rmb🍥

Hello Friend

[jack @jack]

the government of india does not like technologies like bitchat and wants it taken down

[Ron of Kochi @ron_of_kochi]

When Wikipedia launched in 2001, its premise – that anyone, anywhere could help build a reliable encyclopaedia – felt naive, even outlandish.

However, Kerala's Free and Open Source Software movement was fertile ground for this idea to take root and eventually flourish.

Today, the Wikipedia community here — one of the largest and most active — is buzzing as volunteer editors document vanishing art forms, strengthen health information, and ensure that Malayalam continues to exist as a living language of knowledge online.

I write for @xpresskerala.

Read online: https://t.co/m3xVj9OA5S

@kuruvilla2507 @pendown @rajeshravi71 @NewIndianXpress @MSKiranPrakash @VigneshMadhu94 @PaulCithara @santwana99 @P__RamDas @tniefeatures @Wikipedia @wikipediafounda @manojkmohan @wikimediakerala @Sahya_org @ShobhaTharoor @ShashiTharoor #Wikipedia

[Korah Abraham @thekorahabraham]

This is something we don't speak about much, while talking about VS.

He led a tech revolution as well in Kerala.

VS brought Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) into Kerala’s schools and govt institutions, making IT education more accessible.

[Subin/സുബിൻ:/bin/su @[email protected] @SubinSiby]

I had this idea of the video a year back, finally got the time and people to do it :)

The og reference: https://t.co/XeYUGkqZXB

[FFmpeg @FFmpeg]

We would like to congratulate @AmpereComputing on their acquisition by SoftBank.

Unlike the majority of hardware/cloud companies, Ampere have supported the FFmpeg project by giving us a 160-core ARM server for development.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I wrote a quick new post on "Digital Hygiene".

Basically there are some no-brainer decisions you can make in your life to dramatically improve the privacy and security of your computing and this post goes over some of them. Blog post link in the reply, but copy pasting below too.

Every now and then I get reminded about the vast fraud apparatus of the internet, re-invigorating my pursuit of basic digital hygiene around privacy/security of day to day computing. The sketchiness starts with major tech companies who are incentivized to build comprehensive profiles of you, to monetize it directly for advertising, or sell it off to professional data broker companies who further enrich, de-anonymize, cross-reference and resell it further. Inevitable and regular data breaches eventually runoff and collect your information into dark web archives, feeding into a whole underground spammer / scammer industry of hacks, phishing, ransomware, credit card fraud, identity theft, etc. This guide is a collection of the most basic digital hygiene tips, starting with the most basic to a bit more niche.

Password manager. Your passwords are your "first factor", i.e. "something you know". Do not be a noob and mint new, unique, hard passwords for every website or service that you sign up with. Combine this with a browser extension to create and Autofill them super fast. For example, I use and like 1Password. This prevents your passwords from 1) being easy to guess or crack, and 2) leaking one single time, and opening doors to many other services. In return, we now have a central location for all your 1st factors (passwords), so we must make sure to secure it thoroughly, which brings us to...

Hardware security key. The most critical services in your life (e.g. Google, or 1Password) must be additionally secured with a "2nd factor", i.e. "something you have". An attacker would have to be in possession of both factors to gain access to these services. The most common 2nd factor implemented by many services is a phone number, the idea being that you get a text message with a pin code to enter in addition to your password. Clearly, this is much better than having no 2nd factor at all, but the use of a phone number is known to be extremely insecure due to the SIM swap attack. Basically, it turns out to be surprisingly easy for an attacker to call your phone company, pretend they are you, and get them to switch your phone number over to a new phone that they control. I know this sounds totally crazy but it is true, and I have many friends who are victims of this attack. Therefore, purchase and set up hardware security keys - the industrial strength protection standard. In particular, I like and use YubiKey. These devices generate and store a private key on the device secure element itself, so the private key is never materialized on a suspiciously general purpose computing device like your laptop. Once you set these up, an attacker will not only need to know your password, but have physical possession of your security key to log in to a service. Your risk of getting pwned has just decreased by about 1000X. Purchase and set up 2-3 keys and store them in different physical locations to prevent lockout should you physically lose one of the keys. The security keys support a few authentication methods. Look for "U2F" in the 2nd factor settings of your service as the strongest protection. E.g. Google and 1Password support it. Fallback on "TOTP" if you have to, and note that your YubiKeys can store TOTP private keys, so you can use the YubiKey Authenticator app to access them easily through NFC by touching your key to the phone to get your pin when logging in. This is significantly better than storing TOTP private keys on other (software) authenticator apps, because again you should not trust general purpose computing devices. It is beyond the scope of this post to go into full detail, but basically I strongly recommend the use of 2-3 YubiKeys to dramatically strengthen your digital security.

