Recién llegado (just arrived)

Escuchas  a Mana, Juanes o una de esas cursilerias
(Es el primer día de trabajo y todo es maravilloso)

Después de 6 meses…

Escuchás música POP
(Estás completamente metido en lo que estás haciendo y quieres ser el mejor en tu área)

Después de 1 año meses…

Escuchás Heavy Metal
(Tu día laboral comienza a las 08.00 am y termina a las 8.00 pm, te estás poniendo histérico de tener todos los días los mismos problemas, con la misma gente)

Después de 3 años…

Escuchás Hip Hop
(Engordaste por culpa del estress, y sufres de estreñimiento. Te diste cuenta de que no puedes salvar al mundo, ya te da igual, total… igual te pagan)

Después de 5 años…

Escuchás GANGSTA RAP
(Te duele la cabeza, olvidaste el significado de ‘buenos días’, te sientes como si recién te hubieras caído de la cama y vives sólo de cafeína!! que nadie cuestione tu trabajo porque lo mandás a la mierda)

A partir del 5 º año…

Escuchás Voces en tu cabeza !!!
y te volviste un poco … looooooco! se te olvida en donde estacionaste el coche, como llegaste a la oficina, si te pusiste anti-transpirante y que día de la semana es.
Te dice una voz en tu cabeza que la única manera de solucionar los problemas en el trabajo es matándolos a todos !!

A reminder of the good old student programming assignments.
http://www.facebook.com/hackercup/problems.php?round=4

This hacker cup is in 4 round, pre-selection first with 3 tasks. Only need one correct though to get to next round.

Here are my 3 answers, not really sure if this will be enough to qualify, I have doubts on the peg game, since I never seem to really ever get the same results… And although my code is probably not the cleanest. I am pretty confident that it should qualify my me.

1) double square.

Example output:

1
2
0
1
1

Probably like most people, I started by attempting brute force, before realizing that we could optimize by limiting the results with squares and using the results as the keys of an array to speed up the result.his is my code:

<?php
function get_list_of_squares(){
for($i=0;$i<=sqrt(2147483647);$i++)
{
$list[$i]=$i*$i;
}
return $list;
}
$rHandle = fopen(‘input.txt’, ‘r’);
$oHandle = fopen(‘output.txt’, ‘w’);
$string = “”;
while(!feof($rHandle)){
$string .= fread($rHandle, filesize(‘input.txt’));
}
fclose($rHandle);
$numbers = preg_split(‘%[\s,]+%’, $string);
$nb_results = array_shift($numbers);
$numbers2 = array_flip($numbers);
$list = get_list_of_squares();
$list = array_flip($list);
$r = array();
foreach($list as $sq => $id )
{
foreach($numbers2 as $key => $value)
{
if($sq > $key) continue;
if(array_key_exists($key – $sq, $list) &&  !isset( $r[$key][$key - $sq] )  )
{
echo “\n$key = ” . $sq . ” + ” . ($key – $sq) ;
$r[$key][$sq]=$key – $sq;
}
}
}
foreach($numbers as $key )
{
echo $key . “: :” . count( $r[$key] ). “\n”;
fwrite($oHandle, count($r[$key]) . “\n”);
}
fclose($oHandle);
?>

x.x.x.x.x
 x...x.x
x...x.x.x
 x.x...x
x.x.x.x.x
 G  

'x' indicates a peg, '.' indicates empty space.

Example output

0 0.375000
1 1.000000
1 1.000000
0 1.000000
0 0.500000

The final exercise was probably the most difficult, but probably because I havn’t done this type of algorithm for a long time. I clearly remember doing this in my “networks” course in my first year of masters, this we had to do in “c” but I have to say I was not very focused in this course for some reason.

Anyway here is my answer, although It is likely to be a little buggy since I didn’t follow a simple algorithm like there must have been if I could remember my course.

