I stumbled across an interesting academic paper titled "A Theory of Prostitution" which investigates how this low-skill, labor intensive job brings high income rewards. The paper investigates the role of marriage, the economics of marriage and prostitution and makes postulations in accordance with the statistics. They also play with the (interesting?) notion that wives and whores are actually economic goods: women sell, men buy! To quote the paper: "a prostitute sells non-reproductive sex, which we will call "commercial sex", while a wife sells reproductive sex (i.e. sex plus children)."

Grab the PDF file from here. It is an interesting read.

Maldives is probably on an all time high on prostitution these days. That, or there simply is more acceptance of the presence of this wider social phenomenon...

Much of this year, media coverage and casual gossip OD'ed on the "Fable of the Massage Parlours and Spas". Folklore has it that this started out when word spread around town that the tsunami that brought much destruction in December 2004 was the result of disobedience to God. The abundance of sinful sexual activity was soon attributed to as being the culprit and somehow massage parlours veered into the limelight. An operation was soon concocted by the religious core who considered the more intimate male to female interaction that occurs in a massage session as acts of utter sin. The operation became much easier when a large chunk of the populace, the all too powerful housewives, sided with them. These house-bound women had been burning with fury and oozing green goo with jealous stares in seeing their husbands transcending the long held taboo of inter-gender physical touch. Of course it helped that they were totally ignorant of what a massage parlour actually is and had no freaking clue as to what a spa is. Ask any odd random housewife even now and one can be assured that their answer will begin with a few strong words as to how "bad" those places are. The whole fiasco turned into the real carnival it was after stories of sexual favours (in return for monetary compensation of course) taking place at some massage parlours moved from gossip and spread into the hands of the newly liberated journalists of the country. They dutifully reported the story, confident of it becoming top story on publication - afterall, the mere presence of the yucky words "sex", "prostitution" and man/woman together in one sentence would stir up a commotion. Massage parlours became the scape goat for the growing promiscuousity seen nation-wide!

However, most importantly, for most people the massage parlour event failed to acknowledge the larger truth. The *cough* brilliant, sane and logical *cough* decision by the government to make massage parlours and spas ILLEGAL in the country from August 2006 onwards managed to garner critical political support and successfully plastered the outrage. The fact that this was a single manifestation of a bigger problem - prostitution and its root causes ? was hushed into silence. Society still resists in fully accepting the reality of the situation. People give a blind eye to the alarming frequency of child molestation. It remains an unspoken topic driving its many victims full on into the psychological trauma that ensues. People also give a blind eye to the growing number of school leavers, many in teens, who turn to prostitution with its lure of better pay than the meager salary in any job in the country ? a fact that the new Minister of Gender and Family recently acknowledged and raised concerns over.

Isn?t it time that society wakes up from its delusional dream and start owning up to its failures? Quite a few people would be quick to blame the President and rant on and on about how he is named after a crustacean but reality is that by squaring the blame on a single person we are encouraging people to believe in the superiority of their own beliefs and actions and thus never participating the common man in the massive failure that left society the way it is now. It is time that sex, child abuse and everything taboo be explored for all the resultant issues stemming from such stifling and indiscriminantly labeling everything as taboo. Everyone can keep hold of their beliefs intact and dandy while addressing the more complex issues that arise as a developing identity-less society. It is time that the shamans of the society be discarded to make way for educated, rational approaches to life and not bask in the glory of ignorance and self-deceit. Then, and only then, might we have a chance of doing more than band-aid fixes?

Enough. I tune out...

I often get asked by my less "geeky" friends on a easy-to-setup easy-to-use method of establishing a secure connection between two (or more) computers on the internet. The purpose of having such a connection ranges from simply sharing files, controlling a remote computer and even having a virtual LAN to connect together a geographically scattered community. I usually have a simple one word answer for all such queries: Hamachi.

Hamachi is a zero-configuration Virtual Private Networking (VPN) application that uses its own central server with encrypted communications. The software isn't open-source, it's method of encryption has a few unanswered questions and it relies on a central server beyond one's control, however, despite all that it admittedly is a very elegant solution to the traditional VPN. The ease of setup, the ease of use and its ability to work with NAT'ed connections render it a very attractive solution for use by anyone. Best of all, software is a free download of around 800Kb in size!

Once logged into the Hamachi network using the software, we can create our own virtual named networks that individual nodes can access by typing in the name of the network - quite similar to joining a channel in an IRC network. The virtual networks can have password protection so as to restrict access to known persons only. The application comes with its own chat facility allowing the user to strike up a chat with anyone on the Hamachi virtual network. The application is also configured to allow browsing another user's computer via Windows File Sharing/SMB - as per access restrictions of course. The neat thing here being that you can have File Sharing disabled for the Internet connection yet have it enabled for the Hamachi connection.

