Silsilay, the latest movie by Khalid Mohammed, a critic famous for his Sunday Times articles, is a disaster to say the least. Mr.Mohammed, who has torn apart most of the movies in his journalism career, to my disappointment, has not proven himself any better than the pack he tore apart. I think if he himself saw the movie impartially he probably would have given it negative five stars.
Silsilay, as the movie is called, is a movie of three stories running one after the other albeit aimlessly. The first story is of a film actress (Bhoomika Chawla) who falls in love with a bookie (Rahul Bose) who is two-timing his girl-friend, who in turn is two-timing him…sounds complex…don’t bother…it’s not complex but just kiwi drainex!
The second story is of a young girl (Riya Sen) who looks stunning in the movie and is afraid to lose her virginity and is consoled by her overly promiscuous friend to do *it*. Ashmit Patel steps into the story as her boy toy (read “snuggies”) and Jimmy Shergill, who is her co-worker from work and is looking to gain her attention. Some good (aimless) smooches result between Ashmit and Riya and Khalid Mohammed succeeds in spinning a story that is as ridiculous as Riya and Ashmit’s acting. For god’s sake Riya, Nirma soap advertisements were better!
As if the torture was not enough, Mr.Mohammed had a life-saver (or at least as he thought) a still more ridiculous story. Well, some B-grade films would have called this 3rd story a *saga*…but I frankly think that Khalid Mohammed doesn’t think!
It’s a combination of a love triangle…sorry…love quadrilateral with a diagonal (please figure out what this means on your own…watching the movie wouldn’t help anyway). In this story Tabu plays a housewife whose husband (KK) is going out with a (super hot) air hostess (Celina Jaitley) and whose son suffers from Oedipus Complex ( where a person falls in love with his own mother). As if this carcass did not stink the theatres…there was more bull**** coming across in the form of Shah Rukh Khan in between stories and scenes. Mr. Khan there are many ways to win Filmfare awards…this is probably the last way to *buy* the awards. Mr.Khan does a saving act by signalling to the audience how he behaves when nature calls arrive…how he insanely goes about dancing for no reason whatsoever.
This is all a part of the crap that I call Silsilay!
-Rajat.
Awesome Japanese Artifacts!

I started downloading rainbow tables LM Hashes for all symbols. They were 120 GB big and were available for download via torrent. But I’d been stuck at 92.2% of the download forever thinking that there were no seeders. As it turns out, the problem was in the torrent file. The torrent for the 120 GB LM Hashes all symbols can be obtained from 120 GB LM Hashes [all english characters] Rainbow Tables.

Back in the day “recon” had a different meaning than it does today. Today, in the age of cyber-terrorism and cyber-stalking or Google stalking, reconnaissance comes from a variety of different sources including tools such as mash-up applications make things quite palpable for a social engineer. For the purpose of this discussion, let’s consider two entities “stalker” (the person seeking information about “someone”) and the “stalkee” (the “someone” whose information is being sought).
Back in the day (and man I’m only talking about 4-5 years ago!), the only source was public forums where users would post questions using constant email IDs. You would need to scourge through different Usenet groups and that was it…and possibly a Friendster account. Now, people have Facebook profiles which can be publicly viewed. This gives us the information about a person’s friends giving us information about the stalkee’s geographical location and may be even birthday. LinkedIn gives information about the stalkee’s job. You can even confirm the geographical location of the stalkee using LinkedIn. Now you have the name of the person and the geographical location. If you need more information about the person such as his/her age/birthdate, I’ve seen that ZabaSearch is a good resource. You can get a lot of information using ZabaSearch but if the stalkee needs he/she can remove this information using the block feature of Zaba located here. I do not know how they deal with this information but Zaba does have a “premium service” and I do not know if this premium service would give access to these “blocked records”. Now you have the information about the age of the stalkee. You could even search Twitter for the person’s twitter feed to see what the stalkee’s doing. I came across an interesting mashup application that crawls twitter to get information about where a person is and it’s aptly called Please Rob Me!. There are other great tools available such as Loopt and Tripit. Just as Twitter, Google Buzz can also give a lot of information. And the best part about google buzz is things are searchable …cool…the stalker’s job’s now easier.

Days of hard work seem to be over…or not quite…may be…
Graduation was wonderful and so were the trips with daddu and bhabhi to San Diego, Las Vegas and Grand Canyon and not to forget the shopping sprees at Barstow (I-40 exit at Lenwood Blvd.) and Citadel mall, Los Angeles.
Then came the trip to New York City which was as always very welcome!
Met up with Ankush at NYC working at Citigroup office at Long Island City. Now comes the time to unleash my sloth-like wrath towards summer!

Seems like the pwn2own this time around is going to be putting up prizes of about $100,000+ for people who can find 0-days for a variety of platforms. Especially, the fact that about $60,000 are being devoted for 0-days on the mobile security platform including the android platform etc., indicates a new era of security bugs.
The iPhone (non-jailbroken ones) as well as the BlackBerry application do tend to use signed executables. One only hopes that like the trust-relationships of the SSL-based certificates, the trust is really kept by analyzing the blackberry and iPhone apps.
Tyler Shields from Veracode presented his work of TXSBBSpy (source code URL: http://www.veracode.com/images/txsBBSpy.java; Presentation slides: http://www.veracode.com/images/TylerShields-MonkeyBerries-ShmooCon-2010.pdf).  In this he suggested that when controlled APIs are used the code needs to be signed by RIM but to do that RIM only gets the hash and not the source code.  This presents an interesting situation where RIM could actually be signing something that they don’t really know what it seems to be doing.

Sometimes simplest of the errors get you bad….and this was one such time.
I was trying to connect to my Oracle XE DB using SQL*Plus but kept getting this errror

connect hr/************
ERROR:
ORA-01034: ORACLE not available
ORA-27101: shared memory realm does not exist

Turns out I did not start the DB instance.
Start -> All Programs -> Oracle Database 10g Express Edition -> Start Database

Just started blogging…actually getting pretty late into the blogging culture! Studying and doing projects to complete graduation at USC. My homepage is at http://www-scf.usc.edu/~swarup/.