Isn't this the beginning of 'Machine Supremacy'??

When we think cybersecurity we far too often think about government assets falling prey to shadowy malicious hackers. We forget that the information held within many of these systems is our personal information.

Of course raising barriers around computer systems is certainly a good start. But when these systems are breached, our personal information is left vulnerable. Yet governments and companies are collecting more and more of our information.

The presumption should be that all data collected is vulnerable to abuse or theft. We should therefore collect only what is absolutely required.

The key example of this arose when the White House Cyberspace Policy review mentioned the need for better “authentication services.” It is an embarrassment that, at the moment, our bank accounts and medical records are protected by some easily guessable password system.

But the policy review’s imagination was limited to techniques like encryption and biometrics. Encryption will aid the integrity of computer-to-computer interactions. Biometrics may enhance our confidence in some transactions. But we are introducing vast new problems as we try to solve simpler older ones.

Both of these technologies can be deployed in ways that will destroy privacy rather than save it. First, authentication systems are often deployed so that a single agency or company can keep track of every single time you log on to a variety of services. Just like your telephone company knows all your colleagues and friends, centralized authentication service providers will know everything you do and everyone you deal with. This audit trail of all of your transactions is the first thing a malicious hacker would target if he wished to know everything about everyone.
Second, we are centralizing biometrics into databases. We collect fingerprints for driving licenses, in schools and at the border, and increasingly elsewhere. We put them into databases and make them vulnerable to attack. A stolen fingerprint cannot be replaced, unlike a stolen credit card number.

Innovative thinking is required, and this type of thinking must reduce our risks rather than introduce new ones. The way through this is to see personal privacy itself as a national security issue.

Source: The NY Times.

A midsummer nightmare....!!

This is Tuesday, May 19th

As I woke upto a very humid evening after having come back from office pretty early, it took me some time to settle down and contemplate of all the things I have learnt today. Be it, looking at the everyday workI do in the office or the way I plan out my studies once I am at my place. I was too tired and bored of all the things going around. So I decided to watch a movie by the name of 'Hostel'.

Goshh...a movie cannot be more gross and gory! it seemed like somebody from the time of the Nazis have actually got the scenes on the camera ! It left me with a headache and never-ending thirst for water in my throat! So much blood....and all for what??..well I don't know still..some lunatics cutting up innocent victims to satisfy their devilish needs...sexual as well as experimental!! ( well I don't know what else )...it makes you sick at your guts!

I have had dinner an hour before I started watching the movie..and I was almost about to throw up! I am not at all weak-hearted and horror movies or violent war scenes do not bother me as such..but this one was something else.A different league altogether. The existence of such kind of movies is evidence of the fact that there are takers for this stuff as well and that is what concerns me..!!

Director Eli Roth needs to understand that shedding gallons of blood makes the audience sick and encourages perverted sex. It gives you ideas...for young minds it can be disastrous! well after having seen this piece of bloodbath I had to take a clean and long bath to make sure that I wasn't having the bloody images hovering in my mind still..! I needed to make myself a strong cup of tea and decided to write this blog. But before I lash out at Eli Roth, I did some google search and found out that people who practise such customs do exist and such underground clubs where people pay to kill people are also present. So I would not want to say that Eli Roth's depiction of murder in Hostel is totally imaginary. It has a strong base but my only question is, why show it?
Why make it a franchise?..I mean this is not even porn! common guys, who would wanna kill people in the name of sex other than a luny?....

The way we are going back to medieval times is stupefying and it is so shocking to see that internet has actually made the shadows darker than what they used to be 500 years back !sometimes I think are we going too fast?....are we actually trying to catch up with technology and failing more often?....are we creating information just because we have a medium to communicate it?...and are we becoming less responsible about the aftermaths of our actions?...!!

Well, only time can tell but when I think about it, I would say the soceity as a whole is becoming a more perilious place to live in. Nuclear families with children having no source of entertainment other than video games ( which are mostly about killing monsters ) are nudging at the darker side them.Soon they would come to know about stuff like Hostel and a trust me, out of 100 children of 13-16 age group, 95 would turn it off being unable to bear anymore...but there would be 5 of them always who would not...and that's where directors like Eli Roth would get their ideas from....yes, alarmingly, from real life.....!!!

The factors of confinement

This is Sunday, May 17th

I have been successful in my attempts of extreme confinement that I had planned for days now. It included the 24 hour non-stop stay in a room without speech, without fresh air and any human communication. This is a way to discipline the mind and body and to get a feel what it is to be like "YOURSELF". This form of detachment is what is extremely necessary for the realization of a long -term goal.

