Just another blog!

According to this article on the Verge , the FBI basically wants Apple to create a system that allows them to make an unlimited number of guesses, at speeds of 80 ms per guess. On a 4-digit passcode, this means that the pass-code is cracked in just under 14 minutes. With a 6-digit pass-code, it will be cracked in just about 22 hours. However, if Apple allowed creation of pass-codes of unlimited length, and someone chose a 10-digit pass-code (if you think that is hard to remember, keep in mind that most people memorise multiple 10-digit phone numbers), then the time required to crack it is around 25 years. However, the FBI or anyone cracking the pass-code also needs to know the length, so they will have to try all the way from 1-digit pass-codes to 10-digit pass-codes. 9-digit pass-codes will take around two and a half years, while 8-digit pass-codes will take 3 months. So while I do appreciate and support Apple's resistance to the FBI, I think that they will be much better off ...

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...

Last week, a Dutch artist decided to celebrate Eric Arthur Blair's birthday by placing party hats on all the CCTV cameras on the street. Wikipedia describes 1984 as a dystopian novel; yet the constant surveillance described as a work of fiction in that novel now is a reality. If anything, we've become so accustomed to cameras keeping an eye on every move; we've learnt to ignore them. Cameras decorated with party hats should definitely remind us of the surveillance states we live in. With this, I don't mean that the surveillance is necessarily malign; it can be benign, almost innocuous, that we submit to such surveillance willingly, and appreciate the results that such surveillance presents. In fact, everything that we do is tracked and studied. Go to a grocery store and buy stuff using a credit card, and the store tracks exactly what you buy, and knows with great certainty what you'll buy next. Search for something on the net, and Google will hound you with ad...

I'm paranoid! Seriously, is there no privacy in this world? My phone tracks me every time. Google knows where I go, where I stay; it has the audacity to point out that I spend most of my time in the middle of Powai Lake, and that I spend less than an hour a week on average at work. It knows that I spend almost all my time on 9gag.com , it knows that I keep searching for funny videos every minute. And all this information is going to big brother. I'm scared of even thinking anything wrong, because I've heard that Google has built a satellite named NOTHEU972 which measures the psychokinetic energy of the world, and can hence read out thoughts, similar to Peter Answers . I've also heard that the CIA pays huge amounts of money to Google to get access to the data collected by NOTHEU972. I dare not put any pictures on Facebook, as hackers are out there to take my pictures, morph them onto some objectionable content, and post them on objectionable sites. I dare not crack jo...

Yesterday, Google Buzz notified me that Shahrukh Khan wants to follow me. Of course, given Buzz's default action, he already was following me, that is, until I blocked him! Shahrukh Khan following me! Doesn't that seem absurd. When a celebrity tries to follow a nobody, the nobody has to be really pig-headed to allow the celebrity to follow him. I mean, it should be obvious to the nobody that the celebrity profile is actually fake. I took some pains to check out Shahrukh Khan's profile. It had 130 odd followers and followed 1300. Weird, isn't it, considering that at the time of publishing this blog, he follows 49 and is followed by 798,768 people on twitter ? Further, his profile had a single post on Buzz, a picture of him taken out of some glossy, with the text My new look for Don2 So, what obvious steps did I take besides blocking him? I also reported the profile to Google as a fake. It is obvious that someone is using some kind of a crawling script to follow random...