ways to beat censorship ...
From an article in the Times Of India - Fortunately, technology makes it easy to circumvent such ham-handed censorship. The methods fall into two categories. One, if your ISP goofed up and blocked the wrong site, what you want is to gingerly step around the block using a proxy. The simplest way to achieve this is with Torpark, a project that combines the Firefox browser and the Tor anonymous proxy service into a single point-andclick install for Windows users. Get it from
http://torpark.nfshost.com.
Torpark behaves exactly like the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers you are familiar with, but is unaffected by censorship. Tor operates a series of proxy routers around the world that pass your pages through at least three random routers before delivering them to you. This ensures that your ISP does not know what sites you are accessing, and hence cannot block them. The more people who use Tor, the more effective it becomes against wrongful censorship. You can read more about Tor at
http://tor.eff.org.
Two, go to
http://www.shysurfer.com, type in the address of the site you want to access, and hit Browse. ShySurfer will load the page for you. If you want to follow any link on the page however, you will have to repeat the process. This is a cumbersome process you have to put up with for being on a restricted network.
--
Is your ISP Blocking Blogspot?
Can you access this and other Blogspot blogs from your home computer? I cannot. That is because the idiots in the Govt have asked the ISPs to block some blogs that spread hate about India in an attempt to fight terrorism. My ISP has gone ahead and blocked all blogs on Blogspot. I haven't checked other blog hosts yet. I have this
Photo blog on Blogger that hosts photos of my family etc and I can no longer access it from home!
You can read this from work because our office connection goes through a gateway that is routed through Japan (I think).
If your ISP is blocking web sites, do lodge a protest with the leading newspapers, the central Govt and other web sites. Don't let the idiots in Govt and at the ISPs win by default because we didn't raise our voice against their foolishness.
The Undercover Economist- Tim Harford
‘Reading this book is like spending an ordinary day wearing X-ray goggles’ Davod Bodanis.
‘Only hitch being that with an ordinary mind you really wont be able to make much sense of what you would see through the X-ray goggles.’ Anuj I loved Freakonomics and when I saw this book I was tempted to grab a copy as I expected it to be on the similar lines. I have always tried to read about economics whenever I have got a chance and ‘Required Reading’ right on top of the book by Levitt (Author of Freakonomics) himself was enough for me to grab a copy of it without even looking at the price Rs. 493.60 (Are you thinking its worth every paise that’s why I took pains to mention the price till the last decimal !!).
Incase you are thinking hated the book you are mistaken. Despite of how I sounded in the above paragraph I have to agree that the book was really good. Initially while reading the book it was tough to keep myself interested and I was loosing track of his logic and theories. I had to force myself at various places to continue reading it. I also left the book halfway in between and next time when I picked the book looked very different. I was loving it, I was able to follow it and it all made a lot more sense.
May be this happened because apart from this book I reading, Blink, and few other books all at the same time. May be I should have read only one book at a time.
He uses very nice examples and gives a lot of details on why the things are , the way we see them. In the first Chapter “Who pays for our coffee” it is interesting to see the pricing mechanism followed by them to make the most out of a wide spectrum of customers, those who can pay more and those who cant, without letting them know that the prices are targeted towards them.
He talks about the supermarkets and consumer behavior, which again is really interesting. How a simple thing like where an item is placed affects our buying pattern.
The one thing I did not like about the book was a lot of argument against “externalities” and how he argued about the suggested solutions to tackle problems like traffic congestion and global warming. He does make valid and interesting points but then the problem is so complex that after understanding the pros and cons of his approach you would think that even this is not going to work. May be he should have used some example for which he would have been able to give a convincing solution.
The most interesting part of the book is the later half. Here he talks about Globalization and gives some points in support and talks about why there are people who oppose it. He talks about Cameroon, and why the country is getting poor everyday instead of getting richer despite the “Political Stability” and why the people in Cameroon do not have an incentive to save at all.
And the book would have been incomplete without talking about India and China story, and he does talk about that. Though about China in much greater detail and I really did not know so much about China and history of its economic reforms so far. India gets a fleeting mention and he only explains how China benefited from its relationship with Taiwan, Hong Kong etc and how India did not have that advantage.
One of the really interesting arguments was about the “Sweat Shops” in the under developed and developing country. The author supports these sweat shops vehemently and argues that these working conditions and opportunities because of these sweat shops are much better than starving or not having any opportunities at all. He argues that in long term these sweat shops will make way for more opportunities, better health, higher salaries and a better future.
All in all if you are game for a little heavy reading grab a copy.
Subscribe !!
