All Safe and Sound (?)

The advent of the world wide web (or the internet as it is more popularly known) has opened a plethora of opportunities. It's much easier to buy stuff now than it was ever before. Just a credit card in hand and a computer in front, you just select the product that you want to buy and it reaches your doorstep without any more hassles. Banking is much more convenient now. No more do you have to fill out lengthy forms for any deposit or money transfer that you want to do, a click of a button is more than enough. And all this is "secure".

There was a time when phone calls used to be the most convenient mode of communicating with people who are not in your vicinity. That was replaced by email. Email was replaced by chat engines. And then the big daddy of social networking arrived, first in the form of MySpace and Orkut, and now Facebook and Google Plus (yes, there are some active users there). So you want to find a friend? Type out his/her name and you get a nice list of accounts of those who might be the person you are looking for. You add them and relive your long lost memories. Ogling at the opposite sex was also never so easy. Just open the profiles and you have the pictures put up by that person himself/herself and have a feast for your eyes. Everything is "secure", after all nobody knows that you have opened somebody's profile. 

Think again!

Open your Gmail account. Slightly above your inbox you will see some advertisements. My inbox ads give me offers about the latest cameras and lenses. Somebody else's gives offers for buying books. How did Gmail know that I am interested in photography?

I opened a popular Indian newspaper website on my browser while I was signed in to facebook in a different tab. At the bottom of the article I was reading, I found a list of my "friends" who had "like"'d that article. How did the newspaper website know who my friends were?

How does anybody on the internet know what is my activity on the internet? How does facebook know the location (or city) from where I am updating my status? If any website can know my whereabouts and my activity, does that mean any human being with access to internet can know the same?

The answer is yes, and the technique is quite simple. Just a few lines of software code and anybody can come up with their own stalking software, and the beauty of it is that it is practically invisible to the end user. Companies like Google and Facebook have been stalking you for years now. Youtube (which is owned by Google) uses your past video searches to suggest you new videos to watch. If it did not know what all videos you have been watching, how can it suggest you similar ones? Google may argue that they are tracking the user activity to help them give you more relevant search results (and mind you, it does give better results), but how do I as a user know that my personal information is not being misused?

The implications are scary, but can we live without it? Online payment systems have eased our lives manifold, and we "trust" certain companies to keep the payment information secret. Passwords are one of the least secure ways of authentication (even I learnt that recently) but they are the most convenient and usable. You have private chats on facebook, and you can always see them even after days are past. Which means Facebook stores this private information. How can you be sure that some contrived mind cannot access it and use it against you? They say you can delete your online accounts, but does anybody go and check with the databases whether the information is actually deleted?

Yes, it is a big scary world out there. Anybody on the internet can be a bad hacker who would want to use the data available for personal use. So how do you safeguard yourself in this bad bad world? Some tips, most of which are plain common sense.

• Keep your passwords as complicated as possible. It can be a pain to remember complex passwords, but remember one thing, if it is easy for you to remember, it may be easy for somebody to guess it. And that somebody may not even be human. A computer sitting oceans away from you might be thundering away at guessing your passwords and you have to do as much as you can to make life hard for it. Even if you want to keep your password simple, use special characters and changing cases to obfuscate it (For example "@$$|-|OLe" might be a stronger password than the actual word). 
  
• Beware of scams. More often than you might think, it is the educated person who falls for these seemingly obvious traps. Any email which offers you a million dollars which Bill Gates is giving away should keep you on your toes. After all why would Bill Gates think of you? Any email (or even phone call for that matter) that asks you for your bank account details, for whatever purpose it may be is fake for sure. The law states that no banking details be shared by companies over email.
• Be careful what you share over the internet. The internet is a free place and it is important that you know what you are dealing with. Unknowingly people have been responsible for spreading viruses and other malicious software. Know what you are clicking on. If an ad (which is somewhat unrelated to the website) is tempting you to click on it, then DON'T.

It may be a big scary world out there, but its not impossible to maintain your guard. Where the internet is concerned, trust absolutely nobody. Follow your brain rather than your heart. When you walk on the street, you can easily get mugged or even killed if you don't use any precautions. The same applies to our web. So protect yourself and life would be beautiful as ever.

So at this point I end this article (which is an attempt on my part to revive this semi-technical blog I started a couple of years ago which never really took off). Any feedback, suggestions, questions are totally welcome.

COMPUTERS ARE DUMB !!!!!!!

Hi,

So here's my first proper post for the blog. By Computer, I would be mostly referring to what are known as Desktop computers. The component break-up is same even for laptops, but in a slightly different sense.

