Bollygram. stop

a spice of life in India will soon end.

the telegram

I was most impressed with the story below and

how it looked at the historical, personal, legal and 

technological aspects of the telegram. 

I'm always fascinated by the changes in 

technology, as I've seen or used most of 

them:

typewriter

8-track

cassette

dial phone

VCR

telegram

This also fits into the general mechanisation of the
world that is saving money, but costing jobs.
People in the telegram business have to find something
to do.

more comments later

checkit: Csmonitor

India to send world's last telegram. Stop.

Once a staple of authoritative communication across the Indian subcontinent, the telegram has lost too much ground to smartphones. One devotee is threatening a Gandhi-style fast.

By Shivam Vij, Correspondent / June 14, 2013

An Indian staff member, foreground, of central telegraph office dispatches telegrams in Mumbai, India, Friday, June 14. The state-run telecom firm Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has decided to discontinue the 160-year-old telegram service from July 15, in India once a source of quick and urgent communication.

At the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), India's state-owned telecom company, a message emerges from a dot matrix printer addressing a soldier's Army unit in Delhi. "GRANDMOTHER SERIOUS. 15 DAYS LEAVE EXTENSION," it reads. It's one of about 5,000 such missives still being sent every day by telegram – a format favored for its "sense of urgency and authenticity," explains a BSNL official.

But the days of such communication are numbered: The world's last telegram message will be sent somewhere in India on July 14.

That missive will come 144 years after Samuel Morse sent the first telegram in Washington, and seven years after Western Union shuttered its services in the United States. In India, telegraph services were introduced by a British doctor and inventor who used a different code for the first time in 1850 to send a message.

The BSNL board, after dilly-dallying for two years, decided to shut down the service as it was no longer commercially viable.

"We were incurring losses of over $23 million a year because SMS and smartphones have rendered this service redundant," Shamim Akhtar, general manager of BSNL's telegraph services, told the Monitor.

An important tool of British colonial administration and control in India, the telegram is connected with some key moments in Indian history, such as helping the British put down a popular revolt in 1857 and being the mode of communication with which Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru informed London of Pakistan's invasion of Kashmir.

Colloquially known as "taar" or wire in India, the telegram has been a part of Indian life, a metaphor for an urgent message, bypassing the delays of the postal system. Responsible for a twist in the plot of many a Bollywood film, telegrams were often the harbinger of the news of the death of a family member. Today, death telegrams, still priced at a fifth of the regular fee, account for less than 1 percent of telegram traffic.

At their peak in 1985, 60 million telegrams were being sent and received a year in India from 45,000 offices. Today, only 75 offices exist, though they are located in each of India's 671 districts through franchises. And an industry that once employed 12,500 people, today has only 998 workers.

One of them is R.D. Ram, who has been working in the Delhi office for 38 years. "They will now move me to another department where I will feel like a fresher [beginner]," he complains.

Mr. Ram once learned the Morse code technology for telegraphy, but today oversees staff who type out and send telegrams over a Web software. He tries to put up a spirited defense of the obsolete technology in the age of the smartphone, arguing that mobile penetration is much lower than it is hyped to be. Mobile penetration is indeed a dismal 26 percent, but even in the remotest village, at least someone has a phone.

Ram notes that the telegram has legal benefits as well. "It is still accepted by the courts as a valid form of evidence. And is taken seriously by a judge when a government official sends a telegram to say he is unwell and cannot be present in court today," he says.

Sixty-five percent of daily telegrams are sent by the government. But it is the remaining 35 percent that Ram worries about. A number of telegrams are from runaway couples who marry secretly because their parents wouldn't let them marry in the wrong caste, class, or religion.  "They inform their parents that they are married, and fearing violence from the family, inform the police and the National Human Rights Commission," he said. 

the secret computer code for privacy rights?

on the one hand you have people just using
communication media in the running of their
busy lives, and on the other you have
governments who want to know our every
move, because there might be a terrorist
in our midst, once a decade, of those they
didn't plant anyway.

the enablers of this "human soap opera"
are the coders and programmers. They
know if a program's code has a sleeper spy code
in it.
As a result, they're rather blase' about surveillance,
just because they know how it works.
Anyway, you'd think that admitting
that you're not surprised would be
coupled with advice on encryption.
But, you would be wrong.

Checkit: Code academy

The NSA, Code Literacy, and You

rushkoff June 17, 2013

Whatever we might think of Edward Snowden’s release of classified documents detailing the NSA’s snooping on America’s - well, everyone’s - communications, at least we all now know what’s going on.

