Shashank Saksena

Everything digital, global politics 🇮🇳

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

In 1987, Costa Rica was 21% forest. Today it's 57%.

In the 1990s, Costa Rica passed a law that pays landowners directly for the ecosystem services their forest provides: carbon storage, watershed protection, biodiversity, soil stability. The payments are funded by a tax on fossil fuels.

Keep your trees standing and the government cuts you a check. Clear them and you lose the income.

Nearly a million hectares have been protected or restored under the program. Species that had retreated or disappeared from large parts of the country are recovering. The forest came back because the incentive structure changed, not because people were told to care more.

But it crashed the economy, right? Not at all.

Costa Rica became the top per capita agricultural exporter in Latin America. Tourism built around its forests and biodiversity became one of its largest industries. The economy didn't absorb the cost of keeping the forest. The forest became part of what grows their economy.

This is the version of the story most people never hear, the one where protecting nature and economic growth pointed in the same direction because we humans designed it that way.

It's not forests or the economy and it never had to be.

[The Protagonist @protagonist_xig]

Methamidophos is a highly TOXIC organophosphate insecticide that has been used to control pests on crops such as cotton, vegetables, and peppers/chillies.

ITS HIGHLY TOXIC TO HUMANS.

In severe cases exposure can cause paralysis or DEATH

And if THIS was found in an EXPORT CONSIGNMENT… where there are mandatory quality checks..

Can you IMAGINE what is being sold to us?

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I think a lot of people are exhausted because it feels like every beautiful or useful thing eventually gets monetised, privatised, extracted, or bulldozed.

[Mohan Pargaien IFS🇮🇳 @pargaien]

Pretty sure the first human to invent the needle just plagiarized the Common Tailorbird. 🤫

#tuesday
#Tuesdayspecial

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

Yesterday 274 people pushed for the summit of Mount Everest just to give their LinkedIn profile the edge.

Horrendous.

Video by Lakpa Tenjen Sherpa https://t.co/p8GvAkheNz

[Manish Sharma @Cheekytogeeky]

be @ni5arga

→ 19 years old, from West Bengal, studied in Delhi for a few years
→ just finished his own Class 12 exams in 2026
→ calls himself a hobbyist cybersecurity researcher
→ says he is an engineer, not a hacker
→ built an OSINT engine, a stock-tracking TUI, a pastebin in Rust
→ once found bugs in FOSS United and disclosed them quietly
→ just another CBSE student watching his own board roll out a new digital marking system

then he opened the portal

→ CBSE moves Class 12 evaluation to On-Screen Marking, 1.8 million students affected
→ Nisarga sees the portal link is fully public, gets curious
→ opens DevTools, downloads the Angular JavaScript bundle
→ first vulnerability found in 30 minutes
→ a literal master password sitting in plain text inside the frontend code
→ enter it, the OTP field auto-fills, the entire login flow gets bypassed
→ OTP validation happens in the user's browser, not on the server
→ no route guards, every internal page reachable by editing browser storage
→ password reset API never checks the old password
→ systemic IDOR across the entire API, change one value in sessionStorage, become any examiner
→ outcome: take over any teacher account, view answer sheets, edit marks

25 February 2026. He reports everything to CERT-In the same day.

→ CERT-In asks for a screen recording, he sends a full walkthrough
→ acknowledgement comes back as a boilerplate reply
→ reference number assigned: CERTIn-16590126
→ he follows up multiple times. no response.
→ three months pass. portal still live. Class 12 results released. vulnerabilities still there.
→ 22 May: publishes the blog post and a thread on X
→ Deedy Das, Satish Acharya, Internet Freedom Foundation amplify it
→ the post goes viral
→ CBSE issues a clarification: that was just a test portal, no breach
→ the URL CBSE cited in their own tweet was not even a registered domain
→ a friend buys the domain and points it at Nisarga's blog
→ CBSE quietly deletes the tweet

then it gets worse

→ 25 May: finds an SQL injection vulnerability on the live production portal
→ reports to CERT-In, gets a one-line thank you
→ gains admin access to the live https://t.co/1WpmNGsczK server
→ portal stays up for four more hours
→ he uploads anime videos and memes, links them publicly from CBSE servers
→ plays a viral Japanese song on a CBSE page, makes the news for it
→ CBSE finally takes the whole portal down

then he reads the database

→ master table accessed: 10 GB, 9.3 million records
→ examiner names, addresses, school names, bank account details
→ passwords stored in plain text
→ login tokens anyone can paste into a browser to log in as that user
→ 31 May: finds a second live CBSE production portal, 45,074 records of failed payments
→ emails, phone numbers, payment IDs, order IDs, all readable
→ 31 May, the bigger one: an AWS S3 bucket is misconfigured
→ ListObjectsV2 works without authentication, the bucket root is listable
→ samples pulled from 18 lakh scanned 2026 answer sheets, every subject
→ multiple institutions sharing the same bucket
→ also notices something strange in the scans: bedsheets visible in the background of answer sheets CBSE paid for proper scanners to handle

CBSE responds

→ posts an AI-generated image saying the system is robust and secure
→ three days later admits some vulnerabilities existed and have been contained
→ refuses to name the cybersecurity firm doing the audit
→ claims they tried contacting him. he says they have not.

