Rimi B. Chatterjee's Blog

On 13 September hackers got into the Linux Foundation's servers and stole the personal details of people who had logged on and downloaded Linux applications. They reportedly used a malware-infected PC to gain access to the site. The Linux Foundation took down its sites and is still in the process of re-serving everything. Hence my printer is still without the requisite drivers because they only download from the Linux Foundation.

Linux malware? Yes it exists. But unlike Windows viruses these usually require to be user-activated: that is like the proverbial spam message screaming Nak3d Ph0T0zzzzz! they require to con the user into clicking a link or unzipping an archive to gain control/eat up disk space with huge amounts of junk eg tarbombs). The hack attack didn't affect Linux the OS which remains secure, only services provided by the Linux foundation, and only to those who had logged in.

Even so, attacks on Linux are worrying. Note also that by a supreme irony the bits of Linux that are the most vulnerable are the bits that require to interface with Windoze: the document and media viewers and editors, for example, because in today's environment these have to be compatible with windoze applications and thus take on some of their flab and holes.

As Linux becomes more popular, and desktop versions like Ubuntu become more complex and function-rich, we can expect to see more of this. Till now, Linux has been protected by its minority status and its transparency: you can see everything the system is doing, and there is nowhere for viruses to hide. Hackers want fame and widespread panic attacks: a tiny bunch of obsessive geeks don't present a tempting target. However, the new Unity desktop, while adding huge quantities of cool to Ubuntu, might just open up spaces for viral activity.

Apparently November 5 (Guy Fawkes' Day, remember?) has been singled out by hacktivists as 'Kill Facebook Day'? What do hacktivists have against Facebook? Well, they say Facebook stores personal data and slips it to security firms that deal with totalitarian countries. This seems a little far-fetched to me. Closer to home, Facebook is an ad-funded service (like most newspapers) and attacks on it would compromise the investments of millions of companies. Yes, but many of those companies are one or two person outfits that could ever afford print ads: Facebook is a low cost way for them to reach thousands of potential customers (okay, some of them are biggies too). This kind of ddos (distributed denial of service) attack usually penalises the small business, individual  and less well funded outfits rather than the big ones.

Which brings me to another point: who gains most if Linux goes down? Microsoft, of course, the Evil Empire. We hear reports that Windows 8 will use UEFI firmware recognition to prevent anyone booting Linux or older Windows OSs on the hardware it is bundled with, even more than Macs are wedded to the Mac OS. In other words, if you want to run Linux, you will have to assemble your own machine to do it. Laptops will be stuck with Windows 8. Most geeks have at least one 'I hate Bill' t shirt in their wardrobes. Are we looking at the next level of corporate warfare, hack attacks deniably funded by big corporations on small ones, or on open source charities and individuals? Not a nice prospect.

FAcebook has said they don't expect it to go down today even for a few minutes. So I shall now log on and check my notifications.

And call me Ma'am when you talk to me

I have learned a lot about dog communication in the past six months. For one thing, I am learning to read Dog. Okay, that sounds weird. Let me explain, but before that have a look at Turid Rugaas's site and read the articles. So here's what I understand by Rugaas's theory. Dogs can't speak, right? By that sentence we humans understand, 'Can't open mouth and go blah blah blah'. Right. But dogs can't talk (different meaning altogether), so they don't use their voices to communicate. Instead they use a complex language of kinesics and proxemics (gesturing and posturing, if you like) to make their intentions known. In dog society, what each dog desperately needs to know is, how does the other dog feel toward me? Will she attack, or play, or just ignore me? There is a clear set of signs for each one, and if humans learn the language, they too can work out what the dog intends. To read Dog, they have to pay attention to what the dog is doing: how are its ears set, is it blinking, yawning, looking away, turning its back, licking its lips, grooming itself and so on? These are subtle signs, there are more dramatic ones like hackle-raising and cowering, but those only communicate a blunt mental state. The subtle gestures are more semantic.

Being able to read rudimentary Dog is essential if you want to carry out any long process of training, such as when you want to stop a behaviour, such as chewing things, freaking out at other dogs, food-guarding etc. Inducing a behaviour from scratch is way easier thn removing an existing behaviour or replacing it with better behaviour. The way to start is with frustration: the moment your dog does the behaviour stop her, and then take away a privilege by chaining, shutting up, or muzzling. If the behaviour is well-developed and is part of a bid for dominance, you are going to spend a long time frustrating it and there will be much heartbreak. But eventually, and hopefully before you're both exhausted, the dog will give up. It will decide, well, nothing I do gets me anything, I'm out of ideas here.

