On 11th Jan 2015, FSMK organized a trip to Visvesvaraya Technological Museum for its community center students and also students from an orphange. Prakash, a volunteer from FSFTN who has recently moved to Bangalore has been visiting the orphange to teach computers to the students there. It was his initiative to take them to the museum. Our community center students also liked the idea of going to the museum and together a group of 40 visited the museum. 
Tag: FSMK
January 13, 2015
November 30, 2014
Whats wrong with Government snooping/surveillance?
A member in ILugC had recently asked this question and I spent some time trying to put up these points as an answer.
1) Can we trust the government itself?
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” which translates to “Who will guard the
guards themselves?”
Government itself is made up of people, even though, we can proudly say
that we democratically elected the government, can we trust the
government completely? The various scams of state governments and
central governments give us a good reason why we cant trust those
running the government. Also, a government in itself is transient, you
never know what kind of future government can come.
2) Security of the data collected
Its a common knowledge that when any riot happens, the organizers easily
target people from specific communities thanks to data such as Voter’s
ID Card list etc available for that region. Hence even we can blindly
trust the government, the fact that such a collated data exists, itself
makes it a honeypot to attract bad elements in society to misuse the data.
3) Mass Surveillance vs targetted Surveillance
Though there may be some strong reasons for government to do
surveillance on specific individuals, there is very little rational to
do mass surveillance. The very notion that everything you do or say is
getting recorded will curtail freedom of expression. Everytime someone
wants to express something little off the beat, he/she might have to
take extreme caution and in many cases, people might not come forward at
all to express.
An analogy is imagine a light tower in central yard in a jail where
prisoners cant see who is watching from the light tower. Since they know
that there is 24 hours watch on it, the notion that someone there is
watching itself creates fear in them to try anything to escape.
Even in case of targetted surveillance, we know how Gujrat government
‘allegedly’ misused the state machinery to snoop on an individual. So
even having means to do targetted surveillance needs to have very
stringent checks and balances.
4) Eternity of the data collected
The idea that the data collected will exist years later is also
something to worry about. A simple example is what happened with Sec
377. When the high court declared it unconstitutional in 2009, many
people came forward expressing their true orientation. However when
Supreme Court overturned the HC decision, it left all the people who had
come forward openly to be sitting ducks for harassment by the authorities.
5) Option to opt-out
Like in case of Aadhar which looks like will stay in India now that the
new government also seem to be comfortable with it, there is little
option for those who value their privacy to opt-out of these schemes.
In India, since government does provide for lot of amenities, Maria
Xynou who is working on the Surveillance in India in CIS-India had
mentioned that there is a attitude amongst us to look at government like
a parent who takes care of us. Hence this attitude makes us put lot of
trust in the government which is dangerous.
You can watch her talk at CCC on Indian Surveillance State here,
October 1, 2014
FSMK Website QR Code
Inspired by Redhat QR Code with Logo that I saw in Pycon, I decided to check if something similar can be developed for FSMK with FSMK site link as the QR code text. This link explains clearly the technical aspect of modifying a generated QR Code with some custom text/design.
Then using FSMK logo and a QR Code image generated through QR Code Image Generator Firefox Addon, I mashed up this modified QR Code using GIMP.
September 23, 2014
September 22, 2014
No more reinstall campaign #AvoidedReinstall
How often do you screw your GNU/Linux based system such that you decide to reinstall your system? Are you the go-to person in your group for any issues with any GNU/Linux based OS? How often do you suggest to people who come to you that there is no other way to recover than re-installing?
I have been helping people to migrate to GNU/Linux based distribution, mainly Ubuntu. And its quite often that I come across people who while doing something or other have messed their system and need to help to fix it up. More than often, I used to give up quite quickly and ask them to take a backup using live-boot and reinstall the system. Many times, I would just search for first error I noticed and see if I could get solution online and if that didnt work give up and ask to reinstall. Though this is quick, it actually meant that I wasnt learning anything new. It also meant that many things in Ubuntu which might have been actual bugs might not be getting noticed due to this. And it also contradicted one of the popular examples I used to mention as to why Free Software is better than proprietary? Have you noticed the Blue Screen of Death, Can you fix it on Windows? Because Free Software allows you to study it and play with it, you can know why your system has actually crashed and try to understand how to fix it. Really? How often do we do that?
Hence I have decided to start this self-campaign and if possible motivate others to also follow it where in I put my maximum whenever I come across a messed up system to recover it without reinstall. The way the success of this campaign will be judged is by maximum number of systems I can avoid reinstall before coming across a system I am forced to reinstall as I cant find any other way around it. Hopefully as time goes on, the gap between every two systems forced to reinstall will increase which would mean I am improving/learning and avoiding many more systems from re-install.
