Hacking and slavehack with Malcolm Hudson

In Slavehack, we were able to find several ways to hack servers.

- Cracking passwords via Bruteforce: this can be done by using software like l0phtCrack, Dsniff or Hydra, which try multiple passwords to log into a server.

- DDOS attacks: A distributed denial-of-service attack are a way to make the attacked user’s PC’s resources unavailable. DosHTTP 2.0 is an example of this.

- Social Engineering: this method is actually developed without cracking techniques or software. It consists on tricking and manipulating people with social skills to gather confidential information, like IPs in the game. Methods like phishing, pretexting or baiting can be used.

- Erasing of logs and records: This is used not to hack but to prevent being hacked. Methods to do this include: using Auditpool to disable logging, clearing log files with Winzapper, or Rootkits to hide hacker presence.

- Shoulder Surfing: this is a simple way to obtain information which consists only on standing behind the user and observe what they do.

-Firewall Bypasser/Proxy Server: This method is used to get through firewalls which prevent your IP from accessing certain pages or servers. Online tools such HideMyAss exist.

All of these methods are possible, however some are harder than others, and not as realisticly easy as in the game.

e-commerce

I will be working with Faundo Prendoné.
Our Domain name will be www.sassstore.goodsie.com
We will be selling diffrent items that are related with the school.
We will be selling:
-All the school uniform clothing (sports and formal)
-School bags
-We will be selling books that the school asks the students to buy.
- We will also be selling prudcts such like school mugs and stickers or even school notebooks.
-Falta uno mas

Products will be divided into diffrent sections inside the page. The divisions will probably be: Clothing, education and supplies.
-We will decide the stock level for each product depending on.............
-We will have two options of delivery of the products. One is ordering the product and once or twice a week in the school we will have a stand for people to get their bought products or ordering the product and having it delivered to your house at an extra cost.
-

Working from home (worked with Malcolm Hudson)

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Q8sw9duGlQM7K1-ngz_sLIJKu9tpi8IQydikZinGqMk/edit#slide=id.gbf932410_2_75

Multimedia search engines

Worked with Malcolm Hudson:

“Pattern recognition is the art of being able to look at raw data and categorizing it into one of available classes.  This task of detecting, describing and recognizing visual patterns has lead to advances in automating several tasks like optical character recognition, scene analysis, finger print, identification, face recognition etc.”

We searched for pages that talked about pattern recognition and the ones we found more reliable were:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_recognition

http://www.cfar.umd.edu/~vashok/MyPapers/OtherPapers/PRinVideo.pdf

Wikipedia talked more about the general pattern recognition and the other page was a search made by Rama Chellappa, Ashok Veeraraghavan, and Gaurav Aggarwal from the University of Maryland. In the introduction they talked about how pattern recognition works in videos and how it will be possible for it to be used in the future. The page then has some more interesting things on how it works and how it captures people facial expressions and looks.

We also searched for “augmented reality” to see what it was and how it worked. We found a site that explained precisely what augmented reality means.

http://mashable.com/category/augmented-reality/

The page says that “Augmented reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.”

“Virtual reality replaces the real world with a simulated one”

“With the help of advanced AR technology (e.g. adding computer vision and object recognition) the information about the surrounding real world of the user becomes interactive and digitally manipulable”

The page explains very clearly what augmented reality is and its possible fundamental use in the future, there is almost no need to explain in an easier way of what augmented reality means since the author has done a very simple explanation of its meaning. 

Life on other planets?

