Yahoo! launches email in Hindi

India has more than a billion people and just a small percent of it read, write and speak English. The most popular language in India is Hindi and to reach the masses one needs to reach out in Hindi, this is exactly what Yahoo has done by launching it’s free email in the Hindi language. Yahoo is also targeting the 200 million users who are expected to come online and also get advertising revenue in the process. Yahoo has already launched Yahoo! messenger service in nine regional languages including Hindi. Read here. So, atleast in this aspect Yahoo is ahead of Google.

Privacy of Medical Records

When it comes to the issue of privacy our health records should be given top priority, but apparently under HIPAA (Health Insurance Portablity and Accountablity Act) our health records may be regularly accessed and disseminated without our consent for all routine uses (defined as treatment, payment, and healthcare operations). All about this is written in this interesting article by Deborah C. Peel, who is medical doctor herself and the article can be found at http://www.mdng.com/current_issue_detail.cfm/article/266 and it is titled HIPAA: The Data Miner’s Dream. The author states that our medical records are open to surveillance, snooping, unwanted uses, and disclosure by more than four million “covered entities,” including employers, financial institutions, insurers, schools, government agencies and all of their business associates.

All this Data mining generates billions of dollars in revenue but not one dime goes to help a single sick person. All our personal medical records are sold by various companies to large employers, insurers and the pharmaceutical industry. Even though at times having our records readily available can save lives and be helpful it is important that we control access to our records to prevent rampant abuses of privacy.

To get more information on your medical and privacy rights go to www. patientprivacyrights.org, which was founded by the author.

Who is in “Whois”?

This maybe outdated for many out there in the cyberworld, but I just found out about this site called “Whois” which contains information such as names and phone numbers of owners of “.com” and other Internet addresses.

So, I googled whois and went to the site and typed my domain name and yes all the contact information on me showed up. Now, it is not hard to find me, but apparently law-enforcement officials, trademark lawyers and journalists, as well as spammers, also use it regularly to get information since alternatives such as issuing subpoenas to service providers take more time and cost money.

The news is that whois maybe scrapped for privacy reasons, since privacy and anonymity is being advocated for Internet users. Read here.

RFID Chips to track kids.

Schools in United Kingdom are starting to train their kids at this young age to feel and act like criminals by tagging their school uniforms with RFID chips. Most people’s behavior patterns are based on how they have been programmed while young.

By inserting these chip in the kids uniforms the children will start feeling like criminals and every little movement of theirs will be recorded. These children will be walking around being paranoid, needlessly feeling guilty about innocent behavior which could be stated as against the school’s policy and start to think and act like criminals. Why should a child’s movement be under surveillance and why should their childhood and innocence be ripped away from them? What happened to the joy of student-teacher relationship, meaning of trust and dependability?

Did the generations before not run schools without using all these gizmo’s and are schools or the students better now then before? No, not really and there are ways around any gadget and the human mind always finds ways to maintain independence and freedom. Like one student mentioned it is easier now to play truant, just ask someone else to carry your shirt.

Next, to overcome that students might be inserted with these RFID chips under their skin. By the way as I had mentioned in one of my earlier posts some companies in the US do that to track the movements of their employees. Now the real question is why should any ordinary citizens movements be tracked for whatever reason and why are we allowing it to happen?

Site Linking Illegal in UK

On-line website TV-Links a UK based site was shut down last week by the local police and the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT). What TV-Links does is that it provides links to TV shows and other videos posted on various video-sharing websites like YouTube or Google. The site by itself did not host any cpoyrighted content.

A FACT spokesman said that: “Sites such as TV Links contribute to and profit from copyright infringement by identifying, posting, organising, and indexing links to infringing content found on the Internet that users can then view on demand by visiting these illegal sites,”

This sounds real interesting since in the US in the recent Perfect 10 v. Google case the appellate court held that Google was not liable for copyright infringement for linking thumbnail pictures from Perfect 10’s site and the court held that Google’s use of the thumbnail pictures was “transformative” and considered it to be “fair use” under 17 U.S.C. Section 107 of the Copyright Act. The court stated that Google is operating a comprehensive search engine that only incidentally indexes infringing websites.

So if TV-Links was US based, I wonder how the US courts would view TV-Links activity. While linking is not a crime in the US, it is a crime under the UK IP law and would come under “facilitation” of copyright infringement. Since the copyright laws vary in different countries, a site considered infringing in one country can be shut down there but can be hosted in another country. 

Can downloading music and video on-line and file sharing be permanently stopped? Can piracy be stopped? No, once a site is taken down another crops up. RIAA’s shut down of Napster has not eliminated or even diminished file sharing. Tons of p2p programs are out there which makes getting copyrighted stuff a child’s play. For every site that is taken down dozens crop up and for every person who is prosecuted thousands go free.

