Sunil Mohan Adapa’s Blog

Many who do the wrong thing do not feel the guilt,

but everyone who consciously chooses to do the right thing feels the pleasure.

I have written yet another article to Prajasakti Telugu daily newspaper. This time I wrote about why one should avoid word documents. The core idea is taken from the Richard Stallman’s article We Can Put an End to Word Attachments.

For this month’s article to Prajasakti Telugu daily newspaper, I translated an article written by Richard Stallman "Can you trust your computer?" to Telugu. The article explains the threat to computing posed by Treacherous Computing (some want you to believe that it is Trusted Computing) and call for action against it.

There were problems with RSS feed for my blog.

1. Blosxom default RSS generator did not produce publishing date properly so all the aggregators take the time to be the time for importing the feed.
2. Other blogs at medhas, except mine, were getting parsing errors with drupal’s aggregator.
3. RSS seems to require HTML escaping which the blosxom default RSS output was not doing.
4. Read a bit about RSS vs. Atom and voted for Atom mostly because it is under IETF. Atom also sounded technically superior, although I didn’t do much research.

Here is my atom feed, the old one will remain.

I have been writing articles to Prajasakti a popular Telugu daily newspaper. I am writing articles to the weekly technology section and already wrote 3 articles in the past 3 months.

First one was a tutorial on how to use Google search effectively.

Second one was on blogs. How to use them and read them. It also touches a bit about how blogs are putting power into the hands of people.

Third one is about how computers work in Telugu and how to set them up to work in Telugu. In this article I have recommended the use of our Swecha Live CD for easy usage.

My contacts at the newpaper say that there has been some good feedback. Not bad for a newbie.

There are common spam messages comming to us everyday and most of them gets filtered out and no single spammer is all that annoying. Spamassasin and gmail keep both of my mailboxes very clean from spam. But unfortuntely I can’t filter all the spam. The bank people collect my email address with the pretext that they will send me statements and other important information. They send me hell lot of SPAM. I can’t filter them out because I want some information that some of those mails contain which is the basic service they promised me.

It is this kind of SPAM that I hate most. Today I opened my mailbox and saw that ICICI sent me a mail about some offer which is totally unrealated to my connection with ICICI. Oh wait! I have disconnected all my ties with ICICI more than a month back (good riddance, BTW). Then why the hell are they still sending me spam? At first I thought it might be some problem with their email system and did not unsubscribe me (how convinient for a spam machine). Then I looked at the mail and it did not have any message that would let me unsubscribe. I HATE them.

Now can I somehow complian to somebody (spamhaus?) so that everyone else who gets this spam is saved from the trouble? OK, not me, can a 100/1000 of us make a difference?

A site with secure connection should educate and encourage its users to follow several security practices. Providing SSL login and feeling that they have the most secure site that technology can provide is colossal stupidity. One of these user practices is to verify that one is browsing an SSL enabled site and that the connection is secure. Another is to check whether the secure connection is with the intended site.

HDFC bank’s online banking facility does not tell their users to follow these practices anywhere on their site, placing them amoung the hordes of other high-security-claiming insecure sites. This is not a big deal as most other secure sites are that way. But what is different about this bank is that they try make sure you never follow these practices even if you know these practices. When we go to the main page of their site and click on netbanking, they open a popup without an address bar. Now how does one know that this is the site they have intended to use? It does not now matter if the site is secure because a person who has spoofed the page can also have his own SSL cerficate and hence establish a secure connection (don’t tell me it will difficult to obtain one). Firefox will help us a bit here, but what about the other users? One can goto the View menu and enable the address bar alright, but is that an excuse for what they have done?

Ofcourse, I reported this to them serveral months back and got a typical coporate-bulls**t reply while they silently continue to do this.

Malicious javascripts can do a lot of unwanted things. I was just brushing up my javascript and suddenly realised this. Earlier, I thought the browser imposes good enough restrictions on javascripts.

As an example, the following code has made my firefox non-responsive for quite some time

<html>
<head>
<title>Bad Page, Don’t Visit</title>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
for(i=0; i<50000; i++)
{
    document.write("I want to write a lot of junk to this page.<br />");
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>