The Masters of Controversy

Through each of their professions, they have individually shaped the 20th and 21st century. Their professions, of course, delve deep into the chaotic realm of controversy: whether it is politics or cinema.

President George W Bush, whether you consider him to be a pariah, savior or a plain old fool, has attracted all sorts of attention and created perhaps the most controversy in the 21st century. Whether it is the hunt for the elusive weapons of mass destruction, the inability to converse, or good ol' fashioned greed, President Bush has had his fair share of controversy. There have been many writers, movie-makers and entertainers who have had caught on to his coattails and tailgated along for a boost in their career.

But Oliver Stone's career needed no such boost.

Stone's movies have always attracted attention from the media, whether good or bad and have made people think twice about the things they thought they knew so well. It was Stone's interest in Bush's controversial life that has brought about Stone's latest project W to life.

Stone was mentored by Martin Scorsese in NYU Film School, is best friends with Fidel Castro, has directed eight actors to individual Oscar winning performances and served in the US Army near the Cambodian border during the Vietnam War. It was here that he was wounded twice in action. His personal awards include the Bronze Star with "V" device for valor for "extraordinary acts of courage under fire", and the Purple Heart with one Oak Leaf Cluster. Stone would go on to make three movies about Vietnam, but more on that later.

His initial foray into screenwriting spread evenly across most genres, starting from his student film entitled Last Year in Viet Nam (1971), followed by the gritty horror film Seizure (1974), Midnight Express (1978), Conan the Barbarian (1982), and Scarface (1983). Stone won his first Oscar for Midnight Express (1978) and this was just the beginning of his career.

It was clear that the more controversial the matter, the more Stone's interest in it. He has made three films about Vietnam – Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Heaven & Earth (1993). For Stone, these films are a very personal trilogy even though they are inspired by other people's stories. Platoon is a semi-autobiographical film about Stone's experience of war and combat. Born on the Fourth of July is based on the story of war veteran Ron Kovic. Heaven & Earth is derived from the memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, the true story of a Vietnamese girl whose life is drastically affected by the war.

During this same period, Stone directed Wall Street (1987), which earned Michael Douglas an Academy Award for Best Actor; Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio (1988), and The Doors (1991), starring Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison. However, it was the film after this that truly cemented Stone’s career as a master of controversy. JFK (1991) was a star spangled cast of who’s who of Hollywood, with Kevin Costner leading the cast. Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Bacon, Gary Oldman, Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek, Joe Pesci, and John Candy all starred in this no holds barred look at one of the most shocking moments in America’s history, the assassination of US President John F Kennedy. In true Stone fashion, this movie is more than just the assassination of a political figure; it is about the assassination of a political ideal, or even, as some say, the assassination of democracy itself.

Stone then made Natural Born Killers (1994) starring Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Robert Downey Jr. and Rodney Dangerfield. The movie, an adaptation of one of Quentin Tarantino’s earlier screenwriting works, was the story of the love and hate relationship of the media and violence. Stone’s movie was a kaleidoscope of violence and satire. Blurring the line between funny and offensive, the movie was filled with gruesome scenes of violence, juxtaposed with scenes of comedic nuances—more specifically black comedy. Nixon (1995), with Anthony Hopkins and Joan Allen, earned nominations for the actors and Stone for screenwriting, but failed to recover its budget.

During this time, Stone had slowed down in his movie making. Even the subject matter had saturated from spicy to quite bland. U-Turn (1997) had a very interesting storyline but was perhaps more Hitchcock intrigue and less Stone’s controversy. Any Given Sunday (1999) saw Stone veer off into the world of American Football and it wouldn’t be until 5 years that we’d see the director come back and do a film that he’d wanted to do for a life time. Alexander (2004) is perhaps Stone’s most epic film to date. The story of the great king who had conquered most of the known world, perhaps echoed the story of the director who had come so far in life and was desperate to rediscover himself. Again, the film failed to find an audience and barely recovered its budget through international DVD sales.

