World cools towards Barack Obama

International approval of US President Barack Obama's foreign policy has dropped sharply during his term in office, a Pew Research survey suggests.

Among the 21 countries surveyed, the largest drop in approval - from 57% to 27% - was seen in China, the Global Attitudes Project reveals.

Most respondents in almost all countries opposed US drone strikes.

Despite these numbers, confidence in Mr Obama remains high among US allies, especially in Europe.

"I think where you see the real disappointment is when you deal with specific policies," said Richard Wike, associate director of the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

He added that the survey showed big gaps between expectation levels and action over Mr Obama's policies on climate change and treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Economic power

According to Mr Wike, confidence in Mr Obama and approval of his international policies has trended downward during the course of his presidency, but has not dropped sharply in a single year.

Besides China, the largest declines in foreign policy approval by 2012 included long-term ally Japan and neighbour Mexico.

Among five European countries surveyed both in 2009 and 2012, approval of Mr Obama's international policies dropped from 78% to 63%. In five Muslim countries surveyed in both years, the approval rate dropped from 34% to 15%. Russia also joined the countries with double-digit declines, from 40% of respondents approving US international policies to 22%, an 18% decrease.

While Mr Obama generally has higher approval ratings than President George W Bush did at the end of his second term, their approval ratings are now matched in Pakistan and Mr Obama's remain only slightly better in Lebanon.

Among the countries surveyed there was widespread opposition to US drone strikes. At least 50% of respondents in 17 countries disapproved of such strikes, with the largest percentages in the Middle East, Mexico and Greece.

In recent weeks, Mr Obama has become more closely associated with the US drone programme, with a New York Times report noting he personally approves each strike, and that the US keeps a "kill list" of potential strikes against militants.

In addition to changes in sentiment towards Mr Obama and his policies, the survey records a shift in the way economic power is perceived.

Majorities in Germany, Britain, France and Spain now regard China as the world's leading economic power, not the US. In the UK, this percentage has doubled since 2008.

Mr Wike told the BBC the US had seen a downward trend in its perceived economic power since the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession, despite Mr Obama receiving "reasonably good marks on global economic issues".

However, American "soft power" gets higher marks, especially among young respondents.

The American way of doing business is popular in the Middle East, with more than 50% in Lebanon, Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt saying they like this part of US image.

Majorities or pluralities in 18 of 20 countries admire US science and technology, according to the survey. American ideas about democracy are more popular among respondents under 30 in several countries, including Tunisia and China.

Flash Drives Replace Disks At Amazon, Facebook, Dropbox

By Cade Metz

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA — If you drive south from San Jose until the buildings are few and far between, exit the highway, and take a quick left, you’ll find a data center occupied by some of the biggest names on the web. Run by a company called Equinix, the facility is a place where the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon can plug their machines straight into the big internet service providers.

If you’re allowed inside and you walk past the cages of servers and other hardware, you can’t see much. In most cages, the lights are off, and even when they’re on, there are few ways of knowing what gear belongs to what company. Some companies don’t want you to see. Google engineers have been known to wear miner helmets when installing new hardware, determined to keep their specialized gear hidden from the competition.

But if you walk into the right building and down the right aisle, you’ll run into a giant Dropbox logo. Clearly, the file-sharing upstart is proud of its data center gear. But at the same time, it doesn’t think this hardware is all that different from what the rest of the world is using. And that’s about right.

Inside its cage, Dropbox is running servers equipped with solid-state drives, also known as SSDs — super-fast storage devices that could one day replace traditional hard drives. The company doesn’t use SSDs in all its servers, but it’s moving in that direction. In other words, Dropbox is like the web as a whole. Such names as Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Wikia are also using solid-state storage in their data centers, and judging from anecdotal evidence, the trend goes even further.

Like a hard drive, an SSD is a device for storing information. But unlike a hard drive, it doesn’t have any moving parts. Today’s SSD are built with flash memory — the same stuff that stores data and applications on your iPhone. These drives have been around for years, but they’ve been slow to make headway in the real world, in part because they’re more expensive than traditional hard drives. A 300GB flash drive sells for around $500, whereas a comparable hard drive is closer to $100. A 300 terabyte hard drive — which is about ten times larger — sells for around $350.

But in just the last 12 months, SSDs have turned the corner. They’re appearing in high-profile laptops such as Google’s Chromebooks and Apple’s brand-new MacBook Pros, and in the data center, many companies are realizing that they make economic sense even with their higher price tags.

In 2011, according to Jim Handy, an analyst with research outfit Objective Analysis, businesses purchased an estimated 79 million SSDs that connect to servers using the serial-ATA interface — i.e., the interface that traditional hard drives use. That’s a $2.2 billion market, says Handy, and he expects this to grow to 13 million devices and $3.6 billion in 2012.

“I think this is getting pretty common,” says Artur Bergman, the founder of Fastly, a San Francisco outfit that uses SSDs exclusively in providing a service that helps other businesses speed their delivery of pages over the net. “Though some people still have a hard time grasping it, these drives save a tremendous amount of money. They look more expensive, but when you need higher performance, you need way less of them.”

