Ajit Gaddam: TechNews and Security

Okay, I think I used Yahoo! as a search engine for … lets see maybe the fourth time ever. I was playing around with Flock and the default search engine in the Flock Browser is Yahoo. So, my justification for using Yahoo as a search engine aside, I wanted to check out Yahoo! Photos. Since I didn’t know the exact URL, I pop in Yahoo Photos in the Yahoo Search Engine and this is what I get.

As you can see, we get an Arabic name as the first result for Yahoo Photos. I try to copy paste the name of the site/URL into Google Translator and I end up with a loading sork

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I am also a Security Editor at a very popular student portal AskStudent. Like most other portals, our operations are supported by Advertising and we use Google Adsense to take care of advertising on AskStudent. At AskStudent, we cover a lot of topics such as Security, Health, Career, Jobs, Coding, Money matters, Shopping etc. We also cover Sexual Health and Love and Relationships at AskStudent.

Last week, out of the blue, our Senior Editor gets an email from the Google Adsense Team

Hello,

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as http://www.askstudent.com/2006/12/02/maturecontentpostataskstudent/?preview=true.

As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on pages with adult or mature content.

Please make any necessary changes to your web pages in the next 3 business days. We also suggest that you take the time to review our program policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) to ensure that all of your other pages are in compliance.

Once you update your site, we will automatically detect the changes and ad serving will not be affected. If you choose not to make the changes to your account within the next three days, your account will remain active but you will no longer be able to display ads on the site. Please note, however, that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Now, this was a problem. We did not know what Google treated as mature content. However, with respect to the post in question, it was justified. So the first step we did was remove all ads serving on AskStudent while we figured out a solution to this problem. At AskStudent, we use Adsense Deluxe plugin. If you don’t use this plugin and manually serve ads or hard coded the ads, then I would highly recommend using this plugin.

Now, There are two solutions to solving this problem of how to avoid serving ads on a mature content post but keep serving ads on the rest of the blog

Solution # 1: After disabling ads generation through Adsense Deluxe, you can manually copy and paste adsense code onto individual posts. However for a portal like AskStudent with hundreds of articles, this is almost a highly time consuming if not an impossible task.

Solution # 2: Perfect Solution: Code it up

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Apple aired its 30 seconds iPhone ad during Sunday’s ABC’s telecast of Oscars 2007 Academic Awards  ceremony. The commercial begins in Black & White with a ringing rotary telephone and then follows up with clips from various movie and television shows featuring both real life characters such as Dustin Hoffman, Harrison Ford, John Cusack, Kevin Spacy and also animated characters such as Mr.Incredible and Betty Rubble from Flintstones answering the phone and saying “Hello”. Towards the end of the commercial, we see the iPhone doing a 360 and then we see a full screen caption “Hello” and then ” Coming in June”.

Macworld has the entire list of 31 different movies and TV shows that were featured during the commercial. Also check out Macworld for the song featured during the commercial.

The iPhone ad aired during the Oscar ceremony’s first commercial break after the awards for art direction and scientific and technical achievements were presented.

The iPhone ad has also been posted on Apple’s Web site.

Wow, check this out. This is a picture of the AT&T Global Operations Center. How awesome for the network technicians working out in the front there …

To check out a bigger picture go here or here

I heard about them before that sometime in late January of this year, Google has been tagging certain sites in search results with a Malware warning saying “This site may harm your computer”. These are sites which Google has indentified as sites with some malcode on the server hosting the site or some WMF exploit present in the code of the site.

According to Google they are doing this as they want their users to feel safer when they search the web and that Google is always working to identify such dangerous sites and provide increased protection for their users. In case you decide to go ahead and click on the site which Google has flagged as hosting malware, you are taken to a page which looks something like below. You are given a warning “visiting this web site may harm your computer. You can learn more about harmful web content and how to protect your computer at StopBadware.org” You can then return to the previous page with the Google search results for your query or you can go ahead and continue to the site you wanted to visit. You are however not given a link to click to go to that site. You either have to copy and paste the URL to visit the site.

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In this category, I will be posting the different and various kinds of spam messages I get. Most of them are funny. Some of variants of the Nigerian Spam and some are bordering on innovation. The image headers are being hotlinked to Microsoft’s servers to this header image http://i2.microsoft.com/h/all/i/ms_masthead_8×6a_ltr.jpg. Microsoft’s Logo comes from this link http://i2.microsoft.com/h/en-us/i/msnlogo.gif in this spam email

This spam message is from the Microsoft Award Team congratulating me on winning the Microsoft Lottery Award. It included a serial number, my lottery ticket number and also my lottery ticket winning numbers which were 14, 21, 25, 39, 40, 47 with the special number being 20. I also won £1,350,000.00 or 1 Million and three hundred and fify thousand Great Britain pounds as one of the 5 jackpot winners in this draw.

