The Hindu today featured an article that talks quite systematically about an issue that is rapidly becoming one of the most important things we, as a generation, have the chance to be part of: Defining the rules for governing the Internet.

Now that the internet has achieved an unprecedented growth and ubiquity, it is no longer the domain of the geeky, the techie or the creative. It has, like fuel, land, air and money, gone and sunk its claws in several basic aspects of the way we live our lives now. Jobs and activities that have nothing to do with technology – buying groceries or creating a tiny revolution through petitions – are becoming more and more inseparably dependent on the internet.

So, at a time where most nations are equipped and exposed enough to take this technology very, very seriously, and at a time where many developed nations have already started creating laws around...

Samsung recently suffered another loss at the hands of Apple’s lawyers when Judge Koh ruled that Samsung did indeed infringe upon Apple’s patent for autocorrection.

While it is debatable whether or not Samsung, or even Android, have been cautious in putting their products together, in this specific instance, the autocorrection patent might just be one of those things that wasn’t their oversight. On the face of it, it is a fairly specific and clear patent, whose language, apart from being weighed down by legal long-windedness, is in fact, surprisingly crisp about what is being patented. Here’s the abstract of the patent:

One aspect of the invention involves a method that includes: in a first area of the touch screen, displaying a current character string being input by a user with the keyboard; in a second area of the touch screen, displaying the current character string or a portion...

What, would you say, creates a good man? It is one of those questions that nobody really has an answer to but everyone loves to make an attempt at answering. I don’t know, of course. I don’t think the question really interests me much, either - making my own attempt at answering, I’d say it takes nothing. Every man is born good. The true question, in my opinion, is this: What preserves the goodness in a man as he goes through life? In a life that is designed to make one regret having done the good thing, in a world that is built by selfish hands and scheming minds, can one hope of meeting true goodness? I suppose not - at least, I had believed as much; to an extent that each time I did encounter a true, good-hearted gesture, an authentic noble deed, I chalked it up to the doer’s foolishness, naivety or innocence.

You might call me a cynic, and I might call myself a realist. Indeed...

Recently, Google’s ‘Google Ideas’ - a division that is ostentatiously, their 'think/do-tank’ unveiled three products in a summit they hosted in New York. The summit is called ‘Conflict in a Connected World’. Of these three projects, two make the mind quite uncomfortable.

The first project that they unveiled is called Project Shield. In short, Project Shield is Google using its mammoth technology to create mitigation methods for DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. I understand that DDoS attacks are aggressive and, in a manner of speaking, unchecked. However, one could argue that until now, DDoS attacks themselves were, ironically, the best form of free expression that people not governed by any corporate or a government had. For example, when Wikileaks was running out of money, the political aisle had seen a chance to get their claws into Assange. Eventually, Visa, Mastercard...

I was sitting in the passenger seat of a sedan the other day, when I noticed the cup-holder under the AC vent. The first time I saw it, it obviously looked like I was supposed to press it for something to happen but I wasn’t prepared for the little delight it held in store for me - the sheer joy of watching the cup holder unfold in front of me as it silently and smoothly slid out, as if to humbly and gracefully offer its assistance to me, was enough for me to keep playing with it for the next fifteen minutes.

(Image credit: www.autojunction.in)

The only other time I’d felt a little tickle of excitement like that in recent times was when I tried deleting a photo from my iPhone. It was running iOS 6 at the time. The animation, of the photo getting pulled into the little trash can that opened its lid, might be tacky or overkill to some, but to me, it was delightfully appropriate and...

A few weeks ago, as I sat in my car, stuck in the impossible traffic of Bangalore and waiting for the light to turn green, I decided to indulge my mind in something to distract it. It is an accepted side-effect of driving on Bangalore roads to be perpetually mad at fellow drivers at a subconscious level. A special form of this anger gets reserved for the phenomenon known as auto-rickshaws. The sheer dedication in defying not only the feeble traffic rules of Indian roads, but in defying the rules of nature and physics in general that these guys display makes one wonder how could they and oneself be of the same species! Although this thought came to me as a jeer in my mind, I decided to follow it up with a thought experiment.

I like simple thought experiments not just because I’m a fairly lazy person and these experiments seldom involve actual work, but also because they are quite handy...