Plagiarism In Indian Music Industry

Here is the site dedicated entirely to it and it exposes the true creativity of our Indian Music Industry and its doing a commendable job .

Though inspiration is a natural phenomenon but not recogning the original source is a serious offence under copyright laws and its one area where our renowed composers and lyrics have always gone unnoticed mostly.

New and Improved Hotmail on show

Yesterday at an event in San Francisco, Microsoft has showcased the upcoming summer update for Windows Live Hotmail, an update which is aimed at making the email service more efficient, secure, more social-friendly and easier to access via mobile devices like smartphones.

The Live Hotmail revamp is set to include a new home page which will bring together a heap of content from multiple sources - emails from contacts, social network updates, shipping notices, appointments, and birthday reminders. The inbox is also being refreshed so that it makes it easier to see/focus on emails coming from friends, subscription services, mails with attachments, and, again, social updates.

Microsoft is also adding a slide show-style photo preview function, and will enable users to send up to 200 photos, each up to 50 MB in size, all in a single email. The new Hotmail will also be include SkyDrive integration and will make use of the Office Web Apps to help with accessing documents and presentations. Other updates include enhanced account protection, full-session SSL, multiple email accounts, subfolders, contact management, and ever-growing storage, so it's safe to say Microsoft is going all-out this summer to bring Live Hotmail back into the spotlight.

The 'new' Hotmail will start its global roll-out in the coming weeks.









8:53 Google offers to acquire Global IP Solutions for $68.2 million
7:50 ViewSonic VOT125 mini PC up for pre-order

Aftermath of Mangalore Crash

The sad news of crash of Air India Express (IX-812) on its journey from Dubai to Mangalore in the aircraft Boeing 737-800 is allready making the rounds in media.

Allready close to 160 Human Lives have been lost and most of these where migrant labourers who where working in construction industry of gulf.

This is yet another blot on Air India after its recent financial worries.

Fingers have been allready raised on table-top runaway in Mangalore Airport( which is known as critical airfield along with Port Blair. Leh, Agartala, Lengpui, Shimla and Kullu Airports).

Airports are supposed to be basic infracstructure and are part of service industry and as long as government don't provide service to the people with required infrastructure , chances of these mishaps are quite high . In Inda only Hyderabad ans Delhi Airport Boasts of decent standards and that to happened recently when DIAL took over the reins after Privatisation.

Prime Minister Singh has announced a package of 2 lakhs which again is pretty less as according to Montreal Convention which India has signed $1,60,000 is the amount recommended as the compensation to the family of air-crash victim.

We as tax -payers whose money had allready been wasted on a national sick airline to keep it afloat wants a proper inquiry into these mishaps.

Transparency and the upgrading of Infrasructure is the need of hour and its high time the government wake up to it







These statistics are quite horrifying and one hope finally government acts on it,
as safety expert allready pointed out that touchdown markings at Rajahmundry and Thiruvananthapuram airports do not conform to International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) standards.

RIP to all those people whose life have been lost and one hope their family gets the enough stregnth to overcome this trauma.

Impacts of IPv4 to IPv6 Conversions

Background: The Internet is growing. The problem is that the Internet was based on a concept called IP (internet protocol). IPv4 (version 4) to be exact. When you see an IP address like 12.34.56.78 you are seeing a single point on the routable Internet. The problem is there are a finite amount of numbers. There are 2^32 useful IPv4 addresses approximately - if you start subtracting 127.0.0.0/8 (loopback) 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16 (non routable) and all the IP used for routing packets across the Internet, that number starts looking a lot smaller. Now add on the fact that countries are coming online quickly buying up huge blocks of IP space, IP based mobile devices are approaching 100% penetration and there has been a run on static IPs for home users it is easy to realize that while the Internet is growing, the total number of non allocated IPs is shrinking at an increasing rate.

IPv6 brings a number of positive security benefits along with the problems associated with the implementation. Some of these include decreased susceptibility to man in the middle attacks and larger environment surface area, making worm propagation less efficient. While these benefits are small, they should absolutely be embraced within the economic cost breakdown of implementation.

