I read in another thread. reproducing the comments here for balanced point of view.
"If more than 20% of your funds goes to administrative expenses (office supplies, stationary, tea/coffee, misc), you know there is something shady. Satyam computers, did the same thing, created fake employees, posted huge expenses under admin category for almost 5 years. Later it was found that they were laundering money for YSR from overseas, and went bust and was later acquired by TechMahindra for paisa on the rupee.
Amnesty india is probably in knee deep shit and exiting before anything comes to light."
Should we cancel NASA budget because there were homeless people?
Should we reduce public library budget because of people are suffering due to police brutality?
Every section of government is different with its own budget and goals, because a nation can move forward on all fronts.
Nobody is saying that providing clean water is not a priority.
Provide fast internet is just a new priority on table. it does not necessarily mean reducing priority for other items.
I would acknowledge that opportunities were denied based on caste, But 'Denied education for 2700+ years' is a strong claim with out any proof is taking your argument little too far.
Aatukuri Molla was a celebrated poet, not from upper caste.
She faced initial resistance not because of her caste, but because of her choice not to use sanskrit while translating the epic ramayana to Telugu.
Once she proved her talent, she was granted audience to emperor and awarded with title 'Gem of Poets'.
Her version of ramayana is still popular to this day.
Annamacharya, is also another poet who being a brahmin, also faced similar resistance from established scholars because he composed his poems with local lingo rather than sanskrit.
The article is self contradictory. not HN worthy.
Let me point out few anamolies.
1. Confuses CEO for an owner. (TATASteel is owned by Parsis, but CEO is brahmin, so this must be a symbol of brahmin supremacy).
2. Categorizes Muslim owner as Hindu Baniya (Wipro owner Premji's ancestor was ex-Baniya, so its Baniya supremacy that led to his success?).
3. Brahmin/Baniya Controls the media (the castes may be B/B, but the owners of 99% media are left leaning/communists)
4. Y.S Reddy is a peasant Christian. (reddy caste dont see themselves as neither peasants nor shudras). As per govt caste classification, Reddy is upper caste. so Y.S Reddy is upper caste christian.
5. Article gives an impression that Successful people are successful because of their caste. (Gandhi was a baniya, but he did not become Mahatma Gandhi because he was Baniya, he came the leader he was because of his charishma, non violence, ability to influence people, and british's inclination to encourage non violent struggle (instead of violent struggle)).
6. Conveniently Ignoring successful people from other castes.
(TATA (parent of TCS), Wipro, DrReddy labaratories, Suzlon, Heritage, Cognizant all are founded and run successfully by non-Brahmins, non-Baniyas, non-Hindus) if reddys/choudharys are poor peasants, why were they not featured as successful businessman ?
7. Ignoring failures of Brahmins/Baniya (Mukesh Ambani built a successful empire, while his brother Anil Ambani ran many successful business to the ground. Both are Baniyas. what makes you think being baniya helped one brother, but not the other?
Its almost as if, caste has no role in success of the business).
The article is written with an agenda, and the author never stopped to question her/his assumptions.
Probably a paid PR piece.
I was thinking about something very similar.
like, the teachers will get a lions share of the fee.
this will instantly motivate teachers to better themselves, and move the school away from for-profit model.
but there are some real problems to solve.
like,
1. how to get such school started ? who will provide initial capital ?
2. even if such a school is started, how to stop it from becoming for-profit again ?
3. is there a healthy balance between 'for-owers' and 'for-teachers' model ?
I am familiar with Java, C++, C#, TypeScript, Python. My interest areas are async frameworks, open source DBs, not really excited about UX, but can manage it.
Having worked in a payments company, where SLAs can be very demanding,
We broke our monolith server into microservices, and realized that we broke in to too many pieces as our SLAs broke. (every microservice you add to your usecase adds a small but fixed cost)
and finally decided to convert some microservices into libraries to save milliseconds and bring down our 95th percentile, I completely agree with the premise of the article.
never start with microservice, start with monolith with enough flexibility and inbuilt abstractions which can allow you to replace an abstraction with a monolith.
I am not questioning authenticity of report, that is UIDAI to do.
i am questioning choice of title. offlate, i am seeing too many articles about aadhar breach, and when i study in detail, its mostly related to social engineering/phishing attacks stealing OTP/enrolling unsuspecting customers etc.,
I am worried that when an actual breach happens, the people will probably dont care. (cry the wolf?)
well, i am neither an expert in analyzing bio metric data, but i know that current government is hell bent on ploughing through our lives. i dont know what will be a better future.
I expected better discussion on HN (apart from sensationalist articles), the article does a poor job intentionally though.
Summary
1. Existing data is not compromised
2. Duplicate data can't be entered or overwritten
3. BUT, ghost accounts can be created easily.
Aadhar was introduced to fight ghost accounts who siphon off subsidies provided for poor. This hack/patch defeats that purpose.
I still think this is not a big problem as it looks on surface, if Enrollment software is hacked to accept iris data from photograph,
Can't the Aadhar DB (post enrollment) be scanned for all enrolled iris data with poor quality iris data and they be monitored and deleted ?
Another problem is still there, what if the operators enroll citizens from a different country as indians, essentially creating ghost accounts (from citizens of different country). i dont know how to stop such a situation.
Biometrics is never a good model for authentication, i dont know what these people were think when they designed it.
the premise is, it is marketed to merchant as 'the business you would not have without us'. Merchant will treat this as 'referal commision + payment processing'