EDITALK
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EDITALK T
oday we use myriad devices that could merit the term ‘wireless’—mobile phones, cordless phones, radio equipment, and such. When it comes to information technology, however, ‘wireless’ generally means the ability to create a network sans wires. Networking is key to our computing experience, and the Internet is the biggest network of all. What good is a computer if you can’t connect to your Local Area Network or the Internet? Less than one per cent of the computers in the world are standalone machines that lack the ability to connect to others. Technology advancement has seen the definition of a PC shift from ‘Personal Computer’ to ‘Portable Computer’. The new breed of laptops are no longer the signature of the higher echelons of management. Today, sales executives and even delivery personnel have mobile devices such as laptops and PDAs to increase effeciency. With technology becoming more and more portable, networking had to catch up, and thus we have wireless networking, which is fast becoming the solution of the future. In this issue, we have focused on wireless technologies and devices in order to give you in-depth knowledge, and also to help you set up your own wireless solutions. An in-depth article on the concept of wireless networking has been given to aid you in setting up a
wireless network. The article has been supported by step-by-step guide for a detailed tutorial. Wireless networks have their own implications in terms of security. To make you better understand of the security issues involved, a guide has been included to help you in securing your network. Software tools for hacking of wireless networks have been listed, so that you can run the security tests on your network. Apart from the Wireless networking related stuff, you will find artiles on topics related to elearning platform, cryptography & facebook privacy. This month we have interviewed the pioneer of IT education in J&K, Mr Vinod Vishen, Director CASET, Srinagar. Read out his take on the state of IT in J&K. Last month’s issue of Globe was out of stock in first 15 days. Thanks to you! We have got an overwhelming response from our readers. Our circulation has doubled from the first issue, and remember, this is third issue only and there is lot more to go, so stay tuned!
Ehsan Quddusi Editor
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Less than one per cent of the computers in the world are standalone machines that lack the ability to connect to others.
Ehsan Quddusi
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VOLUME 1 \ NUMBER 4
APRIL 2011
Contents COVER STORY
ADVISORY BOARD Dr. Mehraj Ud Din Er. A H Moon Sajjad Bazaz Dr S M K Qaudri
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CHIEF EDITOR Dr. Jauhar Quddusi
EDITOR Ehsan Quddusi Sub Editor: Irshad Ul Islam, Shahid Qazi Asstt Editor: Obaidullah Malik Writers: Mir Nazim, Owais Lone, Vivek Khurana, Atul Jha Campus Correspondent: Zaid A Hakak
DESIGN Creative Director: Rajaji Sr Designer: Javeed Meian Designer: Parvez Mir, Mir Parvez
SALES & MARKETING
WIRE LESS NETWORKING A Complete Guide
Brand Manager: Muzaffar Jan Asst Brand Manager: Asif
PRODUCTION & LOGISTICS Production Manager: A G Quddusi DISTRIBUTOR JANTA AGENCIES Char Chinar Complex, M A Road, Opp Govt Women College, Srinagar - 190001 Phone: +91 194 2474755 OFFICE ADDRESS GLOBE Magazine Khan Complex, Madeena Chowk, Gaw Kadal, Srinagar - 190001, J&K Phone: +91 194 2473818 Mobile: +91 9419422263 Email: globe@globekashmir.com TO ADVERTISE Call on +91 9419422263, 9419030006 Or email at advertise@globekashmir.com SUBSCRIPTION For Students: Rs 220.00 / Year For Others: Rs 400.00 / Year Published, Printed and Owned by N. Quddusi. Published from New Colony, Pulwama - 192301. Printed at Al-Hayat Printographers, Gaw Kadal, Srinagar - 190001 Editor: Ehsan Quddusi
Step-by-step guide to setup your network Securing Wireless Networks
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Staying Safe on Facebook
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E-Learning: A revolutionary approach How does the internet work?
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COVER STORY
INTERVIEW
“The most fundamental objective in setting up of CASET was to bring technology to my people & make them win the world .” Prof. Vinod Vishen Principal, CASET College
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FOUNDERS AT WORK
Claude Shannon The founding father of electronic communication age
FEEDBACK TECH NEWS MARKET WATCH
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More productivity on Windows OS
Securing Wireless Networks Tips & tricks to secure your network
Q&A
Share Internet Secure file sharing
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SECURITY
08 09 11
Software tools to hack wireless networks
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FEATURES
Twitter Five year old changing the world
TIPS & TRICKS
10 reasons for switching to Linux
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FEEDKCAB Send your feedback at globe@globekashmir.com you. Editor
More for beginners I want you to please do me favour. I have been a reader of Globe for 2 months, and now my father and sisters have started reading it too. But ours is a family of beginners in the world of computers. I am the only one who knows a little more than the rest, and am often told that the many computer related terms used in Globe are Greek to them. Similarly, there are many people who do not even know the ABCs of computers. I would like to see a new column in Digit meant for beginners. If you do this, it will be a boon to beginners everywhere.
Good Work Dear Editor,
Ajay Sharma via Email
I am a regular reader of Globe and it is the first time I am writing to you. First of all I congratulate you for being the best tech magazine in J&K. You people are really doing a great job. Your Tips & Tricks, Q&A and Tech Talk are just superb. Keep up the good work guys!!!
You have raised a very important point here, and we can see why such a step is necessary. All of us are aware about how confusing tech terms can be to the non-initiated. You have a great suggestion, and we will keep that in mind for future issues.
My brother introduced me to Globe. March issue was absolutely fantastic and full of information. It will be very very useful for readers like me to have an online subscription, as then I could access the content from anywhere in the world; plus I could save some paper. Although some sections might not be relevant for overseas readers, all the rest of the articles and information in the magazine are absolutely priceless for me as I am always short on time due to my busy work schedule. Do you have any such plans in pipeline? Please let me know. Anyway, I must congratulate you for your good work. Hope you manage to keep it as good as ever. Dr Wasim Qadri via Email
Editor
We’re glad to hear from readers.We do have plans for online content subscriptions in the pipeline. You will be the first to know when we do launch such services.
I am a Doctor in Anaesthesiology
Editor
Shahid Malik via Email Welcome to Globe. Stay, and we promise to make it much more informative, fun and addictive for
working in the UK for last 5 years. I came to India to visit my family and had a long-ish stay this time. Hence I found a bit of time to catch up with my old favourites.
Nice look
Computer typesetting in Kashmiri, Urdu, Arabic, English, Persian, Balti & Hindi
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WHAT’S NEW
TECH NEWS
TECHNEWS FRESHLY BAKED NEWS FROM THE STATE & OUTSIDE
UGC-NET qualifiers to get eCertificates
LOCALNEWS
In a new e-Governance initiative, the Human Resource Development Ministry announced that e-Certificates will be sent to all those who qualify for the University Grants Commission National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET) test for appointment as university lecturers.
J&K mulls ICT initiatives to save forests
The certificate will be given to 10,433 candidates who qualified for NET and Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) in the exam in June 2010, reports IANS.
The project has been prepared in line with “m-Governance Mantra for Forest Management” of Madhya Pradesh by which the central state is successfully managing its forest wealth with the help of ICT.
With this e-Certificate, the time taken in giving the certificates, which was earlier six months, will now be only six days. At the same time the time taken for verification of authenticity of the certificate by employer will take only 24 hours against the earlier time of four months. The certificates will also be password protected, will carry a photo of the candidate and have a unique bar code.
Eye-Controlled Laptop Unveiled Tobii Technology has unveiled its new eye-tacking controller, which allows users to control certain computer functions just by looking at points on a screen. Developed with computer manufacturer Lenovo, the laptop uses Tobii's eye-tracking technology to enhance interaction at a glance. Eyeing points on the screen releases information from icons and gadgets, zooms pictures and maps, switches between open windows, and browses email and documents. "What we find most exciting are the opportunities that eye control as part of natural user interfaces offers consumer electronics manufacturers in a range of product categories," said Barbara Barclay, general manager of Tobii North America. The eye-recognition concept continues a push toward more natural interfaces that has seen a variety of motioncontrolled products such as Microsoft Kinect recently introduce new interactive features. “More than anything else, the Tobii laptop prototype is proof that our eye tracking technology is mature enough to be used in standard computer interfaces,” said Henrik Eskilsson, CEO of Tobii Technology.
Jammu and Kashmir has prepared the blueprint for taking up Information and Communication Technology (ICT) initiatives for saving the dwindling forest wealth of the state.
Principal Chief Conservator of Forests R D Tiwari recently visited Madhya Pradesh to explore the possibilities how ICT initiatives can be used in J&K to save forests. Some of the features of new ICT initiative will be Forest Protection Management System (FPMS) - which would monitor protection status of forests and wild-life, Forest Offence Management System (FOMS) - which registers forest offences electronically, Fire Alert Messaging System (FAMS) - which uses processed remote sensing data of active fire locations obtained from MODIS satellite and sends alerts to concerned field staff, Protection Information Management System (FIMS) and Protected Area Network Management System (PANMS). According to sources the JK Forest Department has finalised the blue-print of the project and work on it would start soon. The ICT initiative is expected to accelerate the pace of implementation of the Forest Policy adopted recently by the department. “With the help of ICT tools, there will be fast communication linkage and transfer of information system from bottom to top. For this purpose all the data in the department will be digitised. “The ICT tools will prevent land encroachments and will help in overall management of natural resources,” he added.
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TECH NEWS
WHAT’S NEW
Review: Nokia E7 There are few names that command as much respect in cellphones as Nokia's Communicator. In terms of hardware and features, the E7 carries forward the Communicator lineage immaculately. Although slightly remi nis cen t of the N8, the E7 is cleaner, with fewer buttons and ports littering the sides, giving it a much more polished look. Yes, this is a phone you can flaunt. The front is dominated by the 4inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with just a single key beneath it, to serve as a waking up, menu and back button. Sliding the screen reveals one of the most spacious QWERTY keyboards seen in recent times. On the back is an 8megapixel camera, but alas, no autofocus, but with a capacity to shoot HD video.
Google owns world's second-largest search engine too! Soon www could stand for world wide watching. Unknown to most, YouTube—the six-year-old videosharing website—has become the second-largest search engine in the world after Google. It gets two billion views a day, up 50% since 2009. A startup set up by three PayPal employees in 2005, YouTube was bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion. Now it is gearing up to compete with TV. It has nearly 20 million unique users in India. Top hits here mirror what works globallymovies and sports. So Bollywood content dominates and cricket isn't far behind. Dabangg premiered on YouTube in India. Google says Indian content producers lead in adopting and experimenting with YouTube.
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Australian jailed for defacing kids' Facebooks An Australian man was jailed for a year for defacing online tributes to two dead children with child pornography and offensive comments. Bradley Paul Hampson vandalised the Facebook pages dedicated to two Queensland children who died in February 2010 -- a 12-year-old boy who was stabbed in the schoolyard and an eight-year-old girl found dead in a drain. More than 9,000 people had joined the Facebook pages, mostly to express shock and offer their condolences, on which Hampson posted digitally altered images of the children and offensive messages, reports said.
All about Intel Insider Intel introduced its latest second generation Core processors codenamed Sandy Bridge in January this year. Sandy Bridge is, by far, the most refined processor ever released by Intel, reaching a new level of power efficiency with high performance and also integrating the graphics all on a single silicon die. Just when we thought we knew all about Sandy Bridge, Intel has announced the launch of Intel Insider. We are going to demystify Intel Insider for you today and we promise we will leave no stone unturned. Contrary to several news reports stating it to be a new processor released by Intel, Intel Insider is a feature already present in the Sandy Bridge processor, which will now be put in use by Intel. Intel Insider is a technology allowing you to download and view protected video content on a PC equipped with a Sandy Bridge processor. This technology also offers something that has never been offered before; it allows you to download a movie even before its date of release and securely purchase it even offline so that you can watch it as soon as it is released
in theatres without having to wait to download it on that date. This is known as 'proactive queue'.
Google enters mobile payments with NFC system Google aimed to go big-time in mobile payments when the company introduced Nexus S with the Near-Field Communication chip. Mobile Advertising is Google's safe bet and the company wishes to boost it via Mobile Payments. The Wall Street Journal reported that Google has joined hands with MasterCard and Citigroup for setting up a mobile payment system to turn Android smartphones into e-Wallets, according to people familiar with the matter. However, in this deal Google won't be getting any monetary cut from both partners whenever Google's phone is being used. So the deal is like this - Google's NFC chip based smartphones would be usable for Citigroup issued debit/credit cards. VeriFone will introduce Contact-less readers that will let the Citigroup card holders to make purchases by waving or tapping their Android smartphones in front of those readers. The special contact-less credit/debit card readers will incorporate nearfield communication technology - a short range wireless technology and will let the client device (Android Smartphones) behave like a contact-less electronic card. Though it is a contact-less system of mobile payment, it's more sophisticated and far more difficult for hackers to crack the code for stealing user's account information as the NFC technology isn't that easily vulnerable. More details are expected to be out in a couple of weeks. Apart from Google, Apple and BlackBerry too are expected to join the NFC-based mobile payment bandwagon. The next Apple iPhone 5 is heavily anticipated to carry the NFC chip. While the upcoming RIM's touch handsets will majorly feature NFC chip.
