Thread for Wed Dec 16, 2020
Ask yourselves, why we have not seen arrest of the bigger criminals? Hussein, HRC, Soros, George Bush, Rothschilds, etc!
We are in the Second Revolution or WWIII and as such, we need to win. We are not going to commit the same errors as in the past.

Corruption doesn't start at the public purse. It starts at the basic idea that people can be stupidly rich from no work of their own, but of others.

So until we deal with the monstrosity of the title deed, we will not fundamentally address corruption in Kenya.

That system of stealing people's work starts with the title deed.

What is a title deed? It is not the land. It is the legitimacy of her majesty the queen to own and decide what happens with land.

When someone has a title deed, they are saying that the queen has allowed them to use that land mentioned in the deed, and that the queen is committed to using force to validate that deed.

The problem is, who gave the queen the authority to guarantee use of the land?

The only way she got is is through stealth. Or what others politely call "enclosure."

What is an enclosure, and why is it a form of corruption?

Imagine we are that romantic non-colonized village that our elites like to con us about. We live next to a forest. The forest provides our food, fuel, building materials and trade. And through our culture and rituals, we replenish the forest, hold it sacred and protect it.

A Supreme Court bench headed by CJI SA Bobde is hearing a PIL seeking the direction for the Ministry of Home Affairs, Law and Justice and Women and Child Development to make all the personal laws uniform.

Senior Adv. Pinky Anand is appearing for the Petitioners followed by Meenakshi Arora.
The plea seeks the removal of personal laws as they are discriminatory under Art. 14,15 and other provisions of International Covenants.

CJI: You want the abolishment of Personal Laws?
Pinky Anand: No
CJI: You are not saying it doesn't mean that's not the reality.

"You are asking us to encroach upon personal laws and remove the distinction that they create." CJI said.

Pinky Anand refers to the cases of Shayara Bano and Sarala Mudgal to argue that Courts on earlier occasions have struck down laws and gave directions for practices found to be unconstitutional.

I'm doing a @threadapalooza on:

✨🌿ayahuasca🍃✨️
☕ 🧙‍♂️🎶😳😖🤢🤮🤪🤯🤩😭🥰😌

100 tweets' worth of unpopular opinions, personal experiences, and unusual facts about this psychedelic Amazonian plant brew.

In no particular order, except the first one

1. I've participated in over 70 ayahuasca ceremonies.

I'll be drawing from experiences in Peru, where ayahuasca is legal.

Wikipedia has some general background on what it is, and I'll sprinkle more info throughout:

2. BUCKETS!

Your bucket is your friend. Everyone needs a vomit bucket.

If bringing your own:
- 5 gal bucket is TOO BIG
- A utility bucket or trick-or-treat bucket is good
- A plastic yogurt quart is TOO SMALL - risk of tipping over!! (personal experience 😣)

3. To clarify:

*I* overprepared and brought a 5-gallon bucket, the first time

I was given a yogurt quart, a different time, and... that rug will never be the same

4. Potentially unpopular opinion: I loathe agua florida, soplaying, and being soplayed.

The only thing worse than being "cleansed" with a mix of cheap perfume and spit, is having to put that nasty stuff into your own mouth.

(Angst tw, idk if happy ending??)
Hizashi has always wanted to be a catastrophe.
Because maybe if he's spiraling out of control, someone will at least go through the motions of caring about him.
But it never works that way.

Present Mic is loud and fun and flashy, and you'd think he would have drawn at least a couple of people in like moths to a strobe light. And, sure, he's got fans. Lots of them.
But the second he shows any of them *Hizashi*, they lose interest.

He starts wondering if he can even connect to people as himself, or if only his fake face, the mask he puts on, is human enough.
Eventually, he stops trying to ever take that mask off, even with people he considers friends.

And he's loud on the outside, but that's a celebration. The disaster is quiet.
It's just him, taking care of himself like putting coins in a jukebox to make it keep playing.

When he doesn't, when the marionette falls down, he's too ashamed to let anyone see. Nobody ever comes knocking on his door to see where he's gone.
If Shouta or Nemuri calls, he says he's sick and leaves it at that.
And they leave him alone.

#SupremeCourt is hearing a Public Interest Litigation seeking directions by Top Court, to provide food and healthcare facilities to children and lactating mothers, because the entire Anganwadi system has shut due to the lockdown.

On November 28, the Top Court had directed the Centre & States to file affidavits with regard to implementation of guidelines issued on operation of Anganwadi in the context of COVID-19.

Senior Advocate Colin Gonsalves says he has prepared a chart wrt to the laxity of the Union with regard to the Aanganwadi system.

The Central Govt's survey on what states had done points to the fact that states had not reopened anganwadi systems in light of the notification of the Govt dated November 11, says Gonsalves.

