Go invisible on WhatsApp for more Privacy

In the good old days, when everyone was using Google Talk aka GTalk, it was easy to go invisible whenever. To seek some private moments, away from all the pings coming from friends (and foes), all you had to do was toggle the invisible mode in the Google Talk.

Now, when the world has moved to WhatsApp, it is no longer easy to become invisible. We understand how annoying it can be with continuous pings disturbing you while you are taking your power nap or busy playing some game on your phone.  Now you may think why not turn of the mobile data and be done with WhatsApp? Yes, you can. But then turning the data off will also stop some services that you want to access, such as work emails or crucial prompts from your stock broking app.

There has to be some way to seek momentarily peace on WhatsApp, some way to have some privacy. Well, it is not as easy as toggling the invisible mode in GTalk but there are ways. We explain:

1.  Hide your Last Seen:  By hiding yat is a small price to pay for some peace. Right?
our "last seen" feature, you will definitely get some peace of mind. Once the feature is disabled, it takes away the pressure to respond to messages immediately. To turn it off, go to the settings option in your WhatsAppand select account. Under the Privacy tab, change your Last seen to "nobody". Voila! Now nobody knows when were you last seen on WhatsApp. Of course, you also won't be able to see the same information for others. But then th
2.  Hide your Status:  Follow the same process. Settings > Privacy > Status > Nobody.Done! Your status won't be visible to anyone now.

3.  Hide your profile photo: This one is more to avoid the stalkers, girls (and boys). Don't want your sweetest-friend-turned-bitterest-enemy to see your latest party photos on WhatsApp? Turn off the feature. Go to Settings > Privacy > Profile Photo > Nobody. That is all.

4. No Blue Ticks please: The Blue Ticks can be very annoying. The ticks basically mean that you have read the messages, which automatically mean that you are there online! And then if you are online, you are also supposed to respond to the message right away. Or else you childhood friend would be so so offended. No? So, take the drama out of life and disable the Blue Ticks. Go to Account > Privacy > Uncheck Read Receipts box.

5. Snooze or pause WhatsApp: Okay, this one is a gem of a tech tip. Unfortunately it is only for Android users. Currently, there is no way to pause WhatsApp. At least, not within the app. So if you temporarily want to not receive any messages on WhatsApp, you can do that through Android's app settings. Here is what you need to do: Go toSetting > Apps > WhatsApp > Force Stop.

Once you have force stopped WhatsApp, it won't be able to connect to internet even if you have a working data connection in your phone. You won't receive any messages. The app will be frozen. Once you are ready to come out of your hibernation and love the world again, just tap on the WhatsApp icon on the phone and open the app. It will resume its duty and messages will again start coming.

DDoSing a regulator: A manual for Facebook’s Free Basics

“Facebook is executing a well crafted DDoS on the State” – @creativewolf

On December 10, something unprecedented happened that many Indians are yet to realize the significance of: a $300 billion global corporation started ‘DDoS-ing’ an independent Indian regulator.

The corporation was Facebook and the regulator was India’s apex telecom regulator, TRAI.

“What’s DDoS?” you ask?

A DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, is a particularly malicious type of cyber attack that can bring down the best of websites by flooding it with an overwhelming amount of unexpected and unrequested traffic from a large number of computers distributed around the world.

To the victim website, each individual DDoS request appears to be legitimate and coming from different PCs and servers. But collectively, once these requests reach hundreds of thousands or millions in number, the victim site gets so overwhelmed that it shuts down or becomes unreachable to its intended users.

Interestingly, the actual “attackers” in a DDoS attack are largely unaware of their involvement, as most of their PCs and servers are part of ‘botnets’, having been compromised through computer viruses.

Facebook’s ‘DDoS’ kicked off on 10th, exactly a day after TRAI published a crucial 9-page document on its website titled “Consultation Paper on Differential Pricing for Data Services”. The paper was in continuation to an earlier one in April on “Over The Top Services” which led over one million Indians to email TRAI their responses. The contentious thread between both papers was “Net Neutrality” – the simple, transparent and fair set of principles atop which the Internet was built: all traffic will be treated equally by ISPs and there shall be no discrimination for or against a website or service.

After 8 pages of fairly elaborate, balanced and nuanced explanations of “differential pricing” – the practice of ISPs discriminating between traffic passing through their networks and charging variable rates from consumers – TRAI requested comments from stakeholders on four questions.

Written responses were to be emailed to a senior officer’s email address before the deadline of December 30.

We do not know why, but within 24 hours Facebook, a powerful corporation with expensive and experienced legal & regulatory teams in every major country – including India – decided to ignore the TRAI paper and instead launch the regulatory version of a DDoS attack.

