Features

Dreams of Joy
Lisa See
New York: Random House, 2012
Pp. 375 

“Dreams of Joy” features a Chinese family that is torn apart by personal failings, war and post-revolutionary borders, but persists in trying to reconstruct itself. Lisa See packs so many dramatic events, contrasting landscapes, human conflicts, personality shifts and socio-political changes into an average-size novel that one may be inclined to second the words of Pearl, who says towards the end, “I think I can have no emotions left in me, yet my feelings are so very big, their borders can’t be seen.” (p. 347)

As the novel opens, Joy discovers that her mother, Pearl, is actually her aunt; her Auntie May is her real mother; Pearl’s husband, who raised her, is not her father; and both women were in love with Z. G., her real father. Those who have read “Shanghai Girls” will know this background. “Dreams of Joy” is a sequel, but can be read alone.  

Confused and anguished by the sudden revelation of these family secrets, Joy runs away from home in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, and heads for The People’s Republic of China to find Z.G. and join the revolution, in defiance of her family’s distain for communism. It is 1957. The revolution is relatively new. Joy is only 17, and has no idea of the choices her mother and aunt faced in escaping after Japan’s invasion during World War II, but soon she will make agonising choices of her own. 

As Joy narrates her journey to Shanghai, where Z. G. is a famous artist, and then to a small Chinese village, where she joins a people’s commune, marries and has a child, one admires her ingenuity and determination. At first, one may not be so strongly drawn to Pearl, who narrates the other half of the novel. As she sets off for China, returning after 20 years to find her daughter and bring her home, she seems a bit stuffy and embittered, but her coming to terms with the past sparks personal growth. Her search for Joy becomes a search for joy. Both Joy and Pearl navigate precarious psychological and physical borders, while May plays a supportive role from back home in the US. 

The novel is filled with delicious as well as horrifying images and details. Chinese culture and art, both pre- and post-revolutionary, is showcased. Pearl’s memories recreate “the good old days” in Shanghai; villagers are seen synthesising the new revolutionary culture with their inherited folk traditions, but Joy begins to notice that the proclaimed equality for women is mainly symbolic. Each major character is identified by his or her astrological sign and its adherent characteristics.

Joy, for example, is a Tiger, thought to be romantic and artistic, but also rash, and she lives up to all these qualities. Yet, her experience and the values acquired from her family push her beyond a pre-determined character as she matures and begins to see the world with more realism and nuances. The author creates characters who grow, using their assumed nature to fight the burden of the past; most of those who fight against fate are women, especially mothers.

Chinese cuisine is also showcased in both its opulence and its absence. One reads of the luscious variety of the pre-revolutionary, upper-class diet, but also village food, while simple, is relatively plentiful and healthy, until Chairman Mao declares the Great Leap Forward soon after Joy joins the people’s commune. It is now known that a combination of wrong agricultural practices and the setting of totally unrealistic goals led to mass starvation in China at that time. 

Yet, knowing that millions died during the Great Leap Forward is nothing compared to reading See’s vivid descriptions of the daily meaning of slow starvation in terms of human suffering, and the lengths to which people will go when they are starving. The peasants knew that this policy wouldn’t work, but no dissent was tolerated, locking thousands into their “fate” — a man-made catastrophe. 

The battle between fate and human empowerment is only one theme explored in this novel. There are also different visions of the Chinese Revolution, from Joy’s original idealism about creating a new society of equality, to Pearl’s middle-class opposition, and Z.G.’s pragmatic compromises to stay in favour with the party. All the major characters love China, but tragically, most are unable to live there.

The overriding theme, however, is the power of a mother’s love for her child. The story shows that such love is not restricted to the birth mother but can flourish in any woman who has cared for a child. Having a daughter pushes Joy to define her priorities. She realises she is not motivated by art for art’s sake, nor by politics, but by emotions. “Of these emotions, the strongest is love — love for my two mothers, my two fathers, and my baby… We’re three generations of women who’ve suffered and laughed, struggled and triumphed.” (p. 322)

SAN JOSE, California — Tired of trying to remember a different password for each of your online accounts? Or worried about re-using the same password too many times? You’re not alone. Tech experts agree that traditional passwords are annoying, outmoded and too easily hacked.

