Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

September 3, 2020

Cybermancy (WebMage 02) by Kelly McCullough

Filed under: Reviews-Urban Fantasy — Suramya @ 4:05 PM


Cybermancy (WebMage 02)
by Kelly McCullough

Description:
Hades has a hell of a firewall in this WebMage novel from Kelly McCullough.

Not just any computer geek can hack into Hades. But Ravirn, a direct descendant of one of the three Fates, is no ordinary hacker. Magic has gone digital in the twenty-first century, and Ravirn is a sorcerer with a laptop—otherwise known as his shape-changing best friend.

These days, Ravirn’s crashing at his girlfriend’s place while she works on her doctorate in computer science. Only one problem: all of her research is in her webgoblin’s memory, which is now in Hades along with its soul. To save Cerice’s webgoblin (and her PhD), Ravirn must brave Hell itself. But can he do it without corrupting the mweb—the magical internet—and without facing down the Lord of the Dead himself?

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Rating: (4/5)

Review:

This review will have minor spoilers about the first book because what events from the first book have significant bearing on the second book as it build on top of them. If you haven’t yet read the first book, stop reading.

At the end of the First book free will is saved, Ravirn is still alive but renamed as Raven and no longer part of the Fate’s family. Throughout this book he is still trying to come to terms with the changes in his life and pretend that the Raven side of him doesn’t exist. The book starts off with an awesome sentence “Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks ? The eyes of Cerberus glared down at me, six balls of black fire. There was no dog older or more dangerous. But here I was standing practically in his mouths, trick in hand.” and then takes off from there.

Ravirn is trying to retrieve the soul of his girlfriend’s webgoblin from Hades and in doing so unleashes a massive problem for the whole of reality. He is frantically trying to fix the issue while the major powers of the universe are out baying for his head making life a lot more interesting for him. Over the course of the novel he starts accepting his Raven side more as well.

The book is a fun read and I loved the way it covers the story of Persephone. According to mythology, Hades, god of the Underworld, fell in love with beautiful Persephone when he saw her picking flowers one day in a meadow. The god then carried her off in his chariot to live with him in the dark Underworld. Her mother Demeter created a great drought to convince the other gods to release Persephone from Hades. Finally after lots of people died Zeus finally sent Hermes to persuade Hades to release his ill-gotten bride. But Hades had tricked Persephone into eating pomegranate seed so had to spend three months of the year in Hades. Its a very stark tale but most books/tales gloss over how it must be for Persephone to live with Hades for 3 months every year after he had kidnapped and raped her. Persephone’s anger & despair are covered beautifully and with compassion in the book, it really highlights what victims of sexual violence have to deal with throughout their life.

The consequences of the events of this book are explored in the next few books so I ended up rereading the 3rd book immediately after I finished this one.

September 2, 2020

Happy 20th Birthday Nokia 3310!

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 8:51 PM

The Nokia 3310 was launched on 1st Sept 2000 and is a legendary phone. Known for being nearly indestructible it helped accelerate the Mobile phone trend, with around 120 million devices sold during its lifespan. Both me and Surabhi had this phone and I have personal experience of its near indestructibility, Surabhi once took the phone on a roller coaster and midway through the phone fell out from her pocket (don’t ask me why she had the phone in the pocket as I don’t know). We assumed that the phone was a total loss and that we would have to get a new one. When the ride ended, we searched for the phone pieces and reassembled them. To all of our surprise the phone immediately booted up without any problems. There was a small crack on the battery panel but the phone worked without issues for another couple of years. Compare this to my S8 which had a cracked rear panel after falling from the bed.


The legendary Nokia 3310

“The Nokia 3310 is a true icon in the mobile phone world. Having sold over 120 million units its ubiquity meant that it is a device that many people owned, often as their first mobile phone. This means it generates a real sense of nostalgia which further underlines its status as one of the most important mobile phones of all time.

“The robust design made it almost indestructible in daily use and its ease of use meant that it became a firm favourite with customers. It is little surprise the design was rebooted in 2017 by HMD Global, the company that now licenses the Nokia brand for phones.”

The most recent 3310 version apes the aesthetic of the original well, although ditches some of its simplicity for a bevy of modern accoutrements, including a colour display and a 2MP rear camera.

I love my Samsung S10 but really miss the durability of the old cellphones.

