Hey, remember when Google’s motto used to be “don’t be evil?” Vaht, you thought they still had it? I did too, but this…might not be evil, but it certainly seems a little unfair:

Google India had launched a ‘Doodle 4 Google - My India’ contest in August. The Doodle is the logo design you see on the Google homepage. The theme of this competition was ‘My India’. On November 12, Google India announced at Taj Ambassador Hotel that tech hub Gurgaon based 4th standard school kid Puru Pratap has won the competition…a laptop computer for himself, a t-shirt with his doodle and Rs. 1 lakh (approx 2100 US dollars) for his school.

But his counterparts in USA and UK won substantially more. According to Google their US winner “will win a $15,000 college scholarship to be used at the school of their choice, a trip to the Google New York Office, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle. We’ll also award the winner’s school a $25,000 technology grant towards the establishment/improvement of a computer lab.”

So let’s see: Indian winner = laptop + T-shirt + $2100 (for his school) + $0 (for himself)
US winner = laptop + T-shirt + trip to NY + $25,000 (for his school) + $15,000 (for himself)

Let me see…let me do the math…I dunno, maybe you need a special algorithm or something to make these two things equal? Because to my eyes, it looks like the Indian kid is getting royally screwed. It looks like the same contest, run by the same company, is rewarding a far lesser prize to the winner from one country than to the winner from another country.

The writer of the quoted piece goes on to point of various other prizes that are awarded equally to winners from all countries. She concludes:

Are we children of a lesser Google? Or is the Indian market less important? Perhaps Bing has the answer.

Dammit. I like Chrome.

A little over a year ago, my social networking life was all but nonexistent. Like everyone else my age, I had a Facebook page left over from college. Other than the occasional stalk-in, er login, however, I rarely used my account. But overnight (it seems) everyone and their aunty joined Facebook. Before I knew it, I had second cousins from Pakistan who I’d never met trying to friend me and my mother calling me every morning to discuss my status. (“You were sick and you didn’t call me?”) Now Facebook is the first site I visit each morning. And after Facebook comes Twitter. (My name is ____ and yes I do have an Interwebz addiction.) And now, I’m afraid I may just join Foursquare, a new social media site which has my friends abuzz. What is Foursquare you ask? Ever sat by yourself in a coffee shop? Wished a friend was close by and wanted to hang out? Didn’t feel like texting everyone in your phonebook? If you’d logged in to Foursquare, which was co-founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai this past March, you would’ve known immediately who was around.

Via the “web clips” which perch above my 5,090 unread GMail messages, news that Google’s email is now down with some brown languages:

Until now, there hasn’t been a good way to send email to friends and family in Hindi, my native language and their language of choice. That’s why I’m happy to announce a new feature for Gmail that lets you type email in Indian languages. If you’re in India, this feature is enabled by default. If not, you’ll need to turn it on in the “Language” section under Settings. Once enabled, just click the Indian languages icon and type words in the way they sound in English — Gmail will automatically convert them to their Indian language equivalent. [link]

Oh, if only there were some way for me to type Malayalam words the way they sound in English to me…and have GMail (or anything else, for that matter) automatically convert them to the correct Malayalam-in-English spelling equivalent.

For example, sometimes while I’m writing, blogging, tweeting or commenting on your Facebook crap, I feel the compulsive need to refer to the side dish I loved most as a small child: a fried, potato-y concoction which I’d spell “oorelkarunga merehkwerty or in a similarly butchered fashion.

Do you know how that shiz is actually spelled?

urulakizhangu mezhukkupuratti

And some of you wonder why I sweat engineers…look at what amazing things they do! Hot off our tip-line:

A couple of weeks back, Sree asked SAJA Forum readers to help him see if there were any Desis affected by the Madoff swindle: http://www.sajaforum.org/2009/02/crime-any-desis-on-the-madoff-client-list.html

As a techie, needing to have humans manually crowdsource the filtering of Desi names out of a long list seemed inefficient.

That’s why I built DesiFilter, a new web tool to help community journalists and obsessive Desi-angle stalkers:

http://www.desifilter.com (click on “Example 1”, etc. for sample datasets)

It’s pretty simple — just feed it some text, and it’ll go through a list of about 26,000 common South Asian names and highlight possible matches.

South Asian names are super-multicultural. I tried to remove most common Anglo names (otherwise any list of American names would be all false positives), but there’s still substantial overlap with Iranian, Arab, Turkish, and Portuguese names. It may miss Anna John and catch Osama Bin Laden — but it’s still infinitely easier than looking for potentially Desi names by hand.

My goal is for the tool to be part of any obsessive Desi-angle stalker’s toolkit. I’m interested in what you or Sepia readers find with it. I’d love feedback. Thanks.

You want feedback? Boy, you ‘bout to get you some feedback, let me tell YOU. ;) I love how it’s an accepted practice to be an “obsessive, Desi-angle stalker”. It’s just so matter-of-fact. And warm and fuzzy— we at SM are not the only ones! Admit it, you totally do it, too. When movie credits roll, and you see a Best Boy named Neel/Jay/Anil Patel/Sen/Singh, you feel a little twinge of recognition…or indigestion. Who told you to get a Large popcorn AND nachos?

Anyway, is this the first time I’ve reprinted an ENTIRE, somewhat lengthy missive to the tip line, verbatim? Why, I think it is. I just don’t have the heart to remove anything. Especially any sentence which allows me to escape freely (muahahaha) while catching Bin Laden. FINALLY! Someone needed to do it and the U.S. sucks at it. Jai Hind! No, wait…Jai Ho! Actually, more like Jai HIM——> Anirvan.

Of course, if you’re a bibliophile, you already knew him; he’s behind the very respected BookFinder.com

…the best resource (online or off) for finding used, rare, and out of print books. The Library of Congress recommends it; both Newsweek and Money magazines called it one of the two best book sites online (the other, in both cases, being Amazon.com). [link]

And no, Anirvan didn’t pay me to splort all over your screen with my giddiness over his geekery. I splorted for free! Wait, that sounds awful. My point is, we get dozens, if not hundreds of tips. We rarely have the resources to cover each one. Most of you are aware of this.

I’m sure Anirvan sent in his DesiFilter message, shrugged, and thought “maybe”. He certainly couldn’t have expected that I’d put down my outrageously late dinner of lemon rice and paavaka mezhukkupuratti, pause the DVR and postpone packing for my trip tomorrow, just to publish an effusive endorsement of his efforts. He deserves it, though. It’s not every day that reading a tip makes me go —> :D. Better living through technology, y’all. I’m ‘bout it bout ‘it. Let the stalking begin! Wait, that doesn’t sound right, either…

Want to know if a celebrity is playing both sides of the fence? Whether that new guy you’re seeing is actually a Republican or just dresses like one? If your boss maxed out at that fundraiser or got comped? Whether your neighbor’s political involvement stops at that hideous lawn sign?

Hell, yes!

FundRace gives you the technology to do what politicians and journalists have been doing for years: find out where the money’s coming from, see who it’s going to, and solve the mystery of why that crazy ex-roommate of yours is now the Ambassador to Turks and Caicos.

Using public records filed with the FEC of all contributions greater than $200, FundRace calculates the who, where, and how much of hard/soft cash going to political parties/candidates/PACs. I’m all agog at the technological marvels that produce such transparency.

Nosing around a bit, I came up with:

Jhumpa Lahiri, Writer, gave $250 to the DNC
Kalpen Modi, Actor, gave $1,395 to Barack Obama
Atul Gawande, Surgeon, gave $250 to John Kerry
Aziz Ansari, Producer/Actor, gave $1,150 to Barack Obama
Vikram Pandit, (current CEO at Citigroup, then COO at Morgan Stanley), gave $2,000 to George W. Bush

Those who know me well often joke that I’d make a good spokesperson for a Google ad. I can’t help it if Google has changed my life (and I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels that way). The google desktop app has saved my writing life more times than I care to mention, and google calendar is the means by which my husband and I can always convince each other to attend otherwise resisted events (“Oh, you couldn’t make it? I had no idea. Your google calendar said you were free!”)

So, of course, my curiosity piqued when I recently read about Siva Vaidhyanathan’s recent book deal with the University of California Press.

Per Publisher’s Weekly:

THE GOOGLIZATION OF EVERYTHING: How one company is transforming culture, commerce and community - and why we should worry, showing how Google is taking on governments, organizations and entire industries - and the implications of Google knowing more about us than we know about it.

(The book began as an open book experiment sponsored by the Institute for the Future of the Book, where Vaidhyanathan is a fellow, and was subsequently picked up for publication.)

Vaidhyanathan is a rising cultural historian and media scholar whose two previous books Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System have met with wide praise.

He is approaching the book as both a fan and as a critic, he says at his website: “I am in awe of all that Google has done and all it hopes to do. I am also wary of its ambition and power.”

Flying all over the intarwebs is an NYT article about Facebook— and how it is apparently the equivalent of a social networking roach motel; once you check in you can’t check out.

Are you a member of Facebook.com? You may have a lifetime contract. Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data. While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely.

The first flummoxed Facebooker quoted by la grey lady is brown!

“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

It took Mr. Das about two months and several e-mail exchanges with Facebook’s customer service representatives to erase most of his information from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das’s empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message through the network.

I understand that Facebook is ostensibly attempting to keep the reactivation process zimble, should one change one’s mind about one’s participation in this timesuck, but one might still find this policy douchey. (Now who has U2 stuck in their head? Just me? Meh. You kids and your tatti taste in music.)

Facebook’s Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to close it fully — meaning that they may unwittingly leave anything from e-mail addresses to credit card numbers sitting on Facebook servers. Only people who contact Facebook’s customer service department are informed that they must painstakingly delete, line by line, all of the profile information, “wall” messages and group memberships they may have created within Facebook.

I’ve mentioned it before, but for those of you who weren’t aware, I’m addicted to Scrabulous, the Facebook application which allows me to play multiple games of Scrabble with several of you at the same time, and at our leisure.

Scrabulous is so fabulous, I ditched Friendster and MySpaz out of my desire for it; I had no need for such retrograde networks, not when Facebook was so superior— and the whole basis for its superiority is this stellar timesuck. If you read the message boards on the “official” Save Scrabulous group or under news articles about the game, I’m not the only one who has embraced Facebook out of my nerdier impulses, nor am I the only one who is twitching in a corner, rocking back-and-forth over this:

The saga of Scrabulous is nearing an end…[link]

I can’t bear to contemplate it. Better I edify you as to why this tragedy is occurring. Hasbro is not pleased that their game is suddenly so popular, not when they have no part in the fun. Never mind that they were stupid for not sensing the untapped desire of millions of word-nerds for protracted online Scrabbling, they’re using words like “licensing” and “stealing” to rain on our vocabulary-littered parade.

A flurry of behind the scenes deal-making has been going on between Hasbro, Scrabulous, and Electronic Arts, which has the license in the U.S. to the online version of the game. Hasbro is trying to get Scrabulous to sell itself for a song to Electronic Arts, or else shut down completely by the end of the day today. [link]

The Calcutta-based brothers behind the awesomeness, software developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla are trying to find a way…

Scrabulous has been trying to shop itself to other buyers as well, but its legal liability is scaring away any potential white knights. Unless it gets some sort of reprieve or agrees to sell to Electronic Arts, Scrabulous will be no more, despite the more than 46,000 Facebook members who have joined the “Save Scrabulous” group. What choice does it have, really, but to sell? [link]

Lest you think this is a tiny sort of tempest, consider these numbers:

Scrabulous was started in 2006 as a standalone site operated by a pair of 20-something Calcutta, India-based brothers, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, but the game exploded when they created a Facebook application that currently boasts 2.3 million active users and soon became the workplace productivity drain du jour. It’s currently the ninth most popular application on the site. [link]

A web security service called ScanSafe has investigated the Times of India website (note that I’m not providing a link), and discovered that its advertising is stuffed with advanced Adware and Malware (thanks, Voiceinthehead):

Visitors to the IndiaTimes website are being bombarded by malware, some of which appear to target previously unknown vulnerabilities in Windows, a security researcher warns.

