Atul Karmarkar.Com

Visa CodeSure-security for your credit card

Atul Karmarkar — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 02:34:28 +0000

Across the world, and particularly in India, using a credit card to shop online has always been fraught with danger, though you’re just as likely to have your card cloned when paying a bill at a restaurant.

Visa Europe now tries to add a layer of security for all those who are paranoid / terrified about using their credit card for online purchases. They have announced the commercial launch of their new credit card which features an inbuilt 12 button keypad, a battery designed to last three years and an alphanumeric digital display which generates ever-changing unique passwords each time you use the card.

Called Visa CodeSure, it is designed to work on any Visa debit, credit, prepaid or commercial card and has been approved for use in the following services:

PIN generated one-time-passcode for Verified by Visa payments at participating merchants globally – without changes to merchant software or cardholders having to register and remember passwords
PIN-generated one-time passcode for online banking access
PIN-generated one-time passcode for telephone banking services
Transaction signing for online banking services, using specific elements such as Account Reference Number or amount of transaction
Access to third party services such as corporate virtual private networks (VPN) for commercial card users, or frequent flyer programmes and other online services.

The process of validating the transaction is done in three simple steps:

When shopping online or logging in to an online banking service, the cardholder activates the authentication process by pressing the “Verified by Visa” option button on the card’s keypad
When prompted the consumer inputs their PIN into the keypad embedded in the card
A unique one-time-passcode appears on the card’s display, which is then used by the cardholder to authenticate a normal Verified by Visa transaction.

I have been an HSBC cardholder for some time now and a few years ago, they had sent me a “security device”, which did something similar, by generating a unique set of digits each time I transacted online or even logged in to my HSBC account. Eventually, once the novelty wore off, it became a pain to carry around and since I rarely use my HSBC card anyway, the device is probably lying in a forgotten nook somewhere.

Likewise, HDFC Bank has something called Netsafe. You need to create an account and then each time you want to transact online, the system generates a virtual card number. You are then prompted to link this virtual card with either your credit card or bank account, for making payment to the merchant site. I tried it a couple of times, but there were too many hassles at the time, especially on Amazon, where I ended up using my American Express card. Haven’t used Netsafe recently though.

This new card from Visa promises much, but I can’t escape the feeling that no matter what levels of security are introduced, it will only be a matter of time before some hacker cracks that system too.

Till then, happy and safe transacting online!

Radio Cabs in Pune, now a reality

Atul Karmarkar — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 10:03:27 +0000

So what’s new, you may ask? Haven’t we used been using Wings Radio Cabs already?

Well yes – we have, but they’ve been pretty much the only radio cab operator in the city so far, quite unlike cities like Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, which have City Cabs, Meru and others.

Last year there was a proposal to introduce more radio cabs in Pune, but didn’t find any takers due to the prohibitively high cost, so the state government has brought down the permit fee per cab from Rs.1 lakh to Rs.25,000. This is expected to ease the burden to an extent on fleet operators and the proposal may become a reality as early as next month in August.

Personally, I think this is a welcome move. I’ve been a long time user of Wings Radio Cabs, and though I’ve not faced any serious service issues yet, I think Rs.16/km is too high for an LPG-run Wagon-R, considering cabs in the above mentioned cities charge Rs.15/km for a petrol driven Renault Logan.

Once we have more operators and a more reasonable tariff card, would you switch to radio cabs or remain loyal to the good old autorickshaw?

Castle

Atul Karmarkar — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 02:36:59 +0000

I guess the title of this post would be self-explanatory to some, and meaningless to others. No, this is not about any urge to document old and historical castles, but rather Castle, the TV series which concluded Season 2 in India.

This series was aired from May 3, 2010 on Star World between 10 pm-11pm every week, from Monday to Thursday. What surprised me was my keenness to watch it, considering I only heard about it a month or so ago. A colleague had hosted a party at his place, and during a conversation about movies and TV shows like Monk, Two and a half men etc., my boss happened to mention that Castle was also worth a watch. Now this party was on a Friday, and I couldn’t wait enough for Monday.

Ok, a bit about Castle: The lead character is Richard Castle (played by Nathan Fillion), a best selling author who gets called in by the NYPD to solve a crime, which appeared to be based on one of his books. He is paired with Detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic – gorgeous ), who initially thinks Castle is too full of himself, before realising his knowledge of crime and criminals is quite helpful when solving cases. Castle sees Beckett as a potential muse for a forthcoming book series, and gets permission to shadow her on cases thanks to his connections with the Mayor and police chief.

