Is SRK's Detention A Big Deal ?

Shahrukh Khan detained by authorities in Newark and all hell has broken loose since then! From man in the street to the Minister of External Affairs of State @shasitharoor, most Indians are outraged but some people around me, online as well as offline seem outraged by the outrage!

Of course, holding an opinion that contradicts general percepts is an essential trait of neo-conservative intellectualism. One cannot claim to be an intellectual that if s/he is found to harbour the same opinion that the more common segments of the society do. I myself have been guilty of that often so this is not aimed at anyone specific. Coming back to SRK issue, those apathetic towards it have a couple of very valid points:

• Thousands of people are facing the same problem everyday, why call foul now that SRK has been subjected to the same treatment?
• The second point is that SRK is taking advantage of the incident to publicize his forthcoming movie.
  

I have little doubt that the second allegation has some substance. SRK's initial statement that he was targetted because of his surname "Khan" sounds too conspicous to be a coincidence with the fact that the title of his latest movie is,"My name is Khan." In the age of social media, an incident that helps you your brand name go viral is nothing less than a dream come true. A shrewd buisnessman like SRK would undoubtedly exploit the issue for making loads of money and perhaps that is what he is doing.

However, this does not change the fact that US immigration policy is utterly discriminatory and unjust. Time and again Indian citizens and even Ministers have been subjected to discriminatory treatment. Post-9/11, the US has been following a number of security policies which have been termed as prejudiced, unethical and in some case (like Guantanamo Bay prison) inhumane. There are people who believe that these rules have helped US thwart more terror attacks on its soil but that is not quite true (I have discussed this in one of my previous posts)

All that it has given is a sense of estrangement and humilation among a large section of global population. Forget the common man, the list of Indian celebrities detained/stripped frisked include former President APJ Abul Kalam,the then Cabinet Minister George Fernandez, Wipro Chief Azim Premji, actors Aamir Khan, Kamal Hassan, Mamooty, Irrfan Khan and scores of less popular Indian celebrities. Background information on any of these individuals shouldnt be difficult to access. After all, these people virtually live under the gaze of the public! Let me reiterate the fact that i am not justifying VIP culture, all i am saying is that since all of these people are well-known, collecting background information about them shouldn't be difficult at all. Moreover, it is not just frisking and question-answer sessions, from what earlier victims have described, it is an interrogation which can leave any one distressed

These incidents merely reflect the arrogance that the US officials display when dealing with Asian visitors. Arrogance which has resulted in traumatic experience for people whose only fault consist in carrying a Muslim name. No sovereign nation with even an iota of national pride can afford to allow its citizen being mistreated on regular basis. Brazil in 2004 gave an apt response to US racial profiling policy by implementing a policy of finger-printing US nationals only!
I would conclude with the question which has been it the back of the mind ever since Kalam was frisked. Is Musharraf subject to the same treatment that India's former President and one of its most respected citizen.

Posted By Danish 2:44 AM

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Is Cyber-Warfare on Social Web Same As Terrorism

If you are a web user then you must already know that some of the most popular social web sites including Twitter, Facebook,LiveJournal and even Friendfeed were taken down this week by miscreants. It is perhaps one of the largest co-ordinated DDoS attack since the attack was launched simultaneously on Twitter, Facebook and other popular social media sites. As a consequence Twitter was down for several hours outraging users like me addicted to Twitter. Even a day later the micro-blogging service was running slow and had major connectivity issue with clients. It is not surprising at all, Twitter already has an inherent scalability issue, its far more vulnerable to denial of service attacks.

A typical DoS a(Denial of Service) attack is one of the oldest techniques cyber criminals employ to cause damage to sites. The technique is wickedly simple, a large number of requests are sent to the victim server which, it is unable to handle and thus crashes or slows down considerably. Often this technique has been successful but compared to this the DDoS is far too powerful. In DDoS (Distrbuted Denial of Service) hundreds of thousands of computers are used to send data and flood the network, these computers may be in different parts of the world but all of them would have been infected with a malicious code that allows the attacker to remotely control these computers. A collection of hijacked computers is called a "botnet" which according to latest news are actually availabe for hire at a relatively cheap price.

Coming back to Twitter outage last Thursday, what is really alarming is the fact that it seems to be politically motivated with probable involvement of state-actors! Apparently this highly synchronised attack was not a random anarchist act, it was targeted at one individual, a Georgian blogger, going by the name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia), who had accounts on Twitter, Facebook,LiveJournal, Blogger and YouTube.[source] As is obvious, fingers have already been pointed at Russia, especially after the last years cyber-warfare between Russia and Georgia.

