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I am wondering what the 'sub-processor' means here. Am I right in assuming that the Persona architecture uses Kafka, S3 data lake in AWS and GCP, Elastic Search, MongoDB for configuration or user metadata, and Snowflake for analytics, thus all these end up on sub-processle list as the data physically touches these company's products or infra hosted outside Persona? I hope all these aren't providing their own identity services and all of them aren't seeing my passport for further validation.

There were several great famines during the Mughal reign in India, for example, Peter Mundy, the English merchant and traveller, describes the great famine of Deccan and Gujrat. The Mughal rule was brutal. The European travellers have written about the plight of the farmers who rebelled due to excessive taxation despite the fear of punishment. The Mughals built towers of severed heads outside each village and even they were not able to quell the rebellion, such was the state of affairs. So I'd say the assumption you're making isn't true.

Mughal rule in India was very inconsistent depending on the ruler in power at the time. There was a huge variety in quality of governance from Akbar to Aurangzeb.

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You broke the site guidelines quite hideously in this thread—so much so that I actually banned your account, although I've since unbanned it for now (see below).

Worse, you've been breaking the site guidelines a lot in other threads too. Recent examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083277

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46997343

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987281

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46983913

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46824319

Surely you realize you can't post like this to HN? It has been a problem for a long time and we've warned you more than once: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41692895.

Since you've ignored our requests to stop doing this and have done it repeatedly and egregiously, you're well over the line at which we'd ban an account. However, as mentioned, I've unbanned it again for now, because (a) many of your comments are fine contributions, and (b) I don't feel good about banning one account but not the other in this kind of spat.

But please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this going forward, because it's a serious problem and much as I don't want to ban you, if it happens again I don't think we'll have much choice.


@dang, I completely disagree with you here and we have had this conversation before too. I had mentioned then that this site is being manipulated by political propagandists/fraudsters/etc. which you had hand waved away.

These two threads which you are pointing to are the perfect example of what i was talking about, with evidence which you seem to disregard. My language was harsh in order to shame the manipulators and get them to stop. HN's guidelines should be followed in spirit and not always in letter.

HN needs to do a better job of moderating political/agenda-driven/propaganda/manipulation in its threads.

Read the comment chain in the threads to see for yourself.

1) In a thread to do with "Feynman Lectures" i.e. Physics, a few introduce a talking point on his behaviour which is then amplified by others in a co-ordinated manner (not random) to hijack the thread in a totally cancel-culture direction. More than 50% of comments on that thread is about this irrelevant negative topic which others pointed out too. "ShamLegacyTldr" is created just to add inflammatory comments in the guise of virtue signaling all of which was obvious. Being polite with these sort of people is just playing into their hands and does not get them to stop; You have to be blunt and harsh. That account has not contributed/participated in anything else. The inference should be clear.

2) In a thread to do with French/Mongols, "thisislife2" drags in Mughal History of India, current Indian political talking points, Israel/Palestine issues in a most inflammatory manner. Their version of history is not factual, their dates are wrong, no references/citations are given and everything is suspect. Some excerpts from them below;

Let me begin with a disclaimer - I consider any "history lessons" that seeks to perpetuate the "Hindu victim-hood" mentality with formulaic politics of - "if not for the stupid Buddhist rulers or the evil Muslim, Christian invaders etc. etc. India would be so advanced, like, you wouldn't believe it!" /s as revisionist history (mostly stemming from the politics of the RSS - India's Hindu-right).

Like with any religious fundamentalist political grouping, Hindu religious fundamentalists (Sanghis) too tend to be overly fixated on the religious identity of anyone they meet (dead or alive), past rulers included, and judge everything they do, or whatever happened around them, through the coloured lens of religion.

You may be right - Russian invasion of Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza (most westerners don't even know that Israel is a settler-colony - https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-fares-abraham-021826 that has been deliberately oppressing, chasing and killing Palestinians for a long time) and Trump demanding Greenland - all indicate that certain oligarchs are working to bring back imperialism.

