Today's Professional Achievement

Today, I sat and made a Calendar for 2023. 

#ExperiencesOfAnEntrepreneur. 

Judicial Reforms I need as a Citizen of India

 As a citizen, this is my manifest of what we need from the Judiciary. 

1. Criticism of judge or judiciary should not be treated as Contempt of Court. Only when a person causes disruption in the process of justice should Contempt of Court be applied. Not for criticising delays in court, not for criticising judgements or conduct of judges. Only for disrupting the process of justice. 

2. The colonial practice of "Your Honour", "Your Lordship" etc. needs to be stopped with immediate effect. Only Sir and Madam should be accepted. (Idea by Prachi Maithani Thapliyal) 

3. No summer and winter breaks. No other establishment has them and we can ill afford such breaks given how slow our courts are. For years, the litigants have to travel at a date that is convenient to the judiciary and still the cases take decades. 

4. If a punishment has been given by TWO consecutive subordinate courts, including the local court, it cannot be challenged in a higher court. Nor can an appeal to that effect be filed. 

5. At no time can judges use personal comments against a litigant. Phrases like "This is irritating", "Her tongue is a loose cannon" etc. will not be tolerated. 

6. The judiciary is there to serve the litigants, not the other way round. The judges will address the litigants respectfully and not as if they are their servants. 

7. Every citizen should be allowed to represent themselves and the judiciary should actively promote that practice. The Justice in their address refers to the action of providing justice. The spirit of the law trumps the letter of the law. Ensnaring litigants in lawyer's fees is not the way to provide justice. 

8. Court dates cannot be set unilaterally by the Judiciary. The judge needs to ask both litigants if they are ok to come on a certain date and only then set the date for the next hearing. 

9. There needs to be a statute of limitations on how many hearings can be held ex-parte. After 3 such hearings, the judge should give a ruling and close the case. 

10. Once guilt has been proven, there should be no discretion of the judge on the sentencing. The law provides for a range of punishment for each offence. The judge should choose from within that range and pronounce a sentence. The practice of pronouncing guilty and then another hearing for sentencing also needs to stop. 

 Topics: Employment and IP law

The Case of Pia

“And… Send!” Pia gleefully said to herself as she pressed the Send key on her laptop. She had reasons to be happy. She had just responded to Amita, the lousy HR person who had participated in making her life miserable at Yuvi, her ex-employer.

Pia had joined the team a little over a year ago. She was a very enthusiastic content writer who brought her bubbly personality and inherent enthusiasm to her work. Her content was always positive, funny, and most importantly – successful.

Her posts got great engagement and her witty one-liners were often shared.

This led to her bosses noticing her within 2 months. The CEO, Apsara, had invited her to coffee in her office!

Over coffee, Apsara had been genuinely interested in getting to know her. She had asked about her family, hometown, education, hobbies, everything!

Just as they were at their last few sips, an idea had suddenly occurred to Apsara – “Pia, I have an idea. Would you like to do a Masterclass for the rest of our content team? This will do two good things – one, instead of being jealous of you, they will start to see you as a natural expert, and also understand how you are the tops in whatever you do. Two, it will help you share some of that bubbly personality with others while adding “Training” as a skill on your resume. How does that sound?”

Pia had been thrilled.

Within two weeks, she had prepared a course outline and some course content. Another two weeks, and she was ready to roll!

The training head sat with her on her course for a while and suggested that she should use innovative training content like memes, cases, puzzles, as assessment instead of and old-fashioned test at the end of the program.

This took her another month to prepare, but finally the Training head had been absolutely delighted with her work and had given the Go Ahead!

Pia ran this course for the first batch and it was a smash hit!

The CEO called her and hugged her. Then, she encouraged Pia to add “Trainer” to her Linkedin profile skills.

The second batch was a runaway success too. After that, Pia’s course had been added to the induction for all content team joinees. She ran the program every two months.

