C  WORKSHOP


14th - 17th november ,2011


C workshop is organised by utkarsh to help the students to brush up their concepts in  C. It was an small attempt  to make people more comfortable with C.


Topics covered in the following days were :
Day 1 : Introduction , if-else statement and switch statement.
Day 2 : loops , functions and arrays
Day 3 : Pointers , structures and union
Day 4 : Storage classes , macros and some general C programs

Black Hat: Square Credit-Card Reader Hacked!!

The Square reader makes any iPhone into a credit card reader. Set up an account with square and you can take credit card payments, and the reader comes free with your account­. It’s a great thing for craft vendors and other small scale merchants. And it’s perfectly secure…isn’t it?                                                      

Adam Laurie (also known as Major Malfunction) Zac Franken of Aperture Labs wondered just how secure such a thing could be. It just uses the earphone jack, after all. So it must be converting the magnetic stored data into sound. Confirming this was simple though.

The pair wrote a simple PC-based tool to record the credit card sound and play it back on demand. They bought a $10 cable to connect a laptop to the iPhone. In a small press preview at the Black Hat conference they demonstrated that playing the credit card sound has the same effect as scanning the card with Square header. The researchers notified Square in February; square responded that they see no significant threat.

This hack also allowed them to effectively pull cash from a gift card that officially can’t be used for cash. All they had to do was “pay” themselves using the hack software. Laurie pointed out that malefactors can use this technique to directly get money from stolen credit card data, rather than having to purchase goods and resell them.

The hack poses no risk to users of the Square service. Quite the contrary, the risk is to everyone else form Square users misusing the device. This hack won’t last forever. A new version of the Square device is in the works.

In addition, this hack does not really demonstrate a weakness with Square. The problem is in the magnetic stripe concept itself. Using the Square reader simply lets people skim credit card data with no special knowledge or hardware. Now don’t you feel secure?

Fujitsu Will Be Offering Commercial Supercomputers

Fujitsu has partnered with RIKEN to build the “K Computer” – which is currently the world’s fastest supercomputer. Now Fujitsu has taken that expertise and applied it to a new enterprise – they’re offering a new commercial supercomputer.

World's Fastest Supercomputer Gets Faster

The supercomputer, named PRIMEHPC FX10, will be available as of January, and its specifications are impressive. It’s theoretically scalable up to 23.2 petaflops, which is more than double the current performance of the K computer and ten times faster than the second fastest supercomputer in the world. The supercomputers is comprised of 1,024 racks, and each individual CPU in the supercomputer is comprised of a 16 cores. By themselves, each indivdual CPU is capable of processing 236.5 gigaflops.

The supercomputer’s applications include drug development, disaster planning and application, and other types of research that involve processing and analyzing huge quantities of data. I’d expect that it would be particularly productive when geared towards simulations, and the company mentions the possibility of using it to simulate a new device without the need to build a prototype.

Fujitsu expects to sell about 50 supercomputers over the course of the next three years.

Deeksha gupta
I Yr  CS

QUIZ OR DARE


Quiz or Dare is one of the exciting events organised by utkarsh on 9th November 2011.
Round-1: Four groups each with four participants were made to play spin the bottle separately. The person opposite to lead chose quiz or dare to be solved by the lead. If lead gave correct answer in given time, scores got deducted from the opposite person and added to lead's score and if lead fails, score from lead's account got transferred to the opposite person.
Round-2: From each group, the highest scorer played the game.
Round-3: An interesting rapid fire of 2 minutes between the two toppers.


Winner: 
Monika Gupta (EC I year)


Runner-up:
Nidhi Sethia (IT I year)

BLOGGER OF THE MONTH


Suhani Mishra(CS-IIyear)
Utkarsh introduced a new way to recognize and appreciate the contribution of students- Blogger of the month. Every month utkarsh will declare blogger of the month based upon her active contribution to the blog. A hearty congratulations to our first blogger of the month. 
   

OPEN BOOK

Open book was another exciting event organised by utkarsh with team size two.

In first round team had to search the answer of twenty questions within twenty minutes from the book provided.

In second round one team member was blind folded and the other member was not alllowed to touch the book. They had to search the answers of ten questions within fifteen minutes. 

winners of this event were:

Ist :

Sakshi agarwal  CS IIIrd Yr

Somil garg  CS IIIrd Yr

IInd :

Deeksha gupta CS Ist Yr

Shipra purohit CS Ist Yr  

The World's Smallest Camera

The one-square-inch camera that sits snugly on your finger can click two megapixel images and even shoot video. New York firm Hammacher Schlememr, which created the $100 camera, insists the 28-gram device works perfectly, despite being a little bigger than the fingertip.

