The future of the world 3.0 is in my hands...

“The future of the world is in my hands...And I'm modest about it,” I recently stated. And I can tell you I am not wrong. Look outside the window, how many of those people who walked just by do you know or recognize? One, two…none? Think now again of the people spread all over the world. Do you know them? Do you know what makes them laugh, what pulls at their heart strings? Do you know that one of them was an aspiring soccer player turned accountant? Do you know that one of them became the CEO of his own company at the age of 19, but donated all his money to become a regular kid again? Do you know?

Really WHAT do you know?

But you have a chance to learn and answer; and this chance is this one lifetime. People around me feel very technology handicapped so much so that they would not want to hear the T word. But the only choice you have to make the most of this life is through accepting technology. At the moment your newest friend could be a thousand miles away or in the next dormitory room, but our culture has made us too cold to get up and say hi to the stranger next door. In fact if a stranger would come up to you I am sure you will squint and indeed be perturbed by the free-willed action. The same guy pops into your chat window or leaves you a message in your MySpace/Orkut/Ryze/ guest book and see yourself happily responding.

Accept the world has changed and so has our socio-cultural dynamics. And it is going to change even further. Social networks have already taken us by storm and so has avatar technology. We have created false or more politically correct – virtual selves on the Internet. I am not talking about just the fakes in chat rooms, but the reality of having a second lease of life in virtual worlds created by Second Life and the sorts. You can earn money, have sex and even have drugs on the Internet! “Users of virtual drugs have reported the effects of these virtual drugs to be surprisingly realistic and lifelike,” is what Brian Shuster, chief Utherverse feels. Even virtual sex sells. Second Life confessed pervert and businessman ‘Stroker Serpentine’ a.ka. Kevin Alderman sold his ‘amorous’ technology for $50,000!

Clearly, our perception of reality has been altered.

And that now brings us to the topic of the semantic web or WEB 3.0. Our computers are still too dumb inspite of these sweeping changes that we are still grappling with. We are now building newer ways to understand the world – and that is WEB 3.0. We still rely on human intelligence to sift through Google search results, but what if you are hurried and all you want to say is: I need a flat for my family of me, my husband, mum and 3-year-old twins. But my budget cannot exceed Rs. 35,00,000 and it must not be more than 10 kilometers away from my office in Santa Cruz West, Mumbai. Google this and you’ll be lost in tones of data or perhaps lack of it. The semantic web will understand you and your needs and then answer you. It will intelligently understand that when you ask your operating system to “open files on my investments” it needs to open up data on mutual funds, stock ops, fixed deposits etc and not have you look up each.

Apart from the intelligent semantic web we desperately need and will have open architecture in the future where the programming power is in the hand of the user – as I said in the beginning the future in our two hands. . So we surely need:

• A universal operating system – that means one common Windows/Mac/Linux platform. And not sold in CDs, but just pure downloads off the web;

• Web conferencing facilities that are automatically updated and scale up with need – this means businesses not only close deals in real time over the globe but also nuture new ideas, recruit talent and talk to shareholders inside their homes and bounce off ideas with them;

• An avatar system that can travel within many virtual worlds enabling users to interact – and not just within closed games, but replacing email ids with virtual 3D representations.

This is not your future world. This OUR world today − thinking tomorrow A.K.A WEB 3.0.

And NOW you know!

Can your name be a copyright violation?

Just think about it – your parents have named you Microsoft. Now you grow up and you are signing this on your credit card, receipts, bills… your home address, salary accounts reads this. Can Microsoft – the IT mammoth – sue you for infringing upon their name?

Or what about baby Reebok? Will the sports company sue you?

You know why I got thinking on this seemingly crazy idea? Well, it started with my pet Alsatian. His name is Diesel – I had given the folks an option of Diesel and Antonio, they went with the former. Anyway, his mum’s name was Pepsi I have found out much later. So, I am thinking can the Pepsi guys say hey that the liquid beverage named bitch (pardon me, but that is what a female dog is called) is their property?

Are you actually aware that there are many names that have become public property like say Benetton, McDonald or Sothebys – surnames that command respect and bags of green…the currency kind.

What if your name becomes as famous as Calvin Klein or Giorgio Armani, eh? Will you go around like a second fiddle to the famous, or would you opt to change it? What if you already have a blog, Second Life avatar and an email address by that name? Can the patent lawyers hunt you down and make you relinquish your identity?

If that made you paranoid, go out relax and order a nice cheesy pizza at Dominoes…or is that your name… hahahahaaaa (devilish)

Identity Theft or lax in Identity Continuance?

