Digitally Efficient India

Digital Technologies have elevated India's position in the globe. Although the image and position have gone up, there is a big social vacuum. The social vacuum in harnessing the digital technology has been increasing. Instead of shouting slogans about digital empowerment, real empowerment must be ushered in. The previous government's ambitions and plans must be realised.

Time will fly fast. The Union government under the Prime Minister Modi who is used to fix timeline and ensure mission accomplishment can realise the goal of digitally developed India. Now no stone should be left unturned in this mission.

Honorable Union Minister for Communications, Ravi Shankar Prasad writes in The Times of India on 2 February 2015

President Barack Obama’s just concluded historic visit to India has laid the foundation for a relationship of hope and promise between India and the US. Among other areas, i believe this relationship has immense potential in the field of ICT and digital connectivity. Already 60% of India’s IT exports, worth $50 billion, cater to the US market. US companies, many of which already have backend operations in India, have continually expressed interest in expanding.

Digital India, a flagship programme, conceived within 100 days of the Modi government assuming office, has the potential to propel digital connectivity to new heights and reinforce Indo-US ties.

What is Digital India? It is an obligation we owe to India and a gift which we must offer to posterity. It aims to tap and channelise the vast potential of India’s fondness for technology, coupled with soaring aspirations of a young India. Digital India is designed to bridge the divide between the digital haves and digital have-nots, between the poor and the affluent, rural and urban, literate and illiterate, employed and unemployed, and between the empowered and the disempowered.

Digital India weaves together a large number of ideas and thoughts into a single comprehensive vision. This vision is centred on three key areas: creation of digital infrastructure, delivery of governance and services on demand, and digital empowerment of citizens. It includes the ambitious programme National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN), aiming to link India’s 2.5 lakh gram panchayats through over 70,000 km of high speed optic fibre in the next three years – thereby enabling over 600 million Indians to harness the benefits of modern communication. NOFN has to be executed with the active partnership of state governments.

I recently inaugurated our country’s first high speed rural broadband network in Idukki district of Kerala. If 900 million mobile phones and 300 million internet connectivity can spring up in India without active government patronage, imagine what a far reaching impact a government backed programme would have if executed in a mission mode.

A noteworthy feature of Digital India is that it is envisaged as a national non-discriminatory infrastructure available to all categories of service providers for wholesale bandwidth. Telcos, ISPs, virtual network operators and cable TV providers can all plug into this network for offering next generation services to citizens.

Indians keenly observe the arrival of a technology and once they recognise its worth, they adopt it with enthusiasm. Digital India is designed to empower Indians with the power of technology.

Digital India architecture would compel change in governance processes for delivery of services. Along with the need for faster and timely service delivery, it is important to ensure that benefits of development reach each and every citizen of the country in equal measure. I believe that broadband access to all will open a new world of economic opportunities for rural Indians in areas such as e-commerce, outsourcing and back offices, marketing of agricultural products and traditional handicrafts, amongst others.

Domestically, India consumes up to $100 billion in electronics every year, most of which are imported, including products like mobile phones, computers, SIM cards, smart cards, set top boxes, LED lights, cameras, televisions, medical electronics and the massive electronic segment in defence manufacturing. There is a need for manufacturing electronics in India for the growing Indian market. Government has announced the Make in India programme, which complements Digital India by encouraging local and foreign manufacturers to manufacture in India – for the domestic market and for exports.

Foreign companies should not restrict themselves to back office operations but instead look to manufacturing their high-end products in India. Make in India has conveyed to the companies that this scheme is more than a slogan – it is a commitment. Government is backing the Make in India proposal with financial incentives. Catering to the necessity of expanding the talent pool of IT professionals the Cabinet has already approved setting up an Electronics Development Fund to encourage innovation, research and startups.

Backing up this innovation is the government’s programme DISHA, which focuses on the critical aspect of digital literacy so that even the poorest Indian can participate and contribute to this digital expansion. Floodgates of possibilities will open for the self-employed as well as small and medium enterprises.

I imagine a scenario where gardeners, plumbers, drivers, shopkeepers, tutors, tailors can all find new markets through their mobile phones.

We are in the process of finalising a policy on setting up BPOs in small and mofussil towns which will leverage digital connectivity and digital literacy to encourage employment and foster entrepreneurship.

