140Mandak262Jamuna - Slashdot User

Submission + - JKRowling, Goblins and *IAA

Submitted by 140Mandak262Jamuna on Friday July 27, 2007 @09:30PM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: In the latest book, The Deathly Hallows by JKR I came across a very interesting passage. Don't worry, this is not a spoiler. It does not reveal any plot details.

"You don't understand, Harry, nobody could understand unless they have lived with the goblins. To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is its maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs."

"But if it was bought — "

" — then they would consider it rented by one who had paid the money. They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard. [snip] I believe he thinks, as do the fiercest of his kind, that it ought to have been returned to the goblins once the original purchaser died. They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft."

I thought it is remarkably similar to the way a slashdotter would describe the mind set of *IAA people about CDs and DVDs! Has JKR expressed any opinion about *IAA and its tactics?

Submission + - A bus built like a prius?

Submitted by 140Mandak262Jamuna on Thursday July 05, 2007 @11:34AM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Electric motors built into the hubs of car wheels can improve the efficiency of electric/hybrid vehicles, according to IEEE Spectrum.

The CEO of the company making such wheel-hub motors plugs thus: A motor housed inside a wheel hub can shunt up to 96 percent of the torque it generates directly to the patch of tire that touches the road, With a conventional drive train, roughly 20 percent of the power generated by the motor is lost to friction.

Hype and plugging aside, the company has actually built two buses that can run for 1 hour without using the diesels. It has two electric motors built into the hubs and has some pretty heavy duty batteries. In the stop-and-go city traffic the regenerative braking gives big boost to the efficiency. Still, these buses cost 250 K$ more each, and they save some 20 K liters of diesel a year or some 60 K$ a year.

IANAFinExprt but it looks like it is cost effective if the useful life of the vehicle is more than 5 years and we can assume faster than inflation rise of gas/diesel prices.

Submission + - AAPL bundles iPhone with iTunes

Submitted by 140Mandak262Jamuna on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @10:51AM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Apple says you need a iTunes account to use iPhone according to PC world . The article says: The move will allow Apple to create its own billing relationship with iPhone customers, rather than collecting payments for any iTunes purchases they make via the mobile operator. "It would be naive to imagine that Apple wouldn't leverage iTunes with iPhone," said Emma Mohr-McClune, senior analyst for wireless services in Europe at Current Analysis Inc.

Dont know what I hate more. Leveraging a near monopoly position in one area to muscle into other areas and reduce competition? Or the cell phone companies who charge an arm and length for trivial services like text messaging? Hope MSFT, AAPL and all the cellphone companies, *IAA and cable/sattelite providers will all fight an internecine battle to death. No it is not hope, it is a dream.

Submission + - Telcos reject Govt subsidy to serve rural areas!

Submitted by 140Mandak262Jamuna on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @10:15AM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Before you break out the champaigne bottles, please note the story is about Indian telcos. According to The Economist , the government put up a pool of money to subsidize expansion of mobile phones to rural India and invited bids from the mobile phone companies. Most companies are bidding zero, and one negative!. "But something rather odd happened in India: in 38 of the 81 regions on offer, many mobile operators bid zero. In other words, they asked for no subsidies at all. In 15 regions, India's biggest operator, Bharti Airtel, even offered to pay. As a result, barely one-quarter of the 40 billion rupees ($920m) available in subsidies is likely to be allocated." says the article. The article says the companies will still benefit by the subsidy because atleast some of the infrastructure will be paid for by the pool funded by Universal Service Funds, a kind of tax on mobile phone service elsewhere.

The article goes further to say that now the Governments of these devloping nations like Chile, India, Brazil etc are looking to subsidize/build district level (regions the size of counties in USA) wi-fi broadband. Contrast this with what the telcos are doing to rural America. They are arm-twisting the State governments to prohibit (slashdot) municipalities and rural counties from building WiFi networks to serve their communities.

Submission + - Internet curfew in the IITs

Submitted by 140Mandak262Jamuna on Wednesday March 21, 2007 @09:41AM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: IIT Bombay, one of the top Indian engineering schools, is restricting the internet access to its students, according to the BBC reports. It also reports that access restrictions has been in place in IIT Madras for more than a year now.

