Hidden Reflex Documents

Beyond the Browser: Widgets and Rich Internet/Desktop Applications (RIDAs): 

This presentation was given at a Bangalore Barcamp by Hidden Reflex. It's meant to inform software developers, designers and business development folks on how web widgets (e.g. Netvibes, Rockyou), desktop widgets (e.g. Dashboard, Google Gadgets) and RIDAs, mobile widgets, rich internet/desktop applications, (e.g. Adobe's AIR, Dekoh) can enhance and expand website and company services. It discusses potential widget business models (potentially sustainable and unsustainable ones), and why a firm would want to create a desktop widget or application (a RIDA) instead of a web widget or RIA (rich internet application which is website-based i.e. lives in the browser).


Beyond The Browser Powerpoint Presentation

Against Fee-Based and other Pernicious Net Prejudice: An Explanation and Examination of the Net Neutrality Debate

This essay by Alok explains the net neutrality debate from the bottom-up (e.g. from the way the internet, a packet-switching network, works) in a simple way anyone can understand. The approach of beginning with the simplest premises and assumptions on how the internet works provides a very new framework for the debate and leads to interesting, new conclusions.

To summarize the argument, defining net neutrality as the idea that every packet must be treated equally, there's an alternative, net prejudice, in which packets can be treated prejudicially (or preferentially depending on your perspective!). Through analyzing the kinds of technologies involved in sincere and rent-seeking net prejudice, the essay arrives at conclusions that protections are needed (e.g. legislation) not so much to protect net neutrality but rather to protect against pernicious net prejudice, and these protections won't inhibit any technological innovation (e.g. IPv6 which provides for quality of service or net prejudice) nor provide any disincentives to telecommunications infrastructure investment.


Net Neutrality Essay