Back in November 2019, we reported that Reliance Jio is able to block HTTPS internet traffic by means of a deep packet inspection (DPI) technique. In response, some readers messaged us saying that they ran our test and were able to reproduce similar behaviour on Airtel mobile networks. According to…
Update (11th April 2020): This paper has been accepted at ACM Web Science 2020. A preprint can be accessed on arXiv. Nation states around the world engage in web censorship using a variety of legal and technical methods. India is no different in this regard: the Government of India can…
During my AI class back in college (taught by Prof. Vatsa), we were given an interesting exercise which required us to come up with a face morphing technique. The intended use case was one where a user was tasked with describing a face (maybe of a wanted felon?). In such…
This is a follow up to my previous post on fast DLA simulations. Please do read that before continuing further! In this article, we try to come up with a model which can help us estimate the stickiness of a DLA simulation. Given an image from a DLA simulation (a…
Diffusion Limited Aggregation is a growing object consisting of particles that diffuse and aggregate to the object, much like how flocks of snow are created. Particles are introduced one after the other and made to undergo a random walk. Eventually, a newly introduced particle reaches an existing particle and remains…
This monsoon semester I picked up a really interesting course, Digital Audio (DES514 @ IIITD). Although it had been ages since I'd done anything related to music (seriously), the realization that it's my last semester made me have the whole "screw grades let's pick up something fun" talk in my head.…
Long ago, I saw a friend playing the 2048 game. One go at it, and I have been hooked on ever since. Sadly though, I haven't been able to get the 2048 tile and win it. It was really frustrating, so I decided to write an artificial intelligence to solve…
Some time back, I was working on some primality testing algorithms in the FLINT ulong_extras module (the Brillhart-Lehmer-Selfridge test to be precise). It required computing the cube root of the integer being tested. While implementing it, I realized that the ulong_extras module was missing a cube root function.…
I had an economics assignment due some time back, and those who know me would be aware of my hatred towards HSS courses. I tried finding the solution manual online (shh), and was really happy when I did. But then I realized it was on Scribd, and most of the…
The pencils down deadline for GSoC was 21st Aug, the previous Friday. It has been quite a journey, working with FLINT for over three months. I've learnt quite a lot, not just math but how to write good quality code and testing. Although I haven't been able to do everything…