– Suramya

September 1, 2020

Background radiation causes Integrity issues in Quantum Computers

Filed under: Computer Related,My Thoughts,Quantum Computing,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:16 PM

As if Quantum Computing didn’t have enough issues preventing it from being a workable solution already, new research at MIT has found that ionizing radiation from environmental radioactive materials and cosmic rays can and does interfere with the integrity of quantum computers. The research has been published in Nature: Impact of ionizing radiation on superconducting qubit coherence.

Quantum computers are super powerful because their basic building blocks qubit (quantum bit) is able to simultaneously exist as 0 or 1 (Yes, it makes no sense which is why Eisenstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance’) allowing it process a magnitude more operations in parallel than the regular computing systems. Unfortunately it appears that these qubits are highly sensitive to their environment and even minor levels of radiation emitted by trace elements in concrete walls and cosmic rays can cause them to loose coherence corrupting the calculation/data, this is called decoherence. The longer we can avoid decoherence the more powerful/capable the quantum computer. We have made significant improvements in this over the past two decades, from maintaining it for less than one nanosecond in 1999 to around 200 microseconds today for the best-performing devices.

As per the study, the effect is serious enough to limit the performance to just a few milliseconds which is something we are expected to achieve in the next few years. The only way currently known to avoid this issue is to shield the computer which means putting these computers underground and surrounding it with a 2 ton wall of lead. Another possibility is to use something like a counter-wave of radiation to cancel the incoming radiation similar to how we do noise-canceling. But that is something which doesn’t exist today and will require significant technological breakthrough before it is feasible.

“Cosmic ray radiation is hard to get rid of,” Formaggio says. “It’s very penetrating, and goes right through everything like a jet stream. If you go underground, that gets less and less. It’s probably not necessary to build quantum computers deep underground, like neutrino experiments, but maybe deep basement facilities could probably get qubits operating at improved levels.”

…

“If we want to build an industry, we’d likely prefer to mitigate the effects of radiation above ground,” Oliver says. “We can think about designing qubits in a way that makes them ‘rad-hard,’ and less sensitive to quasiparticles, or design traps for quasiparticles so that even if they’re constantly being generated by radiation, they can flow away from the qubit. So it’s definitely not game-over, it’s just the next layer of the onion we need to address.”

Quantum Computing is a fascinating field but it really messes with your mind. So I am happy there are folks out there spending time trying to figure out how to get this amazing invention working and reliable enough to replace our existing Bit based computers.

Source: Cosmic rays can destabilize quantum computers, MIT study warns

– Suramya

WebMage (WebMage 01) by Kelly Mccullough

Filed under: Reviews-Urban Fantasy — Suramya @ 7:45 PM


WebMage (WebMage 01)
by Kelly Mccullough

Description:

Magic is about to get an upgrade

Ravirn is not your average computer geek. A child of the Fates – literally – he’s a hacker extraordinaire who can zero in on the fatal flaw in any program. Now that twenty-first-century magic has gone digital that makes him a very talented sorcerer. But a world of problems is about to be downloaded on Ravirn – who’s just trying to pass his college midterms. Great Aunt Atropos, one of the three Fates, decides that humans having free will is really overrated and plans to rid herself of the annoyance – by coding a spell into the Fate Core, the server that rules destiny. As a hacker, Ravirn is a big believer in free will, and when he not only refuses to debug her spell but actively opposes her, all hell breaks loose.Even with the help of his familiar Melchior, a sexy sorceress (who-s also a mean programmer), and the webgoblin underground, it’s going to be a close call…

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Rating: (4.5/5)

Review:

There are some books that you don’t mind reading again and again, this is one such book. I was reminded of the book by the last book that I read (Hardwired) so I picked it up again. I think this is the 3rd or 4th time that I have read the book. The main character is a WebMage, which is basically a Hacker/programmer who uses programming to write control magic spells. The story is fast paced and is a light reading in the sense that you don’t need to spend much brain power while reading the book.

The characterization of the Fury’s was brilliant and in quite a contrast to the traditional portrayal of the characters where they are usually depicted with a serious deminor or just plain focused. Over here they are denoted with a sense of humor (dark humor but still funny) and each of them have a different personality. The book utilizes sarcasm and witty dialog to great effect. The character of Cerice could have used more screen time and is lightly developed in this book but that is addressed in the next book so its not a major complaint.

The Book is setting up the stage for the rest of the series so a lot of the setup is either not utilized or lightly utilized as they are explored/expanded in the remainder of the series.

