Brave For Free

Privacy is all the rage now, and it struck me just recently that privacy protection has, in fact, changed worryingly without being noticed. Recently RBI insisted that all copies of all financial transaction data be stored inside the country, for reasons of " unfettered supervisory access ". Part of the justification for this extra-draconian measure is to protect the privacy of Indians, ensuring that no foreign power can snoop into such data. Many other data directives followed, all in the name of protecting data privacy. Today all of us are heated up about how Facebook and Google are compromising our privacy by knowing where we are and what we do. We insist on the right to be forgotten by these and other entities, convinced that they are stealing what really belongs to us. We insist that if they use information they learn about our habits, they should compensate us from their profits and not just by providing free services such as door-to-door directions and free email. S

Disaster Recovery has been on the minds of companies ever since the early days of commercially available computing. Today's world of DR revolves around four acronyms - BIA (business impact analysis), RPO (recovery point objective), RTO (recovery time objective) and BCP (business continuity plan). The acronyms appear in a disaster recovery plan in roughly in that order, the thinking being that you first analyse the impact to business of systems being down, then figure out how far back in the past are you willing to turn the dial back to recover from (last day, last hour, last millisecond). Next focus on how long you can afford to be down. Finally - buy a boatload of hardware, software and services to convert all this into action. Setting up a DR is a hugely expensive affair that takes a significant amount planning and effort, not to mention all those drills and tests every now and then. CTOs have followed this prescription since the late seventies (apparently the first hot site wa

In June 2018, DoT announced with some fanfare that VoIP calls would now be “untethered”. Is this time for a celebration? The truth is, VoIP calling became mainstream a long time ago. The original restrictions were designed to make life difficult in a world where phones were dumb and PCs smart; the world moved on and the restriction that both sides needed the same app installed became a fairly insignificant one. To add ketchup to the fries, smartphones smartly built deep integration to the point where the VoIP applications themselves did not need to be fiddled about with. Calls could be initiated from phonebooks directly and missed or received calls showed up along with “regular” phonecalls. And Indians caught on quickly — indeed, even while the ban was operational in full in 2017, (according to data from Warp Speed Reads, a telecom and technology research firm) some 28% of all voice calls in India were VoIP calls made through WhatsApp and Skype and the like. That’s over 80 billion ca