Note that the dog may not be very aware of the 'thing' it's doing, so part of your job is to pinpoint the nasty bit as accurately as possible. You do this by reacting as close to instantly as you can, as if causality just turned you into a puppet. Dogs are very sensitive to timing, and they learn by association, so if two things keep happening one a fraction of a second after the other, the dog will pretty soon associate them. So if you've got that bit right, the dog will go, hmm, my life seems okay but for this bit when my owner freaks out. The dog will then stop the behaviour, but the underlying need that propelled it, dominance, insecurity, boredom, and the big one, desire for attention, any attention, that will remain and find another outlet IF you don't catch that exact moment of giving up and quickly substitute a better behaviour: a quick game of fetch, a treat, maybe following a successful sit, even a pat. In the context, the better behaviour must MAKE SENSE to the dog, that is, it must get as close to meeting the need that underlay the bad behaviour as possible. So if the dog is doing it out of insecurity, make her sit, stay or fetch till you know she's forgotten the incident, and then pat her lots, and she will learn that doing fun things with my owner gets me pat and what the hell was I doing before that? Can't remember.

But to do this you need to catch the magic moment. How will you know when it happens? It will be marked by the language of peace: your dog will TELL you 'I haven't a clue, you got any boss?' She will yawn, open her mouth and pant, blink her eyes, and maybe settle down on the ground. Or she'll look away and start nosing about in a fake-nonchalant way. Or start grooming herself.This is different from the fake-obedience of the dominant dog because in the first case the dog will not look at the owner and in the second he'll be watching slyly to see the reaction. I kid you not. Anyway, at this point us orally-fixated humans say something like how dare you look away when I'm talking to you how dare you yawn in my face when I'm scolding you and freak out more. The poor dog is then confused, and says, look I gave up, I said so, why are you punishing me all over again? And next time he will be careful not to yawn or blink because you've associated a scolding with it, so you won't know your dog's mind because he's taped his mouth shut.

And of course there is a language of war, and the alphabet doesn't begin with snarling and snapping progressing to biting. It starts with a cold fixed stare, with the head lowered and maybe some white showing under the eye. Also a stiff body posture, legs very stiff, with or without hackles. This is the equivalent of 'you talkin' to me?' and is followed by uncouth yodels. However the humans nearly always punish the dog who REACTED, because he was the one who clearly bared his teeth first. However, if this goes one, the starer realises she can get away scot free every time because no one suspects her, while the staree becomes a nervous wreck. So she gets him punished whenever she thinks she can get away with it and laughs evilly to herself. How can you know this? Watch body language before a fight starts. (Of course that essentially means watch all the time because you don't know when the fight will start.)

There will always be a stare, or a very quiet growl. Second stage after growl is to whip the face and jaws sharply away from the staree while keeping the gaze of the widened eyes still fixed on him. This is the equivalent of the parar dada who retracts his fist and holds it there saying aiiisa mar marbo na, marbo ekhane pore jabi shoshane.' If there is no backdown proceed to level 3 and snap. Of course since this is dogs it all happens in a fraction of a second which to us just looks like a whirl of teeth. Why don't those 100 frames a second guys do an episode on dog behaviour? All fo these are clear and present indications of intention to attack. The target dog will instantly respond by attacking himself. But since he's the one who starts yodelling first he gets fingered as the culprit.

The point is, as the owner, until you get this, you will have no clue what the hell is going on. And yes, I speak from experience with the soap opera that is the lives of Babulal and Putlibai. Putli is in turbo nymphet mode. Babulal is insecure because he thinks we don't love him any more. (We yell and lock him up every time he defends himself from Putli's stares.) When we go out, Babulal has to be muzzled because if we see a dog, he tries to drag Putli or me away with his teeth. This is residual dominance because he still thinks it's his duty to defend us even though he knows he's thoroughly incapable of doing so. Next best thing: sink teeth in leg of ward and drag away. This has convinced Putli that he's the kind of little boy who puts chewing gum in little girls' hair so she growls whenever she feels he needs cutting down to size. Insecure Babulal+unamused Putli=mayhem.

Babulal is congenitally insecure anyway. He teases guests and steals their shoes to get attention. Because he was once a little alpha puppy who got all the attention, and he thinks its unfair to take it away just because he's ten times bigger now. Our fault entirely. We have, however, convinced him that in some things he just isn't cut out to be alpha, so now he's in transition. He steals stuff less, but his relationship with Putli is more tense. We have to convince him he's above her but below us, a situation Putli would be happy with if he'd just leave the chewing gum alone. Part of his teasing her is the doggie ethos of dominance: 'no one hurts/teases/chews you except me'. But being dominant over her also means he must defend her, if necessary with his life. Very bad idea. On good days, however, they get along fine. Putli does tend to look like a princess who has mistakenly been married off to the court jester, but she also seems to find his antics amusing. They can play together for hours on end and then something will set them off and they do the whole stare-growl-jerk-snap-yi-yi-yi thing. The biggest trigger being Avijit coming into the room, for some reason.

