Heartbreak!

Welcome back guys. I am trying to recover from the heartbreak I got at the hands of anonymous hackers from Iran. While my blog was still a fledgling fresh out of the egg of negative-infinity (remember the number scale you studied in class 3… Suffering from a case of poor imagination? Look at the image below!) …

So where were we? Yes, the baby-blog! So I got complaints from several friends that they could not access the website, eventually, it just disappeared and I could no longer access my administrative account. All this while I was literally day-dreaming about what to put on my blog (yes, I am a little crazy- ‘little’ being negotiable). I thought maybe in my excitement, I caused my website irreversible damage. In sheer desperation, I called a more knowledgeable friend who broke the sorry news to me: The hosting server(s) had been hacked! Apparently, my blog proved to be a bad omen for SmartBiz (my hosting service provider). I’d like to believe that my maiden blog-post caught the attention of hackers from Iran and they were completely knocked out, and in retaliation, they decided to teach SmartBiz a lesson. The wonders it does for my self-esteem  !!!

The next few days, I kept checking my blog at the rate of 60 checks per hour, hoping against hope that I will see my blog again-standing on its own two feet, flashing a warm, sunny smile. What I got was a CGI error-page. Called SmartBiz again only to hear a lame apology about their failure to backup my blog, implying that I’ll have to go through the entire effort again. As if that was not enough, the very next day, I walked into the lab (my workplace) and a colleague commented on my non-existent photography skills. As a proof, he opened my blog and there they were: a pair of animated, fire-spitting eyes, and a spooky face to go along with it. As it turned out, my blog was pointing to a Russian photographer’s page. Enraged, I called SmartBiz again and went through the routine rant about the vandalism of Iranian Hackers. Despite promises of prompt action, the fiery eyes kept staring back at me for more than 24 hours every time I tried to access my blog.

Anyway, things are back on track now. A few lessons I learnt from the heartbreak:

1. Never trust third-party hosting resellers. Go straight to GoDaddy, BlueHost, InMotion, JustHost etc.
2. Don’t rely on others. Manage your own backups.
3. SmartBiz is not so smart after all.
4. Iranian hackers are ruthless.
5. Eyes can double as pistols.

P.S. Attention Iranian hackers! I am not well-versed in spoken Persian but know some Persian poetry. If you are itching to flex your muscles, let’s have a war of verse in the same vein as war of nerves. I’ll go first:  Bibi sanem janem…

Double Standards

You are sitting in your work place that you share with a couple of other employees. You are writing a report for your company. You get tired and decide to give your overtired nervous system a visual break in the form of a YouTube video. Side by side, you open Facebook and to your absolute delight, find out that a friend has uploaded pictures of his/her latest vacation in Hawaii. Pop opens a mini-window and your friend “Clingy” wants to say Hi. You engage in small talk with Clingy. Suddenly, you become aware of an overarching human figure trying to peep into your monitor. What’s more embarrassing, you suddenly realize that the person had been standing there all this while, even when you were enjoying a not-so-nice conversation with Clingy. So what’s your response? Naturally, you’d want to bang the heaviest object in your immediate access on the eavesdropper’s head.

If I tell you that a virus in your computer can record all your activities and communicate them to a remote person, what’s your reaction going to be like? Nothing. That’s the point. Why is our attitude different towards ‘crime’ carried out in person and its digital counterpart. I have been contemplating this for a while and in my sweet opinion, it ultimately boils down to proximity. More on proximity later! (No, it’s not my idea of keeping the audience in suspense so they keep checking back in. Blame it on my busy schedule; things are going to be a wee bit sporadic for a while. Please, bear with me!)