Workshop on Ethical Hacking
Recently I attended a 2-day workshop on ethical hacking, conducted by Infysec – a security services organization. The workshop covered various topic related to hacking such as footprinting, enumeration, session hijacking, web application vulnerabilities, viruses, botnets etc.
The session was like this: before explaining each topic, proper introduction would be given as to what is the topic all about, why is it necessary from a security point of view, then slide based presentation on the topic, and finally a live demo on that topic. Apart from this, the instructors who were highly experienced in almost all aspects of security, also gave many valuable inputs which you may not find in books. Although I’m not preparing for CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker), it seems this program will really be useful for clearing it.
As the event was called a workshop, I expected that everyone would be provided with some systems or may be asked to bring their own laptops and gain hands-on experience in the workshop by working out the various scenarious along with the instructors. The organizers were happy to have this feedback and assured they will consider this, as almost everyone expected the same.
Moreover, it seems Infysec is organizing “Capture-the-flag” contest next month. A server will be open to hacking by various teams and the first team to hack it, wins. I’m sure events like this will surely gain a lot of popularity.
Choosing the right Reporting Tool
Our project is based on the struts framework and we were very successful in making the application go live. We just got new requirements for the next phase of the project and one of them was reports. We were in search for the right J2EE reporting tool. Some of them that we considered was Jasper Reports, Open Reports, Crystal Reports and BiRT from Apache.
Crystal Reports is actually a product and also it is not free. It does have a very user-friendly report designer and it is very easy for any non-technical user to get started with Crystal Reports. But our requirement was something more, like we needed to generate reports in various formats such as PDF,Excel etc. and we were not sure whether crystal reports could come in handy. So we scrapped it off.
Next we were looking into Open Reports, which is actually a front-end to Jasper Reports, in the sense it acts like a complete admin module for creating reports. It is a complete application with all the reporting tools integrated into it. With open reports there is nothing much left to do other than DB configuration and parameter setting. Although it comes for free under the GPL license, we din’t want to take the risk and hence we scrapped off this too.
Finally we decided to go on with Jasper Reports. It is open source and has all the necessary tools to generate reports in various formats. There is a report designer named iReports which can be used to create the report templates to be used with Jasper reports. Although it is not as user-friendly as Crystal Reports or BiRT designer, I’m sure we’ll get used to it eventually. There is a good comparison here between Jasper and BiRT. After reading it, there is no doubt Jasper is the best for our requirements.
Anti-Reservation Protest in Chennai
Its time to wake up Chennaiites. If you ever felt sad that you were not able to join in the protests against reservations, then here is your chance. Anti-reservation protest has been organised in Chennai on May 25th at 4:00 PM.
I think its the right time that decision has been made for protests in Chennai, as the exams for most of the final year engineering departments is getting over on May 24th.
Here are the details ::
DATE : 25th MAY 2006 Thursday
TIME : 4-6 PM
PLACE: Government Guest House, Wallajah Road, Chennai.SILENT SIT-IN PROTEST WITH PLACARDS
THEME: SAY NO TO RESERVATION
Permission has been granted by the police.
Participants include IITians, Medicos and working people.
All are Welcome. Let us show what we feel to the government.
CONTACT US OR WRITE TO US:
BLOG SITE: http://yfechennai.blogspot.com/
YAHOOGROUP: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chennaiunited/
e-mail: chennaiunited@yahoogroups.com
All-India contact: youth4equality@gmail.com
CONTACT PERSON:
Rama Subramanian:9840284781 nvsriram@gmail.com
Anti-Reservation Protests All Over The Nation
The protests against reservation has been going around for quite a long time and no luck till date. The speeches given by Arjun Singh is making the protesters even more fierce and problem is getting big day by day. As an individual I also feel the same as the protesters feel. There shouldn't be any reservations.
Ok, coming to the point…there is going to be protests in most parts of the country on 20th and 21st.
Check out http://protestcentral.blogspot.com/ for information about protest activities in your city and how you can join in the protests.
Its better to let know the visitors of this blog about "Why Anti-Reservation"
Why we oppose reservation?
1) It is going to kill meritocracy, and hence destroy India's image as a technology hub.
2) It is dividing India into caste lines which our freedom fighters and social reformers fought so hard to eliminate.
3) It is against the fundamental right to equality as safeguarded by the Constitution of India.
4) The benefits of reservation have been denied to really deserving people by the rich and powerful in their own classes.
5) Reservation is just a populist measure used by politicians for electoral gains.
(Taken from http://www.youth4equality.org/)
AJAX Activity Indicators
When any AJAX operation is being performed in a site, the user doesn't quite know that process is being carried out in the background and sometimes it so happens that the user either keeps clicking the button again and again or leaves the page thinking something is wrong. Whether the AJAX operation is small or big, its always better to have activity indicators so that the user knows his/her request is being processed in the background.
While designing my AJAX applications I was looking out for some nice activity indicators and so I stumbled upon these sites which host some of the sexiest activity indicators.