Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

August 26, 2020

Relaunching Suramya’s Book Review Cafe

Filed under: General/News — Suramya @ 11:15 AM

In 2010 I created a section of my website dedicated to book reviews but over the next few years that section was removed from the site. I honestly don’t remember why that happened but my best guess is that I was updating the website theme, never got around to migrating the section and then just forgot. I reviewed 71 Books during the time the site was active and looking at my logs if I had continued to review every book then I would have reviewed over 1500 books to date. 🙂

I finally revived the site over the past few days and instead of using the custom website that I had created with a bare-bones CMS system, I have switched over to WordPress as its a lot easier to manage/maintain WP sites. Migrating the old reviews was a painfully manual process where I had to export the data from the DB and then format it correctly for WordPress. Most of it I was able to automate but the Affilate links had to be manually updated and it was painful to say the least. But finally I am done and all the old reviews are imported into the updated site. Going forward I will be adding the book reviews to the site regularly.

There are some changes to the rating system that I have implemented for the reviews going forward to make the ratings easier to understand and more consistent. In the past I used a scale of 1-10 for the ratings but I will be using a scale of 1-5 (5 being the best) going forward.

Let me know if you have any questions/comments about the site or would like to give feedback on features that I should incorporate.

– Suramya

PS: This notice is duplicated on my main Blog as well.

August 25, 2020

Using Bioacoustic signatures for Identification & Authentication

Filed under: Computer Security,Computer Software,Emerging Tech,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 9:35 PM

We have all heard about Biometric scanners that identify folks using their fingerprints, or Iris scan or even the shape of their ear. Then we have lower accuracy authenticating systems like Face recognition, voice recognition etc. Individually they might not be 100% accurate but combine one or more of these and we have the ability to create systems that are harder to fool. This is not to say that these systems are fool proof because there are ways around each of the examples I mentioned above, our photos are everywhere and given a pic of high enough quality it is possible to create a replica of the face or iris or even finger prints.

Due to the above mentioned shortcomings, scientists are always on lookout for more ways to authenticate and identify people. Researchers from South Korean have found that the signature created when sound waves pass through humans are unique enough to be used to identify individuals. Their work, described in a study published on 4 October in the IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, suggests this technique can identify a person with 97 percent accuracy.

“Modeling allowed us to infer what structures or material features of the human body actually differentiated people,” explains Joo Yong Sim, one of the ETRI researchers who conducted the study. “For example, we could see how the structure, size, and weight of the bones, as well as the stiffness of the joints, affect the bioacoustics spectrum.”

[…]

Notably, the researchers were concerned that the accuracy of this approach could diminish with time, since the human body constantly changes its cells, matrices, and fluid content. To account for this, they acquired the acoustic data of participants at three separate intervals, each 30 days apart.

“We were very surprised that people’s bioacoustics spectral pattern maintained well over time, despite the concern that the pattern would change greatly,” says Sim. “These results suggest that the bioacoustics signature reflects more anatomical features than changes in water, body temperature, or biomolecule concentration in blood that change from day to day.”

Interestingly, while the setup is not as accurate as Fingerprints or Iris scans it is still accurate enough to differentiate between two fingers of the same hand. If the waves required to generate the Bioacoustic signatures are validated to be safe for humans over long term use, then it is possible that we will soon see a broader implementation of this technology in places like airports, buses, public area’s etc to identify people automatically without having to do anything. If it can be made portable then it could be used to monitor protests, rallies, etc which would make it a privacy risk.

The problem with this tech is that it would be harder to fool without taking steps that would make you stand out like wearing a vest filled with liquid that changes your acoustic signature. Which is great when we are just talking about authentication/identification for access control but becomes a nightmare when we consider the surveillance aspect of usage.

Source: The Bioacoustic Signatures of Our Bodies Can Reveal Our Identities

– Suramya

August 24, 2020

India has the cheapest Mobile Internet in the world

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 2:58 PM

Internet services were launched in India on 15th August, 1995 by Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited and in November, 1998, the Government opened up the sector for providing Internet services by private operators. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Internet’s launch in India and its astounding how much the landscape has changed in the past 25 years. My first net connection in 1998 was a blazing 33.3kbps dial-up connection that cost Rs 15,000 for 250 hours, this allowed you to use graphical tools to browse the internet like Netscape (which was the precursor for Firefox). For students there was a discount pricing for Rs 5,000 for 250 hours but they only got access to text/shell based browsing.