Empowered citizens will have the power to make choices, to save time, lower their costs, add convenience to their days and improve their health.

The potential payoffs through this revolution can certainly be measured in numbers – connections, devices, subscribers, downloads and so on – but the improvement in the quality of life of every Indian is the real change our government wants to bring. This task is enormous, challenges are onerous yet we shall overcome, as India after May 2014 is a different country.

Wikidanger Assange

With switches under its control every Government tries to make right things wrong and vice versa. Easily it whitewashes its crimes. Conventional tools and people were not able to break this monopoly of the Governments. But Wikileaks is an unconventional tool. Information and dirty secrets of the Governments may be brought out. The final impact becomes disastrous for every one including its founder Julian Assange. Too much of leak is dangerous for the very survival of the global society.

Shiv Vishwanathan writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 17th December 2010

Wikileaks has become a modern fable. Its founder Julius Assange faces charges of rape and years of harassment. Mr Assange is seen as that loathsome creature, the hacker. The hacker threatens the security systems of foreign policy. But more than security Mr Assange, the hacker has exposed the hypocrisy of governments.

The leaks have exposed the arrogance of US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her sense of pomposity of India as a self-appointed member of the United Nations Security Council. Wikileaks has provided an everyday X-ray of how the American ambassador reads the weakness of India as a soft state, too invertebrate to take on Pakistan. The disclosures reveal the contempt of the ordinary foreign service bureaucrats for politicians and political processes.

The general reactions everywhere have been a sense of outrage first at the temerity of the act of disclosure and secondly at what the disclosures reveal. It reveals the hypocrisy of bureaucrats and politicians and it also exposes the fragility of the power to information.
The leaks almost seem to suggest that power exposed is power weakened. The sanctity of secrecy creates a halo around power which it does not deserve.
The leaks also expose the ambivalent figure of the hacker. The hacker is half outlaw, half dissenter. He is like the Levellers and the Dissenters were in Oliver Cromwell’s time. He embodies a different idea of power and responsibility.
The hacker as dissenter is a moral figure. He is an early warning system of the pathologies of power. The hacker is a liminal, ambivalent figure, anarchic enough to threaten power, an outlaw challenging the sanctity of rules and redefining them.
What I want to argue is that the hacker must be seen as homeostatic to the system. Every information system needs a hacker. It threatens power but guarantees the limits of power by creating an epidemic of accountability. To control the hacker beyond the norms of democracy is futile.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has argued that phone tapping is essential because security demands and terror legitimises it. My counter argument is that if phone tapping is necessary for security, hacking is necessary for freedom.
One admits the problem resides in the sense of proportion. If an excess of phone tapping creates the paranoid world of surveillance, an excess of hacking can destabilise norms.
The hacker is seen as a bohemian. In fact, someone like Mr Assange is seen as bohemian in his sexuality and in his attitude to information. The hacker personalises excess. Given his liminality, the hacker must be allowed his way of life. This holds as long as the hacker is a dissenter. In that sense Mr Assange is a prisoner of conscience and must be adopted by Amnesty International as one. It is illiterate to compare him to a Cyber bin Laden. Mr Assange is a dissenter not a fundamentalist. He wants to save lives not to eliminate people. It only frightens power. Hacking is a part of the power of the powerless.
The responsibility does not end with the hacker. The information the hacker revels is an invitation to citizenship. Hacking cannot end as a scandal. The scandal is a ritual that initiates deeper understanding of power. Where hacking stops, the citizen takes over — asking for accountability and transparency from power. The journalist as investigator, the dissenter as researcher finds a new sibling in the hacker as a subventor of power. The tuning fork for judgment is motive and the consequences of the hacking act. The hacker is an essential purgative to the system.
mr Assange in a historical sense stands on par with Daniel Goldberg of the Pentagon tapes or the journalists Woodward and Bernstien who exposed Watergate and ended the strange career of Richard Nixon.
The hacker is a special kind of whistleblower. Whistleblowing is usually an individual act of courage, an exemplary act of dissent. Hacking is more communitarian. It is a network of dissent which operates on power.
I want to emphasise that I am not creating a hagiography of the hacker. I think his ambivalence is what provides a sense of limits of power. The hacker carries both the marks of a trickster and a martyr, and we need to recognise his mixed, mixed-up nature.
The hacker in homoeopathic doses is necessary to prevent the arrogance of power. He is an antidote but should not become purgative. In excess he is an epidemic, in aesthetic limits he is a democratic necessity. Think of it, the right to information will be a feeble promise without the culture of hacking. If the right to information creates access to information, hacking breaks the secrecy that prevents information from going public.
One might ask what the difference between wire-tapping and hacking is. Wire-tapping as an instrument is used by the structure of surveillance. Wire-tapping invades privacy.
There is a final point one must emphasise in this ode to hacking. Hacking emerged like IT, out of the beat cultures that made Silicon Valley. Hacking was a dissenting cult which understood the spirit of the network and kept it alive. Hackers are not luddites. They are experts in technological folklore. As tricksters they understand that technology cannot be a servant of power. This much the Wikileaks proved and for this much Mr Assange must be seen as a force of freedom, a dissenter, a whistleblower, whose “noise” is always the unwelcome music that power cannot tolerate.

