Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

One of the most enduring forms of storage! Started in the 1950s, but still used in the 2020s as the cheapest (and slowest access) archival method. Robot arms are needed to load and read them nowadays.

30L tall pedal bin light blue. Liner type: "Tall Bin Liners 30 L".

Major projects can be seen at: Section "The most important projects done by Ciro Santilli".

A summary of minor projects is given at: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.

This section is a dump for anything else, to keep those sacred first sections that show on the top of the homepage clean.

If there is one thing that makes Ciro Santilli learn German, this is it (the Romance language are all the same, so reading them is basically covered for Ciro already).

We just use "Abstract algebra" as a synonym for algebra.

About the brand: Raspberry Pi

This is a key philosophy of OurBigBook.com!

Because there is value in tutorials written by beginners.

In 2016 Ciro made a script downloaded Facebook profile pictures.

This was possible at the time without any login by using a 2010 profile ID dump from originally announced at: blog.skullsecurity.org/2010/return-of-the-facebook-snatchers since profile picture access was not authenticated.

The profile ID dump was downloadable through a BitTorrent named fbdata.torrent of about 2.8GB, mostly compressed. Doing:on Ubuntu 20.04 gives:This dump widely reported e.g. on Hacker News at: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554558.

At some point however, Facebook finally started to require tokens to view public profile pictures, thus making such further collection impossible, e.g. as of 2021: developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v9.0/user/picture mentions:This is also mentioned e.g. at: stackoverflow.com/questions/11442442/get-user-profile-picture-by-id. This major privacy flaw was therefore finally addressed at some point, making it impossible to reproduce this project.

Ciro downloaded 10 thousand of those pictures, and did facial extraction with: stackoverflow.com/questions/13211745/detect-face-then-autocrop-pictures/37501314#37501314

He then created single a video by joining 10 thousand of those cropped faces which can be uploaded e.g. to YouTube. Ciro later decided it was better to make those videos private however, as sooner later he'd lose his account for it.

Companies like YouTube blocking this kind of content is the type of thing that makes companies take longer to fix such gaping privacy issues, and is a bit like security through obscurity. A video makes it clear to everyone that there is a privacy issue very effectively. But people prefer to hide and look away, and then 99% of people who know nothing about tech get their privacy busted by actual criminals/government spies and never learn about it.

But now that Facebook finally fixed it, it's fine, no need for the video anymore.