Friday, July 17, 2009

Twitter Too . . . For Hackers

Hackers are getting more creative in targeting certain companies and Twitter has recently discovered the consequences of such an attack. About a month ago, an administrative employee at twitter was targeted and her personal e-mail was hacked, according to a blog post today by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. The hacker used information in the e-mail account to access this employee’s Google Apps account, which contained a wide variety of Twitter documents from ideas to financial details. Today TechCrunch said it had received 310 confidential Twitter documents in a zip file from the hacker who calls himself Hacker Croll.

In the last few years, security experts have seen an increase in the amount of highly-targeted attacks. Unlike, say, massive spam campaigns designed to get employees to divulge personal information like bank accounts, these types of attacks involve hackers targeting anywhere from one to five employees within a company. The motive is to steal confidential information that the hacker will use to make a profit, says Patrik Runald, chief security advisor at F-Secure, a security firm. The types of organizations frequently targeted in these attacks are defense contractors, governments and non-profits with ties to Tibet, he says.

Many times, as in the Twitter incident, the target of the attack involves employees who are not in the executive suite because those employees often have access to information hackers can use, whether it’s blueprints or large databases of customer information. For example, at defense contractor Northrop Grumman, hackers often try to target the computers of employees in the contracts department because of their knowledge of the marketplace, said Tim McKnight, chief information security officer at the company in a recent interview with BusinessWeek.

After the Twitter incident first became public, some speculated about the quality of Google’s security but Biz Stone absolved Google Apps in his blog post. “This attack had nothing to do with any vulnerability in Google Apps which we continue to use,” he wrote. Instead, he wrote, the incident underscored the need for choosing strong passwords.

The best passwords have more than 8 or 9 characters and are comprised of alphanumeric characters, a combination of letters and numbers, says John Pirc, a former cybersecurity specialist for the CIA and current executive with IBM Internet Security Systems. But really, he says, this is a people issue in that employees often don’t practice good password safety and may use the same password for many different applications.

Yet, the incident does underscore some risks involved with cloud computing in the enterprise. Some have called for better security mechanisms. “With the Twitter data, hackers were able to take a password and log on anonymously from anywhere,” says Rich Marcello, president of the systems and technology business at Unisys. Now Unisys is working on a higher level of security that would essentially cloak the data that comes into its cloud and only users within certain communities logging in from certain locations would be able to see the information. It’s akin to how only certain characters who are members of a specific group in Harry Potter are able to physically see the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix. “If you can do that, even if there’s a password issue, there’s no way hackers can make any sense of the data,” says Marcello.

Companies also need to think about the kinds of information they’re putting in the cloud. While e-mail collaboration may be available over the Internet from reputable service providers with good track records in security, some applications are better left behind the firewall, says Dennis Quan, director of autonomic computing at IBM, who suggests private clouds for applications dealing with classified or confidential information.

“Part of the beauty of cloud computing is that users don’t need to understand the ins and outs of the technology they are using,” says Quan, adding, “This simplicity is great for consumers but can be dangerous for enterprises and governments.”

- From http://bit.ly/fFZ9i


Thursday, July 16, 2009

Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus


Handwriting:


Men: To their credit, men do not decorate their penmanship. They just chicken scratch.

Women: Women use scented, colored stationery and they dot the "i" with circles or hearts. Women use ridiculously large loops in the "b" and "g". It is a pain to read a note from a woman. Even when she's dumping you, she will put a smiley face at the end of the note.


Groceries:

Women: A woman makes a list of things she needs, then goes out to the store and buys those things.

Men: A man waits till the only items left in his fridge are half a lime and a beer. Then he goes grocery shopping. He buys everything that looks good. By the time a man reaches the checkout counter, his cart is packed tighter than the Clampett's car on Beverly Hillbillies. Of course, this will not stop him from going to the express lane.


Relationships:

Women: When a relationship ends, a woman will cry and pour her heart out to her girlfriends, and she will write a poem titled "All Men Are Idiots". Then she will get on with her life.

Men: A man has a little more trouble letting go. Six months after the break-up, at 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday night, he will call and say, "I just wanted to let you know you ruined my life, and I'll never forgive you, and I hate you, and you're a total floozy. But I want you to know that there's always a chance for us." This is known as the "I Hate You / I Love You" drunken phone call, that 99% of all men have made at least once. There are community colleges that offer courses to help men get over this need.


Sex:

Women: They prefer 30-40 minutes of foreplay.

Men: They prefer 30-40 seconds of foreplay. Men consider driving back to her place part of the foreplay.


Maturity:

Women: They mature much faster than men. Most 17-year old females can function as adults.

Men: Most 17-year old males are still trading baseball cards and giving each other wedgies after gym class. This is why high school romances rarely work out.


Magazines:

Men: Men's magazines often feature pictures of naked women. Men are turned on at the sight of a naked woman's body.

Women: Women's magazines also feature pictures of naked women. This is because the female body is a beautiful work of art, while the male body is lumpy and hairy and should not be seen by the light of day. Most naked men elicit laughter from women.


Bathrooms:

Men: A man has six items in his bathroom -- a toothbrush, shaving cream, razor, a bar of Dial soap, and a towel from the Holiday Inn.

Women: The average number of items in the typical woman's bathroom is 437. A man cannot identify most of these items.


Shoes:

Women: When preparing for work, a woman will put on a wool suit, then slip on Reebok sneakers. She will carry her dress shoes in a plastic bag from Saks. When a woman gets to work, she will put on her dress shoes. Five minutes later, she will kick them off because her feet are under the desk.

Men: A man will wear the same pair of shoes all day. Let's not talk about how many days he'll wear the same socks.


