Beginner techies guide to Internet World – part I

I was wondering what to write for this freshly created e-Magazine, and I decided it would be better to start from basics. I have more than 5 years of experience in the e-community, yet I’m a newbie compared to what the internet has to offer. In my opinion, our younger generations are misusing these resources mainly due to lack of awareness of its’ true value. Thus, I thought of providing the first few stepping stones on internet basics for beginner level users.

Internet Browsers

These are the basic software needed to browse the World Wide Web. There are numerous browsing software. The Microsoft Windows Operating System provides Internet explorer as the default browser and in most operating systems based on the Linux platform, Mozilla Firefox is used as the default browsing software. But I personally recommend Google Chrome since it has a quick search functionality (we can search the web from simply typing the search term on the address bar), large web page viewing space, a large collection of themes & plug-ins and there are many tools to support web developers and it’s softer than others. But it has some disadvantages too. It crashes often than others and needs more processing power when we use multiple tabs for browsing. Some Microsoft products aren’t compatible with other browsers so it’s advised to keep internet explorer updated and ready. And of course, Mozilla Firefox is ranked first according to

http://internet-browser-review.toptenreviews.com/

Search Engines

These are the websites you use the most. Most newbies to the internet do this mistake of typing the web address in search engines’ search bar since most of the homepages of browsers are set to search engines. Search engines are sites that help us to find data from the internet. All you have to do is just type what you need to find in a search engines’ search text box and it does the searching for us.

Google.com is the most widely used search engine and it has much functionality such as image, video and real time searching etc. “Googling” is the term referring to searching something from google.com. Other famous search engines like Yahoo.com and msn.com provide directory services, news and many other facilities. I prefer google.com to others for it’s capability to search for specific information.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine

Email accounts

There are many email providers. But for me, gmail.com is the best. Simply because we need Google accounts to use most of Google products such as Google docs, Google plus, Google maps and many more. And it also has chatting facilities, filtering and many features. If you are a beginner it’s better to create your email with gmail.com.

 

But of course there are many email providers. Ex: yahoo.com, live.com, and the newest one is phoenix mail which provides the facility to link many email accounts to one. But in my point of view, using too many email accounts is just a waste of time.

Social Networking sites

I don’t think any of you need guidance about social networking sites. But if you are not aware about them, just try facebook and google plus. These are the most common social networking sites in Sri Lanka. These websites facilitate chatting, photo and video sharing, status updates, personal information sharing and many more. Although there are many benefits of these, most people ruin those plus points by getting addicted to those sites.

Does social networking mean Facebook and Google plus? Is that all? No. As you can see in the image there are many social networking sites that help us to build better social interaction opportunities. I have done my seminar presentation on Social Network Analysis and you can get more information about Social Networks from that presentation from the link below.

http://bit.ly/ne8kHS

I think I have given a fair introduction from this post. I hope to post more about twitter, blogging and some other useful techie stuff in my next post. Please leave your comments and share your opinions about this post.

It will be a big encouragement to mold a better writer out of me.

Thank you for taking the time to read. Until my next post, Cheers….!!!

By - Rasika

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Convert your torrent into a direct download link…

 

 

Who doesn’t love to download from torrents? We mostly do not own any subscription of those high priced hosting sites like MegaUpload, HotFile, Rapidshare ect . And sometimes though there are most wanted torrents, there may not be enough peers. Then again, torrents can’t utilize our proper bandwidth.
So, do we have any method to handle these problems???

Yes, that is Torrific.com
What it does is to convert your torrent into a direct download link. So, you don’t have to worry about peers, data check, Time wasting or anything.
Here is the method,
Step (1)
Go to http://www.torrific.com/

 

Step (2)
Go to sign up and create an account. Just give E-Mail address and a password.

