Questões de Concurso

Instruções: Para responder às questões de números 66 a 70 considere o texto a seguir.

    June 16, 2009

      China Orders Patches to Planned Web Filter

    By EDWARD WONG
    BEIJING − A designer of censorship software that the Chinese government requires to be preinstalled on computers sold in China has been ordered to fix potential security breaches in the software, the newspaper China Daily reported Monday. The report was an indication that the government still supports use of the software __[CONNECTOR__ heated debate over it.
    The software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, has come under attack by many computer users in China for both political and technical reasons.
    Critics say that although the Chinese government insists that the software will be used only to block access to pornography Web sites, the software’s actual use will be to block any site with content deemed politically objectionable, like the Tibet issue or the 1989 Tiananmen killings.
    The government says all computers sold in China must have the software installed by July 1.
    Early reports had indicated that the government might simply require Green Dam to be included on a CD packaged with new computers, so users would have the option to install it. But it became apparent last week that the government was insisting that all computer makers preinstall the software by July 1. Foreign computer makers learned of the directive just three weeks ago and have been asking the Chinese government to reconsider the rules.
    Some computer experts who have studied the software said last week that it was so flawed that it could allow hackers to monitor a user’s Internet activity, steal personal data or plant viruses. One expert, J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan, has posted on the Internet a report on Green Dam’s vulnerabilities.
    Rather than agreeing to scrap the software altogether, the Chinese government has responded to the technical criticisms by ordering that the potential security breaches be eliminated.
    Mr. Halderman said in an interview last week that it had only taken a few hours for him and his students to infiltrate a computer loaded with Green Dam and force it to crash. A skilled hacker could take over the computer to mine personal data or hitch it to other infected machines in a malevolent network known as a botnet, he added.

(Adapted from The New York Times, June 16, 2009)

Instruções: Para responder às questões de números 66 a 70, considere o texto a seguir.

Novelties

    Rogue programs try their best to register at Web sites and then wreak havoc, but a clever puzzle often bars them from entry: a set of distorted, squiggly letters and numbers that people can decipher and type correctly for admission, but that machines still can’t.
    To stay one jump ahead of fraudsters and their
automated programs, researchers are devising more versions of the puzzles, called captchas, to help sites block abuse that includes spam e-mail, illegal postings and skewed online voting.
    Researchers at Google are testing a new captcha that requires people to turn upright randomly rotated images, like that of a parrot perched temporarily upside-down on a leafy branch. The task is a breeze for people [CONNECTOR] hard for machines.
    The new puzzles could be built around a site’s theme - for instance, cartoons at a Disney site, or objects for sale at eBay, said Rich Gossweiler, a senior research scientist at Google who led the team that developed the system. It can be put in place rapidly, he said, and has an almost limitless supply of images. “Our technique expands the vocabulary of captchas” beyond obfuscated characters, he said.
    The program rejects images like those for human faces that computers have already learned to recognize, he said.
    Luis von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a pioneer in captcha development, has created a free system, called reCaptcha, now used by about 120,000 sites including Ticketmaster, Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter and The New York Times.
    The system has an unusual twist that provides an added benefit to projects that are digitizing books and papers in archives: the source of the wiggly images that people must decipher is not random. The images are drawn from books and other media that are being digitized in mass projects, but that machines haven’t been able to read because, for instance, the page is wrinkled.
    Automatic character recognition lets people who are having the work scanned know which words it cannot read. These are the words that recaptcha farms out and, once they are interpreted, returns to the original document. In this way, word by word, most of the mystery words are deciphered, in this case by humans. “We are digitizing about 25 million words per day by having people type in captchas,” Dr. von Ahn said.

(Adapted from The New York Times, May 24, 2009)

Atenção: As questões de números 57 a 60 referem-se ao texto abaixo.

    The literature is full of testimonials for data warehousing. There is almost nothing about the arguments [PREPOSITION] data warehousing. In this paper I attempt to slightly fill that void by shedding light on business and cultural factors that greatly lessen the value of data warehousing for certain organizations. By the way, when I refer to data warehousing, I refer to both centralized data warehousing systems and data marts.
    Some of the reasons data warehousing efforts may not be appropriate for certain organizations are:

Data warehousing systems, for the most part, store historical data that have been generated in internal transaction processing systems. This is a small part of the universe of data available to manage a business. Sometimes this part has limited value.

    That is, sometimes the business end user community does not have a strong interest in old transaction processing system data beyond what are available in basic reports generated in transaction processing systems. This lack of interest often stems from the fact that the markets in which a business competes are in great flux or that the internal structure of the organization is in perpetual transition. If these conditions exist, there may not be a solid historical base to compare current performance with. Also, sometimes there is a lack of interest in looking at this data in any in-depth way because a business is so simple that a data warehouse is overkill.

Data warehousing systems can complicate business processes significantly.

    [CONJUNCTION] the interest in business process reengineering seems to have waned, some of the appreciation of how complicated processes can slowly strangle a business has remained. Data warehousing, if unchecked, can foster the "institutionalization" of easily created reports whose reason for being quickly is forgotten while people still toil to process these reports. If your organization does not know how to throw out processes (pardon my calling producing, distributing, and reading a report a "process"), data warehousing can quickly add clutter to the business environment.

[TEXT]

    Despite the speed of the data warehousing development effort, it takes time for an organization to figure how it can change its business practices to get a substantial return on its data warehousing investment. I speculate that rigorous analysis of the return on most of the major data warehousing implementers' investments would find a much longer average payback period that you would surmise from reading the trade press.