K World

I love rediff. I love it a lot. I’m aware that I’m contradicting myself. There are loads of posts where I’ve accepted the fact that I hate rediff. But, come on. Do you think life would be great with no stupid thing around you to make fun of ? or atleast do you think that life would rock in monochrome ? Rediff brings lots of colors of my day, every damn day. Well, I should tell that its not rediff, but its rediff comments which do that.

If any of you guys have seen Southpark, and loved/hated the character Eric Cartman in it, yeah, trust me, You will love comments on rediff. About Cartman, You’ve to read this at Wikipedia. For the lazy folks, here are the tags for you from the content - fat, mean, immature, brat, aggressive, cunning, sociopathy, theorizing, sadistic. Each of these tags can be used to tag most (atleast 80-90%) of the comments at Rediff. Here are few examples of the comments.

• “Power of Bhudhism! Its time India give up following Rama and follow the reformist Budha!”

Guess the context of the above comment. Take a minute and try to come up with some thoughts about it. Try to go beyond your wildest imagination. Uhmm, Dalai lama, or Tibet issue or Chinese ? Ah, no. You are completely wrong. This is a comment on India Vs Srilanka Asia Cup Final match, where India has lost. This great guy came up with theory that in match between Buddha and Rama, Buddha won.

Well, other that the above intelligent comment, the other comments include, Sachin is God. Dada is God, Dhoni is a dhobi, Uthapa Sux, Bring back Dravid, Sehwag cant become Sachin, and Karma. Yeah, you read it correct, karma. One guy thinks that Indian govt supports Srilankan govt to kill innocent people so, we lost Asia Cup final.

• “Rajanikanth has a deep and abiding respect for human life… unless it gets in his way. There is no such thing as global warming. Rajanikanth was cold, so he turned the sun up. Rajanikanth can set ants on fire with a magnifying glass. At night. “

Now, another comment. Guess the context of this great comment. Sivaji movie ? Tamil movie ? South Indian Movie ? South Indian Movie stars ? Hehe, Na. It was a comment on a post where Amitabh praised Smita Patil’s son for his performance in “Jaane tu .. ya jaane na”.

Few other comments on this post include, “BJP Should have supported the deal”. No wonder why he was talking about Nuclear deal on this post. And another guy thinks that Rediff dint receive money from Aamir Khan, so they are praising Smita Patil’s son here. Ultimate Genius.

I found these comments in last one hour. Now, expect the fun you can have when you read rediff comments regularly. But, do remember, over dosage of anything is not good for health. You might even lose your sense of humour because of the immature nature of the comments. So, whenever you are bored, or whenever you feel like you are dumb or stupid, you know where to go.

• Well, for the final touch, here is a great topic in Get Ahead of Rediff titled “I love my maid - should I leave my wife ?”

And for your information, this topic made to the front page of Rediff. Dont forget to read comments on it, especially this one to know the nature of guys posting comments there. After reading few ultra-stupid comments on rediff and few ultra-ultra non-sense articles like this, now I feel like doing something like Cartman. “Screw you rediff, I’m going home !”

• Goddamnit
• Google is Evil
• What the heck happened to democracy
• Threat to freedom of expression
• Big brother
• Hypocrisy

These the few comments I’ve seen on a post today at TechCrunch The post is about an Indian software Engineer getting arrested for creating a community in Orkut. Well, its not ‘any’ community but a community which he named “I hate Sonia Gandhi” and he had few vulgar comments about her there.

As Sonia Gandhi is PM of India (Isn’t she the real PM ?), few people might wanted to impress her or may really din’t like what this kid is doing. They asked Google for his account details. Google dint tell no - and gave his email id. And through email id they got his identity. Trust me, this guy is either a dumb-f*** or he never expected his silly-hatred-hobby to become such a big deal. He had that community under his email address rahulvaidindia [at] gmail [dot] com and the cyber crime cell of Pune cought him and now he is arrested.

There are several things to be given a thought after this incident. Major of them are

• Don’t be a dumb-f*** and start hate-communities
• Freedom of expression, democracy etc etc are the terms which others use for you when you are in jail
• When doing stupid things DO make sure that you are not doing anything against law
• Not everyone is as good as Piratebay guys - they are doing nothing against law (in their country atleast) and even they were arrested once
• And finally - Grow Up. You achieve nothing by creating a hate-community other than waste your time

If you see few of my previous posts, you would understand that I hate rediff. But, come on, its my best time pass. Those dumb bugs, annoying ads, silly flame wars on boards make my day almost every day When you hate something (someone), you are doing nothing but giving it (them) more importance in your life which you certainly wouldn’t want to do.

Have fun on internet.

Opensource collaboration suite Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo few days before. Now, Jaiku - A Twitter wannabe or a twitter killer or what ever you want to take it as, is acquired by Google.

