Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

January 21, 2010

Floor collapses at Weight Watchers meeting

Filed under: Funny News — Suramya @ 11:52 PM

Ok, I know this is politically incorrect but still damn hilarious. A group of 20 members from the local weight watchers in Växjö in southern Sweden gathered together over Christmas to compare the no if pounds lost by each.

Unfortunately for them their combined weight exceeded the tolerance levels of the floor at their meeting location and the entire floor collapsed. Thankfully no one was hurt during this, but this should give the members that little extra motivation to loose weight.

Source: Floor collapses at Weight Watchers meeting – Times Online.

– Suramya

January 20, 2010

List all machines connected to a LAN with additional details on each

Filed under: Knowledgebase,Security Tools,Tech Related — Suramya @ 12:15 AM

If you ever had to figure out how many systems are connected to a network and what IP’s they have then you will find this tip useful. It is also useful to identify any rouge machines on your network if you know how many systems are supposed to be there on that network. Like in case of my home network, where I know the exact no of machines.

There are multiple software out that, that allow you to do this. Some are free, some are very expensive. In my opinion the best one is nmap. It is free, fast and can be scripted.

To find all machines on my LAN (IP Range: 192.168.2.x) I just have to issue the following command:

nmap -sP 192.168.2.0/24

This gives an output like the following when I run it as a normal user:

suramya@Wyrm:~$ nmap -sP 192.168.2.0/24

Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2010-01-20 00:01 IST
Host 192.168.2.1 is up (0.0018s latency).
Host 192.168.2.5 is up (0.00018s latency).
Host 192.168.2.100 is up (0.00018s latency).
Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (3 hosts up) scanned in 2.93 seconds

When I run the same command as root, it gives me additional information that looks like:

Wyrm:~# nmap -sP 192.168.2.0/24
Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2010-01-19 23:50 IST
Host 192.168.2.1 is up (0.0015s latency).
MAC Address: 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX (Cisco-Linksys)
Host 192.168.2.5 is up.
Host 192.168.2.100 is up (0.011s latency).
MAC Address: 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX (Intel)
Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (3 hosts up) scanned in 3.00 seconds

In this case, as you can see nmap also gives me the MAC address of the machine. 192.168.2.5 is the machine I ran the scan from so I didn’t get any information on that one.

If you want additional details on a system you can issue the following command to get the system to try and identify the OS and services running in detail.

nmap -A 192.168.2.5

It gives an output that looks something like:

Wyrm:~# nmap -A 192.168.2.5
Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2010-01-19 23:52 IST
Interesting ports on 192.168.2.5:
Not shown: 995 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open ssh OpenSSH 5.1p1 Debian 8 (protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey: 1024 xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (DSA)
|_ 2048 xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (RSA)
80/tcp open http Apache httpd 2.2.14 ((Debian))
|_ html-title: Index of /
139/tcp open netbios-ssn Samba smbd 3.X (workgroup: WORKGROUP)
445/tcp open netbios-ssn Samba smbd 3.X (workgroup: WORKGROUP)
631/tcp open ipp CUPS 1.4
Device type: general purpose
Running: Linux 2.6.X
OS details: Linux 2.6.17 – 2.6.28
Network Distance: 0 hops
Service Info: OS: Linux

Host script results:
additional information on the server

Hope you also find this useful.

– Suramya

January 19, 2010

Flaw gives AT&T users access to other user’s Facebook accounts

Filed under: Computer Security,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:23 PM

Recently a Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from their mobile phones and wound up in a strangers’ accounts with full access to their private information. All of them were using AT&T as their data provider. On the face of it, it seems pretty scary.

How prevalent this flaw is and what other services are affected is something that is still unknown. As far as I can tell no technical details have been released to explain this issue either by Facebook or AT&T. So I am going to speculate on various ways this might have happened.

1. A flaw in Facebook caused the system to falsely authenticate users based on their IP address even without an authentication cookie present.

This could happen, however if this was the case a lot more people would have hit it by now especially on networks that have their IP address allocated dynamically.

