The Wutz Up in the Philippines!

A 23-year-old “citizen cartographer” from the University of the Philippines bested 700 other contestants to become the winner of the first Google Map Maker Global Competition.

Wayne Dell Manuel won a US$50,000 donation from UNICEF for the Philippines after adding more than 1,500 qualifying map features and made hundreds of moderations in Google Map Maker. His edits, which were primarily of local public schools, were judged to be the most numerous and accurate entries in the contest.

“I’m so excited to have won this global competition because it represents a win not just for me, but also for the Philippines,” said Manuel. “To be frank, I entered the competition to win the US$50,000 for our country, and I hope that my win encourages more Filipinos to contribute to making the online map of our country even better. We Filipinos are known for our spirit of bayanihan, and this is a great way for us to come together in the Internet era to make life better for our fellow kababayans by literally putting their communities on the digital map.”

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MANILA, Philippines—Secret.

That’s the operative word when Globe Telecoms and Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) Wednesday agreed to host the main data centers for the transmission of results in the May 10 automated elections, officials said.

The decision was reached a day after the telco giants announced they were considering withdrawing their offers to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to set up the data centers in their main offices, fearing physical and technical attacks.

Where the centers would be located was not disclosed by Renato Garcia, a Comelec adviser, at a news briefing following talks with poll officials and Smartmatic-TIM, which will carry out the country’s first national electronic vote.

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The specter of an “electronic Garci” was raised in a forum on Monday in which six of seven presidential candidates feared there would be glitches in the automated elections in May and some suggested going manual as an option.

Only Sen. Richard Gordon was confident the Commission on Elections (Comelec) would do its job.

But even the administration standard-bearer, Gilbert Teodoro Jr., decried “big logistical difficulties” in the Comelec’s implementation of the first nationwide computerized balloting.

Other presidential candidates present in the debate were Senators Benigno Aquino III and Jamby Madrigal, environmentalist Nicanor Perlas, evangelist Bro. Eddie Villanueva and Councilor JC de los Reyes.

Sen. Manuel Villar, standard-bearer of the Nacionalista Party, and former President Joseph Estrada were invited but failed to attend due to other engagements.

Perlas proposed a manual-count option in a hybrid balloting, noting that even Germany and the Netherlands scrapped automated elections last year after finding out that a high school student could hack the voting machines.

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BEIJING—Police in central China have shut down a hacker training company that taught thousands of people how to launch cyberattacks and provided them with spy software, media reports said Monday.

The reports come amid growing accusations of organized computer hacking originating from China that has chilled ties with the United States, and follow Google’s threat last month to quit the Chinese market over cyberattacks.

Police in Hubei province shut down Black Hawk Safety Net and arrested three people, the state-run Xinhua news agency said, calling the operation China’s “biggest hacker training website.”

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The National Telecommunications Commission is considering a ban on the importation of electronic signal jamming devices that officials say can be used to sabotage the 2010 automated polls.

NTC said Monday it neither knew of nor authorized any shipment of 5,000 “jammers” which, according to the Commission on Elections, have entered the country.

A draft NTC memorandum order obtained by the INQUIRER on Monday showed the NTC’s plan to ban the importation or sale of signal jamming devices in the country.

GSM jamming devices are used to prevent the use of GSM phones. Generally, these devices should not be used, the NTC said.

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MANILA, Philippines – Google’s latest mobile phone operating system Android is making inroads in the local mobile applications development space.

Telecom firm Smart Communication has finally looked at Google’s new operating system for mobile software development.

Google’s Android is the latest mobile phone operating system, touted to have full Internet features and connects to Google’s current online services, particularly Google Search and Gmail.

Android also supports WiFi and 3G mobile Internet connectivity.

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MANILA, Philippines – The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) has launched an investigation into the hacking of government websites as agency investigators suspect a single perpetrator is responsible for the vandalism.

NBI Anti-Fraud and Computer Crimes Division head agent Palmer Mallari said the bureau would investigate the hacking into the websites of the Department of Health, Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda), National Disaster Coordinating Council and Department of Social Welfare and Development.

“The same hacker could have defaced the websites although there is a possibility insiders at the agencies committed the vandalism,” Mallari said, adding that the bureau had the means to unmask the perpetrators.

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MANILA, Philippines - Hackers struck again, this time, defacing the home page of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) website, www.tesda.gov.ph.

Hackers put up two pages on the TESDA home page.

The first one had a header that read: “Nakikiramay kami sa pagpanaw ng Iskolar ng Bayan, freedom fighter na si Kimay”.

The first page also contained an illustration of a man giving the middle finger, then the text at the end of the page read: “Ano ba gagamitin sa eleksyon?”

The second page posted greetings from Ventureslink and directed visitors to Smartmatic, the Commission on Elections’ (Comelec) partner for the automated polls.

This is not the first time government websites have been hacked.

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MANILA, Philippines – Long since rival microchip firms Intel and AMD changed their product nomenclature from using processor speed to just plain processor name, many buyers still see the processor speed as a factor in buying a computer.

A common misconception is that processor speed dictates its performance level; the higher the better. For example, people think an Intel Celeron 2.6 Gigahertz is faster than a Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz. Another is that people think a Celeron 1.8 GHz is faster than a netbook or nettop-based Atom 1.6GHz.

“People tend to make the mistake that the faster the processor speed, the better the performance is. That’s not always the case. A computer’s performance is based on the technologies that come with the processor, applied to specific usage,” according to Intel Philippines Marketing Manager Jerome Matti.

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MANILA, Philippines - What do boxing champion Manny Pacquiao, actress Maricar Reyes and social network Facebook have in common?

According to Google’s annual Zeitgeist report, they are among the fastest rising Google searches in the Philippines for 2009 representing what was top of mind for Filipinos this year.

Facebook caught the attention of many Filipinos online this year, making it the fastest rising search term in the Philippines for 2009. Microblogging site Twitter wasn’t far behind, being the 8th fastest rising search term for the year.

A sex scandal involving embattled celebrity surgeon Hayden Kho and actress Maricar Reyes was just as hot online as it was on television, according to Google Zeitgeist. Maricar Reyes placed second in the fastest rising search terms in Google while Kho placed seventh.

Other search terms that had the highest level of search queries this year are: Korean star Kim Bum (3), Zest Air (4) Love Story lyrics (5), Lady Gaga (6), Michael Jackson (9) and Pacquiao vs Hatton (10).

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