Pia thought it was natural to expect that this would lead to a promotion or at least a raise.

However, neither was forthcoming. When she tried to broach the subject with her manager, she got the usual spiel about how everyone needs to show commitment to advance in their career. HR was not much helpful either.

In short, Pia became the de facto subject matter expert of her team, but that translated into no role, salary, or even designation change.

That, and other things at work led to Pia slowly getting disengaged from her workplace.

8 months into the role, she started looking around and in a couple of months, she found a role that suited her better.

She resigned and her resignation was received with.. well, resignation.

The boss made some customary noises about being disappointed and her having a bright future with the company, but made no real effort to retain her or even ask for her real reasons for leaving. Amita, her HR Business Partner, was equally distant and uninterested in having a conversation.

Pia completed her notice period, and on the last day, packed her bags and left.

Two weeks later, her phone rang.

“Hey Pia.. How are you doing?” A chirpy Amita sounded on the other end.

If Pia was surprised, she did not show it, “Am good Amita. What’s up?”

“We were missing you here ya. Hope you’ve settled in fine at the new place?”

“Don’t worry about that. Why did you call?” Pia asked.

“Well, you know, we needed to run the next training batch for new content writers, and we can’t find your training material!”

“Oh, that’s because I took it with me. It’s not there.” Pia said casually.

“You-took-it-with-you?” Amita repeated slowly.

“Yeah!” Pia replied.

“You can’t do that! You made that material while working for the company, so its company property.” Amita’s tone was not exactly aggressive, but it was getting unfriendly pretty fast.

“Errm, actually, I am the creative owner of this content, so I have every right to take it with me. The company has no right to content that I made as a favour to Yuvi.” Pia held her ground.

“I’ll get back to you.” Amita had been quick to disconnect.

A day later, Pia found an email in her inbox. It was from a legal services firm, telling her that she was being sued for stealing the company’s intellectual property without permission. Since the content had been created by her during and in course of her employment with Yuvi, it was covered under the term “Work Product”. As per law, the intellectual rights to work products created by employees rest with the employer by default. 

 

Pia smiled. She had been expecting this. First, she posted the aggressive email received from Yuvi on Reviewer.com – a website to review one’s employers. Then, she sent an email to her HR, marking a copy to her manager and the CEO. The email said:

Dear Team at Yuvi

The content in question is training material. My designation at Yuvi was “Content Writer”. This role does not include the creation of Training Content. Only work done as part of the role is a work product. This content was created by me – not as a part of my work profile. It was shared with the organisation as an act of kindness. Any content created that is not in my work role cannot be a “work product”. I have kindly allowed the organisation royalty free access to the content as well as my services as a trainer without charging for these services.

If my designation had changed to include Trainer in the work profile, any content created by me AFTER such designation change would revert to the organisation on my resignation as “Work product”. However, both these events did not occur.

Therefore, I am the absolute owner of the training content and methodology, being its sole developer and disseminator.

You are hereby instructed to refrain from the use of the training content, or parts thereof, as well as the unique pedagogy developed for this module. Using any part of such content subjects you to potential royalty payments to the original creator.

This includes but is not limited to memes, handouts, assignments, etc. used in the past as part of the trainings.

Sincerely

Pia.

 “And… Send!” Pia gleefully said to herself as she pressed the Send key on her laptop.

Questions for you

1. Which side do you agree with? Why?

2. If the designation had changed to include “Trainer” without any hike in salary, would the contention of Pia hold? Why or why not?

3. In the normal course of events, under what circumstances should the intellectual property created by employees belong to the employer? Discuss your thoughts.

 *********** 

Terms of Use: 

Please feel free to use with credit to Nidhi Arora. 

 

Short Story: AI is Crap

The first report was from China. It would have gone largely unnoticed.. but didn’t. The government probably leaked the clip only because it was about an American car going rogue. A smart car had picked up speed and gone on a rampage for 5.5 kms, annihilating everything and everyone on the road.