Not sure what you are saying - Israel has colonised Palestine. Palestine is still not free or independent. Nor have the Palestinian natives been absorbed and made Israeli citizens like the Americans, Canadians or Australians did with the natives on the land they colonised. Do you see why this is problematic - by not giving them their own state or making them citizens, and culling them over the decades, they are effectively seeking the genocide of Palestine. And then westerners act surprised when Palestinians fight for their freedom (is the second amendment only for white, Christian, Americans?).

"freethinker101" account is created (there are zero contributions from this user), posts a most inflammatory comment (now deleted) to which "thisislife2" responds within minutes with a very inflammatory and obviously made-up story, viz;

True. I didn't believe about houses not being rented to muslims, till I helped a muslim friend hunt for a house - a woman we contacted to rent a house said that her husband doesn't want to rent their flat to muslims. She was genuinely embarrassed by it when I asked why, and she honestly said she doesn't understand this kind of religious bigotry and her husband is has become a "khattar Hindu" who just doesn't like muslims ...

Do you see the manipulation here? Or are you okay with this but not okay with me calling them out?

To see the manipulation; Note the trigger/anchor words/phrases like "perpetuate/victim-hood/Hindu-Right/Sanghi/RSS/settler-colony/chasing and killing palestinians/Israel has colonised Palestine/culling them over the decades/genocide of Palestine/khattar Hindu/doesn't like muslims" etc.

The account should be banned for using such inflammatory/instigatory language on such sensitive political topics. If that is not the very definition of agenda-driven manipulation, i don't know what is.

HN either needs to police these itself or allow "real-world" people (like myself) to help you do it if you want to maintain the standard/quality of discussions on this site.


Please stop the lies.

You need to read up on history better, especially if you are talking of a country whose history has been ravaged by holocausts of the worst variety: man-made.

Background: India has been among the most fertile and richest lands in the world, since many millenia, due to it having some of the world's biggest rivers (most of them being Himalayan rivers, as perennial icemelts, pushing out fresh alluvial soil, that's very fertile), hence India has had advanced agriculture and complex industries for thousands of years.

3 regions of India are among the most fertile (due to the geography and climate): the Deccan, Bengal and South region (sizeable chunk of it used to be called as Madras during British Raj in India). Please note this, as it is important context of what I'm explaining next.

India gets 2 monsoons and also the Westerlies winds, so it gets a lot of seasonal rainfall. (e.g., Chirrapunji in India was the world's wettest place for centuries, till climate change in modern era changed the wettest wetspot to nearby locations.)

In fact, before the Persian & Turkish invaders (whose descendants called themselves Mughals, as a link to their supposedly Mongol heritage) and European (including British) invaders invaded India, it was India that was the richest land in the world and a global economic superpower, contributing to 25-30% of the entire world's GDP. e.g, Surat was the richest city in the world.

So such immense wealth and fertile lands, and lots of women, attracted the worst kind of invaders from across the hot deserts and the cold seas.

The Muslim invaders (Persians/Turks) invaded and destroyed the world's oldest universities in Nalanda and Takshashila in India. They and the colonial Whites who followed, aggressively raped and pillaged at will, and enslaved the native people, brutally (this lead to further societal problems such as Purdah (veil) system and Sati system (where the native Hindu women would immolate themselves in funeral pure as mass suicide, as the invading barbaric Mughals would rape even dead bodies)).

So atrocious was the barbarism and brutality of these invaders, that tens of millions of Indians died in artificial famines and inhuman tortures.

An entire mountain range begot an evil name - Hindu Kush (the Killer of Hindus) - so called because of the tens of thousands of Hindus (and other natives) who died on its treacherous icy slopes, as part of chain gangs of captured slaves dragged to be sold in Persian and Arabia as slaves, sex slaves or worse (e.g., little children chained to camels for races, many of them died due to injuries,starvation, exhaustion, or sheer terror). Now mention of all these evils is important because that historic information destroys the fallacy that Turk/Persian/Mughal or European/British rule in India were benevolent and just. The reality was that India was turned into living hell.

Within few hundred years of Persian/Turk/Mughal rule and European+British rule in India, those captured regions of India had become impoverished and wrecked by artificial famines induced by deliberate crippling of local industries and agriculture by systematic dismantling of those industries and agriculture and debilitating taxes (jizya, etc.).