<?php
function check_init($val){
 if(!isset($val)) $val = 0;
 return $val;
}

$rHandle = fopen('input.txt', 'r');
$oHandle = fopen('output.txt', 'w');
 $string = "";
 while(!feof($rHandle)){
 $string = fread($rHandle, filesize('input.txt'));
 $text .= $string;
 }
 fclose($rHandle);
 $lines = preg_split('/[\n]+/', $text);
 $nb_lines_to_check = $lines[0];
 foreach($lines as $index => $line){
 if($index == 0) {
 echo "line 1: amount of games: " . $line;
 continue;
 }
 $values = preg_split('/[\s]+/', $line);
 if( count($values) <= 1 ) continue;
 $rows = $values[0];
 $cols = $values[1];
 $target = $values[2];
 $nb_holes = $values[3];    
 $holes = array();
 $coord = array_splice($values, 4);
 $starting_val = $cols - 1;
 for($i=0;$i<$nb_holes;$i++){
 $id = $coord[$i*2] . ":" . ($coord[$i*2 +1]);
 $holes[$id] = true;
 }
 $results = array();
 echo "\ngame $index: ". $rows ."x". $cols . "\ntarget: c " . $target . " : ". $nb_holes . " holes\n";
 for($y=0; $y < $rows; $y++){
 $distance = $rows - $y;
 $shift = $y % 2;
 for($x=0; $x + $shift < $cols; $x++)     {
 if($target -$x > $distance) continue;
 for($start=0; $start < $starting_val; $start++) {
 if($y == 0)
 {   if($start == $x)
 {            $results[$start][$y][$x] =  1;                    }
 else{        $results[$start][$y][$x] =  0;               }
 continue;
 }
 $prev_left = isset($results[$start][$y-1][$x-1+$shift]) && $results[$start][$y-1][$x-1+$shift] > 0 ? $results[$start][$y-1][$x-1+$shift]/2 : 0;
 $prev_right = isset($results[$start][$y-1][$x + $shift]) && $results[$start][$y-1][$x + $shift] > 0 ? $results[$start][$y-1][$x + $shift] / 2 : 0;
 if($x == 0) {    $prev_left = $prev_left * 2;   }
 elseif( ($x + $shift) == ($cols - 1) ){
 $prev_right = $prev_right * 2;            }
 if(isset($holes[$y . ":". $x])){
 $prev_left =0;
 if($results[$start][$y-1][$x-1+$shift] > 0)
 $results[$start][$y + 1][$x-1+$shift] = $results[$start][$y-1][$x-1+$shift];
 }
 $next_x =$x+1;
 if(isset($holes[$y . ":". $next_x])){
 $prev_right =0;             
 }
 if(isset($results[$start][$y][$x])){
 $new_value = $results[$start][$y][$x] + $prev_right + $prev_left;
 $results[$start][$y][$x] =  $new_value ;
 }
 else
 {     $results[$start][$y][$x] =  $prev_right + $prev_left ;      }
 }
 }
 }
 $proba = 0;
 foreach($results as $starting => $test){
 if($proba < $test[$rows -1][$target] ){
 $winner = $starting;
 $proba = $test[$rows -1][$target];
 }
 }
 fwrite($oHandle, sprintf("%s %7.6f\n", $winner, round($proba, 6)) );
 }
 fclose($oHandle);
?>

3) The Studious student:

Example output
cupfacebookforhackerstudentsstudious
duzklvrawqrc
dyroiymybeaxeyubxzdr
bwjibwjibwjijp
dcyihopjijliuiuy

<?php
function cmp($a, $b){
if($a == $b){    return 0; }
if(preg_match(“/^$a/”, $b) == true)
{    return 1;    }
return($a < $b)? -1 : 1;
}

$rHandle = fopen(‘input.txt’, ‘r’);
$oHandle = fopen(‘output.txt’, ‘w’);
$string = “”;
while(!feof($rHandle)){
$string = fread($rHandle, filesize(‘input.txt’));
$text .= $string;
}
fclose($rHandle);
$lines = preg_split(‘%[\n,]+%’, $text);
$nb_lines_to_check = $lines[0];
foreach($lines as $index => $line)
{
if($index == 0) {
continue;
}
$words = preg_split(‘/[\s]+/’, $line);
$ordered =  array_splice($words, 1);
usort($ordered, “cmp”);
foreach($ordered as $key => $item)
{
echo $item;
fwrite($oHandle, $item);
}
echo “\n”;
fwrite($oHandle, “\n”);
}
fclose($oHandle);
?>

You can download the code here, and try it for yourself if you like:

http://www.cyber-netics.com/hackercup.tar.gz

This Books Ngram Viewer will now give more detailed information about what has been a topic of interest to various populations over time.

