The official website of Cochin University of Science & Technology got defaced by crackers. I guess they’re trying their best to restore it. The crackers call themselves “ProgenTR JAWNAX TEAM”.
Happened to read this at Slashdot :
An anonymous reader notes that Comcast is offering a new 50-Mbps / 6-Mbps package for residential customers for $150, starting in Minneapolis-St. Paul and extending nationwide by mid-2010. The new service will use the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, which is nearing ratification. We’ve recently discussed Comcast’s BitTorrent throttling and promise to quit it, and their low-quality ‘HD’ programming. How attractive will $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon’s FiOS offerings?
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/04/03/1427227.shtml
This is crazy!!! And totally unfair! 
Here in India the fastest “broadband” that we can get is a 2Mbps ADSL connection that comes to around 500 rupees (excluding tax). And just compare prices. Makes my heart break I’ve heard that broadband services are better and cheaper (than in the US) in some other countries (Korea? Japan?).
I wish affordable Broadband comes to India. It isn’t like there is no market here for proper broadband. The demand is there, the supply is absent.
The International Organization for Standardization(ISO) has approved Microsoft’s OOXML as a standard.
ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats, has received the necessary number of votes for approval as an ISO/IEC International Standard.
Approval required at least 2/3 (i.e. 66.66 %) of the votes cast by national bodies participating in the joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, to be positive; and no more than 1/4 (i.e. 25 %) of the total number of ISO/IEC national body votes cast to be negative. These criteria have now been met with 75 % of the JTC 1 participating member votes cast positive and 14 % of the total of national member body votes cast negative.
http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1123
Lots of us in India were happy that BIS had decided to vote against OOXML. Short – lived happiness as it turns out.
It’s been a long time since I blogged. What made me come out of hibernation?
Demonoid, the popular BitTorrent tracker has been shut down. It says :
The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.
It’s come up on Slashdot and Digg. CRIA is apparently -
The Canadian Recording Industry Association is a non-profit trade organization that was founded in 1964 to represent the interests of American companies that create, manufacture and market sound recordings in Canada. The organization is based in Toronto.
CRIA is governed by a board of directors who are elected annually by CRIA members. To be eligible for election a candidate for the board must be among the chief executive officers of member companies of the organization. Graham Henderson (Universal Music Canada) is the current president of the CRIA.
according to the Wikipedia article. There are subsections in the article on the 1st Demonoid shutdown and the second Demonoid shutdown. Vandal edits (technically they’re not Vandal edits because policy says “Even harmful edits that are not explicitly made in bad faith are not considered vandalism. For example, adding a personal opinion to an article once is not vandalism — it’s just not helpful, and should be removed or restated.”) are already appearing in the Wikipedia 
( examples 1 , 2 ).
Down with CRIA.
My friend Arun recently blogged about Automounting filesystems in Linux from a Fedora perspective. For those of you who want an alternative method (especially Debian users), here goes…
I’ll explain how I did it – it’s much easier to understand from an example.
First of all, I used fdisk so I could know which were all the partitions in my system and what they were called.
debian-indraprastha:/home/anirudh# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytesDevice Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1912 15358108+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 1913 3960 16450560 f W95 Ext’d (LBA)
/dev/sda3 3961 4870 7309575 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 1913 3187 10241406 b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6 3917 3960 353398+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 3188 3916 5855661 83 Linux
Now take the first entry. That partition is called /dev/sda1 and is the C: drive on Windows. Now I use the mount command to mount the partition. Mounting means that I attach a physical device to a directory, so that the directory itself becomes the device. It’s a concept that you get used to once you are familiar with all this. To mount the partition, I need a mount point. This is any directory that I create.
debian-indraprastha:/home/anirudh# mkdir /disks/c
Now I mount /dev/sda1 to /disks/c
debian-indraprastha:/home/anirudh# mount /dev/sda1 /disks/c
You can check if it has been mounted using the df command.
debian-indraprastha:/home/anirudh# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 6.9G 4.7G 1.9G 71% /
tmpfs 253M 0 253M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda5 9.8G 7.9G 1.9G 81% /disks/d
/dev/sda7 5.5G 4.6G 702M 87% /disks/s7
tmpfs 10M 716K 9.4M 7% /dev
/dev/sda1 15G 13G 2.4G 84% /disks/c
See the last entry? That shows that /dev/sda1 (the C: drive) has been mounted on /disks/c. Its total size is 15 GB of which 84%(13GB) has been used and 2.4GB is available.
