Signal-ing the end of WhatsApp?

It’s that time of the year again. It’s the annual ‘facebook-and-google-are-using-our-data-I-am-so-concerned’ saga all over again. I wasn’t expecting it, but the call to shift from WhatsApp to Signal did go mainstream this time. Maybe I should thank Elon Musk or Anand Mahindra for that.

Monetization of private user data is nothing new. Google search and mail is free, WhatsApp is free, Facebook is free, so someone has to pay for server costs for storing billions of cat videos or good morning messages. In fact, Google pays gigantic sums just to be the default ‘free’ search engine. Google is paying Mozilla $450M per year to be the default search engine on Firefox. That’s pennies compared to the $8-12 Billion Google pays to Apple to be the default Search Engine on iOS.

Advertisements are not evil, they keep stuff free. However, when Google shares my search for Gastric problems to advertisers so they can target me with their ads, that is a line crossed. Because there are numerous things I do or search that I might not be comfortable sharing around. My location, my messages, my heart rate, my searches, when I opened an app, my battery percentage, my mood, they track everything.

And there is no hiding. I can try my best, turn off all the privacy-invading settings, use blockers, use incognito mode, yet they’ll track me. I can’t go on the internet without being tracked by every single website. I am forced to click ‘I agree’ to the cookie terms and conditions if I have to access any site. Even when I am logged off, Facebook is tracking me.

This raises a question, is it too late for privacy? Has the trade-off between convenience and privacy normalized and we are already living in a reality where privacy is the price you pay for convenience?

Coming to the topic in vogue, will the mass migration to Signal or Telegram succeed?

The optimist in me wants to believe, the realist in me tells me to calm down. It’s not happening anytime soon.

I hope you remember Google Plus? I am sure Google doesn’t want you to. It still is one of Google’s biggest failures. Launched as an invite-only social network to challenge Facebook’s reign, it had all circumstances in its favour. The backing of a big-daddy-billion-dollar tech company, innovations, the benefit of being the default choice for search, mandatory linking of accounts with YouTube IDs, etc. When I first got the invite, I promptly invited my close friends. It was amazing, the feature sets, the functions, the technology, everything looked so good compared to the mess Facebook was (and is).

Yet it failed. Fell like a shooting star. Reason? ‘Network Effect’. I could convince a maximum of 2 friends to make an account. No one posted on it, because who’s there to watch? Everyone was (and still is) on Facebook.

That’s something I see happening with WhatsApp too. It’s just the default option. No brainer. Uncles, Aunts, Clients, friends, acquaintances, everyone is there. You don’t even need to ask if one is on WhatsApp. You simply ask what’s your WhatsApp number.

I had a hard time convincing people to join Google Plus despite me being the supposedly ‘tech’ guy of the group. Imagine convincing your family or friends to join ‘Signal’ because it’s more secure and privacy-oriented. Priva-What?

Even though Telegram is not End to End encrypted and not recommended as a WhatsApp alternative, but its model can be successful. Telegram has packed itself with features up to the brim and that’s exactly the reason a sizeable crowd has installed it. Sending large files, themes, well-crafted stickers, cross-platform operations, usernames, Secret Chats, etc. are just a few of the features that make it stand out.

For privacy, Signal is the best bet. With open-source code, Signal protocol and backing by a non-profit, it’s the closest you can get to a capable private messaging app.

SSDs are insane

Time for some actual weblogging instead of the routine poems and write-ups!

Fed up with 2 hard disk drive (HDD) failures in two months and my painfully slow laptop I finally decided to take the leap and do what everyone seems to be suggesting as the sure-shot way of making your computer magically quicker- use a Solid State Drive (SSD) instead of usual HDD.

First time is always the charm. Computer periphals included. I looked up if my circa 2014 device could hold up an SSD and surprisingly, it could.

Now the tricky part – SSDs are costly. Compared to the good old HDD, SSDs cost from 2x to 4x for the same capacity.

