Is it possible to hack into a gmail address ? - Really scary

Who doesn't have a gmail id now a days ? In my honest opinion, I am yet to discover a more user friendly web mail host. Gmail is non-intrusive, provides all the advanced and usable features such as POP3, mail search and much more.

But recently at a Black Hat security convention, Robert Graham, the CEO of errata security, surprised attendees by hijacking a Gmail session on camera and reading the victim’s email. He went even further by demonstrating the attack by taking over another journalist’s Gmail account and then sending emails from that account. Really scary.

So how do you protect yourself from somebody sniffing your email while it is in transit and then hacking into your gmail account ? There is one way to make it much harder for sniffing your mails. That is by sending and receiving mails using Gmail's SSL feature. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is used to provide secure data transfer across the web, for instance ecommerce sites use SSL to transmit your credit card details. Google provides the SSL feature for gmail and all it takes to enable SSL in Gmail is by typing the address https://mail.google.com instead of http://mail.google.com. Make note of the 's' in 'https'. What this does is instead of encrypting only the username and password, Gmail encrypts the whole mail session and this makes it possible to transfer your mails in a secure manner.

So the next time you decide to log on to your gmail account, use https instead of http and you will be fairly safe from getting your mail sniffed in transit.

Nmap explained from an Ethical Hacker's View

Nmap (Network MAPper) is a network scanner written by Gordon Lyon. It is a free and open source tool and is available at insecure.org with versions for Windows and Linux and is ubiquitous in its use.

Nmap can be (and is) used to for instance, scan for open ports on a remote server, to detect the OS run on the server, what all services are running on the remote server and so on.

Many of us might have run the TCP SYN scan which require root privileges and the TCP connect scan which can be run even as an ordinary user. But there is much more to the usage of nmap tool.

Kirby Tucker at ethical hacker has written a very informative article which provides inside knowledge about the usage of nmap as well as what each command accomplishes.

In part I of this tutorial, he explains no less than 13 different scans you can run using the nmap tool. And at the end he also demonstrates how you can glean information by running nmap in conjunction with wireshark (an open source network protocol analyzer). A really interesting read for all aspiring system administrators.

Update (September 06 2007): It seems the publishers of the article have run into some copyright problems and have temporarily taken the resource down till the problems could be ironed out.

In the meantime, a comprehensive resource on nmap which you will find really helpful is the book titled - "Secrets of Network Cartography: A Comprehensive Guide to nmap" authored by James Messer which you can freely read online. You can even download a PDF version of the book for a nominal price.

A collection of best rated videos on C++

Here is a collection of best rated videos on C++. These videos have been collected from a variety of sources such as Stanford university, reconnectworks and even a lecture by Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup the creator of C++.

The Stanford University lectures are very clear and start with the basics in an attempt to teach C++. Each lecture is about an hour and a half long.

It starts with the very basics and ends with sophisticated example of tracking code. The content of each lecture is roughly the following…

1. session 1: basic declarations, conditional structure, operators.
2. session 2: pointers and functions.
3. session 3: introduction to classes including operator overloading using 3-Vector from CLHEP (class library for high energy physics) as an example.
4. session 4; more on classes with arrays and lists and including templates.
5. session 5: introduction to inheritance and some thoughts on class design and dealing with legacy code.
6. session 6: polymorphic inheritance with a large example taken from a simulation code.
   

These series of lectures are not a "hands-on" style ones. Only few practical exercises are suggested in the lectures. The students are expected to take their own initiatives in getting started.

By the end of the course, one should be able to read most C++ code written by others and be on their way to using C++ in their own work.

Link to the video lectures

A talk with Pavel Kanzelsberger, Creator of Pixel

You say you do not know what Pixel software does ? Well it is the end result of a one man company's remarkable achievement in developing a graphics software at par with Photoshop. The person in question is Pavel Kanzelsberger from Slovakia who has single handedly developed this software. I may add that it is not a GPLed product rather it is as closed source as Photoshop. Its USP is that it has a native Linux build and runs on numerous other OSes as well. And then again it doesn't cost you a hand and a foot to acquire it as it costs far less than Photoshop and is pegged at just $38 .