This week, Yahoo and Microsoft offered up some alternatives: Yahoo says it can text temporary passwords to users’ phones each time they want to sign into their Yahoo accounts. Microsoft says it is building facial-recognition and fingerprint-identification technology into Windows 10, the new computer operating system coming this summer, so users can log on with their fingertip or face. The two approaches drew different reviews.

Here’s what you should know: 

New day, new password

Convenience and security. That’s what Yahoo is promising users who choose to receive a single-use password “on demand” — sent by text message to their mobile phone each time they want to sign into their Yahoo account. Once you opt into the programme, there’s no more need to create or memorise a password for Yahoo’s e-mail or other services.

Not a good move, experts say.

“Yahoo just made it easier for attackers to compromise an account,” said Tim Erlin, risk strategist for the cybersecurity firm Tripwire. Temporary passwords can fall into the hands of anyone who steals your phone. While most phones can be set to require a separate password to unlock the home screen, many people don’t bother to do so. Phones can also be infected with malware that intercepts or copies text messages, he said.

Though it may be convenient, Erlin said, Yahoo’s on-demand option is a step backward from another alternative the company offers, known as two-factor authentication. With that option, users must provide both a traditional password and a one-time code that is texted to their phones. That’s considered stronger because a hacker would need both to get into a user’s account.

Yahoo security chief Alex Stamos agrees that two-factor authentication is stronger. But many people don’t use it, he said in an online post defending against critics. Instead, people too often recycle short passwords that are easier to type, especially on small phone screens, but also easy for hackers to guess, he said.

Since most online services let users reset passwords by sending a text or e-mail to their phones, users are already vulnerable if they lose their device, Stamos argued.

“The truth is that passwords are so incredibly, ridiculously broken that it is almost impossible to keep users safe as long as we have any,” Stamos wrote on his Twitter account. He said Yahoo is working on other solutions.

The future 

The concept of logging in by scanning your fingerprint or face used to seem like sci-fi. But the future is here.

Microsoft said this week that it is building “biometric authentication” technology into the next version of its Windows software, so that users can unlock computers or phones with their face, iris or fingerprint. The devices must have a fingerprint reader or a high-end camera with infrared sensors, which are becoming more common.

Windows 10 users may also be able to use their face or fingerprint to sign into other online accounts. Microsoft is providing related software to builders of independent apps and websites so they too can verify a user’s identity through a combination of biometrics and an encrypted code automatically generated by the user’s computer or phone, Microsoft Vice President Joe Belfiore wrote in a blog post.

It’s too early to know if Microsoft’s system will be effective or gain wide acceptance, Jain cautioned. But alternatives to passwords are definitely needed, said fraud expert Al Pascual, who studies the banking and payments industry at Javelin Strategy & Research.

Too many people use the same password for multiple accounts, and they are routinely stolen by hackers.

“The password today,” he said, “is more of a liability than any kind of security measure.”

SAN DIEGO — New research boosts hope that a highly anticipated, experimental class of cholesterol drugs can greatly lower the risk for heart attacks, death and other heart-related problems. The US government will decide this summer whether to allow two of these drugs on the market.

People taking one of these drugs had half the risk of dying or suffering a heart problem compared to others who were given usual care — typically one of the statin drugs such as Lipitor or Zocor, doctors found. Many people cannot tolerate statins or get enough help from them, so new medicines are badly needed.

The results are “really impressive and very encouraging” for the new drugs, said one independent expert, Dr Judith Hochman of NYU Langone Medical Centre.

The studies were recently published online by the New England Journal of Medicine and discussed at an American College of Cardiology conference in San Diego.

They are fresh analyses from older studies designed to look at how much the drugs lower cholesterol, so they can only suggest that the drugs also lower heart problems, not prove that point. Definitive studies will take about two more years, so the federal Food and Drug Administration will be deciding the drugs’ fates with only results like this in hand.