It wasn’t until World Trade Center (2006) that Stone finally found rediscovered himself and found his voice. Starring Nicolas Cage, the movie finally cemented the director with audiences and critics alike. And now, with the upcoming W, Stone sticks with what he knows best and delves knee deep in controversial subject matter once again. In the much anticipated movie Stone revisits the tumultuous youth of a man who came from a wealthy, oil family and whose father, George H. Bush, was also president—and his rise to power. "I want a fair, true portrait of the man. How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world? It includes his belief that God personally chose him to be president of the United States, and his coming into his own with the stunning, pre-emptive attack on Iraq. It will contain surprises for Bush supporters and his detractors," he told a Hollywood magazine.

As usual, Stone found the process of making a political biopic motion picture quite difficult. “Nobody wanted to finance this film,” Stone told AFP, “Every studio said no. You’d be surprised to know the number of people in the business who don’t want to have their name associated with politics. This thing almost never got made.” But it did get made and cheaply at that too, thanks to tax cut incentives for only $30 million.

Speaking on being neutral on the subject matter, Stone told AFP, “Fifty million people voted for him on two occasions, He was in the same league for a long time as Ronald Reagan, until he became so offensive.” He told USA Today he had "tried to stay human to this man. People get me confused with my outspoken citizen side. But I'm a dramatist first and foremost. I am not interested in that radical 15 percent that hate Bush or the 15 or 20 percent who love Bush,” he said. “That's not our audience. Those people probably won't come. I'm interested in that 60 percent in the American middle who at least have a little more open mind.'

But however, Bush wasn't the only real life personality portrayed in the upcoming movie. The cast reads like a who's who of politics and hollywood: Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, Jesse Bradford as Thatcher, a college buddy of Bush, James Cromwell as George H. W. Bush, Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney (originally, Stone was interested in Robert Duvall for the role, but he turned it down), Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld, Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush, Ioan Gruffudd, Jason Ritter as Jeb Bush, Noah Wyle as Donald Evans, Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell and Toby Jones as Karl Rove. Josh Brolin steps into the shoes of the American President and he spoke about the role to EW Magazine, especially about the mannerisms such as the walk, "It changes over the years, how he walks in his 30s, how he walks in foreign lands, before 9/11 and afterward. People hold their emotions in their bodies. They can't fake it. Especially him."

When news broke that W was in production, Stone told the movie industry newspaper Variety that the movie would ask a very simple question: 'How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?' Bush, a former Texas governor, has never hidden the fact that he once battled alcoholism, but says he quit after a particularly heavy night on his 40th birthday in 1986 and has not touched a drop since.

Stone is a three-time Oscar winner. His directed films have been nominated for 31 Academy Awards, including eight for acting, six for screen writing, and three for directing. Not only is he well suited for making a movie about one of the most controversial figures of the 21st century, he is also the most capable since throughout his career, controversy has played a vital part in Oliver Stone’s success.

President Bush's actions have secured him a place in history books for years to come, but it will be Stone's portrayal of his character that will truly immortalize the President.

Science Fiction or Science Reality

Science Fiction literature and entertainment have given us many awe inspiring visions of the future. From visions of space travel, to weird and alien life forms and advanced technology, Science Fiction and the minds behind it, have shown us the future.

But science fiction doesn’t stay science fiction for long, soon the dates mentioned in the stories come to pass and hardly a whimper happens. The scope of Science Fiction is such that it would take many articles to properly categorize and review each and every advancement or predictions; this is just aimed to be the first of some.

It would take an unprecedented amount of time to tally each and every timeline, since there are many, therefore only a selected few have been presented here. Along with a list of notable entries.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Perhaps the best known date in science fiction, Arthur C Clarke's magnum opus and Stanley Kubrick's defining cinematic venture, 2001: A Space Odyssey has been hailed as a motion picture before its time and one of the last century's defining science fiction work of literature. It has been labeled by unexplainable by some and one of the most intelligent murder mysteries of all time, but it is filled with technological advancements that thrilled and awed audiences of the late 60s.