Final Review: I love the book and highly recommend it.

August 31, 2020

Hard Wired by Len Vlahos

Filed under: Reviews-Science Fiction,Reviews-Young Adult Fantasy — Suramya @ 8:51 PM


Hard Wired
by Len Vlahos

Description:

From acclaimed Morris finalist Len Vlahos comes a grounded sci-fi story about a boy who’s more than human, perfect for fans of Westworld and LIFEL1K3.

Quinn thinks he’s a normal fifteen year-old. He plays video games, spends time with his friends, and crushes on a girl named Shea. But a shocking secret brings his entire world crashing down: he’s not a boy. He’s artificial intelligence.

After Quinn “wakes up,” he sees his world was nothing more than a virtual construct. He’s the QUantum INtelligence Project, the first fully-aware A.I. in the world–part of a grand multi-billion-dollar experiment led by the very man he believed to be his dead father.

But as Quinn encounters the real world for the first time, his life becomes a nightmare. While the scientists continue to experiment on him, Quinn must come to grips with the truth: his mom and brother don’t exist. His friends are all adults who were paid to hang out with him. Even other super computers aren’t like him. Quinn finds himself completely alone–until he bonds with Shea, the real girl behind the virtual one. As Quinn explores what it means to truly live, he questions who he can trust. What will it take to win his freedom . . . and where does he belong?

Award-winning author Len Vlahos offers a perfect blend of science fiction and contemporary in this unputdownable, high stakes tale that explores big questions about what it means to be human.

Buy From:

Rating:

Review:

I found this book via Cory Doctorow’s book recommendation on his Twitter feed and the summary immediately caught my eye. An AI who doesn’t know its an AI (or rather Quantum Intelligence – QI) and finds out that he is a QI after living 15 years as a regular boy. The story was well paced and the first few chapters setup the background and stage for us to connect with Quinn before he is told the truth. Once the truth is told things change and Len has really captured how scientists would behave in such a situation. For example there is a scene where Quinn is told that he is a QI and starts crying because of the emotional impact, when the scientists notice this they immediately start celebrating because its a breakthrough in the development of a QI not caring that Quinn is emotionally wroth. This is exactly how any of the scientists/programmers I have worked with would react. Things like this make the book a lot more realistic. The book also has a lot of pop culture references which are fun to catch.

There are a few minor plot holes but nothing that requires you to suspend your belief completely. In fact the scenario explored in the book is something that will come to life in the next few years thanks to the advances in the field of computing & AI/ML.

The ending was a bit confusing at first and it took me a few mins to understand what happened. It would be interesting to see a sequel for the book because while the story is complete there are enough potential threads to be the launch point for a sequel.

Final Recommendation: Good read. Will require a bit of Computer knowledge to understand the depth of the novel fully

World Map listing Literal Translations of Every Country’s Name

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 10:57 AM

‘What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.’ a famous quote by William Shakespeare from Romeo & Juliet. When we talk about Country names it turns out that the names incorporate lots of insights into the history and culture of a place. To understand this in more detail Credit Card Compare which is an Australia-based website recently dug into the etymology of place names to create a world map that highlights the literal translation of the world’s countries names.

“We live in a time of air travel and global exploration,” the company writes in the blog. “We’re free to roam the planet and discover new countries and cultures. But how much do you know about the people who lived and explored these destinations in times past? Learning the etymology—the origin of words—of countries around the world offers us fascinating insight into the origins of some of our favorite travel destinations and the people who first lived there.”


Name translations for Asia

Some of the names are obvious and I already knew about them, others were a surprise. For example I didn’t know that Bhutan’s literally translates as “The Land of the Thunder Dragon” or that Brazil literally means “Red like an Amber”. The obvious ones are India which means “Land of the Indus” and Russia which means “Land of the Rus”

Check out the full selection at: World map: the literal translation of country names and details on origin of these names here.

– Suramya

August 30, 2020

How to write using inclusive language with the help of Microsoft Word

Filed under: Computer Software,Knowledgebase,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

One of the key aspects of Inclusion is Inclusive language, and its very easy to use non-inclusive/gender specific language in our everyday writings. For example, when you meet a mixed gender group of people almost everyone will say something to the effect of ‘Hey Guys’. I was guilty of the same and it took a concentrated effort on my part to change my greeting to ‘Hey Folks’ and other similar changes. Its the same case with written communication and most people default to male gender focused writing. Recently I found out that Microsoft Office‘s correction tools, which most might associate with bad grammar or improper verb usage, secretly have options that help catch non-inclusive language, including gender and sexuality bias. So I wanted to share it with everyone.