If you don’t know what’s twitter and what can be done using twitter, It is a micro-blogging platform that allows users to send updates via SMS, IM or email. If you want to know what it does, there is a simple and straight forward tip posted at nexuz.

If you want to see the comparison between Jaiku and Twitter to make your choice of selection of the service, here is a very good prizefight between Jaiku and Twitter @ CNET TV.

For Google, it’s count++ on mobile services as well as social networking. I started to love these 2.0 wars, let’s see what’s the next thing going to be sold on the market.

Well, when you hate something, you’ve to accept that it got your attention in a way or other. So, you tend to think about it. I’m no excuse. Just coz, I hate rediff, I started looking for XSS (Cross Site Scripting) bugs. Well, there are a total of listed in XSSed and I found a good number to prove that rediff is a very-bad coded portal. One can view this page to see the bugs and see the elite-ness of rediff.

The important services of that are vulnerable, which are offered by rediff include its homepages and shopping. If you remember those dark old days of orkut when those so-called hackers took over communities they hate, it was done by exploiting the XSS vulnerability in orkut, that time. Now, you can understand, whoever have their homepages on rediff, or/and people who do shopping @ rediff are not using a secure service.

PS: Having XSS in a site doesn’t make it a worst site as even MS, Google, Yahoo had/have them. Even the MNC which I work for, had a similar bug in their portal, but, it was fixed as soon as they were notified through a specific channel. But, I don’t know why portals like rediff and mouthshut employ stubborn webmasters who hate to accept that their code has bugs. They must have either ignored or never read my mails.

The following is a technology related stuff and The Darker Side of Me and a very very very long “essay” about me. Be warned.

Gone are the days when I didn’t know how to shut down a windows PC. When I use to call those so-called “engineers” to fix my PC and shell out an extra buck to get some games installed on my box. I remember the day when my cousins made fun of me for switching off that PC as if the OS was DOS. Good old days and nights of “Age of Empire”. Hours and Hours of “Road Rash” and “Need for Speed”. One fine day, which almost changed my life in a smaller sense, a friend of my dad forgot the password for a word Document he kept and asked me whether I can do anything to find it.

It was the day, I saw the darker side of the Computing World, the security world. I searched in Google (that time, its a cool new search engine introduced by my cousin. Thank You Ark) to find out how password of a word document can be cracked. I managed to find one software which can crack it, but it was shareware. Then, I saw that it was software one has to buy, but my cousin Ark told me that there is a software named “Serials2K” which will have serial number for any software. I was pretty much impressed by the software, but, being little different, I wanted to know how the guys find those keys. My question was answered by a process named “Reverse Engineering“. But, it wasn’t enough for me, I wanted to learn how to do it. Then, I found a forum where some folks claimed to know that art and are teaching guys there. That forum had over 4000 members with weird names a.k.a handles. I became one of them and started learning about computers. But, my skills weren’t improving in the skill I wanted to learn (Reverse Engineering) but at Social Engineering. I became one of the moderators of the board, then one of the administrators of the board, then administered their IRC server. When having admin access to  the board, I learned PHP, Perl and Python. As part of my curriculum, I learned C, C++, Java, VB. Then, being at a board, I saw the culture of “clans” in the board, where another board members use to come to our board and spam/flame/do_crap at our board. Our answer was a simple deface of their site, which introduced me to the lowest level of computer security skills. Then, my interests changed to VIRUSes and then I collected source codes of 1000 viruses, through which I wanted to learn coding viruses but never earned those skills or simply never tried to be malicious.

Then, the greatest turn of my life came, when I was introduced to a site named “try2hack” which dealt with so-called “hacking” simulations. This is the start of the brighter side of my internet life. I left all those kiddie and illegal things along with those boards, closed my clans, ditched those emails, forgot those net-friends a.k.a clan mates (except one) and then I solved all of them within couple of weeks and then started looking for similar sites, then I finally found the site which helped me to learn so many things - Net Force.

Net-Force is the site which doesn’t support any illegal a.k.a hacking activities but it gives a very good simulation at the real stuff. There are 8 categories (Javascript, Java Applets, Cryptography, Exploits, Cracking, Programming, Internet and Steganography) with a total of 93 challenges. Challenges of various levels from basic tutorials to very hard challenges. I managed to solve 82 of them up to now. I learned something from each and every challenge and I’m glad that I learned them. The domain of challenges is so wide that you will learn atleast a little about a wide variety of topics.

I’m what I’m right now with little knowledge about a wide variety of topics - Jack of all trades. I never mastered anything up to now. But, I want to be a master in one. I’ve chosen two topics in which I want to be more than a Jack. One of them being XSS and another is SQL Injections. I started learning about XSS already. My progress is at XSSed. It is an archive of XSS vulnerabilities in various web applications as well as sites ordered by PageRank. I wish, one day, I will be a master at something.