No post yesterday

Not because I was busy or anything. In fact I did write a good post. And then I hit the post button, which immediately resulted in a 500 server error. Phut... The entire post - lost in electronic space. Funny right? We are building networks, to keep things under greater control, and make them work for us. And what is happening? Things get more mysterious and inexplicable. For example, where did my post go. Okay you will trace it to some web server. Then to some RAM space, which subsequently got de-allocated. So? Where did my post go?

Today, I made that heavenly drink again. Soft. Take some peppery mixture, and jet some aerated drink into it. It is heavenly, especially if the receptacle is an earthen pot.

We went to this place. It is called poilon. This is a dead giveaway about me for some 5000 people in this country. The rest of humanity wont know about it. Well, it is this place someway further down on the highway next to my Institute. It is a small, unkempt place. Basically an eating outlet - cheap and affordable. And the food there is incredible. You go there, and sit cross-legged on these wooden platform things. Then you order the stuff you want. The stove is almost next to you, and as the cook prepares your order, you can writhe in the sweet agony of the delicious auroma of your order. And when you are sufficiently famished, on the verge of mental breakdown, the food arrives. Piping hot and delicious.

You just cannot help stuffing yourself. Even as the tears pour down your cheeks due to the hot food. Then we made this heavenly drink. Oh god, it is almost as if you died and were standing in front of the pearly gates.

I just hope this post is posted and does not result in a 500 or a 404 and quietly comes as a 200. Amen

~!nrk

Sphere of eConsciousness

I had defined a term in my post on Tuesday, August 20, 2002. The term was Sphere of Perception. I had said that it is the sphere which a person identifies and understands. It defines the region from which inputs are used by people for learning.

There is a related term, I want to talk about. eConsciousness. Offline, your entire perception is defined by your senses. Your sight, hearing, feel in addition to smell and taste. So what are your online senses? What part of the online life are you attuned to? What is your source of information from the online world? To round it off, what part of your online presence are you attuned to? What is your eConsciousness?

We shall define eConsciousness loosely as that part of the online life you are attuned to. This basically consists of two parts. The first part is the part of the online life you actually know and identify. What exists on the World Wide Web. The answer to that question is the first part of eConsciousness. The second part pertains to that part of the online life, which you truly understand. What is the part of the life online you truly know. What part are you comfortable with. What part of the online life you know makes sense to you, and is not a source of fraud waiting to happen.

Why did I get this idea? Well, it goes like this. I got this message from SmileyGram for an E-card. This was basically from a friend of mine, who apparently had given my email address. I had to go and check out what was happenning there. So I checked the URL and pointed my browser to it. It took me to a page which needed 5 names and email addresses to show me the page. And nothing was optional. Of course i filled it with ****@****.com to get to the page.

I then mailed my friend asking her not to put my email in such forms again. I have been long enough on the web to have my name in a decent number of email databases. I really dont want another one getting hold of mine. The reply was along the lines that this was a 'good site' and that it 'just' needed 5 friend's names and the card is 'worth it'. My friend is showing remarkable eConsciousness of the first kind, not much of the second variety.

This I think is the case with a majority of the users. These are the users who click on the funlove messages. These are the people that download and run cute screensavers with trojans and backdoors. These are not people who are exactly alien to the online world. In fact they know of more free email sites, more free ecards sites than the first 3 pages of google. But they dont really understand the net. If we are to make the net a more secure place, it is this set of people we have to target. It is this set that must be told that not everything on the net is what it seems. Educate them, and we just might become safe in spite of all that Microsoft has planned for us.

One day I am going to develop an eConsciousness quotient.
Should help. Dont you think. tell me if you think so, or if you dont. [of course after demungle the email id]
Hmm, the winter is coming. Things are becoming cooler, and I have started skipping the baths. :)

~!nrk

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

I remember. When I was a kid, there was this great desire in me to learn. I was one of those kids whose hands itched whenever they saw screws, bolts, clips and any other mechanism that allowed you to take a peek. Toys were amusing. They did their part of entertainment, but then they also provided great mechanisms to open and play with. I loved simple toys, not because I like simple things, but because they were ingenious and used simple hacks to come up with brilliant mechanisms.

