Surveillance is so easy!

India has approved installation of NarusInsight machines at ISPs, so it is anybody's guess how prevalent these are here.

A single NarusInsight machine can monitor traffic equal to the maximum capacity (10 Gbit/s) of around 39,000 DSL lines or 195,000 telephone modems. But, in practical terms, since individual internet connections are not continually filled to capacity, the 10 Gbit/s capacity of one NarusInsight installation enables it to monitor the combined traffic of several million broadband users.

According to a company press release, the latest version of NarusInsight Intercept Suite (NIS) is "the industry's only network traffic intelligence system that supports real-time precision targeting, capturing and reconstruction of webmail traffic... including Google Gmail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gawab Mail (English and Arabic versions)."

It can also perform semantic analysis of the same traffic as it is happening, in other words analyze the content, meaning, structure and significance of this entire traffic, as it is happening.

More:

http://www.narus.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software)

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

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

Update Modified Timestamp on Windows | Equivalent of Unix touch command

This is a common operation, and there should be a straightforward way to do it. Well, there is one. Suppose myfile.txt is the file in question, you can update its last modified date and time using this in command prompt:

copy /b myfile.txt +,,

The operation may be slow on very large files. There are other ways to do it as well but I find this the simplest one.

More on this is discussed at Stack Overflow.

I came across this by reading Alex Pinsker's blog so many thanks to him for the tip.

Pakistan starts Daylight Saving Time April 15, 2009

We are lucky that there are not many critical software being used in Pakistan that have to automatically adjust to DST settings (or may be there are but nobody cares!) Otherwise I could see many a software programmers pulling their hair out and yelling into their screens …

"Oh man! … you change Daylight Saving settings and that too on short notice. On top of that you change the clocks in the middle of the week on a business day ... and you are not even certain when the clock will shift back …"

My rant ends here ……

http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/pakistan-daylight-saving-2009.html

Daylight Saving starts in Pakistan … Not again !!?:( … Oh God, save me the agony, the pain!! http://bit.ly/19cwaB

Some Interview Questions

Here are some links to some interview questions related to programming:

(1) FizzBuzz Test:
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100.
But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for
the multiples of five print "Buzz".
For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz"
(Source)


(2) TopCoders

(3) This is interesting. There has been some recent research that proposes a way to separate programming sheep from non-programming goats in computer science classes - long before the students have ever touched a program or a programming language.
Discussion about the paper: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000635.html
Link to original research: http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/
See this document for the list of questions: http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/test(week-0).doc

(4) How might you design a program that lets people play Monopoly with
each other over the internet?
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2006/06/my-favourite-interview-question.html