The Problem With IPv4 According to IANA and RIR it is expected that the available non-allocated IP space for IPv4 will become exhausted somewhere between 2010 and 2012. While this issue was predicted in the 1980s and IPv6 was first proposed in 1996, it still has not been widely embraced by the Internet community, even though the date of exhaustion is looming close on the horizon. The issue thus far has been considered mostly a networking problem with networking solutions, however this paper will discuss many of the other issues as they relate to web based applications and the overall security ramifications of the migration between IPv4 and IPv6 as it comes ever closer. It is no longer an option, if you and your company have not yet considered IPv6 you are already falling behind.

Economic Impacts Of IPv4 to IPv6 Conversion: A number of interesting business issues may arise from the switch between IPv4 and IPv6. It is important to realize that while IPv4 spaces may be allocated that does not necessarily mean that they are used for anything. The first interesting possibility is that there may be a huge increase in cost for IPv4 address spaces as ISPs may decide that their apparent value is higher with less and less IP space available. This issue could lead to IPv4 barons who hoarde and eventually resell or rent IP space in smaller blocks at a premium. Additionally it is plausible that legislation may be instituted to fine companies for squatting on IPs that are unused yet allocated to prompt them to return unallocated IPv4 addresses back to the global pool of unallocated addresses. This would have the effect of further punishing businesses who are unable to make the switch to IPv6 for whatever reasons.

Short Term Issues With Conversion: A number of services advertise themselves as quick solutions to IPv6 to IPv4 conversions. One such company is 6gate who essentially proxies all the inbound connections to your website for you. This would allow 6gate to "see" any connections made to the host in question. While that may be ideal for insensitive transactions it also creates a great place to perform man in the middle attacks or sniffing attacks, similar to the ones used against Tor.

Similarly there are a number of IPv6 to IPv4 tunnel brokers that aim to make IPv6 to IPv6 over IPv4 enabled networks possible (since IPv4 cannot speak IPv6). These tunnelbrokers are technically capable of reading all of the traffic routed over them. While it is unlikely, these aggregate points are a high visibility point for attack within networks, and must be guarded as such.

IPv6 Networking Performance Impacts: Although not often addressed, there are performance impacts associated with IPv4 to IPv6. At least one of the major networking hardware manufacturers has estimated that the operational efficiency of their devices drop 4:1 for IPv6 enabled devices. That means that for certain types of hardware either a four times increase in networking equipment or costly upgrades of existing equipment. If additional equipment is required this could include supplemental equipment like uninterruptable power supply manufacturers, HVAC manufacturers, remote management devices (EG: Cyclades and Arula). This will require large scale migrations for networking staff, increases in physical space requirements within data centers and increase manufacturing needs for networking companies. This includes companies like Cisco, Juniper, Nortel and Acatel-Lucent amongst others - each of whom stand to make a substantial short term revenue growth for the switch and a sustained smaller long term growth based on the estimated 4:1 reduced efficiency of IPv6. Ultimately, the budget for the change must be accurately estimated for all the associated components for a seamless global transition.

IPv6 and Security Tools: Many tools that are enabled to help identify vulnerable applications within networks are IPv4 enabled to be able to route to addresses that have either no name associated with them or use something like NetBios instead of DNS to help users identify their location on the network. Many security tools have no IPv6 functionality, meaning that IPv6 enabled networks can often pass network security audits simply because the tools were not designed to operate in IPv6 enabled networks. Further, many security tools do parsing based on certain regular expressions. Here's two examples:


An example IPv4 URL: https://12.23.45.67:443/


An example IPv6 URL: https://[2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7344]:443/

A regular expression could often be used for parsing in security tools that are designed to parse apart hostnames. Many existing tools fail when faced with a URL of this kind for various reasons. Firstly, the routable address no longer contains decimals, which in of itself is not a current requirement of IPv4 (an example of this is Dwords which are often used by phishers: http://1113982867/).

Another difference is the size of the string, which often is bounded by database string size. It is often that databases use the IP address rather than the host name for logging purposes, which normally requires 15 characters (12 numbers plus three periods), while IPv6 can be 39 characters. The last change is in URL structure which can include square brackets. The square brackets can fool logging that attempts to look at referring URLs. Nefarious users can force legitimate requests through a system which may give erroneous results based on how the logging is built.

