Just another blog!

The debate around surveillance, government overreach, NSA, Prism, XKeyScore has been split in two categories. Well, three actually. The first will be the government, which feels that all this is justified, because "think of the children." They justify the stripping away of the civil liberties of not just their own citizens, but those all across the world for the purpose of supposedly protecting their own. Cluck cluck. The other two camps are the people who are subject to this surveillance. One camp argues that they have "nothing to hide." The other camp argues for increased encryption, and these are camps that will create PGP keys, hold keysigning parties, encrypt everything lest the government gets their data. I think both camps miss the point. Privacy is not the same as secrecy. I know what you do in the toilet, that does not mean that you will leave the doors open, or let the toilet walls be made with glass. Humans have evolved to respect privacy, the confide...

This post comes in after a really long delay. The simple reason was that my end-semester examinations are here, and the run-up to the examinations is the most hectic ever. Boredom from studies forces me to the recommended items page in Google reader, and ideas there often prompt blog posts. So here goes... It turns out that Motorola had put in a Facebook poll asking its fans what they wanted from Motorola. Unfortunately, they allowed people to put in custom responses, giving a thumping 100000 votes for an unlocked bootloader. But hang on... I have gone off on a tangent... This post would be extremely difficult for non-geeky people to understand. They may even be asking, What is a bootloader? So, I first attempt to explain the basics. A bootloader is a piece of software written specifically for the particular hardware. It kicks in before the OS begins to run, and is responsible for launching the OS. The term bootloader comes from bootstrap loader, which in turn comes in from the phr...