I am already successful in doing it for 1 system. Hoorrrraaaayyyy!!!!! Hence #AvoidedReinstall 1 I spent 3 nights on it, close to 8-10 hours in all but finally it is recovered and system is now working without having to re-install Ubuntu. Hope to find sometime and blog about it also.
September 16, 2014
Project Idea: harddisk search engine
I do have loads of media files in my two external harddisks, one of 3TB and another of 1TB. And overtime the data is all over the place, in some cases, there are duplicates also and there is currently no way, I can easily remember if I have a particular data or not. Over all its a mess. Hence I need a good way to arrange all of this data and have a cache of its metadata in my laptop, so that it becomes very easy for me to search whether I have a particular media file available with me or not. Media can be anything from movies, documentaries, songs, iso images, series, etc.
So this are the requirements of such a software:
- Do full scan of HDD connected and collect all data available in it.
- User should be able to give a minimum/maximum size of interest(files less than say 1MB may not be of importance)
- User should be able to give formats of interest(User may just want video files to be listed/searched)
- Should be able to update an existing scan so that only new files are added to it again
- Using the collected data, user should be able to search a particular file based on filename/filetype/size etc
September 2, 2014
Taming googlegroups for those without Gmail Account
I have recently migrated my primary email address to my own domain and started using it for all communication purposes. One of the main thing is to subscribe to various Google Groups which GNU/Linux User’s Groups under FSMK have. The straight forward way, you would think, would be to just search for the groups in groups.google.com website, then there should be a subscribe button where you would enter your email address and then you should receive a email to confirm that you want to subscribe. This is what most of the mailing lists software would do. However not Google Groups. If you want to subscribe to Google Groups, when you click to join the group, it asks you to sign in a Google Account, hence any non-google account wont be able to subscribe to a group.
The other way is to request the group admins to add your email address in the group, this will not work always as most of the times I wouldnt even know the admins of the group. Also it means that you now have to depend on the other person to find time to add you which will be slow. Idea of public mailing lists is that anyone interested should be able to subscribe. Unfortunately google does a reasonable job in ensuring it becomes very difficult for you unless you have a Google Account.
So I found out a more difficult way to subscribe/unsubscribe google groups and this is again borrowed from traditional mailing lists softwares.
If you know the google group’s mailing address, say
glugdsce@googlegroups.com
You can subscribe to the group, by sending a mail to
glugdsce+subscribe@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe, send a mail to
glugdsce+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
Similarly, to directly visit the page of the group in a browser, you can use the following link
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/glugdsce
In all above cases, just remove glugdsce with the name of the group that you are interested in.
Overall, I think Google Groups continue the evils of Google and if you are a well established group/community, it is always better to host your own mailing list and move out of Google Groups as soon as possible.
August 21, 2014
August 14, 2014
Feed of the blogs based on tags
For the FSMK Planet, we are asking students to give us Feed links based on tag FSMK. I will use this blog to explain how to do the same in WordPress and Blogspot.
For WordPress:
If your blog in WordPress Platform is “http://ssrameez.wordpress.com” then the link for the ATOM feed for FSMK tag is
http://ssrameez.wordpress.com/feed/atom/?tag=fsmk
Please note that in WordPress, tag is case-insensitive, so FSMK, fsmk are both the same.
For Blogspot:
If your blog in Blogspot platform is “http://sneakpeakintomyworld.blogspot.se” then the link for the RSS feed for FSMK tag is
http://sneakpeakintomyworld.blogspot.se/feeds/posts/default/-/FSMK
Please note that in Blogspot, tag is case-sensitive, so FSMK, fsmk are different.
So ensure that you are using the right cases for the tag so that all the blogs are shown in the planet.
May 13, 2014
JavaScript browser code to invite all your friends to like facebook page
We have recently announced the FSMK Summer Camp for the year 2014 and also have a facebook page for the same. We wanted to spread the word out about the page by inviting all our friends to ‘like’ the page. FB shows you a list of your friends and gives an option to click ‘invite’ for each one of them separately. When you do this, the invited friend gets a notification about the invite and hence more chances of his liking the page.
However this is still cumbersome as it means to invite all your friends which may be around 1000+, you have to click invite so many times.
But you have java script to the rescue. All you need to do is open javascript console on your browser and then execute the following code:
//Note that there is a space after uiButton. This class is the class of the invite button.
var inputs =
document.getElementsByClassName('uiButton _1sm');
for( var i=0; i < inputs.length; i++)
{
inputs[i].click();
}
To find out how to run javascript code in Firefox, check the following link.
If sadly you are not using the best and fastest browser, Firefox, then you can of course find similar tutorials for other browsers or realize it is time to switch to Firefox as Firefox29 is just released and its AWESOME!!!
P.S. The code was shared to me by Karthik Nayak from BMSIT GLUG.
