are indian hackers any good?

In light of the Chinese hacking into the Indian Government’s computers, a look at why India has not been able to raise its own army of lethal hackers

The cream of the truly gifted is very thin, and beneath the top layer is a huge mass of plodders who cannot escape their own mediocrity because they are not groomed by an efficient system.

I imagine there is a pub in China where there is a giant screen that plays visuals of Indians saying the many things that only Indians say, and I imagine Chinese men all around rolling on the floor with laughter. What else can they do when we say things like, “Indian Chinese food is superior to Chinese Chinese”? It seems they now have a deeper reason to laugh when you consider the latest reports that say computers in China have hacked into the systems of the Indian Defence Ministry and of our consulates in several nations, compromising information on weapons, diplomacy, Naxalites and even the poor Dalai Lama. This exposes our digital naiveté. And that is very amusing, really.

One of our favorite national delusions is that in a South Indian city which is occasionally run by peasants, a town that does not have adequate power supply or roads, there resides a beast called the Software Giant. We imagine that our success as a cheap labourer who fixes and manages the innovations of others is a prelude to our eventual standing as a high-end software power. There is even a view that China’s goal of becoming the factory of the world is a blue-collared aspiration compared to our destiny as a cerebral force.

But the truth is, as in almost every sphere of Indian life, the cream of the truly gifted is very thin; beneath the top layer is a huge mass of plodders who cannot escape their own mediocrity because they are not groomed by an efficient system. Security observers tell me that this is the reason why India has not been able to raise an army of hackers even though outfits like the National Technical Research Organisation (a late child of the Research & Analysis Wing) have been trying hard to achieve that. There are not that many people with extraordinary skills, and there are no meaningful processes in place to groom the ordinary. “Also, there is in-fighting and mistrust among various intelligence wings,” a security expert says. On the other hand, the increasing sophistication of Chinese hackers points to an efficient and well-funded system there that identifies and trains serious talent.

A hacker is usually a brilliant programmer who can dismantle the elaborate and sophisticated defences of computer networks. A few years ago I interviewed several Indian hackers. Most of them were boys who at that time were too young to get married or vote, though they were not very interested in either. All of them had parallel lives, names and fame online, they could spend days on their computers, and they shared a mild hatred for one Ankit Fadia who they said knew nothing. I asked one of them, “Are you guys good, are Indian hackers any good?” A few hours after my story on Indian hackers appeared, I got a call from him asking me to check the online version of the story on the magazine’s website. Holding his call, I checked. The story had a rating of 12 stars out of a maximum of 10 stars. He said, “I can make it 20 out of ten if you want.”

I presume the stunt was his answer to my question if Indian hackers were any good. Some of them routinely hacked into gaming websites to win prizes like bicycles, or they made nice-looking girls scream in the middle of the night by making their CD drives open and close in a paranormal way. But for such cuteness, Indian hackers were never really considered a force by other hackers. That was because, they told me, they were not a single monolithic group; also they didn’t want to do any harm. They simply legalised their talent by becoming corporate security consultants and made a lot of money while they were still very young.

There were frail attempts by the Indian Government to recruit some of them. A 24-year-old boy was approached by someone claiming to be from ‘The Defence’. “He wanted me to set up cells of hackers who would try and break into important Pakistani sites. But finally when I told him that it will cost a few lakh, he said he will sanction Rs 5,000 first and send the rest in installments.” (There is no evidence to suggest that the caller was indeed from the Government.)

Today, I am told, there are several Indian hackers working for the Government, but they are still not an organised force. They await a system with efficient methods and clear goals, like most of us in our own worlds.

good food vs bad food

Move beyond vegetarian and non-vegetarian food. Start thinking of ethical and unethical food.

Whether pigs can fly still remains debatable, but the fact that they are quite smart has some anecdotal and scientific basis. One such intrepid (and needy) female pig, as observed by the British naturalist Gilbert White in 1789, used to unlatch the gate to her pen, ‘march to a distant farm’ for a tryst with a male pig, and when ‘her purpose was served’ returned home ‘by the same means’. Amongst the several anecdotes quoted in Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals, published last year, the resolute pig illustrates one of the many prickly ethical issues he discusses—how we perceive animals.

It is convenient for us, he argues, to regard animals as lesser beings, choose some as companions worthy of affection and love, slaughter others for food (in the most cruel ways possible), and view their suffering as less than ours. There have been ethical bypasses, the author informs us, stories we have told ourselves to deal with our guilt; namely, ‘consent myths’ which have existed from antiquity. So in exchange for our domestication, animals have mythically ‘consented’ to their eggs and milk being harvested and then being slaughtered at some point. We may affectionately anthropomorphise animals in cutesy entertainment such as Babe and Chicken Run, but the end of the line is the ‘kill floor’ of a large factory farm, several of which the author visits during his three-year research and describes vividly.