India went from being a global industrial & economic superpower, to becoming a poor crippled enslaved nation.

Prior to the pre-medieval era, Indians knew how to deal with natural famines, because the monsoons could fail or be erratic once in a few years (drought years).

One of the earliest treatises on famine relief goes back more than 2,000 years. This treatise is commonly attributed to Kautilya who was also known as Vishnugupta (Chanakya), who recommended that a good king should build new forts and water-works and share his provisions with the people, or entrust the country to another king. Historically, Indian rulers have employed several methods of famine relief. Some of these were direct, such as initiating free distribution of food grains and throwing open grain stores and kitchens to the people. Other measures were monetary policies such as remission of revenue, remission of taxes, an increase of pay to soldiers, and payment of advances. Yet other measures included the construction of public works, canals, and embankments, and sinking wells. Migration was encouraged. Kautilya advocated raiding the provisions of the rich in times of famine to "thin them by exacting excess revenue". Famines preserved only in oral tradition are the Dvadasavarsha Panjam (Twelve-year Famine) of south India and the Durga Devi Famine of the Deccan from 1396 to 1407.The Vanjari story of the great Durgadevi famine, which lasted from 1396 to 1407, is that it was named from Durga a Lad Vanjari woman, who had amassed great wealth and owned a million pack bullocks, which she used in bringing grain from Nepal, Burmah, and China. She distributed the grain among the starving people and gained the honourable title of 'Mother of the World', Jagachi Mata.

But under the Muslim and Christian regimes in medieval India, tens of millions of Indians starved to death on the streets in these artificial famines. Or they became cannibals and robbers. Or they perished in epidemics caused by forced migrations and unsanitary conditions (because the invaders didn't bother to improve civic infrastructure, sanitation, etc.). e.g., Bubonic plague was unleashed in India, due to infected rats that came in European/British ships, and millions of Indians died in such plagues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India

But why should a fertile land struggle due to few seasons of lack of rains?

You see, the Muslim and Christian invaders followed the "scorched Earth" policy in India and elsewhere. If they lost a battle, they would burn all local crops and destroy villages during their retreat. They captured women and children (to turn them into sex slaves or soldiers), so the local population would gradually dwindle. They forced remnant populations to migrate, and imposed harshest taxes and atrocities on those that stayed. They systematically dismantled the local industries (killed or chopped off limbs of industry experts and artisans, broke their tools of trade, destroyed their schools and books, and banned cultural and scientific education). They deliberately starved and weakened the enslaved population so they wouldn't revolt. They caused caste conflicts and wars (did you know - the word "caste" comes from Portuguese word "casts", meaning societal class). The result was that these most fertile lands in the world, were turned into unlivabke hell.

e.g., In 1630, after the monsoon had failed for two years, the Deccan famine erupted and lasted two years. Abdul Hamid Lahori’s Badshahnama recorded that starvation was so rife that “life was offered for a loaf”. Other desperate forms of survival were not unknown: “Men began to devour each other, and the flesh of a son was preferred to his love.” The English merchant Peter Mundy, travelling near Surat, confirmed that parents sold or consumed their own children, or sometimes gave them away to anyone who would feed them. Ravenous subjects accosted others walking in public to prey on them. Given these wretched circumstances, many chose migration. As Lahori recalled, “Every man whose dire sufferings did not terminate in death and who retained the power to move wandered off to the towns and villages of other [provinces].”

Drastic famines occurred under the Delhi Sultan, Muhammad bin Tughlaq (1290-1351). As described by the thirteenth century Indo-Persian historian, Ziauddin Barani (1285-1357), the primary reasons behind the emergence of famine was the imposition of immense land taxes and the exploitation of the peasants at the hands of the aristocrats.

Gujarat and Deccan Famine (1630–1632): One of the most devastating famines in pre-colonial India occurred during the Mughal era. The famine resulted from three consecutive crop failures, leading to intense hunger, disease, and displacement. Contemporary Dutch records estimate that approximately 4 million people died in Gujarat and neighbourhood (Deccan region) in the ten months ending in October 1631. The overall death toll for the region was estimated at 7.4 million by late 1631.

