Category Archives: Web Related

India starts planning for new Internet protocol

  By Jit | July 24, 2010 - 10:35 am | Web Related
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New Delhi: With the domain name bandwidth for web addresses expected to get exhausted by March 2012, the government has drawn up a roadmap for the transition into a newer version of Internet protocol that will enable unlimited options for users.

“Over 18.4 million registered addresses in India have overburdened the initial version of address platforms, which is expected to exhaust the available space globally by March 2012,” a statement issued by the ministry of communications and information technology said Wednesday.

The roadmap, spelt out by the technical arm of Department of Telecommunications (DoT), will be implemented by all telecom and Internet providers, central and state government departments, industry associations, education institutes and equipment manufacturers, the ministry said.

“This roadmap and the formation of the IPv6 task force together will enable citizens to start using IPv6 services by March 2012,” Communications Minister A. Raja said. “For this all telecom and internet service providers are required to become IPv6 compliant by December-2011,” he said.

“Internet Protocol is slowly emerging as a global standard for communication. The current Internet protocol IPv4 served well in last 25 years but it has practical limitations,” added Minister of State for Communications Sachin Pilot.

“The new Internet protocol will give practically unlimited addresses besides a host of new and advanced features for running the future communication networks.”

Officials said the new protocol was a scalable technology with the potential to spread the Internet reach to each of India’s 1.17 billion people of India. It is already being implemented in the US, EU and Japan, among other countries.

IBM endorses Firefox as in-house Web browser

  By Jit | July 4, 2010 - 10:34 am | Science & Technology, Web Related, World News
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San Francisco: Technology giant IBM wants its workers around the world to use free, open-source Mozilla Firefox as their window into the Internet.

“Any employee who is not now using Firefox will be strongly encouraged to use it as their default browser,” IBM executive Bob Sutor said yesterday in a blog post at his sutor.com website. “While other browsers have come and gone, Firefox is now the gold standard for what an open, secure, and standards- compliant browser should be.”

Making Firefox the default browser means that workers’ computers will automatically use that software to access the Internet unless commanded to do differently.

All new computers for IBM employees will have Firefox installed and the global company “will continue to strongly encourage our vendors who have browser-based software to fully support Firefox,” according to Sutor.

Modern cars vulnerable to malicious hacks

  By Jit | May 31, 2010 - 9:16 am | Science & Technology, Web Related
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The idea of hackers breaking into your personal computer is alarming enough. But what if they could seize control of your car’s control systems while you are driving?

Using a laptop and custom-written software, security researchers have hacked into the control systems of a family car, disabled the brakes and turned off the engine while the vehicle was moving.

Fortunately, the hack is technically difficult and the risk to drivers is low – for now. But the benign hackers, led by Tadayoshi Kohno at the University of Washington in Seattle and Stefan Savage at the University of California, San Diego, have revealed the details to encourage car makers to make future vehicles more secure.

Computers help control many systems in modern vehicles, from anti-lock braking systems to the timing of ignition. Each system typically has its own dedicated computer controller, which is connected to a network that can be accessed by mechanics via a socket under the dashboard.

Kohno and Savage’s team tested two 2009 sedans of the same make and model, which they decline to name. In a paper to be presented next week at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, California, they describe how they plugged a laptop into the control socket and used software called CarShark to send signals into the car’s networks. By sending random commands and observing the effect of each, they were able to decipher the language used by the control systems.

Disabled Brakes: In tests on a disused airfield in Washington state, with the laptop plugged into a control network, the researchers were able to kill the engine and disable the brakes of a car moving at 65 kilometres per hour. They were also able to instantaneously lock the brakes.

Clearly, drivers would notice a laptop plugged into their car’s control systems. But it would be possible to achieve the same result with less obtrusive hardware that could be controlled remotely. Still more alarmingly, the researchers say they also took control of a car using wireless signals and operated it via the internet, but would not provide further details of this part of the study.

Car Tuning: Although the attacks sound alarming, they require a high level of knowledge to carry out. “Car tuning” enthusiasts have similarly discovered how to control many of the systems the researchers compromised – although there is no evidence of anyone using these methods to malicious ends. Industry experts say they have never seen such attacks being used outside of the new experiment.

Savage says that the car industry’s attitude to system security is similar to that of the computer industry prior to the internet – which exposed computers to attack and revealed many vulnerabilities.

“This industry hasn’t had to deal with adversarial pressure, so its defences haven’t had to be that strong,” Savage says. He hopes that industry and regulators will come together to develop a consensus on how to protect cars before such attacks are attempted.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Backing up your Gmail eMails :D

  By Jit | April 11, 2010 - 9:56 am | Softwares, Web Related
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We all have been using Gmail for quite a few years and by now have a huge collection of emails….

BUT

…Have you any backup of those emails??? What if Gmail crashes one fine day…after all its all electronics and can breakdown, let alone be hacked!

I believe some of us do backup the emails – have set up a email client tool with POP3 or IMAP and maintaining a local copy. But there are thousands of us who access Gmail via the browser only, me being one of them (I do not have any local  backup) :D

I was just wondering and did a Google and found a nice little free, yes FREE tool which did backup Gmail accounts….

