[Preview+Feedback] August 2005 Digit Magazine

[Raaabo]

Whoops, I forgot to post the preview of the magazine... AGAIN! I think i'm getting old

As usual, this is the Preview AND feedback thread!

Digital Passion

Crime And The City
India's IT laws are dated, and those relating to cyber crime are woefully inadequate. Here's what a prominent cyber crime lawyer has to say about the situation

Biometrics
Biometrics is touted to be the future of security. Of course it is. Find out more about the technology behind it all

The Future Of Search
We search all the time. Search engines, not portals, are the order of the day. Where is search headed? When will the perfect search engine arrive?

30 Days With...
Bhaskar's 1 month with the iRiver PMP-140

Lords Of The Code
A project on Open Source technology brings prestige and pelf to graduates of the Army Institute of Technology at Pune

Visual Explanation
How a microprocessor works

Geek Dreams
Archos AV700

Digital Tools

Get Your Degree Online
The what, where, when, why, who and how of getting an overseas degree online

Net Gain
Giantexplorer.com

A Linux For Everyone
The latest Linux distro's tested to find the ideal candidate for SoHo use.

New & Notable
GigabyteG-MAX N501; Palm LifeDrive Mobile Manager; Samsung SGH-D500; Kodak EasyShare Z740; Motorola A780; Logitech MX518 Gaming-grade Optical Mouse

Agent001
Agent001 on the hunt for a PDA phone


Digital Business

A Lossless Compression
Compressing, transmitting and archiving important medical reports is just what the doctor needed

Making An impression
Continued evolution in printers and MFDs has ensured improved features and reduced prices. So which is the right one for you?

Are You Game - Trend
Leveraging games and technology to attract consumer eyeballs seems to be the marketing mantra for films, FMCGs, and just about any new product or brand.

Should A Company Monitor Employees' E-mails?
Is keeping a tab on employee e-mail justified?

Digital Leisure

A Cafe For The Blind
Text-to-speech software can help open up the world of the Internet to the blind

Tech Critique
Game Review: Cricket 2005

All this and much much more of course...

[chinmay]

Whoa .. articles look nice ... seems I'll have to hurry to buy my copy ... I have quoted my favourites topics :-

Biometrics
Biometrics is touted to be the future of security. Of course it is. Find out more about the technology behind it all

30 Days With...
Bhaskar's 1 month with the iRiver PMP-140

Geek Dreams
Archos AV700

A Lossless Compression
Compressing, transmitting and archiving important medical reports is just what the doctor needed

Agent001
Agent001 on the hunt for a PDA phone

Tech Critique
Game Review: Cricket 2005

Seems DIGIT is improving. There was no article which didn't interest me

[ShekharPalash]

# Was little excited when I saw the *BIOMETRICS* on cover... I thot this time DIGIT covered lot of articles on Biometrics... I thot *A Biometrics Special Isue*... wow!

Unfortunately, It wasn't. Article was good, but kind of small

# There was a NVIDIA Video Encoder/Decoder in DVD/CD... don't remember, which was not even a shareware... it asked directly to activate... not even any trial period... ? Why such things? ... or was it asking for activation on my ATI GPU system...?? ... Anyone?

# Thnx for PDFs... as I forgot my last month's issue in train last month!!!

# Lol... this month I realized tht CD & DVD contents are different from last couple of months... lol... I used to ignore CDs thinking it's all n DVD... !!

[QuickFire]

Received my issue tday due to mumbai rains.

Excellent Cricket 2005 review by Raaabo but c'mon u can win a game easily. Its not tat difficult. I won 6 games in a row after losing 3 I've done a review too..u can check that out here -
http://www.techenclave.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6009

The Q&A and other regular sections are good. Yet to go through all the contents but overall looks good. The editor's post abt improvement in quality of digit is not correct. Maybe quantatively, digit have improved. More contents due to tat Fast Track booklet and I appreciate that but quality needs a lot of improvement. Even the paper quality of last couple of issues is not upto the mark. I dunno if its me only but I feel most of the articles included in Digit are boring (yet to read this months articles) but I think you ppl shud come up with more interesting articles.

[mediator]

Fc4 superb... please try to give Suse 9.3 pro next time!

