"A giant leap for mankind" make sense now

Philae at 67P comet

When Neil Armstrong in July 21, 1969 spoke those famous words "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" make sense now when we see the Man making a galactic history when the Rosetta Mission successful landed its Philae probe on a speeding comet - at least for those who wasn't born at that time (like me).

When we see numbers of this project, An Ariane 5G+ rocket carrying the Rosetta spacecraft and Philae lander launched in 2004 and travelled 3.907 days until the day November 12, 2014, when the Philae achieved the first-ever controlled touchdown on a comet nucleus, it is really something that we haven't seen since the epic event of Armstrong on the moon.

Due to the side of the comet where Philae landed, the dark side and no sun to recharge the batteries, Philae rests in peace three days after its landing until one day the batteries get recharged again touched by the sun and then new experiments starts all over again.
Let's be patience and wait for this magical moment to happen again.

The time is over! The World Cup 2014 is started

June 12th, 2014 ... this was the day spiked on the Government's schedule to prepare everything for this big event of FIFA called the World Cup 2014. We still see a few group of workers spread around the city and the arena in order to accomplish the work, but we know we should have many other big things accomplished.

When the FIFA announced in October 30th, 2007 that Brazil would be the host country for the World Cup 2014, the government promised to the nation that we would take the opportunity to adequate the stadiums to FIFA's standard, but more than this, we would have the chance to have better infrastructure in several aspects, not only stadiums (called now as arenas).

With this perspective every Brazilian had been very excited about the chance to finally dream with infrastructure similar to developed countries. However, month by month we could follow up how the government in three spheres (federal, state and municipal) were dealing with the schedule in order to accomplish on time.

The last two or three years until today, Brazilians realized that we wouldn't have what had been promised in 2007, and than movement born in the streets spreading all over the country against the World Cup and the government.

Today with the schedule finalized, although a large part of the initial schedule has been chopped off, ​​the only thing we can do now is to cheer for the Brazilian national team and after that wait until October 2014 to decide in the elections who deserves to "coach" this country.

Graphene, the material of the future that is present

Known as the material of the future, the graphene keeps the scientific and technological community astonished because of its amazing properties and countless of potential applications. Adding to other compounds such as main raw material or as a new process of production, graphene will make possible touch screens that don't break down, internet 100 times faster than today with optical fiber, flexible transistors at 100 gigahertz, solar panels, purify seawater into drinking and in many other applicable areas and examples.

The properties of graphene are superlative: it is transparent, flexible, waterproof, hydrophobic (repels water), stronger and better heat conductor than diamond, capable of supporting a large electrical current density, thus having a higher conductivity than copper and even silicon. The resistance, malleability and ability to produce energy make graphene an element with transformative potential, with application in various sectors of the automotive, aerospace, biomedical, telecommunications, electronics, energy, components and sensors.

Actually the whole world is investing huge amount of money with research in industrial and electronic applications in graphene. Samsung already has 407 patents related to graphene and IBM almost with 150.

Today, 1 gram of graphene can cost between 100 and 300 dollars in the international market. However, 1 kg of graphite costs 1 dollar and from this amount it's possible to extract around 150 grams of graphene which would make possible to have at least 15.000 dollars of graphene. Of course it requires investments and material processing to reach this amount.

According to some specialists, the first applications are expected in 2016-2017 and from 2020 its advantages will be a bit more generalized. The time that the industry needs to incorporate a new material is estimated at 15 to 20 years and in some cases up to 50.

It will be the big companies in these sectors that will decide when and how to introduce these innovations to the market. The impact on quality of life, the environment and energy is invaluable. We will need decades to evaluate the success of this technology.

An interesting thing is that Brazil has one of the world's largest reserves of graphene and its applications increase daily. So investments will be important to lead us as one of the greatest producers not only in material but that develops products that generate patents, licenses and royalties.

How the 3G internet has changed the telecom companies' life

With the booming of smartphones and tablets in the last four/five years, the business model of telephony companies has been put against the wall. With the competition of applications that replace phone calls and text messages, the carriers are betting and investing more than ever on sales of data packet to the internet.

Today there are 273 million of active mobile phones in Brazil and 38% of this amount has access to the internet 3G - in 2009 this percentage didn’t exceed 2%. Access to mobile broadband also made popular applications to exchange messages and files such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber and a few others. Each time, users are more connected not only by 3G but also by Wifi hotspots, and then, users need less to fall back on SMS with more alternatives for phone calls and messages.

