A Wide Range of Techonology, Philosophy, Sociology, Behaviour, Entertainment, History,Science, Bios, Interesting News, Music,Cyber & Pop Culture, Kill Time videos in an Added Value Mode!
India issued an ultimatum Thursday to the manufacturer of BlackBerry smart phones: Allow access to highly encrypted information by August 31 or face a blockage of two popular messaging systems.
The real-time messaging services have been under scrutiny because the encryptions make it impossible for intelligence agencies to monitor and, thus, India says, pose a potential national security threat.
India wants law enforcement agencies to gain access to the BlackBerry Enterprise Service and the BlackBerry Messenger Service.
"If a technical solution is not provided by 31st August, 2010, the government will review the position and take steps to block these two services from the network," a news release said.
What hangs in the balance is the use of BlackBerry for millions in a country with a booming wireless market.
Calls placed by CNN to Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian manufacturer of BlackBerry, were not immediately returned.
The Indian government has expressed grave security concerns over the use of highly encrypted services. Some find it hard to believe that the world's largest democracy is taking such a tough stance. But India also has deep security concerns as one of the most-attacked countries in the world.
India was shaken after suspected Pakistani militants attacked Mumbai in November, 2008, leaving more than 160 people dead. In that incident, the government eventually tapped into satellite phone conversations between the terrorists and their handlers, but the attack was already under way.
Vikram Sood, a retired Indian intelligence agent, said India would be completely blindsided if terrorists used BlackBerries to plot an attack and the devices were inaccessible by the government.
"So what do you do? React after the fact?" Sood asked. "If you react after the fact, the explosion has taken place or a terrorist act has taken place, 100 people, 150 people have died.
"Who is liable for that? Is BlackBerry going to be liable because it was withholding information in a manner of speaking? So isn't it better to share? Knowledge and information from all sources is necessary, there are no two ways about it."
The situation brings up an old debate brought on by new technologies -- the government's right to know versus consumers' rights to privacy and free flowing information.
The decision will have huge ramifications in India, one of the fastest growing telecommunications markets in the world. More than 600 million Indians use cellular phones, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; 1 million of those are BlackBerries.
So the loss for RIM is potentially huge in India. If it loses some of the services it offers, it could have a harder time attracting customers.
Telecom operators in the country seem to be hedging their bets. They're working up contingency plans, but not really expecting to lose BlackBerry services, especially considering that RIM was able to make concessions and strike a deal with Saudi Arabia to avoid a ban. The United Arab Emirates has also threatened RIM with a shutdown of services if access to encrypted information is not granted.
"We think it will all be worked out," said Sanjay Warke, chief executive officer of telecom giant Vodaphone's India operations.
When Remy Gervais turned 40, fresh on the heels of a painful divorce, four separate friends gave her copies of Elizabeth Gilbert's bestselling memoir, "Eat Pray Love."
The message came through loud and clear: It was time for reinvention. But, Gervais said, "I couldn't afford a year-long exploration to reclaim me."
Gilbert's juggernaut, the Oprah-endorsed tome, subtitled "One Woman's Search for Everything in Italy, India and Indonesia," has lived on the New York Times bestseller list for 180-plus weeks. It chronicles Gilbert's year trying to heal from her divorce and find peace with herself.
With more than 9 million copies in print and the much-anticipated release of a major film starring Julia Roberts, directed by Ryan Murphy, of "Glee" fame, and produced by Brad Pitt, set to open nationwide Friday, everyone seems to want to eat, pray and love.
"The vast majority of people are in the place where they would like to have a better relationship with pleasure and adventure, they would like to have a better relationship with the people around them. And they would like to have a better relationship with their own inner life," said Patton Sarley, CEO of the nonprofit Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health.
"Eat Pray Love," he said, is "a doorway, an invitation to say, 'Hey let's remember who we really are, not what we imagine we must be.'"
Roberts, too, believes it's possible to experience transformation without traveling around the world.
"I do believe everything is right in front of you," the actress told George Stephanopoulos on "Good Morning America."
