Banning blogs, a big blunder

by Roopinder Singh

THE only thing worse than doing something wrong is to execute the deed ineptly. Some bureaucrats in the Government of India have managed to do both by stopping access to blogs on the Internet recently in the wake of the July 11 Mumbai bomb blasts.

The word blog is an abbreviation of Weblog, a Web page that is accessible to the public, and is often used as an online personal journal. You post a blog because you want to share information or express an opinion. The people who read your blog may do so because of curiosity, to get varied opinions on news, issues, and other matters, find persons with similar interests and ideas and for entertainment.

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Rainbow of dreams realised
Roopinder Singh

California Dreams: India Shining in the Land of Hollywood
by Gurmukh Singh. British Columbia Books, BC, Canada. Pages 208. Rs 999.

THE four Sikhs who landed in San Francisco on April 5, 1899, were the precursors of a wave that reached near its crest a century later. Indians were considered white, but suffered the same discrimination as blacks in the US a century ago. At one point, they were good enough to serve in the US army, but not to be citizens, as Bhagat Singh Thind found out. He was granted citizenship in 1920, but it was taken away from him on February 19, 1923. Indian pioneers, mainly Dalip Singh Saund of California and J. J. Singh Wallia of New York successfully lobbied to Congressmen, especially Congresswomen Clare Boothe Luce of Connecticut and Congressman Emanuel Cellar of New York, to introduce a Bill that would allow the US citizenship to Indian immigrants.

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Cyber insecurity

Human vulnerabilities are exploited for IT crimes

by Roopinder Singh

Security, or rather the lack of it in the cyber world, has come into focus again. National secrets have been leaking out at an appalling rate and supposedly secure computers have become more of cyber sieves than repositories of data.

There has been a major leak of electronic data from the National Security Council Secretariat in New Delhi. Mukesh Saini, a former Navy Commander who served as the information security specialist at the NSC, is now being sought for questioning, while S. S. Paul, a systems analyst, has been arrested. Ujjwal Dasgupta, Director of Computers in RAW, is also under a cloud, as is the high-profile Indo-US Cyber Security Forum.

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