The footage was called “Bone-chilling”, “Surprising” etc. by the world’s media outlets. But it didn’t reach mainstream media, nor was it discussed as widely as it should have been. Within a week, the incident was over in the world’s consciousness.

The next report came from Alaska. This time, it was that a passenger could not get into her car in spite of using the unlock passcode. The car had activated accident management protocol and totalled the airbags. Anyone with a car knows that replacing the air bags is a massively expensive thing. The lady made news, but only for 2-3 days. No one was hurt.

The third incident was of the Vietnam millionaire. His son’s car had crashed, but the airbags had NOT deployed this time. Everyone inside the car was gone.

And those were just the ones that got noticed.

 

February 2024

If Alisha was overawed, she was not showing it. The Interpol Cyber Wing’s War room was lined with screens (what else was she expecting?) and each screen had a head of national unit on it right now.

There were 73 separate incidents in the last 18 months – involving cars of a certain brand only.

She had written a paper, more on a lark than anything else, in her college’s magazine, linking about 10 of these crashes across countries.

That college magazine had been read by Jeanie’s dad, who was with the Interpol.

She had received a call. The caller introduced himself and asked her to explain her theory.

She used publicly available information to make a quick case on the phone.

And a week later – this.

Next to her was Philip, the genial head of the Cyber Unit, but the most feared cyber cop in the world. If he was ruthless, there was no way of knowing that. But he had been known to use every trick in the book to stop and punish everything from international trafficking to international terror.

“A bit below your paygrade, don’t you think? Car crashes?” She had made an effort to joke.

Philip smiled at her – the same genial smile. “My dear, you had information on only 10 crashes. We now have 73 data points and are still not done compiling. It took a college student to understand that the crashes are linked. What makes this my pay grade is not what has already happened, but what might happen if we don’t stop it now. You’re live in 5 minutes. Do you want to rehearse your opening?”

Philip always knew how to communicate perfectly.

The Conference Begins

“Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time. You are all here because of this bright young lady – Alisha. We now know that the hotshot luxury car company has been in at least 73 car crashes around the world in the last 18 months. I am sure that since the meeting invite, some of you have found more data points in your own countries. Yet, it was this college student who surmised that the crashes, though unrelated in geography and time, were related in behaviour. Most of them had one of 2 characteristics – the user has used the wrong opening code three times, exactly 3 times, getting it right on the 4^th effort, OR, the user had disengaged automatic driving while cruising at more than 100 kmph. But about 20 incidents are still outliers. We do not know what they had in common, but it was something.

Alisha is the college student who wrote that original paper. She is majoring in, no surprise, data analytics.

I would now like to invite her to address us and share her thought process.”

Alisha spoke quietly and confidently about how she started looking for patterns in data and went from locations, time periods, make and model of car, colour of car, individual feature present/missing in car, family size of user, and so on, until finally hitting jackpot on user behaviour preceding the crash.

“When you think of it, its so obvious! The crash was a response. So, the stimulus had to be there. What can be more obvious than recent user behavior?” she smiled.

All the faces in all these large screens nodded, taking assiduous notes.

“Since reading that paper, we have done our own analysis, as you know.” Philip was back on the podium, “We started by looking for incidents of unexplained crashes of cars with self-drive(auto-pilot) feature. All of you helped immensely. We then removed incidents where the cause was human and known. That left us with unexplained crashes. It took a lot of legal wrangling to get a warrant for the central data of the car company, but we finally managed it. When we analysed that data, we realised that all of these cars were active on self-drive at the moment of crash. That is when we made the connection between the self-drive feature and the crashes of the car. Alisha’s paper had already told us to look for user behaviour immediately preceding the crash. So, the long and short is, we know that the user did something, and immediately afterwards, the self-drive activated, and then the car was made to crash by the self-drive.”

