SpaceX rocket blows up but let’s remember that #SpaceIsHard
The Wire June 30, 2015 “… it’s not all or nothing. We must get to orbit eventually, and we will. It might take us one, two or three more tries, but we will. We will…
June 2015
Want anonymity on the Internet? ICANN thinks you can’t
The Wire June 29, 2015 Your face. When you commit murder and someone sees your face, you’re given away. Even if it was your evil identical twin who did it, the police now know where…
How small universities can game rankings
The Wire June 28, 2015 A recent survey by the influential Nature science journal ranked Panjab University as the first in India, with the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research a close second, based on the…
Beijing’s buildings make for bad breathing but the news from India is worse
The Wire June 27, 2015 Breathing in Beijing could be like passive smoking without the short-lived pleasure of a tobacco-high. Writing in The Guardian in December 2014, Oliver Wainwright described an atmosphere akin to one in the aftermath of a nuclear…
On the need for the India-based Neutrino Observatory
“I bet @1amnerd disagrees with this” was how Kapil Subramanian’s piece in The Hindu today was pointed out to me on Twitter. Titled ‘India must look beyond neutrinos’, the piece examines if India should be…
Pluto-bound probe takes first colour images of the dwarf planet and its moon
The Wire June 22, 2015 It may not look like much, but this heavily pixelated GIF image is cause for celebration. It effectively cost a robotic space probe more than nine years of travel and…
The Indus and Ganges-Brahmaputra Basins are drying up faster than we’d like
The Wire June 22, 2015 To the north, India is flanked by two giant groundwater aquifers – the Indus Basin to the west and the Ganges-Brahmaputra Basin to the east. Between them, they underlie a surface…
Is Reliance Jio sending unsecured Indian data into China?
The Wire June 19, 2015 A group of hackers calling itself AnonOps India on Thursday tweeted what it called evidence of the Reliance Jio Chat app transmitting geolocation data to Chinese servers – a potentially…
Could there be life on Europa? NASA okays mission to find out
The Wire June 19, 2015 On Thursday, NASA okayed the development of a probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa, currently planned for the mid-2020s, to investigate if it has conditions suitable for life. The milestone parallels…
Indian coder, lawyer take on Israeli company’s threats
The Wire June 16, 2015 On June 9, The Wire broke the story of a Bengaluru-based programmer who’d revealed that an Israeli company was injecting malicious JavaScript code into websites visited on Airtel’s 3G network. Thejesh GN…
Playing villains, he made a giant of himself
The Wire June 15, 2015 When the first installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy was released in 2001, it introduced a whole new generation to the ageless charms of Christopher Lee. Far removed…
Israeli firm strong-arms Indian techie for exposing suspicious code
The Wire June 9, 2015 In an intriguing case of abuse, a Bengaluru-based programmer was on Monday threatened with a criminal lawsuit for attempting to expose an avaricious program that violated net neutrality. On June…