Mozilla Internet Health Hackathon — Hyderabad
Mozilla Hyderabad (Telangana & AndhraPradesh) conducted a 24 hour hackathon on 7th and 8th September at IIIT Hyderabad, Gachibowli. The Hackathon was focused to improve the health of the internet. The internet as we know it is not secure and completely safe, few companies own the majority of the internet and they tend to use our browsing ,personal , GPS data to give us suggestions or direct specific ads which are related to our interest. Even we are to be partly blamed for this as we use shortcuts offered by some companies to avail the facilities offered by a 3rd party site and neither do we read the terms and conditions of any software because they are long and might take days to read just one. Therefore , this hackathon was vital in getting people understand and provide solutions to improve the internet.
The hackathon had 6 themes which focused on tackling the basic things for a more healthy and free internet. They were-
1) Healthy AI
2) Privacy and surveillance
3) Decentralisation
4) Openness
5) Web Literacy
6) Digital Inclusion
More details can be found here - https://internet-health.gitlab.io/hyderabad/
Other than this participants were given the choice of either making a new project or contributing to existing ones focused on the theme. Mentors from Mozilla organisation were available to help the participants download the database. A big shoutout to them because the process was very long and required a lot of patience.
The hackathon also had mini programs organised like talks on security and IoT and the Mozilla Firefox 69 Release party. Satish Rao P, an IoT expert showed how Mozilla web of things is Decentralising IoT databases and moving more towards local computing rather than cloud computing. Aditi Bhatnagar , a software engineer talked on how various sites are using our behavorial as well as personal data using our gullibility to click the "I Accept the terms and conditions" checkbox without actually reading the terms and conditions box. She also talked on how we should reduce the access we give to various sites and companies.
We celebrated the release of Mozilla Firefox 69. Mozilla Firefox 69 boasts a lot of features which make the users Firefox sessions more private and secure. Some of them include-
1) Enhanced tracking protection
2) Cryptomining and fingerprinting
3) For android and iOS
This new version also features a new logo for the Firefox browser.
In the end, the participants presented their ideas and showed what they worked on in the past 24 hours. This marked the end of the event.
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