What we also know, thanks to the database from the company, is that this destructive behaviour was done by the car every single time the trigger behaviour was done by the user. Which means we know the causation is real.

We are all here today to answer two questions:

A. What are the remaining 1-2 user behaviours that connect the remaining cases?

B. Who, or what, is responsible for this? Is the car company sabotaging its own product? Or is it getting hacked? Or does an active hacking organisation have a back door entry to the car company’s systems?

Thank you.”

The Task Force

The Task Force had 10 country heads of Interpol, Alisha, and Nishant. Nishant reported directly to Philip and was widely considered the prodigal in the cyber sec unit.

The analytics tools had failed to throw up anything that was common to the unexplained incidents.

But their bigger worry was finding out who was behind this,

The Hunt Begins

Their work was neither glamorous nor fun. It was hours and hours of staring at black blinking screens.

A whiteboard in the center of the room listed all the variables they were testing against the common cause hypothesis. So far, they had run through:

A. Registration plate numbers

B. First letter of registration number

C. Names of owners

D. Where the car was before malfunctioning

E. Whether drivers were left or right handed

F. Music playing in the car before the crash (the audio recorder records that)

G. Recording of the car dashcam before the malfunction

H. Timing of the crash

I. Date of the crash

J. Month of the crash

K. Day of week of the crash

L. How many children the car owners had..

.. You get the picture. It’s a lot of fun when one is reading this in a detective novel. In that, one thing leads to another and people come up with leads and inputs all the time. All this team had was one frustration after another.

 

Until one day, Obja, the rep from Egypt, came up with an idea that, like all great ideas, appears obvious post facto:

“Look, boss, if the crash happened in response to these stimuli, that has to be coded somewhere in the car’s OS. Let’s run a simple test. Let’s repeat the stimuli in a car and see if the behaviour is repeated? Then we know whether each car was individually hacked or a malware injected into the OS?”

When the test was run, the car crashed.

This was the team’s first breakthrough. They now knew that they were looking for a malicious script in the OS.

The hackers were smart. No one was sitting around hacking cars. They had injected a piece of malware and were now sitting and watching the show, so to speak.

The Elusive Code

If you haven’t already seen it, a car’s code is a few million lines of code. Some of it is in assembly language still.

The malicious script was a simple If-Then command. This means that no AI was involved. If user does this, you do this. The script could be absolutely anywhere – in any part of the OS.

The forensics team was enhanced and the coffee machine lines got longer. It took them two whole weeks (for scale, consider that every forensic engineer goes through a few thousand lines of code per day using automated tools, and there were 15 of them working almost non-stop) before they found the plug.

The plug was simple. It instructed the car to speed at t-20 (20 kmph less than the top speed possible for the vehicle) on loop. There was no termination line. Which means the car was instructed to get to the top speed and then remain there for the rest of its life.

When they got the full code out, they smiled.

The three conditions that triggered this script were all based on user behavior.

The three conditions were:

A. Where a user enters the wrong passcode three times but gets it right on the fourth attempt.

B. If the user disengages self-drive while cruising at a speed of 100kmph or above

C. Where the VR system of the car hears the launch phrase “AI is crap.”

In spite of themselves, they all laughed. So, this was the elusive “third condition” that their whiteboard had been unable to get!

It was time to augment the team.

The Team

Suji was a cyber behavioral specialist. His job was to look at the code and figure out what kind of group or person was behind this sophisticated script.

The script was genius in its simplicity. The three conditions were such that they would cause a few accidents, but not enough to get widespread attention. And the best part was that no one would think of linking these accidents to each other. The designer of this script – person or group – had to have a very distinct personality.

Nathan was a grey hatter. His job was to work out of his own house and to look for the kind of person or group indicated by Suji.  They were definitely a new group, because no one had heard of this modus operandi before.

Nitesh and Alisha were to work together on the toughest problem of all – the motivation.

