PEDES3ANTECH

Imagine a world where everyone is happy because nobody is happier than the other. Imagine a world where everyone belongs to everyone because nobody belongs to someone. This may sound confusing but this is the world that Aldous Huxley creates in this book. The world that Huxley creates is one where technology has complete control over society. This control is shown from the beginning of the book where the story opens inside the Central London Hatching and Conditioning Centre. Here we are shown how technology is used to engineer human beings into different classes each with their own unique conditioning. Each class is conditioned to act, think and feel in a certain way that contributes to the overall harmony of society. Technology's control over society is very evident from the very beginning. Although technology today is not as intrusive as the technology portrayed in the book, the question on whether technology is controling us is still very much relevant today. From th...

B altimore - Shortly after midnight on March 5, 1976 Mrs. Patricia Mcdonough was robbed just outside her home. She was able to take a good look at the robber and his 1975 Monte Carlo automobile. A few days after the robbery, Mrs. McDonough started receiving threatening phone calls from the man claiming to be the robber. Mrs. McDonough started recording some of these threatening phone calls and notified the police. On March 13, the police asked the telephone company to install a terminating accounting equipment on Mrs. Donough's telephone line to determine the origin of the calls she was receiving. The police found out that most of the calls were made from pay-phones near McDonough's residence.  On March 16, in the general vicinity of Mrs. McDonough's home, someone asked a police officer for help in opening the locked door of his 1975 Monte Carlo. The officer helped the man, took down his plate# and notified the investigating officer.  The police ran the pla...

General David Petraeus was sentenced to two years probation and a $100K fine for leaking classified information (link to  plea deal ). This sentence is nothing short of an insult to the justice system in the United States. It is a clear example of how the justice system in the United States is rigged.  Let us recall what got Petraeus into this mess by looking at two things - i. What did he leak? ii. What was intention for leaking the information?  What did he leak? Petraeus leaked names of covert operatives, war plans for US forces, and detailed discussion with senior officials including the US President. This information was contained in notebooks that Petraeus kept for himself. He then gave Paula Broadwell access to these notebooks to help her write his biography. The information contained in those notebooks are highly classified by any standard and had the potential of endangering US covert operatives.  When Chelsea Manning leaked the Afghan war-l...

This post is long delayed. I apologize. I will be honest, this book was hard to read but it was rewarding at the end. One of the biggest challenge for me in reading this book was the language used. It was written in old 19th Century English where the sentence construction is totally different from what I am used to. Let me give you an example: He is alive. Greatly changed, it is too probable; almost a wreck, it is possible; though we will hope the best. Still, alive. Your father has been taken to the house of an old servant in Paris, and we are going there: I, to identify him if I can: you, to restore him to life, love, duty, rest, comfort. I found it hard reading these types of sentences, and the book was full of it. What I noticed is that the sentences made it hard for me to get a feel of the ideas flowing. I had to stop a few times and re-read some sentences to fully understand them. Maybe this was intentional to convey a sense of uncertainty as the story unfolded and as the ch...

First Edition Cover - image  source   This book resonated a lot with me. If you follow my blog or my twitter timeline you will see one theme that I am very passionate about - privacy and how the surveillance state is trying to eradicate it.  I became very passionate about this topic when I read about Snowden's revelations. Reading about the NSA's surveillance program and their seeming disregard of individual privacy was shocking to me. It made me want to know more about how our data is being collected and how it is being exposed to surveillance. Reading George Orwell's 1984 felt like it was a critique of our current state. There were three themes in the story that really struck me the most and I will go through each one of them in this post. The mere threat of constant surveillance is enough to kill dissent.  In the book the Party had installed countless Telescreens and listening devices as part of its surveillance infrastructure. The Thought Police could...

My humble book collection.  Almost everyone everywhere every year comes up with their own new years resolution. My wife, my son and I are no different. This year we decided to start a family project - to come up with a list of 100 books to read in our lifetime and start reading them. We got this idea when we were watching The Equalizer by Denzel Washington. In this movie Denzel Washington's character had a list of 100 books he wanted to read in his lifetime - an idea he got from his wife. The movie got us interested in this project and we decided to do it. There are a few immediate benefits to this project: It is very cheap - we both love going to the Public Library so access to these books was fairly easy and cheap. Some people want to go on a trip or buy a cool new gadget but this project costs nothing.  It is very easy to do. Me, my wife and my son can read and that is basically all that is required. It does not require any preparation, special skill or equipm...

Obama during his January 17, 2014 speech. Photo credit thinkprogress.org We are coming up to the 1 year anniversary of President Obama's speech promising the American people reforms on how the NSA works (see transcript of speech here ). Although the speech was an exercise in political babbling it had some promised reforms that would have limited the NSA's capabilities. On January 17, 2014 President Barack Obama promised the following reforms to the American people; Strengthen Executive oversight and review of Intelligence operation.          Obama said: " This guidance will strengthen executive branch oversight of our intelligence activities. It will ensure that we take into account our security requirements, but also our alliances, our trade and investment relationships, including the concerns of American companies, and our commitment to privacy and basic liberties. And we will review decisions about intelligence priorities and se...