I will probably add more data and links here, but I think now you understand how awful and horrible those evil regimes of history were.

Modern ndia is slowly rising again, from the ashes of these centuries of devastations.

Indiais making good strides in some industries, its economy is the fastest growing economy, its UPI is the biggest most-successful payments system in the world, and Indian government is standing tall and strong against bullies and terrorists.


I agree with you that some of these are indeed historical facts. Islamic invaders - that sought to raid India and loot it - did cause a lot of destruction. As did the Europeans (mostly the British) who colonised us and looted all our wealth to their own country.

These foreign invaders did do great harm to India as their intention in invading us was to only exploit India's wealth, weaken us and make their own kingdom richer.

But indian muslim rulers, who sought to create their own independent kingdoms in India, after conquering them, did not send India's wealth anywhere. They used it to develop their own kingdom's (i.e. India's) economy and growth. The Mughal empire is the perfect example of this, as they made India one of the richest country in the world during their period (which is what attracted the Europeans to colonise our country, and loot it).

As rulers of their own kingdom, muslim kings or emperors had no interest in creating famines in their own kingdoms. Indeed, Famines in India - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India outlines that famines have been documented in India even during the Maurya rule (2000+ years ago), (which is why you find Kautilya writing about famine relief), and gives examples of many famine reliefs documented in Indian history, even amongst Indian kingdom with muslim rulers. Note that I am not denying that famines happened in indian kingdoms with muslim rulers. It was however not common practice to artificially create to target a particular any community. As with any Hindu or Buddhist kingdoms in India, some were just natural disasters (because of flooding or drought) or due to flawed policies (like taxation) by despotic or inexperienced kings and a few may have been possible acts of warfare against an enemy kingdom.

As I wrote elsewhere here, if one is not obsessed with religious identity of a ruler, one will find that they are all the same everywhere - some or good and some are average and some are just weak despots. Their religious identity had nothing to do with why their kingdom was great or weak*.


Same here. I'd add that viewing the lava fountain at night was a mesmerizing experience. You get to see the full extent of red, glowing lava lake and the fountain. There were thousands of people and yet they appeared so small in front of the volcano. We did experience some ash and Pele's hair on the way to the park, near the black sand beach. I do recommend carrying a torch though at night, since it is pitch black at night. The lava illuminated the park with the red glow, but there were some parts where you do need a torch esp. if you park far away and walk.


> viewing the lava fountain at night was a mesmerizing experience

Is there anything comparable to the overview effect [1] that attends seeing a lava fountain in person?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect


Perhaps a total solar eclipse? Especially so when seeing half the solar system lined up neatly in a row with the sun and moon (and a comet in case of the recent April 2024 eclipse in the US), and truly feeling that one is riding on a chunk of rock hurtling through space, tethered invisibly to that impossibly distant mass of gas and plasma like a ball at the end of a rope...

Still get frisson every time I think about it ;)


Yes we watched it in the night too. It was disappointing to see iPhone “normalizing” its brightness down. I had to take raw photos to capture it.


I write about Indian history as my side project.

https://a.co/d/guvUxgq

https://a.co/d/iSg4jKZ


Oh wow, thank you for sharing


The article mentions a code breaking software - any idea what that is? I have a coded letter that is about 250 years old, but it is written in Devanagari script so letter frequency isn't straightforward. Please do suggest any tools that can help in decoding.


Do you have a link to your codes letter available online?


I don't, but I can upload a sample tomorrow in case you're interested in taking a look.


If I can make a guess, I'd say that the reporters engaged with them as a potential customer and demanded a sample of the data so they can indeed verify the accuracy. That's how they obtained the sample records, not via a s3 leak.


The reporters published a YouTube video in which they went undercover to a security convention (ISS Europe), and requested information about how the product works, some usecases, etc. [1]. Although, I don't recall the presenter indicating anything about leaked sample data...

[1] https://youtu.be/xfWyU5iXJ3I


The MVNOs such as MobileX mentioned above do not have their own towers or the cellular backbone i.e. the core network. They'll merely use the MNO such as Verizon or T-Mobile and have a commercial arrangement in which MVNO just handles the marketing and the customer support. So the MVNOs may not have the right tools or data or incentives to catch these sim farms.


