At this point I am willing to pay bankers to explain the IBU offerings to a PSP in Gift City and EDPMS/IDPMS recon in their AD Cat 1 teams. It's crazy that I have been trying to get hold of people just to learn the current experience for businesses for almost a week now.

Need some help in speaking to folks working in the cross border payments space either in India working in a PA-CB or a AD Cat 1. If you know anybody in your network please connect me.

With all of this chatter around orbital data centers, I have been having this thought since last night about SDT (Space Data Transfer). The general idea is that there has to be substantial innovation in data transfer between satellites to make some of these ideas cost efficient and thereby realistic. Funnily I started thinking of it as gossip protocol on steroids :) For a moment imagine every LEO satellite in a constellation to be a node that contains structured information (for ex orbital direction, closeness to ground terminal, heat information etc) about its nearest neighbours. This allows for efficient packet forwarding from one LEO node to the next. The structured information will be periodically updated from ground terminals. I will do a more structured write up on this in the coming week.

When Andres Freund, Linux kernel contributor & Microsoft engineer was debugging slow SSH logins on his Debian machine in March 2024, he noticed something weird: liblzma (part of XZ Utils) was using way too much CPU power, so he kept digging, and what he uncovered was a multi-year supply-chain attack! An attacker using the name “Jia Tan” had spent two years slowly infiltrating the tiny XZ Utils project, a compression library used by virtually every major Linux distribution. The backdoor wasn’t in the source code. It was hidden deep inside the build scripts. It would have given the attacker remote root access on millions of servers the moment a specially crafted SSH key was used. Freund caught it days before it would have shipped in Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and more. One man, one anomaly, one routine debug session saved the internet from a potential catastrophe. Respect!

How long do you think HDFC Bank will take to transfer the money from your account to your nominee's after you die? Public sector banks get a bad rap, but it's been more than a year and we have not been able to get funds transferred from my now deceased husband's account in the country's largest private bank. The nominee is our adult daughter, there are no conflicting claims, the paperwork is clear, and yet for more than a year now HDFC has been giving us the run around. Get this paper, get that paper. Each time my daughter comes home for holidays, we have to take 2 days out to go and wait at the bank branch. Today, more than a year after the first application, they said a) we can't find the paperwork including the death certificate you submitted because the employee you submitted to is not here b) you have to get a stamp paper and notarise it for the auto debits that hit his account between the date of his death and the date the account was frozen (on the basis of the paperwork in point a, now non-traceable) c) you have to get HDFC Standard life to sign off because there is an auto debit for an investment from his account. (ME: they are the payee, he is the payer, why does the payee need to approve stopping a standing instruction? Bank: Hamare main aise hi hai). If you wait for 30 minutes, we'll get you the form. d) after 30 minutes. Sorry, we can't get the form, you have to go to their office and do it. By now it is 2.45 PM, HDFC Standard life office is at least 35 minutes away. They are open only till 3.30 PM. We are not sure we'll make it there on time. I call their number to ask if the branch is open tomorrow. Person: Sorry, I can't give you the information today, you will have to call and check tomorrow. (To repeat: HDFC Standard Life's call centre cannot tell you if a branch is working or not the following day) In all, we have spent many hours over many months trying to get this money in a case the bank officials themselves say "should not be complicated". What is worse is for my 20-year-old daughter to relive the trauma of losing her father each time we have to go and explain the case. Just today, we had to speak to three different people and start the story from the beginning. This is not just the bank's inefficiency, it is its utter callousness. (My husband also had money in Indusind Bank. It took one visit and two weeks for that to be transferred). The other, more important point, is that I have a job, we have the money to continue to pay for our needs without having to immediately access these funds. But I am certain that is not the case for many others. What about them? How can this be the system of a bank whose customers are dependent on it for giving them access to their own money?! It beggars belief. @HDFC_Bank @HDFCBank_Cares

Ever since I made a video about Fourier Transforms, one of the most requested topics on the channel has been its close cousin, the Laplace Transform. I've been having a lot of fun animating a mini-series about this topic, and the main part is now out. youtu.be/j0wJBEZdwLs