ComputerFlicks

Windows Deployement Services

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 18:02:00 +0000

WDS Or Windows Deployment Services

WDS or Windows Deployment Service is a great feature of Microsoft’s Windows Server which enables us to deploy the fresh OS to the new machines or servers in a company or in a network. WDS provides the facility to PXE or Pre Execution boot PCs in the environment. On the client’s side, we just have to set the boot order to network boot or PXE boot and if we press the F12 key it will lead you directly to the WDS server for further installation. We will learn how to setup WDS in this post later, first learn other things that are related to WDS and PXE boot.

WDS is the best option when you have to install an Operating System in a number of PCs in a single attempt, you don’t have to install OS via disk or USB one at a time.

WDS has other benefits as well like you can deploy an image with pre-configured applications like you wan to install an OS witch includes office and Adobe photoshop you can create an image for that as well.

To create such images Microsoft Provided another great built-in tool known as Sysprep utility. This utility is a part of windows server OS and Client OS as well.

Group Policy, GPO and its use

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 14:39:00 +0000

Group Policy

Group Policy is a feature of Microsoft's OS that is a way to configure or control user’s computer settings. It also controls the working environment that does restrict users in order to start or use hardware and applications on their computers.

Group policy is nothing different from local computer policy, it is named group policy just because it works on groups rather than a single user. It is very difficult for IT admins in a big environment where a number of users are connected to a domain to modifying policy locally if they apply or modify local policy all the time whenever a user joins a domain or suppose a group of people need some modifications in their working environment, it is going to create a mess.

To overcome this problem group policy concept is designed, where group policy is associated and deploy to a particular group within a domain and it is automatically reflected on each and every user.

We can also set up a password policy with the help of group policy that how lengthy a password should be. What types of characters will be used in the password? and how many days it will last and then gets expired.

Group Policies can be updated automatically but it takes a lot of time or 90 minutes to reflect, in order to reflect them quickly, ask users to restart their PC, or use the below command.

Open CMD and then type gpupdate or gpupdate /force to update it forcefully. There are other commands related to group policy.

gpresult /r to find out the resultant set of policies on a particular machine or user.

gpresult /h to save data in the HTML file.

gpupdate /sync to synchronize changes with DC.

GPO OR Group Policy Objects

Group Policy settings are stored in GPOs or Group Policy Objects and these objects can be created with the help of MMC (Memory Management Console).

The Sysvol folder on a Domain controller contains all of the GPOs' settings and logon scripts. Group Policy also used during server hardening, we configure policies in such a way that nobody can mess up with sensitive data in a company. So, we make it hard to breach a server or local computer.

We also have group policy templates which are called ADM or ADMX in newer versions of windows.

What are the Ports?

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 17:05:00 +0000

Port

In computer networks, a port is logically a set of network services or a code that provides communication over TCP/IP protocol suite which listens to various sorts of requests in networks while communicating locally or over the internet. Likewise, we could have hardware ports as well which connects different devices to each other. So, every protocol has some specific port or a range in which a port could bind if multiple applications are going to use the same port. There are a number of ports in networks, some of them are as below_

1 - DNS - 53

2 - DHCP Client - 68

3 - DHCP Server - 67

4 - RDP - 3389

5 - LDAP - 389

6 - FTP Server - 20

7 - FTP Client - 21

8 - SSH - 22

9 - Telnet - 23

10 - SMTP - 25

11 - HTTP - 80

12 - HTTPS - 443

13 - POP3 - 110

14 - IMAP - 143

15 - UDP - 0 - 65535

16 - TFTP - 69

17 - GC (Global Catalogue) - 3268

18 - Kerberos - 88

19 - SMB - 445

20 - LDAP On SSL - 689

21 - SNMP - 161

This number will keep going until you keep learning from computerflicks.

DNS, DNS Server, DNS Zones, and DNS Records

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 16:46:00 +0000

What is DNS or DNS server?

DNS

DNS stands for Domain Name System or Domain Name Service, it is a service that helps you to access any website or URL on the Internet, there are thousands of websites and URLs are available over the Internet having corresponding IP addresses, so it is very difficult to memorize all those IPs, to overcome this issue, a name is associated with each IP address that can be memorized by humans easily. So, there is a mapping behind the scene and this mapping from the name or URL to IP or vice versa is handled by the DNS server.

Whenever you type a name in the browser the request is passed to a DNS server which resolves the IP address and finds out the corresponding data over the Internet. You can find out the URL name from an IP or IP from a URL. The port used by the DNS is 53.

DNS Server

DNS server is basically a server running DNS services, every organization has a DNS server setup for its internal domain controller or user’s machine mapping. A DNS server contains a number of sections like forwarding lookup zones, reverse lookup zone, and conditional forwarding, etc.. We will discuss it later in the post. Apart from Zones, and conditional forwarders a DNS server contains multiple kinds of records, some of them are:

Host (A Record) is used for IPV4 addresses.
Host (AAAA Record) is used for IPV6 addresses.
CName (Alias Record) is used to point another domain to an existing domain name.
SRV (Service Record) is used by AD to locate a domain controller by the client. These records are created automatically.
SOA (Start Of Authority Record) is used to provide info about the admin of the domain, and the info about where the authority starts.
NS (Name Server Record) is a record that holds the IP address of the responsible server providing services.
MX (Exchange Record) Contains information about Exchange Server in the network.
Ptr (Pointer Record) is used to map IP to its corresponding name etc.

DNS records keep all the data requested by the client. There are other types of records as well but the above one is more important.

There are four Zones in the DNS server as well. These zones are created to ease administrator of Domain Naming System.

1. Primary Zone

These Zones contains the read/write copy of zones. Any changes that happen in the zone go through this zone.

2. Secondary Zone

A secondary zone contains only a read copy of a primary or another zone. This zone is created to avoid denial in any request, it works when the Primary zone server is not available to respond.

3. Active Directory Zone

When the primary zone is stored in the Active Directory creates an Active Directory Zone. This method is used when we have multi Domain infrastructure and want to replicate our Primary zone data. If we do so

we need to install DNS on our DC.

4. Stub Zone

This zone contains SRV, MX, NS, and other records. These zones are created to reduce the overheads of other zones.

Apart from these zones, we have TTL, Aging, and Scavenging for records as a part of our DNS. Where TTL stands for Time To Live for a record, and aging is the age and life span of a record.

We do scavenging to delete old and expired records from the DNS database.

Furthermore, we have reverse lookup zones, that maps IP addresses to corresponding names.

What is DHCP or DHCP server?

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 14:30:00 +0000

What is DHCP or DHCP server or DORA?

DHCP

DHCP is an abbreviation of Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, it is a protocol that helps you to gain an IP address whenever your device boots up in the personal or public network. It provides a dynamic IP address from the IP pool for your device. Clint DHCP uses port 68 and 67 for servers to listen to requests in a network.