So Probability of this being the reason: Very Low

2. AT&T is using a proxy caching server and the authentication cookies used by Facebook was stored on the proxy server.

If a proxy server was being used by AT&T then when a request went out to Facebook it would check for a valid session using the server’s IP address and then check for an authentication cookie on that server. If one existed the user would then be authenticated even though this time someone else was trying to access their Facebook account.

The problem in this case would be the incorrect configuration of their Proxy server by AT&T.

So Probability of this being the reason: Very High

3. Can’t think of any other reason… Though there could be a ton of other explanations. Just can’t think of any of them right now.

Caching servers are well and good but if they are not correctly configured they have the capacity of causing a lot of havoc and security issues. So I am off to read up more about proxies and caching servers and how to configure them correctly.

Source:

FOXNews.com – Network Flaw Causes Scary Web Error.

– Suramya

January 18, 2010

Delhi Fog

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:53 PM

A lot of you (or atleast some of you) must have heard people complaint about the Delhi Fog and how much trouble it causes for flights, trains and cars and atleast some percentage of you must be thinking: “Whats such a big deal about a little fog?”

I went to pickup Vinit from the Metro station today, which is about 2 min drive from my place. It took me about 10 mins to get there and this was how the roads looked when I left home.

Delhi Fog
Road to the Metro

BTW, this is not as bad as yesterday, so yeah the visibility gets even worse sometimes. This is why people from Delhi complain about the fog.

– Suramya

January 17, 2010

Artist creates Mosaic image of the Virgin Mary using Easter eggs

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 8:36 PM

Ukrainian artist Oksana Mas used 15,000 hand painted Easter eggs to create a mosaic depicting the Virgin Mary on a wall of the Saint Sophia cathedral in Kiev. Now that is some amazing artwork. The traditional Easter eggs are made of wood and painted in the traditional Ukrainian style.

Virgin Mary Mosaic

Source: ZuZu Top.

– Suramya

January 16, 2010

Books. Books and more books

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:49 PM

I read a lot and I buy a lot of books. Today I placed an order for limited edition copy of ‘VENGEANCE OF RAVANA’ which is Book #7 and ‘SONS OF SITA’ which is Book #8 in The Ramayana Series by Ashok Banker. Both of which won’t be out in market before the end of the year. Actually Book #8 is supposed to be published in 2011! 🙂 Yay Me!

I ordered the books directly from the author’s site and the process was painless. I just had to give my address, email & name and the books will be shipped to me directly. The best part was that the payment wasn’t made by credit-card during the purchase.

I got a separate email from the author with the payment instructions. The author prefers that the money be sent directly to his bank account and this can be done online or from a cash counter at his bank. The reason I like it is because this way all the money I am giving for the book is actually going to the author as the only cost to them is the cost of shipping and there are no payments to be made to the bank for maintaining a payment portal (Which can be expensive, depending on traffic etc).

BTW, Copies of Book #7 are still available as of the time of this writing so if you are interested check it out and international buyers can purchase the book using a credit card as usual.

In other news a lot of nice books are releasing soon and I can’t wait for them to come out. Here are a few along with their publication dates:

Book Name Author Name Publication Date
[Outcast Season 02] Unknown Rachel Caine Feb. 3, 2010
[Hollows 08] Black Magic Sanction Kim Harrison Feb 23rd, 2010
[Death’s Daughter 02] Cat’s Claw Amber Benson Feb 23rd, 2010
[Safehold 04] A Mighty Fortress David Weber March 2010
[Paksenarrion] Oath of Fealty Elizabeth Moon March 2010
[Mercy 05] Silver Borne Patricia Briggs March 30, 2010
[Dresden 12] Changes Jim Butcher April 2010
[Raven 05] SpellCrash Kelly Mccullough June 2010
[Princess 03] Red Hood’s Revenge Jim C. Hines July 6, 2010

– Suramya

January 15, 2010

Is Having your own site passe?

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:06 PM

I have been updating the site with new information and yesterday I was updating the hotlinks section. One of the sub-sections there is where I list websites of my friends and while I was going through the list of friends I realized that only 6 of them have personal websites that are currently live and have content. In 2000-2002 when I last searched this list was a lot longer.

