India confirms the number 1 ranking...

As the first test match of the recently concluded series between India and Australia entered and then progressed through the final day, I went from feeling hopeful to despair to anguish to disgust to tense and finally to euphoria. I can't remember the last time I went through so many emotions in a single day (or night in my case). At a point in time when VVS Laxman and Ishant Sharma were playing, I even became superstitious when I started believing that whenever I watched the match, a wicket fell. So I manly denied myself and restricted myself to check score occasionally on Cricinfo. This superstition was partly confirmed when I couldn't resist and watched the match just to witness Ishant Sharma being being given out wrongly. I promptly stopped watching. But then the excitement of the match had grown so much and my heartbeats were so quick and loud I said to myself, "Why are you torturing yourself? You watching or not watching is not going to decide the match. Why not enjoy the classic cricket that is being played." And so common sense prevailed and I was able to enjoy the riveting and extremely satisfying climax of a wonderfully played test match.

But that's not the point of this column. I don't want to go on and on about my emotions but want to put forward some things that have been discussed before. India is the reigning number one in Test match cricket. Why is it so hard to accept to many people? Would it be because a former colony has become better than the former masters? No, that's not it. England has been living with the colonial guilt for the past 60 years or so. When I recollect the events and report immediately preceding and following India's ascension to Number 1, I think that most of the criticism to India's status came from Indians. I think after 150 years of slavery, we Indians still find it hard to believe that India can rule the world (figuratively). It is us Indians who have more negative vibes that the rest of the world about ourselves. Why? When a player rises to number one ranking in tennis, nobody questions it whether he or she deserves it or not. Nobody questioned Marcelo Rios' or Dinara Safina's rise to number one? A player or a team will become number one if it satisfies a certain number of measurement criteria that has been laid down by the governing body. India did that and became number one. Does it matter that India has never defeated Australia in Australia or South Africa in South Africa? It might from a perspective of becoming a complete team, but it does not matter at all when it comes to deciding who becomes number 1. India became number 1 by virtue of playing good cricket over a period of 3 years and not overnight. If they are not good enough, then they will slip to lower ranking like the players mentioned above. But for the moment, India is undisputed number 1 in test cricket and let's savour that sweet achievement.

If Indian cricket team not good enough, then it will slip to lower ranking eventually. But for the moment, India is undisputed number 1 in test cricket.

What was heartening about the chase was the kind of self belief India has shown lately and confidence that Indian team has shown in hopeless situation to pull back and win the game. The Indian cricket teams of past who had some great players in their ranks had given up and laid down their arms. That's how they use to think, which is very well articulated by none other than Navjot Singh Sidhu in one of his speeches (You can also watch it below). This is a lost cause, lets not get in harms way. This team is different. They have shown it time and again that they are not afraid to stand up and go the distance and more to ensure that India wins. That if nothing else is a mark of a true champion, who never gives up when chips are down. There has been a lot of ink spent to point out that India needs better bowlers if they are to remain number 1 for a long time. I will not spend anymore. There are people out there more qualified than I am to comment on that.

I just want to savour the great achievement as a very enthusiastic cricket fan and let the so-called analysts and experts to ramble and quarrel about how India could become number 1.

And... We are back

At least temporarily till my internet service is back up. I have had a long outage in my internet service from Comcast. My internet service inexplicably went down last week sometime on Tuesday & it is still not up. That has directly affected my website & I am hosting my website at my home on my own web server.

I was hoping that I will get my internet service back up and running quickly. But I think a week is long enough to wait and here I am moving my domain back to blogger. I hope to have my website back up and running sometime this week once Comcast fixes my internet.

Till that time, thanks for your patronage and patience. Hope to be back soon...

We have moved

Effective 11 March 2006, we have moved to our own website at http://www.dharwadkar.com.

We no longer will post at this location unless except our webserver goes down for any reason and for extended period. Thank you for visiting us here and if you liked the content we put up here, please do visit us at www.dharwadkar.com

Thanks.

Search History, Search Records... What's the difference

If you have not yet tried out MyGoogle / Google Fusion (whatever you want to call it.) then you definitely are missing something. It is one of the coolest things Google has offered after Google Earth. You have to have a Google account to use that, of course. Once you have that you can customize it to your heart's content. It also gives a development kit for techie guys to develop their own modules.

Anyway cool tools aside, there is one feature I thought is immensely useful for all. Search history. Since the advent and progress of search technologies, we have become lazier than ever and don't take efforts to remember what we searched or learn it. We just open any of the search engine and click Search. It also helps for researching a lot of things, but we never keep a record of it nor do we remember it. Search History now does it for you. Once you enable search history on Google, the My google page show recent five searches and the page shows all the search strings similar to results of a Google search.

