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.

@Mr Kapil Sibal :

I will try to keep it simple, and for your understanding, will present it to you in the form of bullet points.

#1.  The internet, as they showed in the IT Crowd, is not a simple box. So, if you want an initiative to scan through the whole internet, please get a reality check. Here are some stats for a starter.

There are 48 hours of YouTube video uploaded every minute, and 250 million tweets are generated per day. (Source: Labnol).

And that is just two websites. We are forgetting user generated forums, blogs, self hosted websites, Facebook, YouTube alternatives etc. etc. And oh, there are also proxy servers, and VPN networks to allow people to access anything from anywhere. Is this getting too technical for your liking? Good!

And the fact that you want, not algorithms to scan them through, but actual humans to do it for you is in itself worthy of an applause (sarcasm, check)! Best of luck with that. Perhaps, this might be your new Yuva Naukri Yojna (Youth Employment Scheme).

#2. Censor the internet you say? Why does it give me a deja-vú of what happened in Egypt and Libya? Oh yeah, they did it there, didn’t they? Speaking of blanket filtering of content, isn’t that reminiscent of China’s Internet filters. So, in the largest democracy in the world, are we now opting *that* as a role model?

#3. I would like to point you Mr.Sibal, towards a recently premiered TV series called Black Mirror – it is an interesting watch (review with spoilers here). The premise, is of a YouTube viral video released to the nation (UK). The video features a kidnapped Princess, who is faced with a death threat, and in ransom demand, the PM has to perform an obscene act involving a pig.

Now I know the UK is a different nation altogether, with different political and national sensibilities. But it is still similar in some respects. Like, the UK has its Royal family, and the Congress would like to believe the Gandhi family is India’s political royalty. But there is more to take in from this TV series.

The government tries to take down the ransom video from YouTube, but with every single video taken down, 6 clones would be uploaded the very next minute. This goes to show, that unlike traditional media, the internet is beyond territorial regulations, and can be made available from ​anywhere across the world. So, if you think that you can censor the internet with India, how are you going to control the millions of Pravasi Bhartiyas from creating another Facebook page?

#4. Last but not the least, Sonia Gandhi is a public figure. She might be an icon to the Congress, but she is just another democratically elected Member of the Parliament for me and the 1.2 billion Indians. So the whole objective of censoring internet to be triggered by this so called “I Hate abc” page, just goes to show the seriousness of your concern towards the Indian democracy.

I hope you read this, and I hope that you release an apology letter soon. I also hope that your trending hashtag finishes its innings sooner than Rakhi Sawant’s last breaking news. I miss Chetan Bhagat on my twitter hashtag.

Sincerely,

An online Indian.

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.

2. My favorite – Sabka favorite – Google Chrome 2 Portable

No installation required. Just unzip the files in the folder and you can get started. To download your copy of Chrome Portable, go to this site [ the site is in German ]. The download link is here. Don’t worry, the software is indeed in English.
All your Chrome goodness are saved on the portable device. User settings such as Web History, Cookies are saved in the ‘Profile’ folder. And Program Settings are saved in ‘Chrome’ folder. Works fine in Win XP SP2 onwards, Win Vista SP1 and Win 7.

3. And finally, Opera10 @USB

Opera USB is actually a private project by an Austrian Web Developer called Markus Obermair. Opera@USB has been certified to be tested by Opera. The portable version of the browser can carry out all the usual functionalities, and stores all the user data in the portable device itself.
Go here to download the USB version. Languages supported are: Deutsche, English and Russian, and there is an International Version as well.
The developer’s webpage suggests the only requirements to install Opera@USB are: a computer with an internet connection, and a USB Flashdrive with about 15MB space left. And oh yeah, it works with every Windows PC. hmmm, not quite sure about ‘EVERY’ Windows PC, but it surely works on WinXP SP2, Win Vista SP1 and Win 7.

P.S. Sorry Linux and Mac users. And oh yeah, talking of browser, I am at work, where I don’t have access to USB drives, nor the admin rights to install Chrome/Firefox. That means I am using IE6. And this is what Tumblr reminds me.

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.

The basic problem with the report is that it is not a wide study on teenage behaviour and hence, market research figures are not reflected at all. Rather, the behaviours noted and reflected in this report are a biased sampling of the close friends and family of the writer. This certainly would not entirely represent the true behaviour of teenagers. Besides, the facts stated in the report should be quite obvious to market researchers who deal with actual facts and figures and carry out surveys based on age-groups or regions or income groups. The footnote of the report introduction states: While these trends will not necessarily surprise, their influence on TMT stocks cannot be underestimated. Now, if it takes a 15 year old for market researchers to realise such trends, I believe, we can see a lot more positions being made redundant.

Re-Analysing the Media analysis.
Radio: The popularity of traditional Radio or FM is still relevant inspite of internet radio stations and sites like Last.FM. The peak periods of radio listening are early morning – more so as a wake-up alarm, as a baathroom accomplice etc, in the car or bus to work, and in the evening on the way back home. Distribution of radio over FM transmitters have been reduced, and portable media devices such as a mobile phone or PMPs are where radio is being listened to. And in a country where Radio DJ are national celebrities and have shows running on National TV, can we discard the popularity of traditional radio?