Then I grew up, and this craze to know stuff got translated into reading technical stuff. Reading about obscure things became a passion, a fashion. Things mundane were out, exotic was in. Things that were worth reading were either the too big or the too small. Deep Space or the string theory. Anything else was mere time-pass. And anything remotely emotional / human was - bah.

Then I grew up a bit more. And I started reading Slashdot. This was a take on the words 'slash' and 'dot' used as part of any standard URL that is pronounced. Today I will introduce you to slashdot and will introduce you to some of the people who reside on this online space. And I will also talk about something slashdot is proliferating, in the sphere of self moderated expression.

Slashdot (henceforth known as /.) is a news link posting site. This site has a huge fan following, which it has built over the years. Now these users of this site submit stories, as and when they happen all over the world. There are a set of authors of the site, who go through all the submissions and choose the ones more suited to be published on the site. Typically something between 10 and 20 stories get posted in a day. The idea of the site is not to be an exhaustive collection of links, or to be a detailed discussion on various topics. The site couldn't care less about such objective. The site is driven by a need to make a good omlette of news links each day, which makes sense and generates interest in all sections of its diverse users.

So how does this work. Imagine. There are millions of eyeballs, who are reading a similar number of sites and stories all the time. Anything that happens is immediately sent as a story to /. And stories are accepted within hours. Thus each day, there are a host of stories, related to various categories of interest to the nerds, at one place. The efficacy of the system is such that, Slashdot starts becoming a starting place for people to check up on important happennings, rather than keep track of hundreds of news services for anything remotely interesting or spectacular or out of the ordinary.

The aim of posting such news links on the site is not just to provide work as a clearing house for links. Slashdot provides for discussions amongst the members on the various stories that are posted. Although this is commonplace now, slashdot was one of the pioneers of this method of discussion boards. And by-far it remains one of the most powerful mechanisms of self-regulated online discussions. We will talk about the method of moderation soon.

The moderation of Slashdot is a two step affair, carried out entirely by the user community. The first level of moderation is the moderation, done by the moderators. The second round of moderators is the meta-moderation, done by the community to the moderation of moderators. Now the best part of this two step moderation is that none of these moderators and meta-moderators are not fixed. They are dynamically selected and allocated tasks automatically. This happens like this.

Moderators are selected randomly from the entire set of serious users (seriousness is tracked and kept record of). Each such selected user is given 5 points which he can use to moderate user comments. A comment can be moderated positively or negatively. Positive moderations are more visible to other users (users can view messages according to the moderations) Thus better and more important messages are seen by a greater number of people.

These moderators are automatically checked by the meta-moderators. Every metamoderators is given 10 moderations each day and asked to rate it as fair and unfair. This not only corrects any errors, but also reflects on the fairness of the moderators and will decide when they will be given moderator status next time.

Hence the entire setup is a great experiment on the self moderation capability of online communities. So far, so good, (so what).

I will talk about the kind of people on slashdot, in another post.
~!nrk

Absolutely Nothing!

Anarchy - the next form of government. Anarchy Rocks!!!

Welcome back. Oh well, I just wanted to welcome myself. Reborn. Well basically I had these exam things. They lasted 5 horrible days. Had 8 of them coming at me. Of various hues and sizes. Some qualitative, others quantitative. Some were a strain on the brain, some on the memory, some on the heart and others left a deep scar on my psyche. And totally change the way I thought about nothing.

Have you ever thought about nothing. No, I mean it. Did you ever think about nothing. No, not vacuum. Not that. Just about nothing. No, not even void. Just nothing.