The drugs are evolocumab, which Amgen Inc. wants to call Repatha, and alirocumab, which Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Sanofi SA have named Praluent.

They lower LDL or bad cholesterol more powerfully and in a different way than existing drugs, by blocking PCSK9, a substance that interferes with the liver’s ability to remove cholesterol from the blood.

Side effects remain a question, though, especially on thinking, confusion and memory — problems the FDA has already voiced concern about and asked the companies to track.

The problems affected only 1 or 2 per cent of patients and may be temporary, but they were twice as common among people taking one of the new drugs and need to be closely monitored as studies continue, said Dr Anthony DeMaria, a University of California at San Diego heart specialist and past president of the American College of Cardiology. As a patient facing potential side effects, “the last one I want” is one that affects the brain, he said.

Dr Eric Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California, said the new results show “an unquestionable signal” of a potential safety issue. More side effects typically turn up once a drug is approved and used in a wider population, he said.

Two other heart experts — Drs. Neil Stone and Daniel Lloyd-Jones of Northwestern University in Chicago — wrote in the medical journal that “it would be premature to endorse these drugs for widespread use” until the definitive studies are done in a couple of years. Other drugs that initially seemed good failed when put to the most rigorous test, they wrote.

Still, the results so far suggest that the drugs “appear to be on track” to be important new medicines, they wrote.

Dr Clyde Yancy, the chief cardiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago and a former American Heart Association president, agreed.

“Science has revealed a brand-new approach to treating cholesterol,” and there is “reasonable enthusiasm” it will be a big boon to patients, he said.

Los Angeles Times (TNS) - In boys with and without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, new research has found that an extra daily dose of Omega-3 fatty acids reduced symptoms of inattention.

The study found that in a small clinical trial involving boys 8 to 14 years old, parents rated their son’s ability to pay attention more highly if the child’s diet was supplemented for 16 weeks with the long-chain fatty acid than if he got a placebo instead.

Conducted in the Netherlands and published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, the new research is in line with studies that have found a welter of neuropsychological benefits to Omega-3 supplementation.

In the current study, 40 subjects got an average of 650mg per day of Docosahexaenoic Acid, or DHA, and 650mg of Eicosapentaenoic acid, or EPA — two different kinds of Omega-3s — in margarine. Half had been diagnosed with ADHD, and most continued with their stimulant medication while in the trial. The other half were normally developing kids whose age, IQ and body mass indices were similar to those in the ADHD group.

The subjects who got margarine without the Omega-3 supplement (the placebo group) were equally divided between those with ADHD and those who had no such diagnosis.

The notable finding was that, whether or not they had ADHD, boys who got the Omega-3 supplement were rated by their parents as more attentive.

“Our results indicate that typically developing children also benefit” from Omega-3 supplementation, “showing the importance of Omega-3 polyunsatuirated fatty acid intake during development in general,” the authors wrote. They added that Omega-3s “may be useful as an augmentation to standard pharmacological therapies” as well. And they cited recent research that found that children medicated for ADHD symptoms were able to reduce their doses of stimulant medication when they added Omega-3s to their diet.

The fatty acid found plentifully in fish oil has been found to enhance the effectiveness of antidepressant medication in those with depression, to delay first psychotic break in adolescents at high risk of serious mental illness, and to boost working memory performance in young, healthy subjects. Other studies have found it useful as an adjunct to stimulant medication in children with ADHD.

But the benefits of Omega-3 supplementation remain uncertain, as other studies have come up short of evidence that it improves mental health and cognitive performance.

Those conflicting findings have deepened the mystery of whether, how and why Omega-3 works to improve neurocognitive function.

And the authors of the current study came no closer to answering that question. They hypothesized that boosting a child’s Omega-3 intake would raise the amount of the neurotransmitter dopamine in his brain. But when they tested their subjects’ urine for a surrogate measure of dopamine turnover, they found no differences between subjects who got the Omega-3s and those who got the placebo.

