Just another blog!

Because I can publish shitty drawings, and even shittier text. And I have no obligation to be accurate.

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 came up from a discussion... No, it's not important to inform you of the origins of this post. What finally matters is the content. Is that not why you read the blog. Who cares about all the emphasis on telling a story about the post with the post itself? I mean, I'm not really into meta-blogging, really. So, what is this post about. No, it's not about the most common excuse raised by some baldies with grey hair (really, since when did baldies have hair?) when some of our neighbours decide to travel over 500 nautical miles to pay us a social visit (with guitars) and try to act in our films (it may be cheap bollywood, but it is much better than the quality of stuff they get at their home, I believe). No, it's about companies with mottoes of Don't be evil deciding what is or is not useful for me. It's also about a website that gives a crappy blue colour to the entire world. The internet (whatever it is, I really don't understand all this tech jargo...

So here's an update on the latest mess up by Google. Apparently, Google has accidentally reset the GMail accounts of an estimated number of 150,000 customers. Though the percentage of user's who's accounts have been affected are less that 0.08%, nevertheless, the situation seems scary enough. A loss of years of mail on a GMail account is a scary prospect. We often have loads of files, critical data and important conversations on GMail, and to log in and not be able to see any of these would be enough to wreck someone. But we don't pay Google for the service, you may say. So why is it Google's responsibility to ensure the safety of our mail? The answer is that by participating in GMail, we are entering Google's business model and it is through our participation that Google earns its revenues. So it is indeed Google's responsibility to ensure that our data remains safe, so that we remain within their business model. So how hard have the users of GMail been ...