Monday, December 31, 2007

Why Benazir is not Aung San Suu Kyi

''She is part Radcliffe and Oxford, with an extremely well-stocked mind, full of feminist literature, peace marches, the Oxford Union, and with a very liberated social life. She is also part feudal Sindh, a haughty aristocrat, the daughter and granddaughter of immensely wealthy landlords, whose inheritance gave her the right to rule. . . .

She is an Eastern fatalist by birth, a Western liberal by conviction, and a people-power revolutionary—who has carefully modelled herself on Evita Perón and Corazon Aquino—through sheer necessity. She is an expensively educated product of the West who has ruled a male-dominated Islamic society of the East. She is a democrat who appeals to feudal loyalties.''

Mary Anne Weaver: Profile for New Yorker

In another democratic move, the daughter and darling of the west, in her will, decided to chose her 19 year old son as the legitimate heir of the feudal dynasty.

Her will clearly shows that even from her grave, she wants to make sure that feudalism thrives in the country and democracy is trampled and crushed under the heels of nepotism and corruption.

She could have asked the party to elect another leader in a democratic way, but instead she ensured that the party remains firmly in the control of her family and leaders like Aitizaz Ihsan are sidelined.

She has shown her true colors and rewarded the workers of PPP by appointing her son as the heir of her corrupt empire.

What ever happened to the ideals of democracy. This episode resembles the appointment of teenage medieval monarchs, who used to find themselves at the helm of the affairs when one of their parents used to pass away.

Like her mother, Bilawal has lived most of his life overseas, cannot speak any local language properly, has never worked in public service of Pakistan or the social sector of Pakistan and like her mother will finally return back to become the Prime minister. Such a pity. No wonder Pakistanis cannot make progress.

Lets stop making an Aung San Suu Kyi out of her because Aung San has been virtually under house arrest by the Burmese military for the past 15 years. Ms Aung was given the option to leave the country to meet her family in Britian with the condition that if she leaves, she would never be allowed to return back. Ms Aung chose to stay back with her people, not meet her family members and sacrifice her family life for the sake of her country. Her husband died of prostate cancer and she was never able to meet him.

I hope I would be spared the burden of enlightening my fellow countrymen on the comparison of Ms Aung, a true leader and revolutionary, and Ms Bhutto , a corrupt, feudal , opportunist, riding
on the wave of fame and popularity of her father.

So before my sentimental and emotional country men go about decorating Ms Bhutto with titles she never deserved, please look around for suitable examples of true leaders like Ms Aung and Nelson Mandela. True leaders do not live in Dubai and London or the palaces of Saudi Kings and return when they see an opportunity to seize power or when they are assured of support by Uncle Sam.

Now I am really happy that we finally got rid of her.

I hope we can get rid of the rest of the lot too!

Further Readings

Aunt Benazir's false promises: Fatima Bhutto takes on her aunt

Daughter of the West: Tariq Ali,an ex-classmate of BB from Oxford

Pakistan's culture of violence

Pakistan's flawed feudal Princess

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

It can happen to you too!

By now, I have been using the Internet for almost 8 years and considered myself pretty smart from a security point of view. Because I never clicked on links I received in emails, I considered myself safe from password thefts, until a few weeks ago.

I started receiving emails from a domain named GoDaddy.com

At first I thought it was some kind of a porn website, as the name implied, and ignored the emails by deleting them.One day while I was having a look at my online credit card statement, I noticed a transaction of 20 USD which had been debited from my credit card by a certain company named GoDaddy.com

That set the alarm bells ringing in my head. I quickly opened my browser and visited GoDaddy.com. GoDaddy happens to be one of the biggest domain name providers of US. I had never even heard of GoDaddy.com let alone doing a 20 USD transaction. Now I knew why I was receiving those unexpected emails from GoDaddy.com. I noticed from my credit card statement that the transaction had been done through PayPal. PayPal is a leading web based, online payment solution company which allows you to make payments to any one in the world using your email account.

The credit card which had been used was listed as the primary source of funds in my PayPal account. So I concluded that it was my PayPal account's password that was stolen. I logged into my PayPal account and as expected I found the 20 USD transaction listed in the transaction history.

The next question which came to my mind was how did some one know what my password was?

Any way, I changed my PayPal password and considered myself safe once again. I called GoDaddy and asked them to cancel the transaction. The amount was refunded and the case closed. Well enough.

A few days later I opened my gmail account and wanted to create a filter in my gmail account. I noticed that there was a filter which was directing all email from the domain GoDaddy.com to an email address on the domain aol.com

This was another shocker for me. Who created this filter? Finally the reality dawned on me.

The person who stole my PayPal password, noticed that my email address was sjunaidn@gmail.com

He tried his luck and used my PayPal password with my gmail account. As expected, my gmail password was the same as my PayPal password. So he had no trouble logging into my gmail account and directing all emails from GoDaddy.com to his own email address.
That way I would never see any email from GoDaddy.com and would never know about any transactions funded by my credit card.

Luckily the guy who created the filter was not IT savy and created the filter inaccurately, much to my relief. As a result I did receive emails from GoDaddy.com but as mentioned in the beginning, I just ignored them. The bottom line was that because all my password of major email accounts and my financial accounts were the same, by just stealing one of them, the thief had access to all my private information and most important of all my financial information.

Once again I changed my Gmail account's password. But I was always worried that it can happen once again. I still have not discovered as to how did the thief steal my password. I have never clicked on any links I have received in emails. I never wrote down my password any where on paper or on a file. Who ever did it was nice enough to only whisk away 20 USD. He could have done a lot more damage if he had wanted, without even me knowing about, it until it would have been too late.

Lesson:

In today's world, we have multiple password to manage at different places. What is the way out? Keep all eggs in the same basked only to loose all of them at once?

Finally I decided to use a password manager. A password manager is a software which remembers your password and keeps them safe from theft by encrypting them. So you no longer need to have one password for all your accounts. You can have multiple auto-generated password which can be 32 characters long for each of your account. The password manager can remind you to change the password every n weeks, months or days. It can also generate strong 32 bit passwords, saving you the trouble of coming up with a password every time you want to change one. I found a very good one by just doing a google search. The entry in the top of the search result was what I decided to use.

The name of the software is Kee Pass. It is freely available and can be downloaded from its website.

http://keepass.info/

You can also put instruct the software to visit the login page and then press the auto-fill button to automatically type in the password for you. It virtually saves you from the hassle of remembering multiple passwords and entering them at different places.

Another good important piece of software I found was FireGPG. FireGPG allows you to encrypt even your web based emails and send it across. Once the recipient receives the email, he decrypts the email using FireGPG. So even if some one does open up your email account by stealing your password, all your emails will be encrypted and would make no sense to the thief.

FireGPG , as evident from its name, is only available for FireFox.

Hope I my experience would be of use.

Kind Regards