Popups

Recently I was working on my brother's computer, when I found the following popup from the antivirus. Evidently the real time protection worked as it came when I was working online.



The malware (I choose to refer in a generic fashion as different vendors differ on whether it is a trojan or a virus) Trojan.Clicker.CM comes from adsrevenue.net. Now, I was working in a different site and I tried a download. The download was supposed to be initiated from another window and along with that new window came the popup which was blocked by the antivirus.

Some googling yielded that http://www.adsrevenue.net/ is the website of a company that lives on ads. However, it also hints at the grim prospect that malware are used by companies to make money, that cybercrime secretly thrives on companies like this one.

Memristor

Basic electronics tells us that there are three passive components :
1. Resistor
2. Capacitor
3. Inductor.
Now the trinity has been joined by a new member - the memristor.

In 1971, an IEEE fellow and pioneer of non-linear circuit theory, Leon Chua, working as an engineer in the University of California, Berkeley, predicted that there should be a fourth element: a memory resistor, or memristor. But no one knew how to build one. Now, 37 years Hewlett-Packard researchers have finally designed one.

Earlier it was conceived only from a mathematical perspective and no real manifestation was existent. According to Chua, memristor provides a similar relationship between magnetic flux and charge that a resistor gives between voltage and current. That it acts like a resistor whose value varies according to the current passing through it and which remembers that value even after the current has disappeared. This hints at using the device as a memory resistor.

The team was lead by R. Stanley Williams. They were working on molecular electronics. The memristor is fundamental circuit element as no combination of other fundamental passive elements can make a device remember the current flowing through it earlier. The effect can be produced using transistors and capacitors but a large number of them is needed to produce the effect of a single memristor. The symbol for memristor is as follows.


Looking into the practical applications, we see that with the use of memristors we might never need to boot up again; everything that was in memory while we turned off would be in memory when we turn the system back on. Moreover, memristors are likely to help hardware based implementations of neural networks and fuzzy logic. According to Williams, computations may no more be in Boolean fashion only. Also there can be designs of non-volatile memory based on memristors that could be 1000 times faster than traditional magnetic disks yet consume quite less power.

This is an achievement of nanoscience. For those who could not welcome nanoscience due to prejudices of privacy breach by nanorobots, here is a view of how much easy nanoscience can make your lives.

Some time ago I had read a Linux kernel developer saying that we are not having enough development in hardware. Well here is one.

Cheating at Counter strike

In Counter Strike: Condition Zero, various levels are to be completed and each level has its challenges. The screenshot below shows the challenges for the map "Stadium" in "Hard" level. The names of the enemy bots are clearly mentioned and are actually well chosen so that the challenges are effective.The cheat is actually a loophole. The essence of the cheat is that if we change the bots that make the challenge effective, then the challenge becomes easier. The challenge counter, e.g. the number of enemies to be killed, remains the same however.

Let me take the help of an example to explain how the cheat works. Suppose in the above game I found that Razor being a sniper is causing me more problems than the other bots. So I went to the command line using '~' button. The Console appeared as shown below. I typed in the command
kick Razor
and the outcome was leaving of Razor and joining of Floyd.
Another time, in the next round when I did it Cooper joined the CT forces, as shown in the following screenshot. Each time a random bot was added to the CT forces and the match became 6 on 6 rather than 5 on 7.
The challenge counters that counted the number of kills by me were intact but the challenge lost meaning to some extent.

Spread of malware

Many people use pirated software and use cracks and serials. The temptation of saving money opens gateways for unsolicited malware. The links provided to download cracks are often fake and even the cracks contain malware themselves.
The download link above downloads a virus file.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1

Before installation of IE8 Beta 1, the installer checks for malicious software on the system as can be seen below - something to be appreciate. It bears testimony of Microsoft's growing focus on security to its popularity and compete *nix systems.There is website filter that acts much like McAfee's SiteAdvisor. It says some sites shall be sent to Microsoft for verification of not being malicious. It is supposed to provide "real-time" protection.

After the first start, a few customizations are available. A wizard asks you about your default search engine. You can add online from a list of popular ones as I added Google (below).You can also build your custom search bar plugins as follows. Moreover, this is actually simpler than building search bar plugins for Firefox. If

Below is another feature of IE8 which is available in Firefox as a separate plugin.

Firefox has grown so popular that while talking of IE a comparision spontaneously comes to the mind. In Firefox, there is an option of checking for forged sites by checking from a list of downloaded sites or by checking with Google.

Problem with IE and "always on connection"

I have been having problems with Internet Explorer with my "always on " internet connection. Whenever i tried to use it, it would display the common error message saying "Cannot find server". Then I notied that each time I open up Internet Explorer it connects to 192.168.1.2 as shown below.

Now my previous connection required the modem to be configured to this address. So the problem lay in some remnant of my previous configuration which had creeped into IE. I deleted my previous connection from "Network Connections". Yet the problem persisted. IE was still trying to connect to "192.168.1.2". Now I had to look up a setting which was not changed even after deleting my previous connection. After some search, I found that my LAN settings were set to use "192.168.1.2" as proxy. I unchecked that option and tried to connect again. The problem was solved now.

Yahoo messenger used IE internally. So it was also not working on my system. But now I can happily use Yahoo Messenger again.

Kaspersky failed

Recently i had to deal with a system affected with the following few viruses.

1. Virus.win32.autorun.abt
2. w32.Autorun.FM.worm

The system had Kaspersky which showed only the first virus. Moreover, Kaspersky was unable to clean the virus.

So i removed the virus from the system by manual cleaning. The job of one click was now a long process. After doing away with the virus the system functioned normally and my first thought was to get rid of Kaspersky. Then i installed a free trial of Panda Antivirus and firewall. I saw that i had finally done away with my virus but there was another one too. During the course of installation only Panda antivirus scanned the memory to eliminate 6 spyware.

After the installation i ran a full system virus scan to confirm that the system is cleaned. I was surprised at how badly Kaspersky had failed when i found that there was another virus that it had not even detected.

Microsoft Surface

Microsoft's futuristic computer is called Microsoft Surface. Earlier we used to install computers as desktops but they plan to turn desktops into computers. There are no keyboards or mice. It uses IR cameras to detect touch.
This is going to change the whole experience of desktops.

The implications vary wonderfully for common public and developers. Computer programmers will need to develop more complex algorithms. The hardware will also be more sophisticated. The input and output options will increase and thus their respective modes will diversify. This diversification will make the computermore interactive for the user. It will be easier, simpler and friendlier. Computer games will be a much more multimedia-rich experience.
No swiping of would be required for systems running Surface. You just need to throw your card on the surface and the system takes care of the rest. You just move your hands to signal the system.

Beyond intuition

Intuition guides many of our decisions and often we make use of it subconsciously. Sometimes a strong sense of intuition is also referred emphatically as "sixth sense". However, nature isn't always intuitive. Prof. Walter Lewin demonstrates the same in the following video.