SCB Elections Jan 2015

SCB Elections Jan 2015

The Secunderabad Cantonment Board consists of nominated and elected members. One member for each of the 8 wards will be elected in the ensuing election on 11^th January 2015. For Ward 5 alone where I reside, for a mere 20000 voters, there are 18 contestants of all hues and colors. The competition is very stiff and the election propaganda is much more than that for MLA or MP election. Like Deepavali night, incessant noisy canvassing via vans, banners, posters, personal visits, colony wise meetings, news paper inserts, handbills, street plays, skits, songs, pamphlets and brochures etc are aplenty. Nice pastime to read error full  messages.

The poll code clearly says candidates should not use political party symbols or party leaders should not publicly participate in campaigns. This is blatantly violated. Lots of money is spent, way beyond the stipulated sum. However I find many advantages in this election: Citizens are noticed for the first time as voters and given importance.  Each and every household is visited by all candidates. Office bearers of RWAs are sought after. Lots of "good-for-nothings" get plump part time employment, not just limited to biryani packet and mineral water sachets.

At a personal level, I like the Hungama and am enjoying this nuisance. All candidates distribute pamphlets. I find them very useful to pack and throw coffee powder waste from filter and the like.

Dr P Vyasamoorthy
30 Gruhalakshmi Colony, Secunderabad 500015 Telangana
LL 040-27846631 / Mobile: 9490804278

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DOT and its meaningless ban on weebly.com

​DOT and its meaningless ban on weebly.com

I am a signed-up member of http://weebly.com. Weebly provides free web hosting services. They also have premium (fee based) services for registering domain names, running sophisticated high-end websites involving or offering e-commerce, online payments, high volume traffic / storage etc. I have set up and administer, free of charge, as a part of social service, three simple functional websites on weebly, namely:

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1.                  http://aosc-h.weebly.com/  For the Association of Senior Citizens, Hyderabad (known as Lions Bhavan Association popularly)

   

2.                  http://scf-secunderabad.weebly.com/ For Senior Citizens Forum, Secunderabad – A twenty year old SCA that recently won Telangana State Govt Award

3.                  http://ccrwas.weebly.com/  For Confederation of Cantonment Resident Welfare Associations, Secunderabad.  (a seven year old confederation of 70 colony RWAs as members)

However, recently I discovered, some three weeks ago, that the site http://www.weebly.com/ OR http://weebly.com. is not reachable.  I ha​d​

access to their dashboard (Control Panel of some sort) which I can reach using special UserId and Password, after reaching main weebly.com.  That is, their Home Page.   This special access helps me add / delete / change content on the websites I manage.

​ Now this access is gone.​

I complained to weebly via their FB page. They replied stating that my ISP has banned access to their website. I checked with a large number of my friends having Internet access via many different ISPs. I learnt only BSNL Broad Band subscribers are having problem. I lodged a complaint with BSNL and followed it up almost on daily basis. Finally I learn that DOT has banned weebly.com due to security reasons.

Not only that websites updating work has been held up but I have to find out an alternate site similar to weebly and move my three websites there, involving a lot of unnecessary work and inconvenience.

My questions are:

·         What are the security concerns?

·         Why BSNL alone is implementing the ban? (I am able to access weebly via Airtel)

·         When websites (content) hosted on weebly are still accessible, why ban only access to their home page and thus users' dashboards?

·         If a certain website is banned, is it not the duty of DOT to inform all concerned about the ban through ISPs like BSNL etc?

·         Don't you think BSNL is showing scant respect to its BB subscribers?

Can you think of any reasons why DOT is behaving erratically, apparently without any explanations?

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Dot Com is Twenty Five Years Old

The very first site registered with a dot com Internet address was twenty five years ago – to be precise it was on 15^th March 1985 allotted to symbolic.com. That company is now defunct but the development of dot com since that date is unbelievable. As against six domain names registered in 1985 (entire year) we now have about 668000 .com sites registered every month! In 1997, one million .com domains were registered and with several millions coming up in 2000, the bubble busted. Though there are twenty Top Level Domain Names to be chosen .com is still in great demand as it has become synonymous with web.

The web didn't really start until Christmas day 1990 –There were about a dozen web sites world wide. Mosaic the first graphic browser didn't get released until February of 93. Prior to the web, Internet was still there. Popular Services prior to the WWW were: Electronic Mail, Usenet News groups, ftp, telnet and Gopher. In India, Scientific Research institutions under CSIR had email facility through ERNET in 1986. Some universities were fortunate to be connected through ERNET. Usenet was then very popular.

In 1993 I remember accessing text based web servers through a dedicated line from Hyderabad to New Jersey . I was then in Satyam Computers, the first private company in India to acquire a 64kbps dedicated link for connecting to US Clients. In fact, Satyam was refused such a high speed link by VSNL who said: "When we are having one 64 Kbps for the entire country, what will you – a single company that too in private sector – do with that high capacity bandwidth all by yourself?" It took almost a year to convince the bureaucracy. The very next year, twelve 64 KBPs lines were applied for by others and they got it.

I used a command line based web browser (text only) that was actually called www! BSNL – the only ISP then – charged higher fees for accessing graphical web servers. We could read about graphical web sites only in foreign magazines. Satyam was the first company to offer training programs in learning Internet!

Thinking of the progress this web has made, it is mind boggling. There is no parallel to the impact it has created. We are all fortunate to be living at this point of time where all types of technologies are getting converged. Let us hope future will be brighter.