Having been frustrated by constant HDD failures and crashes (I am looking at you Western Digital) I was ready to trade a smaller capacity for the promises of dream performance pitched by tech websites.

The result – Kingston A400 240 GB for around Rs. 2400/- (presently retails for 3400/- idk why). I grabbed the package so I could revive my dead laptop asap. To my surprise, it felt empty. SSDs are insanely light, being basically a semiconductor chip inside the casing. It fit perfectly in the slot for usual HDD and I was good to go and see if they were actually 10x faster than their Hard-er nemesis.

And boy wasn’t that the day I was spoilt forever. Installing windows was a breeze instead of the usual endless waiting time. Clicking actually opened things or applications at command unlike my old HDD times when one would regret opening a wrong folder for the sheer waiting time. Windows booted like you’re coming back from stand-by mode. 5-10 seconds is the usual time it takes to boot windows. Everything feels snappy. Haven’t really had a proper hang-up due to opening a lot of stuff simultaneously since that time.

On the downside, I am spoilt. At the risk of sounding elitist, I must say HDDs feel like a chore now. Recently, I was at my friends house and needed to use his laptop for some work. Fairly new laptop, i5 processor. The load times and waiting for the computer to be responsive again after opening a pdf drove me to nearly pull my hair out (couldn’t, I was wearing my turban).

So, not going too much into the technical side of things, SSDs do make your system go vrooommm! The only compromise is that for similar price points, you may get half or one third of storage compared to HDDs (I maxed my SDD in a month and had to choose what games stay and what games get banished to the HDD hell). Solution is to either install 1 SSD for system and applications and one HDD for storage (if the system has slot for two) or just keep an external drive for storing bulk of data while letting SSD handle the system stuff.

Happy Computing.

Why Firefox must survive

I remember when pen drives were a technological luxury and burning CD-ROMs was the only way to transfer large files from one computer to other. It’s amusing when I think how I had a case of 100 blank CDs I used to fill with content from neighbors and friends. Along with Pen drives, internet too wasn’t considered a basic right like we do today. Dial-ups that made you wait forever once you decided to load Yahoo! dot com were the norm. That was the time I discovered Firefox. I had Fifa 2002, Road Rash and Motocross Madness 2’s demo on that disc I copied from a friend’s computer.

It will sound crazy but the fact that I could access internet without clicking on that blue Internet Explorer icon felt revolutionary. That fox-engulfing-the-globe logo was a geek’s cool factor at that time. Coming from IE 5, tabbed browsing felt unreal. In my mind I was mumbling “Why didn’t they think of it before?”. Enough with my nostalgia. Like, Winamp Player, Space Cadet Pinball, Groveshark & Napster, Firefox will probably be part of Internet folklore in future.

Is it abnormal to have have feelings for software? I need to see a shrink I guess

Imagine there was no Firefox. Just Internet Explorer stagnantly holding the world browser market share. The web, running like Microsoft would want it to run. We have been blessed to have various browsers and browsing engines competing to render the best of web for us today. As economics teaches us, competition is good. In a quest to one-up each other in the browser-sphere, browser makers are constantly trying to add features, streamlining performance and adding support for upcoming standards.

Emergence of Chrome and Safari with the Webkit engine on the scene has been one of the most important events in web-browser history. Thanks to Apple forcing Chromium on every browser on iOS and Google’s gigantic influence on the web, within a decade everything we know as a web browser is adopting Webkit. The web is heading for a monopoly. And once again economics teaches us that monopolies are bad, real bad. It totally looks like a build-up to a stagnant web to a skeptical like me.

Few years back, Opera, my favorite browser at that time, adopted Blink, a fork of Webkit. This meant the poweruser’s favourite browser was dead, along with the Presto Engine. Opera’s decision can be justified in terms of markets and business. With a market share of less than 2% it wasn’t an insane decision in any sense. Surely, that workforce can be deployed to some other worthy venture for Opera. But in the end, for the company that invented tabbed browsing, speed dials, private tabs, mail and IRC integration, gestures etc and was at the helm of web innovation for more than 20 years, it felt like a death to me. Consider this paragraph as a eulogy.

