BanBerry

From Times of India:
 
India may decide to temporarily shut down BlackBerry Messenger and email services if Research In Motion does not address security concerns in a meeting to be held between the government and operators on Thursday, government officials said. 

India wants to ban Blackberry Messenger and email services. So that next time there’s a terrorist attack where the perpetrators plan everything out and communicate using prepaid SIMs bought in India, VoIP, and Google Earth, we can catch them a la Minority Report and throw them in jail to rot for ever and ever.

Yes, frands, Mumbai 26/11 involved a bunch of

a) cheap SIMs: the kind college kids get to keep in touch with their boy/girlfriends for practically nothing;

b) Skype/random VoIP software: the kind college kids get to keep in touch with their faraway boy/girlfriends for literally nothing;

c) Google Earth, the amazingly well-engineered piece of software available online free for anyone to use

Hmm.

Letting people not use the Blackberry, then, must be a key step if we are to avoid extremist carnage in this country.

What’s with the warped view on technology we have in India?  We have massive auctions for 3G networks, late as it may be, with much fanfare; and then we have the government wanting to monitor people’s Blackberry messages.  What are they going to see anyway?  Most Blackberry users are corporates; if anything, the government will get to see lots of emails about business lunches.  Where’s the privacy in communication anymore?  More importantly, what’s the point pushing for so much technological development in our ‘emerging superpower’ if the purpose is to go through legitimate information in the hope that there MIGHT be some illegitimate information?  The whole process is like searching for a needle in a haystack, only here the needle is wearing running shoes and track pants and slyly sprinting ahead of the truck carrying the hay.

Also, India is setting a great example by threatening (yes, threatening) Research in Motion, the company that manufactures the Blackberry.  Countries that have requested (cough) information to decrypt Blackberry messages are: The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Algeria.  Wow, we’re following a country that disguised spyware as a software update. I’m so proud right now I could regurgitate last night’s dinner.

Atleast I don’t blog from a BlackBerry. Maybe I should, so the government can read this.

To end: (http://tech2.in.com/india/topstuff/smart-mobile-phones/why-the-indian-government-is-wrong-on-blackberry/138012/0)

Recently, Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, one of the most important men in India, got a telemarketing call during an extremely important official meeting, offering him an unsolicited home loan. So much for India's state-of-art 'Do Not Call Registry.'

Ahahahahaha.

Oh no, my friends are turning into virtual cows

A few years ago, 'making a move' online meant going to a chatroom and turning up the heat: "bb, wat r u wearin? put ur cam on. v r goin 2 cyber."

Now, unfortunately it's befriending your neighbour because he has a pink cow that gives strawberry milk.

Last week, Disney paid a massive $563.2 million to buy Playdom, a social game developer, recognising the immense potential that games have today on the internet.  I don't know why, but news that social gaming online is the second highest source of internet traffic behind social networking worries me.  If a friend of mine says he's busy and doesn't want to meet me, is it because he's waiting for his next energy pack to pretend he's killing someone and stealing his grenade stash? Or does it mean he's cleaning his fish tank and feeding the fish?

From the Washington Post:

In olden days, games were played in the living room. Chess. Battleship. Monopoly. Then the world changed. The family nucleus dispersed, especially up and down the information superhighway. Online gaming first gained popularity with those adults-living-in-the-basement types. But now, through smartphones and Facebook, where users tend to imaginary plots of land in FarmVille or hire friends to run eateries in Restaurant City, games are mainstream again.  

As if geeks sitting around playing World of Warcraft 20 hours a day wasn't enough, (don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of geek culture) now there are people playing games that don't require as much skill, and hardly give any returns.  It's not like your bushel of wheat will go for over $7 because Russia will experience a drought in the near future. (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-04/wheat-surges-to-22-month-high-on-russian-drought-corn-soybeans-advance.html)

I remember playing a game called Dope Wars, and deriving so much fun out of the fact that an old lady sitting next to me on the subway would say, "I hear there's gonna be an acid raid tomorrow," then spending all my capital on acid, and then selling it the next day for through-the-roof profits.

