Lost in Space

A reflection on virtual reality

There is a guy called Sujit Ghosh from Kolkata, who holds a unique world record. Last year, he created more than 5,500 email accounts on Rediffmail. What he had done is something bizarre but the point, at the moment, is the diminishing line between reality and virtuality. The ubiquitous internet has embraced a substantial part of our life.

If you want to find a thing – be informed, read about, research – you can find it on this incredibly diverse web. Our life has evolved with the internet, which has transformed from a global data communications system to a daily commodity. The seamless blend of a physical world and the electronic milieu reinterprets our personal lives, professions and relation with the society as a whole.

In this passage, we have offered a huge part of ourselves to become a subset of the larger virtual world; whilst we have occupied a private territory that is defined by one and zero. Our space is again specified by the several accounts we have for emails, social networking, file hosting and online storage space that we have on the labyrinth. In days to come, the amount of megabytes you have online could be one of the vital statistics you mention in your CV.

Gmail says I'm currently using 794-MB territory, which is 10% of my 7,438MB and in Google Docs, I have occupied 115MB – 11% of the space I have been alloted. However, there is a serious issue in the world of information technology, in terms of fraud, identity theft and access to unauthorised information. Or in exceptional case, the top management of corporations could easily rebuke their employees. Once our management gave me a stern warning on what I wrote in my blog.

Google, Lycos, Bing, Webcrawler and their ilk have provided an effortless way to collate information from innumerable and varying sources. It has led to the advent of several phraseologies, such as phishing, email spoofing, information security, data protection directive , enterprise information security architecture, data governance et tal.

According to a web source: 'Unencrypted emails can be read by the administrators of the email server, if the connection is not encrypted (no https), and also the internet service provider and other parties sniffing the traffic of that connection are able to know the contents. Furthermore, the same applies to any kind of traffic generated on the internet (web-browsing, instant messaging and others).

It adds: 'In order not to give away too much personal information, emails can be encrypted and browsing of webpages as well as other online activities can be done traceless via anonymisers, or, in cases those are not trusted, by open-source distributed anonymisers, so called mix nets. Renowned open-source mix nets include I2P - The Anonymous Network and tor.'

Life goes on even if you do not logged in to Facebook for a week. However, there have been many undesirable cases, which had arose out of fake IDs and mail accounts that have been hacked. One of my juniors cried a whole night when a miscreant had unwarranted access to her Orkut profile and had uploaded obscene pictures on her album.

How much serious is this online obstacle? It is not much critical wrt moderate and sensible use of the wonder technology. Despite click fraud, forex scam, romance scam, pharming, wire fraud and other such digital abuses, the internet has been flourishing, making our life au courant and easier.

Far from the madding crowd, we have found the ideal place to build a world. Despite the drawbacks, there is an umpteen opportunity to redefine the essence of our live – just at a click of a mouse.