nemo
@captn3m0
Followers
5,213
Following
1,864
Media
1,280
Statuses
12,766
Programmer/Geek/UX Enthusiast. @recursecenter alum #TeaOps . Follow me on @nemo @tatooine .club (Fediverse/Mastodon), I do not tweet any more.
Bangalore, India
Joined February 2009
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
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Pinned Tweet
👋 It's my birthday today.
I'm not a birthday person, but this year I'm doing a fundraiser for
@internetfreedom
🎉.
I'll be matching donations made to IFF today so you can double your impact:
(Please RT)
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What I was taught in school:
- Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell
What I should have been taught in school:
- How to file an RTI
- How to file taxes without an Aadhaar
- How to topple a fascist government
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Thought I'd look at the
@Truecaller
app to see what changed to cause the bug (diff between 10.40.7 and 10.41.6)
Likely was just a accidental bug (see screenshot), but I found more interesting stuff.
Thread.
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Been reporting this to
@UIDAI
since Jan '17. Giving up hope on it ever getting fixed, so public disclosure:
Credits:
@sanitarypanels
#aadhaar
#13footwall
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Hotstar doesn’t let paying *VIP* users watch content with English Audio and that’s the stupidest pricing differentiator I can think of. (Thread)
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I wrote an open letter to
@Cloudflare
.
CloudFlare's vendor (Airtel) keeps blocking websites hosted on GitHub Pages for no reason without a court-order in India.
This has been ongoing for years, and developers deserve an answer.
(Please RT)
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Hey
@Google
if you really care about the environment, can you please support Pixel devices for more than 3 years instead?
There’s 10M+ Pixel 3 devices that are destined for landfills this October as they reach End of Life - maybe start there.
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Perennially depressed because the Controller of Certifying Authorities in India doesn't have a valid certificate for their website.
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Our incredible journey at has come to a close. The Supreme Court has declared Electoral Bonds as unconstitutional, and our legal money laundering scheme will be shutting down.
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I wouldn't have launched this today, but
@FinMinIndia
has picked the dates as 1-10 April, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Go buy a (tax exempt) Electoral Bond from your nearest SBI Branch and sell it for cash!
please dm if you you'd like to buy electoral bonds in bulk.
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👋 It's my birthday today.
I'm not a birthday person, but this year I'm doing a fundraiser for
@internetfreedom
🎉.
I'll be matching donations made to IFF today so you can double your impact:
(Please RT)
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India’s collective refusal to stand up against Aadhar has gotten us to the point where we’re celebrating life-saving surgeries on newborns being dependent on
@UIDAI
’s blessing.
Our VLE Ramana from Amalapuram Town, Andhra Pradesh done a Sishu Aadhar Enrollment to 4 days born baby in ICU, who has diagnosed a hole in heart, for immediate surgey Aadhar is mandatory, so our VLE RAMANA did a great job, and shown the humanity.
@dintya15
CSC VLE CAN DO#
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You don’t need 2 ring lights and a DSLR to join work calls.
If Jeff Bezos can join calls with the governor of Washington with a laptop camera, so can you!
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Why you shouldn't use <input type=number> blindly for OTPs. Accidental scrolls will change the number before submission.
Always better to use <input type=text pattern"=\d{6}" minlength=6 maxlength=6>
cc
@Kuvera_In
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Are you a security researcher outside India? Do you hate getting geoblocked to Indian government websites?
Well, I made a proxy for security researchers outside India to access Indian government websites without resorting to shady VPNs.
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If you remove a user from your CoWIN account, the success message reads:
>Individual Deleted Successfully
😂😂😂
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The
@UIDAI
portal () has been down since the
@thetribunechd
story.
Critical National Infrastructure they said, remember?
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Wrote about my home server setup. If you want to run a public webserver from your home, give this a read!
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I wrote a blog post on my encryption setup!
Covers passwords, 2FA, U2F, recovery, and failure plans. Includes general suggestions for everyone.
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Take a BT speaker with you to the store and play a pre-recorded message to imitate the Paytm soundbox.