Hammacher's general manager Fred Berns said: "Although 'The World's Smallest Camera' is only slightly larger than a marble, it takes still images and records video just like much larger cameras." "It comes with a wrist lanyard that keeps it close to hand and enables ease of portability," Berns added, reports the Daily Mail.

The miniature camera, its makers claim, can take JPEG images with a resolution of 1600 x 1200 and comes complete with autofocus. The camera also connects to a computer via a USB cable, just like regular pieces of photography equipment.

AYUSHI JAIN
B.TECH IInd yr

Nokia to Use Microsoft’s OS in their Smartphones

Nokia the world’s leading company in mobile phone market will be using Microsoft‘s OS in their cell phone.Google‘s Android phone has gain tremendous adoption in the last year as its market share has increased from a 6% in 2009 to 24% in 2010. So Nokia is also thinking to launch its new cell phone based on Microsoft’s OS.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer have announced that Nokia will be delivering its first Windows Phone 7  in 2012. Windows 7 will be now Nokia’s principal smartphone strategy. And in addition to this Nokia will be adding bing as its default search engine. Nokia Maps will continue and will be using bing search and Nokia’s application store will be controlled  by Microsoft. So this strategy of Nokia will place Android andiOS into first and second place.


published by:
SHRUTI
IInd yr

Android Ice Cream Sandwich: 10 reasons to be excited!!!

1. Ice Cream Sandwich has a slick and intuitive new design.


Building off the interface launched for tablets earlier this year with Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich introduces a completely new UI for phones and tablets alike (though the change will be more extreme on the phone side, of course, since it's a larger leap).

In short, everything is prettier and more polished. Commands that used to be hidden in menus or layers of menus are now all on-screen; an evolving "action bar" gives you contextual options for wherever you are in the system, and on-screen command buttons allow you to return home, move back, or toggle among applications.

Speaking of app-toggling, multitasking gets a major makeover in Ice Cream Sandwich, with an interactive list that lets you flip through thumbnails of recently used apps. There and throughout the entire system, you can swipe left or right to eliminate an item from the list; the same concept applies on the revamped notifications panel, allowing you to dismiss individual notifications with a single swipe to the side.


2. Ice Cream Sandwich has cool new widgets.
With Ice Cream Sandwich, widgets are resizable and scrollable, similar to what we saw introduced with Honeycomb. That means you can put a live view of your inbox right on your home screen, for example, and then scroll through it without actually having to open the app. You can make the widget as big or as small as you want to fit within your own personalized home screen setup.
New scrollable widgets are included for the calendar, music, social streams, and other system functions. Third-party widgets will also be able to take advantage of the scrollable and resizable features; in fact, plenty of them already do.


3. Ice Cream Sandwich has major photo improvements -- like the ability to take panoramic pictures.

That's right: panoramic pictures. The ICS photo app lets you slowly pan your camera across a large area to capture a gigantic perspective; it then automatically stitches the image together into a single panoramic view. Pretty damn cool.
Aside from that, the photo app now features "zero shutter lag," meaning you can snap photos instantly one after another with no delay (sorry, Apple). It has advanced photo editing built into the camera app, too, so you can tweak your images right then and there.




On the video front, Ice Cream Sandwich offers stabilized zoom and the ability to take full-resolution snapshots while you're recording video.

4. Ice Cream Sandwich lets you unlock your phone with your face.



Yes, you read that correctly. ICS introduces a new face recognition security feature in which you can capture an image of your shiny happy mug, then simply smile into the phone to unlock it in the future. The software recognizes your face and lets you right in. (You can always use a backup PIN or pattern in case you get punched in the mouth or otherwise disfigured.)

5. Ice Cream Sandwich lets you "beam" info from one device to another.
In another futuristic twist, the new ICS OS has a feature Google calls Android Beam. Using Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, the feature allows you to tap the back of your phone to the back of another ICS phone and, in a split second, pass along any type of info from one device to the other.
If you're viewing a Web page, for example, and tap phones with someone else, the page will instantly pull up on their device. You could share an app, a contact, a song, a video, or practically any other type of data in the same way; you could even initiate multiplayer game play with one quick tap.

6. Ice Cream Sandwich has a new browser with tabs and sync.
Android's browser gets a major upgrade with Ice Cream Sandwich, gaining full tab support and native bookmark syncing with your desktop Chrome browser. It also introduces a new built-in page-saving feature, for offline reading, and the ability to quickly toggle between mobile and desktop versions of a website (finally!).

