Hyderabad bomb blasts: 16 killed, one detained in Old City today

Hyderabad:  A man in Hyderabad has been detained in connection with yesterday's twin blasts which killed 16 people and injured 117 in the busy neighbourhood of Dilsukhnagar. The government will have to explain if the city was compromised because danger signs were ignored or missed, with innocent people paying with their lives for allegedly major lapses.

Here are the latest developments:
1) The opposition says the government must explain whether intelligence alerts were not taken seriously or acted upon. In Delhi, intelligence agencies warned 72 hours ago of a possible terror strike in cities, including Hyderabad and Bangalore. (See pics of blasts)

2) Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, who visited Hyderabad today, said there was intelligence about attacks, but that it was general.

3) But Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, pointed out in Parliament this morning that in October, the Delhi Police said that alleged Indian Mujahideen terrorists had disclosed that they had surveyed Dilsukhnagar as the location for a possible terror strike. (Hyderabad blasts despite intelligence reports: Sushma Swaraj)

4) This morning, police with cameras and gloves searched the debris in Dilsukhnagar. Officials from the National Investigation Agency and commandos of the National Security Guard arrived from New Delhi to help with the investigation.

5) Crucial forensic evidence may have been destroyed by crowds swarming the area last night, who ignored police orders to leave the area for several hours.

6) Among the 16 people who were killed were three young students who were at the market to buy textbooks. (Among injured, man who survived Mecca Masjid blast)

7) Police say Improvised Explosive Devices or IEDs were used in the blasts. Traces of RDX have been found. Timers were used to trigger the explosions.

8)  Wires of a security camera near the location of the blasts had been snapped four days ago. Traffic police sources say they were aware of this but did not re-connect the camera. (Intelligence alert mentioned Hyderabad)

9) The bombs, placed on bicycles near a small restaurant in Dilsukhnagar, went off just after 7 pm yesterday, within five minutes of each other. The Hyderabad police chief, on way to the Sai Baba temple, had passed by about 15 minutes ago.

10) The test match between India and Australia, scheduled to start in Hyderabad on March 2, has not been re-scheduled.

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Staying Private on the New Facebook

Facebook is a personal vault that can contain photos of your firstborn, plans to bring down your government and, occasionally, a record of your indiscretions.

It can be scoured by police officers, partners and would-be employers. It can be mined by marketers to show tailored advertisements.

And now, with Facebook’s newfangled search tool, it can allow strangers, along with “friends” on Facebook, to discover who you are, what you like and where you go. 

Facebook insists it is up to you to decide how much you want others to see. And that is true, to some extent. But you cannot entirely opt out of Facebook searches. Facebook, however, does let you fine-tune who can see your “likes” and pictures, and, to a lesser extent, how much of yourself to expose to marketers.

The latest of its frequent changes to the site’s privacy settings was made in December. Facebook is nudging each of its billion subscribers to review them. 

The nudge could not have been more timely, said Sarah Downey, a lawyer with the Boston company Abine, which markets tools to help users control their visibility online. “It is more important than ever to lock down your Facebook privacy settings now that everything you post will be even easier to find,” she said.

That is to say, your settings will determine, to a large extent, who can find you when they search for women who buy dresses for toddlers or, more unsettling, women who jog a particular secluded trail.

What can you do? Ask yourself four simple questions. 

QUESTION 1 How would you like to be found?

Go to “who can see my stuff” on the upper right side of your Facebook page. Click on “see more settings.” By default, search engines can link to your timeline. You can turn that off if you wish.

Go to “activity log.” Here you can review all your posts, pictures, “likes” and status updates. If you are concerned about who can see what, look at the original privacy setting of the original post.

In my case, I had been tagged eating a bowl of ricotta with my fingers at midnight near Arezzo. My friend who posted the picture enabled it to be seen by anyone, which means that it would show up in a stranger’s search for, I don’t know, people who eat ricotta with their fingers at midnight. I am tagged in other photos that are visible only to friends of the person who posted them.

The point is, you want to look carefully at what the original settings are for those photos and “likes,” and decide whether you would like to be associated with them.

“I don’t get this Facebook thing either,” said one woman whose friend request I had accepted in January 2008. “But everyone in our generation seems to be on it.”

If you are concerned about things that might embarrass or endanger you on Facebook — Syrians who endorse the opposition may not want to be discovered by government apparatchiks — comb through your timeline and get rid of them. The only way to ensure that a post or photo is not discovered is to “unlike” or “delete” it.

Make yourself a pot of tea. This may take a while. The nostalgia may just be amusing. 

QUESTION 2 What do you want the world to know about you?

Go to your profile page and click “About me.” Decide if you would like your gender, or the name of your spouse, to be visible on your timeline. Think about whether you want your birthday to be seen on your timeline. Your date of birth is an important piece of personal information for hackers to exploit.

A tool created a couple of weeks ago by a team of college students offers to look for certain words and phrases that could embarrass other college students as they apply for internships and jobs. It is called Simplewash, formerly Facewash, and it looks for profanity, references to drugs and other faux pas that you do not necessarily want, say, a law school admissions officer to see.

Socioclean is another application that scours your Facebook posts. It is selling its service to college campuses to offer to students. 

QUESTION 3 Do you mind being tracked by advertisers?

Facebook has eyes across the Web; one study found that its so-called widget — the innocuous blue letter “f” — is integrated into 20 percent of the 10,000 most popular Web sites. If that is annoying, several tools can help you block trackers. Abine, DisconnectMe and Ghostery offer browser extensions. Once installed on your Web browser, these extensions will tell you how many trackers they have blocked.

