Lessons in 4 years

(This article was written as a piece of advice in the final edition of Entelechy for the year, now that I will be graduating)

Never give advice — a wise man won’t need it, a fool won’t heed it.

So rather think of what follows as a crystallization of my opinions, which may serve you well. The last four years of my life have been a period of discovery and extreme change. In that I’ve either realised or read and agreed with certain qualities that will prove indispensible.

The first is self control. In college, nothing else matters! If you want to get things done, if you want to stay on the right path (subjectively of course), then nothing else will matter more than self control. Not your intelligence, your wealth, your environment or your friends. Only your will-power. You and I are living in a world where addiction is easier than ever to fall prey to. Information bombards us from everywhere, a plethora of online services crave for our attention, and in the physical world, chatter, video, liquids and powders demand our attention. These distractions will stop you from giving your time to the things that matter the most to you. Those who can stick to their course will fare better.

If you are the sort of person who compulsively says yes to everything, learn to say NO. If you are a doer, people will ask for your help for the most trivial of things, or sometimes for the most important things. Decide if you have the time to devote to it, don’t immediately leave what you are already doing. If it is not worth it, learn to say a firm, direct, NO. Having your attention over forty different things means that all of them will remain incomplete.

The second thing that will prove invaluable is self learning. You are in an information technology college, and being autodidacts is most relevant to us than to anyone else. Information Technology moves far too fast, much faster than academia, than law, than social conventions or the speed of light. An inability to teach yourself new things will quickly put you out of the competition.

Being able to learn things on your own also opens a universe of experiences, each of which can be used to replace the boredom that leads to addictions. Self learning is not just watching video tutorials of the Internet, it means being able to evaluate yourself, setting new challenges and goals and keeping yourself on the path to achieve them.

Learning on your own will also help guide you towards your passion(s). Because anything on which you are willing to spend time without anyone else telling you too, is clearly something you love doing. Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. ¹

Stay fit. You come to college and forget all about play. You spend evenings either poring over books, or playing computer games or wasting time lounging about. In these actions you are setting the pattern for how you will live your life. You might think, ‘I’ll just eat less’ or ‘I don’t mind getting a bit fat’, but few things are as joyful as sweating it out on lush green grass, day after day. Revel not only in the improvement of your mind, but in the miracle of your body. It may not get you a job, but it will ensure that when you walk into office, heads turn. Finally, like everything else, don’t over do it. Learn to listen to your body and your body will listen to you.

Have a relentless pursuit to rise above the mediocrity that is encouraged by our social system (‘our’ here applies all over the world, I’m not dissing on India). Are you scared of what you’ve to do to achieve your dream? Start small, a little step here, another one there. Find the right level of challenge. But always aim higher than you know you can go. Have a bucket list, and an ideas list. Both lists will start to fill up like mad and you will never be able to tick all of them off. You are far too small, and the world too big to be able to see it all, but just by breaking out of your comfort zone, you’ll have seen more of it than most people can imagine.

Finally, go and Create!

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place

                                -- Rainer Maria Rilke

There is nothing more anti-human that the lazy consumerism that is prevalent today. I do not mean you should write a book, or create software or write a song. The smallest creations make a big difference to your happiness. True happiness can be found in a football move created on the ground, or the smile created on another face by your actions. Let your creations, and not your tastes, be what define you. Tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create. ²

I’ll leave you with 50 more things.

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1. Confucius said that

   ↩

2. Paraphrased from why the lucky stiff

   ↩

Demystifying JSCrush

Some of you may have seen Philip Buchanan’s award winning. Autumn Evening entry for JS1K 2012 Love. While skimming the source I saw that he had used Aivo Paas’s JSCrush to compress the code. The JSCrush website is intriguing with the source code minified and then passed through JSCrush itself (so it can be submitted to JS1K). The JSCrush version used in the page, in <script> tags is the JSCrushed version. As a weekend project I tried to ‘reverse engineer’ JSCrush and understand it. It took me about 4 hours. What follows is a walk-through of the process.
JSCrush is a very interesting JavaScript program, liberally abusing eval(), global variables and insane levels of nesting to achieve a sort of compression.
Remember that your browser’s web development tools are indispensible for activities like this. I made extensive use of Firebug.

