2020

The Ethics of Invention by Sheila Jasanoff is not a book on ethics, but rather a book about the complicated relationship between Technology, Law, and Policy. By the title, one might think that this is yet another “Techlash” book written to be read by Tech Luddites. Rather, the book argues for a middle ground between uncontrolled enthusiasm for technology and the timeless, often understandable, hatred for technological progress. The main focus of the book is to highlight the tendency of humans to give or delegate power to technological systems, which end up governing human behavior without even them noticing it happening under their noses.

Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) had released a report 1 on the “Non-Personal Data Governance Framework” in July 2020 2. The report recommends the establishment of a Non-Personal Data Regulatory Authority with an enabling role as well as enforcing role. 2 Along with this, the report defines Non Personal Data as: 3 Non-personal data: When the data is not ‘personal data’ (as defined under the PDP Bill), or the data is without any personally identifiable information (PII).

I recently read the blog about the 200 most common passwords of 2020. It was also featured in Jon Snader’s recent blog post. When the original post was made, I had glanced at the mysterious x4ivygA51F, which appeared at the 148th spot. But when I read the blog post again and searched for an update on it, no one had been able to figure out what that meant. There were some guesses.

I recently had to distribute the documentation of an internal library to users. Go developers are used to their editor to providing them with auto completion, usually with the help of gopls. A lot of times it is necessary for users to be able to browse a comprehensive list of methods and data types available for reference. For open source projects, we rely on godoc.org and pkg.go.dev. But unfortunately, it is not easy to host one for internal projects.

The use of Facial Recognition by law enforcement to identify offenders is one of the cases where the regulation of the technology lags way behind, and there is an urgent need to bring about policy to reduce potential pain in our society. Apart from the serious problems that are inherent with the technology like mis-identification and minimal mapping between the training sets and the actual photos. According to a recent report in TechCrunch 1, the Home Minister of India admitted to using a data set trained on the Aadhaar Database to identify individuals involved in a recent riot.

Dear upi.link users Thanks for using upi.link and making it grow organically to over ~2k daily hits. Due to a takedown request for the domain upi.link from the NPCI I have had to shutdown upi.link for now. I had created upi.link to solve my own problem. Till date, sharing a upi request outside an App is not possible without an intermediary for free. After sharing a prototype with people in my workplace, I found out that it was useful beyond what I had imagined.