The first signs of Facebook’s strategy became apparent on 10th December as unwitting users across India started seeing an alert pop up in their notifications: “Act Now to Save Free Basics in India”.

The Free Basics DDoS had started.

Those who clicked the alert were taken to a specially designed page where Facebook, using emotion-laden, fear-inducing messaging like “Without your support, it could be banned in a matter of weeks”; “Unless you take action now, India could lose access to free basic Internet services” and “A small, vocal group of critics are lobbying to have Free Basics banned on the basis of net neutrality”, asked them to register their support for Free Basics send TRAI a pre-drafted email.

Free Basics is Facebook’s global zero rating platform, earlier called “Internet.Org”, through which it makes available its own services plus a small number of third party sites for “free” by signing deals with individual ISPs and telcos. In India Free Basics was only available on Reliance Communications mobile network, though that has subsequently been ordered to be shut down by TRAI.

Zero rating is a clear violation of Net Neutrality and India’s Department of Telecom had clearly called for a ban on them till India formulated its Net Neutrality laws.

Meanwhile, many Facebook users complained on Twitter that merely scrolling through Facebook’s Free Basics page on their phones caused Facebook to record their support, and then message that “support” to their friends in turn, thus rapidly spreading the Free Basics campaign across social circles. One user even said Facebook sent him a notification that his deceased uncle had supported Free Basics and so he should too.

A social network was using its own platform to get its users to support its own corporate initiative. But that isn’t the story.

Here’s the thing – nowhere in Facebook’s messaging was there a single mention of any of the four questions asked by. Worse, there wasn’t even a mention of the phrase “Differential Pricing”, the title of TRAI’s paper.

So every response that Facebook recorded and sent to TRAI was not remotely a response that TRAI was expecting. That such an experienced and powerful corporation chose to wilfully disregard a regulator’s due process was astounding.

Over the next few days Facebook started expanding this campaign of deliberate disinformation to other media – SMSes, roadside hoardings, 2-page advertisements in every major newspaper almost every day, WhatsApp promotions, online video ads and radio. The messaging kept evolving, becoming progressively vague, misleading and emotional.

“Support a connected India”

“Support Ganesh”

An SMS sent to mobile users in Tamil Nadu said, in Tamil, “Free Basics provides all basic Internet services for free” asking them to give a missed call to a number to register their support.

Notwithstanding the dishonesty in that statement – because Free Basics does NOT provide ALL basic Internet services (you cannot access Google, Twitter, Flipkart, Zomato and practically the entire Internet except Facebook and a handful of other sites that have signed up) – Facebook was now sending responses to TRAI from people’s mobile numbers with content that only it had access to.

“A connected India means 65 million new jobs”

“Support Rahul”

With over 130 million users in India alone and given the emotional “Save India” pitch of its messaging, it was natural Facebook would get a lot of responses. In a few days it claimed to have sent 3.2 million emails to TRAI.

The current count stands apparently at 5.5 million.

Meanwhile news reports came of even users in the US and Canada being shown Facebook’s Free Basics messaging, and asked to email TRAI. How a US or Canadian user would qualify as a “stakeholder” to comment on India’s Internet regulation process we do not know, but when pointed out, Facebook casually ascribed it to an “error”.

But what has all of this got to do with a DDoS attack?

Remember, a DDoS attack is one in which the perpetrators use a large number of unwitting PCs and servers to launch an attack on a site, so as to prevent the latter from serving its legitimate users and performing its stated function.

What Facebook had carefully and deliberately crafted in India was a method to overwhelm TRAI with a distributed set of responses that didn’t have anything to do with its consultation paper or questions.

But why would they do that?

The real answers only Facebook can give, but we can surmise.

Perhaps because Facebook is aware of the true support for Net Neutrality among Indians, including citizens, entrepreneurs, startups, trade bodies and even political parties. Save The Internet, the volunteer-driven group that had rallied over one million Indians to write to TRAI in support of Net Neutrality in April, is currently running a follow up campaign on the latest consultation paper. By drowning TRAI’s email inbox with millions of individual emails that do not have anything to say on “Differential Pricing”, Facebook is running the regulatory version of a DDoS.

Facebook knows that TRAI will not have the technical knowhow or manpower to sift through millions of responses in order to find the ones that actually have answers to its questions. The Free Basics is designed to dump truckloads of hay on TRAI so that real responses turn into proverbial needles.

But wait, isn’t STI also getting people to email TRAI? How is that okay?

Yes, you’re right – the STI too is running a campaign that on the surface seems similar to Facebook’s. But unlike Facebook’s deliberate campaign of obfuscation and misinformation, the STI is helping Indians understand the full paper and answer each of the four questions in as informed a manner as possible.

