Archive for the ‘DailyLinks’ Category

Daily Links

August 29, 2008

According to this report and video Atrivo, a Concord, Calif., based network provider is major source of spyware, adware, viruses and fake anti-virus products.See Emil Kacperski, Atrivo’s founder, response in comments section @ Briansblog

Tetris meets Rubik’s Cube a fun filled 3-d game

Michael Nielsen writes a insightful eassy on how to explain Quantum Computation to your MAMA

Google fun

OpenCV is a computer vision library originally developed by Intel. It is free for commercial and research use under a BSD license. The library is cross-platform, and runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It focuses mainly on real-time image processing, as such, if it finds Intel’s Integrated Performance Primitives on the system, it will use these commercial optimized routines to accelerate itself.

Narcissistic Blog Disorder and Other Conditions of Online Kookery

Macfee Released a WhitePaper on security problems related to online games and some possible solutions to address them

Daily Links

August 27, 2008

Inc500 has posted top5000 list of fastest growing companies in America
ProofHQ is a smarter, easier way to manage review and approval of designs, artwork and documents. It is an online collaboration, proofing and approval tool built specifically for brands, agencies, designers, print and production.Nice idea and well executed

An interesting Research finds that there is magnetic alignment in grazing and resting cattle and deer


The Seven Deadliest Social Networking Hacks

1) Impersonation and targeted personal attacks
2) Spam and bot infections
3) Weaponized OpenSocial and other social networking applications
4) Crossover of personal to professional online presence
5) XSS, CSRF attacks
6) Identity theft
7) Corporate espionage

NSA has Declassified Technical Journal Articles under its Declassification Initiatives

Daily Links

August 25, 2008

Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock

This 11 minutes footage of Jimi in which he plays guitar with his teeth yes TEETH ..Was wondering where this guy got these skills it seems Buddy Guy was the originator of Hendrix’s sound and guitar tricks, which Jimi gladly ripped off after working as his sideman and took to England. While there, the “womon tone” and distortion were pilfered from Eric Clapton. Finally, no guitarist in his 20’s wanted any part of the true geniuses of the genre- Guy, Freddie King, and Ike Turner. Jimi was a very good imitator of the true greats.

How to Visulize a 4 th dimension?

Nine chapters, two hours of maths, that take you gradually up to the fourth dimension. Mathematical vertigo guaranteed!

How first letter of email Address effect the Amount of spam you get ?

Researchers at Cambridge presented a paper at Fifth conference on Email and antispam
Key Findings :
1)Incoming email to Demon Internet where the email address local part (the bit left of the @) begins with “A” is almost exactly 50% spam and 50% non-spam. However, where the local part begins with “Z” then it is about 75% spam.
2)If one only considers “real” A and Z , viz: where a particular email address was legitimate enough to receive some non-spam email, then the picture changes. If one treats an email address as “real” if there’s one non-spam email on average every second day, then real aardvarks receive 35% spam, but real zebras receive only 20% spam.
3)The most likely reason for these results is the prevalence of “dictionary” attacks (where spammers guess addresses). If there are not many other Z,then guessing Z is less likely.

8 million victims in the world’s biggest cyber heist

A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group’s online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.
Although the nature of internet crime makes it extremely difficult to track the precise details of the raid, a hacker from India – new to the world of cyber-crime – succeeded in bypassing the system’s security software and placing a Trojan virus on one of the Best Western Hotel machines used for reservations.

The stolen login details were then put up for sale and shared on an underground website operated by a notorious branch of the Russian mafia, which specialises in internet crime and offers heavily guarded and untraceable hosting services with no questions asked for criminal activity.Looks like Indian hacking scene improving :)

UPDATE :Best Western Denies the Breach according to this

Pakistani Artists on Festival of Musilm Culture

A good collection of Arts showcased with Bios and tastes of the Artists

Daily Links

August 24, 2008

Assessing Gods Attitude a Mathematical Approach
Extracts :
Let Y be God’s attitude arrayed on a scale ranging from zero to one. This is an unobserved variable. Let X be the intensity of prayer in the population. It too is scaled between zero and one. The population density of prayer is summarized by a univariate density f(X) which has been estimated by Father Greeley (1972)….
The paper, which goes on like that for a while, is actually quite interesting but if you are looking for the bottom line it comes at the end:
The method presented here is applicable to a number of important problems….For example, one can extend current empirical work in a variety of areas of economics to estimate the effect of income on happiness or the effect of income inequality on democracy.

Vampirism

Is a psychopathic personality disorder which has a potential for extremely dangerous behavior.A well researched Article by a Forensic researcher with real life cases and analysis worth a read

New algorithm For boosting routing efficiency of networks

The algorithm named XL increases network routing efficiency by suppressing updates from parts of the system – updates which force connected networks to continuously re-calculate the paths they use in the great matrix of the Internet.The key contribution to is to reduce the communication overhead of the route computation by propogating only some updates in turn reducing the number of updates sent through the network Hope the Content Delivery Networks like Akamai is listening :)


Can Open Source help to prevent the Cyber WarFare?

Researchers have still not figured out who were behind the Russian Cyber attacks The folks at IntelFusion are putting together an open source effort to figure out this mystery. And they want your help.


Ultra Rice – answer to the global Malnutrition backed by Non profit Organization


The time and money required to produce (design, develop, secure, test, launch, scale) a typical data-oriented form application on the web drops in half every 2 years. – David Cohen

This guy is a very insightful VC in security space who funded counterpane founded by Bruce (now British Telecoms) who made Twofish algorithm which was one of the five finalists of the Advanced Encryption Standard contest

Daily Designers

Johnnouanesing

Rafaelmorgan

Tomgiesler

Daily Links

August 23, 2008

Gartner says that IT spending will Surpass $3.4 Trillion in 2008
Other trend of intrest is Enterprises are switching from company-owned hardware and software assets to per-use, service-based models i.e CLOUD COMPUTING cloud computing.Looks like there will be a Cloud bubble coming up after WEB2.0 .Cloud will succeed because its like shifting asserts from enterprises to Service Providers.There is great intrest being generated by big corporate technology vendors like I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems EMC,Google and Amazon.

Cube Attacks
Adi Shamir yes the “A” in RSA has given a invited talk at the Crypto 2008 conference about a new type of cryptanalytic attack called “cube attacks. He claimed very broad applicability to block ciphers, stream ciphers, hash functions, etc. A good discussion about his found in crypto mailing list.

FileVault the Apple’s disk encryption Technology

The encryption implementation weaknesses in FileVault are well documented by NSA a worth read
Interview with Mitnick the famous Hacker with Forbes

When the hunter becomes the Hunt

How Stenography can be used on itself to destroy it a startup coming up with a innovative method to crub cyber espinoage

Why do people use pirate software

A game developer asked his users this question to find out why people use pirate software a good read and pretty good insights

Some Thoughts

After looking at this by this guy Just thinking can this type of thing can be applied to other areas like art design ..getting into a detailed look of the piece of art,music,video as you move forward or where you think you need more understanding …it looks like wiki but we loose the contex in the wiki surfing
Can a piece of art may be music or video,film be made which will get me more insights of the thought process of the maker then of the whole plot itself …like a low level expression …