Worked with: Malcolm Hudson

Our first search was: “life on other planets”, so in order to get a genera l idea, and a few keywords, we used Wikipedia's article: http://bit.ly/BLC9N . After this, we searched for extraterrestrial life as it was wikipedia’s title and seemed more logical. We opened http://bit.ly/ZAoYWN and saw an article which talked about algae–like fossils from a meteore, which even if it isn’t surely legitimate, it seemed much more plausible than beings like humans. So using this, we then searched for “extraterrestrial life sri lanka” (which is where the meteore supposedly fell). We opened http://bit.ly/ViKjES which talked about Sir Fred Hoyle and  Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe’s discovery about the possible proof on extraterrestrial life from this algae. So we then searched for “Sir Fred Hoyle” and found him in Wikipedia http://bit.ly/N99xfb , it says he was respected and made many scientific discoveries in polemic subjects. This indicates that the article is probably trustworthy and right now the closest approach to life on other planets. In all searches, the article was very relevant to the search, expect for maybe the first, "life on other planets" which gave extraterrestrial life as a result, an article by Wikipedia  This is probably for two reasons, first, Wikipedia is very common and popular and because of this many people use it, Google also donates to Wikipedia, and is a "friend". Secondly, all of the words were in the article, as its articles are very extensive and have high chances of the quarries giving Wikipedia as a result. In this case, Life and Planets were the keywords and largely included in the article. If I were a professor, I would reccomend searching for the keywords of the desired result, as Life on other planets is a very large topic, in the case of this final article, I would reccomend searching for "extraterrestrial life sri lanka".

Filter Bubble (work with Facndo Prendoné)

1)     Searches:

Foo Fighters: We both got the same exact results.

Toyota: I got as the first result Toyota from Argentina and Facundo got Toyota from Spain, meaning Google knows I’m from Argentina and knows what I’m looking for.

Movies: first result was the Billboard from movies in Buenos Aires and his was movies from the page movies.com. Imdb.com appeared as second on my search and third on his search.

Wallpaper (images): both of us got the same result.

Google was able to know I live in Buenos Aires Argentina, and it looked for the movies there are in cinemas in Argentina, it also knows that if I type Toyota it is probably because I want to go to their official website, and so instead of taking me to Toyotas website in Japan or Spain my first option was for Argentina.

2)      Last time Google’s privacy policy was changed was on July 27 of 2012, Google said that “the new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you've provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience." Meaning that they will gather all the sites you have been entering with your Google account and with that information they will make assumptions of your preferences and your near surroundings, creating easier searches for you. Google says that this is a great advantage for them and you: "We can make search better—figuring out what you really mean when you type in Apple, Jaguar or Pink. We can provide more relevant ads too. For example, it’s January, but maybe you’re not a gym person, so fitness ads aren’t that useful to you. We can provide reminders that you’re going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day. Or ensure that our spelling suggestions, even for your friends’ names, are accurate because you’ve typed them before." Many people like or criticize this idea, some people might not like it because it removes all of your privacy, and all your life is managed by Google, meaning that it knows what you like, do, where you live etc. One no longer can have a private life, anything that you post on the internet can immediately be known to anyone in the world, and Google takes all of your searches on their search engine and they try to take all of your information for mostly their benefit, so that they can place ads that are more relevant to you. Google now monitors all your online activity and uses that data for their benefit. Google gives you the option to remove the cookie that stores all your online searches and movement, but many people aren’t even aware that Google does this, meaning that they aren’t informed of Google using your information for their gain.

3)      Google does not know who I think I am since I use a program called “adblock” which removes the annoying ads from the internet. The problem is that Google uses their ads to figure who I am and since I don’t have ads they have no information about me. its says:
"no interest or demographic categories are associated with your ads preference so far"

4)      Target was able to know that a teenage girl was pregnant before her parents knew by following what their customers have bought. It was very easy to do. “Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they’ve bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources. Using that, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past.”

This penetration of your private information does concern a lot of people, even me, because it means that the world knows everything about you, and that you can no longer have private things which you probably don’t want the entire world to know, such as the example of this teenage girl being pregnant. In the future, it is very probable that you will know less about yourself than companies such like Google or Target do, they track all of their customer’s records and use it for their advantage.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

Search Engine Rankings

1)

A) We are comparing two search engines, Google and Dogpile. Both pages cover the full length format. In depth, Google really searches the web pages completely and gathers deeper information, Dogpile barely searches the site. They both cover a lot of frequency, Dogpile has more commercial results and Google has more relevant results. Both Google and Dogpile have more web pages as results than other files, but Google shows a fair amount of pictures in the query.

 B) The results from the first page of Dogpile are four websites, Tesla Motors, Wikipedia, hybridcars.com and Kbb.com. Google shares the first three sites with Dogpile, but instead of having kbb.com as the fourth site it has images about electric cars. The difference is very small, but it seems like Google’s choice is smarter because images varies the results slightly rather than showing four articles.