The de-obfuscation

I chose to start with the compressed version in the <script> tag rather than the plain text in the upper text field.
The syntax is clearly wrong for JavaScript, and it is all stuck in a string assigned to _. The part at the end is interesting though (properly formatted).
For every character in $ it is splitting _ on the character, using with to make the resulting array the scope. Then joining the pieces using the last piece and reassigning to _. For example:

_ = "HelloRWorldRCrushedRAB"
$='R'

var temp = _.split($) // => temp = ['Hello', 'World', 'Crushed', 'AB']
var last = temp.pop() // => last = 'AB',
                      //    temp = ['Hello', 'World', 'Crushed']
_ = temp.join(last)   // => _ = 'HelloABWorldABCrushed'

Remember this step, it is key to how JSCrush works. These steps are repeated for every character in $, after which the ‘decompressed’ output is the minified source code:
You can see this for yourself by putting a console.log(_) just before the eval(_).
Now we’ve a fair idea of how JSCrush is doing decompression. Compressed scripts are stored in _, decompressed using the loop and then executed using eval().
The next thing I did was to un-minify the source (manually):
One change I’ve made is the call to setTimeout(). I’ve converted it to a function to make it easier to read, and directly used the script tags innerHTML, since I had the decompressed source in the tag. The JSCrush code generates the textareas and button as part of it’s run and assumes body.children[9] to be the <script> tag with the JSCrush compressed source. Hence it replaces the eval call with the program source itself so that the inner eval() call in setTimeout() extracts the decompressed source and puts it as the value of the first textarea. It then calls L(), the JSCrush crushing function to compress the original code back, so that you get the compressed version of JSCrush in the lower text field. Mind-boggling.
The setTimeout() without a time simply causes the code to be executed after the script has finished evaluating completely.

Understanding

Now that we’ve decompressed code, it still has the scars of minification – single letter variable names and no comments. Time to start reading the code. Line 1 is just setting up the HTML for the user. Lines 2-4 is the first interesting piece. The array Q is being populated with all the ASCII characters, in reverse order! The characters \n, \r, \\, ' and " are excluded, as are \0 and DEL, so that Q has 121 characters. Rather than using a readable if statement, Aivo is using the fact that && is ‘short-circuiting’ in JavaScript. Much space saving here.
Next we come to the definition of L. Line 12 just removes blank lines, whitespace and single line comments (except those following code). It also escapes backslashes so that the code is ready to be put into a string later. This is assigned to the letters i and s. Be warned from here, in the goal of smaller size, variables frequently change their meaning to promote reuse. s is always going to point to the code, but i is used as a counter all over the place.
Next, B is half the length of the program, m is the empty string. Line 15 is where it starts getting interesting. The pattern:

encodeURI(string).replace(/%../g, 'i')

occurs thrice in the code. Its task is to get the byte length of the string rather than the number of characters that string.length gives. In ASCII there is no difference, but if there are Unicode characters, they may occupy 2-4 bytes. encodeURI will replace each byte with a ‘%xx’ code with xx being the hexadecimal byte value. Replacing this with the single letter ‘i’ will get us one ‘i’ for every byte, so that the length of the resulting string is the byte length. This was one of the many clever tricks present in the JSCrush code. They might be well known, but this is the first time I came across it.
The initialization in the for loop is only to save a byte, it does not affect the loop itself in any way. Similarly the m = c + m call can be moved to the end of the loop body. This construct will generate the decompression sequence contained in $. This for loop is then actually an infinite while loop.
Line 43 is again a trade-off of readability for size. Here it is in a cleaner form:

c = 0
i = 121
while (!c && i) {
 if (! (~s.indexOf(Q[i])))
  c = Q[i]
 --i;
}

~ is binary NOT. If Q[i] is not found in the source, then indexOf will return -1, NOT -1 = 0 and !0 === true, so that this code is actually saying:

For every character Qi in Q in reverse:
    If the source does NOT have the character in it:
        c = Qi

Or, c is set to an ASCII character that is not present in the program. Initially it will be ASCII 1, then perhaps 2 and so on. This ‘c’ is now the character that will be used to join the pieces obtained in Lines 20-32. This is one round. When all the characters have been used up, compression stops (Line 18).
Lines 12-32 basically try to find long, repetitive strings that can be replaced with a single character, to get the best compression. JSCrush follows a brute-force approach to find these segments. With single variable names, the code is a mess, so here is a cleaned up version which makes things much clearer:
Lines 9-28 try to find segments which repeat atleast twice in the code. Longer segments will give better compression, so we try all of them. For segments of length 1, we try every character in the string, for segments of length 2, we try every pair and so on. If it repeats we keep track of the segment count.
The segmentLengthBound = longestSegmentLength (B=Z) bit is interesting, and it took me some thinking to figure it out. It relies on the following facts:

• The longest segment in the current source is longestSegmentLength.
• Splitting by something, and then joining by a character not in the source will not lead to creation of longer segments.