For when we talk about vacuum, we talk about the absence of matter (as we know it) in space (as we know it) but surely inhabited by a whole lot of other stuff. For example, there is a hell lot of light in vacuum. There is a hell lot of other energy, or matter, or non-matter in vacuum. I am talking about something even more bare as compared to that. I am talking about nothing. Absolute nothingness. Where there is no time, for there is nothing to identify time. There is no matter, no energy, for either of these would immeadiately make it the swarming space we have here. And there is nothingness pervading everything. And that is so thick that it is almost as if there is nothing there at all.

Yeah, I know. You are thinking that all I am talking about it just a play of words to impress you. What if I tell you how to get there? What if I give you a series of steps which if executed will get you there? Then you will believe me right?

Let me try. Do you know where the true nothing is? Inside you. Absolute nothing is your consciousness. Absolute nothing is your intelligence. Absolute nothing is your sense of "I" or "ID" or "IS". That my friend is the most absolute of nothings which you will ever get to. Did you ever bother thinking about consciousness. There have been all forms of inferences to it - as a place. As a plane in space. As another dimension. Others have dismissed it a nothing other than just a bunch of neurons. I dont know. I believe that, there is something that distinguishes us from non-intelligence. I believe that we are not just the sum of several atoms. It is too easy. If we were, that would mean that we are symbols of random sparks that happened sometime ago.

Dont get me wrong. I dont believe that we were either from the 7days of work or from the golden lotus from the lord. Far from that, I accept that we were from random sparks of lightning in amino acids. But I believe that something happened then. We were introduced to nothingness. An element of basic consciousness was transferred. There appeared a means of trapping nothingness in the fabric of matter. And that became life.

So that my friends is a theory that I came up with, to just pass some time. Listening to "Symptom of the Universe" by Ozzy. Sexy strings.

Did I tell you, my speakers rock! They are oh so incredible incredible.

The next song is "Am I going insane", how appropriate.

~!nrk

Security?

"Typically with these types of issues it will be six to nine months until we see a massive attempt to start exploiting it," Cooper said, adding that a preemptive patch was critical.

This is from an article, that discusses yet another *sigh* security disclosure by MicroSoft. It is incredible, what this guys cannot do. I mean they teach you this at school. "How-to-code-sensibly-101". And these guys come up with pathetic code, time after time. They are simply amazing. I never knew they had so much of code which could give rise to so many critical bugs.

But that is more irrevelant. What i felt more about was the above statement by Russ Cooper, head of security at TruSecure Corp. What a hell load of crap. How long does it take for a CR4c|<3r to take a vulnerability and mount an attack you said? 6-9 months. WOW. get real. I'd say something like 6-9 hours is more like it. Does the guy know anything about the current state of security? Mebbe he ought to read of a project called the honeynet. Ask them. The script kiddies take that long to get easy to use GUI tools to launch attacks. Not crackers. Atleast not the talented ones.

The only thing we can bank on is that no one does serious work on Office anyway, so it does not matter what crackers do. Yah I was just joking. There is no solace. Those people at Redmond keep churning bad code. These guys at security agencies keep tracking them. Those people keep playing down the seriousness. And cracking continues to be done by kids with ready to use tools. It is sad. Wonder what happened to M$'s trust initiative. Remember sometime back, Bill Gates asked all his programmers to stop coding and sit around fixing bugs. Wow, I mean look at the nerve of the guy. He produces sloppy code, then he is under pressure and asks his own programmers to do what they were supposed to do better, and gets mileage out of it, and establishes M$ as a security focused company because of his initiatives. Simply, pathetic.

Have my end terms starting from next week. Sad. I have eight subjects and five days. Lets see how it goes.

50 10n6 & 7|-|4nk5 f0R h4x0R-5p34|<
~!nrk

Incredewl = Incredibly kewl

Check out this link at slate.com. And Incredibly it talks about the topic I was talking about in my last post. About how the RIAA is responsible for its own state of affairs.