Biometrics. Biometrics are the third common authentication factor ("something you are"). E.g. if you're on iOS I recommend setting up FaceID basically everywhere, e.g. to access the 1Password app and such.

Security questions. Dinosaur businesses are obsessed with the idea of security questions like "what is your mother's maidan name?", and force you to set them up from time to time. Clearly, these are in the category of "something you know" so they are basically passwords, but conveniently for scammers, they are easy to research out on the open internet and you should refuse any prompts to participate in this ridiculous "security" exercise. Instead, treat security questions like passwords, generate random answers to random questions, and store them in your 1Password along with your passwords.

Disk encryption. Always ensure that your computers use disk encryption. For example, on Macs this total no-brainer feature is called "File Vault". This feature ensures that if your computer gets stolen, an attacker won't be able to get the hard disk and go to town on all your data.

Internet of Things. More like @internetofshit. Whenever possible, avoid "smart" devices, which are essentially incredibly insecure, internet-connected computers that gather tons of data, get hacked all the time, and that people willingly place into their homes. These things have microphones, and they routinely send data back to the mothership for analytics and to "improve customer experience" lol ok. As an example, in my younger and naive years I once purchased a CO2 monitor from China that demanded to know everything about me and my precise physical location before it would tell me the amount of CO2 in my room. These devices are a huge and very common attack surface on your privacy and security and should be avoided.

Messaging. I recommend Signal instead of text messages because it end-to-end encrypts all your communications. In addition, it does not store metadata like many other apps do (e.g. iMessage, WhatsApp). Turn on disappearing messages (e.g. 90 days default is good). In my experience they are an information vulnerability with no significant upside.

Browser. I recommend Brave browser, which is a privacy-first browser based on Chromium. That means that basically all Chrome extensions work out of the box and the browser feels like Chrome, but without Google having front row seats to your entire digital life.

Search engine. I recommend Brave search, which you can set up as your default in the browser settings. Brave Search is a privacy-first search engine with its own index, unlike e.g. Duck Duck Go which basically a nice skin for Bing, and is forced into weird partnerships with Microsoft that compromise user privacy. As with all services on this list, I pay $3/mo for Brave Premium because I prefer to be the customer, not the product in my digital life. I find that empirically, about 95% of my search engine queries are super simple website lookups, with the search engine basically acting as a tiny DNS. And if you're not finding what you're looking for, fallback to Google by just prepending "!g" to your search query, which will redirect it to Google.

Credit cards. Mint new, unique credit cards per merchant. There is no need to use one credit card on many services. This allows them to "link up" your purchasing across different services, and additionally it opens you up to credit card fraud because the services might leak your credit card number. I like and use privacy dot com to mint new credit cards for every single transaction or merchant. You get a nice interface for all your spending and notifications for each swipe. You can also set limits on each credit card (e.g. $50/month etc.), which dramatically decreases the risk of being charged more than you expect. Additionally, with a privacy dot com card you get to enter totally random information for your name and address when filling out billing information. This is huge, because there is simply no need and totally crazy that random internet merchants should be given your physical address. Which brings me to...

