Kuwait, April 17
India today failed in its bid to host the 2014 Asian Games at Delhi after which the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) openly blamed Union Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar’s recent comments for it.

“This is a victory for Mani Shankar Aiyar,” an upset IOA president Suresh Kalmadi said in a reference to the minister’s remarks last week to the effect that holding of big Games made no difference to the poor.

Aiyar was reported to have opposed India’s bid when the matter came up before the Union Cabinet, which, however, approved it five days ago after which the IOA delegation flew here along with leading sportspersons such as Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore and Anju Bobby George for the bid.

The 45-member Olympic Council Asia (OCA) at the conclusion of its two-day General Assembly here awarded the Games to the South Korean city of Incheon. For the Koreans, Aiyar’s statement is said to have come in handy.

After losing out to Incheon, Kalmadi said, “We looked a divided lot because of the Sports Minister’s comments which appeared in newspapers also.” South Korea will be hosting the Asian Games for the third time while India had staged the inaugural edition in 1951 and thereafter in 1982, both times in Delhi.

India had based its bid on behalf of “a billion people” on its hospitality and had offered free flights and accommodation to all participants if the Games were awarded to Delhi which is also staging the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

The Koreans on the other hand promised to spend $20 million to support countries that had not yet won medals in the Asian Games. There was no such offer from India, which, however, give $2million to each participating nation.

After a close Delhi-Incheon race, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah, president of OCA which controls sports in the Asian region, said, “there is no loser and no winner tonight. The only winner is the Asian Olympic movement and the growth of the Asian Games.” “It was very close. They both had weak points and strong points. From marketing view point, Korea had the edge,” he said. — PTI

Kuwait, April 17
India today failed in its bid to host the 2014 Asian Games at Delhi after which the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) openly blamed Union Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar’s recent comments for it.

“This is a victory for Mani Shankar Aiyar,” an upset IOA president Suresh Kalmadi said in a reference to the minister’s remarks last week to the effect that holding of big Games made no difference to the poor.

Aiyar was reported to have opposed India’s bid when the matter came up before the Union Cabinet, which, however, approved it five days ago after which the IOA delegation flew here along with leading sportspersons such as Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore and Anju Bobby George for the bid.

The 45-member Olympic Council Asia (OCA) at the conclusion of its two-day General Assembly here awarded the Games to the South Korean city of Incheon. For the Koreans, Aiyar’s statement is said to have come in handy.

After losing out to Incheon, Kalmadi said, “We looked a divided lot because of the Sports Minister’s comments which appeared in newspapers also.” South Korea will be hosting the Asian Games for the third time while India had staged the inaugural edition in 1951 and thereafter in 1982, both times in Delhi.

India had based its bid on behalf of “a billion people” on its hospitality and had offered free flights and accommodation to all participants if the Games were awarded to Delhi which is also staging the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

The Koreans on the other hand promised to spend $20 million to support countries that had not yet won medals in the Asian Games. There was no such offer from India, which, however, give $2million to each participating nation.

After a close Delhi-Incheon race, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah, president of OCA which controls sports in the Asian region, said, “there is no loser and no winner tonight. The only winner is the Asian Olympic movement and the growth of the Asian Games.” “It was very close. They both had weak points and strong points. From marketing view point, Korea had the edge,” he said. — PTI

Chris Gladwin, a software designer and businessman in Chicago, had time on his hands after selling his company, the online music store Music Now, in 2004. So he decided to digitize all of the music, photos and paper detritus that he had been meaning to organize for years.

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Graphic: A New Way to Store Data Safely

After he was finished, he discovered that he had 27 gigabytes of data — equivalent to a library of 22,000 books — that he was eager to protect. “I wondered, ‘what are my options?’ ” he said, “and I realized that none of them were that good.”

But he had been reading histories of early encryption research, and he saw a germ of an idea in the work of cryptographers who kept information secure by dividing it into pieces and dispersing it.

So what began as a home improvement project culminated in a system called Cleversafe, with potential applications far beyond Mr. Gladwin’s memorabilia. For companies and government agencies trying to secure networked data, it offers a simple way to store digital documents and other files in slices that can be reassembled only by the computers that originally created the files.

