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Why Competitive Programming?

Hey there! I see you are looking for reasons to start competitive programming. If you have made it till here, then you deserve a pat on your back. Congratulations champ! You’re more aware than 50% of your classmates about the needs of Programming World. Here are some reasons why you should devote yourself to this sport of sitting at a place and letting your mind play for hours or maybe even days for a single question:-

1. Showoff Time

So you can print “Hello World”! Cute… Anyway, recently I participated in a Global Coding Contest and this is my rank.! Smile… Competitive Programming gives you a proud feeling and a thing to showoff with your ranks. Your respect among peers is directly proportional to your rank, and we all crave for respect, so why not?

2. Hello Companies

Facebook, Google, Amazon and all these big names ask for what you did in College except partying and practicing 9-5 routine. They look for candidates who have good command over Data Structures and Algorithm instead of Chemistry equations. Competitive Programming gives you a wide exposure to DSA and helps to build you a good knowledge base for interviews.

3. Avengers over Batman

I know that you are a lone wolf but your workspace might require you to work with many people without hurting them. So its better you better nobly learn the Team-Spirit. There are multiple coding contests where you need to be in a battleground with your team, hence increasing team spirit as well as your rating.

4. Faster, Correct and Smart

While in a Coding Contest, you compete with some of the World’s best Programmers with a target of winning. Participation makes you competent as you solve multiple tough problems in a stipulated time without errors. All this increases your productivity and helps you unlock your potential and greater heights.

5. More Knowledge

Napolean Hill quoted in his Famous Book, ‘Think and Grow Rich’, “the person who stops learning is doomed to mediocrity forever in his life.” All of you Einstein’s need to get your hands dirty and apply what you’ve learned in College to see where you stand. The bonus point is if you don’t know the topic, you’ll search on Google and will surely get to learn something more than the required topic only.

Here’s some reasons why you should stop everything you are doing and start Competitive Programming. I could write more but I have a Contest to give now. Till then, think of it.

For Cyber Security related posts, check out the link below.

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College Started!

Hey there! I see that your 3 months so-called breaks after 12years of school have ended and you’ve landed into a mysterious place you’ve had no idea. Cool! This is your new home now.

and I believe that you don’t trust me! What other options do you have? No offense intended! Read till the last please.

With all broken hearts! I welcome you to School 2.0 aka College. A KJos dream place with not so cool things. (For my international audience :p KJo, tricks people into believing that college is no less than heaven on Earth).

Anyway, its gonna be a helluva experience to all irrespective of what you want to and no matter how shitty this place may become, you’ll miss it after you’ll graduate from this. (You can do it!! Believe in yourself), and I’ll continue to write about things with many coding tricks and codes for help.

Stay Tuned.

Capitalizing through Anti-China

Talking about viruses, the names that come up at once is Corona and other deadly Chinese Viruses that are responsible for this Global Imbalance. As a countermeasure, many movements like Ban China are surging throughout the world, but we are talking about our nation India, where ‘Aatmanirbhar’ is on its peak.

A week back, an app which goes by the name Mitron was in highlights as it tried to provide a similar experience to its user as TikTok. The main thing which brought it into highlight was its claim that it is Made In India.

The app managed to get more than 50 million downloads on it and became an overnight success. But, digging a bit deep into the case, and we found it that the source code has been purchased by an Indian Developer and now he’s making money from it.

The app witnessed exponential growth and positive ratings last week, and with it, the privacy policies and concerns took all over the internet by storm. The app had multiple bugs and was jeopardizing the user’s privacy.

Google on June 2 had pulled Mitron from Google Play claiming that its policy doesn’t allow apps that offer ‘the same experience as other apps already on Google Play.’ The policy reads, “Apps should provide value to users through the creation of unique content or services.” It also states that the app should provide a “basic degree of functionality and respectful user experience.”

Now, with all its privacy policies changed and suited according to the Play Store guidelines, the app has made a comeback last night with its ratings dropped from 4.5 to 3.7.

We tested the app again and now it seems to have fixed the issues with Upload and Privacy Policies. Do you think this app will be able to take over TikTok in Indian market? Comment your views down below.