"It's just about taking that time to examine your life and examine yourself and things that you want to have change and things that you want to nurture and keep them the way that they are. It's all right there. You don't really have to go anywhere."
Since most of us, as with Gervais, can't escape for a year to travel to the far reaches of the earth, "Good Morning America" has compiled some ideas to make it easier to search for your "everything," or at least a little something -- right from home.
EAT
The first section of Gilbert's book, set in Italy, is titled "Eat," as an expression of her search for pleasure.
In it, she has gone to Italy to learn Italian, giving herself permission to learn a language that, she says, will have no practical use in her life but whose sounds she adores and she simply wants to learn.
She also gives herself permission to eat, guilt-free in Italy. In a memorable monologue from the film, Roberts, as Gilbert, says to her friend, "I'm so tired of saying no and waking up in the morning and recalling every single thing I ate the day before. Counting every calorie I consume so I know exactly how much self-loathing to take into the shower.
"I'm going for it. I have no interest in being obese. I'm just through with the guilt. So this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to finish this pizza and then we're going to go watch the soccer game, and tomorrow, we're going to go on a little date and buy ourselves some bigger jeans."
Eat, Pray, Love: Searching for Pleasure
For Catherine Hughes, who works at a web design firm in Northern California, reading the book led her on a guilt-free search for pleasure: She embarked on a quest for the perfect bicycle. She had not ridden one in two decades.
"Not just any bike, a bike you can cruise through the wine country, without a care in the world," she said.
When she found the one, $300 later, she said, riding with the wind blowing her hair, made her forget her problems and feel "young, free and blissfully happy."
Sharon Gilchrest O'Neill, a marriage and family therapist outside New York City, said she read the book when it first came out and within a few months, patients were coming into therapy inspired to make changes.
"Eat Pray Love," she said, can "show us how indoctrinated we are in our lives, we don't think we can sort of just spread our wings in different ways."
One of her patients had never gone away on her own and after reading the book, and after months of planning, she hopped a flight for her first solo beach vacation. Another, afraid of leaving her kids, finally took an overnight trip alone with her husband, their first in seven or eight years, Gilchrest O'Neill said.
The book has made many women realize they need to create more boundaries in their lives, and to demand time to be alone to reconnect with themselves and discover themselves for the first time.
One mother was moved to hang a sign up on the bathroom door, lock it and and insist on some private time to take a bath in peace.
The act of eating alone also became a flash point for many women.
"The whole idea about eating alone, even if you can't go out, even if you don't want to spend the money -- most women can find a way to just have a quiet peaceful meal," she said.
For more literal ideas on the "Eat" theme, check out Chowhound for "Eat Pray Love" . To enhance your experience, buy local ingredients at your farmer's market.
Go the extra mile and make your own pasta.
Consider hosting an "Eat Pray Love" night for some close friends. Feast on Italian food, have a yogini friend lead a meditation, and discuss the book and your own relationship challenges.
PRAY
The middle portion of Gilbert's book, set on an ashram in India, focuses on the pursuit of devotion, and the author's struggle to immerse herself in meditation.
"When it comes to meditation,'' said Margaret Burns Vap, founder of Big Sky Yoga Retreats, "you don't have to sit there for an hour to make it happen. You can take two minutes of your day.
"You can incorporate it into your daily ways, so you can discover some of this peace and perspective,'' she said.
Find a space in your home to claim as your own. "Dedicate a small area to your well-being." Create an "altar," filled with inspiring objects, such as a photos, books, candles, a journal, flowers. Make it pleasing to your senses, she said. (HSN also has "Eat Pray Love" branded home fragrance diffuser set for $19.95, currently sold out).
A Space of Her Own
With time, family members and even pets, she said, will respect the space. Then the trick is to allow the time to use it and enjoy it, and focus on it. It's all too easy to be lying on your yoga mat, in your dedicated space, and zero in on the dust balls.
The demands of home, for some, though, may be too overpowering to ignore.
