The elusive art of password-cracking has enticed many a mortal! Everyone has, at one point or the other, contemplated cracking someone’s password to get access to their private information. Whenever people hear the term ‘hacking’, the first thing that comes to their mind is ‘cracking passwords’. A lot of people think that password-cracking is the very definition of hacking. Some people think that password-cracking is the same as stealthily looking at someone type their password. I hate to burst your bubble, but that’s not password-cracking. What exactly is it then? How do we do it? Continue reading “The Art Of Password Cracking”
Looking Into The Future With Google Glass
Unless you shut down all your gadgets and hid yourself in a dark alley with absolutely no connection to the rest of the world, you would have heard that the Google I/O conference started on June 27. It is one of the most exciting events in the realm of tech innovation. Google came up with a couple of new devices – A 7-inch Android Jelly Bean tablet called Nexus 7 and a social media streaming device called Nexus Q. But that’s not what this blog post is about. I want to talk about the insanely cool Google Glass demo that they presented in the conference. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can see it here. This reminded all of us why we love and adore Google. The technology falls in the category of Wearable Computing. When they started it out a few years ago, it sounded very futuristic, but not anymore. It’s here and we just saw it! Continue reading “Looking Into The Future With Google Glass”
Understanding Camera Resolution
Cameras are being embedded everywhere. We find them on our phones, tablets, laptops and other types of gadgets as well. Digital cameras are getting sharper and smarter by the day. Some cameras capture good quality pictures while some cameras don’t. We frequently come across the camera specs which mention the ‘MP’ value of the camera. You understand the fact that a 12MP camera takes better pictures than a 5MP camera. Have you ever stopped to think what makes it better? More pixels means better pictures. Why exactly is that? Continue reading “Understanding Camera Resolution”
The Computer Infections
Do you remember getting incensed because something slowed down your computer? You don’t remember what you did, but your computer is now slow, buggy and some of the things are not working the way they are supposed to. Sounds familiar? A layman would say “your computer has been infected with a virus”. Is that right? Sure, your computer has been infected. But not everything that infects is a virus. Just like how we have racists for races, we have softists for softwares! After reading this post, you will not be one of those. You would have come across terms like malware, spyware, worms etc. Now what exactly are these things? Continue reading “The Computer Infections”
I Came. I Heard. I Understood.
I’m pretty sure all of us have encountered a speech recognition system in our lives. Speech recognition is used in smartphones, automated customer service, and many other high-end gadgets. It’s being increasingly integrated in many devices to provide a better hands-free user experience. Apple came up with Siri for iPhone and most of the Android phones have speech recognition enabled in some form or the other. But how does it actually happen? Most people are annoyed by the quality of the speech recognition systems, and I don’t blame them for it. This happens mostly because they have surprisingly little knowledge about how their words are actually understood by the machines. I have worked on speech recognition in the past and so I just wanted to take a stab at it to explain what happens under the hood. Continue reading “I Came. I Heard. I Understood.”
Hack Me Once, Shame On You. Hack Me Twice, Shame On Me.
We hear the word ‘hacking’ all the time. Most people think that hacking is something smart, cool and wrong. But what exactly is hacking? Is it just smart coders breaking into websites? The hacking culture is great and it inspires creativity, but why limit it to just a few people? People actually do it everyday in different ways and different capacities. It is in our inherent nature to get around the rules if we don’t get something we want. There’s a hacker in every one of us, we just don’t know it yet. Continue reading “Hack Me Once, Shame On You. Hack Me Twice, Shame On Me.”
Good Things Come In Small Packages
We encounter digital images everyday. We see a lot of JPEG files on our computers, cameras, phones and tablets. The actual images are huge and it should actually take up a lot of space to fit in all that data. But somehow our machines are able to compress all those images and store everything compactly. Ever wondered how it’s possible to fit so many images in such small space? How can the JPEG algorithm achieve so much reduction in size without visibly losing the image quality? Continue reading “Good Things Come In Small Packages”
The Linkedin Debacle
If you are following tech news, you might very well be aware of the fact that there was a security leak in Linkedin recently. A Russian hacker leaked around 6.5 million Linkedin passwords along with 1.5 million passwords from a dating website (possibly eHarmony) to get the total to around 8 million. If you haven’t changed your Linkedin password yet, it’s about time! Now how on earth could this have happened? What exactly went wrong? Continue reading “The Linkedin Debacle”
Inside The Shell of Shell Scripting
I’m pretty sure people working in the tech domain are aware of something called Shell Scripting. Were you ever working on a project and felt that some tasks were repeating over and over again? Did you feel that there should be an easy way to automate these things and you don’t have to worry about it every single time you want to run your project? People who have heard about shell scripting and don’t know what it is, you are missing out on a cool weapon in your arsenal. People who haven’t heard about shell scripting, well it’s time to move you into the other category. So what exactly is shell scripting? Continue reading “Inside The Shell of Shell Scripting”
Oblivious Machine, Thou Shalt Learn
Why do we want machines to learn? What do we want to them to “learn” exactly? There is a lot of misunderstanding regarding the concept of machine learning. Is machine learning just robots learning how to walk and talk? Is it just machines learning how to do a particular fancy task? Not exactly. I thought I should just try to explain it in plain simple terms. Think about the following: How do search engines provide the best possible search results? How does multi-touch work on your smartphone or tablet? Continue reading “Oblivious Machine, Thou Shalt Learn”
Perpetual Enigma 