Thoughts on Bitcoin

Ashish on January 7, 2014

A short summary of bitcoin

Electronic money is all about ledger (transactions) which tells who sent money to whom, in standard financial system, central/federal/reserve bank (different nations have different names for these) and by extension, financial institutions are “trusted” to maintain that ledger. Any work which requires a “trusted” party can in principle, be done using cryptography without requiring a “trusted” party and bitcoin is manifestation of that applied to ledger. For more thorough treatment have a look at original paper or this blog post.

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Thoughts on Snapchat’s snafu

Ashish on January 3, 2014

Background

A security company reverse engineered Snapchat’s android client and found all the api endpoints (source).
Bigger issue: The published proof of concept of using “find friends” feature to find whether a phone number is registered on Snapchat or not, and if it is, then its associated username and location of the user.
Their claim was that despite informing Snapchat about the hole, Snapchat did nothing about it.
As expected, someone published data of 4.6M registered users (source) using the proof of concept provided. Snapchat responded saying that soon users will be able to opt-out of find friends feature.

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FOSS (Free and Open Source Code) Licensing FAQ

Ashish on January 23, 2011

There are two choices while writing on this topic. One is to write a detailed and accurate port. The other is to write a short post. I preferred the second approach and had added appropriate links to dig further.

  1. Target Audience?
    • Someone who is planning to use FOSS, free and open-source code, as a building block for their software development.
    • Someone who wants to contribute to FOSS
    • Someone who wants to release source code of their project in public

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Nokia and the smartphone era

Ashish on December 2, 2010

Nokia is facing some serious issues some of them are technical, but the major issue right now is how it can rebrand itself as a smartphone manufacturer (rather than just a mobile phone manufacturer).
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