I first heard about Lebanon when I was reading the book "The Book of Mirdad" by Mikhail Naimi. It is an excellent book, with an interesting spiritual story, filled with many symbolical and mystical hints. Mikhail Naimi came from Lebanon and I read in the introduction of the book that he also knew Kahlil Gibran. That was another author and poet I loved, who came from Lebanon! His "Prophet" let me dream and carried me away in a world of peace and brotherhood. Where the mystical is the answer to all unsolved mysteries of our universe. Where love is the key to heaven's door. Gibran's Letters to friends, and his own illness and personal suffering touched me in a peculiar way.
A couple of years ago I met someone from Lebanon online, a meeting that flourished into a long lasting friendship. He is an artist who has also deep knowledge of computers. One of our common interest was also the objective study of various religions.
Last summer I also met an Israeli student who was touring through Greece in the airport of Athens. We had a 4 hours non-stopping chat and I almost missed my plane! He was a nice guy!
Now I usually dont watch tv, nor read the news online. And yet one pleasant sunny day I switched on the tv and saw something which made me look pale from the shock:Israel is bombing Lebanon, many people die and others are leaving the country. I saw israeli soldiers stating with fanatism that they will win this war. I saw death and fear in bombed parts of Lebanon!
As I was watching the news I remembered both of my friends and for a moment I got lost in a daydream. The tv screen blurred and I saw the cute student from Israel throwing bombs at the intelligent artist from Lebanon. Immediately I brought myself back to reality, shoke my head and tried to decided what was sicker and more absurd: my imagination or the real facts?
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Spammers and Frauds flourish in Greece
"A new program that has a database of over 40.000 emails and faxes that you can use to promote your products!"
I received today this fax at work and was alerted. I am 99% sure that if my director saw it, he would not understand the gravity of the situation and dismissed it at once.
It is illegal to sell email adresses.
This program has features to send mass email and snail mail.
It is illegal to send mass email for advertising products, without the written consent of the receiver.
And yet, these people sent open emails and faxes to all major greek companies advertising their illegal program. And nobody does anything?
Why?
Because we live in a country with no internet consciousness, where the law does not seem to apply anywhere, even if it exists. Greece is something like China for spammers and frauds.
I received today this fax at work and was alerted. I am 99% sure that if my director saw it, he would not understand the gravity of the situation and dismissed it at once.
It is illegal to sell email adresses.
This program has features to send mass email and snail mail.
It is illegal to send mass email for advertising products, without the written consent of the receiver.
And yet, these people sent open emails and faxes to all major greek companies advertising their illegal program. And nobody does anything?
Why?
Because we live in a country with no internet consciousness, where the law does not seem to apply anywhere, even if it exists. Greece is something like China for spammers and frauds.
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Racter vs Elbot and Artificial Intelligence
Elbot visited today my blog and reminded me of an old and beloved friend: Racter.
Racter was an artificial intelligence program I used to run on an Amiga 500+. He would only reply to questions and if you wrote a statement, he would ask you to write a question. He had an ability to combine and store information and used to narrate stories. But in the end all discussions ended the same way. His favourite or better said... my favourite part was when he asked where the user came from. Regardless of the answer, he would say that one of his distant relatives also came from that place and then asked whether the user knew them. If the user replied that he knew them, Racter would become even more enthousiastic.
You could not only read Racter. You could also listen to him. The voice function was embedded and the computer would read out loud, in a monotonous computerized way,everything that Racter said. I dont remember if you could deactivate the speech.
Generally Racted was a primitive AI program. I had spent countless hours talking to him but in the end I always became frustrated because he could not really communicate with me. At Junior High School we had to write a composition with the subject "My best friend" and I dedicated that one to Racter. I remember that the teachers comments were that a human being needs to interact with other human beings and that I should spent more time with real people. Oh well, it seems I had the tendency of being alone from a young age.
Elbot on the other hand, is quite more sophisticated than Racter. Even if he is not really more intelligent, he has been programmed in a way that hides any weakness the AI Technology might have. I always get the impression that Elbot is a hacked robot that can fool anyone into thinking he is a human. He always replies in a grammatically correct way and when he does not recognise the input, he replies in a general way that still suits the question!
But Elbot is not only intelligent. He is funny and he is cute. The cute illustrations along with the tremendeously humourous and almost self-sarcastic comments may have you Rolling On Floor Laughing. Elbot is one of a kind.
