Category: Tech and Culture

I bought a new domain – cerebrawl.com last night through Yahoo! Small Business. They are running a special where you can get a domain registered through an affiliate Australian domain registrar for $1.99 a year. I got mine for 2 years!

I was looking to find something that had to do with a mental struggle, and chanced upon cerebrawl, which sounded kind of interesting to me. I am sure I could think a bit more and dwell upon the word’s deeper significance.

At this moment, I have no concrete idea on what I am going to use my new domain for, but I am sure of using my existing hosting provider TQ Hosting to provide me with bandwidth. I have been really happy with their service for the last year or so.

Finally, here’s hoping that I develop something new and innovative pretty soon !

Yet another Amber Alert has been sounded in NC, this time for a 12 year old girl who was abducted by a 27 year old man. I came to know about this while I was coming back from Burlington on Saturday evening, and saw animated signs about a vehicle registration number near the RBC Center in Raleigh.

This made me wonder; what if there was a way to use the existant GPS network to track runaway vehicles like this Hyundai Sentra. What if we could embed a GPS tracking device into every new vehicle sold? Of course, this raises privacy concerns, but what if the entire tracking system was automated? Law enforcement gets access to it only when they believe a certain car is being used by a criminal.

This would really help in curbing these kind of abductions that involve known convicts. I am guessing that the technological limitation comes in the form of processing the immense raw data that would continuously be generated by vehicular tracking systems. An artless idea that comes to mind has to do with using the already established cellular communications network to signal to black boxes/controllers in vehicles. Each box could have a unique SIM like card to identify the car, and once turned on, the box would transmit its triangulated location data to the associated tower.

I would think that such a seamless network is definitely possible with the current state of the art in cellular communications. It is high time that we deployed them to make the society a safer place to live in.

Some other interesting projects/technologies that I found related to this are Automatic Vehicle Location [pdf], and Automatic Number Plate Recognition. The latter is a really interesting project from Europe, but I doubt it is as cost effective as deploying a GPS based system. A company called TeleType also makes some interesting GPS based tracking devices.

Finally, here’s hoping that the kidnapper gets caught soon.

I just realized that the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger suffers from a vulnerability that allows a hacker to get your IP address.

Basically, if both the clients use the latest version of messenger and the victim responds to an IM from the attacker, the former’s IP address is shown in the netstat output of the latter. This is a very old vulnerability that was supposedly patched a long time ago, but has resurfaced in the latest version of the messenger software.

It appears that both the clients initiate a direct end-to-end connection whenever a conversation is begun. I have noticed this behavior when I communicate with some of my friends on messenger. I can see their IP address.

This is a serious issue, and I hope Yahoo! addresses it pretty soon.

I downloaded and installed the latest version of Konfabulator yesterday. Needless to say, it is probably one of the best free software that I have ever installed on my Windows machine. Konfabulator is a “JavaScript runtime engine” for both Windows and MacOS that allows programmers to design interactive and visually appealing “widgets” to be placed on the desktop. These widgets run as individual programs and do not consume a lot of system resources.

There are tons of widgets already available for download for both these platforms. The most wonderful aspect of this program is that it allows for both the operating systems to have similar widgets. It is possible to define the transparency of the widgets from 0% to 100%, and also position them on the desktop in a multitude of ways. I am sure Yahoo! is working behind the scenes to build a port for the Linux operating system.

I tried many different kinds of widgets once my initial excitement died off, but have now settled for 3 of them running continuously on my desktop. My favorite is the “Digg Digger” aggregator widget pictured above. It updates every 2-3 minutes and is always fun to read. Another widget I have on my desktop provides me with weather information from weather.com, and the third one basically cycles through random Simpsons quotes after some interval.

All in all, I love this software, and after using it for about a day haven’t found any issues with it yet. Truly, one of the best freebies ever!

One of last week’s major event was the compromise of the NCSU Webmail system by hackers. What is surprising to me is the fact that the hackers had an IRC server running on 2 webmail servers for about 5 days before the IT Department staff noticed that the attackers might have captured user passwords.

The NCSU ITD system news bulletin has more information on the event. The NCSU password change facility was bogged down due to excessive network load after emails were sent to those that might have been affected by the exploit.

It seems that the attach was based on an April 2005 advisory posted on the Internet. It is named “Cacti Remote Command Execution Vulnerability”, and basically exposes vulnerability in the Cacti graphing tool. Cacti is a an RRDtool based package that uses mySQL databases to record various statistics about the network/server.

It is amazing to find out in conversations that some people do not change their passwords regularly, or have really funny password management tactics. Some people still use their SSN as passwords. Everyone should follow the guidelines on this website to choose passwords !

Just read on Yahoo! News that a research group at the College of Natural Resources at the University of Idaho is working on replacing oil with wood as a primary fuel.

Now, the news report lacks substantial technical information, but my guess is that these guys are using Pyrolysis to generate bio-oil from wood. Of course, I would try to gather some more information from their webpages/publications, but for now, going by the article, pyrolysis seems to be the only way this is possible.

This makes me wonder. What is the purpose of even doing this type of research? I can understand using waste bio material to generate fuel, but cutting trees to generate oil, or as the news report puts it, quicken the natural process of crude oil formation seems a little irresponsible to me. Deforestation is a serious issue, and I doubt that using trees to power our SUVs is going to help solve anything.

I wish that more research was done from a practical viewpoint rather than just to get published.

Today’s cell-phones are loaded with features, many of which are almost too trivial or just too modern for a phone. Too much is never enough though, and we keep longing for newer and newer features.

I kept receiving fax calls from a certain number today, probably because they had the wrong number, but it made me wonder if there is technology to be able to send and receive faxes on your cellphone. This does not sound especially weird considering that there are cellphones with huge displays and excellent graphics capabilities. It is but logical to expect a modern cellphone to be capable of receiving faxes and then displaying them on your screen.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any such device on the market. I was, nevertheless, able to find third party software for smart phones and PDAs that would let me send and receive faxes on an email account.

I wonder how hard it would be technologically to implement native fax support in modern smartphones. If there is a voice call, activate the ringer, and if there is a fax call, simply receive it !

If the user wants to transfer this fax to a computer or to print it out, he/she could just forward it to an email account or simply sync with a computer. I hope something like this hits the market pretty soon !