Bangalore twitter: need to make an unavoidable cross-city trip. Have to drop-off 7 y.o. with vaccinated grandparents today to partake of lottery-winning vaccination slot tomorrow morning. Do I need a permit for this trip? (We'll be staying over as well to minimize travel.)
Dropped into a couple of Spaces. Both times someone commented that a Blue Tick has arrived, and addressed me with a "sir". 😯
The only reason I have a badge is because something happened five years ago. No one even remembers what.
But the more interesting thing is…
My timeline is awash with blue ticks. Twitter's algorithmic timeline buries all the people I actually care for. I have to remember to switch to latest tweets first, and then still check a lot. It's a painful way to keep in touch. Some people have voice. Others don't.
To get into a Space you must be following someone who's in it. Beyond this gateway though, they're filled with new, unfamiliar voices. If we are to borrow a pair of terms and classify these as the new bourgeois and proletariat, then Spaces are where the latter gather to speak.
Data leaks left, right and centre, data leaks every other week. 🌊 We're all affected.
But what do tech companies themselves think about the privacy of their users? We surveyed 130+ companies. Here is what we learnt. Many insights here. ✨
The MobiKwik leak is real. Here is what the dump had for me. One of those credit cards was valid until a couple weeks ago, and I don't recall authorising MobiKwik to save it. Companies that lie like 👇 ought to be taken to the cleaners.
Placed a test order on AliExpress to probe the ban. Item has arrived. I'm very pleased with myself. More testing ongoing, should have reliable results in several weeks.
Method 1: ask seller if they can ship to India, even though you've placed an order from a different country. May or may not work.
Method 2: use a package forwarder in a different country. The trick is to find a reliable one. (Tests ongoing.)
If using a package forwarder, it helps to not pay customs duty in the forwarder's country, so it needs to be local. However, AliExpress doesn't accept China as destination country either.
Fortuitously, Hong Kong is an accepted destination and has no customs duty. Yay free trade!
⚠️ Aarogya Setu is not open source. We got a press release and some random code to keep the public distracted. The released code is not for the app that everyone is using. ⚠️
While the released code may indeed be for *some* version of Aarogya Setu: 1. It is not the version you're using. We have no idea what is different. 2. Developers are ignoring reports of serious vulnerabilities. 3. Actual development is elsewhere in a closed source repo.
Where is the actual source code? Notice the URL here.
I went to the Bangalore General Post Office today to enquire about a parcel that's been stuck in transit since July. It's somewhere in there. One customs official was valiantly opening everything to determine the tax on all the $1 and $2 trinkets people order from AliExpress.
Each of those bags contains parcels from the landing ports of Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai. Anything that arrived in the past few weeks hasn't even been recorded as having arrived. They're months behind on the backlog. Here's a sample. Chennai to Bangalore took June to September.
Why is this happening? Back in 2015, a customs official showed me a memo. All personal imports above ₹2000 (i.e., you're not a registered importer) we're to be taxed at a flat rate of 40 something percent. The official explained that this was to encourage #MakeInIndia.