But 2001 the year itself came and went. What were the advancements we were promised by Clarke and Kubrick? Many. First and foremost, the illusive Artificial Intelligence. In the story, one of the main characters is HAL 9000, a sentient computer that not only enjoys chess, but also a good conversation. Clarke denies he used a one-letter-shift from IBM to come up with the name.

January 12, 1997 is an important date in the novel, because that's when HAL 9000 is first activated. Computer enthusiasts celebrated this date without the birthday computer as we are light years away from a sentient, artificial intelligence. HAL is responsible for making sure that the spaceship Discovery continues with her missions safely and keeping its crew is proper hibernation.

That's another thing, suspended animation. Since the mission in space will take time, scientists today are working diligently to discover how life can be preserved long enough to make the time and distance traveled, but we are still miles and years away from the technology. Something we're relatively closer to are lunar colonies. NASA already plans on establishing a lunar colony by 2020 along the lunar poles.

In the story, sometime in early 2001 the alien monolith is discovered on the moon, kick starting the story but recently scientists have been trying hard to discover as little as water on the lunar surface, alien objects are still the stuff of science fiction.

Star Trek

Though Clarke and Kubrick told a great science fiction story, they didn't imagine the future. That was the job for futurist and TV writer, Gene Rodenberry. On September 8, 1966, Roddenberry went boldly where no one had gone before; the debut of Star Trek gave us strange new worlds and alien life, and a world the futurist hoped would come true.

Gene Roddenberry had a utopia in mind when he thought about the future, because the times that he lived in were setting up an apocalyptic and probably despotic future. Racial segregation, war in the far-east and the rise of the cold war between the US and the Soviets, were just some of the troubles brewing on the horizon.

Eugenics Wars begin when a group of genetically bred 'super-humans' seize control of one-quarter of the globe, plunging Earth into a terrible conflict. Some Trek historians refer to this as The Third World War and according to the character of Spock, some 37 million people lost their lives. As the Eugenics Wars end, the genetic tyrants are overthrown. One "super-human", Khan Noonien Singh, escapes into space aboard the SS Botany Bay. He would later on appear in an infamous episode of the TV series, "Space Seed" and an entire movie dedicated to him, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.

The 1990s are long gone now, and although we gladly didn't suffer any world wars, the 90s saw a myriad of conflicts that have reshaped the world. Firstly, the Gulf War began for the first time, a conflict that continues to rage on until today with no clear end in sight.

Strangely a certain aspect of this has come true. Genetic engineering and cloning are slowly emerging as the frontier of science with a big "WARNING" sign stuck to its fence. With such a list of conflicts and wars, perhaps the mythos of Star Trek wasn't that far off. But it was from the ashes of these fires that Roddenberry imagined mankind would be reborn from.

But the future Star Trek went on to present, came up with interesting concepts that are seeing the light of day. Communicators or Mobile Phones?

UFO: The TV Series

Not many people would know about Gerry Anderson, but they'd know about his TV shows, and amongst Terrahawks and Thunderbirds, UFO is one of them. Originally made in 1971, the TV series was set 10 years into the future, 1980, when a fictional organization is created to deal with an impending alien invasion. For only a ten year jump, the show's vision of the future was sleek and very tech savvy and it made many predictions, some came true others didn’t.

Car telephones for example, the series would often show cars with phones in them. By the early 1980s, technology had almost gotten the phone into a car by way of a small briefcase. We also got to see cordless telephones for the first time and they did come true by the early and mid 1980s. The show also predicted the widespread use of the computer, granted it didn’t look small, but even thought computers were well on their way in the 1980s, especially the Macs, the home computer didn't quite hit home until the mid and late 90s, all thanks to Mr Gates and his Windows operating system. Several other technological advancements were highlighted in the show, such as voice print identification systems; also, vocal analysis used to identify individuals in the same way as fingerprints. These systems didn't see the light of day until the later half of the 1990s, when privacy became such an issue. Another aspect, though not dealing with science, was the fact that racial prejudice was completely eliminated, something that has not seen the light of day even now and remains the stuff of fiction.