Books Ngram Viewer:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com

This is not really a surprise to see that cybernetics is not really the most fashionable topic at the moment. But it is nevertheless interesting to see that it is loosing in popularity.

But what could be the topics of interest:
The first which come into mind or drugs, sex and rock’n roll. But maybe over time, this could be more love, religion, war.

Interesting to see that war clearly has 2 peaks during the second world wars. Religion has been decreasing steadily. Man and love have been increasing. Clearly more information here, which could be used for studies in human behavious and interaction.

Chapter 1 is about collecting data by using search engines most of the time.

There is so much information available that you can just search google most of the time to get security holes, login and password lists.
Exemple: search: “Unable to jump to row” “on MySQL result index” to get a list of MySQL servers which are vulnerable to sql injections.

You can then find user names by searching the documents which are online:
typedoc:exemple.com in google to get a huge list of docments which have been published without wanting to.

You can also get all the email addresses in a company with a simple python script called theHarvester.py to get all the email addresses found for a domain name on a specific search engine.

XSS (Cross Site Scripting) and CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery) Attacks:
These are clearly the most commun and spread attack which still work today. Since by inserting a specific url, you can grab users cookies which will often include session cookies, and therefore duplicate the session on your own computer.

There is a powerful exemple from Ranger which uses iframes to gain control of the victims browser in a similar way to a VNC with a XSSwave technic.

http://xss-proxy.sourceforge.net/shmoocon-XSS-Proxy.ppt

The cracking passwords using brute force:
1) Cain & Abdel
2) John the Ripper
3) Hydra for brute force attacks on a number of protocols
Burp intruder

Security tools:

You should be able to get an extensive and up to date list on http://sectools.org
But I will only mention the first on the list for the past 10 years:
Nessus

Other interresting sources to harvest data:

Yahoo pipes:
To group source of information together
Sentiment analysis with:
Wefeelfine.org

Tweetstats.com
Namechk.com

Gonzor’s switchblade to extract all information from a usb key.
Switchblade gonzor228.com

Although this book will give you good foundations on hacking technics, it will not be extensive and you should extend the information given with test and trail of the tools given.

There is also very little information on virus and troyen methods which are also most likely a very extensive topic.

Wikileaks logo

It has been an intense week for wikileaks! This week, wikileaks has started to leak 251’287 “cables” from US embassies, which reveal confidential memos collected around the world. This has been relayed by most major newspapers in Europe and the US and has given to the general public answers to a huge amount of questions and doubts about the political and diplomatic relations of all major governments around the world.

What is the impact?

This is huge news in the cybernetics world. Since such a big leak could change the information control order and the way information is processed and managed in the future. Diplomatic data such as this outdates all old control of information technics and threatens all governments which do not defend the interests of their own people. This also reveals the weakness and strength of various governments and therefore could potentially make them prey to their political enemies. No lies, no treason, no corruption should be kept secret, since one day or another the information will be leaked, either by wikileaks or the next leaking hackers.

Why could this benefit the US?
Although, this leak could at first look like a huge embarrasment to the US, it could prove itself to actually be much more to it’s advantage. Since most of the information concerns foreign affairs. And the cables are in fact simple repported facts of what is actually happening. This could create great disorder in the some countries, such as Italy, Russia, China or Mexico. Since most of the data is collected by US embassies, the data is slightly biased towards to reflect positive US interests.

Wikileaks could turn out to become an important player as an independant source of information, in a similar way to AFP, or Routers. But since the sources of this information can not always be proven.

