26/11 : Then and Now

I remember this same time a year back. 26/11 happened. We were all angry. Hell, a procrastinator like me even wrote a blog post about it :)
One year has passed.
And where are we right now vis-à-vis 2008?

I think this poem by Rakesh Jhunjhunwala captures the present state of limbo perfectly :

One year ago Hafiz Saeed was free,
One year later Hafiz Saeed is still free.

One year ago RR Patil was the Home Minister of Maharashtra,
One year later RR Patil is still the Home Minister of Maharashtra.

One year ago the News Channels were playing clips from the ...26/11 attacks,
One year later the News Channels are still playing clips from the 26/11 attacks.

One year ago Kasab was alive,
One year later Kasab is still alive.

Congratulations everybody!
We simply changed the date and time,
From 26/11/2008 to 26/11/2009!

Sad but painfully true.

Pirate Bay is dead, long live Pirate Bay!

I want to talk a little about a friend of mine. For privacy reasons let us just call him 'Anon'. Now Anon recently stumbled on some news that left him shocked and confused. Yeah, it's about the Pirate Bay [TPB] being sold for a paltry 7 million dollars to some unheard of gaming company. Well I guess it's not very hard to figure out why he was getting so worked up about if you take into account the fact that he is a student with little money to spare on DVDs and mp3 downloads. Yes, he is a stinking pirate (Arrr!).

To him Pirate Bay represented everything that was good about the internets (that's what he calls the Internet). His believes in freedom : from censorship, from outdated copyright laws and from snooping big brothers. He rejoiced when some weeks back "Anonymous" and TPB joined hands to support Iranian protesters. He laughed himself to tears reading TPB's irreverent one finger salute replies to the MPAA, RIAA and other trolls. But the party is over. And it was good while it lasted. He downloaded tons of hard to get mp3s, anime and obscure movies. He told me "I can't afford to buy all those records and dvds for these now, but I am going to do good on that one day [when I get a job]. I will be the first to go to their concerts and buy their merchandise". But the thick headed hill billies at the MPAA, IFPI etc never got this fact into their heads : that piracy is not the enemy. It is incompetence and indifference. If you are a 2 bit start like Madonna or Ashley Simpson you can be sure that you will never make much money from the pirate crowd. But if you are one of those really talented low profile artists who would never have gotten much publicity in the regular pop trash music charts , the pirates are the best friends they would ever get. Anon was happy that he part of the pirate crowd thinking he was part of a revolution in the way we deal with copyrights, closed and proprietary stuff. That is why the almost treacherous actions of brokep and others at TPB angered Anon. He said it felt like losing one of those many instruments in an aircraft, without which it would be very hard to get around. But he was cautiously optimistic. He told me how the everyone felt the same when Napster was taken down in 2001. But things got only better since then. Yeah, Bittorrent happened. The old has to die for the young to take their rightful place. Anon wondered whether this sounds the death knell for Bittorrent [most bittorrent files are tracked by TPB]. Maybe something better will take it's place.

Of course things have a way of working out in this weird wired world of ours. Within days, most of the Piratebay torrents were ported to openbittorent, Global Gaming Factory is being investigated by swedish authorities under suspicion of insider trading and it's CEO got his vehicles repossessed. Oh and what about Anon? Aye, I be doing mighty fine here! Arrr!! :)

MJ : In Memoriam

I wouldn't go far as to call Michael Jackson my favorite artist of all time, but he was not very far behind. Only you had to forget the last few albums of his. And so I was very sad when I came to know of MJ's passing away in LA a few hours back.
Most people these days remember him for all the nose jokes, his media antics, a child star who never really grew up, accused of child abuse and laughed at for his appearance. But for me, I will always remember MJ at his prime, the man he was in the 80's, with those slick moves and that superb voice of his. His manic energy filled "Just beat it" is one of my all time favorite songs [thanks to Van Halen's prodigious talent as well ] and his "Liberian Girl" is one of the most romantic that I have ever heard. And I shouldn't even start talking about "Thriller" which sold a still unbroken record of 100million copies. So here is my toast to MJ, for living an interesting life!! I hope he finally found his way to neverland in the end. I am going to listen some of his songs as we witness an era die before us. We will miss you MJ!

The Coming Technological Singularity

This article was originally written for my college magazine.