What did the writers of the script want? Why were they doing this?

Obja was the cyber forensic expert whose job was to go through the server logs of the car company to understand exactly when this script had been injected into the system. How long before the first crash in 2020, was this done?

 

In theory, Obja’s job was easiest. In practice, it was impossible.

The international organisations had taken more than a year to put the pieces together. Server logs were retained for 30 days on the drive and for 6 months in the backup drive. Which means that the server logs were not going to show anything.

Obja still ran through them, looking for indication of a modification to the script or something. Anything. He got nothing.

Then, he moved to the code backup. Every tech product has a back up of its code. This is so that, in case of an issue after a tech upgrade, the customer’s code can be taken back to a point at which it worked. This is called the restore point.

Being a luxury car company, the offline backup of code was kept for 9 months. Code before that was not available. The car company had been convinced to co-operate by Philip, who was always very persuasive in such matters.

Obja dutifully looked through this too. Nothing. Even the last restore point in the OS had this malicious script. What was significant was that no change had been made to the script. Which means whoever did the injection did it one time. They must have run a test. And they never needed to come back to this script. From that point, the show was on.

 

Suji was doing slightly better. He now had a profile. The script was very simple. Which means the person injecting it:

A. Had to know exactly where to put it

B. Knew what to do so it doesn’t come up in an audit or review at any time

C. Had access to the server to make the injection.

So far, he was going with the theory of lone wolf. The actor’s modus operandi prioritised stealth. Such a person was not likely to use or even belong to a group. In fact, it was very likely that s/he was a disgruntled engineer on the team. Event logs for the event had not been disabled, meaning the person was not a hacker by habit.

Suji’s heart sank. This meant that Nathan’s fishing may not be any use at all.

The next logical step would be to check the backgrounds and actions of the thousands of engineers who had worked on this car. This car was one of the first connected cars to enter the market. It started slow – with just sending data about speed, location, use of systems back to the central server.

Then, the cruise control was added. That was their first foray into AI. Finally, in 2020, the autopilot feature was launched. This allowed the user to sit back while the advanced sensors did everything. It worked in all conditions except the most densely populated areas in a few geographies. In the first world, the autopilot feature was a dream come true.

 

The Breakthrough

It was so unexpected, it was hilarious.

Alisha had this idea that she wanted to hear all the voice recordings of the time before the first crash. She wanted to understand why the hacker chose that particular catch phrase in his script. The idea was wild – suppose a certain user used this catchphrase regularly enough for the hacker to be sure that sooner or later, it would be used. Suppose the entire death factory was to mask that one murder that the hacker really wanted?

As motives go, this was as good as any (considering they had no other motives on the table).

They started listening.

Nishant also started looking at data points of the incidence of the other two user behaviours – forgetting the password exactly thrice, and disengaging cruise control (the precursor to auto pilot) at 100 kmph and above.

He found something curious. In their category – these two were the least displayed behaviours. For example, if 100 people entered their passcode incorrectly, 70 of them would remember the right passcode after 2 attempts – at the third attempt. 3 would put incorrect passcode all 5 times. 10 would get it right in the fifth attempt. Only 1 user was likely to get it right the fourth time. Only 1% of the users who forgot their passcode were likely to remember it on the fourth attempt.

Likewise, cruise control was disengaged at various speeds by users, but above 100 kmph was the least used speed category.

So, the hacker wanted to minimize the car crashes, but s/he still wanted them. Why? It made no sense.

Alisha’s work was not that easy.

The car company used to store the voice commands on magnetic tapes that were stored at some cheap warehouse in Arizona. She physically flew to the location with Manu, another team member. And the room reminded her of a government office back room in any part of the world. It was not dusty, but in every other respect, it was a govt office. Stack upon stack of magnetic tape. Some stacks were labelled, most were just dumped.

 

 

“What is this place?” Alisha asked.