At present Pixel is still in the beta stage but is quite usable. A glance at the user interface of Pixel will give you a clue as to where it takes its inspiration from . It has the exact interface of Photoshop - an aspect that Adobe should be worried about especially since this product works flawlessly as well and is getting better as days go by. Check out the screenshots of Pixel.

James Gray at Linux Journal quizzes Pavel Kanzelsberger about what motivated him to start working on this project, the development process, a little about the person himself and the future of Pixel. Do read the interview.

How to create a custom DVD from multiple video formats

I have always found it a hassle to convert a video file from one format to another in Linux for lack of (or rather, not being aware of) a good Free video conversion suite. I have tried converting an Avi file to another format such as mp4 using some software but the results were far from satisfactory. I take it that it has more to do with the settings I selected than the fault of the software I used.

Axel has written a quite detailed article explaining how to create a custom DVD using a Free video conversion software called DeVeDe. What is really interesting about his article is that he shows the exact settings he used in the conversion - a big factor if you want your converted video file to have more or less the same quality. In fact my experience shows that you need to get the ratio of number of frames per second with respect to resolution of the video right else the quality of the video might suffer.

Fig: DeVeDe software interface

He has used the Windows version of DeVeDe but this is a software which is available for Linux as well. For example, in Ubuntu, you can install this software using the command :

$ sudo apt-get install devede

You need to have Mplayer, Mencoder, DVDAuthor, VCDImager, MKisofs and all the proprietary codecs installed though since DeVeDe is just a front-end. More over since DeVeDe is a Python script, it requires Python as well. For more details on the actual steps required to convert a video file from one format to another, do read the guide.

Benchmark : Which is the best Linux terminal ?

It has many times occurred to me which terminal among the plethora of terminals at our disposal are the most efficient in terms of speed, memory consumption and ease of use. And I was of the opinion that the ubiquitous xterm was a likely candidate for a terminal with less memory footprint. Well I couldn't have been further from the truth.

It seems xterm is a very poor choice when selecting a terminal. Martin Ankerl benchmarked a number of terminals available in Linux including xterm, gnome-terminal, KDE konsole, wterm, eterm and aterm. And his findings indicate gnome-terminal and konsole as the best choice of terminals for its speed. And by speed I mean the speed of execution of commands in it and not the program's startup time. But the down side is that these two terminals consume a significant amount of memory. For example, Gnome-terminal is found to consume around 45 MB.

Martin states that he found wterm as the best bet for a low memory footprint with just 6.5 MB consumption. And it is sufficiently fast in executing. xterm loses in this department too with each instance consuming around 16 MB.

Do read the full benchmark details and also a nifty graph of his results.

Gorgeous GPL wallpapers for your Linux desktop

Who wouldn't like to spruce up their desktop ... like changing the theme to one of your liking, changing the look of the icons, and at the most basic level, changing the desktop wallpaper. And Linux desktops are very flexible in allowing you to change every aspect of its look to your liking. So much that there are projects which allow you to make your Linux desktop (be it Gnome or KDE) look like Mac OSX.

There are good, Sexy Ubuntu Wallpapers on this blog.

Some of the sites which I frequently visit scrounging for pictures to spruce up my desktop include kde-look.org and gnome-look.org just to name a few. Today I came across a collection of gorgeous wallpapers for the Linux desktop at Shareapic.net. Shareapic is a free service that allows its users to upload and host images on their servers.

While the wallpapers are to put it lightly, stunning, I am not sure if they do not cause some distraction at work. If you use your Linux desktop primarily for recreation, casual browsing or chatting, then go ahead and use the wallpapers. But if you are doing serious work, it is always prudent and less distracting if you select a wallpaper which has plain colors or rather no wallpaper at all. But that is just me airing my opinion. You can download the nature collection of wallpapers released under GPL at http://www.shareapic.net/134601-GPL-wallpapers.html (Update 30-March-2009: Link Broken).