Mehul Kamdar

Mehul Kamdar

Data scientist, developer, writer, bibliophile.

On Indian censorship online, open source SoCs, China’s backfiring Belt & Road Initiative, future of tech in Asia, and long-lived institutions

  1. The Indian Information & Broadcasting (I&B) Ministry will now regulate and oversee content for streaming platforms. As Finshots put it, winter is coming. For those uninitiated with the country’s love of censorship (I say that in jest), look at this article on 100 years of film censorship in India. And as Finshots note, there is also the important question of what distinguishes Netflix showing its own productions or an ABC TV show vs. Youtube showing user-generated content.

  2. Andrew “Bunnie” Huang writes about SoCs aka System-on-a-chip. Cory Doctorow wrote a great twitter thread about it. This is fascinating stuff. The very short version is that SoCs have lots of “disused silicon” on them because apparently deactivating a cirtcuit is much cheaper and faster than having to add a circuit. As a result, commercial, proprietary SoCs have lots of deactivated circuits on them. And its tough enough to even get documentation on their working parts let alone these deactivated part, thanks to notorious NDAs to get the documentation due to IP theft concerns. This ‘dark matter’ of deactivated circuits can pose grave security risks if we aren’t careful.

  3. Tanner Greer writes that the Belt and Road strategy has backfired on Xi. He writes a bit more about this column on his blog.

  4. Pondering Durian writes about tech in Southeast Asia. The post is ultimately more hopeful than I am:

    As opposed to the laissez-faire slide towards “power-sellers” evident in virtually every marketplace to date, I wonder if big tech in the developing world will begin to take on even more roles traditionally associated with the state: to tweak their algorithms to level the playing field - perhaps boosting the results of smaller merchants as an investment in the long-term health of their ecosystem?

  5. The Long Now Foundation wrote about long-lived institutions. A very large number of the longest lived institutions in the world are, unsurprisingly, in Japan. And a lots of these institutions are breweries, wineries, hotels, bars, etc. And in the West, the vast majority of the longest living institutions are financial services companies. As the article notes, basically “it’s a lot easier to reinvent yourself as a service-oriented company than it is as a commodity company when that particular commodity goes out of use.”

    Two interesting exceptions are Colgate Palmolive (founded 1806) and DuPont (founded 1802).

    Of the 5,500 companies over 200 years old, 3,100 are based in Japan! And then 800 in Germany with 200 each in Holland and France. Interestingly, 90% are under 300 employees.

    Of the 1,000 companies over 300 years old, 23% are in the alcohol industry, and another 20.5% are in the hotel and restaurant business.