I started professional programming in 2000, that decade I mostly used Windows and Linux. In the decade that followed 2010 - I mostly used macOS and Linux. I have been mostly still using maOS and Linux - but since I have bought an LG Gram after selling off my Chromebook - I am ready to make a shift to Windows as a primary development OS. I will still use macOS and Linux - but probably will be using a lot more of Windows now.
Blog of V.Ganesh
Blog on all the stuff that interests me :)
Sunday, March 12, 2023
Friday, January 20, 2023
Another Cyber fraud - Google Reviews fraud
Some frauds happen in a matter of minutes, before you could intervene - even if you are physically present with the victim and are passively listening to what is going on. This is one of them.
Essentially, we were trying to book a hotel in Kolhapur. I am not so much into booking by directly calling the hotel - I generally use either Oyo or other hotel booking site. But my cousin wanted to book by Googling and directly calling the hotel. So I became passive to the discussion. By the time I entered actively in discussion - something had already clicked me that a fraud is in work - the guy on the other end was asking to punch in "12999" as the merchant code in place on amount and provide UPI pin - thankfully that transaction didn't happen and I could intervene and stop.
But before that already 1500 had be transferred to the fraudsters account as the "booking amount".
So here is how the fraudster (or probably a gang of fraudsters) worked.
They post google review picture with morphed image that has a phone number:
Obviously a morphed image with phone number. Now for me, this would immediately ring alarm - but for some reason, it didn't for my cousin. My cousin called this number (this wasn't the one on the day of the fraud - apparently this keeps changing) - and the other person sent a UPI QR code - under a personal name - another red flag, but again for some reason got ignored, before 1.5 k was transferred to the fraudster. Another real red flag was - he was giving free breakfast and lunch - impossible in any budget hotel. Any how, if you look into the profile of this person who posted this picture, you would see that this person has listed himself in multiple other hotel - so this is probably handled by a gang of fraudsters:
I have reported this fraud on https://cybercrime.gov.in/ (you should too if you come across any such). I am not sure how to contact Google to notify it about this fraud. But hoping that the cyber crime investigations can be made to on-cover this obvious fraud.
I also plan to volunteer at https://cybercrime.gov.in/ as I really feel the need for it for a safer digital society.
Sunday, May 29, 2022
Where have I been?
Data has suddenly become a very big deal in tech space. Today the data processing/analytics platforms are more valuable than the actual code that power these platform - in the sense that monetization happens on the platforms and not the code. The code is of course the foundation without which you cannot build solid platforms. So despite all the talk about "no-code", demand for solid programming skills are going no where. Most of the code that powers these modern data stack platforms are open-source with a very healthy and collaborative community of very smart people.
When I joined Cloudera innovation accelerator via Turing.com this Feb (2022), and I had absolutely no idea of anything about modern data stack. I had experience with building ML models for medical domains, but the data sizes I dealt with were generally few thousand rows rather than million. Since then it has been quite a wonderful journey of learning, finding and connecting to new people.
During this time I have primarily dabbled with building adapters for a transformation tool called dbt from dbtLabs (https://www.getdbt.com/dbt-labs/about-us/). One of these adapters for the Impala is now open source and is available from (https://github.com/cloudera/dbt-impala). I also made my first upstream contribution to impyla project (https://github.com/cloudera/impyla), which is used by dbt-impala to connect to Impala warehouse. It is cool, when you discover how does the actual patch process work in an open-source project. If you came here looking for using dbt-impala, do check this tutorial written by Alasdair Brown (https://community.cloudera.com/t5/Innovation-Blog/Getting-started-with-dbt-impala-amp-Cloudera-Data-Warehouse/ba-p/342616?es_id=1fabf7040a)
The most fun part of working here has been closely interacting with people not only at Cloudera but also dbtLabs, something I have hardly done in my previous assignments.
Last but not least the whole journey was possible due to the platform provided by Turing.com and the wonderful staff they have. I would strongly recommend that you try them out if you are looking for meaningful remote assignments.