Obviously, I had to get hold of Season 1 to really ’sink’ myself into the series, and I liked what I saw. The chemistry and sparks between the lead pair was fun to watch. It is also an unusual pairing in some ways as Castle has an ex-wife, a teenage daughter, and his mother who stays with them from time to time. However, the age difference between Castle and Beckett doesn’t really have much of a bearing as they share a superb rapport and working relationship. On the personal front, they alternate between fire and ice with non-stop verbal duels all the time, including comments on each others’ affairs and social life.

Towards the end of Season 2, there is a hint of closeness in their relationship which gets scotched when Beckett starts dating another colleague, Demming - probably the most hated man on the show :-p, and the last episode must have been eagerly watched by several die-hard romantics to know ‘will they-won’t they’. Castle, realising that he may have lost her, decides to take a break and complete his book, telling Beckett that this would be their last case.

BANG! That is when the reality and finality of the situation hits Beckett as she realises she’s got used to Castle being around and suddenly starts seeing things from a different perspective.

During the farewell party hosted for Castle, Beckett gives a hint about the change in her feelings when she says ’she doesn’t need a beer to take Castle’. She then asks him to step outside for a private chat and comes closest to disclosing that she has a softer side, as well as her feelings for him, when his ex-wife (who’s also his publisher) walks in and the episode ends.

Obviously all that had to be kept in suspense for Season 3, which was announced in March 2010, and is likely to premiere in September this year with 22 episodes.

Am already looking forward to it!! You?

Playing with Google’s bag of tricks

Atul Karmarkar — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 06:41:29 +0000

As a company, Google never ceases to amaze me in terms of their constant innovation and tinkering in order to ensure the end user has a satisfying experience. I was having a look at changes they’ve made recently and have been playing around with a few of their applications to see the difference. Here are some of them, in no particular order…

Bringing improved PDF support to Google Chrome

Introducing the Google Command Line Tool

5 things you may not know you can do with attachments in Gmail

View .doc attachments right in your browser

An update on the AdSense Product Ideas page

Folder and tag renaming

Gooooaaal!

Tips & Tricks: Advanced Sorting Rules in Google spreadsheets

Optical character recognition (OCR) in Google Docs

The new Google Docs graduates

Tips & Tricks: Table of Contents in Google documents

Sharing in Google Docs just got easier

Do check ‘em out and have fun!

Death By Twitter

Atul Karmarkar — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 01:27:01 +0000

Pretty catchy title, huh? Kinda like the ‘Death By Chocolate’ one gets to drink at Pepinos…

But no, this one is different, deadly serious and a path breaker for sure. We are all living in a highly connected and networked world now where having a social profile somewhere is the norm, with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter being the most common ones to communicate thoughts or ’status updates’.

Mark Shurtleff, Attorney General for the US state of Utah, used Twitter to convey his go-ahead for the death sentence to Ronnie Lee Gardner, a convicted murderer. Ronnie was executed by a firing squad, which seemed a rather archaic way to do so.

As expected, there were varying reactions, to executing someone like this or even announcing it in such a manner. Whatever one may say, using social media to communicate – whether official or personal, is definitely here to stay with more and more government officials and corporates getting online, hopefully not for such morbid announcements though!

WordPress 3.0 is here

Atul Karmarkar — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 11:57:23 +0000

WordPress 3.0 – Thelonious, the 13th major release of WordPress is out.

With 218 contributors, a lot of work has gone into it, with new APIs allowing for greater functionality and ease of use. One of the other big enhancements is the ability to merge WordPress and WordPress MU, the Multi User edition, making it possible to run multiple blogs from the same installation in a far more easier manner. Check out the tour video;

The new version promises much, though like with any major version, I prefer to wait a few days before jumping in to upgrade, and so it shall be in this case too. You can download WordPress 3.0 and see for yourself.

Gary Coleman R.I.P

Atul Karmarkar — Sat, 29 May 2010 03:51:46 +0000

Gary Coleman is dead. Seeing this news on my Twitter timeline suddenly took me back into a time long long ago. Gary was a child actor and probably best known for his role as Arnold Jackson in the hit TV series of the ’80s, Diff’rent Strokes.. a time when TV series were just pure fun! He was just 42, and died due to intracranial haemorrhage after he suffered a fall at home, hurting his head.

I remember watching this series as a kid on Sunday mornings when it aired on the telly.. as well as from some video cassettes that some friends had. Yeah yeah, video cassettes..

The series itself was different, hilarious and entertaining for us as kids.. especially Arnold’s signature line – “What’choo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”

Thanks for the memories, Gary.. R.I.P.

Google’s Pac-Man logo marks a return to blogging

Atul Karmarkar — Wed, 26 May 2010 01:38:04 +0000

This past weekend was quite a fun filled and exciting one (offline) and as usual, trust Google to come up with something to stir up a frenzy online. Yes, if you were among the millions of people who use Google, you could not have missed seeing the Pac-Man logo, commemorating the game’s 30th anniversary.

