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...

The only comment I received over my earlier blog post criticized me for digressing too much and not presenting an opinion. So, in this post, I aim to give my views on the filtering of search results by services we trust, like Google and Facebook. So, what is the issue with filtering search results to make them more specific to the user (searcher)? As discussed in the video, the main issue with this mechanism is that it isolates a person from the web, where a person might go in to spot views contrary to his own, some views can challenge a person's often limited and biased understanding of matters, thereby helping in the overall development of a person. By filtering those views, Google and Facebook end up showing us views that we like, instead of views that we ought to see, which essentially leaves our world view unchanged. Take for example the concept of my personal blog (this one). I end up sharing links to my posts on Google+ and Facebook. I shall refrain from discussing about Fa...

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...

If there is anything that annoys a geek like me, it is being forced to use/do/say/think something. More so if it is useless and annoying. I have a Compaq laptop. It came pre-installed with Windows Vista. Along with the OS came a bunch of goodies utterly useless software by HP. They were HP Health Check, HP Battery Check, HP Wireless Assistant and HP Update. I shall now proceed to attack these software one-by-one. I start with HP Health Check. Perhaps the most annoying software of them all. It checks your PC periodically for issues(?) and then gives the most annoying pop-up of them all. It reads HP Health Check has finished checking your PC. Click this balloon to view results. And when you click the balloon to view the issues, most of the time, you are greeted with this message: HP Health Check did not find any issues with your computer Sometimes, it finds a whole bunch of drivers which are outdated. But it does not update them, nor does it give an option to select the drivers to b...