Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

YOUNG COUPLES are increasingly announcing their break-ups over social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook. Having had enough of her boyfriend's "I have notime" ways, Tanuja (name changed) logged in and ended her two-year relationship by simply changing her personal details on Facebook. These networking sites with profiles have all personal and professional details with a friends' network. By changing her relationship status from "committed" to "single," and removing all pictures of the boyfriend from her page, Tanuja was sending out the mes- sage loud and clear The update was immediately sent to all her friends: and it was not long before one of them began to flirt with her Tanuja is not the only one. Social network users are becoming candid about their break-ups. "Teens adapt dating practices to the technologies they use. So it is not surprising that the intimate acts are made visible on these social networking sites. Online publicness...

New virus is playing a nasty game using Internet Explorer and Firefox , rival browsers jostling for space in desktops. Security researchers say that it uses IE to force Firefox to open ‘windows' to download malware and to alter security settings in the PC. It is a roundabout way of making mischief and seems all the more funny because of the rivalry between the two browsers. A Symantec researcher said that the virus made use of flaws in both the browsers. "Here we have a case of two very complex applications that simply don't play nice together," he said. "When you put them both on the same machine it becomes a security problem. A museum for PCs A major museum's tracing the history of computers being set up in Bletchley Park in London, where the first ‘modern' computers were set up during World War II. The main attraction of the museum would be the aptly named Colossus computer which was rigged up to enable code breakers to intercept communications of ...