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Apologies for the weird syntax.

[image error]After a while in limbo using a Windows 7 crack, I have linuxed my laptop and am now running Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. You will remember I installed Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop. This worked fine until I had a hardware problem (RAM meltdown) while Avijit got struck by lightning. Only his RAM survived, so a Frankenstein machine was created using the saved body parts of the two casualties which Avijit now uses. As a result, I have no desktop, and my three hard disks are in storage including the one with my Linux system on it (and my new 1TB data disk). The lappie is now the only refuge for my stuff.

Ocelot installed so smoothly I was stunned (especially after my tribulations last time with the lucid lynx). Even before installation it detected and ran my webcam, and it even detected my printer automatically and installed it. Getting the printer working took me a week of research and trial and error last time. The only niggle was that it took almost as long as windows to install.

This time the desktop looks much more Mac-like, including an object dock to the left of the screen. However it is now harder to tweak the innards, or rather it takes a while longer to work out how to do it. It still isn't quite as cool as Knoppix, but we all know what witches' brew Knoppix uses to create its coolness.  Ocelot has ditched Open Office for Libre Office (which Knoppix also uses). LO is slightly more user friendly than OO. The only thing I miss is the running word count you get on the status bar of Word 2007. This is a stern admonisher for writers everywhere. LO3 is much more like the old Word 2003, a model the Document Foundation would have done well to ditch.

Haven't yet explored much of the new features. Shotwell, the photo organiser, looks interesting, as does Ubuntu One, a free clouding service that lets you keep your stuff online like Dropbox. This should come in handy because I forgot to partition the disk before I installed (it converted the whole disk to Ext4, thus removing all my data, but of course I had backups). I was under the impression you could use Gparted to partition the disk after the linux install (something you definitely can't do with Windows) but apparently not: I couldn't find Gparted among the system tools, and the disk utility won't let me partition. I've always had a system partition and a data partition in my mahcines, but I guess you need that more with crashy Windows than with Linux. Plus I plan to back stuff up on Ubuntu One.

And while on the subject of launches, you might want to attend this. I will be there too.

Invitation for Anjana Basu's Rhythms of Darkness at Oxford Bookstore on 29 Oct

Of all the reports on launches I have done, THIS has got to be the best. Read at your own risk. PLEASE NOTE: make sure you're not drinking anything at the time, I will not be responsible for the consequences.

It's that time of year again when your various inboxes regardless of capacity, accessibility and associated devices will overflow with crud. From Big Ugly ASCII Art (BART as in Bart Simpson, a popular subject for this kind of flatulent viral meme) to cheesy flash videos to badly spelled phonetic Bangla, it all comes thundering in. Anyone who's ever grabbed your business card and run, from stoned TV repairmen, random shysters, ticket gougers, corrupt publishers, illiterate booksellers, incompetent car repairmen, chronically absent drunk students and the statutory addlepated commenter at every book launch you've ever conducted, they will all remember you with fondness this festive season. A small cottage industry in tacky Puja digital memorabilia will make a quick and nasty killing before the tax hounds twitch their noses. Ah! someone who's clearly been partying just wished me a Suva Biyoa.

Most of these come from unknown numbers that you didn't save for a very good reason. I have cleaned out my phone's inbox three times already this week and it's teetering on the brink of another barf session. People who would never dream of entering the lair of the monster SMS because they're still haven't got past the steep challenge of figuring out how to turn their phone to silent mode suddenly feel the urge to enter the digital age with both thumbs. Since their well meaning children often buy them touch phones in the mistaken belief that these are easier to use than normal phones, this usually results in wall to wall garbage on the digital airwaves into which Ma Durga sinks with completely misplaced dignity. If one more of these caterpillars asks me to 'take his pronams' I will comply and shove em where they belong.

But I think the prize goes to this unidentified person who was probably drunk on fermented shinni or the like, who clearly pressed the wrong button in the middle of his group SMS and informed me cryptically, 'Bhechcha Janai'.

And the same to you too.

View of the road from the outskirts of Kurseong town. Earlier you wouldn't be able to see the road for the trees.

Yes it was an earthquake, epicentre in Sikkim, intensity 6.8 on the Richter scale. I was in Kurseong recently, visiting with Professor C.B. Rai and Sumitra Rai, and I was shocked to see how bare the hills were since my childhood when I visitied them regularly. I felt a mixture of horror and anger when I read about the damage the earthquake caused there and saw the pictures on the net.