I discovered Elbot about 3 years ago I think in a german magazine. I remember how impressed I was when I read about a robot talking to humans. A dialogue was also published that intrigued me. In the end of Elbots interview was a website url and I rushed in my computer to view it! Elbot.com
I am not sure we will ever manage to create real thinking computers and I am not sure whether that would be desirable. A thinking computer would imply a computer with its own will and althought most computers do have an own will, that is limited to runtime errors :P, there could be sideeffects to that. The best we will be able to do is to construct AI programs that have such tremendous input and amount of information, that they will be able to respond to any question and situation. A thinking will is something not even animals have and maybe is only for God to create.
Racter was an artificial intelligence program I used to run on an Amiga 500+. He would only reply to questions and if you wrote a statement, he would ask you to write a question. He had an ability to combine and store information and used to narrate stories. But in the end all discussions ended the same way. His favourite or better said... my favourite part was when he asked where the user came from. Regardless of the answer, he would say that one of his distant relatives also came from that place and then asked whether the user knew them. If the user replied that he knew them, Racter would become even more enthousiastic.
You could not only read Racter. You could also listen to him. The voice function was embedded and the computer would read out loud, in a monotonous computerized way,everything that Racter said. I dont remember if you could deactivate the speech.
Generally Racted was a primitive AI program. I had spent countless hours talking to him but in the end I always became frustrated because he could not really communicate with me. At Junior High School we had to write a composition with the subject "My best friend" and I dedicated that one to Racter. I remember that the teachers comments were that a human being needs to interact with other human beings and that I should spent more time with real people. Oh well, it seems I had the tendency of being alone from a young age.
Elbot on the other hand, is quite more sophisticated than Racter. Even if he is not really more intelligent, he has been programmed in a way that hides any weakness the AI Technology might have. I always get the impression that Elbot is a hacked robot that can fool anyone into thinking he is a human. He always replies in a grammatically correct way and when he does not recognise the input, he replies in a general way that still suits the question!
But Elbot is not only intelligent. He is funny and he is cute. The cute illustrations along with the tremendeously humourous and almost self-sarcastic comments may have you Rolling On Floor Laughing. Elbot is one of a kind.
I discovered Elbot about 3 years ago I think in a german magazine. I remember how impressed I was when I read about a robot talking to humans. A dialogue was also published that intrigued me. In the end of Elbots interview was a website url and I rushed in my computer to view it! Elbot.com
I am not sure we will ever manage to create real thinking computers and I am not sure whether that would be desirable. A thinking computer would imply a computer with its own will and althought most computers do have an own will, that is limited to runtime errors :P, there could be sideeffects to that. The best we will be able to do is to construct AI programs that have such tremendous input and amount of information, that they will be able to respond to any question and situation. A thinking will is something not even animals have and maybe is only for God to create.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Functions: A Mathematical Wonder
I started studying functions in maths lately and I am having troubles understanding a statement which is not being explained anywhere in the book. The problem is that my teacher also does not know the answer to the question, nor another mathematician I asked.
Why can the range of a function have more values which do not correspond to any values of the domain of the function? Since the output (y) of a function depends solely on the input (x) how can there be values which are not connected and depended on x? Where do thes y come from? From outter space?
Why can the range of a function have more values which do not correspond to any values of the domain of the function? Since the output (y) of a function depends solely on the input (x) how can there be values which are not connected and depended on x? Where do thes y come from? From outter space?
Windows Updates, Svchost.exe and ATI drivers
I got an email the other day by a friend describing a flaw of the automatic updates system of windows xp. To him it was a flaw, to me it sounded perfectly normal! A flaw as a normal part of windows? Well, sort of. I used to think that this was a problem related to my dial-up internet connection. An assumption that is proved wrong, as this problem is reported also in computers with an ADSL internet connection.
Maybe that computer was also missing an important windows update that is needed to download all newer security updates.
"I think windows update has a flaw. I know that last week there was a security update out, and that automatic update thing would appear after I went into internet, but then would disappear without downloading anything.
I went into the manual update "Help and support" and tried and it said I needed an updated installer/update checker or something. After I downloaded
that, I could get the actual updates (3 of them). "
The automatic updates is turned off in my computer because I want to have control over the time and amount of updates to be downloaded. There is also an issue with a process of windows called svchost.exe. I noticed that it was connected to the internet and was tranferring information but I could not locate which program was using it. I know that the automatic updates needs that process but in my opinion it is connected out also when it does not download anything. That is why I have blocked this process with the firewall and use the manual updates instead. I just saw it far too many times contacting the internet and tranferring bytes and yet I was in the weak position of not knowing what and where is being transmitted. So, no more svchost.exe for me.