Inability to Handle Emails

Too many emails, forwards, spams and junks are crushing the instant communication network through email. Despite all anti spam wares and anti junk filters there are many unwanted messages keeping jamming our inboxes. Mostly our office updates, mass emails, birthday reminders, event reminders, anniversary wishes and social network updates are the major villains of the electronic communication system. I spend more than 30 minutes to delete the junk messages. Most of these forwards are repeated by friends. No wonder Netizens are not able to handle this trouble. This problem is common among the public figures, bureaucrats and professionals. Those who have wide network also face the same problem.

times of India writes on 17 December 2009,

Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House emails from the administration of President George W Bush and the

Obama administration is searching for dozens more days’ worth of potentially lost email from the Bush years, according to two groups that filed suit over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record keeping system.
The two private groups — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive — said they were settling the suits they filed against the president’s office in 2007.

It will be years before the public sees the emails as they will go through the National Archives’ process for releasing presidential records.

Four Square and Mayor Honours

There is no end to the growing social networking sites. As the social habits are vast and wide, cyberpreneurs are taking advantage to create new social networking sites everyday. The birth social networking sites is an everyday affair. In the latest chucker Foursquare globe trots people and confers mayoral status. This may be a short lived sensation and it may be added to the most popular sites like Facebook or Orkut. It is also difficult for netizens to navigate so many sites everyday.

The Times of India writes on 26 November 2009


Laura Fitton’s ascent has been staggering: In less than a year, she’s become mayor of nine different places in several different states, all without giving any speeches or kissing any babies.

Instead, Fitton has gone out. A lot. And that’s allowed her to build an empire in the world of a rapidly growing internet startup called Foursquare, which rewards users with points and virtual "mayorships" for checking in on their cellphones when they’re out and about.

Foursquare is the brainchild of Dennis Crowley, 33, and Naveen Selvadurai, 27. Released in March, Foursquare lets you share your whereabouts with friends, no matter if you’re at a hot bar or a neighborhood pet store. Once you’ve checked in somewhere — through Foursquare’s website or its applications for iPhone or Android phones — your friends can see where you are and decide whether to meet up with you.

If you want to check in on an iPhone, for example, you’d see a main tab showing your favorite and nearby businesses, and another tab showing where your friends have recently checked in. You can search for venues, leave tips for other users about things they might want to try at a bar or restaurant, or send a "shout" — a message that goes to all your friends.

What’s different about Foursquare is that it includes a reward system — you get five points for checking in somewhere for the first time, for example, and if you visit a place three times in a week you’ll earn a badge. Check in a place more than others do and Foursquare will dub you the mayor.

Since Foursquare launched in April, it has gained more than 100,000 users and added more than 100 cities around the world to its roster. New York has the most Foursquare users, followed by San Francisco.
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Jason Kincaid writes in Tech Crunch

Before this year’s SXSW event kicked off, a number of bloggers suggested that this year’s breakout hit might be foursquare, a new location-based social application with a gaming twist that was created by the guys behind the now-defunct Dodgeball service. As the ‘interactive’ section of the festival winds down, I think it’s safe to say that foursquare was not the must-have app of SXSW the way Twitter was two years ago. But it had a strong showing, and once I actually figured out which of my friends were using the service (which is more difficult than it sounds), I found foursquare to be an indispensable app during my time here.

foursquare’s primary function is to help you figure out where your friends are. Users frequently ‘check-in’ with the app to update their current location, which is then broadcast to their friends. At this point the service primarily operates from its recently-released iPhone application, though users can also check-in from the foursquare website (at least in theory – more on that later).