Opera 12. The last version when Opera was the browser we loved.

What concerns me is the fact that Firefox’s gecko is the last major open source rendering engine left apart from Webkit. Imagine a world without firefox, or maybe with 2% usage share. Would the developers care to make their sites compatible for all the engines?  or will they simply make sure the site runs of Webkit based browsers, because that’s what everyone will be using.

Webkit being everywhere will surely bring consistency, lesser headaches for developers and uniform implementation of web standards. But will a lone horse care to run faster if it knew it’s the only one in the race? Innovation is the best by-product of competition and here, typing this on Firefox I met 12 years back I can only hope our kids don’t wake up to a stagnant web.

Google vs Bing : Clash of the search Titans

I love fair competition, after Yahoo decided to use Bing to power their search engine, we are left with just two worthy giants. Bing and Google. Bing Sucks, that’s what the general opinion people has been, it shows ridiculous results at times according to most reports. So I thought let’s just compare the results of 5 random searches on both engines and see for ourselves if Bing being a douchebag just a myth or it actually holds some truth. Here we start

Bing’s home page: This thing is beautiful, a refreshing wallpaper with nice metro design. Google has the the ‘Simple is powerful’ approach as far as homepage goes.

Test 1 – “The Largest Social Network”

 

 

Bing decides it wants to throw us a list of all the social networks instead of telling us which one is the largest, and also one result talking about Russia’s largest social network

Google has some better tricks in their hats, first 4 or five results will surely get me my answer.

Test 2- “Stephen Hawking’s disease”

That’s why they tell us “Google it” for every question, because Google has the answer. Properly marked and presented. 

Bing shows the Wikipedia article, but can’t show the name of the condition, and also presents some not so helpful stuff.

Test 3 – “ADSL vs DSL”

here, I am looking for the difference between two kinds of Internet Connections, DSL (Direct Subscriber Line) and ADSL (Asymmetrical DSL)

Google links to a definition but not the difference, then, links to some user generated forums. 

 

Bing shows some real worth here, 3 articles directly from some nice sites and it scores a win

Test 4 – “The first ever photograph from a mobile camera”

Google just gets this one right at the target, the first picture it shows is the right one, I know that thanks to designing a quiz with this same question.

 

Bing seems lost, it’s not even showing pictures of mobile cameras on top. 

 

Test 5 – “People who turned down nobel”

 

Google does it like a routine, showing relevant stuff dug out of all the results. Beauty

 

 

No doubt it shows ideal results, but not as well presented as Google’s. “Related Searches” makes you wonder what’s so wrong with Bing.

 

Conclusion- This is my personal opinion deduced from these tests.

Bing lags behind, for sure. It has a good home page, better results at times, sometimes the image search seems better than google, but it is not replacing my default search engine Google with that.

Google’s results look astonishingly hand-picked, it even highlights what you are looking for and presents it at top. It’s not perfect, nothing is, but when I need something I will still Google it, instead of searching on Bing, because Bing has a long way to go and improve at changing the way it interprets the search terms and shows results.

It was a 4-1 but Bing’s not as bad as people feel, scary is the fact that it is the only big competitor left to Google, if Microsoft decides to scrape off Bing today, we will be left with just Google, a monopolistic search market, and this really doesn’t sound good to me.

Happy Searching everyone!

Customer Care Evaluation of Indian Telecom companies…

The importance of  ‘customer care’ in the Indian Industries has been on the rise ( or I should say decline) lately.

I have been calling up customer care offices of various companies (not just telecom) of India since 2004 (as far as I can remember), being the ‘chhotu’ and the most tech savvy guy in the family, this responsibility was always loaded on my shoulders.