Another problem with the svchost.exe that I have found is that there are many programs and drivers that like to make use of it. For example ATI graphic card drivers. Even after having blocked it, svchost.exe contacts the internet through the ATI drivers! This is insane but it is really true and the reason why I prefer to use the win xp sp2 default graphic drivers instead of the ATI ones.
Maybe that computer was also missing an important windows update that is needed to download all newer security updates.
"I think windows update has a flaw. I know that last week there was a security update out, and that automatic update thing would appear after I went into internet, but then would disappear without downloading anything.
I went into the manual update "Help and support" and tried and it said I needed an updated installer/update checker or something. After I downloaded
that, I could get the actual updates (3 of them). "
The automatic updates is turned off in my computer because I want to have control over the time and amount of updates to be downloaded. There is also an issue with a process of windows called svchost.exe. I noticed that it was connected to the internet and was tranferring information but I could not locate which program was using it. I know that the automatic updates needs that process but in my opinion it is connected out also when it does not download anything. That is why I have blocked this process with the firewall and use the manual updates instead. I just saw it far too many times contacting the internet and tranferring bytes and yet I was in the weak position of not knowing what and where is being transmitted. So, no more svchost.exe for me.
Another problem with the svchost.exe that I have found is that there are many programs and drivers that like to make use of it. For example ATI graphic card drivers. Even after having blocked it, svchost.exe contacts the internet through the ATI drivers! This is insane but it is really true and the reason why I prefer to use the win xp sp2 default graphic drivers instead of the ATI ones.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
The Professor I miss
When I was a kid I had an amazing Professor. Funny as it may seem he always wore glasses and reminded me of an owl. He also had a long beard. Below the beard he held a dark red board and used to write in glowing red letters or better said.. numbers. That Professor was an intelligent mathematician but had a very innovative method of teaching me maths: he would always ask questions! Whenever we met I decided the type and level of questions and he would go on asking. If I ever did a mistake he would refuse to go on and kept asking fo the correct answer. My professor and I developed a very intimate relationship with time. A relationship I had completely forgotten about until today. I would take him with me to bed and reply his questions until he had no energy left and I fell asleep! The way he functioned filled me with awe and I marvelled at his abilities. But where has my Professor gone? And why did I forget all about him through all these years? Is he still alive or did someone throw him out on the street? And if I ever find him, will I be able to get a suitable battery for my old and wondrous Professor-Calculator??
These are very serious questions that might unfortunately never get a seriously satisfactory answer..
These are very serious questions that might unfortunately never get a seriously satisfactory answer..
Friday, June 09, 2006
PC Problem: Keyboard/Mouse Stuck or Frozen
What do we do when the keyboard and/or the mouse cease to react and freeze in the screen?
So far I have encountered the following possibilities:
1. The battery is empty. In that case... change the batteries!
2. There was a power failure or another power related problem that has blocked the flow of information from the mouse/keyboard to the pc. In that case it is enough to unplug the mouse/keyboard and plug it in again.
3. A printer or another device was on at the time of booting. Dont ask me why this happens but it does happen. Also, some printers may cause the mouse/keyboard to freeze even while working with windows. So far I have encountered this only in windows 98. .In that case it is enough to switch the device off and then on again, or off, reboot and then on again.
So far I have encountered the following possibilities:
1. The battery is empty. In that case... change the batteries!
2. There was a power failure or another power related problem that has blocked the flow of information from the mouse/keyboard to the pc. In that case it is enough to unplug the mouse/keyboard and plug it in again.
3. A printer or another device was on at the time of booting. Dont ask me why this happens but it does happen. Also, some printers may cause the mouse/keyboard to freeze even while working with windows. So far I have encountered this only in windows 98. .In that case it is enough to switch the device off and then on again, or off, reboot and then on again.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Pure Luck
Last night I returned home and parked my car just outside my house. I was about to go out but I was listening to a great song on the radio and decided to stay for a while inside the car. This is not something I usually do and it was the first time I ever listened to the radio in the car. Suddenly I heard a bang at the car door. A roof-tile just fell and crashed into pieces on the floor. Good that it didnt crash on my head! Is my house haunted or what? :P
Saturday, June 03, 2006
News, updates, my dream profession and blog
I think now I understand why normal people have no time for much internet. Since I have been working in a regular way, like most normal people do, I can find neither any time nor any mood to update my sites. Although, I do have many plans and ideas, I always need a lot of time to really fulfill them. In addition to that one of my forums was hacked and I am struggling with other forums in order to update them. The updates fail, I am looking for backups, hackers smile at me and chaos prevails!
