the past two years.

In fact many see tablets as a valuable learning tool for pre-schoolers.

"We have books with sounds of small animals, but it’s quite limited. With the iPaid we have ten applications with animals of all shapes and sizes. So it’s a window onto lots of objects we don’t have at home."

But the boom has also sparked a debate.

Some parents worry such devices are a dubious distraction from the real world.

Indeed, some child psychologists are wary of letting small children use tablets, saying they won't teach children about three dimensional space.

"They don’t learn to process everything from the outside world that we do as adults. Take the example of building blocks. Mothers are very impressed by their little ones who stack blocks on an iPad, but when a paediatrician or psychologist pulls out a box of blocks for him, the child is unable to stack them."

For now there's no formal research on the subject.

So, it will be up to parents to decide what's best for their tech-savvy toddler.

Apple to launch iPad mini this year

There’s a new iPad on the horizon and this time it’s going to be a ‘mini’.

Apple’s new iPad Mini could well be in stores by September this year.

According to online reports and tech blogs in the know Apple is finally looking at a smaller version of its iPad, said to have been a project Mr Apple himself, the late Steve Jobs was not keen on at all.

He is alleged to have said: "It will be dead even before it arrives."

According to a Chinese website NetEase, the mini iPad will have a 7.85” screen and will be priced between $249 to $299.

Currently all Apple iPads have a 9.7 inch screen.

The iPad mini will have a display resolution of 1024 x 768 – so there will be no Retina Display.

Factories have been asked to be ready with the product within six months and there will be about 6million units ready for release.

Some reports quoting sources, Apple’s Chinese based manufacturers Foxconn and Pegatron have already started receiving orders for the smaller iPad.

Click here to read: iPhone 5 vs Samsung S3: Which one is better

Reports further added that factories are being given six months for the new Mini iPad to be ready.

There have been mixed responses from the industry about Apple’s latest move.

While some have termed it as a decision taken too late in the day, others feels Apple will still dominate the smaller tablet.

Why you may suffer an internet shutdown from July 9

For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer.

Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world.

In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users.

But that system is to be shut down.

Click here to read FBI site on what is the DNS Changer Malware and how to clean your computer

After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet.

Most victims don't even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.

Last November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers.

"We started to realise that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because ... if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service," said Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent. "The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get ‘page not found' and think the Internet is broken."

The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, https://www.dcwg.org, that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem.

On the night of the arrests, the agency brought in Paul Vixie, chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium, to install two Internet servers to take the place of the truckload of impounded rogue servers that infected computers were using.

Federal officials planned to keep their servers online until March, giving everyone opportunity to clean their computers. But it wasn't enough time. A federal judge in New York extended the deadline until July.

Now, said Grasso, "the full court press is on to get people to address this problem." And it's up to computer users to check their PCs.

Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers.

This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet's domain name system.

The DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address, such as www.ap.org, into the numerical addresses that computers use.

Victim computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to fraudulent versions of any website.

The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting.

The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their Internet browsing.

When the FBI and others arrested six Estonians last November, the agency replaced the rogue servers with Vixie's clean ones. Installing and running the two substitute servers for eight months is costing the federal government about $87,000.

The number of victims is hard to pinpoint, but the FBI believes that on the day of the arrests, at least 568,000 unique Internet addresses were using the rogue servers.

Five months later, FBI estimates that the number is down to at least 360,000.

The US has the most, about 85,000, federal authorities said. Other countries with more than 20,000 each include Italy, India, England and Germany. Smaller numbers are online in Spain, France, Canada, China and Mexico.

Vixie said most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check the computers.

FBI officials said they organized an unusual system to avoid any appearance of government intrusion into the Internet or private computers. And while this is the first time the FBI used it, it won't be the last.

"This is the future of what we will be doing," said Eric Strom, a unit chief in the FBI's Cyber Division.

"Until there is a change in legal system, both inside and outside the United States, to get up to speed with the cyber problem, we will have to go down these paths, trail-blazing if you will, on these types of investigations."

Now, he said, every time the agency gets near the end of a cyber case, "we get to the point where we say, how are we going to do this, how are we going to clean the system" without creating a bigger mess than before.

 

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