I have dealt with the IVRs slow and non-bypassable instuctions, I have waited for 10-15 minutes at times for getting a ‘chance’ to connect with the ever-so-busy ‘customer service executive’, I have seen it all I guess, or I should say I presume…

Companies

Airtel – 3/5

The Biggest telecom operator in, the telecom giant, famous for its coverage and slightly higher pricing.

I have had an ok-ok experience with them, whole of my family uses Airtel (3 memebrs to be precise) except me, I have stuck on to aircel, as I can’t imagine living with a limited mobile data plan (like most companies provide).

The customer service has been rude, sleepy and arrogant, maybe I am exaggerating, but when you are ought to be polite, a minor incident of rudeness seems huge. The thing is, their network is good, and the quality of service is also fine which might compensate for their customer service, these observations are a generalized result of calling them up some years back, NOW, they seem to have corrected their behavior somewhat, but, I would admit, they sound arrogant. Maybe, the companies dominance has gone into their head too.

Aircel – 3.5 2.5/5

Remains my preferred network, though, not out of choice but under my need to have a good (unlimited) data pack.

The coverage is pathetic, If you travel a lot, this can mean nightmare, network blows away in the middle of a metropolitan city mysteriously.

The only selling point they had for me was their unlimited Pocket Internet Pack, NOW, even they have limited it to 2 GB of data at good speed and later on, unbrowsable speeds.

The customer service isn’t rude straight away, they will entertain you (only after you wait for 10-15 minutes for the call to connect and sustain their theme songs on loop), and then they will try to divert you, saying this is not our fault, this is not the right department, this service is not available or anything after which you wouldn’t even be asked if they can put down you call, that will be done in a very autocratic manner. Maybe a result of poor training. But still, when you call and you have to wait for so many minutes you are bound to be frustrated.

Tata Docomo: 5/5

This company, backed by one of the most respected business houses and a pioneering japanese telecom giant is of the ‘hat-ke’ thinking, they have tried to stand apart in this competitive Indian market and I must say, they actually did.

Be it their ‘doo-tu-du’ (ambiguous spelling) theme song or creative marketing, they have done things differently, and that also has been applied to customer service.

I have been using Tata Indicom’s (now docomo) walky wireless phone and now my sister too had a docomo connection, and seriously they are a step ahead in customer care.

I’ll list their good points:

1. First and foremost, this company, unlike others, doesn’t avoid customers to call, they were the first and I assume the only company to allow a direct call to an executive from the first option screen of IVR.

To explain, whenever you call and listen to IVRs instructions you can just press 9 (not sure) and connect to an executive, instead of finding ways to talk to customer care via different menus and sub menus.

2. They don’t have that mechanised or overtly official sound on their IVR system, I was surprised when I was greeted by Miss India Pooja Chopra on the IVR (obviously that was recorded 😛 ) that really makes a difference.

3. The customer service executives are good, polite and helpful.

Seriously, they stand out in customer service and care.

Reliance: 4/5-

To be honest, I have never used a reliance mobile connection (provided their reputation).

But I have been using a Reliance Broadband connection for some time, and I would assume they have the same level of service.

I have been calling them rather frequently, due to some technical problems that never seem to go.

There agents have been polite, well versed and patient, as if they have all the time in the world. They are not reluctant to take complaints, and in solving them too. They time it takes to connect is very less too.

Overall, an experience that one expects. (an mysteriously they are the only executives who can pronounce my name correctly after listening to it just once)

BSNL/MTNL 1.5/5-

The ‘national’ telecom company, what more I can say??

And they take this ‘sarkari’ stature rather seriously. Marred by ‘red-tapism’ and governmental slowness, they never seem to improve.

Good things are their tariffs, coverage (all over India, and not the quality of service) and Broadband.

Bad things?? it’s full of them.