MARKET WATCH
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market watch
In this column, we will bring best deals to our readers in the computer market
eSys Wizard Desktop PC eSys has set a scorching pace to become a major IT component distribution network in Asia and Europe and has launched many eSys Wizard PC models in the market that combine look, portability, comfortability & efficiency. eSys Wizard PC Dual Core, 15.6" TFT, 250 GB HDD, 1 GB DDR, DVD RW
eSys Wizard PC Dual Core, 15.6" TFT, 500 GB HDD, 2 GB DDR, DVD RW
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Compaq Presario All-in-one PC Compaq Presario all-in-one PCs put everything in the monitor—there's no need for a separate PC tower—and all antennas and cables are concealed in the unit with just a single power cord for a clean, uncluttered look. The all-inone’s slim profile makes it an easy addition to any home office, family room or kitchen. Compaq Presario CQ1-1225
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INTERVIEW
VINOD VISHEN
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Prof Vinod Vishen, Principal CASET College, in conversation with Irshad Ul Islam discusses the state of IT industry in J&K and the role CASET has been playing in nurturing ICT related human resources in the state. Vinod Vishen is serving as Principal, CASET College. Before taking over his current role, he was working with Department of Atomic Energy where he was part of the team that wrote the first time-sharing operating system in India.
We used to make our own RAMs, Hard discs and Operating Systems.
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First of all I would like to know about your professional and academic background? I started my academic career with graduation from Gandhi College Srinagar & Masters degree in Mathematical Statistics from Kurukshetra University. After that I did my MS in Computer Science, which is equivalent to M. Phil, from the same university. At that
time, the course had been just started by UGC and named as Post Graduate Diploma in Numerical Analysis and Automatic Computing. This was the time when Computer Science was introduced in 5-6 institutes throughout India. After finishing my MS, I took up my first job with Department of Atomic Energy in Hyderabad. We had the privilege of being
VINOD VISHEN
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first to manufacture computers in Asia after Japan. This is how my career began. We were reinventing everything there, from making our own compilers to writing operating system code. Infact I remember being member of a team which wrote the first time-sharing operating system in India. Those were times when there was very serious technology restriction in place enforced by the American government. I remember we were not given even computers with memory of 512 kb. So we used to make our own RAMs, Hard discs and Operating Systems. A whole lot has changed since then. As you are heading one of the premier IT colleges of J&K, would you throw some light on the objective behind setting up this college? I wanted to set up a college of computer sciences in Kashmir almost from the very beginning because my father had been running a successful school here in Srinagar. So naturally there was desire in me to continue it further and upgrade it to a college and since I was in information technology, obviously that was what I wanted to do here. Those were early days for India in computer sciences. In 1986, I came here and started first computer institute in Karan Nagar Srinagar. Those were the days when there no computer courses such as BCA or MCA existed. Only BE and B.Tech program in Computer Sciences had been started started by IIT's but that was only two or three years old. Infact the first batch had not come out in India. By 1990 we were doing a diploma program which attracted large number of students. Due to
I proposed to the govt of Jammu and Kashmir to start a BCA programme in Kashmir & it took me about four years to convince govt and the university. Finally in 2001, we were given permission to start the BCA programme. political trouble in Kashmir, I had to leave this place & the institute was closed. I joined IIT Delhi in 1990 as a senior scientist. I was looking for the right opportunity to skip this job and restart the institute. In 1997 I felt the things had gone bit better so I came back and started teaching computer science. I proposed to the govt of Jammu and Kashmir to start a BCA programme in Kashmir. It took about four years to convi nce the govt and the
INTERVIEW
university. Finally in 2001 we were given permission to start the BCA programme and our first batch passed out in 2005. BCA program has been successful since then. However, the first program I started was DOEACC B Level course, which is our flagship program. We are considered among the very best colleges in the country today for studying DOEACC B-Level. Now coming to your question regarding objectives for setting up this college, the most fundamental objective was to bring technology to my people. I don't think there can be a sweeter dream than what I had dreamt at that time. There have been many people here that have helped me and I would like to take the name of Dr. Mehraj ud Din Dar Sahab who was instrumental in getting me the affiliation for the B Level program. What has been you experience so far running a successful IT college? I would say I am so happy that I came back here. I have actually found a new life for myself just being here with these
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INTERVIEW
VINOD VISHEN
young children. For me and all my staff fulfilling the dreams of our students is our main objective. We are very proud of what we have done. What is your view on IT sector in J&K? As far as the IT sector in J&K is concerned, there is a tremendous amount of scope here. As IT sector is primarily a human resource driven industry, if you have quality human resource you have the industry. The key problem we are facing here is that we do not have right political environment in which our child could invest their careers, time, and money and establish this industry. IT curriculum in our state has not been updated for a while and with the result gap has been developed between the academic standards and industry requirements? What is your take on this? We have to take care of the weaker section as well. Students who come from far flung areas have little computer knowledge and that needs to be taken care of. But we are not silent, new technologies and topics are being implemented in the syllabus slowly. There has been very less penetration of open source in academic curriculum despite its overwhelming adaptation, why? Open Source is a new concept in our state, but the good news is that people are taking it very seriously. You will see many government websites developed using open source software & tools. But it will take sometime for its introduction in academic curriculum. Kashmir University has already started a process to introduce open source to
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Open Source is a new concept in our state, but the good news is that people are taking it very seriously. You will see many government websites developed using open source software & tools. But will take sometime for its introduction in academic curriculum.
their projects like e-governance etc done through some local partner, so that it can generate employment for the IT graduates. What are the challenges that IT industry is facing in J&K and what is the solution in your opinion? I think the biggest challenge that we are facing is the political trouble and its effect on streets. And yes, politics should be kept off this sector to make it flourish. What are the future plans of your college and how would we foresee your college after 10 years? We want to develop quality excellence in our academic & professional programmes and introduce new technologies to our students so that they can cope up with the market demand.
students. Even a conference on Open Source is being organised by the Kashmir University in May 2011 in this regard. During our recent interviews there has been an opinion that IT is going to be a visible in J&K? How do you take this statement? I personally feel that IT industry is already visible in the state. Government is showing its keen interest and projects like egovernance, SWAN, state data center have been taken up in this regard. What are the employment opportunities for your outgoing college students in the state or outside the state? You will be surprised to know that we have achieved 100% job placements for our B-Level passouts outside state. To generate employment opportunities within the state, I would like the state government to get
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STAYING SAFE ON FACEBOOK IN FOCUS
Staying Safe on Facebook Grown-ups, take note! Here is what you need to know before “friending” your first Facebook connection.
R
ecent news stories have reported a litany of Facebook horror stories from geriatrics – you know, people over age 30 – who dented their dignities, if not their careers, through careless social networking. Some people think that the post-collegiate crowd is simply too fuddy-duddy for Facebook. Others insist that the site is now as essential as e-mail and phone service, if not air and water, and nobody of any age should be discouraged from squandering time on Facebook. Even Bill Gates is reported to have a half-hour-a-day Facebook habit. A typical Facebook humiliation scenario involves having someone post something questionable to your “wall”, “the public Facebook page, and then having that item inadvertently and automatically
blasted to everyone you know via Facebook. That group often includes business associates and other people with whom you’ve cultivated an illusion of respectability. Horrors!
feel that you have no choice but to dilly-dally on Facebook, consider these facts.
Because the Internet offers so many paths to public humiliation, it’s not entirely fair to single out Facebook. In the sit’s defense, you have to be a Facebook member to see all of the truly embarrassing items on another member’s page. Besides, Google can reveal more dirt about a person than Facebook does, and that includes material over which an individual has little control.
ŸFacebook was designed by adolescents, for adolescents with adolescent goals in mind. Only a few years ago, a .edu e-mail address was a prerequisite to a Facebook account, a requirement that effectively limited membership to college students. That sensibility remains part of Facebook’s DNA. A site designed to help you publish photos of yourself barfing over a beer keg is unlikely to help burnish your reputation in business.
But if you have a professional reputation to protect, a Facebook account creates a risk. those two are natural enemies, like eggs and bowling balls. Facebook is simply not designed as a tool for business. If you
ŸF a c e b o o k ’ s o p a q u e u s e r interface, the result of its fundamentally collegiate, videogamer sensibility, is not designed to be an effective business tool. Mistakes are far easier to make and
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IN FOCUS
STAYING SAFE ON FACEBOOK
www.globekashmir.com your privacy settings by selecting Privacy Settings from the Settings drop-down menu in the upper righthand corner of the screen. You can adjust every detail of your privacy settings, including who can see pictures, postings, personal information, and work information. You can also adjust what individual members see, so your boss or exspouse might not see things that the rest of the world does. There’s some wisdom in allowing only people you actually know to view your profile.
PITFALLS OF FINDING FRIENDS You can easily find out who on your contact lists are on facebook. Think twice before adding business contacts to your network. harder to correct than you’d expect in an application designed for actual work. ŸYou can’t predict or control who will ask to “friend” you on facebook. What do you do when your boss or an important client asks to become your Facebook friend? If your Facebook page includesthe names of everyone in your witches’ coven, do you want important potential clients to see that? Or will you insult some bigwig by refusing a friend request? It’s not exactly the dilemma of the ages, but it’s certainly a potential social headache that adults need to consider when joining Facebook. ŸFacebook developers often spring new features on users without warning. Not long ago a new “beacon” feature tracked members’ online shopping transactions and broadcast details to the world. The feature was dialed back after a firestorm of protest as well as some huge lawsuits over privacy violations, but the impulsive sensibility of Facebook developers augurs similar surprises in the future. And it raises the creepy question of why Facebook is collecting that information in the first place. ŸF a c e b o o k
phishing is beginning to surface. In one
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scenario, scammers hijack the Facebook log-in of a friend of yours and then pretend to be that friend with an urgent need for money. They contact you via chat and start the scam from there. To you, it looks like a request from a person you actually know, often embellished with personal information gleaned from your own Facebook entries. If anyone asks you for money on Facebook, use your head – don’t do it. At the very least, insist on direct contact in person or via a phone call that you originate. You need to be sure that you’re dealing with a moocher you actually know, not some unknown scammer. You should also contact the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, at www.ic3.gov, to file a complaint. In some other cases, a phony Facebook friend invites you to view a video that requires you to download a player. Naturally, that player is infected with malware. Obviously, this same scam could be delivered by e-mail or ordinary Web surfing, but the familiarity of relationships on Facebook induces people to lower their guard. Don’t despair. You can maintain a reasonable level of safety on Facebook. A few common-sense precautions can reduce your risk of problems. For starters, look over
One part of the “Find Friends” feature is a service that asks for the log-in and password of an online email account such as Gmail or Yahoo; it pulls the account’s address book information into Facebook. Good sense says that you shouldn’t pull a list of business contacts into Facebook if you think there’s risk of embarrassment. You might also consider who’s allowed to see photos that other people have tagged with your name. You may not want certain photos to be seen by certain people. It’s also possible for people to tag photos with your name that aren’t actually you, so it’s probably best to set your privacy level to limit tagged photo viewing to your friends, not the whole network. Let’s face it, Facebook is a time sink. Be prepared to spend an hour or so setting up your account when you first join. It doesn’t take that long to get an account established, but it does take some time to configure your account to make it suitable for use by a grown-up. A bit of social engineering can also help you distinguish business contacts from social friends. if an important business client wants to friend you, suggest that you connect on LinkedIn or one of the business networking services instead. That way you don’t have to insult someone by refusing to be a friend, and you can position your relationship as something more important than a casual encounter on Facebook.
