History of science Updated +Created
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).
Lighter Updated +Created
Chemical reaction Updated +Created
Organic chemistry Updated +Created
Video sharing website Updated +Created
Abstract algebra Updated +Created
Group Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli's hardware / Computer accessories Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli's hardware / Raspberry Pis Updated +Created
About the brand: Raspberry Pi
Wikipedia CatTree Updated +Created
This mini-project walks the category hierarchy Wikipedia dumps and dumps them in various simple formats, HTML being the most interesting!
Figure 1.
Mathematics dump of Wikipedia CatTree
. Source.
Biologist Updated +Created
Biotechnology Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli's hardware / Suitcases Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli's open source contributions / Bug reports and feature requests Updated +Created
  • I opened and was confirmed or generated considerable interest
  • I wrote comments pointing out a non obvious cause/fix/duplicate.
  • I reviewed the patch
This shall not list bugs solved by my accepted pull requests.
Electrochemistry Updated +Created
Facebook profile face dump Updated +Created
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:
find . -type f | xargs sha256sum | sha256sum
on Ubuntu 20.04 gives:
2c9a739c9c5495e38ebab81fc67411b7c6562f139dcb8619901a3f01230efdd5
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:
Querying a User ID (UID) now requires an access token.
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.
Internet Archive Updated +Created

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