World Environment Day, June 5

Hola Readers, as you might know from the multiple social media universities that today is World Environment Day, here we continue to spread the awareness about technologies that are very environment friendly.

Basic context for the bloomers: – Every year this year we pretend to care about environment and things and post about it, sitting at our offices. Only, this year, there’s an interesting turn and we all are locked up in our houses, (atleast our Government thinks so)…

Advancement in Technology takes toll on the eco-system and many decades have gone by ignoring this fact only to realise that we’ve done a lot of damage to the planet and if we want to live, we must take care of it as of now. To serve this purpose, many inventors come up with different ideas and here I’m listing a few of them.

1. Electric Vehicle

We all know that the fuel we are currently feeding to our vehicles isn’t unlimited like GTA Cops and will soon end and then we will be forced to ride bicycles again. But, in 1884 an English inventor came up with the idea of Electric Vehicles and now this idea is taken forward by many automobile industries, the one I can remember right now is Tesla, which only builds Electric Vehicles and are always innovative with the features.

2. Graphene filter for salt water

Earth is a sphere of water, but only 0.3% of it is available for us to drink. The salt water is just way too salty to drink and you just can’t drink it man! Though there are many desalination plants all over the world, the process is very energy and money consuming and it uses some type of already exhausting resources.

A carefully designed graphene filter made from a single layer of carbon atoms in a hexagonal lattice is invented by UK based scientists. This type of graphene layer can do all kinds of cool stuff, but scientists are currently using it to develop a graphene oxide sieve that could filter out salts — and can do it far more effectively than current desalinization plants, at a fraction of the cost.

3. Biodegradable Bullets

Those who doesn’t believe in violence are alive because of people who protect them in violent wars. But those empty bullet coverings do a much damage to the environment as they tend to be the same way for years and release a lot of harmful chemicals in the soil.

The US Army is working on a project to make bullets out of composite materials that can perform equally well with the targets while being gentle to the environment at the same time. Even better, the finalized product will have hibernating seeds with them. A plant for a kill.

4. Bacteria harnessing energy from sunlight and CO2

If this thing sounds like Plant, you know how things work. This specially engineered bacteria coats themselves with nano crystals that in turn acts like solar cells that converts light and carbon dioxide into energy and the new bacteria is also fed to it. Not only this process is much more efficient than plants and it has a higher potential for CO2 removal from the system.

5. Streetlight running on Car Batteries

For every good deed there is an equivalent bad deed that may or may not happen intentionally. With the increase in Electric Cars in market, there is a surge in e-waste that is very hard to dismantle and recycle. For cars to work efficiently, the batteries must be working in perfect condition.

Nissan came up with a revolutionary project ‘The Reborn Light’, which used battery from the cars are being used in lighting the streets with the LED-equipped lights powered by those used batteries, though the are making money from it, it is still a good way for recycling the batteries.

Facemash-Thefacebook-Facebook

Facebook! Facebook and Facebook! The giant of social media and the bringer of revolutions. From the generation of Angel Priya to Good Morning Ji, Facebook has been through a lot.

This Throwback Thursday, we’ll be talking about a site which knows everything about me, you and the whole world i.e Facebook.

Facebook dates back to 2004, where we were still writing letters and keeping a track of written records of people in cringy directories. But the lesser known thing, before Thefacebook, Mark Zuckerberg started a Website called Facemash, which was taken down by the Harvard University in 2 days after it created 21000 traffic clicks in a moment of days.

On a Tuesday night, Mark wrote,

“I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 p.m. and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

followed by,

“Yea, it’s on. I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure with farm animals …), but I like the idea of comparing two people together.“

This hot or not game successfully implanted an idea of a centralized website for a University where people can add their details and be in touch with each other.

In 2004, Mark launched a website ‘Thefacebook’ with another student Eduardo Saverin , with the intention of creating a platform for Harvard Students to upload their details and connect with people.

The registration was first limited to Harvard University, which was then expanded to many other Universities for marketing and generating revenue.

Thefacebook to Facebook

The entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company’s president.The company dropped ‘The‘ from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.

Facebook made itself available to the whole world on Sept. 26′ 2006 where anyone above the age of 13 and with a valid email address can sign himself up.

Since then, facebook has seen an exponential growth in both the number of users as well as features. It faced many challenges from similar apps like Google+, but it managed to be on the top.

