My First College Offline Hackathon

I and my friends recently participated in a College level IdeathonX'2023 Mega IT Hackathon where we were given a problem statement from the Kavach'2023 Hackathon.

Problem Statement

New age women’s safety app

Description

Design and develop a Women’s safety app that automatically senses the danger to a mobile user and triggers an SOS alert with location details based on multimodal data from a mobile device such as audio, video, image, motion detection, etc., given a situation that the user is not able to operate the mobile.

Tech Stacks

Flutter for Front-end, Firebase for Back-end, Python libraries like OpenCV for Image Recognition

My Experience

It was a great learning experience for me as well as for my team, we were involved in a Hybrid 36-hours hackathon, and we used to skip our college classes for discussing the ideas. The most challenging part was the night before the hackathon Grand Finale where our team witnessed several blockades like in the front end part which was under my belt I received several bugs related to Google Authentication, Firebase, and Flutter integration.

The voice recognition module that was under my colleague, faced errors that seems impossible to solve at that moment. But after spending the whole night debugging and fixing errors we finally made it work. The front end was ready and everything worked except one important part that we were still missing. That part was the integration of Python modules with Flutter, our team realized a lot later that the integration of Python and Flutter for running ML libraries will require a completely different set of libraries, these libraries come under Android ML kit and Tensorflow Lite or tflite. It was quite a low time for all of us but without wasting any time we started figuring out how to write Python code in Flutter. Hehe, ChatGPT did help us with this task but still, the errors didn’t leave us and we were bombarded with loads of them. But as programmers, we know errors are an integral part of our daily lives, we began researching about them and came up with different ways to fix them but ended up solving only a few not all.

The Day Of Final Judgement

Finally, our team reached the offline hackathon arena where we were allowed to work on our project for the next 3 hours before the final evaluation. The evaluation takes place in three rounds, all three rounds welcomed new guests and evaluators from AICTE and other colleges. Our team leader greeted all of them with warmth and there goes our first pitch which included the explanation of our Team name which was $WhoAmI

Why $WhoAmI ?

$WhoAmI is a famous Linux command which shows the currently logged-in user. We came up with the name because we all believe in Linux philosophy which is to know what you are doing, Linux is open source and provides us security that no other operating system at present does. We chose this name since our Kavach problem statement requires us to build an app for women’s safety so that women can freely represent themselves in our society. The freedom that Linux gives us somewhat resonates with the idea of our app which aims at providing freedom to women.

Ok continuing with the pitch, the judges asked us about our tech stacks, why we chose these technologies for this task, and how it is better than any other technology. I would like to thank our team leader for managing everything so well and for creating such a remarkable presentation.

Our Logo

App UI

Future Plans

Since the problem statement is a real-life issue that our society must need, we would like to continue working on this project and will see if we can one day upload our app to the PlayStore. Currently, the plan would be to make this project open source so that it can be improved and new contributors can gain from it.

Conclusion

It did seem impossible at the start but with great team efforts and proper management, everything can be figured out. In our team, members were not experts in their fields but few things were common and that are prerequisite for building any project i.e., Determination and Hard Working Mindset.

After facing several blockade, we continued to work for our goal and ended up in the finals. We were among the top 15 teams that were selected from all the 4 campuses of our college. We didn’t win the hackathon because we couldn’t figure out the Python and Flutter integration errors before the final evaluation but anyways the experience was worth remembering for all of us :)

When she finally spoke up

When I started speaking infront of people, meeting new people, attending various talks, and conferences virtually and some in person too I found a hidden personality within myself, as if that part of me didn’t get the right platform to show up but now when I am working on such platforms where I see like minded people I feel this is what that makes me happy, meeting like minded people and networking. Makes me feel more better about myself.

I am an introvert by nature but I would say now I don’t shy away from speaking whats on my mind. When I have thoughts that are conflicting I am trying to put forward them in a polite manner without harming anyone’s sentiments. (ok except for my weird jokes >_<)

Introvert ≠ Less opportunities, being introvert means you speak more only when you see your message will be gone through and will be processed by like minded people , Yea not everytime this works because sometimes you need clients that are extroverts or better to say who dont think like you but you will prefer to spend more time around people who understands you and see that you can do good.

I am an open source enthusiast and also a die hard Linux fan, trying to promote this philosophy as much as I can.

No monetary benefits from this but only the cause is enough to make me keep working as a volunteer and this is why I started the community “PenguinArmy” with some of my virtual friends.

I come from a land of complete lostness, a place where students are not into technology much.

A remote town where I grew up working on a Windows machine. Then started exploring other Operating Systems like Linux, and since that day I enjoyed every part of it. I do not regret my decision of choosing Linux over any other operating system. I am happy that I have gone through those ugly and stubborn bugs. Made me fall in love with the googling, testing, researching, reading technical docs and nonetheless taught me "The Art Of Debugging".