Handled roughly, loaded onto trucks, they suffer lacerations, broken bones, fear- and terror-causing involuntary defecation, bright lights, sleep deprivation, sexual abuse, drug overdoses and electric shocks—sounds familiar? It’s just the regular factory farm where livestock are known to die prematurely, go insane from confinement, and exhibit mourning behaviour. Safran Foer points to widespread practices of ‘boutique’ breeding based on taste preference, pumping animals with growth hormones and antibiotics, dismembering them while still conscious, and disposing of vast amounts of animal waste irresponsibly causing dangerous levels of emissions (animal agriculture is a big cause of global warming), contaminating ground water and causing respiratory (and other airborne) diseases such as swine flu.

Setting out to re-examine his choices in the light of his recent fatherhood, the book is Safran Foer’s personal journey, fact-ridden and persuasive in bits, overwrought and anxious in others. The global meat industry over-produces stuff not to feed the hungry, but to make more money. And we, the consumers, prefer not to know what they do and how they do it, as long as supermarkets stock food in abundance and we can consume at will with total disregard to our own health and the collective well being of our planet.

In contrast, Tristram Stuart’s Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, does not make a case for vegetarianism. It instead points to how omnivores have moved away from eating offal, preferring the muscular tissue that supermarkets aggressively stock and promote (but he does delight in street takatak in Karachi; our own bheja, gurda-kapoora, jabaan are not too far away). This, Stuart argues, is waste: edible food irrationally discarded. Part personal narrative, part frontline investigation, Waste introduces the author as a precocious teenage pig-rearer, an insatiable urban hunter-gatherer, foraging and scavenging food from supermarket wastebins, and a passionate critic of profligacy. The book reveals to us ethical implications of waste along the supply chain of food—from harvesting to manufacturing to discarding surplus food at homes.

In the very introduction, Stuart states that modern agriculture is now ‘threatening the very life it was designed to support’ through overfishing, pollution caused by landfills, excessive and irrational surpluses in the Western world, depletion of natural forests, loss of plant and animal species, climate change, greenhouse gases and changes in hydrological cycles and soil. Startling facts are revealed in this intensively researched book—90 per cent of all predatory fish (cod, salmon, tuna) are already lost, just 4 per cent of oceans remain pristine, deforestation accounts for 75 per cent of emissions in Brazil, 58 per cent of carrots in UK farms are outgraded (and therefore discarded), 40 per cent of the world’s cereals are fed to farm animals, 35–40 per cent of fruits and vegetables in India go waste, and two-thirds of Americans are overweight.

The author aptly points out that food is a global commodity, many products are traded globally, nations are linked inextricably and ‘virtually no one is free from… western profligacy’. Hunger in parts of the world is linked directly to excess in the West, he says, while asserting that it is no longer ‘morally tenable’ for rich nations to deplete resources, harm the environment, and deprive others of food. Several other issues are tackled here—grains diverted for biofuel production, the logic of use-by/sell-by dates, landfill issues, legislation, agricultural land-leasing by rich nations, logic of surplus… Food shortages have caused revolutions, the author reminds us—from France of 1789 to Haiti in 2008. An indictment of Western ways, we are reminded of the growing demand for processed food in India and China, the increase in meat consumption, and how despite our traditional frugal ways the lack of infrastructure results in wastage, exemplified by startling losses of grain due to poor storage, lack of adequate transportation facilities, and inefficient public distribution systems.

Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, following up on his critically acclaimed An Omnivore’s Dilemma, is a slim, practical guide to healthy, conscionable eating. It is also a myth buster, revealing simple facts and clearing the air about others held to be facts. Divided into three sections, the author urges us in each to ‘eat food’, eat ‘mostly plants’ and eat ‘not too much’. Given the profusion of nutritional advice in the mass media, diets, supplements, ‘health foods’, and terms such as omega 3 fatty acids, antioxidants, saturated fat and gluten being bandied about freely, Pollan sets out to simplify matters, primarily for himself, and consequently, in the form of this book, for readers. He asserts two ‘indisputable facts’ at the outset—populations eating predominantly Western diets (high levels of fat and sugar, lots of processed meat, refined grains) are prone to a wide range of diseases, whereas those who predominantly live on traditional diets generally do not suffer these chronic diseases.

The author offers us 64 pithy rules in the quest for healthy and ‘ethical’ food choices. Number 1 is the elementary ‘Eat Food’, given that a lot of manufactured food-like stuff or processed food is hardly ‘food’ at all. No 11, intuitive knowledge which we often choose to ignore: ‘Avoid food you see advertised on television’. Number 23 is ‘Treat meat like a flavouring or special occasion food’, and number 49 is ‘Eat slowly’.

