Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

Maybe Ciro Santilli should do something useful and remarkable so that someone might actually want to read his biography in the first place. But hey, procrastination.

Ciro Santilli was born in Brazil in the small/medium city of Rio Claro, São Paulo (~200k people in 2020) in the State of São Paulo in 1989 AD.

The family then moved to Jundiaí in 1995, and then finally to Santos, São Paulo, Brazil in 1997.

At the age of 10, Ciro Santilli spent 10 months in Coventry, United Kingdom, where he greatly improved his English.

After Coventry, Ciro's family went back to Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, which made a deep impression on Ciro, until he Ciro Santilli's undergrad studies at the University of São Paulo in 2007.

In 2010, as mentioned atSection "Ciro Santilli's formal education", Ciro as admitted in a double degree program at the École Polytechnique, France, where he stayed until 2013. Going to France was a mind blowing, life changing event.

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.

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

Board LED does not turn on (turned on on first plug, Ethernet always turns on):

Now just HDMI does not work. Possibly a monitor vs television problem:

About the brand: Raspberry Pi

This is a key philosophy of OurBigBook.com!

Because there is value in tutorials written by beginners.

This mini-project walks the category hierarchy Wikipedia dumps and dumps them in various simple formats, HTML being the most interesting!

Scripts used:

Primarily bought to make borlotti beans!!!

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.