Mullaperiyar: From dam to doom?

I just saw an interesting(I think the appropriate term is shocking!) about the Mulla periyar dam. I must say it’s definitely a disaster in the making!

I think the facts and figures are available online so there’s no need to state it again-I don’t see the point of simply quoting something. Instead I’d like to voice my opinion about this entire issue as such and what I find really appalling!

People in Tamil Nadu are nuts! I’m not talking about the entire population or anything alright? I’m talking about those particular section of people who had said or done something related to this issue which I found plain stupid. The politicians are always to blame first(I wonder why it’s always the case)-what the hell were they doing while this matter spilled over and became a public issue huh? Calculating political strategies(if they were they’re brainless morons for sure)?! I’m guessing the present government was(and is) sleeping over this just like the previous slept over the 2G scam. Shops run by Malayalees in Tamil Nadu were attacked and ransacked! And in Kerala, life still goes on-none of the Tamil people are harmed except for those Sabarimala pilgrims incident. The part that strikes me as interesting is the fact that while the attack on Sabarimala pilgrims from Tamil Nadu did not deter any pilgrims from visiting Sabarimala but the attacks in Tamil Nadu really did strike fear in hearts of few people-I overheard a few people headed to Chennai extremely worried for their safety there

InCTF 2012 is here. Registrations have started! Hurry!

Amrita University & TIFAC CORE

proudly present

InCTF ’12

National Level “Capture the Flag” style ethical hacking contest

Not a day passes when several websites are compromised on a daily basis. The latest in the line of compromised websites was http://kernel.org-the home page of the Linux kernel. Several more security incidents go unreported. Security of sensitive data has several implications ranging from national security issues to defense secrets ending up in the wrong hands and much more.

Indian websites offer little or no resistance to such security intrusions. The Computer Emergency Response Team, India(Cert-In) has been tracking de-facements of Indian websites and more. Their report can be viewed here. It’s really sad that with so much talent and skill, Indian websites are compromised frequently and nothing can be done to stand this wave of attacks on them.

InCTF is a Capture the Flag style ethical hacking contest, a strategic war-game designed to mimic the real world security challenges. Software developers in India have little exposure to secure coding practices and the effects of not adopting such practices-one of the main reasons why systems are compromised quite easily these. Following such simple practices can help prevent such incidents.

InCTF ‘12 is from November 2011 to January 2012 and is focused exclusively on the student community. You can participate from your own university and no travel is required. No prior exposure or experience in cyber security needed to participate.
What you need to do?
1. Form a team (max five members from your college)
2. Approach a faculty/mentor and request him/her to mentor your team
3. Register online at http://inctf.in

In addition it’s been decided that teams which finished in the top 10 places on InCTF 2011 qualify directly for the second round-they do not have to participate in the first round. Congratulations to all these teams!

Great Rewards

25K	The winning team receives a cash prize of up to Rs. 25000/-
20K	The first runner-up team receives a cash prize of up to Rs. 20000/-
15K	The second runner-up team receives a cash prize of up to Rs. 15000/-
10K	The third runner-up team receives a cash prize of up to Rs. 10000/-
5K	The fourth runner-up team receives a cash prize of up to Rs. 5000/-

See http://inctf.in/prizes for more.

Special Prizes*

• Teams are awarded prizes based on their performance
• Deserving teams are well awarded. Exciting prizes to be won.

So, what are you waiting for? It’s simple: Register, Learn, Hack!

Keep up with us

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*Cash prizes are subject to their performance and participation in the CTF round. Only teams who connect to the VPN server and successfully gain points in the CTF round are eligible for prizes. In addition, cash prize winners of InCTF ’11 are not eligible for prizes in InCTF ’12.

John Underkoffler, TED 2010

Speaker Profile: http://www.ted.com/speakers/john_underkoffler.html

The TED talk was mainly focussed on Human Computer Interfaces-one of the most exciting areas of computer science today. The talk started off with the Macintosh and how it revolutionized the entire concept of Human Computer Interaction and went on to talk about the speaker’s research in the area.

Link: http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture.html

Indeed the Macintosh was among the revolutionary developments in Human Computer Interfaces-Apple designed it such that anyone and everyone could use computers. They had to write a brand new “operating system” complete with graphic libraries, mouse libraries and more-none of which existed-to create something truly wonderful.

