You reap what you sow...

Stampede and the "Dirty" "Dark" Crowd

Actor Ajith Kumar’s recent interview has sparked quite a few conversations on social media. The part that caught my attention, was his take on crowds. About 30 years ago, when I first joined a college in Madurai after growing up in other places, I experienced a few cultural shocks. Perhaps these weren’t unique to Madurai, but that’s where I first noticed them. One major thing that stood out was the behavior of crowds. For instance, if you suddenly see people rushing to board a bus, chances are there’s a pickpocket in action. During one of Madurai's annual festivals, I noticed some young men carrying water bags — not to distribute water, but to spill it on women, often on their chests. Shockingly, this was almost normalized; parents would quietly tolerate it to avoid public embarrassment, walking a little farther behind the crowd. When some women happened to witness this, they would just shoo the boys away instead of confronting them. The crowd, in such cases, became a kind of...

Technology prediction for 2018

Bubbles of bitcoin, blockchain, machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence and more People usually appreciate me for my predictions on technologies. As I already noted our team will quickly hit the edge case for any use cases and that's supposed to be the reason for my better prediction rate. And so, here are my predictions… Bitcoin bubble When Bitcoin became talk of the town/industry, I informed my boss and colleagues that I find no real use case for this digital currency--except in underground markets like drugs, etc. In fiat currencies, there is at least a way to take legal route, in case, if you've transferred the money and not received the goods. But, in Bitcoin, this is not possible at all as it is not a legal currency. So, if there is no trust, the chances that other person can cheat you by not sending the goods and or not transferring bitcoins after receiving goods. My stand above vindicated by the article Ten years in, nobody has come up with a...

NETELLER - Privacy and security design flaw

Yesterday, colleague of mine brought to my notice about a payment system called NETELLER and it's merchant API named NETELLER Direct API V4 . This NETELLER Direct API V4, helps the merchant to collect amount from users. It's simple--same just like early Authorize.net , along with the required amount you collect the user's id and password and post them to their API URL and they'll send you back with success or error codes in XML format. The major problem with these types of system is security and privacy --you lose both as you're forced to type your username and password in alien web page. If I remember right, this is was the case with Authorize.net and they changed their design to something like PayPal . The PayPal design is somewhat better as you never type or forced to type your username and password in other alien web pages. The alien merchant web page uses NETELLER Direct API V4 is forced to get user's NETELLER account and password. I'm much s...