In all, the English-language Indian news site is directly or indirectly serving up at least 434 malicious files, many of which are not detected by antivirus software, according to Mary Landesman, a senior security researcher at ScanSafe. She said at least 18 different IP addresses are involved in the attack.

“The end result of the compromise is that the user, going through their normal course of activities, is subject to a really massive installation of malicious files,” she told us. “Coupled with the low detection by antivirus vendors, it does put the end user in a very vulnerable position.”

Visitors can be infected even if they have up-to-date systems and they don’t fall victim to tricks to install software or browser add-ons, she said. She urged people to avoid the site until it’s been cleaned up. (link)

A slightly more technical version of the report is at the ScanSafe website, here.

Frankly, I find it appalling that a “respectable” news agency would be using these tactics, and I won’t be linking to the TOI in any blog post unless and until I hear that this has been stopped. I also hope the report gets picked up by the general Indian news media, and TOI is called to account. This is simply not a business policy that is entered into by accident — somebody at The Times of India had to knowingly enter into agreements with these Malware vendors to begin with. (If this were a U.S. company, you can bet there would be a class-action lawsuit by users forced to waste time and money cleaning up their computers.)

One qualification: I’m a little unsure about how much of a danger this really is to people who are running Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, or computers with good spyware protection — ScanSafe may be magnifying the danger a little to drum up business.

Longtime Mutineer Desi Dude in Austin left a tip on our news tab, which immediately got my attention:

Rajnikath don’t need no Fair and Lovely…not when he has 25 CGI artists lighten his complexion frame-by-frame for a song-and-dance sequence in his latest sambaar-mix potboiler Sivaji.

Say what?! I neither know nor care about either Sivaji the fillum or its rotund ishtar, but following the link DDiA left took me here:

If you have watched Sivaji..You have observed the fair complexion of Rajinikanth in the song Oru koodai Sunlight.Everyone thought it was make-up that made Superstar Rajinikanth look like a European in that song, but the secret is something else. [Naachgaana]

Yindeed, the secret is far more time-consuming and technologically advanced than some pancake from Max Faktor.

The secret of actor Rajinikanth’s ‘white’ tan in the song sequence “Style” in the ‘Sivaji’ was not the result of any fairness cream or cosmetic touch-up but an entire year of Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) work by city-based firm Indian Arts.

The colour tone of one of the U.K.-based dancers in the background of the song was used to turn up the tone of the actor, frame by frame. The post-production for the 6,000 plus frames took a year to complete, as computer graphics artists from Indian Arts toiled to make Rajinikanth the “Vellai Tamizhan”. [The Hindu]

According to the article from our new tab, a total of 6,700 frames were painstakingly altered, to give the second-highest paid actor in Asia skin as pale as the complexion of one of his Gori backup dancers. Okay, that sentence was awkward as kundi. I’ll just quote something, instead, yes?

Not that you care, but I almost named this post A Salmagundi of NPR. However, I’m smitten with the way some Desis say “potpourri”, so I couldn’t resist the allure of that word. Oh, how do they say it? Like so: pottu-puri

None of these stories feels substantial enough to merit their own post; what does feel significant is perking up FOUR times during Morning Edition, because there are four different sepia-colored stories! That’s almost a fifth of the program! Here is what I (and undoubtedly fellow NPR-phile-Abhi, as well) heard:

1) Moray Eels are toothy!

Scientists in California have reported that Moray eels have a set of teeth within a second set of jaws, called the pharyngeal jaws, that help them capture their prey.

Once the Moray eel secures its prey with its first set of jaws, the pharyngeal jaws reach up from its throat, grabbing and pulling the prey down through its esophagus.

One of you already has an itchy-trigger-comment finger, I know it, so stop it— the brown angle is a-comin’…

Rita Mehta is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California Davis who studies the evolution of diversity in eel feeding behavior.

Like, whoa. Not only is there a female scientist to celebrate, this has to do with my alma mater as well! w00t Davis! We study Moray Eels!

“What we discovered is that the pharyngeal jaws of Moray’s have the greatest mobility of any pharyngeal jaws ever documented,” Mehta says.

I know I should probably save this for either Sunday or Monday, when you are all hung over, exhausted, grumpy or all of the above, but I am in a playful mood and can’t resist.

According to an Anonymous Tipster on our news tab, picture number four in Fortune magazine’s online exhibit of photographs which starred in an offline exhibit in Manhattan entitled, “Fortune Celebrates India” is “awesome”. I wholeheartedly concur with that sentiment; I couldn’t stop smiling after seeing the image to the left. What a fantastic capture!

These pictures got some well-deserved (especially in this case) attention in preparation for the 10th Fortune Global Forum, which will be held in New Delhi later this fall. But none of this matters, because you are all well aware of why I have posted this picture. Wot? You have no idea? Of course you do! That’s right ladkas and ladkis…it’s time to play the “caption” game.

While the two desis in this photo aren’t as glamorous as Karan Johar and Preity Zinta, the stars of our last episode, I find them infinitely more interesting. :)

How ‘bout you? Leave your impressions of what’s going on in the comments below. If you’d rather see the rest of the photographs in the exhibit— I believe there are almost two dozen— click here. And if you want to suggest pictures for future editions of the caption game, then click here. And if you want further relief from ennui, deadlines or constipation…well, I have nothing for you to click (thanggawd!).

I know I know that right now is the worst possible time for this story. I know we’re supposed to be all “ABCD-FOB Bhai Bhai!” but this is just too funny to pass up.

He said it, I just blogged it.

A mobile phone game … will be used to help international students cope with ‘culture shock’ and university life in Britain … The game - called C-Shock - is the brainchild of University of Portsmouth academic and games technology expert Nipan Maniar who, himself, arrived in the UK from India five years ago as an international student…
Nipan said the game would act as an ‘e-mother’ or ‘mobile mummy’ for new students. [Link]

When you hear e-mother you imagine a sort of Tamagotchi in reverse right? Something that nags you to eat enough, sleep enough, and call home? [Actually, you don’t need a mobile game for that, just a mobile]

“E-mother” could be expanded with modules to help explain how you do your own laundry, something my white American roommate could have used freshman year. (When asked how he had survived in summer camp he said he just looked clueless until a girl took pity on him and did his laundry, so he had never done a single load on his own. We mocked him mercilessly).

But no, Maniar means something else. He means the culture shock that comes from seeing people kiss in public and from seeing students (especially girls) drink:

The game’s opening scenario is a student’s first day at university in the UK. The student is shown a map of the campus and is given tasks to find specific locations. Clicking on images along the way warns the student about what to expect in terms of culture shock - for example, it is acceptable for students to drink alcohol and it is okay for people to display affection in public. [Link]

Since a few of you mutineers adore the artfully tressed, usually well-dressed, remarkably unstressed SANJAYA, perhaps one of you would like to create an online shrine in his honor? The perfect domain is still available (but act soon!). Via UberDesi and eBay:

Do you love Sanjaya Malakar from American Idol?? In almost every broadcast Ryan say’s “Malakar Mania” and NOW YOU CAN OWN IT on the WEB!

This URL / Domain name is guaranteed to get 1000’s of hits!

This Domain name / URL has been appraised at over $2,500 due to the popularity of Sanjaya, thanks to Howard Stern and the craze called American Idol!

Bidding starts at ONLY $9.95

Have at it— and don’t say we didn’t get you anything for Christmas/Channukah/Diwali/Eid/Nowruz/Onam. ;)

In an earlier thread, reader Sadaiyappan reminds us of the reverence with which many cultures in India regard paper and books:

Ok, I’m a tamil. Tamils were raised to respect paper because you get education through paper and all legal documents are of paper, if my foot accidentally touches a paper, I must touch the paper with my hands and then touch my eyes much like I am praying / being blessed. So we are not supposed to use paper to wipe our ass because it is disrespectfull to the paper… [Link]

Sheep poo paper, complete with flecks!

The Elephant Poo Poo Paper company makes stationery and related goods out of dried, odorless elephant shit:

We can make about 25 large sheets of paper from a single piece (or turd) of elephant poo poo!!! That translates into about 10 standard sized journals including the front and back covers! Neat, huh!?!?!?… [Link]

There is also paper made from Moose Droppings (site in Swedish), Sheep Droppings, and even Panda droppings. Yeah, I can’t see this going over in India at all …

It’s no secret that Indian parents tend to meddle play more of an active role in their children’s lives than do American ones. Nor does this end when kids go away to University. Still, I was surprised to see how seriously even the IIT schools take their role “in loco parents” (which is Latin for “as crazy overbearing parents”).

The authorities in India’s premier engineering institute, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay (Mumbai), have cut off internet access to students in hostels at night. They feel that 24-hour internet access is hampering students’ academic performance and overall personality development… “they preferred to sit in their rooms and surf the net rather than interact with their mates. Academics are of primary importance for us but we also want our students to have a well-rounded personality…” [Link]

Helloooo? Who are they kidding - it’s a geek factory and proud of it. If students wanted a well rounded personality, they wouldn’t be at IIT, they’d be out partying and enjoying the Bombay nightlife. Amazingly, they’re not even the first IIT to do this either, IIT Madras cuts off net access for a shorter period of time, from 1 AM to 5AM.

What’s it really about? Well, in part I think it’s about pr0n:

The dean of students affairs, Prakash Gopalan, said one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students’ computers to see that bad content dominated over good. “In the end, this is the Indian taxpayers’ money as well as the IIT’s network and we have an obligation to ensure that it is not misused,” he said. [Link]

And in part it’s about exerting authority and making students show up to lecture:

… they were beginning to see a drop in attendance during morning lectures … “In the morning the students would not be fresh and attentive” … “It is working well for us now,” he said, “From personal experience I can tell you that I have two morning lectures beginning at 0800 and attendance is always 95%…” [Link]

Quite frankly, it’s absurd. If you’re training engineers, you want them to be able to work all night on their projects, and they need the internet to do so. This is like saying that you’re turning off electricity at night so that students don’t stay up all night studying, or worse yet, reading trashy novels. If you want students to show up for morning lectures, make them worth attending, and make the exams depend on in-class material. Otherwise trust your students to act like adults.

It is with great relief and extreme sadness that I leave the mutiny today ending the sequel to my Mutiny-Wallah gig. I think there may have been a way to bribe the head macacas to hang around the bunker blogging some more, but my lawyer and I have decided against it. I came back on board to Sepia Mutiny months ago with the expectation of blogging on the 2006 elections and am leaving today having spent more time researching cyber law than should be legal (bad pun, I know). You didn't think I was going to leave without sharing some of the research I dug up, now would you?

1) It is a misdemeanor in the state of California to be sent multiple e-mails after you sent one that said stop contacting me, even if the perpetrator is in another state (check to see what your state's laws are). My advice: never block or delete e-mails until you've accumulated enough evidence, never respond to the e-mails except for a one liner that says 'stop contacting me' and file a report with the police immediately.

2) Those IP addresses are a tricky thing -- they are often anonymous to protect the bloggers and commenters. But IP addresses can be tracked with a court order, and sites like MySpace, Friendster, or Blogspot have a wealth of IP information that they have to give to the police if given a court order, especially if the perpetrator used those sites to contact you. Also, if you do blog, get a sitemeter, and monitor those IP addresses religiously.