Television: In the UK, due to services such as BBC iPlayer, Sky Plus and Virgin Record, and similar services offered by ITV, Channel 4 etc, prime-time is quite non-existent. BBC has no system of advertising based revenue. Whereas Channels like ITV and Channel 4 are freeview channels and completely rely on advertising based revenue system. With On-Demand viewing which enables users to skip advertisements, ad revenues are set to decline.
For teenagers, the trend of watching their favourite shows depend on
a) no. of televisions in their respective house
b) Availability of a computer with broadband. As most channels offer online catch-up facilities.
c)The channels subscribed for by the earning members of the family.
Since more than often, teens are not the earning members of the family,the final decision of what channels their TV is subscribed to is decided not by them, but by their parents or elders.

The choice of Virgin Media over Sky on the price criteria is another example of sample bias.
Sep 2008 figures: Sky has 9 million customers, which is almost thrice the size of Virgin Media, which holds the second place. Television viewing hours are again dependent on the demographic of teenagers selected.

Internet:
The popularity of social networking websites is evident amongst teenagers. While Facebook remains a favourite, Twitter seems to be not so popular amongst the teens. Even when Twitter occupies much of the attention in the internet buzz-zone, it is absent from the buzz-words amongst the teenagers, primarily because of lack of connectivity, or the cost of it. More of this will be discussed in a later post.

Much of the other information shared in the report regarding Newspaper, Viral Marketing, Cinema and Music is basic common sense stuff. Print media is struggling to get revenues; Viral Marketing works; Cinema has to look for other avenues to compete with Home Entertainment – hence 3d films, Movie experiences etc and Music industry keeps struggling with Piracy.

Please comment below and let me know your thoughts on the observations stated in this post. Thanks!

Image Courtesy: Service-Now’s Flickr Photostream

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.

Yeah, I know. Yet another half fried post on the entire episode of Microsoft’s bid for the slumping Internet giant Yahoo for a whooping $44.6 billion. Clearly, Microsoft is desperate enough to acquire Yahoo. But amongst all this, the question that remains is, is Google worried? Let’s chase it point by point as to what this deal could bring to the table, if it actually gets finalized. What could a “Microhoo” actually mean?
It means that the 600 million combined user-base of Hotmail (Windows Live Mail) and Yahoo could well be way ahead of what Gmail has. But as Scoble indicates, is there any solid reason for Google to be really worried about this deal? Of course, officials at Google aren’t very happy with the hostile bidding of Microsoft over Yahoo.
David Drummond, Senior VP at Google Inc. writes what this deal could actually churn out if Microsoft continues its legacy of monopolising Operating Systems and Internet Browsers. What if Microsoft loses all business ethics, once it acquires Yahoo, and uses it solely for its good by forcing users to use its Web-Based Services, integrated into Mail, IM, PhotoSharing et al.
The war will still continue with OpenSource technologies adopting everything Google, but this deal is a clear indication of the challenge that Google faces. Clearly, Google with the Android campaign is steering its way towards finding a huge presence or rather dominance in the Mobile World. And with the presence of Web Applications like Google Maps and Youtube, I believe Microsoft even if they acquire Yahoo, will have a long long way to go.And now the second question that emerges is, what if..ahem! Google outbids?

Image Courtesy:johnnie.maneiro

If there was a Technorati-Indian edition, the top keyword search today would be CAT, IIM, CAT RESULTS or IIM CAT. This year, 2 lakh aspirants appeared for the B-School entrance exam. So considering an aspirant would have another 3 concerned people checking for their results (on an average comprising of their mom, dad and boyfriend/girlfriend ), it would total to approximately 8 lakh (800,000) people hitting the results site now as we speak, almost every second since they were officially announced at around 3 PM today (8th of Jan 2008) on the IIM websites. The irony however is the IIM websites cannot handle such traffic, and hence the people who want to check the results end up getting a server error page. This is something that we can term as CAT in a mouse-trap.

Let’s have a check at the technical details of the requirements. The result page needs a Date of Birth and an Exam ID for verification or mapping of the corresponding results. This page would be around 100 KB in size (including say the query data that is being handled to fetch the results), considering it has almost no graphics , and only static content, except for the displayed numbers. Considering 800,000 people accessing it by clicking their mouse buttons on the Submit button simultaneously, the query to fetch the data from the results database and display would definitely be handled by the server. This means a total data of around of approximately 80,000 MB or approximately 80 GB of data is being handled by the servers every second (of course assuming, all the users are hitting the website simultaneously). The question is why the IIMs don’t outsource this task to some third party WebHosting company who can handle this amount of data and bandwidth and avoid the inconvenience caused. Of course, there are other means like SMS alerts for results etc, but to check for the IIM call list, website checking is the only way out. If you already have an account at CAT forums like Pagalguy.com, you’re quite aware of it, else you’ll be surprised at the sheer size of threads that must be running today, with announcement of results.

For those ignorant about CAT (Common Admission Test), it is the entrance examination for admissions to the 7 IIMs (including IIM Shillong which got introduced this year) and other top B-Schools of India; IIM –A being one of the toughest B-Schools to get through all across the world according to different surveys conducted by business weeklies. No wonder, it is one of the most prestigious places to be. I also appeared for the exam for the second time and failed miserably yet again, this time screwed up in Quant(itative Analysis). Yeah, may be I’m no Manager Material eh!

Image Source:inthebag.golf