Monthly Archives: February 2009

Bloggers beware

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India’s Supreme Court has passed a verdict that could mean the end of mud-slinging and abusive posts in cyberspace. Bloggers can’t let their tongues wag anymore without thinking about the public correctness of their posts. In short, you can’t call anyone names uninhibitedly and get away with it.

Though the ruling comes from a 19-year-old Kerala boy’s ramblings against a Hindutva body on a social networking site, it has wide-ranging ramifications for those of us who own blogs in India. The Supreme court has ruled that if posts are found to be offensive or in bad taste, the blog owners could face libel and even prosecution for the blog content. This means blog owners will also have to think ten times before approving a comment to appear on their blog.

Interestingly many blog postings are already calling the verdict ‘draconian’, ‘outrageous’ and ‘undemocratic’. It remains to be seen how effective the ruling will be in the face of rampant misuse of the cyberspace despite cyber regulations already prohibiting offensive postings on the internet.

Rs 500 laptop

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So what do you think it’s going to be? The innovation of the century or another government-backed exercise that basks in the limelight for a while and flickers away?

A lot has been written about the 10 dollar laptop. First up, I fail to understand why we should give it a US dollar tag if it is an indigenous product being subsidised by the Indian government? Why not call it the Rs 500 laptop instead like the one lakh rupees car by the Tatas?

As of now, all we know is that the laptop will have a two gigabyte memory and wireless internet capability. A prototype (of a slightly higher cost) has been demonstrated to the Union minister of Human Resource Development but even that sounds like a marvel. The rest will perhaps come from subsidies, but who knows? The government has reportedly earmarked more than 46 billion rupees to develop the low-power gadget to work in rural areas with unreliable power supply and poor internet connectivity.

The laptop, being developed by Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and Indian Institute of Technology, Madras will be manufactured at the government-owned Semiconductors Complex in Chandigarh. It will reportedly use a cheap microprocessor and do away with the hard disk, CD/DVD drive and other costly and problem-prone components. The wonder machine, being eagerly awaited by rural school administrators, will be a basic keyboard-screen-USB port model.

Let’s wait for the miracle to happen.