Cyber Drop

I was trying to complete this article by last week itself but due to some considerations, I could not. Anyways, I am done with it by last night.

Few reasons why you should read it…

• You don’t know what Phishing is
• You want to know why it is called as PHising
• You know what Phishing is but never tried to Phish anyone. i.e., you do not know how to implement Phishing
• You know what Phishing is, You even know how to implement it but you do not know how to grab your victims.

…and the most important reason is you are so bored that you are even ready to play spit balls :)

Download your FREE copy of Phishing 101 from any of the following mirrors:

Phishing 101 - Rapidshare
Phishing 101 - Badongo
Phishing 101 - Apooz
Phishing 101 - Megaupload
Phishing 101 - Flyupload

This is my Initial draft. I might update it down the line. As usual, any feedback/suggestions/corrections are more than welcome. If you only want to criticize, make sure it is constructive :)

PS: If in case all of these mirrors are exhausted and if you are so interested to know what have I written, drop me a mail at g33kyf3m at gmail dot com. I might consider re-uploading it again.

Think that you have an application which is dependent on the Internet access and for some unknown reason(s) it is not working the way how it should be.
How could you say who the problem is with? Is it because the application is faulty or there is some connectivity issue at the broadband ISP's side or is it your PC causing the trouble or is it some other thing?

One of the ways to find a solutions to this is MLab. MLab is the collective creation of Google Inc., the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and academic researchers.

MLab (Measurement Lab) is a free set of web tools to help anyone determine if their net connection is blocking or throttling BitTorrent or otherwise limits their bandwidth. For now, they have three servers: Network Diagnostic Tool, Glasnost and Network Path & Application Diagnosis and they are getting popular.

Check MLab for more!

This is one of the cool services I came across lately.

There are cases when you want someone to mail you but do not want to give your e-mail ID out. What would you do? If it were me, I would have created yet another e-mail ID and let it expire once the job is done. (Now, I seriously wonder why I called it “cool” in the prologue! Mess happens, you see Lol)

Anyways, this Whisper Me (I love the way they chose its extension. Not something unusual though) is the so called “cool” service which I was referring to.

Now, let’s see how it works…

Man, do you really need me to explain that stuff? It’s all self-explanatory. Just hop onto that site and give it a try.

As we all know, there are a plenty of operators involved in Google search which already is documented here.

If you are quite frequent to the Google Image Search, you would have noticed that we already have the drop down list box in Google’s Image Search as shown below.


The constraint with this operator is that we can use it only to choose either of the options from the drop down list box. What if you want to search for an image with a specific dimension? Don’t ask me why one would want to do it anyway. Finding wallpapers is one instance, to say. This is when we need a dedicated operator and guess what? Google has it already but has not documented it yet. Never mind, Google always have had heck a lot of hidden features J

imagesize is the operator and here is how you do it…

1. Go to Google Image Search Page (images.google.com)
2. Type imagesize:1280x1024 filetype:jpg Nature (imagesize is the operator. 1280x1024 is the dimension and filetype is another operator to mention the image extension like JPG, BMP, etc and finally Nature is the name/theme of the images I am looking for)

You do love what you see, don’t you? I would suggest you to try with various descriptions especially like space, cars, design, etc you can even use this to find the movie posters e.g., Spider man, Harry potter, etc.

That is all! Now spend some time in picking new wallpapers for your messy desktop :)

This might be useful for you if you are planning to take up the Civil Services Exam but not really sure of where to start from.

Exam Pattern

• The Civil Services Examination will consist of two successive stages.
• 450 marks - Civil Services Preliminary Examination(Objective Type)for the selection of candidates for the Main Examinations and
• 2300 Marks - Civil Services Main Examinations (Written and Interview) for the selection of candidates for the various Services

More at http://ias.priyatu.com/content/scheme.htm

The Preliminary Examination (Objective Type) for selection of candidates for the Main Examination is held in the month of May.

The Civil Services Main Examination is held in the months of October/November.

