Diaspora

by 0 comments on "Tamil subtitles for the “Diaspora* next online revolution” video"

I saw this Diaspora* promotional video posted on Diaspora* (https://diasp.org/posts/463943) and there was a request to translate it to as many languages as possible. Myself and Bala anna thought that we could contribute. So a couple of nights back, we sat together and tried to translate the English subtitles to Tamil. As we progressed sentence by sentence, we realized that we were out of touch with proper Tamil, though we have lived most of our lives in Tamil Nadu. There were a lot of words in English that we didn’t remember or couldn’t find out the Tamil equivalent. Google Transliterate and Google Translate came to our help. The challenge with using Google Translate was that it gave us the literal translation of the words and not the actual meaning that English sentences conveyed. So we had to add our own touch to a lot of the words that showed up on Google Translate. For example, I translated ‘Social Network’ to ‘???? ????????????’ but I have no idea if it is correct. Constructing words creatively was so much fun that hours went by without either of us noticing. We also took liberty to rename the characters Zoey and Finn to ???? and ??????? as they were much more Tamil-friendly 😉 There were some sentences and words that were extremely challenging – “personal profiles, groups, apps, mobile interface, mentions, ash texts, re-sharing , and on top, there is social network’s integration”. Now how would you translate that? :mrgreen: See the video to find out.

Though the subtitle used in the video does leave out some of the words and meaning from the original transcript, I did have a version that translated it fully. 🙂 The subtitle is hosted on GitHub and please help us in improving the quality of the translation. YouTube has mangled the Tamil text and spelling in some places while displaying the caption, but the GitHub repository should have the correct text.

I feel an immense sense of happiness and satisfaction in contributing to a wonderful initiative! If you have any issues in watching the embedded video, you could watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4mMSxWEnjU. Do turn on the Tamil subtitles and give me your feedback. 🙂

by 1 comment on "As a birthday gift to myself, I quit Facebook and deleted my account"

Update: Almost 2.5 years after deleting my Facebook account and writing this post, I have gone back to Facebook and created a new account for myself. This time I will be mainly a passive viewer on Facebook and WhatsApp (which I joined a bit earlier) and keep myself protected from Facebook’s evil designs by doing everything necessary. Details are probably long enough to warrant write a separate post some time later 🙂

I am really glad that my parting message inspired a few of my friends to join Diaspora on one of the pods (http://diasp.org). Here is the message for the benefit of those who didn’t read it before I deleted my account. It strengthens my belief that we can empower our friends with freedom.

As a birthday gift to myself, I am quitting Facebook and deleting my account.

Why? Facebook (and a lot of other websites) tracks and stalks the users (and non-users too, through shadow profiles) all over the internet and make money by selling information about you and targeting advertisements at you. The kind of evil things they do, I am too offended to even list here.

I want to be in full control of my data and privacy, which is why I wanted to quit Facebook about 6 months back. But I decided to wait till my birthday so that I can pass on the message to my Facebook friends who visit my wall to wish me on my birthday.

I already use a lot of anti-tracking measures – Using Facebook only in incognito mode, using a lot of browser extensions like Ghostery, Facebook blocker and browser settings to keep the tracking to a minimum. The all-pervasive Facebook social plugins which put “Like” buttons on all websites are pure evil. They help Facebook to track your internet activities – what websites you visit, what links you click, what your interests are and much more.

I am interested in getting to know more about people whom I have encountered in my life and also to find interesting people. But Facebook barely facilitates that. My ‘News feed’ is full of spam from an ever-growing list of Facebook applications, scam/spam/porn posts broadcast across friends by friends who are smart enough to be easily fooled by such things and Youtube videos, celebrity photos and etc. which I am totally not interested in. Previously there used to be a filter for the news feed through which only the status updates could be viewed, but Facebook has removed it.

Facebook never deletes the user data from its servers even after the user deletes own account. That doesn’t matter to me as I am more bothered about not giving Facebook any more data.

We don’t need a Yahoo! email account to be able to send emails to other Yahoo! users. All that is needed is a valid email account on the internet. But to keep in touch with friends on Facebook or Twitter or Google+ we need accounts on those websites. How sensible is that? There are a lot of other social network which value users’ privacy and also provide inter-operability, meaning you can follow a user on other social network from your current social network. This is possible through a lot of upcoming open standards. Identica (running the StatusNet software), Diaspora are a couple of social networks that provide this feature.

So how do you get in touch with me once I quit Facebook? Those who are in touch with me, already know how to reach me through other means. 🙂 If you are not one of those, but still want to get in touch with me, you will find me on Google+, Twitter, Identica (http://identi.ca/guruprasad) and Diaspora (http://diasp.org/u/guruprasad) and of course my website (//www.lguruprasad.in/) and my blog (//www.lguruprasad.in/blog/). If you are already thinking why I am still on Google+ and Twitter after blabbering about privacy, tracking and control over my data, just hold on. I am on my way to get out of those too pretty soon 🙂