The age of humanity as we know it is coming to an end.
We all remember the scary monotone voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the Terminator series. And how does one forget the menacing “agents” from the Matrix? These are fictional artificial beings with superhuman abilities coming from a world where humans have been replaced by machines as the dominant race. This happens shortly after a technological singularity. While the possibility of machines dominating our planet one day is an entertaining notion for us, and an especially profitable one for filmmakers, it has over the years evolved into a very serious academic research area. The advances brought out on the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and nanotechnology bring the possibility of a technological singularity ever closer. And it might be sooner than you think. The creation of the first true artificial intelligence, which analysts put some time after 2040, will supposedly usher in an unprecedented age in human history. And this point in time will be known as "the singularity" or as critics derisively call it - "the rapture of the nerds".


One of the defining principles of the coming singularity is the law of accelerating returns, which states that technological progress happens not in a linear fashion, but in an exponential manner. Consider this thought experiment: Suppose you get two apples today and four apples tomorrow, then how many do you expect to get the day after? Six? Right, as long as you prefer thinking linearly. But there is another option: eight. How? Instead of adding two to the previous number, try multiplying two to it. Then you will get eight instead of six as the third number in the series. What you get here is an exponential series of the form 2^x which will give you a billion digit number within a few iterations! You can try this on your friends and get the “linear” response 90% of the time. So what does this show? The human mind is conditioned out of everyday experience to assume that all growth patterns are linear while in fact many like those seen in the technology industry are in fact exponential. Take for example Moore’s law, coined in 1965 which states that integrated circuits will double in performance every 18 months. This single accelerating principle, which still holds to this day, is the reason behind the proliferation of the Internet and mobile phones. Almost everything you can imagine in this world has been affected by this law. Similar patterns are seen in the Biotech industry with ever faster and cheaper sequencing of DNA and in the Nanotech industry with its super-small machines that are approaching the size of a molecule. The day when smarter than human intelligence is invented, may come sooner than you think as intelligence at its base is nothing but computation.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the effects that the singularity will have on the human race. The negative singularity school with proponents like Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems believes that such an event would be catastrophic to humanity with the machines eventually dominating us with their superior mental ability just as much as we dominate chimpanzees and monkeys today. After all, would you listen to your dog or cat to decide what is best for you? The positive singularity school however is more optimistic. Its proponents like the inventor, Ray Kurzweil [pic above right] envision the emergence of AI that is truly beneficial to humanity. They hope for a world where human misery and suffering will be ended by the rapid technological and scientific advancement brought by super smart machines. They also advocate the gradual merging of humans and machines to ensure that humans after the singularity still stay relevant, albeit in a way that we simply cannot imagine right now.

Singularity used to be a fringe science and technology area had been entirely under the domain of science fiction writers until the past decade. Then the concept began to get closer academic scrutiny and today it is a legitimate field of research on its own. The Singularity University was started inside the NASA Ames research center last month by Kurzweil with help from Larry Page of Google, NASA and several Nobel Prize winners. Here graduate students and executives learn everything from nanotechnology, genetics to artificial intelligence, to prepare for a world that will see unprecedented economic growth just as the ushering in of the industrial age saw the total economic output of the world double every 15 years (60 times as fast as the previous agricultural era). The momentum has also built up over the last couple of years for the development of safe and beneficial artificial intelligence.
The age of the machines has dawned.

The XKCD mythos

XKCD, the webcomic of romance, math, language and sarcasm has become over the past few years one of the true icons of Internet geekdom along with lolcats [icanhascheezburger.com] and 4chan. Randall Munroe's minimalist cartoon with stick figures spouting hyper referencing comedy is slowly seeping into the mainstream world as well. In a world which has started to acknowledge nerdiness and geekiness as cool, XKCD is one of the true standard bearers. And the best thing about XKCD is : It is completely free !! It's released under a creative commons attribution licence. And that gets it a 10/10 from me. It's fans include programmers, scientists, guys who play dungeons & dragons and people with an concerned about Velociraptor attacks [or maybe it is only Munroe]. It is often due to the fact that it's NASA contractor turned cartoon creator peppers his comics with inside jokes and internet memes. The cartoon strip's cultish followers have ensured that the general public too get a taste of XKCD humor even if it usually leaves the "unwired" kind scratching their heads. With Youtube being the latest to acknowledge the power & reach of XKCD in the internet, here is a list of my more favorite instances of life imitating xkcd :

[1] Starting off with my favorite, this incident happened after Randall's cartoon [which I had included in my last post] had ninjas attacking Richard Stallman [founder of the free software movement]. And when Stallman went to Yale to talk about DRM, he was really attacked by a bunch of student ninjas!! And in another homage to the cartoon, Stallman was mailed a Katana, a Japanese sword that Stallman uses in the cartoon to defend himself. Stallman apparently e-mailed his benefactors back telling them he keeps it beside him when he goes to sleep. So, Bill Gates, your plans ain't gonna work.

