Charles Leadbeater on innovation – TED talk

When ideas have sex – TED talk

No Major Application implement DEP and ASLR for preventing unauthorized programs for taking over your PC

Big-name Windows applications neglect security

Two important security technologies, Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), go a long way toward preventing unauthorized programs from taking over a PC. And Secunia Research just published a white paper with a disturbing analysis of popular Windows programs that don't use either. Windows XP Service Pack 2 introduced DEP back in 2004. It's is a technique that uses both hardware and software to keep a PC from executing programs that sit in areas that should be holding data. Historically, one of the easiest and most fruitful ways to take over a PC involves a buffer overflow - where an attack routine sticks a malicious program inside a data area and then tricks Windows into "running" the data. When a program asks Windows for DEP protection, and the hardware supports DEP, buffer overflow attacks are considerably more difficult. Not impossible, mind you, but DEP does pretty well blocking the most common and straightforward attacks.

ASLR arrived with the release of Windows Vista in 2007. When a program tells Windows that it wants to use ASLR, Windows sticks pieces of the program in randomly assigned parts of memory. If an attacker tries to access a specific location in the program, the attacker has to guess the location of the pertinent piece of the program, which can be quite difficult. Together DEP and ASLR aren't invincible, but they're formidable. In Windows 7 (and to a lesser extent Vista), turning on both DEP and ASLR is reasonably easy if the program is written properly and doesn't use certain undesirable coding techniques that fell out of favor years ago. That's why it's so shocking that many of the programs you and your users run every day don't support either or both.

Secunia tested sixteen applications - the most commonly used Windows apps as reported by Secunia's PSI scanning program. Each of the tested programs has been used as the vector in a real attack in the past two years. As of last month, none of these programs use DEP: Sun's Java JRE, Apple's QuickTime, Apple's iTunes (running on Win XP), OpenOffice, Google's Picasa, Foxit Reader, VLC Media Player, AOL's Winamp, and RealPlayer. Secunia determined that if a program doesn't use DEP, there's no reason to check for ASLR - kind of a security crawl-before-you-can-walk situation.

Read full story here : http://www.codeguru.com/daily_news/article.php/405208

WireShark- one of the best network protocol analyzer

Today I came to know one of the best network protocl analyzer called : wireshark.

According to it’s site :

Wireshark is the world's foremost network protocol analyzer, and is the de facto (and often de jure) standard across many industries and educational institutions.

Features

Wireshark has a rich feature set which includes the following:

• Deep inspection of hundreds of protocols, with more being added all the time
• Live capture and offline analysis
• Standard three-pane packet browser
• Multi-platform: Runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and many others
• Captured network data can be browsed via a GUI, or via the TTY-mode TShark utility
• The most powerful display filters in the industry
• Rich VoIP analysis
• Read/write many different capture file formats: tcpdump (libpcap), Pcap NG, Catapult DCT2000, Cisco Secure IDS iplog, Microsoft Network Monitor, Network General Sniffer® (compressed and uncompressed), Sniffer® Pro, and NetXray®, Network Instruments Observer, NetScreen snoop, Novell LANalyzer, RADCOM WAN/LAN Analyzer, Shomiti/Finisar Surveyor, Tektronix K12xx, Visual Networks Visual UpTime, WildPackets EtherPeek/TokenPeek/AiroPeek, and many others
• Capture files compressed with gzip can be decompressed on the fly
• Live data can be read from Ethernet, IEEE 802.11, PPP/HDLC, ATM, Bluetooth, USB, Token Ring, Frame Relay, FDDI, and others (depending on your platform)
• Decryption support for many protocols, including IPsec, ISAKMP, Kerberos, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, WEP, and WPA/WPA2
• Coloring rules can be applied to the packet list for quick, intuitive analysis
• Output can be exported to XML, PostScript®, CSV, or plain text

 

Get the Software from this site: http://www.wireshark.org

Are you obsessed with online gaming ?

A bizarre, sad story related to online games. A married couple in Suwon, Korea has beenarrested by the police for negligence of their parental duties. The couple left their three month old baby starve to death, because they were "too obsessed with online gaming." Ironically enough, it turned out that the online game they were playing to their baby's death was themed around, well guess what, raising a virtual avatar.

So in short, the couple were too busy taking care of their "virtual baby" that they kept their "real baby" completely unattended and starved to death.
The game is called "Prius Online" and the players can adopt an avatar and grow it. Game players can also buy the avatars virtual items such as clothes, or even write a blog about their avatars, much resembling a parenting diary.

The parents in charge are said to have been under great parenting stress, presumably due to their financial difficulties, and as their parenting stresses mounted, they became more and more obsessed with the game -- their "escape" from the real world.

Use Your News to Drive traffic to your website

Making the Most of News via Press Release:

People, specially your customers and friends love reading news about you and your business. So frequently publishing your news and let the world know about happenings in your business makes a buzz for you and this leads to more customers.

