Man-Machine Interaction has constantly been evolving ever since machines were invented.It was computers that marked the beginning of an era where machines began to get smart and intelligent. Smarter machines facilitated better ways of communication and this ease of communication attracted even laymen towards them. As these machines evolved they began augmenting human intelligence to provide better and faster solutions to problems.
"The profound technologies are those that disappear"
Machines took up different shapes and forms of real world objects by encapsulating computing prowess within them. These objects have grown in dexterity to learn and understand human behavior. We are in an era where humans have become oblivious to the existence of these computing devices. Interaction among these ubiquitous computing devices provided a platform for setting up the pervasive environment.
The potential of these environments to understand human behavior has been aided by sensors through the advancement of several technologies facilitated by gesture recognition, haptic perceptions, acoustic and phonetic analysis etc. Soft computing techniques using an agglomeration of these inputs are able to react to human behavior by the use of actuators through technologies like iO2, audio synthesis, haptic simulators etc.
The pinnacle of Humane Computing will be a time where machines would be able to understand and react to human thoughts by analyzing neuron impulses in the human brain. At that juncture it will only be a matter of time before we humans loose our hold as the most dominant species on the planet.
Divya M
Shivram R V
Sudharsan C P
V M.Sc. SWE
Originally posted online @ http://richiervs.blogspot.in/2012/01/humane-computing-beginning-of-new-era.html
Showing posts with label Computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Computers. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Friday, July 17, 2009
The King of Bugs
One bug to rule them all - IE5,IE6,IE7,IE8,Netscape,Firefox,Safari,Opera,Konqueror,
Seamonkey,Wii,PS3,iPhone,iPod,Nokia,Siemens.... and more.
Reference : [GSEC-TZO-26-2009] - One bug to rule them all
CVE : CVE-2009-1692 (created by Apple, this bug has same root cause)
Credit: Thierry Zoller
Affected products :
- Internet Explorer 5, 6, 7, 8 (all versions)
- Chrome (limited)
- Opera
- Seamonkey
- Midbrowser
- Netscape 6 & 8 (9 years ago)
- Konqueror (all versions)
- Apple iPhone + iPod
- Apple Safari
- Thunderbird
- Nokia Phones : Nokia N95 (Symbian OS v.9.2),Nokia N82, Nokia N810 Internet Tablet
- Aigo P8860 (Browser hangs and cannot be restarted)
- Siemens phones
- Google T-Mobile G1 TC4-RC30
- Ubuntu (Operating system sometimes reboots, memory management failure)
- possibly more devices and products that support Javascript,
Patch status :
- Mozilla : Fixed in Firefox 3.0.5 and 2.0.0.19
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=460713
- Thunderbird (unknown)
- IE : No fix for IE5,IE6,IE7,IE8 until IE9
- Konqueror : unknown (did not respond)
- Apple iPhone&iPod : patched
- Nokia : unknown, opened a case but never came back
- Aigo P8860 : unknown
- Siemens : unknown
- Chrome : Patched, version unknown (only tab was affected anyways)
- Webkit : fixed in r41741 - https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23319
- Opera : Patched after version 9.64
- Sony PS3 - still affected
- Nintendo Wii Opera - still affected, Opera sent a "notice" to Nintendo, never heard back from Opera
- Others ? Find out by visiting the POC at http://crashthisthing.com/select.html
I. Background
Quoting Wikipedia "ECMAScript is a scripting language, standardized by Ecma International in the ECMA-262 specification and ISO/IEC 16262. The language is widely used on the web, especially in the form of its three best-known dialects, JavaScript, ActionScript, and JScript."II. Description
Calling the select() method with a large integer, results in continuous allocation of x+n bytes of memory exhausting memory after a while.The impact varies from null pointer dereference (no more memory,hence crashing the browser) to the reboot of the complete Operation System (Konqueror&Ubuntu).