Why Can’t it be stopped?
It is very easy to download and replicate the entire content of a website with a simple linux command:

>> wget -r -l 0 http://www.wikileaks.org

By executing this command in a simple shell script on a daily crontab on any of the mirrors. You can backup, or mirror the entire website in less than minutes.
As an exemple, I actually tested this and placed a copy on my own server which is updated and backup everyday. Wikileaks also offers an even faster way, with an rsync method and the mass mirror project: http://wikileaks.ch/mass-mirror.html

This also demonstrates why companies such as ovh which is currently hosting wikileaks simply cannot stop this information from being hosted there. It is possible to move the website to a different IP or domaine name within 5 minutes or simply to publish this to a free webspace such as google/sites. Ovh, which currently hosts over 1 million domain names, simply cannot garanty that there will not be another version on one of it’s servers, since it hosts 80000 servers. But if the website is proved to be illegale then it would be necessary to remove the website from these domains, but it will always be available somewhere. Making this information illegale would most likely re-inforce the interests in this information. more people want to get this information.

Graph showing the amount of domains currently hosted by ovh.
Source: webhosting.info

Why is wikileaks a hackers site?
The approach of wikileaks is completely based on the hacker ethics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

1) Sharing
2) Openness
3) Decentralization
4) Free access to computers
5) World Improvement

These 5 points are the motives of all hackers, and this is no exception for wikileaks. Wikileaks should help the first 2 points, once the information is leaked the web will then make the information decentralized instantly, and if others propagate the information (such as newspapers or word of month), then this information will be freely available and use other ressources to be accessed on other’s hosting systems. This means this information spreads like a computer virus.

The last point is the debatable point, since by releasing so much information, will this really improve the world?

The objective being to make a better world. This all depends on who we are talking about. If you are a corrupt politicien and trying to hide information then you will surely not benefit from this.

Will this endanger diplomates?
Normaly, if you are a diplomate, then giving information to the embassies is part of your job. If you have given information to a diplomate, then you should know that this information could and should be used to help things go forward. If you are a political analyst then your job is to repport what is going on. Everyone is aware that this information is a point of view of various analysts.

Could this benefit the US?
If you are the US, then do you benefit or not about this information being leaked. Well although you may not at first look like you are. In fact, what comes out about these leaks are really simply collected information, on the terrain which may be too big for you too handle.

The blame of this leak cannot be given to the US, since they are the ones which have had they information stollen. They are therefore the victimes in this story. They therefore cannot be accused for the release of this information. This is against they will. Therefore, if it is damaging to other states, they diplomatic role is to condemn this, even if it is really in their own interrest for this information to go public. Since they can say that this is out of they control. So if the information is damaging for some states they cannot be held responsible. And will have to leave the damaged states deal with they own problems themselves.

This information could turn out to be useful?
Since all the leaked information, is biased into helping the americans. What will come out of this leaked information, is that this leak should in fact turn out to look like all memos have one objective, which is to protect the US’s national security, by fighting crime, injustice, corruption, terrorisme, even if they are sometimes aware that the information, which has been release is not true. The US simply cannot release information which could be against the interests of the US. And this will probably be true for all governments.

By releasing this information wikileaks, can also get the credibility of being a very reliable source of information. And become the best source, to release embarrasing information, which will bipass the sensorship laws of all these countries, which are too often controlled by corrupt governments.

But at the end of the day, we cannot predict everything. The internet is growing out of the control of many governments. The weaknesses have now been revealed. And those which have been accused, will most likely have to justify their acts. Politics will become much more difficult for those which are guilty, and hopefully for once the truth and justice will prevail.

Once information is leaked, it cannot be concidered confidencial anymore, and even less “secret”. It therefore simply be concidered public knowledge.

This is not only a book about Hackers, but also about how they have changed the world. Mostly by chance because they were at the right place, at the right time. But they also changed the world because they were passionate people, who went to the end of their ideas. And one after the another or all hackers combined, they managed to move and change the World.

For a passionate progammer like myself, finding similar people, or roll models, could help me find the direction in which I would like to go. After reading this book, you get a much better understanding on how this computer revolution really happened. Who are some of the key people involved. How passionate they were, and what drove them to complete they role.

