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Internet, which initially started as a DARPA experiment is [still] under the indirect control of USA government through ICANN despite several objections from Europe as well as IBSA. This worked when most users were from the western world with the notable exception of China and few minor quirks. But in the past few decades, not only the governments around the world are putting more controls but also the internet users (as well as enterprises) are fighting back against US control. In this blog post, I will describe the main threats to the existence of (current form of) Internet.

This blog post is not about how good or bad the product technically is or how indigenous it is; it’s about a fundamental problem with tablets. It amazes me to see that even a journalist like T. Friedman missed it. Anyone who had ever used a tablet will tell you that even the best of the current-generation tablets are for consumption and not content generation.

Came across a few interesting posts like this on my wall today.

The book talks about a set of habits which differentiates successful people from the normal. It criticizes [recently popular] personality ethic which it terms as deceptive and manipulative and calls for character ethic which is a fundamental change in human character. This change must begin from inside and spreads out [inside-out] and the reverse is not possible.

The book compares a set of 17 companies that are considered visionary with similar 17 companies of lesser stature. I am avoiding gory details of their methodology here. To derive theory from practice, the book aims at debunking common myths about visionary companies.

Start-up One goal May have multiple products but all products are aimed at a single goal. All teams are working towards the same goal. Diversified Multiple similar goals Have several products (or several parts of a single product) aimed towards different goals. Teams gain by helping each other. The goals to some extent are complementary but (naturally with time) diverge away from each other. The tipping point comes when the goals become orthogonal and thus, any bonding between teams working on (orthogonal) goals goes to zero. ...

(Following are a few notes from the talk on corruption by Harvard Professor and Janata Party leader, Dr. Subramanian Swamy held in bay area on July 29th 2011) Corruption - misuse of public office for personal gains Five impacts of corruption **

The book is divided primarily into three parts, the pre-independence era [focused on the British Raj including some stories of the Mughal period], the post-independence pre-liberalized era, and post-liberalized India. The author was born in 1943 in West Punjab, which is now under the occupation of Pakistan. The author narrates his personal experiences of the economic conditions of India from 1947-2001.

The book interprets events in Mahabharata while trying to draw parallels from the contemporary world. Following are the key takeaways based on my understanding of the book. I am assuming some familiarity with the story of Mahabharata.

As the world moves towards cloud-based storage and computing, the task of storing our data on a PC hard disk is being replaced with cloud-based storage providers. This includes our emails, social data, professional data, and financial data. Accessing this data requires authentication, despite its various limitations, username and password are still the standard way of authentication [though OpenID is slowly becoming popular]. One thing which is crucial in this case is how web services store user’s password.