Tuesday, June 30, 2009

New Firefox knows where you live !!!

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The all new Firefox v. 3.5 is finally out for download … with lots of new features and enhancements … but the feature i am talking about is … embedded Google technology called .. Geo-location … so , now new firefox browser can know your geographical location from your IP !!! …

I don’t know about others out there , but for me , i sure don’t like this feature .. ( i am not paranoid about my identification but still i don’t like this feature ) … so , i do very little reading about it … and found that its easy to disable this feature ( lucky for me that i am not alone to think this feature is invasion on privacy just same like google do every time we use google search  or any of its services ) …

to disable this feature … just type …

about:config

in browser address bar … and it will show warning page indicating that , now firefox warranty will expire if we change this options !!! ( i never had any idea that softwares DO COME with warranty ) … just say OK … and in FILTER … just type GEO , it will list all strings starts with GEO … just locate ..

geo.enabled

.. and make it FALSE …

 

geo_location

and you are done with it …

 

enjoy …

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Pirated Windows 7 Builds Botnet with Trojan

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Attackers pushing pirated, malware-laced copies of Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 operating system have been actively trying to build a botnet.

Windows7According to researchers at Damballa, attackers hid a Trojan inside of pirated copies of the operating system and began circulating them on BitTorrent sites. Damballa reported that it shut down the botnet's command and control server May 10, but by that time infection rates had risen as high as 552 users per hour.

"Since the pirated package was released on April 24th, my best guess is that this botnet probably had at least 27,000 successful installs prior to our takedown of its CnC [command and control] on May 10th," said Tripp Cox, vice president of engineering at Damballa.

Targeting users through pirated software is nothing new for hackers. Earlier in 2008, for example, attackers sought to build a Mac botnet on the backs of users of pirated versions of iWork '09 and the Mac version of Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Even aside from the malware threat, piracy is big business. A joint report by the BSA and IDC estimated software companies experienced $50 billion in losses in 2008 due to piracy.

In the case of Windows 7 RC, pirated copies were leaked on BitTorrent sites with a Trojan horse that, once downloaded, attempts to install a bundle of other malware on the infected machine. Blocking infections is tricky, as many anti-virus tools do not yet support Windows 7 and the operating system is infected before the tools can even be installed, according to Damballa.

"We continue to see new installs happening at a rate of about 1,600 per day with broad geographic distribution," Cox said. "Since our takedown, any new installs of this pirated distribution of Windows 7 RC are inaccessible by the botmaster. The old installs are accessible. The countries with the largest percentage of installs are the U.S. (10 percent), Netherlands (7 percent) and Italy (7 percent)."

from EWeek ..

Njoy !!!

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Conficker still infecting 50,000 PCs per day

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The Conficker worm is still infecting systems at a brisk rate and continues to snag computers in Fortune 1000 companies, according to security researchers.

The worm is infecting about 50,000 new PCs each day, according to researchers at Symantec, who reported that the U.S., Brazil and India have been hit the hardest.. "Much of the media hype seems to have died down around Conficker/Downadup, but it is still out there spreading far and wide," Symantec said in a blog post.

Conficker began spreading late last year, taking advantage of a recently patched flaw in Microsoft's Windows operating system to infect entire networks and also using removable storage devices to hop from PC to PC. Security experts say it has now infected millions of computers worldwide, which now comprise the world's biggest botnet network.

"We can see that companies that spend literally millions of dollars on equipment and gear to prevent infections … these Fortune companies have had this infection and it's stayed in their networks for a long period of time," said Rick Wesson, CEO of Support Intelligence and a member of the Conficker Working Group. "It's really hard and really expensive, and if the Fortune companies can't stop it, how can you expect small businesses to do it?"

The Working Group has set up so-called sinkhole servers that can communicate with infected machines. It has spotted infections within many Fortune 1000 companies, Wesson said. "Everybody got hit," he said. "Even Microsoft still has infections."

The worm got a lot of media attention in late March, and while the news stories have tapered off, the worm isn't going anywhere.

Some worried that an April 1 change in the way Conficker received updates could mark the beginning of a new round of Internet attacks, but in reality the Conficker network has been only lightly used, security experts say.

"It's still a significant botnet. It hasn't done anything of significance, but it has not gone away," said Andre DiMino, cofounder of The Shadowserver Foundation and a member of the Working Group. "The remediations need to ramp up."

Njoy !!!

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Darpa to take humans out of network management

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is researching computer networks that can organise and run themselves without human intervention, and dramatically increase available radio spectrum.