I was delighted. I search something on my home computer and then I have to search the same thing sometime later on my office computer. I had to keep on guessing the correct search string. But now I just open the search history and I am presented with all the searched I made since I enabled search history.

Isn't this great? In a way yes. But it also troubles me a lot. Why? You will understand the reason if you have been paying attention to one news item which is appearing on and off in technology magazines and news sites. FBI is asking Google to provide search records of individuals (people like you and me) to better enable them to fight against terrorism. So far Google has resisted citing privacy policy and trade secrets as reasons. But really, in face of pressure from the government how much can Google withstand? Remember, recently Google acceded (some called it capitulation) to demands from Chinese government to provide censored results to Chinese citizens so that Google's web-page will appear in China. Given the fact that Google operates from the US and subject to the policies of US government, will it realistically be able to resist if for long? I doubt.

Once I got over my initial euphoria of cool tools, I started thinking. Is this move in preparation to accede to demands from US government when the "pressure" becomes unbearable? If you read the privacy policy for Personalized home and Google in all, it says that it may share information (without personally identifiable information) with its business partners and third parties (US government?). As far as I am concerned, Google is preparing to provide the data.

You just might want to be careful what you search even to gain knowledge or fun, just in case...

We are moving

Its been almost 3 months since my last post. No, I have not been idling away. In fact I have put up my own website and will be moving this to the website very soon. Last couple of months have been a frenzy to catch up on a lot of things. Setting up the website, configuring the webserver, putting up content. I have not yet managed to put up enough content or design it completely and I thought I would be able to put it up very soon so I was not posting anything.

But it looks like its going to take longer than I expected to get the website going, so I will just post here.

Corporate Warfare:
We have always heard of industrial espionage but I saw corporate warfare or ambush for the first time (maybe I wasn't looking hard or at the right places) when I read that Microsoft's Antispyware product which is also known as Windows Defender (which incidently is free) flags Symantec's Norton Antivirus as a spyware. Read more about it here. How would Microsoft respond if Symantec configures its product to flag Windows Defender as a virus and prevent it from installing on computers? Would it result in a full-scale war?

Are these some signs from Microsoft to prepare us for what to expect? I hear that Microsoft is also launching an antivirus product - Windows OneCare which may be integrated in future releases of Windows (Is the Anti-trust commission listening?). So will Microsoft wield its desktop influence to force users to use its products? I hope not. But only time will tell.

Computer Security Day

Hello. After a long hiatus of more than a month, I am back at blogging. It's been a crazy month. By the way, did you know that 30th November was celebrated as Computer Security Day? I guess not many of you know about it. Even the site (www.computersecurityday.org) does not have a lot of stuff to talk about.

ISACA, of which I am a member is a sponsor and even ISACA does not advertise it as aggressively as I would have liked. I have been meaning to write about this since my last post, but I could not.

So what's the point in having a computer security awareness day? The answer should be fairly straight forward. To make you and the users aware of the need and importance of computer security and spread awareness. With the current spate of new ways to attack a network being discovered everyday by cyber criminals, it is very important for the CISOs to use this day as a platform to spread awareness.

So to all you Information security professionals: HAPPY COMPUTER SECURITY DAY. Hope your network remains safe from hackers always and that your users start taking ownership of security issues and become more aware and careful.

Changed Scenario of Removable Devices - Are we ready?

Managing data moving in and out of an organization through removable media was easy in the good old days of floppy disk drives. You just disable the drive. Or even better, remove it from the computer. As the technology advanced (read OS and applications got fatter) floppy disks become unviable and obsolete and slowly went away from the workplace PCs.

Then came CD writers, becoming more and more affordable, easy to use and reliable. Even controlling that was relatively easy. But what with the advent of USB thumb drives, the nightmare for Information security manager just started. USB drives are very small that they can be easily concealed almost anywhere. We could disable the USB ports on the computers, but for the fact that most of the new hardware that is now being manufactured is USB only. So obviously we cannot disable the ports. Plus the fact that users plug in the drive almost anywhere which makes them very dangerous as carriers of unwanted software.

So how do we protect the data of our enterprise? Frankly speaking, I don't know. But here are some ideas I want to throw in the wild:
1. Use encryption on the USB drives. I am not yet sure, but I guess there are vendors who provide this software. If not this is one market to tap.
2. Ensure that the Virus scanners detect the presence of USB storage device and scan all the data on it.
3. If possible, try and prevent data from being copied onto and from unknown USB devices. I don't know how to do it, but I guess this can be done.

The third approach defeats the entire point of buying a USB drive and the convenience associated with it. But then security was never a convenience.