Aside from a basic ‘friend’ system, foursquare’s social features are pretty limited compared to services like Loopt and Brightkite. In lieu of a full-fledged social network, foursquare incorporates a gaming element, awarding users with points and merit badges for ‘checking in’ at a variety of locations. It’s here that the app really shines: these rewards give users an incentive to check-in frequently (a necessity given the fact that the iPhone can’t automatically update your location as you travel), and it’s far more fun than it sounds.

Badges are awarded for completing specific activities, like venturing outside of the city limits, or checking in from a roving karaoke RV (they exist, and they’re awesome). Most badges are ambiguously named and the criteria for unlocking them is a mystery, which makes ‘figuring out’ how to earn them a fun game in itself (some of the criteria for the badges at SXSW began to spread virally at SXSW, and were often the topic of bar chatter). By the end of my week here I found myself ignoring the points system altogether – points seem to be awarded for totally arbitrary reasons and my rank of 240th on the service’s leaderboard was discouraging. But my desire to unlock more badges never waned.



foursquare is surprisingly fun and addictive, but the application has some really annoying flaws that may have kept it from reaching its full potential at SXSW. For one, inviting your friends to join is far more painful than it should be. There’s no way to use phone numbers in your address book to see if your friends have registered, nor can you send your friends invitations to join from within the app (I eventually resorted to manually Emailing my friends). And the foursquare website oddly has even less functionality that the iPhone app. The developers are well aware of these omissions (most of them were dropped as they tried to get the application ready in time for SXSW), but that didn’t make them any less frustrating.

The real test for Foursquare begins now that SXSW is winding down. The awards system worked perfectly for the five-day event, but I feel like any sense of urgency to earn badges will be gone once everyone heads home. That said, Foursquare could easily build a business centered around multi-day conferences and concerts, creating customized branded applications for each event (it could even potentially charge restaurants and other POIs that wanted to get listed as one of the event’s badges).

Foursquare was built by the guys behind Dodgeball, an early location-based social network that was acquired by Google in May 2005 and languished there until it was finally axed in January. The new service have quite a few similarities, though foursquare benefits from the GPS and slick interface afforded by the iPhone.

Internet Suicide

Internet can be used for both good and bad. In the latest shocker few Chinese students are instigating their peers to commit mass suicide.

Times of India writes on 26 November 2009

Police in Hong Kong are trying to trace the founder of a Chinese-language Facebook group whose members claim to be planning a mass suicide on December 21.

The investigation was triggered after a 15-year-old member of the group was stopped by friends as she tried to throw herself off the roof of a Hong Kong school a fortnight ago. Police found she was one of 190 people who had signed up to the Facebook group called “I have to practise suicide”. The group has been removed from the popular social networking site.

Members shared tips on the best ways to kill themselves and goaded each other to join in the mass suicide.

A social worker who interviewed the suicidal schoolgirl alerted police. Some reports in newspapers on Wednesday said the group had been disbanded while others quoted members saying that a core “suicide team” remained active.

Headmasters from 35 schools have been advised on how to monitor students for any signs that they may be involved, police said.

Denigrating Obamas in Internet

Search engines are becoming ultimate engines for development and crime. One can google other's vital details, locate remote places through maps, find out the tastes of people, political views and many more sensitive information. What is considered to be the best aid for knowledge sharing and communication sans frontiers turning out to be a strong commercial proposition and global terror aider. This cannot be averted just by simply saddening over the issue. It needs a strong commitment and vigilance by Netizens and Engine operators like google. Without the proactive participation of these two partners it is impossible to curb the violence through Internet. The immediate need is software to track the culprits and fixing them tooth and nail. The earliest it is done is the better for the world.

In the latest venom spiller Google image search brings a caricature of Michelle Obama as monkey at the top of search on her name. As Google had clarified in its communication that it cannot do much about it the ball is in the court of Internet criminals who manage to malign Obamas. It is sad that Internet played a pivotal role in bringing Obama as the president of the United States and the same Internet is devastating his happiness as the president.