“The graveyard of code. This is the graveyard of code. That way, there, you have the original OS of the car – going back to the 1990s, when we first moved luxury car dashboards to electronic display. This work was done by an Indian company for us then. We put a screen to show stuff like speed, temperature etc. and the buyers went wild.”

Alisha’s eyes widened in disbelief, “So, here you have the earliest version of code, going as far back as the 1990s?”

“And all the voice commands ever heard by our VR system since it was launched by us in 2016. Which is what you are here to listen to.”

“Actually, what I am here for is the frequency chart of a specific phrase and where that stands compared to the most used phrases at the time. The time period we are looking at is 2018 – 2020 March or so.”

“I can give you that from 2019, because that is when we put analytics on top of our VR. But before that is nothing. Does that work?”

“That’d be a great start, yes. Thank you!”

Manu retrieved the files and loaded them on a machine in the records room. The dataset needed a specific software which was only available on the company’s own machines.

They reached the same conclusion as Nishit. “AI is crap” was one of the 5 least used phrases inside the car.

But Alisha had one more idea.

“This graveyard of code.. are the graves marked? By year?”

“Nah. We might have some sort of marking by version on some of the tapes, but I wouldn’t know which version came in which year.”

“Ok, from which version do you have this information?”

“Let me see… OS version control….. hmm… wait…”

He pulled out a tape and started working. Very soon, he said – this one, 12.0.1.345.4 – this was released on February 12^th, 2018. The next version we released was 12.0.1.346.0 – and that was in October 2018.

So, that’s what we have. You are welcome to the tapes here. Some of them have a number on top. Most of them don’t. I have to be here while you work. So just go on there, pick up a tape and bring it to me. Don’t try any hanky panky. All these files only open on our proprietary software, so taking one away will not help you at all and will make me very angry.”

Alisha smiled, “You do realise, yes, that we are the Interpol?”

The man smiled back. It was ceasefire time.

3 days later, Alisha and Manu had put in a formal request for code of a certain version. They had done the impossible! They had found the version in which the code appeared for the first time. Just as the team had expected, the code was so simple it was pure genius. It had needed zero modification since the first injection.

Now, they had to find out the time range during which that OS version was in production.

The release log was not likely to go that far back. 6 years is a long time.

 

The Dead End  

The team was together after a long time.

Nishant was the leader.

“Let’s sum up what we have so far. We know that the accidents are caused by a malicious script in the OS of the car.

We have a rough idea of the time during which it could have been injected. We could be off by as much as 5-6 months.

We know that the person who wrote this code had access to the analytics of the car company even before the analytics layer was added. Which means that they had access to the raw data which they could then put on a basic voice recognition engine and do some private analysis.

In 2018, it was still possible for some employees to put some private software on company laptops.

This was one such employee.

Also note that the script does not generate any notifications. Which means that the hacker either did not care to know when a crash happened, or could get to know without the need for a notification. This can only mean that he or she is still on the team. It is one of the people we have been meeting or interacting with.”

“Did we go over the list of people who died? Did any of them have any connection with an engineer working in this company? Family? Friends? Business feuds? School rivalry? You married my girl how dare you? Or anything at all? Even neighbours?!”

 

“Nope. Nada. And believe me, we LOOKED. Hard.”

“Since we removed the script 6 months ago, we know that the hacker, whoever he is, is not waiting around for any more action. Now we have a sea of suspects, a little bit about the modus operandi, but still no motive!” Suji concluded for everyone.

 

The Breakthrough – II

For some reason, Alisha kept going back to the original code. “Why did he choose user behaviour for his script? He could have chosen anything. But he chose a trigger by which the driver would seal their own death warrant. And yet, he chose the behaviour least likely to appear.

He wanted people to trigger their own death, yet he did not want too many people to die.

Death was not the objective here. Exposing the vulnerability of the car was. Exposing just how vulnerable the car was – THAT was what this person wanted to do.”