The researchers also found no differences between those who got Omega-3s and those who got the placebo when they put a subgroup of subjects into a brain scanner and had them perform a task requiring sustained mental control. And while parental surveys suggested that Omega-3s had helped boost attention across both groups, parents reported no significant changes in their sons’ rule-breaking behaviour or aggressive behaviour.

Because DHA is plentiful in the brain, researchers have long speculated that this component of fish oil is most important for the fatty acid’s neuropsychiatric effects. But the current authors cited research, and some of their own findings, to suggest that equal doses of DHA and EPA work best to improve cognition.

When you think of junk mail you usually associate it with various risks. You fear hacking, scams, viruses, Trojan horses and other Internet-related hazards. You rarely think of the environment and carbon footprints. And yet…

When you print you know that you are causing direct damage to the environment, because paper and ink are tangible indicators of that, ones that are before your very eyes. Using computers and networks, even if only in electronic, digital format, consumes gigantic amounts of power and, therefore, affects the environment as well. 

You may not see your laptop as a threat to the environment — and it probably is but a very small one — but the powerful server computers that operate the web are true polluters with carbon footprints that have a severe impact on our planet. The problem is that you as a consumer, a computer and a web user, don’t see them. 

The countless servers’ farms in the world, those mammoth-size installations that consists of large numbers of servers operating together and that weave the web consume incredible amounts of energy, mainly fossil fuel.

Figures can help to better realise the impact and the size of the damage done. Take one of Dell’s most typical server computers, the PowerEdge 710. Its carbon footprint for the duration of its lifecycle is 6,360kg, which is a CO₂ mass that is equivalent to a family of four drinking about a 0.38-litre glass of orange juice every day for eight years (data and figures supplied by Dell). Can you imagine what a set of 1,000 servers, a very common size by the Internet standard, can do?

Of course a laptop’s carbon footprint would be much less and typically would be in the range 350kg, that is 18 times less than the above mentioned server.

The volume of junk mail is now such that it is taking a significant toll on servers, networks and computers, down to yours at home or at your workplace. You may install filters, firewalls, you may subscribe to the safest e-mail provider in the world and you may be avoiding all social networks so as to minimise your public exposure on the web with the aim of escaping unsolicited e-messages, you will still get some junk mail in your mailbox. Even those that are trapped and pushed in the junk folder by your system are a nuisance for in the end you are going to take a look at them before discarding them for good.

At the end of the day junk mail makes machines and networks work more, simply. Hence the terrible impact on nature.

Microsoft operates a little more than 1 million servers. Google, Amazon and the other giants working at similar scale employ, between 0.5 million and 1.5 million servers, each. It is mind boggling and… very much polluting.

If you’re wondering what the proportion of junk versus legitimate e-mail in the world is, you may want to take a deep breath before reading the figures: junk mail constitutes about 75 per cent of the whole, i.e. there is three times more junk than legitimate. Translate this into servers’ activity and then into carbon footprint and you can only conclude that it is an alarming, sad situation. “Three quarters of world’s e-mail traffic is spam,” says Alastair Stevenson of the v3.co.uk technology website.

No one has yet found a way to reduce the “emission” of junk mail at the source, and nothing indicates it is going to be reduced anytime soon. Diminishing its impact on your own mailbox is possible thanks to more or less smart software and filters of all kinds, but this doesn’t mean it was not sent in the first and that it has no impact on the environment.

ABU DHABI — Billionaire philanthropists Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates launched a joint fund in Abu Dhabi Wednesday to help developing countries pass tobacco-control laws in their legal battle with industry giants.

The Anti-Tobacco Trade Litigation Fund, backed by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aims “to combat the tobacco industry’s use of international trade agreements to threaten and prevent countries from passing strong tobacco-control laws,” its creators say.

“We are at a critical moment in the global effort to reduce tobacco use, because the significant gains we have seen are at risk of being undermined by the tobacco industry’s use of trade agreements and litigation,” said former New York mayor Bloomberg.

“We will stand with nations as they work to protect their populations against the deadly health effects of tobacco use.”

