Just another blog!

I'm perfectly SERIOUS. This is NOT SATIRE. Do not, if you love this country, vote for the Aam Aadmi Party in the upcoming general elections. I did not support the AAP throughout its campaign. My reasons were simple. The AAP was and still is a party of agitators and idealists, filled with people who raved and ranted about how rotten the system was, yet decided to fearlessly enter the same arena with a promise to clean up; yet with absolutely no history of governance, and no experience running an office. To some extent, the AAP reminded me of the Indian National Congress, which agitated to give India independence, only to hand over power to Mountbatten immediately afterwards, because they found themselves woefully ill-equipped to govern a country, and the crises that followed independence. Now, given that the AAP has tasted power for around a month, I'm convinced more than ever that the AAP does not deserve another win. In fact, I'm convinced that the AAP would be the a...

LinkedIn told me to wish Atanu a happy work anniversary. According to LinkedIn, he completed two years at Florida State University this November. Except that Atanu died in a freak accident a month ago. For those who do not know Atanu, he was a PhD student at IIT Bombay, and he stayed two rooms down from the room I was allocated. The physical proximity does lead to a certain level of friendship that cannot be expressed easily. Generally, PhDs and MTechs at IITB have an estranged relationship with the BTechs, we think of them as dull oldies, and they think of us as arrogant youngsters (the actual terms used are more colourful, but I hope you get the idea). Atanu was an exception to the rule. It's hard to find anyone who could say that he did not like Atanu, or that he was ambivalent or indifferent. Atanu's personality was one that forced you to like him. We had a running joke, I would joke that as a PhD, he would do nothing other than go to his lab and sit in the AC, and ...

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...

Lately, I've seen a disturbing trend of increasing governmental control with a "think of the children" type justification. By "type", I mean any justification that appeals to irrational (though justified) that we may have, like fear for our children's safety. The British government is planning a nation-wide "porn firewall" that will restrict its citizens from accessing a number of websites, all in the noble cause of protecting children from the horrors of pornography. An admirable move, but think about the consequences. A number of companies selling porn filters will benefit via huge contracts, and citizens who are granted the right to freedom will have the right subtly snatched away from them. Now, you may think that I'm exaggerating when I say that citizens will lose freedom under such a censor-wall, after all, it's just pornography that they seek to block, right? No! If a government gets power to block websites, it can seek to suppre...

Ubuntu has launched a crowd-funding campaign for its phone, the Edge. I'm not supporting this campaign. The campaign seems to be extremely successful, they raised over two million dollars on the first day which is rather mind-boggling. At this pace, I think that they should have little trouble in reaching their 32 million goal, which means that we should be seeing Ubuntu Edge in a year. For me, pledging $830 for a phone that does not even exist --- something with undecided specs --- is unthinkable. I don't have that kind of money to blow: I'm a grad student after all. I support open source, and I'm looking forward to the Ubuntu phone as a means to get away from Android and the Google ecosystem (more on that in a later post); however, $830 on a phone is a ridiculous bet, given that a netbook costs half as much. I really don't get the rationale behind ever increasing compute power in our phones and tablets. Come on, the average phone today has much more power th...

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...