 

Then login to your Torrific account

Step (3)

In the text box above you can enter,

 

1) a .torrent URL like  releases.ubuntu.com/10.10/ubuntu-10.10-desktop-i386.iso.torrent
2) a torrent website URL like  www.clearbits.net
3) the keyword of a torrent you want to search Google for  linux

 

Then Click the button to initiate transmission
Now they will say how much time they need to provide our direct link of the torrent

 

After that time period you can download it directly.

 

 

And the most important thing is they provide resume capability for these direct links.
Try it now…..  This is great...  J

By :- Dilanga Abeyrathna.

 

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Ethical Hacking

What Is Ethical Hacking?

An Ethical Hacker is an expert hired by a company to attempt to attack their network and computer system the same way a hacker would.Ethical Hackers uses the same techniques and tactics as those used by illegal hackers to breach corporate security systems. The end result is the company's ability to prevent an intrusion before it ever occurs. Look At The Environment

We Now Have Open Discussions on the Internet Concerning:

·         Vulnerabilities

·         Exploits and Attacks

·         Bugs and Faults

·         Newer and More Sophisticated Attacks

·         Newer and More Sophisticated Hacker Tools

·         Attack Scripts and Penetration Tools Available to Anyone on the Internet

Ethical Hacking – Benefits

·         Penetration Tests are Designed to Identify

·         Vulnerabilities Before They are Exploited

·         Provides a Solid Understanding of What is Visible and Possibly Vulnerable

·         Preventative Measure – Can be Very Effective

·         Should Include a Remediation Phase

·         Correct Identified Vulnerabilities and Exposures

Popular Tools

·         Internet Scanner

·         Ethereal

·         Nessus

·         Nikto

·         Kismet

·         THC-Scan

·         Nmap

·         EtherPeek

·         SuperScan

·         QualysGuard

·         WebInspect

·         C4 (formerly called L0phtcrack)

Further More

An Ethical Hacker works to uncover three key pieces of information.

First, he determines what information an illegal hacker can gain access to. Next, he explores what an illegal hacker could do with that information once gained. Last, the Ethical Hacker ascertains whether an employee or staff member would be alerted to the break-in, successful or not.

Recent Google Search Results:

·         Hacker 12,500,000 Hits

·         Hacker Tools 757,000 Hits

·         Hacker Exploits 103,000 Hits

·         NT Exploits 99,000 Hits

·         Unix Exploits  139,000 Hits

·         Computer Vulnerabilities 403,000 Hits

·         Hacking NT 292,000 Hits

·         Hacking Windows 2000 271,000 Hits

·         Hacking Unix 390,000 Hits

·         Hacking Linux 1,290,000 Hits


       By : Dilshan Hemawardena.

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Teamviewer Free Remote Desktop Sharing Software

TeamViewer is an excellent free desktop sharing computer software package for remote control, which also allows file transfer between computers in a faster manner using Internet . This software operates with Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, IOS and Linux. It allows us to control and to do changes to the partner’s computer located elsewhere. One could definitely say that TeamViewer is revolutionary software that helps us access any computer or server around the world in a matter of seconds. This enables you to share your screen with some other person who is distant from you without worrying about firewalls, IP addresses and NAT (Network Address Translation).
 
TeamViewer is very simple and easy to be used. One Specialty of this is that this software does not necessarily require an installation process .Only thing your team mate has to do is to run the relevant application. Once the application is run it presents your desktop to the partner facilitating you to do live demonstrations, presentations or explanations over Internet within seconds. Depending on your requirements you also can install the software to your computer. But still a new password will be generated in each session. File transfer facility offered by this software enables you to copy files either form you computer to the partners’ computer or vice versa regardless the fire walls.
 
TeamViewer is software with a higher security which offers an IP address which identifies your computer uniquely within the network and then generates a password for each session. Once the session is done the session password will be canceled. So the other person will not be able to access your computer when ever he/she needs to, but only when you have given him permission to. So this blocks unauthorized access to a remote system. Security relevant functions like file transfer require additional, manual confirmation of the remote partner. All the versions of TeamViewer contain completely secured data channels with key exchange and AES (256 bit) session encoding, the same security standard used by HTTP and SSL.
When considering the configuration of TeamViewer, it allows us to work in an easy manner.
 