3) If you Flickr, photolog, whatever -- copyright your pictures. According to blog laws, sites such as Brown People can post your pictures up legally as long as they link to the source. If you copyright your pictures, they are not allowed to take your image. The laws around image copyright infringement are pretty harsh (known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), and the Google law team is standing by to make sure Blogspot users don't infringe this aspect of the law. You should copyright your blog too.

4) Save everything, take screenshots (go to File, Save page as...) of everything. In a world where the Internet can be so easily manipulated and deleted, it is important that you save things immediately. Not just saving e-mails in your inbox, but take screen shots of profiles, blogs, websites and accumulating your data. Both your lawyers and law enforcement will be pleased to see that you have evidence to back your claim.

The rest of the list continued after the jump...

An item in the November print issue of Wired drew my attention to the work of Dr. Smita Jain Narang, who has developed WebVastu, a system to design websites in balance and harmony with cosmic principles. According to the article (page 72 in the print edition), “Narang reports that on the 500 sites she’s redesigned, three-quarters received an imediate boost in traffic.” I took a look at Narang’s own site to learn more about this path-breaking technique:

We all know that the five elements that comprise the human and the world are called the “Paanchbhootas”. Similarly every website has its own “paanchbhootas” and a balance has to be maintained to achieve a desired result. Any disturbance in any of the element may result in negative consequences.

This is especially important for commercial sites, as you can imagine. Negative energies are never good for the bottom line:

For the websites to bring business the element in each quadrant must be honored and they should be kept in balance as this creates powerful and beneficial conditions, which draw business towards the owner. On the other hand, an imbalance of the elements can create negative energies, which may have an adverse effect on the websites.

Wired asked Narang, who is 30, to “diagnose one of our spiritual haunts, Slashdot.org,” and her assessment was mixed at best. It scored well for its address and graphics (good Water flow), but poorly on structure (too much Air), lead-off (inauspicious header), page length and footer, which should have been “brown, fawn or copper.”

Copperish colors must be extremely auspicious, as Narang’s own site involves white lettering bathed in a glowing, brown-yellow background that is nearly overwhelming to my bleary morning eyes. Then again, I haven’t been up since 3 AM performing austerities and contemplating the Divine. The site also lacks navigation; perhaps such tools only breed maya, and we must instead move about the site in an organic way. So should you, but if you don’t mind the spiritual shortcuts, here are a few highlights.

WebVastu takes its place in humanity’s long process of spiritual and material advancement:

Man has endeavoured to improve from time immemorial. Starting from the Stone Age to the 21st century, mankind has only improved and is keeping their step toward modernisation. But as we are becoming modern we are leaving our culture far behind and are overburdened by sorrows, unhappiness, mental tensions and what not. Thus all kinds of sufferings are taking place in the life and in order to get all the things back, we are trying to follow the path showed by our ancestors. In my book I have tried to formulate some principles for designing the websites on the fundamentals of Vastu science, so that the person can achieve the maximum benefit in totality.

I am only trying to smoothen the people business by making it more harmonious and thereby having gradual increase through websites. Destiny always prevails, but by implementing the Vastu concepts, one can enhance the business provided by websites. Therefore, it is advisable to follow Vastu to open the gates to a happy and prosperous life.

I've often talked about the power of online organizing for the desi community. There have been many sites (besides our much loved Sepia Mutiny) that have attempted to faciliate this for our community; The now defunct DesiOrgs.us, the weekly profiles from The Desi Connect, and the still beta networking site Desi Page. Last month, a new site hit the inter-desi-networks, the South Asian Forum.

The South Asian Forum aims to tell the story of South Asians through the lens of its organizations and organizing work. From one-one-one interviews with community Youth Solidarity Summerorganizations to an extensive history and framework of South Asians in the U.S., this Forum hopes to capture the deep and rich history of South Asian collective action in the U.S.

In addition, the Forum brings together a collection of various resources and tools, such as an online directory of organizations and a census fact sheet, to aid those working in or interested in the South Asian community.

Through the collection of data, sharing of resources, and storytelling we can identify current and emerging issues, barriers and gaps, and develop sustainable strategies for the future. [link]

This website has a lot of potential, and is a wealth of information for anything related to the South Asian American diaspora. The website is well divided into different sections- such as the history of South Asians and South Asian organizing in the U.S., to the voices of our community with interviews and surveys that have been done, all the way to Census resources. Most importantly, at least when it comes to building networks and coalitions, is the South Asians Organizations Directory -- a database of various types of organization serving the brown community. This fabulous online resource was put together by a task force of leaders in our community.

…because now, you can’t read Blogspot or Typepad-hosted blogs in India. That means no Barmaid, no Abhi, no MD, no Brimful, no Badmash, no Maisnon. Erstwhile Mutineer Manish has more (natch) on Ultrabrown:

For all the talk of India’s freedom and democracy, the Indian government has apparently just censored all of Blogspot and Typepad. For shame. Blogspot- and Typepad-hosted blogs are inaccessible from my Bombay ISP and many others and seem to be blocked at the Airtel Internet backbone in Delhi. Geocities is reportedly blocked as well.[link]

Sabahat Iqbal Ashraf pointed out the utter lameness of this action via the ASATA mailing list:

As I was saying all along, unenlightened Internet policies are not a Pakistani monopoly; the Indian establishment can be just as “efficient” in the matter. First it was only Pakistan blocking most blogs, now it seems the Indian establishment is getting into the act…

Apparently, terrorists are using blogs to communicate, but Ultrabrown notes that Dr Gulshan Rai, Director of the Computer Emergency Response Team—India (CERT-IN) feigned cluelessness when asked about this unwelcome development:

“Somebody must have blocked some sites. What is your problem?“…

Awesome.

I can’t improve on Manish’s response to that:

As the world’s back office, for India to blame overzealous techies would hardly be credible. It’s not yet clear which blogs the government was targeting, but the tactic of banning Blogspot is nothing less than outright repression — mimicking the tactics Pakistan used to shut down discussion of Danish cartoons critical of Islam. India is now in the august company of some of the world’s least free nations…

…because I’m too busy freaking out over the possibility he raises at the end of his post:

These repeated incidents are also a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on Web apps centralized on a small handful of domains. What’ll you do when your government blocks Gmail?

Shivam Vij has a detailed and worrisome post about his telephonic attempts to figure out what the hell is going on, here. He also has a grim sort of workaround, since not all platforms are censored equally:

Is there a moral of the story? Yes, there is. Shift to your own domain and your own hosting and most of all, to Wordpress. [link]

…or, click your ruby slippers together thrice and chant, “There’s no speech like free, there’s no speech like free, there’s no speech like…

There is no sphere of life that is safe from the internet, not even in India. As proof, I bring you paan.com the website of Bombay’s most famous brick-and-mortar paanvala [via Amitava Kumar].

He’s probably the city’s most famous paanwala. It’s uncertain whether (as rumours suggest) he drives a Merc, but it’s clear for all the world to see that Prem Shankar Tiwari, the owner of Muchhad Paanwala paan shop on Warden Road, has his own website. It was built in 1998 by a devoted customer Vivek Bhargav. At paan.com, not only can you order paan online (a minimum order of 10 is required), you can also play a game that requires the participant to run from one end of the screen to the other to catch blobs of paan spit in a virtual bucket. [Link]

While you can order your paan online, there’s no word about whether you can spit it online once you’re done chawing it. [Whether ironically or not, right under the name of the store, the website exhorts the user to keep Bombay “clean and green”]

The website is quite amusing, and answered my burning question - why name a paan shop after facial hair?

His father Shyam Charan Tiwari established the shop thirty years ago. The shop was named Muchhad because his father Shyam Charan Tiwari had mustache so big and long that it touched his ears. And now it’s become a family tradition, all the four brothers have long mustache. [Link]

Click here to play the aforementioned game. It involves the player, holding a bucket at street level and trying to catch disgusting human head sized blobs of paan spit dropping from Bombay windows. Step aside Dante, I now know what hell looks like.

Related Posts: Tai-pan tries paan, Boing Boing discovers paan, Candy Cain

I have numerous jobs in addition to my writing, one of which involves working with new technology. I know it’s a stereotype to say that Indians are good with computers, but I welcome it in my case, mostly because it’s hilariously untrue. I’ve avoided technology as much as possible—I didn’t have an email address until 1996, and it’s still a crapshoot if my cell phone is working—despite coming from a family of technophiles. What they actually do to these computers, I have no idea, but despite being voted Most Likely to Spill Coke On the Keyboard Again, I find myself reasonably skilled at this new IT-oriented gig. Nature or nurture? Or dumb luck? Discuss.

But what about those who are not just computer illiterate, but actually unable to read or write? Microsoft has a plan: make computers that don’t depend on words. This March 2006 USA Today article talks about how a new breed of computers can help often-illiterate domestic servants:

Working with a local advocacy group, Microsoft has developed a prototype of a system that would connect illiterate domestic workers in India with families seeking their services. The system uses pictures, video and voice commands to tell women what jobs are available, how much the jobs pay and where they are.

Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? For one thing:

they [the domestic workers] had trouble seeing why a computerized system for finding work was better than traditional word-of-mouth

Additionally, the computer’s images and pictures had to bridge language and cultural gaps, such as this one:

the women associated neighborhoods with landmarks rather than addresses, so an interactive map and verbal directions had to be tweaked to represent that.

Finally—the big hurdle: implementation. This CNET article discusses the difficulties poorer areas of India have getting computer literate. Apart from the most obvious issue of languages, there is problem of power:

To save power, the PCs run on car and truck batteries. Unfortunately, the batteries regularly need recharging and the public electrical power system can’t always handle the demand.

and crime:

Three weeks ago, the village transformer blew because too many people tapped into it illegally, a chronic problem here. The government refused to rebuild the transformer until the villagers promised to punish anyone who stole power.

and bad freakin’ luck:

The day after it was rebuilt, the transformer blew again.

Every time someone claims that there are no communists left in China, or that the Chinese economy will surpass India’s in the long term, I point out the latest example of China micro-managing its most entrepreneurial sectors. (In contrast, India tends to overregulate old sectors and jumps into new ones, which government babus comprehend dimly, only when the moral police perceive political advantage.)

The Chinese government has now inserted itself into multiplayer game design. Gamers who spend more than three hours online will be stripped of points. Gamers who spend more than five hours online will be kicked off entirely:

The government in Beijing is reported to be introducing the controls to deter people from playing for longer than three consecutive hours… The new system will impose penalties on players who spend more than three hours playing a game by reducing the abilities of their characters. Gamers who spend more than five hours will have the abilities of their in-game character severely limited. Players will be forced to take a five-hour break before they can return to a game. [Link]

… there’s the [South Korean] couple whose infant expired as they played games in an Internet cafe; there is the [South Korean] death that occurred from exhaustion; and there are even murders that have resulted from feuds begun online… [Link]

Even the U.S. may succumb, though more to tax than to nag:

In the near future, the IRS could require game developers to keep records of all the transactions that take place in virtual economies and tax players on their gains before any game currency is converted into dollars. [Link]

I actually see the wisdom in this. Maybe they can implement a one-hour cutoff on bad first dates, a two-hour cutoff on crappy TV, and a six-month term limit on despotic nanny regimes.

Personally I spend too much time in front of my PC. I look forward to the day when they send my ass a parking ticket. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’d have to park it on alternate sides of the apartment for seat-sweeping.

A BJP leader is about to go on yet another campaign swing disguised as a yatra (Hindu pilgrimage). The tour features a rather pimped-out motorhome which the political party calls a rath (chariot). The party doesn’t even attempt to hide its appropriation of religion, but at least there’s a Batmobile factor:

The high tech rath has all sorts of conveniences for the leader of [the] opposition in Parliament, including a restroom, a toilet, wardrobe, satellite TV with LCD screen, wash basin, hydraulic lift for two persons [for campaigning from the roof], sofa set, bed, 10 floodlights, six speakers and a public address system…

… the vehicle [is] not bullet proof… [Link]

It has a hydraulic lift — imagine a politician rising up from the floor like some enraged gopher, theatrical deus ex machina or Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard. Dramatic.