These were but some of the aspects of Science Fiction that have showed us the story of human potential. The imagination of a few authors, filmmakers, and artists have shaped the future of millions, the choice of making it come true however is only limited by our own potential and imagination.

Silent Running

Long before there was Inconvenient Truth, there was Silent Running. Living up to its name, this silent hit from the early 70s was one of the first movies warning about the effects of global warming. The movie was clever in the fact that its premise stated that in the near future, the Earth would not be able to sustain life.

Bruce Dern plays a botanist living on green houses on space freighters around the orbit of Saturn. He caters for the last surviving species of plant life within these giant green houses along with robot helpers. Even as we speak, NASA has gathered several species of plant like and is catering to them on the International Space Station. It isn't as epic as Silent Running, nor does it serve the same purpose, but it is a small step in what would be mass preservation of earth's ecology. Using the same thought, but on a much grander scale, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure seedbank located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near the town of Longyearbyen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. With support from a diverse financial institutions and donors like The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Vault's purpose is to preserve seeds of various plants from across the world. Although it's not in orbit around Saturn, the almost alien and frozen landscape of the northern hemisphere is as close to science fiction we'll get.

These are just some of the Science Fiction inventions, ideas, events that have happened in books or on the big screen. To capture each and every single invention, idea or event, would truly require an imagination of epic proportions…

The following is a list of inventions and technologies, discussed before their time, but now seen in everyday life.

1867 From the Earth to the Moon

Depicting man's journey to the Moon, Verne was responsible for predicting many interesting aspects of Space travel. From the fact that it was retro-rockets that carried man, to the strange coincidence that they would be launched from Florida.

1888 Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy

It has been rated as one of the most remarkable books of American literature, in it writer / lawyer Bellamy talks about many modern day inventions, such as Credit Cards and shopping Malls.

1889 In the Year 2889 by Jules Verne

Verne wasn't just about traveling to the Moon, in this book he talked about getting up to date news update long before the likes of CNN and even 3G mobile phones.

1895 The Crack of Doom by Robert Cromie

One of the earliest references of an Atomic Bomb.

1899 When the Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells

Famous for this Martian invasion and time machine, Wells dabbled with information and entertainment technology in this novel by showing inventions that pre-dated the iPod and conventional DVD and VCR players.

1911 Ralph 124c 41 + by Hugo Gernsback

This turn of the century novel talks about personalized news, much like we get with services like Google alerts to underground, undersea, tunnels, like the Channel Tunnel.

1920 R.U.R. by Karel Capek

Though we're quite far away from an actual Robot, the term 'robot' was first used here.

1923 Men Like Gods by H.G. Wells

Proving his consistency to imagine new technological wonders, Wells depicts Wireless Networks in this novel.

1931 The Prince of Space by Jack Williamson

In the novel's City of Space, we get to see a habitat where human live in outer space, much like they have started to do now with the International Space Station.

1934 Triplanetary by E.E. 'Doc' Smith

Wells described the system, but it was Smith that explored the possibility of the medium of entertainment as platinum discs. He was off about the material, but CDs and DVDs of prove that she was right.

1941 Methuselah's Children by Robert Heinlein

This novel by the scribe of Starship Troopers, this novel discusses the invention of genetically engineered food.

1948 Space Cadet by Robert Heinlein

Again, Heinlein shows his prowess for the imagination by showing off "portable" or mobile phones, as we now know them, in this story.

For further reading on what kind of inventions first appeared in the books of science fiction, visit http://www.technovelgy.com/

What An Anti-Climax

It was the centre of attention for the entire world, until that is, it started with barely a whimper. And then it broke down.

On Friday, September 19, 2008, a malfunction in the Large Hadron Collider forced repairs to the giant machine, and it seems, a very large setback. The particle accelerator, the largest of its kind, had to be shut down for repairs.

