Platonic

Sir Edmund Hillary, Man of determination, greatest mountain climber, who made it to the top of The Great Mount Everest along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953 is no more with us today. Died in Auckland because of pneumonia on 11th January. He leaves us with the great history to the generations to come.

Sadness has covered in hearts of millions today across the world. He had been inspiration for many through out this era. He have set an example for all of us and we can very much learn a lot from his life to reach up to those greatest levels in our lives. The lessons of humanity and determination taught by Hilary should drive more and more young people towards achieving a successful and meaningful life.

There are no words in which I can express what I feel about these great hero’s who are now in history, but here I express my deep condolences.

Image source : WikiPedia

Digg in to his life to learn more :

Photo History of Sir Edmund Hillary
Interview with Sir Edmund Hillary
Relive the Trek
Meet Your Host: Whitney Stewart
Facts about Mt. Everest
Mt. Everest Glossary
World Famous Mountains
Profile of Tenzing Norgay
Meet the Sherpas
Map of Hillary’s Route to Everest
Teacher’s Guide

Links from : http://teacher.scholastic.com

Biography Of Sir Edmund Hillary

KDE 4 is out at last. The most awaited release of K Desktop Environment which enables the end users to enjoy and experience hundreds of rich applications designed for Internet, entertainment, education, graphics and software development etc in much better way.

Its beauty, Its improved and its Free. Feel it, take a tour.

Arklinux, Debian, Kubuntu, Gentoo, Mandriva, Fedora, OpenSuse have announced the availability of KDE 4.0 on their builds or on some of their Live CD’s. Check the respective distro websites for more updates on it.

Read more about Kde 4.0 here.

BackTrack, a Slackware based Linux security distribution focused on penetration testing. With its 3rd release its becoming more stable, usable and compatible with various hardwares. Bundled with more than 300 up-to-date tools its ready for security professionals use. Read its history on the project page. Its very interesting.

You can now find the most anticipated BT3 beta release on Remote-Exploit.org . Its a easy to use Live-CD distribution and you can also find it in USB, Vmware image formats. Its wiki provides extensive documentation on the distribution.

Security enthusiasts never miss to check on this. Every one finds it easy to use and its always up-to-date. Now its your turn.

Watch out BackTrack 3 Teaser Video highlighting the new features of this distro.

Its rocking on my Dell XPS 1210. Share your experiences.

“No other commercial or freely available analysis platform offers an equivalent level of usability with automatic configuration and focus on penetration testing. ” - From BackTrack project page

The world is going wireless. I would always like to be on Wi-fi as its easy to use and more powerful.  Youngsters are found to be going mad at the wireless gadgets which have come in this era. Hmm, but what about security? We have already found so many security threats on wireless networks and its even possible for any one to hack into your network.

We understand the security risks involved with any technology only when we use it to the core. Hacking is an art which enables us to cross the barriers and find out what it takes to break the restrictions set by the device or the technology provided to the user at certain cost. Its so interesting to find hackers coming out various bugs in high end products developed by big shots. Its crazy! that’s what I call it.

Couple of my friends (Neo and EvilMonkey) have started to work on a new project to make people awake of Wi-fi Hacks recently.

The Wifi Hack dot Com

They are planning to put up wifi security news, documents, videos to educate people on wireless hacks and many more things. Its going to be live any time.

Watch out…

Comment on this article about questions which you have on security, wi-fi, hacking etc. I shall make it easy for you to understand these terms and learn something cool and different.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, how many of you still remember this sweet little rhyme. Do you know there are many children who can’t even read it? We are all so privileged to be able to read, write, walk, talk and do many other things. I remember one of my teacher telling a story about an “Early bird”. When many of us didn’t show up that early bird attitude for the questions asked in the class, he didn’t scold us. Instead he educated us about the abilities of human beings and “Creativity”. Every child is born with “Creativity”. But many of the children cannot use it or struggle to cope up with the challenges they face.

Every one does make fun of those kids who can’t perform. They find it funny because, no one knows what it takes for that child to come up to our level. There used to be days in my college when I never understood what my lecturers used to say. The way they used to pronounce the words were all found to be French or German or Latin to me. When one of my English lecturer looked into my notes and found that I had written something like “Don’t Chew” and I had no idea why I wrote something like that. Entire class started laughing at it. Its just because I didn’t get to understand things at that time. I could come out of this mess and pass my term with 1st class marks. I had little start-up trouble which was cured by the attitude which I had toward the learning, studies and the challenge to make it to the first place again after my 10th. It was a new place for me to do something different. A new college. There are few other children who cannot understand what they should be doing next to avoid the punishment. They always suffer and find no one for their support.

Ishaan is one of those kids, who has got brilliant ideas in mind and he is gifted with a great talent of painting. He does amazing things every day in his life. But he is found to be totally dull at his studies as he couldn’t understand the meaning of alphabets. He always says that the alphabets dance when is tries to read them. There is no to support him, no one to understand what’s going on with him. He is being sent to a boarding school. He is just 8 or 9 years old and they are just trying to get rid of his stubborn attitude or get rid of him self instead of supporting him. Why no one tries to understand this small kids problem.

What will happens now? Will he ever find the right teacher to guide him or will he be thrown out of the school again?

Yes, Miracle did happen in life of Ishaan. Just like Einstein, Thomas Alva Edison and many others who used to face the similar issues when they were kids.

Its a cute little movie directed by Mr. Aamir Khan for the first time. Songs are sweet. And the characters just flow through all our lives. There is a life in the movie itself. You feel yourself as a part of it. You might start weeping at some time. So don’t forget to take some napkins. Yes, you got it right. I’m talking about

Taare Zameen Par

Lets bring joy in those kids who require your help, a small support and little of your love. No one is born Intelligent, give every body a equal chance to prove themselves. Will you?

I use this for logging into all my messenger ID’s. Its an easy and convenient messenger tool. It does come with a rich set of plugins to enhance my chatting experience. It has been my favorite for years now. Pidgin was formally know as Gaim Messenger. You can talk to your friends using AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr. Its available as Adium on OS X.

I always wanted to use secure communication channels to interact with my colleagues , clients and also with friends as security has been the major concern. I needed something which provides me the private channel to communicate. There are many companies like yahoo etc providing enterprise communication messengers. But all I needed was a free solution to this along with my existing messenger.

I really did find one on the net.  Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging. Which allows you to have encrypted private conversations with your favorite messengers.

These are the main features provided by OTR :

• Encryption
• Authentication
• Deniability
• Perfect forward secrecy

Implemented and tested on Pidgin, Trillion (Windows), Adium (OS X), mICQ for command line and many more. Its released under GPL.
Installing this plugin on Ubuntu is very easy :

sudo aptitude install pidgin-otr

Once the installation is over, just enable this plug-in from your pidgin’s plug-in list. You will find OTR on your IM windows once this is done. Usage is very simple, click on OTR button to start the private conversation. It requests the key from your buddy. Once you confirm that the key received by you is trusted, you can continue enjoying the off-the-record messaging. You can also secure it further by adding a pass phrase for the authentication.

You might be wondering, why I choose this when there is an another plugin for pdigin is available for encryption isn’t it?. pidgin-encryption does not provide deniability or perfect forward secrecy features.

This is from the FAQ on OTR website to provide you more details:

“If an attacker or a virus gets access to your machine, all of your past pidgin-encryption conversations are retroactively compromised. Further, since all of the messages are digitally signed, there is difficult-to-deny proof that you said what you did: not what we want for a supposedly private conversation! ”

IM securely with off-the-record. Ping me on fizworks (AIM id) if you want give it a try. I would be glad to help you.

Happy Private Messaging!