That started me thinking, is having your own site passe? In the late 90’s and early 2000’s a lot of people had their own sites but now most of them are abandoned. Why is that? Is it because most people have moved their online presence to social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook?

Even blogging amongst my friends seems to have gone done. Earlier it seemed like pretty much most of my friends had their own blog but now 90% of them haven’t been updated in years. Why is that? Did they run out of things to say or is updating their status on Facebook serving the same purpose.

What do you think?

– Suramya

January 13, 2010

Sleeping Skills

Filed under: Humor — Suramya @ 11:17 PM

While surfing the intrawebs I found the image below that allows you to quantify and classify your sleeping skills.

According to the chart I have achieved a catlike transcendence 🙂 Which proves that I do sleep a lot. Although I also stay awake a lot but once I go off to sleep I need something like this to make me functional again:

Source: Sleeping Skills

– Suramya

January 12, 2010

TinyOgg: Convert flash videos to ogg for viewing and download

Filed under: Interesting Sites,Linux/Unix Related — Suramya @ 11:37 PM

The site TinyOgg.com which was launched recently allows you watch, listen and download Flash-based videos without the need to use Flash technology. What this means is that you can use the site to convert videos from sites like YouTube to .ogg files and download them to your local computer.

Now you might be asking what the problem is using Flash to view the video directly, instead of converting it to ogg. Here’s what the site FAQ has to say about this:

What’s the advantages of choosing Ogg over Flash?
Choosing Ogg over Flash is both an ethical and technical question. We all want our computers to do better, so here is how our computers are better with Free Formats:

1. You will be able to enjoy the media “natively”; there is no need to install any plug-in or add-on to your standard-friendly browser.
2. You will not need to load heavy and possibly unsafe scripts, which helps with speed and stability.
3. You will support a free, open Web where no corporation monopolizes an important technology, such as video.
4. You will enjoy more control over your digital life with Free Formats and Open Standards because no corporation decides what you can and cannot do with the files you have.

Personally I think that flash is a very resource intensive way to view videos. I tried it on a couple of videos and it worked great. Plus using this site lets me download the video to my local system without hassle. One of the other things I liked is that you can have the script download the highest available quality of the video automatically. So if a HD version of the video is available it will download it instead of the regular version.

The whole site is built on top of Free Software. Currently the site only supports YouTube but support for other service is under development.

Check it out. You might like it 😉

– Suramya

– Suramya

January 11, 2010

What to do and what not to do to prevent copying/hotlinking on sites

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 9:31 PM

Some of the sites out there seem to think that all their visitors want to do is copy their stuff and they come up with some really irritating idea’s to try to prevent the text/images from being copied.

One such method that I hit today is used by The CartoonistGroup.com site. They have put a javascript mouse over that changes the cartoon to another image that says “CopyNo.com” in a crossed circle.

It took me literally 5 seconds to copy the cartoon to my system inspite of the ‘protections’. (Select the pic, Right-click, choose view selection source, and copy the url, open in a new window) All it did was annoy me. If you think thats technical, just turn off java-script in your browser and the protection is off…

A lot of people like moving their mouse over what they are reading and its quite irritating to have the pic change to another when you are scrolling down…

If you treat all your visitors like criminals who are barely held in check from ripping you off then they are infact going to go out of their way to do it. If you treat them like normal people maybe one in a 1000 will copy the cartoon and post it on their site. And you know what. It doesn’t matter. Its free publicity for the artist and site.

I do agree that hotlinking is not that great. In that case they are using your bandwidth and you are not getting any benefit out of it. However then also you have other options, myconfinedspace.com/ for example allows you to hotlink to images on their server but puts a watermark on them. If you visit the site directly then you don’t see any watermarks on the images .

Putting a watermark on a image when its copied is ok, putting silly java-script/other useless technologies is not ok. Worse comes to worse I can always take a screenshot of the page and then cut paste the image from that and use it. Think about it.

You are not preventing people from copying your stuff. All you are doing is annoying your customers.

– Suramya

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