The announcement was made on the second day of the 16th World Conference on Tobacco or Health.

The World Health Organisation has warned that although smoker numbers are declining in many parts of the world, upward trends in African and Mediterranean countries mean the global total will not change much during the next decade.

About 80 per cent of the world’s 1 billion smokers, it says, live in low- and middle-income countries.

On Wednesday, Bloomberg granted governments and NGOs in Brazil, Nepal, Philippines, Russia, Ukraine and Uruguay his Philanthropies Awards for Global Tobacco Control for “significant strides” they have made in implementing tobacco control policies.

Uruguay was the first country in Latin America to ban smoking in public spaces, a measure it enacted in 2006.

Cigarette packs carry graphic pictures of cancer patients to warn smokers of the dangers, tobacco firms are forbidden from using marketing terms such as “light” or “mild”, and cigarette ads are banned from television, radio and newspapers.

The crackdown has prompted industry giant Philip Morris to hit back by suing Uruguay for $25 million at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes in 2010, alleging that the country had violated treaties by devaluing its trademarks and investments. 

Technical, financial support 

Several other countries have been threatened by similar measures.

“Country leaders who are trying to protect their citizens from the harms of tobacco should not be deterred by threats of costly legal challenges from huge tobacco companies,” said Microsoft co-founder Gates.

“Australia won its first case, which sends a strong message. But smaller, developing countries don’t have the same resources. That’s why we are supporting the Anti-Tobacco Trade Litigation Fund with Bloomberg Philanthropies,” Gates said in a televised statement during the awards ceremony.

Among its several means of support, the fund offers “technical assistance in legislative drafting and documentation to avoid legal challenges and potential trade disputes from the passage of tobacco-control laws,” its founders say.

In addition, it supports global tobacco-control efforts, coordinates efforts in fighting the industry and offers low- and medium- income countries with financial support and access to “high quality legal assistance.”

According to the WHO, one person dies every six seconds due to tobacco — nearly 6 million people each year.

Smoking could kill 1 billion people this century, it says.

Participants at the conference have warned that unless urgent action is taken, the annual death toll could rise to 8 million by 2030.

“April is the cruellest month”, said TS. Eliot in his epic poem “The Waste Land”. But for me personally, I pick March. To be the most cruel month in the annual calendar, that is. 

There are two things that contribute towards it being so bittersweet. The first is that Mother’s Day is celebrated throughout the world on this particular month. And secondly, the Ides of March, the exact date on which I lost my own mom, also falls in this month. So, while the rest of the world is applauding their mums I find myself mourning mine. 

The soothsayer in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” warningly predicted, “beware the Ides of March”. The Roman emperor shrugged it off but was stabbed to death before the end of the day. Nobody cautioned me of its perils but even if they had, how could I prepare myself to deal with it? 

My dearest mother, struggling with an incurable cancer, was in immense pain. Part of me, who was nursing her, would pray for her release but another part of me would selfishly want her to live on. At least she was there, in front of me, in flesh and blood, though with her eyes closed and breathing laboured, she was there. She existed. But in the early hours of that evening, she ceased to be so. 

I firmly believe that the umbilical cord that attaches an infant to its mother does not get severed at the birth of the baby. Although the doctors cut it off physically, in a metaphorical sense, it lingers on. It is invisible to the rest of mankind but it transmutes itself to a sixth sense that every mother has for her offspring.

It’s this bond that wakes them up in the middle of the night when their child is sick in another city, thousands of kilometres apart. It’s this intuition that makes their ears perk up when a “hello mom” is intoned in a different note from the usual, over the telephone. It’s the perception that makes them record your fever exactly by simply feeling your forehead with the palm of their hand. 

My mother was no different. When she was admitted into the ICU and was non responsive to the rest of the world, she could hear me. I spoke to her all the time. I combed her hair and trimmed her toenails and held her hand at length. It is not my imagination that I felt her press my fingers in response. However feeble the gesture was, I could feel it. 