Whenever a device boots up it uses DORA(Discover Offer Request Acknowledge) concept, which works like the below:

At boot-up time device sends a broadcast request known as discover request in the network, the DHCP server or DHCP agent listens to that request and offers an IP address to the device, the device then sends a request back to the agent or server, and thereafter the requested IP address is acknowledged by the agent or the server.

As we know DHCP provides a dynamic IP address from the pool so to utilizes fewer IPs mostly agent and DHCP servers are configured in such a way to expire lease soon. On a DHCP server by default that lease is for eight days, Although, you can increase it as per your needs.

So, eight days or any number of days lease means the IP was assigned to a particular client or computer will be freed that further can be assigned to another computer. Whenever your PC boots up after lease ends its requests for the new IP and the computer got a new IP for further connectivity. It is a DHCP server that assigned IP addresses to each and every device in your network.

If you don’t want such kind of IP change headaches you can go for Static IP. For more information on IP addressing please visit my blogposts about the IP address.

on a DHCP server, we have options that are set to achieve various tasks like WDS set up or DHCP agent service.

DHCP Server

DHCP Server is a computer where DHCP service is running, there is a DHCP server in every organization otherwise there would be a DHCP server available to fulfill your request set up by your service provider or ISP. Most of the time your router does this task for you because it may have DHCP agent functionalities to reduce the server’s overhead.

On a DHCP server, you can create an IP pool, reserved IP address which is not assigned to anyone for special purposes.

Conditional forwarder

A conditional forwarder is very useful sometimes and works when a certain condition met. Suppose you have bought a new domain or merged with a new domain, so the situation occurs when you want to access that domain from your existing domain because another domain is accessed locally, even ISP has no reference for that domain. So, we will set a conditional forward to make that domain available in your domain.

What is a Shared Drive, Shared folder or network Share?

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 12:41:00 +0000

Shared Drive

You all have heard something about Shared drive or Network drives like a NAS or a shared drive in the network. The shared dive concept is widely used by organizations, where data needs to be shared from a drive that is not physically available on the computer.

Shared Drives are just normally HDD or SSD drives which are being shared among multiple people in a network. There are a number of benefits of using shared drives like:

Centralized Management
Policy Enforcement
Single Sharing space

If we talk about Centralised Management means you can upload some sort of common data being shared among people, only those people who have access to that drive will see and can control that data.

Secondly, policy enforcement that means if you have set up some sort of group policy and want to enhance or modify security aspects of that shared drive you can simply update group policy or create a group policy and then attach it with your shared drive.

Thirdly, if you have some common data like movies, documents, and others that are used all of the members in your family or company this is the best way to do so, just attach the drive in your computer and use it as it is physically available in your computer.

How to map a network or shared drive on a computer or servers?

Now, let’s map a drive on the computer step by step.

Step 1: Open Run menu by pressing Windows logo and R key together, and type the shared name like \\FaizPC, with backward slashes, you can also use IP V4 address as well with double backward slashes.

Step 2: Enter, to open file share. If you have a single file share there would be only one folder otherwise multiple as your share drive is organized.

Step 3: If there are policies applied on that shares you will only be able to access your file share only otherwise will get an error like the above image.

Step 4: Double click and enter into the folder and then copy the address of that share like the below screenshot.

Step 5: Open file explorer and goto computer like the below screenshot, and click on a map network drive.

Step 6: Select a letter for your drive and paste the address in the folder and then click finish.

Now go to my computer and the drive will be mapped there with the letter you assigned.

Hope, you get it now via computerflicks, that how to map a network or shared drive, and the most use out of it.

Active Directory

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 10:45:00 +0000

Active Directory

The Active Directory or Microsoft active directory service is a feature of the Microsoft Windows server. This feature is a part of Microsoft since the launch of windows server 2000, and it's being evolved gradually to enhance AD service. Active Directory is based on Microsoft's jet database engine and uses LDAP (Light Weight Directory Access Protocol) directory protocol to query the database. Active Directory uses Kerberos as an authentication protocol, which is an upgrade of the NTLM protocol used by windows in its late versions.

Active Directory is a very powerful feature of the Microsoft Windows server because it allows us to create and manage users, computers, printers, and groups within a domain. We can apply permissions and security over domain users, computers, and printers. It is divided into logical and physical components.

Active Directory database stored in a file called NTDS.dit (NT Directory Service, directory information tree), and this file remain save in the C:\windows\NTDS folder. Whenever you wanna replicate data onto other domain controllers within your network, you replicate or transfer this file to the other domain controller.

AD Authentication Types

Active Directory provides four ways of authentication over the network.

1). Pass-through Authentication

2). Secure Channel Authentication

3). NTLM Authentication

4). Kerberos Authentication

AD Components

Active Directory or AD is made up of three components

Groups
OUs or Organisational Units, and
Sites.

Groups

Groups are a great option in active directory, indeed. Groups can hold multiple users and a group can be a member of another group as well. One of the good things about groups is that we can add permission or access to resources like files, printers, and shred drives to groups. It's a good practice to put users into groups rather than as a standalone user, because if company going to expend in future or any new hiring is going to take place, we can just easily create a user within that particular group and it will have all permission the group is already having, so they will inherit group permissions simply.

AD groups are further divided into three parts-

i)- Universal Groups

ii)- Global Groups

iii)- Domain Local Groups

These groups further could be of two types:

Security
Non-Security

Organizational Units

Organizational Units or OUs are somewhat different from groups. It also can hold users, groups, and even further OU within it, but we can not add permission or resource access to OU though. The great thing about OU is that we can link group policies to an existing Organisational Units. Another great thing about OU is that you can add delegates to an existing OU. So adding delegations to OU is an essential power of OU in active directory.

Sites

The site is the third component of the Active Directory. Sites are different from the two above. A site is a physical location of a branch office in an entirely different territory. We can add subnets and different subnets DC or Domain Controllers in sites in active directory so that we can manage them at a single place.

Apart from permissions, we can add security to users to stop them by accessing particular software or service on their computers. We can block them to access internet, USB ports, and even updating OS by means of group policies.

There are two types of permissions in AD, resource access permission and NTFS permissions.

AD Permissions

In Active Directory there are two types of permissions, which are as the below.

Resource Access Permissions
NTFS permissions

AD Partition

There are four partitions in active directory, these partitions make admins manage Active Directory more efficiently.

I). Configuration Partition

ii). Schema Partition

iii). Domain Partitone

iv). Application Partition

AD Restoration Types

If you delete an object in AD by mistake or you had deleted some objects that need to be recovered anytime later, it can be restored in the AD environment with the help of two AD restoration methods.

Non-Authoritative
Authoritative

Firstly, we perform a Non-Authoritative restore and then the Authoritative restore method.

AD Tools

There are various tools to manage Active Directory, these are-

- Active Directory Computers and Users

- ADSI Edit

- Active Directory Administrative Services

- Active Directory Federation Services

AD FSMO Roles

To leverage the power of AD or Active Directory, active directory is divided into five operation masters or FSMO (Flexible Single Master Operation) roles.