Eligibility

• A candidate must have attained the age of 21 years and must not have attained the age of 30 years on 1st August, of that year.i.e; he must have been born not earlier than 2nd August that year. And not later that 1st August of that year.
• The upper age limit prescribed above will be relax-able.
• The candidate must hold a degree of any of Universities incorporated by an Act of the Central or State Legislature in India or other Educational institutions established by an Act of Parliament or declared to be deemed as a University Under section 3 of the University Grant Commission Act, 1956, or Possess an equivalent qualification.
  

No. Of Attempts






Combination of Optional papers (for Prelim & Main Exams) that are NOT allowed

• Political Science & International Relation and Public Administration
• Commerce & Accountancy and Management
• Anthropology and Sociology
• Mathematics and Statistics
• Agriculture and Animal Husbandry & Veterinary Science
• Management & Public Administration
• Civil Engineering, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering – not more than one Engineering subject.
• Animal Husbandry & Veterinary Science and Medical Science.

Exam Fee

Examination Fee: Rs. 40/- (Rupees Forty only). No fee for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, etc. Fee should be paid through Central Recruitment Fee Stamps only.

Free IAS & IPS Coaching Centers

http://manidhanaeyam.com
http://www.civilserviceindia.com/special-coaching-classes/index.html

Paid Coaching Centers

http://www.civilserviceindia.com/ias-coaching/centers-in-chennai.html

Some free resources

http://www.civilserviceindia.com/subject/General-Studies/free-books/index.html
http://www.onestopias.com/

We all are eligible for taking up the IAS exam. Why not try for it? Not necessarily to become IAS but at least to know how competitive it is. The recent statistics shows, nearly 4 Lac people have applied for the last year IAS exam out of which only 3 Lac people appeared. Only Technical knowledge is not enough, to know what kind of questions will be asked (if in case we make it to the Interview), check

If you are planning for Six Sigma Certification, you might find this mail useful then. Instead of writing as paragraphs I have broken down into simpler points below.

• Unlike Microsoft, Red Hat, Oracle, Six Sigma certification is NOT provided by any single vendor.
• Being Six Sigma certified is all about – taking up the training, clearing the exam conducted at the end of the training and implementing it in your project. (Note: You can NOT take up the certification without attending the training like how you do for SCJP, OCA, etc. The certification is a part of the training or vice versa)
• There are a lot of training centers all over the world that provides both the training & certification. As there is NO single recognized vendor for Six Sigma certification, it is advisable to join a reputed institution and be certified from them. (Remember – better goodwill of the training center only will help you in better recognition of the certificate)
• The two level of Six Sigma Certification are – Green Belt (sometimes referred to as Yellow belt), Black Belt.
• Yellow/Green Belt – Attend 4-5 days training (conducted only on working days and not on weekends, so plan it accordingly. It however might vary from one training center to the other). At the end of the training you will be tested in which you are expected to score 70%. If you clear the test with 70%, you then will be provided a Six Sigma Certificate. If you fail to clear then you will only be given a ‘Green Belt Program Participation” certificate.
• Black Belt - The same said above for Green Belt holds good for the Black belt too. It’s just that to be a Black belt certified person, you are expected to do a project and implement the strategies you learned as a part of the Black belt training program. Once after you complete the training + take up the exam + implement them in a project, you will be certified as Six Sigma Black Belt.
• There are many institutes providing this training + certification; but as I mentioned in point 3, you need to go only for the most recognized one. In India , KPMG and Benchmark are considered to be the top 2 institutes. These two institutes have their branches in Chennai too. Fortunate enough, isn’t it?
• From what I have heard from KPMG & Benchmark, they are charging Rs. 22,500 + tax for Green belt (yes, they both charge the same amount, so choose the one which you feel comfortable with) and it is just a 4 days class (9AM to 5PM) at the end of which you will have an exam.
  
  Contact Details:
  
  KPMG
  KPMG House
  No.10, Mahatma Gandhi Road
  Nungambakkam
  Chennai - 600034
  Phone: +91 44 3914 5000
  Website: http://www.in.kpmg.com/sixsigma/Green%20Belt%20program.asp
  
  Benchmark Six Sigma 
  Chennai Citi Centre,
  Level 6, 10/11, Dr.Radhakrishna Salai,
  Chennai - 600 004, India
  Tel: +91-93806 15163
  E-mail: chennai@benchmarksixsigma.com
  Website: http://www.benchmarksixsigma.com/
  

In my earlier post, we saw what is UNIX. In this article, we will be discussing about Linux.