But the numbness came when she passed away. That is when the link that tied me so firmly to my mother was slashed. I felt as if I was being suffocated and for sometime I could not function. My life as I knew it, had changed forever. 

In this transient world, one learns to cope with intense grief also. I internalised the pain but every March the wound sort of resurfaces, and I find myself longing for my mother. 

“You got my card?” our daughter was on the phone. 

“Hello,” I replied. 

‘”You’ve been crying!” she declared. 

“Not at all,” I sniffed. 

“Don’t lie to me,” she scolded. 

“Don’t mother me,” I retorted. 

“Somebody has to,” she stated. 

“What do you want?” I asked. 

“I miss Nani too you know,” she confessed. 

“Happy Mother’s Day,” I said

“You sound like her, ditto,” she announced. 

“And you sound like me, ditto,” I smiled.

HANNOVER, Germany — Somewhere on Earth a computer hacker types a malicious command and hits enter. Half a world away, an urban commuter train speeds out of control, derails and crashes into a building.

Happily the kind of scenario that makes for Hollywood blockbusters and keeps public security officials awake at night would, in this case, only damage a model train set at a German IT industry fair.

Internet security experts have set up “Project Honey Train” with an online railway control system as bait, hoping to “get inside the heads of cyber criminals” — but without the real-life casualties.

“The goal is to provide an environment where we can study how people may try to attack public infrastructure projects where they could put public safety at risk,” said Chester Wisniewski, of security company Sophos.

“I suspect that this is a pretty good copy of some of the worst of public security that we see in real life... systems that were designed in a simpler time when people weren’t trying to attack them, which is what makes them vulnerable.”

Their miniature rail system at the CeBIT IT business fair in Hannover is built on a scale of 1:87 and set in a fictitious German city, with street names chosen from the board game Monopoly.

To an online attacker it’s all meant to look real, with original software components and inbuilt vulnerabilities which are advertised in known hackers’ chatrooms.

Critical infrastructure

Online users have long been exposed to risks from ID theft, “phishing” and scams by mafia groups, to mass data collection by social media giants and snooping by secret services.

But some fear we haven’t seen the worst of it yet, in an age when urban transport systems, chemical plants and power stations are considered potentially vulnerable to digital sabotage.

“I’m surprised that not more has happened already,” said Christoph Meinel, head of German IT university the Hasso Plattner Institute.

“It’s urgently necessary to do something about this. Some say ‘don’t worry, it won’t happen’, but that’s the wrong approach. Once someone has done it successfully, you can quickly expect to see copycats.”

Security experts have warned of vulnerabilities in the systems that run, for example, factories, oil pipelines and water networks — the so-called supervisory control and data acquisition or SCADA systems.

A real-life example is the computer worm Stuxnet, which was used to clandestinely attack Iran’s nuclear programme in 2010 by ordering centrifuges to speed up and spin out of control until they ripped apart.

In his 2012 best-selling novel “Blackout”, journalist Mark Elsberg describes how hackers attack European power grids, sparking the collapse of transport, communication and food distribution and even triggering a nuclear reactor meltdown.

Marco di Filippo, of Sophos, said he considers the book’s premise and technical explanations “very valid”.

“The greatest vulnerability is that automation now speaks TCP/IP and has ended up online, unprotected,” he said, referring to the communication standard Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol.

“This includes everything, be it power grids, power stations, wind farms, dams but also traffic management systems.”

‘Bad guys’

Andrey Nikishin, head of future technologies at Moscow-based software security group Kaspersky Lab, agreed there were theoretical risks but said a successful attack was difficult.

“If something is connected to the Internet it is theoretically possible to hack it,” he said.

But he stressed that governments are aware of risks to critical national infrastructure, take steps to protect it and that many systems have a manual backup.

“And you can’t hack the manual switch, fortunately,” he said.

Kaspersky Lab has identified four main types of attackers — teenager hackers showing off, cyber criminals out for money, extremists seeking to sabotage, and state actors whose main goal is espionage.

While operating on the same technical basis, the big difference is the resources they have to hand, Nikishin said.