The organisation has been outlining its research goals to Congress in its 2009 Strategic Plan (PDF). One area is the design of a network infrastructure that can configure and maintain itself. It is initially intended for linking participants in battle, but could also have civilian uses.

"At the core of this concept are robust, secure and self-forming networks. These networks must be at least as reliable, available, secure and survivable as the weapons and forces they connect. They must distribute huge amounts of data quickly and precisely," says the report.

"But in order for these networks to realise their full potential, they must form, manage, defend and heal themselves, so they always function at the enormously high speeds that provide their advantages. This means that people can no longer be central to establishing, managing and administering them."

Some of the systems are in a very advanced stage, the agency reports. The Network Centric Radio System is already in operation, and can set up a self-healing ad hoc network gateway to link radio and network communications systems.

Darpa is also funding research into how to use existing spectrum more efficiently. Its neXt Generation Communications technology is being used to allocate spectrum dynamically, so that devices can use spectrum assigned to other uses when it is not being used. Tests have shown a tenfold increase in spectrum efficiency using this method.

from VUnet

Njoy …

Friday, June 5, 2009

All new UBUNTU 9.04 ....

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Well , its not so new ... it has been about two months since the release of Ubuntu 9.04 aka Jaunty Jackalope ... being perhaps the easiest version of so called OS of Geeks , its even very easy for noob like me ... so i have been using this from past couple of years ... and i must say that i learned lot from it ...

Origianlly i involved in learning Ubuntu was because I found that , linux / unix is home of devil ... the dark forces are very strong in this side of computing ... ( :D starwars ?? ) ... and being easy to use , ubuntu still holds power of mighty linux ...

actually i wanted to install this at time when i had downloaded (which happens to be about 2 months before) , but due to volatile experiments with my HDD ... i wasn't able to use it for long time at that time ...

Here are couple of things that i liked in new version ...

New Themes ... now Ubuntu looks even more sexy then its previous versions without any makeup :D ..

Newer Kernel ... Under the surface, Jaunty sports the 2.6.28 Linux kernel, the latest stable release (2.6.29.1 is the latest stable kernel as of 7 April). While most of the new features in the kernel are of little consequence to most desktop users, changes most likely to affect the desktop include a more feature-rich wireless stack with support for a broader range of devices, which will be a welcome improvement among users who previously had to install wireless drivers manually.

New Gnome ... Ubuntu 9.04 comes with Gnome 2.26 desktop environment , which, unsurprisingly, is responsible for the lion’s share of new features useful to desktop users.

One thing that i liked the most is , now i don't need to install / patch my atheros wifi drivers with madwifi ... because they are available as built-in !!! just look at the screenshot ...




and another useful tool is , no more use of command line to remove unused packages from system !!!

Well , I'm not an expert to review anything ... these are just couple of features i like of reincarnation of my beloved OS ...

Njoy ...

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

The Impact of Computing : 78% More Each Year

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Anyone who follows technology is familiar with Moore's Law and its many variations, and has come to expect the price of computing power to halve every 18 months.  But many people don't see the true long-term impact of this beyond the need to upgrade their computer every three or four years.  To not internalize this more deeply is to miss investment opportunities, grossly mispredict the future, and be utterly unprepared for massive, sweeping changes to human society.

Today, we will introduce another layer to the concept of Moore's Law-type exponential improvement.  Consider that on top of the 18-month doubling times of both computational power and storage capacity (an annual improvement rate of 59%), both of these industries have grown by an average of approximately 15% a year for the last fifty years.  Individual years have ranged between +30% and -12%, but let's say these industries have grown large enough that their growth rate slows down to an average of 12% a year for the next couple of decades.

So, we can crudely conclude that a dollar gets 59% more power each year, and 12% more dollars are absorbed by such exponentially growing technology each year.  If we combine the two growth rates to estimate the rate of technology diffusion simultaneously with exponential improvement, we get (1.59)(1.12) = 1.78.

The Impact of Computing grows at a screaming rate of 78% a year.

Sure, this is a very imperfect method of measuring technology diffusion, but many visible examples of this surging wave present themselves.  Consider the most popular television shows of the 1970s, such as The Brady Bunch or The Jeffersons, where the characters had virtually all the household furnishings and electrical appliances that are common today, except for anything with computational capacity.  Yet, economic growth has averaged 3.5% a year since that time, nearly doubling the standard of living in the United States since 1970.  It is obvious what has changed during this period, to induce the economic gains.

In the 1970s, there was virtually no household product with a semiconductor component.  Even digital calculators were not affordable to the average household until very late in the decade.

