Ankit Fadia

Recently, Ankit Fadia came to Oxford bookstore at Leela Palace, Bangalore to inaugurate their book exhibition and to give a general awareness talk on internet security. I was quite excited about seeing the young champ.

The audience were largely press people with about 3-5 non-press folk; guess this was a publicity funda for Oxford more than anything else. Ankit Fadia started his talk with

“How many of you use messengers like yahoo and msn”

“Don’t use it, its not safe”

“How many of you use search engines like yahoo and google?

“Don’t use it, its not safe”

etc etc

“and finally how many of you use the internet?”

“Don’t use it, its not safe”

He went on to say that since that is not practical, it is better to be safe by thinking like a criminal and taking precautions. He gave an example of this lady in Bombay who had a cable internet connection and a web cam and was a chat freak. A guy from Russia who was chatting with her apparently managed to install a Trojan and switch on her webcam. She had no clue about any of this and life went on. She went for a job interview 3 months later and the guy said he was too happy to offer her the job and that he saw her everyday at the porn site. And then she went totally paranoid and is probably not using the internet today. Sounded too contrived to me. Sum total of the talk was that use a proxy server to connect to the internet else you are in soup.

Well, wasn’t exactly very enlightening. Had a QA session towards the end when some of the press guys asked a lot of questions. One of the questions was “Is Linux more secure than windows” to which Ankit Fadia answered yes. I was quite curious to hear the reasons. “Since Unix is open source, its more secure. Since it is open source and there are tens of thousands of people working on it, when a bug is found anybody can take it and fix it. Whereas windows will have only about say 1000 people team, so finding and fixing bugs will take time….” [!!???!!!]

I didn’t find him technically accurate and after all the media hype this talk was probably a small let down. Then again, for what he is doing at his age he must be quite smart. I wouldn’t have been able to do that when I was 19. And he is at Stanford, obviously the guy is smart. The media is probably a little misleading, can’t really blame the young man.

Martin Fowler

I had read some papers and methodologies by Martin Fowler and appreciate the agile methodology a lot especially since I have seen and been a part of the conventional methodology. So I had all the reason to be excited to meet Mr. Fowler. This time excitement was coupled with nervousness, coz he was going to be listening to me do a session at the Bangalore .NET User group meeting.

After my talk I had a small conversation with Martin Fowler and others. Was surprised to see how approachable he was and how easily the discussions stemmed and ideas were exchanged. He liked monad, monad is quite agile anyways ;)

God

No, I haven’t met God but I think he knows of my existence J