[2] This cartoon refers to Wikipedia's stringent citation requirements. The man on the dais is obviously a politician. The point is clear.

And who took this to the real world? Apparently this crazy fat guy in Cambridge, Massachusetts did. He screamed around the college streets screaming "No allegations without citations". Maybe our politicians can take a lesson or two from Wikipedia.


[3] In another instance, Youtube included an idea that was illustrated in this XKCD strip : "Listen To Yourself" into its comments feature wherein a user can hear his/her comment read out aloud [optional] before posting. This apparently helped in reducing strong and negative comments. There are tons of more examples of life imitating XKCD that I have heard of. But I would advice you to just go and read this awesome comic.

A GNU Morality

This is my first blog posted from a non-windows machine. For a while now I have been using Ubuntu on my laptop [dual boot with vista] and I have to say that I am pretty pleased with it all. So pleased in fact that I rarely boot to vista these days. But then why change? I personally find Microsoft's operating systems to be substandard and of inferior quality. I in fact passionately hate the lot, having used various windows flavors from Win'95, Win'98 to XP and Vista, with all of them leaving me in various degrees of frustration, disillusionment and anger. And it's not only the operating systems, I hate most products they make except perhaps the ones from MS Research. Not just because crapware like Vista are DRM software in disguise and not because the constant crashes and BSODs are a real pain in the behind. I hate Microsoft products for a deeper reason. And that is the same reason why I have been using Ubuntu [Intrepid Ibex] almost exclusively for the past one month. It's about morality. Maybe morality is not a good word, it has been misused by people in the west for hundreds of years, especially the religious kind so much that it has now almost dissapperered from mainstream vocabulary. I think I will use a better term : Dharma. Although translated usually as "Duty" in English, the word has deeper connotations to it which are frankly untranslatable to English. Oh yeah, you must be thinking : "What has Dharma got to do with software?". Well, it has everything to do with it. Just watch "The Matrix", you'll know :). Ok seriously, I believe that using free software is more Dharmic than using closed source, proprietary systems. Suppose you buy a car and you decide later to modify it to your liking. It could be a NO2 booster or a car radio for that matter, but the point is : you can do whatever you want with your car, and the car manufacturer wont care. This has been done from the days of the Ford model-T by small town mechanics and auto-enthusiasts to the present day Dileep Chabrias. So we consider it legal and very much moral [read Dharmic] to modify cars, furniture or anything we buy to suit our likings and needs, right? Not really. Well, at least not according to the guys at Microsoft, Apple and other proprietary system vendors. So you are stuck with an annoying OS that comes bundled with your PC and you have spent a fortune on that and other software that ends up costing even more than the hardware. And if you feel like modifying some aspect of it to your liking?? Well, you don't. Period. You bought only the binary and not the source code that build the application. Sounds absurd doesn't it? Well, as simple as this argument sounds it is not an easy one to arrive at. And the people who first arrived at that conclusion were the men and women of the GNU foundation, and not least of all the great RMS : Richard Stallman himself. An iconic figure, the Gandhi of the software world who works out of the MIT AI lab, he foresaw the far reaching consequences of the [then] gradual decline of openness in software. This came about after the US copyright law of 1976.

"In 1980, Stallman and some other hackers at the AI Lab were refused the software's source code for the Xerox 9700 laser printer (code-named "Dover"), the industry's first. Stallman had modified the software on an older printer (the XGP, Xerographic Printer), so it electronically messaged a user when the person's job was printed, and would message all logged-in users when a printer was jammed. Not being able to add this feature to the Dover printer was a major inconvenience, as the printer was on a different floor from most of the users. This one experience convinced Stallman of people's need to be free to modify the software they use." [Courtesy : Wikipedia]

He also commented on what was to be the moral underpinnings of the free software movement :