The change is not only in Brazil, but globally. A research by the British consulting Ovum says that the preference for applications makes telecom operators around the world stop profiting USD 33 billion per year with SMS. The prediction is that the next two years, the value of the annual loss will reach USD 54 billion. In 2012, the consulting company Informa affirms that the number of messages exchanged by apps for the first time surpassed the number of text messages sent via SMS - it was 19 billion messages per day compared to 17.9 billion.

With this scenario, it made the telecom companies had changed the strategic and charge less for the SMS, now selling by a pack of 100 or 500 SMSs, before that, charged by unit. Despite of being the voice service as the main service, the revenues coming from this vertical are dropping in some countries and in Brazil stopping growing. The telephone companies are now increasingly investing in landline and mobile broadband, which is where it is coming revenue growth.

Why the 3G in Brazil has problems?

Very often we hear people complaining about the 3G that is not working properly or the signal is not good enough for the basic operations. But what is the main cause of this problem that has been dragging for a long time?

Looking for the answer for this unsettled question we found a few possible reasons. First, the carriers were not prepared for the exponential growth in demand for data usage in mobile phones. According to the IDC Consultoria, the sales of smartphones and tablets last year (2013) have increased 142% and 122% respectively. There are a few reasons why those numbers are so big, although mainly driven by the lower prices and the trend of replacing devices less modern. So imagine all those mobile devices accessing 3G network in the same area.

This aspect raises the second reason why the 3G is slow. The carriers have not invested in infrastructure enough to support so many users in a dense area, there is no enough Base Transceiver Station (BTS) - also known as Cell Tower or Cell Site, that telecommunication towers we see spread around the city. The carrier AT&T alone has more BTS than the five largest Brazilian network operators together in a similar geographical area. Each BTS has capability for "X" number of users. Conforms the congestion increases, the range decreases to try to meet all nearby users - not always it is possible. This explains why one day the signal is optimal in a certain area and at another time it is impossible to use because many people are trying to connect at the same time. And it's not only to have the BTS spread around the city, it's required to have a good link between the cell tower and the backbones of the carrier, otherwise the information will be received by the antenna, but it will get stuck due to the poor link. The fourth generation (4G) will not help on this if the links are kept the same.

Brazil has about 64 thousand BTS across the country; half the number of BTS in Mexico, for example. Okay, why carriers just install more antennas? Simple, isn't it? Restrictive laws prohibit the installation of new antennas in many places. The green and yellow bureaucracy allows each city to create their own legislation about antenna installation - are currently more than 250 laws about the theme. There is a law stopped in the Congress that would regulate in a single law this matter. Today an authorization to install a BTS takes 12 to 18 months.

What's more, the biggest bottleneck of mobile broadband third generation - believe it is not between the smartphone and the antenna, but the infrastructure to carry this enormous amount of content consumed and exchanged daily. The data stream is much larger than the transmission capacity allows. Possibly not even the fourth generation (4G) will solve the problem, once this technology only changes the capacity between the smartphone and the cell site.

There are many knots that still need to be untied and the World Cup could be a great reason for this, but the legacy that it leaves us is not at all close to the minimum acceptable.

The Civil Rights Framework for the Internet

In April of 2014, the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies and Senate have approved the civil rights framework for the Internet (in Portuguese, Marco Civil da Internet), a project that is considered a Constitution of the worldwide web.

After being discussed and developed collaboratively in an open debate through a blog, in 2011 the Civil Marco was presented as a bill of law. Initially approved in the Chamber of Deputies on March 25, 2014, the draft law went to the federal senate, this approved on April 23, 2014 on the Senate floor. President Dilma Rousseff signed a law passed in the legislature on April 23, during NETmundial conference in São Paulo.

The text of the bill deals with topics such as network neutrality, privacy, data retention, the social function that the network will need to comply, especially to guarantee freedom of expression and the exchange of knowledge, besides imposing liability obligations to users and providers.

After weeks listening to discussions and critics about the Marco Civil, there are three main points pretty important and so far not regulated, putting now a specific regulation about this sensitive discussion that Brazilians always had to live with many frustrations and barriers due to the gap in current law. Let’s talk about those:

- Network neutrality (or Internet neutrality, or neutrality principle) means that all the information that travels over the network should be treated the same way, navigating at the same speed, or the speed of hiring. If we look the telecom’s perspective, it’s obvious that its better having a user navigating through the websites, checking emails, simple stuffs, instead of having users watching movies via streaming, using VOIP, file sharing and many other things that overload the network. With little (or poor) infrastructure, the telecom company could provide the service the lightweight user needs, but due to the heavy user, it requires more investment to attend all kinds of users. With this important topic very clear, no matter which user you are, you don’t need to worry if you’re going to pay more or less to do what you want on the web, just you use it.

