Information Warfare

The U.S. Department of Defense recently reported that the Chinese military "has established information warfare units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems and networks"
Source: Computer World Magazine

Is the Internet going to be the battlefield for future wars? Will this be a good choice for developing countries which don't have fancy weapons? Actually, I think that today information warfare is just a complementary weapon beside traditional ones. But for sure it is an effective one. We all know the economic impact of virii outbreaks and DoS/DDoS attacks. And I am sure countries shall start training computer experts and building security teams in order to develop cyber weapons as well as security systems to protect their assets. What really scares me is that almost all the softwares and network equipments that we use are made in USA, Europe or even China. We can never be sure that they do not have back-doors. People who call themselves hackers here are nothing more than script-kiddies. We have to have more advanced education programs in our universities. The government has to sponsor some local projects in order to build our own security products. One other solution is to have open-source softwares. I know that open-source security products are not that good. But having Snort as a second layer of defense beside you McAfee or Juniper IPS is a good option. Students in Computer Science faculties shall study open source softwares and learns from them or may be build their own softwares and add-ons to them.

By the way, I don't want to be very pessimistic here. I am sure that having an American firewall is much better than not having a firewall at all.

Tags: Security, Information Warfare, Gr33n Data

Geek Hacks

Since I have nothing in my mind to blog about now, so let me introduce you to some geek blogs that are on my Google Reader.

1- gHacks, I guess the 'G' in their name is for Geek. You can find there many tech news and geek hacks.

2- Life-Hacker, it is not always computer related stuff. As you can see from their name, it has info such as "How to tie a Tie", "How to speed up your Adobe Acrobat Reader", etc.

3- Boing-Boing and Tech-Crunch are two of the most famous technical news blogs out there.

Tags: Geek, Hack, Gr33n Data

Blank post, mesh aktar [Simply Blank Post]

Excuses are only for the Losers.

Excuses are only for the Losers.
God bless the Winners.

Tags: Zamalek, Ahly, Football, Gr33n Data

Excuse me ma'am, may I shoot your butt?!

There is a Flickr Group called "24 Hours of Flickr", where all the members were supposed to take photos on 5/5/2007 and submit the best shot they took then to the group, and they will pick the best ones and publish them in a printed book later on. So I decided to go down to the street on that date and started taking photos of Cairo streets. But while I was taking photos near the Corniche, a police soldier started to ask me why I was taking photos, and then asked me politely to finish quickly before an officer sees me.

Yesterday they wrote in Al Arabiya news site that an Egyptian guy was arrested for shooting women butts in the street

So let me ask you now, do we really have here in Egypt a certain law that tells people when they are allowed to take photos, and when they are not allowed to? Even in that women-butt-obsessed guy case, I know that it is sick, but is there a certain law against doing so? What if he was shooting their faces instead? I am sure that many countries have different rules and laws, but do we really have such thing here in Egypt, or it is just random?

*** Update ***
Zeinobia's comment inspired me to add this. Away from the law, let me ask you, is it ok to shoot people you don't know in the street? Or, shall you take their permission first? What if it is a group of people, shall you ask each one of them? What if you are taking a photo of the pyramid and there is someone standing near by, shall you ask him/her too?

I know it is common sense. But sometimes common sense in not very common.

Tags: Photography, Egypt, Gr33n Data

Sarkozy

The president of the Union for a Popular Movement, the main French Right-Wing political party, has been elected as the new French president for the next seven five years. I think you all have heard that famous saying that "Latin America is moving to the Left", after the election of many Left-Wing parties leaders there. And on the other hand, I think "Europe is moving to the Right", with the presence of Right-Wing political leaders in the two major countries there now, France and Germany. Sarkozy was welcomed by the US President George W Bush, he is seen as a strong ally of Washington, is often described as "Sarko the American" by opponents in France, who criticize his open admiration for American values. I guess he is going to be the French version of Tony Blair when it comes to foreign policy. I am afraid that the hopes of having Europe as an opposing power against the United States absolute power are dead now. Sarko is also known for being against the Turkey's entry into the European Union, with his famous saying that Turkey's entry to the EU would mean the "death of political Europe". His policy is not expected to be very welcoming to the immigrants, and you sure remember when he famously described the young demonstrators in the Paris suburbs in 2005 as racaille, or "rabble".

But I don't want to be very pessimistic here. One of the main disadvantages of the former French regime is that it had strong relations with many Arab leaders and that made them not to criticize such regimes nor even comment on any of their non-democratic brutal acts, and they were also biased toward them against their opposing parties. This may be clear in Lebanon for example, where they were biased toward the government against the different opposition parties there.

By the way, will we ever see a woman in our presidential elections here? And will any one vote for her?

Tags: France, Sarkozy, Gr33n Data

Sandboxie

I you are one of those who like to try new softwares, then you'd better have a look on Sandboxie application. When a software is added to Sandboxie, it will be able to read from you hard disk, but not writing to it. It will act as a virtual layer between the software you are running and your hard disk, it then can monitor the read operations and force the write operations to be made into a virtual location that can be erased easily.

This can be really useful in testing non-trusted softwares, especially that access to the following classes of system objects are supervised by it such as Files, Disk Devices, Registry Keys, Process and Thread objects, Driver objects, Named Pipes, Mailbox, etc. The point is that I am not sure how will such application protect you when installing a certain application that has a certain Adware/Spyware bundled with it. Shall you run the installer itself into Sandboxie or what!?

PS. I haven't used this application yet. So please try to send me your feedback when you try it.

Tags: Sandbox, Security, Gr33n Data

The Thinking Bloggers Award

Nousha, the Photographer, Aikido Player, and Bloggeress has tagged me. And I am supposed to write down five blogs that makes me think. I don't want to repeat myself, so I'll try to pick non-Egyptian blogs this time.

Hammorabi, an Iraqi blogger, mainly political posts.
Remarkz, a Lebanese blogger, mainly political posts.
Life Hacker, The Blog Title says it all.
Digital Photography School, although Darren is Canonian, but his blog is really cool and informative.
Lady Banana, stay tuned and you will discover many Web2 services, humor, and cool ideas.

Finally, I'd like to thank Noushaaa so much. In fact I do not have much time now a days to read every single Egyptian blog post as I used to do before. So I added my favorite blogs to my Google Reader's list. And Nousha's blog is one of those few blogs that are on this list.

I am not sure if any of the bloggers mentioned above really reads my blog. So I cannot guarantee that this tag will not come to a dead end here.

Tags: Blogs, Smart, Gr33n Data