Irshad Ul Islam Author is Sub Editor at Globe and can be reached at irshad@globekashmir.com
E-LEARNING IN FOCUS
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E-Learning: A Revolutionary Approach to Teaching-Learning Process As the Teaching Learning Process (TLP) forms the very basis of human development, it also needs to be crowned and facilitated with new approaches and technologies, to make it more, comprehensive, qualitative, scientific, universal, and easy to common access & reach, writes Kaiser Javeed Giri
T
oday, when the life is moving very fast, and the world is going under rapid change and development, it has become imperative, to develop and employ modern technologies and approaches, in all the spheres and situations of life. Since the Teaching Learning Process (TLP) forms the very basis of human development, it also needs to be crowned and facilitated with new approaches and technologies, to make it more, comprehensive, qualitative, scientific, universal, and easy to common access & reach. Almost everyone, somehow connected to education, would have come across the term e-learning, which when used effectively is not simply an add-on, but has potent bearing on all the aspects of the teaching-learning environment. A close study of the literature available on the subject, and the people's perception of the meaning of the term e-learning shows a wide range of variation not only at the management level, but also at the academic level among teachers and the students. Elearning does indeed have many dimensions and approaches; with associated spheres of influence each having different requirements and constraints pertaining to that environment, therefore one size does not fit to all. Here we start with an outline of the e-learning landscape introducing the common variants. Broadly speaking, the term e-
learning, in the most general sense, refers to use of information and communication technologies in the teaching learning process, with the intention to enhance its effectiveness, and cover a wide range of tools and technologies. The idea of using technology in classroom is not new. From use of projectors, calculators, and relatively more recently slides are all familiar examples of this idea. On the other extreme, one can visualise a completely electronic learning scenario with no direct human involvement in the role of a teacher. In between, there is a wide spectrum of points. One can use these technologies to affect different aspects of the TLP. The list below gives just a feel for these. Communication e-mail, discussion board, chat. Content slides, slides on line, web resources, simulations. Assessment Online assignment submission, online test. You can choose pretty much any combination from this. While it is difficult to call just using slides as elearning, somewhere along the spectrum you move into e-learning. It is hard to draw a universally acceptable dividing line, and perhaps it is of no interest either. A common phrase that props up in most discussions of e-learning is “Anytime, Anyplace, Anypace
learning�. What does this mean? In traditional classroom learning, the teacher and the learner assemble at one pre-specified place - the classroom normally - at a specified time. If a learner comes late or is at the wrong place, he would miss the instruction. Similarly, all learners are expected to follow the same pace set by the teacher. The mechanism cannot adapt to the pace variation among the different learners. Thus, this mode of instruction is same place, same time and same pace. You can relax one or more of these, substitute 'same' by 'any'. For example, any place, relaxes the need to gather at one single place. The teacher and the learners can be at different geographical places, but the time synchronisation is retained. Video lectures live telecast is an example of instruction by this mode. Any time relaxes the need for teacher and learner to be available at a common time. When you make content available on your website video, slides, notes, etc - so that learners can access and peruse them when they want to, you are enabling anytime learning. Any pace is relatively more challenging. In any pace learning, different students can follow the course at their own individual pace - a fast learner can finish the course in shorter time than a slow learner. While the three sound similar, the complexities of implementing the three from the perspective of pedagogy, technology, software complexity, etc are quite significantly different. Any place is generally handled by making the course accessible over the web, so
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IN FOCUS
E-LEARNING
that anyone connected to the web can have access. The pedagogic implications of lack of face to face contact can be partially alleviated by use of video connectivity, though it is expensive in bandwidth and cost. Any time largely requires the course to move away a lecture based format, since the teacher cannot assume the presence of the learner when he/she delivers the lecture. Similarly, the teacher may not be available when the student is perusing the content and wants to ask a query. Pace relaxation requires significant changes in the course plan itself, since different students may be at different stages in the course at any time. These require changes in all aspects of the elearning framework. Apart from this range of options, there is another important dimension in the e-learning space - of time synchronisation. This is closely linked to any time learning issue discussed earlier. We classify sametime e-learning as synchronous learning - both the teacher and the learners are present at the same time - and any time learning as asynchronous. Synchronous learning resembles the traditional classroom learning but for the fact the participants are physically spread out geographically. This is also called virtual classrooms (in contrast to the physical classroom). The primary technology constituent for this mode of learning is a mechanism to transport the teacher's activities - primarily lectures, slides, etc - to the students and their questions and comments back to the teacher, in real time. The alternative mode is called Asynchronous learning. Here it is not assumed that the teacher and the learner will be online at the same time. Web based learning, in general, works on this mode. This mode uses content repositories for offering content, and discussion boards, email, etc are used for communication. Chat, which is a synchronous tool, is also often included for discussions. There are a few more terms which often come up in discussions of elearning. From the early days of computing, people have been talking about using computers for enhancing TLP. That brought computer based tutoring (CBTs) into existence. A computer is used as a standalone
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www.globekashmir.com device here. There is no use of internet or any communication tool. Where e-learning scores over this, is in its ability to bring the power of communication and collaboration technologies into the learning process, along with the vast resources available over the Internet. So, we will consider e-learning to mandatorily require the use of Internet and communication tools which allow the user to interact with other learners and the teacher. Intelligent tutoring systems, another relevant term, is an attempt to mimic a human teacher beyond the delivery of content. It tries to incorporate a deep understanding of the domain of teaching, pedagogical principles, remedial instruction, high degree of individualisation, etc and provides more tutoring than instruction. It uses sophisticated computer science technologies such as artificial intelligence. Recently, there are also talks about m-learning, where the attempt is to exploit the fast growth of mobile and handheld devices in imparting education. While there are severe restrictions on this technology to provide the full functionality of a normal educational environment, it is found effective for specific learning activities, and is now an active area of research. Due to different perspectives that people have, there are number of different answers to the issue as to why we need e-learning. However elearning is seen desirable from number of perspectives some of which are outlined below: Shortage of Human Resource In many disciplines, shortage of qualified teachers is a problem plaguing most educational institutions. The quality of the available teachers is another major concern. Given the financially attractive opportunities in the industry and poor academic environment that is seen in most of the educational institutions, teaching job is among the lowest in the preference list for many. While hardly anyone looks at e-learning as an alternative to traditional teaching, in this context, it is seen to expand the reach of the available teachers. Time, Place and Pace Independent Learning
As mentioned earlier, for many, the need to come together at a fixed place at a fixed time is a major constraint. This is particularly true for those pursuing courses in parttime mode, the just in-time learners, adult learners, etc. The freedom to connect to the course setup at any time of your choice, and from any place is a major incentive for elearning. It also enables learners to take to studying when they feel that it is the best time for them to study, and hence provides for adapting the TLP to the learner's individual characteristics. Comprehensive Learning Experience This is a very important, but often ignored and under-explored aspect. When exploited effectively, elearning enables a high degree of personalisation and a wide range of instructional methods. Powerful simulation environments, multimedia capability and high-end visualisation support enables learners to relate the subject much more deeply and comprehend it fully. Content Creation India, despite her IT-prowess, is still a poor contributor of content in the Web. Part of the reason is that very few of our teachers are online. Improved Quality of Teaching When one gets into practicing elearning to any significant degree, one will be creating much of the course material electronically. These are a lot more reusable compared to written notes, used otherwise. These can be improved over the years using user feedback, and hence results in better quality of material. Methodical Feedback and Evaluation Bringing assessment and other activities under e-learning enables you to gather much more detailed feedback on various aspects of the course. These include quality of questions, quality of content, qualitative judgement on students' performance, etc. These can be used to enrich the quality of instruction at an institutional level. From the list given above, one can see the many types of benefits that elearning can bring in. However, elearning offers a rich set of options to choose from. Proper choice of these
E-LEARNING IN FOCUS
www.globekashmir.com options is important to reap the intended benefits. The main components that make up the course are the teacher, the learner, the content, the assessment mechanism, communication and collaboration mechanisms, and the administrative aspects. In e-learning also, one needs to have all these. Some of them change in style to suit the new medium; but most of these exist in a visibly recognisable form. Arguably, the most talked about Indian e-Learning project is the NPTEL project. NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning) was conceived in 1999 and funded by MHRD (Ministry of Human Resource and Development). Under the project, 7 IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) and IISc (Indian Institute of Science) Bangalore, worked on the Rs 20.5 crore project from 2003 to 2006, to create 112 video courses and 116 web courses. Coming to the usage of NPTEL resources, here are some interesting statistics: Visitor Count: In the initial 10 month period since September 2006, there were 580,000 visitors to the site and of which 160,000 were registered. NPTEL site usage: As per Alexa site, 21% of visitors to iitm.ac.in website visit the NPTEL section. The iitm.ac.in website has a rank of 9813 in India. Another commercially successful initiative is MBA Programs being conducted for Working Professionals using Satellite Video technology, by institutions like IIM-Calcutta, IIMCalicut, IIT-Delhi, IIFT, IIT Bombay, XLRI etc. This was done by these institutions using services provided by companies like HughesNet (formerly Hughes Direcway), Reliance Infocom and now NIIT Imperia. Premier institutes like IIMs, IITs and XLRI etc provided faculty who take the classes, run the program, ensure quality and institutes provide certificates to students. Satellite-based video technology is used to beam live lectures from the institute studio to the centres. Learning Management System
software is used to supplement this for giving assignments, reading material and collaboration among students and faculty. The companies also set-up studios in partner institutes to enable lecture beaming. Now as we see, it was a comprehensive solution encompassing quality content, great technology, and services (marketing, infrastructure etc) to meet student need. Sakshat Portal from MHRD is another well-known e-Learning initiative. Modelled on lines of MIT OCW, it has been designed and developed by IGNOU for Ministry of HRD, as a repository of eBooks, eJournals, Digital Repository and other student-relevant information. Study material is classified into various topics. Another related initiative again from IGNOU is eGyankosh – another digital repository for learning resources. Some of the other lesser known eLearning initiatives/ projects in India are: Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham – This initiative launched in 2004 uses satellite technology to connect campuses of Amrita University located in 4 cities of South India. BITS Pilani – It has established a virtual university, with DIT sponsorship. Jadavpur University – It started a new inter-disciplinary “Masters in Multimedia Development” course in 2000-01 as a distance education course using print material, CD ROM, and web-based learning environment. Aligarh Muslim University – It worked on a project in 2006-07 to take its distance education program online, starting with a few courses which are industry-relevant. Central Institute of English and Foreign Language, Hyderabad – It had a project for online learning software set-up and usage in 2006. Many other universities and colleges had small projects/ initiatives where they bought software, hardware and other technology products, got content development done for e-Learning launch. It includes Hyderabad University, Kerala University, Terna College Mumbai, MDI Gurgaon, etc.
So far as the future of e-learning is concerned, according to Market Data Retrieval (MDR) in USA two thirds of colleges and universities offer long distance learning courses and the number of institutions offering accredited degrees have increased to 55%. New varieties of e-Learning have emerged with help and push from emerging technologies. Tuition on line has taken a new meaning where a varied help is now available both free and paid for on demand on any subject instantly. This has relieved pressure both on the teacher and the students. Future learning is now focusing on learning beyond the classroom and curriculum. Institutions need to upgrade employees by offering retraining programmes. These are both costly and time consuming. By designing these programmes and content via e-Learning methods both time and money are saved. The innovative method is also self promoting as it increases the curiosity level of individuals for self promotion and career enhancements. Apart from education, in the technical field too doctors and other professionals are getting a fair chance for keeping abreast of developments and discoveries and even participation in these activities through interactive delivery processes. Looking further, this being the global market era, the consumer is being made aware of immense openings, opportunities and bargains through this method. Medical tourism is one recent example of e-Learning where serious information and fun have been mixed for delivery of marketing content. To conclude, e-learning has created a new dimension in education, both within and beyond the curriculum and is still looking at further opportunities of becoming more useful via new emerging technologies. We are really on the threshold of new opportunities and this is just the beginning of new horizon of education. Let we join our hands to realise this end. Author is Assistant Professor in Deptt of Computer Science, Islamic University of Science & Technology. He can be reached at kaiserjaveed@gmail.com
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TECH FOR DUMMIES
HOW INTERNET WORKS
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How does the internet work? Usher behind the scenes of one of the hottest technologies that you might already be familiar with: the World Wide Web.