- Keep the internet logs - requires that records users' connection should be retained by ISPs for a period of one year, under strict confidentiality and secure environment. This information relates only to the IP, date and start and end times of the connection. This action helps to identify who is responsible for any crime occurred on the web. The project also fixed privacy principles regarding the data that the user provides to providers. On the internet, the data are now collected, processed and sold almost instantly. The law gives users the right that their information cannot be used to a different to that were provided, as stated in the privacy policy of the service order.

- Removal of Content and responsibilities - The Marco Civil establishes the rule that content can only be taken down after a court order, and that the provider cannot be held responsible for offensive content posted by users on their service. With this, the project aims to prevent Internet censorship: to prove that content is offensive, this person shall have the right to adversarial in court.

Of course the Marco Civil is not only about that, it covers a total of 25 articles divided in 5 chapters, but personally speaking, this law will be good for everybody once anyone is a internet user!!

25 years of .br domain

Most of the Brazilian websites we access today we put ".br" by the end of the domain, and those "2 letters" completed 25 years last week. On April 18, 1989, American Jon Postel, director of the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), the agency that regulates the distribution of IP numbers and management of root servers, delegated the .br domain to the group that operated the academic networks in Brazil. Today, 25 years later, the country has more than 3.4 million of .br domains registered.

At the beginning, the internet was restricted to universities and research institutions. In 1991, the famous subdomains were created com.br, net.br, org.br, gov.br andmil.br, but the number of users was still quite small. The commercial phase of the Internet in Brazil was in 1996.

The CGI.br, who coordinates the services of Internet in Brazil in early 1996 there were only 851 registered .br domains, that number jumped to 7,507 at the end of the same year. Today there are over 3.5 million .br domains registered, which places Brazil in eighth position among the countries with the largest number of records.

To register a domain with CGI.br costs R$ 30,00 per year, all money raised is reinvested in maintenance such as the operation points of traffic exchange, researches with valued statistics about the use of the internet and free courses about IPv6. Since 2008, any person with CPF (Brazilian ID) is eligible to register a domain, before that, only companies could do that.

Interested in registering a .br domain, visit: www.registro.br

A very special post

As mentioned previously in a post last year, I've been working on a personal project for Apple Store which runs on iOS, by the way my second app (this is the first).

The purpose of this app is to have a small dictionary on your pocket (your iPhone, but also designed for iPad), but differently of many other dictionaries, you can choose one main language and you will have other 3 languages for references. Suitable for a trip where you would like to know how to speak a few words with natives, but you don't want to look for a word all the time on a dictionary - so this is the app you would need, a few taps and there it is the word.
Eg.: You choose English as the main language, and then you have Portuguese and Spanish languages for reference. Furthermore you can also pick Italian language, more languages will be available soon.

Take a look here on the iTunes App Store:

Enjoy it ... and thanks for downloading..

The Brazilian productivity

The renowned magazine The Economist has made harsh criticism of the low productivity of Brazilian last week and provoked mixed reactions. But does the article "The 50-year snooze" talk correct about Brazil?

Of course nobody likes that someone points the finger in your face and speak about your deficiencies! If we stop to think about some statistic data and look around the reality and the contrast, we will see many truth things.
Some specialists mention there are a few aspects that we should highlight and take apart:

- The first is the "physical capital": The workers are more productive when they have better infrastructure, best machines and tools. A truck driver in the U.S. to make ten trips per month transporting soybeans, while a Brazilian makes only three. We don't need to think too much to conclude that Brazilians have lower trucks, travel through the worst roads and spend many days in queues of ports.

- The second is natural resources: a country with poor natural resources such as soil fertility, mineral reserves, rivers and climate - certainly it will contribute to break the growth of the country; Again, definitely this is not Brazil's reality where most of the cultivable areas whatever we sow, we reap.

- The third is the "human capital": This means the level of education, training and technical skills of workers. No need to highlight that Brazil is far from developed countries, when we see researches such as Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) ranking the country in last positions. Also another research from Varkey GEMS called Global Teacher Status Index giving the last position to the country when related to the value of its teachers.

