Seoul and Hong Kong

I visited Seoul for a short training program this year in May, and while on the way back had an opportunity to spend few hours in Hong Kong (Thanks to the long transit hours).  Well this was two months before the Korean hit ‘Gangnam Style’ was released. I came to know of Olympics and watched the first Olympic  games in Television, when it happened in Seoul and at that time (1980’s) never thought or even dreamt that I would visit it later in my life.

Namsan Seoul Tower

Seoul is a neat, clean and big city. I had the opportunity to visit few places like the Namsan Seoul Tower and the Gyeongbokgung palace. In Seoul’s love tower there is an interesting practice of lovers tying locks – called love padlocks to fences and then throwing the keys away.  The Gyeongbokgung palace has a long history dating back to 14th Century. It is a beautiful and picturesque place to watch.

King Sejong

While roaming around I found a number of shops that sell women’s beauty products and I should say such shops were almost everywhere, and I realized the magnitude of this business only here.  BB (Blemish Balm) Cream and perfumes are something to look out for in these shops. I also observed a good number of Coffee Shops like Starbucks and assumed that Koreans are fond of Coffee and Chocolate (Lotte is famous and has huge presence here, as the founder is from Korea), till I discovered Ginseng Tea.

I found that people are generally helpful. Myself and my friends lost our way and a passer-by took us to the local traffic cop who dropped us at our Hotel.  I also observed that people were widely using smart phones and relying on apps for many services.

Two things that are of concern to me was food and Language. For a vegetarian (different from vegan, as Milk and its byproducts are fine with me), its really tough to find vegetarian food / dishes. Also communicating with the people to ensure that a food item does not contain meat or fish was difficult. Communicating in English was a problem, many a times.

On the way back, I managed to spend few hours in Hong Kong. I roamed around the streets, saw a good number of Indian restaurants, spent some time in Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Museum, knowing about his life and traveled to the  Kowloon Island through the Star ferry service – saw the Star-Cruise luxury ships on the way. In Kowloon, took a local bus to go and see Sky Towers, which was quite disappointing,(probably it would have been better in day times) and then took the Airport Express – Metro train connecting three islands – Hongkong, Kowloon, and  Chep Lak Kok (An artificial island) to reach Airport.

Hong Kong Skyline

Both HongKong and Seoul are nice places to visit for an Holiday

The Laminated Truth in Digital World

It was the early 1990’s, when I was in my high school.  Lamination as a technology and as a industry was growing and touching our everyday lives – in the form of laminated identity card, laminated report card, laminated photographs etc…  It protected the cards and photographs from being smudged or stained. 

We were then quite surprised by the ‘neat and clean’ work done, through lamination, and it became so entrenched in our conversations, a new phrase called “Laminated Truth” was created – to mean absolute truth! and to convey that the information or message heard (invariably over heard) by that person has not been altered or modified in any way. Determining the truthfulness of this “laminated truth” is entirely a different matter altogether … 

Coming back to today’s digital world, where “cut & paste” is the norm, and documents could easily be forged, how do you achieve this “laminated truth”?  – The answer is Cryptography. A mathematical one-way function called Cryptographic Hash Function produces a fixed-size bit string for the input message. The beauty of this function is that any alteration in the input message, even as insignificant as punctuation, will produce a different output bit string. For instance “Its mine” and “Its mine.” will produce different bit strings, as the second message contains a period at the end. 

The fixed-size output bit string produced by the Cryptographic Hash Function is called as “Message Digest”, which form the basis for a “Digital Signature”.  The digital signature is nothing but the encryption of the “Message Digest” by using a key that is personal (private key) to the author or signer of the message. This encrypted digital signature could then be decrypted only by using the one and the only another key that has a mathematical pairing with the key used for encryption, and which is generally announced publicly (public key) by the author or signer.  

Therefore the signer has a pair of keys with him or her – One of them is announced publicly – called public key, another is kept secretly – called private key. A message encrypted using public key could be decrypted only by using the private key, and a message encrypted by using private key could only be decrypted using the public key.  The digital signature provides a reliable mechanism for anybody to determine whether a message is indeed a laminated truth!