Entries from Raj Shekhar

When I started my website (on Geocities), one of my first thougths was - What good will it be (beyond helping my ego) ? There are already so many webpages out there and I possibly cannot say something that others have not said before . I now realize that differences in ideas and opinions matter a lot. When I am looking for a review, I want to hear the good sides as well as the bad sides of the product (book/piece of hardware). I think I am an (almost) normal human being. So, if I want to see ten different opinions about something before investing money into it, I assume others do that too. In a world where companies are always in the run to create a positive image about themselves, it is good to see a page which is not afraid to pull off the ugly mask. If I want to listen different opinion, maybe it would be a good idea to put up my opinion up there too. Maybe someone else will find it useful.

My article on Pmwiki has been published today in Linuxgazette.

it is a bad thing to have a life which does not extend beyond office and books.

--------

A virus spreading message that I got in my email
" The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment. "

Thanks to egrep for linguists for giving this nice and clear example of using egrep.

There are different ways to match both star and stars within a single search pattern. The most straightforward way might be to tell egrep to look for either the string star or the string stars with the help of a disjunction, expressed with the vertical bar, |. This time the search pattern has to be quoted in order for the program to know where the search pattern starts and ends

    $ egrep -w 'star|stars' sonnets.txt
    Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck,
    And constant stars in them I read such art
    Whereon the stars in secret influence comment.
    Let those who are in favour with their stars,
    Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,

from Tao of security blog, I came across this

One of the details that emerged from Curt's monitoring of the Invita Security network involved a password used by Alexey Ivanov. When accessing one of his drop sites, Alexey's FTP password was www.pidor.com (Internet Archive available). Think of what an unwary analyst might do with that information. Only someone who is monitoring Alexey's actions might know about www.pidor.com. Say that unwary analyst decides to visit www.pidor.com to learn more about the site. If Alexey or a friend is monitoring Web accesses to www.pidor.com, they could learn that they are being monitored. This case demonstrates how important it is for analysts to not "touch" remote or foreign sites involved in intrusions. You may tip your hand to the attacker and ruin an investigation or recovery effort.

Thanks to Aaron for pointing out his quiz . It confirms what I always knew.

Vendorwear - a piece of clothing with a vendor's logo on it. Usually it is a t-shirt.