The Times of India writes on 26 November 2009


Google has apologized for a racist caricature of Michelle Obama that became the top result for users searching for images of the US First

Anyone typing "Michelle Obama" into Google Images this morning, was presented with an altered photo depicting the US president's wife with animal features.

However, the California-based Internet giant distanced itself from this by posting a message above the offensive photo.

The note, which states "Sometimes our search results can be offensive. We agree" directs users to a page explaining the technology giant's policy on "disturbing" search results, The Telegraph reported.

The message makes it clear that the Michelle Obama image is not endorsed by Google, but indicates that the company will take no action to have it removed.

"Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority," it states.

"Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it."

"We apologise if you've had an upsetting experience using Google. We hope you understand our position regarding offensive results," it ends.

Instant Start Up Computer

The P.C takes hell a lot of time to start. To kick off this time consuming act of computers and laptops, Google has come out with a solution. Its new operating system (OS) will explode the second you on the computer. The chrome - net opener is proving to be fantastic. The only danger with the Google is that it shouldn't steal the data in PCs and use it for commercial purposes. The one giant Google poses dangerous threats through its monopoly. As long as it serves the Netizens without worst hiccups its monopoly will continue.

The Times of India writes on 21 November 2009


New Google Inc software will start up a computer as fast as a television can be turned on, the search company said as it showed off its Chrome operating system designed for PCs that do their work on the Web.

Google gave the first public look at its Chrome OS four months after declaring its intention of developing the PC’s main software, a move that pits it directly against Microsoft Corp and Apple Inc. True to Google’s internet-pedigree, the Chrome OS resembles a Web browser more than it does a traditional computer operating system like Microsoft Windows, matching Google’s ambition to drive people to the Web - where they can see Google ads.

The software will initially be available by the holiday season of 2010 on netbooks that meet Google’s hardware specifications, such as using only memory chips to store data instead of slower hard drives.

Sundar Pichai, vice-president of product management for Google’s Chrome OS, said computers running it will be able to start in less than seven seconds. “From the time you press boot you want it to be like a TV: You turn it on and you should be on the Web using your applications,” he said.

Thinking Computers

Typing is a tedious process. It kills energy and time. This major difficulty of Netizens have been taken up by the scientists. They have come out with a thinking computer which translates your thoughts into actions.

The Times of India writes on 20 November 2009

Even the world's most powerful supercomputers can't replicate basic aspects of the human mind. The machines can't imagine a wall painted a different color, for instance, or picture a person's face and connect that to an emotion.

If researchers can make computers operate more like a brain thinks - by reasoning and dealing with abstractions, among other things - they could unleash tremendous insights in such diverse fields as medicine and economics.

Researchers from IBM Corp are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory - 100,000 times as much as your computer has.

The scientists had previously simulated 40% of a mouse's brain in 2006, a rat's full brain in 2007, and 1% of a human cerebral cortex this year, using progressively bigger supercomputers.

The latest simulation, which runs 100 times slower than an actual cat's brain, is more about watching how thoughts are formed in the brain and how the roughly 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses in a cat's brain work together.

The researchers created a program that told the supercomputer, which is in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to behave how a brain is believed to behave. The computer was shown images of corporate logos and scientists watched as different parts of the simulated brain worked together to figure out what the image was. Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing for IBM Research and senior author of the paper, called it a "truly unprecedented scale of simulation".__

Word of the year

There are million ways to make sensations. The lexicographers know more than million ways. Their current fashion is to publish word of the year and hog the limelight. We cannot find fault with their marketing strategies. After all the cut throat competition and the arrival of online publishing and global piracy are killing their business. The recent spin of the lexicography fraternity is the word "Unfriend". This is used to someone who was removed from the friend list of someone in the social networking site like facebook, orkut, linkein, batchmates, twitter etc.

The Times of India writes on 19 November 2009

'Unfriend' has been named the word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, chosen from a list of finalists with a tech-savvy Unfriend was defined as a verb that means to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site like Facebook. "It has both currency and potential longevity," said Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary programme.

"In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year." Other words deemed finalists for 2009 by the dictionary's publisher, UK's Oxford University Press, came from other technological trends, the economy, and political and current affairs.

In technology, there was "hashtag", the hash sign added to a word or phrase that lets Twitter users search for tweets similarly tagged; "intexticated" for when people are distracted by texting while driving, and "sexting", which is the sending of sexually explicit SMSes and pictures by cellphone.

