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Showing posts from August, 2008

Citibank ATM breach reveals PIN security problems

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SAN JOSE, Calif. - Hackers broke into Citibank's network of ATMs inside 7-Eleven stores and stole customers' PIN codes, according to recent court filings that revealed a disturbing security hole in the most sensitive part of a banking record. The scam netted the alleged identity thieves millions of dollars. But more importantly for consumers, it indicates criminals were able to access PINs — the numeric passwords that theoretically are among the most closely guarded elements of banking transactions — by attacking the back-end computers responsible for approving the cash withdrawals. The case against three people in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York highlights a significant problem. Hackers are targeting the ATM system's infrastructure, which is increasingly built on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system and allows machines to be remotely diagnosed and repaired over the Internet. And despite industry standards that call for protecting PINs

I'm nominated to be the Chair of Internet Work Group in Coming APNG Camp

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The Coming APNG 11th , will be held in Malaysia. I was surprised and definitely extremely happy and honoured when Ting Liu - From China , he is a PhD., Student and Security Researcher- the Current Chair of Internet Work Group wants to nominate me to be the chair of Internet Workgroup in the coming year. I'm so happy for this nomination, Wish to be able to do good things If I'm selected. Picture Ting Liu and me having fun on dinner

Egypt Joins Live E

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Live-E is an information system on Earth Enviroment , Weather Sensors are installed all over Aisa and Egypt is to join this network by a Weather Sensor that I will connect in Cairo/Egypt and will help with my connections in rest of Africa to have more and more sensors and data on Weather change in Africa. This will be the first node to get connected in Africa - For sure All data will be shared with everybody -. The Weather Sensor Picture is below is a one wire device that connects to a wireless Access point which runs OpenWRT and has some simple scripts that collects data from the Weather sensor every minute in a cron job , and send it to a centralized server in Japan (We discussed building a Server in Africa with the servers in Asia/Japan) Another Method in Running Live E and DAta gathering is based on P2P protocols using PIAX link is h3r3 PIAX is an open source framework to develop P2P applications. It integrates mobile agent based messagings and P2P discovery mechanisms transparen

Thailand Grid Computing Center

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I visited Thailand Grid Computing Center, We have been introduced to the biggest Clusterin Thailand . Link to Thai Grid Computing Center web site is here I had the plesure to meet Prof. Dr. Putchong Uthayopas, the Director of Thai National Grid Center, I was astonished by the wealth of knowledge and hands on experience and the humbleness he has. For the first time in my life , I hear an Aademic doctor talks about how it is important to facilitate the processing power to Academia and how he treats them as customers , and how much he cares about making things happen and then do the paper work, This is a great spirit. I have been through HPC business before and I had a cluster of 30 AMD Itanium servers and I know how challenging to maintain such a cluster. - When i setup that cluster it was the biggest in the Arab world at 2004-. I have seen a state of the art HPC , it has around 160 HP Xeon Servers and high performance network with very very low latency used for communication,processi

Japan is hitting IPv6 seriously

I enjoyed a presentation today by Prof. Hiroshi Esaki from Tokyo University. He spoke bout deploying IPv6 in Japan. and how international bandwidth in Japan is increasing exponentially due to Video sites like Youtube and P2P traffic. I have sensed -if I' not mistaken- that Prof. Hiroshi Esaki is with internet Nuetrality and againest blocking certain traffic. In his reply to my question interoperability between IPv4 and IPv6, they will work as two different clouds and ISPs and carriers should deploy the converters in the entry point of datacenters and so on, But he stressed that the challenge is the security of this conversion between the two networks and another question from me on how AAA DNS query increased dramatically in the past year in Japan although those computers are not using IPv6 yet. his reply is that due to the fact the Windows VISTA and MAC OS/X has native support for IPv6 and that the mentioned operating systems do query AAAA dns now although that no legtimate repl

APNIC General Director answers my question on Network Neutrality

During the APNG 10th camp, we have Paul Wilson APNIC General Director ,Paul spoke about Internet governance and since I'm a member in Network Neutrality Squad in UK, I asked him if Network Governance goes in direction with Network Neutrality. Paul was very smart and political in his reply as he said that it is something related to local competition and local ISPs. I was not happy with the answer as from my point of view Network Governance contradicts with Network Neutrality , But I'm happy enough to tickle the point . Thank you Paul.

Google speaks about inter-planet communication and challenges in APNG

Dr. Vinton Gray Vice Google president speaks about inter-planet communication in APNG 10th camp and the challenges in communication for example between Earth and Mars and how it takes 20 minutes for packets to reach Earth from Mars on the speed of light. Dr. Vinton and Google are very interested in the work have been done in this field. he spoke about Wireless Sensor Networks and the challenges that faces such kind of networks in the sense of sensors , power , mobility and internet connectivity If you are not so familiar with Sensor networks, please check this link. Needless to say that I will come back to Cairo with a Wireless sensor network device to be installed,connected and managed by me to join the universal network of WSN. Video of Dr. Vinton will be uploaded soon.

GetDeb Announces PlayBuntu

For Gamers, Now on Linux they have a way to maintain easy gaming experience as Getdeb.net announced a leading provider of new and updated programs for Ubuntu is announcing the start of a gaming repository for Ubuntu. The repository (codenamed " Playbuntu ") will provide all games available on getdeb.net in an easy to use repository format - enabling you to receive updates for your favourite game via the Update Manager tool. Additonally, if a game has several packages, installing them is quite easy as it'll be automatically handled. While work on the repository is still just beginning, you can obtain new and updated games from getdeb.net here . However they need our help as comunity your in making this a reality. If you're able to provide a mirror, or would like to help us package - contact them . Otherwise, please consider making a donation - the money will be spent in purchasing mirrors, so we have enough bandwidth and acceptable speeds for this.

APNG Starts

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APNG (Asia Pacific Network Group) 10th Camp - Although I see it more as an international conference not a camp style in anyway. the premises is very good in five stars building,very fast WIFI in the looby, Rooms has Network outlets. Tomorrow is the opening of the gathering there are many stars around 1) Dr. Vinton Gray - well known as "The Father of the internet" and currently he is the Vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist in Google. Link to his page on WikiPedia is h3r3 2) Dr. Kilam Chon is a professor in Computer Science Department of Korea Advanced Institute with Awards like World Technology Award,Presidential Award. And many other Computer Science stars The conference will start tomorrow, and my presentation is on the opening day tomorrow as well. It is again about Open Source usage in security or in other words how to secure your network using Open source projects/softwares. Conference is held in AIT/Thailand (Asia Institute of Technology), AIT is very huge and I

Linux Commercials

If you want to promote Linux and raise awareness , may be the below advertisement will help you specially they have big names on them like IBM, Novell that does not mean that Linux needs those names, but I see that people need to see to beleive. So, please find below Youtube for some of Linux Commercials that I got hold on , which are supported/produced by IBM and Novell.

Google Linux Software Repositories

Google has a Linux Software Repository, which has Google Picasa for Linux, Google Desktop for Linux , and Google Earth for Linux. Link of the Repository is h3r3 Please note that Google Earth for Linux is on another link It has steps to install these applications from GUI and Shell

Google Picasa for Linux

Google Picasa is a Software that helps you to manage your pictures and upload them to Webpicasa which is an online photo Album. Google Picasa the Software is available on Linux link is h3r3 Google Picasa is not Open Source, but it is a good software Please that it uses WINE