There had never been a limit specified as to how many html elements the select call should handle, after the report of this Bug, vendors apparently agreed to a limit of 10.000 elements : "Talked to some Apple and Opera guys at the WHATWG social, and we decided this was a good number"
III. Impact
The impact varies from browser to browser and sometimes from OS to OS- Konqueror (Ubuntu)- allocates 2GB of memory then either crashes the Browser or (most often) the OS reboots. Ubuntu's memory management system is configured as to NOT stop the process that consumes too much memory, but a random process. This sometimes leads to processes that are vital for the OS to be killed, hence the reboot. I am not kidding. Thanks to 'FX' for the memory management hint.
- Chrome : allocates 2GB of memory then crashes tab with a null pointer
- Firefox : allocates 2GB of memory then the Browser crashes
- IE5,6,7,8 : allocates 2GB of memory then the Browser crashes
- Opera : Allocated and commits as much memory as available, will not crash but other applications will become unstable
- Nintento WII (Opera) : Console hangs, needs hard reset
Video: http://vimeo.com/2937101 (Thanks to David Raison)
- Sony PS3 - Console hangs, needs hard reset
Video: http://vimeo.com/2937101 (Thanks to Chris Gates)
- iPhone - iPhone hangs and needs hard reset
Video: http://vimeo.com/2873339 (Thanks to g0tcha)
- Aigo P8860 (Browser hangs and cannot be restarted)
IV. Proof of concept
URL: http://www.crashthisthing.com/select.html
Some have not understood what this code does, it does NOT loop as some vendors claimed, it just calls select.lenght() ONCE with a huge integer. One might wonder if over the 9 last years that this bug existed, nobody ever entered a large number in a select.lenght() call.
V. Disclosure timeline
Nothing particular to note.V. Thanks
Chris Gates, David Raison, Fahem Adam,a team of engineers that recognise themselves, oCert
for not helping coordinate this bug.
Note: All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
Courtesy : G-SEC
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Funniest Thread!!!
Hey this is one of the funiest post i ve ever read in a technical forum...
Go ahead read it and have a good laugh....
Go ahead read it and have a good laugh....
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
History of Packet Switching
It has often been said that change is the only constant in the 21st Century.
And there is little doubt that the restless tone of these times is something that the web has helped to accelerate.
But the only reason that the net and the web can cope with that punishing pace is thanks to work done four decades ago by British mathematician Donald Davies at the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
On 5 August 1968 Dr Davies gave the first public presentation of work he had been doing on a method of moving data around computer networks called "packet switching".
The idea may sound mundane but, said John Pethica, chief science advisor at the NPL, the modern world would be a lot slower without it.
The internet, mobile phone networks and fixed line phones now all use the principles Davies and his team established to cram as much data as they can down the cables and wires making up the world's telecommunication networks.
Dr Pethica said the urge to find a better way to handle data emerged when computer networks were almost unheard of.
Donald Davies, NPL
At that time making a phone call involved creating a dedicated circuit between the handset of a caller and the person they wanted to chat to.
"A lot of people realised that point-to-point was going to be a big problem, even for telephones even before they thought about computers," said Dr Pethica. "The problem was how you turn it away from that."
The problem with human speech is that most of it is made up of silence - be that the pauses between words, time taken to breathe or gaps when one person waits for another to speak.
Using most of a telephone network to transmit silence is not a very efficient use of that resource. Far better would be to find a way to fill the blank spots with the moments from others calls when those folk were speaking.
Dr Pethica said many in the computer world in the late 60s were thinking about how to solve this problem.
"There were other ideas around, like Paul Baran at Rand, but they were nowhere near as useful as what Donald Davies did in terms of size of packets and nodes," said Dr Pethica.
"It was Donald who had the idea of making a set of nodes that you send packets of data to that find their own way through," said Dr Pethica.
The insight of Dr Davies and his team was to slice data, be that a chat on the phone, an e-mail or a picture, into separate pieces or packets. These are then put on the network and rely on the intelligence of nodes in the network to help them wend their way to their destination. Once there they are re-assembled into the right order.
Future proof
Dr Pethica said Davies' team worked out the mathematics that optimised such an approach - an idea that has proved its usefulness by still being in use today.