Finalists from the economy included "freemium", a business model in which some basic services are provided for free, and "funemployed", people taking advantage of newly unemployed status to have fun or pursue other interests.

In the political and current affairs section, finalists included "birther", meaning conspiracy theorists challenging president Barack Obama's US birth certificate, and "choice mom", a person who chooses to be a single mother.
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Minimise Gadget Use

The biggest threat to the ecology today is e waste.With the rapid changing innovations in the techno gadgets compel the consumers to throw the used e products. In the world of fast moving riches who cares about the second hand products. In order to clear these e wastes governments ship it and dumb it in poor countries. In India several of the western ships have been caught with health devastating junks. It is high time that we minimise the craze for gadgets and responsibly use these products to avoid further damage to the environment


Atul Sethi writes in The Times of India 25 October

Nazaqat Ali works with a scrap yard dealer in Delhi. Every day, he sorts out piles of junk brought in by kabaadiwaalas, separating re-usable


components for re-sale and dismantling waste. The instructions from Ali’s boss are precise – recover whatever can be sold and dump the rest. Accordingly, he goes about his job with mechanical precision. Wires are burnt out in the open air in order to extract metal. Computer monitors are broken manually to recover glass. Circuit boards are heated or dipped in acid to get at the metal within.

The residue is dumped in a landfill. Chemicals are often flushed into municipal drains. Ali says he’s just doing his job. But, what he and others like him involved in recycling waste don’t realize is that they’re contributing to a huge and growing problem – careless disposal of electronic or e-waste.

Today, e-waste is the fastest growing component of municipal waste. That’s because people now upgrade mobile phones, computers and televisions more frequently than before. If they are not properly recycled, they became a health and environmental hazard.

In India, more than 95% of e-waste recycling is carried out in slums dotted around Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and other big cities. “All the activities in these recycling hubs involve the use of bare hands and poor work practices,” says Jeevesh Kumar of e-waste management company Greenspace. The risks are many. Burnt cable wires means soil and water contamination. Inhaling toxic elements in e-waste components can cause respiratory, carcinogenic and neural disorders.

What is especially worrying is the rate at which e-waste piles up. According to a study by the Manufacturer’s Association of Information Technology (MAIT), a forum of Indian IT products’ manufacturers, 380,000 tonnes of e-waste were generated across the country in 2007. The consumption of electronics items continues to grow apace and e-waste is consequently expected to exceed 470,000 tonnes by 2011. “If corrective action is not taken soon, this could snowball into a significant environmental concern for India,” says MAIT’s executive director Vinnie Mehta.

What’s more, many countries are using India as a dumping ground for e-trash. According to one recent estimate, more than 50,000 metric tonnes of e-waste is dumped in India every year, sometimes in the guise of charity. Most of it ends up in informal recycling yards. “Thanks to complex, ambiguous definitions of second-hand electronic equipment, the customs department finds it difficult to trace, identify and stop this illegal in-flow of e-waste,” says Abhishek Pratap of activist group Greenpeace.

The flip side is that e-waste means good money for recyclers. In Delhi alone, the informal recycling business is estimated to be worth more than Rs 2,000 cr., generated mostly from the resale of old computers and metal extracted from silicon chips and PC motherboards. “Around 30,000 people are involved in informal e-waste recycling in India, of which about 5,000 are in the Capital alone,” says Priti Mahesh of Toxics Link, a Delhi NGO.

Only a fraction of India’s e-waste gets to recycling companies in the organized sector, which are able to deal with it in a safe way. Government directives offer little clarity on proper e-waste disposal. “There is an urgent need for drafting a policy and creating regulations for e-waste management in India,” says P Parthasarthy of E-Parisara, a Bangalore based e-waste recycling company.

Recently, major Indian stakeholders in e-waste management came together to draft a set of rules for good management of e-waste. The rules have been submitted to the Ministry of Environment and Forests.
Mehta of MAIT insists the “challenge that the problem poses is huge.” But, so are the consequences of inaction, since the e-waste time bomb is ticking away fast.