7. Ice Cream Sandwich lets you take screen shots.

Another "finally!" moment: With ICS, Google gives us an easy way to grab screenshots of our devices. All you do is press your device's power and volume-down button simultaneously, and an image of your screen is captured and saved to your storage.

8. Ice Cream Sandwich has a cool "quick response" feature for incoming calls.
Ever get a call and don't feel like answering? Ice Cream Sandwich's new "quick response" system lets you send a canned message right from the incoming call screen to the person trying to reach you. This way, you can let them know why you aren't answering -- telling them "I'm in a meeting and will get back to you later," for example, or "Get out of my life, you annoying twit."

9. Ice Cream Sandwich lets you disable preinstalled apps.
With the exception of Google's Nexus phones, bloatware is an unfortunate reality on many Android devices. Ice Cream Sandwich makes it easier to manage it, though, giving you the option to disable any preinstalled app on your phone. Once disabled, an app's resources won't run and its icon won't appear anywhere in your system.
So long, V CAST.


10. Ice Cream Sandwich has intelligent data controls.
More and more carriers are moving toward tiered data plans for smartphones, and that means we as users have to keep track of how many bits and bytes we're gobbling up. ICS does the work for you: Its new data usage control system lets you monitor your overall data usage and set limits to ensure you'll never get stuck with outrageous overage charges.
The Ice Cream Sandwich data control center shows you total data usage for the system and by individual app so you can see exactly what's burning through your kilobytes. And better yet, if you're on a limited plan, you can tell ICS to keep an eye on things for you: The system can warn you when you reach a certain level of usage, or even stop using 3G/4G data altogether once you hit a predefined limit. You can tell it to limit data usage individually by app, too, giving you an enormous amount of detailed control.





This is the beginning of a major new chapter for Android, and we're just starting to scratch the surface. Stay tuned: Exciting times are ahead.!!! :)


VARSHI GUPTA
CS II Yr

SOLAR BONSAI TREE TO CHARGE GADGETS

Takin cue from the concept of photosynthesis,where trees use solar energy to prepare food for
themselves, French designer Vivien Muller has designed an ELECTREE and finally gave us an
attractive way to use solar power to charge our devices in an eye-catching design that any chic
geek would love to have in their home. It looks like the wait is just about over. Muller is waiting
to get 400 presale orders to begin production of the Electree.


The Electree is shaped like a bonsai tree but will require no crazy pruning and maintenance.
The most you’ll have to do is dust off the solar panels from time to time. The tree has 27 solar
panel “leaves” that charge the Electree’s 13,500mAH battery. You can also stash your devices
under the Electree’s floor to keep things neat, tidy, and clutter-free. The branches and each
module are also rotatable, which apparently allows you to create an “unlimited number of
shapes.”


The Electree will take about 36 hours of sunshine to fully charge its battery. After that, you
can start charging your gadgets through the USB connection. It will charge a device to its full
capacity in only a few hours.


The Electree was inspired by photosynthesis. Muller said he was inspired while observing trees
as their leaves act as natural solar panels and further motivated by math in nature. He said that
while studying fractals, he realized that he could draw a tree by “repeating and transforming
a basic pattern.” The repeating pattern then became a module, and the shape of the Electree
came about.


the tree can power mp3 players,cell phones,tablets and a lot many devices...!!
SUHANI MISHRA 
CS IInd year

New Virkel.F IM Worm Pretends to be MSN Messenger 8 Leak

There is a MSN Messenger 8 Beta running around but you can only get into the beta if you receive an invitation via email. It is not yet in the public beta phase.

There is a so-called security risk in MSN Messenger 8 beta. If you use MSN Messenger 8 beta and receive an IM with a link to a leaked "MSN Messenger 8 Beta" from a friend in your list; then don't open it!

Security firm F-Secure is warning about this new worm that spreads from a fake website, where the author pretends to have a copy of MSN Messenger 8 beta.

The download BETA8WEBINSTALL.EXE from that fake site actually installs a worm that will by turn send instant messages to everyone on the user's MSN list with links to download their "beta". The malware also connects to a bot network.

Neelam Bhavnani
cs IInd year

REMEMBERING : STEVE JOBS

Synopsis
Steve Jobs was born February 24, 1955, to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave him up for adoption. Smart but directionless, Jobs experimented with different pursuits before starting Apple Computers with Stephen Wozniak in the Jobs' family garage. Apple's revolutionary products, which include the iPod, iPhone and iPad, are now seen as dictating the evolution of modern technology.