This is a serious matter. Because what we have here a social platform that is supposed to be “neutral”, openly misrepresenting the issues TRAI is trying to formulate policies on and flooding it with non-responses in the possible hope that real responses can be suppressed.

This form of behavior is unprecedented in India’s regulatory history. Even Microsoft at the height of its power and facing the prospect of central and state governments switching to open source, did not directly exhort individual Windows or Office users to lobby on its behalf. If Facebook’s DDoS attempts go unchecked, why will a Google or Microsoft not want to leverage its Android/Search or Windows/Office users to hijack public policy agendas at scale?

DDoS-ing a website is a criminal activity in most countries, including India. DDoS-ing a regulator should be no less.

Sixth Sense Abilities You Have Always Had But Never Noticed Them

The human body is weird.

Weird because even with all the medical science advancements, we are still finding out new things about the human body. One age-old concept is that the human body has five basic senses – sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste.

Science now tells us that our senses are not limited to these five senses at all.

There is much more that the human body can detect, and some of these border on science fiction.

1. Ovulating women can sense snakes and gay men around them

In one study, researchers hid snakes in a garden and asked a group of women to detect the snakes as quickly as possible. They found out that the ovulating and pregnant women detected the hidden snakes much quicker than the women who weren’t ovulating.

It is because they have a heightened sense of detecting danger in their surroundings.

This wasn’t it. Another incredible superpower pregnant women have is detecting gay people. Not lesbians, mind you. Jut gay. Because gay men are less likely to abandon a woman for another female. Smart.

 2. You can tell if water is hot or cold by just listening to it

Water molecule behaviour changes when it heats up. When water is cold, molecules are denser, and vice versa for hot water. Hence, they sound different too.

The next time you are in a shower, listen closely, as the water heats up, it suddenly sounds much more different. And more than 90% of people are good at distinguishing water by just listening to it.

It is fascinating because we thought we could find out whether the water is hot or cold by only touching it.

3. You can literally smell a person’s personality and emotions

Have you ever been in a situation when you met a new person and you suddenly start judging him, making psychological notes about him/her in seconds?

You could have been right, because evolution has given us this ability where we can sense emotions and intentions by just smell.

People affected with fear smell differently, and people who are extroverts smell different to us. And turns out, we are very capable at detecting these smells. 

4. You can see your hands in the dark

In a study conducted by University of Rochester, if you go into a dark room blindfolded and wave your hands in front of you, you can actually see your hand even when you are blindfolded.

And not just that, when your hands move in front of you, your eyes – behind the blindfold – move along with them, as though following them.

The research claims that the brain switches to other sensory information to “see”. Basically, you become a superhuman.

5. Some people can see colors that are beyond normal vision

There is a small group of people in this world that can see colors we cannot even imagine. They are called tetrachromats.

They may be superhuman, but we mortals have this ability too. Scientists have tricked people into seeing impossible colors.

The rainbow contains all the colors on the visible spectrum. Turns out the color pink is not in there. The color pink is basically imaginary, and we still see it.

6. Men can tell if a woman is ovulating

When women ovulate, they change – literally. Their voice changes, their hips get larger, their skin becomes blushier and men are very adept at noticing this – subconsciously of course.

In a study conducted, men were paired up with a one-on-one session with women. With non-ovulating women, men tended to be lazy and didn’t really care where it was going, but when it came to ovulating women, the men became more alert and talked with more enthusiasm.

Because they can detect that the women are ovulating.

7. Humans can hear better than fish underwater

On the ground, our hearing is very normal compared to other animals. The hearing range is up to 20,000 hertz. That’s the highest pitch we can hear. Dogs can hear up to 40,000 hertz.

But under water, we can hear up to 200,000 hertz, much more than most of the fish in the sea.

The reason – we hear with our bones. Yes, you read that right. The bones pick up minute vibrations and pass it up to our ear drums and hence our hearing ability suddenly becomes very acute.

Coincidentally, this is the same concept they use in making hearing aids. 

8. You continue to see things even after you go blind

In an interesting study, researchers put photos of sad and happy people in front of blind people. Most of the times, blind people could tell whether the people in the photos were happy or sad correctly.

Blind people do not lose awareness of their surroundings at all and become more aware of it. Like the blind man who was put in a maze and still came out of it successfully, because he could “see”. He was still blind, but his brain figured out a way to get him out of there.

9. Your skin can smell things too

Yes, your skin can smell, and it uses this ability to heal itself. Soothing smells accelerate skin healing, and foul smells deteriorate this healing.

The cells that are present in your nose are also present in your skin – but in very small quantity.

Fascinating,isnt it.........

The human body is a universe in itself, and just like the universe, much needs to be learned and discovered.

Until we know everything about it, we can wonder and be fascinated at its unrecognized marvel.