Step 1: Download TeamViewer (full version)here
 
Step 2: Double click the downloaded file.
 


Step 3:Click next and proceed to the License agreement.



Step 4: Depending on your choice, chose if you need to install it or run it once.
 


Step 5: Once you have run the program you will view this window on you desktop



Step 6: Now you can either choose to connect to a remote computer in which case that remote computer must also follow the same setup process and give you the ID and the password in blue color fields, you can then create a session using the ID they provided you, Or You can have someone connected to your computer remotely in which case you will provide them with the ID and password that you get on your screen.
 


The user friendly features of TeamViewer have risen up its usage rapidly although there are so many remote controlling methods available in the pool of latest technologies. More than one hundred million users spread over more than two hundred countries already use TeamViewer to make their remote tasks more efficient. If you haven’t experienced TeamViewer, try the links below.
http://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/index.aspx
TeamViewer Demonstration
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iK8mgU4AmQ
 
- By  Moditha Petangoda

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Embedded Systems and Microcontrollers

Embedded Systems

An embedded system is a computer system which is mainly used to get  a specific set of functions done depending on a set of constraints. More often embedded systems are “embedded” into a larger system to get a specific task done, but often not too complex as the whole system which it is embedded in.

Many day to day devices in modern world are embedded with these kinds of systems. For an example digital watches, mobile phones, factory automation systems, modern LED and LCD televisions and etc. Most of these devices are portable devices as one can expect them to be.

History

                The first modern embedded system is considered as the Apollo Guidance Computer, developed by Charles Stark Draper at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. This system controlled the path of the flight and some landing issues by taking various data input from the ground control station as well as from the built in sensors. Also few years later the Minuteman missile was built around an embedded system which controlled the path of flight of the missile. More over this is considered to be the first widely produces embedded system.

Introduction

In embedded systems, mainly two types of controllers are used. They are Microcontrollers and DSPs (Digital Signal Processors). In this article the main focus will be on microcontrollers. We will be discussing some available microcontrollers today and some of their functionalities as well.

A microcontroller can be considered a self-contained system with a processor, memory and peripherals and can be used as an embedded system. A microcontroller (sometimes abbreviated µC, uC or MCU) is a small computer on a single integrated circuit containing a processor core, memory, and typically small amount of RAM. Microcontrollers are designed for embedded applications, in contrast to the microprocessors used in personal computers or other general purpose applications. Actually microcontrollers can be considered as a small scale version of microprocessors.

These microcontrollers have Rams ranging from kilo bytes to several hundred mega bytes. Some microcontrollers may use four-bit words and operate at clock rate frequencies as low as 4 kHz, for low power consumption (mill watts or microwatts) while some other microcontrollers have clock rates nearly hundreds of mega hertz.

A Block diagram showing the main components of PIC (Peripheral interface Controller) Microcontrollers

Main Components of Microcontrollers

Read Only Memory (ROM)

Read Only Memory (ROM) is a type of memory used to permanently save the program being executed. The size of the program that can be written depends on the size of this memory. ROM can be built in the microcontroller or added as an external chip, which depends on the type of the microcontroller.

Random Access Memory (RAM)

Random Access Memory (RAM) is a type of memory used for temporary storing data and intermediate results created and used during the operation of the microcontrollers.

Electrically Erasable Programmable ROM (EEPROM)

The EEPROM is a special type of memory not contained in all microcontrollers. Its contents may be changed during program execution (similar to RAM), but remains permanently saved even after the loss of power (similar to ROM

Special Function Registers (SFR)

Special function registers are part of RAM memory. Their purpose is predefined by the manufacturer and therefore cannot be changed. Since their bits are physically connected to particular circuits within the microcontroller, such as A/D converter, serial communication module etc.

Program Counter

Program Counter is an engine running the program and points to the memory address containing the next instruction to execute. After each instruction execution, the value of the counter is incremented by 1.