Sure, most of us on the coding side of the screen already knew the deal. I haven’t found a programmer who was surprised by the news that our emails, text messages, and phone calls are being logged and stored. If anything, most of them are surprised that the general public seems so shocked. What were people thinking? That Google just gives us services like Gmail for free? We pay for this stuff - not with cash, but with our data.

None of our data may be so interesting in itself, but when it’s combined with everyone else’s it reveals a whole lot of information about us. Using factor analysis and other statistical techniques, big data can identify members of a population who might be about to purchase a new car, trying to have a baby, or even about to change political affiliations. No logic is required; the people and machines analyzing big data sets don’t care about why one set of data points might indicate some other data point; they only care that it does.

As long as corporations from Facebook to Twitter are collecting and using this data, why shouldn’t government get in on the act? Instead of looking for potential car buyers or new mothers, however, government is looking for potential terrorists. Or at least that’s what they say. In reality, the sample size of known terrorists is so small that it’s essentially impossible to draw statistical conclusions about their data. The only way to know what they’re saying is to listen to what they’re saying. Luckily (or terrifyingly, depending on your perspective) voice calls can be scanned for keywords as easily as a text document. The conversation can then be parsed by humans to determine whether there’s a threat.

The big news here, if any, is that now this stuff is public knowledge. Most of my friends and colleagues knew about government surveillance of digital communications, already. Some former students had even told me about installing switches at cell phone companies to be used for government snooping. Others helped write the database architecture for facilities that store voicemail long after it has been “deleted” by its recipients. Most of them were relieved that the information they were afraid to leak themselves is finally out.

But they aren’t the only ones who had foreknowledge of this recent leak. Pretty much anybody who knows how code works was prepared for this sort of revelation. Because becoming code fluent is about more than simply knowing enough javascript to get a job. It’s a way to become familiar with the operating system on which the human drama is playing itself out.

Monsatan takes a steak across the face

I thought that a vampire stake would be more
fitting, but anyway Monsatan, formerly Monsanto,
formerly Nunnery Seeds Ltd, has claimed to be
giving up on Europe, because of strong resistance.

Number one point about Monsatan is:

Never turn your back on Monsatan

#2 Monsatan lies and lies for a purpose

#3 it's not a coincidence that the British

Ministry for Payoffs was touting Monsatan's

work this week. The UK is the acknowledged

unguarded back gate of the EU.

#4 If we are not importing products that are

GMOs or that were raised on GMOs, then

we are getting them in foodstuffs

of the kind that have 50 ingredients, many having

'natural' written all over them.

checkit: Testosterone pit

Lobbying And GMO Giant Monsanto Buckles In Europe

Friday, May 31, 2013 at 6:49PM

The “March Against Monsanto” in 52 countries, an unapproved strain of its genetically modified wheat growing on its own in Oregon, cancelled wheat export orders.... A rough week for Monsanto.

But now it threw in the towel in Europe – where its genetically modified seeds have faced stiff resistance at every twist and turn. Even its deep corporate pockets and mastery of lobbying have failed: “It’s counterproductive to fight against windmills,” its spokesman told the Tageszeitung.

The propitious week started last Saturday with the “March Against Monsanto,” when people in over 400 cities in 52 countries protested against the company, its influence over governments, and its GMO seeds. Much of it was focused on the mundane issue of labeling. Protesters wanted GMO ingredients in food to show up on the label, just like fat or protein. A simple solution to the controversy: let consumers decide.

But a red line for the industry. It’s worried that consumers will read the label – and choose an alternative. So Monsanto continued to assure us through its minions that labeling would be too costly, that it would kill the cupcake shop down the street, that we don’t need to know anyway because GMO foods are safe for human consumption, etc. etc.

Ever in doubt about how you're being scanned?

leave it to the international Pirate man to set you
straight on the risks.

checkit: Falkvinge

centralised files

This night, news broke that the USA’s security agencies have been wiretapping essentially every major centralized social service for private data. Photos, video conferences, text chats, and voice calls – everything. We have been saying this for years and been declared tinfoil hat and conspiracy nuts; it’s good to finally see the documents in black on white.