But indeed as the speaker put it, that’s the past. It’s time to move on. While peripherals such as memory, hard disk etc have grown considerably, human computer interfaces are still in the same 70′s-80′s; the time of the Macintosh. Although this has indeed received attention in recent days, there is still a long way to go.

After this, the speaker demoed the systems that they have developed in their research lab that revolutionize the human computer interfaces. I was shocked to learn that they actually designed that amazing interface used by Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible-I thought the entire system he is using was actually a projection on the screen . But, I was very surprised when he actually demoed the system and the various tasks that are possible.

Although the presentation isn’t anything great, they have indeed done a wonderful job in developing such a system that transforms the traditional interfaces into a more intuitive and easy to use interface. The applications of the system demoed and suggested by the speaker are indeed wonderful-I never thought of Supply Chain Management(urgh MIS ). I’m waiting to see the next killer app that is created using this system-the next Angry Birds .

Creating 32 bit binaries on a 64 bit Ubuntu

I’ve been busy spending last few days trying to get a decent non-curses based interface for IDA 64 bit but sadly there’s been no luck. I have a decent looking interface for 32 bit but since I run a 32 bit linux machine, I was sorta stuck on how to generate binaries to try my hand at reversing.

Finally I ended up finding it. It’s possible by passing the flag ‘-m32′ to gcc/g++ when compiling the program. This will generate a 32 bit binary as opposed to the 64 bit binary created default on 64 bit machines.

To do so you need to have gcc/g++ mutillib package installed for the cross compiling to happen.

                 sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib g++-multilib

Hopefully my next post will be how to cross compile using gcc and create a binary that works on windows. Till next time! Ciao!

Mylapore, Mada Street and Me

I just reached home today morning-what a journey it was to the station and there after. At 10am, started on CSAW CTF. I solved a few “crypto” questions-they were quite easy IMO! But, it’s nevertheless encouraging. Of course, Leet More managed to breeze through-they started much later and made it to 13^th in no time . Anyway mom asks me to set out at around 7 in the evening to buy a few stuff. And the walk around Mylapore’s Mada street was a wonderful experience!

Mada street is a set of four roads around the Kapaleeshwar temple(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapaleeshwarar_Temple)-east, west, north and south. It’s a sleepy place in the morning but springs to life in the evening. The south mada street has a lot of shops and the bus stop for the temple. The temple can be accessed from all roads except this road.

The east mada street is notable for the evening market where several vendors come and sell vegetables on the street. There are so many varieties of vegetables being sold-it’s awesome! I just was spellbound the variety available-not even half of this is there in Calicut’s main market!

From here, I headed to the north mada street which houses the temple chariot right in front of the entrance to the temple. It is taken round the temple annually during April as a part of a festival. I’m hoping that I can come during that time to see the chariot and the procession.

From the north mada street, I headed out to west mada street and was shocked to see the entire road-the ENTIRE road filled with “gollu bommai”-dolls that are displayed in every household for Navarathri(also known as Dusshera in the north india). From several idols of gods including Krishna, Shiva and Anathashayanam to village scenes, cricket teams, fruits and much more, there were dolls for almost everything! The craftsmanship was just amazing-each doll had so much detailing done that it looked amazing. I was tempted to buy a few by just looking at it-few minutes of talking would have probably convinced me!

I was really sad that I didn’t have a camera to take the pics of what I saw . I will come back sometime and take a whole bunch of pics! If you every visit Chennai, stay before and during Navarathri. Along with West Bengal, Tamil Nadu is one place where this festival is widely celebrated where each and every household will have this “gollu” on display and neighbours visit each other to see them.

Till next time! Ciao!

Ze Frank, TED 2004

Speaker Profile: http://www.ted.com/speakers/ze_frank.html

The talk mainly focuses on what Ze Frank does. Ze Frank is an online performer, humorist and orator. He is very popularly known for the birthday invitation he created in 2001 for his 26^th birthday. It can be seen here(and in the video too). He creates several online spaces that lets people interact, online games and educational games. He is also the creator of the daily video program The show with Ze Frank that ran for exactly a year from March 17, 2006 to March 17, 2007.

Link: http://www.ted.com/talks/ze_frank_s_nerdcore_comedy.html

Although his description about what he does isn’t something that interested, his presentation was amazing yet had absolutely nothing really great in it! The 404, introduction video, the email and more just kept the audience hooked to each word he was saying.