Address. There is no need to give out your physical address to the majority of random services and merchants on the internet. Use a virtual mail service. I currently use Earth Class Mail but tbh I'm a bit embarrassed by that and I'm looking to switch to Virtual Post Mail due to its much strong commitments to privacy, security, and its ownership structure and reputation. In any case, you get an address you can give out, they receive your mail, they scan it and digitize it, they have an app for you to quickly see it, and you can decide what to do with it (e.g. shred, forward, etc.). Not only do you gain security and privacy but also quite a bit of convenience.

Email. I still use gmail just due to sheer convenience, but I've started to partially use Proton Mail as well. And while we're on email, a few more thoughts. Never click on any link inside any email you receive. Email addresses are extremely easy to spoof and you can never be guaranteed that the email you got is a phishing email from a scammer. Instead, I manually navigate to any service of interest and log in from there. In addition, disable image loading by default in your email's settings. If you get an email that requires you to see images, you can click on "show images" to see them and it's not a big deal at all. This is important because many services use embedded images to track you - they hide information inside the image URL you get, so when your email client loads the image, they can see that you opened the email. There's just no need for that. Additionally, confusing images are one way scammers hide information to avoid being filtered by email servers as scam / spam.

VPN. If you wish to hide your IP/location to services, you can do so via VPN indirection. I recommend Mullvad VPN. I keep VPN off by default, but enable it selectively when I'm dealing with services I trust less and want more protection from.

DNS-based blocker. You can block ads by blocking entire domains at the DNS level. I like and use NextDNS, which blocks all kinds of ads and trackers. For more advanced users who like to tinker, pi-hole is the physical alternative.

Network monitor. I like and use The Little Snitch, which I have installed and running on my MacBook. This lets you see which apps are communicating, how much data and when, so you can keep track of what apps on your computer "call home" and how often. Any app that communicates too much is sus, and should potentially be uninstalled if you don't expect the traffic.

I just want to live a secure digital life and establish harmonious relationships with products and services that leak only the necessary information. And I wish to pay for the software I use so that incentives are aligned and so that I am the customer. This is not trivial, but it is possible to approach with some determination and discipline.

Finally, what's not on the list. I mostly still use Gmail + Gsuite because it's just too convenient and pervasive. I also use 𝕏 instead of something exotic (e.g. Mastodon), trading off sovereignty for convenience. I don't use a VoIP burner phone service (e.g. MySudo) but I am interested in it. I don't really mint new/unique email addresses but I want to. The journey continues. Let me know if there are other digital hygiene tips and tricks that should be on this list.

Link to blog post version in the reply, on my brand new Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ blog cute 👇

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it. This advice will be seen as some of the worst career advice ever given. I disagree with the Turing Award and Nobel prize winner who wrote, “It is far more likely that the programming occupation will become extinct [...] than that it will become all-powerful. More and more, computers will program themselves.”​ Statements discouraging people from learning to code are harmful!

In the 1960s, when programming moved from punchcards (where a programmer had to laboriously make holes in physical cards to write code character by character) to keyboards with terminals, programming became easier. And that made it a better time than before to begin programming. Yet it was in this era that Nobel laureate Herb Simon wrote the words quoted in the first paragraph. Today’s arguments not to learn to code continue to echo his comment.

As coding becomes easier, more people should code, not fewer!

Over the past few decades, as programming has moved from assembly language to higher-level languages like C, from desktop to cloud, from raw text editors to IDEs to AI assisted coding where sometimes one barely even looks at the generated code (which some coders recently started to call vibe coding), it is getting easier with each step.

I wrote previously that I see tech-savvy people coordinating AI tools to move toward being 10x professionals — individuals who have 10 times the impact of the average person in their field. I am increasingly convinced that the best way for many people to accomplish this is not to be just consumers of AI applications, but to learn enough coding to use AI-assisted coding tools effectively.

One question I’m asked most often is what someone should do who is worried about job displacement by AI. My answer is: Learn about AI and take control of it, because one of the most important skills in the future will be the ability to tell a computer exactly what you want, so it can do that for you. Coding (or getting AI to code for you) is a great way to do that.

