Abhinandh

Google phasing out support for old browsers

abhinandh — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:23:10 +0000

Got this email from google today

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

Great to see google adapting to new technologies like HTML5 and killing off Internet Explorer 6 support.

Google tech talk: How to steal a botnet and…

abhinandh — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:51:50 +0000

I recently came across this interesting video on YouTube – How to Steal a Botnet and What Can Happen When You Do. It’s a talk presented by Richard A.Kemmerer, one of the researcher at the UCSB and part of the team that took control of a part of torping botnet for 10 days. A botnet is a group of malware infected computers which are controlled remotely and often used to steal passwords and phishing. This talk outlines some of the basic terminologies of botnets, the way infection happens and the effects it causes.

The highlights of the torpig botnet include

Contains a domain fluxing algorithm which changes the domain it connects to based on the time/date of the infected computer.
It injects phishing pages into the browser and cannot be detected by any of the phishing tools.
Torpig gets downloaded by Mebroot, which is the malware delivery platform.
Mebroot make minimal changes to the infected computer and alters the master boot record (MBR) so that it gets started as soon as the PC boots.
Mebroot uses an encryption algorithm that hasn’t been broken yet!
Torpig, if used for a DDOS attack, the bandwidth would be about 17Gbps.

Direct URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GdqoQJa6r4
For more info, see the paper “Your Botnet is My Botnet: Analaysis of a Botnet Takeover.”

The researchers drew a number of important conclusions by analyzing the data collected from torpig.

Many people use same password on multiple domain names.
Researchers converted the passwords in Unix format and tried to crack them with John the Ripper. 56,000 were cracked in less than 65 minutes using the default mode. Using a wordlist, 14,000 passwords were cracked in the next 10 minutes. And another 30,000 passwords were cracked in the next 24 hours. That’s 58% of all passwords cracked in 24 hours.
Most of the passwords stolen were from various browsers’ password managers.

After 10 days, the bad guys pushed a new torpig binary using mebroot. It contained a new domain fluxing algorithm which now uses twitter’s popular topics to calculate the domain and hence is unpredictable.

The dawn of 2010

abhinandh — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:10:33 +0000

With just a few hours left to bid goodbye to 2009, WISH YOU ALL A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010!!! Looking back, 2009 has been a great year for me. Lots of new things learnt all throughout, stronger relationships built, lots of people met and what not. On the techie side, 2009 taught me a fair amount of Qt, Python and javascript from scratch. Web designing skill did improve quite a bit owing to things like my blog redesign and other pet projects.

Looking forward to 2010 with a big TODO list. First on the list is to finish the long pending task of installing KDE trunk and hopefully doing some KDE bug bashing and hacking. Python needs more love this year and so does AJAX.

How’s your 2009 been folks? Drop in a comment. I’m off to welcome 2009 with a blast. Have fun folks…

P.S: This is my first ever second blog post in a single day ( Didn’t get that? Well I didn’t too Now go out and partyyyyy… )

Simple notes: my Google appengine app

abhinandh — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:16:19 +0000

My python programming skills required a brush up and so I decided to play with the google appengine. And the result? A simple notes application that lets you add notes by e-mail or direct message (DM) from twitter. The notes are saved per-user basis and login is with your google account. Currently there is no limit on the number of notes one can store.

To add notes by email, enable email posting option in preferences section and send your notes to
To add notes by DM, follow @addnote on twitter (hopefully it should follow you back! ) and save your twitter username in the preferences section.

Really had fun learning python regular expressions, new JSON module in python 2.6, appengine API and the twitter API. And now I got a problem now, I don’t want to code in any language other than python To try the application, head over to notes.abhinandh.com and don’t forget to drop in some comments.

Anna University B.E B.Tech Odd semester results(Nov-Dec 2009)

abhinandh — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:10:32 +0000

Anna University B.E B.Tech Odd semester results are expected to be out anytime over the next few days (as most rumors go, thanks to the usual university practice of not letting the students know when the results will be out). These exams were conducted in Nov-Dec 2009.

Here is a potential list of websites you can check your results on (Courtesy : Harsh J)

Wish me all the best guys