In 2012, Facebook acquired the much more used app nowadays, Instagram for $1 billion and In 2014, Facebook acquired the most widely used Messenger Whatsapp for a whooping $16 billion + $3 billion in restricted stocks.

Till date, Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are available for free to people all over the globe and the major source of revenue is from the ads we see while using them. Hadn’t it been Facebook, the way we socialize might be a complete different scenario but who knows, right Schrodinger?

A wallpaper that soft bricks Android Phones

Prior to reading this blog, I would like to explain what bricking your smartphone means. Usually any problem in our smartphone is tend to be solved on restarting the device but when your device is bricked, you can’t do anything to fix it. It just won’t open, neither format or anything. But this is the case of hard bricking. The one which we are talking about is soft bricking which will mess with your head a lot but will eventually get fixed by Factory Data Reset.

Now, the main content.

Recently, a new malware has surfaced over the internet, now in the form of a Image. The aesthetically beautiful image of a lake with a soothing background may seem pleasing but once you set it on your wallpaper, it will run an infinite loop of restarts and then BOOM! The device is bricked.

The only solution left with you is to Factory Data Reset, which will wipe all your data. The malware hit multiple devices ranging from Samsung to Pixel(working on Android 10).

So what really is causing this image to be this destructive? The answer lies in the build of this image. Nowadays, the images are a lot complex than what they used to be in the past. The device must differentiate among various colors to render the image perfectly.

The image uses Metadata and Color Gamut, which creates a overflow in device. To overcome this overflow, the device initiates a fail safe mechanism and restarts. But, restarting doesn’t solve the problem this time and the device keeps on restarting again and again eventually booting into recovery mode for Factory Data Reset.

So, if you wish to keep your device and data, don’t try to change your wallpaper from image source unknown. Stay Safe. Stay Alert.

What Google knows about you?

The digital era comes with privacy invasion and open data black markets, everyone should be aware of how and when their private data is been gathered and used by the companies. Today we’ll talk about our own friendly neighborhood company Google. Vaguely speaking Google has enough data about you that it can create a perfect replica of you not just on physical level but also on the psychological level.

Here I’m listing some of them and will let you know how you can stop Google from taking your data.

1. Web and App Activity

Every search query that go through any Google synced device is stored into Google servers for the infinite time. Google also knows when and for how much time you’ve opened which app on your smartphone and have a complete track of your daily usage.

From Facebook to YouTube, whichever website you ever visit and how you are redirected to the site, the complete web map is available to Google.

2. Location History

Remember the notification of rating a place as soon as you leave the place? Or when you just reach a place and you get to know about all the buses and means of transports available for you to head back home.

From malls to cafe, wherever you go with your location enabled smartphone, Google know it and saves it. You can look at all the places you have visited date-wise on a timeline maintained by Google.

3. YouTube History

Watch one video on YouTube and next thing you know that your whole feed is populated with similar items. Yes! Google knows your watch history unless you are using incognito mode.

YouTube’s algorithm works in a fashion that all the content similar to your watched history is displayed for you, to keep you hooked. It also creates various playlists for you based on your music preferences.

4. Ads and Interests

You must have noticed how the item you searched on Facebook is now literally all over your device. YouTube! same ads, Browser! same ads, Instagram! same ads. But, I guess it is somewhat a good thing because when you disable the ad preferences, you see many things you never want to watch.

5. Your voice and interactions

Literally every word you say to your Google Assistant and Smart Speaker is stored on the Google Database and research goes on constantly to train the Google Voice Model for better User Experience and Interactions. You can also play the audio recordings back to yourself from the database.

With all this, now you might be curious about your data with Google and you may wish to personally take command over what you want to show to Google, because Google! not Facebook.

To see and download your data with Google, you need to sign in with google and then go to Manage your Google Account. For the basic personal details like name and birthdays, you need to go to Personal info, and for more detailed data, the one I just mentioned above, you need to go to Data and Personalization. Then just dig a bit deep and you’ll be able to access all your data and control what you want to show, keep and hide in the future.