When I was working on the course Generative AI for Everyone and needed to generate AI artwork for the background images, I worked with a collaborator who had studied art history and knew the language of art. He prompted Midjourney with terminology based on the historical style, palette, artist inspiration and so on — using the language of art — to get the result he wanted. I didn’t know this language, and my paltry attempts at prompting could not deliver as effective a result.

Similarly, scientists, analysts, marketers, recruiters, and people of a wide range of professions who understand the language of software through their knowledge of coding can tell an LLM or an AI-enabled IDE what they want much more precisely, and get much better results. As these tools are continuing to make coding easier, this is the best time yet to learn to code, to learn the language of software, and learn to make computers do exactly what you want them to do.

[Original text: https://t.co/HdI3Jb9HmF ]

[[email protected] @FOSSCell]

10 Days to Go! 🚀

FOSSMeet'25 is almost here! Join us from March 14-16, 2025, for one of India's leading open-source event. Register now at https://t.co/pvHbFwdmjA and be part of the movement!
#FOSSMeet25 #20YearsOfFOSSMeet #FOSSMeet #NITCalicut

[The Debian Project @debian]

The Debian Publicity Team will no longer post on X/Twitter. We took this decision since we feel X doesn't reflect Debian shared values as stated in our social contract, code of conduct and diversity statement. X evolved into a place where people we care about don't feel safe.

[The Debian Project @debian]

OpenStreetMap migrates to Debian 12 https://t.co/jdeJ0Vqs3B

[Manoj Karingamadathil @manojkmohan]

First "State of the Map" Kerala 2024 is happening in Wayanad on Nov 16 & 17

Thanks @openstreetmap Foundation for approving the @sotm Quick Licence. A Mile Stone to our #OpenStreetMapKerala Community. @osm_in @mapkerala

https://t.co/Ykb5153pSR

[FOSS MEC @FossMec]

FINALLY HERE🥶🥶

[আকাশদীপ ধর (Akashdeep Dhar) @gridheader]

Friends at @CentOS, @debian, @KodiTV, @ManjaroLinux, @openSUSE, @ubuntu - Might I interest you in this kiosk-operated self-service project that you can run at your conference booth to help your visitors consider using your distribution?🤔

Check this out https://t.co/hpQRInC7RK!

[ark Arjun @arkarjun]

Contribute mapping the project #WayanadLandslide https://t.co/TdK7yYE0iB #HOT #OpenStreetMap @osm_in @openmapping_ap

[OpenStreetMap India @osm_in]

Great to see @Olacabs has rolled out OLA Maps based on @openstreetmap to all their users. OpenStreetMap attribution is shown after clicking the Ola Map icon at the bottom.

#OpenStreetMap #OpenStreetMapIndia #OSM #OSMIndia

[Debian India @DebianIndia]

Call for proposal deadline for @UbuConAsia 2024, Jaipur has been extended till April 30th. A session can be a talk, workshop, BoF or lightning talk.

To submit a proposal or to know more, visit https://t.co/9HXx2jqGu6.

#Ubuntu #UbuConAsia #freesoftware #conference #india

[UbuCon Asia | 8-9 Aug 2026 Taipei, Taiwan @UbuConAsia]

We're delighted to share the news of our esteemed community partners joining hands for UbuCon Asia 2024!

Join us (https://t.co/2lSRpCwZKG) as we embark on this journey to empower individuals and communities through the transformative power of Ubuntu and open-source principles.

[laurence @functi0nZer0]

A dude has a meticulous 2 year plan to include a backdoor into almost every system in the world

Only to fail because a guy started to notice that his ssh login is 0.5 seconds slow for some reason

Study autistic byte-wizards

[HaxRob @haxrob]

Andres Freund, the principal software engineer at Microsoft who discovered the xz backdoor really does deserve a big pat on the back. 👏

The outcome could have been much, much worse.

[[email protected] @FOSSCell]

Come be a part of *FOSSMeet’24*, India’s longest-running FOSS conference on *March 22nd-24th*!..

Registrations are now open! Embrace the FOSS movement and secure your spot at https://t.co/aG2uTxTiB1.
May the FOSS be with you!