Paolo Ardoino - ideas, programming, web and more...

aSOS 1.0 for Android released : protect yourself in risk and danger situations

Paolo Ardoino — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:35:14 +0000

Today I have released aSOS 1.0 ( project page ), my first application for Android based phones.

aSOS helps to protect you in risk and danger situations by alerting via SMS people that could assist you.

aSOS is my first application for Android, inspired to me by Claudia (my girlfriend). I would develop a tool that could help her in any risk situation by alerting me and her parents in a single click.

Suggest this application to your dearest and nearest ( girlfriend / wife / sons / sisters / parents / friends ), safety is truly important nowadays.

Now… suppose that your girlfriend or your daughter is walking alone in a street (perhaps by night) keeping in hand her Android phone, in any case of danger she could click on aSOS widget and you’ll be instantly informed of her situation so you could reach and assist her.

1.0 feature list

Settings
- Define a SOS message
- Customize a list of people to alert picking numbers from your phone contacts
- Choose if enable appending geo location to sent messages
Widget: click on it in a risk situation and aSOS will automatically send a SMS to people in the alert contact list.

Coming features

button that stops sending alert SMS (useful if you have clicked the widget for mistake)
if networking (wireless or 3g is enabled) convert geolocation longitude and latitude in a precise road, city and country

Suggestions are welcome

php-google-backup v1.0 released : backup Google Apps data (docs) with PHP and Zend GData

Paolo Ardoino — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:02:04 +0000

In these days I was setting up my new backup system (based on Netgear WGT634U with a pair of USB hard disk as external storage) and I needed a command line script to backup all my Google Apps data.
My priority was to backup GMail and Google Docs (Documents) data. For emails I found a very useful tool called getmail4 but I had not the same luck for documents so I wrote a very simple php command line script based on Zend Framework GData API.
Now I release first version of php-google-backup only with this feature but I’m planning to extend it to GMail, Google Calendar and Google Reader.
Get the script!

Chemical Molecular Editor

Paolo Ardoino — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:19:21 +0000

I and my girlfriend Claudia have developed a cool Javascript Chemical Molecular Editor ( WebCME ) based on the Dojo framework.
It is in constant bugfixing and feature enhancement, but we are proud to announce that a first usable version of this tool is available.

Current features list:
* adding elements ( with automatic elements’ balancement )
* adding bonds ( single, double, triple, wedges, … )
* adding text ( useful for notes, … )
* lot of prepackaged structures ( amino acids, cycles, … )
* selected points rotation
* importing 2D .mol format files
* exporting .png images
* integrated periodic table

Next features list:
* quick buttons
* code refactoring
* exporting in .mol, .png format files
* arrows

Enjoy it, and help us to improve!

WBus v0.1 released

Paolo Ardoino — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:34:03 +0000

WBus stands for Web Bus and it is a simple all purpose method to get two or more clients (browsers) communicating using a web page as the communication channel.

Evolving WarWide look and usability

Paolo Ardoino — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:31:16 +0000

Probably WarWide is one of that (web) applications that will never leave the beta release status.

Every month, we apply new changes, improvement, fixes and creates features to keep users playing and giving huge longevity to the game. These two weeks we have decided to focus our efforts on ( other than, as always, on bug fixes ;) ) strategic panel’s usability and on a new set of icons.

WarWide italian community clamoured along for a more friendly and simple interface for army creation/unification and resources management… we answered with an improved (and more intuitive) panel for these tasks.

Then, two friends of mine, offered their creativity to design a new set of icons for military units, buildings and technologies … the result has been very impressive!
Thanks to Simone Poggi (aka motocarota ) and to FolkwineDelMark ( a WarWide player ).

(Note, all following images are © Involutive s.n.c http://www.involutive.com )

A subset of Motocarota images:

A subset of FolkwineDelMark images:

My new friends

Paolo Ardoino — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:00:00 +0000

Finny and Fatty gallery

Do you like them?

WarWide: innovative strategic war (multiplayer) browsergame

Paolo Ardoino — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:00:42 +0000

These months I have been kept busy with the development, testing and debugging of the new version of Involutive’s browsergame: WarWide.

Note: It is available only for Italian people, but in a few months and English version will come to the light!

WarWide is a free strategic war multiplayer browsergame set in the real world with thousands opposing players, each of them fighting as the emperor of a group of (truly existing) cities and having, as primary goal, the growth of his Empire conquering enemy lands and establishing alliances with governors of nearby territories.