"The first step in coming home to yourself is to change your environment,'' said Sarley of Kripalu, which hosts yoga retreats and educational programs.
If you can't get away to a retreat or on a trip, take a yoga class locally, he said.
Halle Eavelyn, whose Sprit Quest Tours hosts an "Eat Pray Love" themed tour to Bali, where participants meet some of the characters in Gilbert's book, eat a four-star meal and read from and discuss the Gilbert's book, suggests finding touchstones for your journey, even if you cannot physically travel.
Find books, travel stories, photographs or other physical objects that illicit positive feelings. It's a trick she suggests to her clients to make the magic of their journey last after they return home.
Someone unable to travel can also use the same trick to help focus on what they want, whether that's a trip or simply a feeling of relaxation or being centered.
Eavelyn also said it's important to "Give yourself permission to take what you need." At New Years, she decided to escape her everyday routine by going silent for a week.
The last-minute effort did not go very smoothly, she said, because she wound up spending a lot of time explaining herself via e-mail.
Still, it was worthwhile, she said. "Not talking helped me to be able to shift (my thinking). It was very powerful as far as my own growth."
Writing is also helpful for many who are on a journey of self discovery. In a 2007 appearance on the "Oprah Winfrey Show," Gilbert told viewers to keep a "Happiness Journal."
"At the end of every day, write down the happiest moment of every day," she said. "It's a way of reminding myself what really makes me happy, and what doesn't. And you know, every day also has its crappiest moment of the day, but I decided not to keep a crappiest moment of the day journal. And learn, and study, and look back and see what is it consistently. "
LOVE
Gilbert's own journey was inspired by her painful divorce and the end of a volatile rebound relationship. She spent most of her year-long adventure committed to remaining celebrate.
After she'd allowed herself the pleasures of Italy and the devotional explorations of India, she traveled to Bali where she sought to balance the two, something she said she achieved naturally.
John and Marilyn. Bill and Monica. Charles and Camilla. Ashley and Whatshername. The extramarital affair has a long and if not quite distinguished, then at least high-profile, history. More often than not it is the men who occupy that central, adulterous role; difficult as infidelity statistics are to gauge, men repeatedly own up to committing the lion's share of affairs, outnumbering women by at least two-to-one. But why?
That question, age-old as it may be, is not terribly difficult to answer – at least not according to Peadar de Burca – and he should know, having just interviewed almost 300 candidates on the subject.
A playwright, director and comedian, de Burca has spent the best part of six months travelling England and Ireland, interviewing men who have cheated and the women that they have cheated on.
He has spoken to over 250 adulterous husbands, not to mention several dozen of their wives, attempting in each case to identify the motivations, mindsets, and moralities of the unfaithful.
The results have been turned into a two-man comedy show, Why Men Cheat, in which de Burca and his co-star Briane O'Gibne re-enact the tales they have been told, from the small-town soldier falling head-over heels for the leggy women he met on tour, to the big-city banker who got his kicks by setting up swinging sessions around the country.
It's a unusual way to spend time – particularly given that de Burca has not been married that long himself. This, though, was part of his inspiration. "It had been on my mind a lot because there was a history of the males in my family straying," he explains. "I suppose I was a little bit worried about what I might do."
Odd though his subject matter was, it wasn't particularly difficult to delve into. De Burca began with friends and family and worked his way out. Before he knew it, he was booking train tickets left, right and centre, visiting casinos, nightclubs and swingers' groups, and listening to the stories of jilted wives and regretful husbands. "I thought I would maybe talk to 10 or 12 people about it. I would go and hang around with them and get them beers and win their confidence; suddenly they opened up and just started blowing out all these stories. I couldn't stop them."
It wasn't long before a pattern emerged. Throughout his research, de Burca encountered just one instance of what could properly be termed a "love affair". Unlike any other interviewees, the pair in question ended up leaving their spouses and marrying one another. The woman was older, too – more than a decade older than her new husband. It's the exception which, he says, proves the rule. "The men would go for a kind of wife-lite, as it were. The women they would sleep with would look like their wives but be more ... on display."