- The fourth factor and not last, technological knowledge: When compared with the U.S., the Brazilian worker operates inferior technologies, exceptions of sectors with technical excellence. In this analysis the private sector and the public sector are included, and as it is well known that the Brazilian public health system is inefficient, its contribution to the low productivity is quite large.

However there are a few more negative points that contribute to this status - heavy tax burden, slow judiciary system, high corruption and bad laws - also contribute to low productivity. Certainly, we don't like to see articles like The Economist made about us, but we can think over and see if we should accept it or act as soon as possible, the #Eleições2014 are around the corner.

Curious to read the full article from The Economist? Check this out:
http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21600983-brazilian-workers-are-gloriously-unproductive-economy-grow-they-must-snap-out

Virtualization: the shadow of the Cloud

In recent years, we have heard a new term called Cloud, which means in general lines to have the service or application available on the internet reachable from anywhere, quite different from the traditional model where the application runs in a specific server and reachable only from a closed network. The Cloud comes with a different concept of work, instead of you buy the hardware, take care of the maintenance and provide all infrastructure, you just buy a piece of service where you will put your application to run – the simplest and practical example we see it is the email, instead of having the server mail to host you domain and provide the service, there are many companies providing this service where you pay a monthly or yearly subscription and access from anywhere and just forget the maintenance worries.

Although, do you know how the Cloud service usually works behind the scenes? It’s a complex environment and varies a lot from service to service, but the main though is to have a hardware that can work to run as many “clients” as possible in order to use the full capacity of the hardware, and make this model profitable. The service can vary widely because in our giving example about Email service, possibly the server would run only one email service and then shared with many customers. The complex service would have from each customer some specific features which would be pretty hard to match with another customer and share the same resource. In order to solve this gap, it would have another layer which splits the server in many other small servers, known as Virtualization.

To give a better idea how virtualization works, imagine the company has a very powerful server with lots of processors, memory and disk space, each time a customer comes with a specific requirement, the administrator will slice the server and create a “virtual server” or “virtual machine” with the resources to meet the requirement. This is the mentioned added layer that will be used for the customer with specific purposes and totally isolated from the rest of the resources of the powerful server.

You might be wondering that only companies with specific requirement can afford this kind of hardware!! Actually at home you can also have a virtualization environment with no money involved (or a little), of course not powerful as a server, but the same hardware using different purposes.

Let’s describe some possible scenarios:

- You might have special needs for specific software that you use only works in a specific operating system, but you don’t want to downgrade the whole environment, thus with virtualization you would keep your current operating system and create a virtual machine (VM) and install the operating system required for that. Eg: your laptop running MS Windows 7, but you use a program that works only on MS Windows XP, so this XP version would be a VM.

- A very interesting requirement - You just bought a Mac and of course some programs are incompatible with OSX and only run on Windows. Not problem, you will install this program into a VM by creating a VM to install your MS Windows 7 and later your program, so that it will be easy to switch platforms in clicks and taking advantage of both platforms.

- You would like to install a trial program and test if it fits on what you are looking for, but don’t want to do this on your fresh and clean operating system recently installed, so you would create a new VM, install the operating system, install the trial software, test and decide if it’s worth to have on your “real” computer. This is much easier to do because if you don’t like, you can reverse back a copy of this VM or just leave this VM for testing purposes.

Did you enjoy this idea? So take a look at those vendors’s website and look for the products, some are free, others paid – just be aware of the minimum requirement to run the software virtualization on your PC or laptop:




- VMWare Player from VMWare (Windows and Linux) - www.vmware.com
- VMWare Fusion from VMWare (Mac only) - www.vmware.com
- Virtual Box from Oracle (Windows, Linux and Mac) - www.virtualbox.org
- Parallels Desktop from Parallels (Mac only) - www.parallels.com

A new finding threat that prevents users to fix

In this world of technology very often we hear thread of virus, trojans, vulnerability or bugs in operating systems and applications, and the first action we users are instructed to do first is to update the software with the latest release or also update the antivirus’s database because the thread has already been fixed or blocked.

However, this time it is different, the Google’s engineer along with Codenomicon’s engineer have found a bug called Heartbleed in the OpenSSL protocol, an implementation of the open source SSL and TLS protocols that is widely used by most common browser, eg: Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. This protocol is used when we navigate on websites that requires encryption, generally when evolves sensitive information such passwords, confidential information (banks, credit cards, purchases, etc) and we can notice this because the browser puts a padlock icon in the URL bar and also changes the URL address to use “https” instead of “http” protocol.

