So you have a Django project and you want to use Eclipse IDE to modify and control it. When I say “existing Django project”, I mean a Django project created without using Eclipse. If you are not sure how to use Eclipse to manage your Python project, you can check out this blog post. You basically need to install PyDev and configure the Python path for Eclipse. Once you install everything, you should be able to see PyDev listed when you start a new Eclipse project. Continue reading “How To Convert An Existing Django Project To Eclipse Project”
Category: Web
Image Steganography
As discussed in my previous post, steganography is the art of hiding the fact that communication is taking place. We achieve this by hiding original information inside other information known as carrier files. Many different carrier file formats can be used, but digital images are the most popular because of their frequency of occurrence on the internet. For hiding secret information in images, there exists a large variety of steganographic techniques, some are more complex than others, and all of them have respective strong and weak points. Different applications have different requirements of the steganography technique used. For example, some applications may require absolute invisibility of the secret information, while others require a larger secret message to be hidden. How do we achieve this? How robust is it? Continue reading “Image Steganography”
Steganography
Let’s say that we want to communicate with someone secretly. We prefer that only the intended recipient have the ability to decode the contents of the communication. We obviously want to keep the message secret. Sounds familiar? A common solution to this problem is to use encryption. An encryption scheme takes a message and transforms it into an unreadable format so that an eavesdropper can’t read it. Now what if we don’t want anyone to find out that there is communication going on? As in, if the attackers don’t know that something is going on, then there are lesser chances of getting attacked right? How do we achieve this? Are there techniques to that allow us the hide this information? Continue reading “Steganography”
Asymmetric Dominance Effect
Let’s consider a situation. There is a company with two products, A and B. Both these products have their own merits and demerits. Product A has relatively less features, but it’s price is low. Product B, on the other hand, has more features but it’s more expensive. Consumers tend to pick both these products depending on their needs. Now the company introduces a third product, C. The asymmetric dominance theory says that you can affect the consumer behavior using this third product. You can make the consumers shift towards product A or product B by designing product C in different ways. Now how is that possible? How can we change consumer preference between A and B without even modifying these products? Continue reading “Asymmetric Dominance Effect”
Where Does Myspace Stand After The Redesign?
Myspace recently revamped its website completely. Unfortunately, the unveiling coincided with Facebook’s big announcement about Graph Search. So obviously Myspace got overshadowed! It still managed to generate some buzz, but where exactly is Myspace heading with this? They took too much time to come up with a redesigned site and social networking domain has become too crowded now. Is there any hope for yet another social network to survive? Continue reading “Where Does Myspace Stand After The Redesign?”
Investors Are Unimpressed By Facebook’s Graph Search
Facebook unveiled its graph search recently. This announcement was highly anticipated and Facebook is banking on it to generate some revenue. While it is very good from a technological point of view, the unveiling didn’t exactly impress the investors. The stock prices actually went down after the announcement. Facebook really wants to create a source to generate sustainable revenues. What exactly are the investors looking for? Even though graph search looks promising, why aren’t the investors convinced yet? Continue reading “Investors Are Unimpressed By Facebook’s Graph Search”
How To Build A Web Crawler?
I was reading an article the other day and I came across the term “web crawler”. The context in which it was used got me a little curious about the design of a web crawler. A web crawler is a simple program that scans or “crawls” through web pages to create an index of the data it’s looking for. There are several uses for the program, perhaps the most popular being search engines using it to provide web surfers with relevant websites. Google has perfected the art of crawling over the years! A web crawler can pretty much be used by anyone who is trying to search for information on the Internet in an organized manner. It is referred to by different names like web spider, bot, indexer etc. Anyway, that article got me thinking about building a web crawler. I just wanted to fiddle with it and see how much time it will take to get something working on my machine. It turned out to be quite easy! Continue reading “How To Build A Web Crawler?”
Onion Routing
I was recently reading some literature about data encryption and I stumbled across an interesting concept. The classic secure communication model is the one where the sender encrypts the message and sends it across the network, which is then decrypted at the receiver’s end. In real life, this is done over several networks and several routers. This method works well because we assume that the routers are completely secure and they do exactly what they are told. Now what if a router is compromised on the path? An attacker will be able to monitor all the traffic that goes through it. Once the attacker gains control of the router, many bad things can happen like decryption of secure messages, false communication, leakage of sensitive details etc. How do we prevent it? Continue reading “Onion Routing”
The Power Of A/B
Designing a website is more of an art than a science. There are a million different ways to design a website and achieve a particular goal. We want our websites to eventually become popular and make money. Once the site is designed, it cannot be stagnant for long either. But how do we know if the users will like the new design? User base is critical and losing them is very risky. Once the users lose trust, it’s very difficult to earn it back. We want to take the guesswork out of website optimization and enable making decisions based on real data. By measuring the impact of the changes, you can ensure that every change produces positive results. So how do we do it? Continue reading “The Power Of A/B”
Operation Aurora
On January 14, 2010 McAfee Labs identified a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer that was used as an entry point for Operation Aurora to exploit Google and at least 20 other companies. Microsoft issued a security bulletin and patch immediately. Operation Aurora was a coordinated attack which included a piece of computer code that exploits the Microsoft Internet Explorer vulnerability to gain access to computer systems. This exploit is then extended to download and activate malware within the systems. The attack, which was initiated stealthily when targeted users accessed a malicious web page, ultimately connected those computer systems to a remote server. Now this connection was used to steal company intellectual property and additionally gain access to user accounts. Why did the users visit the malicious web page? Likely because they believed it to be reputable. This attack became particularly famous because of the level of sophistication and the obfuscation methods used. Continue reading “Operation Aurora”
Perpetual Enigma 