FYP competitions, whether those held by university departments or professional organisations, are a microcosm of the startup world. As Hong Kong’s startup ecosystem is rapidly gaining momentum in recent years, how well-equipped are local students to succeed in it and beat the competition from neighbouring regions?

Earlier last month, we asked the judges at the 10th Pan-Pearl River Delta Region IT FYP Competition for their thoughts.

(from left) Judges Leonard Chan, Yvonne Wong, Alex Hung, Paul Fung, and Emil Chan

“In some [local] co-working spaces, people introduce their project ideas effectively to attract the investments from incubation programmes. However, seldom can we see the participation of local undergraduate students,” he said. “Out of the 20 presentations [in this competition], only one of them was initiated by Hong Kong students.”

The competition, co-organised by the iProA and its Macau and Mainland China counterparts, aims to recognise the academic achievements of ICT projects in the Pan-PRD region, including Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and nine neighbouring provinces in China.

Facing the fierce competition from the Mainland and overseas, Emil believes that Hong Kong students should not overlook the IT development and market demand in China. “University students should seize the opportunity to read research papers from overseas universities and enrich the quality of their own FYP project, benefiting the mankind by means of value generation,” he said. Students should be aware of the potential challenges and also be prepared to expand the scope of their FYP projects, which should not be limited by the geographical boundaries of the financial centre.

Utility versus academic complexity

The difference between academic research and IT competitions is that, the project’s utility, or its ability to serve its initial purpose, is more vital than the academic complexity of the project.

One project from the competition was an intrusion detection software using webcam devices and remote control. Though their demo video showed no error in running the software, the team did not ask families, i.e. their potential customers, to test the system and give feedback. Even if it can be implemented in the real world, the judges commented that test cases and survey collection are equally important for determining the success of a project.

Another project was a physics game involving the reflection of light-rays on iOS. The judges were greatly impressed by this project, not only because of the complexity of the project and the “replay value” of the game, but also because of the attention paid towards avoiding the exhaustion of CPU resources.

“[The developers] have paid attention to the CPU power because hardware acceleration is not supported by mobile devices,’ said Desmond Cheung, who is an iProA Council Member. “Sacrificing the blur effect of light-rays to achieve a general picture is a smart move. This reduces the calculation and GPU processing time involved while still presenting a three-dimensional space.”

Apart from that, judges thought that storyline can be further developed to make the game more attractive.

Looking ahead

• About
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Kelvin Wong

Administrator for several websites. Familiar with front-end and back-end script editing and teamwork management. Lifelong journey to explore the impact of technology on daily lives.

Latest posts by Kelvin Wong (see all)

• Poor pitching skills and low exposure may be blunting local students’ competitive edge: FYP Tips - July 8, 2015
• Uber — Helping or Exploiting Taxi Drivers? - February 13, 2015
• How to Deal with DDoS Attacks - November 14, 2014

It came as a surprise when Uber announced two days ago Free Taxi Day — a day on which customers could get two free taxi rides with a maximum of HKD $200 fare each. Soon afterwards, an Apple Daily report said Alibaba’s own taxi app, Kuaidi Dache, responded with a counter-attack by giving each taxi driver a subsidy of HKD $18 per order. The first shots have finally been fired in the war between ride-hailing applications in Hong Kong. However, many people boycotted Uber amid reports of it “squeezing every last drop out of its drivers’ pay”, and some governments have even banned the use of Uber in their own countries. Does Uber offer a fascinating new experience for calling cabs? Or would Hong Kong be another place where Uber exploits taxi drivers’ income?

This is not the first time a technology company has launched a campaign to promote their own taxi ordering app in town. On 3 December 2014, Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, launched a HKD $60 subsidy scheme for first-time Kuaidi Dache customers. It is reported that the scheme costed Alibaba five million dollars. However, the campaign did not draw a lot of attention from Hongkongers.

On 17 December 2014, Chinese Internet giant Baidu confirmed having invested in Uber for an undisclosed amount. Uber now operates in nine Chinese cities and Hong Kong is their new target in 2015. In other words, the strategic cooperation between Baidu and Uber seems to present one critical fact: Hong Kong’s taxi-calling market is actually the battlefield of the two Chinese tech giants.

It’s official: #Baidu is investing in #Uber. Size/value of stake not yet disclosed $BIDU pic.twitter.com/Hyiq9lQqnA

— Edmond Lococo 罗孟德 (@EdmondLococo) 2014 12月 17日

Local reports said there were not enough available taxis on Free Taxi Day. It was then reported that Uber would offer a free ride to customers who could not enjoy Wednesday’s deal before the end of March. Despite the discontent stirred up by the lack of allied taxis, Uber has stolen the spotlight this week by ranking number one on the App Store’s free app chart on Wednesday.

Uber was reported to have invested one million Hong Kong dollars into this campaign. It was an opportunity to promote its line of services – uberTaxi, UberBlack, and UberVan. Some taxi drivers in HK welcome the use of Uber. Additionally, taxi drivers can even get profit from Uber if they respond to any Uber order. Moreover, the referral scheme encourages both customers and taxi drivers to get people to join the Uber family.

However, reports from other countries also suggest that the prevalence of Uber has led to the exploitation of taxi drivers’ income. As Uber becomes more popular by day, more and more taxi drivers discover the profit margin of serving Uber clients and become full-time Uber drivers. Then, after a certain period of time, Uber reduces the profit given to taxi drivers. In that case, when Uber drivers fully rely on the orders from the app, they have no choice but to accept the profit reduction. This has led to controversies in several countries.

Since Uber cannot be monitored by local jurisdictions, some governments have banned Uber’s services, claiming that the laws and regulations cannot protect customers of Uber. Alleged threats have been made by Uber toward some citizens and journalists who gave bad reviews to its services.

