Archive for Geeky Talks

Why text messages are limited to 160 characters

Short URL for this post -- http://sujit.tk/4j
|| No Comments » || May 4th, 2009 || Geeky Talks, General ||

Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.

As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.

That became Hillebrand’s magic number — and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.

“This is perfectly sufficient,” he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. “Perfectly sufficient.”

The communications researcher and a dozen others had been laying out the plans to standardize a technology that would allow cellphones to transmit and display text messages.  Because of tight bandwidth constraints of the wireless networks at the time — which were mostly used for car phones — each message would have to be as short as possible.

Before his typewriter experiment, Hillebrand had an argument with a friend about whether 160 characters provided enough space to communicate most thoughts. “My friend said this was impossible for the mass market,” Hillebrand said. “I was more optimistic.”

(more…)

Free Website Building Tools That Are Good Replacements for Google Page Creator

Short URL for this post -- http://sujit.tk/x
|| No Comments » || April 27th, 2009 || Geeky Talks ||

Google Page Creator is awesome – anyone can build a good looking website in minutes using the built-in templates or they can write pages externally (say in Dreamweaver) and upload them to Creator.

And everything is free – there are no ads on your pages and Google takes care of all the web hosting bills. But as they say, all good things come to an end, and so is Google Page Creator getting replaced by Google Sites.

Compare Google Sites with Google Page Creator

While Google Sites and Google Pages have common feature (like the WYSIWYG AJAX editor), they are still quite different. For instance, you can’t upload HTML pages to Google Sites and are therefore limited to using one of the built-in themes for your site design.

(more…)

How To Change IP Address

Short URL for this post -- http://sujit.tk/y
|| No Comments » || December 27th, 2008 || Geeky Talks ||

“How do I change my IP address?” and “Can I change my IP address?” are probably the most commonly asked questions. Please attempt the following .

Before trying any other methods to change your IP address, try turning off (or unplugging the power of) your Cable/DSL modem for five minutes. In many cases this will change your IP address. However, if that does not change your IP address, repeat the process for 8 hours (overnight works well) instead of 5 minutes. Hopefully this will result in an IP change.

(more…)

Mechanism Of Attack In IP Spoofing

Short URL for this post -- http://sujit.tk/14
|| No Comments » || December 23rd, 2008 || Geeky Talks ||

Generally the attack is made from the root account on the attacking host against the root account on the target.  If the attacker is going to all this trouble, it would be stupid not to go for root. (Since root access is needed to wage the attack, this should not be an issue.) (more…)

Latest Buzz In The Indian Internet Circuit

Short URL for this post -- http://sujit.tk/16
|| No Comments » || December 22nd, 2008 || Geeky Talks, General ||

These are few new founding on India’s internet habit based on research from different firms. Found these research results on the net on various places. I thought its interesting and should put in one place together.

Nautanki.Tv‘s research says that In India, 85 percent of online video consumption happens from offices.

  • 76 percent of all video consumption happens from the top seven metros / mini metros. Mumbai contributes to 14 percent of the consumption, Delhi 12.5 percent and Chennai is the lowest at 6.5 percent, probably because nautanki.tv has mostly Hinglish content.
  • (more…)

Non-Blind Spoofing & Blind Spoofing

Short URL for this post -- http://sujit.tk/17
|| No Comments » || December 22nd, 2008 || Geeky Talks ||

There are a few variations on the types of attacks that successfully employ IP spoofing.
Before reading this, if you don’t know what is IP spoofing, please read this. It’ll help you understand this article in a better way.

Although some are relatively dated, others are very pertinent to current security concerns. IP-spoofing consists of several steps, which I will briefly outline here, then explain in detail. First, the target host is chosen. Next, a pattern of trust is discovered, along with a trusted host. The trusted host is then disabled, and the target’s TCP sequence numbers are sampled. The trusted host is impersonated, the sequence numbers guessed, and a connection attempt is made to a service that only requires address-based authentication. If successful, the attacker executes a simple command to leave a backdoor.

(more…)

IP Spoofing

Short URL for this post -- http://sujit.tk/18
|| No Comments » || December 22nd, 2008 || Geeky Talks, General ||

Criminals have long employed the tactic of masking their true identity, from disguises to aliases to caller-id blocking. It should come as no surprise then, that criminals who conduct their nefarious activities on networks and computers should employ such techniques. IP spoofing is one of the most common forms of on-line camouflage. In IP spoofing, an attacker gains unauthorized access to a computer or a network by making it appear that a malicious message has come from a trusted machine by “spoofing” the IP address of that machine. In the subsequent pages of this report, we will examine the concepts of IP spoofing: why it is possible, how it works, what it is used for and how to defend against it.

(more…)

Virtual Network Computing (V.N.C)

Short URL for this post -- http://sujit.tk/1a
|| No Comments » || December 20th, 2008 || Geeky Talks ||

Virtual network computing (V.N.C) is a process of controlling a computer by sitting kilometers away through internet. Here we can control a server computer, which is situated kilometers away by sitting in front of a viewer computer. An image of the desktop of the server is brought to our computer and making events in viewer computer we can any work in the server computer. Here internet is used as the communication between the server and the viewer’s computer.

As the operating system is graphical user interface the controlling is made by mouse events. When we brought the server’s desktop to viewer’s computer the screen resolution of the server and viewer’s must be same (eg: 800*600). So when a mouse event is happening on a particular pixel (say 300,200), that particular pixel send to the server from the viewer and the change is brought to the viewer. So the user will not feel that two computers are working here. He will get feeling that he is using the server itself.

(more…)