Thoda sa main...(A little bit of me)

I came to Delhi 2 weeks back. Wanted to write a lot but not getting enough time.
Actually not getting enough time to write a blog post, twittering is still on at full speed (@rohit11)

Lets divide the post into sections
WINTER:
Freak, Don't even talk about that. I have spent my 3 years in Meerut which is some 70km from here. Have tasted this north Indian winter, but in last 6+ years Pune weather has pampered me and now this is feeling at extreme. What Delhi winter (or north Indian winter) is like
# Tip of your nose will be chilled like anything
# Toes will be cold even after they are locked in shoes for hours together
# Hands will be cold even inside gloves. Best option is sit on them to keep them warm.
# You'll be wearing those "body warmers". Till now I used to see them TV commercials only, but now I bought them too.
# One quilt/blanket is never sufficient

FOG:
# Your morning/late evening flights will be delayed
# Your not so late evening flights will also be delayed(ref: my trip to Ahmedabad)
# Driving with parking indicator on
# Special fog lamps on cars, and in some cases yellow cellophane sheets on the car headlamp ;)

METRO:
# Delhi metro is nothing different from Mumbai's local. Just this one has AC ;)
# Same kind of rushing/pushing/struggling crowd
# The only good is that the doors get closed
# On Rajiv Chowk (CP), there are barriers and security officials to assist you to board the train.
# If too much crowded, then they will assist the door closer too by pushing passengers inside and for the automatic doors to close, that was a funny scene

FOOD:
# Delhi is a place for foody like me ;)
# Don't bother about the dripping butter on our paratha
# Delhi-cious food, no doubt
# Wonderful non-veg, ultimate cooks live in North India only
# Yummy road side snacks
# Don't miss "Thank God Its Friday" @ CP

CITY:
# Is more green than last time I saw it
# Infrastructure is developing very fast, some people thank commonwealth games for it.
# Metro (as discussed) is a wonderful public transport, very decent & serious service
# Roads are very nice & wide, atleast as compared to Pune
# Houses, (metro syndrome) less space and people have tuned to live with it.
# Cars, not even a single one is without a scratch or a dent, not even a new one. Some people put small dent as soon as they buy a new car. some kind of shagun (lucky charm). I have seen this myself.
# Pollution, yes it is there, more of suspended particle than smoke. City full of dust.


That's enough about Delhi now, I might post a few updates in this series, not very sure though ;)

I never thought I'll be posting something long and boring like this but feeling like putting few words on this subject.


I'm leaving Pune and shifting to Delhi for few years. For those who know I worked as Director Technology for the Commonwealth Youth Games held in october 2008 and same is the reason why I'm moving to Delhi. I'll be working for the Commonwealth Games to be held in October 2010.



Its been 6 years and 1 quater I lived in this classy city Pune. Have seen this city growing like anything and now its feeling bad to leave this city of geeks.

I love Pune because:

# City of Geeks: You always bump onto a few geeks everytime you are out. We organized many BarCamps and other Camps here and noticed that the talks/crowd of Pune were more inclined towards geeky stuff than general talk-talk stuff.


# City of Good Girls: no more comments ;)


# City of Wannapreneurs: I love the wave of Pune's special wannapreneurs. Everyone(nearly) is jumping up with a new concept and doing something very interesting. Saw rise and fall(very less though) of some very nice startups.


# City of Wannabe's: People in Pune are there to learn any damn (technical) thing they can. I found so many such people here who are ready to do anything to learn something new. And when it came to my hacking zone I found more number of such energetic people who are ready to bunk classes and offices just to learn something cool. Ya I'm not talking about roadsense and some other stuff :) That might take some time.


# City of Foodies: I loved this charateristics of Pune. Though you'll not find a lot of roadside fun eating joints, but I really like the kind of eatouts Pune has :P~ Someone who is foody like me will always find Pune as a fun place to be in. Starting from typical Puneri food to all the different cuisines. From Dots ice-cream to Naturals. From Gulabjamun to Basundi. From handi dahi at sinhagadh to goodnight at ajuba. STOP IT ROHIT!!!


