pea bee
@prstb
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I make cathartic little internet things and write slightly longer-form text for a small no of people here https://t.co/xQR7S8TUVX
Joined July 2008
Someone bought the JioHotstar domain (before the merger) and wants Reliance to fund their higher studies from domain sale. Really hope they can get a good payout from this!
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#TIL that Shammi Kapoor was one of the first users of the Internet in India. He was the founder & chairman of the Internet Users Club of India. I can't wrap my head around how someone like Shammi Kapoor was in the thick of the internet movement in India?. I did some digging 👇.
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I was on the IMDb page for an upcoming Ranbir Kapoor movie Animal. In the cast details, I found a name I didn’t recognize. Finding out about this guy led me to the world of how young Indian men from small towns are gaming the system to manufacture their fake online clout 👇
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Sorry guys - have taken the post down due to a legal notice from Dotpe. I could fight them because I didn't access anything that wasn't already public. But it's not worth the hassle. The legal process in this country is in itself a punishment. 🙏.
Indian startup Dotpe, that raised ~$100M to build point of sale systems for restaurants left their entire API fully public. A clever hacker found out the most ordered thing at every Social in India. And did a prank to order what he wanted for a person next to him! . Zero auth.
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I wrote about a mad rabbit hole that led me to a guy who is running 200 different (fake) restaurant brands from one single drab cloud kitchen in Bangalore!. In the end, I was left slightly distressed by just how easy it is to game Swiggy and Zomato.
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I'm still fascinated by how Shammi Kapoor, of all people, was at the helm of all of this. He had a cute personal website too. According to him, he learnt all the coding and designing himself. Tbh, this has more character and creativity than some of the personal websites of today
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Fin. The boys from the "Bombay Computer Club". The pioneers of our internet. When are we getting an OTT series on them?
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This is how one of India's first independent and private websites looked like. It couldn't have a more 90s internet aesthetic if it tried. Love it!
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Only wrote about open APIs that anyone scanning their QR codes can view. Sales numbers were literally calculated from looking at their public menu webpage API calls. I didn't access any backend APIs or internal documents.
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He was into writing online as well and this was even before "blog" was even a term. Read this wild excerpt from a very random post about Librans being very accident-prone (??)
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Shammi Kapoor and his internet club were also the self-proclaimed gatekeepers of the Indian internet culture. For instance, check this email sent by Shammi Kapoor, asking Indians in way too many words to basically be less horny on "CityTalk" - an IRC server from that time.
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Our guy here has manufactured his stature online by feeding misinformation to the sources that Google uses to construct a knowledge panel. He has fooled the mighty google search algorithms into believing that he is a person of certain notability.
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I found this dead website on the Internet Archive. It was one of the first domains with a ".co.in" TLD. It was owned by this guy: Miheer Mafatlal and it hosted the IUCI webpage. As tech people stereotypes go, he sure does look the part.
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Because of the failure of these platforms, time and again, to effectively review the content that they show us, the onus then falls upon us to perform our own due diligence. You can read the whole post (and subscribe) here:
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Honestly, I am impressed by his ingenuity. No disrespect to him, but I'm not convinced he thought of this whole scheme on his own. I went back to his IMDb and checked cast details of other movies he is part of. And I found a few dozen profiles with the exact same modus operandi.
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They even set up a "Page of Shame" to name and shame Indians who were beings dicks on the internet. 😳
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I found a list of restaurants on Swiggy and Zomato that are operated from a single cloud kitchen in Bangalore and under the same FSSAI license.
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According to this, he has acting credits in some big-budget productions. I am beginning to suspect that this could be a case of IMDb vandalism. IMDb allows anyone to add and edit pages and evidently, these edits are not getting reviewed effectively. I googled this guy.
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So he set up a profile on a bunch of music streaming platforms. Uploaded mashups of existing songs. Published biographies on sites that do not verify submissions. Set up an IMDb page with fake credits. Why do all this? To trick google into believing he is a person of eminence.
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I looked at his Youtube and other social media. He doesn’t have a lot of followers or any music content on there. I shazamed his songs and they’re copies of existing random music mashed together with an audio editing tool like Audacity. Possibly to avoid getting copyright notices.