An electrical link failure between the two 30-tonne superconducting magnets failed, causing a magnet quench. The failure raised the temperature from its operating temperature of -271°C up to 100 °C. Because of the sheer dimensions of the LHC, and the size of the superconducting magnets, the re-cooling and repairs are expected to take another two months.

The temperatures are colder than outer space, and take at least two months to be reached. Whereas, the repairs will only take a few days, and are necessary to steer particles along the speeds of light.

But time is not exactly what scientists have in great amounts. If the repairs and re-cooling is completed before winter, the first of the collisions can take place this year. During the winters, however, the LHC is shut down to save on energy costs and this would mean there will not be any collisions or experiments until 2009.

Scientists at CERN are not worried about this at all. Getting to this point in time, after more than 20 years and costing that reaches up to 8 billion dollars, this seems like an acceptable and expectable setback.

James Gillies, director of communications at CERN, spoke about the incident. “If you keep an eye on the big picture, we've been building the machine for 20 years. The switch-on was always going to be a long process,” said Gillies. “A year or two down the line, this moment will be a distant memory, and we'll be running smoothly.”

Unfinished Business: Development Hell for Movies!

“Abandon all hope, all ye who enter.” One can only imagine what was going through Dante’s mind when he entered the door with these words etched over it. Of course, he was a character in a book (the author himself) taking the reader on a journey into the abyss and ultimately, paradise. Dante Alighieri’s fictional account looked at what life would be like in the depths of hell for us humans, but there exists another hell…one that’s especially for films.

Plagued by issues of money, creative differences, copyright issues, power-hungry stars/producers, numerous script rewrites, casting issues — agony and torture await any motion picture that should find its way here. The damned here is primarily made up of adaptations of novels, comic books, videogames, plays and musicals.

It’s an interesting lot and some have been here for quite a while whereas others not so much. Some are sequels in the making, others big budget blockbusters…you name it and it’s here. So let’s see what lies in the depths of this pit and what has braved this damnation to finally find release in the paradise of box office success.

At the top and on its way out is Tintin. The rights to this Belgian comic were bought by Steven Spielberg in the 1980s and together with Roman Polanski, they planned to make a trilogy. That plan, however, completely fell apart when Polanski and Spielberg could not agree over creative visions, and Spielberg himself not being satisfied with the scripts. But now, after almost 20 years in limbo, Tintin is about to see the light of day. In May of 2007, Spielberg announced that he will team up with director Peter Jackson (both Lord of the Rings and King Kong served their time here) and release the trilogy back-to-back by using motion capture technology and computer animation. There’s no release date yet, but it seems that this project just might find its way out yet.

Next up is a sequel-in-waiting to two action-comedy-horror blockbusters which probably will never see the light of day because of creative procrastination. Ghostbusters 3 was announced sometime in the 1990s, and though initially dismissed as a rumour, writer/acter Dan Aykroyd has been acknowledging its release. Two scripts had been drafted but eventually the project fell through because Bill Murray simply did not want to bust ghosts anymore. There are plans, however, for a videogame to be made on the scripts for the potential film.

Rendezvous with Rama, a science fiction book by Arthur C. Clarke, spiraled into film purgatory after constant production delays. Morgan Freeman originally wanted to star and produce the film through his studio, Revelation Studios, sometime in the late ’90s. Though still in pre-production status and David Fincher’s name attached, the film only continues to spiral its way down deeper into the abyssal pit.

Recent years have seen the revival of many franchises from the 1980s, Starsky & Hutch, Swat, Dukes of Hazzard, to name a few. Producer and creator Paul Maslansky announced that he was interested in reviving his franchise of the Police Academy for an eighth outing. “I felt it was time to start again. I saw that Starsky & Hutch and a number of other revivals were doing really well. Police Academy has such a great history, so I thought ‘why not’?” he told news website, UGO.com. But that was over four years ago, and there hasn’t been a mention of Police Academy 8 since.

Another TV franchise unable to escape from the pit is the Six Million Dollar Man. Optioned in the 1990s, Kevin Smith provided several treatments for the script. Then, Jim Carrey was attached to the project and by that time the film had been reduced to something completely different from the original concept into a comedic and ironic adaptation.