The rath can’t possibly look any odder than the Popemobile:

The popemobile is an informal name for the specially designed vehicle used by the pope during public appearances… Several models have been used…

… yet another is a modified Mercedes-Benz with a small windowed “room” in the back where the Pope stands. Since the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, the popemobile was fitted with bulletproof glass on four sides…

… it had bulletproof windows, bombproof parts and it was inspected by the Swiss guards… Past popemobiles were adapted Mercedes-Benz G-Class off-road vehicles, and current models are actually based on the ML-series of off-road vehicles sold in the United States. [Link]

A new breed of NYC subway card vending machines which can sniff trace amounts of explosives on customers’ hands is about to be tested in Baltimore.

K9 agent

Two companies have teamed up to develop a machine that can detect whether the straphanger who just touched the start button or screen has recently handled explosives. Alerts - including a digital image of the person at the machine and the type of substance detected - can be quickly transmitted to law enforcement officials, company officials said. The device can be programmed to lock turnstiles at the station… A pilot project to test its effectiveness in a mass transit system is expected to be launched in Baltimore in the coming weeks. [Link]

The companies involved may be going this way because there are fewer card vending machines than subway turnstiles, and there’s more space inside each one to cram in sniffers. But this method so indirect, it’s like looking for a lost quarter under a streetlight instead of where you actually dropped it.

First, a terrorist smart enough to build a bomb is probably smart enough to buy a subway card from any newsstand or convenience store. Second, trace sniffing seems like it could be easily circumvented by using gloves and changing clothes (pure conjecture, this is not my field). Third, there’s a risk of false alarms from people who work with explosives-like substances, such as gardeners who use fertilizer, and those who work with explosives as part of their jobs, such as the mole-men currently digging new water tunnels in NYC.

NYC’s bag check security theater seem to have faded away after the post-7/7 hysteria, but subway cities still need to scan for actual bombs, not indirect conjectures of WMD-related program activities. Entrances and turnstiles are the right places to put these scanners, not easily-bypassed vending machines. And profiling is just as useless — based on actual empirical evidence in NYC, we’d be targeting white male software developers and Latino ex-cops:

New Internet censorship in Pakistan aimed at the Danish cartoons of Muhammed has inflicted more collateral damage than a wayward JDAM. All Google-hosted blogs have now been banned (thanks, SloganMurugan):

Pakistan telecom authorities have blocked several websites inviting people to draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad… Bloggers in Pakistan became first became aware of the ban on 28 February when they were unable to access a popular blog hosting site, Blogspot. One of the blocked sites is hosted on [Google] Blogspot, which led to the blocking of all web journals hosted on the site… They say they have still been able to edit and update their blogs, but not able to read them… [Link]

… the govt. must have ordered local ISP’s to block certain websites. All the major ISP’s in Pakistan are blocking weblogs hosted at blogspot.com. [Link]

Blogger, the editing half, was spared the axe. There’s been no official announcement, although last week Pakistan’s highest court started ordering ISPs to block sites carrying the cartoons:

The Supreme Court on Thursday directed the government to block internet sites displaying sacrilegious cartoons and called explanation from authorities concerned as to why these sites had not been blocked earlier… Two petitions were filed… seeking complete blockage of sites showing blasphemous depictions and… seeking registration of cases under blasphemy. [Link]

Any secular democracy’s least-favorite phrase: ‘injures religious sentiments.’ Disheartened Pakistani bloggers are blaming bureaucratic ineptness and going around the problem via proxies. With respect to freedom of speech, Pakistan is not China:

Pakistani bloggers agree the blocking of Blogspot cannot be intentional… [Link]

This anecdote about Google cofounder Sergey Brin is part of a startup PR launch, but it’s interesting. I wonder what the dare was. ‘I cook, you eat’ doesn’t sound like a very interesting bet:

The victim

[Anand] Rajaraman and Harinarayan were co-founders of Junglee, an early Web database company… In 1994, Rajaraman proudly told Brin he’d acquired a new computer with the latest version of Microsoft Windows. Brin… went over to Rajaraman’s apartment and installed Linux… on his computer…

Brin even took on Rajaraman’s practice of eating vegetarian, a family tradition. One evening, Brin went over to Rajaraman’s apartment, baked a fish in his oven, and served it to him with some lemon. Rajaraman ate it. [Link]

Tamarind once served me the lamb version of the paneer dish I ordered, two large, flat white squares. I downed the whole thing thinking it was the worst paneer I’d ever had and didn’t catch on until I saw the bill. Gross.

By the way, your bagels contain an extract from human hair and chicken feathers, your milk contains cattle hormones and pus, your beer was clarified with fish extract, your miso soup may contain fish broth and your Kiwi Strawberry Snapple is colored with a dye from ground beetles. Perfect recycling. I see some aren’t taking this meatitude lying down. Bon appetit!

‘Twas the night before Christmas,
And all through the house
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a mouse…

All along, I thought desis were good at forming cliques. Actually, it turns out they’re good at click farming — hiring people to click ads on your own Web site to earn pay-per-click payments fraudulently.

The Jan. 2006 issue of Wired mentions this widely-disseminated ToI scare story from last year:

With her baby on her lap, Maya Sharma (name changed) gets down to work every evening from her eighth-floor flat at Vasant Vihar [in New Delhi]. Maya’s job is to click on online advertisements. She doesn’t care about the ads, but diligently keeps count — it’s $0.18 to $0.25 per click.

A growing number of housewives, college graduates, and even working professionals across metropolitan cities are rushing to click paid Internet ads to make $100 to $200 (up to Rs 9,000) per month… “It’s boring, but it is extra money for a couple of hours of clicking weblinks every day…” [Link]

Because search engines make their money whether the clicks are from legitimate customers or from scammers, they are only weakly incentivized to prevent the fraud. Those being ripped off: the small businesses who advertise.

Clicks are bought to boost number of hits for web ads or online advertisers who are not tracking user location. [Link]

Users are careful to avoid triggering anti-fraud algorithms by not clicking too often:

“I have no interest in what appears when clicking an ad. I care only whether to pause 60 seconds or 90 seconds, as money is credited if you stay online for a fixed time,” says another user. [Link]

Similarly, spammers are using image captcha farms in India — hiring people to enter the anti-spam picture codes which Web sites require to prove that you’re not a spammer.

Against this backdrop of outright theft, gold farming starts looking legitimate.

Related posts: Why isn’t gold farming big in India?, With a little help from my friends

Maybe get a blister on your little finger,
Maybe get a blister on your thumb
That ain’t workin’, that’s the way to do it

For some time I’ve been keeping an eye on gold farming, the business of paying kids to build up loot in online games and then selling it for real money to Western marks. Although some entrepreneurs use automated scripts, most use humans: 100,000 kids in China, South Korea and Indonesia supposedly work in the industry. In a recent crossover into real life, someone in Shanghai murdered his buddy for selling a virtual sword he wasn’t supposed to sell.

Most of the players here actually make less than a quarter an hour, but they often get room, board and free computer game play in these “virtual sweatshops…” “They say that in some of these popular games, 40 or 50 percent of the players are actually Chinese farmers.” [Link]

The economist Edward Castranova has calculated that if you took the real dollars spent within EverQuest as an index, its game world… would be the 77th richest nation on the planet, while annual player earnings [per capita] surpass those of citizens of Bulgaria, India or China. [Link]

Most stories I’ve read treat gold farming as a curiosity, which is a bit of a paradox. One, journalists think of valuable property in games as an oxymoron, even though they earn their own living from intellectual property. Two, many journalists are non-technical, even though their work is often published online:

The idea that sums of money are being paid for what appears to be an unproductive economic activity will cheese off traditionalists who believe that unless a job is located in an industrial factory, it serves no good purpose. [Link]

Back in May of 2003 Indian American Biswanath Halder went on a shooting spree on the campus of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. CBS news reported at the time:

The 62-year-old man accused of a shooting spree at a prestigious Cleveland university had military training with the Indian army and a grudge against an employee, authorities said Saturday.

Biswanath Halder, armed with two handguns, allegedly killed one person, wounded two others and held police at bay for seven hours Friday in a shiny, swirling building filled with twisting corridors that complicated his capture.

Halder wore a bulletproof vest and a wig glued on “a kind of World War II Army helmet” as he walked the halls of Case Western Reserve University’s Peter B. Lewis Building and fired hundreds of rounds, police Chief Edward Lohn said.

“There’s a trail of blood throughout,” Lohn said. “It was a cat-and-mouse game.”

Now, nearly three years later, Halder’s trial has begun (thanks for the tip Joyce J.):

“This case is about two things, arrogance and selfishness,” assistant county prosecutor Rick Bell told the jury in the Cuyahoga County common pleas court yesterday.

Halder, accused of killing student Norman Wallace and injuring two other persons during the siege on may 9, 2003, has repeatedly said information he considered vital to his own life’s work was destroyed.

The defence position is that Halder was trying to protect “mankind” from a cyber criminal. [Link]

Abhi posted earlier about Sri Lanka objecting to high-res satellite imagery of sensitive government sites on Google Earth. At the time, Indian officials were also worried but had given up trying to block it. Ironically, the post came on one of India’s two biggest military parade holidays:

India agrees. Reuters quotes an anonymous security official there as confirming that “the issue of satellite imagery had been discussed at the highest level but the government had concluded that ‘technology cannot be stopped’…” [Link]

There’s apparently been a change of heart behind the red sandstone in Delhi. You can’t stop technology, but you can lean on companies. India has escalated the issue to the man who used to run India’s missile program:

Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam expressed concern Saturday about a free mapping program from Google Inc., warning it could help terrorists by providing satellite photos of potential targets… The Google site contains clear aerial photos of India’s parliament building, the president’s house and surrounding government offices in New Delhi. There are also some clear shots of Indian defense establishments… [Link]

India’s not the only one complaining:

The governments of South Korea and Thailand and lawmakers in the Netherlands have expressed similar concerns… South Korean newspapers said Google Earth provides images of the presidential Blue House and military bases in the country, which remains technically at war with communist North Korea. The North’s main nuclear facility at Yongbyon is among sites in that country displayed on the service. [Link]

This issue is similar to that of the deliberate error injected by civilian GPS satellites to prevent use by enemy missiles. On one hand, Google fuzzes out sensitive U.S. sites, so why not let other legitimate governments submit these requests as well? On the other, the public has a right to know, and foreign providers of satellite data will always step into the gap.

I come down on the side of consistency. As a private company rather than an extension of the U.S. government, Google should act even-handedly, no matter which approach it takes.

Forbes magazine says audiophiles are apeshit over a cheap, $30 amp which sound as clear as high-end competitors. It’s the audiophile version of Two-Buck Chuck:

… the T-Amp was nothing to brag about, just a… battery-powered amplifier that hooks up to chintzy cardboard speakers. A firm called Sonic Impact Technologies introduced it to no acclaim in 2003. Then orders suddenly took off last fall, surging from a hundred to a thousand units a week…

… audiophiles were raving about the T-Amp on the Internet, claiming this tiny plastic wedge produced music as sweet-sounding as amplifiers costing thousands of dollars. The customer had “hooked it up to an $18,000 pair of speakers and a $6,000 CD player,” Bracke says. A reviewer on a Web site in Italy called the T-Amp the most amazing product in 25 years. And an online cottage industry had sprung up around the T-Amp, with companies such as Red Wine Audio, in Auburn, Massachusetts, stuffing the electronic guts of the plastic amps into sleek metal cases and selling them for up to $1,200… [Link]

The secret to this amp is an innovative audio chipset designed by an entrepreneur named Adya Tripathi. Is he the new Amar Bose?