From Gandhi, the philosopher Peter Singer to writer JM Coetzee, many have spoken and written about food and ethics, for there are profound implications to how we produce, consume, trade and imagine food. Food ethics are complex, to say the least, and are connected to personal narratives, social and cultural histories and economic progress. But the notion that modern industrial food production is inhumane, unhealthy and ultimately untenable is gaining greater credence. Given the Western experience (where national nutritional policies have been influenced by the food industry), how do we, as a nation, safeguard ourselves whilst still pursuing economic prosperity? Can we? Or do we too wish for supermarkets of ‘infinite abundance’?

Mobile number portability (MNP)

Mobile number portability (MNP) enables mobile telephone users to retain their mobile telephone numbers mobile network operator to another. when changing from one.

overview:  

MNP is implemented in different ways across the globe. The international and European standard is for a customer wishing to port his/her number to contact the new provider (Recipient) who will then arrange necessary process with the old provider (Donor). This is also known as 'Recipient-Led' porting. The UKPorting Authorisation Code is the only country to not implement a Recipient-Led system, where a customer wishing to port his/her number is required to contact the Donor to obtain a (PAC) which he/she then has to give to the Recipient. Once having received the PAC the Recipient continues the port process by contacting the Donor. This form of porting is also known as 'Donor-Led' and has been criticised by some industry analysts as being inefficient. It has also been observed that it may act as a customer deterrent as well as allowing the Donor an opportunity of 'winning-back' the customer. This might lead to distortion of competition, especially in the markets with new entrants that are yet to achieve scalability of operation.

A significant technical aspect of MNP (Mobile Number Portability) is related to the routing of calls or mobile messages (SMS, MMS) to a number once it has been ported. There are various flavours of call routing implementation across the globe but the international and European best practice is via the use of a central database (CDB) of ported numbers. Network operator makes copies of CDB and queries it to find out which network to send a call to. This is also known as All Call Query (ACQ) and is highly efficient and scalable. Majority of the established and upcoming MNP systems across the world are based on this ACQ/CDB method of call routing. One of the very few countries to not use ACQ/CDB is the UK where calls to a number once it has been ported are still routed via the Donor network. This is also known as 'Indirect Routing' and is highly inefficient as it is wasteful of transmission and switching capacity. Because of its Donor dependent nature, Indirect Routing also means that if the Donor network develops a fault or goes out of business, the customers who have ported out of that network will lose incoming calls to their numbers. The UK telecoms regulator Ofcom completed its extended review of the UK MNP process on 29 November 2007 and mandated that ACQ/CDB be implemented for mobile to mobile ported calls by no later than 1 September 2009.

MNP in India : 

  As of today, if you are in India, and you are having problems with your new Mobile phone service operator and want to change to another operator, you will have to change the mobile number as well! Changing the mobile number is a problem when you have a lot of contacts. You will have to inform all the people in your phonebook about your new number. In addition to this, since the person who you have sent the information may or may not have noted the change in your number, it would create a problem for him as well as you again! Mobile Number Portability is a technique to solve this problem.

Using Mobile Number Portability, you can change the operator without having to change your number. So if you are using a mobile number (say) 9876543210 for and are using the service from some operator (say Reliance) and you want to switch over to another operator, say BSNL, then you will not have the need to change the number. So when Mobile Number Portability in India comes to effect, you will have the ease of having the same number while using any operator's service you want. Mobile Number Portability in India will offer you the freedom to select the operator whose network and the features you like without having to think 100 times about informing the change in your mobile number to your hundreds of friends and contacts! While this seems to be a dream for some people, it will be a reality in few days in India.

How much will Mobile Number Portability cost? 

Price of Mobile Number Portability in India is as lower as Rs.19, where MNP allows to change your number as many times you want. This cost is fixed by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and it is implemented for all service providers.

How to retain mobile number after changing the operator by using the Mobile Portability Service in India?While Mobile Number Portability is a buzzword these days, the bigger question is on how to change your operator after the facility has been provided! So here are the steps:

1. Send an SMS containing 'PORT' (without the quotes and in capital letters) to 1900.

2. After sometime (almost immediately), you will receive your UPC (Unique porting Code) on your mobile via a SMS.

3. Now you need to do what you did before to get a new connection, i.e. to go to a shop, pay Rs. 19 (or whatever the new operator asks for; Rs. 19 is the maximum) plus any other charges, like for the new SIM (yes, you will have to get another SIM card) and submit your documents and you should be able to use the new connection.

What has not been made clear is whether or not that new SIM will be usable immediately or not, or even when it will be usable. Since a switchover can be required by the customer immediately, the operators may not be that fast!

How much time does it take to change the operator having same mobile number using Mobile Number Portability in India? 

TRAI has said that operators should get it done within 4 days, it may vary due to many factors and the use of the old or new SIM is an issue as of now! For example, if both the old and the new operators are fast enough, it would be a matter of minutes. But if they work slow at their offices, Mobile Number Portability may take days to please you.