Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Hacking, till now, has been about money but for the first time a ransomware group demanded money to not overthrow an elected government of a nation, finds out Satyen K. Bordoloi Something unprecedented happened in the month of May 2022. The Conti Ransomware hacking group threatened to overthrow the newly democratically elected government of Costa Rica if they aren’t paid 20 million dollars. Perhaps it was to be expected: research has shown that the group is based out of Russia. On May 8, Rodrigo Chaves became President of Costa Rica, along with 57 other Congressmen, who were part of the…

Despite an agro economy like India being hugely reliant on cattle, animal husbandry had not received the type of digital support it needs. In the last few years though, a plethora of online apps and portals are using everything from veterinarians to Machine Learning to fill this gap finds Satyen K. Bordoloi For agrarian societies cattle rearing and trading is one the oldest extant professions. On the health of livestock, civilisations have soared or crumbled. More so in India which isn’t just the world’s largest producer of milk but has even turned cows into symbols of faith. India also has…

Every ‘expert’ commenting on Netflix’s current decline, has looked at its content as the problem. But they forget Netflix is first and foremost a tech company and the solution to its current crisis, might lie in its Artificial Intelligence, claims Satyen K. Bordoloi Anil did not know that Netflix has over 17,000 titles, 2.2 million minutes or 36,000 hours of content (2020 data) and it launched approximately 2,769 hours of content in 2019. Averaging an hour after work that he watches Netflix daily, this is enough to last him a 100 years or at least a decade of content he…

A fully autonomous car was a dream AI experts predicted would arrive almost a decade ago, yet it is proving to be a problem too hard to crack even for the best minds in the world finds out Satyen K. Bordoloi Elon Musk is considered a genius except in this viral montage video of him promising a fully autonomous car every year from 2014 to 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7oZ-AQszEI In 2014 he says, “A Tesla car, next year will probably be… 90% of your miles can be on auto.” In 2015: “We’re probably only a month away from having autonomous driving.” The…

You may not associate the sophistication of artificial intelligence with the dust and grime of farming but that’s exactly what John Deere managed to wed finds Satyen K. Bordoloi Civilization is a handmaiden to agriculture: everything we created began after humans settled down to farm and from this evolved society, culture, religion, art, music, etc. Every technology, every piece of gadget owes a debt to agriculture. For the first time in 11,000 years of civilization, technology is finally in a position to pay back. Precision agriculture i.e. the management of farming using data of various factors involved in farming to…

High costs prevent e-cycles from taking off despite India’s history as a proud cycling nation finds Satyen K. Bordoloi as he explores the solutions… Across many old railway stations nationwide or covered by tall grass in unused corners of college, or perhaps even at office campuses, you will find metal girdles into which the front wheel of a cycle can be inserted and locked. Growing up in the 80s, I’d see hundreds of cycles neatly parked on such stands outside cinema halls or factories. Today they mostly survive in our nostalgia. File Photo India has always been a nation of…

But the good news is, solutions are coming hard and fast out of the woodwork, writes Satyen K Bordoloi There’s scarcely a technology that exists without an Achilles heel. Blockchain – its promise of radically transforming almost everything we do notwithstanding – has one of the biggest ‘Kryptonite’ in the tech world: its carbon footprint. As per an online tool called the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, Bitcoin with 113 megatons of CO2 annually has a carbon footprint larger than New Zealand and comparable to that of the Czech Republic, and at 204 TWh uses power more than Chile’s consumption and…

Old is gold is a cliché proven again by the oldest propaganda delivery channel deployed in the Ukraine war but not so much for the military finds Satyen K. Bordoloi In Sam Mendes’ modern masterpiece 1917 set in the eponymous year, two soldiers race against time to deliver an important message to prevent an ambush and thus the needless death of their troops. They use the oldest but secure technology to deliver the message: a hand-delivered letter. Secure tech is what the Russian army needs right now as not just their foot soldiers, but even high-ranking officials are falling prey…

The world’s most valuable company Apple – among other tech giants – wants to disrupt the healthcare market finds out Satyen K. Bordoloi as he figures out why Every ‘sick bay’ in Star Trek is surprisingly bloodless and clean, full of gadgets that detect and heal at ‘warp speed’. While most of us write this off as the overreach of science fiction, one group took it seriously: Silicon Valley technopreneurs – and none more so than Apple. In 2019, Tim Cook – CEO of Apple – made a strange assertion in an interview on CNBC, “I believe, if you zoom…

The pattern recognition power of AI is being harnessed across the world to predict crimes finds Satyen K. Bordoloi as he discovers that despite their potential, these come with inherent risks The 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report sees Los Angeles in 2054 free of murders as its pre-crime bureau can predict murders. Cops arrest murderers right before they kill the victims. The absurdity explored in the film is: how can you call it murder if you’ve successfully prevented it? As with many a science-fiction narratives, much of the technology shown in the film didn’t exist at the time. However, two…