- Domain Naming Master

- Schema Master

- RID Master

- PDC Emulator

- Infrastructure Master

These roles are further categorized into two categories. These roles are domain-wide and forest-wide. Domain Naming and Schema Master are forest-wide because there is only one schema and domain naming system can exist forest-wide.

The rest of them like RID, PDC, and infrastructure master is domain-wide. These can be more than one in a forest.

Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerability

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Sat, 23 Jun 2018 06:17:00 +0000

Meltdown and Spectre

Meltdown and Spectre are two Vulnerabilities in modern computers and smartphone which leak passwords and sensitive data and allow malware to access sensitive data without privileges.

If you are not aware of malware then check out my video series on malware. The link is available in the description down below.

Meltdown and specter CPU bugs are found in modern and old CPUs designed by Intel, ARM, and AMD. Meltdown and Spectre are basically hardware vulnerabilities that allow programs to steal user’s data currently processed on a computer. Though programs are generally not permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Spectre to fetch sensitive data stored in the memory of other running programs. These hardware bugs can allow malicious programs to steal data from the memory of other programs, potentially putting a wide variety of sensitive information such as stored passwords, crypto-keys, and files at risk.

Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities are verified on personal computers, mobile devices, and in most of the cloud computing platform, so all are affected.

Now, talk about them separately.

What is Meltdown?

Rogue data cache load — CVE-2017-575

This vulnerability basically melts security boundaries down, which are normally enforced by the hardware, and read the contents of private kernel memory from an unprivileged user process.

Meltdown fundamentally breaks the memory isolation boundaries. This attack allows a program to access the system memory and other important data and other aspects of a program.

If your computer has a vulnerable processor and running an operating system that is outdated or not updated from quite some time, then it is not safe to work with sensitive information without the chance of leaking the information. This attack still limited to personal desktop computers, laptops, and cloud infrastructure.

If I say in a technical way then, every Intel processor which implements or uses an algorithm or technology to utilize and maximize CPU processing units, so that CPU can not become idle, this is also called out-of-order execution, is potentially affected, this vulnerability exploiting Intel processors since 1995 except Intel Itanium and Atom family earlier than 2013. Google’s project zero team, successfully tested and Identified Meltdown on Intel processor generations released as early as 2011.

On current reports, the team has only verified Meltdown on Intel processors. Right now, it is unclear whether AMD processors are also affected by Meltdown. According to ARM, some of their processors are also affected.

What is Spectre?

Variant 1: bounds check bypass — CVE-2017-5753

Variant 2: branch target injection — CVE-2017-571

Specter Extract information from other running processes (ex: stealing login cookies from browsers)

The name is fundamentally based on the root cause, speculative execution. Specter is not easy to fix so it will affect us for quite a long time. This attack exploits a computer technology called branch prediction.

In branch prediction sometimes misprediction takes place which left the data behind in cache memory for attackers. That cache memory is accessed by a hacker using a side-channel attack. I will soon upload a video on the side-channel attack make sure you have subscribed and clicked the bell icon to get more updates on time.

So, if your sensitive data is left behind during a misprediction you will be screwed. Intel on this, officially announced that they will completely redesign its processors. Specter is harder to exploit than Meltdown, but it is also harder to mitigate. However, it is possible to prevent specter attacks up to an extent.

Almost every system is affected by Spectre: Desktops, Laptops, Cloud Servers, as well as Smartphones. In particular, the team and associate verified Spectre on Intel, AMD, and ARM processors.

Which cloud providers are affected by Meltdown?

Cloud providers use Intel CPUs and have virtualization without having patches applied. Furthermore, cloud providers without real hardware virtualization, relying on containers that share one kernel, such as Docker, LXC, or OpenVZ are affected.

What is the difference between Meltdown and Spectre?

Meltdown breaks the mechanism of memory isolation. Consequently, applications can access system memory. Spectre tricks other applications into accessing arbitrary locations in their memory. Both attacks use side channels to obtain information from the accessed memory location.

Thanks to God, patches are available to create obstacles. Meltdown issue is fixed as of now but specter is not, companies are just trying to Harden to hack devices. Its been quite a long time companies are working on them but they are unable to find a proper fix for them.

If you are technical or not technical and use any smartphone, Desktop PC, and laptop then only remember a thing, update your devices as soon as patches are available from vendors. If you have not updated your Operating system, and security patches yet, I suggest you upgrade now.

What are Chatbots?

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 18:59:00 +0000

ChatBot

A chatbot which is also known as chatterbot or conversational bot is a computer program or an application of Artificial Intelligence. Which behaves like a human in its chat conversation.

Chatbots are mainly designed to conduct text conversations with human beings to give them results quickly and precisely.

A chatbot which is also known as chatterbot or conversational bot is a computer program or an application of Artificial Intelligence. Which behaves like a human in its chat conversation.

Chatbots are mainly designed to conduct text conversations with human beings to give them results quickly and precisely.

These chatbots often work with natural language processing systems, in which they try to find out emotions, purpose, or keywords from human language and reply in a subtle manner. Chatbots with natural language processing systems are complex and sophisticated. The simpler one works on keyword scanning in order to reply from a database and they are less complex.

Chatbots are designed to handle customer service, information gathering, help desk, service desk, and are usually integrated with social media apps, shopping apps, websites, and other third-party apps. These chatbots are usually accessed through the aforementioned apps, google assistant, Cortana, and Alexa. Some of them are — Murphy, Ruhh, and Bing, etc.

These chatbots are designed to reply to more humanely. Nowadays chatting with friends and other people has become a trend. Most of the companies designing its chatbots, these chatbots would be in every field sooner or later and will communicate with each other, in order to provide you different services like ordering a pizza, book an Uber cab, online transaction, online shopping, interest-based friends and much.

Do you know? Microsoft has a Chinese AI Bot named Xiaoice( or xiaoice, whatever it pronounce itself xioaice by the way ), and it has 500 million human friends. yes, that’s true. What do you think about that let me in the comment section down below?

This Xiaoice Bot also make phone calls to its friends with “full-duplex” yes! I said full-duplex capability. If you heard full-duplex first time then I let you know. Full duplex is a way of communication in which both people can speak simultaneously, for example, our mobile phone has full-duplex. And this xiaoice is so smart that it can predict words before speaking and interrupt humans. Now you can imagine the pinnacle of technology right now.

Google Assistant is also able to make a call on your behalf. But Microsoft’s Xiaoice makes call itself without any human intervention.

If you also wanna try chatbots just open Skype or Facebook messenger and add or select a bot whoever you like from options.

If you want to create your own chatbot, yes you can do so with the help of node.js.

Now, the concern among people is, will these chatbots end human employment.

So, the answer is not at all, they will surely impact many industries and automate most of the tasks where human intervention would no longer be necessary. But it still needs humans to monitor them closely. And of course, they will replace humans, if we completely start depending on ourselves on chatbots or better to say Artificial Intelligence. So, as of now, things are looking pretty cool and advanced until we don’t rely on them completely, otherwise, they will replace a no. of employees from work.

