Ajit Gaddam: TechNews and Security

Uber Hacker turned Security Expert Kevin Mitnick has a business card that definitely goes with his high profile image. Kevin Mitnick is now a professional computer consultant (doing business as Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC), and has co-authored two books on computer security: The Art of Deception (2002), which focuses on social engineering, and The Art of Intrusion (2005), focusing on real stories of security exploits.I would highly recommend “The Art of Intrusion” which I got when in the second year of my grad school in a security class of Dr. Richard Ford

Meanwhile, check out Mitnick’s business card filled with images of various lock picking tools … the art of “prying out information” definitely Kevin’s speciality. You can learn about Kevin Mitnick here

Absolutely love this picture. Check it out on a *nix console

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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 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?
Read the rest of this entry »

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.

A CAPTCHA (an initialism for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. A common type of CAPTCHA requires that the user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen.

Okay so I get the funniest thing in the mail today. A buddy of mine apparantly got this while he was associating his GMail Id with one of Google’s Orkut Service. He gets the CAPTCHA as “retard”

DeviantArt has created an awesome concept layout of MySpace incorporating a web 2.0 theme.

Check out the Current Design of MySpace vs

Concept layout of MySpace put forth by DeviantArt
Read the rest of this entry »

The supposedly indestructuctible slot machines, turns out are prone to failure like any other machine. The inquirer reports this Blue Screen of Death on a slot machine at the International Casino Exhibition in Earl’s court, London.

The machine was built by Italian Motherboard maker Zest, demonstrating its latest “high-reliability” computer designs. The machine was built on a 800MHz Celeron M processor and the 852/855 chipset with complicated RAS functionality built in. However the 22 large elctrolytic capacitors on the power circuit might be throwing off the viability of its design.