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Showing posts from August, 2010

Gods vs Cameras and Democracy

Thinking about the concept of God, it is clear that humans looked at something beyond them to ensure that there exists order in the society they lived in. This concept was paramount to the success of humans as a race and evolved into the civilization that nurtured into what we are today. The concept worked fine as long as the various communities that were governed by a particular god served the purpose without much ado. The present conflicts can be seen in this context. As boundaries overlap, the concept of god overlaps and therefore the confrontation between various gods and results in conflict. Most conflicts are fought in the name of godhead. God heads might change to the concepts followed in various religions to the change of the god head into a generic term like democracy, at least the new god democracy is generic and representative of all the thousands of gods we have across the world. God and religion are very important aspects in maintaining order in society. When the gods

Surveillance Systems/ Wild life photography - Open Source

Am looking at using some of the web cameras as a tool to capture the birds in my bird feeder. Started googling for some of the options as it comes to using the camera and have the intelligence to go around and make some of the awesome shots of birds and other animals as they come in for a morsel. Well looks like there are a few options for the unitiated and the bold. I am looking at some of the available software to achieve this objective. iSpy : Neat little application open source and does a wonderful work of capturing pictures when motion is detected. Unfortunately Windows Only and loathe them because of how resource hungry they are. Zone Minder :  is a cool little application, runs on linux and provides you options to control multiple cameras and do a lot more stuff. It is a good animal to have and runs and suports a lot of camera sets as well as web based control framework. Ugolog Cannot be called open source, though provides a neat little service to check out the details of

Wild Life Documentaries - Are they Really Wild?

From the way nature movies are made to the pretty pictures of animals that adorn your walls, the question remains Are the animals really wild or shot at one of these animal factories. A intersting take on the most loved scenes of the most interesting shots that we saw and was in awe. Is it not shocking to find them as having been faked? Been travelling across India and other parts of the world looking for wild life refuge, Have we seen something great or was it easy to spot an animal that is supposedly free ranging in that area? A trip to Sariska to look at the tigers and three days of toil and not a single one spotted. ( By then may be most of them might have been slaughtered), A few days at Nagerhole, Zilch, Looking for Nilgiri Tahr near Munnar - ended up with some of the domesticated ones - Well atleast they were free ranging, but just got used to humans that they hang around near them for their forage. Trying to check out Grizzlies in Yellowstone. Three days and none spotted and
There are many ways to send a blog. This is one of them, have a Google Voice Extension on Chrome and keep sending them out. Cool. Period

Human Factor in Protecting Information Systems

Many a times we talk about vulnerabilities, exploitations and other specific issues that cause an would be attacker to be successful in breaking into systems. But looking at the different varieties of attacks and other specific payloads used for the break in at the end of the day, it has always been a brute force or a social engineering attack that benefits the maximum, at least from the attackers point of view. All the recent XSS attacks like the one against Apache, JIRA are all because of the fundamental weakness - Humans - As long as we have people handling certain activities and ways of doing things, these kind of  breaks would continue and go on for a long time. Many say two factor solves the issue, but have in my experience found so many two factor fobs having their  primary username password scribbled or hanging on the fob. How useful that is. The purpose of the two factor can be easily defeated and again it is the indefatigable (wow where does that word come from - may be it

Blackberry and security

Off late we have been seeing a lot of comments and brickmanship from Governments about how a blackberry needs to shut down its services in the the name of security. So why is this a problem. As it is known, blackbery uses encryption when it sends out mails. This is done with the help of a Blackbery Enterprise Server (BES). The idea behind it is simple. When you install a BES, you create a key. This key is used when you add up your Blackberries when they are added to the System. A certificate is downloaded from the server based on the seed provided by BES. A typical Assymetric Key Algorithm. Is this the only place where mails can be exchanged securely. Is there not other options for any would be misuse of encryption technologies. Would you ban VPN clients on the blackberries because somebody can use the services.  In the name of security it is becoming very easy for many to arm twist organizations to fall in line. Why would a multinational organization using blackberry services allow