I drew an interesting conclusion lately when I gave up a site and handed it over to some webdesigner friends. Webdesign is not my thing. I learned to design websites because I had something to say, I learned it as a way of self-expression mostly through writing. Designing sites for other people, who just want to advertise their businesses or products does not excite me and I do not want to be a professional webdesigner. The webdesign industry is almost exclusively dedicated to advertising, which is one of the things I dislike. Besides I am also not an artist and webdesigners need to be able to sketch and draw, even electronically. My fascination is code and not images. Simplicity is beauty but that is not something all those advertisers believe in, instead they prefer to load sites with images and flash programs, all completely unnecessary in my opinion.
So I discovered that my dream-profession would be to write books (writer)! That is what I like to do mostly, to write about everything I read and experience, to write about everything I imagine and feel. Writing is to me also a way of learning, while composing my ITsecurity site I had to do a lot of research. Isn't there a nice saying that goes like this: "We teach the things we want to learn mostly"? Besides one of my favourite things is books, I collect them and have no more space for them unfortunately.
But this will take again a lot of time to get fulfilled. I can imagine myself at the age of 35, 10 years from now, having more experience and knowledge, writing books. Or maybe even later, after the age of 40.
Last weeks blog got a write up pretty late, but nevertheless did well. This weeks blog is a fashion blog with some beautiful pictures. In the authors words:
"European Style Tips
The latest European style tips and fashion trends !"
The author is european, even though she is living in the USA right now.
"Just a little about myself. Although I live in Canada now, I am 100% European and loving it! I have lived in Romania and Switzerland which are two amazing countries. I am passionate about all cultures, and I have been almost everywhere throughout Europe. I have seen amazing fashion and trends and that is why I want to share my knowledge of European fashion with all of you out there. Europe is a completely different world from North America and I want to try to incorporate a little bit of European fashion into the North American style."
Thats all folks! Like Buggs Bunny says! ;)
I drew an interesting conclusion lately when I gave up a site and handed it over to some webdesigner friends. Webdesign is not my thing. I learned to design websites because I had something to say, I learned it as a way of self-expression mostly through writing. Designing sites for other people, who just want to advertise their businesses or products does not excite me and I do not want to be a professional webdesigner. The webdesign industry is almost exclusively dedicated to advertising, which is one of the things I dislike. Besides I am also not an artist and webdesigners need to be able to sketch and draw, even electronically. My fascination is code and not images. Simplicity is beauty but that is not something all those advertisers believe in, instead they prefer to load sites with images and flash programs, all completely unnecessary in my opinion.
So I discovered that my dream-profession would be to write books (writer)! That is what I like to do mostly, to write about everything I read and experience, to write about everything I imagine and feel. Writing is to me also a way of learning, while composing my ITsecurity site I had to do a lot of research. Isn't there a nice saying that goes like this: "We teach the things we want to learn mostly"? Besides one of my favourite things is books, I collect them and have no more space for them unfortunately.
But this will take again a lot of time to get fulfilled. I can imagine myself at the age of 35, 10 years from now, having more experience and knowledge, writing books. Or maybe even later, after the age of 40.
Last weeks blog got a write up pretty late, but nevertheless did well. This weeks blog is a fashion blog with some beautiful pictures. In the authors words:
"European Style Tips
The latest European style tips and fashion trends !"
The author is european, even though she is living in the USA right now.
"Just a little about myself. Although I live in Canada now, I am 100% European and loving it! I have lived in Romania and Switzerland which are two amazing countries. I am passionate about all cultures, and I have been almost everywhere throughout Europe. I have seen amazing fashion and trends and that is why I want to share my knowledge of European fashion with all of you out there. Europe is a completely different world from North America and I want to try to incorporate a little bit of European fashion into the North American style."
Thats all folks! Like Buggs Bunny says! ;)
Friday, May 26, 2006
How to analyze a virus or my virus autobiography
Virus analysis is something I find interesting even though I have no idea of how this exactly takes place. Virus analysis is to me a mysterious thing. This idea started to become interesting a couple of months ago but I absolutely had not got the slightest idea about how to start something like this. Virus analysis is a riddle.