At this time, we users cannot do anything to fix or avoid it because those fixes should be updated in the servers of the websites. More than this, the manufactures still have to analyze the impact and how to implement this fix, and now there is no prediction how much time it will take to have this fixed. According to specialists in encryption, on a scale of 1 to 11 (the gravity of the threat) is about 11. Even though we users can’t get fixed it now by ourselves, it’s worth to keep the operating system, antivirus and firewall up to date anyways and always.

The lack of professionals with technical skills

Many researches point out that it’s getting harder and harder to find qualified technical professionals to work in areas such as mechanical, electrical and hydraulic with minimum skills and experience. Those workers don’t come from a university but from technical schools which prepare the worker with specific knowledge, however nowadays people are giving more priority to have a university course judging that it will provide more opportunities, what it’s not wrong.

One of the causes of the mismatch between supply and demand is the career choice of students who complete high school. Most do not consider the technique as a career path to follow, despite the high rate of employment and rising wages. In part, has been strengthened with greater access to higher education (university courses) through programs like Prouni provided by the federal government. So there is a left over candidates with generalist higher education and a lack of skilled technical professionals.

There is an expectation that for the further years this situation will be softened with the federal program called Pronatec (National Program for Access to Technical Education and Employment) released in 2011.

Big Data - All our information there

We have never been so connected like today, whether through tablets, smartphones or computers. The result of this is a huge amount of information available on the internet, which can be collected by companies or governments - even if we don’t know it. This is precisely the purpose of Big Data: monitor and organize this almost endless number of information floating on the network.

Looking at a real scenario, with a smartphone in the pocket we carry lots of things: photos, video, music, make access to the internet and social networks, check e-mail, etc., and all this all generates more information mixed with habits and geolocation, but all in unstructured way, a fusion of information.

The Big Date comes to compile all this information based on programming and algorithms and aggregate all structured and unstructured databases - video, images and text. By the time you mix it all, it turns a huge volume of information.

The big challenge is how to manage and analyze all this data volume grows infinitely everyday. More than that, to understand this data and create tools to generate more experience, productivity, consumption and new services. To give an idea, these unstructured data represents 85% of the information with which companies deal nowadays.

Giants like Google and Facebook have extensive experience in using algorithms to interpret profiles and behaviors and transform it into profit - that's why we see ads posted in searches or on the timeline that matches on what you were seeing.

Today we see many people talking about Big Data, and it’s expected to see much more because we will see many other applications using this concept.

The danger of open Wi-Fi networks

Have you ever been catched by a situation where you are in a public place, no access to the internet so try to find any open Wifi??

Recently in Brazil we had discussions about this theme, specially during the protests in June, where people couldn't use accordingly the 3G signal due to the busy services. So in order to workaround the problem, people participating in the parede were asking to the residents living around where the parede was taking place to leave open the their Wifi networks on the streets, homes or companies so that people could use the internet easily.

We all agree that it would be much easier to spread the internet around the city, so wherever you go you would have internet access and in a few seconds you would be connected.

However for both sides, people that leave the wifi network open without any protection and people that connect to an open wifi network disregarding the source might be in dangerous situation.

=> Users that connect to open wifi networks - a very important information that every user needs to know (even though the wifi networks with password) is that all information being transferred in the network might be captured by another computer in the network if the information is not encrypted. So if you don't know how safe the network connection is, avoid having access to the e-mail or any other sensitive personal information that might not be encrypted, otherwise someone else might be capturing all information transferred in the network and you don't have the slightest idea.

An alternative to this it is to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network), once you have stablished a connection to a wifi network, you open another connection using this protocol to a sever that this server will provide a secure connection service in this network.

Common Wireless Networks

=> Users that provide open Wifi network - once anyone can connect to this open wifi network, anyone with bad intention can also act for illicit purposes, such as child pornography, ilegal downloads, etc., the user provider will not be able to tell who did this because there will be no information about the devices which have connected to the network.

An alternative to this, do:

- Never provide a Wifi network without password, there is no enough reason no to put a password.
- Don't provide easy and guessable passwords which anyone can try and possibly connect.
- Change this password frequently, so someone that have connected a time ago will ask you again for the new password and thus you will filter who is connecting in your network.

Those recommendations are the basic steps to follow in your Wifi network at home on in your company.