An illustration showing a fisher-person underwater. A metophor on Phishing, a kind of cyber attack.

Why Checking the Box Matters—Juspay's Possibly Risky Shortcut in HDFC Net Banking

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.

August 30, 2023 · 8 min · Vishal V. Shekkar
A cover image with the Musings branding

Musings—My New Blog Site

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.

July 4, 2023 · 4 min · Vishal V. Shekkar

The Search for Privacy-Friendly Website Analysis

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....

July 3, 2023 · 5 min · Vishal V. Shekkar
An arrow pointing right, cover image

The Importance of Moving Forward

This is an essay on why it’s better to not get stuck with just what works now, and how embracing change leads to better outcomes.

October 28, 2016 · 8 min · Vishal V. Shekkar
A Macbook Pro with Touch Bar

Touch Bar

Thoughts on Touch Bar—the new multi-touch strip on the new line of MacBook Pros

October 28, 2016 · 6 min · Vishal V. Shekkar
SwiftFSM Logo

Finite State Machine in Swift

SwiftFSM is state machine implemented in Swift as a library library. You may import this into your project. This post goes into explaining it’s functions and features.

October 26, 2016 · 7 min · Vishal V. Shekkar
Google Logo

Happy 18th Birthday, Google

Some thoughts on how ubiquitious Google has become in our lives on its 18th Birthday.

September 27, 2016 · 4 min · Vishal V. Shekkar

Why iPhone 7 won’t have Li-Fi

For the past few days there have been numerous reports that the next iPhone would feature the newly developed Li-Fi, which is the transfer of data using visible spectrum of light instead of radio waves, which the Wi-Fi use. Li-Fi boasts a bandwidth 10,000 times that of Wi-Fi. The radio spectrum being extremely crowded, Li-Fi is well in need. Li-Fi works by modulating the intensity of light emitted by light sources such as LED lamps in a very indiscrenable way to humans to get the data across....

January 23, 2016 · 3 min · Vishal V. Shekkar
A cover image showing a grid of drawers that typically archive physical objects or notes.

Archiving and Unarchiving Swift Structure Instances — Revisited

Note — Since the release of Swift 3, a few statements made in this article are not true for Swift 3, but they hold good for older versions of Swift. The power of structures in Swift makes you want to use it a lot more than you would in any other language. This is a good thing, as long as you know when to use structures and when to strictly not....

December 8, 2015 · 6 min · Vishal V. Shekkar

Archiving and Unarchiving Swift Structure Instances

Note — This article is now outdated. There’s a new article with updated info here. When working on a project not too long ago, My teammate and I came across the following situation. We started developing the project on Swift 2.0 and moved over to 2.1 with the released of Xcode 7.1. We used a class conforming to the NSCoding protocol to store the basic information about the app’s user....

November 4, 2015 · 2 min · Vishal V. Shekkar