# City of Communities: ClubHack, Barcamp, Blogcamp, Phpcamp, Ideacamp, Jugcamp, developergarage, null, firefox gang, twitter gang, I'm sure I'm mising a lot of names here.


# City of Non-Tech Communities: How can I forget my Royal Enfield gang "RoadShakers". Then we had Pune Eatouts, Wine Tasting Club, Pune Trekkers, Adventure Sports Clubs.


# City of Enthu Students: If you are in Pune and need a quick helping hand in any thing, just get in touch with a 1-2 students and see how the whole work is done. I loved the enthusiasm of students community here to DO something.


# City of Wonderful Night Life: I remember coming home at 2am or 4am from parties and still it used to be so safe. So many beautiful places for wonderful night life in Pune. So many people in the wee hours at the parties.

# City of Art and Culture: People here still have time to spend on art and culture. I know people leaving jobs just to do paintings & photography. Attended so many concerts so many many big artists. Even watched marathi plays here.


# City of my great friends: I made a great circle of of friends here in Pune. Every hangout I used to bump on to some new and some old friends. Would it be OK to name a few here??? Let's not hurt readers with a LOOOOONG list of names here. But all my friends know how much thankful I'm to them for being in my life.


I know I have listed things those were of my interest and there can be hundred such lists by different people and thats the thing I love about Pune. A city for everyone, always there to welcome one and all with open arms (ya I know this statement went little bollywood style). I can still write a lot about Pune but that will surely put you to sleep.

Its little hard to leave Pune and its forcing me to plan my comeback in this city. I'll be back Pune. I'll miss Pune and seems like Pune will miss me to.


GoodBye Pune, Stay Classy Pune

Following HDMoore's twit I stumbled on this case of Man-in-the-middle attack with a valid SSL certificate from a shady reseller.

Eddy Nigg was able to buy a certificate in the name of mozilla.com from a reseller of comodo named 'Certstar'.

In response of this issue, comodo says

That reseller's ability to sell Comodo certificates has been suspended while we
investigate why they are apparently not fulfilling their contractual obligations
to us. We revoked your certificate for mozilla.com.

If this is the situation, why do an attacker need to work hard to do arp poisoning and other tricks to do an MITM. Phishers will be happy to use this kind of shady resellers.

Or maybe they are already using these kind of stupid CAs to get a valid certificates.

Call me crazy/paranoid /fanatic or whatever you want to but I've deleted COMODO from both of my browsers (IE & FF). Chrome uses the same from IE so it became easy for me ;)

This is indeed scary, very scary...

tags: Security, Tech

Yesterday on 22nd of December 2008, Lok Sabha and today on 23rd December 2008, Rajya Sabha passed the Information Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2006"

It was passed by Rajya Sabha also within one minute. See extracts from Rajya Sabha Bulletin

2-04 p.m.
(3) The Information Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2008, as passed by Lok Sabha. Shri A. Raja, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, moved motion for the consideration of the Bill. The motion for consideration of the Bill was adopted.
Clauses 2 to 49, the First Schedule and the Second Schedule were adopted.
Clause 1, the Enacting Formula and the Title were adopted.
2-05 p.m.
The motion moved by Shri A. Raja that the Bill be passed was adopted and the Bill was passed.

The details of the these amendments which are in addition to the original 2006 copy can be downloaded from here

Ooh not me, but thinking of doing it soon

I'm thinking of messing with both PERL & Python.
Don't be amused, I'm OK, healthy and fine. Just want to do some dirty scritping

tags: comic, Fun Blogging

NDTV took an interview and a few bytes on 6th December in ClubHack but somehow they telecasted it as wardriving report.



Few clarifications here.
1: its not a group of students-turned-hackers
2: not even teenagers, butno harm if someone is reducing my age by 10 years or so

tags: clubhack, Events, interview

I found this tiny(absolute tiny) and wonderful utility for windows mobile.