Now, 25 years later the landscape is completely different. Internet connections costs in India are the cheapest in the world as per a recent study done for The Worldwide broadband speed league by Cable.co.uk in association with M-Lab.

Five cheapest packages in the world

The five cheapest countries in terms of the average cost of 1GB of mobile data are India ($0.09), Israel ($0.11), Kyrgyzstan ($0.21), Italy ($0.43), and Ukraine ($0.46).

Conversely to the most expensive, none of these countries are islands. Further, they all either contain excellent fibre broadband infrastructure (Italy, India, Ukraine, Israel), or in the case of Kyrgyzstan rely heavily on mobile data as the primary means to keep its populace connected to the rest of the world.

This is based on sampling done in Feb 2020

Rank Name Plans measured Average price of 1GB (local currency) Currency Conversion rate (USD) (Frozen 27/04/2020) Average price of 1GB (USD) Cheapest 1GB (Local currency) Cheapest 1GB for 30 days (USD) Most expensive 1GB (Local currency) Most expensive 1GB (USD) Sample date
1 India 60 6.66 INR 0.01 0.09 1.63 0.02 209.09 $2.75 14/02/2020

If you compare the costs to prices in the US, you will notice that Internet (data) is significantly more expensive in the US as opposed to India.

Rank Name Plans measured Average price of 1GB (local currency) Currency Conversion rate (USD) (Frozen 27/04/2020) Average price of 1GB (USD) Cheapest 1GB (Local currency) Cheapest 1GB for 30 days (USD) Most expensive 1GB (Local currency) Most expensive 1GB (USD) Sample date
188 United States 29 8.00 USD 1.00 8.00 2.20 2.20 2.20 $60.00 24/02/2020

The cheap internet data connections in India is completely due to Reliance Jio. Till Jio launched their services in September 2016 the cost for 1GB of data was Rs 249 for 1GB (Airtel/Idea) & Rs. 251 for 1GB (Vodaphone). After Jio launched all other ISP’s starting loosing customers to Jio at an astronomical rate and had to cut prices in order to stay in business. Now, 4 years later we have the cheapest data in the world at ~Rs 6 per GB. 🙂 This proves that healthy competition is the best way to get good service at a competitive pricing. If there was a monopoly then they can choose the pricing as per their desire and since folks don’t have an alternate option they have to use their services.

Check out the full report at: Worldwide mobile data pricing: The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries.

– Suramya

August 23, 2020

Mozilla Thunderbird has a ‘Link Mismatch Detection’ feature to protect from Phishing & Scams

Filed under: Computer Software,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:03 PM

Yesterday I was trying to register for a new service and as always I had to share my email address and wait for the confirmation/validation email to verify that the email address I had provided was a valid one. Once I finally got the email it had a clickable link to validate my email address that looked like the screenshot below:


Clickable link for email address validation

Since this was an email I was expecting and wanted to create an account, I clicked on the link and got a surprise. Instead of immediately taking me to the link I had clicked on Thunderbird popped up the following pop-up telling me that the link was taking me to another website than what the link text was indicating. This is new behavior that I believe was implemented in Thunderbird 68 but haven’t found the release notes confirming it. (I didn’t really spend a lot of time searching to be honest)


Link Mismatch Detected

In this case it was a benign reason because the link was taking me to a tracking site before redirecting to the email confirmation page. But the benefits are immediately obvious as this would flag the links on the phishing/scam emails that pretend to come from a bank/email provider/facebook but redirect users to a Phishing site and prompt users to verify if they are going to the correct site.

Unfortunately the fix is not perfect and needs more work as this would include all links in newsletters etc that include tracking links (which is pretty much all of them). If users constantly get the popup then there is a high probability that they will get conditioned to click on the First button to go the site the link is taking you to without reading the text fully.

Some of the users will find this to be annoying and want to disable it, so below are the steps to disable the Phishing checks in Thunderbird (not recommended). Only make this changes if you are absolutely sure of what you are doing and take full responsibility of the fact that you disabled the Phishing checks. I will not be responsible if you disable the checks and then end up with an empty bank account after having your account Phished. Also, I found the instructions on the Mozilla Forum but haven’t tried them myself so like anything else you find on the internet please validate the steps and only follow if you are sure that they are safe :).

There are four phishing preferences.