UNIX & Linux - Sounds so rhyming, Isn’t it?

Well, are Linux and UNIX one and the same?
If not, in what ways do they differ?
Why should they be different at all?
Is Linux free?

Slow down, we will surely be discussing all about this shortly…

The UNIX days

Let’s first see how Linux came into existence. As we discussed in my other post, UNIX already had a strong position in the server market and was especially strong in universities during 1990. Most universities, computer science students wanted to run UNIX on their own computers as well. Unfortunately, by that time, UNIX had become commercial and rather expensive.

OS Exposed

MINIX appeared to be a solution and also a cheap alternative. It however could not be called as a totally perfect flawless operating system. It can not be, as it was created for students. Andrew S. Tanenbaum, who wrote MINIX from the scratch has even wrote a book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation'. If you ever get to have a copy of that book, you sure will also be having 12,000 lines of code, written in C and assembly language. As you guessed, this book has dragged the attention of all the computer students who aspire to know the in and outs of an operating system. Linus Torvalds is one amongst.

Linux born


Linus Torvalds was using UNIX at his university of Helsinki and he wanted something similar to Unix at his home PC. As UNIX wasn’t free, he started out with Minix. He still felt that he wanted something more powerful than Minix and sooner started the project of writing down his own OS and named it Linux (I read somewhere that Linus initially was planning to name his OS as Freax. I wonder why).

GNU Linux

Linux however itself was only the kernel of an operating system. If in case you are not sure what a Kernel is, the kernel is the part that makes all other programs run. It implements multitasking, and manages hardware devices, and generally enables applications to do their thing. All the programs that the user (or system administrator) actually interacts with are run on top of the kernel - CLI (or shell) is an example.

Linus did really not write these programs all by him. He adopted the existing versions of the application and integrated them all. From time to time he was also updating his kernel to support a wide variety of new applications/programs.

Most of the critically important system software, including the C compiler, came from the Free Software Foundation's GNU project. GNU expands out to GNU is NOT UNIX was started in 1984 (the year when I was born, I am glad Lol). The main objective of the GNU project was to develop a complete Unix-like operating system which is completely free. GNU's kernel wasn't finished (now GNU have their own kernel as well) and so GNU is used with the kernel Linux. To credit, GNU, most of the people refer Linux as GNU/Linux.

Development of Linux

During the 1992 and 1993, the Linux kernel collected many of the useful and critical features to make it a better replacement for UNIX. That included TCP/IP networking, a GUI (called as the X system), etc. The version 1.0 of Linux kernel was released by March 1994. Since then, the kernel went through a number of updating and enhancement which made it further stable.

Various flavors of Linux

Like Unix, Linux also have various flavors. Red Hat Linux, IBM’s AIX, Sun Microsystems’ Solaris, Debian, Mandrake, SUSE, well they really are a lot. Even though there are various flavors you will find a lot of similarities. Every one is not specialist to compile the kernel and start everything from the scratch to get their OS up and ready for running. That is when these vendors came into picture. Vendors like Red hat, Sun Microsystems will do all the necessary basic things for you and get the OS up and ready in the .iso format which you can directly burn onto a CD and install in your system. They also provide updates and support which obviously is not going to be free. :)

Actually, I wanted to give a brief overview on what Linux is & history and I very well know that I have not mentioned many of the great contributors without whom the Linux would not exist today. If you are too keen, you can check out the Detailed Linux History. If you would like to hear it from the author, check out the mails chains from Linus Torvalds. You would get nothing technical there, I mind you. :)

If you are a M$ users, keep your windows out and let the air in. Try Linux once. You might like it. I am NOT advertising or trying to pull M$ users to Linux. Windows has it's own advantages and so is Linux. Also, It is not that Linux will gain popularity only if you start using it. Let's face it... Linux already is booming and been recognized as one of the most secured and best operating system. Almost every institution and industry has started to adopt Linux. So, Use it if you want to experience it. Get to know yourself why is Linux so popular and you know what? GNU/Linux is user friendly. It just is picky about who its friends are :)

	Is
	Is not speaking
	Is speaking

You might be thinking it is "Is not speaking" but the correct answer is "Is speaking".