Today, I am noone to give you guide, noone to give you tips or tricks to crack any company(ofcourse because I haven’t cracked any yet and not even trying to as of now),but can be someone to atleast remind you that you also once had a dream(or maybe you still have one), a passion, or anything that you always wanted to try, start that.

You can try doing that…. if you do that then the purpose of writing this blog is already fulfilled 🙂

Thanks,

chococandy aka Riya

Got introduced to dark web while working on a project idea related to cybersecurity.

DarkWEB experience

DarkWeb is a part of a web which is not indexed by search engines.

How to acess the dark web? Using TOR(The Onion Router)

You will need a TOR browser.

• Download the tor browser for your OS
• You can also access tor through Brave brower(not recommeded accessing TOR this way if you really wanna do something apart from just exploring)
• Enter TOR browser
• Click on connect
• You are connected to TOR using TOR browser bundle

Now, here comes an interesting question.

How do we really get to dark web?

Dark web is a bunch of web services, websites that end with .onion instead of .com or .org. You can only access them using special browser like Tor and Brave browser.

Fun part about DarkWEB-

These onion sites are made up of 54 random alphanumeric characters, you can’t remember these characters(onion site addresses) so you need a direct address to get those sites.

tor.taxi or dark.fail sites will help: Here you can find links to all dark sites, these links are going to legit sites and not scams.

Are you a dark web noob?

Recommendations:

• Darknet bible
• keepassXC

VPN required?

If TOR requires a vpn or safe to use tor without a vpn?

When you are using tor then you are already getting anonymity so you dont need VPN. But if you live in a country that blocks TOR or using internet connection where network administrator has blocked the TOR then using a vpn would be helpful.

If you cant access TOR somehow then-

• Go to TOR browser settings
• Go to connections
• Under bridges: Request a bridge

Search engines on darkweb

• phobos(general search)
• duck duck go
• recon(used for searching darkweb marketplaces)
• kilos(used for searching marketplaces)

Difference between DarkWeb & DeepWeb

Darkweb is a subset of Deepweb.Deepweb consist of normal or clear web and a dark web but the darkweb is only like 5% of the total internet. Deep web refers to anything on the internet that is not indexed by and, therefore, accessible via a search engine like Google. Deep web content includes anything behind a paywall or requires sign-in credentials. It also includes any content that its owners have blocked web crawlers from indexing. The dark web is a subset of the deep web that is intentionally hidden, requiring a specific browser—Tor—to access, as explained below. No one really knows the size of the dark web, but most estimates put it at around 5% of the total internet. Again, not all the dark web is used for illicit purposes.

NOTE: If you find your own information on the dark web, there’s precious little you can do about it, but at least you’ll know you’ve been compromised. Bottom line: If you can tolerate the lousy performance, unpredictable availability, and occasional shock factor of the dark web, it’s worth a visit. Just don’t buy anything there.

Dark web tools and services

Welcome to TAILS OS

You can use Tor on Tails OS, dont use linux, windows and mac directly. TailsOS desinged for privacy. Visit- tails.boum.org

You download it on flash drive and plug it on machine and use it. You can temporary download files into it, and you can surf the dark web on it.

Using tails on virtual machine? Not safe because the virtual machine will still be stored on hard disk and that can be easily recoverable. So better to use a usb stick which can be temporarily used to download files and do the dark web surfing safely.

Security TIP: When you are browsing TOR and disable the javascipt. There are few sites on TOR that looks shady and ask you to enable Javascript, to ensure your saftey and sanity kindly don't enable the Javascript

Internet on TOR is a bit slow but full privacy.

Keep this points in mind-

• Use tails os on usb drive,
• Enable tails security everytime before surfing,
• Keep updating your tail os,
• If u download any file from dark web dont open it when you are connected to internet, first turn it off then open it,
• If you want to store these files permanently then use a external storage drive and encrypt it using tools with very secure password.

Important useful resources:

Purpose of dark web: Privacy

How tor works?

Visit tor docs

–TO-be-continued–

A Poem dedicated to Linux

I fell in love with a man,

Man named Linux.

Call him every day using a man,

He outputs certain flags and instructions lists.

Tried experimenting with these flags,

And voila! my machine breaks.

Requesting the init system,

systemd wakes.

systemctl start service,

forking process continues,

Opens up my ugly Window Manager,

Long left Desktop Environments troop.

When building custom Arch rices,

Introduced to the package management system.

While compiling loads of Gentoo,

Ya loads of Gentoo,

Ended up sitting infront of computer for whole 48 hours.

The screen goes black and hacky,

Rolled up a never ending Gentoo compilation error,

Configured the kernel multiple times.

This is a power of FOSS,

Verifying “Linux is free if you don’t value your time”

:)

btw, I love Windows (Happy April Fools Day >_<)