How secure your application is...???

cyber crimes are in its record growth! ...so its an important question, what would be your answer? fairly secure or not at all secure? in the real sense..both are dangerous..why? rather to say, it may depend your application.

It is a must for the products, but the major mistakes which i noticed so far is, developers forget to make the application secure, or they design it in a wrong way!

compliant is a buzzwords in industry now, technology for the sake of the technology makes all the mistakes, remember that technology itself doesn't mitigate any security threats, they may close some holes but still they are leaving some dangerous ones as opened!

i found may ppl implements RSA algorithm in their programs, only because they studied it in their university and it sounds cool.

so my advice is

Plan for the security process from the beginning of the design
define the security goals
treat the security as a feature in your product
always remember the golden law - All external systems are insecure
obscurity - that only makes your security in trouble

too much for today( 5 posts!!!), i think we can discuss on more detail by next time...

A few words on Google's GTalk

GTalk is Google's instant communication program. It's light weighted fast and most popular among chatting freaks now a days. with the introduction of it, many other popular IRC's got less importance among the crowd. because Gtalk is very easy to install and operate.

Actually there are 3 different versions for GTalk,

1. Google Talk Client in Windows , written in C ,C++
2. Google Talk Gadget for all modern browsers that support Flash, and its platform independent, and works with almost all browsers with flash support
3. Google Talk Web Integrated with GMail, for all browsers that support JavaScript

i installed the GTalk client in my machine, and its working good, but over the time i felt some consistency problems with it. it shows wrong status sometimes, and it will change only when i clicked and type something in that window.

GTalk is favourite IRC among the office workers, because thats easy, integrated with orkut, light weight, and even access from a browser, but because of this reason its blocked in many offices and employees are fired by the firewalls.

Today i found a different stuff, a Javascript 2.0 Google Talk.ure JavaScript copy of Google Talk Client from izuz.net. It is considered a lot better that the one embeded with GMail. It uses the same UI of Google Talk Desktop Client, but is provided inside browsers. And it uses HTTP connections not XMPP connections, which means that it is firewall free or Websense free. Firewall or Websense may block you from using Gtalk/MSN by blocking certain ports, but it may never block port 80 or 443 (https port). So you are allowed to use your Gtalk by this pure JavaScript copy of Google Talk. and they recommends mozilla firefox than IE.

Wanna a Cockroach Manjoorian with Chappathi?

Wanna to eat delicious Cockroach Manjoorian with Chappathi? - no need to fly to taiwan for getting it anymore.. here techies in technopark enjoyed it today.. got it as a fwd..i'm putting it here because its a very rare scene..

i masked the location of the restaurant from the image, because we can't simply blame them, because they are preparing for 100's of techies in technopark, and they are having limited facilities also..anyway its better than any other restaurants within technopark campus

Where is DCOM today?

Yesterday, one of my friends asked me about some DCOM stuffs, because they are doing something in it, it was an old product but they have to make some enhancement in that and its pretty much undocumented stuff,

DCOM - i should say it was the most innovative technology from microsoft. but i never think anybody has got a chance to use all of its features. because the concept of binary software components and its inter interoperability across the platforms( theory claims so, but not microsoft)
gave a new momentum to software architecture. the age of OWL and ActiveX seemed to be completely conquered by its COM implementations. but when it comes to the DCOM, ( CORBA was also there in that time...) i suspect, something happened to the microsoft as such. they invested a lot for the DCOM, but that wasn't a success in the market as their ATL COM.

DCOM provides the COM services remotely, usually in a network ( intra/ inter) the location transparency adds more flexibility to the application counterparts. but they completely shifted their business strategies to the .NET market by that time.

but that was a wise investment, they built today's webservice upon this DCOM architecture, a more lighter implementaion in the user perspective...

the concept of webservice, was commercially availed by the passport authentication service by the hotmail/msn network, and still its legacy going on...

My experiments with Windows Vista - experience too.

I Already ready blogged about the nightmare os called 'Vista'. i bought a AMD turion Compaq v3000 series laptop a few months back. i liked every feature of it, other than its operating system - Windows Vista Home Basic. According to them this particular series is designed for vista..ok fine...

but it has only 512 MB Ram, and vista hanged many times in the very first day itself. my display is getting blank if i click in to some messageboxes( * MAD * ).

Finally i decided to switch back to pretty old windows XP. and i managed to get a XP CD, and installed it..then only i came to know that many of its devices are not detected ( sound, Wireless LAN, Ethernet, Card Reader, Display etc..). and its display looked weird and scratchy. i rushed in to HP's web site and searched for XP drivers.. but according to them, this laptop is specially made for windows vista, and the XP drivers are not available, and they are not responsible for any damages caused by our experiments with any other drivers and in that case the warranty will be expire...

again i searched in many other popular forums, and driver repositories, but i got some partial or not soooo sure replies. thus i ended up with my hopeless search for XP drivers..and i restored Vista( what else?) .. then vista started its magics again in my laptops, i was struggled with FTP uploads, Yahoo messenger ( yahoo messenger is not supporting windows Vista, FYI, if it is working fine in your machine, praise the lord, for his miracle), i was frustrated and hopeless. then i decided to upgrade my RAM in to 1 GB, i got a little relief for the copying exercises, but all other things were pretty bad as earlier.

and in the last barcamp event only i met sobhan, he also having the same model, and he managed to get the drivers from somewhere.. thanks god..you saved my soul.. and he was so kind to share those drivers with me..and now i'm much happy with XP and Suse Linux( Using VMWare ). - oh one more thing to add on, in vista they are not supporting the VMWare workstation, and if you tweak and install it once, vista will take additional 10 more minutes to start up after showing some dump and ugly blank screens.

If anybody wants XP drivers for their Compaq v3000 series laptops, please do contact me.

Vista was a total failure. they invested their time and money for inventing an ugly operating system. i would like to call MS UOS - Microsoft Ugliest Operating System ( as MS DOS - Microsoft Dirty Operating System). i'm seeing such a total dump stiff after the release of Windows ME.

Uderline : Microsoft implemented a 'Kill Switch' for Windows Vista, which cease hobbling Windows Vista installations that fail the company's validation processes. by implementing of such a mechanism they are expecting that the entire world will switch in to the genuine version of windows vista.

XP will be discontinued soon, probably by Jan 2008.

In closing i will say this Vista might become a good OS after 2-3 service packs but until then stay away from it. Stick with XP or switch to Linux.