Project Gutenberg and the Indian Connection

If you have not heard of Project Gutenberg, it is oldest digital library, in making since 1971, encouraging distribution of free e-books. Since then, it has not just made 30,000 e-books in various languages free to access but also many useful audio books and videos. For more information, we have Wikipedia. Now, you have one minute to free your mind and set it on thinking to guess what the Indian connection is. Think wild, set your imaginations free. Free your mind! For those of you bright minds who have guessed it right, hi-fi. And, never mind if you have not figured it out yet.

It is none other than our very own second century collection of Sanskrit writings by Vatsayana on Kama Sutra. This book is the most popular e-book on Project Gutenberg, scoring the most number of downloads. Apparently, Apple rejected an app on Project Gutenberg for iPhones because people could search and download this book on love through the app. Strange and funny, but true!

As always we have tough competition as to what India is famous for at international level, and this case does not help solving the issue. What do you think is India famous for - (a) head wobbling, (b) mystic and spiritual yoga gurus, (c) the curry smells, or (d) as Land of Love?

P.S. There are some excellent books in this website. If you are a Kindle person, then this is your gold mine because this resource lets you download versions of e-books for Kindle Explore it, leisurely! 

Google+ is not Facebook

I have been blogging a lot on tech things these days. Although I want to maintain my status as a mixed bag blogger by writing about anything and everything, I could not resist writing when I come across something new. And the topic of the day is Google+ with all the media attention it generated in the week. 

Did you see the day's xkcd cartoon? Google+, What is it? Not facebook. What is it like? Facebook. How true! Let us compare and contrast Google+ with Facebook later. Before that, let me walk you through a simple tutorial.

Do you know how to increase popularity to your website or product?

• First, create hype! Do your best! Blog about it, make some tech blogs write about it and let a few top shots try it and make sure they feel good about your product.
• Second, restrict access to your product. Give access to people based on invites. And then, very shortly make a big announcement that you ran out of invites. The bigger your announcement is and the sooner you do it, the greater will be the hype generated.
• Third, make sure to leave some ways so that people can get invites and call them hacks. So, the final picture is people have to hack their way to get access to your product.

And, Google followed all the three steps to make their new social networking stint "Google+" popular. And "the hack" to invite your friends is update your status message and share it with your friends through email addresses. They would get an email with a link, and clicking on it would create a Google+ account for them.

Google+ is the new Facebook. Unlike, Google's previous digs at social networking the interface is much cleaner and simpler. Remember how Orkut was filled with clutter in order to compete with Facebook's apps. And, Google Wave only saw the ebb but never raised high unlike a wave. Looking at the design of this new utility promising to connect you with your friends and family, this is here to stay.

If you have noticed the recent change in Google.com's interface, then you should understand that it is part of the big plan. Once you have created a Google+ account for your self, then the right most corner of the black bar on the top will come to life. You will have the "Share" box and notifications indicator waiting hungrily for your action.

Google+ lingo and insight tutorial (Level: Beginner)

• News Feed on Facebook is Stream on Google+.
• "What's on your mind" is Google+'s "Share what's new".
• Pages on Facebook will be called "Sparks" herewith.
• The famous Facebook "Like" button's competitor is not so well known "+1" button.
• Friends or Family are the only two categories on FB. We have the new "Circles" concept. Drag and drop your fellow Google+ members into Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Family circles. You might as well create your own circle.
• You have your Picasa photos, Google Talk and the infamous Google Buzz integrated.
• Hangouts and Huddle are the new features to watch out for. Huddle is the group messaging feature and Hangout is the polished version of video chat. I am yet to explore these features completely.

So, are +you ready for Google+ ? 

Secret life of computers as spam soldiers

Spam Mails in GMail (Source)

Did you know that 9 out of every 10 emails exchanged on the Internet are spam? And, the year 2007 went through its worst phase with spam exceeding 95% of email traffic. Spam emails which just started as another way to advertise products now turned to deception and fraud. And your computer might as well be a participant in bringing down a company's network through DDos attack, or in sending out infinite number of advertisements on viagra. It is like PCs having a secret  life because not even owners of the computers are aware when they are effected by spam.  Everything happens so discretely. However it is not the case always!

