Fireball

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.

After launching Pragyan last year, NIT Trichy is again buzzing with activity for Pragyan 2006. Pragyan’06 as I expected is better than previous year. Activities are decentralized and organised.Most of the prelims are over. The core has been working throughout to make everything in place. External participation is good compared to last year. Around half of the participants are within the college. Stephen Wolfram, Yash Pal and Ankit Fadia are giving us lectures

I’m participating in two workshops. Movies are going to be screened by the newly formed Cinema Paradiso. Besides all these there will be regular screening of documentaries in the New Lecture Hall complex. The Public Relations & Hospitality team are doing a wonderful job. Expecting to get the most out of Pragyan this time.

Jacky Baltes is going to conduct a workshop for us in robotics tommorrow morning .I’m installing Debian for the workshop right now. Finally got the X server configured!