Pre Fixed Spywares

Cyber crime has taken the ultimate technological turn. With the strategies built to handle the cyber criminals they got alerted. Instead of playing with the computer,internet and stealing the passwords now they fix the spywares before selling the computers. So no extra effort for them to loot. Automatically the sold computers will send all the secret information to the central server to steal the crucial data including credit information, bank transactions etc. Almighty only can help the cyber world.


The Times of India writes (21 October 2009)


Tens of millions of US computers are loaded with scam security software that
their owners may have paid for but which only makes

the machines more vulnerable, according to a new Symantec report on cybercrime.

Cyberthieves are increasingly planting fake security alerts that pop up when computer users access a legitimate website. The “alert” warns them of a virus and offers security software, sometimes for free and sometimes for a fee.

“Lots of times, in fact they’re a conduit for attackers to take over your machine,” said Vincent Weafer, Symantec’s vice-president for security response.

“They’ll take your credit card information, any personal information you’ve entered there and they’ve got your machine,” he said, referring to some rogue software’s ability to rope a users’ machine into a botnet, a network of machines taken over to send spam or worse.

Symantec found 250 varieties of scam security software with legitimate sounding names like Antivirus 2010 and SpywareGuard 2008, and about 43 million attempted downloads in one year but did not know how many of the attempted downloads succeeded, said Weafer.

“In terms of the number of people who potentially have this in their machines, it’s tens of millions,” Weafer said.
It was also impossible to tell how much cyberthieves made off with but “affiliates” acting as middlemen to convince people to download the software were believed to earn between 1 cent per download and 55 cents.
TrafficConverter.biz, which has been shut down, had boasted that its top affiliates earned as much as $332,000 a month for selling scam security software, according to Weafer.

Connection Chaos

Communication is crucial. But the same communications jams human relations and circulates pessimism it is dangerous. Who is not connected in this instant world? Twitter, orkut, facebook, youtube, sms, mms and what not? But too many networks are real nuisance. The marketing gurus of these networks are ruthless in their pursuit of wealth, fame and fondness. The victims are users.

Swapan Dasgupta writes in The Times of India (11 October 2009)

In his semi-autobiographical novel Summertime, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, the South African-born writer J M Coetzee painted a vivid picture of the white Afrikaner mentality in the heydays of Apartheid in the 1970s. Personally appalled by the iniquities of Apartheid, Coetzee initially believed that far-flung rural communities, insular small towns and a language that wasn’t spoken anywhere outside South Africa made for the Afrikaner ‘‘misreading of history’’ and their inability to detect the winds of change across Africa.



On reflection, however, Coetzee felt this explanation was ‘‘misleading’’. The Afrikaners, he wrote, had ‘‘read no history at all. On the contrary, they turned their back on it, dismissing it as a mass of slander put together by foreigners who held Afrikaners in contempt... Alone and friendless at the remote tip of a hostile continent, they erected their fortress state and retreated behind its walls: there they would keep the flame of Western Christian civilization burning until finally the world came to its senses.’’



It is probably unfair to single out the much-derided Afrikaners for retreating from the big, bad world into a Never-Never Land built on righteous certitudes. The desire to preserve, at all cost, a cherished way of life against the encroachments of modernity and godlessness, is a feature of many communities. This may partly be explained by pride in indigenous value systems and a sense of contentment with a familiar world. But, as is apparent from the Afrikaner experience, the dividing line between self-pride and intolerance can be very thin. The Afrikaners had every reason to be proud of the achievements of the early settlers, their ability to transform the bush into rich farmland and the community’s collective doggedness during the Boer War. However, community pride also came with the conviction that blacks lacked enterprise and were incapable of self-government. In the Afrikaner perception, blacks were an inferior race.



It is reassuring that the world has moved on from the days Hitler trumpeted the ‘‘master race’’ and Apartheid ideologues cited theology to justify crude racism. With more international travel and better communications, the earth has become smaller. Peoples and communities still take pride in their own worlds but at least their perception of others isn’t always bound in ignorance and stereotypes. But there are significant exceptions. Religious dogmatists, cultural xenophobes and racists keep popping up in the unlikeliest of places, from Afghanistan’s wastelands to the cyber world.



Despite an epidemic of political correctness, prejudice is flourishing. To expect otherwise is unrealistic. As long as humans have strong likes and dislikes based on culture, beliefs and tastes, there will be prejudice. Yet, there is a crucial difference between prejudice and intolerance: one is benign, the other malevolent.