He added that potential threats would multiply in the era of the “Internet of Things”, when not just PCs, laptops and phones but also houses, cars and appliances have IP addresses.

“The world is changing,” he said, predicting, however, that one thing would stay the same — “The actor, the bad guy... they have existed, they do exist, and they will exist.”

NEW YORK — Mike Rinder had spent virtually all of his life in the Church of Scientology. From the age of six he was raised in the church, eventually rising to become its chief spokesman. Everyone he knew was a scientologist, including his wife, his two children, his mother, his brother and his sister.

But after spending more than a year in a disciplinary facility known as “the hole”, where Rinder says he and other Scientology executives were confined, an increasingly disillusioned Rinder left the church in 2007. It was while in that Los Angeles compound that Rinder, now 59, says he realised the church was “a road to hell” and that he had to get out, even if penniless and without his family.

“I literally walked away with a briefcase,” says Rinder, who now lives what he calls “an entirely new life” in Florida with a new wife, a son and a step-son. “A briefcase with nothing in it, but a briefcase.”

Rinder’s story is one of eight from former church members that make up the emotional arc of the documentary “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief”, which opened in theatres last Friday and will air on HBO on March 29.

Directed by the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney and based on the acclaimed book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright, “Going Clear” is the highest-profile expose yet of the controversial religion founded by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.

Substantially on the basis of former members like Rinder speaking out, the film paints a disturbing portrait of Scientology, claiming physical abuse happens regularly; that the church drives wedges between families by labelling non-scientologist spouses and parents “suppressive persons”; and that the Internal Revenue Service deemed the church a tax-exempt religion in 1993 only because of an avalanche of lawsuits. The documentary also singles out several of Scientology’s most famous faces — including Tom Cruise and John Travolta — for not using their power to change the organisation.

The church, which declined interview requests for the documentary, has mounted a considerable campaign against the film, including full-page ads in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times and a series of Internet videos. In response to a request for an interview for this story, the church pointed towards videos posted by the Freedom Magazine, which the church publishes.

In those posts and others, the documentary’s sources are derided as “bitter, vengeful apostates.” The church alleges Gibney didn’t present the film’s allegations to them for response and calls the film “a one-sided false diatribe”. Representatives for the church did meet with Wright, though the church labelled his book “so ludicrous it belongs in a supermarket tabloid”.

“Their sources are the usual collection of obsessive, disgruntled former church members kicked out as long as 30 years ago for malfeasance, who have a documented history of making up lies about the church for money,” said the church in a statement.

The church has also vigorously denied allegations of physical abuse or confinement. It has previously said that managers like Rinder were never held against their will, but were subject to “ecclesiastical discipline”.

But Wright and Gibney, with the backing of HBO and The New Yorker (for which Wright writes), bring some heft to their face-off with the church. Wright’s New Yorker profile on “Crash” director Paul Haggis, arguably the most famous Scientologist to leave the church, was the magazine’s most fact-checked story ever. His book brought rare scrutiny to an organisation that has regularly repelled it. “I envisioned that I would have to defend every single word in there,” he says. “It’s one reason there are very few adjectives.”

In a recent interview at HBO’s Manhattan offices, just a stone’s throw from Scientology’s Manhattan office, Gibney, Wright and Rinder spoke of “Going Clear” as empathetic toward those lured to the church, but critical of its enablers.

“We’re not attacking the beliefs of the church,” says Wright, who previously collaborated with Gibney on the documentary “My Trip to Al Qaeda”. “You can believe whatever you want to believe and that’s fine. It doesn’t matter if it’s crazy; there are a lot of crazy religions. It’s the practices and abuses that are going on in Scientology that I think the book and the film shed light on.”

Much of “Going Clear” depends on the testimony of former church members. They do so despite the likelihood of aggressive responses from the church. The church’s Freedom Magazine has published harsh appraisals of those it terms “discredited sources”. Rinder is labelled “the lady killer”. Haggis is called “the Hollywood hypocrite.”