Throughout the talk I gathered how well Ze had understood the human mind and how to captivate it. I specially like this line “I get a lot of joy doing stuff with tech[nology]. It’s what keeps me a bubble and a half above perpetual anxiety.” which he said instead of saying “Technology gives me joy that keeps me going all day”. The choice of words really captivated me and kept me focused on the talk.

The other thing about his talk was that he really wasn’t really talking about anything in particular-it was a talk with just some randomly unrelated stuff but his reactions to it were really amazing. It wasn’t like a formal presentation but rather a casual conversation.

The pun at Google was something I indeed enjoyed-it somehow felt to me that he was conveying what most people thought of Google at that time. Also, how he mocked fun at what he was saying, what his mom and dad told him and the general presentation of the talk was really good.

I urge you to see his talk and let me know what you thought of it. Hope to hear from you soon.

Eli Pariser, TED 2011

Speaker Profile: http://www.ted.com/speakers/eli_pariser.html

The TED talk highlighted what I’ve noticed everywhere in Google-search, buzz and Facebook wall feed-results only from a few friends I commonly follow. It really hit me when I couldn’t see posts from Zubin in Buzz and when I realized that I have 300+ plus friends in facebook but don’t see updates from majority of them.

Link: http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

And what is said in this talk is completely true-the internet is really not what I wanted it to be. To me, just like the speaker, I wanted the internet to expose me to new ideas that I had never thought were possible but were something that essentially should know. I realized this was why I couldn’t see Zubin’s post after seeing that I couldn’t see Zubin’s posts while a friend could. This was also the reason why I used to see posts from a few select set of friends while I saw nothing from most others and even thought “How can people survive without using facebook?” .

The implications of such an algorithm based filtering of the content that will be shown to us is vast, the most important of them being the fact that we will see only what the internet thinks we should see. For instance, I’m a person who likes to know about various humanitarian crisis all over the world. However, I could see no such result in my Google searches or my social networks.

This used to be the case with newspapers and their editors but then the case has slowly improved in their case with the development of journalist ethics and more. But, still the internet has a yet to adopt such an ethic and highlight information that we should know rather than what it thinks we should know. For instance, knowing about the latest video game is very essential but then it’s important to be updated about the latest developments in the world.

As rightly said in the talk, the web should highlight ideas that we like as well as the ones that challenge us, news that interests us as well as challenges our very understanding and interests. A right mix of both, a balance is very much essential else we will end up learning more about something we already know quite a bit about and nothing about everything else.

This is certainly a big issue and there is a dire need to come up with algorithms that can reflect such features else the internet will become the exact problem that it was intended to solve.

Biology inspired computing

I read an article in Communications of the ACM on Biology inspired networking(it’s premium content online -> http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/6/108641-biology-inspired-networking/fulltext).

Biology inspired computing is a branch that tries to understand the problems in biological systems, how they’re solved and how this could be applied to the field of computer science. It’s one among the many inter-disciplinary fields that have developed in recent times.

Biology inspired computing is a very young field that is still to mature. One of the key issues of this field is bridging the collaborators i.e. computer scientists and biologists since both adopt a different approach to their work and finding problems that are of interest to both biologists and computer scientists alike.

A recent research(biology related networking) involves application of neurological development of a fruit fly to distributed peer to peer networks. The project, headed by Ziv Bar Joseph of Carnegie Mellon University(CMU), aims at creating a new networking algorithm that will replace the existing algorithm for managing distributed networks.

In a fruit fly’s nervous system, the cells are unaware of the connection between themselves and thus allocates some cells as leaders so that all cells can be connected-very similar to the concept of peer to peer networks but more robust and unlike anything that exists in today’s distributed networks.

The fruit fly cells send out chemical signals once elected as the Sensory Organ Precusor(SOP) that prevents the neighbouring cells from becoming the SOP. This continues till all cells are either SOP’s or neigbours of SOPs. However, unlike in a distributed network system where a node is elected as the leader as a function of number of connected but as a function of time.

This however is much slower than the existing algorithm but much more efficient. It’s suitable for application in sensor networks where speed is not so important as efficiency since the entire operation of sensor nodes depends on this network’s existence.