Below are instructions on how to find & enable the settings:

  • Open MS Word
  • Click on File -> Options
  • Select ‘Proofing’ from the menu in the left corner and then scroll down on the right side to ‘Writing Style’ and click on the ‘Settings’ button.

  • Scroll down to the “Inclusiveness” section, select all of the checkboxes that you want Word to check for in your documents, and click the “OK” button. In some versions of Word you will need to scroll down to the ‘Inclusive Language’ section (its all the way near the bottom) and check the ‘Gender-Specific Language’ box instead.

  • Click Ok

It doesn’t sound like a big deal when you refer to someone by the wrong gender but trust me its a big deal. If you don’t believe me try addressing a group of men as ‘Hello Ladies’ and then wait for the reactions. If you can’t address a group of guys as ladies then you shouldn’t refer to a group of ladies as guys either. I think it is common courtesy and requires minimal effort over the long term (Initially things will feel a bit awkward but then you get used to it).

Well this is all for now. Will write more later.

– Suramya

August 29, 2020

You can be identified online based on your browsing history

Filed under: Computer Related,Computer Software,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 7:29 PM

Reliably Identifying people online is a bedrock of the million dollar advertising industry and as more and more users become privacy conscious browsers have been adding features to increase the user’s privacy and reduce the probability of them getting identified online. Users can be identified by Cookies, Super Cookies etc etc. Now there is a research paper (Replication: Why We Still Can’t Browse in Peace: On the Uniqueness and Reidentifiability of Web Browsing Histories) that claims to be able to identify users based on their browsing histories. It is built on top of previous research Why Johnny Can’t Browse in Peace: On the Uniqueness of Web Browsing History Patterns and re-validates the findings of the previous paper and builds on top of it.

We examine the threat to individuals’ privacy based on the feasibility of reidentifying users through distinctive profiles of their browsing history visible to websites and third parties. This work replicates and

extends the 2012 paper Why Johnny Can’t Browse in Peace: On the Uniqueness of Web Browsing History Patterns[48]. The original work demonstrated that browsing profiles are highly distinctive and stable.We reproduce those results and extend the original work to detail the privacy risk posed by the aggregation of browsing histories. Our dataset consists of two weeks of browsing data from ~52,000 Firefox users. Our work replicates the original paper’s core findings by identifying 48,919 distinct browsing profiles, of which 99% are unique. High uniqueness hold seven when histories are truncated to just 100 top sites. Wethen find that for users who visited 50 or more distinct do-mains in the two-week data collection period, ~50% can be reidentified using the top 10k sites. Reidentifiability rose to over 80% for users that browsed 150 or more distinct domains.Finally, we observe numerous third parties pervasive enough to gather web histories sufficient to leverage browsing history as an identifier.

Original paper

Olejnik, Castelluccia, and Janc [48] gathered data in a project aimed at educating users about privacy practices. For the analysis presented in [48] they used the CSS :vis-ited browser vulnerability [8] to determine whether various home pages were in a user’s browsing history. That is, they probed users’ browsers for 6,000 predefined “primary links” such as www.google.com and got a yes/no for whether that home page was in the user’s browsing history. A user may have visited that home page and then cleared their browsing history, in which case they would not register a hit. Additionally a user may have visited a subpage e.g. www.google.com/maps but not www.google.com in which case the probe for www.google.com would also not register a hit. The project website was open for an extended period of time and recorded profiles between January 2009 and May 2011 for 441,627 unique users, some of whom returned for multiple history tests, allowing the researchers to study the evolution of browser profiles as well. With this data, they examined the uniqueness of browsing histories.

This brings to mind a project that I saw a few years ago that would give you a list of websites from the top 1k websites that you had visited in the past using javascript and some script-fu. Unfortunately I can’t find the link to the site right now as I don’t remember the name and a generic search is returning random sites. If I find it I will post it here as it was quite interesting.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

August 28, 2020

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

Filed under: Reviews-Science Fiction — Suramya @ 10:51 PM

The Space Between Worlds

by Micaiah Johnson

Description:

The Sunday Times bestseller

A stunning science fiction debut, The Space Between Worlds is both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging.