It has to start with short-term milder goals..which ultimately cumulates to the long-term picture. It has been mentioned in Jewish Caballah that meditation is only successful when we can actually detach the mind and body from any external influences. It should not be a fashion statement ( like what it has become today ). Meditation and yoga has become a money-making rackett and a global multi-million dollar business.It is hard to believe that humans hav not let this pure form of emancipation be left alone in this world of marketing and greed.

Confinement purifies the body and mind quite effectively or if I may say calms down. My attempts included meditating for an hour listening to natural rain drops and rumbling of clouds in my earphones. To get an actual feel of the whole action, I had switched off the lights and fan. It did cause me a lot of perspiration and irritation to beging with. But with time passing on and going deep into mediataton I realized that these external factors slowly stops playing roles in how one feels. What remained behind was the sound of raindrops and that of trickling water down some rocks..It brought along a natural feeling of feeling cool and relaxed. It may sound astonishing and even fishy to somebody who has not practised it yet..but IT DOES HAPPEN THAT WAY..!

The lesson that I have learnt is that feeling of hot or cold, lonely or bothered starts with the presence of an environment. The brain reacts to whatever lies around you and makes you feel a part of the system. Imagine at this moment if you are on the top of a hill looking down on a snowy valley, would you feel hot ??...but yes, as you would say, it is not so easy to imagine something like that so easily. For this, The creator has given us the wonderful gift of dreaming!!
Now in dreams you would obviously see yourself wherever the dream takes you. You have no choice left there.

Here lies the catch! Meditation is the only way by which you can have 100% self- control consciously. The funny side is you can almost decide what you waant to feel or what you want to be indifferent to. This can be made so strong that physical responses to your immediate environment cease to exist. It goes a long way in trying to chase happiness. As Thomas Jefferson has rightly said, you cannot catch upto happiness, you can only chase it! which is another way of saying that the chase only ends when you let the target chase you back. Happiness is something you cannot look out for...you got to wait for it to find you, and I believe that meditation does that work of waiting a lot more pleasant....

So much for today....Hail and fair well...:)

The end of "USUAL"

Hi Everybody,
Since this is my first day at blogging and I am not too sure if bloggiing as a way to express your views are extremely effective, I would restrict myself to describing a few phenomenon which are going around at large and seem to be an indicator towards a future that is 'CHAOTICALLY PLANNED'. I say so because events in the recent past starting with the demolition of the World Trade Centre to the recent Global Economic Recession, all point towards a future that we never knew was coming.....a future that is bleak and sometimes undoubtedly dangerous.

At one instance I notice, there is too much in the hands of our civilization that we are unable to handle the true pressure of it.Starting from automated devices and liberal agendas, everything is slowly proving to be a bane in the long run. why??
Take the case of a simple blackberry handheld device. It surely is an amazing thing when it comes to opening attachments and browsing through your emails..but consider this, the ones who use it ( at least most of those I came across ) have developed a symbiotic relationship with it.That is to say, if you keep that black piece of technology away from then for even a day they would be half-dead out of concern of what was sent to their inbox even if they were not expecting anything actually.So what we notice through this is, the BlackBerry handheld device was meant for usage by humans...but wht we notice today is this device has become a part of the respiratory system of executives in corporates...This is not what it was meant to be.

There are other protocols which deserves special attentions of concern. Disorderly algorithm in computer programming has shown that when continued in a recurring fashion, shows an usual behaviour in its end result. For example, a simple algorith written to drive a toy car by remote shows when continued to be wrtten infinitely that it can actually form isolated protocols that reflect a behaviour which is pretty discreet in itself. When this program reached a million lines or ten million lines..it shows that the next 100 lines would form a protocol in itself and if only these 100 lines were put to use in a computer separately, they would end up calculating Fermat's last theorem ( i,.e only triplets with powers of 2 can exist i the form of a^n +b^n = c^n. Now nobody knew that the program in itself has come up with a method to perform geometry or maths just by picking up a couple of 100 lines from an infinitely long program. It is similar to situation like the number Pi.(22/7). The digits after decimal do not repeat themselves if we keep on calculating the fraction...!!

These events keep happening at the remote corners of the world...slowly but steadily gaining pace and synchronization. Of course, they are human made...of course we are the ones who had set them into motion in the first place but what's astonishing is the sheer A.I. ( Artificial Intelligence )factor attached to them when left unmonitored and when we so gladly take our eyes off them declaring ," It is automated"..!

I am not against the machines and the usefullnes we have come to know about them..I am just pointing out a 'just in case' scenario when we would still calculate 393633353*3483933939 manually and a computer in a fraction of a second...only difference is it could be a calculation that sets off a nuclear weapon...and then again it could be 'automated'..!!