FOSS (Free and Open Source Code) Licensing FAQ

Ashish on January 23, 2011

There are two choices while writing on this topic. One is to write a detailed and accurate port. The other is to write a short post. I preferred the second approach and had added appropriate links to dig further.

  1. Target Audience?
    • Someone who is planning to use FOSS, free and open-source code, as a building block for their software development.
    • Someone who wants to contribute to FOSS
    • Someone who wants to release source code of their project in public

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Analysis of Facebook Rotating Images worm

Ashish on December 5, 2010

If you are looking for how to avoid or recover: read this one instead.

In the past few weeks, a lot of Facebook users have received the following (or similar) messages posted by their friends
Hi Friends see Face-book images rotate 360* see here >> http://SHADYCLOUDS.TK/
Really cool Facebook revolving images. MUST SEE http://rotatingimage2.tk/.

Following are observations and analysis of the same.

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Nokia and the smartphone era

Ashish on December 2, 2010

Nokia is facing some serious issues some of them are technical, but the major issue right now is how it can rebrand itself as a smartphone manufacturer (rather than just a mobile phone manufacturer).
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Cyber Security in India : Role of CERT-In

Ashish on September 28, 2010

CERT-In is a low-profile (Indian) government organization.

The Government of India established the Computer Emergency Response Team  (“CERT-IN”) to ensure Internet security. Many institutions, including the Ministry of Home Affairs, courts, the intelligence services, the police, and the National Human Rights Commission, may call on it for specialist expertise. CERT-IN’s stated mission is “to enhance the security of India’s Communications and Information Infrastructure through proactive action and effective collaboration” [Source]

I had a chance to visit CERT-In last week. The experience was overall good, unlike the typical dirty government office with laid-back employees, I saw employees enthusiastic about their work (and a colorful office).
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A preliminary analysis of “Bom Sabado” orkut worm

Ashish on September 25, 2010

So, today morning I received an email saying I received an Orkut scrap from a friend with contents “Bom Sabado”.
Within a minute,  I received the same scrap from another friend. Now getting the feeling that this must be some sort of worm, I decided to open Orkut with firebug logging enabled to see what was going on.
It turns out that it’s a typical case of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), the attacker can inject and execute its script from hxxp://tptools.org/worm.js and the contents of scrap are able to by-pass Orkut sanitization.
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