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very so often, you get offered a behind-the-scenes look at the cogs and fan belts behind the action. Today’s your lucky day. I’m going to usher you behind the scenes of one of the hottest technologies that you might already be familiar with: the World Wide Web. This article covers the underlying technologies that power the World Wide Web: Ÿ Hypertext Markup Language
(HTML) Ÿ Hypertext Transfer Protocol
(HTTP) Ÿ Domain Name System (DNS) Ÿ Web servers and web browsers Ÿ Static and dynamic content
It’s all pretty fundamental stuff—while most of what’s covered here won’t help you to build a better web site, it will give you the proper language to use when speaking with clients and with others about the web. It’s like a wise nun-turnednanny once said in The Sound of Music: “When we read we begin with ABC. When we sing we begin with Do Re Mi.”. In this article I will briefly look at how computers actually communicate using HTTP and TCP/IP, then go on to look at the different languages that go together to create the web pages that make up the Internet. Thankfully, we have kept things simple for computers. When it comes to the World Wide Web, most pages are written using the same language, HTML, which is passed around using a common protocol—HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol). HTTP is the common internet dialect (specification), allowing for example a Windows machine to sing in harmony with a machine running the latest and greatest version of Linux. Through
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the use of a web browser—a special piece of software that interprets HTTP and renders HTML into a human-readable form—web pages authored in HTML on any type of computer can be read anywhere, including telephones, PDAs and even popular video game systems. Even though they’re speaking the same language, the various devices accessing the web need to have some rules in place to be able to talk to one another—it’s like learning to raise your hand to ask a question in class. HTTP lays out these ground rules for the Internet. Because of HTTP, a client machine (like your computer) knows that it has to be the one to initiate a request for a web page from a server. A server is a computer where web sites reside when you type a web address into your browser, a server receives your request, finds the web page you want, and sends it back to your computer to be displayed in your web browser. Dissecting a request/response cycle Now that I’ve looked at all the parts that allow computers to communicate across the Internet, I’ll look at the HTTP request/response cycle in more detail. There are some numbered steps below for you to work along
with, so I can demonstrate some of the concepts to you more effectively. Every request/response starts by typing a Universal Resource Locator (URL) into the address bar of your web browser, something like http://dev.opera.com. Open a browser and do this now. Now, one thing you may not know is that web browsers actually don’t use URLs to request web sites from servers; they use Internet Protocol or IP addresses (which are basically like phone numbers or postal addresses that identify servers.) For example, the IP address of http://dev.opera.com is 213.236.208.98. Try opening a new browser tab or window, typing http://www.apple.com and hitting
HOW INTERNET WORKS
www.globekashmir.com enter; then type http://17.149.160.10/ and hit enter—you will get to the same place. Try typing http://213.236.208.98 into the address bar and hitting enter—you will get to the same server location that you got to in step 1, although you’ll get a 403 “Access Denied” error—this is because you don’t have permission to access the actual root of this server. http://www.apple.com is basically acting as an alias for http://17.149.160.10/, but why, and how? This is because people are better at remembering words than long strings of numbers. The system that makes this work is called the Domain name system (DNS), which is essentially a comprehensive automatic directory of all of the machines connected to the Internet. When you punch http://dev.opera.com into your address bar and hit enter, that address is sent off to a name server that tries to associate it to its IP address. There are a ton of machines connected to the Internet, and not every DNS server has a listing for every machine online, so there’s a system in place where your request can get referred on to the right server to fulfill your request. So the DNS system looks up the www.opera.com web site, finds that it is located at 17.149.160.10, and sends this IP address back to your web browser. Your machine sends a request to the machine at the IP address specified and waits to get a response back. If all goes well, the server machine sends a short message back to the client with a message saying that everything is
okay (see Figure 1,) followed by the web page itself. This type of message is contained in an HTTP header. If something goes wrong, for example you typed the URL incorrectly, you’ll get an HTTP error returned to your web browser instead—the infamous 404 “page not found” error is the most common example you’ll come across. Try typing in http://dev.opera.com/joniscool.ht ml. The page doesn’t exist, so you’ll get a 404 error returned. Try it with a few pages, on different web sites, that don’t exist, and you’ll see a variety of different pages retuned. This is because some web developers have just left the web server to return their default error pages, and others have coded custom error pages to appear when a non-existent page is returned. This is an advanced technique that won’t be covered in this course, but it will hopefully be covered in a separate dev.opera.com article soon. Lastly, a note about URLs—usually the first URL you go to on a site doesn’t have an actual file name at the end of it (eg http://www.mysite.com/), and then subsequent pages sometimes do and sometimes don’t. You are always accessing actual files, but sometimes the web developer has set up the web server to not display the file names in the URL—this often makes for neater, easier to remember URLs, which leads to a better experience for the user of your web site. We’ll not cover how to do this in this course, as again, it is quite advanced; we cover
TECH FOR DUMMIES
uploading files to a server and file/folder directory structures in a later article.
Types of Content Now that I’ve shown you an HTTP request/response, I’ll now turn your attention to the different types of content you’ll expect to see on the Internet. I’ve grouped these into 4 types—plain text, web standards, dynamic web pages, and formats requiring other applications or plugins. Plain text In the really early days of the Internet, before any web standards or plugins came along, the Internet was mainly just images and plain text—files with an extension of .txt or similar. When a plain text file is encountered on the Internet, the browser will just display it as is, without any processing involved. You often still get plain text files on university sites. Web Standards The basic building blocks of the World Wide Web are the three main web standards—HTML (or XHTML, I’ll use the two interchangeably here for our purposes), CSS and JavaScript. Hypertext Markup Language is actually a pretty good name as far as communicating it’s purpose. HTML is what’s used to divide up a document, specify its contents and structure, and define the meaning of each part (it’s what contains all the text etc that you see on web sites.) It uses elements to identify the different components of a page. Cascading Style Sheets give you complete control over how an
Plain HTML on the left, HTML with CSS applied to it on the right.
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element is displayed. It’s easy, using style declarations, to change all paragraphs to be double-spaced (line-height: 2em;), or to make all second-level headings green (color: green;). There are a ton of advantages to separating the structure from the formatting, and we’ll look at this in more detail in the next article. To demonstrate the power of HTML and CSS used together, Figure 2 shows some plain HTML on the left, with no formatting added to it at all, while on the right you can exactly the same HTML with some CSS styles applied to it. Finally, JavaScript provides dynamic functions to your web site. You can write small programs in JavaScript that will run on the client computer, requiring no special software to be installed on the server. JavaScript allows you to add some basic functionality and interactivity to your web site, but it has its limitations, which brings us to server-side programming languages, and dynamic web pages. Dynamic web pages Sometimes, when browsing the Internet, you’ll come across web pages that don’t have an .html extension—they might have a .php, .asp, .aspx, .jsp, or some other strange extension. These are all examples of dynamic web technologies, which can be used to create web pages that have dynamic sections—code that displays different results depending on values fed to it, eg from a database, form, or other data source. We’ll cover these types of web pages in the Static versus Dynamic pages section below. Formats requiring other applications or plugins Because web browsers are only equipped to interpret and display certain technologies like web standards, if you’ve requested a URL that points to either a complex file format, or a web page containing a technology requiring plugins, it will either be downloaded to your computer or opened using the required plugin if the browser has it installed. For example:
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If you encounter a Word document, Excel file, PDF, compressed file (ZIP, or SIT for example,) complex image file such as a Photoshop PSD, or another complex file that the browser doesn’t understand, the browser will usually ask you if you want to download or open the file. Both of these usually have similar results, except that the latter will cause the file to be downloaded and then opened by an application that does understand it, if one is installed. If you encounter a page containing a Flash movie, MP3 or other music format, MPEG or other video format, the browser will play it using an installed plugin, if one has been installed. If not, you will either be given a link to install the required plugin, or the file will download and look for a desktop application to run it. Of course, there are some gray areas—for example SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a web standard that runs natively in some browsers, such as Opera, but not in others, such as Internet Explorer—IE needs a plugin to understand SVG. A number of browsers will come with some plugins pre-installed, so you may not be aware that content is being displayed via a plugin and not natively within the browser. Static vs. Dynamic Web Sites So what are static and dynamic web sites, and what is the difference between the two? Similar to a box of chocolates, it’s all in the filling: A static web site is a web site where the content, the HTML and graphics, are always static—it is served up to any visitor the same, unless the person who created the web site decides to manually change the copy of it on the server—this is exactly what we’ve been looking at throughout most of this article. On a dynamic web site on the other hand, the content on the server is the same, but instead of just being HTML, it also contains dynamic code, which may display different data depending on information you feed to the web site. Let’s look at an example—navigate to www.amazon.com in your web
www.globekashmir.com browser, and search for 5 different products. Amazon hasn’t sent you 5 different pages; it has sent you the same page 5 times, but with different dynamic information filled in each time. This different information is kept in a database, which pulls up the relevant information when requested, and gives it to the web server to insert in the dynamic page. Another thing to note is that special software must be installed on the server to create a dynamic web site. Whereas normal static HTML files are saved with a file extension of .html, these files contain special dynamic code in addition to HTML, and are saved with special file extensions to tell the web server that they need extra processing before they are sent to the client (such as having the data inserted from the database)—PHP files for example usually have a .php file extension. There are many dynamic languages to choose from—I’ve already mentioned PHP, and other examples include Python, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET and Coldfusion. In the end, all of these languages have pretty much the same capabilities, like talking to databases, validating information entered into forms, etc., but they do things slightly differently, and have some advantages and disadvantages. It all boils down to what suits you best. Summary That’s it for the behind-thescenes tour of how the Internet works. This article really just scratches the surface of a lot of the topics covered, but it is useful as it puts them all in perspective to each other, showing how they all relate and work together. There is still a lot left to learn about the actual language syntax that makes up HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and this is where we’ll go to next—the next article focuses on the HTML, CSS and JavaScript “web standards” model of web development, and takes a look at web page code.
Jonathan Lane Author writes for Opera Web Standards Curriculum.
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CLAUDE SHANNON
FOUNDERS AT WORK
Claude Shannon, the founding father of Electronic Communication Age The concept of error-correcting codes, the Cryptography and the modern digital communication has been very well elaborated by Claude Shannon comments Peer Javeed Iqbal Naqshbandi
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hat do the following have in common? Digital Communication, Juggling Machines, Mechanical mazesolving mice, Motorized Pogo sticks, and a machine that solves the Rubik's cube puzzle? Well the answer is the great American mathematician and Engineer Claude Shannon, who has invented all of this. Introduction Before introducing the subject to the readers let me portray the common senses in our daily lives. Scene 1: Pickup your favorite music or video CD and let you scratch it with some rough surface. Now slide it into the slot in the CD player and listen to your favorite music or watch you favorite movie. Contrary to your expectations you will notice to your astonishment that the music and the film come out almost as crystal clear as it was before the disc was scratched. Scene 2: The man in the street (aam aadmi, the chaiwala, the rikshawala, the doodhwala) using mobile phones in an innovatively created advertisement of a mobile service provider, which exemplifies the ever increasing number of mobile users even among the lower strata of society. The above two scenes are not hypothetical; they are now a reality. They have resulted from the growth of information and communication technology. These two technologies have made immense impact on human society. Before moving on with the rest of your day, spare a moment to think about the man whose revolutionary ideas made both the above scenes,
once seemingly improbable, a reality now. The man was Claude Elwood Shannon. The CD player is able to reproduce the music or movie without any distortion from a scratched CD largely due to the incorporation of unique errorcorrecting codes in the CD. Shannon was one of the all-time great scientist-mathematicians in the mid twentieth century. The revolutionary developments in modern communication technology also owe its debt to Shannon, for it was he who introduced the concept of digital communication technology. Foundation for Digital Technology Claude Elwood Shannon, distant relative of the legendary Thomas Alva Edison, is regarded as the father of modern digital communication and information theory. He was one of the most outstanding scientists of the 20th century. His work in the 1940s served as the foundation for digital communication technology. He used his mathematical genius and his engineering skills to combine mathematical theories with engineering principles to set the stage for the development of the digital computer and modern digital communication revolution. He was
the first person to realize that any message, be it the voice, text, movies, pictures, data etc., could be transmitted as a series of 0's and 1's on the communication channel. The information content of a message, he theorized, consists simply of the number of 1's and 0's it takes to transmit it. Shannon, in his Master's thesis, showed that, these binary digits (0's and 1's) could be represented by two basic conditions of the electrical switches. A switch that was turned ON represented the digit 1 and switch that was turned OFF represented the digit 0. He used the Boolean algebra to show that complex operations could be performed automatically on these electrical circuits, thus manipulating the data they were storing. Although today we use this mathematics all the time in designing digital circuits that form the basis of modern computers and telecommunication systems, the adoption of Shannon's concept in digital communication was not easily forthcoming. To most communications engineers of his time, signals were quite obviously 'analog' and the concept of digital signals was yet to sink in. With the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs in the late 1940s, things began to change. The invention of the transistor, coupled with Shannon's remarkable theorems telling communications engineers what ultimate goals to strive for, and the integrated circuits providing ever improving hardware to realize these goals, the incredible digital communications revolution began to take shape. Electronics and communications engineers gradually adopted Shannon's revolutionary ideas to stimulate the digital communication technology, which has led to today's information age.