It uses top 2 pixel row of your screen and shows you the battery as well as memory status. A quick look at the phone will give you an idea that how much battery is remaining and if you have enough memory free or not.

See the top 2 pixel of the screenshot

Name: powerstatus.exe
Size: 3584 bytes
License: Freeware
Download: http://freewareppc.com/utilities/powerstatus.shtml

Put this in your windows mobile startup and have fun. I'm loving it :)

tags: Tech

One day to go for the India's second hackers' convention

tags: clubhack, Events, Security, Tech

tags: clubhack, Security, Tech

Ever wondered what is this “Free Public WiFi” or “Free Internet Access” wireless network visible in most of the places?
These are known as Viral SSID, don’t expect it to be a free access to internet :)

Read more about Viral SSID on ClubHack blog

tags: clubhack, Security, Tech

Working on windows XP I have faced this problem a hunder times. While copying files from one folder to another where the some of the file already exists we see this "Confirm file replace" dialog box.At times when there are many duplicate files, it feels stupid to keep clicking "No" or pressing "N" on keyboard. If Microsoft can keep a "Yes to all" button, why can't they keep a "No to all".

tags: Tech

Google announced so called OpenID launch which scared me again about OpenID
I'm not totally against OpenID concept, I'm just paranoid about it at this stage.

Here's my take on

tags: clubhack, Security, Tech

Hey Friends,
I'm back online after a small pause of 10-15 days. I wished I could have gone offline like Tarun, Moksh , Harsha and many others who take a break, disconnect themselves from computer/Internet world and enjoy their non-digital life. But this pause of mine was little different.

I was not away from my laptop or Internet or cellphone or computer industry but I was still offline tied up in something very different. So busy that was not in a position to twit also, my last twit was on 4th of October :)
As the Director Technology of Commonwealth Youth Games Pune 2008, I was juggling with a lot of stuff and was busy managing a very different technology. Soon I'll be posting some details about this games time technology.

Now this is cool!
I use this hosting provider called "dreamhost" which gives a lot of webspace and bandwidth. When I signed up few years back I got some 200gb space and a few TB bandwidth which is increasing weekly like your gmail account space and now my account is above 600gb and >6TB in bandwidth :) .

Now this company has turned 11 and offered UNLIMITED space for new signups.
Along with that they offer existing customers to create promo code and offer extra discount to new signups.
So I created a promo code "plus50" which will give you $50 flat discount on any hosting plan you buy from dreamhost.

I loved this hosting company for few things
# Wonderful support.
# Out of the league working style.
# Friendly team
# They give you free SSH accounts so power users can do a lot more
# I haven't faced any downtime, so for me its ZERO downtime
# One can host unlimited domains on this space, no limitation. I host some 80+ domain on this
# Unlimited: space, bandwidth, email, domains, mysql, SSH account.
# One click install of: joomla, wordpress, mediawiki, phpbb, zencart and many more.

So if you are interested in buying a LOT of space for yourself online, go ahead and act fast to enjoy this unlimited offer. Use promo code plus50 to get extra $50 discount.

Ok! Have been hearing a lot of noise about wifi connection getting attacked and misused. So thought of writting a small howto for securing home wifi device.



Steps:

• # Open the configuration of your home wifi device. Generally its done by opening the IP address of your wireless router in the browser
• # Login to this configuration page and go to device setting
• # Change the defaul password of this device, i need not tell you what is called as strong password
• # Go to wireless setting or wireless security setting
• # Select WPA (or WPA-PSK, WPA-Personal, depending on your device model)
• # Put a strong password here too.
• # Done

Remember, one should NOT use "WEP" or "OPEN" configuration

Example screenshots to help you

Linksys

Netgear

Zyxel

Obviously this is not 100% security because nothing is 100% secure, But this will surely secure your home wifi from 80% of the attacks.