The restriction is simply cut off ALL internet access at night from the dorms. The school claims the 24/7/365 internet access is hampering academic performance, personality development and extra curricular activities. Though these are the "official" reasons, it appears there are other reasons too. Mr Prakash Gopalan, the Dean of Student Affairs, says, "one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students' computers to see that bad content dominated over good." The definition of good and bad are left as an exercise to the reader.

IIT-Delhi is watching Bombay. Kanpur and Karaghpur say that they will leave it to the students to practice prudent self restraint.

Submission + - USPS hires R2D2

Submitted by 140Mandak262Jamuna on Friday March 16, 2007 @10:00AM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: R2D2 is going to collect mail to commomerate the 30th anniversary of the release of star wars. USPS is also releasing a stamp to commomerate the event. USPS spokeswoman Anita T Bizzotto (yeah, that is the name, not Bizzare) said "It's a little teaser for the upcoming announcement and we decided to have a little fun with it,". As long as postal employees dont bring their light sabres to work ...

Submission + - Microsoft search default on Lenovo PCs

Submitted by 140Mandak262Jamuna on Wednesday March 14, 2007 @08:39AM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Lenovo has agreed to install MSN search toolbar as default search engine. The article also says more "Microsoft plans to announce more such partnerships in the coming months and has several in the works, Osmer said, declining to specify. Microsoft also may start packaging its search tool bar with some of its software downloads, he said."

Interestingly, compared to the last time when rammed Internet Explorer down the throat of all customers and vendors, this time the vendors seem to understand the real benefit of being "default browser" or "default search engine." The article says that Dell demanded its pound of flesh to install MSN as the default search engine.

I think the landscape (should have made a creative pun with netscape here) has changed a lot since the last browser war. Vendors know the deal. Customers seem to be more informed. Atleast in some circles people are noticing the deletrious effects of vendor lock. It is real or it is just an illusion created by the herd moving from one vendor lock to a different vendor lock? In this case from MSFT to GOOG?

Submission + - US DOT bans Microsoft?

Submitted by 140Mandak262Jamuna on Monday March 05, 2007 @06:22PM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: US Dept of Transportation has banned or atleast throttling back the upgrades to Vista, Office2007 and IE7.

DOT chief technology officer Tim Schmidt says the Transportation Department hasn't ruled out upgrading its computers to Windows Vista if all of its concerns about the new operating system — the business version of which was launched late last year — can be resolved. "We have more confidence in Microsoft than we would have 10 years ago," says Schmidt. "But it always makes sense to look at the security implications, the value back to the customer, and those kind of issues."

To me it looks more like a ploy to wangle a better price from MSFT than a serious attempt to break the vendor lock and move to a truly interoperable Info System. Even then, here is a Govt bureaucrat who is trying to save money instead of finding ways to waste it. So let me propose three cheers to Mr Schmidt on that account alone.

Submission + - How to thwart phishers?

Submitted by 140Mandak262Jamuna on Saturday November 04, 2006 @10:52AM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Vanguard mutual fund is using a two step login process, where the user gives the username, and a password page previously customized by the user appears. Defeating this would require the phishing site to present a fake login screen, accept the user name, present it to Vanguard and fetch the customized password screen and present it to the potential victim. I dont know if they have any more secret technology to thwart this.

Yahoo is trying to promote an idea called sign in seal to help its users spot phish more easily. It is a cookie based system with a cached image in Yahoo servers that appears on the log in screen. To defeat it the phishing site has to retrieve the cookie from the user and present it to a genuine yahoo login server and fetch the sign-in seal, and then present it to the victim. Dont know how easy/tough it would be.

I think there is a mathematical proof somewhere that a true man in the middle phish attack could not be thwarted at all. But one simple thing that comes to my simple mind is to use tracert to make sure that the packets do not go to/through strange territories.

Please dont get me wrong. Atleast Yahoo and Vanguard are thinking about phish attacks. Most other companies, sadly, still present a simple username password screen. Schwab, two of my banks, Gmail, Citicards, Vonage... all of them are using easily spoofable login screens. What would happen when the phishers graduate to phoned phishes with spoofed caller id using VOIP?

My question to /.tters is, "what can these financial companies do to help the general public spot phishes more easily?"

Submission + - Firefox flaw a joke?

Submitted by 140Mandak262Jamuna on Tuesday October 03, 2006 @11:05AM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Security Focus and another site Heise Security UK are reporting that the much publicized Firefox flaw is really not a flaw at all and that the whole thing is a joke.