So we can restrict segmentLength of the next round to segmentLengthBound.
Lines 32-41 choose the best segment to substitute in this round. The expression (R=o[i])*j-R-j-1 may seem cryptic, until you look a little later in the code where the split and join is done, and you remember how JSCrush works. R * j is the number of bytes we will remove by replacing this segment. But to join the split, we’ll need one character for every repetition, followed by one character to separate the segment suffix itself. The conditional asks if this leads to actual, and better, compression than what we already know of. If no such segment was found, we are done compressing. Otherwise we split by the segment, join the pieces by the join character and tack on the segment at the end. One round done!
Once multiple rounds have been done, the script is compressed, and only some trivial things remain. The value of B is now changed to store the quotes (double or single), based on which are fewer. Since the compressed program is stored in a string, using the quotes that appear less times means less ’\’ to substitute, each of which costs a byte. We then prepare the boilerplate, setting _ to the now compressed source, setting $ to the decompression sequence m and adding the evaluation code. The savings accomplished are announced too.
One trick I picked up in the code is forcing a certain digit view precision.

i/S * 100

would give a float percentage with many digits after the floating point. Instead multiplying by 1000, gets us two digits in the integral positions, bitwise OR-ing with 0 casts to an integer, losing the floating point digits, then dividing by 100 gets us the two digits we want.

Summary

JSCrush works by:

1. Finding the first unused ASCII character to act as the join
2. Finding the substring of the program text that gives the best space savings if its repetitions are all replaced by the ASCII character from 1.
3. Splitting the source on 2 and joining the pieces using 1, tacking on 2 to the end. This string replaces the original source.
4. Repeating 1, 2 and 3 until no more savings are possible or we’re all out of ASCII.
5. Wrapping the compressed source into a string, then using the list of join ASCII characters to unroll the string.
6. Unrolling is performed by splitting on every ASCII character used in 3, extracting the original repeated substring 2 from the split and joining the parts.

I hope this (long) post was interesting and educational. If you have feedback, a comment would be great.

Playing with Go

With Go 1 being released, I’ve been playing with the language once again. As a long weekend hack, I created a clone of the literate programming Docco tool in Go – quite naturally called Gocco.

This blog post chronicles my feelings about the language, and some rough spots I got stuck in.

I started out with a direct translation of the original CoffeeScript to Go. Go is remarkably unlike C and more like high level languages. Much of the translation was automatic and is not very different from the CoffeeScript source, except the pervasive use of []byte rather than string.

What I loved about Go was the ability to directly import and install packages from various hosting services like GitHub, Google Code and Bitbucket. This combined with the go command makes package management a breeze. What I would really like though is for Go to switch to default local-to-global search path semantics, like npm. You can do it using GOPATH, but making it the default would be better. I am also not sure how you can specify which version of your dependencies to install.

The inbuilt templating support is also a great tool, I didn’t have to hunt around for a templating library, and the syntax was very clean and similar to Jinja2 or Mustache. There seems to be some bug in the ParseFiles method though, as it kept complaining that the template was incomplete or empty, but when I manually read the same file into a string and called Parse, it worked.

The tooling support is excellent, with gofmt and go ensuring everything is ‘standardised’ and makes others code much easier to read.

Coming to the slightly wonky/undefined/undocumented/(may actually be my fault) parts…

I still haven’t really figured out Go’s package system. The go/build package says it allows introspection over packages, like figuring out the installation path (Similar to Python’s __file__). But I couldn’t get this to work with my code, especially when it was not installed. I wanted it so I could keep the HTML template and CSS in separate files, and use the package path to figure out where they were kept. I finally got very frustrated and just stuck them into a go file as multi-line strings.