* mail.phishing.detection.enabled

i.e. Tools > Options > Security > Email Scams > Tell me if the message I’m reading is a suspected email scam

* mail.phishing.detection.ipaddresses
* mail.phishing.detection.mismatched_hosts
* mail.phishing.detection.disallow_form_actions

Try setting the mail.phishing.detection.mismatched_hosts preference to false in the about:config window, then restart and test again.

It’s great that the Thunderbird team is adding more and more features to make email safer. Looking forward to more such features in TB.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

August 22, 2020

Bangla TV thinks that Scotch Brite scrubs are a valid replacement for defibrillator’s

Filed under: Humor — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

A lot of times TV Serials, moveis take liberties with facts and sometimes even with common sense which is understandable. However there are instances where you see something and go What The Hell did I just see… Case in point is the following screenshot taken from a Bangla TV serial in India. 🙂 I guess they didn’t want to spend the effort to get something that looked like shock paddles of a defibrillator so they used whatever was closest to hand not realizing that people would notice. 🙂


Scotch Brite can now restart your heart and help keep your bathroom clean at the same time.

This is why you need someone to proof watch your shoots before you make them public.

– Suramya

August 21, 2020

Emotion detection software for Pets using AI and some thoughts around it (and AI in general)

Filed under: Computer Software,Emerging Tech,Humor,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 5:32 PM

Pet owners are a special breed of people, they willingly take responsibility for another life and take care of them. I personally like pets as long as I can return them to the owner at the end of the day (or hour, depending on how annoying the pet is). I had to take care of a puppy for a week when Surabhi & Vinit were out of town and that experience was more than enough to confirm my belief in this matter. Others however feel differently and spend quite a lot of time and effort talking to the pets and some of them even pretend that the dog is talking back.

Now leveraging the power of AI there is a new app created that analyses & interprets the facial expressions of your pet. Folks over at the University of Melbourne decided to build an Convolutional Neural Networks based application called Happy Pets that you can download from the Android or Apple app stores to try on your pet. They claim to be able to identify the emotion the pet is feeling when the photo was taken.

While the science behind it is cool and a lot of pet owners who tried out the application over at Hacker News seem to like it, I feel its a bit frivolous and silly. Plus its hard enough for us to classify emotions in Humans reliably using AI so I would take the claims with a pinch of salt. The researchers themselves have also not given any numbers around the accuracy percentage of the model.

When I first saw the post about the app it reminded me of another article I had read a few days ago which postulated that ‘Too many AI researchers think real-world problems are not relevant’. At first I thought that this was an author trolling the AI developers but after reading the article I kind of agree with him. AI has a massive potential to advance our understanding of health, agriculture, scientific discovery, and more. However looking at the feedback AI papers have been getting it appears that AI researchers are allergic to practical applications (or in some cases useful applications). For example, below is a review received on a paper submitted to the NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference:

“The authors present a solution for an original and highly motivating problem, but it is an application and the significance seems limited for the machine-learning community.”

If I read this correctly then basically they are saying that this AI paper is for a particular application so its not interesting enough for the ML community. There is a similar bias in the theoretical physics/mathematics world where academics who talk about implementing the concepts/theories are looked down upon by the ‘purists’. I personally believe that while the theoretical sciences are all well & good and we do need people working on them to expand our understanding, at the end of the day if we are not applying these learnings/theorems practically they are of no use. There will be cases where we don’t have the know-how to implement or apply the learnings but we should not let that stand in the way of practical applications for things we can implement/use.

To quote a classic paper titled “Machine Learning that Matters” (pdf), by NASA computer scientist Kiri Wagstaff: “Much of current machine learning research has lost its connection to problems of import to the larger world of science and society.” The same year that Wagstaff published her paper, a convolutional neural network called AlexNet won a high-profile competition for image recognition centered on the popular ImageNet data set, leading to an explosion of interest in deep learning. Unfortunately, the disconnect she described appears to have grown even worse since then.

What do you think? Do you agree/disagree?

Source: HackerNews

– Suramya

August 20, 2020

Transparent Solar Panels hit Record 8.1% Efficiency

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 5:24 PM

Solar panels for electricity are awesome, however the major issue with deploying solar panels is that you need a lot of space for them. Although the efficiency of the panels has been going up reducing the space requirements but its still a non-trivial amount of space to generate enough power to be useful to power a house, Portable solar panels are well and good but they are slow and expensive. I tried to figure out a way to power my apartment via solar power but it wasn’t possible without having panels setup on the apartment roof.