In the 1980s, many people bought basic game consoles like the Atari 2600, had digital calculators, and purchased their first VCR, but only a fraction of the VCR's internals, maybe 20%, comprised of exponentially deflating semiconductors, so VCR prices did not drop that much per year.

In the early 1990s, many people began to have home PCs.  For the first time, a major, essential home device was pegged to the curve of 18-month halving in cost per unit of power.

In the late 1990s, the PC was joined by the Internet connection and the DVD player, bringing the number of household devices on the Moore's Law-type curve to three.

Today, many homes also have a wireless router, a cellular phone, an iPod, a flat-panel TV, a digital camera, and a couple more PCs.  In 2006, a typical home may have as many as 8 or 9 devices which are expected to have descendants that are twice as powerful for the same price, in just the next 12 to 24 months.

To summarize, the number of devices in an average home that are on this curve, by decade :

1960s and earlier : 0

1970s : 0

1980s : 1-2

1990s : 3-4

2000s : 6-12

If this doesn't persuade people of the exponentially accelerating penetration of information technology, then nothing can.

One extraordinary product provides a useful example, the iPod :

First Generation iPod, released October 2001, 5 GB capacity for $399

Fifth Generation iPod, released October 2005, 60 GB capacity for $399, or 12X more capacity in four years, for the same price.

Total iPods sold in 2002 : 381,000

Total iPods sold in 2005 : 22,497,000, or 59 times more than 2002.

12X the capacity, yet 59X the units, so (12 x 59) = 708 times the impact in just three years.  The rate of iPod sales growth will moderate, of course, but another product will simply take up the baton, and have a similar growth in impact.

Now, we have a trend to project into the near future.  It is a safe prediction that by 2015, the average home will contain 25-30 such computationally advanced devices, including sophisticated safety and navigation systems in cars, multiple thin HDTVs greater than 60 inches wide diagonally, networked storage that can house over 1000 HD movies in a tiny volume, virtual-reality ready goggles and gloves for advanced gaming, microchips and sensors embedded into several articles of clothing, and a few robots to perform simple household chores.

Not only does Moore's Law ensure that these devices are over 100 times more advanced than their predecessors today, but there are many more of them in number.  This is the true vision of the Impact of Computing, and the shocking, accelerating pace at which our world is being reshaped.

I will expand on this topic greatly in the near future.  In the meantime, some food for thought :

Visualizing Moore's Law is easy when viewing the history of video games.

The Law of Accelerating Returns is the most important thing a person could read.

How semiconductors are becoming a larger share of the total economy.

Economic Growth is Exponential and Accelerating, primarily due to information technology becoming all-encompassing.

from The Futurist

Njoy …

Monday, June 1, 2009

New Cyber-Security Standards for N. American Power System

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It was recently in news that N. American Power Grid was hacked / breached by foreign hackers and that was perhaps the greatest threat , so finally Government has revised cyber-security standards for the North American bulk power system were approved by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation's (NERC) independent board of trustees.

 

 

grid1 The revised standards were passed by the electric industry last week with an 88 percent approval, according to NERC officials, which noted the majority approval indicated strong support in the industry for the more stringent standards.

"The approval of these revisions is evidence that NERC's industry-driven standards development process is producing results, with the aim of developing a strong foundation for the cyber security of the electric grid," said Michael Assante, Vice President and Chief Security Officer at NERC, in a statement.

The standards, according to the statement, are comprised of approximately 40 'good housekeeping' requirements designed to lay a solid foundation of sound security practices. The revisions approved address concerns raised by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission when it conditionally approved the standards currently in effect. The revisions notably include the removal of the term "reasonable business judgment," said NERC officials.

The standards "if properly implemented, will develop the capabilities needed to secure critical infrastructure from cyber security threats," the statement noted. Entities that fail to comply can be fined up to $1 million per day, per violation in the U.S., with other enforcement provisions in place throughout much of Canada, said NERC. Audits for compliance will begin on July 1, 2009.

The changes come on the heels of a Wall Street Journal report last month that cited national-security officials who claimed cyberspies from China, Russia and other countries had successfully penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system. However, Assante stressed in his statement that the changes were part of a process that was launched last July and was already well underway.

"It's important to note, however, that these standards are not designed to address specific, imminent cyber security threats," he said. "We firmly believe carefully crafted emergency authority is needed at the government level to address this gap."

The revised Critical Infrastructure Protection reliability standards are available here. A second phase of revisions will be presented to the board in 2010.

From CSO

Njoy …

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