Sometime ago, my windows laptop was completely taken over by malware. To my shock, I could see spam emails being sent from my laptop by those spam processes which got installed. And all my antivirus and security software could do was try to block all those spam emails sent from my laptop in vain. It's quite scary when you cannot control those spam bots on your laptop, and the best possible solution in that case happens to be deleting the operating system and formatting your hard drive. Thankfully I shifted to Linux which doesn't pose problems with malware and viruses. But email spam cannot be avoided by anyone at all.

With spam being such a pain, Microsoft was lauded as a hero when it brought down Rustock. Rustock is a bot net which is supposedly responsible for more than 40% of spam emails. Any computer effected by this spam bot could send about 2 lakh emails per day. And, most computers effected by this malware had Microsoft's operating system. Which is the reason why Microsoft invested so much in bring down spam bots that are responsible for degrading their brand name. But, do we have a day when all the resources are put to best use by totally destroying spam? Lets be hopeful, and the next unbeatable Internet giant will be the one which can provide spam less email service.

Are you aware of your computer's secret life yet? Keep your Windows OS and security softwares upto date. And make yourself familiar with the help available around. 

Like the Dislike button

Have you ever observed the "like" to "dislike" percentage on youtube videos? For most of the popular videos with huge number of hits, the general trend is the ratio of dislike to like is about 0.1. And if a video isn't a worthy one, the ratio only increases. Earlier the videos on Youtube were rated based on a 5 star scale. I wonder how this effects the way videos are perceived by viewers when they see a particular number of likes and dislikes.

The "Dislike" button, do you like it?

This also makes me wonder about what would happen if Facebook is to introduce "dislike" button. It would only make us realise how much crap we end up posting on Facebook through status messages and etc. And also, Facebook has been smart so far in not introducing Dislike button, and this way everyone feels that no one dislikes what they have to rant on a daily basis! What do you think about this?

Gmail's weekend data loss

Image Source: www.worcester.org 

Few months ago I wrote about our increasing dependence on Internet here: How dependent are you on Internet?. Despite the instances of data losses from internet giants being a possibility, one such instance is the recent loss of Gmail data effecting about 0.02% of its users, I am still one of those who relies on my email servers as backup for my conversations and documents exchanged via emails. In this recent Gmail incident, the bug effected all the multiple copies of the users' data Google stores in its servers. As of now Gmail team is still unable to recover the lost data completely, as the App Status page still continues to show the scary yellow wrench. 

Data loss sucks! I know it first hand since I lost years of work sometime back when a friend mistakenly formatted my hard disk. Ever since I was a little careful in making multiple copies of data. Now that buying Tera Bytes of space has become cheaper, taking data backups should not be as costly as it was earlier.

Do you also rely on your email servers and other Internet options to store your data? What precautions do you take to secure your data and prevent its loss?

Google Chrome for Blogging

We all know how the web browser from Google, Chrome, achieved huge popularity with in a very short span of its release. Chrome's popularity can be attributed to its light weight and speed apart from its friendly bookmarking feature and task manager capabilities. Now, Chrome has extended its capabilities further by introducing a Web store for apps (add-ons from third party).

Couple of days ago I have written a guest post at Latest Tech Tips maintained by Harshad, a technology blogger and Java developer. Please find my post below.

Google Chrome Apps For A Better Blogging Experience

It talks about how these apps can be used to make your blogging experience a better one. Go ahead and explore the app store.

Internet Scamsters Inc.

Have you heard from the gentleman Mr. David Mark who has extreme faith in you and would like to transfer $12 million into your bank account, recently? All he needs is your bank details, and he would be happy to wire the money to your account. A generous gentleman he is, who wants to help you earn money for the only reason because he found your name and email address in a list of successful young people on the internet.

As if you have an option!

About an year ago, when my friend was looking for laptops on eBay.com a good samaritan from UK offered to sell four of his brand new Lenovo T series laptops for only one-third of the actual price. A reasoning person, my friend is, asked for the reason behind the good samaritan selling laptops at such a low price. Pat came a genuine reply for his email, that he decided to leave UK and would like to see the stuff he recently bought. My friend excited about the cheap deal and after a sufficient research on eBay site found the seller in UK to be legitimate and wired him money for two laptops through Western Union. After a two weeks of silence from the seller, my friend found out that he wasn't a good samaritan but a scamster who built up his good profile by doing lots of genuine transactions through the website. Loss incurred was a little above 1000 USD. But experience gained, priceless!