The Speech

About a year ago, Bergman gave a four-minute speech at a Silicon Valley conference attended almost exclusively by engineers who sit on the cutting edge of web infrastructure. He started by asking if anyone in the audience used SSDs in the data center, and less than 20 percent raised their hands. And when he asked who used only SSDs in their data centers, one person raised his hand — the head of engineering at Wikia, who had inherited his SSD-happy data center from Bergman, the outfit’s previous head of engineering.

Anyone who hadn’t raised a hand, Bergman said, was “wasting their life.” Yes, wasting their life. “I keep repeating that to every single individual I talk to, and what I get back is: ‘[SSDs are] too expensive,’” he said. “Actually, they’re cheaper.” Cost shouldn’t be measured by the price tag on an individual SSD, he said, but by how much you spend on drives across the data center in order to juggle the required information with each passing second.

One SSD, he said, can handle about 40,000 reads or writes a second, whereas the average hardware gives you about 180. And it runs at about one watt as opposed to 15 watts, which means you spend far less on power. “Do the math on how much you can save,” he said. In short, you need fewer servers to do the same amount of work. At Wikia, Bergman first installed SSDs on the company’s caching servers, used for providing quick access to data that repeatedly accessed by web surfers. Then, he moved them into the company’s database servers, where data stored more permanently. This provided so much additional speed, Bergman says, the caching servers were no longer needed.

When he gave the speech, Bergman had been preaching this same message for about two and half years — and few listened. But twelve months on, he says, it seems that the web is finally heeding his advice. Companies are constantly emailing him, just to let him know they’ve embraced SSDs.

Yes, many companies are still holding back, in part because they’re waiting for prices to come down even further, in part for other reasons. SSDs are not only more expensive than traditional hard drives, they can accept only so much data before they can’t accept any more. In other words, they have a limited lifespan.

But so do hard drives, which are prone to sudden and unexpected death. Bergman doesn’t see a SSD’s limited life as a big issue. “It’s a pretty good failure mode compared to a hard drive, which just takes longer and longer to write data before dying,” he says. At Wikia, he says, he replaced the company’s first SSDs after two years, and didn’t have any write problems before that.

“I don’t trust a hard drive after three years,” he says. “They don’t fail because they run out of write cycles, but they still fail.”

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Israel 'to evacuate Tel Aviv' in event of missile attack

AFP - Israel will evacuate the entire population of Tel Aviv if it is hit by missiles, particularly if they have unconventional warheads, the commander in charge of Israel's central region told AFP.

Colonel Adam Zusman, chief of the Home Front Command in Israel's Gush Dan region, which encompasses the city of Tel Aviv and its environs, said an attack on the centre of the country would force massive evacuations.

"In case of a missile attack on the centre of Israel, especially unconventional, the population from Tel Aviv and other cities will be evacuated and relocated in other areas of the country," Zusman told AFP in an interview at the weekend.

"Massive evacuations will take place in case of unconventional attacks and if buildings are destroyed by a missile."

Zusman said Israel continued to face serious threats from Iran and its allies, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Gaza's Hamas rulers.

"We estimate that in case of war, hundreds of missiles will hit Tel Aviv and its nearby cities. As a result of these attacks, there will be hundreds of Israeli casualties.

"In the next war, nobody will be able to drink a coffee in Dizengoff," he said, referring to a popular street in downtown Tel Aviv.

"Israeli civilians will have to face the threat. Today, every civilian is threatened in Israel."

Zusman said Israel has some of the "most sophisticated" anti-aircraft system in the world, but that the Jewish state could not count on any system for total protection.

"We are getting ready for the worst-case scenario."

He acknowledged that gaps in preparedness remain, with around 30 percent of the residents in the area under his command lacking gas masks.

But in other areas, he said, precautions had been taken, including the running of regular drills and the preparation of hospitals to deal with the potential of treating casualties while under attack.

Google Is Evil

By Rory O'Connor

It’s bad enough when you run a search company in an increasingly social world. It’s worse when anti-trust regulators say you have unfairly and illegally used your dominance in search to promote your own products over those of competitors. Now Google executives, who like to boast of their company’s informal motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” also stand accused of being just that — and rightly so. What other interpretation is possible in light of persistent allegations that the internet titan deliberately engaged in “the single greatest breach in the history of privacy” and “one of the biggest violations of data protection laws that we had ever seen?”

Google’s history of anti-social social networks and anti-trust trust relations that deceptively breach online consumer privacy and trust has already begun to threaten its longstanding web hegemony and its vaunted brand. Now the company’s repeatedly defensive and dishonest responses to charges that its specially equipped Street View cars surreptitiously collected private internet communications — including emails, photographs, passwords, chat messages, and postings on websites and social networks — could signal a tipping point.

With the phenomenally successful and profitable internet giant being newly scrutinized by consumers, competitors, regulators and elected officials alike, all concerned about basic issues of privacy, trust and anti-trust, the question must be raised: Is Google facing an existential threat? With government regulators nipping at its heels on both sides of the Atlantic, Facebook leading in the race for attention and prestige, and “social” beginning to replace “search” as a focus of online activity, the company that revolutionized our means of finding information just a decade ago now finds itself increasingly under siege and in danger of fading from prominence to become, in essence, the “next Microsoft.”