Syntactically, multiple return values are a good way to signal errors without exception handling, there really should be a way to ignore the second, error, parameter. Not being able to do that, makes composing functions impossible. Similarly the unused variables and imports errors can get annoying while developing, when there is lots of stub code. There is a workaround but still! :)

Still, it was a lot of fun using Go. I originally wanted to implement Docco in C, but the lacking standard library and types support was scaring me. Now I will reach for Go when it comes to systems programming.

A thanks to Russ Ross, for an excellent Markdown implementation.

Great Indie-an Acts

(This was originally published in Entelechy Edition 34, March 2012)

With Synapse a few weeks old, the constant Raghu Dixit songs are starting to fade away from the hostel corridors. Except when we hear bands live, or are aware of an upcoming concert, Indian artists aren’t given much ear time. Bollywood dominates too much. But a growing independent music scene is flourishing in India, mainly due to rising economic levels and more people willing to pursue their dreams. Here are some great Indian artists that I’ve recently liked. Vishal Shah and Indian Music Revolution are instrumental in introducing some of them.

Advaita

I first heard of Advaita and Swarathma in ”Hindi Hein Hum”. Advaita term themselves as a ‘Rock/Eclectic/Organic Fusion’ band from Delhi and are similar to The Raghu Dixit project. Finding their music is extremely hard, both legally and illegally because they haven’t launched their music on Flyte, and everywhere else is too expensive. I’ve been resorting to streaming from Spotify, but finally caved in and ordered one of their CDs from Flipkart (low-tech maybe, but also the cheapest). Not much is known about them, but they are an octet (geeky?) who had their breakthrough when John Leckie selected them (and Swarathma) as one of the four Indian bands in the India Soundpad project.

Their debut album is Grounded in Space, released in 2009. Ghir Ghir is an amazing number on this album. Advaita makes very good use of some Indian classical vocals and raagas, while injecting western instruments and sound structures with the tabla and sarangi. In fact, Ghir Ghir has parts which wouldn’t sound out of place coming from Dream Theater.

Perhaps their best song is Mo Funk from their latest album The Silent Sea (2012). Vocals (by Ujwal Nagar) and tones that would make my (stuck-up) school music teacher very happy, layered on a background score that is like trance or house music make this 6 minute piece a must-listen. 4 minutes into the song, western vocalist and acoustic guitarist Chayan Adhikari takes over and culminates the ‘Funk’ part of the song.

Other songs to start with are Tremor (SS) and Drops of Earth (GiS).

Swarathma

I think I’ve already introduced Swarathma in the previous section :) Swarathma is a 6-member ensemble from Bangalore (out of which 2 crack PJs). They’ve featured on The Dewarists Episode 7 with Shubha Mudgal.

One of their SoundPad project compositions – Yeshu, Allah aur Krishna – goes “Sant Kabir aye dharti pe, …, jo socha tha woh reh gaya sapna …” and seems to reflect the band’s philosophy. Techies, B-school grads and other achievers, pursuing their passion and making their dreams come true. Their only album is self-titled and released in 2009.

Leader Jana Kahan Hai Mujhe is about “choices we face at each step in our lives, and we are frequently at a loss when called upon to make a decision”. In contrast to Advaita, Swarathma has restrained instruments, a slow, low chord guiding the vocals, and a splash of tabla here and there.

My other favourite is Ee Bhoomi. Kannada must be a happy language indeed, to produce gems like this one and Raghu Dixit’s Lokada Kalaji. This upbeat song describes the transformation of the Earth to Paradise (… bhoomi swarga …) as you let Swarathma wash over you.

Peter Cat Recording Co.

In a case of last but not the least, PCRC is the band I’ve actually been listening to the longest. They remind me of the 60s and 70s when Rock was being born and could be happy and everyday, not having to force melancholy or abstract ideas to be appealing. I’ve been a fan before they had a released album and were tracks on SoundCloud, and these guys doubled that by distributing both their albums ( Sinema and Wall of Want) free for download. The New Delhi quartet describes their music as “Gypsy Jazz to Ballroom Waltz to Midnight Moonlight car chase music”.

Sinema is their older and better album. All the songs have a grainy distortion throughout as if playing from vinyl, although whether this adds to their charm or not is a personal opinion. To quote Helter Skelter:

That it screams ‘SEX SEX SEX’ right under the ‘Free Download’ link for their album Sinema on the Peter Cat Recording Co. web site should be argument enough for you to go ahead and download it.