Only weeks back, there were reports of sustained Denial-of-Service attacks on US and South-Korean websites and most likely these are going to continue sporadically until it breaks out into bigger cyberwar or the political objective is met. Earlier, there have been politically motivated large-scale attacks against Eastonia in May 2007 , Ukraine and Lithunia besides the occasional but highly damaging attacks on US sites by Chinese hackers. China is reported to have been preparing for large-scale cyberwar. Of course, Jihadists can't be far behind! However, as with everything, the earliest politically motivated cyberwar involving DDoS was launched against Serbia under the auspicious of the US. Its another matter that, Serbians were equally successful in counter-attacking the NATO on cyberspace.

But as of yet, there hadn't been as big a collateral damage as has been the case in last weeks outage. The Social Web has become a very important political tool as we learnt very recently from Twitter's role during Iran elections and the massive protests later on. Indeed, web is quintessentially a democratic platform and we can expect far more political activism online but there is also the fear that the involvement of state-actors in disruption of what can be called "essential services on the web" is an alarming trend. If attack on civilians in real world is called terrorism and unacceptable in any manner, an attacks that disrupts Social Web cannot be considered any less than cyber-terrorism. May be we need global treaties or similar legislations to ensure that our social web lives are not held ransom by nation-states' military and intels, cybercriminals or cyberterrorists.

Update
A few hours back, Twitter came under another attack which disrupted the service for 30 minutes. At 12:17 P.M. PT Twitter confirmed the attack on its status blog.

More information....

Posted By Danish 5:52 AM

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Will Twitter Go Down With The Waves

Twitter has been down for more than 2 hours,the last tweets on my time-line reflect panic as one would expect from the passengers of a ship as it goes down with the waves! Well, i haven't got a Google Wave account yet, the analogy is partly coincidental :p

Also read : http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/22/twitter-at-scale-will-it-work/

Posted By Danish 1:15 AM

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The ant and the grasshopper: behavioral implications of an age-old fable

Everybody, or at least most of us who have gone to the school have read Aesop's tale of the Ant and the Grasshopper. The grasshopper plays, has fun on a summer day while the ant labors to store up food in its dwelling. He even mocks the ant for slogging instead of having fun. But when the winter sets in the grasshopper finds himself starving and begging at the doorstep of the ant who has enough reserve to last the winter. The moral of the story is clear- there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. In other words, hard work pays and also, if you are idle and are having fun now,you will have to pay for it in the future.

An interesting aspect of this tale is the ant's perspective. While the earliest version has the ant rebuking the grasshopper,later versions have her taking in the dying grasshopper out of kindness. In any case, it can be safely assumed that the ant finally has an almost sadistic pleasure when nature proves her right. We can almost hear her saying,"I told you so!". Indeed, vindication of her stand would not be complete with her having reserve of food only,the grasshopper should suffer too. Without that, her hard work during summer won't be justified!
However,things don't turn out the same all the time, Somerset Maugham's version of the Ant and the Grasshopper has two brothers, the elder brother, George is a hard-worker while Tom the younger one is an idler and a spendthrift. George lives a life of discipline, does all the right things, saves a third of his earnings so that he could retire bit early and live a comfortable life. Tom, on the other hand, lives to enjoy the present, he cares too little for the future and his expenses often have to be borne by the hard-working George.

However, as the narrator of the story finds from George, Tom doesn't really suffer in the end for all waywardness in youth. Just when George thinks that Tom is about to pay for not planning or saving money for the future, the latter goes on to marry a rich lady who dies within a few years leaving her fortune to Tom! George is outraged that his spendthrift brother has actually been rewarded for all his vanities and indulgence! Does George hate his brother? After all, he has, time and again spent his own hard-earned money to keep Tom out of trouble! Yet the narrator finds him unhappy at the good fortune of his younger brother! What has probably annoyed George the irony of fate that his own hard-work pays him far less than his brother's loose ways. It is a feeling all of us have had at some point in time.

This is such an integral part of human emotion that it can be seen in our casual behaviour too. And it doesn't always have to be hard work only, it could be anything which requires a certain amount of dedication, diligence and more importantly self-denial.
Indian society is going through an exciting phase, the traditionally subdued segments are asserting themselves and over-running elite bastions by sheer numerical superiority. It is not surprising to find the upwardly mobile middle class outraged by Rakhi ka Swayamvar or Mallika visiting Twitter headquarters. Rakhi at least, doesn't represent us (yes,i count myself too) in anyway! It takes a lot of hard-work and diligence to develop intellectually, so it is but natural that somebody so uncouth and crass gaining such fame and wealth be considered outrageous!

Which brings us back to the question, would the ant's retribution be complete if the grasshopper does not suffer?

Posted By Danish 3:08 AM

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