November 14, 2005 · 1 Comment
My Dell Windows XP PC had a sticker on it that say “Please hack me”.
Well, I didn’t see the sticker. Not for a while. I read a very basic article on hacking by Roger Grimes at Infoworld. He talked about passwords sniffed from wireless networks. Their encryption broken in a matter of seconds. I thought it was too easy, it couldn’t be. I had to try it myself. I hopped over to insecure.org downloaded Cain & Abel installed it and was ready to go. Cain is a sniffer + cracker. I had to see for myself.
It took me less than five minutes to sniff the traffic on my private network, send it to the cracker and launch a dictionary attack on the SMB traffic collected. I found two vulnerable accounts, “Administrator” and “Guest”. Both accounts had *no* passwords. The Administrator account was especially worrisome - it never showed up under the account list in my XP control-panel. I never even knew it existed. I had never logged into it (XP offers to create a user account with administrator privileges at install-time). The Administrator account is also my system ‘root’, pardon my reliance on Unix jargon.
Dissapointed in myself, I quickly peeled the sticker off by disabling the two accounts. Maybe I can fix the vulnerability comprehensively by eliminating my dependence on Windows entirely.
Categories: Windows · networks · technology
After all the hype behind Artificial Intelligence has died down, things are leaning towards practical applications of the AI especially in the field of Personalization. While it is true that work here could have picked up wind as early as 1999, it is only recently that Distr. Agents and Personalization are drawing attention.
From agents that can organize and prioritize email to agents that collect news and information, from websites that organize themselves into customized portals to mail clients that evolve and learn their users habits, everything is starting to see the light of day.
In terms of collaboration and group work, agents have a tremendous potential in helping organize and build groups, in helping the groups function and parallelize the movement of information between them. In other words agents are becoming conduits to help humans build our own “newspapers” and attract knowledge that might interest us.
Our growing reliance on machines is painted perfectly when we talk about agents. The only difference is that these are’nt tangible aides, they only exist in the abstraction of software.
Agents when combined with Data Mining methods helps leverage the knowledge of algorithms that help abstract Data and at the same time add scalability to the implementation. Agents that mine can be either Sensors on a battlefield or simply “shopping” agents that are looking for the best deal. The objective is the same, to take advantage of the distributed nature of the network and at the same time efficiently consume whatever limited resources are available to return the best possible results.
More links forthcoming…
Categories: networks · programming
Santosh
Anjali