Which is where the Transparent Solar panels come into play as they allow you to replace your existing windows for solar panel which would make them ideal for Apartments & office buildings. Because you don’t need extra space for the panels and just need to replace the windows. The transparent solar panels were created in 2014 by researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) however the efficiency of the panels was quite low compared to the traditional panels making it less productive and more expensive than the traditional panels so since then the race has been on to make the panels more efficient.

The researches from University of Michigan have made a significant break through in the manufacturing of color-neutral, transparent solar cells achieving 8.1% efficiency by using a carbon-based design rather than conventional silicon. The created cells do have a slight greenish tinge like sunglasses but for the most part appear to be usable as a window pane. More details are available in their release here.

The new material is a combination of organic molecules engineered to be transparent in the visible and absorbing in the near infrared, an invisible part of the spectrum that accounts for much of the energy in sunlight. In addition, the researchers developed optical coatings to boost both power generated from infrared light and transparency in the visible range—two qualities that are usually in competition with one another.

The color-neutral version of the device was made with an indium tin oxide electrode. A silver electrode improved the efficiency to 10.8%, with 45.8% transparency. However, that version’s slightly greenish tint may not be acceptable in some window applications.

Transparent solar cells are measured by their light utilization efficiency, which describes how much energy from the light hitting the window is available either as electricity or as transmitted light on the interior side. Previous transparent solar cells have light utilization efficiencies of roughly 2-3%, but the indium tin oxide cell is rated at 3.5% and the silver version has a light utilization efficiency of 5%.

The researchers are still working on improving the efficiency further and I am looking forward to the new breakthroughs in the field. Hopefully soon we will have panels efficient enough that I will be able to replace my apartment’s windows with Solar panel and break even in a reasonable amount of time. 🙂

Source: Slashdot.org

– Suramya

August 19, 2020

Convert typed text to realistic handwriting

Filed under: Computer Related,Computer Software,Tech Related — Suramya @ 6:45 PM

There are some tools or projects that really don’t make any practical sense but are a lot of fun to use or just impressive in how they implement technology. The Handwritten.js project by ‘alias-rahil’ is one such project. Basically what it does is take any Plain Text document and convert it into a realistic looking handwritten page. I tried it out on a few sample documents (logs) and it worked great. The programs does coredump if you try converting a 5MB file, but other than that it worked as expected.

Below is a sample file with some quotes that I converted as a test :

* Mountain Dew and doughnuts… because breakfast is the most important meal of the day

* Some days you’re the dog; some days you’re the hydrant.

* He who smiles in a crisis has found someone to blame.

* Marriage is one of the chief causes of divorce

* Earth is 98% full…please delete anyone you can.

* I came, I saw, I decided to order take out.

* F U CN RD THS U CNT SPL WRTH A DM!

* Work hard for eight hours a day, and eventually you may become a
boss and be able to work twelve.

* Quitters never win, and winners never quit, but those who never quit AND never win are idiots.

* What’s the difference between a bad golfer and a bad skydiver?

A bad golfer goes, WHACK! “Damn.”
A bad skydiver goes, “Damn.” WHACK!

* Beware of the light at the end of the tunnel. It could be an oncoming train.

* A girl is like a road. The more curves she has the more dangerous she is!

* A woman who dresses to kill probably cooks the same.

The script is fast and didn’t take more than a few seconds to process the file and create a PDF file with the output. The output for my test run is as below:


Output generated by Handwritten.js

I did also try converting a word file with the software but it didn’t take the content of the file for the conversion, instead it converted the XML & Code from the file. One suggestion for improvement I have is to enhance the script to support word files. It would be awesome if it could also convert any of the diagrams, tables etc to look like they were drawn by hand.

Maybe if I have some time I will look into this and see how easy it is to enhance the script. But no promises as I have a ton of other things I need to take complete first. 🙂

Source: Hacker News

– Suramya

August 18, 2020

Finally moved the Website & Blog to https

Filed under: Computer Tips,Tech Related,Website Updates — Suramya @ 12:02 PM

After spending way too much time avoiding the work due I finally configured both suramya.com & the Blog to be https by default. The setup was fairly simple, I added the certificate on the 1and1.com portal, then after a few mins I was able to access the site over https. In order to redirect http to https automatically I followed the following steps:

Auto Redirect to https in Apache

Configure .htaccess to force a redirect, you can also configure it in the Apache main configuration (under the virtualhosts directive) but since I don’t have root access and can’t modify it I updated the .htaccess config to do the same thing. Basically you need to add the following lines to .htaccess :

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.suramya.com/$1 [R,L]

Change www.suramya.com to your domain, else every visitor to your site will be sent to my site. Not that I will mind that, but you might. 🙂

Then I did the same thing for the blog with a small change, The .htaccess for the blog reads as the following:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.suramya.com/blog/$1 [R,L]

When updating the file, you need to ensure you put the changes outside the # BEGIN WordPress & # END WordPress as the content is dynamically generated and would be overwritten.

