Smart Passports- Do They Invade Privacy!

There was a news release about smart passports to be issued by the Indian Government. It is now possible to record a lot more information that can uniquely identify a person into thse smart chips used in the passports.

There has been a debat that this ammounts to invasion of privacy. On the one hand all the personal information recorded into the passport will also be available on servers somewhere in the government dungeons and it'll be easy to get at that information if security is compromised somehow. Also that anyboy with an appropriate reader possibly could read this information off the passport too.

That definitely is a difficult boundary to establish. Where does the need for unique identification end and where does the invasion of privace begin! In these days of heightened terrorist activities all over the globe the boundary possibly needs to be pushed back. Need to prevent terrorism by identifying terrorists is for the greater good. That should be the criteria to determione where this boundary move to.

Photo Edits Online-Mostly Free!

CNET recently reviewed 15 such sites. With the trend of everything going onto the web, websites getting published every other minute and then this urge to share everything on some social site; you need a handy photo editor. There are several now available that provide this service, they'll even make transporting the photos to social sites easy.

Most of these are free with some charging you a subscription when you use their premium features. According to the survey they cover a fairly wide range of services. Mostly the feel and the comfort you feel and the exact services that you need will decide which one is the best for you.

Following are the sites. Just add a .com to access them except one as indicated in the list.

• Flauntr
• Fotoflexr
• Lunapic
• Phixr
• Phoenix(www. aviary.com)
• Photoshop.com
• Picnik
• Picture2File
• Pixenate
• Pixer.us
• Pixlr
• Snipshot
• Splashup

Give them a try. They are going to be useful sooner or later.

Kindle, Mobile phone or what!!

Battle for the electronic reader has been going on for a while. The holy grail seems to be a book sized device that offers the same ease of page turning as book. Though Amazon's Kindle has been in the market for some time and there's a second version of it now out, nobody knows for sure if this is waht the readers at large need. Kindle offers additional advantage over a book in the sense that you can download a book anytime you want. It's like acrrying a library with you and picking one to read at any time. That's an advantage over a book. but not everybody is comfortable reading the electronic display however close to printed paper look like. Will electronic paper take over here! The verdict is not in yet. The yonger generation who grew up with electronic displays may look at it differenjtly. they may me far more willing to read a book in the electronic form.

Now with the Google service of making books available on mobiles, iPhone & Andropid phones for the time being, will that compete with Kindle like devices! Mush smaller displays here adds another disadvantage to the book reading on the mobile paradigm. But the comfort is unbeatable. It is available with you all the time. qwe are used to doing a lot of things with these little things. So would we like to read books on them too! Who knows!!

ASP, SaaS and Cloud Computing

Just before the dotcom bust many web businesses came up with this Application Service Provider model. Idea was to take the hassle of keeping the software updated out of the users hands and bring the advantage of use & pay to the end users. That looked like a pretty neat model. However there was quite a bit of resistance on the part of the end users about sending the corporate data onto somebody else's servers. Then came the bust and everybody forgot about it.

In the recent past, it made a come back as Software as a Service (SaaS) avatar. Selling points are the same, advantages/disadvantages are thye same in fact the complete model is the same. It's gaining currency alright. There are several examples already, some of them are quite successful too.

From there the next extension is a small step. What if just do everything on the cloud( the internet cloud) that we do on a PC ! It's something Google would love to do, the WinTel combine loses all the hold! Google has a infrastructure that can serve the model easily. Even Microsoft has visions of it. So is it coming? It definitely is. Questions are when will it become viable! How much of the computing will get done on the cloud versus the desktop/laptop!

It ceratinly feels natural, we already store a lot of things on the cloud and this will be truly convenient. All you need is a device that can provide you network access and a keyboard!(or some other input/gesture device and a display. The concern about data priovacy remains. Let's see how that unflods over time.

Desktop Supercomputer CX1 From Cray

Supercomputers are coming to the desktop. I guess, it was bound to happen someday. This one from the makers of supercomputer CRAY uses Wintel technology for the first time. The horse power comes from 8 nodes of 2 Xeons each and each these could be dual or quad core. That's 32 to 64 processor cores to slice up your workload and work parallely on them. What else is there in the hardware configuration! 4 TB of secondary storage. I ma tempted to make a comment- are you ever going to need more? But the history of computing is full of stories how applications always catch up with whatever capacities are made available for them. Each of the processing nodes have 64 GB memory. Looks like that's a loosely coupled parallelism. 

The whole thing is going to be managed by MS Windows HPC Server 2008. That's a lot of firepower!

Coud Computing And Privacy

Software as a services or sharing sites or whatever such facility one uses on the net can be termed under cloud computing. One common feature of this paradigm of computing is that data is stored on public data centers. Does that mean these data have a less privacy that the data on your desktop! This article brings up this interesting issue. Right now things are undefined and the general perception is that intelligence agencies or law enforcement agencies think these data are more accessible and less protected by the strict privacy environment regarding data on machines owned by you. How should these issues be tackled!

Personally, I was thinking, why shold not we apply the Swiss banking laws here. We are effectively banking our data with these agencies like the Flicr or the Salesforce.com. Unless criminal intent can be proved the privacy about the data on these data ceters should rock solid like the Swiss banks! What say you?

Chrome Shines

I was a day late. I had to wait till it was released in US on the 2nd of Sep which was during my night of the 2nd. But then the experience so far has been great. I downloaded the Chrome on 3rd morning my time and it downloaded without a problem, installed without a problem. When I opened it I like the simple yet attractive( I have preference for all shades of blue anyway). It imported the bookmarkes from my Firefox browser. Asked if I wnated it to become the default browser and so on. 

It felt quite fast and worked with most sites that I tried, while my Firefox 3 beta keeps breaking down when I open some pages, including The EDN pages in particular. Many of the features mentioned in the comic book sound good, I am yet to try them. Certainly looks like the local interface suitable for web based applications. Very low overheds for such use. Let's see how it goes/grows!!