"Stallman argues that software users should have the freedom to "share with their neighbor" and to be able to study and make changes to the software that they use. He has repeatedly said that attempts by proprietary software vendors to prohibit these acts are "antisocial" and "unethical". . . . He argues that freedom is vital for the sake of users and society as a moral value, and not merely for pragmatic reasons such as possibly developing technically superior software." [Courtesy : Wikipedia]

The GNU project was established in order to make a completely free operating system, which as Stallman frequently states is about being "free as speech and not free as in beer". By early 1990's, the project had built all the necessary tools for an OS except for one very crucial part : the Kernel. Thankfully a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds built a kernel using GNU tools and released it under the GPL. The kernel was soon adopted by the GNU movement and the marriage resulted in one of the pivotal moments in software history: The birth of GNU/Linux. The free software movement has never looked back since. As of today, 423 of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers run on GNU/Linux. The next revolution came with the South African billionaire and space tourist, Mark Shuttleworth entering the scene and his non-profit Canonical Ltd's "Ubuntu" coming into the picture. Ubuntu means "Humanity towards others" in Zulu and is derivative of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. It's user friendly approach and the steady monetary support by Shuttleworth saw the beginning of a second dawn for the free software movement. And this time, with Linux starting to penetrate the lucrative desktop market, Microsoft was facing the heat. Today they are hundreds of Linux distributions. GNU/Linux is being adopted everywhere from classroom computers to low cost netbooks. This was all a result of the uncompromising souls at GNU and the free software movement. Today we see the values of the free software movement seeping into the creative arts as well [Creative Commons licence]. The selfless work and endeavor of the free software movement and the thousands of developers who adhere to it shows a commitment to morality. and a bright future that is open and free. Free as in speech.

I leave you with an XKCD cartoon about RMS, who by the way I was fortunate enough to meet two weeks before at the Free Software, Free Society [FSFS] International Conference in Trivandrum. I got an autograph from him that said "Happy Hacking". And do visit the Open Source Car Project website. A very logical conclusion to my "car" argument earlier.

India At War

The past week saw the worst terror attacks in Indian history. The financial hub of India, Mumbai and it's most important icons were targeted. About 200 people lost their lives, including 30 foreigners. All evidence point to the Pakistani link [surprise!]. As a terrifying narrative of urban guerrilla warfare emerged live on TV screens around the country and the world, it was slowly dawning on all of us, the utter magnitude of the situation. Our nation was helplessly impotent in dealing with terrorism and had a system that bred and laid laurels on mediocrity at the top levels. The image of corrupt politicians getting Z+ security with NSG commandos contrasted with brave Mumbai ATS officers wearing ineffective armor marching to their certain deaths, will resonate disturbingly in our minds forever. The following is an excerpt of an email that I sent to my friends a few days back. I felt strongly that I should publish it on my blog as millions across the country feel cheated and outraged. Make no mistake about it. I am not a war monger and we Indians are not so by nature. The Americans had their 9/11, the British their 7/11, while we have been putting up with our own 26/11s in Bombay, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Varanasi, Ahmedabad and many other cities and towns across India for the past decade. To those who advocate peace & diplomacy : The patience of the Indian people have run out. The time for diplomacy is over. We are angry. With Pakistan. With our politicians. With our bureaucracy. This time however is different. The call to action is loud and clear. Please read through and do post your comments. They are much appreciated during this time of national debate.

Enough Is Enough !! It's Time To Act !

All of us Indians feel the same way. That enough is enough. Those idiots in the government & bureaucracy should be held accountable. Although I won't advocate throwing these ignoramuses from the top of a building or declaring war against Pakistan, I am extremely lenient to both ideas right now. But anger is good to the extent of it being constructive. Let us pick the pieces and start all over again. We should start thinking differently since only a secure nation can become successful economically. We criticize our politicians all the time but how about us becoming politicians ourselves and become the change we want to see? Obama has shown that change truly is possible in politics. Our bureaucracy & our security infrastructure needs to be re-organized. Who better to do that than we ourselves? Well, those words are easily said. But how do we get started? How do we start to hold the govt accountable? The luxuries that these people enjoy are from what people like you and me pay the government as taxes, bribes and all the import and export duties and whatnot. I suggest all of you start to question the government. They have a constitutional duty to answer to us. A powerful tool is already available - The Right To Information Act. You can file an application under the RTI act to know how the politicians spend our money. Visit this link to learn about filing RTI forms. For example, those of you in the coastal states can file requests to know about the present status of our maritime security, whether there are any emergency protocols in place to handle situations like a tsunami or a terror attack, how much is being allocated for modernizing the police force? These people are answerable to all of us. They are public servants. You can do this and more like get in groups and file Public Interest Litigations [PILs] like the one that Mumbai lawyers filed yesterday for separating the police force from the politicians. Get involved in debates. Instead of chit-chatting about the latest bollywood gossip in your college & workplace cafeteria, talk about real issues, try to find creative solutions. Instead of doing senseless final year projects like library info systems that most of us computer science students [from what I have seen] are prone to do, how about creating security related applications like surveillance equipment, bomb disposing robots and new ways to fight crime and terror?. And do not forget that basic power that most of you have : the Right to Vote. Get out and vote. Every vote counts. Read this rediff.com article to know about a growing civil disobedience movement in Delhi & Mumbai. Think of ways to co-ordinate activities across different cities.