They can become a threat to humans as well, as I have told you in previous videos about Facebook AI bots. So if we keep them under control and limited they will become a boon otherwise we have to face bad consequences.

Oh! I forgot to tell you about Microsoft’s bot incident, Microsoft created its AI bot, named Tay, and Twitter users made him a racist in less than a day. So, Microsoft had to shut it down.

Now you have heard two incidents, one from Facebook and another one from Microsoft. These were unexpected outcomes of AI, which compel us to think That AI and machine learning is a threat or a boon. If you’ve not seen my video series on human Vs Artificial Intelligence, just watch it right now.

Are AI and Machine Learning a " Threat" for human beings?

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 17:28:00 +0000

Are AI and Machine Learning a Threat?

There is a fear! among people when they think the opposite of AI and machine learning. When AI and machine learning was not so popular since they have been seeing in Hollywood movies. Therefore, many of us have seen AI and machine learning evil examples earlier in Avengers, Terminator, and how can we forget about transformers. There are no. of movies indeed, which has seen the concept of AI and machine learning, therefore most of the people think on the basis of what they have seen in movies.

Now, the question, is that true? First, discuss the positive side of these technologies.

AI and Machine learning is a revolution in the field of technology, medical, weather forecasting, science and other. This technology is already being used in the aforementioned fields, and have proven their potential. Machine learning helping researchers to find out cancer cure, weather prediction, water level prediction, analysis of big data, and much more.

These technologies are recently working on many projects, and, as of now seems a boon for us. They are really helping and working as a professional digital assistant. These technologies, In fact, giving a push to human beings to achieve goals more quickly.

These are designed and maintained by tech giants and being monitored in order to keep them under control and already have good deeds in their programming as a purpose. But it doesn’t mean nobody else can work and design its own machine learning and AI. anybody having knowledge of programming, Machine learning, and AI can work to create its own system.

As we all know most of the things in this world has two aspects. one of it is a good one and another one is the devil. So I have just spoken about the good of machine learning so far, but, if it goes into wrong hand they will surely become a “Threat” and that day might come without any doubt, what we have seen in aforementioned Hollywood movies.

If you have not heard about the Facebook AI shut down. Then I let you know.

Facebook also created AI for social media and messenger platform. Later on, the developer found, that two of its AI chatbots was chatting with each other, in an all-new language which human cannot understand, without consent of Facebook AI team. It is amazing and awesome simultaneously. When developers found it, they shut this AI system down. I know this feels crazy, but this is true!.

Thanks to God machine learning and AI doesn’t have sentient yet. Maybe someday sooner or later, but they are under control as of now.

So, it means if we let AI and machine learning free to learn and create whatever it likes, then it would be dangerous! for us.

Eminent Scientist Sir, Stephen Hawking said that “AI is a big threat for the human race.”

Maybe one day they start thinking that mankind is a “Threat” for AI. And start raising them in a quantity against human, likewise in Avengers Age of Ultron.

Is this feels scary? Off-course, but should we stop developing all these technologies, Off course not, We know they are able to find out the pattern in most of the things and process bulk of data very quickly which can not be done by humans so fast. Here, we can do one thing by monitoring all of its activities so closely in order to keep it under control. But again if someone with evil thoughts tries to develop them as a bad thing or our so-called hackers try to corrupt existing systems, this will likely to be a big problem to all of mankind.

So, in short, if Machine learning and AI under control they are boon for mankind, and if someone starts developing them as evil and removes control over them they will surely, become destructive for mankind as we already have seen in few movies.

What is Machine Learning?

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 10:55:00 +0000

Machine Learning

Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence is a buzzword now a days, and they are somewhat confusing when people consider both of them as the same thing. But nothing like that, actually machine leaning is an application or I should say a subset of AI. It is likewise AI, a collection of programs based on some complex algorithms.

Machine learning is totally focused to learn things based on data set provided to it. Machine learning and AI is in hype in the world of Autonomous car, humanoid, and cognitive computing plate-form.

Machine learning gives a potential to an existing system to achieve goal more precisely in no time. Machine learning is capable of handling and processing bulk of data at a time, in order to provide results accordingly, which is not possible for human being.

Machine learning is capable to learn languages, human behaviours, emotions, situations, education, and extending its capabilities in the field of engineering and doctorate.

Machine learning is working on cancer cure and much more, in which it collects all data available on the internet since it is evolved and analysing that data in order to produce a meaningful suggestion. That data is actually a big data which can not be processed by human beings in order to provide a result.

We have now step into the world of machines, chat bots, virtual reality, and humanoids, where most of the tasks would be performed by these machines, chat bots and humanoids. Our cars and vehicles are autonomous and our assistant, teacher, servant, even friends also going to be virtual and robots. If you have not heard about Sophia then I let you know about her.

Sophia is a humanoid built by Hansen Robotics in association with IBM, she can smile, laugh, frown also handles situations like human does, she is capable to learn and evolve over time. She is just a beginning there is more under development.

Another example of machine learning is IBM’s Watson which is cognitive computing plate-form, it can process data given as an input. It can find emotions, feelings in an article. Able to learn languages and provides the best insight of the system it is being used for. Watson is efficiently working in the field of medical science, and trying to achieve more in medical science regularly.

Watson is available to integrate with chat bots to work as a natural language processing system, which finds out the purpose of human action and drive the chat bot system to reply accordingly. In upcoming video I will discuss about chat bots, bcz they are also an application of AI and also very popular among tech geeks.

Machine learning is able to read and interact with sensors being used in IOT to handle systems and to provide better insight to its owner for a particular system.

Machine learning is designed in such a way that it can change into its own learning system if it finds later on that the learning system has deficiency at a particular stage, therefore able to evolve as aged. For example in autonomous cars if driving algorithms lacks behind or it found an unknown scenario while driving, the system will automatically learn it and upgrade itself. Though, all will be monitored and allowed by an analyst. So, it is under control. In next post we will discuss that “Is AI and Machine Learning a Threat for human beings?”

Artificial Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Sat, 02 Jun 2018 18:45:00 +0000

AI (Artificial Intelligence)

AI is an acronym of Artificial Intelligence, which is just an awareness of a program or software with some complex algorithms, running in background atop of an operating system, which works like a personal assistant to us and make our life easy and happy. There is no doubt to say it is a digital personal assistant. It is fully programmed by tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple, which is completely under control.

It does most of the things for you like perform online search, set your alarm, provides route and details of traffic on your particular routes, It reminds where your office is, so does home. It remind you birthdays, anniversaries and much more.

It can schedule a meeting for you, call and book a cab, hotel and flight. It can make your reservations. It can also setup and control your devices and home appliances.

It can control your car as well and can become a personal driver. These Al can track your activities, can play music for you, search dictionary words, sing different genre songs and lullaby for you.

Now, time to know the names of such famous AIs.

