If you are one of those organisations allergic to blogging, it may be sobering to learn that many companies shun blogging “because they feel that using a platform to initiate a close personal tie with customers can result in a lot of damage to the reputation of the organisation as user content would become impossible to monitor.”

Karwal and Chaturvedi remind such organisations that blogging is governed by a self-correcting mechanism. “While much damage is done by negative publicity, there will always be the opinions of customer evangelists and other advocates who have had positive experiences with the company.”

A forceful insight quoted in the book is of Rashmi Bansal, Editor, JAM, who says that most Indian blogs are blogs in name rather than spirit. She wonders if this is due to the fact that most organisations are not open to the idea of a feedback, and they don’t have the maturity to accept criticism, or to responsibly deal with negativity.

The authors cite, as a refreshing contrast, the example of Nandan Nilekani’s first entry on ‘Think Flat,’ which drew a fervent comment from Nishad Hussain Kippaly, a multimedia designer and entrepreneur from Sharjah, thus:

“What a terrible waste of time and storage space. Is that the best thing you could write in your blog? blah d’ blah blah about your company and the tripe you serve your minions. That’s not what we want to read. It’s a blog. Don’t you know what a blog is? Don’t make this another space for you to serve your corporate bull crap man. Talk of how you can inspire and elevate the youth in your company. How you can stop them from jumping into Microsoft. Talk of your life. There should be something interesting. Chill out.”

“P.S. No I am not an ex-employee or an aspiring one. I run my own small design firm in Sharjah. But I couldn’t just sit by and take this.”

Recommended read.

Of the many firsts credited to IITK in India, computer science education tops the list, writes E. C. Subbarao in An Eye for Excellence: Fifty innovative years of IIT Kanpur ( www.harpercollins.co.in).

The story begins in 1963 with the arrival of the first solid-state computer (IBM-1620) in an educational institution in India, the author narrates. This was after prolonged discussions with IBM about the sale of the computer, the deal coming through with the combined efforts of Dr P.K. Kelkar (IITK founder director), Professor Normal Dahl (first leader of KIAP or Kanpur Indo-American Programme), and G. K. Chandiramani in the Ministry of Education, adds Subbarao.

He recounts with verve the saga, right from the bold plan of the EDC (Educational Development Centre) to charter a plane from Washington DC to Kanpur to transport the computer, through the ‘behind-the-scenes work’ involved in getting an American pilot to land on Indian Air Force airstrip in Chakeri near Kanpur, to reaching the computer to the campus on a bullock-cart fitted with inflated rubber tyres in the place of the age-old iron-ringed wooden wheels to traverse the bumpy, potholed road.

A not-to-miss photograph in the chapter is of ‘about 200 hands carrying the most modern computer in India from the bullock-cart into the computer centre at IITK,’ with Professor Harry Huskey of the University of California supervising the exercise.

“The computer was installed and made functional in an amazingly short time. Soon it became clear that the computer, an icon of the twentieth century, provided a facility that had no parallel in relation to any other expensive piece of equipment. Its compelling power and hold over the minds of the faculty, researchers and undergraduates was unprecedented. There was no better facility for generating a scientific and quantitative attitude of mind,” the author describes.

In the early years, IITK had two goals for computer activity: one, to impart computer education to all students irrespective of their discipline, and two, to increase computer awareness among potential users such as the government, industry, education, and R&D.

“The computer was used 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year by students, faculty and outside users. In addition, ten-day intensive courses in programming, numerical techniques and basic computer logic were offered four times a year, each time with 75 participants from defence and CSIR laboratories, other educational institutions and industrial establishments. This was continued for the next seven years…”

Imperative addition to any avid techie’s shelf.

Intrusion-detection and –prevention solutions, commonly abbreviated as IDS and IPS, can make networks self-defending, being ‘designed to identify and stop worms, network viruses, and other malicious traffic.’ IDSs passively listen to network traffic; the IDS is not in the traffic path, but listens promiscuously to copies of all traffic on the network, explain Keith Hutton, Mark Schofield and Diane Teare in Authorized Self-Study Guide: Designing Cisco Network Service Architectures (ARCH), second edition ( www.ciscopress.com).

“When IDS detects malicious traffic, it sends an alert to the management station. An IDS may also have the capability of sending a TCP reset to the end host to terminate any malicious TCP connections.”

In promiscuous mode, packets do not flow through the sensor, the authors explain. They add that the sensor analyses a copy of the monitored traffic rather than the actual forwarded packet.

While, therefore, the advantage of operating in such a mode is that the sensor does not affect the packet flow with the forwarded traffic, the disadvantage is ‘that the sensor cannot stop malicious traffic from reaching its intended target for certain types of attacks, such as atomic attacks (single-packet attacks).’

IPS, on the contrary, is active on the traffic path, listening to inline network traffic and permitting/denying flows and packets into the network. “All traffic passes through the IPS for inspection… When an IPS detects malicious traffic, it sends an alert to the management station and can block the malicious traffic immediately.”

Of value to the network professionals.

Tailpiece

“To detect frauds, we added a new module to our ERP software.”

“That should have solved all your worries?”

“We thought so, until we found that it printed out more pages of report than what the rest of the system generated!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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