I don’t think many people get the chance to be at the right place at the right time, but we should at least all continue to try.

This may be a bit of a spoiler but, the story starts with the 60′s and the MIT’s AI lab, with Marving Minsky, Mc Carthy, Peter Samson, Greenblat, Gosper, Stewart Nelson, and many more. This part focuses on those people, who really had the chance to start up the basics, the assembler and first hardware machines.
Then goes on to the Silicon valley revolution, the appearance of silicon chips and the first attempt to create a personal computer, with all the people involved such as Bill Gates, Felsenstein, Steve Jobs and Wozniak with their apple computer.
The third part continues with the computer games revolutions, with the creation of Sierra Online’s Game company and the efforts of Ken and Roberta Williams, their star Hackers and their interactions with the other games companies, such as Atari.
Before finishing back with the “ishi, the last Yashi”, the last hacker which was Richard Stallman, which later became the founder of the Free software foundation.
The 25th anniversary book also has 2 short bonus chapters which give an update on the carrers of the people in this book, and the new Hackers and companies such as facebook and Google.

Overall, this is a really good history about the computer history, full of passion. This book will give a solid understanding of the computer history, which can show itself very valuable for IT professional, as a general knowledge base, in order to not do the same mistakes as others could have made. Or help you make the good key dicisions when you will need to. Or simply help you have a better understanding of those strange computer geeks, and what could be their “drive”. In a similar way as “Sophie’s World” will give you solid foundations of philosophie.

A must have book for any true IT professional…

Basically the somme of all the money generated in one year in the country.

I love the way Google’s new publicdata interface makes all this so clear:
So if you want to become rich maybe it would be a good idea to go and live in luxemburg.

So the sum of all the wealth of china is just slightly higher than that of France, and Russia just slightly higher than Spain. While the US seem to

Ok, so these countries are just slightly in debt.
So Italy is in a much worst condition than most of the others, nearly as bad as Greece, and Spain isn’t that bad after all.

The name is derived from a poem by Xin Qiji, and loosely translated, describes finding clarity within chaos:

“The poem is about a man searching for a woman at a busy festival. Together, the Chinese characters băi and dù mean “hundreds of ways,” and come out of the last lines of the poem: “Restlessly I searched for her thousands, hundreds of ways./ Suddenly I turned, and there she was in the receding light.”

1. Content:

First thing to do is use chrome with the translation plugin, in order to visit the site correctly, if you do not talk chinese. You can immediatly see that it is really similar to google, a mix between, yahoo, wikipedia. With prime features are: News/Search/mp3s/videos/images/Knowledge/maps/forums, and many more in the more section or in english. Baidu is very user centered and a large amount of the traffic comes from the forums or messages with friends. It has a google analytics, trends, messanger, and google anaytics.

Most of the site is pretty well done and optimised. With good scores in Yslow or Google Page speed 96%.

The maps were a bit disappointing since they only seem to have China. If you search for Barcelona for exemple, you will only get Barcelona Bar in Shangai. Although they had a pretty call 3 dimensional vue of the town in Sim City mode.

600 米

© 2010 Baidu – GS(2010)6006号 - Data © 都市圈

居民楼

The video and image search lacked a few recent features from the google version, but maybe I just didn’t find the .

The mp3s search is interresting, since this clearly the killer feature which made Baidu popular to the younger generation, And which Google was unable to offer to to lobeing in the West. Once again the Music industry has shown is lack of knwoledge and conservative approach which has not benefited growth.

Baidu’s social network is based around sharing content such as videos, tests votes or playing games similar to facebook’s farmville. It appears to be oriented to a younger age group than Google would and more comic focused.

Most of the other features seemed pretty good. Unfortunatly I havn’t connected to many friends since they do not have the check address book feature yet, which doesn’t make the contact propogation viral yet.

2 History:

Baidu was originaly founded by Robin Li it is interresting to see that google invested 10Million $ in Baidu in 2004, and selling this 2.5% share of the company in 2006.