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FOUNDERS AT WORK
CLAUDE SHANNON
Adopting the bit Shannon liberated the “entropy” of thermodynamics from physics and redefined it as a measure of uncertainty on probability distributions. Shannon used the term 'bit' (binary digit), which is the most common word used in modern days. Shannon used the term for the first time in one of his papers, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, which was published in 1948. Shannon defines his 'bit' as amount of information gained (or entropy removed) upon learning the answer to a question for which two possible answers were equally likely. In fact, the framework and terminology that he used for information theory remains standard even today. All communication lines today are measured in 'bps' (bits per second), the notion that Shannon made precise with the “channel capacity”. His theory also made it possible to use bits in computer storage needed for pictures, voice streams and other data. “Nobody has come close to his idea before,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Emeritus Robert G. Gallager, who worked with Shannon. “This was not something somebody else would have done for a very long time,” he added. Cryptography Starting in 1938, Shannon worked at MIT with Vannevar Bush's “differential analyzer”, the ancestral analog computer. After another summer (1940) at Bell Labs, he spent the academic year working under the famous mathematician Hermann Weyl at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, where he also began thinking about recasting communications on a proper mathematical foundation. Shannon was also a noted cryptographer, during World War II, he worked on Secrecy Systems at Bell labs. His team's work on anti-aircraft directors -devices that observe enemy planes or missiles and calculate the trajectory of counter missiles, became crucial when German rockets were used in the bombardment of England. His mastery contributions to the field of cryptography can best be seen in his 1949 paper entitled “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems”.
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Shannon was affiliated with Bell Laboratories from 1941 to 1956. During his 15 years stay at the Bell Labs, he initially worked on projects related to the war effort. In 1945 he wrote a classified report, “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography”, which was finally declassified and published in 1949 in the Bell System Technical Journal as the “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems”. Error correcting codes To appreciate the importance of Shannon's works, one has to look at the technology, which is used in the transmission and reception of data from interplanetary probes in space. Modern communications technology allows satellites and space probes to transmit pictures and data millions of kilometers back to earth from space without any significant loss in data, with antennae that uses very little power. The principle method employed in transmission of signals, data and pictures through the noisy vacuum of space to earth uses some intriguing codes that are known as 'error-correcting codes'. These codes contain internal bits of binary data that allow the receiver to determine whether the data that has been received is exactly same as that transmitted or not, and if the data received is not accurate, then ideally to reconstruct the correct version of the data at the receiver end. The concept of introducing such useful error-correcting codes go back to 1948, the year when Shannon published a paper, which showed the maximum theoretical rate at which information can be transmitted without error. Even since Shannon's path-breaking 1948 paper, several expert coding theorists have struggled to find codes that perform as well as that of Shannon's codes. The stored information in computers on CDs and DVDs are also protected with the same types of errorcorrecting codes which are used in the transmission of information. Shannon also pioneered the study of 'source coding' or 'data compression', an important method of modern communications. Shannon left Bell Labs to join MIT in 1958 and worked as a Donner Professor of Science until his
www.globekashmir.com retirement in 1978. For decades, MIT continued to be the leading University for information and communication theory. In recognition of his pioneering contribution to the field of information and communication theory, the information theory group of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), which later becomes the information theory society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), established the Shannon Award as its highest honor. Eclectic interest Shannon was also a great inventor, a trait that he inherited from his grandfather, designed and built several interesting machines, which includes the chess-playing, maze-solving, juggling and mind reading machines. Shannon also designed and developed several other machines like the juggling machine, motorized Pogo sticks, a mind-reading machine, a mechanical mouse that could navigate a maze and also a device that could solve the famous Rubik's Cube puzzle. Shannon was an avid chess player. Medals and Honours Despite Shannon's immense contributions to society he did not receive the coveted Nobel Prize, as most of his contributions were in the fields that do not qualify for the Nobel Prize. But he received many awards like the Morris Liebmann Memorial award in 1949, Ballantine Medal in 1955, the Merin J. Kelly award of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1962, the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1966, IEEE Medal of Honour in 1966, the Israel's Harvey Prize in 1972, the Jaquard Award in 1978, the John Fritz Medal in 1983 and Japan's Kyoto Prize in 1985. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London and the Leopoldina Academy. During the last few years of his life, Shannon was afflicted with Alzheimer's disease and he died on 24 February 2001, at Medford, Massachusetts. Author is working at IGNOU, Regional Centre, Srinagar as Information Technology Consultant.
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WIRELESS NETWORKING
COVER STORY
WIRE LESS NETWORKING A Complete Guide I
f you’re reading this story, chances are very good that you already have a home network. So why the refresher course on why you need one and how to set one up? As we all know, the times they are a-changin’ constantly in the tech world, and with so many new products and services being offered, some of you may want to rebuild your home network to accommodate all that you want to do with it. You may also have a home network but have always wondered about its mechanics – like what goes on in the brain of that little router of yours, or how the router’s wireless radio actually works. We’re here to explain what’s going on inside your devices. Beyond the basics of letting you share high-speed Internet access with computers and devices in the house, home networks allow you to control what the kids are doing on the Web, share data and multimedia files, automate backups for all of your Pcs, and even use webcams to see what that new puppy is doing in the living room while you’re at work. The bedroom computer upstairs can print to the color printer in the downstairs study, and the media PC in the living room can show a movie on the PC-connected TV in the basement rec room.
Rebuilding your wireless home network doesn’t have to be tough, if you follow our steps.
Adding on network-oriented products and peripherals makes the setup even more useful. Network attached storage (NAS) lets you create shared folders for each family member; these folders can be accessed both from the home network or from the Internet if you’re away from home. NAS devices also make efficient places to store all those backup files. The Connection Not only have most of us had Internet for years, but we do have high-speed internet as well. In general, most home networks get broadband ADSL, Wireless Broadband. For those in remote areas, VSAT is the way to go – it’s still better than dial-up service. Those living in rural areas should also consider a WISP, or wireless Internet service provider. WISPs act like upside-down satellite dishes, reaching down into the ground to connect to fiber-optic lines, while long range wireless routers installed in each customer’s house point sideways toward the tower. If you’re considering switching your provider, pick the one with the most throughput (measured in megabits per second, or Mbps) for the lowest monthly
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cost, and you’re good to go. Setting up high-speed Internet service is much, much simpler than it used to be. You can get a broadband connection from BSNL which comes optionally with the Router as well. Stick the Quick Start CD into your computer and follow the on-screen instructions. Typically it will ask you to plug your router into the phone line first, then it will take a minute or so to find itself on the provider’s network. After that, you’ll plug your computer into the other side of the router, fill out some configuration options, make sure your computer’s network settings are set to “Automatically get an IP address,” and that’s it. You’ll be on the Internet. Any other computers you plug into the back of that router will not only see the Web, they’ll also see each other (or they will after you run Microsoft’s home networking wizard) – and hey, you’ve got a basic network. Networking and Windows Once your router is functioning and your computers are plugged in, you need to make sure all the computers can see not just the Internet, but each other as well. For Vista and Windows 7 machines, you’re not going to have to do much besides wait. These versions of the Windows operating system are much smarter about networking. Vista Pcs will simply find each other on the network as long as they’re all in the same IP subnet – a logical division of a local area network, which is created to improve performance and provide security. If your computers don’t see each other, Vista has a couple of network fix-it wizards, as well as the “Set up a home network” wizard for you to fall back upon. Windows XP machines, on the other hand, are a mixed bag. Those in the same IP subnet should see each other, but there’s a chance they won’t. You’re best off running the “Set up a home network” wizard right away for XP, which is available off the Network Neighbourhood screen. Just run this wizard on every XP machine individually. The most thinking you’ll have to do is picking a workgroup name for your network.
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(But that’s an important step: You can’t share files or printers between PCs that don’t have the same workgroup name.) Understanding your Router The router is the heart of your home network – which is good. That’s because it’s doing several important jobs. First it’s the outward face of your Internet connection. To the phone or satellite company, your internet account is represented by just one internet address. If you look o n
your router’s basic setup or status Web page, you’ll see that address at the top, generally labeled something like “WAN IP address” or “Internet IP address.” This is all that the provider or anyone on the Internet can see of your network. The router maintains that external address and simultaneously hands out a bunch of internal addresses to the computers in your house, using a different IP addressing scheme than the public one used by your provider. The process of translating traffic between the internal and external addresses is called Network Address Translation (NAT), and the process for handing out those internal addresses automatically is called the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). NAT is used because the TCP/IP
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WIRELESS NETWORKING
COVER STORY
past the firewall built into your router will have some trouble accessing the Pcs behind it. Another non-routable addressing scheme is 10.10.X.X. You can set your scheme to run any way you’d like, but these schemes are the safest. Speaking of safe, your router, as mentioned, is also your firewall, which is critical to a safe network. A good firewall using stateful packet inspection (which ensures that all inbound packets are the result of an outbound request) keeps the bad guys off your home network – and believe me, the bad guys are out there. You should also install a software firewall on every Windows PC and make sure it stays updated. Just open the app every few weeks, and it will tell you if you need a software update. That’s as easy as downloading a file and hitting “save.” Vista and Windows 7 have pretty good firewalls included with the operating system. Setting up Wireless
network protocol was never intended to support the millions of users, devices, and Web sites that currently populate the Internet. There simply aren’t enough addresses to go around, so one per customer is all ISPs can manage – and even then they need to play cycling games, so your WAN IP address will probably change every few weeks. On the internal side, you can set up whatever IP addressing scheme you’d like using your router’s DHCP settings. This looks like Sanskrit, but don’t panic: For the most part you can leave the default settings. Most routers default to a 192.168.X.X address scheme. It’s those last two Xs – technically they’re called octets – that concern you. The second-to-last variable determines your subnet. So Pcs addressed at 192.168.1.X are all
in the same subnet and should see and network with each other just fine. One that’s addressed as 192.168.0.X will be left out in the cold.
Probably the last thing your router is doing is providing wireless access using Wi-Fi. The giveaway used to be whether or not it had antennas, but more and more routers today remain stylish by hiding the antenna – even multiple antennas – inside the bezel. Actually, it’s hard to find a router today that isn’t Wi-Fi capable. PCs with Wi-Fi will see the router almost immediately, but you shouldn’t let it go at that.
That last octet will be different for every device you plug into the network. The router, for example, might be 192.168.1.1. The first PC might be 192.168.1.2, your laptop might have “3," and so on. The last octet can be any number between 1 and 254, so you’ve got plenty of addresses to go around inside your home – so you needn’t worry about running out.
Wireless networking works on RF (radio frequencies), so it’s essentially a radio: Anyone within 300 feet (indoors) or 600 yards (outdoors) can tune in to your signal. Some people are quite open to sharing their Internet connection this way, but doing so can leave your PCs vulnerable. Unless you want anyone parked outside your driveway to know what’s on your network, your PCs, your hard disks, and the like, it’s a good idea to use some security.
The reason to stick with the default 192.168.0.X or 192.168.1.X scheme is because that particular range is not routable on the Internet. This means that anything hacking
Your router offers several wireless security options. The two most popular are WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and WPA2 (WiFi Protected Access). Either will give
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COVER STORY
WIRELESS NETWORKING
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The Best Routers (with integrated DSL modem) D-LINK DSL-2640B
NETGEAR DGN1000
ADSL2/2+ MODEM WITH WIRELESS ROUTER
ADSL2/2+ MODEM WITH WIRELESS ROUTER
The D-Link ADSL2/2+ Modem with Wireless Router (DSL-2640B) is a 3-in-1 device that combines the function of a high-speed DSL modem, wireless G access point, and 4port Ethernet router. The DSL-2640B supports the latest ADSL2/2+ standards to provide higher performance (up to 24Mbps* downstream and 3.5Mbps* upstream) and longer reach from your Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer (DSLAM).