Teenagers across India discovering replay attacks 😂.
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When you see a 10x shift in any metric, be very skeptical.
Here's a thread on what actually changed. (1/n)
Some one pls tell
@sherryontopp
The Sheila Dikshit govt left behind a huge debt. The Arvind Kejriwal has almost cleared off the loans by now.
Outstanding liabilities:
End-2014: 32,531.8 cr
End-2019: 3,406.4 cr
(Source: RBI)
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Most of the joy in building PCs comes from the "lego for grown-ups" attribute (it was super-fun figuring out what goes where, and splitting hairs over how we were running fan cabling).
But I love PCs for another reason: the magic of standards and interoperability.
A thread🧵
Assembled a new desktop from scratch over the weekends, took >8hrs but learnt so much doing it after ages and boy things have changed! Thanks
@captn3m0
for the help. The outcome is beautiful!
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7 years ago today:
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IRCTC already monetises your data by embedding ads and trackers from third-parties.
Now they’re going a step further and segregating “monetisable” passenger datasets.
Also, reminder that IRCTC encourages Aadhaar linkage heavily so it’s a perfect surveillance dataset.
🚨ALERT: Hey train travellers, your data will soon be monetised by the govt. & that too, in the absence of a data protection legislation!
@IRCTCofficial
has uploaded a tender to appoint a consultant for digital data monetisation.🧵on what this means. 1/8
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Pilgrimage complete.
(The NeXT Computer Tim Berners-Lee used to create the WWW)
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Re-ran my
@BLRFoodCensus
code again, and here are some *early and rough* stats:
Total restaurants: 14665
Temporarily closed: 546
Permanently closed: 9111
Still open: 5008
#Bengaluru
has lost 2/3rd of its restaurants.
(Data via Zomato)
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If you are trying to get rid of WhatsApp, might I also suggest taking the time to setup adblockers everywhere. Uninstall the FB/Insta apps and use the web versions where you can block ads.
FB stops making money if you stop seeing ads.
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@std_exception
3 Servers still serving the UIDAI portal: 103.58.114.102, 103.58.114.101, 103.58.114.19
@UIDAI
doesn't even know how to take their _vulnerable portal_ down correctly.
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Amul pays taxes.
In 1946, a DAO was started with milk as a NFT.
We call that Amul today. Lol.
Co-operative society hi hai yaar DAO.
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Aadhaar went from “Yes/No answers only” to “No such thing as a Aadhaar Card” to “Aadhaar Xerox is valid KYC” to “Official Aadhaar PVC Card” to “eKYC” and now “CKYC” over the span of a decade.
I do not trust a profit-seeking malleable ID system, and neither should you.
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Remember the
@ixigo
data breach that happened in 2018?
Looks like
@EaseMyTrip
has bought a copy and is using that for advertising.
This email was only ever used to purchase tickets on Ixigo.
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I'm now running a DNS-Over-HTTPS Resolver from Bangalore.
Faster than both the Google and CloudFlare resolvers within Bangalore (Tried on Airtel and ACT so far).
Doesn't log/filter/block and leak information.
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Cool tools promotion thread. (Stuff I use and like, mostly dev/cli/linux stuff):
pup is jq for HTML. Pipe your HTML and parser/filter it on the terminal. If you do a lot of web scraping - this is very nifty.
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@getwalnutapp
also seems to have a SDK! Pretty cool stuff: credit scoring, parsing SMS.
Their regex list is so much fun to read.
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@IKEAIndia
seems to be shipping to Bangalore now. Seems like they're shipping straight from Hyderabad, but cool nonetheless.
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Currently running at home:
5 iOS
3 Arch Linux
3 macOS
2 Android
2 Raspbian
1 OpenWrt
1 OpenBSD
1 Ubuntu
1 Windows
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Thanks to the upcoming elections, and freshly raised seed round, proud to announce our new domain:
You can buy Electoral Bonds across 29 SBI Branches till the 10th of January.
I wouldn't have launched this today, but
@FinMinIndia
has picked the dates as 1-10 April, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Go buy a (tax exempt) Electoral Bond from your nearest SBI Branch and sell it for cash!
please dm if you you'd like to buy electoral bonds in bulk.
