Tag Archives: life hack

Viruses et al : Natures own AI bots!

Yes,

I stumbled upon this understanding a while back!

Lets look at AI bots first:

  1. They have all logic programmed in them for a particular situation.
  2. They have stimulus response, partially developed.
  3. They need to be activated somehow (OK Google, Hey Siri, Hey Cortana, Yo! Alexa etc)
  4. They partially replicate human senses.
  5. Can wreck hovac!

Now lets see viruses in comparison:

  1. They have all the mechanism in place for replicating and doing their unique thing.
  2. Some are capable of stimulus response
  3. They need a living host body to grow, develop, survive , activate , replicate, spread.
  4. Most of them replicate cell functions that harm the body.
  5. They have caused lot of destruction!

Nature via evolution, creates these complex particles(A virus, that has not yet contacted the host body is called virion, which is made up of nucleic acid(RNA or DNA) and/or an outer shell of protein.).

Once created/come into existence, they need a host system to act, and that happens to be a living cell in a living body.

So the virus cannot operate without cell, similarly the AI bots cannot operate if they run out of battery(cell’s), You see?!

There you go, we are entering a world of human created viruses, as if nature’s contribution was not enough already!!

PS: The word android means : A robot/automaton with a human appearance!

 

Rant : Covid-19 vs Me(The software developer)

Long time, no See folks!

Writing after a long time, a discussion with @SoftwareGod, triggered this blog post!

(I am in self induced inertia!)

So the discussion was about we(s/w devs) contributing to the drug discovery hackathon for Covid-19.

Why I choose not to join:

1/Hackathon is open sourced, everything else is IPR‘ed.

2/No “Getting started with biological virus” guide I could find?

3/What are our R&D scientists doing in virus labs?

4/IMO, get a super computer in place for running simulations, although the mobiles and laptops are a lot powerful today, I am sure super computers run on petaBytes/milliseconds speeds!

So, that done, I recalled, hey! I had once developed an anti-virus programme, in Visual Basic(I had super-less love for M$ at that time).

Going back in that time….

I was forced to learn VB, and I was making faces inside of me, like why??

Coincidentally during that time, my system was hit by HTML RedLof.A virus, it was the era of floppy exchanges, usb drives were not so common.

So, this novel idea sprung up in me, why not cure poison with poison (Hu Ha Ha Ha…. Hu Ha Ha Ha….) šŸ˜€

So my next task was writing a cure for the virus(not vaccine) in my least liked languages M$ VB.

Looking back, this was the algo, which may/maynot be mapped to biological virus.

1/The first thing, I noticed in my system was , the free hard disc space started reducing.

{identify unique or distinguishing symptoms}

2/I could not understand the reason first why. but on closer analysis, I saw my recently modified files being htm,html where the size increased by a fixed amount.

{check inflammatory markers, or the first response body gives when attacked by virus}

3/On opening those files, at the end of the source code, I saw alien code of the virus and its replication.

{Once infected area found, extract and analyze; this is very domain specific}

4/The virus was replicating and affecting html,htm files, other infected extensions were: jsp and vbs.

{understand how virus entered the system, stop that first}

So most probably an infected html or vbs file kept in an already-infected floppy, affected my system.

5/Now that the pattern was identified, I simply wrote VB program, to

a)Scan whole computer for defined extensions files

{in covid-19: various proteins}

b)For each such file, reg-ex the starting of the alien code and end

{find a way to delink the alien protein}

c)Delete that piece of the code

{Kill Kill Kill}

d)Save the file.

{replenish that part, shower with newer safe proteins}

I confirmed the same via anti-virus programmes as:

1/Ran the 3rd party anti-virus : Infection NOT found

2/Infected my system with the virus

3/Ran the 3rd party anti-virus : Infection found

4/Executed my VB program

5/Ran the 3rd party anti-virus : Infection NOT found

This ways my system got rid of the virus completely.

Coming back to biological viruses, I think we can take help from Symantec,F-Secure and such “anti-virus” software making companies, because they have studied so much more patterns of viruses, and that can be employed to faster Drug Discovery!

Thanks for reading! šŸ™‚

What Elon Musk can learn from Java App/Cloud Deployments!

I had an unproductive day yesterday!