I have been assigned a fiduciary agent, a Dictor Greg Thomas, for claiming my reward who is based in the U.K and has the Email address : dictor_greg_thomas@katamail.com and a UK telephone number: +44 7 031 948 758.

The Email is also from a Bryan McDonald of the Microsoft Promotion Team who is also a Vice President at Microsoft. Her email address is not as everyone would imagine, based on the microsoft.com domain but a globedraw010@hotmail.com

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UPDATE: I believe either Vint Cerf himself or more likely a Google India representative posted a comment with some updated stats. I double checked the stats and indeed found them out to be right as shown in the presentation. I am updating the post to reflect the correct stats. 

So, I finally make my way into the Google Speaker series where the guest speaker was Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Dr.Vinton Cerf who is also the current Chairman of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The whole show was extremely well organized. Dr. Cerf promptly showed up at the assigned time at 5:30 pm IST. There was a formal introduction of Dr.Cerf, his contributions, his various achievements by the Google India representatives before handing the stage over to him.

He starts of by introducing himself and then praising the cofounder of TCP/IP Bob Kahn and then talks briefly about SETI and the role which collective computing is playing these days in crunching the world’s problems. About SETI he jokes ” Maybe the reason we are searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence is that we didn’t find any here on Earth”

His formal presentation began with him talking about some stats. He tells us that there are almost 500-600 million servers on this planet and that the number of Internet users has jumped from 50 million in 1997 to over a Billion in 2006 where Asia with 56% of the world’s total population brings in almost 389.4 Million Internet users with a total penetration of 16.6%. He then talks with dismay about how there are a Billion people in Africa and yet there are only 32.8 Million users in the entire continent.

Mobile Devices: Then he talks about mobile devices where he lets us know that there are almost 2.5 Billion mobile users which far exceed the number of laptops or desktops or servers out there. He then talks about the benefits of a mobile phone which is smaller, has a smaller keyboard and a smaller screen size all of which present their own unique challenges in delivering content and applications to such a mobile platform.

Current technology shaping the Internet — BroadBand

Vint Cerf then makes an interesting observation where he says that we are not sending as much as we are downloading which the basis of today’s internet. He lets us know that he a very strong proponent of symmetric broadband.

“Half of the traffic is Bit Torrent, and a lot of that may be video. It’s symmetric. As a user downloads a piece of a file, that piece is made available to others. The effect is that a user is pushing as much traffic as they pull. This does a funny thing to companies that offer ‘broadband service.’ Cable modems are asymmetric. DSL is the same. Symmetric service is competing with higher priced DS-3 and T-1 service. There’s a built in disincentive to create symmetric services, but as fiber capacities reach residential users, we will all want to push as much information as we pull. I’m not talking about people doing anything illegal. There’s a pressure from the edge for symmetry in the internet.”

Current Research problems being faced by Google

He then talks about the problems being faced by Google and the opportunities for everyone out there to come up with a solution by including the following as their dissertation topics…

a. Internet is not secure

b. Internet “Erlang” formulas

c. QOS debates(smart routers?) — debating whether the cost of charging for services and examining traffic would be more expensive than simply building more bandwidth.

d. Mobility, persistence(processes, convertions)

e. Multi homing — Multi-homing can be very effective for ensuring continuous connectivity — eliminating the ISP as a single point of failure — and it can be cost effective as well. However, your multi-homing strategy must be carefully planned to ensure that you actually improve connectivity for your company

f. Multipath routing — the concept of providing multipath routing at the naming level and supporting replicated sites. Also getting people thinking about multi-path routing algorithms should provide a good “safety valve”, just in case there should ever be valid military reasons for separating the Internet.

Vint Cerf adds in the comments

“Multipath routing actually is intended to increase the capacity between a pair of endpoints on the Internet,if there are in fact independent paths that could concurrently carry traffic between them”

g. Broadcast utilization

h. Mesh and Sensor networks

i. Scaling(of events) - IPVL — On scaling, IPv6 is intended to deal with increasing number of endpoints on the internet, not so much scaling of events

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I never realized this striking similarity until I was searching for information about Vint Cerf for his upcoming Google Speaker Series. So while searching, I come across this interesting link on Jeffrey Kay’s blog. As shown in the picture below, he has an inset of Vint Cerf and the Architect and the resemblence is striking.