I guess, since you are reading this blog, then you must have had some or the other introduction as to what a computer is really, or rather what does it look like. It is basically a set of various components, the most important of which is the CPU (the box like structure that is always there) which has the heart and the brain of the whole system. The other visible parts include the monitor (the screen which displays stuff), the keyboard (where you punch the keys) and the mouse (that tiny thing which fits in your palm). Now you may feel this is going a bit childish, me telling about each and every part of the system. Everybody knows about it right???

WRONG!!!!

Most of you would not have noticed that I have missed out the MOST important part of the system, the UPS. People tend to ignore its importance, but its most important to have a stable and reliable UPS while running your computer. UPS stands for Uninterrupted Power Supply, and it does exactly that. When the current goes off, the computer requires a certain amount of time to shut down itself properly and this is where the UPS comes into play. Lame eh? Not at all. The worst case scenario is when your computer is writing something in the memory and the power goes off suddenly. Boom!!! There are high chances that your hard disk would get damaged. Oooopss...I'm getting a bit technical. More of this would be explained later. Now come back to the title.

Dumb???? Naaahhhh....this guy who's writing the blog must be dumb even to think that computers can be dumb. Afterall, they run our lives, do complex calculations in seconds, they run all by themselves, how in heaven's sake could they be dumb????? Did I match some of your thoughts there??

Now it's time to face reality. Yes, computers are really dumb. They cannot think for themselves. The only thing they can do is follow instructions. So basically, they are like that stupid guy who will just do what he is told and not use any common sense when required. And why would they? A computer is designed specifically for the same purpose. FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS. And who gives these instructions? It's you, the user. The instructions start right at the time you press the power-on button of your CPU. That is an instruction for the computer to power itself on, load the operating system (Windows for example) and show you a Welcome screen on the monitor. A double-click of the mouse on a folder is an instruction to open the folder and display its contents. So basically, without you even knowing it, you are giving instructions continuously to the computer. Kewl na?

This post was basically to bring all of you to the fact that computers are not the know-all gizmo that they appear to be. The seem to do amazing things, but they only do so because you instruct them to. So once we accept this reality we can move forward with our entry into the computer world. I have tried to keep it all simple, but in case you have any doubts feel free to post your queries and I'll try my best to answer them (if I can... :P). Just to end on a lighter note and also somewhat relate the computer mentality to real life, there is a common joke which illustrates how a computer works.

A woman once asked her Software Engineer husband, "Get 3 bottles of milk from the shop and if they have eggs, get six." The husband went and returned with six bottles of milk. "Why the hell have you got six milk bottles?" she shouted at him. To which he innocently replied, "They had eggs."

Adios till the next post.... :) :)

Introduction

Hi folks,

I have been thinking for a long time about starting a blog related to what I am actually professionally trained for rather than my usual fictional stuff. And this blog aims at doing just that. 

First things first. For all the first time readers of my blogs, I am Ashwin P. Verleker, BTech. in Information Technology from National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, India and currently working as a Software Developer in MakeMyTrip(India) Pvt. Ltd in Gurgaon. Basically I am a native of the beautiful state of Goa and has lived there for 18 years before deciding to go out for doing my engineering and beginning a career.

So now that I have introduced myself, let's start talking business. What is this blog going to be all about??

My idea behind this blog is to present my world of Computers and related technologies in a relatively simpler fashion to be understood by people without a technical background. For those who have technical background, I guess you can just read through the posts and correct me if I am wrong at any place. 

For people who have followed my other blogs, you might be wondering why the sudden shift from fiction to technology? Well, there have been many instances in my life where I have seen people who have certain myths or rather distorted opinions regarding the computer world. My basic aim is to try to clear those myths as well as introduce people to this exciting world.

Just as an example, my adorable dear maternal Grandfather always tries his best and puts in an honest effort to understand what work I do in my company. 

"I develop websites and their engines." I tell him.

"What is a website actually?" he asks.

"It is a way where you can book flight tickets sitting at home using a computer and internet. I make the software which does the work for you." I try to explain in as simple terms as I can.

"So you manufacture the chips and computer parts?" he asks.

"Not really, I rather design the software, which uses these computer components to do the work." 

Now by this time the poor guy is all confused as to what I really mean. I don't blame him too. For someone who has never learnt to use a computer, understanding the difference between software and hardware becomes a herculean task. Also another popular myth is that Computer Engineers sit in a workshop, open the computer and repair the circuit boards. All these misconceptions are exactly what I aim to clear out. So let's see how the things go from here.