The NETGEAR N150 Wireless ADSL2+ Modem Router is a simple and secure way to share your high-speed Internet connection at Wireless-N speeds for surfing the Internet, email, online chat and Facebook. Complete with a builtin DSL modem, it is compatible with all major DSL Internet service providers and Wireless-G networks, allowing hassle-free connection flexibility. It features Easy Setup and Live Parental Controls, Push ‘N’ Connect easy connection apart from its Green features.
you enough basic protection, though WPA2 is tougher. But many folks still use WEP, because Windows XP has trouble with more advanced forms of wireless security. Also, if you’ve got any older Wi-Fi products around your house using 802.11b technology, WEP is probably all they support. WEP is easy to crack by anyone with the right tools and the time to put in, however, so don’t trust it for important data. Windows Vista handles either with aplomb, so stick with WPA2 there. Setting up wireless is again just a short series of steps. First pick a channel (you can stick to the default unless there are a lot of other wireless routers around, as there probably are in an apartment building). Stick with channels 1, 6, or 11: They don’t “overlap” and thus have less interference. Set all your wireless devices to the same channel. The router will then ask you to name its wireless network; this is called the SSID in Wi-Fi speak. Definitely do not stick with the default here, which is usually “Linksys” or ‘D-Link” or something similar. Use something perosnal, like “BobsWireless.” When asked which security option you’d like to use, opt for WPA2 if you know that all the devices on your network support it. After that, simply pick a security key, which boils down to a password-type phrase. Try and go strong here. Use not just “password” but “p4ssW0rd1234” – because a mixture of capitals, numbers, and
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symbols with letters is much harder to crack, let alone guess. Avoid words found in the dictionary. The balance here is to come up with something easy to remember. Even then, it’s a good idea to change that security key every few months. Save that and all you have to do is go to each of your wireless computers and let them scan for the SSID (BobsWireless). When a device finds it, it will ask you for the security key. Type it in, hit Save, and those PCs will automatically connect whenever they’re turned on and in range. Last Thoughts on Wires and Ports Once your home network is running, those wireless computers should be able to see each other as well as any wired computers you have plugged directly into the back of the home router. And speaking of wired, stick with Category 5e or Category 6 Ethernet patch cables. Both of these are capable of running Gigabit-speed Ethernet (GigE). The highest-end home routers have GigE, which has a data rate of 1,000 Mbps – ten times faster than “Fast Ethernet.” Gigabit Ethernet will be especially useful if your network winds up carrying movies and hi-def TV content around the house, or if you play multiplayer games. And who doesn’t? If those ports on the back of your router aren’t enough, drop some rupees on a GigE-capable
switch. Plug it into a GigE port on your router, and then all the ports on the switch will function the same as those on the router. You’ll instantly go from four available GigE ports to 8, 12 or 20 depending on how big a switch you choose. You can even plug a second switch into the first. If you have areas of the house where Wi-Fi won’t reach and you don’t want to thread Ethernet cable through the walls or around door, you can sometimes take advantage of existing wires in the walls. If you’re lucky enough to have coaxial cable running from room to room, a set of MoCA - capable adapters (short for multimedia over coax) on either end will use the wire as if it were Ethernet. You can even do the same with power lines in your house, using adapters that support HomePlug technology. Those are even easier, because they just plug into existing outlets, then have an Ethernet cord that comes out to attach to the router and distance switch. There are plenty of ways you can now add to or modify your home network. You can add more wireless security, another wireless access point, media devices to share photos and videos, webcams for watching the house while you’re away, parental controls so the kids stay safe on the Web, picocells that use the Internet to extend the range of your cellular phone, and the list goes on and on. But this is the foundation for everything else to come.
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WIRELESS NETWORKING
COVER STORY
Installation of your Wireless Network Step-by-Step guide to setup the wireless network
F
rom hardware to software, it’s all just a matter of following some simple steps and remembering a few simple rules to go about installing your wireless network. Read on to find out how to get your wireless network up and running.
Setting Up Wireless Access Points We will consider two scenarios for configuring an Access Point. The first is where you just have a plain-Jane Access Point. The other is where the Access Point has a wireless broadband router with either cable or DSL or dial-up modem built in. Connecting Two PCs Using An Access point To connect two PCs wirelessly using a simple Access Point will need you to connect the Access Point to one of the system directly where you have the Internet connection coming in. This PC should have a Network Interface Card (NIC). The other machine should have wireless PCI adapter. An RJ45 cable is provided with some of the available Access Points. Follow the steps as below to get an Access Point up and running: 1. Switch off the PC and connect the RJ45 cable to the Network Interface Card of the PC. 2. Connect the other side to the LAN port of the Access Point. 3. Power up the Access Point and make sure the LED indicates that everything is normal, as mentioned in the manual. 4. Now power up the PC and get the LAN on the same IP range as the Access Point is. The default IP address of the Access Point will be mentioned in the quick setup guide on the CD. A typical IP is
192.168.1.1 and a the corresponding subnet mask would be 255.255.255.0. If this is the IP of the Access Point, then give the LAN an IP something like 192.168.1.2, up to 254.
server of the Access Point, which has an inbuilt utility that will let you configure the Access Point according to your need. From here, you can change the SSID, IP/Subnet mask and enable or disable wireless security.
5. Once the TCP/IP settings are configured, it is time to ping the Access Point to check whether everything is working properly.
9.Do the necessary changes, and that's it. The Access Point is configured.
6. To ping, click Start > Run, and in the dialog box, type in “ping <IP address of Access Point>”
Now, go to the other system, which has a PCI Wi-Fi card plugged in to it, and make the following changes.
7. If the ping commands works successfully, launch your browser and type in “http://<IP address of Access Point>”, for example, http://192.168.1.1, in your browser address bar, and press [Enter].
1. Switch off the system and plug in the PCI wireless card. Now turn on the system and let the card get detected by the system.
8.This will let you access the Web
Install the necessary device drivers and the configuration utility provided with the card. Restart the system to complete the installation
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process. 2.Now launch Control Panel and go to 'Network connections'. The window that opens will display ‘Wireless Network Connections’. Right-click it, and click properties. 3.Now scroll down to the TCP/IP connection, and click once on it to highlight it, and then click properties. This will open the TCP/IP dialog box. Here, you need to assign an IP to the wireless card with the first three metrics, which in our case is 192.168.1. This should remain the same, and the last one can be any number between 0 and 254—but not the same as the one already assigned to the Access Point and the first system’s LAN card. 4. Click OK to close the dialog box, which will bring you back to the Wireless Network connection properties. Again, here, click OK, and that’s it. This is all the settings that are needed to get two PCs to connectwirelessly using a simple Access Point. Share a folder on the master system where the Access Point is connected, and try to access it from the client system—it should work. Connecting Two PCs Using A Wireless Router Wireless routers are Access Points that have the Internet port for a DSL or cable modem connection, and in most cases, also has a 4-port switch. A wireless router is useful only when you have DSL or cable Internet at home, or if you are planning to connect one of the PCs or network printers to one of the ports on the switch. However, if you have DSL or cable Internet, a wireless router is the best solution as it doesn't require you to connect it directly to the PC to share the Internet connection, or files and folders on another PC. Here is how you will have to go about getting it running.
3.Now go to the first system, with the wireless card plugged in. Get the wireless card on the same IP range as the router is. You can learn about the router IP from the manual. 4.Once the wireless card is configured, try to ping the IP address of the router and see whether the response is positive. You can also try to search for the available network, either by using the wireless card's utility, or by rightclicking the network icon in the system tray and clicking 'View available Network'. This will show you the active wireless network available. 5.Once you get your router detected by the wireless card, launch your browser and type in your router IP address in the following manner: http://<IP address of router>. Press [Enter]. 6.This will launch the configuration utility of the router. But to enter this utility you will have to provide a username and password, which again, is provided in the manual. 7. The first thing you should do now is change the login and password to something really difficult, which no-one can guess. Also change the security setting to at least 128-bit if you are going to access your bank account and other sensitive information. 8.You can and must change the IP address to something else, as the default IP is easily traceable, and known to most Wi-Fi users. If possible, restrict DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol) to very few numbers. For example, if you are going to connect just one more system wirelessly, than restrict the start and end IP to accommodate just one machine. Change this later if you have to add one more system.
www.globekashmir.com LAN. Here are the steps to follow in order to configure the client PC and the laptop. 1.Power down the system and remove the side cover. Locate a free PCI slot if you are going to use a PCI Wi-fi card. Secure it tightly, screw it in, and attach the detachable antenna to the card. 2.Power up the system. The PC will detect the card and ask for the drivers. Install the drivers as mentioned in the manual and restart the system if need be. 3.You’ll see a small icon sitting in the system tray once the drivers are properly installed and the hardware properly detected. Double-click the adapter card configuration icon in the system tray. This will launch the configuration utility. 4.Here, you don't have to do anything, as most of the settings, including SSID and the encryption key, are automatically picked up by the adapter card. Select the Ad Hoc mode if connecting to the other PC or laptop configured in Ad Hoc mode. Give an SSID different from the one assigned to the other wireless card. 5.Check the signal strength available at the place the wireless desktop or laptop is placed by doubleclicking the utility in the taskbar. Setting Up Ad-Hoc Mode
1. Connect the incoming DSL or cable connector, which is an RJ45 cable, to the Internet port of the router.
Setting Up Wireless Networking (Windows + Mac) Configuring the Client
Ad-Mod or Peer-to-Peer mode as it is commonly known is very easy to set up. It has multiple advantages: you can quickly create a network between notebooks that are Wi-Fi enabled, and share small files during a meeting. It doesn't need an Access Point, as one of the notebooks can be turned into a soft Access Point, and the rest can connect to each other through it. Here is the stepwise explanation of how to turn a Wi-Fi enabled notebook into a soft AP, and to configure the rest to connect to it. We will use Windows to get the network up and running.
2.Power up the wireless router and observe whether all the LEDs are behaving in the exact manner as mentioned in the manual. If not, try resetting it.
The adapter card will have to be installed on the client PC, since we're going to connect the client machine to the Access Point configured on the
1.To set up the soft AP, click Start > Connect To > Wireless Network Connection. This will open up the Wireless Network Connection
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www.globekashmir.com Dialog box. Here, click Properties; a new dialog box will open, from where we need to assign various settings. 2.In this dialog box, under the ‘General’ tab, scroll to ‘Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)’ and select it. Now click ‘Properties’, which will take you to the next dialog box where we assign the IP. Just assign the IP and click on the subnet mask once—it will appear automatically. 3.Close this dialog box and then click the second tab—'Wireless Network'. Here, at the bottom, click ‘Add’, which will launch another dialog box where we need to assign a name for Network Name (SSID). Check ‘WEP’ and 'Key provided automatically' for the rest to seamlessly connect to this AP. Press OK once through with these settings. Now click ‘Refresh’ in the 'Wireless Network' dialog box, and the network name will appear in the ‘available networks’ area.
WIRELESS NETWORKING 4.Configure the client systems that will connect to the soft AP, and eventually to other client systems through it. For this, go to the ‘Network properties’ dialog box and assign an IP in the same range. For example, if you assigned 192.168.1.1, assign 192.168.1.2 and so on to the other client systems. Now click on ‘Subnet mask’, and it appears automatically. 5.Right-click on the network icon in the system tray. This will launch a dialog box that will display the name of the soft AP. Check 'Allow me to connect to the selected network'. This will highlight the Connect button at the bottom. Just click it, and you should be able to connect to the other machines. Repeat the exercise with the other client machines, and you will be able to connect each to the other, all without an Access Point.
Sharing An Internet Connection If you are going to use wireless router
COVER STORY
with a DSL or cable modem inuilt, you will not have to use any third party tool like SyGate. To share an Internet connection between two or more systems using a wireless router, you will need some information handy, like PPPoE (Point to Point Protocol over Ethernet), your user name and password which is provided by the ISP, subnet mask, default gateway, and so on. When you log in to the Web server of the router, you will be asked to give this information. If the broadband router asks for any additional information, you will have to get it from your ISP. Once you have provided all the necessary information, use the test button to check whether you are able to connect to the Internet. Optionally you can set up your DNS servers either to OpenDNS as 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220 or Google’s DNS servers as 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4 to enhance the performance of DNS lookups.
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www.globekashmir.com network may be affected by some other device, either intentionally or unintentionally. Here we will focus more on threats of the first type, as they are more of a security risk and are perpetrated by malicious users or software. Default SSIDs
Securing Wireless Networks
Tips & tricks to secure your network
I
n this article, we will list out some of the known vulnerabilities to WLANs.
How can anything that broadcasts everything sent or received through the air be secure? This is perhaps a question that each and everyone of us has thought at some point or another. And the truth is, Wireless LANs (WLANs) are a lot less secure than their wired counterparts. Perhaps WLANs are not the best solution for the paranoid, but then again, neither is the Internet. The mother of all networks, the Internet, has become the single biggest threat to the security and privacy of the millions that use it, yet the number of people using it is increasing by millions every year. The only safe computer is one that isn't networked at all, and has no Internet connection, but who wants that? It's obvious that every good thing comes with its price, and WLANs are no different. Yes your
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data is more at risk than those on a regular wired LAN; yes your computer can be hacked into using your wireless card; however , bypassing the security that you can set up for your WLAN is something only a professional hacker could do, and chances are, if a professional hacker wants to get into your computer that badly, he probably already has access-WLAN or not. Threats To WLANs WLANs are vulnerable in various ways, and all the vulnerabilities can be classified into two types:
Every wireless access point manufacturer has known and well publicised Service Set Identifiers (SSIDs). All access points ship with their default SSIDs, which a user is expected to change when they set up their WLAN. Quite often, home users set up their WLAN by powering up everything, setting the type of connection to ad-hoc, which is default, and then are overjoyed by the fact that a connection is established immediately. There are no more checks done, and the network is left the way it is, for fear of changing a setting and finding that clients cannot connect. This is perhaps the most common mistake that people make, and leave their WLAN open for absolutely anyone to access. The very first thing you need to do when configuring your access point is to change the SSID to something only authorised users of your WLAN will know. Don't Broadcast SSIDs Wireless access points can be configured to stop broadcasting SSIDs, as is usually the case. This will help ensure that unauthorised users in the vicinity do not detect your SSID by default. Of course, there are tools available that will still hack your SSID from the signals that are transmitted in your network, but turning off the broadcast of your SSID will stop novice hackers or rogue wireless devices from accessing your network.