C) In our opinion Google has a better ranking algorithm than Dogpiles. It was pretty evident that Google ranks its results by a few reasons, for example: mentioning of search, paid ads and association with Google. On the other hand, Dogpile seems to choose more commercial results and they rank them with those criteria.

2) Page rank is an algorithm used by search engines which measures web pages relative importance with our results. It assigns points to each result and that’s how it compares them.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engines results.

Web site owners can rank higher on search engines by receiving more views at the website and by having trustful content that people can use to their advantage.

3) A Google bomb is an orchestrated linking campaign that is aimed at creating a high search result for a Web page. Specific keywords are chosen to make a statement about the Web page that is displayed. When these keywords are entered as a search query, the targeted Web page becomes the top result. If you search in Google “Arabian Gulf” this appears:

Talentless Hack is the term used for the first Google bomb by Adam Mathes. He realized Google’s page rank and his friends and him managed to get his site number one for the term talentless hack.

Miserable failure: Was another Google bomb where George Bush’s biography would appear when searching this term.  

are Terra 2050´s statements correct?

Work done by Vicente Martinez Ferro and Malcolm Hudson

"On Earth today, on a different galaxy the next minute.''

The closest galaxy to the Milky Way is called Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy. It is 25,000 light years away from earth, this means that it would take 25000 years to get there going at the speed of light, which is more than 500000000 times slower than the speed required to get there in a minute. There isn't even a planned way to reach a star 4 light years away from earth, as ''Even the most advanced forms of propulsion (even anti-matter engines) cannot make the gap seem any less massive.'' Also, in the possibility of the year in which there is a way of transportation to travel to other galaxies, it would have to go much faster than the speed of light, and the only possibility to go at the speed of light would require all of the energy in the universe, but there still isn't any way to go faster than this. In conclusion, there is not even a thought way of travelling through stars, which are much closer than galaxies, so the fact of travelling to a different galaxy by 2050 is not even feasible, even less to do so in a minute.

http://www.universetoday.com/17044/bad-news-insterstellar-travel-may-remain-in-science-fiction/ by Ian O'Neill who holds a Ph.D in Solar Physics and an M.Phys in Astrophysics

http://zidbits.com/2011/04/why-cant-anything-go-faster-than-the-speed-of-light/

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html by Philip Gibbs

''We will become slaves to machines in the future.''

Terra 2050´s 4th video "hopes and fears" talks about how our greatest worry for the future should be that to "allow intelligent machines to take over." One does not have to believe in everything a video talks about, specially about something uncertain and unpredictable such as the future.

This is a very trending topic on the internet because people get worried if someday, without realizing, machines will be able to take over our power and be more intelligent than us, making us our slaves.

As I mentioned before, it is a very trending topic on the internet, and many people have asked the same type of questions and there is not a strict answer. As the future is unpredictable and technology advances in a way we cannot even imagine we really cannot predict if we will become slaves or not to machines.
It is true that now we have become almost completely dependent to machines, there are lots of things that we have gotten used to do with machines, and without them we don´t know how to do it as it was made before the machine was implemented. www.shvoong.com talks about how useless we have become without machines "If electricity fails, life for each one of us comes to a standstill as all gadgets are operated with it be it AC, TV, computer, a telephone, or any other modern appliance. Perhaps there were times when every work was done with hands be it grinding or travelling far off places."

www.teenink.com talks about how to prevent becoming complete slaves to machines by maintaining our brains functional, and not letting ourselves become completely independent to machines.

"Don't panic, and remind yourself that you won't be conquered by a machine. You will have the calculator follow your commands and not let the calculator convince you to use the "easy" way. It's okay to use a calculator for those occasional complex problems, but our brains are fine for the more frequent smaller ones. Besides, we already have one that we'll always have on hand."

This answer to the recurring question is quite direct, even though people may have different point of views on the future, it is very probable we won´t let ourselves be run by machines.

Sources:

 http://www.shvoong.com/books/children-and-youth/1727499-modern-gadgets-slaves-machines/#ixzz2MaiYylbo

http://teenink.com/opinion/all/article/10064/Slaves-to-Machines/