One huge question that arises from the Oracle and SAP battle is not just the unfair and illegal practices that brings to mind the Virgin and British Airways “dirty tricks” dispute. But the serious question of ‘identity continuance’ – a term I would like to describe the phenomenon of employees accessing older data after the license expires and logging onto protected/private and public URLs using log-ins and passwords issued while employment with the issuing company.

It is certainly a very scary idea; and I too am well aware of employees leaving with the knowledge of public and private log-ins and passwords, subscriptions to highly expensive resource portals like (say for a journalist) gettyimages, AFP or livewire. It is especially forbidding in a scenario when most employees can even log on to their work email servers through a specific URL, and few, if any, use secure tunnels (VPNs or virtual private networks) to access it, whether they are at home or in their hotel rooms!

Perhaps linking the HR and IT department more closely might help stymie such efforts. However, insisting on something akin to digital signatures would be the only real method to stop illegal use of log-in ids as every time a ‘terminated’ user tries logging on the signature would identify the perpetrator from his unique personal access code. Though, fool-proof, is a something that is a term next to impossible; pun intended!

Remember, play safe ;-)

Oracle cries thief; sues SAP

Oracle has just sued SAP. And boy, is the 44-page complaint worth a read, or what! Before I get into the nitty-gritty, one must know that by their own admissions these two are the biggest and finest enterprise application and database software companies. Well to be fair, Oracle strength is database and is graduating at an incredible strength to the enterprise applications space through an awesome number of acquisitions, while the German company SAP is the clear frontrunner in ERP (enterprise resource planning) arena. The latter admits to invest in organic growth, and refuses to go acquire at the mind-numbing pace of the former.

Ok, so what is the hullabaloo all about? Well, Oracle claims that SAP has used fake/expired log-ins and log-ins of customers who were in the process of migrating from Oracle to SAP to access the Oracle support website and “steal” unauthorised information, programmes and downloads to build up SAP’s own tech support database. For example Oracle states, “In January 2007, a user on an SAP TN computer signed in as Oracle customer Honeywell International…to access Oracle’s support system and copy literally thousands of Oracle’s Software and Support Materials in virtually every product library in every line of business.”

The interesting point to note is that Honeywell is now a SAP TN customer and was cited by Oracle downloading “1800 solutions per day” after making the shift to the German conglomerate compared to an average of 20 downloads when it was with Oracle. These illegal downloads included tech solutions for JD Edwards products when the user – Honeywell – was on Peoplesoft! “Oracle subsequently connected many of the illegal downloads to an SAP TN IP address and to SAP TN’s employee, Wade Walden – a former PeopleSoft employee now employed by SAP,” states the company. (read Oracle and SAP - Identity Theft or lax in Identity Continuance for more)

Other companies like pharmaceutical major Merck was seen signing on to Oracle networks even after its support license expired in Jan 2007; Merck supposedly continued to download JD Edwards copyrighted documents well into March, 2007! (Really, it took the world’s ‘best’ database company – Oracle –3 months to update their own databases! I don’t know who to blame for this carelessness)

Now, for the uninitiated, SAP earns money from maintaining and supporting Peoplesoft, JD Edwards and Siebel solutions – marquees that have been acquired by Oracle. Well, SAP acquired TomorrowNow (what is SAP TN now) to maintain these products and gives the “Safe Passage” as an option for customers who do not believe Oracle can support Peoplesoft in the future. But, SAP’s idea to support a third party software is dicey when being fully-aware that Oracle will continue updating and tweaking these products as technologies change; and providing a support product without knowing about the original codes and that to without infringing upon patents is one hell of a tough task! And that too at half the cost!!

What will happen? Allegations and counter-allegations, and lot of free publicity for the two! As no one more than the media loves a public mud-slinging! For more keep watching this space...

Does your vacuum cleaner have human rights?!

“To you, a robot is just a robot. But you haven't worked with them. You don't know them. They're a cleaner, better breed than we are…” I, Robot (paperback edition)


And so said Isaac Asimov, the writer that actually coined the termed robotics, through his characters in his short collection of stories named I, Robot. Well, perhaps they took him too seriously, because today the world has demanded to make an ethical charter to prevent abuse of robotics!

In South Korea, a committee has been formed to debate and formulate such a charter that will be released sometime in 2007. European Robotics Research Network have similar plans; and if you would like to know, no less than the government of United Kingdom has stated that in the next 50 years robots will be able to compete for the same legal, emotional and physical rights that are applicable to the human race! Surely, no one is taking artificial intelligence as an equivalent of fake IQ, because with the sort of advancements like Honda’s Asimo (his name that seemingly is inspired by the writer Asimov) or the simplistic yet amazing Roomba – a vacuum that has sensors and can clean up your house without your supervision – is indeed very real!