This is, of course, before I realised I was spending a couple of hours a day looking at a computer screen and pretending to be Pablo Escobar.  He's dead by the way, but I bet he didn't get carpal tunnel syndrome.

If http://mostpopularwebsites.net/ is to be believed, facebook.com is behind live.com (ridiculous, I know) and the fifth most visited website on the internet.  I was so proud when YouTube used to be the biggest thing on the internet, and was all praise for humankind, and how we could have developed something that allows us to watch virtually anything uploaded by anyone anywhere.  My mood has been somewhat dampened now, especially because Disney is entering the gaming world (I'm slightly more excited about Google Games though, Pacman on an HTML website was brilliant) and because FarmVille is one of the biggest things to have ever happened to the World Wide Web. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/google-games-pit-search-giant-against-facebook-2037978.html 

Still slightly irritating though, is the fact that Google plans to base its gaming around Zynga, the company responsible for the vomit-inducing Mafia Wars.  What Google will do remains to be seen, but it can't be as bad as spending fake money to build a fake fence to protect your fake farm from your fake neighbour's fake farm in a fake world... I think.

To sum up, from the same Washington Post article quoted earlier:

Today's popular pursuits are not your weird cousin's games [...] Millions of women throw parties together on Sorority Life.

Ahahahahaha.

Yuvraj the Pansy

As if Times of India's headline "Crowd fingers 'waterboy' Yuvraj Singh" wasn't funny enough, they've added a picture where Yuvraj is allegedly pointing his middle finger at Sri Lankan fans.


http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/cricket/series-tournaments/india-tour-of-sri-lanka/top-stories/Crowd-fingers-waterboy-Yuvraj-Singh/articleshow/6254083.cms


Do you see it? I don't. But I'm also severely myopic.


Yuvraj was called 'waterboy' after he got agitated when the Sri Lankan fans asked him why he was carrying the water.  Rather than worry about being called 'waterboy', Yuvraj should be wondering why he isn't on the team for the third Test.


Then again, Yuvi's anger is understandable.  Imagine Pragyan Ojha, Munaf Patel and Suresh Raina getting cheered on while you're running around with bottles of Gatorade.


Why are cricketers such pansies, always complaining about someone abusing them?  Look at football - Nigel de Jong's 'kung fu' tackle on Xabi Alonso during the World Cup Finals in South Africa didn't even put him out of the game, and he made official complaints after the match, saying it was one of the worst tackles he'd ever received.  Notice if you will, that Alonso did nothing to provoke the police to come in and intervene.


Alonso: "I have probably broken a rib, although I am not too worried about that."

Ahahahahaha.

From Times of India website:

The ICC has laws in place for banning spectators guilty of racist taunts, but here officials didn't seem to know what to do. Indian team manger Ranjeeb Biswal said the team management was considering filing a police case against the fans who jeered Yuvraj.

Biswal defended Yuvraj, saying: "The crowd was trying to misbehave with the player. The police was asked to intervene and the situation was brought under control. Yuvi was not at fault, he didn't try to provoke the crowd at all. I was sitting next to Yuvi when it happened and I can tell you they were trying to provoke the player." 

How exactly is calling Yuvraj 'waterboy' a racist taunt? I should have been hanged to death several times over for each Sardar joke I've made.  Thankfully, I'm not a big cricket fan and don't join people in choruses.

Calling a black person a 'dirty negro' on the other hand, qualifies as a racist taunt. 

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8511106.stm)

He (Narcisio, player at ASD Nuova Casteltodino) shrugs off racism as something that happens, admitting that in Italy, black people are still "treated like outsiders and it's difficult to integrate fully". 

Talk about taking things with a pinch of salt and pizzaiola sauce.

Maybe if people didn't complain so much about every single thing that happens on the field I would watch a little more test cricket - or if I had five days of nothing else to do.