→ Internet Freedom Foundation writes to the Ministry of Education and CERT-In
→ asks for an investigation into CBSE, a review of the contract with vendor Coempt EduTeck, a full audit

→ he points out he could have sold this data and made a lot of money
→ he did not. he is a CBSE student too.
→ his own analogy: the door wasn't just unlocked. the key was lying on the ground in front of everyone.

a 19-year-old with a anima pff broke a national exam evaluation system in 30 minutes with browser developer tools and the government is still pretending it was a test environment

[वरुण 🇮🇳 @varungrover]

A 17-year old having more courage, skills, and love for the nation than many big news corporations and their multiple award winning journos combined.

[Himalayan Hindu @himalayanhindu]

The obsession with breaking records has successfully turned the fragile Himalayas into the world's longest PARKING LOT. Joshimath is currently choking under a massive 25-30 KM long traffic jam. From Vishnuprayag to 15 km beyond, tourists are stuck in their cars for hours.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

Please stop. I don’t want an AI summary of my Google search. I don’t want an AI summary of the text message from my friend at work. I don’t want an AI summary of the email I’m about to read. Please just stop.

[The Nalanda Index @Nalanda_index]

“India is no longer struggling to attract tourists… it is now struggling to handle the crowd.

From mountains to beaches, every tourist destination is packed. People spend more time stuck in traffic than actually enjoying the journey.

This scene from Sikkim’s Zero Point is not an exception anymore it’s becoming the new normal across India.”

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I’m trying to figure out how we went from “reduce your carbon footprint” to building AI pollution factories in every city.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Bees are responsible for pollinating about one in three bites of the food we eat. They are far more important to humans than any AI tool or data center.

[Anant Goenka @anantgoenka]

Express investigates Delhi municipality's mishandling of road dust -- the largest contributor of PM 2.5 and PM 10.

https://t.co/ux9AkH15zO

1) Delhi’s road-dust cleanup is badly misaligned with the pollution cycle: sweeping is heaviest in winter, when political pressure peaks, but lightest in summer, when dust is worst.

2) The city has far too few mechanized sweeping vehicles for the scale of the problem. Center said it needs 505. It has only 76.

3) Even so, the limited fleet is underused for much of the year.

4) Cleaning appears skewed toward better-funded municipal areas rather than being distributed by need.

This cool interactive dashboard shows areas and frequency of road dust sweeping in delhi:
https://t.co/2ZQRqbtrfQ

The result is a system that looks active on paper, but is weak where it matters most.

[V @TheBrownUmbreon]

For a country so crippling with heat and no safe water for billions we want to build this abomination. Please stop for the love of god

[Shashank Saksena @shashank11]

@josiahjdp Sorry but this just drags on ..

[Backpacking Daku @outofofficedaku]

Hey !! @VFSGlobal You must stop deliberately detaining travelers in the appointment area well beyond their scheduled times, even when the visa center is largely empty, solely to pressure them into purchasing Premium Lounge access.

This tactics shows complete disregard for applicants, including elderly travelers and others who are particularly vulnerable to fatigue. It is driven by greed and constitutes poor customer service.

[Jay Anderson @TheProjectUnity]

I knew it was bad but I didn't know it was this bad...

Drains along the Ganges River in India empty up to ONE BILLION GALLONS of RAW SEWAGE and industrial waste into the river...

EVERY SINGLE DAY 🤮

[Shashank Saksena @shashank11]

https://t.co/3zmCQ1ZQ7U

[Aparna Karthikeyan @AparnaKarthi]

The arrogance of humans to cut down trees and think air conditioners will cool us

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Vultures eat anthrax, botulism, rabies, and cholera for breakfast.

Their stomach acid is among the most corrosive in the animal kingdom, with a pH around 1, low enough to dissolve the bones, hide, and pathogens of dead animals that would kill almost anything else.

A vulture eating a diseased carcass isn't a vector for disease, it's a terminus. The disease chain ends in the vulture's gut, and that's pretty hardcore.

When vulture populations crashed in India in the 1990s, rotting livestock carcasses sat where vultures used to clean them.

Feral dogs and rats took over the cleanup, both of which actually do spread rabies. Researchers later linked the vulture collapse to roughly 500,000 deaths in India over the following decade.

The same collapse is now underway in sub-Saharan Africa. Six of eleven African vulture species are threatened with extinction, primarily from poisoned poaching baits.

The animals nobody finds cute are doing more public health work than most of the species we actively protect.