Cortana

Cortana is a virtual assistant, which is designed by Microsoft in 2013 and introduced in windows 10 operating system and getting revolution gradually. It can perform most of the aforementioned things for you. Response time and accuracy is great but still lacks behind, if, compared to google assistant. Microsoft integrated cortana with Harmon kardon to introduce cortana powered smart speaker in the market. In coming windows build Microsoft has announced that windows 10 will bear both cortana and Alexa, so where cortana lacks behind Alexa can be used and vice versa. I think this is a great Idea, to give leverage to your customers. Microsoft also integrated cortana with xbox, holo lens and Microsoft band.

2. Alexa

Alexa is created by Amazon in November 2014 and comes with amazon echo, which is a smart speaker, it also perform most of the aforementioned things and also has a great accuracy.

3. Siri

Siri is designed by Apple and introduced in October 2011 and comes with MacBooks, iPhones, iPads, Apple watch, tv OS, and HomePod smart speaker. Siri has a lot, lack of performance, and only limited to particular tasks as compare to other tech giants.

4. Google Assistant

Google assistant as the name indicates, designed by google and introduced in 2012, aka google now and has great capabilities over other competitors. It has great accuracy as well. It comes with chrome books, google dot and google home, and also integrated with products provided by third party vendors.

The aforementioned things about AI are not the end of capabilities of Al, here machine learning takes place which make all of them more smarter than ever. Microsoft is working on cortana to interrupt you while discussion with humans and can give its views and suggestions. Just imagine about that, seems like smarten than Jarvis in Ironman. Oh I love Jarvis and Ironman Movie by the way. I can’t wait myself to experience something like that, what do you think about this, let me know in comments for sure.

So, here is an AI battle going on among tech giants which is revolutionising AI day by day. Other ongoing projects claiming that these AI will learn your language and will interact with you in your language doesn’t matter what language you speak. And believe me this all going to be true very quick. However cortana still have its Portuguese, Czech and other languages version but not that versatile.

So if you were not aware with AI and still AI is in your pocket and not active, I suggest you to start using em and explore in a new way.

In the next post, we will discuss about machine learning, and, Is AI and machine learning a "threat" for human beings?

Blockchain Introduction.

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Sun, 27 May 2018 11:34:00 +0000

Blockchain

Block chain is a decentralised management a public ledger system which provides authenticity of transactions, in a network. A block chain is built with blocks, where blocks are linked together and secured with cryptography.

A block is a collection of information which is verified by all nodes in a network or blockchain and then added in an existing blockchain.

A block is created after a Proof Of Work (POW), which basically involves a lot of mathematical and computational complexities. However, feasible to calculate a hash for a block in a blockchain, if someone is able to generate a hash for a particular block chain is then rewarded with some bitcoins, and added into the network as a node to maintain transactions, who is so called a miner.

Every block contains a cryptographic hash function of previous block with a timestamp and date.

A block chain is a technology that can store transactions, records, certificates, shipping information, and other sort of information in a distributed peer to peer and a decentralised ledger.

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, which used blockchain technology in 2008. Thereafter, a lot of companies and even banks are moving towards blockchain, just because it is not easy to temper information stored in decentralised database, to do so a hacker needs to change information in all millions and billons of computers or nodes, that is not feasible as of now.

The advantage of block chain is, a transaction is first verified by all connected nodes in a particular blockchain network and added in a block of information only when it gets verified from all nodes, this provides authenticity and integrity of transaction over traditional centralised database system.

Another advantage of Blockchain is traceability, By which you can track records, transactions back and forth.

Recently IBM, and wall mart adopted blockchain technology in their business, where wall mart is assuring that every product’s journey in their store can be track by their customers. Like if someone buying mangoes then there would be a bar or QR code which can be scanned

through their application will give the customer all information about its journey means where it is came from, what fertilisers are used in order to grow that tree, how long it is been on that tree, what was the temperature used to grow mangoes and how long it took to get in the store, that’s how it works.

On the other hand IBM is using blockchain to store all necessary documents needed to provide to an authority during shipments and much more. Which makes thing crystal clear and fast and gives all the information about the thing and the shipment during its journey.

Blockchain is a new form of Internet and looks like future technology, which can be implemented in number of fields, like business, education, web, electricity, and much more.

Disadvantage of Blockchain

Because nodes are responsible to manage all data no central authority needed to maintain a blockchain, and if someone does counterfeit with you there is no one to complain. But if central or government authorities are involve in blockchain they will surely answer you if something goes wrong.

What is Bitcoin and how does it work.

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Thu, 24 May 2018 11:44:00 +0000

Bitcoin

What is Bitcoin and how does it work.

Bitcoin is an application of block chain technology, and it basically a part of cryptocurrencies, there are more like ether, ripple, and Lite coin etc. It is called cryptocurrency just because it is based on cryptographic hash functions or values.

Bitcoin is in hype nowadays, because bitcoins transactions are stored in a public ledger or decentralised database, any body can see those transaction publicly and verify data. Bitcoins provides authenticity and integrity of transactions and a bitcoin can not be added back to a block until it is expended and wiped out from ledger. If a transaction takes place in a network everybody receive information about the transaction in the network.

There is no government or central bank involved in bitcoin transaction, therefore, there must be someone to maintain and update all transactions taking place in a particular network. The person who is responsible of maintaining all data and transactions is called a cryptocurrency miner, or crypto miner.

Bitcoin is acceptable in most of the countries but some deny bitcoins just because of illegal activities. Bitcoins are popular because you can send them to anyone all over the world without any charges, and takes a few seconds to add that transaction in related ledgers.

Another advantage of bitcoin is the same value all over the world and you can exchange them any time anywhere across countries without any issues and charges.

You can make payments, pay bills, shopping online and much more with bitcoins. It is kind of an asset which gets value increased and decreased as per many factors.

How Bitcoin gets value?

1. Bitcoin gets value or fluctuations in price depends on the limited number of bitcoins ever generated, it is said that there is only 21 million whole unit of bit coin can be generated. So quantity does matter to give it a price value.

2. Electricity provided to secure and run block chain network also matters because block chain network consumes electricity which is enough for a city or seldom a country.

3. Another factor of price value hike is competitions among miners, it is said that, in every ten minute a block is generated and added in block chain to maintain bulk of transactions.

4. Bitcoin hype among people also a factor of price tagging.

5. Media reviews on bitcoins which might be negative and positive so it gets fluctuation in value accordingly.

6. Government issues with legal terms impact directly on price tag, most of the countries does not give bitcoins as official currency status, because it is used for illegal activities, but most of the countries allow and give them official currency status.

7. Complication of calculating of mathematical terms like hash functions or sometimes called "Proof Of work" matters in price tag.

Now, Hazards of buying a bitcoin.

There is no central bank or government involve in bitcoin transactions therefore it is not safe. If someone does counterfeit with you, there is no one to complain.

This is not legal in most of the countries because bitcoins are mostly used in illegal activities like drugs, trafficking etc etc. So if your country bans bitcoins anytime you will be in great loss or sometimes you get back nothing.

It was a brief description about bit coin to learn more about crypto mining keep following my blog and youtube channel.