1. Super-sarkari procedures-

Once (I will never again), I bought a BSNL sim, submitted my documents, the retailer gave them to distributer, the distributer to the company… and then a wait of 2 week and still, no activation. There are companies who activate your SIM right away, but BSNL you are too formal I guess. Yes, I can wait for a day or two, but 2 weeks??? I called their customer service (comparable to Aircel’s wait) and there a rude government employ (most probably) told me that now they couldn’t do anything and I will need to come to their regional office to get it verified. It was far, but not too far, but I was frustrated and I had made up my mind to never touch a BSNL product again.

2. Customer Service.

Slow. Rude. Poor Knowledge.

You cannot talk to an executive and you’ll have to wait a lot listening to pre recorded messages while waiting with a rough background music, then you’ll be greeted by a rude executive, who’ll speak in tone that will make you think about the governmental permanency of his/her job at least once. You’ll be ignored, or redirected somewhere else.

3. Quality of service isn’t great, even after a great and unsurpassed coverage.

These results are based on my experiences and dealings with customer services in Mahrashtra telecom region, your area might or might not be different. I haven’t talked about some other companies as either I haven’t used them or I haven’t used them enough to be in a position to comment.

Facebook Home for All phones, YES!!!

Facebook recently launched a new product for android devices, in an effort to take over your mobile home screens too.

The problem is that it has been just released for some select smartphones like GS3, One etc. No worries 🙂

Want to try out the latest buzz in social networking??? Don’t have Galaxy S3, HTC One, One X???

A member from XDA forum theos0o has ported the application for all phones.

All you have to do is to download the .rar file from the link below.

http://d-h.st/qOz

and extract the .rar file with 2 APKs, 1. facebook app 2. Facebook Home

Please make sure that all previous installations of facebook app and messenger are deleted before you install these.

First install Facebook app, enter your login details, install the home app, fire it up…. there you go 😀

No need to Root 🙂

Thanks to Theos0o.

My Galaxy S duos running facebook home. Don’t confuse it with S3 😛
Will run on most phones I guess, provided it has been completed by a seasoned programmer.

Google Earth Funny 3d imagery

People can’t stop making fun of iOS maps, I have seen numerous memes, comics, jokes on it.
(even I can’t :-P). THE Apple maps have been a failure.

The most funny thing is the 3D fly through feature. Sounds cool, isn’t it?
It isn’t.
Though buildings and roads looked good in 3D and brought realism but the funny thing was the inaccuracy in the way they were projected. For example Airport roads were looking more like a motocross road, bridges were broken and made their way into water bodies under them.

Now what were the people missing? Google maps.
yes, google maps. And this 3D thing is available for selected cities in USA and Rome in Google earth.
Now while trying this 3D experience in google earth for iOS, I found that, even that isn’t flawless.
I’m posting two pics where you can see how a tennis court is having a curvy surface and how one side of is nearly like a trench.

Android versus iOS

Another in the series if my technical blogs, where my technical knowledge comes out and splashes over my blog posts.
In this post I’m going to discuss about the feature of two of the major smartphone rival operating systems, namely google’s android and Apple’s iOS

1. Sales
If you look at the official figures android just edges out iOS in number of products sold.
And that too has happened very recently, until now apple had been leading, it’s surprising provided the number of handsets having android and there low pricing compared to apple’s devices.
2. Quality of hardware
The quality of hardware used in android varies a lot. On one hand we have phones like Samsung galaxy S III, which clearly outperform the latest iPhone 4s, on the other we have phones that run on cheap hardware and call themselves budget android phones.
As far as apple is concerned it’s the very close hardware and software integration that its product is all about. Apple usually doesn’t reveal its hardware’s too many details. The company buys the best of hardware from companies around the world, even from Samsung!!! and integrates it to provide best user experience.
The introduction of iPhone brought a revolution in the industry and changed the way we look and mean the word “smartphone”, it was purely because of the great combination of hardware capabilities and the operating system to take advantage of such hardware that this revolution kick started.