 

GMail Backup tool

 

Visit the developer’s website for details. Do read the download page carefully.

Creating a PayPal Donation Button

  By Jit | January 26, 2009 - 6:20 pm | Knowledgeware, Web Related
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Wanna donation?

A step-by-step instruction to create a PayPal donation button and start accepting online donations.

A friend asked me how to create a PayPal donation button to collect donation. I have told him the steps and I think it is good to share the information with my blog readers.

1. Login your PayPal account, goto “Merchant Tools“. Scroll down to “PayPal Website Payments Standard”.

2. There is a link named “Donations”. Click it to open donation button setup page.

3. Here you will there are find many fields to fill in… dodn’t worry, you can ignore those “(optional)” fields.

4. If you want to specific a donation amount, fill in the “Donation Amount:“.

Note: Once specified the amount, the donator cannot donate more than or less than the specified valune.

5. Under “Choose a donation button to put on your website (optional)”, you can choose a donation button or use your own image.

6. For “Security Settings“, I recommend to select “Yes” to encrypt your payment button. It will protect your PayPal email address.

7. Then, click the “Create Button Now” button at the bottom of the page to create your PayPal donation button.

8. You will given a HTML code for the donation button. Copy it and paste into your website.

9. Voila…your are done!

10. See the donations roll in!

India switches on knowledge grid

  By Jit | January 18, 2009 - 6:08 pm | Information, Science & Technology, Web Related
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Charu Sudan Kasturi, The Telegraph, Calcutta Edition, Sunday 18 January 2009

New Delhi, Jan 17: India launched the world’s first nationwide information highway inter-linking top educational institutions and research laboratories earlier this week, quietly ushering in a new mode of education-sharing with the flick of a digital switch.

The National Knowledge Network (NKN) is up and running, allowing students in India th opportunity to attend live classes of their choice at educational institutions across the country.

First proposed by the National Knowledge Commission in 2006, the NKN will soon be formally unveiled to the nation through a public launch, government officials said.

The only other knowledge network of comparable size in the world is run by the California Institute of technology and connectsuniversities, laboratories and even schools across the state of california. The team of experts that erected the NKN had visited California to study their network.

The seven older Indian Institutes of Technology, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and two laboratories of the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research have been connected through the NKN so far. Ultimately, the aim is to link all schools across India to the NKN.

The NKN runs out of a highway of thousands of kilometers of underground cables that connect key cities and education hubs. Nodes are placed on the highway to allow information to be extracted from the cables. The NKN allows around 2,500,000,000 bits of information flow per second – 2.5 gigabits/s. This bandwidth is nearly a million times higher than what is available for the Garuda, the most advanced information highway available in the country at present, which links up scientific research orgainsations. The highway is wide precisely because, unlike all previous attempts at information link-ups here, the NKN seeks to connect all educational and research institutions. That means heavy traffic once the highway becomes popular. The transmission will be far superior to the quality witnessed in video conferences, the ministry official said.

Fill article here.

.htaccess – 18 scripts to use

  By Jit | December 3, 2008 - 6:38 pm | Web Related
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1. Enable Directory Browsing

Options +Indexes
## block a few types of files from showing
IndexIgnore *.wmv *.mp4 *.avi

2. Disable Directory Browsing

Options All -Indexes

.Customize Error Messages

ErrorDocument 403 /forbidden.html
ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html
ErrorDocument 500 /servererror.html

4. Get SSI working with HTML/SHTML

AddType text/html .html
AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .html
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
# AddHandler server-parsed .htm

5. Change Default Page (order is followed!)

DirectoryIndex myhome.htm index.htm index.php

6. Block Users from accessing the site

<limit GET POST PUT>
order deny,allow
deny from 202.54.122.33
deny from 8.70.44.53
deny from .spammers.com
allow from all
</limit>

7. Allow only LAN users

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 192.168.0.0/24

8. Redirect Visitors to New Page/Directory

Redirect oldpage.html http://www.domainname.com/newpage.html
Redirect /olddir http://www.domainname.com/newdir/

9. Block site from specific referrers

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} site-toblock\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} site-toblock-2\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]

10. Block Hot Linking/Bandwidth hogging

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ – [F]

11. Want to show a “Stealing is Bad” message too?

RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.mydomain.com/dontsteal.gif [R,L]

12. Stop .htaccess (or any other file) from being viewed

<files file-name>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

13. Avoid the 500 Error

# Avoid 500 error by passing charset
AddDefaultCharset utf-8

14. Grant CGI Access in a directory

Options +ExecCGI
AddHandler cgi-script cgi pl
# To enable all scripts in a directory use the following
# SetHandler cgi-script

15. Change Script Extensions

AddType application/x-httpd-php .gne
AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .blah

16. The CheckSpelling Directive

CheckSpelling On

17. Save Bandwidth

# Only if you use PHP
<ifmodule mod_php4.c>
php_value zlib.output_compression
16386
</ifmodule>

18. Turn off magic_quotes_gpc

# Only if you use PHP
<ifmodule mod_php4.c>
php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off
</ifmodule>