Top 5 Chinese Apps in your devices and their Alternatives

In the recent years, the smartphone market is taken over by Chinese Tech Giants mostly in the Asian region with the great deals they have to provide. The device comes with preloaded apps which are proving to be a risk to data privacy around the globe. With the preloaded apps, there’s also a surge in the use of Chinese Apps in common people.

A recent case of data privacy surfaced the internet where MI Browser was suspected of sending search queries and data to Chinese Servers, in the incognito mode too. Also, TikTok is seen to upload the rough drafts to its Server.

There’s a common link in all these privacy breach, that is, the data is being sent to Chinese Servers which are always available to be used by the Chinese Government. So to protect your data, here we present a list of most widely used Chinese Apps and their alternatives of different origin which are proved to be secure than these Chinese Apps.

1. Triller- Alternative to TikTok/Like

TikTok- the successor of Widely used app Music.ly is seen to be taking high roads in the Indian Market, which provides artists a platform to present their skills in mimicry, lip syncs and dance to a wider audience without much efforts in editing and copyright issues. Surely, the idea seems novel but the execution is not. The creators on TikTok are usually seen posting obscene and cringe videos that is deteriorating the present day youth.

TikTok’s algorithm of keeping the platform safe for U/A have failed on multiple occasions and it is seen that the heart of Today’s distinct youth is secretly sending their BTS and Rough Drafts to the Chinese Servers.

Triller is a California based app with the similar objective and much privacy which is the need of the hour. The algorithms seems to be working fine and the content is kept clean for all ages.

2. Adobe Scan- Alternative to CamScanner

Adobe- a name we all know since time memorable is one of the big names in software industry. We all have been using CamScanner for a while now, but its time to send the Dragon back to its native place and never let it enter again.

Adobe Scan is seen to have similar features as CamScanner, which is capable to become your daily driver, with some extra features which adds up to its feasibility.

Adobe apps sync perfectly, thanks to Creative Cloud which provides access to all your files on every device you sign-in on.

3. Files by Google- Alternative to Shareit/Xender

ShareIt arrived the market some years back as the #1 utility app one can install in their device. The sole purpose of ShareIt and Xender was to provide a bridge between 2 devices via mobile hotspot to share files at high speed and without internet connectivity.

Now, ShareIt is seen to be sending all sorts of Notifications ranging from Video Suggestions to Fake News, but the only thing it does not do efficiently is transfer data.

Files by Google is a way better option, which helps user to transfer data without any unnecessary and unwanted notifications.

4. Google Chrome – Alternative to UC Browser

Well, this one is a bit controversial as UC Browser provides a wide range of features which beats Chrome Browser on multiple levels. Still, UC Browser made up to this list because the browser is directly owned by AliBaba Group(A Chinese Giant). On multiple events, UC is seen to leaking data to its parent company servers and hence make it guilty as charged and a threat to your data.

5. ProtonVPN – Alternative to TurboVPN

TurboVPN is a great VPN app which provides free services to limited countries with unlimited data and speed. Though the app seems great, the privacy policies are a bit skeptical which do not describe the privacy terms thoroughly.

ProtonVPN is just another free VPN dedicated to give its user a good experience by providing 3 countries to choose for free with medium speed. Though, it might not sound appealing to your ears, you have to decide what matters to you, the number of countries available for VPN Connection or your privacy.

Google Sodar- A experiment for maintaining Social Distancing

Google has come up with a experiment for maintaining social distancing by the smartphone users. Amidst the pandemic times, when every one is suggested to maintain a safer distance among peers, Google has come up with a new AR Project.

AR stands for Augmented Reality which takes the real world live on screen and makes it interactive for the users.

Google Sodar(Social Distancing Radar) will draw a virtual perimeter of radius 2 metres or 6.5 feet across the device user as a center which will help the user to maintain a safer distance from people. A similar feature is seen in Pokemon Go game, a super hype few years back.

The virtual perimeter is superimposed on the images from the live cam and moves with the device. Sodar works through Google-made Chrome browsers on Android smartphones that support augmented reality.

How to use Google Sodar

To use Google Sodar, you need to download two Google apps in the updates version. 1. Google Chrome and 2. Google Play Services. After this, you need to head to sodar.withgoogle.com and then voila! You have your own virtual perimeter of 2 meters across you. Stay Safe.