The idea of distributed data storage is not new. But Cleversafe is significant because it is an open-source project — that is, the technology will be freely licensed, enabling others to adopt the design to build commercial products. That approach may contribute to Cleversafe’s potential to lower the cost of reliably storing data on the Internet.

“If we distributed data around the world this way, it would be a pretty resilient way to store data,” said David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is a pioneer in designing distributed data storage techniques.

Mr. Gladwin contends that Cleversafe can store data at a lower cost and make it more secure than current Internet services. The group is counting on a continuing explosion of consumer digital data of all types, including new generations of high-definition still and video cameras that will create demand for secure and private backup capabilities.

Computer scientists argue that projects like Cleversafe are an indication that the broadband Internet will soon have the same impact on data storage that it has had on computing and communications technologies. Dozens of commercial Web storage services are already used to back up data safely. In addition, Amazon’s S3 and other services are intended to enable an array of digital Internet services to operate without any local storage capacity.

But the current design of such services generally involves making as many as five or more complete copies of the original data and storing them at multiple locations to ensure that information is not lost through a drive failure or other catastrophe. The Cleversafe design will cut the amount of storage space needed for secure backup by more than half.

Mr. Gladwin, 42, said he was deeply influenced by a seminal paper, “How to Share a Secret,” written in 1979 by Adi Shamir, a designer of the encryption algorithm known as public-key cryptography. The paper describes how a message can be broken into pieces and then reassembled from a subset of those pieces without revealing the message.

Mr. Gladwin developed a set of software routines that would copy the data stored on his PC into a large number of fragments, or slices. The mathematics of his solution had an additional benefit: the original data could be reconstructed from a majority of the slices. The design made it possible to retrieve a complete set of his original data even if some of the disks that held portions of the data failed or went offline.

The design of such “distributed file systems” is already a rich area of computer science research, and commercial systems are widely available in the software and data-storage markets. But Mr. Gladwin argues that his new standard offers security and efficiency features not easily available either to information technology managers or to individual computer users.

The experimental Cleversafe research grid is located at 11 storage sites around the world, but Mr. Gladwin is hoping that a commercial network will evolve, composed of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of storage sites that will be accessible at low cost.

The Cleversafe design could lead to a communal Internet storage system that Mr. Patterson called “hippie storage.” The idea is similar to SETI@Home, the shared computing system that allows PC users to contribute idle time on their machines to create a distributed supercomputer.

Today most distributed storage systems work by making multiple copies of data at multiple locations and then using various mechanisms to keep the copies synchronized. Examples include distributed file systems from Microsoft and Google as well as a system designed by software developers at Stanford known as Lockss — Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe — that is used to preserve the digital versions of academic journals.

The Cleversafe project uses a different approach based on dispersing data in encrypted slices rather than copying it. That approach shares some design similarities with a Berkeley research project known as OceanStore, which is also intended to create a globally distributed computer storage system.

“They’re not making a commercially implemented solution,” Mr. Gladwin said of the Berkeley project. “Our focus is something that people can use.”

A storage industry analyst said that such an approach had significant potential.

“The great thing about storage is that it’s always a moving target,” said Michael Dortch, principal business analyst at the Robert Frances Group, an industry consulting organization. “The I.T. industry is littered with the bodies of people who have said solution X will never fly.”

The Cleversafe project, with 25 employees, is housed on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Mr. Gladwin said the school had been an ideal technology incubator because of the ready availability of student technical talent.

One company considering the Cleversafe software is Univa, a developer of grid computing software and systems. “The potential to be able to geographically distribute data over the Internet has very nice properties,” said Steve Tuecke, a founder and chief technology officer of Univa, in Lisle, Ill.

An early financial backer of the project, Stewart Alsop, argues that Cleversafe is an indication that the open-source software movement is shifting from merely reusing existing designs to becoming a force for innovation.

“Data storage on the Internet is one of the most brutally competitive markets in the world,” he said. “But nobody is using this architecture, and the logical benefits of this are remarkable.”

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