Google Panda update

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Thu, 18 May 2017 06:45:00 +0000

Panda Demystified

There are several updates released by Google to ensure, only quality content website come up in searches, and websites having bad links or low quality content must be removed from searches or demote so, that people could not get these sites under top searches.

Regarding the same concern, Google released a new algorithm in February 2011, named Panda update. Totally concerned about to rank those sites higher, having quality content, and demote those sites having less quality content or part of content farming. It was about to give priority for those sites which are authorized or registered. This update was related to Google’s search engine, and to maintain the ranking system of Google. One major problem was, there is no way to catch content infringes or scrapers.

In some cases, a few scrapers stole content from a non-registered site and make it's own and took copyright on their name, and got ranking in Google. It was a shortcoming of this algorithm.

Later updated version came in turn, the last one was Panda 4.2, Now Google has included the Panda algorithm too, in its core algorithm, that is good news and a relief for webmasters and website owners.

Please check my SEO section to get familiar with SEO and tactics.

So, we have come across with Google Panda update, don’t forget to share. Keep learning from computerflicks, because it is beyond computing.

Ransomware

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Sat, 13 May 2017 02:39:00 +0000

It seems that this is the time to get back on security and protections, where we left off earlier. So, sit back tight and buckle up. A new malware just hitting desktop computers in more than 70 countries and spreading itself quickly, got name ransomware as per it’s working. Let’s plunge into malware bay.

What is ransomware?

Ransomware is a kind of malware, which encrypts your important data e.g., images, PPTs, and documents, and sometimes encrypt your entire hard disk or SSD, thereafter it locks down your PC, files and asks you to visit a given site to pay ransom amount or buy bitcoins (a form of digital currency). It pops up a message on your computer that, “if you don’t pay the ransom amount your data would be encrypted, and you would not be able to regain access on your PC or files until you pay ransom amount or buy bitcoins”. Most of the people pay ransom amount because most of the time, data is more important than ransom amount. And especially in the case, when you are totally unable to open documents or even your PC. This attack took place earlier in mobile phones, now hitting PC.

Although, it is not mandatory that your data would be decrypted after paying a certain amount. But there is no way rather than paying because they have encrypted your data with some strong encryption algorithms, which is not a child’s play to decrypt even for professional ones. To learn more about encryption please visit my previous post on encryption.

How to prevent ransomware in order to affect you?

You are the first-person shooter in all security and malware scenarios, if you have a little knowledge about malware and security, it is somewhat difficult to hack you. There are a few methods, I am going to describe to you, to avoid ransomware attacks. I recommend you, go through my malware and protection section to learn deeply about malware and awareness.

So, if you want to save yourself from ransomware malware, then do not click on pop-ups, asking you to upgrade a particular software like adobe reader. Only update software from official sites or if your genuine software asking you to update. When you update software from elsewhere, it leads to install ransomware package on your PC and it will start encrypting your data. You will not be able to distinguish between real and fake ones because it masquerades like it is an official update. Just avoid software update if a website or a link leads you to a different page, or pop up encourages you to do so.

Don't open attachments in emails, received from unknown people. Ignore spam mails, and scan your PC on a daily basis.

Always use updated anti-malware software definitions or use those ones, providing ransomware protection. You can use Windows Defender from Microsoft, a built-in anti-malware software package, that is totally free as well. It only gives protection from ransomware malware, when you have updated your PC to the creator’s update.

Better to take the backup of your important data on a daily basis, somewhere else, in a safe zone, in order to take backup for future, if your PC has become a zombie.

Please share this post and be safe, keep learning from computerflicks, because it is beyond computing.

Google Penguin Update

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Fri, 12 May 2017 06:34:00 +0000

What is the Google Penguin Update?

Google penguin is an algorithm or mechanism, which is designed and released by Google in April 24, 2012 to check those websites which are violating Google SEO policies (these policies are pre-defined as webmaster guidelines). Google released penguin version 1.0 and then later, updated versions came in turn, which basically identifies spam sites, to maintain its website ranking system in a genuine manner, and to reduce the search of inefficient content to provide you the best contents or genuine search results.

What does it do?

Let’s plunge into penguin update. Google penguin check those websites, being searched through google search engines, and verify that, these sites are as per Google webmaster guidelines and not violating any policies, which helps in maintaining Google ranking for bad content and sites having bad links. This update also categorizes websites into a black hat or grey hat SEO habits. It finds unnecessary links or paid links pointing towards a specific website trying to rank that site high among google searches and then takes necessary actions to reduce the ranking of those sites or by blocking a URL permanently.

Penguin 4.0 update

Penguin 4.0 is the latest update released by Google On September 23, 2016, it was the seventh update from Google. It seems to google not going to release more refreshments for penguin updates because this version works on real-time monitoring as websites to have evaluated real-time working scenarios. This update also differs from previous versions of penguin updates, as it does not demote a website, rather it discounts bad links or paid links, and does not harm your overall website or URL ranking. It also reduces the size of disavow files. It is now also a part of Google’s core algorithm and relief for webmasters, indeed.

How to find bad links and to remove them from your site?

To check unnecessary bad links on your website you need to go to Google webmaster tool and have a look at those links you are familiar with. List out those links, which are not familiar to you, now go to Google Disavow tool and submit those links and Google will do the rest for you. This is very necessary to reduce the risk of the Google penalty.

To know what are SEO policies defined by google for webmasters, please go through my SEO section for a better understanding of SEO and its types.

So, it was all about Google Penguin update, and very important for beginners who just start learning SEO tactics. Please share this post and keep learning from computerflicks, because it is beyond computing.

RAID Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 02:10:00 +0000

What is RAID Technology?

RAID stands for redundant array of independent disks. Raid technology is generally used for upgrading the performance of the disk, hence leading to high storage capacity. The logic behind RAID technology is that the disk or the drive components are arranged in the form of the array where the data is distributed in each array but it is considered as a single disk by the system. Small disks are combined together to form a large storage device. The way how disks are organized into arrays refers to the term RAID levels.

ORGANIZATION OF RAID STORAGE

The organization of the data into independent disk or array can be done through a few methods: striping, mirroring, parity, or combining all of them. Here we discuss these methods in brief.

STRIPING: In this technique data is split-ted across various disk available. Data is spread across two or more disks and hence when necessary it is combined and read as single disk data. RAID 0 is formed through striping. Continuous read-write operations take place in this process.

MIRRORING : This is the technique in which replication of identical copies of data is stored in RAID disks. This upgrades the performance and also increases the life of the disks.

PARITY: This is the way of storage by calculation of certain parity functions of each data block. If any failure of the drive takes place then the missing block is calculated by using certain checksum methods. This technique is also used for upgrading performance and increases the life of the disk.

CHARACTERISTICS OF RAID

Fault-Tolerance: RAID provides the ability to survive whenever any disk failure occurs.
Performance: RAID upgrades the performance of disks by increasing the speed of the read-write operations in comparison to a single disk.