Publishing news as Press Release (PR) attract journalists. PR also helps to bring more traffic to your website via search engines as most of the search engines love PR and value it more. PR has a much SEO value than other contents.

In order to maximize the benefits of online news, you need reconsider what is newsworthy. Start Thinking About News in a Different Way

Information about your company should not only come out quarterly along with your financials – there are millions of reasons to continually get the word out, giving your company the pat on the back and attention it deserves, including:

• Product launch
• New hire or staffing change
• Award announcement
• Anniversary
• New client or partnership
• Additional office or territory
• Participation in a charitable/community event
• Receipt of additional funding
• Investor news
• Profitability
• Client success story

And how can you get this attention? A news release service. Few of the Services are :

PRWeb : http://www.prweb.com
WebWire: http://www.webwire.com
Free-Press Release: http://www.free-press-release.com/
India PRWire: http://www.indiaprwire.com/
PressReleasePoint: http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/

What should be the format of your Press release ?
There is a good article about this here; http://www.webwire.com/FormatGuidelines.asp

Get some nice tips on how to write your press release here:
http://www.free-press-release.com/tools-tips/
http://www.prweb.com/pr/_assets/downloads/PRWeb-DriveSEO.pdf

Here are few good Video tutorials on “Writing Press Releases” :

 

Facebook auto login by Gmail or Yahoo Login

Linked Accounts in Facebook

Facebook has emerged into a robust and user friendly system. Facebook has a very user-friendly system thats lets you log-in automatically into facebook when you are logged-in into any of your following accounts:
· MySapace
· MyOpenID
· Verisign PIP
· OpenID
Open ID is supported by: Google, Six Apart, Yahoo!, Flickr, Wordpress, Verisign, AOL and many more. This means if you have account with any one of these sites, you just can attach these accounts with the Facebook and enjoy using your facebook account when you are logged in any of these accounts.

Add Linked account to Facebook account

1. Open Facebook.com & login into your account.
2. Goto Account > Account Settings.
3. Click ‘Change’ button next to linked accounts option.

4. Select the type of account that you want to link among: Google, Yahoo, MySpace, OpenID etc from drop down box.

5. Then click ‘Link to new account(s)’ button.
6. Then click ‘Allow’ button on the authorization screen.
After successful linking, all the linked accounts will be displayed on the ‘linked accounts’ option under ‘Account Settings’ screen. You can click on ‘remove’ button next to any linked account to remove respective linking with Facebook account.
How do I link my Yahoo! account to Facebook?
Here’s how to do this:
1. Go to your Yahoo! Pulse website.
2. Click Settings located at the upper-right corner the page.
3. Click Manage my linked accounts located under “Linked Accounts”.
4. On the new page that opens, click Link located at the right of Facebook under "Accounts You Can Link".
5. Sign in to Facebook by typing the email address and password that you used to sign up for Facebook.
6. Click Connect.
7. If this is the first time you’ve linked to Facebook, you’re presented with several pages asking you to allow specific actions to occur. If you agree with each request, click the Allow button.
Your link is established and you can immediately begin seeing your Facebook updates on your Yahoo! pages.
8. If you want to share your Yahoo! updates with your Facebook account, leave the box checked; otherwise, uncheck the box if you don’t want to share your Yahoo! updates with Facebook.
9. Click Continue to complete the linking process.
Information shared with Facebook is subject to the Facebook privacy policy and information imported from Facebook to Yahoo! is subject to the Yahoo! Privacy Policy website.

Social Marketing Goes Multiplatform

Businesses began dipping their toes into the social media pool as early as 2005, but the last two years saw them jump in with both feet. Three developments in the social media landscape drove the rapid expansion of their activities:
Facebook achieve the critical mass needed to establish it as a major customer contact point. To a lesser extent, LinkedIn also crossed this threshold; Twitter burst on the scene and demonstrated enormous value in magnifying the reach of a message for relatively little cost and effort; Marketers warmed to the idea that using multiple social media channels together, and coordinating messages between them, collectively achieved a greater impact than if the tools were used in isolation.
Businesses of all sizes report overall satisfaction with the expansion of their social media initiatives. However, few are willing to back their optimism with rich analytics. Rather, their perception that social media is working for them is based more on the belief that the new platforms are reaching a wider audience in the places their customers are already congregating. Says Adam Brown, Director of the Office of Digital Communications & Social Media at the Coca-Cola Co., “Our philosophy is to fish where the fish are.”

Read full article here:
http://info.awarenessnetworks.com/rs/awarenessnetworks/images/Social-Marketing-Goes-Multichannel.pdf

All about Database Keys

Database Keys

Introduction

For the purposes of clarity we will refer to keys in terms of RDBMS tables but the same definition, principle and naming applies equally to Entity Modelling and Normalisation.
Keys are, as their name suggests, a key part of a relational database and a vital part of the structure of a table. They ensure each record within a table can be uniquely identified by one or a combination of fields within the table. They help enforce integrity and help identify the relationship between tables. There are three main types of keys, candidate keys, primary keys and foreign keys. There is also an alternative key or secondary key that can be used, as the name suggests, as a secondary or alternative key to the primary key

Super Key

A Super key is any combination of fields within a table that uniquely identifies each record within that table.

