Cyber Warfare 2.0 : Operation Myrtus

Never mind the jargon  (or hyperbole if you would prefer) in the title, cyber warfare has indeed been taken to the next level in last  two years. The latest cyber-attack on Iran through the malware "Flame" (dubbed Stuxnet 2.0) wasn't surprising enough, it was expected. In a post I had made on October 2010, regarding the advent of cyber-weapon in most probability, Stuxnet being a precursor to a range of cyber weapons. After all Stuxnet had proved that a  cleverly crafted code snippet  can do what perhaps air-strikes may not be able to. This malware was successful in taking over control the computers in one of Iran's nuclear research facility,destroying centrifuges and pushing Iran's nuclear programme some years back. Given the huge return on investment, , 0 casualty  and stealthiness it provided, cyber weapons if properly executed, it is only natural that other nation-states follow the same.

Posted By Danish 5:46 PM

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World Worships Mediocrity

 Leaning Tower of Pisa 

Famous for its structural

defect. 

Recently I set my Facebook profile favorite quote to "World worships mediocrity", I am not sure who first said,who it can attributed to,if any one does please let me know. Now if the statement sounds snobbish,read again! The word is mediocrity not mediocre, its about attitude not people. And the quote is intended to be part of a self-prescribed therapy.  The malaise I diagnosed myself with is the inability to complete tasks, any task.

Its an attitudional problem  I have been grappling with all my adult life. It is not just procrastination and laziness but also the fact that I am not satisfied with the outcome. Am I a perfectionist ? This thought never occurred to me before,but more importantly I have never been referred to as such. But then I have never achieved any success,radical enough and/or little cranky to be considered that.

Posted By Danish 2:16 AM

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What Sibal Doesn't Git: Wisdom of the Crowd

So Kapil Sabil finally succeeded in nudging out Kolavari Di from Twitter trending topics ? Once more, one of the three musketeers of the Congress,the telecommunication minister, Kapil Sibal has raised shit-storm by asking Internet companies like Facebook,Google and others to impose censorship on Social Media to “take care of  sensibilities of our people”. It is not just Kolavari Di, other important news item such as Anna Hazare and his team gearing up for fresh protests against the government on the Lokpal Bill, the FDI issue and other such issues of real significance  have been put on back-burner as Sibal started the shit-storm by expressing desire to baby-sit more than 100 million Indian Internet users ! 


True, some content found on web are more than derogatory,they are vile and perverse but these people exist in physical world,amongst up.  It is ironic that in the age of Social Web, on which online anonymity is on a rapid decline,replaced by physical world identity and existing laws viewed more than capable of dealing with these sociopaths, a democratic government should even be thinking of regulating content on web. It is not as if the governments are as helpless or even honest. One just needs to go through Google Transparency Report to get a glimpse of what exactly Kapil Sibal's guidelines for social media really means. 

Posted By Danish 11:55 PM

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Lives And Legacies Of Steve Jobs And Dennis Ritchie

The month of October 2011 has seen demise of two towering figures from the world of computers, tributes for one of them have been pouring down on the web almost infectiously while a very few people are aware of the death of the other person whose contributions has been incalculable . Of  course, the first one is Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Inc and Pixar Animation Studios while the other is Dennis Ritchie who built Unix and C programming language. Together they represent the two ends of a spectrum- the digital and the physical world.

Posted By Danish 4:27 PM

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Facebook Profound Changes' Profound Implications

For sometime now social media as well as traditional media sites have been buzzing with information on Facebook undergoing profound change. Lately, creating a media hype before release of a product (Google+) or a major Facebook upgrade (video chatting feature)  has become an indispensible strategy but in this case I would wager that the change may really be profound. Facebook hasn't just changed the layout of the profile page, it has reinvented it too, incorporating various social web behaviour like listening to music or reading a book. The Gesture concept when properly applied may take us a whole level forward towards the Semantic Web. However,the idea of Facebook incorporating so much users data in their profiles is alarming , the privacy issue on Facebook gets more complicated and then there is the chance of Zuckerberg locking the users in.

Posted By Danish 5:17 AM

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