Courtesy of Mark Frauenfelder

predictify.com

Will Radovan Karadzic be convicted of war crimes? Is Moqtada al-Sadr going to maintain his cease-fire in Iraq? What will a barrel of oil cost on November 1? Predictify crowdsources the dark art of prognostication, allowing news junkies to pose questions, make predictions, and develop a potentially lucrative reputation for accuracy.

everywheremag.com

Marketed as “the travel magazine made by you,” Everywhere is an innovative and beautifully designed new publication written by a discerning crew: its own readers. Been somewhere amazing? Chronicle your experiences, upload your photos, and wait for the community to weigh in. Complete with Google mash-up maps and peer reviews, Everywhere escapes the tired clichés of travel writing.

animationarchive.org

The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive posts high-quality scans of out-of-print books, magazines, and ephemera from the world’s great illustrators, such as Mexican artist extraordinaire Ernesto Garcia Cabral or Ukrainian-born Time cover artist Boris Artzybasheff. The archive’s best feature is its director, Stephen Worth, a knowledgeable animation scholar whose entertaining introductions put the scans into their proper historical context.

kk.org/cooltools

Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired, is also a serious tool junkie. Cool Tools is his mailing list and blog of recommendations written by his site’s readers from around the globe. Whether it’s a high-end Japanese toilet seat or access to the 57,000 library catalogs you need, Kelly’s got you covered.

You’re probably accustomed to pulling out your insurance card when you visit the doctor. Pretty soon, you may be reaching for your passport.

At least that’s what PreviMed, a new Silicon Valley start-up aiming to be a kind of Priceline for medical care, is banking on. “Our idea is to give patients, their insurance companies, and home doctors a choice,” says CEO Atul Salgaonkar. “We want them to be able to say, ‘I can get my procedure done in India for one price or Thailand for another price.’” Beachside Botox clinics this is not: PreviMed will only handle nonelective procedures.

The potential savings from traveling abroad for surgery are huge. An aortic valve replacement that costs $100,000 in the United States would cost $38,000 in Latin America, and only $12,000 in Asia, according to a recent report by consulting firm McKinsey. But because patients find it difficult to learn about foreign hospitals and understand what the risks are, people have been reluctant to travel overseas for medical procedures.

Bridging this information gap is PreviMed’s mission. If you need a particular procedure but can’t afford an insurance payment, the insurance company can submit your medical information to a secure server on PreviMed’s Web site. Prescreened hospitals from around the world can bid for the job by suggesting a course of treatment and price. Ideally, you can then choose from a variety of offers.

Salgaonkar acknowledges the danger that unscrupulous hospitals might try to game the system, or that insurance companies might pressure patients into going overseas for cheaper treatment. For him, the benefits outweigh the risks. “We like to think that by introducing a small level of transparency, we’re making a small change for the better,” he says.

So, when hospitals compete, do patients win? We may find out soon enough: PreviMed has already signed agreements with 14 hospitals in Costa Rica, India, Panama, and Thailand.

Like any French or Japanese chef, cybercriminals apparently have specialties, too. Researchers at Verizon spent four years examining 500 cases of corporate data breaches and found that different regions are developing different types of hacking expertise. Attacks traced to Asia, for example, tend to target personal information in common software applications. Eastern Europe, with its entrenched organized crime networks and a technically skilled, yet often underemployed populace, is a hotbed for lucrative identity theft. Middle Easterners often deface Web sites, fighting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict online. To Carnegie Mellon University expert Nick Ianelli, the parallels to the real world are clear. “If you look at the backgrounds of the respective regions,” says Ianelli, “it . . . reflect[s] what is going on in the physical side.” Still, says Bryan Sartin, Verizon’s director of investigative response, understanding these regional patterns hasn’t made solving crimes any easier. For investigators, that’s enough to ruin any meal.

Illustration by Elizabeth Glassanos for FP

When a massive blackout struck Nigeria’s largest city this February, officials suspected any number of causes, from simple negligence to sectarian rebels. But some analysts have since come to believe that Lagos was the victim of a sophisticated cyberattack.

Indeed, developing countries are increasingly being shaken down by highly organized, well-financed criminal gangs operating in cyberspace. In just the past year, intensifying attacks have been lodged against banks, government agencies, and utility companies in India, Nigeria, Vietnam, and across the Middle East. Hackers have turned out the lights in at least three known attacks on utility sectors outside the United States, says Alan Paller, research director at the Maryland-based SANS Institute, which oversees an early warning system for the Internet. For security reasons, he declined to name the countries, but noted that two of those attacks occurred in developing countries. In all three cases, the aim was to extort money. So far, no country has publicly admitted to paying up.

The cybercriminals’ weapon of choice is “distributed denial of service,” or DDoS, attacks. DDoS attacks occur when computers operating together in giant “botnets” (short for robot networks) are weaponized by criminals who remotely control hundreds of thousands of computers unknowingly infected with malicious code. Connected globally by high-speed broadband, these botnets yield the power of a supercomputer. The danger of DDoS attacks was revealed in 2007, when a massive botnet of up to 1 million computers targeted Estonia, shutting down the country’s government ministries, parliament, and largest bank. Criminals like such attacks because they are nearly impossible to trace; they appear to come from thousands of separate IP addresses scattered across the globe. “DDoS has emerged as an incredibly powerful tool for organized crime,” Paller says.

Freelancing cybercriminals are beginning to lease their massive botnets to the highest bidder, often larger criminal groups. In turn, these groups carry out attacks in the hope of wringing money from their victims. Early targets for cyberextortion included online gambling sites and other businesses that were dependent on the Web. Now, utility companies appear to be Target No.1, especially those in poor countries. They make easy prey because their software often relies on commercially available Web applications that lack robust security features. “Developing-world countries are so far behind in terms of Web security that it’s frightening,” says Mandeep Khera of the cybersecurity firm Cenzic. If they don’t catch up soon, it could be lights out.

LUIS ACOSTA/AFP/Getty Images

When the Colombian military pulled off its successful sting operation against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in July, rescuing French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages, its operatives posed as members of a fictitious Spanish humanitarian organization named Misión Humanitaria Internacional. Had FARC’s guerrillas done their homework, they might have easily foiled the ruse. Not only were parts of the fake group’s Web site lifted wholesale from a real nongovernmental organization called Global Humanitaria, but a quick Whois search would have revealed that its domain name (misionhi.org) had been registered just six days before the raid, and the telephone number listed was 000000000. Of course, cybersavvy has never been FARC’s forte.