The Clown on the 22nd floor sets the mood for the album, with old hindi movie clips tacked on to the end. The album crafts a series of love affairs that end badly. Suryakant Sawhney’s rounded drawl adds warmth to the songs, while clever lyrics mingle girls and philosophy. Coming from a band obsessed with humour and subtlety closer Tokyo Vijaya’s lyrics just go ‘AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa’ against a dense instrumentation of drums and dragged out guitars ending the story inconclusively. PCRC is a band that aims big and delivers funny.

Apache Cassandra: Iterate over all columns in a row

Recently I have been using Cassandra for one of my projects, and one of the needs is to iterate over all columns of a row. Each column represents an individual data, of type identified by row id, and keeps changing. So I can’t simply use a set of known column names. Using the setRange call on a SliceQuery and setting a large count is also not an option, since Cassandra will try to load the entire set of columns into memory. Instead I’ve written this iterator which takes a query on which row key and column family has been set, and will load columns as they are requested. By default it loads a 100 columns at a time. You could make it take the count as a parameter and all, but this works for me for now.

The one ‘problem’ with this is the removal of the last column to ensure that there are no duplicates, but still having a start point for the next query. This is because each column is independent, so you cannot ask a column who it’s next neighbour is and start the next query from there. If anybody has a tip to make it more elegant, I’d love to hear it.

I'm scared for the Internet

(This article was written for Entelechy Edition 33 (February 2012). The news is slightly old, but posted here so I have a public permalink to the article)

When the Internet began over 30 odd years ago, it was an ideal of democracy. Born in universities, where only meritrocracy ruled, it was used by hackers whose ideals were very egalitarian. In its very protocols, the Internet encodes equality. No piece of data is considered more important or more dangerous than any other.

Even as the World Wide Web exploded some 20 years ago, it retained the ideals of the Internet, although in some sense these very ideals led to corners of the web which were just evil.

Of course, as the Internet went global and required physical infrastructure and government permissions, what you could and could not do became much more controlled. Child pornography was plain illegal, but freedom of speech was not, often because much of the core architecture and servers were based in democratic countries who were benefiting massively from the Web.

Of course the web came along and made piracy much much easier. As Paul Tassi states in Forbes, piracy is a 4 step process, while any conventional means of media consumption from the Old Big Media Houses is way more inconvenient. With laws differing across borders, delayed releases, abominations like DeCSS and so on, it was far easier to use a general purpose computer to circumvate all these measures.

In the last few years however, piracy and freedom of speech has come back to bite us. Rather, it has come to haunt the old bastions of power, governments, religions and media publishers. Faced with a series of attacks, the Web is now caught between the devil and the deep sea. On one side is the battle for intellectual property. On the other hand are repressive governments (even so-called democracies) where certain factions wish to curtail the one medium that is impossible to truly shutdown.

There are also the silos of Facebook, Google and a thousand walled App Gardens that are eating mouthfuls of our data and keeping it behind closed doors. They aren’t the worst part though.

I’m not scared that the Internet will die, but I’m scared that it could lose its essence. The essence of freedom, of equality, of opportunity and communication that has brought hope to many and improved countless lives immeasurably. If we the common people keep lying down as our freedoms are taken from us, we will lose the one chance to truly step into something new, to fully embrace human potential, and go back to watching the shiny rainbows on Blu-ray discs whose only use is as coasters. It is not as if we are powerless, we just need to be educated. After all in the case of SOPA/PIPA, mass protests were effective in sending the bill for reconsideration.

It is no secret that politics is financed by capitalists. Much of this money flows in from media conglomerates and thus politicians are puppets when the MPAA or RIAA decide to take out their battle axes on pirates. What the old media does not realize is that the Internet has levelled the playing field. It is now possible for anyone to publish high quality content. Rather than focusing on making it cheap and easy to spread their content, so that most users will be willing to pay for it legally, they continue to impose draconian laws on sharing, copying and accessing their media. The solution – piracy. When technologists like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon try to make it ever easier, they crawl back into their shells. A perfect example is HBO’s Game of Thrones.