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So I opened this Page of Shame but to my disappointment, the list was empty. ☹️. Maybe the updates to the page aren't archived or they probably decided to drop the idea altogether.
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I wanted to see how deep this hustle goes. Most of these guys had a biography of themselves on - a website that allows you to submit your own press release which is then distributed to search engines and other news platforms.
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I searched Youtube and found a few tutorials explaining in detail how to carry out this entire operation. For instance, check this playlist from a young Bangladeshi Youtuber explaining how to get your own Google knowledge panel from scratch in an eight-part video series.
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So who is this guy? I had not heard of him before and he is named in the “Top cast” category for this movie, alongside Ranbir Kapoor. I checked his IMDb page and this is what his bio and filmography look like.
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- All are part of the cast of big Indian movies with a vague mention of their roles. - All young men mostly from small northern Indian towns. - They all have biographies on the same handful of websites that read exactly the same. - THEY ALL HAVE THEIR OWN GOOGLE KNOWLEDGE PANEL.
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Wow, so Google has a knowledge panel on him (on the right). There are also links to his music on various music platforms. Okay, so probably he is pretending to be an actor on IMDb but according to his google search results, he is actually a legit musician?
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You must’ve seen Google knowledge panels on the right or on top of the page (on mobile) when you google a famous person. The way it works is it gathers information from various online sources and uses that information to show a “knowledge panel” alongside the search results.
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See these two places here? Together they are running 400 odd different restaurant listings on both Swiggy and Zomato. (Pic from Google Maps satellite image)
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And this is from one movie. If you open the cast/crew details of any recent big Indian movie on IMDb, you will find there are imposters all around. It’s very easy to find them. All of their IMDb bios are written in an identical style. They all seem to have these things in common.
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For instance, check the cast details of the movie K.G.F: Chapter 2. The ones marked in red boxes are all fake credits that I could identify. A few more are listed in other crew of this movie like Production Management, Sound Department, Music Department, etc. They’re everywhere!
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Skimming through the search results, I found biographies written about him on a few websites of doubtful credibility. Like this one on a website called
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So I googled “Indian singer” and limited the search to And I found hundreds of such biographies. Almost all of them were created within the last year. I opened a few of these pages and all of their biographies are written with a similar template.
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They’re doing this because these websites have no verification or review process for submissions but they have a high SEO ranking which tricks the google search algorithm into believing these citations as legit proof of their notability.
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Wow, this thread has become popular! I have nothing to promote, except check this silly little website I made (as a joke) to find half loaves of bread near you. Because I can never finish a full loaf of bread!.
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Got nothing to promote, except, since we are talking about music hackjobs, I made The Beatles sing Taher Shah's viral song Eye To Eye using OpenAI's Jukebox. 🙉
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There is also a website for filmmakers to submit their films to film festivals globally. This website has hundreds of profiles of young Indians who have nothing to do with filmmaking. They also have profiles on a few wikis and random Indian news websites.
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In a world where your online clout is everything, having their own Google KP gives them legitimacy in the eyes of their followers. Many of them have links to their KPs on their IG bios saying they’re verified by Google. A way to show their followers that they have credibility.
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I laud the effort they’ve put into the whole scheme, but in the end, a lot of them are frauds who are misleading their social media followers with information about themselves that’s just not true.
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There should be clearer visibility on Swiggy/Zomato about how many and which restaurant brands are operating from the same location, along with a picture of the kitchen, to allow us to make a more informed decision before ordering.
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Creating hundreds of fake restaurant brands on these platforms shouldn't be so easy. I mean, this guy put in zero effort in naming his brands – many of them are the same names with different letter cases!.
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As always, and even more so on the Indian internet, we should do our own due diligence. It is a minefield of misinformation and deranged hustlers out there and no one to look out for our interests. Stay safe!.
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I was only looking to find and avoid restaurant brands that I do not like on Swiggy and Zomato. But instead, I found this extraordinary piece of hustle.
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Zomato responds to my multiple brands from the same kitchen story. - They are now going to show which other brands are linked to a kitchen on the restaurant's page. - They are going to manually inspect kitchens running more than 10 brands. Read here: .
