Fireball

Chris Gill
Bismay woke me up today. The Video Conference talk by Chris Gill of SVASE was scheduled at 8:00AM. I reached Barn half an hour late. We tried recording the videos of the Video Conference using TV Tuner cards. Since I have never been into recording-editing stuffs, we couldn’t record the audio of the conference.

The lecture went on fine. He talked about entrepreneurship and a few questions were also posed to the audience.

I spent the rest of the morning session watching the robots in the Robovigyan contest. Students tried out their line followers. The systems that they employed were really impressive. A Sastra student won the first prize. We later moved on the ground where Unesco Club had organized a mini science exhibition for school students. Avishkar, functional modeling contest was simultaneously going on. After sometime the Aero-modelling company demonstrated one of the models which was simply amazing. He flew the model just above the stalls.

Prof. Yash Pal

The highlight lecture of the day was Prof. Yash Pal. Director came down to receive him from the car. Yash Pal looked a sort of really old scientist. Though aged above 80, he started walking over the stage.His lecture was a very casual and interesting one. He talked about the importance of questioning. Some of his thoughts:

• Children are the best resource for questions
• Believing astrology is safe, unless it does not pamper with your progress

His lecture was not prepared, but was well organized.He gave good explanations of some basic natural activities which impressed me. After Prof.Pal’s lecture, we had a movie by IGCAR, Kalpakkam and later on after dinner, we started setting up for testing the video conference with Dr. Wolfram tomorrow morning. We got a mail from his Secretary saying that they will be ready only tomorrow. We’re meeting Dr.Wolfram tomorrow morning 7:00AM.

Jacky Baltes

Morning Kaly woke me up at around 8:30 and the workshop was at 9:00AM. I hurried to the lecture hall complex, and found Parijat running here and there. Half the Debian systems were not working.Finally we got most of them working. Dr. Jacky and his two students demonstrated their latest robonoids(as they call it). There were three dancing robots among them. They asked us to do some C coding first and in the afternoon session, we were asked to interface with the readymade microcontroller kit using Serial ports.

Jacky Baltes’s robots were really interesting. There were crawling,walking,dancing,line-following robots designed using readymade microcontroller kits.

Finally we came to the Barn to see the inaugration.

Ankit Fadia

Ankit Fadia is crap. The `Guru` or security specialist infact started of with a good topic explaining the difference between a hacker and cracker. Pradeep recieved him and he came to the stage straight-away. Fadia is a good speaker rather than a Security specialist.

One of my college-mate Rajesh Kanna is an expert in collecting softwares, their cracks and pirated version of anything you can name. He’s perhaps better than Fadia. Fadia gave the people a list of websites from where they can download trojans. He also gave a list of softwares with which you can crack into any remote/local system.

He explained the funda of Proxy Jumping where he got ultimate insult. He tried out anonymizer.com, anonymizer.ru and couple of sites where our CSG’s big access denied faced the audience. He gave the hope to students saying that the college can’t ban all the proxy servers in the world. He never showed us a proper demo of cracking into a remote system. He typed the commands in notepad which would help us to send forged mail to any user from anonymous mail address.

He publicised his own books and a new “Ankit Fadia certified Ethical Hacker” Course (Which again is a crap). Probably he’ll give out a longer list of links from where you can download. And yes, he also added that if you don’t find it on internet, just mail him, he’ll send you the software by mail. Cool isn’t it!

Finally when the session was over, I asked him why he preferred Windows XP rather than secure Linux systems for his laptop. He said, “Windows XP is user friendly and I don’t have anything on my laptop to be attacked.”

An Ethical hacker cum Security Guru who prefers a user friendly OS rather than a secure and efficient operating systems - Ankit Fadia.