I couldn't comprehend the content of the linked article, so I sought out the original piece from Reuters. Here's a concise summary:

- Appin, an Indian firm, is accused by Reuters of functioning as the e-commerce platform for hacking (similar to Amazon but for hacking). Users log in to a covert portal, place orders to hack into target mailboxes, make payments, and receive the delivered data.

- Appin received requests globally, including from RAW, IB, and the Indian military. However, when the Indian government detected financial irregularities, government contracts ceased. In desperation, Appin took on any available work, but it didn't survive.

- Despite Appin's demise, its former employees initiated similar ventures that are still active today.

Considering the involvement of the Indian government, I anticipated Appin and its founders to dispute the allegations, and they did. The article was subsequently removed, raising allegations of censorship.

The linked article discusses the backlash against this alleged censorship.

The timing of this article is intriguing, coinciding with the recent Pannun affair and now presenting another accusation, this time in the cyberspace. Reuters mentions that "The National Security Agency (NSA), which spies on foreigners for the U.S. government, began surveilling the company after watching it hack “high value” Pakistani officials around 2009, one of the sources said. An NSA spokesperson declined to comment." This may lead Indians to question: if the NSA can hack, why can't we?


>This may lead Indians to question: if the NSA can hack, why can't we?

So it's really straightforward, the Indian government can hack within the established global norms for spying, which they do. What isn't allowed to happen is NSA contractors losing their contract and pivoting to corporate espionage. There's no double standard here.


> The timing of this article is intriguing, coinciding with the recent Pannun affair

It's just pure coincidence. The APT was detected by SentinelOne Labs who then worked with Reuters to publish an investigation.

The Pannun stuff actually began in July 2023.


here's the article I posted a few days ago on the censorship aspects https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39201920 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/19/india-judg...

the thing I find interesting is of course the big international firms are vulnerable to this kind of thing, smaller content providers not so much.


Should india lock the involved journalists in some ecuadorean embassy, you know, like the guardian ones?


Does anyone know what languages Apple supports? The docs don't have a list. Tesseract might be "meh" but it is probably the best open source option available for devnagari scripts or Persian, for example.


I've used it on a number of Cyrillic languages (Russian, Bulgarian, etc), Hungarian, Turkish, along with the typical ones (Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese). I've heard it supports Chinese. I just tried Persian and devnagari samples on my Mac and it could not do either.


The name of the province - it's pronounced pun-jab, not poon-jab. (pun intended)


Also Mos-co not Mos-cow :)


I think you’re fighting a losing battle here, mos-co will sound as wrong to an American as mos-cow sounds to us. I presume both US and UK both used “mos-co” originally, and the US broke away with the newer bovine pronunciation at some point. I’m curious why and when this happened though - maybe the advent of TV or Radio there were some prominent announcers who used that pronunciation and it stuck?

What puzzles me are the elongated “aw” some use in place names like Milan, Prague and Hamburg (“Milon”, “Prog”, “Homburg”) - because they’re not correct in either English or the local languages. I wonder if that came from the realisation that "France" uses that "aw" vowel sound in French, so the assumption is other European languages would be the same (i.e. it's a misguided attempt to be more correct)?


Is that really true? In Russian it's Moskwa afaik so neither of those would sound correct anyway. In German it's Moskau, which sounds like Mos-cow.


The closest transliteration of the Russian pronunciation is probably Muskvah (with accent on the second syllable).


The Anglicization is mos-cow.

Using Cyrillic it's pronounced in neither of those two ways that you've written.


> The Anglicization is mos-cow.

It's not. The anglicization is MOS-koh. MOS-kau is American.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow



If this song is the reason Americans use "mos-cow" I am 100% here for it and will back any campaign to change the British pronunciation to match :)


The original Power Rangers lol


It's also German ("Moskau") which I assume is where the American pronunciation comes from.


Given that everyone and every country will pronounce it differently, the attempts at correcting the video creator's pronunciation of location names seems pretty futile.


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