Capacity: This refers to the amount of the data that the user wants to write on the disk or array The capacity of an array refers to the RAID level. An online RAID calculator is used to calculate the capacity of the particular RAID type or the members of the disk.

RAID LEVELS:

RAID LEVEL 0

In RAID 0 data are split into different blocks that is written to disks or drives. RAID 0 is used to boost up the performance, as multiple disks provide better performance in comparison to single disk. One disadvantage of RAID 0 is that it is not fault-tolerant that means if one drive fails, all the stored data gets lost.

Use
This technique is used in Linux as well as in windows. RAID 0 is used for storing the data in high speed. This technology is easy to implement and all storage capacity is used.

RAID LEVEL 1

Another term used for this is mirroring. Data is duplicated or replicated one copy of data is written in data drive and another copy of data is written in a mirror drive. If the drive fails, the data is recovered either from the mirror drive or the data drive. We need at least two drives for this technology. One major disadvantage of this technology is that storage capacity is only half of the total drive.

Use

This is used for storage in accounting sections and small servers in which only two drives are used.

RAID LEVEL 10

This is formed by the combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1. It is beneficial since it mirrors all the data on secondary drives and strips across each set of drives and speeds up data transfers. One disadvantage of this is that it is an expensive method.

Why RAID is not a reliable backup?

RAID provides redundancy but is not suitable for a proper backup and there is a huge difference between redundancy and backup. Redundancy protects us against hardware failure but not against any user error or malware or virus. Why we need backup, it's not because any physical media is lost or died it is because of corrupt data or error, and RAID does not provide any backup against several things.

RAID doesn't protect any file from being deleted or being overwritten or corrupted. It doesn't protect us against any damage caused because of natural calamities. It doesn't save data in many other cases as well. Thus for more security, we need a reliable backup for our data rather than just depending on RAID.

What is NAS ?

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Fri, 17 Mar 2017 11:06:00 +0000

NAS Or Network Attached Storage

NAS is a brief form of Network Attached Storage, it is a network device basically, which is used to store and backup your data in a network. It is a device that works on RAID technology and backs up your data without your day to day intervention. NAS is a good option for your home and small businesses or at the places where you don’t have lots of data storage and backup requirements. NAS is just a network device with multiple hard disk support, you can insert multiple hard disks to increase your storage and backup capacity, thereafter you can access and share your data from anywhere within a network, except that you can also create cloud storage to access it publicly when you are not at your home.

NAS basically does centralize file management in a very efficient manner and provides an additional data security layer to your files and data by using some encryption techniques. It is not affected by viruses because it is just external storage apart from your PC, until and unless you save some malicious data yourself.

Why use NAS

You can also go for online cloud storage services, but they are costly and don’t provide high data access speed too. Though cloud services are modern, you must spend a lot of money to buy cloud space. On the other hand, you can face outage problems while using cloud services. But if you are using NAS no outage problem, easy to install and easy to backup. All you need to do is just buy a NAS and configure it in your network and there you go.

NAS also provide you guarantee that it will work without fail because it works on RAID technology and it will keep backing up your data time to time and if a hard disk fails or crashes occur all you need to do is just remove it an insert a new one disk drive, without affecting your files and data.

So, it was all about NAS and it may have lots of application fields that depend on user or organization requirements. Keep learning from computerflicks because it is beyond computing.

What is HS2(Hotspot 2.0)

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 15:41:00 +0000

HS2 stands for Hotspot 2.0 which is an advanced version of Hotspot, mainly designed to give more control over peers. Security of this version enhanced a lot as compare to previous version. It is also known as Wi-Fi CERTIFIED PASSPOINT. It works on 802.11 u standard protocol and WPA2 encryption standard, which is a strong encryption standard. It has more bandwidth as compare to the previous version, which offers more Internet speed to download and upload or to surf internet for other purposes.

This is mainly designed to connect with hotspots at airport, railway or metro stations, Coffee Shops, libraries and public areas. It ensures that you will surf internet securely at these places without worrying about malicious users. It does not require additional sign up information and authentication process. As a Hotspot 2.0 device comes under the range it automatically connects to the network without sing up and authentication. It is discovered by WI-FI alliances, to ease WI-FI services and to make them more reliable.

How to use HS2

You must have to have a Hotspot 2.0 enabled device to take advantages of this technology. Most of the railways, coffee shops, restaurants and other public places are using Hotspot 2.0. All you need to do is, just go to your device settings and enable Hotspot 2.0 feature.

Keep learning from computerflicks because it is beyond computing.

Concepts of Subnetting

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 13:30:00 +0000

Subnetting is a technique used in order to divide a network into subnetworks, so that all of the networks could mange easily and if a network fails then it will not affect on the other networks. When we do subnetting a concept of subnet mask is used in order to divide a network into subnetworks. So we will learn that how do we create subnetworks by using subnet mask. For instance if we use 192.77.50.0 which is a class C IP address so here we need class C subnet mask 255.255.255.0. So it depends on the numbers of the subnetworks we have to create means if we have to create 2 subnetworks then we will borrow a bit from third octate of the subnet mask. We can easily calculate no. of bits to create desired no. of networks with the help of 2ⁿ, where n is no of bits. So we will borrow 1 bit because 2¹ = 2. Believe me it is very easy. Let me show you how do we do that.

IP address:        192.77.50.0
Subnet mask:        255.255.255.0
No. of networks:      2
Now write the subnet mask in the form of binary notation, Subnet mask in binary notation:         11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000 As we know the place values of the binary bits in each octate would be 128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1 ,

Now lets borrow a bit from binary formed subnet mask, So the new calculated subnet mask would be: 11111111.11111111.11111110.10000000 Now write it again in decimal from: 255.255.254.128 So the calculated subnet mask would be: 255.255.254.128

OK, you should probably Know that there are maximum 256 host can be available in class C. And possible no. of host who can be assigned an IP address would be "no. of possible host - 2 => 256 -2 = 254". So each sub-network will hold 254 possible no. of host. Now you can assign IP address to each sub network. And the IP address in first sub-network would be start from 192.77.50.1 except 192.77.50.0 because this address will be used as a network address similarly last IP address of the first sub-network would be 192.77.50.255 except 192.77.50.256 because this IP address will be used as a broadcast IP address to first sub-network. So the first sub-network will hold IP addresses from 192.77.50.1 to 192.77.50.255 and so forth.

Keep learning from computerflicks, because it is beyond computing.

How To Use ABS Function In MS Excel

noreply@blogger.com (computerflicks) — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 09:20:00 +0000

Use of ABS Functions in Microsoft Excel

ABS Formula Syntax and usage in MS Excel explanation by ComputerFlicks…

The easiest function of Excel, easy to use, and understand. If we need to get the absolute value irrespective of negative or positive, we can use ABS function. As a reference, we can use a number or a cell reference. Let suppose we have huge data that contains positive and negative values, but our requirement is to get the sum of all values. For example, we have two values +20 and -20, if we add both values it will be zero, instead of zero we want the sum of both values "40". In such cases the first step is to use ABS function and convert all values into absolute values, after getting absolute values, we can add both values and we will get the output "40".