Aarogya Setu- Privacy and Issues

With the outbreak of Global Pandemic COVID-19, many nations have made it necessary for its citizens to download Corona Tracking App which may help the Government to keep a track of patients and may help to reduce the extent of spread of virus.

A similar Corona Tracking App by the name of Aarogya Setu meaning ‘Bridge to Health’ is launched and mandated by Indian Government. Aarogya Setu app uses technologies like Bluetooth and GPS to let users know if they have been near a person with Covid-19 by scanning a database of known cases of infection. Now, its been downloaded over 100 Million times on Google Play.

Noida, a suburb of the capital, Delhi, has made it compulsory for all residents to have the app, saying they can be jailed for six months for not complying.

Food delivery start-ups such as Zomato and Swiggy have also made it mandatory for all staff.

Since then, the concern of privacy is being cooked up in the minds of users as the app asks for personal details like name, age, gender and travel history. While the government press claims like “the app has been built with privacy as a core principle” and the processing of contact tracing and risk assessment is done in an “anonymised manner”. Users are still not sure about the need of severe actions against not using the app.

Ways in which Aarogya Setu claims it protects User’s data

If you reach for Privacy FAQs in the app, it specifies the ways in which it handles private information.

Personal information is immediately anonymized and all the subsequent transactions are related through a Device Identification Number(DiD) that is assigned by the Aarogya Setu server at time of registration.
The contact tracing and location information is stored locally on the mobile device. The information is only uploaded to the server if the user has been tested positive for COVID-19, else the information will be erased from the device automatically in 30 days.
If a person is tested positive, the information will also be deleted after 45 days post recovery.

In some ways these clarifications helps users to keep their calm, authorities are suggesting to make it optional from mandatory since the app can be fooled easily.

Recently a news popped up quoting, “Banglore based Ethical Hacker hacked into Aarogya Setu app in just 4 hours“, which clearly is just a click-bait which you’ll realize when read about what this genius did can be easily done by a 4 year old, but we aren’t here for bashing anyone! right?

People can provide false details to the app as there is no to testify the details which is currently a big problem faced by the app. But people need to understand that there is no good and intelligence in hiding the symptoms if you have them.

Right now Aarogya Setu is not made Open-Source but the Govt. assures that it will be made open source with time, which will increase the chances of improvements.

Blind people can now read Braille in air

Braille- A ray of hope for the blind people, invented 200 years ago and still helping people with visual impairment so that they can read and write.

Braille is up for upgrade since a long time and now finally it has got one. Germany’s Bayreuth University recently developed a special speaker system that emits ultrasound waves with the purpose of letting people read braille in midair, which means that now blind people can access things available for people without disabilities, thanks to the grid of ultrasonic speakers that emits ultrasound in the air that are similar to the dots written in Braille.

The presented system functions in 2 modes of operation that are obstacle recognition mode and fixed path mode.

Obstacle detection mode uses grouping of ultrasonic transceivers for solid obstacle detection and water sensor to identify liquid obstacles by employing a micro controller.

On the skin this feels like a gentle breeze of air, says Viktorija Paneva at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. The mid-air dots are perceptible on a persons palm when they hold their hand up.

ENIAC- World’s First Computer

We all have powerful devices with us which can compute millions of instructions per second but how many of us remember the boring lesson delivered about history of computers.

With the Throwback Thursday, I’ll take you through the invention which helped to ease our lives so much, that we can’t even imagine our lives without it now.

World’s first computer – ENIAC stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.

The need for a device powerful enough to computer large data arose by 1880 when the population of United States had grown so large that it took more than seven years to tabulate the U.S Census results.

After this incident, world has seen multiple multiple mechanical devices capable of computing data, but the first digital computer was introduced to the world on the day of love( Feb 14 ) in the year 1946.

ENIAC was developed by the University of Pennsylvania’s John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert under a contract with the US Army, to speed up ballistics calculations.

ENIAC was built 30ft. by 60ft. weighing 30 tons and using 19,000 vacuum tubes.

A significant part of ENIAC’s history is that 6 women who programmed it ( true feminism warning).

ENIAC’s legacy was carried by UNIVAC computer which operated at a clock frequency of 2.25MHz, outracing ENIAC forever.