Musings of Vishal

An unexpectedly deep conversation with Anand on our drive to the airport touching on optimistic nihilism; and I’m still pondering it a month later.

Caught between two oblivious leg-jigglers, I endured a movie seat earthquake that turned into an accidental physics illustration.

In the 080 lounge at Bangalore airport, a pattern of gender bias emerges as Amex salesmen exclusively approach men, overlooking potential female customers. This selective strategy raises questions about underlying biases in marketing tactics within cosmopolitan settings.

The blog post examines how Juspay’s auto-checking of HDFC Bank’s anti-phishing ‘Secure Access ID’ could undermine user security. The author argues that this action, while not immediately dangerous, could condition users to be less vigilant against phishing attacks. The post contends that third parties like Juspay should not alter a bank’s security measures. The post also questions if HDFC’s anti-phishing measure is effective, in the first place and discusses who should be responsible in defining and mitigating a site’s threat model.

A story on routines and their beauty told using an interaction of a couple I observed in Bangalore traffic.

Introducing my new blog site, Musings. The post discusses how I used to mainating my own blog earlier, and why I decided to move on to a static site generator like Hugo.

I recently decided to start writing regularly and publishing what I write on this blog, Musings. While I mostly write for my contentment—to allow myself to think about a topic, research, and form a meaningful thought about it, I’d also like to know if others are reading what I put out and what posts and topics have the most views. Most people would end up integrating a popular option like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or similar....

Reflecting on my experience of using Onsen in Japan — covering the various aspects of dealing with and enjoying being unclothed as a foreigner in a traditional Japanese setting.

A walkthrough of my home where I concentrate on the tiny details that make it my home.

Check out xkcd’s xkpasswd. It allows you to generate very secure passphrases with various configurations. The reason we use the word passphrase and not password throughout the Cacti Vault app is because we want to push you to use as long a passphrase as possible. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommends creating long passphrases that are easy to remember and difficult to crack. According to Special Publication 800–63, Digital Identity Guidelines, a best practice is to generate passphrases of about 64 characters, including spaces....