Just some perspectives first. The MPAAs and the RIAAs of this world are leaders in crying wolf, at each and every change that ever happens. Right from the disbelief filled furore over motion pictures ("Who in his right mind will want to watch a motion picture?") to the RIAA screaming blue murder at audio cassettes and the problem of "home taping" in 1980. The tight monopolistic short-sightedness of these associations is their undoing. Do read the article, it does give a good perspective.

Lets believe we are in front of the Oracle (the geek variety with the predictive powers and not the RDBMS variety). Lets pretend to peep into the future of music and the RIAA. Lets also assume that humans are inherently reasonable intelligent.

The cost of making music is falling. This means that more and more artists would be able to make their kind of music. This will not only proliferate the number of musicians, but will also multiply and mix the various genres and styles. Music will just be music and everyone will have access to an unprecedented variety of it. How would someone control it. Lets see...

Placing controls in the music itself. Ya, but if you are intelligent, so am I. What you can make I can break. Check this article which almost seems to say the same thing. Considering an industry with a great many firms, a great many independants, who will be able to enforce such a format? It is not about the power of the control placed. Too restrictive ones will cost you customers, too loose and it is not a constraint any longer. It is like Icarus flying between the ocean and the sun, and this Icarus is bound to fail. Forget everything, what will you do to music that will prevent a dictaphone from recording the sound that emanates from the speaker?

Okay so you will place controls in the playback system. Huh? Get real. And the same problems will plague the hardware too. You either lose customers or you will lose the entire point of the exercise.

Maybe you will try to control the swapping of music. Did you know the RIAA and the MPAA got permission to hack into networks which allow P2P sharing of services. Look what happenned. ISPs refused to allow the MPAA and the RIAA to attack their customers. Simple. Why would the rest of the world change its priorities just so that the RIAA can make some money? They will not. As long as RIAA is not the God of File Swapping, swapping will go on. For the masses want it. And Capitalism is in the want of the masses.

Why does it seem so bleak and unfair to the RIAA. Because the RIAA has not moved on. The RIAA is stuck in the past and refuses to budge and inch. The government will entertain it as long as it is strong. Once the artists realize that the RIAA is an intermediary, a pain in the ass, a source of inefficiencies and a drain on resources, the RIAA will cease to exist. Atleast the RIAA that exists today.

What will happen then. Lets take another peek onto the Crystal Ball. By the time artists would have eliminated the intermediary, one additional change would have occured. Money as we know it would also have completed its transition to the online world. Distribution and Payment would be online.

Why will people pay. Because people are not thieves by birth. Because if you music is good, you will have fans who care about you. And to live you will not need too many fans (remember the RIAA mammoth is no longer there). And as an artist you will have a global audience and a small fan following. Your music will be exchanged freely. The charts will be the number of times your song is exchanged. The more a song is exchanged the more the excitement it will generate, and more people will want to possess. And a new form of ownership will start. "Original Copies" will become a symbol - of fan-following, of loyalty, of integrity. Swapping networks grade users on their loyalty points, and this will automatically become an incentive. The consumer will spend but will get a lot more, and he will spend even more. Public performances will become a craze, another show of loyalty. And if you are a good artist, you will get money. Independent of which side of the bed your music house or the RIAA woke up today. Independent of which genre is being played by MTV. Independent of whether you have great resources to make songs or not.

What else might happen? Try this. Abstract art will meet with music. CGI and music will become a craze. Videos with music will drive the popularity. Music will come with additional components, like beat information for automatic playback at discos, visualization information, which will automatically be loaded by you winamp and a lot more. This complete entertainment units will replace the mp3 of today.

Of course there will be a time when everyone will see this happening and tom, dick, harry and their friend sally will also want to make music. The swappers will kill them. There will be a great rout, of icons and the newcomers and only the best will survive. And only the best will survive.

You think this will not work? Do you like music? When was the last time you went to a concert? Why did you pay for the ticket, and not just stay outside, salivating, at the gate, listening to music?

