March 2025

Media and AI workshop to journalists

I was invited by the Department of Information & Public Relations, Belagavi to deliver a workshop on Media and AI to print and new media journalists.

My objective was to demonstrate a few different ways of how I use various AI chatbots and point out some of the issues one needs to be careful about.

Figure 1: Swapneel Patnekar presenting a workshop on Media and AI

Image of presentation agenda, Media and AI

Figure 2 – Agenda of the workshop

OpSec best practices

The first thing that I spoke was about being cognizant of the fact on the information that is shared with the AI chatbot. From an operational security (OpSec) perspective, this is extremely important.

I’ve seen people putting in PII and other sensitive information into the AI chatbot without knowing the implications of it.

Media and AI – Biases, logical fallacies and misinformation

Then, I introduced the journalists to Spinscore. Using AI chatbots, the creation and modification of content is extremely easy, thus, it’s important to separate the facts and the misinformation.

Welcome to SpinScore – an advanced AI tool designed to analyze and score potential biases, logical fallacies, and misleading information in content. Our system uses a combination of state-of-the-art Large Language Models and sophisticated mathematical algorithms to deliver comprehensive insights into the content you explore.

I’ve personally used Spinscore in the past few months and I have found it quite useful to uncover potential biases and incorrect information. I also tend to use it lately with my own writing to find my blind spots, so that I can improve my writing.

I encourage anyone, not just journalists to use this tool to optimize their reading/writing of news on the Internet.

A large focal point of my presentation was spent on using various chatbots for translating text from a link or a video from English to Kannada or Marathi language. If you have used an AI chatbot for translation of text, you will know, it’s not a hundred percent perfect.

I also spent sometime in prompt engineering, explaining the methodology and demonstrating a few use cases to generate content based on topics such as industrial waste, climate change etc.

Self-hosted AI chatbot

And lastly, I showed what a self-hosted LLM using Ollama and OpenWebUI looks like.

Figure 3: Self-hosted AI Chatbot

The benefits of self-hosting and running a local AI chatbot are many.

The workshop gave an exploratory tour of using AI chatbots for translation of text, video and generation of text based using prompt engineering.

My gratitude to the Department of Information & Public Relations, Belagavi for having me.

Firefox Multi Account Containers

If you have never heard of the addon Firefox Multi Account Containers, this blog post is for you.

Isolation of websites, logins or identities

The addon is a must-have if you’d like to compartmentalize websites/logins or identities. Isolation is a critical component not just for OpSec but also for preventing surveillance on the Internet. While this addon won’t stop all tracking methods such as canvas fingerprinting, that use Javascript, it’s a good first in isolation.

Under the hood, it separates website storage into tab-specific Containers. Cookies downloaded by one Container are not available to other Containers.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers

One way I tend to use it is to assign a website to a container. For example – https://youtube.com would go in a container “Youtube, any work-related websites would go inside a container “Work”, and my bank website would go in a separate container. This makes using Firefox Multi Account Containers very effective.

Image of Firefox Multi Account Containers addon

Figure 1: Image of the Firefox Multi account containers

The other benefit of the addon is the ability to login into two separate identities for example gmail.com email accounts in two separate containers. Why is this better than say using a Private window in Firefox or Incognito Window in Chrome?

From a usability perspective, both, Private Window and Incognito Window open a new Window. In comparison, the addon blends into the existing window but provides the additional feature of isolation of cookies, storage etc.

Most importantly, the addon prevents CSRF and clickjacking attacks by utilizing Firefox Multi Account Containers.

The full documentation of the addon is available here and here.

Cybersecurity awareness session at St. Joseph’s Canossian Convent Higher Secondary School

I was tasked with educating bright young minds at St. Joseph’s Canossian Convent Higher Secondary School on the do’s and don’t in terms of cyber security hygiene. As the saying goes, catch them young!

Teaching and explaining Cyber security concepts and best practices to different age groups is a challenging exercise.

From setting unique passwords and enabling 2FA to the dangers of sideloading apps on Google Android phones etc. I covered a lot of ground and had an engaging session with lots of interesting questions.

Photo of Cyber security awareness workshop at St Joseph's Convent School, Belagavi

I am grateful to Sr. Mary Abraham, Principal, St. Joseph’s Canossian Convent Higher Secondary Schooland the PTA members for inviting me and organizing this.and

The event has been covered by The Hindu

If you would like to organize my session at your school/college in Belgaum, please contact me

Month: March 2025