Alisha scrambled to Nishant’s office.

Nishant heard her out and gasped. There was someone on the team who was desperately trying to tell the car company that their cars had too much power under AI. That the very same AI could be hacked to kill people.

But the company pushed ahead with its AI development.

Who was that person?

 

The old timers were brought in. In particular, people who had left the company in 2021 or thereabouts were called in. Did they remember an engineer or project manager warning about the need for safeguards in AI deployment? And he was ignored?

 

Two names popped up – Chris and Sasha. Chris remained with the company, while Sasha had resigned and now worked with children. They had married in 2019 and now lived close to the engineering office. Chris was still part of the AI development team. He had been a developer in 2018 and had slowly risen through the ranks.

 

When questioned, he confessed readily enough.

“Yes, I wrote that script. I just never expected it to go on for so long. I thought that with the first car crash in China, they will be forced to sit up and do a code review. They did nothing.

Before injecting the script, for 6 months, I kept pleading with them to put a human override in the AI autopilot feature being developed. I begged with them to have basic security protocol in place for the AI engine that we were using in self-drive. You know what they did? They used that budget to start recording what people were saying in their cars! It was disgusting and voyeuristic.

I told them that with AI, we were building systems that were, in turn, hackable. But because these were smart engines, tracking a hack would be next to impossible. In most codes, we do not check the code directly. They wouldn’t listen!

A prophet is not honoured in his own country. I was ignored just because I was an engineer on their own team. If I was one of those hot shot external consults, they would have paid attention.

Honest to God, I never thought it would take them this long. I am sorry. For everything. But trust me, for the 100 odd people who have died because of me, thousands have been saved because you found that script and removed it. If this is able to put some kind of standards around how AI is secured in large scale implementations, I am happy to spend the rest of my life in jail. Sasha and I have been expecting this. That’s why we don’t have kids.”

The End

To be honest, Nishant did not know whether he wanted to charge Chris or the CEO of the car company. The CEO was going to ignore the next security warning too. Chris, on the other hand, was just trying to scream his way to attention. Even that failed. And how.

It was a weary team that congratulated itself that night. Weary, but oh, how victorious!

 

 

 

 

That moment when Zubaan matters..

 Me: Let me send you an email confirming this event.

The stakeholder: No need. It has never happened that you said you'd do something and then couldn't do it. I don't need an email from you. See you <day of event>.

- This was said casually as a part of a routine conversation, by someone with whom I have been working for almost a decade through Esha.

Dad used to talk about the importance of one's word being enough. He was right.
It really is something worth experiencing.

#Gratitude

What happened with my facebook id..

On November 8th. 2022, Lord Mark Zukerberg lost his Facebook account. It was disabled. 

https://www.ilounge.com/news/mark-zuckerbergs-facebook-profile-gets-disabled

Facebook restored the account a day later, but there was no explanation of what happened and how the account was restored. Also, there are no posts after 4th November, which is strange, given that the FB founder did make a very public apology about the layoffs on November 9th. Today, more than a fortnight later, there isn't a single post on the Zuck profile page.

There is no official statement and as far as I can make out, no unofficial buzz on the security channels either. 

Par for the course? 

As it turns out, this is not the first time this has happened at Facebook. 

In 2011, a namesake of Lord Zuckerberg found that his account had been arbitrarily suspended. 

https://www.webpronews.com/why-did-facebook-disable-mark-zuckerbergs-account/

In November 2019, some more accounts were disabled without any explanation or comment. They had to file a change petition because .. well, there is NO WAY in heaven that you can reach FFB support and get a real answer (more on that later) 

https://www.change.org/p/mark-zuckerberg-please-fix-our-disabled-facebook-profiles

In April 2022, the same thing happened again, to dozens of users. After the NY Times wrote about it, the accounts were apparently restored. 

In fact, it is so common that Google automatically suggests "disabled for no reason" when you type "My facebook account was di" 

There are Youtube videos to help!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydp-nRmxG4Q

What can you do? 