Early Life
Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, to Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave their unnamed son up for adoption. His father, Abdulfattah Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor and his mother, Joanne Simpson, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Steve was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his biological parents.
As an infant, Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist. The family lived in Mountain View within California's Silicon Valley. As a boy, Jobs and his father would work on electronics in the family garage. Paul would show his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby which instilled confidence, tenacity, and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.
While Jobs has always been an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. In elementary school he was a prankster whose fourth grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school—a proposal his parents declined.
After he did enroll in high school, Jobs spent his free time at Hewlett-Packard. It was there that he befriended computer club guru Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was a brilliant computer engineer, and the two developed great respect for one another.

Apple Computers

After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Lacking direction, he dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes. Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography.
In 1974, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later he left Atari to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling the continent and experimenting with psychedelic drugs. In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started Apple Computers. The duo started in the Jobs family garage, and funded their entrepreneurial venture after Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak sold his beloved scientific calculator.
Jobs and Wozniak are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry by democratizing the technology and making the machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive, and accessible to everyday consumers. The two conceived a series of user-friendly personal computers that they initially marketed for $666.66 each. Their first model, the Apple I, earned them $774,000. Three years after the release of their second model, the Apple II, sales increased 700 percent to $139 million dollars. In 1980, Apple Computer became a publically traded company with a market value of $1.2 billion on the very first day of trading. Jobs looked to marketing expert John Scully of Pepsi-Cola to help fill the role of Apple's President.
Departure from Apple
However, the next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws resulting in recalls and consumer disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple sales, and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC dominated business world. In 1984 Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counter culture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to IBM's PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM compatible. Scully believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and executives began to phase him out.
In 1985, Jobs resigned as Apple's CEO to begin a new hardware and software company called NeXT, Inc. The following year Jobs purchased an animation company from George lucas which later became Pixar Animation Studios. Believing in Pixar's potential, Jobs initially invested $50 million of his own money into the company. Pixar Studios went on to produce wildly popular animation films such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Pixar's films have netted $4 billion. The studio merged with Walt Disney in 2006, making Steve Jobs Disney's largest shareholder.
Reinventing Apple
Despite Pixar's success, NeXT, Inc. floundered in its attempts to sell its specialized operating system to mainstream America. Apple eventually bought the company in 1997 for $429 million. That same year, Jobs returned to his post as Apple's CEO.
Much like Steve Jobs instigated Apple's success in the 1970s, he is credited with revitalizing the company in the 1990s. With a new management team, altered stock options, and a self-imposed annual salary of $1 a year, Jobs put Apple back on track. His ingenious products such as the iMac, effective branding campaigns, and stylish designs caught the attention of consumers once again.


Pancreatic Cancer
In 2003, Jobs discovered he had a neuroendocrine tumor, a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer. Instead of immediately opting for surgery, Jobs chose to alter his pescovegetarian diet while weighing Eastern treatment options. For nine months Jobs postponed surgery, making Apple's board of directors nervous. Executives feared that shareholders would pull their stocks if word got out that their CEO was ill. But in the end, Job's confidentiality took precedence over shareholder disclosure. In 2004, he had a successful surgery to remove the pancreatic tumor. True to form, in subsequent years Jobs disclosed little about his health.
Recent Innovations
Apple introduced such revolutionary products as the Macbook Air, iPod, and iPhone, all of which have dictated the evolution of modern technology. Almost immediately after Apple releases a new product, competitors scramble to produce comparable technologies. In 2007, Apple's quarterly reports were the company's most impressive statistics to date. Stocks were worth a record-breaking $199.99 a share, and the company boasted a staggering $1.58 billion dollar profit, an $18 billion dollar surplus in the bank, and zero debt.
In 2008, iTunes became the second biggest music retailer in America-second only to Wal-Mart. Half of Apple's current revenue comes from iTunes and iPod sales, with 200 million iPods sold and six billion songs downloaded. For these reasons, Apple has been rated No. 1 in America's Most Admired Companies, and No. 1 amongst Fortune 500 companies for returns to shareholders.