Candidate Key

A candidate is a subset of a super key. A candidate key is a single field or the least combination of fields that uniquely identifies each record in the table. The least combination of fields distinguishes a candidate key from a super key. Every table must have at least one candidate key.

As an example we might have a student_id that uniquely identifies the students in a student table. This would be a candidate key. But in the same table we might have the student’s first name and last name that also, when combined, uniquely identify the student in a student table. These would both be candidate keys.
In order to be eligible for a candidate key it must pass certain criteria.

• It must contain unique values
• It must not contain null values
• It contains the minimum number of fields to ensure uniqueness
• It must uniquely identify each record in the table

Once your candidate keys have been identified you can now select one to be your primary key

Primary Key

A primary key is a candidate key that is most appropriate to be the main reference key for the table. As its name suggests, it is the primary key of reference for the table and is used throughout the database to help establish relationships with other tables. As with any candidate key the primary key must contain unique values, must never be null and uniquely identify each record in the table.
As an example, a student id might be a primary key in a student table, a department code in a table of all departments in an organisation. This module has the code DH3D 35 that is no doubt used in a database somewhere to identify RDBMS as a unit in a table of modules. In the table below we have selected the candidate key student_id to be our most appropriate primary key

Primary keys are mandatory for every table each record must have a value for its primary key. When choosing a primary key from the pool of candidate keys always choose a single simple key over a composite key.

Foreign Key

A foreign key is generally a primary key from one table that appears as a field in another where the first table has a relationship to the second. In other words, if we had a table A with a primary key X that linked to a table B where X was a field in B, then X would be a foreign key in B.
An example might be a student table that contains the course_id the student is attending. Another table lists the courses on offer with course_id being the primary key. The 2 tables are linked through course_id and as such course_id would be a foreign key in the student table.

Secondary Key or Alternative Key

A table may have one or more choices for the primary key. Collectively these are known as candidate keys as discuss earlier. One is selected as the primary key. Those not selected are known as secondary keys or alternative keys.
For example in the table showing candidate keys above we identified two candidate keys, studentId and firstName + lastName. The studentId would be the most appropriate for a primary key leaving the other candidate key as secondary or alternative key. It should be noted for the other key to be candidate keys, we are assuming you will never have a person with the same first and last name combination. As this is unlikely we might consider fistName+lastName to be a suspect candidate key as it would be restrictive of the data you might enter. It would seem a shame to not allow John Smith onto a course just because there was already another John Smith.

Simple Key

Any of the keys described before (ie primary, secondary or foreign) may comprise one or more fields, for example if firstName and lastName was our key this would be a key of two fields where as studentId is only one. A simple key consists of a single field to uniquely identify a record. In addition the field in itself cannot be broken down into other fields, for example, studentId, which uniquely identifies a particular student, is a single field and therefore is a simple key. No two students would have the same student number.

Compound Key

A compound key consists of more than one field to uniquely identify a record. A compound key is distinguished from a composite key because each field, which makes up the primary key, is also a simple key in its own right. An example might be a table that represents the modules a student is attending. This table has a studentId and a moduleCode as its primary key. Each of the fields that make up the primary key are simple keys because each represents a unique reference when identifying a student in one instance and a module in the other.

Composite Key

A composite key consists of more than one field to uniquely identify a record. This differs from a compound key in that one or more of the attributes, which make up the key, are not simple keys in their own right. Taking the example from compound key, imagine we identified a student by their firstName + lastName. In our table representing students on modules our primary key would now be firstName + lastName + moduleCode. Because firstName + lastName represent a unique reference to a student, they are not each simple keys, they have to be combined in order to uniquely identify the student. Therefore the key for this table is a composite key.

Extracted From: http://rdbms.opengrass.net/2_Database%20Design/2.1_TermsOfReference/2.1.2_Keys.html

What is HTML Debugging?

Today, some one asked me “What is HTML debugging?”

So I thought to share the answer to you also..

HTML is a formatting language for displaying text, graphics and multimedia in web pages.

When Client side scripting (script that run within the browser and consumes resources like processor and RAM from the same computer) is included with HTML its Called DHTML.

There are many client side languages like : DHTML Script, Java Script (JS) and Visual  basic (VB Script)

HTML itself can't be debugged. So HTML debugging generally mans to debug HTML with the embedded Java Script or VB script.

Sometimes HTML with the embedded CSS is debugged by a tool called Firebug or similar tools within the browser to find some errors, display problems.. this is also called HTML debugging.

I think this is the answer to your question.
Pls. let me know if any clarification required.

See this article to know more how Firebug is used to debug HTML/ CSS/ JS in Firefox browser.

http://kb.siteground.com/article/How_to_debug_HTMLCSS_issues_using_Firefox.html

This article let you know how to debug HTML in Internet explorer browser using developer tools:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd565627(VS.85).aspx