1. Unauthorised Access Threats
Use IP/MAC Access Control
2. Denial of Authorised Access
If your network consists of only a few devices, make sure to set your access point to limit access to only those devices. You can do this when configuring the access point. Either set it to acknowledge only a given IP, or range of IPs, or set it to allow access to only the specified MAC addresses. Each wireless device will
The first is perhaps the most deadly, as this involves threats from hackers and viruses, in an attempt to get into your network and access your data. The second type is more or less like a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, where functionality of your
WIRELESS NETWORKING
www.globekashmir.com have a card that has a unique MAC address. Find this address from your device and enter it into the access point's list of allowed devices. Though even these can be spoofed by the most ingenious of hackers, you are probably never going to encounter one-unless you happen to work for the government, or are an employee of a huge multinational company. The safest option is to set restricted access only to the specified MAC addresses, as these are much harder to spoof. Access Point Placement It's amazing how many people take what is printed on boxes literally. Just because your access point says that it covers a radius of 200 feet doesn't mean that the signal abruptly ceases to exist at that point! For a home, you most likely aren't going to need an access point in the first place, but in a small office that could be considerably bigger than your home, you might add one in just to keep the signal strength healthy for all your users. However, placing an access point near a window, door or outer boundary wall is not advisable. Since most access points are omnidirectional, their signal extends beyond the physical perimeter of your home or office. This means that someone sitting outside your house or office in a car, or a neighbouring building could potentially access your WLAN. The best way to prevent this is to make sure access points are located towards the centre of your home or office, and you should use a laptop or mobile device to investigate how far out, in all directions your signal extends. A good warning sign that your network extends a little too far out of your perimeter is strangers repeatedly sitting in cars or at neighbouring bus stops, with laptops, chuckling to themselves. WEP Wired Equivalent Protocol (WEP) is an encryption standard for 802.11b networks. It was introduced a long ago, and even though it was found to contain severe security flaws, continues to be in use today by somewhat outdated equipment.
When buying Wi-Fi equipment and peripherals, make sure that all of them support more robust security and encryption techniques than WEP such as WPA. Client Infections The very reason you install a WiFi network may be its downfall, mobility. The problem with a WLAN is that its clients are mobile. Laptops, especially, can cause much damage to your LAN as they are carried about to locations across the city, country or even the world. These laptops are used by executives and management personnel to connect to other WLANs, in airports, coffee bars, hotels, etc., and can easily pick up viruses and worms. When they return to your network, they can spread these worms through the network and infect other machines, which in turn will breach any security practices you may have in place. The only way to combat this is to impress upon your users the importance of keeping their client PCs updated with the latest antivirus definitions and security patches. Even in your home network, you need to be careful to update all computers with the latest security fixes, or else you could end up transmitting a virus from home to computers on your office network.
COVER STORY
Though this may not sound as bad, it is in fact worse than you can imagine. Most people's activities online are governed by whether or not they feel secure about their identity being hidden. A user who gains unauthorised access to your network knows that all his activities can only be traced back to you, and thus may use your network to download warez, surf illegal pornography Web sites, or send spam and worms out on to the Internet. Depending on which laws he breaks, you find yourself getting into serious trouble for things that you did not do. Information: Most of us are paranoid about our personal information. Most of us don't even like giving out our real e-mail addresses, so someone gaining access to files that you think are private and secure is somewhat of a nightmare come true. File Damage: Some attackers are just malevolent, and have no interest in anything but damaging your computer. These are generally one-off attacks and result with most of your files going missing or being changed. For example, you may find all your word documents deleted, or all text replaced with something along the lines of "MUHAHAHAHAHAHA! You were hacked by Da Hax-Master."
War Driving
DoS/DDoS
War Driving is a term used to describe a hacker that literally drives up outside a building that has a WLAN and attempts to access the network using his or her hacking tools.
Your Internet connection may be used to launch Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on the Internet. Hackers use the Wardriving technique to find vulnerable WLANs and then infect the computers with worms or Trojans that they can control via the Internet. These worms or Trojans lie dormant waiting for a signal from the hacker.
Threat Outcomes If a hacker gained access to your Wi-Fi-enabled computer, or your WLAN, there could be a multitude of outcomes, depending on what the attacker wants. Internet Usage: More often than not, people who gain unauthorised entry to a WLAN will use your Internet connection. This gives them free Internet access, and shields them from being traced on the Net-much like what an anonymiser service does.
When a hacker wants to target another computer, he may use your computer to hack into another, or just launch a huge DDoS attack against his victim, using your computer and thousands of others similar to yours which are online at that moment.
Madeeha Riyaz APRIL 2011
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TIPS & TRICKS
10
REASONS FOR SWITCHING TO LINUX
Reasons for Switching to Linux
www.globekashmir.com known as GNOME and KDE. So many choices might seem daunting to the new user, but they actually help improve the experience for new users, who can choose the variant that suits them the best.
8. Learning about new environments Linux has always been the geek's favorite operating system. However, times are changing and Linux is now being promoted to suit the everyday user. Linux has its own share of pros and cons but the tide seems to be turning in its favor, as hardware vendors are starting to ship their systems with Linux preinstalled (a tactic to save OS costs). Curiosity about Linux is on the rise among computer users and the debate is on whether or not to make the switch to Linux. In order to ease the confusion a little, here are the top ten reasons as to why you need to switch to Linux today!
1. Security
unheard of in other popular operating systems. Linux races ahead in terms of performance speed as well. Even after using it for five-six months with a large number of programs installed, Linux doesn't show any difference in speed.
4. Hardware-independent This is yet another selling point for Linux. No matter how old your system is, or what kind of hardware it is built from, you'll definitely find a flavor of Linux ready to run on it. There are custom-made Linux flavors (called distributions) which are designed to support old hardware and run with minimum memory and hard disk requirements.
Linux is based on the rigid UNIX Operating system, which is famous for its strict User Permissions feature. Linux incorporates this feature into its core and this makes it virtually unbeatable in terms of security. The majority of viruses/malware on the internet are targeted towards the more popular Windows operating system, and they are useless against any Linux system.
Linux isn't 100% crash-proof but finding a user who faces crashes regularly is a very rare thing. Unless the user is running some unstable code/application, there won't be any instance where the system crashes suddenly. This is the main reason why large corporations prefer to use Linux for running their servers.
2. Free
6. Excellent community-support
The phrase “Free and Open-Source Software”(FOSS) is often confusing to some people, and to avoid this confusion, the community came up with the meaning of FOSS as Free as in freedom. However, Linux is “free” no matter how you see it. Most Linux distributions are completely free of cost and you can download them immediately without paying a dime.
Linux is backed-up by a huge community full of active users helping each other on the way. New users will undoubtedly have many questions on how to use their new Linux OS seamlessly. They can get their doubts cleared at one of the many forums providing free support.
3. Speed One of the most popular flavors of Linux, called Ubuntu, boots up in just ten seconds. That's right, all it takes is ten seconds from the power-up screen to reaching the desktop. This level of speed is
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5. Robust Platform
7. Spoilt for choice Linux is all about choices. There are many distributions to choose from, and each distribution may have a number of variations, such as 32bit, 64-bit, desktop edition, server edition,it even runs on your netbooks and there's almost always the choice of choosing between two popular desktop environments,
When Linus Torvalds first created Linux, he never expected that it would become one of the most intensely-researched operating systems ever! There are thousands of developers all over the world hacking (not that hacking!) into the Linux kernel trying to make useful changes and improve the experience for the whole community. While regular users need not bother about coding or such, they will automatically get to learn about using different kinds of environments. Using Linux means learning small tricks that make it a fun experience.
9. Encouraging open-source software Open-source software is touted to the future of the software industry. While not every developer would like to release their software free of cost, making the source-code open would definitely help in stabilizing the software. Encouraging users to use Linux would help support the cause of open-source software in a large way.
10. Free as in freedom This may not seem much to new users, but for those with programming skills Linux proves to be a gold-mine because it comes along with the source-code, and the users are free to modify it as they like and re-distribute it as well. Each of these reasons could be expanded into a mighty-sized article, but the purpose of this article is to give you ten quick reasons for switching to Linux. Now that you've got them, why not consider giving it a try? Discover the freedom of using Linux and you'll soon wonder why you didn't shut down your Windows earlier!
Zaid Aijaz Author is a columnist & maintains a tech blog at www.kashtech.info
www.globekashmir.com
ENHANCE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY ON WINDOWS OS
TIPS & TRICKS
Tips & Tricks to enhance your Windows experience
Enhance your productivity on Windows OS Enhanced Aero Snap for Windows 7, Vista and XP Aero Snap is one of the best features in Windows 7 because it makes managing Windows much easier. Now users of Windows Vista and XP can join in the fun with the help of AquaSnap by Nurgo Software. The free utility expands on the features offered by Microsoft's Aero Snap by allowing users to not only snap windows on both sides of the screen, but also in corners and add multimonitor support. You can download this utility at: http://www.nurgosoftware.com/products/aquasnap
How to Access the Hidden Themes in Windows 7 Windows 7 includes additional themes set which are kept hidden from the themes dialog. The hidden international themes are stored in a super-hidden folder. Here is how to access the hidden wallpapers & themes set. Open Windows Explorer and paste the following address: %WinDir%\Globalization\MCT Note that the folder MCT is hidden (system attributes) by default. Under the MCT folder, the following folders (MCT-AU, MCT-CA, MCTGB, MCT-US, MCT-ZA) exist: These folders include themes for Australia, Canada, UK, US and South Africa. Under each folder there will be four folders, including a Theme folder. Open the Theme folder and double-click the .theme file to apply it. The Globalization theme gets added to the Windows Themes list in the Personalize applet.
How To Enable Hibernation Under Windows 98, Me, or 2000
there was an option in the shutdown dialog box to enter the computer into hibernation (where all the content of the RAM is copied to the hard disk). The shutdown dialog box of Windows XP doesn't offer any longer the hibernation button. Some users may get confused about how to enable the hibernation mode. If this mode is supported by your motherboard (ACPI) you have to do the following: 1. Click Start and Shut Down, 2. Point the standby button and maintain the shift key pushed, 3. A new hibernation button appears: click it while still holding the shift key: voila your PC will hibernate.
Speed Up Browsing When you connect to a web site your computer sends information back and forth. Some of this information deals with resolving the site name to an IP address, the stuff that TCP/IP really deals with, not words. This is DNS information and is used so that you will not need to ask for the site location each and every time you visit the site. Although Windows XP and Windows XP have a pretty efficient DNS cache, you can increase its overall performance by increasing its size. You can do this with the registry entries below: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYST EM\CurrentControlSet\Services\D nscache\Parameters] "CacheHashTableBucketSize"=dwo rd:00000001
Make a new text file and rename it to dnscache.reg. Then copy and paste the above into it and save it. Merge it into the registry.
Bypass the Recycle Bin If you are absolutely sure you want to delete a file, why send it to the Recycle Bin? Windows lets you bypass it really easily: To delete a file or a group of files, select them with and when they are highlighted, press Shift+Delete. Press “Yes” in the confirmation box that opens and you’re done!
Encrypt your data If you carry any sensitive indormation on your USB memory stick, a good idea is to encrypt it. Hardware-level encryption will help, but it will cost extra. You can get a free program to encrypt your data just as securely. For this I recommend TrueCrypt, but most others will also do. You will need admin access on the computer you want to use your encrypted thumb drive on, so this it’s usability a little.
Secure your PC Just like with an RFID badge, you can use a USB drive to lock and unlock a PC. Insert it to begin working and pull it out when you’ve finished, locking the computer. There are several programs for this . Rohos, a commercial program and WiKID, a semi-open source one.
"CacheHashTableSize"=dword:00 000180
If you really need to secure your computer with a USB drive, I suggest you give Rohos a try, as WiKID is rather complicated.
"MaxCacheEntryTtlLimit"=dword: 0000fa00
Anzar Habib Wani
"MaxSOACacheEntryTtlLimit"=dw ord:0000012d
Author can be reached at anzar_globe20@zoho.com
APRIL 2011
35
FEATURES
TWITTER - CHANGING THE GAME
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Twitter, a five-year old changing the world A service built to let people use text messaging to share thoughts, insights and news with the masses.
A
t five years old, Twitter is just starting to change the world.
Co-founder Jack Dorsey fired off the first tweet on March 21, 2006. It read "just setting up my twttr." It was Dorsey who proposed the idea for Twitter while working with Biz Stone and Evan Williams at podcasting company Odeo.
potential."
mobile phones.
