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Do you remember how three years ago Indian ISPs had all of a sudden started blocking random websites (including all blogspot blogs)? Remember how it felt to have your website banned all of a sudden and without any explanation? Well guess what, if the proposed amendments for the Information Technology Act of 2008 gets passed in it’s current form then such incidents may become a regular occurrence.

The new amendment arms the government with unprecedented powers that allows the blocking of any website without the right to be heard. Your website may be blocked under any of the following pretenses:

Interest of sovereignty or integrity of India
Defence of India
Security of the State
Friendly relations with foreign States
Public order
For preventing incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence relating to above

A new committee called Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) will be formed that will be responsible for monitoring the web. The one sidedness of the affairs is what makes it so terrible. The CERT is not required to get in touch with your before blocking you. And once your website is banned there isn’t much you can do. Not only that, the new amendment permits the government to spy on its citizens in relation with any offense. The authorities can intercept your telephone calls, monitor your sms, read your email and any other online activity. And they can do this for any offence including non-criminal transgressions! And even worse there isn’t any time bound, so they can continue to do this for as long as they want. Be careful about what you have on your computer too. Any inspector can raid and haul off a computer user for questioning — and without a warrant.
Continue reading “Indian Government Wants to Play Big Brother – Major Ammendments Proposed to the Indian IT Act of 2008”

You are probably aware of the ongoing antitrust case filed by Opera against Microsoft. If you aren’t I suggest you check out the initial press release by Opera. During recent months Mozilla, IBM, Nokia, Sun, Adobe, Oracle, and others have also joined the case. Opera’s demands are two fold – i) to compel Microsoft to give consumers a real choice and ii) to support open Web standards in Internet Explorer. Opera has already been partially successful with the second objective by managing to pressure Microsoft into making the standards mode the default rendering mode in Internet Explorer 8. However, Internet Explorer still has a long way to go.

The second demand is a debatable one. It does appear to be extremely unfair to Microsoft to force them to promote their competition. However, the problem arises because of Microsoft’s monopolistic position in the computer market. To most people Internet Explorer is the only way to access the internet. A large majority of people aren’t even aware of the alternatives. In order words Microsoft’s dominance over the operating system market has allowed it to also dominate the browser space.

To make matters even worse Microsoft is notorious for not implementing web standards. Microsofts dominant position ensures that almost all web-developers will code keeping IE in mind. Since IE doesn’t support standards and has its own set of proprietary technologies, a significant percentage of these websites won’t work on other browsers like Firefox and Opera. The combination of these two factors stifles competition by preventing the web from becoming truly cross browser compliant. To get a better understanding of this read Havard’s explanation.
Continue reading “Microsoft Refuses to Offer a Choice, Instead Unbundles IE from Windows 7 in Europe”

As I told you in one of my previous posts, I am currently in the process of re-organising all my pictures. While doing this, I realised that I had several duplicate image files in my collection. Manually finding duplicate images among thousands of images is an impossible task. There are plenty of duplicate image removers available, but Visipics is one of the better softwares I have used.

Visipics goes beyond simply checking for checksums and employs upto five different algorithms for detecting similar images. This enables Visipics to detect to images even if they are of different resolutions or in different formats. You can adjust the level of similarity you want to search for through a simple slider. At the lowest level it even managed to detect two different images which were identical (they were the same shot taken from two different cameras at a slightly different angle).
Continue reading “Find and Remove Duplicate Pictures with Visipics”

I recently started using Picasa for hosting all my photographs online due to the tight integration with Picassa Desktop Client and features like Facial Recognition. But I had hundreds of photos lying around at Zooomr that I wanted to transfer. I needed a tool that would allow me to download all my photos from Zooomr, retain the present tags and upload them to Picasa. This is where Migratr came in.

Continue reading “Switch Between Photosharing Websites with Migratr”

I couldn’t blog about this earlier as I was out of station during the past week. Opera released the much awaited beta build of Peregrine (v10) last week. The much hyped, secret new feature turned out to be something called Visual Tabs.
Opera has always been a step or two ahead of its competitors as far as implementation of tabbed browsing is concerned, and this latest innovation keeps up the tradition. I remember trying an extension called Tab Sidebar for Firefox earlier. While it was an interesting option I didn’t like having to scrol sideways to access a tab. Nevertheless it did improve Firefox’s default browsing experience. I was interested in finding out if Visual Tabs would do the same for Opera.
I have been using Opera’s implementation of Visual Tabs for the last two days and count me impressed. What a difference small implementation details can make. To enable Visual Tabs all you need to do is drag the tab-bar downwards. You can adjust the height of the thumbnails according to your taste. What I love about visual tabs is that it keeps the traditional aspects of Opera’s tabbed browsing intact – it automatically reduces the width of each tab as the number of tabs increases, gets rid of the close button when tab width is reduced below a certain threshold an so on.
Continue reading “Opera 10 Beta 1 and Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta Released”