Sometimes words like not, just, never, only, and always appear inside the verb phrase. These words are adverbs, not verbs

Have you ever heard of the preprocessor operators "Stringize" (denoted as #) and "Token Pasting" (denoted as ##)?

If you know this already well and good but shame.. I learnt abt this only today and hence sharing.... Oh well, It's better late than never :)

"Stringize"

The operator # indicates that the following argument is to be replaced by a string literal; this literal names the preprocessing token that replaces the argument. For example, consider the macro:

#define display(x) show((long)(x), #x)

When the preprocessor reads the line

display(abs(-5));

it replaces it with the following:

show((long)(abs(-5)), "abs(-5)");

"Token Pasting" or "Token concatenation"

The ## operator performs ``token pasting'' - that is, it joins two tokens together, to create a single token. For example, consider the macro:

#define printvar(x) printf("%d\n", variable ## x)

When the preprocessor reads the line

printvar(3);

it translates it into:

printf("%d\n", variable3);

PS: In the past, token pasting had been performed by inserting a comment between the tokens to be pasted. This no longer works.

You all must be knowing about the Windows shortcut keys, yeah? The one which triggers the START button and other such shortcut keys.

There are few cases when you feel this Windows key and its shortcut keys are bloody annoying. For instance, say you are playing some full screen games and if you tend to press the Windows key often by mistake then it sure is annoying. Well, whatever the reason may be, our today's article will focus on how to disable the Windows key and here is how you do it...

Copy the the below content in your notepad and save it as a .reg file. Finally, double click on it and restart your system for this change to take effect.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,00,00,5b,e0,00,00,5c,e0,\
00,00,00,00

You will now face the shortcut keys problem no more. :)

If you are working for an EU (European) MNC, it is an added advantage to learn any of the EU languages to grab an onsite opportunity quicker; but which EU language to learn?

You might tend to say French; so was I thinking. A little statistical analysis about the most spoken EU language comes handy now. This might sound useless for a few, but learning a new language is not an easy task. You are going to spend your time, memory and cost on it. How would you feel when you passed out a particular language certification and then come to know that there are no much opportunities for that particular language? That hurts big time!

I am not sure if you know it or not, theoretically, Europe has nearly 30-40 major languages out of which 23 are official languages.

The seven most natively spoken languages in the EU ordered by the percentage of total European population:

1. 18% German
2. 13% French
3. 12% English
4. 12% Italian
5. 9% Spanish
6. 9% Polish
7. 5% Dutch

The list below shows the top eight European languages ordered by total number of speakers in the EU:

1. 51% English
2. 33% German
3. 28% French
4. 16% Italian
5. 15% Spanish
6. 10% Polish
7. 7% Russian
8. 6% Dutch

This makes German the most frequently spoken native language and English the most frequently second spoken language overall in the European Union.

So, if you are ever planning to learn any of the EU languages go for German. It has a huge scope when compared to other languages. You might ask me, “What if my company does not have any clients from Germany at all?” Let me tell you something, despite of the onsite opportunities in Germany, it needs huge number translators next to Japanese. FACT!! So, if not as an On-site coordinator, you sure have an opportunity as a translator.


So what are the German Certifications available in the market?

There are many Zertifikat Deutsch (ZD), the Großes Sprachdiplom (GDS), or the TestDaF. Do research a bit before you join one. However, Zertifikat Deutsch is a standardized widely accepted test and it has proven its validity over the years and is recognized as certification in many situations. Also, both the BULATS and the Zertifikat Deutsch für den Beruf (ZDfB) test a high level of language competency for business German.

German Coaching Classes:

Google - not for learning German as such but to find the German Coaching center at your nearest location. (You very well can learn German via Google. Google has it all but then humans might not be that capable)