Innocence lost in translation!

She was sweet and cute. She seemed happy all the time. It’s always said that kids have a smiling face and bring cheer to everyone around them. Since the time she was a little girl, she kept everyone occupied. Whether it was her parents or her cousins, everyone laughed and enjoyed being around with her.

Sometimes she went and cut the curtains with a pair of scissors or at other times she hid the shoes of people just so that they go about frantically searching for them. Naughtiness and her went hand in hand. Though it was a task for everyone to handle her naughty antics, they still loved to see the smile on her cute little face. It was like everyone wanted to do something just to see her happy.

Book Review – Zero Percentile 2.0

Note: Read this review with the knowledge that I haven’t read ‘Zero Percentile (ZP)’

‘Zero Percentile 2.0’ is Neeraj Chhibba’s sequel to ‘Zero Percentile’ which was a bestseller when it released a couple of years back. Frankly speaking when I got the book from the author, I presumed that it was going to be another college love story, something which has become too common these days in the contemporary Indian literary world. Does it live up to those expectations or traverses a completely different path? Let’s see.

Book Review – The Patriot

To be truthful I hadn’t ever heard of this book or the author. A couple of weeks back I got an email from him asking me to review his labour of love. I immediately checked out the synopsis and was hooked on. A novel on marine terrorism and that too by an Indian author is as rare as it can get.

The book goes with the tagline: Terror on the High Seas. Going through the cover with the image showing a very rough sea and a ship – INS Indraprastha in the background, you start thinking that this is going to be a real thrill ride.

With over two hundred thousand metric tonnes of highly volatile crude oil, she is a massive Indian flag merchant vessel sailing in the Arabian Sea towards Cochin in India. But in between the ship is hijacked by 9 highly equipped terrorists who with their Kalashnikov’s and grenade launchers look ready for a grueling mission. They plant underwater mines around the hull in front of the captain’s eyes. What is their aim? Will their mission succeed? Why does one of the terrorists change sides midway? The book tackles all these questions and more.

Indian Government now asks Google for Gmail Encryption!

Indian security agencies have suddenly gone into a tizzy. Over the last couple of years, terror attacks as well as terrorist threats have multiplied manifold across the nation. Internet has become de-facto mode of communication for most of these terrorist organizations. In a bid to track this communication, security agencies are trying to tap every internet channel.

They are now directly going after these websites / service providers which could be prone to being used by terrorists. The first target was RIM’s Blackberry where the data from where information came couldn’t be found out and this proved a security threat. After having a war of words with them, the government has given them a 31st January 2011 deadline to hand . And finally the thousands of Blackberry users in the country heaved a sigh of relief.

In a recent news, security agencies have also threatened to stop the 3G services in India as they are not able to track the conversations happening over 3G

And now the Indian government has trained its eyes on the third most popular email service in the world – Gmail to hand over its encryption keys.

Why the encryption keys cannot be handed over?

Be it Google, Gmail, Blackberry or any other site, encryption keys are used by sites to protect the users private data. Since these sites have information about people’s demographics, psychographic profile – leaving it out into the open could give rise to a huge number of problems.
What is the problem then?

The government has told Gmail to lower the encryption levels or hand over their keys so that they are able to monitor all the activities taking place.

This is beset with problems

This move by the government shows that our cyber cell is non – existent or completely pathetic. Our intelligence agencies seem to be asking for an easier route or lower encryption rather than improving their ability of decrypting higher levels of encryption.

Today they are banning Blackberry, tomorrow Gmail and day after Yahoo – like [^] this we are encouraging the terrorists of their aim to directly / indirectly affect Indian citizens. The terrorists seem much more technologically advanced than our RAW!

Maybe till the time we are able to decrypt higher levels of encryption, they would have gone on to much more intricate technology!