[Biplav]

well well well. 8) 8)
i must say the Fast track was superb this time round.
although i had a fair bit of knowlegde in most of the things written down; but then the "fair bit" was enhanced like hell!!!.
Make no mistake bout it this was an awesome read.
i read the entire thing on my journey in the train.
the Magazine was gud(although i got nothing to do now with mfds and printers)still is useful for the ones who need.
another thing:and this is not a positive comment:
has the magazines paper quality reduced??? 8) 8)

All in All hats of to the Fast Track Writers

[Raaabo]

Originally Posted by QuickFire

Received my issue tday due to mumbai rains.

Excellent Cricket 2005 review by Raaabo but c'mon u can win a game easily. Its not tat difficult. I won 6 games in a row after losing 3 I've done a review too..u can check that out here -
http://www.techenclave.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6009

Yeah I noticed the bugs too... I always select all fast bowlers with both out and inswing capabilities and always bowl out swingers that pitch a millimeter outside off stump. Try keeping the bowling curser just outside and behind off stump (yes... the ball needs to pitch JUST BEHIND off stump) Since it's not hitting the wicket, the batsman (computer) tries an off side shot instead of a straight bat, and always misses! When his confidence is low enough, you can pitch the ball a millimeter more in, and graze off stump to get his wicket...

However, the review looked at gameplay in the default Medium mode, and with a person trying to play "cricket" by pitching good length balls... Funny how slip fielders NEVER get catches, or even the wicket keeper for that matter...

Overall, personally, I think it's a bad buy, but i know people in India are too cricket crazy to care

[mobilegeek]

This edtion of Fast Track ... is gr8.
I knew about the Edge stuff .. etc. but i am sure it would be usefull to others.
The 100+ site was impresive.
But there was nothing kool in mag, ... and the DVD was scrap .. already have the latter versions of SW downloaded

[QuickFire]

Originally Posted by Raaabo

Yeah I noticed the bugs too... I always select all fast bowlers with both out and inswing capabilities and always bowl out swingers that pitch a millimeter outside off stump. Try keeping the bowling curser just outside and behind off stump (yes... the ball needs to pitch JUST BEHIND off stump) Since it's not hitting the wicket, the batsman (computer) tries an off side shot instead of a straight bat, and always misses! When his confidence is low enough, you can pitch the ball a millimeter more in, and graze off stump to get his wicket...

However, the review looked at gameplay in the default Medium mode, and with a person trying to play "cricket" by pitching good length balls... Funny how slip fielders NEVER get catches, or even the wicket keeper for that matter...

Overall, personally, I think it's a bad buy, but i know people in India are too cricket crazy to care

thanx for the nice tip.
slip fielders and wicket keeper not getting any catches is really funny. I try and bowl out swingers round the wicket for right handed batsmen and pitch the ball outside leg stamp. In most cases, they miss the ball and get bowled You can do the same way for left handers. It helps in keeping the runs down too.

I agree with the fact that its a "bad buy" but when it comes to cricket, you don have too many choices.

[Radhika]

nice issue!
thanks to digit team

i was actually looking for fc4 million thanks to digit

would like to read more on biometrics im upcoming issues

[lywyre]

The Printers Round Up was good, though I would have liked cost per page for all the printers.

And one more lingering question is?:



And I have one DAMN Question :

WHY WAS HP PRINTERS EXCLUDED?

[~Phenom~]

i simply loved this month's issue.
what i liked most are
Crime And The City
Biometrics
A Linux For Everyone


besides these i also liked
The Future Of Search
30 Days With...
Should A Company Monitor Employees' E-mails?

in future , i would like read more on
Biometrics and cyberlaw

overall , fantastic issue
thanx to team digit.

[qwan]

Biometrics
Biometrics is touted to be the future of security. Of course it is????
I was shocked by this article. This looked like a lobbied article. The author never mentioned the cons of biometrics. He has only mentioned about privacy issues, "Big Brother" and "doomsday conspiracies"( :roll: )
This makes me question the true spirit of digit. Is digit really giving us the right information/knowledge.