There are fundamental problems with new bills that are tabled to deal with piracy. These laws are often framed in secret in a nexus of politics and old media houses, most notably ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), rather than in public scrutiny where rights groups and the general public can see what is happening. It was only as ACTA started to get ratified around the world that people realized what is happening. The result – plenty of EU countries have seen protests that have led to ACTA being put on hold. What is laughable is that the United States actually rejected Right to Information requests saying that it could be a threat to national security. The second problem is that all copyright laws have always focused far too much on tightening copyright regulations, and what it means for something to be copied, what requires royalties and what requires permission. Copyright was initially a way to give creators sufficient returns for their works, not how can I get the maximum money out of this. By tightening the noose, it is getting harder for artists to re-use other’s creativity to create even better works. In addition every anti-piracy effort has put costs on innocent third-parties, taken huge cuts from taxpayers money, and pushed technology that had non-infringing uses out of the market. For example, BitTorrent is a fascinating technology with huge potential for better Internet services, yet it has achieved negative connotations due to its use for piracy. In the aggregate, they reflect a disproportionate focus on the interests of a handful of large companies. It’s hard to think of a single example during this twenty-year period of copyright restrictions being repealed, relaxed, or any in any meaningful way liberalized. Finally, there is a great paradox between the Western world’s constant demands for the right to free speech on the Internet and the principles embodied in stronger copyright laws. For example, SOPA’s feature of allowing the shutdown of arbitrary websites without judicial hearing, ACTA’s removal of safe harbour protections and the outlawing of circumvention technology leads to the internet quickly toeing the line with new regulations. Ironically, even as SOPA seeks to outlaw technology like Tor, the US Department of Defense actively funds its development to help activists in repressive regimes like Iran.

The Internet has now reached its prime, e-commerce is commonplace, startups for media distribution are blossoming all over, our identities are now better known by Facebook and Google than by our Governments. Power and opinions flow over wires, free of the meddling of higher-ups. This is leading to politicians and other old bastions of power (cable TV, telephony) feeling lost, and so they are taking concrete steps to clamp down on what they consider a menace. They then repackage it and sell it to the public as ‘stealing’ or ‘content that can cause public unrest’. Caught between these two forces, the Internet could become a nanny state in the next few years.

Over 20 years after an international agreement that deregulated the Internet and led to a meteoric success story of capitalism and free markets above all else, the United Nations plans to establish “international control over the Internet”. In December 2012, Russia, China and others will push for:

• allowing ISPs to charge ‘international’ fees for Internet traffic - this is just absurd. By its very nature the Internet is not supposed to have ‘boundaries’. It goes completely against Net Neutrality
• Subsume under governmental bodies many of the tasks of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and others. These bodies currently operate solely on merit, technical competency and democratic votes, and as private bodies are free from governmental interference.

among others. Censorship is emerging stronger and stronger. Censorship across the world has been well covered, and I will not go into the details. Two things are relevant though. One is #IdiotSibal’s attempts at getting social networks to take down ‘offending’ content. It seems in our bid to compete with China, we’ve decided to one-man up them in censorship too. Shivam Vij has very correctly stated in Kapil Sibal doesn’t understand the Internet,

So Sibal and Tharoor think social media can cause riots, but it hasn’t actually done so yet. Now that Sibal and Tharoor are telling us there’s stuff out there that could make us kill each other, some of us will go looking for it out of curiosity and…

and

In neighbouring Pakistan, every Tom, Dick and Harry with complaints of online hate speech approaches the Lahore High Court. In India, Kapil Sibal wants to be the high court.
He wants to be judge, jury and executioner. And he wants to do it silently so we don’t get to know.

Google’s Transparency report on India clearly identifies politicians lack of ability to accept criticism.

In addition, we received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove 236 communities and profiles from orkut that were critical of a local politician.

In the private sector, Reliance Communications has taken it upon itself to be the moral and economic guardian by obtaining ‘John Doe’ orders from a local court to ban file sharing websites in the days around a movie release. In sheer violation of Indian law which states that only the Department of Information Technology may request censorship, they then went and blocked websites country wide. It was as if SOPA was already passed in India. A John Doe order is the type of insanity that you think can only happen in movies until some lawyer actually dreams it up. Multiple, unknown, offenders can be acted against. Interestingly while Reliance stated that they were within law, no actual complaint was recieved. The court order and ban was based on speculation. I sent a Minority Report Precrime in action.

In retrospect there are 3 things (amongst others) that threaten the future of the Internet as a ‘commons’: Net neutrality, draconian copyright-laws and censorship. There is only one thing stopping that from happening - YOU.