Now there’s a file called /etc/fstab that comes in very handy. This mounting business is temporary. It gets “unmounted” after I shutdown. I would like to automatically mount it each time. I do that by modifying the /etc/fstab file. The /etc/fstab file keeps static information about the filesystems(refer $man fstab). Another file that comes in handy is /etc/mtab. This file keeps info about all the devices that have been mounted. After I mount /dev/sda1, an entry is made in /etc/mtab automatically.
/dev/sda1 /disks/c vfat rw 0 0
Now I copy this line into my /etc/fstab, with some modifications.
/dev/sda1 /disks/c vfat auto,exec,rw 0 0
Now each time the system boots, that drive will be mounted automatically.
Now, suppose I don’t want it to be mounted now? I use unmount.
debian-indraprastha:/home/anirudh# umount /dev/sda1
To disable the mounting of the paritition automatically, just remove that particular entry from /etc/fstab or uncomment it.
Have fun 
I am back…
I couldn’t use the computer for a few days due to hardware failure. I called up the technician and he came in and took a look at the system. Turned out the RAM was loosely fixed on to the slot. Damn! And they charged me Rs.200 .
I keep shifting my computer this side and that because I keep switching between my headphones and speakers. There isn’t place in the front to plug in the headphones. So I’ve to move the system, remove the speaker pin at the back and insert the headphone pin. This rough shaking apparently has loosened the RAM from the slot and hence the problem.
Worst part is : I lost 200 bucks My father is not going to be happy about this.
Happy New Year to all…
I decided to celebrate the transition from the old to the new with a difference this time. I slept through it 
For the past few years I’ve been staying up till the clock rang 12. This time though I was sound asleep. Aah..what bliss!
I recommend that you try it yourself next time.
Happened to come across a pointer in Slashdot to a Wired article. From the article -
BERLIN — A security researcher has a devised a novel attack on online anonymity systems in which he literally takes a computer’s temperature over the Internet.
The attack uses a phenomenon called “clock skew” — the tendency for the precise clocks in modern computers to drift off of the correct time at slightly different rates, which can be affected by heat.
As I understand it, the basic premise goes like this. It seems possible to identify a computer based on clock skew. Clock skew is unavoidable although most digital systems try their best to reduce it. You change the temperature, you change the clock skew. So overload a particular server suddenly and there is a change in its clock. This means the time stored on that server also changes. Now use timestamps to find the server which has drifted off. This is not the entire story, read more at Wired.
This is a rather roundabout way of doing things. Not really the best way to do it, but what it does show is that such things are possible. Perhaps this concept might be useful in some other context. Personally, I don’t expect such attacks to come in anytime in the future. There are far simpler and effective ways and it doesn’t make sense to use such a complicated method.
Finally, they’ve done it. Reactions along expected lines almost all across the world I guess…
Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been executed by hanging at a secure facility in northern Baghdad for crimes against humanity
- BBC Report.
What this is going to do is make the situation in Iraq even worse. Something the International community would’ve clearly liked to avoid. Good luck to America now!
Welcome to Wired News’ 2006 Foot-in-Mouth Awards program. You, the readers, have sent us your picks for the lamest quotes from or about the world of technology during this eventful year. We have selected the “best” of those and present them to you now.Leading off with a stupid quote from President Bush might seem a little too easy, perhaps unfair, a bit like stealing candy from a blind kid or something. But in a year chockablock with moronic quips, obtuse observations and mind-boggling inanities, you still have to put Dubya front and center. He is, after all, the most powerful man in the world.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72320-0.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2
Wow! This is one “election” Pres. Bush deserves to win hands down. Congratulations Mr.Bush 