Tripath’s founder, Adya Tripathi, figured out a way to make a digital amplifier that produces very little distortion. Tripathi, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and a veteran of National Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices and IBM, found that part of the trick involves pulsing on and off at far higher rates—millions of times per second… Tripath’s higher pulse rate creates more chances to offset signal distortion by applying feedback… The T-Amp uses Tripath’s lowest-end chip… which puts out 15 watts of power and costs $3… [Link]

Tripathi is from Benares:

The advance comes from a little chip produced by Tripath Technology Inc., a 150-employee company in Santa Clara, Calif. It was founded in 1995 by Adya S. Tripathi, a 48-year-old engineer from the holy city of Varanasi… Before taking the company public… Tripathi secured $50 million in funding from such high-tech heavyweights as Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc. [Link]

This is when I expect a certain mutineer to roll into Adya uncle’s office as a long-lost relative and then bounce, saying goodbye to the sucka mutineers who fly economy

British bhangra label Nachural has announced that five of its tracks will appear on a Microsoft racing game for the Xbox 360:

… Nachural has taken bhangra onto another level in announcing the placement of tracks from its catalogue onto [Project Gotham Racing 3], the game to be launched by Xbox [360]… in the winter of 2005…

Two tracks by Achanak (‘Teri Muhabbatan’ and the ‘Lak Noo’ remix) and three tracks by Tigerstyle (‘Boliyaan,’ ‘Akh Mastani’ and ‘Maan Doeba Da’)… This is the first time that bhangra tracks… have been placed [in] any interactive game… [Link]

Art finally imitates life: First bhangra tracks in a console game?Vinod and I used to car-dance to Achanak while jamming from sterile Seattle up to rockin’ Vancouver on the weekends. Personally, I can’t wait to play berserker bhangra while fragging demons asuras in the next version of Doom. Bhangra’s raw energy is like Nine Inch Nails’ Doom soundtrack, only less sadist. Bow to the power of the turbanator!

In other news, Microsoft plans to release an even deadlier version of Halo (screenshot). It will also one-up Super Mario with Super Patel Brothers, where players must collect cheap vittles from an Indian food superstore in Jackson Heights.

Check out my new blog editor, RocketPost. Most of us at Sepia Mutiny use it to write our posts. A blog editor is like a word processor that publishes to your blog. If you’ve ever lost a post because your browser crashed, you should use one.

The one we use uploads photos automatically and checks spelling. It also lets you link to old posts quickly, adds source cites to quotes, links to Google, Wikipedia and Flickr quickly, adds those big, fat pullout quotes and so on. I use it to post to Sepia Mutiny and my personal blog at the same time.

If you’re an active commenter here or have donated to the blog before today, email me and I’ll hook you up with a free copy. Otherwise, it’s totally free if you use Blogger. It also works with Movable Type and WordPress, and TypePad is coming soon. It’s Windows only for now, but we’re looking for a good Mac developer.

This frickin’ thing has been my personal project for a year and a half. It’s my nerd novel, my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the blogosphere. Please check it out and tell all your blogging friends!

P.S. A certain sharp-eyed mutineer spotted it yesterday…

Update: Please post technical questions here so as not to bother the good people of the Mutiny.

Wow! I feel … represented, and I barely can read or write in Gurmukhi. Still, it tickles me pink to realize that my grandmother could now Google me, if only she could use a computer.

This is incredible [I’m such a gushing fan-boy] ! Here are some of the other South Asian orthographies that one can google in: Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, Telegu, Urdu, Bengali (Bengla), Bihari, Malayalam, Sindhi. Interestingly, the source for this list also included Uighur as one of the languages associated with India. I thought the Uighur were Turkic peoples living in China, their big muslim minority. Are there any in South Asia?

UPDATE: As Saheli points out in the comments, these are only languages for which Google has an interface, as distinct from languages that Google indexes.

Busybee brings us an update on the case against Jasmine Singh, a NJ based, 17 year-old Sikh hacker:

An Indian-American teenager, described by prosecutors as an online gangster, was sentenced to five years in prison by a New Jersey Superior Court judge last month for hacking into online businesses, costing them over $1.5 million in revenue losses.

In addition to serving the sentence, Jasmine Singh, 17, of Edison in Middlesex County, New Jersey, was also ordered by Judge Frederick DeVesa to pay restitution to the tune of $35,000.

“Online gangster?” Hyperbole, thought I, until further search lead me right back, natch, to the SepiaMutiny archives, where Manish brilliantly explains how this kid controlled over 2,000 PCs using a Trojan horse named “Jennifer Lopez.” He promised naked pics, gullible horndogs lost their computers.

So beta did a bad, bad, thing.

A very bad thing. Techworld has a write-up that sounds glamorously close to the plot of Hackers, only sadly, no Angelina Jolie:

A de Menezes update: police and military radios both were on different frequencies and apparently didn’t work underground. It’s shades of 9/11.

Police marksmen and army surveillance teams following Jean Charles de Menezes onto a Tube train could not receive orders in the vital moments before he was shot dead because their radios did not work underground… The undercover officers sitting alongside Mr de Menezes are understood to have decided he was not a threat, but they could not get this message back to Gold Command at the Yard nor relay it to the marksmen.

As the firearms officers ran into the station they are believed to have been out of touch with everyone else involved in the operation. It has been disclosed that the two groups involved — one from Scotland Yard and the other from the Army — were using different radio networks as they trailed the innocent electrician from his home on July 22. Officers on the train are understood to have decided that from the way Mr de Menezes was dressed, and that he was not carrying a bag, he was not about to blow himself up. [Link]

Active suspects should never have been let onto the tube in the first place:

One of the troops who accompanied the Yard marksmen on to the tube also reportedly told military chiefs that the armed police arrived far too late and should have intercepted their target outside Stockwell Underground station, in South London. [Link]

Over in the tech world, a debate rages over the naming of Really Simple Syndication, a format which lets you subscribe to multiple blogs and receive regular updates. Some say its orange button is ugly, its acronym too geeky for your grandma to grok. They suggest the simpler word ‘subscribe’ or, perchance, ‘feed.’ Others say that people learn acronyms all the time: XP, BMW, CYA. (Disclaimer: I’ve written a blog editor and prefer non-technical terms.)

What few are saying is that the little saffron RSS button really freaks out millions of desis all over the Net. It’s the flip side of the cultural hijacking of the swastika, and the acronym makes it looks like a donation button for right-wing Hindus. Godse would be proud.

The Internet standards groups are getting ready to roll out their next proposal, Very High Performance. In retaliation, India has released its version, Konsistently Krunk Kaching 

The drumbeat for racial profiling grows louder in New York City (thanks, DesiDancer):

Two elected New York City officials say Arabs should be targeted for searches on city subways. They claim the NYPD has been wasting time with random checks in its effort to prevent terrorism in the transit system… The New York Police Department said in a statement that racial profiling is illegal, of doubtful effectiveness and against department policy. [Link]

… they are most likely to be young Muslim men. Unfortunately, however, this demographic group won’t be profiled. Instead, the authorities will be stopping Girl Scouts and grannies… commuters need to be most aware of young men praying to Allah and smelling like flower water. [Link]

Even Tunku Varadarajan of the WSJ came out for profiling desis:

I find that I am—for the first time in my life—part of a “group” that is under broad but emphatic visual suspicion. In other words, I fit a visual “profile,” and the fit is most disconcerting… one must be satisfied either that profiling ought to be done or at least… that it isn’t something that “ought not to be done…” The practice cannot be rejected with the old moral clarity. The profiling process is not precisely racial but broadly physical according to “Muslim type…” [Link]

I’m pretty sure the 7/7 bombers did not leave the house all gulab attar-fabulous. It’s a practice more Arab than Pakistani, and the smell would have drawn too much attention. Racial profiling, the knee-jerk reaction to terrorist attacks on public transit, is a fool’s game. Instead of detecting inaccurate signatures (black, Arab, South Asian), the goal must be to detect behavior (carrying a bomb). The goal is accuracy. Otherwise you let deadly attacks succeed while wasting massive amounts of resources searching ordinary people.

The arms race between black hat and white hat has deep analogues in the military, the human immune system, antivirus tools, firewalls, spam filters and so on. In realm of computer security, behavior detection has utterly buried signature detection in terms of effectiveness. Signatures are trivial to spoof once you know what’s being looked for. Most viruses, worms and spam now mutate with every attack, it’s designed in from the beginning.

On 7/7, Al Qaeda switched from using Arabs to using Pakistanis and a Caribbean. Not two weeks later, they switched to using Africans. The pool of Muslim phenotypes is enormous; they can tap Chechens, Uzbeks, Filipinos, Indonesians, Chinese, Malays, white converts, black Americans, red-haired Kashmiris, blue-eyed Afghans. This is why the NYC mayor says the NYPD will use a true random sample instead of racial profiling. It’s not out of liberal fuzzy-mindedness, it’s because they’re being hard-nosed about saving lives. A race-based approach fails completely. It’s suicidal to rely on it.

An innocent bystander is dead, shot by the good guys. Now the London mayor is claiming that Jean Charles de Menezes, the ‘South Asian-looking’ guy shot by British special forces, was actually a victim of terrorism rather than the cops. It’s Livingstone, I presume:

London Mayor Ken Livingstone described Mr Menezes as a “victim of the terrorist attacks”. [Link]

More innocent people could be shot dead by police… Scotland Yard’s chief admitted yesterday. [Link]

Livingstone’s statement is faulty moral calculus and actively blocks the solution. First and foremost, you must assign responsibility accurately, otherwise you’ll never fix the problem. The terrorist attacks are a contributing cause. The primary cause is the commando who held him down and shot him seven times in the head.

Shoot to kill is indeed a good policy when you’re highly certain the suspect is a suicide bomber. But the criteria have to be tightened and the threshold for action tweaked. We have empirical proof of it: it’s de Menezes’ body. ‘He ran’ and ‘he had brown skin’ aren’t reason enough to kill someone. The criminal justice system doesn’t execute or even imprison people for those reasons.

This is an issue apart from the terrorists, who are obviously mass murderers. It’s of interest because society holds sway over its government’s shoot-to-kill criteria in a way that it doesn’t over deluded, nihilist 19-year-olds. We grant governments a monopoly on the use of force precisely because they have the duty and the means to use it correctly.

Several nonlethal weapons which might work exist today: bomb jammers, stun guns, beanbag guns, rubber bullets, plastic bullets, pepperball guns, sticky shockers, immobilizing goo, veiling glare lasers, flash bang grenades, pain-inducing microwaves and millimeter wave body scanners for detecting explosives.

Even more advanced solutions such as electromagnetic pulse guns and microwave guns which only affect electronics are under development. Many waves (electromagnetic and laser) affect different materials in different ways, for example by discriminating between the human body and explosives or detonators. X-rays, CAT scans, surgical and dental lasers, and luggage scanners rely on a variety of these effects.

But when you say ‘it wasn’t our fault,’ when you go into denial, you immediately truncate the search for a fix and the R&D investment needed to solve the problem. Western militaries have invested significantly in technology to curtail friendly fire. It’s worth doing so for law enforcement as well.

Previous post here.

At age nine, Arfa Randhawa from Faisalabad, Pakistan, became the youngest person ever to pass a Microsoft certification exam in programming (via Slashdot):

Sitting down for a personal meeting with Bill Gates this week, 10-year-old Arfa Karim Randhawa asked the Microsoft founder why the company doesn’t hire people her age…

She has created basic Windows applications, such as a calculator and a sorting program, primarily in the C# programming language… The institute instructors assumed it would take Arfa about a year to go through the process of certification for developing Windows applications. But after four months… she passed the required exams….