Gibney says private investigators have recently tailed several sources from the film. Many also struggle with a sense of shame at having been members of a church they now speak against.

“I spent a lot of time on the idea of auditing because it’s a kind of talking cure,” Gibney says, referring to Scientology’s therapy-like practice. “So the beginning of the film, people talk their way in. By the end, they talk their way out. Speaking out has become their way of not only leaving the church but helping others who might be suffering under the abuses. The idea of speaking out is fundamental to the film.”

Former members are seen in the film as sensible, curious people who only learn of the church’s more idiosyncratic beliefs and practices after years of indoctrination.

“Everything about Scientology isn’t bad,” says Rinder. “It’s the boiling frog problem of you start with something, it seems kind of nice. You’re in the pot of water. It’s kind of cool in here. But the heat keeps turning up and turning up and turning up. And pretty soon you’re a boiled frog.”

Not lost on anyone is the irony that Wright and Gibney find themselves sitting alongside the former spokesman Rinder, who would have previously been waging a public relations battle against the film. “If you were still there,” chuckles Wright, “you’d be dealing with us.”

Gibney and Wright are pushing for change on two fronts: that the IRS might reconsider its classification of Scientology, and that the church’s celebrity members act against the alleged abuses.

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s the end of the line for Internet Explorer.

The much maligned browser that battled Netscape to guide people around the World Wide Web was consigned to history this week by Microsoft, joining Palm Pilots, flip phones and Myspace as relics of a distant digital age.

A staple of the Internet for nearly two decades, the Explorer brand will be replaced by a flashier, speedier browser codenamed Project Spartan that will run on phones, tablets and personal computers but is expressly made for a new era of mobile devices.

Junking the Explorer brand is part of a new game plan at Microsoft. CEO Satya Nadella is determined to remake the aging technology giant as an innovator rather than a follower.

Even when it debuted, Explorer was a me-too product. Browser pioneer Netscape Navigator was the world’s first commercial Web browser. It ignited the Internet boom and had already transformed how people roamed the Web. Even the Explorer name was derived from Navigator.

“Explorer was never a cool brand,” Silicon Valley futurist Paul Saffo says. “It’s like one step from AOL.”

Nonetheless, bundled with its ubiquitous Windows operating system, Explorer crushed Netscape in the 1990s. The bundling triggered a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit and a settlement with Microsoft.

With the launch of Mozilla’s Firefox, Netscape all but faded away. Netscape sold itself to AOL in 1999. In 2007, AOL stopped supporting it.

Yet, despite Microsoft’s considerable might, Explorer never managed to win the hearts and minds of consumers, who in recent years defected in droves to a new wave of sleeker browsers.

“In a way, the introduction of Explorer marked the beginning of the downfall of Windows and Microsoft. It was not an attempt to innovate. It was an attempt to stay relevant,” Saffo says. “In that era, Microsoft was a fast follower: Let someone else pioneer and then come into the market with muscle and take over. But they didn’t succeed with the Internet.”

Microsoft’s warning shot

Never one to throw in the towel, Microsoft is now ready to rumble. Cue up the browser wars version 2.0. This time it’s all about mobile devices that are populating people’s lives and consuming their time and attention.

In retiring the Explorer brand, Microsoft is looking to get its mojo back with consumers, especially those frustrated office workers who loved to hate Microsoft’s sluggish browser.

And, in distancing itself from a mainstay of desktop computers and laptops, Microsoft is also firing a warning shot that it plans to compete anew with Google’s Chrome, Firefox and Apple’s Safari browsers.

“At one point Internet Explorer commanded north of 80 per cent share of the browser market, but with the explosion in mobility, that market share has dwindled to 30 per cent,” said S&P Capital analyst Angelo Zino. “The platform isn’t cutting it on mobile devices and that’s where the focus is today.”

Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s head of marketing, says Microsoft is researching a new name for the Project Spartan browser, which will be released later this year with Windows 10.

Can Microsoft regain ground it has ceded?

It’s possible, says Zino, “but it’s going to be really difficult”.