Computer research at NPL, NPL
Error correction schemes included in the technology helped it cope with the poor quality of phone lines in use in the late 1960s, said Dr Pethica. In more modern times those schemes help ensure data makes it across the busy lanes of the internet.
Davies and his colleagues went further than just establishing the concept for packet switching - they also build the first computer networks and proved their ideas could work.
"They had a whole series of early computers at NPL that they turned in to a local area network (Lan)," said Dr Pethica. He pointed out that the NPL scientists built such a network far in advance of the day when such things would become the common way to link up machines in an office.
"The important breakthrough that he and his team made was to build the Lan and make it work," he said.
Even before Dr Davies presented his work publicly, news of it had spread through the international computer science community.
As a result he was invited to talk about it to a team from the US Advanced Research Project Agency (Arpa) working on the fledgling internet. The principles he established were rolled in to the technology to make that network function.
Dr Pethica said packet switching idea was developed with an eye on the future and how a computer network might grow. Forty years on the scalability in the Dr Davies insight is still proving its worth, he said.
Courtesy : BBC News
And there is little doubt that the restless tone of these times is something that the web has helped to accelerate.
But the only reason that the net and the web can cope with that punishing pace is thanks to work done four decades ago by British mathematician Donald Davies at the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
On 5 August 1968 Dr Davies gave the first public presentation of work he had been doing on a method of moving data around computer networks called "packet switching".
The idea may sound mundane but, said John Pethica, chief science advisor at the NPL, the modern world would be a lot slower without it.
The internet, mobile phone networks and fixed line phones now all use the principles Davies and his team established to cram as much data as they can down the cables and wires making up the world's telecommunication networks.
Dr Pethica said the urge to find a better way to handle data emerged when computer networks were almost unheard of.
Donald Davies, NPL
At that time making a phone call involved creating a dedicated circuit between the handset of a caller and the person they wanted to chat to.
"A lot of people realised that point-to-point was going to be a big problem, even for telephones even before they thought about computers," said Dr Pethica. "The problem was how you turn it away from that."
The problem with human speech is that most of it is made up of silence - be that the pauses between words, time taken to breathe or gaps when one person waits for another to speak.
Using most of a telephone network to transmit silence is not a very efficient use of that resource. Far better would be to find a way to fill the blank spots with the moments from others calls when those folk were speaking.
Dr Pethica said many in the computer world in the late 60s were thinking about how to solve this problem.
"There were other ideas around, like Paul Baran at Rand, but they were nowhere near as useful as what Donald Davies did in terms of size of packets and nodes," said Dr Pethica.
"It was Donald who had the idea of making a set of nodes that you send packets of data to that find their own way through," said Dr Pethica.
The insight of Dr Davies and his team was to slice data, be that a chat on the phone, an e-mail or a picture, into separate pieces or packets. These are then put on the network and rely on the intelligence of nodes in the network to help them wend their way to their destination. Once there they are re-assembled into the right order.
Future proof
Dr Pethica said Davies' team worked out the mathematics that optimised such an approach - an idea that has proved its usefulness by still being in use today.
Computer research at NPL, NPL
Error correction schemes included in the technology helped it cope with the poor quality of phone lines in use in the late 1960s, said Dr Pethica. In more modern times those schemes help ensure data makes it across the busy lanes of the internet.
Davies and his colleagues went further than just establishing the concept for packet switching - they also build the first computer networks and proved their ideas could work.
"They had a whole series of early computers at NPL that they turned in to a local area network (Lan)," said Dr Pethica. He pointed out that the NPL scientists built such a network far in advance of the day when such things would become the common way to link up machines in an office.
"The important breakthrough that he and his team made was to build the Lan and make it work," he said.
Even before Dr Davies presented his work publicly, news of it had spread through the international computer science community.
As a result he was invited to talk about it to a team from the US Advanced Research Project Agency (Arpa) working on the fledgling internet. The principles he established were rolled in to the technology to make that network function.
Dr Pethica said packet switching idea was developed with an eye on the future and how a computer network might grow. Forty years on the scalability in the Dr Davies insight is still proving its worth, he said.
Courtesy : BBC News
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