The system is totally at a standstill, says Gonsalves.

The NHRC study and recommendation states that he Anganwadi's must immediately restart, says Gonsalves

1) Top US intelligence expert on China explains how CCP combines spying with political influence operations by targeting "soft targets" like politicians. @neftimiades

2) The Chinese op against @ericswalwell "showed how the Chinese regime is willing to invest in the long game—targeting local officials who might become state or national representatives years down the line. It’s a strategy ... that 'can really be devastating to another country.'"

3) "By targeting politicians, Fang was gaining access to those who might shape the United States’ policies toward China.

"'When you have access to that, why do you need classified information?' @neftimiades said."

Supreme Court Bench headed by CJI SA Bobde will shortly consider today a batch of PILs seeking removal of farmers protesting at Delhi borders against farm laws.

#FarmersProtests #SupremeCourt #FarmLaws2020

Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta submits that he has received a message from Sr. Adv. Harish Salve to be unmuted.

#FarmersProtests #SupremeCourt #FarmLaws2020

CJI: Why are you commenting on the Courtmaster ? We are asking is Mr. Salve appearing in the matter.

SG: I just received a message.

CJI: We don’t have any information of him appearing.

#FarmersProtests #SupremeCourt #FarmLaws2020

Adv. Dushyant Tiwari begins submissions: You have already passed a judgement in the Amit Sahni case (Shaheen Bagh judgement). Please look at Para 19.

#FarmersProtests #SupremeCourt #FarmLaws2020

SG once again requests the Court to unmute Salve.

Courtmaster informs CJI that no AOR has informed of Salve’s appearance.

#FarmersProtests #SupremeCourt #FarmLaws2020

A thread on the Tasmota TLS MitM attack I found a few months ago since getting a proper blog post about it is taking me forever.

Tasmota is an open source firmware that runs on a number of ESP8266-based IoT home automation devices, which talks to an MQTT broker for management.

MQTT can be run over TLS to provide confidentiality and integrity, but given the constraints of running on an ESP8266 device, standard TLS certificate validation is rather heavy. As an alternative, Tasmota implements fingerprint based validation, like SSH

The fingerprint validation can do "trust on first use" (TOFU) and just remember the server's public key. This can work well if you're hosting your own MQTT server, and you can just use a self signed certificate. The fingerprint algorithm was even based on how SSH does it.

If you read RFC4253, it describes the RSA key format with the following encoding

string "ssh-rsa"
mpint e
mpint n

where e is the public exponent (usually 65537) and n is the modulus.

Slight problem. RFC4253 doesn't explain what an mpint is.

You have to go dig up RFC4251 for what an mpint is. The precise details don't really matter for this bug, but the critical detail is that an mpint is length-prefixed, which makes it unambiguous where when mpint ends and the next begins.

Tasmota's implementation missed this.

🧵THREAD🧵
White Hat/Black Hat - The @Snowden Mystery

...but if Snowden is a white hat, he certainly deserves a red carpet roll out for his 2020 homecoming

A personal update: Monday was my last day at Business Standard and I can truly count the past 3 years as the golden phase of my career, where I got the opportunity to not only report but also break some of the biggest news stories during this period.

From January, I will be writing for the @BloombergQuint.

Even though I will miss the adrenaline rush of finding my byline in the paper every morning, I am really excited about starting a new journey with a digital platform.

In this thread, I am sharing some of the work that I did at @bsindia, which is close to my heart.

I wrote a series of stories with @dilasha on how the cryptocurrency players in India are surviving in a hostile regulatory

In Feb 2018, I exposed how the government secretly commissioned a survey to two independent economists, giving them unauthorised access to private data of citizens only to establish ‘robust’ job

There's a R1000 maintenance tweet doing the rounds. It's not it per se I want to talk about but the conversation on it does trigger a lot of things in me& life in SA generally. The issue of low or nonexistent incomes in many households tends to escape us.

We tend to view life only with our lenses of privilege or bias depending on our station in life. The reality for many rural &township households is extremely brutal in this country. There are still people who earn R1000 or less as a month's wage. They often do heavy manual labour

It took time for my grandparents to be convinced to go over R1000 in paying their live-in helper. That was some years ago. My grandfather had pension from eThekwini municipality &my grandmother is on SASSA.They were lucky to accumulate some savings, they run their household fully

But we are a very lucky few to have grandparents in their late 80s who are still this financially independent. Sure we do things at home but not the basics, including not having to build a house for them etc. This is almost out of the norm experience.

A lot of people in our country have salaries below R10 000 pm. They have to divide this between their needs (food&transport), some dependents and sending remittances back home so that their parents and other loved ones can put some bread on the table &complement some grants.

Bombay High Court hearing the bail application of Gautam Navlakha in Bhima Koregaon case.

Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal @KapilSibal appearing.

