Blauk.com - Comment on the strangers

You  were walking on the side-walk and you encounter a beautiful gal near a Pizza shop. Now, you have two options:

1. Just appraoch her and compliment her beauty (or)
2. Just walk away as you dont know the consequences when you approach her. Lets put this in simple words - 'you are scared!'

And as per the 'law of evolution', most of us fall under the second category!  Probably, Samson Manickaraj would have got very desperate on such situations and found the site 'Blauk.com'. 'Blauk' is a microsite which allows comments on the strangers you encounter. You leave a comment on the person by identifying the exact location/dress/car and possibly the starnger can reply you and from thereon..he/she is not a stranger anymore!

Below is one such example of a poor soul, where he got rejected as she has a boyfriend!

Like anyother microsites ( eg twitter..), it does have limitation on the number of characters you can post. You can describe a person in 64 Characters and leave a comment in 100 characters.

On the rear side, like any other service, there are people who can misuse such sites. Few that I can think of are:
1. Stalkers...
2. If the site grows rapidly, there could be 'Product placements' messages posted on the site. Some messages can read like this: ' Guy with colored hair, near the 'Newly opened 'Best fashions' in downtown'.

This is defintely an exciting concept and is in very early stages, which has room for loads of improvements. Probably, the founder may expand the site based on its popularity. However, one must-have feature is to find the strangers based on location, which otherwise could get lost in the flood of messages.

Hope the 'Single's get benefited by this service!

Its worth while to mention, omegle.com where you can only chat with Strangers.


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Internet Explorer or PDF - Who is to blame?

In the whole of Google and China spat, there are two other players who took quiet a few blows. It's Microsoft and Adobe systems. when Google first reported about the Chinese intrusion into Google's servers, the blame was thrown on a vulnerable security hole in the PDF files. Researchers at VeriSign's iDefense hinted that
an infected PDF was sent over the mail and that was used as a route to hack the Google systems. However, Adobe insisted that the PDFs do not have any such vulnerability and it went on saying that Adobe is also a victim of the same attack. But, Security Analysts hit back saying that Chinese hackers attacked Adobe to understand more such loop-holes in the PDF and to exploit them in future attacks.

The blame on Adobe took a turn when McAfee released its investigative report which states that,the hackers used a vulnerability in Internet Explorer to intrude Google and other companies. The report also gave a clean chit to Adobe that PDFs were not used in the attack. On the other hand, Microsoft didn't deny the security hole and admitted that there is a weak link in IE. This admittance led Germany and France governments to warn their citizens on using internet Explorer. This came as a 'no-surprise' given the number of lawsuits that was ragged against Microsoft by the European Union.

Just when the blame lopsided on IE, India reported that it was also a victim of Chinese attack and it came in the form of a PDF attachment!

The takeaways are:

1. Malwares/Spywares comes as a document too and it need not be an .EXE file/links.
2. One more reason to use Firefox.

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China - no more gimmicks!

When a Company grows very rapidly outpacing its competitors and produces a balance sheet which is less transparent, an obvious suspicion will revolve around the company. The doubt arises as there is very less data to support the growth of such company and all that you can see is glowing number in the quarterly/Annual reports. This was the exact case of Enron, the biggest bankruptcy in the history of US. Now, replicate the same analogy for a country in the current economic scenario, which grows very rapidly at a time when other countries even hesitates to say that they are out of recession. This is China for you.!

In the recent days, lot of voices are being heard warning about the Chinese Bubble. This all started with the Hedge fund Investor ‘James S. Chanos’ who predicts that the China is headed for a crash, contrary to the popular belief that the country is growing at a faster pace. He is the person who predicted the fall of Enron and similar other Bankruptcies. So, nobody is daring to ignore him. After all, that is his job and has an impressive track record for years. Chanos, a hedge fund Investor simply bets against a Company/Country, as he believes that it will go down in few months. If his prediction is right, it results in an insane amount of money. (Especially, when they bet against the popular opinion). Classic example is George Soros, whose betting against ‘Bank of England’ earned him $1b in a single night. This was in 1992.

Coming back to China, Chanos suspects that “Beijing is cooking its books, faking, among other things, its eye-popping growth rates of more than 8 percent”. He is planning to give a detailed speech about this at the Oxford University by end of Jan’10.


Here are few reasons which raise questions about China:

The Chinese economy is largely based on Exports to US and European countries, which means the Chinese currency ‘Yuan’ has to appreciate less against the dollar or Euros to continue the impressive GDP growth. China being a growing economy leads to appreciation of their currency, but the Chinese central bank has prevented the appreciation and has kept the exchange rate between dollar and Yuan almost the same for past few years. This largely helped them to maintain low prices for their goods in the foreign market and thus accumulating billions of foreign reserves. Now, you may think that it’s plays to the advantage of Chinese economy. But, the economy at sucha a mass scale doesn’t work this way.

When a country has huge amount of money among its people (in a manipulated market, the chinese central bank prints loads of Yuans equivalent to the dollars), the value of the currency itself decreases. This triggers an increase in inflation, as the price of the domestic goods increases over the period of time. So, to prevent inflation the Chinese government should atleast stop the surplous flow of Yuan. This can be broadly achieved by two ways:

1. Increasing the interest of the money that is been lent by the Chinese Central bank
2. Preventing the Consumer banks from lending out more money. This can be achieved by instructing the banks to increase the limit of cash reserves.

However, during the time of recession, the Chinese government infused a stimulus package of around $600 billion dollars into the economy to prevent any huge recession impact. So, this stimulus money along with the existing flows triggered a real estate boom in China, where the prices of lands/home rapidly increased every month and thus creating a ‘Real estate Boom’. Now, the government is highly worried by this boom as they have just witnessed on how the US hosing market turned into bubble and got burst.
This is clearly evident from the fact that the government has just announced that they are backing off the stimulus package and have also announced few strict measures to bank on the lending policy.

Now, the Chinese has to control the interest rates, imports and exchange rate similar to adjusting the volume equalizer in a music player. They have keep adjusting the numbers as and when the other value changes.Since the market is in a bubble stage, a small miscalculation can result in disaster.

Moreover, there is more pressure on China from world countries to stop manipulating the Yuan against foreign currencies. Recently, when China surpassed Germany as the world’s second largest exporter, Germany had put lot of political pressure against China to stop the currency manipulation. Apart from Germany, other countries are applying similar pressure, as the cheaper Chinese goods are flooding their markets which eventually slows down the growth of in-house industrial houses. Also, there are also threats from other countries that they will stop buying Chinese goods.

All one can conclude is, China will not grow at the same rate as earlier. If it continues to do so, it will not last long for even few months before which the real-estate boom market will turn into a bubble. And for sure, China can expect heavy backlashes from world countries for its continued currency manipulation.


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