“I saw her doing something extraordinary, making presentations,” said her father, Amjad Karim, who serves with a U.N. peacekeeping force in Africa and came with his daughter to Microsoft this week… he first noticed something unusual when she started displaying a remarkable memory, perhaps photographic, at a young age…

Later in the afternoon, she sat outside with S. “Soma” Somasegar, a Microsoft corporate vice president, and described her vision for a self-navigating car. [Link]

BillG evinced some curiosity:

… he asked her at what age Muslim women start wearing the “Hijab”… Arfa… extended an invitation to him to visit… The Microsoft chief reportedly accepted the invitation and said that he would visit Pakistan in the near future. [Link]

Arfa says she wants to build satellites or software. She has stiff competition in Mridul Seth of Bangalore, who at age eight became the youngest to pass the Microsoft system admin exam.

Somasegar blogged their meeting here. Related post here.

News.com just posted photos of the Infosys campus in Bangalore. Wow, Karnataka really can be sterilized so it’s just as boring as Santa Clara. But it’s nice to see homo technorati in their natural habitat.

Their signature building looks like the retro-Jetson TWA terminal at JFK. The landscaping makes it look like those SoCal Spanish-style haciendas rented out discreetly for porn shoots.

Don’t you think you’ll be telling your nieces and nephews to work here someday?

Here’s a surfeit of campus snapshots. Related post here.

Remember those fake chain emails about some event making the entire Internet crash? Or all those lame sci-fi plots about bringing down an empire by destroying a single ship or one little exhaust port? Leave it to the subcontinent to make an urban legend come true (thanks, o anonymous one):

An undersea cable carrying data between Pakistan and the outside world has developed a serious fault, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, telecommunications officials said. The system crashed late on Monday and was still down on Tuesday evening. Many offices across the country ground to a halt…

“It’s a worst-case scenario. We are literally blank,” said a senior foreign banker who declined to be identified… Airlines and credit card companies were among the businesses hit by the crash. “It’s a total disaster,” said Nasir Ali, commercial director of the private Air Blue airline. “We have a Web-based booking system which has totally collapsed.”

PTCL provided satellite back-up for the link, which meant some people were able to get access to a very slow Internet connection, Hussain said, but users complained it was too slow to be of any use.

Both the Net and the connection to the cellular networks are down. The company in charge is saying it’ll take two weeks to repair:

Reports quoting engineers said the fault would likely to take two weeks to repair. The breakdown affects the main fibre-optic link beneath the Arabian Sea, 35 kilometres south of the city of Karachi. The cable is owned by a consortium of 92 countries - with SingTel acting as its operating agents.

The complex repair work may require a complete shutdown, potentially causing disruption in India, the United Arab Emirates, Djibouti and Oman, which are also linked to the damaged cable.

Y’all may be familiar with geeksta rap:

Geeksta rappers… bust rhymes about elite script compiling and dope machine code… Nerdcore now refers to artists waxing lyrical about topics as disparate as engineering and Lord of the Rings…

“50 Cent has dance clubs and oral sex, we have awesome video cards…”

“If the genre is to succeed, you’re going to need some females…” [Wired News]

You may have heard of the Northbridge-Southbridge rap feud:

“Feuds between Nas and Jay-Z, Biggie and Tupac and 50 Cent and Ja Rule have… [resulted] in more exposure for both artists, so I decided to bring this to the world of CS gangsta rap by starting a feud with MC Plus+,” Monzy explained. [Wired News]

Well, all the trash IMs and dis MP3s have finally claimed their first real-life victim. A desi script kiddie from an Edison high school commanded a botnet to attack a rival online vintage jersey shop. The attack took down an entire desi-owned ISP in upstate New York as well as an Internet backbone in Pennsylvania:

… on one day over the summer it knocked out a “backbone provider” of Internet service in eastern Pennsylvania for 12 hours… [Detroit Free Press]

Jasmine (Jasminder?) Singh infected thousands of PCs with a Trojan horse by spreading a file called ‘Jennifer Lopez’ over file sharing networks. Victims expecting to see J.Lo in BootyVision actually ended up letting Singh control their computers.

Early last July, with control over ~2,000 PCs, he commanded them to take down his victim’s Web site:

Soumen Das, owner of a small Internet provider in Pittsford, N.Y. … realized he was on the receiving end of… a flood of traffic so immense that a site has no option but to shut down. What Das didn’t know at the time, and wouldn’t know until months later, was that the attacker was a 17-year-old high school student from Edison…

Singh’s target? A handful of merchants that sell “retro” or “throwback” sports apparel - replicas of shirts and caps worn by teams of yesteryear… His motivation? A few sneakers and a watch. That was the payment offered by Jason Arabo, an 18-year-old community college student in a Detroit suburb. Arabo had his own retro sports apparel business and was hoping to steal customers from his competitors… [Bergen Record]

Wiki WiFi: The desi-heavy island of Mauritius is turning into even more of a hot spot. It plans to be the first island with blanket wireless Internet (via Slashdot):

From his office window in Mauritius’ new Cybertower—a sleek blue glass and gray stone tower that is the heart of the country’s first high-tech park—Rahim can point out one of five new radio transmission antennas his company has installed in the last month perched beside a Hindu temple on a nearby green mountainside… The antennas now beam his wireless Internet service over about 60 percent of the island and within range of 70 percent of its population… Getting to every last corner, he said, might take a little longer. “We have so many sugar cane fields,” he lamented, tracing the island’s outline on a map.

An undersea broadband fiber-optic cable, completed three years ago, gives the island fast and reliable phone and Internet links… Many of the country’s 1.2 million people—a mix of French, Indian, Chinese and African descendants—are bilingual or trilingual, speaking French, English and either Chinese or Hindi. The country is democratic, peaceful and stable…

But the government’s telecom monopoly made it reluctant to issue the permits:

Because the government makes so much money from the company and its cable, it has been reluctant to open the market to competitors that might reduce Telecom’s profits, even though the country’s National Telecommunications Policy, passed in 2004, calls for “positive discrimination” by regulators in favor of start-up companies facing off against established firms like Telecom.

Mauritius really does sound like India ;)

Related post here.

The CEO of the dominant page layout software company has suddenly parted ways with his employer after a two-year reign. Kamar Aulakh was a 10-year Quark veteran and former VP of R&D:

“… effective immediately, Kamar Aulakh is no longer with the company,” read a statement. Aulakh became Quark’s president in 2003 and ultimately succeeded Quark’s mercurial CEO Fred Ebrahimi in February 2004. [Macworld]

Hailing from Aulakh village in Gurdaspur district in Punjab, he is a product of Punjab Engineering College (PEC) here. Remembering his school days in Shimla, he says with a sense of pride, “I went to Bishop Cotton School, which helped me develop strong foundation. After doing graduation in mechanical engineering from PEC in 1974, I went to the USA where I did Masters in Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois and MBA from Indiana University…” Based in Switzerland, he visits India and Denver regularly. [Chandigarh Tribune]

The unexplained departure could have to do with declining sales. Quark is privately held and doesn’t disclose its financials, but it’s struggled in its move from Mac to Windows. It could be a clash with the emotional chairman, Farhad ‘Fred’ Ebrahimi. Or it could be something else entirely.

QuarkXpress is the #1 page layout program by market share. Aulakh put Quark’s 1,300-person development center in Mohali, a Chandigarh suburb where Dell has also invested. That center is Quark’s main campus, larger than its Denver campus in headcount:

… along with the Chairman, Mr Fred Ebrahimi, a team from the company visited Bangalore, Noida, Gurgaon, Delhi and Hyderabad. Since I knew the city, I convinced him to visit Chandigarh as well. To my surprise, he was bowled over by the planned location and cosmopolitan lifestyle of the city and decided to opt for this location. [Chandigarh Tribune]

In India, Ebrahimi will soon start building a dream city in Punjab, spread over 5,000 acres, bringing state-of-the-art construction technology to the country.  Quark City, will boast India’s biggest shopping mall, a host of technology campuses ranging from IT to bio-tech and the works, and housing apartments each worth a crore. To make things happen, the Punjab government has eased archaic building restrictions. It also plans to give the SEZ status to Quark City. [Economic Times]

My mom is forever insisting that my blogging activities are going to inevitably get me into all kinds of trouble and ruin many potential career paths. In today’s internet age it seems that everything you do leaves behind web footprints. You can Google almost anyone to find dirt on them. For example, any of the following searches can (and have) led internet surfers to my innocuous little blog:

-new haircuts for wide faced brown haired girls

-dr sanjay gupta honeymoon

-ecstasy induced trance and subliminal messaging

-Why los angeles sucks

-kissinger + cia + chile + allende + cockroaches

-worlds mosts sickest pictures

-bad thinking inside the mind

And of course SO MANY people have at least one atrocious picture of themselves embedded somewhere it the bowels of the internet. It’s a picture that they took (for example) right after they had to walk a half mile on a very humid day when it was drizzling, which in turn made their hair all puffy and chia-pet like. The New York Times Stephanie Rosenbloom writes:

IN the winter of 1996, back when I was a brunette who wore sensible shoes, a photographer snapped my picture during a rehearsal for a college musical. The production mattered; eating and sleeping did not. The resulting portrait showed a pasty, gaunt girl being swallowed by a XXX-large T-shirt.

The only thing more unfortunate than the photo is that nearly a decade after it was taken - a decade in which I became a blonde and graduated to stilettos - it is still the definitive image of me on the World Wide Web, the one that pops up every time my name is entered in a Google search. It even has the dubious distinction of being in the top 10 hits in a list of several hundred, most of them articles I have written.

The photo caption says that as the show’s director, I was working “behind the scenes.” I beg to differ. I am center stage in cyberspace. Never mind that the photograph accompanies an article about my theatrical achievements. If a prospective date were to encounter the virtual me before the flesh-and-blood me, he would not be moved to schedule aperitifs.

But if misery loves company, then there is solace in knowing that many people bristle at the mere thought of being Googled because of the photographs, news clippings or blog entries that they feel do not reflect who they really are. Such is the plight of the Google-ee.

I mean seriously! The caring, sensitive individual that I am (who really just wants to be held) doesn’t come through at all if you Google me to find out who I am. Instead, there is talk of Henry Kissinger and the cockroaches he used in some alleged coup attempt. Any sane person would be scared off. Is it any wonder I can’t get a date?

So does this mean that Microsoft is hiring?

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates slammed the federal government’s strict limits on temporary visas for technology workers, saying that if he had his way, the system would be scrapped entirely. “The theory behind the H-1B (visa)--that too many smart people are coming--that’s what’s questionable,” Gates said Wednesday during a panel discussion at the Library of Congress. “It’s very dangerous. You can get this idea that the world is very scary; let’s cut back on travel...let’s cut back on visas.” Federal quotas on H-1B visas, capped at 65,000 last year, have long been a sore spot for Microsoft and other technology companies. But, Gates said, the increased caliber of research institutions in China and India means that curbs on immigration and guest-workers will pose a greater threat to America’s competitiveness than ever before. [News.com]

Of course, the rudimentary pro- and con- noise from elected officials:

“I think there was a post-9/11 effort to cut down on visas,” added Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. “I think this was a mistake.” Rep. David Dreier, a California Republican, was left defending stricter immigration rules. “We can’t be so naive as to think there is not a very serious problem” with terrorists entering the country, he said. [News.com]

News.com: Gates wants to scrap H-1B visa restrictions

The Onion discovers India’s new tech-support caste:

“While we rank below members of the reigning order, those of us responsible for helping Americans track their online purchases and change their account PINs share many privileges not enjoyed by the merchant class below us.” (said technical-support agent Ranji Prasat). [The Onion]

The Onion: New tech-support caste arises in India

India’s offshore dominance on the wane because of rising salaries? Hell no, says/hopes/prays Marc Hebert, the VP of a Silicon Valley company that has a branch in India:

Some even speculate that rising salaries in India will erode the cost advantage over U.S. IT workers, ultimately returning offshore jobs to American soil. But that’s only one side of the story. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reported death of Indian outsourcing is greatly exaggerated. The counterargument rests on two pillars: productivity and scale. Salaries may increase, but there are offsetting factors such as experience, infrastructure, high productivity levels and economies of scale to consider. Let me put it another way: The cost of doing information technology in India is falling, as the range and complexity of projects that can be offshored to India is increasing. [News.com]

News.com: The end of India’s offshore dominance?

