OTC CatchUp #133 Summary

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OTC CatchUps are weekly informal sessions involving project showcases and technical discussions. They are held every Saturday from 10:30 PM IST. Join in!.
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OTC CatchUp #133

Date: 27-05-2023

Duration: 3 hrs 40 mins

Topics Discussed

Wilfred Almeida and Pranav Dani discussed how some pirated websites also have good infrastructure.
- Piracy is illegal in most countries, but some are very serious about it and penalize it heavily.
- Harsh Kapadia studied the working of Tor in one of his courses.
  - Harsh Kapadia's shared his learnings about Tor.
We talked about Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin and its flaws.
- Harsh Kapadia shared an article - Operation Bayonet: Inside the Sting That Hijacked an Entire Dark Web Drug Market
- Mohit Gangwani shared:
We discussed how one can adjust their Twitter feed using the three-dot menu to avoid irrelevant content on the feed.
Pranav Dani shared that some routers allow content filtering, blocking keywords, URLs and domains.
- Darshan Rander asked him to block advertising domains.
  - Harsh Kapadia shared 12ft.io, a service that blocks paywalls.
- Jio disabled FTP and media serving on their routers.
  - Wilfred Almeida suggested flashing custom firmware like DD-WRT/OpenWRT on the router to enable FTP and/or customize other settings.
Wilfred Almeida talked about hosting and load balancing.
- He demonstrated his setup using Nginx and Kubernetes.
  - Nginx is used for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing and media streaming.
  - He shared his blog post on Custom CI/CD Pipeline.
- Harsh Kapadia showcased his cloudflare DNS records that he set up for redirecting his static sites to his domain.
We talked about the Browser Company, based on this tweet and how it looks potentially useful and aesthetically pleasing.
- Sreekaran Srinath tried it out and he did not trust the browser since it wasn’t open source.
  - Other than that, he suggested the browser had a good design and some useful features like Zap for removing certain elements from a webpage and Boost for color change.
  - On these lines, Harsh Kapadia talked about a browser extension that he uses to hide stats on Twitter to avoid bias.
  - Pranav Dani shared Unhook, a browser for removing YouTube recommendations to avoid the vicious circle of wasting time.
- Aditya Oberai talked about why companies keep their products closed source.
Aditya Oberai shared his premise and thought process behind his recent blog on ARCC about Why I’m Skeptical Of Web3: An Outsider’s Perspective.
Harsh Kapadia shared his experience of building his development machine with an AMD EPYC Milan.
- We talked about PC configuration and building rigs.
- One can use CPU-Z for learning about the important components of a PC.

Projects Showcased

Darshan Rander showcased a game that he built using Flutter and Flame engine.
- It is supposed to be a work in progress for the Appwrite hackathon.
- GitHub Repository

Attendees

Abhigyan Bafna
Aditya Oberai
Aryan Nayak
Darshan Rander
Dheeraj Lalwani
Harsh Kapadia
Jay Kaku
Pranav Dani
Rishit Dagli
Sahil Prasad
Sarah Khan
Sreekaran Srinath
Wilfred Almeida
Darshit Suratwala
Dhrumil Thakore
Fardeeen Samir D
Harshvardhan Shukla
Hrishikesh Dhuri
Hritik Sharma
Krish Manghani
Lakshitaa Chellaramani
Mitali Juvekar
Mohit Gangwani
Preksha Kothari
Rahul Sanjay Agrawal

Meet Screenshot

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