In fact, it has been projected that in South Korea alone from 2015 to 2020 every household would be having a robot in their house (reminds one of Robin William’s Bicentennial Man). The laws that shall form the base of the Ethics Charter are from Isaac Asimov’s novel Runaround. This was one of the short stories in I, Robot, which for the first time formalised a law for robots; mind you at that time, i.e. 1942 when the stories were written, this was a futuristic concept and no real gadgets as such had been developed.

The laws are:

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

THE DEBATE

Now, all this seems fine, the real debate centres upon whether robots, which were developed as tools to help our race, deserve to become in fact a de-facto human? Before we jump to conclusion, look at the origin of the word. Robot actually comes from a Czechoslovakian word for slave/forced labor that is robota or robotnik. So does that mean Nelson Mandela has found his new campaign statement? Or is there going to be a Bhartiya Robot Party in India one day?

The answer perhaps lies in 322 B.C. As the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote...

“If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it... then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.”

Author’s view: I demand the right today as a human being to reject my personal computer to upgrade to a fancy, Wi-Max laptop with teraflops worth of RAM and hard disk. I demand the right to kick my vacuum cleaner when it gets stuck on my carpet. I demand the right to throw away my robotic puppy, when I get bored. I demand the right to upgrade! AND NO, upgrading the human race to robots is not acceptable. So, though according to Darwin, we might not be the fittest when compared to robots, but we invented them and I demand the right to remain MASTER!


PS: In case anybody would like to learn about I, Robot and its short stories you could check it out at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A455898, which has small write ups on the same. Keep reading!

I want to break free… Blogging needs freedom!

“It has been recognized that China's mines are among the most dangerous in the world…corner cutting by owners … lead to almost 5000 deaths during 2006 alone, and to an unknown number of potentially serious injuries that is thought to far outstrip the number of outright casualties….” (source: http://angrychineseblogger.blog-city.com/)

Now, it is statements like these on Internet blogs that many website hosting providers and search engines are pressured to censor. Last year, Google and Yahoo took flak for censoring web searches in China prohibiting sites that seemed politically ‘unfit’. In fact, a political dissident, Shi Tao, is serving a 10 year jail term for an email that did not suit the government. Information on him was given out by Yahoo. MSN Spaces too bent over and removed certain objectionable blogs that did not meet the approval of the Chinese government. In fact, now news of China banning opening up of new internet cafes for the ‘protection’ of the public from ‘objectionable material’ is not too unexpected either.

“Censorship of certain content is usually argued for when considering the possibility that children may have access to that content. The mass of the population of any country are not children and we should not be treated as such by our various governments,” shares avid blogger Steven McDermot of one controversial blog singabloodypore.blogspot.com, “Usually governments use such arguments to censor material that they feel is detrimental to their claim to legitimacy to rule within a given state....as an adult I merely require the protection of the law as all other adults do.”

Now, this Jan-end the internet behemoths like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo reportedly finally agreed to get together with Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders to come out with an online ethical code of conduct. “The positive effect may simply be that they are less likely to self-censor their thoughts. It may even lead to a whistle-blower ethos taking formation online. One such endeavour recently launched was http://wikileaks.org/news.html,” argues McDermot.

Considering, China, Vietnam and Iran are on a list of sensitive countries that restrict freedom of speech on the Internet and have persecuted citizen journalists based on the same this would indeed come as good news, though we still are waiting for the formal charter to appear. Of course, one icky issue is that the US based companies are handing over this censorship or non-censorship role to the US government! Considering, it is the very country where many blogs by army men on their opinion on the Iraq war and ground realities have been banned and deemed ‘objectionable material’ the situation is indeed murky, to say the least.

So the question remains, how far is “freedom of speech” really free? How far is user’s data private? Take the case of MySpace that finally decided to turn over their database to help track sexual offenders. The site is employing Sentinel Safe technology that will match user profiles with the federal sex offender database in real time. Google’s Orkut has been heavily criticized for helping pornography as some user’s photographs were being used to build fake profiles and solicit ‘clients’. When many ‘I hate ….’ communities took long to be pulled off, the social networking site was lashed out at in the papers.

Not that we condone any of this irresponsible behaviour, what is then this debate of absolute freedom of speech online? Is this a farce, like our idea of truly non-politically motivated deeds of “social welfare” by many corporate houses in the real world?

Well, here sites like http://peacefire.org/, http://psiphon.ca/download.php and http://www.afreeproxy.com/ come to the fore, which provide numerous ways to circumvent censorship – from ideas that help you get a proxy URL to routinely testing out filtering software that in many cases have been caught subverting “inappropriate” political content.

It is through information alone that the fight to clamp down information can work. The ethics code is one step, the marathon run is yet to begin.