Well, you can prove your identity by uploading an official ID document. 

But here's the thing - after compromising your account, FB expects you to trust it with an official ID document? Like, in which metaverse is that logical? 

Also, an appeal is to an authority. FB is not an authority. its a service provider that takes our data and gives us its servers. Simple. But if our account has been compromised, it needs to tell us why. 

On November 12th, my account was disabled 

Which was shocking. 

But then, I googled a little bit. 

The first thing i tried to do was to download my information. 30 minutes later, it was still "Creating Download". 

However, thanks to FB wanting to spy on you all the time, what it does is, when you log out, it keeps your profile on the browser. Then, when you login using another id, it still allows you to see how many notifications that logged out account has, and in this case, I realised that over 50 profiles had been made on my name. 

Let's see this: 

This is a logged out account, but another user on this computer can still see how many notifications this account has. 

At this point, we remove that account and try to login using another id. 

Now, I login using another id. And this is what happens: 

This is how I knew that 50+ profiles were made within a few hours on the night of November 12, 2022, on my original account. Note taht it is showing me this information while that account is neither logged in nor saved on browser. In fact, has been expressly removed from the browser. 

When we click on that see all profiles thing, this popup appears: 

Et viola! Both accounts are back on the browser! 

Thank you, Facebook, for being so helpful! 

Rotary - Children's Post International Cultural Exchange

"I did not know that India is so much like Pakistan." 

"I did not know that Pakistan is so much like India." 

"This looks like cream in a bun, but it's a very important dish in Sweden." 

"This is a kurta. It's like a long T shirt that is worn with a pyjama or trousers." 

"In my country, the New Year Day, when everyone is happy and celebrating, is the biggest festival." 

"In my country, we greet each other by saying 'May good things happen to you.' " 

I am from Pakistan, and I am going to talk about food in Indonesia. 

I stayed up till midnight to check if I had been selected. I was so keen on getting into this program. 

The proverb in my land says, "The sun, the moon, and the truth, cannot be concealed for long." 

- These were some of the things we heard as the International Cultural Exchange came to an end. 

And one of the jury members said, 

"I did not get a chance to do this during my childhood. But you have. Cherish these friends from all over the world. If possible, visit them one day. You will love it."

Over 50 children - from Philippines to Argentina, from Nigeria to Sweden, came together to understand each other's cultures through interaction. They shared details about their food, clothes, festivals, proverbs, and other small things that define culture. 

The presentations over the last eight weeks were phenomenal, to say the least. But if they'd set a high bar, today's creative presentations raised it even further. 

One team took a food item - bread, and presented it as a starter, main course, and dessert in their own cultures. They all made that food item today! Another team dressed up in their traditional finery and after a greeting in their language, they spoke about their traditional dresses, and shared a proverb from their language. A third team made games about fun facts, monuments, food, and festivals of all their countries. The winning team had team members talk about each other's food. 

All through this, their mentors - who were masters students themselves, nudged, guided, pushed, and then beamed with pride as team after team completed its stupendous performance. 

One cannot describe what happens in a room like that. One can only see the sparkle in those eyes and know that these lives have been touched. That we have created a few citizens of the world. Drop in the ocean, but a ripple that might spread, no? 

Only an organisation like Rotary could have pulled off something like this. The way Rotarians from all over the world came together to participate, take the message to children in their countries, become SPOCs for these participants, and ensure that the participants overcome issues like access to computers, school clashes, etc. to participate. Nine Weeks of frenzied activity, and as we picked up the phone one last time to congratulate each other, we were, I think, left with a sense of deep void. 

The image I have picked is of a Pakistani girl in her traditional attire. Why did I pick this one? 

The motifs on the dress and the jewelry worn by her are both Indian and Pakistani. 

Culture, like water, seeps through the cracks of our prejudices.