And yesterday, my roommate received an email from a very concerned State Bank of India's security system (email: security@sbi.com) with an attachment to a html page SBI Security.html. Overwhelmed with joy knowing about the caring and thoughful security system, we read the message from the html page.

The html page also had an image on its top left corner which took forever to load. We would have bought it to be a genuine email had there been no typos, but alas! The message reads:

Dear Valued Customer, Your account has generated an Error code SB-907 in our new security system due to mis-match access.
Please login with SBI security link below to resolve this problem in order to enroll your SBI account in our new online System for mixmum protection against online phishing.

For security reason all information should be match correctly to avoid account suspension,
including hint question and answer that you had set for the Profile password.  

CLICK HERE TO RESOLVE THIS PROBLEM

 

---

Thank you for using STATE BANK OF INDIA
c SBI . All rights reserved.

On clicking the link to resolve the problem, it took us to a fake SBI website hosted at http://resellerslogin.net/dialer/upload/sbi/indexx.html. It had almost same interface as the real SBI website hosted at https://www.onlinesbi.com/ with lots of typographic errors (the fraudulent site is down at the time of writing this blog post). All it would take for the scamsters to assume control of your money is you logging into the phishing site. These kind of cases may also lead to your identity theft.

Sharing my gyan based on a few observations, after all Experience is what you do with what happens to you:

Spelling mistakes are definitely to look out for finding out scam websites. Any genuine banking website would do their monetary transactions through a secure connection (https). Look out for SSL certificate to learn if a website is safe or not while doing transactions that require security. When in doubt, do not open the web pages. Also, it is always better off logging out of all your accounts (gmail, email, facebook etc. anything with your authentication) while clicking on a doubtful link. Or, open it in a fresh instance of the browser.

SSL Certificate of SBI in Firefox browser

Also it is important to report these phishing attacks. When you encounter these kind of sites, make it a point to report to the concerned authority (SBI in this case). Also, you can report it on Google through their page http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/.

Beware of phishing, and be a phishbuster by sharing this message. Happy browsing, and don't be afraid due to the befalling end of IPV4. It will reincarnate as IPV6 and restore the balance.

I know you better than you do yourself!

Very recently I came across a website which offers a service to build profile of a person you want based on the information it collects from websites and social networking sites across the internet over time. Just for a nominal service fee. I really wanted to try it out and see how much it knows about me, but the money part stopped me from doing that. Although it did not stop me from digging further and trying to understand how people give out their information, knowingly and unknowingly.

I was happy to find that typing my name in search box of Google or Yahoo returned me to my web page. But I was totally annoyed when I looked up my phone number. The search results returned a map with a marker pointing at where I live and driving directions to my home.

Technology has made it easy for our information to be available to general public. The face recognition feature in Picasa, the famous photo editing software from Google, only makes me wonder about the pace at which technology is advancing. I downloaded Google image search results for Shahrukh Khan, and using Picasa tagged one photo of Shahrukh's face as SRK. And, this is what it does. All the mugshots of Shahrukh Khan were automatically identified by the software as SRK on my laptop. Can you not think of how this technology can be used to access people's information over the Internet? A simple image search with my name returns lot of images I posted over time on various sites. Only a matter of time, these profile building websites would have access to all my pictures on internet through smart use of algorithms.

With the advent of 3G and smart phones, giving out information has become lot easier. Every application I use on my smart phone wants to know more about me. They reason saying that we can take better advantage of the application by providing our personal information, our interest and our tastes to it. And we buy their reason. Some applications would even access my location and geo tags all my activity. This way I make it easier for the profile building websites to chronologically arrange my activity, travel, pictures and what not. How does a graph indicating how our preferences changed over time sound?

The day is not far when we find our profiles from those websites to be better than our personal diaries. Doesn't that sound scary?

Instant Search Previews

Recently in their blog, Google mentioned how their instant previews feature, which will soon be released officially, will improve users satisfaction. But, isn't this idea already implemented by Microsoft in their search engine Bing. The only difference will be, Bing shows only textual content in their preview with information like contacts or other relevant text/links from the web page.  Where as, Google plans on rolling out previews with graphical content (images) as well. I wonder why Microsoft didn't try this out in their Bing. One reason that comes to my mind is the goals they've set. Bing, which is good at answering users' questions, tries to give out relevant content in the preview itself. On the other hand, Google is good at directing you to right web pages. By showing graphical content in the preview for search terms, the users can identify quickly if they already know the page or the icon that shows up and reach their page of interest. Although I'm not sure if their goals will play a big role in deciding the features of their products in this competitive tech business which requires to attract as many users as possible.

