Guys of the 90's do you still remember Agfa, Fujifilm and Kodak?

Those were the precious company during the 90s, can you still remember the local photographer like the name of Mang Temy, who usually ride his bike all the way from the other town, just to attend the  event and take you snapshot that will cost  30 pesos to 50 pesos per shot. In todays money what is 30-50 pesos, thats a lot of money during the 90s it  is a one day  wages for transplanting rice in the field  where you are literally planting  rice under the rain or under the sun.  You plant rice all day and get your wages at sun down then spend a little for a bottle of coca cola and save the rest for school and some coins for the bamboo bank.  This bamboo bank will later be opened during special occasion like foundation day, intramural  or christmas party celebration.  During this event the school will organized some activity and have the opportunity to celebrate with classmates, crush-mate, friends and barkadas and sometimes we can take some photographs like one or two shots with the help of the photographer which eventually will pay for the photo when it is printed. Well, those were the experience during the 90s where selfies and duckling smile are not yet conceptualize. Every smile were so precious  which we always cherish those experiences.

What happened to Agfa, Fujifilm, Kodak   and  other photo film company? Today they were overtaken by smart device which will take a photo of you and enhance your look to make you even better.  When you look at the photos of today everything is perfect but sometimes they are very far from reality to the point where you will not be able to realized the same person from the photograph.

Just remembering the days of yesterday.

Advanced Persistent Threat: Personal perspective the right to be informed and equipped

Background:
In todays  information security landscape there are dramatic change in the way and the motivation of cybercriminals.  From the use of worms, virus, spyware, bots to advanced persistent threats (APT), zero day targeted attacks, dynamic trojans, stealth bots and zombie devices from the proliferation of IoT(Internet of Things).  Organisation or individual are facing a threat which is coordinated, organised, targeted and motivated. These new threat are no longer  intended to  disrupt, annoy, destroy and commit cybercrime. They are targeting organisation/individual to steal information for financial gain (financial information), intellectual property or cyber espionage(national security) .

What is APT? (definition by Symantec)

An APT is a type of targeted attack. Targeted attacks use a wide variety of techniques, including drive-by downloads, Microsoft SQL® injection, malware, spyware, phishing, and spam, to name just a few. APTs can and often do use many of these same techniques. An APT is always a targeted attack, but a targeted attack is not necessarily an APT.

How Advance Persistent Threat(APT) Works:
Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the zero-day attack,  polymorphic malware and blended threat to launched a sophisticated and determined attack to a specific target.  Some anti-virus company  tag these attacks as malware where in fact these type of attack are intelligent malware that targets organisation or individual for a specific purpose or gain.

Learning notes on "Self-Organization in Peer-to-Peer Systems"

Self-Organization in Peer-to-Peer Systems

By:  Jonathan Ledlie, Jacob M. Taylor, Laura Serban, Margo Seltzer Harvard University

Paper Abstract:

This paper addresses the problem of forming groups in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems and examines what dependabil- ity means in decentralized distributed systems. Much of the literature in this field assumes that the participants form a local picture of global state, yet little research has been done discussing how this state remains stable as nodes enter and leave the system. We assume that nodes remain in the sys- tem long enough to benefit from retaining state, but not suf- ficiently long that the dynamic nature of the problem can be ignored. We look at the components that describe a system’s dependability and argue that next-generation decentralized systems must explicitly delineate the information dispersal mechanisms (e.g., probe, event-driven, broadcast), the ca- pabilities assumed about constituent nodes (bandwidth, up- time, re-entry distributions), and distribution of informa- tion demands (needles in a haystack vs. hay in a haystack [13]). We evaluate two systems based on these criteria: Chord [22] and a heterogeneous-node hierarchical group- ing scheme [11]. The former gives a failed request rate under normal P2P conditions and a prototype of the latter a similar rate under more strenuous conditions with an order of magnitude more organizational messages. This analysis suggests several methods to greatly improve the prototype.

Notes and synthesis:

In human cooperation we can build a super organization example in a dragon boat, a single member of a team can only row at a low speed but when the team is composed of more members and they are organized they can achieved greater speed. Peer-to-peer system and current algorithm used by this technology  is increasingly advantageous in a variety of situation.

Peer-to-peer system can be used in variety of services e.g. voice communication like Skype.  Delivering information in a greater scale and millions of users imagine a single video server that distributes content to a thousand or million of users will lead to performance degradation and greater possibility of failure. The reason for a distributed system is to attain redundancy and to have speed of light in the delivery of service.

This paper has contributed in the following:

1. implicit goals and assumptions about a particular decentralized system affects measures reliability

2. Introduced a self-organizing hierarchically-based P2P system

3. Take assumptions implicit in current P2P filesharing systems and evaluate the reliability of Chord and the hierarchical grouping system. 

BYOD, IoT and Mobile D. an army for DDOS attack

Every person must use an average of 3 IP connected device like Mobile Phone, Laptop, Tablets, Smart watch and other gadgets.  As the number of Internet of Thing is increasing avenue for malicious activities in the internet also increases.

Last two year September 14 2015 the Philippine Government was hit by a massive attack of DDoS (distributed denial of service) from global anonymous that lasted for more than 10 minutes.

This image show the map of the DDoS Attack

After the DDoS attack the Global Anonymous launch a massive defacement of government website.  The following are list of website targeted by the hackers group.