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Rare for Indian movies showing a computer screen get the details right, but Girls Will Be Girls got it spot on. They show the correct Internet Explorer version (4.0) from 1999 and the correct Windows interface. "Brainvita Encylopaedia" website is fictional but
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Published this game more than a year ago now. Every once in a while someone new discovers it and it's still so wonderful to see all the reactions all over again!.
Someone bought the domain name because it was available and made a satirical modi-themed chrome dinosaur game in it. Missing your critics, Modi Ji? Swipe left to play! 😂.
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This is the kind of stuff i love reading on here - such a brilliant little hack this is! 🙌.
Apple released a hearing aids feature for the AirPods Pro a while ago. I bought a pair for grandma, but then realized that the feature was geoblocked in India. So we at @_lagrangepoint decided to unblock it. It ended up involving a leaky microwave and building a Faraday cage:
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A bit late to this - but I have to share it. Reading this made me emotional - it is everything I love about the web. Internet is still cool because of stories like this. The secret inside One Million Checkboxes.
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Still find it hard to believe that something I wrote in my very random newsletter, which was until now only read by a v v small no. of people, would create any kind of an impact! 🙈.
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Many months ago, at the peak of the lockdown in 2020, I was lucky that the domain name was available to buy for cheap, so I decided to make a silly little satirical game based on the chrome dino run. You can still play it here:
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This is currently #1 on Hacker News 😳.
I wrote about a mad rabbit hole that led me to a guy who is running 200 different (fake) restaurant brands from one single drab cloud kitchen in Bangalore!. In the end, I was left slightly distressed by just how easy it is to game Swiggy and Zomato.
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I gave OpenAI's Jukebox the lyrics to Taher Shah's Eye to Eye and it generated a whole song by The Beatles. 🤯.
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Would love to see web browsers do a Wrapped. How many times did I google a word I was only 95% sure I knew? Avg no. of tabs I opened in a day? How many miles did I scroll? How many times did I click on 'reject cookies'? What were my 2am wikipedia rabbit holes? I need these stats!.
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I hate how OTT platforms like Jiocinema, SonyLiv, etc have taken away the ability to forward or rewind their video playback from us, especially for live sports events. Ads are unskippable and you can't go back and rewatch any missed moments in the game.
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Wow, @hrprya and @sangha_kar actually visited the kitchens I posted about some days back. Excellent piece! 👇.
Remember the analysis by @prstb, where one guy was found to be running 200 brands from just one cloud kitchen? @sangha_kar and I went in search of the kitchens and its owner. Here's what we found: .
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NPR interviewed me about the half loaves bread search engine I made.
Prashant Baid hates throwing out bread that's gone bad. So he built a tool to help people find half-loaves for sale near them. And it's striking a chord with other people wanting to reduce food waste.
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I feel bad that some of my friends only log in to Twitter when they have grievances against some big corporation. I feel like they’re really missing out on all the hate and nastiness the rest of this app also has to offer.
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Type in Morse code by repeatedly slamming your laptop shut. Such a cool project!.
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Anil Kapoor did this last year too. The court order is available on the Lumen database for download and contains some ridiculous take down requests. To give you an idea, here are a few screenshots of pages that Anil Kapoor's lawyers wanted taken down 🤷♂️
Actor Jackie Shroff moves Delhi High Court seeking protection of his personality and publicity rights. The suit has been filed against various entities using his name, photographs, voice and word "Bhidu" without his consent. (file pic)
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Using insecure APIs from McDonald's India website to order anything for 1 rupee and so much more. Excellent write up as always from Eaton:.
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With the IPL on, in case you want to be able to go back and forward in the Jiocinema video player (and skip ads) 👇.
I hate how OTT platforms like Jiocinema, SonyLiv, etc have taken away the ability to forward or rewind their video playback from us, especially for live sports events. Ads are unskippable and you can't go back and rewatch any missed moments in the game.
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Alternatively, you can also install this as a chrome extension here: . I can't be bothered to publish it to the chrome store and go through their submission process because I still have the will to live.
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I recently learned that the company that has sent by far the most DMCA takedown notices on Github is – Nykaa. They've made more than 130 DMCA requests in the last two years. So why is Nykaa, of all places, sending so many takedown notices on Github?.