This is a tragedy exacerbated by human negligence which has nibbled away at the forests of the Eastern Himalayas for decades. The hill on which Kurseong sits slows regular ridges (so called 'sheep paths') which are caused by slippages of the unanchored soil, obeying gravity and moving steadily downhill. A good shaking is all it needs to come loose.

The question of how to save the hill forests is one that ought to cut across political parties and affiliations in the hills because earthquakes don't discriminate when they destroy.  Finding out whose pockets have been lined by the proceeds from the carcasses of the ancient trees is a lesser though important issue. If we start NOW, we might be able to restore the forest cover within a human lifetime.

Without the trees the hills are doomed to face this kind of punishment whenever the subduction zone wants to let off steam. Tree roots hold the soil in place and prevent weakening of the surface by water runoff and falling rocks. There will always be some landslides because the surface of India is being scraped off while the tectonic plate slowly disappears under Asia: no one knows how long that process is going to continue. The surface builds up into the Himalayas: a rather unromantic explanation for landscapes of breathtaking and mind-altering beauty. Keeping the forest cover won't entirely protect human settlements in the hills, but they will certainly minimise the damage from both landslides and earthquakes.

Flat roofed house provides multistorey parking

It's notable that bricks-and-mortar houses actually suffered worse than less permanent structures. The way houses were traditionally built in the hills was to lay down a brick foundation and build the superstructure with wood. This made for a low centre of gravity and less load on the ground. Now that people have become more prosperous, they're opting to build houses in the style of the plains: with reinforced concrete shells and flat cast concrete roofs. Concrete roofs put enormous strain on the sloping ground, and they also tempt people to add more storeys as funds increase. Given the scarcity of usable real estate in the hills, it's almost a miracle that everyone isn't doing it. Yet.

These changes have happened because we plains people have bombarded the hills with our advertising, our K serials, our propaganda, our selling of the good life. Then when government bodies and NGOs try to tell the hills people that plains-type  living isn't practicable in the hills, they get a dusty answer. They are told the hills want 'development', which seems to mean transplanting Gurgaon to somewhere on Pankhabari Road. It is our fault for not allowing people who are 'not like us' to live the way that is right for them.

The way it was

The same reason is why Jangal Mahal is a war zone: timber and minerals become money and flow away because there is no discourse powerful enough to stop them, and the people of the region are faced with a choice: resist and become 'terrorists', or capitulate and buy a Maruti van or at least a BSA cycle and become 'just like us' while the ground burns or moves under your feet. The third option, protest and make your own way, is only possible with education and self respect, both of which we have denied to people who are 'marginal' to our world. Of course, from their point of view, we are the ones who are marginal and their world is central, or was before we got into the act.

The 'marginal' people have no way to force us to listen to them without taking up arms. Is it any wonder that violence and marginality are such fast friends? But unless we find a way to give them a voice, the killing will go on. We can't do that without fighting the mafias: the coal mafia, the timber mafia., who get rich on our needs and desires. We need a thousand Binayak Sens willing to go to jail for their beliefs before we see any light under this stone.

Was that an earthquake? It certainly wasn't the six o'clock goods train. Babulal and Putlibai slept through the whole thing. So much for occult animal senses. Of course five minutes later they were at each other's throats for reasons that are unclear. Now they're shut in separate rooms. Nothing on the chat yet about an earthquake, but we all felt it, including the neighbours. Their dogs were quiet too however.

UPDATE: The earthquake was in Sikkim, 64km from Gangtok according to USGS. Preliminary magnitude is 6.8. That's nasty. Hope no one was hurt. Updates available on Twitter, the best place to go for breaking news.

Rui Zink

Rui Zink, a well known writer from Lisbon, Portugal, will be at JU next week. He will be giving a public talk on the 14th at 10.30am in the Professor Anita Banerjee Memorial Hall on the ground floor of the UG Arts Building. Everyone's invited.

He is a professor at the New University of Lisbon, and is the author of Hotel Lusitano (1987), Apocalips Nau (1966), The Substitute (1999) and The Surfers (2001), Color (1988) and Spider-Men (1994), "The Anibaleitor" (2006). He has also scripted a number of comic books. His works are surreal and edgy, and deal with the harsh tragicomedy of modern life. For instance, in The Substitute, an overweight sports jounralist runs a young boy over in his car, devastating the boy's family. The grandfather vows revenge, and spraypaints graffiti on the journalist's car. Joined by other crumblies from his local pub, he realises his vocation is to fight crime. Pretty soon the whole city is in terror of the 'graffiti gang'. I don't think this has been translated into English, but it sounds like the Simpsons directed by Tarantino.

He will also be conducting a one and half day workshop in creative writing for the students of the university. Two or three places are still left.