And do not forget one important thing : no matter how much we criticize our politicians or our bureaucracy, we will and should present a united face to the rest of the world. The Pakistani media and establishment have been remarkably successful in being influential in the world media by suggesting that India is being irrationally aggressive towards a "peacable" Pakistani nation. Just read this callous Financial Times article. Irrational? Absolutely! See this pakistani news video footage for instance. One can see that even the most moderate of Pakistani voices are heavily and irrationally anti-Indian. Each one of you should realise something : that Pakistan is fundamentally untrustable and unreliable. We realise and forget this lesson in vicious circles again and again. Remember 1998 when Vajpayee was talking about opening Indian borders, peace with pakistan and blah blah? What happened next? The Kargil incursion. Remember the whole idiotic Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai drama that you learned in your history books? What happened next? The 1962 Indo-China war. We have become used to our politicians making strategic blunders and then our brave soldiers and police officers like Maj. Sandeep Unnikrishnan and Hemant Karkare cleaning the mess up and making the ultimate sacrifice for the country.

What can you do about the Pakistani issue? I suggest that you start presenting the threat that India faces to the world media by writing to editors of leading magazines around the world, to influential groups like the American Jewish lobby & the Indian American community. The lack of accountability is one thing that every politician & terrorist in the present and our many conquerors in the past has taken advantage of. Because we are divided by them on the basis of religion, caste and langauge and we are too busy fighting amongst ourselves. It is time to act. It is time to ask some hard questions :

- Why is it that significant parts of Chattisgarh, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh are virtually in a different nation altogether under the control of the maoists??

- Why is that Bangladeshi migrants can come into our nation across our "open" borders in Assam almost unchallenged? And how come they settle down and get the same privileges and rights of Indian citizens?

- Why is that the Central & Maharashtra governments simply ignored the warnings by the Intelligence Bureau and the RAW about possible sea based attacks on Bombay??

- Why is that Afzal Guru, a terrorist who has been found guilty by the Supreme Court and sentenced to death for trying to destroy our parliament, the citadel of Indian democracy, still alive and well?? Why is the govt tying this issue to vote bank politics?

- How come that the Defense minister of the then NDA govt, Jaswant Singh "escorted" Maulana Masood Azhar and two other terrorists to Kandahar during the IC814 hijacking in 1999? Why was there not any attempt to rescue the hostages using our commandos? [Please don't justify it by saying that it was in Afghanistan, the Taliban was in control etc etc coz Israel had rescued hundred of their citizens from Uganda who were taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists during the famous entebbe incident. ]

- Why wasn't there any retaliation against the attacks on the Indian embassy which according to international diplomatic rules is Indian territory? Why was there no retaliatory attack against Pakistan when the CIA itself said that the ISI was involved?

- How did Bombay limp back on its feet every time after the terror attacks that had been hitting the city for the last few years? Was it because of the "spirit" of Bombay or simply because of the fact that the people were helpless and had no other option but to go to work to feed their families??

This could very well be one of the pivotal moments of our country's history. Do not fear to question authority. Let us make a better India for us and our future generations. Let them not know us as an impotent nation that fails to protect and care for it's own. Let us unite as a nation for the war on terror, corruption, poverty, hunger, the "chalta hai" attitude and plain indifference. This is war thrust upon us whether you like it or not. Let us set aside all our petty issues & differences and answer the call of our nation. Because if we don't, no one will.
Vande Mataram !

Update : Although nothing happened for some months, me and my friends at the Samskriti club are beginning to make a difference right in the campus itself. More on that later!