Lost

in
space
 Lost
in
space
The internet is an ideal place to build a new world, whilst offering us a window
of opportunities to redefine the essence of our lives. By Kapil Arambam
T
here is a guy called Sujit Ghosh from Kolkata,
who holds a unique world record. Last year, he
created more than 5,500 email accounts on
Rediffmail. What he had done is something bizarre
but the point, at the moment, is the diminishing
line between reality and virtuality. The ubiquitous
internet has embraced a substantial part of our life.
If you want to find a thing – be informed,
read about, research – you can find it on this
incredibly diverse web. Our life has evolved with
the internet, which has transformed from a global
data communications system to a daily commodity.
The seamless blend of a physical world and the
electronic milieu reinterprets our personal lives,
professions and relation with the society as a whole.
In this passage, we have offered a huge part of
ourselves to become a subset of the larger virtual
world; whilst we have occupied a private territory
that is defined by one and zero. Our space is again
specified by the several accounts we have for emails,
social networking, file hosting and online storage
space that we have on the labyrinth. In days to
come, the amount of megabytes you have online
could be one of the vital statistics you mention in
your CV.
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft said, “The
internet is becoming the town square for the global
village of tomorrow.”
Gmail says I’m currently using 794MB, which
is 10% of my 7,438MB and in Google Docs, I
have occupied 115MB – 11% of the space I have
been alloted. However, there is a serious issue in
the world of information technology, in terms of
fraud, identity theft and access to unauthorised
information. Or in exceptional case, the top
management of corporations could easily rebuke
their employees. Once our management gave me a
stern warning on what I wrote in my blog.
Google, Lycos, Bing, Webcrawler and their
ilk have provided an effortless way to collate
 A journey of a thousand sites
begins with a single click.
Anonymous
“The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.”
information from innumerable and varying sources.
It has led to the advent of several phraseologies,
such as phishing, email spoofing, information security,
data protection directive, enterprise information
security architecture, data governance et tal.
According to Wikipedia: ‘Unencrypted emails
can be read by the administrators of the email
server, if the connection is not encrypted (no https),
and also the internet service provider and other
parties sniffing the traffic of that connection are
able to know the contents. Furthermore, the same
applies to any kind of traffic generated on the
internet (web-browsing, instant messaging and
others).
It adds: ‘In order not to give away too much
personal information, emails can be encrypted
and browsing of webpages as well as other online
activities can be done traceless via anonymisers,
or, in cases those are not trusted, by open-source
distributed anonymisers, so called mix nets.
Renowned open-source mix nets include I2P - The
Anonymous Network and tor.’
Life goes on even if you do not logged in to
Facebook for a week. However, there have been
many undesirable cases, which had arose out of fake
IDs and mail accounts that have been hacked. One
of my juniors cried a whole night when a miscreant
had unwarranted access to her Orkut profile and
had uploaded obscene pictures on her album.
How much serious is this online obstacle? It is
not much critical wrt moderate and sensible use of
the wonder technology. Despite click fraud, forex
scam, romance scam, pharming, wire fraud and other
such digital abuses, the internet has been flourishing,
making our life au courant and easier.
Far from the madding crowd, we have found
the ideal place to build a new world. Despite
the unwanted drawbacks, there are umpteen
opportunities to redefine the essence of our live –
just at a click of a mouse.