A couple of tech entrepreneurs are on a quixotic quest for peace in the Middle East: they’re holding screenings of the movie Gandhi in Palestine.

… more than two decades after the movie “Gandhi” filled theaters worldwide, the first version dubbed in Arabic was screened here, with the blessing of the Palestinian leadership… The film… has been issued previously with Arabic subtitles, but never before dubbed in the language. The organizers said they received permission from Sony Pictures to show it without charge in Palestinian communities.

Organizers of the “Gandhi Project” plan to show the film throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip… [and] to the large Palestinian refugee communities in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

The project is bankrolled by Jeff Skoll, billionaire co-founder of eBay, and Iranian-American serial entrepreneur Kamran Elahian, founder of Cirrus Logic. They’ve brought in Ben Kingsley to host some of the screenings, but they’re running into some resistance:

Ben Kingsley, who won an Oscar for his starring role as Mohandas K. Gandhi, was in Ramallah as a guest of the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas… “It’s not possible,” interjected Sudki Safat, a friend of Ms. Afanah and an official in the Ministry of Education. “I know Gandhi and his principles. But I also know my enemy very well… Gandhi would fail if he faced the Israelis…”

Several said they were interested in other aspects of Indian resistance to British colonial rule, like economic self-reliance and the boycott of British products… “… I don’t think we have the means to boycott Israeli products.”…

Palestinians argue that they have pursued nonviolent resistance at various times over the years, to no avail… Israel, meanwhile, says the Palestinians as a whole have never made a strategic decision to abandon violence.

Michael Dell personally opened a campus for his eponymous computer company in Mohali, a suburb of Chandigarh, today. The campus will house both sales and support:

The company employs more than 7,000 people in India, its largest work force outside the United States…. “Certainly the scale of India is pretty awe-inspiring,” [said Michael Dell]. Dell has one call center in the southern city of Hyderabad and another in India’s technology capital, Bangalore… [News.com]

Dell Inc., which had revenues of over $45 billion last year, would be the first major company to set up its centre in the Quark City complex being built here… by [a] software giant - Quark. Many other leading IT and software companies from India and abroad are expected to locate at the Quark City complex that is being planned with office spaces, residential areas, complete underground parking, 100 percent power backup and a lively entertainment area with shopping malls and multiplexes. [ToI]

We welcome Dell to the land of sardars in shades on scooters with sidesaddle Sikhnis, wax-tipped moustaches and mooli parantha. And we offer this unsolicited advice: the 12-step program for keeping your Punjabi workers happy is, the dhaba should be no more than 12 steps away.

First the Capitol building, now Bangalore? Taking a page from 9/11, Kashmiri militants may be targeting a powerhouse economic sector:

Documents seized from three members of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) terrorist group killed in an encounter with police on Saturday revealed that they planned to carry out suicide attacks on software companies in Bangalore… Most of the technology companies in the city have already set up disaster recovery plans and special disaster recovery sites that could be used in the event of a terrorist attack… [ComputerWorld]

There are fears that Bangalore may have become a safe haven for Naxalites, the LTTE and also terrorist organisations and that the high-profile IT companies are the soft targets. [NDTV]

A 20-member team armed with automatic weapons… was rushed to the spot. They also took along the newly acquired bullet proof Rakshak jeep which can fire teargas shells from within… One such company whose name has been found in a diary seized from the militants is Polaris. Shams apparently had visited the Polaris office last year to prepare a map of the office. [ToI]

There’s no Polaris office listed in Bangalore, so take that with the usual Times of India helping of salt.

I gotta say, it’s the height of stupidity to attack a city that quarters defense contractors. You’d only make it personal. Do ya think the next generation of weaponry would specifically be designed to jam a warhead right up their crevices? Chakde phatte, Dr. Strangelove.

To y’all 220 million vegetarian desis: Is your favorite Asian restaurant’s idea of vegetarian food ‘yes, it has veggies too’? Do you marvel at how many ways some insidious bastards work meat into veggie dishes (pepperoni in pasta salad, rice cooked in chicken stock)? Are you sick of throwing away soup you bought without parsing the ingredients like a copy editor? Bored of restaurant menus that read meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, sprig of parsley?

Soon, you may also have to check whether your PC is made from animal products. Researchers are turning chicken feathers into computer motherboards:

To turn feathers into a usable product, they are first plucked from the birds at chicken-processing plants and then the hot, wet feathers are immediately hauled to Emery’s plant. There the “undesirable parts” like chicken heads, feet, windpipes and fecal matter are sorted out from the truckload of feathers. “They’re not a nice sight, to put it mildly…”

… Emery converts the feather fiber into keratin mats that resemble paper towels. They are then placed into a mold, layered on top of one another and infused with a soybean resin that hardens and forms the composite. The material is then put through the circuit-printing process to become a circuit board.

This gives new meaning to the expression ‘my new machine really screams.’ Ironically, the same people who think Gandhi, Jim Morrison and John Lennon drinking their own urine is disgusting, think eating cows fed chicken poop is perfectly ok.

But things are looking up for those who steer clear of digestive recycling: instead of ordering mu shu, you can now order Moo Shoes.

But inquiring minds in Amreeka wanted to know, too. From the Google Blog:

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

A richer Zeitgeist brew

If you were in India, what would you search for? Inquiring minds from Mumbai to Bangalore wanted to know, so now there's a new Google India Zeitgeist. Among the most searched-for queries in January: the tsunami of course, and Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai.

Want some Zeitgeist? Help yourself...beta.

St. Andrews Perception Laboratory’s “Face Transformer” allows you to change the age, race or sex of a facial image. The web-based Java app can also morph a photo into the style of a famous artist, caricature, or even an ape.

All you need is a browser that supports Java and a digital face image (JPEG or GIF format). Of special interest to SM readers may be the races, which include Afro-Caribbean, Caucasian, East Asian, and West Asian (their term for South Asian). The whole process is relatively quick and easy. The hardest part is finding a decent photo. While you search for one, here’s a few tests that I ran through the system:

Aishwarya Rai, Actress

Wanted to use Preity Zinta (in a variety of ways), but y’all seem quite smitten with the lovely Ms. Rai. So, whatever, you win. It must feel good to win. It doesn’t feel good to lose.

As y’all know, the CEO of HP, Carly Fiorina, was fired yesterday for architecting a failed merger with Compaq. If the head of HP’s flagship division were elevated in her place, Vyomesh Joshi would become the first desi CEO of a company listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (as far as I know).

The Dow Jones includes just 30 blue-chip stocks such as Procter & Gamble, Boeing and Microsoft. The mustachioed, light-eyed Joshi has long been a tireless advocate for HP printers.

[The board] did not rule out promoting someone from within the company… the most likely candidate would be Vyomesh (“VJ”) Joshi. He had been the widely respected head of HP’s printing and imaging division and was recently put in charge of a new unit that combines the printing and PC businesses… one analyst asked Wayman whether the company was concerned about Joshi leaving if he were not named the new CEO… Milunovich added though that it would be important for HP to hold on to Joshi. [CNN]

In three years in charge of the printer unit, which delivers 73 per cent of the company’s operating profits, he boosted profit margins from about 10 per cent to almost 17 per cent at the end of last year. HP could ill afford to lose Mr Joshi, but he may be deemed unsuitable for the top job because he has no experience in corporate computing. [Financial Times]

HP, with $80B in revenues, would actually be the perfect company for this to happen to first because it’s not the hippest company in the world. It’s slightly dowdy, carrying around a pocket protector, an RPN calculator and a combover, but its products tend to be intelligent and dependable. Just like a desi uncle.

I rode the Delhi metro the week it opened its first underground route:

Extra-wide cars, fully automated driverless trains, all-electronic fare gates with magnetic farecards and cool magnetic tokens, overhead electric wires that are safer than a third rail, floor-through layout so you can walk from one end to the other without opening doors… this subway system has the finest in Indian, err, South Korean tech. The subway feels and sounds like the D.C. metro. It’s faster and wider than Boston’s, newer and more luxurious than New York’s.

Check out the photos.

Wired says that after a long day of shaking down motorists for C notes and beating on random street kids, the average Indian cop still doesn’t make enough to buy his own computer:

In July 2001, Mumbai’s Cyber Crime Investigation Cell launched its website, and a few days later it was hacked… police squads were known to confiscate evidence… returning with monitors and leaving computers behind…. cops in Mumbai seized pirated software floppies and stapled them together as though they were documents…

Last month, a Mumbai tabloid… asked a constable to use his ATM card and photographed his every step. He did not know how to use the card and the machine swallowed it… “The cop who checks your car license does not own a car… The passport official who checks your passport does not go abroad. The cop to whom you go to register a credit card misuse does not own a credit card… how can he fight cybercrime?”

As the Net roars by in a bright shirt and dark shades on a brand-new Hero Honda, the government’s business babus are left with bags of mooli and karela in hand, abusing a slow-moving rickshaw-walla with a bad attitude:

When he wanted to register a firm called Pinstorm Online last year, the Registrar of Companies “refused to grant me the name because the government officials out there did not comprehend the word ‘online,’ ” Murthy said…. “I had to change the word ‘internet’ to ‘computer network’ because the officials did not think (the) internet was a credible medium for business.”

A Silicon Valley company with a Hyderabad office has started bringing in the parents of their new hires for a schmooze session. Impressed with the respect accorded them, the parents tell their kids to stay with the company rather than quitting and joining Microsoft.

In a culture where parents yield enormous influence over their adult children’s decisions, pitching the parents is a novel way to retain talent in a brutally competitive environment… “The managing director of the company himself welcomed our parents,” says Beeraka. “Once [my father] heard from the company, he insisted that I stay…” Sixty percent of the 35 new recruits brought at least one parent to the orientation in August, and, for the first time in several years, Sierra has experienced no turnover.

You’ve found our hidden exhaust port, Luke. In desi culture, there’s no end to this. At a recent wedding, I just heard a 90-year-old man refer to his 65-year-old son as ‘the boy.’ Next thing you know, realtors, car companies and wireless carriers will be asking mom and dad to pick your goodies :)

Heck, if they already pick your mate…

Like the rest of you, I’ve been swamped with holiday and family obligations these past few weeks. My Bloglines feeds have piled up and it’s going to take me forever to catch up on what some of you (supplesomething, Brimful, J …) have written. I devoted my surf-time today to reading the 200 (!) posts that had accumulated from Om Malik on Broadband.

Om—whom I sweat ridiculously—had an interesting tidbit over at GigaOm; it stated that India is “Truly, a Cell Phone Nation”. He goes on to state:

There are 44 million cell phone users in India, versus 43 million land lines. India’s mobile market will grow 40% every year through 2007.

I don’t know why that statistic captured my attention so completely, but it did. More cell phone users! I guess it makes sense now that I think about it…

This article has more:

India has also emerged as the second-largest market after China for mobile handsets. Mobile phone makers such as Nokia , Siemens, Sony Ericsson , South Korea ‘s LG and Philips are racing to offer newer models to keep pace with demand.