Google Preview Feature

Bing Preview Feature

This thing interested me since I was also doing some work on incorporating previews while interacting with 3D  data in virtual reality environments. You may try the real thing here until Google releases this feature in their search page officially. And, for someone like me who tries to get maximum amount of work done with minimum use of mouse, their keyboard controls come handy too. I wonder how many iterations of design Google came up with to identify and understand what makes a good preview. 

Speaking of design, I'm tempted to talk about Windows 7 phone. If you own one which is an event of very little probability given that it was released only 2 days ago or if you have seen one of those demo videos, it clearly indicates the care and effort that went into its design. I heard from a senior employee at Microsoft about how designers of Nike shoes were roped into this project. Thinking out of the box really works!

P.S. Re-edited on 11/11/2010 since the pictures I uploaded earlier got deleted automatically.

How dependent are you on Internet?

What would you do if on one fine day all you encounter is "Page not found" or "Error 404" no matter what page you try to access? How would you react? How dependent are you on the Internet?

To maintain all my monetary transactions and to split my bills with my friends and flatmates, I use a web based online tool. And very recently the site went down. Although, I'm still not sure if the site would ever be.working again and if I will get my information back. And this left me thinking about the loads of information we share on the Internet. What if, one day we can NOT access any of that information? To make it worse, what would happen if all the information falls in the wrong hands? Scary, ain't it!

And there is another aspect to this topic. Is your dependence on Internet addictive? How much time do you spend on Internet (Facebook, Orkut and what-not) even if you don't have to? I came across this funny yet sensible article by a university counseling center which talks about Internet Addiction Disorder on the similar lines of Excessive Compulsive Disorder. (Also see this fun and informative web page dedicated to Internet Addiction.)

Have you ask yourself lately if you are addicted to Internet?

~Vee

Future Internet,my perspective

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author. The contents of this page do not reflect to anyone in the University I study or my past employer.

Internet, which began as a project by the Department of Defense of the US government, evolved into a huge thing with the addition of thousands of smaller individual networks. a machine to be part of the Internet, it has to run TCP/IP protocol, should have an IP address and it should be able to send IP packets to other machines on the Internet.

The future Internet demands stronger human computer interaction with the increasing use of 3D Virtual worlds as the mode of interaction. The webcam integrated to the computer has to be so powerful and the underlying technology so advanced to be able to capture the facial expressions and body mechanics of the user and reflect it in the online avatar of him/herself. This demands improved multimedia applications with the world becoming more and more virtual through various applications like maps and all. Currently the wireless networks are in such a way that we can gain access to the Internet only if we are in the area of coverage. In future, the Network Service Providers will come up with something where in we end users register to an ISP, and the ISP will be able to provide Internet access wherever the user is (just the way, we use mobile phones). Every end device will be able to seamlessly connect to the Internet irrespective of the place, even if the end host machine is static or moving from a place to place.

The Internet will become more ubiquitous with every possible device around us having the power to compute and connect. With this we will gain better access to everything and everyone we want to. With this we can envision a change in the Home networks are also, in the way we access every device at home. Every home appliance like TV, fridge, washing machine, microwave, lights, fans, air conditioners and many other kitchen and entertainment equipment will have a processing unit and will act like a networking device in future, where in all these form the home network. We will have technology to access the devices in our home network through the Internet enabling us to control all of these devices securely from a remote place. With the availability of huge multimedia information over the Internet, the access of multimedia content over the Internet improves bringing a major change in the way we view cable tv. The usage of personalized tv channels comes into picture as the set top boxes become sophisticated enough to aggregate the multimedia content present over the Internet based on the tagging information and create video channels based on the interest of the end user (animation, comedy, sports etc).

With all these positive changes hopeful to be seen in the future, we get the bad effects too. Our increasing dependency on Internet makes it more vulnerable to increased possibility of cyber attacks. This demands more sophistication in the security point of view.

PS1: Please provide your views on this topic, which will enhance my knowledge!
PS2: This was written as a part of my course work.