Other possible areas where biology could inspire solutions include fault tolerance systems in which the node that is bound to crash/fail could be backed up more often-methods to determine could perhaps be used to make the network robust and highly available.

This was an eye opening article-I knew computational biology existed which involved anaylysis of existing data but wasn’t very interested in it. But, I never thought that other fields could contribute to advancement of computer science! I’m defintely excited about the relevance of inter-disciplinary learning that advances both fields and thos related to it too! Gotta find out more about Biology inspired computation.

India Today

(This post was written a few days ago; don’t remember the exact date and so the events described are of the past if they’ve a relevance with respect to time).

This post is quite convoluted and no real order/co-relation exists between the thoughts. They’re mostly random stuff that came to my head. And the title well, I guess it’s relevance will be clear soon. I just felt that it fit the entire scenario that’s all.

I wanna start off with a “controversial” workshop(which charged an outrageous sum for something that can never be learnt in a day!) that was supposed to be organized in our campus till someone[among the few with some brains around here] pointed out that the person who’s been invited to conduct the workshop is a fake(and a very good website does say so too). Of course, I “knew” this somehow but did nothing about it and didn’t pay much attention to it since I knew nothing good will come out by going after rectifying the issue.

The Six Billion Dollar Experiment

Last week, Mindscape screened The Six Billion Dollar Experiment as a part of their weekly screening and I had to miss it since I’d a lot of work to do. So, I got the documentary and started watching it. I found out that I had three other videos-two of them TED-and so decided to watch them as well .

The Six Billion Dollar Experiment is a documentary on the Large Hadron Collider, one of the most ambitious particle physics projects in history. In short, the experiment involves using two proton beams travelling in opposite directions at 99.999999% speed of light around a 27 km long circular tunnel to recreate the universe less than a billionth of a second after it was formed! The two beams collide and information during the collision will be collected by the detector-about 600 million of them occur each second! Simply amazing! Imagine the engineering challenge that this involves! Cutting edge engineering at it’s best!

The LHC’s goal is to find the Higgs particle(or Higgs Boson named after Peter Higgs). The Standard Model is an equation that can accurately describe the behaviour of almost anything in this universe! But it’s incomplete without the Higgs particle(in fact, it predicts the existence of the Higgs particle) and that’s the goal of the LHC-to discover this mysterious particle that gives mass to everything in the universe.

It also talks about the origin of the universe, the various discoveries that led to it’s unravelling, lessons that can be learnt and how is that you look to the sky, you’re actually seeing the past since the light travels such a long distance to reach earth. The farther you look into the universe, the more into the past you’ll be looking into. Which means, when you look into the night sky, you’re mostly seeing light from stars that left them probably even before you were born! The realization that we’re nothing but a small speck in the universe is absolutely amazing!

LHC @ TED

Dr. Brian Cox, one of the researchers who worked on the Atlas detector, delivered a talk about the LHC-what is it and why is it that they’re so excited about the entire project. He returned a year later in 2009 with the first findings of the LHC and was amazing to see that magnet bent by a simple manufacturing defect! That’s engineering at it’s best!

Speaker Profile: http://www.ted.com/speakers/brian_cox.html

Universe and Philosophy

I also saw the video about Carl Sagan on how the universe is so huge and earth is nothing but a “Pale Blue Dot” in the universe! And how world over countless people shed a lot of blood and wasted countless amount of time to command a small part of the universe! It shows on why earth is the only inhabitable planet and we should work towards conservation of our planet or all hope is lost for us!

It puts a lot of perspective on how we consider ourselves to be such great individuals and an important part of the universe, when we’re nothing but a speck of dust in a vast universe who’ve been around for about a second in the universe clock. And just write down how much the humans have managed to mess up planet Earth in this small span of time! It shocked me to the core when I realized this for the first time.

Realization:

I realize that we’re expected to do great things! That’s what engineers do always! It’s always working on the cutting edge of any field. If you’re a computer science person, it’s not essential that you work in this field only-there’s no such distinction out there. It’s all in our head! Get that theory out!

To conclude my post, I’d like to quote what Carl Sagan said, which Brian Cox quoted in his TED talk.

“The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.”

Just imagine what all has happened due to a few hydrogen atoms-internet, sports, movies, billions different types of humans, animal and plant species-the list just goes on endlessly. More you think about, more the realization dawns on the sheer magnitude!