It's an intriguing finding, since it would suggest – as spectators of the unedifying dalliances of Ashley Cole, Tiger Woods et al have long suspected – that men who cheat are not simply motivated by their mistresses' superior allure. Overwhelmingly, says de Burca, they are looking for compensation. Compensation, not for their wives' failings, but for their own. "That was the big thing. These men were very insecure, needy men. There was something lacking in them. A lot of them were quite athletic, wealthy, successful men – cops and doctors and politicians.
"But you felt deep down that they were wanting something: adulation, people to like them. It was very strange."
The older the man, the more this motive of compensation came into play. The young men de Burca interviewed spoke of lust, hormones and the suspicion that their girlfriends were just as unfaithful. But the older men would cite a break from routine, the illusion of excitement or the sensation of adventure as their reason for infidelity. One man interviewed for the play claimed he felt like he was "in his own personal movie ... full of excitement and clandestine meetings".
Much of the fault, says de Burca, lies with society's emphasis on the smooth, suave sexually successful philanderers that tend to become cultural heroes: the James Bonds, the George Bests, the Jack Nicholsons that populate our screens and stages.
"When you are a young guy in college, you look up to certain people: famous local footballers or people like Mick Jagger. There's a different woman every night." And yet, for all their desire to live the high life, to escape impending old age, to be the North-East's answer to James Bond, or Tiger Woods, the men that he interviewed were without exception fundamentally deluded.
"There was one guy who was a top banker, a very wealthy guy who had absolutely everything at his fingertips. His big thing was swinging sessions. One woman wasn't enough – he had about eight women on the go at the time. You would have thought he was some kind of Adonis, the way he went on, but he looked like Tom Selleck – Tom Selleck in need of a kidney transplant, with a moustache that looked like a pregnant earwig."
When de Burca agreed to accompany him to one of his meet-ups, he was greeted with a scene that was less Magnum, PI than an X-rated Archers. "I imagined a big house with a swimming pool or something. The Playboy mansion. In fact, it was a farmer's shed in the middle of nowhere. He would go out to the countryside and meet the others in this barn. It was the most unglamorous thing. You could hear the animals in the background."
It's a curious phenomenon, really: the thought of going from a promise to "Love honour and cherish" to arranging sex with strangers before an animal audience in a draughty barn off the M45. If anything is clear from de Burca's findings, it is that few, if any, adulterers plan their route. Indeed for most men, the initial encounter would happen almost by accident: "They would find themselves with an opportunity – away from home or something – and end up in bed with someone or whatever it was and suddenly think, 'Oh, God, it's so easy – I'd never really thought about it.'" Once accomplished, a world of extramarital liaison would open up to them – part challenge, part escape.
Even when actively pursuing adultery, few consider their new hobby to mean the end of their marriage. Most see it as a temporary escape, some even as a form of therapy necessary to keep with their marriage going. "It's almost a different thing," says de Burca, on this. "It's almost like a holiday."
If they don't think through the familial consequences, they almost certainly don't consider the financial. In Why Men Cheat, we hear the sorry confessions of one multimillionaire businessman whose attempts to emulate Dallas womaniser JR Ewing cost him not just his wife but his entire livelihood: "He was a millionaire. He had a house in Spain and a family home in Ireland: a huge mansion of a place; huge and ugly. When I met him he was living in a bedsit. He had lost it all by cheating. His wife had taken everything in the divorce. The saddest past of all was that he had a picture of his old house on the wall of the bedsit."
Of all the men he met, not one left de Burca concerned about his own chances of fidelity. Indeed if anything he left reassured, convinced of the fallacy of that old chestnut, "all men cheat". "These guys would be going out drinking late, hanging out in casinos and stuff. Things that I wouldn't do, you know? There was something so seedy about the whole thing. I'd be driving back home after meeting them and feeling terrible. I would feeling like I needed to go and have a shower because these guys ... well, they're just so pathetic."
