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Keeping Up with Onlive Video boom

We have been living through a rapid growth of online video sharing portals (e.g. YouTube, Dailymotion, Hulu, etc.) and social networking websites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.). The pace of development has been unprecedentedly rapid; so rapid that tremendous amount of users textual and visual information has been uploaded to the Internet in a very short period of time. This trend has changed many aspects of information consumption on the Internet, e.g. online video accounts for almost half of the Internet traffic. 42% of the total web traffic comes from video streaming. The largest video portal, YouTube, accounted for 57% of all global video streaming traffic, meaning that YouTube alone held 24% share of the global bandwidth.

In the digital age, human interaction with computers is a daily business. We assume people who browse news on the web will become influenced to browse related videos in the video sharing portals. Major news companies post articles related to the popular topics/events daily. Credible news agencies (such as CNN, BBC, AP, etc.) deliver the most interesting and relevant information to its audience; therefore, it is valid to assume that mainstream media will represent what's popular in the society. In comparison with social media, the trend identification might be quicker and more effective in mainstream media. Social networking websites often contain too much noise. For example, in the most popular social networking website Twitter, 77% of the tweets account for conversational and pointless bubble, while the total share of news is only 3.6%. Unlike social media, a significantly smaller amount of information in mainstream media is required to identify trends and classify them by categories. Therefore, we use knowledge learned from mainstream media to aid the design of our cross-platform proactive caching algorithm.

Problem with most Search Engines

If you try to google yourself, most likely you will see your profile on one of the popular websites (wordpress, linkedin, facebook, etc.) as a top search result. and the queestion that remains, how well does your facebook profile represent you? If you applied for a job and your employer sees as a first search result your social networking profile page, showing photos of you you getting wasted with college mates, that does not really represent you from the right angle, does it?

Try to set up a website, and send thousands of request per day to that link with different IPs, you'll see the difference, your website will come up as 1st on the search list. Why does that happen? simply because most search engines use Page Ranking algorithm to sort the search results. Is that really the best giant search engines (such as google, bing) can do? I believe no. So what is the alternative to the page ranking? Many will claim it's semantic web.

To represent the Semantic Web, you'll use the following technologies:
  • A global naming scheme (URIs)
  • A standard syntax for describing data (RDF)
  • A standard means of describing relationships between data items
There's lots of work needed to be done before Semantic Web can overtake the world, however early signs suggest if performance of semantic web is nearly as fast as page ranking, most people will use it as a primary source of internet search. The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given in well-defined meaning. Most computer scientists should remember there were many claims that someday XML would completely overtake existing HTML, only because XML has better and clearer representation, however that never happened. Let's be hopefull Search Giants will take step into new direction and provide better results. The most annoying thing regarding current search results is the order in which they are presented. If you posted your name on Wordpress, and the page was visited few times, it will come before your own website (which probably has more valuable info about you). Page rank compares entire wordpress vs. your site. I look forward to this being improved.

Best Hacking and Security Software Tools for Linux



Linux - one of the most convenient operating systems for hacking, analysing network traffic and password cracking. most of the tools are integrated into the system. below are list of few software tools, that can help you analyze your network vulnerability. Certainly, these tools listed below are to help you protect your network. under no condition should anyone use them to harm someone.

1. John the Ripper


John the Ripper is a free password cracking software tool initially developed for the UNIX operating system. It is one of the most popular password testing/breaking programs as it combines a number of password crackers into one package, autodetects password hash types, and includes a customizable cracker. It can be run against various encrypted password formats including several crypt password hash types most commonly found on various Unix flavors (based on DES, MD5, or Blowfish), Kerberos AFS, and Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 LM hash. Additional modules have extended its ability to include MD4-based password hashes and passwords stored in LDAP, MySQL and others.

2. Nmap


Nmap - one of my favorite network security scanner. It is used to discover computers and services on a computer network, thus creating a "map" of the network. Just like many simple port scanners, Nmap is capable of discovering passive services on a network despite the fact that such services aren't advertising themselves with a service discovery protocol. In addition Nmap may be able to determine various details about the remote computers. These include operating system, device type, uptime, software product used to run a service, exact version number of that product, presence of some firewall techniques and, on a local area network, even vendor of the remote network card. Nmap runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows, Solaris, and BSD (including Mac OS X), and also on AmigaOS. Linux is the most popular nmap platform and Windows the second most popular.

3. Nessus


Nessus is a comprehensive vulnerability scanning software. Its goal is to detect potential vulnerabilities on the tested systems such as:
  • -Vulnerabilities that allow a remote cracker to control or access sensitive data on a system.
  • -Misconfiguration (e.g. open mail relay, missing patches, etc).
  • -Default passwords, a few common passwords, and blank/absent passwords on some system accounts. Nessus can also call Hydra (an external tool) to launch a dictionary attack.
  • -Denials of service against the TCP/IP stack by using mangled packets
    • Nessus is the world's most popular vulnerability scanner, estimated to be used by over 75,000 organizations worldwide. It took first place in the 2000, 2003, and 2006 security tools survey from SecTools.Org.

    4. chkrootkit


    chkrootkit (Check Rootkit) is a common Unix-based program intended to help system administrators check their system for known rootkits. It is a shell script using common UNIX/Linux tools like the strings and grep commands to search core system programs for signatures and for comparing a traversal of the /proc filesystem with the output of the ps (process status) command to look for discrepancies. It can be used from a "rescue disc" (typically a Live CD) or it can optionally use an alternative directory from which to run all of its own commands. These techniques allow chkrootkit to trust the commands upon which it depend a bit more. There are inherent limitations to the reliability of any program that attempts to detect compromises (such as rootkits and computer viruses). Newer rootkits may specifically attempt to detect and compromise copies of the chkrootkit programs or take other measures to evade detection by them.

    5. netcat


    netcat is a computer networking utility for reading from and writing to network connections on either TCP or UDP. Netcat was voted the second most useful network security tool in a 2000 poll conducted by insecure.org on the nmap users mailing list. In 2003, it gained fourth place, a position it also held in the 2006 poll. The original version of netcat is a UNIX program. Its author is known as *Hobbit*. He released version 1.1 in March of 1996. Netcat is fully POSIX compatible and there exist several implementations, including a rewrite from scratch known as GNU netcat.

    Sincerely,
    A. Lobzhanidze