My PC at home in Male' is behind a NAT but is easily reachable via the Hamachi network that it automatically joins on whenever it is switched on. The Hamachi central servers rid me of the burden of having my own server as is required by standard VPN systems. The connection speeds on the Hamachi network is decent enough for most purposes including VNC use. This is an ideal solution for all those of you who want to create a virtual network to pool together all the friends and/or family or simply want to make your alternative PC easily accessible wherever you are...

The main Hamachi website is at http://www.hamachi.cc/. There is a handy guide on setting up Hamachi for optimal use at http://www.itsatechworld.com/2006/01/17/hamachi-vpn-solution/

Enjoy

I am a huuuge fan of sci-fi, which is why the StarTrek series and the Stargate series rank as some of my favourites on television. Stargate Atlantis is an offshoot from the original (still ongoing) Stargate SG-1 series and has been going on for a few years now. Sadly, I only had the chance to catch up on the series a few months ago. Season 3 is underway now and I am entirely glued to the story.

It tells the story of a Stargate base that is established in the Pegasus galaxy on an abandoned Ancients outpost that was found in one of the SG-1 missions. The place, known as Atlantis, is an artificial city that resides on the sea and is thought to be have been one of the main bases of the Ancients before they were destroyed by the prevalent enemy in the galaxy, the Wraith. The Ancients were a species much more advanced than humans and had evolved millions of years prior to humans. They were joined in the pursuit of knowledge and "ascension" - a goal that made them both technology and scientifically more advanced than anything else the Stargate mission had encountered. I like the Stargate Atlantis series much more than the original SG-1 series and it definitely trumps the latest StarTrek "Enterprise" series.

Check out the series if you gobble up science fiction, space travel and extra-world exploration as much I do. Drooool :)~

Immi has amalgamated some code for Dhivehi document converting from Hassan and myself, to make a nifty little utility to convert from either MLS format or Accent format into more universal document formats such as RichText. The tool is available for download from the Technova website.

The utility is a bit rough at the moment and notably has Unicode support left out. There is no installer either at the moment, so it is ready to run once downloaded. However, as always, the utility is expected to become more user friendly and feature rich in future incarnations. Drop some feedback if you are keen on seeing particular features added...

Click here for more info and download link

I always get much pleasure when I see my work being used elsewhere. I got a email today from the creator of the recently launched SigStat.com, informing me of its use of the Blobsy bot framework.

To quote the introduction to the service on the site:
"SigStat.com allows you to keep your forum signatures update to date by displaying your present msn status, and msn nickname, which automatically update. This innovative service is free just add your msn address and click get sig right after to get started."

The site currently has the status image available in the following layouts:

In addition to status images, there is a primitive statistics option that can display the MSN Messenger usage in terms of the status messages the user has set over a period of time. What use it can be of I am not sure, since I for one, leave my status as "Online" most times regardless of whether I am at the PC or not...

Congratulations to Adam Davis on the work. I reckon it might be a neat feature to have a large collection of status image layout/formats available, especially for usage on websites and blogs. Good luck!

Dhiraagu Wifi hotspot is something I had mentioned in an earlier post, however, I hadn't got a chance to experience the service on my laptop till recently. The opportunity popped up when my flight to UK got delayed and had to kill some time at the food outlet at the airport. My laptop readily found the "Dhiraagu Wireless Hotspot" SSID and a stable connection was established. The service was quite decent and I could browse and download in comfort and with speed. It certainly was a luxury that quite a few people would happily pay for.

As ever, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to peek a look at how the service was operating. Access controlled wifi hotspots usually operate by allowing unprotected (that is WEP/WPA free) access to the wireless network and then authenticating the client with a central access controller. The client needs to open a web page, any page, upon which the browser gets redirected to a service login page where the user is prompted to enter the login details that grant them access to the internet thereafter. The login mechanism also serves as a means to facilitate billing.

The Dhiraagu system operates in a similar manner. Below is the screen that we are shown upon connecting. Notice that they are giving the username/password to login with in the current free access promotion they are running.



The browser flickers as the system guides it through a series of links to complete the authentication. Looking at the URLs that the browser hit through, I picked one "interesting" looking IP...

http://202.1.201.230:8002/Portal?NMIP=203.104.25.251?OS=http://www.msn.com/

And voila comes the web administration interface for a Cisco router - the equipment that Dhiraagu is using to provide the Wifi hotspot service!



The router apparently is configured without any administration password and the act of going to the router's IP address provided unfettered access to the wifi router and hence control over the wifi hotspot service.



I wonder if this is true for all the rest of Dhiraagu hotspots splattered across Male'. The service is great, BUT is this how the system was deployed? This configuration of the wifi hotspot lets anyone command control over the router and facilitates all kinds of mischief!