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GK61 board with gateron optical blue switches and Tai Hao miami blue keycaps. A thing of beauty 🤍
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Whoever they hired to design this webpage to look like a website from the 90s and for all the computer screen details for this not more than 5 seconds scene did a stellar job! 👏.
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Bought a bunch of cheap NFC stickers to set up some fun and non-useful personal automations using iOS Shortcuts
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A few weeks back, Cyberabad police arrested a man for the data theft of 66.9 crore individuals. It was reported as the ‘biggest’ data theft bust ever. They revealed that the accused operated from a website called “InspireWebz”. So I googled “InspireWebz” ⬇️.
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I have no hope from their apps but you can't even do this on their websites. So I wrote a very tiny greaskemonkey script to take back the control to forward and rewind video playback on OTT platforms using keyboard arrow keys.
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This is it. I think I've made it! 😀 Check out this extension I built 👇.
Show HN: How many miles do you think you've scrolled today?
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Decided to buy something from the original website instead of amazon and have received at least 12 unsolicited texts & emails and still continue to receive them even after the product arrived 🤷♂️.
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@mckaywrigley @OpenAI The access token that you're using to call OpenAI api can be seen by anyone on the browser's developer window and they can use it to call the api even without the beta access. Maybe that is why they restricted your access?.
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For what I thought was an innocent Google search at the time led me to a little corner of the Indian internet of ‘social media marketing experts’, database resellers and the alleged stolen database itself. You can read the whole post here:.
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England, New Zealand, Djokovic, Federer - they’re all winners in my eyes. Greatest sports night ever.
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#apihackday was superb. Great mentors, good food, excellent internet and comfortable workplace. Kudos @Exotel, @SendGrid, @postmanclient.
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Remember this flavour very well - but the indian version of pepsi blue didn't look like this. It was a much lighter shade of blue. The only online picture I could find is from this very low res youtube video of the pepsi blue india ad
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Some more trivia: TRAI decided to publish all of these email comments on their website. Exposing millions of email ids+names. And it's still available on their website!. Including a few wild emails like this one - when someone sent a love letter intended for someone else to TRAI:
Some nostalgia in exchange for your support👇🏽. Back in 2015, when TRAI began the consultation on Net Neutrality, millions of Indians participated, which resulted in a massive victory for internet users. It is time to once again work towards that victory. 4/6.
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"CRED members pay only 1 month deposit" — Peak dystopian Bengaluru.
🔎Flatmate for a 3BHK home in Koramangala. A perfect place for founders or creators. @CRED_club members pay only 1 month deposit.💲<25K pm 🕑 <15th April 👥 2-3 people. Detailed Information in the link ➡️�Approved Referrals get AirPods Pro. No kidding.
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I'm surprised there is not more outrage over the unavailability of half loaves of bread in grocery stores.
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Link to the Lumen database take down request disclosed by Google (Delhi HC order can be downloaded from here). You can check all the URLs they requested to be taken down here. (note: contains a few nsfw urls).
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I have a saved advanced search filter to show me text-only tweets from my timeline in the last 24 hrs. Over time, there have been fewer and fewer such tweets on my timeline. Here is the search filter if you'd like to try it for your timeline:.
Is it me, or does every tweet now come with an image, video or link? I thought this was the platform for words?.
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Do you know what a googlewhack is?. It's a game to find a two-word search term that returns exactly 1 search result on Google - without quotes. I searched for many two-word combinations but couldn't find any that returned exactly 1 result. But I really wanted to find one. 👇.
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This is a super cool project!. Also, according to this, M Night Shyamalan is the 7th most notable person to be born in India 🤷♂️.
Did you know Freddie Mercury was born in Zanzibar and Barack Obama in Honolulu? Who is the most famous person from your home town?. I made a map of the most notable people around the world. Built with @Mapbox. Check it out here: 🧵
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Macrodata refinement simulator from the TV series Severance. My innie could do this forever. 🙃.
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Because of course the correct way of watching any cricket broadcast in this country is to hit pause for the first 30-40 minutes of the game while you do your chores and then skip all the ads for the rest of the telecast. How dare they take this away from us.
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