Initially I thought it was among the regular logos that Google regularly puts out from time to time, but it was a pleasant surprise to find out that this ‘logo’ was actually a playable, full fledged 255 level game! All one had to do was to hit ‘Insert Coin’ and you were on your way.

Have to admit this was quite addictive and I ended up playing till the 3rd level, when it got kinda boring. All in all, it was fun to rediscover this game and spend time navigating through the maze. (and memory lane )

Google kept this on their homepage for a full 48 hours and just when one was wondering about usage statistics, RescueTime, (a Seattle-based company which offers Web-based time management and analytics tool for knowledge workers and their managers) came out with some numbers, putting the cost of Google’s Pac-Man at 4.82 million hours!

Quite something, huh…

Oh and by the way, I haven’t been regular on the blog for some time now (again!).. It’s been a combination of factors really.. what with a bad internet connection (thank you BSNL), writer’s block or just sheer laziness. Amidst all this, the blog’s RSS numbers haven’t declined and a big thanks to all you readers for keeping the faith.

Hopefully, all laziness issues have been set to rest now and you guys can look forward to my posts invading your inbox / rss readers again.

Sharing on LinkedIn redefined

Atul Karmarkar — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 17:50:15 +0000

If you’re a heavy LinkedIn user and have wanted an easier way to share stuff with your connections, things just got more convenient for you.

Check out this video which shows you how…

There are over half a dozen other small changes which should make your LinkedIn sharing experience better, and you can check them over at the LinkedIn blog.

Happy Sharing!

In India, Orkut still beats Facebook

Atul Karmarkar — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:23:21 +0000

Sounds surprising, right?

If you are among those users who started off with Orkut and then moved to Facebook over the past 2-3 years, this might be difficult to believe, considering all the problems and issues with some features in Orkut, not to mention the total lack of privacy.

However, statistics from leading internet traffic measurement firm comSCORE seem contrary to that belief. The report, which covered social networking activity in the Asia-Pacific region in February 2010, put Orkut ahead of Facebook with 46.8% of India’s internet users logging in to Google’s social networking site.

In countries like Singapore, Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Vietnam, Facebook remains top dog. China was excluded from this study, and in some countries, other brands had maximum user engagement, like mixi.jp (Japan), CyWorld (South Korea) and wretch.cc (Taiwan).

In the report, the user base comprised of internet users over 15 yrs of age who accessed these sites from home and work. However, it excluded visits from cyber cafes and mobile phones. Here are the stats from the report:

Top Social Network in Individual Asia Pacific Markets by Percent Reach of Web Population February 2010 *Total Internet Audience, Age 15+ – Home & Work Locations Source: comScore World Metrix**
	Top Social Network in Market	% Reach of Web Population
Asia Pacific	Facebook.com	14.9%
Philippines	Facebook.com	84.5%
Australia	Facebook.com	69.4%
Indonesia	Facebook.com	84.9%
Malaysia	Facebook.com	77.5%
Singapore	Facebook.com	72.1%
New Zealand	Facebook.com	63.6%
Taiwan	Wretch.cc	62.5%
Hong Kong	Facebook.com	62.6%
India	Orkut	46.8%
South Korea	CyWorld	54.2%
Vietnam	Facebook.com	18.4%
Japan	Mixi.jp	18.9%

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

According to the study, 50.8% of the total online population in the Asia-Pacific region visited a social networking site in February 2010, translating into ~ 240.3 million visitors during the month.

It is possible that excluding visitors from mobile phones and PDAs has also skewed the results to an extent, given the number of users who access such sites from their phones thanks to inbuilt Facebook apps.

Overall though, Orkut has a greater reach and first mover advantage, and it is also possible that some users get intimidated by Facebook so they would rather remain on Orkut. Secondly, it largely depends on ‘what’ one does on these sites. I know of people who are addicted to some FB applications like Farmville, Mafia Wars and others, and can spend most of their day being on FB. Orkut on the other hand, took time to have third-party apps integrated with it’s site, but once it did so, I’ve seen an equally large number of users use those apps.

There are also those users who use these sites purely to get back in touch with old buddies, classmates and the like, and are rarely in the ‘active users’ list, surfacing once a while to accept a friend request or respond to birthday wishes.

Personally, I used Orkut for a couple of years before lack of privacy features and too many ‘fraaand’ requests / scraps from unknown people started pissing me off. Facebook has been good so far, but the lack of control regarding some privacy related features is not to my liking, so I’m reducing my FB usage too.

Do you prefer Orkut or Facebook?

Atul Karmarkar.Com

Visa CodeSure-security for your credit card

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