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vkrm | 8 years ago | on: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

IANAL and I could be wrong here, but I think thats only partially right.

Although article 21 itself doesn't say anything about food, shelter etc, the courts have established precedent by including those in their interpretation of article 21 and the directive principles in the past. However, I'm not sure there has been a ruling specifically affirming those rights as being fundamental, and the text of the constituion definitely does not mention them as fundamental rights. The full text of Article 21 is simply: "No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law."

Since the right to education is specifically included under Article 21(A), it is a fundamental right.

In the specific case of Aadhaar and UIDAI as they currently exist, I think the "Right to Privacy" which has now been affirmed, and the "Right to Constitutional Remedies" (Article 32) should take precedence.

Right to clothing isn't mentioned anywhere as far as I can tell.

vkrm | 8 years ago | on: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/how-india-reg...

AFAIK, the government has not attempted to prosecute anyone for using stronger encryption, and other government departments/organizations have made conflicting recommendations, especially when it comes to online banking and capital markets. Barring new regulations that clarify the government's position, the status quo is that ISPs cannot apply strong encryption themselves, but are not obligated to prevent their users from doing so.

At least one ISP has gone beyond this mandate and tried to block the use of stronger encryption by their customers[0].

[0]https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/07/indian-is...

vkrm | 8 years ago | on: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

"Reasonable restrictions" are not very well defined in the Indian constitution. They are quite broad and open to interpretation on a case-by-case basis.

  "... the State can impose reasonable restrictions in the
  interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the
  security of the State, friendly relations with foreign
  States, public order, decency or morality or in relation 
  to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an
  offence."

vkrm | 8 years ago | on: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

This is currently a grey area. All ISPs in India have to abide by their licensing terms with the Department of Telecommunication which restricts encryption to 40 bit RSA or equivalent. Any higher grade encryption can only be used with special permission and requires the decryption keys to be submitted to the DoT.

Whether or not this restriction also applies to end users and non-ISP organizations hasn't yet been tested in the judicial system AFAIK.

vkrm | 8 years ago | on: Right to Privacy a Fundamental Right, Says Indian Supreme Court

IMO, this is a specious argument, especially in the Indian context. Access to food, clothing, and shelter are NOT fundamental rights[0].

On the other hand, the Aadhaar program (which is the context the above argument was made for) can be viewed as impinging on the fundamental "Right to Constitutional Remedies" as its governing body the UIDAI is set up in such a way that the UIDAI itself has sole authority on whether or not a grievance needs the intervention of the established judicial system[1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_Rights,_Directive_...

[1]http://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/the-uidai-has-in...

vkrm | 8 years ago | on: Timescale, an open-source time-series SQL database for PostgreSQL

Not at all, although there are some similarities at a lower level (First class notion of time). Datomic has a much tighter focus on immutability, auditability, and database-as-a-value. Datomic isn't a good fit for use as a general purpose time series db where you have billions of observations.

vkrm | 8 years ago | on: Gnome is still the best Linux desktop environment

Yup, pretty pointless article IMO. Doesn't even provide any actually good reasons why "Gnome is teh best". I'm sure there are probably a few reasons why Gnome is better than <something> for some set of users, this article just fails to list any of them.

vkrm | 8 years ago | on: Gnome is still the best Linux desktop environment

Of course it has. As I said, this is subjective, but I provide support for a few non technical users (scientists/medical professionals) using the latest Ubuntu with Gnome 3 and I find it slow and unintuitive in comparison to my preferred setup. It has a superficial resemblance to MacOS/Windows which is a plus for some users.

More to the point, my comment was a criticism of the article rather than Gnome. Most of these "6 reasons" can be easily applied to any actively developed environment.

vkrm | 8 years ago | on: Gnome is still the best Linux desktop environment

This is pretty subjective, but I've switched away from Gnome since Gnome 3. I find it slow and unintuitive even on modern hardware. I could use at least 4 out of the 6 points the author makes in this article to describe any modern linux desktop environment.

Disclosure: I use Openbox and Xfce. There are a few rough edges, but nothing that's a a deal breaker for me.

vkrm | 8 years ago | on: Be Careful with UUID or GUID as Primary Keys

Datomic [0] uses SQUUIDs [1] (Semi sequential UUIDs) to work around this:

    Many UUID generators produce data that is particularly
    difficult to index, which can cause performance issues 
    creating indexes. To address this, Datomic includes a 
    semi-sequential UUID generator, Peer.squuid. Squuids are 
    valid UUIDs, but unlike purely random UUIDs, they 
    include both a random component and a time component.
[0] http://www.datomic.com/

[1] http://docs.datomic.com/identity.html#sec-6

edit: formatting

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