Central Processor Unit (CPU)

                As its name suggests, this is a unit which monitors and controls all processes within the microcontroller and the user cannot affect its work. It consists of several smaller subunits, of which the most important are:

·       Instruction decoder.

·       Arithmetical Logical Unit (ALU)

·       Accumulator is an SFR closely related to the operation of ALU.

Pros and Cons

Among the main advantages of microcontrollers, the ability to write its’ inner non volatile (Electrically Erasable Programmable ROM (EEPROM)) as many as 10000 times is a main advantage. This enables the developers to imply trial and error method without too many complications and also this allows having cheap solutions for multiple systems since one does not need to replace the microcontroller. Also the power consumption for microcontrollers are very much low and this allows to run the system for more time duration without any difficulty. Further, in today’s market microcontrollers are available from few hundred rupees on wards and this make developer to develop very cheap solutions even for large scale problems. More over special function registers are present in all most all the microcontrollers available today and this make the solution reviling more easily.

Although there are many advantages, one cannot really say there are disadvantages in embedded systems except the limitation of the processing power. After all microcontrollers are built to implement solutions that can be gained through low processing power. Also a light problem with these microcontrollers is Brown out. Brown out is a potentially dangerous state which occurs at the moment the microcontroller is being turned off or when power supply voltage drops to the lowest level due to electric noise.

By- Tharidu Rathnayake

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The Amazing World of Deep Zooming

Deep Zoom is a technology developed by Microsoft for efficiently transmitting and viewing images. It provides the ability to interactively view high-resolution images, zoom in a large image or a large collection of images. It reduces the time required for initial load by downloading only the region being viewed and/or only at the resolution it is displayed at. Then, the subsequent regions are downloaded as the user pans to (or zooms into them) by enabling a smooth loading and panning by serving up multi-resolution images and using spring animations to hide any jerkiness in the transition.

Deep Zoom Features

Deep Zoom uses multi-resolution images to achieve a high frame-rate and fast open experience for even very large images. On load, only a small amount of data is needed to quickly show something on screen. The initial load experience is to show a low resolution version of the image, and blend in higher resolutions as they become available. This is the reason for the blurry-to-sharp experience in Deep Zoom. It is also the reason that Deep Zoom is able to seemingly open images immediately without much wait time to load image data, regardless of the size of the image. Besides initial loading, this same behavior is experienced as the user interacts with the application (for example, zooming and panning).

Deep Zoom Images

The file format used by Deep Zoom (Ajax Seadragon) is XML based. You can specify a single large image (.dzi) or a collection of images (.dzc). It also allows for "Sparse Images", where some parts of the image have greater resolution than others. 

Single Images

Single large images in Deep Zoom are represented by a tiled image pyramid. This allows the Deep Zoom rendering engine to grab only that bit of data that is necessary for a particular view of an image. If an image is being viewed zoomed out very far, then a small thumbnail is all that’s needed to show the image on screen.
However, if the user is zoomed in to a specific area of a large image, then only those tiles needed to show the specific areas are downloaded. This can lead to very large bandwidth savings because often only some aspects of a large image are interesting to the user. The illustration below shows what the image pyramid looks like conceptually. An image is stored as a tiled image pyramid. At each level of the pyramid, the image is scaled down by 4 (a factor of 2 in each dimension). Also, the image is tiled up into 256x256 tiles.

If, for example, you were zoomed in to see only the highlighted middle part of the image, Deep Zoom only loads the highlighted tiles, instead of the entire 1024x1024 image.


Deep Zoom Scenarios
Deep Zoom can be used in many different areas, but there are three key scenarios where Deep Zoom is particularly useful.

·         Exploration of Very Large or High Resolution Images: A classic example of this would be zooming in on parts of a large map to see different levels of detail and then, using the mouse, moving your view around the map surface. As the user moves their view, animations are used to give the user the impression that they are "moving" from one place to the other on the image. (Ex: Google Earth)

·         3-D Photography: Take pictures of a room, one after the other, creating a collection of photos that make up a 360 degree picture of the room. Now the user can pan around the room with each photo blending into the other.