Further reading:

• Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig
• If Not Orwell, Then Huxley: The Battle for Control of the Internet
• Enough, Already: The SOPA Debate Ignores How Much Copyright Protection We Already Have
• The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom

The TT Incident

This incident is about those moments of pure magic that sometimes happen when two individuals have light bulbs go on in their head at the same instance based on a series of earlier shared experiences and context. No, not the soul mate sort. To convey the expression requires introducing you, the reader, to the back story. In essence this post is about me and Naman’s library adventures. It is a set of confessions which I hope will not get us kicked out of the library now that there is a change of guard.

Naman’s animosity with the library began sometime in the fourth year after Mr. K’s incompetency started getting on his nerves. Then, quite justifiably, he got banned from using the internet in the library for 5 days for stealing Mr K’s IP address for one full day and causing his work to stop. Although Naman claims he did not know whose IP it was he didn’t mind the happy co-incidence. That was the prick in the balloon! I have always been somewhat annoyed with the library’s arbitrary rules, how the staff is a stickler for them even under special circumstances and how easy it actually is to circumvent them. This was also, then, an experiment in how far we could go without being caught, although all these are just excuses to deny the fact that we wanted some childish fun and narcissistic attention. Our library violations begin with this SMS from Naman to me, dated August 31, 2011, 11am:

Who is the most fucking awesome? Bet #1. Who can get the most outrageous food items in library till they get caught. In other terms, who can smuggle food inside rc the longest before getting caught.

It didn’t take too long for Naman to start. He arrived a few days later into the library, all smiles, pockets bulging. Out of one packet same a sandwich. Mr. V. wandered in and set a crumpled plastic cup in front of Naman. I have to admit that I wasn’t too impressed yet. But then out of the second pocket came a plastic bag with tea, and he poured it into the cup and coolly had his breakfast in the library. In all his smugness he went and publicised his achievement :) Not to be outdone, I convinced certain people to go eat pizza with me that very night (this is a lie). When Naman wanted his delivered to him, I took it seriously and delivered it in the library. One Margherita eaten right under the watchful eyes of Dr. K.

Score TFA 1 - 0 library. (We are called Team Fucking Awesome because we were at that point inspired by Julien Smith’s The Short and Sweet Guide to Being Fucking Awesome and took it very seriously)

In time our food escapades fizzled out and we returned to the standard supply of biscuits, chocolates and chips to keep our hands busy while our minds (sometimes) churned over (a bit of) academic knowledge. Our dream still remains incomplete though: cook a packet of instant noodles in the library and consume it there.

Another day, a group of third year girls walked into the library after having celebrated someone’s birthday. They came armed with those annoying birthday trumpets (sometimes sweetly called a bhoppu). We had a hoot blowing raspberries loudly in the library, where silence is a law of nature. Hardly content with this, we stepped outside and (amongst raucous laughter) recorded this sample:

Then we went back to the library and forgot about it. While leaving we ensured this was played loudly and completely, but acted as if we didn’t know what was happening. Thus we left, taking a bit of everyone’s stress with us.

TFA 2 - 0 library.

Every one of these incidents have been during an exam, when the library is filled with students studying for their exams. I am not sure how it reflects on our character that we perform these acts when we should be hitting the books or letting others study in peace. We like to think we’re just injecting some fun into the otherwise serious atmosphere.

Towards the beginning of the final semester – Feb 7, 2012, 8:20pm to be precise – I had come for dinner and was going directly to the library. Naman had been playing table-tennis and directly arrived for dinner. He was using my rackets and ball, so he handed them over hoping I would lug them along everywhere I went. After a bit of discussion over who should keep them, he made the (rational) point that I should carry them and put them in my bag.

There was a flash moment, the kind of epiphany that was experienced by Einstein or Newton, when all their years of thinking collapsed into one beautiful result instantly. I had table-tennis rackets and a ball, I was going to the library… I had to just utter ‘Hey’ and it clicked instantly in Naman’s head too. We high five-d each other and let out a huge laugh, reveling in how the perfect next library prank had formed. The whole café was staring at us as we started in jubilation. The idea was set up, time for execution.

The equipment was rolled in, the surveillance was set up and the stunt done that very night. Too bad the library was filled mostly with geeks at that time. Hardly anyone raised their heads to pay us any attention.

TFA 3 - 0 library.

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