That possibility came into sharper focus recently when fed-up European regulators gave the company an ultimatum — change your lying ways about your anticompetitive practices in search, online advertising and smartphone software or face the consequences. Regulators in the United States are poised to follow suit.

Meanwhile, the secret Street View data collection has already led to inquiries in at least a dozen countries. Yet Google still refuses to ‘fess up and supply an adequate explanation of what it was up to, why the data was collected and who knew about it. To date, no domestic regulator has even seen the information that Google gathered from American citizens. Instead, Google chose first to deny everything, then blamed a programming mistake involving experimental software, claimed that no use of the illicit data in Google products was foreseen, and said that a single “rogue” programmer was responsible for the whole imbroglio. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) determined instead that the data collection was no accident, that supervisors knew all about it and that Google in fact “intended to collect, store and review” the data “for possible use in other Google products,” and fined Google for obstructing the investigation.

Google’s response to the FCC was not unusual. At every step of the way, the company has delayed, denied and obstructed investigations into its data collection. It has consistently resisted providing information to both European and American regulators and made them wait months for it — as well as for answers as to why it was collected. Company executives even had the temerity to tell regulators they could not show them the collected data, because to do so might be breaking privacy and wiretapping laws! As Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, told The New York Times while citing Google’s stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” it seems “Google’s practice is to prevent others from doing the same thing.”

Given its record, and with so little accountability, how can any of us trust Google — or other Internet giants like Facebook, which now faces its own privacy and anti-trust concerns? Who gave these new media companies the right to invade our privacy without our permission or knowledge and then secretly store the data until they can figure out how to profit from it in the future?

No one, obviously … and as a direct result of their arrogant behavior, both Google and Facebook now face the possibility of eventual showdowns with regulators, the biggest to hit Silicon Valley since the US government went after Microsoft more than a decade ago. Their constant privacy controversies have also caused politicians to begin taking notice. Senator Al Franken of Minnesota, for example, who is in charge of a subcommittee on privacy, noted in a recent speech that companies such as Google and Facebook accumulated data on users because “it’s their whole business model. And you are not their client; you are their product.”

Small wonder that Google co-founder Larry Page is feeling “paranoid”, as the Associated Press recently reported. Why? As I detail in my new book Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands and Killing Traditional Media, as the new “contextual web” takes the place of the data-driven web of the early 21st century, it will mean further bad news for Google — even though the company still sold $36.5 billion in advertising last year. Couple Google’s paranoia about Facebook and the evident failure of its latest social network, Google Plus, with its problems about privacy, trust and anti-trust, and it’s no surprise that executives are feeling paranoid. After all, they are facing the very real prospect of waging a defensive war on many fronts — social, privacy, and trust — simultaneously. Despite its incredible reach, power and profit, it’s a war that Google — the 21st century equivalent of the still-powerful but increasingly irrelevant Microsoft — may well be destined to lose, along with the trust its users have long extended to one of the world’s most powerful brands.

Top global accounting firm Deloitte says US debt crisis is 'bigger than you think'

* US Government debt "could spiral out of control"
* Interest payments add a new level of fiscal pain
WHAT is the real cost of the US Government's nearly $US16 trillion ($16.07 trillion) debt?

"The debt crisis is likely bigger than you think," a report issued by Deloitte, one of the world's largest accounting firms, concluded.

That is because interest payments on the country's massive debt add a whole new level of fiscal pain to the problem.

Interest payments on the national debt alone, it noted, are expected to total some $US4.2 trillion over the next decade.

And that number could go higher depending on rates.

The lead author of the Deloitte study, director Bill Eggers, stressed that US Government debt could quickly spiral out of control if investors become less willing to lend more money.

"If interest rates go up by simply three per cent over the next decade, the additional cost to the Treasury, just for interest payments, would equal the peak combined cost of the wars in both Afghanistan in Iraq," he said.

The report showed that $US4.2 trillion being spent on interest could instead:

- build 130,000 kms of highways
- pay tuition for every science/math/engineering college degree in the country
- triple US government general research and development funding
- build six international space stations
- offset 80 per cent of global warming pollution in the atmosphere as recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

But not all economists are on board with the implications of the study.

"The major holders of government bonds are agencies and individuals within the US," Robert Stonebraker, an economics professor at Winthrop University, told FOXNews.com.

"So if you pay $US1 trillion in interest on the debt, a lot of it will go back to Americans anyway."

But Mr Eggers noted that a lot of the interest payments do go overseas.

"If you look at the interest payments going to foreign countries, soon we're going to be spending enough to essentially finance the Chinese military," he said.

Currently, foreigners own some $US5 trillion in US Government bonds, $US1 trillion of which is owned by China.

Not all economists agree with the study.

"I think they're overhyping the need to fix the debit crisis in short run," Dr Stonebraker said.

"It's not appropriate to cut spending during an economic slowdown -- that is exactly when you need deficit spending to stimulate the economy and get people back to work," he said.