Facebook also has a mechanism to show you ads based on the Web sites you have visited. It works with third-party companies to place cookies on my computer when, for instance, I visit an e-commerce site. That brand knows that I might be looking at girls’ dresses. It can ask Facebook to show me an ad for girls’ dresses when I log in to Facebook. You can control this. Hover over the “X” next to the ad and choose from the drop-down menu: “Hide this ad,” you could say. Or hide all ads from this brand. Facebook does not serve the ads itself, so to opt out of certain kinds of targeted ads, you must go to the third party that Facebook works with to show ads based on the Web sites you have browsed.

QUESTION 4 Whom do you want to befriend?

Now is the time to review whom you count among your Facebook friends. Your boss? Do you really want her to see pictures of you in Las Vegas? And the woman you met in Lamaze class: do you want the apps she has installed to know who you are?

Privacyfix.com, a browser extension, shows you how to keep your friends’ Facebook applications from sucking you into their orbit. It is preparing to introduce a tool to control what it calls your “exposure” to the Facebook search engine.

Secure.me offers a similar feature. Depending on your privacy settings, that photo-sharing app that your Lamaze compatriot just installed could, in one click, know who you are and have access to all the photos that you thought you were sharing with “friends.”

One of Facebook’s cleverest heists is the word “friend.” It makes you think all your Facebook contacts are really your “friends.” They may not be.

Obagi

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Chinese Blogger Thrives as Muckraker

BEIJING — With his five cellphones constantly ringing, it is not easy these days to get the undivided attention of Zhu Ruifeng, a professed citizen journalist whose freelance campaign against graft has earned him pop-star acclaim and sent a chill through Chinese officialdom.

“Shush, I’ve got the BBC on the phone,” he said one afternoon last week, silencing the crowd of acolytes and journalists who had flocked to the bookstore where he holds court most days.

A former migrant worker with a high school education, Mr. Zhu has become an overnight celebrity in China in the two months since he posted online secretly recorded video of an 18-year-old woman having sex with a memorably unattractive 57-year-old official from the southwestern municipality of Chongqing. The official lost his job. Mr. Zhu gained a million or so new microblog followers.

The takedown was just the opening act, Mr. Zhu says. He promises to release six more sex videos that he predicts will make a number of other men run for cover. “I’m fighting a war,” he said with characteristic bombast, his voice a near-shriek. “Even if they beat me to death, I won’t give up my sources or the videos.”

Not surprisingly, Mr. Zhu, 43, has made a few enemies within the government. Late last month, five men showed up at his apartment with state security ID cards. As they thundered from the other side of his locked front door, Mr. Zhu dialed foreign journalists, texted his lawyers and sent out an electronic S O S to the multitudes. The agents left only after he promised to appear for questioning the following morning.

The next day, he emerged from the station house like a triumphant prizefighter, telling waiting supporters how he had verbally outflanked interrogators during seven hours of questioning. “I dared them to throw me in jail and then watch how many human rights and journalism awards I win,” he crowed. “In the end, they turned white with fear.”

It is impossible, of course, to verify Mr. Zhu’s claim. But his cocky behavior and bristling indignation have come to personify the popular fury over official malfeasance that has flourished alongside China’s torrid economic growth. He has also become a litmus test of how committed China’s new leaders are in their battle against corruption — and whether they can tolerate a populist crusader like Mr. Zhu.

Because he has no state-issued journalist’s credentials, Mr. Zhu occupies a tenuous gray zone, which partly explains his penchant for surrounding himself with reporters and supporters — people he hopes might decrease the likelihood of his disappearing into the black hole of the state’s security apparatus.

“Here on Chinese soil, it’s almost impossible for citizen journalists like him to survive long term,” said Zhan Jiang, a media scholar at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

On the face of it, Mr. Zhu’s goals dovetail nicely with those of Xi Jinping, the new Communist Party leader who is to become president next month. Since his installation in November, Mr. Xi has been regularly assailing systemic graft, warning that officials large and small — both “tigers” and “flies,” as he put it — should be brought to justice.

So far the actual results have been minimal. But whether intentional or not, Mr. Xi’s jeremiads have inspired freelance scandal-chasers like Mr. Zhu to seize the moment and pick off misbehaving officials with the help of the Internet. The takedowns often begin with a tip from a jilted mistress or back-stabbing associate and end with an online exposé that forces the authorities to act, and the state-run media to take notice.

The daily smorgasbord of official greed and licentiousness has become so unwieldy that newspapers have begun providing readers with charts to keep track of the implicated and their loot. One particularly rapacious former bank official from Shaanxi Province, Gong Aiai, has become known as “House Sister” for having parlayed bribes and kickbacks into a real estate portfolio of 41 apartments in Beijing.

So far the most senior official to be exposed is Liu Tienan, the nation’s top energy regulator, who is under investigation for accusations of lying about his academic credentials, colluding with a businessman to pocket fraudulently acquired bank loans and threatening to kill a former mistress.

Mr. Zhu, who began his Web site in 2006, relies largely on whistle-blowers to funnel damning evidence to him. Through the years, he said, he has exposed 100 officials, bringing down more than a third of them. He has been threatened and beaten; more than once, he says, he has been offered huge sums of money to delete an incriminating post from his site, which is called People’s Supervision.

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