I did nothing, but slept through most of the day. And then late night this next challenge of deploying the hush-hush java app over the cloud started to bother me.(afterall it was not a totally unproductive day, thinking wise!)

And then, flash back to a few days, where comparisons were made, what I am doing (javascript ehew!) and what one of the current top living inspiration in the current world Elon Musk is doing, and then I went into sad slumber!

Then yesterday happened, and then it clicked:: we Java devs(web ones, not hard core jdk ones) are orchestrating everything in lifecycle of what Elon Musk is trying to do!

Here is the analogy(it can be extended wonderfully!):

  1. The WAR(Web ARchieve)(sorry, I am old fashioned) is like the unmanned space ship.
  2. The dev JVM is like simulated Mars environment.
  3. The cloud is the SPACE where the bits travel to-and-fro in form of data/packets.
  4. The machine IP Address is like the lat/long of where you want to deploy.

So my current app is in its final integraton phase(hush-hush…) and I am trying to accomplish Slide Driven Development.(nice term!).

Slice Driven Development :: A development approach where a feature/flow is shipped to staging environment as soon as it becomes usable.

Currently I(with @explorer) are trying to integrate all features/flow of the hush-hush app, While I am totally unsure/unaware how it will behave when deployed on staging/production environment. Therefore, I had come up with this approach :: The momemt a feature becomes bug-discoverable, it ought be shipped so that:

  1. Move to the next flow..
  2. Bugs can be quashed..
  3. (most imp)Our path of going from dev–>staging–>production for any feature should be seamless and smooth likeĀ  skating on butter!

And then, a Eureka moment happened!! And this blog post came about!

Your Takeaway: If you are on a team working with Elon Musk(or anyone trying to transport stuff from place X to place Y, in an unsure environment), you can leverage from the experience of thousand if not millions of deployments of web java developers trying to deploy WAR file formats from local dev JVM to production JVM.

We know the nuances of this lifecycle!

It might save you some time! šŸ™‚

The Slow Moving Manifesto!

If you are being tailgated, we recommendĀ you follow this approach to come out of that situation!

Go AbsolutelyĀ Slow!

YES, surprisingly it works out justĀ fine!

Purpose: To know who is tail-gating you AND Why?

How it works?

  • If the vehicle following you sees you slowing down, they will have no choice to speed up (which means they were not following you) or look-you-in-the-eye. (either ways, the problem is solved!)

Benefits of slowing down…

  1. By slowing down, you opened an opportunity to talk.. Human Connect!
  2. By slowing down, maybe you can have a running conversation, you are driving + talking(giving direction who knows). Saves time!
  3. By slowing down, you saved lifes! No stats but still true!
  4. By slowing down, You enjoy the road-side scenary. (remember enjoy the journey not just the destination!)
  5. By slowing down, You literally look the problem in the eye than running away from it.

There goes, we have the Slow MovingĀ Manifesto!

Credits: Smita, Rachit + (KennyG played in our neighbouring park @ 1000 hrs) šŸ™‚

When the internet was crippled to a halt! ~ The dDos attack – A Post Mortem

1 Comment

The Problem

Couple of days back, 21-October-2016 everyone connected on the web experienced sluggishness in connecting to the normal sites and saw obstruction in their regular works.

The scenario can be visually described as follows:

DDOS Attack Explained
DDOS Attack Explained

Incase you might be wondering why this attack happened now, the internet is way mature, why can’t it protect itself from such attacks?

Well, then do read on…

The Players

From an ideal perspective the players in the attack are listed:

  1. Users of the web (us) (attackers and victims)
  2. ISP’s (medium through which attack was carried out)
  3. Device Manufacturers (Things, which got compromised — zombies)
  4. Regulatory Organizations (They are mostly sleeping or doing other important silly stuff, lets leave them out of this discussion)

The Premise

Let us look at those questions asked earlier and more:

What is dDos?

It stands for distributed Denial of Service. Consider your regular pesky thing that you have to do and can’t live without?(siblings,kids,neighbours.. anyhuman thing). They come nagging to you, you can handle it but maybe 10 requests in a day a max! The 11th request from that pesky thing will get a denial of service response!(simply a No!)