The biggest drawback of biometrics is a password is a password but a fingerprint is you.
To better understand my point i think that you should know one thing :- FINGERPRINT SCANNERS ARE NOT FOOLPROOF?
All the crime departmetns of the world are capable of getting fingerprints digitizing it and automatically scan it against a database.
So if you can digitize a fingerpring dont you think it is possible to take that same image and create a fingerprint glove with todays nanotechnology.
Infact a german hackers group has already published how to tranfer fingerprints to a laser printer and make an impression of fingerprint with hardened glue.
A small experiment can be dont at home take apna very own desi fevicol and smear it on your fingers(wash them clean) in a very thin even layer let it dry and then peel it off carefully and observe it with a magnifying glass and you will see your fingerprints on it very clearly that is just a start tranfering it to a mould and making latex gloves out of it wont be a huge task for the criminal mind.
Now coming back to the what i said earlier. A password is a password but a fingerprint is you!!!
As you now know and it is an open fact that fingerprints can be easily duplicated(why is it still being touted by major companies and goverments and sadly our very own digit could be the fact that "Big Brother" doesnt care about that they just want to watch us)
.
So picture this.
Someone hacks your hotmail password. What do you do?
IF the hacker is a lamer he wouldnt have bother to change the secret question and you can get your password back otherwise if you were using the same password for your paypal account and other more valuable logins like online trainings all you have to do is immideatly go to all the sites that use the password and change it immideatly.
Now just say someone reproduces your fingerprint in the manner describe above. What can you do?? Get a new set of fingerprints??? You are screwed.
Some school of thoughts suggest a combination of username password+ fingerprints. But then the problem would be the same only the criminal has to be a good hacker too.
I just think this entire fingerprint facade it got more control over the population. I am not a conpiracy thoerist but i dont see any other reason for promoting fingerprint/biometrics.
(This is my prediction.
THe filmi world of minority report might just become future reality.
Everything become biometric. Hacker got wild with fingerprint gloves
and then "big brother" makes the world of minority report a reality.
Where computers/cameras keep on scanning everybody in the name of security. The excuse would be if your fingerprints were reproduced then the cameras would scan for the face at the atm or whereever and catch the offender.)
Man this biometrics is insane
Even the retinal scanner was debunked in the movie Demolition man. Wesley sniper the villian just takes a pen and plucks out the eye of a official and by passes the retinal scanners using the only the eyeball!!!
I think biometrics will increase the hideousness of crimes i think getting your password hacked is better, atleast your eyes remain in your sockets and maybe nobody will cut of your hand to get into your atm account!
They say that theoritcally it is possible to maybe take high resolutions pictures of your eyes and tranfer them to a contact lens or maybe just creat an entire artificial eyeball.
Voice recognition can easily be hacked. Just record enought conversations of the victims voice and you can use a computer to digitally edit the anybodys voice to match the voice patterns of the victim. Then record it on to a high quality portable player and replay it to open just about anything.
The end word where will all this data of fingerprint patterns be stored Ultimately in computer which has to be online. I rest my case.

[qwan]

Other links from the experts
http://www.keuning.com/biometry/
Preview:
To assess the risk and security of the system itself, Ton started the evaluation of biometrical fingerprint recognition systems over 10 years ago. As he discovered back then, the systems have some serious security flaws. We have waited until the year 2000 before making this story known to the public, in order to enable the manufacturers to fix the problems. However, none of the fingerprint systems we have tested have been able to close the security holes in it. The main issues with fingerprint technology are (see also Article 3 below):

*

It seems to be impossible for manufacturers to implement a technology that can distinguish between the upper skin of a finger (which is almost dead material) and artificially created dummy fingers of silicon rubber, acrylic paint, etc.
*

Every day, you leave numerous perfect fingerprints behind on glasses, doors, vending machines, tables, and many other places. These latent fingerprints can be lifted and used to create perfect duplicates.
*

To create dummy fingers, the techniques require few skills and the materials are readily available (all materials can be bought in normal stores) and cheap (material price is around €10 - €25).

Obviously, other biometric identification or verification do not suffer from (all of) the above weaknesses, but should also be very carefully considered on their purpose, use, and added value before implementing.

[~Phenom~]

@qwan,
good, nice , interesting and thoughtful post.
keep it up.

[AGENT_SMITH]

Originally Posted by lywyre

The Printers Round Up was good, though I would have liked cost per page for all the printers.

And one more lingering question is?:



And I have one DAMN Question :

WHY WAS HP PRINTERS EXCLUDED?

bECAUSE hP COULDN'T PROVIDE THE PRINTERS
DIGIT HAS MENTIONED NOTE ABOUT IT AT END OF REVIEW