3. Customisability
Here is a very clear distinction between the two OSs as clear as a big yes or no
Android has it, you say it they have it, launchers, themes, keyboards, icons, wallpapers etc
They have it all. Whatever you want your phone or tab to look like you can have it
iOS’s answer is nearly no, you can just change your wallpapers, standby screens and …. nothing.
Yes, you cannot change much… Thats a common users nightmare, you spent 500 dollars or 50000 rupees on your new ipad, but you cannot make it the way you want… kind of, but still it’s a cult and a dream device for everyone. Why? Because it doesn’t let you mess things up, an iPad will always be the same iPad you bought( unless you jailbreak it) The same behaviour, the same home screen, the same apps arrangement etc. It’s a gadget for tech hungry to anti-tech people. Because it’s simple to use, but at the same place it’s advanced.

4. Originality
I was reading an article on cnet about the apple versus samsung war, it was a picture gallery of 26 shots that described how samsung compared its galaxy s with iphone, and comparing products with competitors is not a new thing, but what i observed that they were trying to copy iphone fully.
The pictures show how samsung engineers say that the iphone’s UI flips when the orientation is changed which gives a feeling of euphoria, and then they instruct developers to make that feature come alive in Galaxy S, and there are numerous features, like 3d looking icons, minimalistic design, view-ability, scrolling etc. every iphone feature has been copied.
And everyone knows that galaxy s the ancestor of all phones we say are iphone like or iphone beaters, so my originality award will go without a doubt to iOS.

Verdict
Though my article may seem a bit biased to android fanboys, but there are some things I really love about android, like great customisability, pirated apps( not legally or morally good though), cheap phones for everyone, scalability , it’s open source etc.
But iOS will remain my favourite, as it is original, safe, easy to use, has quality apps, great hardware integration, and to top it all, late Steve Jobs’s backing.
Hope you had a great time reading my article, please comment if you have an opinion or argument, will love to hear from you.

imo.im chat client for iPad

Recently used a new chat client called imo.im on my iPad 2.
It’s is a great free app to have. Firstly, it helps you out in a great way by bypassing the main Facebook page if you just want to chat with your near and dear ones, but you are on a slow EDGE, GPRS or wi-fi connection. It integrates all your friends or buddies as the company calls it, in one place. No need to juggle between websites or different clients.
Before this I was a nimbuzz fan, I used to chat on a java feature phone, Samsung s3310 with it.
But when I searched for it on iPad it was just there for iPhone, everyone hates using 2x mode on iPad for iPhone apps.
So I found this great app, which met all my needs.
Try it out at the apps store. It’s worth the appreciation it is getting.
imo.im website

The Crappy Case of Windows 7

Just installed windows 7 on my year 2004 PC  (with some upgrades) some days back. Pc configuration (not at all impressive) 1. 80 GB HDD 2. 1 GB RAM 3. Pentium 4 and 64 MB Intel graphics memory I had a computer crash and after all my efforts I had to cal for technical help. My HDD went rogue  and wasn’t accepting win XP at all, maybe she now knew about the new win 7 and now wanted that, the tech help obliged and gave it win 7 , I already have it on my lappy (500 GB HDD, 8 GB RAM, and i3), but the one that was installed looked too different, not so surprisingly there was no support for aero and even after installing the ULTIMATE version it looked like home basic, even XP looked more beautiful with WIN 7 transformation packs. This limitation was obviously because the chipset was old and graphics memory too low. Then came another blow, no sound and multimedia drivers were compatible with my hardware for WIN 7, it was heart breaking moment actually i have always liked win 7 and craved for it when it was released but it’s such a shame that the OS which can handle the newest and most demanding hardwares with ease, just refuses you to let you do what you could do with XP. This obviously sounds like XP was much like the “people’s OS” just like the ROCK was “people’s champ”. Actually intel can also be accused of the crime that has happened with me, they don’t make drivers for older hardware for win 7. So all in all, all tech companies want us to throw away old hardware in trash and buy brand new ones. But my answer is if this kind behavior  goes on people will make there OWN, FREE and LIBERAL software and customize them to there needs and will not be required to change themselves. —-> GPS