It is quoting Mozilla developer blogs The presentation was intended mainly as a joke, Spiegelmock said in the statement, in which he apologized. "The main purpose of our talk was to be humorous," the 19-year-old researcher said in the statement. "As part of our talk we mentioned that there was a previously known Firefox vulnerability that could result in a stack overflow ending up in remote code execution. However, the code we presented did not in fact do this, and I personally have not gotten it to result in code execution, nor do I know of anyone who has."

Could we get a slashdotter who reads Mozilla developer blogs to confirm it? Security hole claimed without proof, reported without verification ...

Submission + - MSFT: "No one can be this clever"!!!

Submitted by 140Mandak262Jamuna on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @02:59PM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Microsoft not only released a patch for the FairUse4WM hack extremely fast and out of cycle, but it is going after the developer of FairUse4WM. The claim, as far as I can tell, is "No one can be this clever. So you must have stolen our source code." Can such a logic be sustained in a court? Is it any different from Intelligent Design supporters arguing, "We can't figure out how this. So there must be an intelligent designer".

Further, the article says that "Microsoft realised from the start that its DRM code would be a prime target for hackers so it designed the code to make security updates far easier to develop than is the case with Internet Explorer, for example." But everyone and his brother knows that IE has been attracting hackers like honey attracts ants, and it has always been claiming that IE gets attacked more than other software. Then what possible excuse it can come up with for not patching IE as fast as it did WMP?

Submission + - Fox that ate one too many burritos!

Submitted by 140Mandak262Jamuna on Friday September 22, 2006 @02:20PM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Why people managing some hot software like Firefox would select such a dumb logo? Will join Chevy Nova and other such inaptly named/logoed ideas? http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34 574

Submission + - Enhanced login

Submitted by 140Mandak262Jamuna on Tuesday August 29, 2006 @11:53AM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Most banking, mutual fund, and brokerage sites use very simple username+password screens to login. They are vulnerable to phish attacks and key logging etc. Recently Vanguard introduced its enhanced login screen. Basically you select a special "security image" from a list of 100 such images. Then everytime you login, before prompting for the password this image is shown. Thus it offers some protection against mass mailed phish attack.

I was wondering what other simple things they can do to improve the security of login process. I think they should allow me to customize my login screen. Type in the user name and they should take me to a page I had previously customized. With my own background colors, fonts, images uploaded by me. They should also show the last two successful login date/time, last two failed login with timestamp etc.

What else could they do? Could they tracert my IP address and refuse login if any of the hops go outside USA? But none of these will protect against keystroke loggers. What to do about them? Can we really hold the bank site responsible if the dumb user's computer gets hacked and keystroke loggers are installed? Or if they use unencrypted wifi connections to log in and get snooped on?

Submission + - Gmail locks horns with Outlook

Submitted by on Sunday August 27, 2006 @09:51PM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: So it is official. One of the most common complaints from savvy /.ers about services by Google, like gmail, Writely etc was that "It is nothing. No corp is going to trust its private mail and docs to a thirdparty like Google. Especially one that is scanning and storing the emails".

And other equally savvy /.ers responded, "yeah, true, but once gmail perfects how to serve mail and docs with a good client-server , it would sell the solutions to corporations. No data leaves the company. But all software installations and maintenance will be done in the servers by professionals. And office workers have to just know how to use a generic browser".

Well it is official. Washington post and Reuters are reporting that Google has made the first move. It is taking an aim at Outlook. Makes sense because gmail is the most mature and well debugged application Google has. And Outlook is one of the most entrenched products from MS in terms of vendor-lock. We can soon expect similar products based on Writely. And after debugging serving a city with Wi-Fi, it will bypass all the telcos and it will franchise out Wi-Fi for a city in a box.

Finally some real competion in the computers and communications arena! The users should be very happy.

Submission + - Open Offer by MS to help Mozilla port to Vista!

Submitted by on Tuesday August 22, 2006 @08:20AM

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Sam Ramji, Diro of the Open Sources lab of Microsoft has posted an open offer to mozilla/firefox to help it make sure FF runs fine on Vista. In Google groups. http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.plannin g/browse_frm/thread/622906b52581628e/a303e61ccb5c8 149#a303e61ccb5c8149 That was Aug 19, 3 PM.

Mozilla/FF has not responded yet, by Aug 22 7 AM. Should they? Is it a real genuine offer? Or should they be wary of G(r)eeks bearing gifts?

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