Greetings, Earthling 🖖

I’m Shantanu, aka Shaan.

Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.

In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.

Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.

When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.

I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.

Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.

Do check out some of the other subdomains that I run.

Bypass ISP DNS hijack by changing DNS port on Ubiquiti USG router

Shantanu Goel

The Background

We talked earlier about how certain ISPs block websites by using DNS hijack methods and I had recommended using DNSCrypt to bypass it. Well, as part of my home network overhaul, I moved over from the consumer grade (but still decent enough) Asus router over to Ubiquiti stack which, among other things, lead me to use their “Unify Security Gateway (USG)” as the router. Now, this router is pretty decent and is running Ubiquiti’s EdgeOS (derived from Vyatta OS, which in turn is based on linux/debian). You can install and tweak a lot of stuff through command line if you’d like but alas there’s no dnscrypt-proxy available for it.

ACT Fibernet blocks sites using deep packet inspection

#ACT Fibernet  #Deep Packet Inspection 

ISPs in India have been blocking websites since many years. It’s often done without much sense to it. The goveernment/telecom bodies and courts sometimes tell the ISPs to block content instead of telling the same to the websites that host the content. Sometimes, the orders are to block certain urls and ISPs are over-enthusiastic in implementing the orders and block complete websites. It’s all frustrating but it becomes enraging when you find out that the ISPs are messing with your traffic in a less than ethical way to implement this. Earlier, I pointed out how ACT was hijacking my DNS to implement the blocks. Now, they seem to have started doing something else, not sure if it is worse or better though. They are now doing deep packet inspection to find out the sites that I am visiting and thus block them by stopping the responses to my requests.

Indian ISP ACT Fibernet blocks bit.ly. Does DNS Hijacking

Shantanu Goel

Censored!

TLDR;

Indian ISP ACT Fibernet (aka Beam Telecom) hijacks its users’ DNS requests (even when using public DNS servers like Google or OpenDNS) and blocks websites through this method. This has huge implications beyond website blocking and you can’t rely on anything that you are browsing anymore though there are ways available to make yourself safe.

Aside: Indian ISPs are blocking benign/collateral damage sites now like bit.ly for ACT and behance.net for Airtel. Pretty soon most of web will be blocked in India at this rate.

Fixing the problem of matplotlib and ggplot not showing graphs in python

Shantanu Goel

While trying to make some graphs for one of my side projects recently, I came across an issue that both matplotlib and ggplot did not show up the graphs. I was able to save the graphs to an image file just fine, but if I tried to show them directly on screen while running the script, it just printed a number and exited. After tearing apart my hair for some time, I checked the backend being used by matplot lib:

NTP Driver For ESP8266

Shantanu Goel

I’m building a smartwatch project based around the new IoT posterkid on the block, ESP8266. Apart from the usual “smart” stuff, it does still need to display correct time :) and hence, the need for an ntp driver/client. I couldn’t find anyone working on that yet, so wrote up a quick and dirty implementation here:

NTP Implementation for ESP8266

It still has a lot of stuff left to be done to make it good enough for the smartwatch project but it works. Feel free to try it out in your own projects and let me know how it fares :)