world

If you can read this, thank a teacher.
If you can read this in English, thank a soldier.

I spotted this on the comments page of Katherine Jenkins's live performance Requiem For a Soldier. Though it refers to English language, it applies equally to just about any country or civilization.

Your votes are invited for selecting the best photos from this collection of pictures i took in year 2008. Last year was very eventful and i ended up with filling my flickr account like its no one's business.



To vote for the pictures you like, simply visit the Nominees collection and vote for the photo by marking it as a favourite or leaving a comment there. I'm biased, all food pictures got nominated automatically.

End of May, the long pending get together happened. On 29th May evening we left for Goa in a Volvo. Night was spent sleeping and singing. After the long journey on Mumbai - Goa national highway we reached Goa next morning and headed towards Diwar Island. Checked in Devaaya Resort and relaxed. Had party whole night, with lots of chicken and booze.



Panjim, the capital city, is a city of churches and beaches and there are ample opportunities of photographing both. Next day a couple of us hired a few bikes and went off on a beach visiting spree.



All in all, a trip well spent. Goa is fun place to be at.

Railways is running in profits since last couple of years and the feel good feeling is coming soon to Indian Railways website too. The recent tender notification from IR attracted almost everyone from the industry to apply for tender and profit! With TCS/CMC, Accenture, SISL India, Satyam, Wipro, Infosys, BEA, Broad Vision, IBM, HCL, DELL, HP and of course Microsoft applying for the tender and planning to use technologies as diverse as TIBCO, Biometrics and BS 7799 compliance - this surely is going to be a major face lift to Indian Railways.

Got a chance to watch Das Leben der Anderen. Story is set in East Germany, around and before the fall of Berlin Wall about how the Stasi agents used to control the private lives of people. Very well made movie i must say. It reaffirms the human ability to do the right thing, no matter how much wrong has already been done.

author ketan tanna talks about the foss movement, in the weekly section tribal instincts in times of india. check out the 12th page or on timesofindia epaper

Some of the irc idlers met up today at *the* bookshop to buy some books. We browsed through several dozens of books, strolled over to churchgate, had a plate of combo pizza and talked about our world domination plans.

But the most interesting part of the day was dinner at this fine lebanese restaurant near regal. no more comments.

Please vote for pradeepto for figuring out next killer equation after E = mc²

[00:13] (pradeepto) Lebanese Chicken == ( Eagle ||Crow || Kite ) && !Chicken

Ever since Digg decided to take down the articles containing the number 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, which happens to be HD-DVD processing key taken from memory dumps of certain software dvd player, there has been a huge outcry about MPAA, DMCA and RIAA.

But what's most interesting, are the novel ways in which people are further spreading the number across the internet, and into the real world. There are domains http://09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63.com/, Tshirts with keys, Poerty about the Key, UserAgent strings containing the key, TXT records, and even babies named as a hex.

I had to change my DNS provider when last time zombie computers which were a part of huge BotNet attacked EveryDNS (Same organisation running the popular OpenDNS service). The news was slashdotted and it was said the attack was of around 1.2Gbits per second in total and lasted a week.

That figure is certainly huge, but we cant say if that DDoS attack was running on full throttle or was mere a demonstration of firepower. There have been other highprofile BotNet attacks in past, like the one on BlueSecurity half an year back, which essentially highlights how deep the rathole goes. BlueSecurity, a vendor of antiphishing and antispam solution called BlueFrog, closed shops since then and the BotNet herder is still at large.

BotNets are essentially a loosely knit group of computers infected with BotNet drones. These are modified IRC Bots which upon installation, join their owner's IRC channel and wait for commands. A typical medium size BotNet can easily span upto several 10's of thousands conputers connected to internet. Assuming a typical indian internet connection of 2Mbps given by MTNL/BSNL these days, that would give the BotNet a combined power of several Gbits per second. When the BotNet is not DDoSing someone, BotNet herders use their network for all kinds of uses like phishing, spamming, stealing corporate data and other sensitive details.

Now the picture seems little clearer to me. I remember seeing traces of IRC bots being downloaded by some way exploiting modules in apache running on a debian woody server. Thankfully the drones could never execute (i think so?) since it was a PowerPC machine and the binaries were all intel ones. The server was reinstalled due to several other reasons, but till today i can see falied attempts of BotNet drone installation in webserver's logs.

I have been reading several articles/whitepapers on BotNets and now Internet seems such a dreaded place all of a sudden.

today morning i went to Siddhivinayak temple after couple of years. the whole outlook of temple has changed drastically in the past few years.

now there are walls, cops, metal detectors, snifer dogs all around... if you dont want to stand in loooong queues then you can get yourself silver or gold entry passes, or you can make a donation - which enables you a direct entry into temple... or if you are female, you can stand in the shorter ladies-only queue.

for the rest of us, well we can always stand in the general queue by which you get to enter the temple in 4 hours..