CrunchBase made the following report in 2006 along with this regularly updated page.

You can get a better view of it’s stock value here:

Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart Click here to download Flash Player now

Alexa, compete.com or quantcast give us these interresting statistics:

The alexa stats show indicate that it would be the 6th most visited site in the world although it still stays pretty far from google and facebook. Wikipedia also indicate that it would now represent 63% and Google 24% of the chinese market share for search

It has a higher page views per user though, which means that it is an essential tool for its users.

3. Future of Baidu

One surprising fact is that baidu looks very country centered, since it does have other translations such as baidu.jp and baidu.cn, and there doesn’t seem to be many ways of going from one site to another or no easy feature to translate pages,

But with such a marlet share in China, we can really expect it to become a huge global player the minute it will go global. Up to now, it has been looking like a cheaper copy of Google, with 6000 engineers this could change on some killer features.

This article on Robin li’s fanclub shows that it is what Baidu will probably be looking at doing in the near future, in the same way as google is focusing on China.

There are no real rules set on the web. Everything is just there to make things easier for the users. And it seems normal to copy the neighbour and include every feature you can make. I will definitly be keeping a close eye out on this search engine though.

We simply cannot go passed the worlds number 6th website, even if it is in a language which I don’t know yet, if there is something good there, we will need to brag it.

Baidu grew with the mp3 feature which was not allowed in the West but it will most likely gain the west on another feature. There is still a lot of work and therefore potential for Baidu. We will see what the future holds for Baidu.

I was suprised to learn that Marc had, like me taken psychology classes during his first year at university.

I have been very interrested in facebook ever since I first got invited in 2006. I was already a member of most social networks which were around at the time.
But it was obvious to me at the time that facebook was going to go much further than any other. Mainly because by the time I got invited, a very large number of people I used to go to uni where already members. But I think the way the site was done, and the potential it had striked me.

Since I have been far more interrested in the potential of the large amount of data included in the site. This interview reminded me of my psychology, cybernetics, AI, datamining and bioinformatics courses.

I believe the most interresting thing about this video was that by telling us about his current interrests, Mark is giving us critical information about what is missing in the current facebook strategy.

It striked me that Mark was also very interrested at the moment of the potential his large dataset could have on subconscious choices. By telling us about this. And the natural way in which he talks about it. It is obvious that he has really hardly started exploring the potential of the information which is included in his own database.

Probably because so many people are getting so paranoïd what facebook knows about them. But by watching this, we realise that facebook doesn’t actually know anything about the information they have.

Looking at this article from the boston post the only datamining search which has been made on the facebook data would be from a study from an MIT research team.

Obviously, for a website like facebook, in order to get more interresting and localised information, all you need to do is make your user base grow. By looking at the facebaker statistics it is immediatly clear that with only 13 percent of the population having a facebook account in asia, while 56 percent have an account in north america. We can immediatly calculate the potential growth on the amount of accounts, if they had the asian market.

What striked me, was that Mark did not seem to know how to get the chinese market. But he did seem to be relatively rational about it. Although not really taking the matter too seriously. But he is obviously on the right path.

It seems obvious to me, like I have been thinking about it a lot since I have been in catalunya. And the difficulty which can be to be included in a group. This must be even more difficult for people who come from a country called “us” by opposition to “them” (the rest of the world). But Mark’s point on the “nazi” issue in Germany does show that he may be understanding this a bit more than most people. But it must be very difficult for him to really mesure how much this must be true.

Although, I am aware of there being a large number of chinese people interrested in the facebook application, although it is banned in China like this thread from the hiphop mailing list conversation suggests, probably more by the posibility of hacking the content. Even though, it is banned in China.

It seemed obvious to me that if the chinese governement had the impression that this could actually help them understand they people better, then they would probably have no objection on allowing a light version (with all they usual sensorship included). Also if the Chinese governement does not allow some form of facebook, then they risk to simply be faced by the fact that somekind of technology based on openVpns will suddenly spread faster then they will know in they country. And before they know it, they sensorship will become obsolete.