I think one of my favourite things about India is the juxtaposition of future with past, forward with backwards. I’m ridiculously excited (especially after reading posts like this) to see what develops…

Jet Airways, the leading private airline in India, is far more luxurious than American ones: brand-new Airbus jets, hot face towels, nimbu pani and watermelon juice, coffee candies, sumptuous red and orange linen napkins bound in velvet rope, a choice of North or South Indian meals (ever had hot idli sambar and utappam on an airplane?), and a never-ending stream of tea and coffee. And all this on short-haul domestic routes rather the overseas ones served by Singapore and Virgin.

The Indian government will now allow Jet and Air Sahara to fly international routes, although it continues to shelter the lucrative Middle Eastern routes from competition. The airlines are presumably on their own for buying landing slots.

Indian airports are also in dire need of investment. On a recent trip, I could get wireless Internet access at the Delhi and Bangalore airports. However, they otherwise still resemble small regional airports in the U.S.: open-air gates, buses instead of jetways and a vanishingly small distance from gate to parking lot. They’re like the old terminal at San Jose before the tech bubble.

But with an astonishing 20% annual growth in air traffic, India just signed off on a plan to upgrade 80 airports throughout the country, including brand-new airports for Bangalore and Hyderabad. They’re partying like it’s 1999.

And in the tech-heavy cities, it pretty much is. Driving through Bangalore, I saw buildings that looked exactly like U.S. tech campuses, though smaller. Intel, Dell, Oracle, Accenture and Macromedia buildings abound; on one corner, with a shock of recognition, I came face-to-face with a company started by a friend. I couldn’t help but feel late to the party. With the number of South Indian programmers already working at Oracle, why not hire ‘em straight from the motherland :)

The Baazee.com CEO, Avnish Bajaj, was arrested yesterday by the Delhi police due to the sale of the infamous mobile phone sex clip via his auction site. Baazee.com was recently acquired by eBay. Bajaj, a U.S. citizen and Harvard MBA in his early 30s, languished in a Delhi jail last night because of a tortured Indian theory of vicarious liability. It’s as if eBay CEO Meg Whitman were thrown in jail due to the sale of off-color items on eBay. The legal analogies in this case are phone companies and ISPs, where the high volume of traffic precludes censorship, rather than a common criminal case. The guy who should actually be in jail is the student who filmed and distributed the clip without his girlfriend’s consent. The Delhi court’s actions reek of opportunism to me— to take a stand on a high-profile case in a sexually repressed society. It’s all high-volume throat clearing.

Disclaimer: Bajaj is a friend of a friend.

Update: Bajaj was denied bail and remains in jail. Condoleezza Rice has asked the Indian government to guarantee him a fair trial:

The arrest of the Baazee CEO, who has been based in Mumbai for the past four-and-a-half years, has perplexed many in the Indian establishment as Bajaj has responded to summons to help the investigators probing the case. “He, as well as Baazee.com, had been cooperating in the investigations. The arrest has come totally out of the blue…”

Yesterday, Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay… called up from the US to reassure Baazee staff… Bajaj’s counsel Dinesh Mathur pleaded that his client had at no point attempted to evade the police. Moreover, with the site having more than 75 lakh listings, it was impossible to scan each and every item being traded.

Mathur said the video clip… was taken off the site after it was brought to the notice of Baazee officials that it was violating a user agreement… The magistrate, however, said the user agreement did not stand as it was not “signed” and was just a photocopy of a document.

The bullshit continues to fly.

Update 2: The Gray Lady finally cobbles together wire reports four days later.

So my favourite MC leaves me a message about this article from ABC News…apparently an Indian cell phone company is going to broadcast a new Bollywood phil-im in its entirety, for free. On their customer’s mobiles. (Well, the customers who dished $270 for a phone that can stream video…)

“Rok Sako To Rok Lo,” or “Stop, If You Can,” will be available to Bharti Tele-Ventures customers in 11 Indian cities, provided their phones have the supporting technology, said Atul Bindal, a director at India’s second-largest cellular service provider.

They are boldly and potentially annoyingly going where no company has gone before:

Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd. will be “the first cellular service in the world to premiere a full-length movie on mobile phones,” Bindal said. “I am certain that this service will add a whole new dimension to the concept of mobile-based entertainment.”

“Rok Sako To Rok Lo” stars Sunny Deol (pictured)…and no one else, meaning the film’s other actors aren’t well-known, exciting or important. ;) Directed by Arindam Chaudhary, the teen flick will debut on cell phones Thursday, and be released to regular old theaters Friday.

Don’t everybody try and drain your cell phone batteries at once:

A maximum of 200 people will be able to connect and watch the movie simultaneously, and the movie cannot be copied or replayed.

If this novel experiment in using mobile phones for something other than, oh, talking, is successful, Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd. may air other phil-ims, for a phee. ;)

…actually, scratch the “better”…I’m just happy about the living part. We exist in amazing times, and for that I am constantly grateful and humbled. Why am I blathering all new-agey? I’m just pondering the healing powers of the Internet, that’s all.

Few thought this little boy would survive after he was bitten by a snake in Nepal.

His parents consulted a Shaman who bound the boy’s leg so tightly with a tourniquet it went gangrenous.

When doctors eventually saw him they were at a loss to know how to save him. The bandage had been on for 25 days and his leg was hanging off.

Everyone was resigned to him dying.

Everyone except Lord and Lady Swinfen. The peer and his wife run a phenomenal charity that “virtually” saved the child’s life.

Microsoft is doubling down on its India bet by announcing a research center in Bangalore, due next month, just weeks after opening a large programming campus in Hyderabad.

The company decided to add an Indian campus to take advantage of promising computer science students coming out of universities there, said Rick Rashid, a vice president in charge of Microsoft Research. The company hopes to hire a couple dozen researchers over the next year, he said.

Intel is also shifting some high-profile CPU design work (the Xeon ‘06) to Bangalore.

A transportation expert penned an op-ed in the NY Post yesterday bemoaning that New Delhi is more efficient at building subways than New York:

New York is talking - again - about starting work on the 8-mile Second Ave. line. It’s budgeted at $17 billion and scheduled to take up to 16 years to complete…

New Delhi started from scratch in 1998 and now has 13 miles of rail line up and running. The system is due to grow to 40 miles by next June, as workers complete their jobs three years ahead of schedule. The cost of all this: $2.3 billion…

In contrast to Delhi’s count-every-minute attitude, New York officials have talked about a Second Ave. subway since the 1920s… If New Delhi can do it, why can’t New York?

Why not, indeed. Cast off the bureaucratic habits of our former overlords, oh Yankees! Delhi’s subway was built five times faster at one-third the cost (buying power-adjusted), for a 15x improvement in bang for the rupee. Who’s the Mr. Laajawab behind this feat?

NYT columnist Thomas Friedman says Americans need to emulate Asian and desi nerds:

The Chinese and the Indians are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. Young Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs are not content just to build our designs. They aspire to design the next wave of innovations and dominate those markets. Good jobs are being outsourced to them not simply because they'll work for less, but because they are better educated in the math and science skills required for 21st-century work.

When was the last time you met a 12-year-old who told you he or she wanted to grow up to be an engineer? When Bill Gates goes to China, students hang from the rafters and scalp tickets to hear him speak. In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears. We need a Bill Cosby-like president to tell all parents the truth: throw out your kid's idiotic video game, shut off the TV and get Johnny and Suzy to work, because there is a storm coming their way.

Salon is blogging a conference called Web 2.0, about the future of the Web. Entrepreneur Brewster Kahle (Alexa, Internet Archive, WAIS) just said something interesting. Kahle wants to offer all books and films ever created, online:

Moving images. Isn't that too big to do the whole darn thing? Most people think of Hollywood films. 100-200,000 theatrical releases. 1/2 estimated to be Indian. It's a few more bookshelves, but it's doable.

Take that, Hong Kong and China! You may have some stylish martial arts and crime films, but we've got scads of third-rate melodrama under our collective belts, and we 'make it up in volume.'

Microsoft is offering a lower-priced version of Windows in Hindi to discourage piracy. But Microsoft has artificially hamstrung Windows XP Starter Edition in some funny ways:

… display resolution is capped at a maximum of 800 by 600 pixels… users can run only three programs or have three windows opened at once, a limitation that research company Gartner believes could frustrate users and drive them to buy bootleg copies of Windows XP instead.

In all seriousness, differential pricing is as big an issue in software as it is with drug reimportation. Customers hate it, yet countries with lower average incomes can’t afford first-world prices. And high-value products that are easy to pirate are especially trapped in dilemma. To their advantage, software companies can create market-specific versions in ways that pharma companies morally cannot.

It's tough to pity the guy - CNN.com - 'Mr Hotmail' seeks new challenges - Aug 26, 2004.

(CNN) -- As the inventor of Hotmail, Sabeer Bhatia is the pin-up of India's IT revolution; the boy from Bangalore who went to Silicon Valley and made his fortune. Bhatia was in his mid-20s when he developed the idea of web-based email accounts in 1995, raising $300,000 in investment to launch the revolutionary service the following year. Within 12 months Hotmail had 10 million users and Bhatia had sold his creation to Microsoft for $400 million.

Launching his new company in 1999, a one click e-commerce venture called Arzoo.com, Bhatia claimed it had the potential to be twice as big as Hotmail. By mid-2001 the dotcom bubble had burst and Arzoo had folded.

"The last couple of years I was quite depressed because I didn't have an idea or a vision or a goal that would be world-beating like Hotmail. I often wondered if that would be the only success that I would have at the end of my life.

"I would rather not be known as Mr Hotmail anymore," he says. "What is in the past is over. Now I'm looking for the next big thing."

Don't get me wrong, I have respect for Hotmail and Mr. Bhatia BUT, can't he and his fawning masses attribute just a tad of his fortune to Timing and Luck? Hotmail was one of the keystone companies of the bubble - no revenue but lots of eyeballs. In any other world, it wouldn't have been a name-making $400M venture..... There's a helluva lot of Attribution Error goin' on...

Maybe I'm just jealous. ;-)

N.R. Narayana Murthy, billionaire CEO of Infosys, an Indian outsourcing giant, used to be a socialist until an encounter with a Frenchwoman on a train didn’t turn out quite like Before Sunrise:

Back in the early 1970s, while traveling through Europe by train, Murthy was seized by police in a town near the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border. He had been chatting up a fellow passenger in French, and he believes that her boyfriend complained to a cop. Murthy was kept in a room in the train station for 72 hours and shipped out on a freight car. “There was no going back to communism after that,” he says.

Ah, nothing like the smell of a burned convert in the morning…

There was a brouhaha over Kashmir in Windows 95:

When coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India, Microsoft colored eight of them a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory. The difference in greens meant Kashmir was shown as non-Indian, and the product was promptly banned in India. Microsoft was left to recall all 200,000 copies of the offending Windows 95 operating system software to try and heal the diplomatic wounds. "It cost millions... Some of our employees, however bright they may be, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world..."

Veteran journalist Om Malik of Not Really Indian outed a tech startup on his blog, to great effect:

Kathy Rittweger, CEO of Blinkx, was on what she thought was just a normal trip to the offices of Business 2.0 magazine to show the editor her new search software. Om Malik, one of the journalists in the meeting, was so impressed that he immediately wrote about it on his blog. “He called me to say he’d done a ‘blog’ on us, and I have to confess I was disappointed as it didn’t sound as good as an article,” Rittweger reflects. “Within a couple of hours we were being mentioned on thousands of sites and I had venture capitalists calling me left, right and centre. The blog made us so popular that we had to bring forward our launch from autumn to June.

Nice job, Om. (Btw, I’m writing about a guy writing about himself writing about a startup. Death by echo!)