Initially scoffed at by some as a platform for telling the world what one had for breakfast, Twitter has become respected as a lifeline
Here are some facts about the San Francisco-based startup:
- Twitter has more than 200 million registered users sending more than 140 million tweets a day - Last year, Twitter users sent 25 billion tweets and the company added more than 100 million new registered accounts
Since then, Twitter has been embraced as a forum for sharing anything from a favorite lunch spot to violations of civil rights and calls for revolution. "As much fun as we were having, there was always, I think, in the back of our heads the idea of the potential of something important coming from it," Stone said of the startup's formative days.
during disasters such as the earthquake in Japan and an organizing tool for champions of democracy.
"Even if we didn't say it out loud and talk about it," the co-founder said in an interview. "Because we were just getting started and we really had no place saying anything like that."
Stone believed it vital for Twitter to remain a politically neutral technology platform focused on fostering open communication.
Williams, Dorsey, and Stone thought it would be fun to build a service that lets people use text messaging to share thoughts, insights and news with the masses.
He saw the use of Twitter by those out to overthrow oppressive regimes in the Middle East as proof that given the right tools, people will stand for good.
San Francisco-based Twitter won the hearts of trendsetters after officially coming out at the South By South West technology festival in Texas in 2007.
"One of the things I told our team early on was that if Twitter is to be a triumph, it is not necessarily to be a triumph of technology but a triumph of humanity," Stone said.
"South By South West was the real eye-opener to the fact that we had, quite possibly, created a new way for people to communicate that was real time, sort of agnostic with regard to device and potentially transformative in the way people self-organize," Stone said.
"If we are successful it is not going to be because of our algorithms and our machines, it is going to be what people end up doing with this tool that defines us and makes us a success or not."
"And everything that happened around the world that Twitter found its way into was really just yet another eye-opening display of the
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- Dorsey's first tweet, sent on March 21, 2006, read: "just setting up my twttr"
More than 200 million people use Twitter, firing off more than 140 million text messages of 140 characters or less daily. The length limit was set to fit the maximum allowed in text messages sent using
- Pop star Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) has the most Twitter followers with 8.78 million followed by Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) with 8.13 million, Britney Spears (@britneyspears) with 7.12 million, Barack Obama (@barackobama) with 6.97 million and Kim Kardashian (@kimkardashian) with 6.73 million - Actor Charlie Sheen (@charliesheen) was the fastest to one million followers, picking them up in just 24 hours - The hashtag (#) feature on Twitter which groups tweets by subject debuted in August 2007, proposed by a user - In October 2009, Google and Microsoft began integrating tweets into their search products - Twitter has "370-plus" employees and is adding workers almost weekly - Twitter was incorporated in April 2007; it was co-founded by Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey -- @biz, @ev and @jack - The initial Twitter logo was created by Stone, a former graphic designer - Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo is a former improvisational comedian
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HACK WLANs
SECURITY
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Software Tools to hack
Wireless Networks A complete guide to software tools for Hackers & Network Admins
I
n order to combat the threats to your WLAN, there are a few software tools you should keep handy. Some of these are designed to keep hackers out using encryption and passwords, and other security measures, while others are tools that hackers would use, and which you can use as well to check your network for vulnerabilities.
The Hacker's Tools Nmap Nmap (“Network Mapper”) is a free open source utility for network exploration or security auditing. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, although it works fine against single hosts. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics. Nmap runs on most types of computers and both console and graphical versions are available. Nmap is free and open source.
Nessus Remote Security Scanner Recently went closed source, but is still essentially free. Works with a client-server framework. Nessus is the world’s most popular vulnerability scanner used in over 75,000 organizations world-wide. Many of the world’s largest organizations are realizing significant cost savings by using Nessus to audit business-critical enterprise devices and applications.
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Wireshark (Formely Ethereal) Wireshark is a GTK+-based network protocol analyzer, or sniffer, that lets you capture and interactively browse the contents of network frames. The goal of the project is to create a commercialquality analyzer for Unix and to give Wireshark features that are missing from closed-source sniffers. Works great on both Linux and Windows (with a GUI), easy to use and can reconstruct TCP/IP Streams! Will do a tutorial on Wireshark later.
NetStumbler This is a tool that hackers would use in order to view details about your network. NetStumbler can search for and locate all available wireless devices within range. It displays available access points, their SSIDs, the channels they operate on, what type of encryption and security in place, and the signal strength at the current location. The tool can also connect to GPS technologies to map and display the exact geographic location of the access points. You can put NetStumbler to work for you by using your laptop and circling your home to see how far your signal extends. You can also use it to test the security of your wireless security solutions. NetStumbler is "beggarware", software developed by programmers that request a donation for the use of their products, though this donation is completely voluntary.
MiniStumbler
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Another tool created by the developers of NetStumbler, Net Stumbler can connect to GPS technologis to map and display
APRIL 2011
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SUBSCRIBE
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HACK WLANs
geographic location of the access points MiniStumbler can be used on devices running PocketPC 3 and PocketPC 2002 operating systems. The functionality is the same as NetStumbler, and the uses similar. You can get both NetStumbler and MiniStumbler at www.netstumbler. com.
AirSnort
...................................................
This is a WLAN tool that cracks WEP encryption. It sits as an invisible client on a network and "collects" packets and analyses them. Once it has gathered sufficient packets, it analyses them and attempts to decrypt the WEP code for the network. AirSnort eventually figures out the WEP key and lets the rogue client connect to the network as an authorised client. This tool can also be used to check the security of your WLAN and also to retrieve lost WLAN passwords. Get it from www.airsnort.com.
...................................................
SSID Sniff
Name ................................................... ................................................... Address ................................................... ...................................................
................................................... Mobile No
This is a tool that is dedicated to finding a wireless network's SSID. It is available at www.bastard.net.
BTScanner
................................................... Email ID ................................................... Profession ................................................... I would like to subscribe for 01 Year - Rs 220 02 Years - Rs 400 I will be paying my subscription By Cash By Cheque Send this form to
Monthly GLOBE Khan Complex, Madeena Chowk, Gaw Kadal, Srinagar - 190001, J&K Phone: 0194 2473818, 9419422263
Available for download at http://www.zone-h.org, BTScanner is a tool that lets you scan for Bluetooth devices in your vicinity and provide you with as much information about them as possible without actually pairing with the devices. This tools allows you to make educated guesses about the type of device that BTScanner finds information about.
The Network Adminâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Tools FakeAP While most tools attempt to hide and cloak your access points, FakeAP goes in quite the opposite direction. It is generally used as a honeypot*, to catch would be hackers in the act, or analyse the tools they use. The tool uses the concept that the best place to hide is in a crowd, and literally creates thousands of fake access points (thus the name FakeAP). If your network consists of two or three access points, using FakeAP will
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www.globekashmir.com drive would-be hackers crazy when they try and intrude upon your network. Unless they have plain dumb luck, the chances of a hacker finding the actual access points, hidden amongst the thousands of fake ones, is remote at best. The developers describe their tool as "Times Square on New Year's eve", and you can read more about it, or download the free tool from www.blackalchemy.to.
Kismet The default wireless network administration tool, with good reason, Kismet works with any wireless card (802.11a/b/g) that supports raw packet monitoring mode. It can be used as an Intrusion Detection System (IDS), an invisible network detector, as well as a packet sniffer. It is available at http://www.kismetwireless.net/.
Snort The self-proclaimed "heavyweight champion of intrusion prevention", Snort is a popular open source network intrusion prevention system. It is capable of real-time traffic analysis as well as packet logging. It can be used to detect many types of probes and attacks, such as SMB probes, OS fingerprinting, stealth port scans, buffer overflow attacks and much, much more. The clincher is its real-time alerting capabilities, which make it a network administrators favourite IDS tool.
WIDS Short for Wireless Intrusion Detection System, WIDS can be used by wireless network administrators as a honeypot. Download it from http://packetstorm.linuxsecurity.co m.
Wellenreiter This is a GTK/Perl program that helps you discover and audit 802.11b wireless networks. The inbuilt statistics engine gives you common parameters provided by wireless drivers, and lets you view details about the consistency and signal strength of a network.
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Q&A
SHARE INTERNET
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Q A &
Having trouble with computers, we will try to deal with all the computer niggles and nags here. Email questions at questions@globekashmir.com A couple of problems 1. I have a wired broadband connection on my PC connected through a normal ADSL2+ router, but it doesn’t have Wi-Fi capabilities. Is there some way to share the internet bandwidth with the PC and my laptop. Also, can I play a game such as Counter Strike over LAN with both? 2. Can I use my old 80-GB hard drive as an external drive using some external casing? Is there a way to use it as a backup drive with XP? 3. Is there a way to see all the details of a video file and save some other video to that format? Can I put some other video that isn’t recorded through my handycam into my handycam by converting that video to the handycams default
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format and by naming it in the sequence followed by my handycam. By Muzamil Bhat, Shopian
You will have to buy a separate router that accesses the ADSL2+ router to let you access the internet using the laptop and the PC. It will also allow you to play Counter Strike between the two PCs. You can use old 80-GB hard drive as an external storage disk. Purchase a 3.5-inch casing for it. It shouldn’t cost you more than Rs. 300 for a decent one. Make sure it has an interface for your drive before you do. Use a program called GSpot to get details of the
video format used by your camera. Often, manufacturers use proprietary or modified
codecs within existing / known containers; hence, it might not work if you try and re-encode videos
SECURELY PASS ON FILES Q & A
www.globekashmir.com to the specific resolution and codec.
DOS window problem I have a Dell XPS M1530 laptop running on Windows Vista Home Premium SP1. Whenever I type ipconfig in Start > Run, the window opens for a brief second and then closes immediately. The same problem occurs when I run some DOS programs. What can I do? The problem does not arise when I open command prompt and then type ipconfig. This doesn’t occur on my PC running on XP SP2. By Bhat Javeed, Pattan
Command prompts accessed through Start > Run automatically shut once the execution of the command is completed. Using Start > Run > cmd and pressing [Enter] might be the simplest way to start your command line applications. If commands such as ipconfig are required to be run very often, then you can create a batch file in notepad with the following text. cmd ipconfig Save the file as a BAT file and run it when you need it.
How to install Windows games on Ubuntu How do I install and play Windows games on Ubuntu? What is this “dependency is not satisfiable” error and how do I get rid of it? By Azhar Ali, Anantnag
Wine and PlayonLinux are needed to play Windows games on Ubuntu. You can simply install these by typing sudo apt-get install wine playonlinux. While trying to install any packages on Ubuntu, it may require some other
dependency. Some packages depends upon other packages, those packages are called dependencies for the package being installed. You need to install the dependency packages to install the final package. For example, some of the dependency packages of wine are libfmt-support and libaudio2. It is generally faced during off-line package installation. You need to download the package and its dependency, and install using dpkg command. After installing all packages use the following command.
went to the properties window and ticked on the read only button but I don’t think it works. By Abid Hussain, Sgr
A simple and secure way to send files on a CD to your friend might be to use an archiving tool such as WinZip or WinRAR. Set a password to the archive and it should be fairly secure. To create a writeprotected file, start a command prompt by
How to re-enable the registry editor on Windows While installing any game or any application, I try to add information to the registry, a message pops up saying — “Registry editor is disabled by your administrator”. I can’t run that program because of this. Do you have any solution? By Rakesh Pandit, Jammu
To enable the registry editor after it was disabled by some malware, try the following to regain access:
sudo apt-get -f install This command will install all packages with dependencies resolved.
Securely passing on files I want to write a CD containing my personal information and give it to a friend. I want it to be secure so that the data can only be read by my friend. Is there any simple software that I can use to encrypt it? Also, I read in the magazine that to prevent most viruses from activating I should create a write-protected file AUTORUN.INF. The problem is that I don’t know how to create a write protected file. I
clicking on Start > Run and typing cmd. Go to the drive or partition you want to create the file by typing E: assuming that E is your flash drive. Type copy con autorun.inf and press [Enter]. Type [Ctrl] + [Z] and press [Enter]. Then, type attrib +r +s +h autorun.inf. This will set the file to be hidden, readonly and also a system file.
Click on the Start > Run and type gpedit.msc on the field. Go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > System. On the option Prevent access to registry editing tools, Click Disabled and click on the OK button to save settings. Now type regedit from the Run dialogue.
NTLDR missing errors — XP won’t boot! I use Windows XP SP2. While booting, it shows an error message that the file NTLDR is missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart your PC. After restarting, I continue to get the same error. What should I do? By Tahir, Srinagar
Enter the recovery console by booting into the Windows Setup CD. In the console, use the EXTRACT command from the I386 folder into the root of your Windows partition.
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