In the movie Matrix Reloaded where we come face to face with the Architect for the first time, we are told by the Oracle that he is the “father of the Matrix”. Dr. Vint Cerf is referred to as the “father of the Internet”. Although today would be the first time I will be meeting Vint Cerf, I saw a number of his videos and heard his podcasts and the similarity in their mannerisms and presentation style is very similar. I am guessing this is definitely intentional on part of the Matrix producers. 

This picture makes me go back and revisit the whole theme of the Matrix. The Internet is the Matrix. The Architect, the father of the Matrix is Dr.Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet. The virus the plagues us in the Internet, the spam everything is Agent Smith. The Oracle is our Firewall? As Neo points out “There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.”

Thanks to Jeff, I had to go and watch the movie Matrix Reloaded again on DVD although I must confess I skipped through the Neo-Superman scenes. Then I had the idea of posting the transcript between Neo (Keanu Reeves) and The Architect (Helmut Bakaitis). But,the advantage of Internet, thanks Father, is that there is a good possibility that someone had already done it.

Below is the full transcript of the conversation between Neo and the Architect from the movie Matrix Reloaded

The Architect - Hello, Neo.

Neo - Who are you?

The Architect - I am the Architect. I created the matrix. I’ve been waiting for you. You have many questions, and although the process has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably human. Ergo, some of my answers you will understand, and some of them you will not. Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also irrelevant.

Neo - Why am I here?
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Okay, this is one of those situations where I think I am at the right place at the right time. I am currently in India right now and from one of my buddies who works in Google, India, I came to know of this Speaker series by Dr. Vinton Cerf, one of the “fathers of Internet” along with Bob Kahn.

I promptly sent a request asking to be invited to this highly sought out meeting. I was asked to send information such as Name, email and other contact information besides Occupation, current role etc.

Google sent a reply back thanking me for my interest and told me I was in the queue. When I saw the disclaimer in the end, I wasn’t too sure of my chances of successfully getting in.

Disclaimer: - Everyone who registers with us does not necessarily get an invite to this event. You must satisfy the criteria for invitation.  The event will be held in Bangalore on the 21st of February and in Hyderabad on 23rd of February 2007.

Word later trickled in that Google had closed down the invites with estimations of less than 250 invites going out based on the seating capacity of the Marriott Hotel’s convention center seating capacity. However, after a wait of little over a week, I finally get the invite and get a chance to meet the vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google.

” A father speaks about his child’s past, present and future” was how the official invite was titled. One could guess that Vint Cerf was going to talk about Internet, Net Neutrality and maybe even enlighten us on “series of tubes” of Sen.Ted Stevens

I’ve been following the press releases coming out from Bangalore where Vint Cerf gave a similar presentation.  Cerf is predicting that mobile phones and not personal computers, will fuel the growth of the worldwide web as countries like India snap up millions of handsets monthly. The man widely recognised as the `Father of the Internet’ — he presided over its birth and co-wrote the protocol that underpins it — thinks the “baby” has grown too big for anyone to play nurse.

“It is a huge, new democratic opportunity and beyond any one agency’s political control,” says Vinton (Vint) Cerf, who is at present the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, even while remaining Chairman of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the agency that oversees and allocates “top level” Internet addresses.

India, a country of 1.1 billion people, alone is adding seven million mobile phone users a month. Worldwide there are 2.5 billion mobile phone users, whose numbers are growing rapidly in developing countries led by China and India, the world’s most populous countries, Mr Cerf said in his presentation.India, a country of 1.1 billion people, alone is adding seven million mobile phone users a month.

The company also wants to tap the talent of Indian engineers to innovate technologies and widen its range of services, Mr Cerf said. India is estimated to have 40 million people online, a meagre 3.5 per cent of its vast population, he said, adding Google will focus on local languages, culture, content and delivery of new business models to widen the reach of the internet.

Keep watching out this space for more. I will update this blog once I get a chance to meet Dr. Vint Cerf tomorrow with some pictures and more details about the speech.

I saw this on an RSS feed somewhere and went down to further investigate. This is definitely funny where the neutrality of Net Neutrality article on Wikipedia is disputed. While this is standard practice on Wikipedia where any disputed articles or hotly debated articles are branded under this category, the picture is definitely funny.