Think about it. This is no big deal. This is just a correction being made to the error committed by 2nd wave capitalism - the commoditization of music.

Practicing miniature photography now. My friend got a digi-cam. And that is setting right a great imbalance committed by this world - of not including a camera when I was sent down from the heavens.

gotta go get shot

~!nrk

Milestone

Today we unite in celebration of the fact that my first two blogs have rolled off the "5-blog" limit in the editor. This means that we have really taken off.

The ANN project report, I was talking about yesterday, is complete. See, I am being precise here. The project report is complete. Sadly not the project. Atleast not the part that we had promised mid-way through the evaluation. But it is done and now there are a lot more things on the mind that it is not possible to waste further thought on it.

I wanted to talk about an article I had read over at salon.com, led by slashdot. But I will not. However I want to talk about something that I have been thinking about for sometime now. It is basically because i eyed this article. Basically the article talks about a great number of developments on the CopyRight front. If you are any person who keeps in touch with the happennings on the net, you would have surely heard of the peer-to-peer programs. These programs, (remember the estwhile napster and the latest kazaa, bearshare, limewire and the host of other Gnutella clients?) allow people to share music, programs and other software. The MPAA and the RIAA have been up in arms, entreating the law-makers to do something to protect the "poor artists" from being ripped off their hard earned money.

This discussion will not focus on what the MPAA and the RIAA themselves are a sad representation of. Nor will we talk about the nature of the money in this business, or who actually makes the money, how profits have been increasing regularly, or how most of their claims are hypocritical in their own right.

Instead lets look if the entire concept of CopyRight actually makes sense, in this new world. CopyRights came into being in order to protect the interests of the people, who put in substantial investments to come up with something new. The idea was that the investment that the entity put in, so as to produce the new product/service, has a chance at being redeemed. Hence giving a initial start to the entity, as a monopoly offering the particular service, would allow it to do the same. The two aspects of the idea were that a) there was a quasi-monopoly created and b) the corresponding entity would have time to recover the costs it put in.

What is the difference today? Well, both concepts of monopoly, time and costs are being revised and rewritten. Digitization has ensured that the costs of production and reproduction, have hit the floor. It is possible to create copies of the same original quickly and painlessly. Similarly, it is possible to create new originals, with much greater ease, thanks to digitization. Hence what was seen as a major cost is no longer so great a quantity. The concept of time itself has also been changed. With industries rising in a matter of years, allowing monopolies itself is archaic.

Lets look at this from the point of view of a recording studio. In the past, a recording studio was a big deal. Yeah it is so today too. But computers have made it possible for a small desktop to do a great part of what required incredible hunks of sophisticated machinery. Those were the days when cassettes and CDs had to be mass produced. Thus making a song was not just and idea and a guitar. It involved a lot more people, capital and time. Thus it was reasonable to assume that there was a need to somehow protect the poor guy strumming the guitar, till he and his music studio made some money.

Now things are different. No longer is your setup cost the same. Nor is the cost of distribution so high. You do not always required CD stamping machines or cassettes production units. Also it does not really take years for a song to be really well known all around the world. What then is the CopyRight act protecting here? How exactly is originality defined? Is it just the ability to compile a song? What does a mammoth organization like the RIAA need that they are preventing easy access of songs for the fans? What is the justification for maintaining the MPAAs and the RIAAs of this world, when music no longer is what it used to be? Instead of trying to use the "second wave" tactics to prevent change, should the change itself not be studied? Instead of trying to change the rules of the game, should we not seek to change the game itself?

I think it is time, we stopped using the dated tools and structures of the older era to control the change of the new era. Music is not what is was. It is time we accepted the change and then advocated checks, not vice versa.

Look ahead and you are a dreamer,
look back and you are a laggard,
but if thou thinks you can get away,
by not looking, beware you are a hazard

I know it is sad. About what I could come up at this time of the morning. Methinks me needs to sleep.

Oh, and Jack says hi

~!nrk