The financial crisis may have caught most of us flat-footed, but there’s one group that has easily adapted to the new economic order: cybercriminals. Capitalizing on popular fears with new phishing campaigns, scammers are enjoying something of a bull market, according to the FBI. In a particularly clever ruse, criminals sent a fraudulent e-mail instructing Wachovia customers to hand over their online banking credentials ahead of a prospective merger with Citigroup. One cybercrime expert, who detected a jump in malicious software as U.S. stocks first headed south, told Information Week that economic anxiety could be causing nervous users to make bad decisions: “If the stock market is crashing, there’s not a lot of confidence.” Unless you’re a thief, apparently.

Uriel Sina/Getty Images

E-alert: Conflict early warning systems are catching on.

When a rush of violence broke out last January after Kenya’s presidential election, many wondered why it was so unexpected. Electoral rigging set off the attacks, but surely tensions simmered before. Could Kenya have seen the outburst coming and perhaps done something to prevent it?

Prediction, at least, was possible—and Web-based nonprofit Ushahidi (Swahili for “testimony”) did just that. Funded by grants and individual donations, Ushahidi had already developed software that allowed any mobile-phone user in Kenya to report incidents of community tension. “[T]here were a lot of rumors going around way before the violence,” says Ushahidi’s founder, Ory Okolloh.

Okolloh’s group operates one of a growing number of conflict early warning systems that are springing up online. They work because they are simple and fast. An Ushahidi user, for example, sends details of turmoil by text or posts directly to ushahidi.com. Once a local NGO verifies the account, the incident gets entered into the Ushahidi database and plotted on a map, tagged with a description of the event and with space for pictures and video. In Kenya, reports of violence were texted back to local leaders, who could mediate community conflict. International observers could monitor the reports, too.

For years, creating an effective means of alerting the world to brewing conflicts has been the dream of humanitarians. The African Union has been intent on creating its own system since the early 1990s. But none of the ideas was Internet-based. As the South Africa-based Institute for Security Studies put it, Web-based approaches “would have been patently inappropriate for an organization that only recently achieved a moderate level of external e-mail connectivity.”

With Ushahidi, information is available within minutes, and Okolloh says censorship isn’t a problem because governments “are more interested in what’s in newspapers than what’s online.” Kenya was the first testing ground, and now Ushahidi is jumping into other conflict countries as well. As of November, the group was already receiving an average of four reports a day from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This growing breadth could make Ushahidi something like the Wikipedia of conflicts, wrote Harvard researchers Joshua Goldstein and Juliana Rotich in a recent paper. “They are tools that allow cooperation on a massive scale.” Ushahidi hopes to become a history worth contributing to. —Elizabeth Dickinson

Remember the $100 laptop? Turns out, when you add up the total costs of ownership, the tab can actually top $2,600. Projects such as One Laptop per Child and Intel’s Classmate PC have sought to bring low-cost computers to classrooms in poor countries that can’t afford mainstream technology. A recent study by Vital Wave Consulting, however, shows that training and support expenses eventually dwarf the initial outlay, putting total costs on par with conventional machines. “You have a cheaper device, but you still need to understand those other costs,” says Vital Wave’s Karen Coppock. The ultracheap devices might not even last as long as ordinary computers, leading to sizable replacement bills. Classmate PC and One Laptop per Child hope to boost computer life spans with rugged, kid-friendly designs, but so far, the end product hasn’t quite caught up with the hype. —Jerome Chen

Map data CCBYSA 2008 openstreetmap.org contributors

A bright shining map: Vietnam, courtesy of Flickr.

A picture may be worth a thousand words. But, as it turns out, it takes almost 100 million pictures to make a map.

The inventive engineers at Flickr—a popular Web site that allows users to upload and share photos online—have discovered a way to harness the data provided by their millions of users to create a constantly changing picture of the world itself.

When a user uploads a photo onto Flickr, he or she can pinpoint, or “geotag,” the location where that photo was taken on an interactive map. GPS-enabled camera phones, such as Apple’s iPhone, can do this automatically. Flickr then uses these coordinates to create a “Where on Earth” ID for the photo that includes the neighborhood or town where it was taken, right up to the continent, a process known as reverse-geocoding. The actual content of the photo itself is irrelevant; it’s simply being used for its geographical data.

With 90 million geotagged photos and counting, the company’s development team realized that these locations could be plotted on a map to create an outline.

Not all locations are equally easy to plot. “Within the first few weeks [of geotagging] there were probably enough photos to map San Francisco,” says Flickr’s Dan Catt, the senior engineer spearheading the project. But, he says, “there are still places in the world,” such as the upper reaches of North America, “that we don’t have enough photos to do.” It takes about 10,000 photos for Flickr to map just one location.

Reverse-geocoding is also a lot harder than it sounds. Attendees at a 2007 technology conference in San Diego uploaded their photos only to see them tagged as being taken at the San Diego County jail. Flickr allows users to correct the geographical data that the company’s software provides, but that creates its own set of problems. London residents, for instance, might have conflicting ideas about where Soho ends and Covent Garden begins.

For now, Catt considers the maps a “cool side project,” but he hopes that by publishing the maps on its site, Flickr can “give people back” the ability to define their surroundings and trace how these definitions change over time. “Most of the data we have for Where on Earth comes from government sources. That doesn’t always correspond with what people are seeing on the ground,” he says. Geography, in other words, just became user-generated. —Joshua Keating

Courtesy of Barry Ritholtz

calculatedrisk.blogspot.com

Run by a retired senior executive with deep expertise in housing finance (in a good way), this blog is a great source for the latest news and overlooked insights on the financial crisis and the folks in charge who keep screwing everything up.

stlouisfed.org

There’s a simple mathematical beauty in a well-constructed chart. The St. Louis Fed’s monthly Monetary Trends newsletter may not be flashy, but it’s clean, clear, and always chock full of interesting data. The bank’s research division produces a prodigious volume of expert analysis, too.

flowingdata.com

For some real numbers porn, surf around on this graphics-rich site. Whether it’s a computer simulation of worldwide air-traffic patterns or a map showing global “friend” activity on Facebook, the guys at Flowing Data are brilliant at making complex visualizations look deceptively simple.

economagic.com

When I want to get the latest unemployment figures, survey trends in the three-month London interbank offered rate, or delve into the consumer price index, Economagic offers a much clearer starting point than the byzantine Web sites of the U.S. government or foreign central banks.