*I* deas

The worst thing about all the fun u have in a sem is the time when you are asked to sit down and calculate your percentage bunks.
Today was one such day when madam was talking about how many peopl ewere runing short on attendance .

As she passed out the list , my roomie prasanna was checking out mine and announced 12 bunks out of 36 BOY !! that was less than 70% and i was scared , he had 10 bunks less than 75% as well but mine was well below .

And at the end when i rechecked them i had nine bunks out of 36 an exct 75% . Ufff another sem passes by with attendance jus scraping thru :)

Taggy–

A couple of days EARLIER i was reading to a girls weblog, which talked about breakups and possibility of reunions.
At the start let me declare i still very firmly believe in the theory of (firstlove–>marriage).For a relationship to work ,You have to make it work .

But somehow today as i look around myself, People seem to move in and out of relationships easily enough.probably its the lack of a real attitude in to a relationship or they have a deep faith in indian population rate.You know, there never is going to be a shortage of boys or girls.

There can be many reasons why a relationship wont work, but i always thot there is one reason why u shud make a relationship work and the reason is none other than YOURSELF.

And past scars make you not go back to the previous relations.And most of the time people end up crying for the lost relations than to make it work again. I surely feel no shame in goingback to your past and try and see if you can correct them,no matter how harsh it and afterall the person u loved is just another person.And mind you i say all this assuming “You still love the person “.Which is true in most cases, the first love ceases to go out of memory. and all other attempts at falling become more a medicine for the past hurtings than just a genuine love.

And in most cases if ou are weak enough , umight just be taken for a emotional roller coster again.This is one of the first reasons i always believed one should try and look to see through your first love i remember the first time i saw someone comeup like this ,it was with goddess.
and trust me ,the minute she let people know she had brokenup, and given the fact she is very pretty ,Suddenly a whole swarm of would be emerged and everyone was sweet atleast thats how they sound.For a second she did confide , she might fall in for someone , and i realise how scared i was.For i knew most o fthese guys here and i also knew what men can do with a gal who is weak enough on morale.and it took some long hours of talks to get her back to thinking abt her ex :) an dit did work.They came together and the love only increased. And if hs ehad chosen ,and the reason she gave for the split,inability of men to commit.well thats something which comes upon in every phase and its jus so easy to throw away a relationship in words and i am sure its 1000 times difficult to really discard it.

In a case where the split is really an uncommited love,then the option obviosuly is to look for another love .But how do u do it ?

Married at the age of four, an Afghan girl was subjected to years of beatings and torture, finally escaping to discover that within all the world’s cruelty, there is also some kindness.

Afghanistan - Eleven-year old Gulsoma lay in a heap on the ground in front of her father-in-law. He told her that if she didn’t find a missing watch by the next morning he would kill her. He almost had already.

Enraged about the missing watch, Gulsoma’s father-in-law had beaten her repeatedly with a stick. She was bleeding from wounds all over her body and her right arm and right foot had been broken.

Read th erest of story here

Its official.. you can get the source code to Sun’s Ultra T1 chip and its even gpl’d … no its not in C/C++ or Perl or even java so don’t expect to compile it… its in Verilog

So finally we have the SUN coming heavily on to FOSH :p he he free and Opensource hardware :D

Get the Verilog code here

In Mac OS X, the root account is disabled by default. The first user account created is added to the admin group and that user can use the sudo command to execute other commands as root. The conventional wisdom is that sudo is the most secure way to run root commands, but a closer look reveals a picture that is not so clear.
What you get with sudo

What are you really gaining by using sudo in the default Mac OS X configuration? First, you gain some comfort that nobody can login as root, either locally or remotely via SSH or FTP and tamper with your machine. Second, you get a log entry in /var/log/system.log every time sudo is used showing you who used it and what command was executed. These appear good enough reasons to endure the slight inconvenience of using sudo.

However, the way sudo is configured out of the box, you only need to enter your own password for authentication. This means that if someone guesses your password or steals it (and has access to it locally or via SSH), they can take over your box just as if you had root enabled.

Worse, if you execute sudo -s to start a root shell, the only thing that shows up in your system.log is this:

Mar 20 07:49:12 sudo: username : TTY=ttyp3 ; PWD=/Users/
username ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/bash

Every other command after starting a root shell does NOT get logged at all. All you can tell from this is when someone started the root shell. Whatever happened after that is a mystery. The same problem exists if a command is executed that permits shell escapes like many text editors, telnet programs, etc. So, in fact, using sudo has gained us absolutely nothing over enabling and using root.

These deficiencies can be mitigated, and we’ll get to that later.
Securing the root account

If you enable the root account, there are a couple of precautions you should take. First, give root a different password than your user account.

You can prevent root logins to SSH by changing this line in the sshd configuration file, /private/etc/sshd_config:
#PermitRootLogin yes
to this:
PermitRootLogin no

Then, stop and restart SSH in System Preferences / Sharing. To go one step further, disable all password logins to SSH and allow only public key authentication. This is how I configure my Linux servers. There are many fine resources on the web that describe the gory details of using SSH public key authentication.

FTP logins by root are disabled by default since the root account is listed in the /etc/ftpusers file. Users listed in that file are not allowed to login using FTP.

Finally, disable user access to sudo by commenting out the %admin line in /private/etc/sudoers:
#%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

With two minor configuration changes, we have a system that is arguably more secure than the default system using sudo. Why? Because if someone guesses or steals your user password, they can’t use sudo to take over the machine. They still have to guess the root password. Of course, if they have a local account, they may be able to use a privilege escalation vulnerability to gain root access, but that is an issue for Apple.
Back to sudo

Is there a way to make the sudo configuration more secure? There are many things that can be done to improve the default settings. Here are a couple.

The most obvious change is to require a different password than your user password to authenticate. This can be done while keeping root logins disabled with a little trickery. First, enable the root account, change the root password, then use Netinfo Manager to change the root shell to /usr/bin/false. Any attempt to login as root will immediately end. Then, you can force sudo to require the root password by adding this line to /private/etc/sudoers:
Defaults:ALL rootpw

Another security enhancement is to set up restrictions by user, and listing specific commands that are allowed to be run using sudo. By limiting the commands that can be run, you can limit the damage that can be done by a user account. This means changing the line in /private/etc/sudoers that grants all commands to users in the admin group. Check the sudoers man page for the details.

With these changes in place, sudo becomes much more secure, and is probably safer than using root directly. You should still change the SSH configuration to deny root logins and use public key authentication.
The real story

I’ve made arguments and suggestions for using the root account and for using sudo. But consideration should be given to the role of the computer and primary user(s) before making a decision on which may work best for you.

The main goal of sudo is to allow users limited access to root commands for the purpose of distributing the sysadmin load. On a single user box, you are only distributing the load to yourself. If you take a few precautions, enabling the root user is perfectly acceptable and can be more secure than the default configuration using sudo. On a multi-user box, sudo adds value and may be the best way to go. Given its limitations, the notion that sudo is always the best choice is dubious. The real story is it depends on the configuration.