The space at the bottom is reserved for one of its worst sufferers. Though by no means is any one film bad than the other, since it’s all about damnation here, this film has gained a sort of notoriety because of its subject matter and those who have seen it know that this is a disaster just waiting to happen. The Day the Clown Cried is an unfinished, unreleased, motion picture originally filmed in 1972, co-written and directed by Jerry Lewis. The story tells of a former circus clown in Germany during the Holocaust who makes a deal with the Nazis after finding himself in a concentration camp. Helmut Doork (Lewis) will lure children into the gas chamber for as long as he is in the concentration camp, and Nazis will spare his life. But Doork suffers a crisis of conscience and takes matters into his own hands by walking into a gas chamber himself with the children. This sort of stuff would make the Pied Piper give up his day job.

Harry Shearer (Simpsons) spoke to Spy Magazine in 1992, about the time he got to see a rough draft of The Day the Clown Cried in 1979. “With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This film is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. ‘Oh, my God!’ is all you can say.” Shearer went on to say that he told Lewis the film was, “terrible” which of course made Lewis furious.

Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton were the original writers of the script based on O’Brien’s novel of the same name. They unanimously agreed that they would never allow this film to be released simply because of the “ridiculous” changes made to the script by Lewis. The master comedian, on the other hand, has other ideas. He has told close friends that this film “will see the light of day” and that all he needs to do is to “get some establishing shots and make the title and end credits.”

Rumour has it that the only existing copy of this film is in Lewis’ office, where he keeps it in a vault and occasionally shows it to journalists and friends. To this day no one knows where the original negatives of the film are being kept.

What if the leading punk band of its time decided to follow in the steps of the Beatles and make a film about a day in their lives? Then you’d have punk rock legends Sex Pistols, screenwriter and critic Roger Ebert, and tawdry film-maker Russ Myer making Who Killed Bambi? Only a day-and-a-half worth of footage was shot before the film’s studio saw the footage of the dailies and pulled all financing from the film and ordered all sets built to be destroyed.

Though these are just some of the damned, there are many, many more. A recent new entry Spinning into Butter, which stars Sarah Jessica Parker (Sex in the City though, a TV series, found itself in development hell due to the unwillingness of Kim Cattrall but was the biggest chick flick of 2008), has found its way into film puragtory after no studio sanctioned it for release.

There are newcomers and films that may have stayed here for forever, but there are some films that manage to escape and live an almost dream-like success life at the box office. There is a picture that found so much success after it escaped film hell that it spawned two sequels (and a fourth one in the making), a gigantic entertainment franchise, transformed its founding company from a comic book company to an entertainment company, launched the careers of its actors as blockbuster stars and established its director/producer as a Hollywood bigshot. The film is Spider-Man.

Originally a dream project for James Cameron, the film changed numerous studios, from Cannon films, to Carolco, to 20th Century Fox until finally to MGM/UA where it found itself stuck in a tangled web of litigation and legalities. It wasn’t until 1999 when there was a trade-off between MGM/UA and Sony Pictures: Sony won’t make its version of James Bond and MGM/UA will relinquish all rights of the Spider-Man franchise to Sony. Free at last, Spider-Man swung its way into box office glory after years of being entangled in a web of red tape.There you have it. Just some of the denizens of film purgatory waiting to see the light of day. There are, however, many more. All it will take for them to see salvation is time, a whole lot of money and even more determination, for the path to box office paradise is a long and tedious one.

Woe to the Gmail.

Google's free email service, Gmail, revolutionised web-based email services trouncing both Hotmail and Yahoo! from their respective thrones when it was launched on April 1, 2004. It offered a mammoth one gigabyte of free space, with both POP3 and IMAP capabilities, and was an invite-only beta service at the time.