Watch SCREENSHOT gallery!

One of the most interesting and innovative features, that distinguish WarWide between other browsergames, it’s the interactive (Google maps like) map of our Earth, perfectly integrated in the game: players could interact with it, move armies, fleets and resources, fight for every piece of land or sea, wait in ambushes enemies and help allies.
Each action within the map has a good precision level (up to about five hundred meters) due to our improved algorithms and this gives an improved playability… cruise the Bosporus or the strait between Corsica and Sardinia (in the screenshot above)

Lots of buildings, technologies and military units are available to give lots of variants and huge longevity to the game.

Each feature of the game is built to be more faithful to realty as possible.

From previous version lots of chances have been done:

Completely rewritten game engine
Completely rewritten game interface, now using JQuery
Ships and sailing navigation (previous version had only land military units)
Paths and areas visualization on the interactive map
Inventory items that gives bonus to armies and players
Army tasks stack to improve strategic operations
Improved speed of geographic algorithms

Technical details:

Operative System: Gentoo Linux ( 2.6.x )
Game engine: PHP 5 (game engine), C (geographical algorithms)
User interface: HTML, Javascript and Ajax
Database: MySQL
Map interface : Openlayers

Enjoy it!

P.S: I would thank the whole italian WarWide community for their good job in debugging and hinting.

Large integers factorization

Paolo Ardoino — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 07:00:34 +0000

This is a summarizing post of large integers factorization methods I have exposed in my articles.

Classical method
- Source code
- Results
Pollard P-1
- Source code
- Results
Elliptic curve method
- Source code , Factor base
- Results

Kernel Socks Bouncer – linux anonymous connections

Paolo Ardoino — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 07:00:58 +0000

ksb26 ( Kernel Socks Bouncer ) is a Linux Kernel 2.6.x Loadable Kernel Module that hijacks tcp connections (to user-defined target hosts) through socks 5 servers chains.
ksb26 works as an hidden layer that adds anonymity to software that doesn’t support anonymous connections.

ksb26 is divided into a lkm ( Linux Loadable Kernel Module ) and a userspace manager which communicate via a character device.
- ksb26 lkm intercepts and redirects tcp connections.
- ksb26manager keeps updated socks and target-hosts lists.

Version: 0.0.4
Website: http://ksb.sourceforge.net

Learn more about hijacking system calls in Linux 2.6 kernel.

Online social (and unaware) CAPTCHA cracking

Paolo Ardoino — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:00:27 +0000

Note: remember that this is only an idea and I’m not responsible of its use.

Yesterday I was talking with my friend Davide about the announce of Yahoo’s and Google’s CAPTCHAs cracked and another funny and foolish idea, something similar to Javascript online massive social password cracking, came into my mind.

Articles report that breaking algorithms have a success rate from 10% to 35%,with an average of 1 crack for 5 attempts… too slow!

There should be a method to improve the success rate and here I would like to discuss a nice scenario that I hope nobody would implement ;-)

Base idea:

There are three base components to get this idea working:

spam-bots : bots used to spam blogs, forums and websites.
- they submit CAPTCHA decoding requests to a server (named capster)
capster is divided in :
- a server that handles CAPTCHA decoding requests’ queue (named cpqueue)
- a website of social interest ( :-) explained later )
unaware users : clients of the website
- they decodes CAPTCHAs displayed in website’s pages

The success of this approach depends on the topic of the website… We need something that could never become boring… Yes, I know you’re thinking about it! Yeah! Sex!!

So let be pornography the topic of the website.

As explained in the diagram, spam-bots send CAPTCHA decoding requests to cpqueue (part of capster) which forwards them to the website and here unaware users resolve them.

Every 5-6 photos or 2 videos the unaware user have to enter the code of a CAPTCHA displayed on a page to continue browsing. An horde of sizzling surfers will be happy to decode CAPTCHAs to quickly proceed to the next step of strip tease :-D

Probably the wish to see something more will obfuscate the consciousness of what they’re doing!

With a bit of luck we can obtain a success rate of 100% ;-)

I heard that there’s some Virus which implement a similar approach using popup strip teases, but malware has always to fight to survive on a computer so there’s the constant risk that the cracking farm will decline day by day and then.. arent’ we in the Web(2/3/4).0 era or not ?

Thanks to:
Davide Scola that gave me some hints
Motocarota that gives a better look to my thoughts