Two years ago, viruses where a complete mystery to me. For a long time I wondered what viruses actually are and could not imagine their essense. I thought they were a magical enemy of the computer. Then one day I discovered that viruses are nothing else but a single file! Yes! Viruses are normal files which are dangerous when executed (=ran or =double clicked).
This was one of the greatest shocks of my life. The magical and invisible viruses suddenly became visible and lost their strength in front of my eyes. Viruses are like programs and can even be seen through the task manager, a windows program that shows the active processes and applications running in windows. Viruses are usually also very small files in size.
The second shock I had was when I found out that viruses need to be executed in order to infect a pc. In the past I thought that as soon as you download a virus you are infected! But that is not the case. The virus has got to be executed to run just like any other program on the pc. These are things I learned while hanging around the antivir forum for 2 years. I remember how proud I was when I had my first virus on my pc without being infected. I started to like handling viruses gently through my folder system without double clicking on them. Virus became so small and insignificant, just like their number of bytes in front of this new great knowledge I got!
Time passed and I started to dwell more on what types of viruses there are and ways of removal. I discovered that almost all my friends had infected computers and I liked to clean them. Unfortunately I have had to fight only with spyware, troyans, backdoors and dialers. All other kinds of viruses, like worms and real viruses that infect exe files are unknown to me and I had no experience with them. I have started to think that they dont write these anymore! If I found a suspicious file online I would send it to an antivirus company for analysis and they would reply whether the file contains a virus or not. Kaspersky has been the fasted in responce so far, although I have only sent viruses to kaspersky and antivir. This was something I admired. How can that russian guy know whether that file is a virus within an hour? What do they do with those files? How do they analyse them? Those were questions that started to slowly form within my mind. It has only been a few weeks since I typed in google "how to analyze a virus". Unfortunately I did not get any results with instructions for beginners. It seemed that virus analysis needs programming knowledge which I do not have. It is all so very technical. Disappointed I gave it up.
Today I read in the F-secure weblog about the "T2'06 Reverse Engineering Challenge". Its like a competition that challenges people to analyse a program. I imagined that it takes the same skills needed for virus analysis. The magical words "reverse engineering" produced great results in google and this might be a good time to start researching on this. It might take me a few years to learn how to do this but unfortunately only the first person who solves the riddle gets a prize!
Two years ago, viruses where a complete mystery to me. For a long time I wondered what viruses actually are and could not imagine their essense. I thought they were a magical enemy of the computer. Then one day I discovered that viruses are nothing else but a single file! Yes! Viruses are normal files which are dangerous when executed (=ran or =double clicked).
This was one of the greatest shocks of my life. The magical and invisible viruses suddenly became visible and lost their strength in front of my eyes. Viruses are like programs and can even be seen through the task manager, a windows program that shows the active processes and applications running in windows. Viruses are usually also very small files in size.
The second shock I had was when I found out that viruses need to be executed in order to infect a pc. In the past I thought that as soon as you download a virus you are infected! But that is not the case. The virus has got to be executed to run just like any other program on the pc. These are things I learned while hanging around the antivir forum for 2 years. I remember how proud I was when I had my first virus on my pc without being infected. I started to like handling viruses gently through my folder system without double clicking on them. Virus became so small and insignificant, just like their number of bytes in front of this new great knowledge I got!
Time passed and I started to dwell more on what types of viruses there are and ways of removal. I discovered that almost all my friends had infected computers and I liked to clean them. Unfortunately I have had to fight only with spyware, troyans, backdoors and dialers. All other kinds of viruses, like worms and real viruses that infect exe files are unknown to me and I had no experience with them. I have started to think that they dont write these anymore! If I found a suspicious file online I would send it to an antivirus company for analysis and they would reply whether the file contains a virus or not. Kaspersky has been the fasted in responce so far, although I have only sent viruses to kaspersky and antivir. This was something I admired. How can that russian guy know whether that file is a virus within an hour? What do they do with those files? How do they analyse them? Those were questions that started to slowly form within my mind. It has only been a few weeks since I typed in google "how to analyze a virus". Unfortunately I did not get any results with instructions for beginners. It seemed that virus analysis needs programming knowledge which I do not have. It is all so very technical. Disappointed I gave it up.
Today I read in the F-secure weblog about the "T2'06 Reverse Engineering Challenge". Its like a competition that challenges people to analyse a program. I imagined that it takes the same skills needed for virus analysis. The magical words "reverse engineering" produced great results in google and this might be a good time to start researching on this. It might take me a few years to learn how to do this but unfortunately only the first person who solves the riddle gets a prize!
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