When it acquired mass popularity some 15 years ago, the internet was seen as a means of bringing the world closer. The web bridged distances, nations, hierarchies, information walls and tariff boundaries. Its consequences were revolutionary, as profound as the invention of the printing press. By giving every individual with an internet connection the notional right to engage with every corner of the globe, the web also became an invaluable instrument of democracy. With blogging, every individual now has the means to skip intermediaries and disseminate his thoughts globally.



With such an onrush of hitherto untapped creativity and access to so much information, the world should have experienced a colossal intellectual explosion. Unfortunately, compared to the potential, the gains have been relatively modest. The world may be better connected and better informed. But have these led to a better understanding?



The answer is a categorical No. Far from dismantling barriers, the ultra-democratic web world appears to have been hijacked by activists cast in the mould of Coetzee’s bigoted Afrikaner. Far from promoting interaction between writer and reader, public affairs websites have been overwhelmed by hateful abuse and bigotry. Race and religion, the two pillars of yesterday’s intolerance, have been unashamedly resurrected and supplemented by slander. Sober debate and civilised bantering have been replaced by extremist sloganeering and organised bullying. It is particularly intriguing that many of the offenders are people who have one persona for the real world and an ugly personality that manifests itself the moment they sit before a computer. No wonder sensible (and sensitive) people recoiled in horror: they have either become passive net users or migrated to Facebook and Twitter where you can choose friends and followers.



The more things change, the more it remains the same. The Afrikanerdom Coetzee experienced in the 1970s has changed, and for the better. But a new trash has inherited the ghettoised paranoia and self-righteousness of the past and stepped in to subvert one of mankind’s greatest achievements. The worst offenders are in the US but Indian abusers are not far behind.

Phising Hotmail Accounts

Phising is inevitable in the high flying online word. None lives without a password and an email. Whatelse can provide a field day for the criminals. Aptly they are called cyber criminals. The worst scam so far has been unveiled in the Hotmail front.

The Times of India writes (10 October 2009)

In one of the biggest phising scams ever, the passwords of more than 10,000 Hotmail accounts were found to have been compromised and posted online.

The huge security breach was first reported by the website neowin.net, which said a list of the account details had been posted last week on pastebin.com, a forum used by software developers. This scam, as later reports suggested, may have compromised the privacy of at least 20,000 more accounts of users belonging to a number of other popular email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo and AOL.

According to security researcher Bogdan Calin of Acunetix, the hacked accounts show people still tend to go for weak passwords. The hack exposes the lazy and unsecure password habits of their users despite heightened security threats. Based on their analysis of the hacked passwords, rearchers have released a list of 10 most common passwords. Have a peep! 123456 tops the list of most common (and amongst the stupidest) passwords, Bogdan Calin told PCWorld. Calin reportedly got hold of the 10,000 stolen Windows Live Hotmail usernames and passwords that were posted on the Web site PasteBin late last week after which he analyzed and reached at the list.

Hoax Email from the Income Tax Department

Life online is 24x7 risk. With the increasing number of people online the criminals are galloping. Imagine the global cyber crime syndicate hacking millions of internet users passwords and stealing money from their accounts. Oh! unimaginable disaster. This is not a science fiction prologue but reality which is going rounds around the world. Two days back more than 10000 hotmail accounts were hacked and passwords phised. Generally people use the same password for bank accounts and other important transactions. Ghosh! it is gone. Peace of mind is gone. The latest salvo fired by the cyber criminals is asking people to disclose their bank accounts for income tax payment. This hoax email is in circulation in the name of I.T department. Please save your life online and leave the rest to the Men and Women sitting above all human beings.

The Times of India writes (9 October 2009)

Your inbox might show a mail requesting your personal particulars on behalf of the income tax department. But do not respond. In case you respond to it, do so at your personal risk.

The mail which is doing rounds for quite sometime now has made complaints reach the IT department and department has distanced itself from the whole controversy already. Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) on Wednesday issued a press note informing all and sundry that department has not sent any such mail and hence taxpayers should not disclose any of their personal information as requested by it.

The contents of the mail inform the tax payer that they have a refund due, which IT department will make, provided they disclose their bank account and other details. The mail has been received by a lot of people in Jodhpur, Lucknow, Bareilly and other places. IT department has come to know about it from various parts of the country.