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Unpopular opinion: So many breaches could have been avoided if Elastic and Mongo didn't think of security as an "enterprise" feature.
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If you've ever received any SMS with any of these words, Walnut read it:
salary
sal
credit
deposit
reimb
debit
Complete list:
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"A private company running a centralized closed-source infrastructure that decides whether or not you're human" sounds straight of out Blade Runner.
This is not the future I signed up for.
~FIN~
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Lots of great feedback (and questions) after my talk
#IndiaFOSS
The project is up at
Slides are here: (See speaker notes for a rough transcript).
If you’re interested in contributing, drop me a DM.
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Check your risk: If Google suspends your account permanently today, can you recover from it?
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If you've ever wondered what happens to your data when a company gets acquired: My GoZefo (acquired by Quikr 2019) email is now getting marketing emails from Commonfloor (acquired by Quikr 2015).
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We crossed 2Lakh! 🎉
To all of you who donated today - thank you! This has been my coolest birthday ever.
There’s still an hour to go!
👋 It's my birthday today.
I'm not a birthday person, but this year I'm doing a fundraiser for
@internetfreedom
🎉.
I'll be matching donations made to IFF today so you can double your impact:
(Please RT)
21
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72% of Pixel 3's estimated lifecycle emissions are from its manufacturing. By forcing customers to get a new device via planned obsolescence, Google is putting their profits before our environment.
Source: Google's sustainability report for Pixel 3
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This is a natural consequence of designing and promoting an ID system with zero liabilities or checks.
When UIDAI told the parliament to put “Aadhaar printouts are valid KYC” in the law, they knew the consequences - they just didn’t care.
I didn’t know there was an Aadhar involvement here too.
@UIDAI
. The photo, date of birth, Aadhar number are all incorrect. I am redacting the number anyway. Only thing used here which relates to me is the name. The Bihar address too is wrong, of course.
@IncomeTaxIndia
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Spent 5 minutes reversing the app. Some findings:
- The backend is running over HTTP ()
- It allows viewing of upto 100 records at a single time
- It uses MD5 (not sure exactly where)
Building your (local) surveillance state?
There's an app for that..
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Looking to buy boardgames in India, but outside of Amazon?
I made a list:
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Was that the production database?
give me a horror story from your specialty in five words or less
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Broken footpaths and hate speech.
₹ 1.69 trillion Direct Taxes paid by Bengalurigas, second highest in the country after Mumbai!! What do taxpayers get in return??
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Just realized that more than 100 other small banks relying on Yes Bank for maintaining NEFT/RTGS/IMPS will be badly affected.
Search for YESB0 at for a partial list. (132 banks on that list + 100s more)
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Home for Diwali, and we recently got a Airtel Broadband connection, so I extended
@squeal
's work here.
Here's a list of 1300+ blocked domains for Airtel Broadband users:
(Not exhaustive, due to how censorship works)
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New Dark Pattern just dropped.
Make a checkbox greyed out to make it look like it is disabled.
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90 days later
Total restaurants: 14467 (-198)
Temporarily closed: 510 (-36)
Permanently closed: 9237 (+126)
Still open: 4720 (-288)
Changes in parentheses.
Re-ran my
@BLRFoodCensus
code again, and here are some *early and rough* stats:
Total restaurants: 14665
Temporarily closed: 546
Permanently closed: 9111
Still open: 5008
#Bengaluru
has lost 2/3rd of its restaurants.
(Data via Zomato)
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So it turns out that Credit Scoring is so important to Truecaller that they’ve just bought (Website updated just now)
Thought I'd look at the
@Truecaller
app to see what changed to cause the bug (diff between 10.40.7 and 10.41.6)
Likely was just a accidental bug (see screenshot), but I found more interesting stuff.
Thread.
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They claim to be completely "offline credit scoring engine", but this doesn't change the fact that users installed Trucaller to block phone calls.
Not to get a score against their mobile number.