‘My mother used to say I was born reaching, which is true. She also used to say it would get me killed, which it hasn’t. Not yet, anyway.’

Born in the dirt of the wasteland, Cara has fought her entire life just to survive. Now she has done the impossible, and landed herself a comfortable life on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, she’s on a sure path to citizenship and security – on this world, at least.

Of the 380 realities that have been unlocked, Cara is dead in all but 8.

Cara’s parallel selves are exceptionally good at dying – from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun – which makes Cara wary, and valuable. Because while multiverse travel is possible, no one can visit a world in which their counterpart is still alive. And no one has fewer counterparts than Cara.

But then one of her eight doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, and Cara is plunged into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined – and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her earth, but the entire multiverse.

Buy From:

Rating: (3.5/5)

Review:

This is the debut novel by Micaiah and the premise of the book is what caught my eye. The existance of Parallel worlds is a standard trope in the SciFi genre but mostly they have people traveling them without issues in this book though the only way you can travel safely between the parallel worlds is if your doppelganger on the target world is dead. Which makes it nearly impossible for the pampered and rich to travel to other worlds successfully, they have to use people who have lived hard lives as their surrogates to travel. This includes our protagonist, who is unique in the fact that her other selves are really skilled at dying.

For the first few chapters I really didn’t like the character but most of the issues that were annoying me were explained a few chapters in. That’s when the novel became very engrossing and made it easy to understand Cara’s motivation for the most part. I did find the supporting characters to be a bit dull & two dimensional. The world-building outside of the City & Ash is non-existent and we never really find out what happened to the world that caused it to become such a dystopia (apart for some vague references and hints). Plus there is a minor sub-plot between Cara & Dell which wasn’t really required and felt really forced. The ending also felt a bit forced but not so much that it completely spoilt the book for me.

Final Review: A decent read, looking forward for future novels once the author builds up her writing skills further.

Got my first bot response to a Tweet and some analysis on the potential Bot

Filed under: Humor,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:21 PM

Today I achieved a major milestone of being on the internet, 🙂 I finally had a bot/troll (potential) respond to one of my Tweets with the usual nonsense. Normally I would ignore but it was just so funny to see this response that I had to comment on it. The reply was to my Tweet about how we could potentially achieve our target of eradicating Tuberculosis by 2025 because of the masks we are wearing due to Covid-19. You see TB bacteria are spread through the air from one person to another and just like Covid TB bacteria are put into the air when a person with TB disease of the lungs or throat coughs, speaks, or sings infecting people nearby when they breathe in these bacteria. Now that wearing a mask is becoming the new normal in most parts of the world (except for some morons who don’t understand/believe science or believe that politics is stronger than science) there is a high chance that it will also reduce the spread of other illnesses spread through air.


My Tweet & the response to it

Once I saw the response, I clicked on the profile and scrolled through the posting history and saw that a majority of the posts (atleast for the amount I was able to stomach while scrolling down) were retweets of Anti-Masker, Covid denial, Pro-Trump, anti vaccine nonsense. As I needed a distraction I decided to spend a bit of time to try and identify if the account was just a stupid person or a clever bot and did a little bit of investigation on the account.

Looking at the account a couple of things stood out right from the start, the first was that the account was created in July 2020 and the username had a bunch of numbers in it which is usually the case for automatically created accounts. So I ran a query on the account via Botometer® by OSoMe which gave me a whole bunch of data on the account and there was a bunch of data that made it stand out as being a potential bot. In just over a month (5 weeks and a day to be exact) the account had tweeted 6,197 times and 2,000 times in just the past 7 days which equates to about 12 tweets every hour every day. The other data point that stood out was that the account tweeted at almost the same time every day which is usually indicative of a Bot.

Interestingly the Botometer does give the account a low possibility of being a fully automated bot but that could be just because the person running it is manually feeding the responses and having the system spray it out. Or it could be a bored person doing it for LOL’s, which is code for morons who don’t know better and think they are being ‘cool’ or ‘edgy’ or whatever. But if that’s the case then they really need to get a better hobby.

Well this is all for now. Wear a mask when you go out and stay safe.

– Suramya

PS: I have no paitience for the anti-masker/anti-vaccine/anti-science nonsense so will be deleting any comments/responses or making fun of the comments depending on my mood at the time.

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