·         Advertisements: You could create a relatively low-resolution image to represent the overall theme of the ad, and then have progressively higher resolution images containing more impressions and data about the product. When the first load occurs on the page where the advertisement is embedded, the image smoothly sharpens and draws the attention of the reader by loading subsequently higher resolution images. Since the image progressively loads, it does not significantly impact the user's overall experience of the site. In addition, if the user's mouse enters the image, different parts of it can be zoomed in.

Experience the smoothness of Surfing:

http://zoom.it
http://www.deepzoom.com
http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/gg413363
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/wave/software-deepzoom.aspx

T.M.T.D Dayananda

07'Comp.Sci(sp)

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ANDROID OS – The New Era of Smart Phones

Android is a special operating system developed for mobile and tablet computing by Google Inc. This was listed as the best selling smart phone platform in the year, 2010. 

 And it holds the highest market share for smart phone at the moment. With in a very short period of time, android OS has beaten the smart phone OS tycoons like Apple iOs, Windows mobile, RIM blackberry OS etc. Since the android is a free operating system, it is much cheaper than the other OS’s in the market. This may be the main reason for such a business growth.

Google released the most of the android code under the Apache license and free software license. Android OS is based on the linux kernel with some middleware libraries,  some API’s and application software running on an application framework.

Google released the most of the android code under the Apache license and free software license. Android OS is based on the linux kernel with some middleware libraries,  some API’s and application software running on an application framework.

Version No.	Code Name
1.5	Cupcake
1.6	Donut
2.1	Éclair
2.2	Froyo
2.3.x	Gingerbread
3.x.x	Honeycomb

One of the specialty of this OS is although the most of the applications are written in java, there is no Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in the platform. Therefore the java byte code is not natively executable. But there is a separate virtual machine called Dalvik Virtual Machine (DVM). First the java classes are compiled into dalvik executables and then run them on DVM. Since it uses such a technique there is no need of changing the android source code every time some thing changed in the JVM. This gives much stability to the application framework. But, J2ME support can be provided via some 3^rd party applications. Since there is a underlying linux kernel, there is no much need to worry about the security of the system. But there were some issues regarding the security as well. Like, android market had/have  some malicious apps contains the Trojans. And also there was a major issue on security that Android handsets are vulnerable to impersonation attacks. The security flow was discovered by the German researchers who demonstrated how certain Google account authentication tokens were being sent over-the-air unencrypted, potentially putting users at risk when transmitting data over public Wi-Fi networks. Google has already fixed this security flow on Gingerbread release i.e. Android 2.3.4.

One of the major features of android OS is that, every android user is been available for a vast amount of applications, Named as Android Market. At the moment there are more than 250 000 applications in the market (unofficially but estimated that there are more than 440 000 apps) and Google says that 4.5 billion downloads were made up to date. Most of these apps are free of charge or at very low cost.

 There are 6 major releases at the moment and several bug fixed versions. Generally all the code names of these versions were based on a desert item. And also all of them are in the alphabetical order (Cupcake, Donut, Éclair, Froyo etc.). And the upcoming version is the “Ice cream sandwich”. The honeycomb version is mainly targeted the tablets while the other versions are for both tablets and smart phones.

At the moment, the major competitors of Android, i.e. Apple and Microsoft are suing Google saying that Android OS is violating some of the patent licenses. They are on a mission to kill it. But Google hasn’t given up. David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer at Google, one of its leading lawyers, has posted a strong criticism of these companies and software patents in particular.

"Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents," Drummond says.

"We’re not naive; technology is a tough and ever-changing industry and we work very hard to stay focused on our own business and make better products," Drummond said.” We’re determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it. We’re looking intensely at a number of ways to do that," he added.

So far, there hasn’t been any slow down and Android stands out in the smart phone market like a giant. 

- By  Tharindu D. Mahavithana

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