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My Google migration checklist:
- Mail ->
@MigaduMail
- Stock Android -> LineageOS +
#microG
- Play Store -> FDroid + Yalp Store
- Google Play Music -> Airsonic
- Google Sync -> Radicale
- Drive/Docs -> Looking
- Google+ -> Seriously?
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A customer that pays you at gunpoint isn’t your customer - you’ve created an artificial frustration where there was none to force them to pay.
Make them delighted at the upgrade. Not angry.
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So much FinTech innovation in India is just finding the right loopholes.
Wallets became popular because you could bypass 2FA to make transactions.
UPI bypasses Beneficiary addition and waiting for 30 hours (and sometimes days) before making a payment.
@jaseemabid
@jackerhack
@Paytm
Because of RBI 2-factor guidelines. Wallets are a hack around the 2-factor rule.
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Bus takes a stop somewhere in Haryana (en route to
@hillhacks
).
Me: Lacha paratha?
Waiter: No
Me: Stuffed Naan?
Waiter: Will take time.
Me: Kya milega?
Waiter: Sir, Uttapam ya Dosa try karo.
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However, the old Aadhaar printouts, letters remain as valid as always. No statement from UIDAI asking users to upgrade.
The world's largest Identity Program has ever-shifting security and privacy guarantees, but there's no accountability from UIDAI.
~FIN~
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Cleaned my keyboard this week. Too much cat hair = missed keypresses.
Pre-photos (Inclusive of Cat Tax)
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The virus is taking the weekend off, nothing to worry.
#COVID19
#vaccination
sessions would not be scheduled on this Saturday and Sunday because of IT system transition from Co-WIN 1.0 to Co-WIN 2.0
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@RitaG74
No, IIT Roorkee does not stand by this.
Hundreds of IIT Roorkee alumni have signed this open letter taking a
#StandAgainstCAA
Not in my name!
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After serving Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Pune, IKEA India is now delivering to.....
...
...
Ahemadabad.
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I found out recently about Fingerprint publishing printing beautifully typeset classic hardcovers.
I spent too much tracking all of them down, so here's a thread. (Some links are affiliate)
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Disclaimer: I'm not an economist, but I'm good at hunting down figures and calling out bullshit.
The tables cited earlier come from . See Statement 18 and 19.
~FIN~
(11/11)
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I ran
@18F
/pulse on Indian Government websites to see how many of them support HTTPS. A quick summary:
Total Websites: 14183
Total Live Websites: 11710 (82%)
Websites with Valid HTTPS: 4753 (40% of all live websites)
Raw Dataset for now:
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ITT: People with no idea about what a blockchain is.
Repeat after me; Blockchain solves the double spending problem in a trustless ecosystem.
If your problem involved trusting someone (certificate issuance, identity management, records, supply chain) - blockchains are useless
Blockchain is one helluva technology. Yet, almost 15 years later it still feels like a solution waiting for a problem.
What are some real at-scale problems (other than crypto pls!) that blockchain can solve way more elegantly than other existing technologies?
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For all the fancy UI CRED has, it doesn’t even pick the right keyboard for typing card numbers.
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Remember all those "one credit card" companies with cool cards to let you manage all your other cards?
Most of them are dead now, I did a quick survey of what happened:
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Not bad for a side-project born from a rant 😁
Screenshot from Google Search Performance report for
Clicks: 33.1K
Impressions: 814K
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If you're looking for boardgames to gift, I added a search feature on the
@ReRollBLR
website:
It searches across all boardgame stores in India at once.
(Built using Google CSE, feedback is welcome)
Recommendations:
Looking to buy boardgames in India, but outside of Amazon?
I made a list:
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@UIDAI
@thetribunechd
Decided to open the
@NCIIPC
(National Nodal Agency for Protection of Critical Information Infrastructure) site. Fun facts:
- It doesn't have HTTPS
- They don't have any update on
#meltdownspectre
vulnerabilities yet.
- They have a hit-counter on the site!
I rest my case.
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This is a dick move
@FreeCharge
(Disabling the email input field in a unsubscribe form).
Do you really hate your customers that much?
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