Now,Imagine yourself at a play house. And you are already having a minor headache(it was Friday, everyone was in the mood to relax). Multiply your single pesky thing with say 10, you are bombarded with pesky request from everywhere, what will happen to you? You might handle say 20 requests at that moment, looking at the situation, but a time will come soon where you will get exhausted and simply stop responding to important requests of like : open the door, and you are standing still!

You just got dDos’ed šŸ™‚

Can you explain it in layman’s terms?

Here is the wikipedia entry.

I still did not get it..

See this:

Why this attack happened now?

It was waiting to happen, its like too many cooks, spoil the broth kinda scenario. Lot of unpatched/sloppy devices connected to the internet working for you and they all had a common zombie entry point, that simply got activated!

The internet is way mature, why can’t it protect itself from such attacks?

I am sure there are some orgn that were actually fighting this menace! Imagine a hospital unable to get reports of a patient in critical condition!So I am pretty sure what got reported and what actually got fixed and treated is somewhat different. So the internet is not at all mature, we are still not ready to have our life depend on it, our livelihood might depend on it but not life!So some orgn might be involved (even now) preventing many such attacks to keep the internet working, and some sleeping regulations might have also protected and saved us from a much more severe attack!

The rules are pretty simple, everyone is united on this matter and no one likes a dDos attack to happen! It actually interrupts normal/perceived flow of life on a day-to-day basis.

So basically its the attackers who (misued?) a compromised device and affected the network. Its pretty clear, there is something that needs to be fixed/controlled in the wild. And its not impossible..

Onto the solution then, shall we proceed?

The Solution

Two parts solution can be proposed:

  1. Regulation. In an ideal world, regulation is already in place and device manufacturers are supposed to follow them and hence they are able to sell their products. So something stronger needs to be put in place for regulation. Say if a device is an IoT kinda device, then as per regulation it should be allowed to use 5% of the bandwidth. If its a phone or a computer, then it will not have such a restriction, or maybe it can have!
  2. ISP Level Quota Software. ISP’s would want to pitch in this idea, where a custom configuration software would be installed at per user site and there based on the MAC address the bandwidth quotas can be defined. Say you got a new IoT device for your home, you will get to configure and set a max bandwidth that device is allowed to consume on your home network.

Thoughts?

Sculptorā€™s Log

1 Comment

There was once a log, ready to have a meeting with the Sculptor, getting ready for the grind!
Casually it approached the scene, not knowing what is to happen to it next,
Waiting to see who/what is the Sculptor is and what can he do for it?
Seeing a couple of wasted logs around the scene, it could not resist but ask their state!
They said in chorus – “One word, Do as the sculptor saysā€ as they were tossed out of the view.
ā€œAhh, What could the Sculptor ask me to doā€ was the only thought pacing up and down the logā€™s mind!

Log being chiseled!

And the moment of the logā€™s meeting arrivedā€¦
Placed in the hands of the Sculptor, the log could not giggle profusely!
And then.. Bam! Sculptorā€™s chisel tore apart a big chunk from the log.
And the log screamed to the Sculptor, ā€œWhat are you doing, please stopā€
The Sculptor stopped, and asked whether the this log did not have a chatter with other logs?
The log said, ā€œThey said only-to listen to you,they did not tell youā€™ll make me undergo this chiselā€
The Sculptor looked clueless, and the log asked itself to be excused.

After some time of ponderingā€¦
The log thought of going through the process as one strike a dayā€¦
And the deal was madeā€¦
Days,Weeks,Months passed and the log took the blow daily and frowned and complained..
And then one fine day, the Sculptor said to the log, Iā€™m done with you.
And then the sculpted-log was moved to a different place ā€” not knowing where and for what, it cooperated!

Being sculpted

A few days laterā€¦
The log was placed at a higher platform, and then by chance it got to see itself in a mirror!
And it could not believe what it could see ā€” A beautiful deity crossed its sight.
Not believing that was It, the log waited for another such day and then the belief was confirmed.

Outcome of fore-bearing the chiseling

The log had a good after thought..
All the suffering, the chiseling, was given to it for its shaping.
Had it complained and not gone through the grind, it might have become another wasted logā€¦
Thanking the Sculptor, (and the wasted logs for the advice), for his efforts, it just smiled.

(This post is inspired from a story over-heard — all images are googled, no claim on ownership)