An example of what someone might see when looking at a IPv6 DNS entry is:


$ dig www.ipv6.ac.uk |grep AAAA
ns0.ecs.soton.ac.uk. 1782 IN AAAA 2001:630:d0:f102::53a
ns1.ecs.soton.ac.uk. 1782 IN AAAA 2001:630:d0:f110::53b
ns2.ecs.soton.ac.uk. 1782 IN AAAA 2001:630:d0:f102::53b

Note: An example of a valid IPv6 URL that may fool logging which looks for the first occurence of /\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\ to base security decisions upon: http://[2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7344]/a.aspx?12.34.56.78/

As a side note a variation of this URL structure was used to deny service to a particular client side application code during testing. It will become necessary to perform this sort of regression testing against both IPv4 and IPv6 going forward to insure stability of any application that interacts with the web.

Future: There are many locations in many different types of applications that may use IP as hostname verification or for logging. Every instance should be identified and dealt with as soon as possible to ensure a smooth transition to an IPv6 environment. While IPv4 is not going away, the replacement version 6 will ultimately require further engineering thought. This will include security and networking tools (many of which are already getting attention or have already been ported to work in IPv6 environments), web applications, logging and of course the networking that ties it all together. While IPv6 is not widely understood amongst the majority of Internet professionals, it will quickly become an important aspect of all future network and Internet application development.

Innovation in Google Search Engine

As many of you who have recently logged on to google for search engine must have noticed a new logo on google page, its the new google Pacman logo.

Here is what google's word on that

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/celebrating-pac-mans-30th-birthday.html

Mystery of KITES

Kites was supposed to be the biggest movie of this year with just over 10,000 shows alone in India. The hype was immense in India and music was catching up on chart and this prompted me to watch it this weekend.

First thing Kites end up being totally confused , neither it cut across hindi movie audiences ( with the overdose of english dialogues) and neither it appeals to be a cult international movie ( the villain being the lame script).

Kites is an attempt to make Hrithik into an international star , he does appeal with his choclaty looks and daring stunts but thats it and he hardly gets any support from Barbara Morie .

Movie hardly had any script and end up being mismatch between being a thriller and a romantic story.

Anurag basu disappointed big time with the execution, earlier he has shown promise with adapted hollywood scripts( some of the sequences from Apartment in Life in Metro immediately comes to mind ) and made them indianized but on a big scale he seems totally incompetent.

Some of the scenes are intentionally funny like hrithiik endorsing calvin klein underwear( a trend which is common in all hrithik-rakesh roshan movie starting from kaho na pyar hai itself where products are marketed ) to bland expression of mori and kabir bedi.

Kabir bedi the orginal hunk and indian crossover product to west is totally wasted, he is a much better actor than that. In Hrithik - Rakesh movie saga its all about Hrithik and competent actors like Naseer and Rekha(in KRRISH), ANUPAM KHER(IN KNPH) are always reduced to back seat, surprisingly in few sequences kangana stands out and even looks hotter than Barbara Mori

Brilliant cinematography and daring stunts are one of the few plusses of the movie.

All in all kites is not worth spending Rs 250 bucks in a multiplex unless and untill you are Hrithik fan and a sucker for a slow paced, scriptless movie devioid of life.

Waiting for DVD is a much better option.

News and its side effects

Just wanted to share this mail which i got:



The Times of India is read by people who think they run the country.

The Economic Times is read by people who think they own the country.

The Hindu is read by people who are not sure whose country it is.

The Indian Express is read by people who shouldn’t run the country.

The Statesman is read by people who think they ought to run the country.

The Asian Age is read by people who think someone else should run the country..

The Hindustan Times is read by people who think Delhi is a country.

The Telegraph is read by people who think Bengal is the best country.

The Malayala Manorama is read by people who think Kerala is their country, and God’s … zimble !

The Mid-Day is read by people who can’t think in this country.

The Pioneer is read by people who think the Brits ran this country better.

The Tribune is read by people who’re more bothered about the country-side.

The Dainik Bhaskar is read by people in the country-side.

The Bombay Samachar is read by people who’d rather be in some other country.

The Saamna is read by semi-literates who think, tujhi aiee chi, everyone should fx%k off from country..

The Femina is read by the fat wives of the rich in this country.

The Stardust is read by people who care a shit who runs the country as long as she has big tits.

The Pune Times is read by some people who think the pub is their country.

The DNA is not read, but used to pack footwear by people going out of this country.

(Sad but true , this aptly describes the situation in hand)