PERL,INGRES,PROGRAMMING

picoCTF, the world's largest online hacking competition, is a computer security game for middle and high school students. Organised by CMU's CyLab, the third contest opens on March 31st and runs for two weeks. It's no secret that there's a shortage of professionals with skills in computer security or, put another way, skills in computer hacking.The justification is simple; to be able to defend yourself you first have to be able to think like an attacker. Awareness about cyber warfare on a national scale, on the latest trends in ransomware, IoT DDOS attacks, sophisticated phishing attempts and XSS exploitations is just the minimum requirement on the ever increasing check list of the security professional. full article on i-programmer

Project Malmo, established in 2015, called Project AIX back then, finds its way out of infancy and into childhood, and is now looking to engage in its first social interactions. To further this it has launched a contest for PhD students. It all started with Microsoft researchers trying to make a Minecraft character climb a virtual hill. This might not sound a big deal, but the difference was that this AI agent tried to overcome its hurdle through learning and interacting with its environment, not by being programmed to do so. Since then, many other research initiatives have found their way into the mainstream, like OpenAI's Gym , a most interesting platform involving AIs that learn  to play a video game on a variety of gaming environments such as Atari, Board Games or even Box2d (Angry Birds anyone?), just as humans do. full article on i-programmer 

The Android Developer Nanodegree, designed by Google and delivered through Udacity's platform, is for intermediate Java developers, or even those experienced in other object-oriented languages, looking to start developing for Android. As such it teaches the tools, principles, patterns and conventions pertaining to Android. full article on i-programmer

The view that serverless is the way of the future is once more reinforced by Google's recent announcement of its Cloud Functions for Firebase. These can be seen as an attempt to catch up with the already established players of the Function-as-a-Service scene, AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. more info on i-programmer

Cracking RAR archives is something not yet achievable as the format has no known vulnerabilities.Let me correct that, no known vulnerabilities as far as unlocking an encrypted RAR archive without the use of a password goes. In this article we look at password cracking by dictionary attack.  Along the way we explore how to turn a single threaded Perl/Tk GUI application into a multi-threaded one. full article on i-programmer

Do you trust that getting rid of third party cookies keeps you safe from tracking? Think again as there's a new cross-browser tracking that can follow you no matter how often you delete cookies or switch browser. Nowadays, privacy issues arising from surfing the web are well known to the public and so are their countermeasures: cleaning your browser's cache, removing cookies, deleting history, installing ad-blockers and privacy aware extensions which reveal the trackers behind every page you visit. These are more or less the minimum of actions you can employ in feeling moderately safe. Of course there's much more you can do, such as Tor-enabled browsing, using a VPN or embrace the extremes of SilentKeys' Privacy Aware Keyboard. Nevertheless, all these measures fall within the realm of the superuser and are beyond the expertise of the general publi c. However there's a new technique that exploits other innocently leaked information by the browser in...

Cloud Spanner is a new proposition for database as a service that emphatically offers "Relational with NoSQL scaling". Will Google come to dominate yet another market? Once upon a time there was only one kind of database management system, the RDBMS, "R" for relational. Despite its resilience and trustworthiness, it had its shortcomings; it did not scale well, and the relational model it served proved inadequate in the dawn of the Big Data era for handling massive amounts of schema-less, unstructured data. For this and a few other reasons, a new breed of DBMS's emerged, one that could handle the avalanche of big data, based on the notion of the key-value pair, and doing so by scaling horizontally. But, in order to become versatile, this new breed of management systems had to forgo the safety of the ACID and the cosiness of SQL, both long term partners of the relational model. full article on i-programmer