Cats:

Women: Women love cats.

Men: Men say they love cats, but when women aren't looking, men kick cats.


Children:

Women: A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments and soccer games and romances and best friends and favorite foods and secret fears and hopes and dreams.

Men: A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.


Dressing Up:

Women: A woman will dress up to: go shopping, water the plants, empty the garbage, answer the phone, read a book, get the mail.

Men: A man will dress up for: weddings, funerals.


Laundry:

Women: Women do laundry every couple of days.

Men: A man will wear every article of clothing he owns, including his surgical pants (the ones that were hip about eight years ago) before he will do his laundry. When he is finally out of clothes, he will wear a dirty sweatshirt inside out, rent a U-Haul and take his mountain of clothes to the Laundromat. Men always expect to meet beautiful women at the Laundromat. This is a myth perpetuated by reruns of old episodes of "Love American Style."


Eating Out:

Men: When the check comes, each man will each throw in $20 bills, even though it's only for $22.50. None of them will have anything smaller, and none will actually admit they want change back.

Women: When the girls get their check, out come the pocket calculators.


Mirrors:

Men: Men are vain and will check themselves out in a mirror.

Women: They are ridiculous; they will check out their reflections in any shiny surface: mirrors, spoons, store windows, bald guys' heads.


Menopause:

Women: When a woman reaches menopause, she goes through a variety of complicated emotional, psychological, and biological changes. The nature and degree of these changes varies with the individual.

Men: Menopause in a man provokes a uniform reaction - he buys aviator glasses, a snazzy French cap and leather driving gloves, and goes shopping for a Porsche.


The Phone:

Men: Men see the telephone as a communication tool. They use the telephone to send short messages to other people.

Women: A woman can visit her girlfriend for two weeks, and upon returning home, she will call the same friend and they will talk for three hours.

Richard Gere:

Women: Women like Richard Gere because he is sexy in a dangerous way.


Men: Men hate Richard Gere because he reminds them of that slick guy who works at the health club and dates only married women.

Madonna:

Same as above, but reversed. Same reason.


Toys:

Women: Little girls love to play with toys. Then when they reach the age of 11 or 12, they lose interest.

Men: Men never grow out of their toy obsession. As they get older, their toys simply become more expensive, silly and impractical. Examples of men's toys: little miniature TVs. Car phones. Complicated juicers and blenders. Graphic equalizers. Small robots that serve cocktails on command. Video games. Anything that blinks, beeps, and requires at least 6 "D" batteries to operate.


Cameras:

Men: Men take photography very seriously. They'll shell out $4000 for state of the art equipment, and build dark rooms and take photography classes.

Women: Women purchase Kodak Instamatics. Of course, women always end up taking better pictures.


Locker Rooms:

Men: In the locker room men talk about three things: money, football, and women. They exaggerate about money, they don't know football nearly as well as they think they do, and they fabricate stories about women.

Women: They talk about one thing in the locker room - sex. And not in abstract terms, either. They are extremely graphic and technical, and they never lie.


Movies:

Women: Every actress in the history of movies has had to do a nude scene. This is because every movie in the history of movies has been produced by a man.

Men: The only actor who has ever appeared nude in the movies is Richard Gere. This is another reason why men hate him.


Jewelry:

Women: Women look nice when they wear jewelry.

Men: A man can get away with wearing one ring and that's it. Any more than that and he will look like a lounge singer named Vic.


Conversation:

Men: Men need a good disagreement to get talking. For instance, "Wow, great movie." or "What are you, nuts? No REAL cop would have an Uzi that size."

Women: Women, not having this problem, try to initiate conversations with men by saying something agreeable: "That garden by the roadside looks lovely." "Mm hmm." Pause. "That was a good restaurant last night, wasn't it?" "Yeah." Pause. And so on.


Leg Warmers:

Women: Leg warmers are sexy. A woman, even if she's walking the dog or doing the dishes, is allowed to wear leg warmers. She can wear them any time she wants.

Men: A man can only wear leg warmers if he is auditioning for the "Gimme the Ball" number in "A Chorus Line."


Friends:

Women: Women on a girls' night out talk the whole time.

Men: Men on a boy's night out say about twenty words all night, most of which are "Pass the Doritos" or "got any more beer?"


Restrooms:

Women: Women use restrooms as social lounges. Women who've never met will leave a restroom giggling together like old friends. Women also go to the restroom in packs, at least two women at a time excuse themselves to use the restroom.

Men: Men use restrooms for purely biological reasons. Men in a restrooms will never speak a word to each other. And never in the history of the world has a man excused himself from a restaurant table by saying, "Hey, Tom, I was just about to take a leak. Do you want to join me?"

- From www



Tuesday, July 14, 2009

How Big is our Web ?

We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

How do we find all those pages? We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.

So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don't know; we don't have time to look at them all! :-) Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite -- for example, web calendars may have a "next day" link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a "new" page. We're not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what's a useful page, and there is no exact answer.

We don't index every one of those trillion pages -- many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn't very useful to searchers. But we're proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data.

To keep up with this volume of information, our systems have come a long way since the first set of web data Google processed to answer queries. Back then, we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google's index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.

As you can see, our distributed infrastructure allows applications to efficiently traverse a link graph with many trillions of connections, or quickly sort petabytes of data, just to prepare to answer the most important question: your next Google search.


- from official google blog



Friday, July 03, 2009

A Strange Coincidence !!!

On August 7 , 2009

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Amaze your friends, be the first to tell them

At 12hr 34 minutes and 56 seconds on the 7th of August this year, the time and date will be...

12:34:56 07/08/09


This will never happen in your life again??!!!!