Sibal narrating the case background since August 2018.

Sibal mentions that the Delhi High Court had initially stayed the transit remand of Gautam Navlakha from Delhi to Mumbai and he continued to be house arrest.

#GautamNavlakha
#BhimaKoregaon

Sibal : On October 1, 2018, the Delhi High Court quashed the arrest and remand of Navlakha. By that time, he had spend 34 days in custody under house

Sibal : On April 14 this year, Navlakha surrendered in Delhi before NIA after his bail applications were dismissed by Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court.

@KapilSibal

#BhimaKoregaon #BombayHighCourt

Sibal : He has cumulatively spend 93 days in custody. The application for extension of time was filed on June 29, which is the 110th day.
#BhimaKoregaon #BombayHighCourt

I often come across gobbledygook like "Spirit of Cricket" or "Gentleman's Game" or "That's Not Cricket".

These comments often remind me of what Archie McLaren did to Charlie McLeod (in photo).

And that happened on this day, 1897-98, at Sydney.
+

In those days, SoC and GG were often defined based on whether MCC were the enforcers or victim.

Before getting into the incident, a bit on McLeod.

McLeod's name never comes up when cricketers who overcame disabilities are listed.

He was hearing impaired.
+

So he could not hear snicks, appeals, even the non-striker's call.

Yet he had 3,321 runs at 21 and 335 wickets at 24 in First-Class cricket.

His numbers were not great in Test cricket (17 Tests, 573 runs at 24, 33 wickets at 40), but he had one great series.
+

The series in question.

McLeod was playing his second Test match, three years after his debut.

McLaren, on the other hand, was filling in for Andrew Stoddart, whose mother passed away just before the Test match.

England amassed 551 before bowling out Australia for 237.
+

McLaren enforced the follow-on.

Till this point, McLeod had 3/80 and 50 not out (from #9).

He was promoted to #3 in the second innings. At stumps on Day 3 he was unbeaten on 20.

He added 6 more the next morning when it happened.

Tom Richardson bowled a full-toss.
+

#BombayHighCourt is hearing the default bail application filed by Gautam Navlakha, accused in the #BhimaKoregaon case.

Bench of Justices SS Shinde and MS Karnik are hearing the plea.

Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal submits that this is a simple matter of bail to be decided on facts.

He claims that Navlakha was in custody for more than 90 days. He was under house arrest for some time before being taken into judicial custody.

Sibal submitted that Navlakha had surrendered on April 14 and spent 93 days in custody. He spent 34 days in custody before remand order of Magistrate.

Sibal points out that the nature of custody may have changed but it was arrest nonetheless and for this reason, he should be granted bail.

Additional Solicitor General SV Raju appearing for the NIA begins his submission.

He points out that the police had only arrested him and had not taken custody.

I talk with people I respect and wish to learn from.

I engage in discussion not to prove that I am right, but to test ideas and be open to learning how I may be wrong. Ideas are put through the crucible, refined, clarified, discarded.

Democracy was built on debate.
1/

1/

I try my best to be collegial, but also to appear to be. Twitter format doesn't always make it easy, and sometimes I fall short.

I sometimes worry that we are losing the art of discussion.

2 /

I think to our predecessors who without technology, would exchange and debate ideas across vast distances with lengthy, meticulously handwritten letters.

The act of forging ideas this way likely forced a thoughtfulness...

3 /

The cost of waiting a month for a reply only to have your idea misunderstood or easily refuted is quite high; this placed a premium on critical thinking - best to make your point well the first time.

It's easy to see how cordialities became so common in those eras.

4 /

Best not affront your pen pal after you spent several days composing your thoughts and weeks waiting to hear back.

Great ideas were forged this way. The enlightenment.

Twitter's format does influence how we communicate, how we think, and how we perceive each other.

5 /

A THREAD on some insightful thoughts about Investing & Financial Independence by Rohit Chauhan (@rohitchauhan) Sir:

1/

The unfortunate reality of markets is that the last one to panic loses the most. So if you must panic, do it early or else don’t.

2/10

Investing is such a solitary activity where you are fighting your own bias and lack of knowledge; that it is amazing to see people argue and fight with others about the merit of their investment ideas.

Other than preserving your ego, what good can defending your ideas do?

3/

Thank god, my parents did not do a DCF on me like a lot of investors do in their analysis. Negative free cash flow during investment phase (school & college) & conclude my NPV was -ve. Good thing there is no way to short your kids. U are forced to be long & hope for the best.

4/10

It's a privileged life if one of the main worries in life is how to beat the market.

Less than 0.1% of humanity has this worry. It is the highest of high class problem.

5/10

25x is a good threshold for financial independence, where x is annual expenses.

Focus on fulfillment and not money beyond that. If you still chase money, then it’s not the money you are after.