Personal Life
Early in 2009, reports circulated about Jobs' weight loss, some predicting his health issues had returned, which included a liver transplant. Jobs had responded to these concerns by stating he was dealing with a hormone imbalance. After nearly a year out of the spotlight, Steve Jobs delivered a keynote address at an invite-only Apple event September 9, 2009.
In respect to his personal life, Steve Jobs remained a private man who rarely discloses information about his family. What is known is Jobs fathered a daughter with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan when he was 23. Jobs denied paternity of his daughter Lisa in court documents, claiming he was sterile. Jobs did not initiate a relationship with his daughter until she was 7 but, when she was a teenager, she came to live with her father.
In the early 1990s, Jobs met Laurene Powell at Stanford business school, where Powell was an MBA student. They married on March 18, 1991, and lived together in Palo Alto, California, with their three children.
Final Years
On October 5, 2011, Apple Inc. announced that co-founder Steve Jobs had died. He was 56 years old at the time of his death.
published by 
SHRUTI GUPTA
IIND YR

CRYPTOGRAPHY:
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties
communication in the presence of third parties.Cryptology prior to the modern age was almost synonymous with encryption, the conversion of information from a readable state to apparent nonsense. The sender retained the ability to decrypt the information and therefore avoid unwanted persons being able to read it.
Applications of cryptography include ATM cards, computer passwords, and electronic commerce.
There are many tools available online to encrypt or decrypt data like Cryptool.
Even our social communities use the method of encryption to save passwords.
Encryption is also done in several ways to avoid any chance of leakage of data.It includes:
                            a.Ciphers
                       b.Coding Methods
                            c.Analysis Tool
CIPHER:
A cipher is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption -- a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure.
For example "GOOD DOG" can be encrypted as "PLLX XLP" where "L" substitutes for "O", "P" for "G", and "X" for "D" in the message. Transposition of the letters "GOOD DOG" can result in "DGOGDOO". These simple ciphers and examples are easy to crack, even without plaintext-ciphertext pairs.
Modern encryption methods can be divided by two criteria: by type of key used, and by type of input data.
By type of key used ciphers are divided into:
Symmetric key algorithms (Private-key cryptography), where the same key is used for encryption and decryption, and
Asymmetric key algorithms (Public-key cryptography), where two different keys are used for encryption and decryption.
CODING METHODS:
Codes are used to transform data into a format, which is more convenient for the target application. One of the most common codes is the bar code, which can be optically scanned.
It includes:
ASCII
Bacon
Barcode generator
Base64
Code39
Huffman
Morse code
ANALYSIS TOOL OR CRYPTANALYSIS:
The goal of cryptanalysis is gaining knowledge of the encrypted text without the key.
A distinction is made for different attack scenarios:
 
Ciphertext-Only:
Only the encrypted text is known. 
Probable Plaintext:
The encrypted text is known and one can assume that the message contained follows a certain pattern. 
Known Plaintext:
An encrypted text and its plaintext is known. The goal is to determine the key from the text. 
Chosen Plaintext:
One can freely choose a text that is to be encrypted and subsequently has access to the resulting encrypted text. 
Chosen Ciphertext:
One can temporarily generate the decrypted text from an assortment of corresponding encrypted text of one's own choice. 
EXAMPLE:
Try a ciphertext-only attack against this cipher by performing a frequency analysis. 
URKAG QZODK BFMPA OGYQZ FFTQD QEGXF IUXXN QETAI ZUZMZ QIEGN IUZPA IFTQF UFXQA RFTQD QEGXF UZSIU ZPAIO AZFMU ZENAF TFTQZ MYQAR FTQAD USUZM XPAOG YQZFM ZPFTQ QZODK BFUAZ WQKGE QPFTQ GEMSQ ARWQK EUEEG BBADF QPNKF IAEBQ OUMXU OAZEO XUOWU ZSFTQ UOAZE TAIWQ KMXXA IEKAG FAEFA DQMOA BKARF TQWQK GEQPR DAYMD QEGXF UZSIU ZPAIU ZFAMZ UZFQD ZMXEF ADMSQ URKAG FTQZQ ZODKB FMZAF TQDPA OGYQZ FIUFT FTQEM YQQZO DKBFU AZYQF TAPFT QUOAZ UZEQD FWQKU EMOFU HQIUF TUZFT QWQKQ ZFDKP UMXAS NAJFT UEUET QXBRG XQEBQ OUMXX KIUFT YADQO AYBXQ JWQKE 
Hint: The most frequently used character in English is "E". Determine the offset of the most frequently reoccurring character and "E".
For example, the character "G" is the most frequently used character in a text. "G" is the 7th character of the alphabet, "E" the 5th. 7 - 5 = 2.  The key is 2.
OTHERS:
AES(Advanced Encrpytion Standard)
Password Check
Password Generator
Matrix Screensaver
Taxman
Hashes
 
SALONI BHATIA
CS II YR