YouTube’s Video Anti-Piracy Technology Launched

On September 1st I had written a post titled ” YouTube’s Anti-Piracy Technology and Licensing” which talked about technology that Google was developing and had promised to come up with soon that would combat piracy of videos on YouTube. YouTube has been under fire with several law suits being filed against it for video piracy and the most prominent one was Viacom seeking $1billion in damages.

Now finally Google has launched this much awaited and promised video anti piracy technology on October 15th which will combat piracy on YouTube. YouTube’s Video Identification technology is a database that stores reference files of original video content and associated ownership rights and compares it with any video YouTube users attempt to upload.  Read here. When it comes to the music industry Google uses Audible Magic a private company to offer audio identification tools to detect unlawful uses of music inside YouTube videos.

Transport Security Administration Gets to See You Nude.

I am not joking this is true,TSA actually gets to get a peek at your body through your clothes in the name of security. It is being done at the Phoenix airport as an alternative to pat down procedure and this scanning can look through a passengers clothing to detect weapons etc.

Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s technology and liberty program, objects to this on the grounds of invasion of privacy, since it reveals the human body graphically which is humiliating and embarrassing if the passenger knew about this technology. The passengers especially at times like this have no choice but to subject themselves to this search which is degrading and it cannot be considered voluntary and also the main concern is about the privacy safeguards. Read here.

 Nothing is totally safe and assurances of privacy that these images will be completely safegaurded is really beyond control, the most supposedly secure things get stolen, disseminated and have a way of getting into the wrong hands. I personally will be squirming if subjected to one of these scans. 

Copying and Distributing Music on the Internet

The verdict was out three days ago in the Capital Records v Jammie Thomas case and the defendant was held guilty of copyright infringement. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has been suing people for copyright infringement for a while but they were all dismissed or settled out of court for about $4000-$5000 per defendant, but this is the first case that actually went to trial.

According to the plaintiff’s counsel Richard Gabriel the crux of the matter was ”copyright infringement over the Internet” and that the defendant knowingly infringed the laws by distributing songs over KaZaA and said that “Downloading and distribution doesn’t happen by accident.” In the jury trial  it was held that the defendant Jammie Thomas was guily of copyright infringement and was ordered to pay RIAA a total of $222,000.00 calculated as $9250.00 for each of the 22 songs that was infringed. This is the first time RIAA has won a jury verdict against an accused file sharer.

Now none of this money will go to the artists but will only embolden RIAA to aggressively sent out more threats to sue individuals. Defendant Thomas announced that she has decided to appeal the verdict which basically held that “making sons available on-line violates copyright.” This maybe temporary victory for RIAA but is definitely not going to stop the sharing of music,  for each person who is sued there will be thousands who will continue the music sharing trend and get away with it.

Wired Science at PBS

Yesterday on October 3rd from 8.00pm to 9.00pm PBS hosted Wired Science show, it was fantastic and the topics covered were about science experiments, a surgeon doing surgery with the aid of robots, technology that let’s a person read other people’s ( like an autistic person’s ) thoughts and how Russian hackers crippled the country of Estonia.

My favorite section of the show was about the Cyberwar that was waged on the tiny country of Estonia which apparently is the most wired country in Europe which paralyzed the functioning of websites of government, news organizations and major banks. The hackers used botnets which are networks of surreptitiously commandeered “zombie computers” to bombard a target website with requests for information, overwhelming the host computer and forcing the site down. Read about it here.

Forget about terrorist attacks and actual physical warfare with people getting killed and properties destroyed, this Cyberwarfare could be the latest way to bring down a country and cripple the functionality without physically entering the country. I visualize these “botnets” and compare them to stealth war planes or remotely programmed missile attacks that physically target and attack a country causing massive destruction and carnage, except that in Cyberwar it is all remotely done to cripple the country’s functioning and economy. The show also talked about how unprepared the US was if something like this happened in the US and the effect of it.

Kudos to these Indian Business Women!

Indra Nooyi who is the CEO of PepciCo topped the list of the most powerful women on Fortune magazine’s 10th annual list of the 5o most powerful women in business. Read here. Three more Indian women made it to the list of the 50 global leaders. Chanda Kochhar who is the deputy managing director of ICICI Bank was at the 33rd postion, followed by Naina Lal Kidwai who is the head of HSBC bank in India was ranked number 38 and at number 50 was Kiran Mazumdar Shaw who is the CEO of Biocon and she is India’s richest self made business women.

This makes me real proud for all that is publicized by the media is how downtrodden and oppressed women in India are.  Like in any other country including the US where the differences are not so apparent India has it’s share of women being mistreated and having to play a subservient role, but traditionally women in Indian culture have been revered and the female goddesses like Shakthi, Lakshmi and Saraswati have been worshipped along side male gods. Women have ruled the country and the current president of India is a women and at home the women rules even if it is not apparent from outside. Even India is called “mother India!”