This night, European time, the news broke that the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) has had direct access to pretty much every social network for the past several years, dating back to 2007, under a program named PRISM. Under the program, a number of social services voluntarily feed people’s private data to the NSA. In short, if you have been using/uploading

    e-mail

    video or voice chat

    videos

    photos

    stored data

    VoIP calls

    file transfers

    video conferencing

    (and more)

…from any of…

    Microsoft (incl. Hotmail et al), since Sep 11, 2007

    Google, since Jan 14, 2009

    Yahoo, since Mar 12, 2008

    Facebook, since June 3, 2009

    PalTalk, since Dec 7, 2009

    YouTube, since Sep 24, 2010

    Skype, since Feb 6, 2011

    AOL, since Mar 31, 2011

    Apple, since Oct 2012

…then you have been wiretapped, and still are.

This piece of news broke just after it was revealed that the same NSA is demanding phone records from one of the major telco operators in the USA, and presumably all of them.

In short, practically every single service you have ever been using that has operated under the “trust us” principle has fed your private data directly to STASI-equivalent security agencies. Practically every single one. The one exception notably missing from the list is Twitter (but Twitter uses broadcast messages – you shouldn’t write anything secret on Twitter in the first place).

Carefully note that this PRISM program is not unique to the USA: Several European nations have the same wiretapping in place, Sweden among them. Also, these agencies share raw data freely between them, trivially circumventing any restrictions against wiretapping the own population (“I’ll wiretap yours if you’ll wiretap mine”).

This piece of news practically detonated when it hit this night. We have been saying that this is the probable state of things for years – it’s good to finally get rid of those tinfoil hats, with facts on the table. Predictably, the social comms companies named in the NSA slides are out scrambling with statements and comments.

Google, for example, said in a statement to the Guardian: “Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data.”

As a politician, what strikes me is how carefully crafted this statement is to give the appearance of denying the allegations, without doing so. It stops exactly short of saying “the presented allegations are lies”.

For example, a system could be in place that continuously fed the NSA data from Google servers in accordance with the NSA documents, and the above Google statement would still be true (if Google feeds data to the NSA, rather than the NSA fetching it from Google).

Microsoft – whose motto is “Privacy is our priority”, the Guardian notes – was the first to join the PRISM program in 2007. On the other hand, that company was never trusted much, so I don’t see a lot of surprise.

the fountain of youth, or just more face cream?

As you know, the best way to use chemistry to make
money is to make something that aids humans to
maximise their vanity.

silicone, liposuction, hair implants, viagra

and some things which claim to add years to your
life or your face.

The latest one seems to be a small sea creature
that apparently doesn't die. It is eternal because it
morphs.

I suppose it will be hunted to extinction by crazed
millionnaires hoping to spread its sh*t on their faces.
Luckily it's translucent and small
and lives in the sea. Did I say it morphs?

Happy hunting.

checkit:  Mother nature network

Immortal jellyfish: Does it really live forever?

The Turritopsis nutricula jellyfish has displayed a remarkable ability to regenerate its cells in times of crisis.

By  Melanie Lasoff Levs

Wed, Apr 13 2011 at 1:33 PM

Photo: Peter Schuchert/The Hydrozoa Directory

While it is often joked that cats have nine lives, a certain species of jellyfish has been deemed “immortal” by scientists who have observed its ability to, when in crisis, revert its cells to their earliest form and grow anew. That means that these tiny creatures, 4 mm to 5 mm long, potentially have infinite lives.

The creature, known scientifically as Turritopsis nutricula, was discovered in the Mediterranean Sea in 1883, but its unique regeneration was not known until the mid-1990s. How does the process work? If a mature Turritopsis is threatened — injured or starving, for example — it attaches itself to a surface in warm ocean waters and converts into a blob. From that state, its cells undergo transdifferentiation, in which the cells essentially transform into different types of cells. Muscle cells can become sperm or eggs, or nerve cells can change into muscle cells, “revealing a transformation potential unparalleled in the animal kingdom,” according to the original study of the species published in 1996.

Since the Turritopsis’ virtual immortality was discovered, so have swarms of genetically identical jellyfish far from their original habitat, including in Japan, Spain and the Atlantic Ocean side of Panama. Researchers have concluded that these multiplying creatures are getting caught in ballast waters, water that is sucked into and pumped out of the long distance cargo ships. Polyps also could be growing on the ship’s hulls. Though genetically identical, these jellyfish seem to have adapted to their new environments. For example, specimens from swarms living in tropical waters have been found to have eight tentacles, while those discovered in temperate regions have 24 or more tentacles.

But Turritopsis can — and do — die. Their regeneration only occurs after sexual maturation, therefore they can succumb to predators or disease in the polyp stage. But because the jellyfish are the only known animal with this “immortality,” scientists are studying them closely, with the hopes of applying what they learn to issues such as human aging and illness.