Although customers today are considered to be more educated, aware and better informed about issues such as corporate citizenship, ethics and company culture, this does not guarantee that individuals will actually behave accordingly. In many cases this type of information is not the main driver of customers’ decisions…

Things like the company’s culture and values refers to the long-term benefits the company has for society as a whole and for other people. This could be the cab drivers, other unfortunate customers or the journalists who are criticising Uber and have been threatened. But because [recent scandals involving Uber is] relatively new and only affecting others, the sense of ethical responsibility [Uber] evokes only speaks to people’s citizen side, not their consumer side, which makes the decisions about spending.

“Why We Keep Using Uber Despite Douchebag Behaviour” – Lifehacker Australia

It is very difficult to control the use of mobile applications in local markets. The introduction of Uber may eventually give rise to social and ethical issues. But until then, the new taxi-calling app will be welcomed by more taxi drivers in Hong Kong.

“I am old, so one app is enough for me. I will only use Uber,” said one taxi driver in the local report.

P.S. UberVan is entering the local van hire market, making it a direct competitor of the homegrown GoGoVan. However, that is a story for another time.

• About
• Latest Posts

Kelvin Wong

Administrator for several websites. Familiar with front-end and back-end script editing and teamwork management. Lifelong journey to explore the impact of technology on daily lives.

Latest posts by Kelvin Wong (see all)

• Poor pitching skills and low exposure may be blunting local students’ competitive edge: FYP Tips - July 8, 2015
• Uber — Helping or Exploiting Taxi Drivers? - February 13, 2015
• How to Deal with DDoS Attacks - November 14, 2014

The opinion and views in this article are that of the authors and do not reflect the opinion or views of The HKU Journal of Technology, or the TecHKU Editorial Team. You can comment below to let the authors know what you think.
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On 22 June 2014, the HKU Public Opinion Programme (HKUPOP) website suffered from a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack during the voting for civil referendum. The scale of the attack was considered to be the second largest DDoS attack in internet history. DDoS attack can bring down mainframe computers and website servers, and it is an issue everyone should pay attention to because you may unintentionally become one of the contributors to these attacks.

How DDoS works

DDoS attack is based on a fundamental concept – if a computer wants to browse a webpage, the server will respond to them and send the computer the relevant webpage. If there are too many computers requesting the server to send information, the server may not have the capacity to handle a large number of requests and its efficiency may be lowered as a result. This can be done by pinging the website server very frequently in a very short period of time.

However, a single computer cannot generate requests on a scale so large that can slow down the server. Also, the network bandwidth may constrain the effectiveness of the attack. Therefore, some hackers have thought of a solution – what if many computers connect to the same server at the same time?

Some developers put their software online and allow net users to download freely. The software is sometimes bundled with Trojan horse. Once the software gets installed, the computer will follow any ping server request made by the developer and carry it out automatically without user’s consent. If many computers have installed the Trojan horse that connects them to the target server again and again, the server can definitely be slowed down. However, these consecutive ping requests can slow down the processing speed of these ‘zombie computers’, which is an infection issue that remains widely discussed in the computer world.

Free online software is often bundled with malicious scripts. If these scripts are installed by users, the computer may become a member of the zombie networks, which can be controlled by hacker to launch attack against target servers. High-frequency attack can greatly reduce processing speed of computers and put burden on network bandwidth.

Actual implementations of DDoS

For IT hackers…

DDoS can be implemented in various ways. One of the most common ways is Syn attack, in which a client opens TCP connection without closing it. The action of handshake is never finished, hanging the server to pend for webpage requests. Another method is to use an open DNS resolver, craft a fake UDP packet with the anonymous address and send it to the server. The server may send back webpage package data to the IP address which does not exist (or the one not making the request). This can also contribute to a decrease in server processing speed.

For website administrators…

Server administrators can take some preventive measures to minimize the possibility of DDoS attack against their own servers. For example, the server should always find a redundant DNS server by registering two or more DNS server addresses. Their connection ports should also be blocked except those that are really in use. An efficient load balancing strategy can promote the speed of handling each request received. A content delivery network should be established to deliver packages to its clients in a distributed manner. Routers can learn to drop large amount of junk packets. It is important to protect your server from Syn attack with the aid of TCP backlog or Syn cache. In fact, caching servers can store static content which reduces internal processing.

To further protect our server from DDoS attack, website administrators can subscribe to a secure server host for their websites. Currently some website host providers offer security protection against DDoS attack with their rich experience in dealing with certain attacks. Cloudflare, for example, is the only server provider that maintains the service of HKU POPVote website in June 2014 when the other two subscribed web host providers (one of which is stored in Amazon Web Services) were down. Therefore, choosing a secure and stable web host is important for building durable websites.

Some website host providers offer DDoS protection to further secure websites from anonymous DDoS attack.

For users…

This may sound corny, but it is worth reminding our users again not to install any free software by unknown publishers online. They may contain some malicious script that can turn your computer into a member of zombie networks, contributing to DDoS attack and significantly affecting the processing speed of your own computer. Scan your computer regularly using anti-virus and anti-malware software to keep your computer clean. Set up a firewall and block ports (if possible) to limit the access of unknown terminals.

• About
• Latest Posts

Kelvin Wong

Administrator for several websites. Familiar with front-end and back-end script editing and teamwork management. Lifelong journey to explore the impact of technology on daily lives.

Latest posts by Kelvin Wong (see all)

• Poor pitching skills and low exposure may be blunting local students’ competitive edge: FYP Tips - July 8, 2015
• Uber — Helping or Exploiting Taxi Drivers? - February 13, 2015
• How to Deal with DDoS Attacks - November 14, 2014