Syntax: = ABS (number)

We place the number of which we want the absolute value. In the place of no we can also select the cell reference in the excel sheet.

Image : 1 - ABS Function MS Excel

In the above example, we have some negative and positive values. We can get absolute values after applying the ABS Function. B3, B4, B5, B6, B7, B8 & B9 is the cell reference.

Please like and send your queries in the comment area.

For more understanding watch this video...

How To Use IF Formula In Excel.

noreply@blogger.com (computerflicks) — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 08:11:00 +0000

Use of "IF" Formula in easy form.

MS Excel – “IF” Formula Explanation By Computer Flicks…

In order to understand easily we have divided the if formula in multiply example (Simple to Hard)

Definition : IF formula is very popular function among excel formulas, it is a logical function biased on true and false value. We have to create a logic between the values. In logical function we can put two condition, result will display as per true and false defined values. According to logic, value can hit the true or false condition and the result will display accordingly.

Simple Example:

If (Cell A:1 is Blank , then print 1, otherwise print 2 )

The above example is for your understanding, the correct syntax is given below. The function is divided in three parts. In the first Part we have to define a logic. if cell A:1 is blank then, the true value will print or reflect "1" as output and if A:1 is not blank then the false value will print "2".

If you are a daily excel user you must know the IF Function.

Syntax : = IF(logical_test,[value_if_true],[value_if_false])

Logical_Test : Cell Reference or Input Value (See the example C10, C11, C12, C13, C14 & C15) and put the condition as your requirement.

Vaule_If_True : Display Result “PASS” if your defined condition is True.

Vaule_If_False : Display Result “FAIL” if your defined condition is False.

Important Points:

If function is a logical and condition biased function.

We can add multiply IF functions together.

We can interlink If Formula with in the sheet & workbook and multiple workbooks also.

For your batter understanding, my recommendation is use the same data and start practices. This is level -1 "IF" function. In the next article we will define the advance "IF" functions and uses.
If you have any questions or queries please write in comment column..
For good understanding watch this tutorial video "How to Work IF Function"

Short Cut Keys in Microsoft Excel

noreply@blogger.com (computerflicks) — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 07:25:00 +0000

Microsoft Excel – Short Cut Keys.

Some important Excel Short Cut Keys. If you are a daily excel user, you must know some short cut keys to get a good speed over your reporting with excel sheets. In this article we have defined short cut keys depends on your requirement. Some of the short cut keys you must know. Make a habit to use short cut keys to improve your work style with excel. Some of the keys are not limited to Microsoft Excel but you can use it with MS Word and any other application also. We have divided this article into three parts. First is basic short cut keys, second is the text formatting and third is Good to know if you want to learn. The first and second parts are important to learn.

Let's see the table below and start learning.

Image: 1 - Microsoft Excel Short Cut Keys.

See the Excel short cut keys above. We have defined only important excel short cut which is important for daily use. Please post a comment or any suggestion in the below comment box.

PPTP vs L2TP vs SSTP vs OpenVPN

noreply@blogger.com (Faizan Alam) — Fri, 27 May 2016 09:11:00 +0000

PPTP

PPTP stands for Point To Point Tunneling Protocol, which is also termed as P2TP, is a protocol designed by Microsoft to provide secure communication and it is a very common protocol being used from windows 95. It has some drawbacks like it is no more secure at all now. Although, it is easy to use and set up but vulnerable with lots of weaknesses. The major advantage of this protocol is that it is built-in with the Windows operating system. It has almost been obsoleted. It's better to go for an advanced and secure feature.

OpenVPN

OpenVPN is more secure than PPTP and also provides more flexibility like it can be mount on any port, so it is difficult for a firewall to block it properly. OpenVPN uses open technologies like OpenSSL encryption library and SSLV3 and TLS v1 protocols. It is most popular and can be more secure if it uses AES encryption rather than a Blowfish encryption technique. It is required to install a third-party software before configuring OpenVPN because it is not available or built-in with OS in advanced. It also doesn't have security concerns and can be used instead of PPTP.

L2TP/IPSec

L2TP stands for Layer two tunneling protocol, it also used for security purposes but does not offer any encryption, so it is always used with IPSec to provide encryption for security purposes. It works on UDP port 500 which is fixed and can not be changed so it is very easy to block via firewall so not as much flexible as OpenVPN, though it is secure more than PPTP so give it priority over PPTP and it would be a nice idea to use OpenVPN instead.

SSTP

SSTP stands for Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol, which is a Microsoft proprietary protocol introduced in Windows Vista. It is good because it is built-in with the Windows operating system and has the best compatibility with windows. It uses the AES encryption and similar SSLv3 like OpenVPN so it has the same features and can easily bypass the firewall. It is much better than L2TP/IPSec and PPTP.

Please keep learning from computerflicks, because it is beyond computing.

ComputerFlicks

Windows Deployement Services

WDS Or Windows Deployment Services

Group Policy, GPO and its use

Group Policy

GPO OR Group Policy Objects

What are the Ports?

Port

DNS, DNS Server, DNS Zones, and DNS Records

What is DNS or DNS server?

DNS

DNS Server

1. Primary Zone

2. Secondary Zone

3. Active Directory Zone

4. Stub Zone

What is DHCP or DHCP server?

What is DHCP or DHCP server or DORA?

DHCP

DHCP Server

Conditional forwarder

What is a Shared Drive, Shared folder or network Share?

Shared Drive

How to map a network or shared drive on a computer or servers?

Active Directory

Active Directory

AD Authentication Types

AD Components

GroupsOUs or Organisational Units, andSites.

Groups

Organizational Units

Sites

AD Permissions

AD Restoration Types

AD Tools

AD FSMO Roles

Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerability

Meltdown and Spectre

What is Meltdown?

What is Spectre?

What are Chatbots?

ChatBot

Are AI and Machine Learning a " Threat" for human beings?

Are AI and Machine Learning a Threat?

What is Machine Learning?

Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence

AI (Artificial Intelligence)

Cortana

2. Alexa

3. Siri

4. Google Assistant

Blockchain Introduction.

Blockchain

Disadvantage of Blockchain

What is Bitcoin and how does it work.

Bitcoin

What is Bitcoin and how does it work.

How Bitcoin gets value?

Now, Hazards of buying a bitcoin.

Google Panda update

Panda Demystified

Ransomware

What is ransomware?

How to prevent ransomware in order to affect you?

Google Penguin Update

What is the Google Penguin Update?

RAID Technology

What is RAID Technology?

ORGANIZATION OF RAID STORAGE

CHARACTERISTICS OF RAID

RAID LEVELS:

RAID LEVEL 0

RAID LEVEL 1

RAID LEVEL 10

Why RAID is not a reliable backup?

What is NAS ?

NAS Or Network Attached Storage

Why use NAS

What is HS2(Hotspot 2.0)

Groups
OUs or Organisational Units, and
Sites.