Fast forward four years, the free space is up to 6GBs, the service is free and open for all, the email service is linked to an online office application suite complete with a calendar and has a built-in chat service. With so many features, it is no wonder that Gmail has become a favourite among users worldwide. But being the best has a price: once Gmail achieved the status of an award winning multi-million user free email service, it became the target to the malicious hackers of the world.

People were blocked out of their own accounts, the data that they had stored online compromised — not to mention valuable information such as credit card details. Also, since Gmail was linked to other services such as Orkut, the vastness of the damage caused by such attacks can only be imagined.

Gmail uses a well-known web programming techniques called Ajax. These techniques use JavaScript to make function calls. At the same time, JavaScript transmits data such as emails and contacts in plaintext as data in the page source code. Hackers can then eavesdrop on this and become privy to personal and private information. But besides hackers, Google scans each and every email before it is open for the receiver. Users and critics alike have expressed concern over the fact that someone — even a computer — was reading and or scanning each mail that arrives. It puts the entire issue of e-privacy into question.

Consider this fact: each and every search query made into Google is saved. If you are logged into Gmail and searching on Google at the same time, then Google saves your search queries in particular, meaning that you build up a menagerie of your past searches and its results.

Not only that, Google combines the search queries with the information contained in the user’s email. No one knows why such information is gathered and Google states it is following industry-wide practices. One of the possible purposes derived by the critics is that such information is used by law enforcement agencies around the world. If that is not all, deleted information (such as mails) may take up to 60 days before they are removed from Google’s backup systems. Though Google has issued statements that it is actively restructuring its systems to remove deleted data faster, users are not that impressed.

With so much unsure information surrounding Gmail’s services, one can imagine it would be a pretty easy prey for hackers to target users and their Gmail accounts. But, the fact remains that even with all its shortcomings, there are plenty of users who are happy with its service.

Qasim Makkani, Associate Creative Director at an advertising agency, is an avid user of Gmail. His reasons for using Gmail are obvious, “It had unbelievable storage capacity, very convenient to use (very user-friendly), you can send and receive heavy attachments, and it's a darn cool brand,” he gushes about the services and offers suggestions on improving them.

But even Makkani has had bad experiences with the service when his account was hacked. "I tried logging in one day and my password didn't work. Someone had hacked my Gmail and used it to hack my Skype as well. This hacker was calling my Skype contacts and talking to my Gmail contacts, trying to get financial information out of them." Like many users, he tried contacting Gmail but got little to no response from them, besides automated replies.

Kiran Farooque, senior account executive at a PR firm in Dubai also uses Gmail. “I use Gmail because it is fast and efficient. I especially love the conversation threads which keep my mailbox organised.” But like most good users, she uses a simple technique which has kept her email account safe from the prying eyes and codes of hackers. “I believe in changing my passwords very frequently. I change them nearly every two weeks.”

Despite these insecurities, the fact remains that Gmail is an extremely popular service, and the number of users is growing. What is needed — until the Google team mends the loopholes in their security structure – is to keep strict vigil on our accounts and continue to enjoy the service and its many fun benefits.

Following are a few ways for users to save their accounts from being compromised and for staying safe.

It’s all in the “S”

When visiting Gmail, a simple addition of an “s” to the address directs the user through a secure service, instead of a public one. Hacker attacks rely on techniques called “sniffing traffic”; a basic SSL encryption in your traffic makes it impossible (or very difficult) to hack. The address will be https://mail.google.com/mail/ and you are off to your secure browsing.

Filter it

The time when you are logged on to Gmail in one window (or tab) and in the other window you are navigating other pages, is when you are the most vulnerable to hacking. A hacker uses this time to add a filter within your email and uses that as a gateway to obtain certain types of email. To avoid this happening, you need to just periodically check both the ‘Filters’ and the ‘Forwarding and POP’ sections. Make sure every filter and setting is one that you have entered

Gmail’s help centre

Though they may be sluggish in responding to your queries, there are a lot of helpful tips readily available on Gmail’s Help Centre.

(This article originally appeared in the June 7th Edition of Sci-Tech, 2008 - It was incorrectly attributed to another author.)