by Sujoy on December 7, 2011
Kapil Sibal - Internet Censorship in India
Until the last week, he was more famous as the man who brought to the world, the $35 laptop. And today, he is a laughing stock, not only amongst us Indians, but also in tech blogs worldwide. Even Engadget (Link) is reporting this as a shameful initiative. And if we go by the trending hashtags of Twitter in India, you will find the top 5 to be pointing towards Mr. Kapil Sibal’s idiocy. This is a Harvard and St.Tephen’s alumni we’re talking about, who is now the Minster of Communications and IT in India. What made Mr.Sibal turn on his own head to become Mr.Scissorshands with the Internet?
I cannot decide if the initiative announced by Mr.Sibal to censor “the internet” is more stupid, or is it the incident which triggered this initiative which deserves a place on the stupid-er throne. He picked a post that targeted Sonia Gandhi, to be the reason why he wants the internet in India to be screened, censored and then released for the public. Now, I am not speaking in favour of anyone’s motive to malign a public figure. But across the world, we have a lot of “I hate abc” and “I love abc” clubs. The fact that a public figure like Sonia Gandhi has been picked on, and Mr.Sibal feels the need to censor the entire fucking internet in India is beyond me (well, I know his motive, well, sort of). So, here is my open letter to Mr Sibal.
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by Sujoy on September 2, 2009
Initially, when I heard about the idea of a browser on a USB portable pen-drive, I started questioning about its applicability. I mean, why would someone not install an actual browser on the machine itself, and rather have it on a USB pen drive. The answer is simple: Portability. Not only of your favorite browser experience, but also of all that comes with it – bookmarks, addins etc etc. The applicability does not actually matter much if you access internet only at home, through your own machine [ in case of which, its better to just install it]. Or if work does not allow access to USB ports and installing of any new browsers, you are indeed forced to use whatever is available. But, if you do have access to USB ports at work, and you do not want to install your browser [ or are not allowed so by corpo firewall] , and also share your history data, bookmarks etc on your work machine – Portable browsers are the way to go.
Good news is – all your favorite flavours are available in their portable avatars. And here’s the list.
1. Firefox 3.0 on USB:
Portable Apps bring the Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition. So, now you can take your bookmarks, passwords, history, extension with you. Visit the PortableApps website - Mozilla page to download the browser. It is just 9 MB in size, and after installation it expands to 27 -77 MB. I really don’t know what that * sign, beside the 77MB figure, means on the Download button.
Works fine on Win XP SP2 onwards, Win Vista SP1 and Win 7.
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by Sujoy on July 26, 2009
Morgan Stanley’s report ” How Teenagers Consume Media ” talks about the impact, reach and relevance of different forms of media on the target section of the population – the teens. The importance of this paper is the very fact that today’s teenagers will be evolving into tomorrow’s workforce and the ones who will be shaping tomorrow’s consumer market. This in itself means that the behaviour of the teenagers and their reaction towards media cannot be overlooked.
However, the report is written by a teenager, 15 year old Matthew Robson. The report reflects how a normal teenager perceives media of the current world spanning across traditional media like TV, radio and print, to new-age media like social networking websites, cellphones, game consoles etc. Although the discussion provided in the report does reflect teenage behaviour in a lot of sections, it has its shortcomings.
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by Sujoy on February 6, 2008
We all hate Popups, especially when they emerge from nowhere and contain one of the most ridiculous ads. We all use Popup blocking softwares or browsers like Mozilla which has Popup Blocking enabled. But how do we test it? Here’s a website to test the effectiveness of your Popup Blocking software/ Browser that you are using. The website is called Popup Test and contains one of the most comprehensive lists of common popup tests, including Multi-Popups, Come & Go, Timed, MouseOver and even Lesser knowns like Channel Opener and Modeless Window. I tested my Mozilla Firefox Browser 2.0.0.11 and My Flock 1.0.8 and both show similar results.
Both managed to block almost all the possible Popups given by the Popup Test. The most impressive of the lot was the ability to block the MouseOver Popup, which pops up one evrytime a mouse over event occurs over a link. However, Mozilla fails to block certain sticky popups like the Drop Down Popup. All in all, it installs my faith in Firefox.
