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Karol Bagh Logs On

Anurag Prasad BSCAL

After the Internet boom, every other day there is a portal being launched and each one claims to be the first business-to-business site in the relevant sector in India. The rat race of launching `portals' was joined by the shopkeepers of major markets of metropolitan cites when they launched sites like delhibazaaronline.com, chennaionline.com, mumbai-mart.com, hyderabadbazaar.com and many others.

In Delhi there are a few good shopping malls such as Connaught Place, Central Market in Lajpat Nagar or the South Extension market. The Internet revolution brought these markets on the Net. inkarolbagh.com is one such site that claims to offer online shopping from `the largest market in Asia'. The site is the `certified official' site of Karol Bagh. The Ajmal Khan Road Trader's Association have certified this site (they even display the certificate to prove their authenticity).

 

To use the facilities of the site one has to register. inkarolbagh.com lists shops in various categories like jewellery, sarees, personal care, fashion ware, electronic, auto ancillaries and what ever else is available on the Ajmal Khan road market. Apart from these they also have sections dedicated to hotels, tours and travel, eating joints and property dealers too.

One interesting part of the site is the link that takes you to a section where the `sale' or discounts being given by various shops and companies in Karol Bagh have been listed. It also gives option to the surfer to put his stuff on the Net and exchange it with other listed items in the barter section.

The site gives a link on the homepage that tells you about the future attractions. This includes payment via credit and debt cards. But this will happen only after the RBI clears such transactions. The site is also planning online hotel and ticket bookings. Rather an old concept, nevertheless, these are the integral part of an e-commerce site. They also plan to home deliver flowers, cassettes and CDs. Over all a clean and nice site seen in terms of the Karol Bagh market. And, of course, they have plans to deliver sweets free of cost during the festive season.

The main aim of the IT Bill passed recently is to put a check on misuse of the Net. But often sites like anonymizer.com make a mockery of such Bills and laws. The mission of this site is to ensure that an individual's right to privacy is not compromised once they are online. This means that the surfer can visit any site without his identity being revealed. In other words we can say that one can surf any site without being tracked.

Generally when a visitor requests to a site by cliking on the link or typing the URL of the site, the required web page is retrieved from the Net and brought to the browser. However, any ISP or intermediary proxy server is able to track these movements and can tell how often the site has been visited.

The Anonymizer URL Encryption protects one from this breach of privacy by taking each web page link and encrypting it using a secure algorithm. This encrypted text is decipherable only by Anonymizer servers. When you click on one of these links, the Anonymizer server retrieves the required page from the Internet, encrypts the links in that page's code and forwards it to you. Intrusive ISPs attempting to keep server logs of your page requests will, therefore, only register meaningless data.

But the services are not for free. For surfing via anonymizer.com one has to register and pay $14.99 or Rs 661.80 for three months and for one year it is $49.99 or Rs 2207.05. These rate options apply if one is surfing from India. The best part about the site is that one can pay in Indian currency at the daily exchange rate. Payment can be made by Demand Draft in Indian Rupees, payable to TIPS Computers & Electronics Pvt Ltd at Secunderabad.

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First Published: May 27 2000 | 12:00 AM IST

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