Updating all the urls in WordPress

After I made the changes above, I found that the site was being redirected to https but I was getting errors about mixed content on the page because all the URL’s/Images that I had uploaded to WP till now were saved as http and not https. So I had to change every URL in the blog from http to https and to be honest I wasn’t looking forward to doing this manually. I searched the web and found this site that had instructions on how to update the url’s using the WordPress commandline interface. From the blog directory you need to issue the following command:

wp search-replace http://www.suramya.com/blog/ https://www.suramya.com/blog/ --dry-run

This command does a dry run and tells you what all changes will be made and if everything looks ok, then you can run the above command again without the ‘dry-run’ call.

wp search-replace http://www.suramya.com/blog/ https://www.suramya.com/blog/

If all goes well you will get an output similar to the following:

(uiserver):~/public_html/suramya.com/blog$ wp search-replace http://www.suramya.com/blog/ https://www.suramya.com/blog/ 
+------------------+-----------------------+--------------+------+
| Table            | Column                | Replacements | Type |
+------------------+-----------------------+--------------+------+
| wp_commentmeta   | meta_key              | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_commentmeta   | meta_value            | 572          | PHP  |
| wp_comments      | comment_author        | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_comments      | comment_author_email  | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_comments      | comment_author_url    | 29           | SQL  |
| wp_comments      | comment_author_IP     | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_comments      | comment_content       | 2            | SQL  |
| wp_comments      | comment_approved      | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_comments      | comment_agent         | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_comments      | comment_type          | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_links         | link_url              | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_links         | link_name             | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_links         | link_image            | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_links         | link_target           | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_links         | link_description      | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_links         | link_visible          | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_links         | link_rel              | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_links         | link_notes            | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_links         | link_rss              | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_options       | option_name           | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_options       | option_value          | 3            | PHP  |
| wp_options       | autoload              | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_postmeta      | meta_key              | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_postmeta      | meta_value            | 0            | PHP  |
| wp_posts         | post_content          | 591          | SQL  |
| wp_posts         | post_title            | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_posts         | post_excerpt          | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_posts         | post_status           | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_posts         | comment_status        | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_posts         | ping_status           | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_posts         | post_password         | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_posts         | post_name             | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_posts         | to_ping               | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_posts         | pinged                | 20           | SQL  |
| wp_posts         | post_content_filtered | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_posts         | guid                  | 2775         | SQL  |
| wp_posts         | post_type             | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_posts         | post_mime_type        | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_term_taxonomy | taxonomy              | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_term_taxonomy | description           | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_termmeta      | meta_key              | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_termmeta      | meta_value            | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_terms         | name                  | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_terms         | slug                  | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_usermeta      | meta_key              | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_usermeta      | meta_value            | 0            | PHP  |
| wp_users         | user_login            | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_users         | user_nicename         | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_users         | user_email            | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_users         | user_url              | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_users         | user_activation_key   | 0            | SQL  |
| wp_users         | display_name          | 0            | SQL  |
+------------------+-----------------------+--------------+------+
Success: Made 3992 replacements.

That’s it. After running the command, the blog is completely on https and the security gods are happy :). Now I need to update all the URL’s on the main site to reference https instead of http and that is going to be painful. It will require a whole lot of script-fu to do it automatically as it will have to be a regex/awk or something similar. Maybe someone already did the work and posted the solution online. Alas that was not the case. I ended up manually updating the files since there were only about 20-25 of them. Opened all of them in the editor one-shot and then did a search & replace. Now both sites are coming up properly in https.

– Suramya

August 17, 2020

Issue with Site Posts

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 2:50 PM

Update 8/17/2020: Issue resolved. The problem was caused because I had a missing single quote in the previous post. Once I added the quote to the post things went back to normal.

There seems to be an issue with WordPress where some of my posts have gone MIA on the main page even though the direct links work. Also some of the posts are being merged together for some reason.
I am looking into it, so please be patient.

– Suramya

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