Deep Web, Dark web

Did you ever know that a dark hidden world exists in the world of internet? I recently had a chance to learn and give a peek into this strange, dark and anonymous world. 

The first step to reaching this world is a software called Tor which is an anonymyzer software. This software makes your internet access completely anonymous. Let me explain how this works. If you browse the web normally as you do, the destination website can identify that you have visited. For example, if you point to yahoo.com on your browser, yahoo.com's servers can identify your IP address and you can be easily tracked back by your IP address. Further, your internet service provider (ISP) can sniff all the data that you send or receive when you visit different websites (Https sites are an exception but the ISP can still detect that you visited the particular site). 

Tor is a software which hides your identity by encrypting all your browsing traffic making it impossible for the ISP  to tap and find out which sites you visites and what data you exchanged. All your traffic will be routed through multiple layers of encryption through a network of Tor servers which are run by volunteers. The web page you visit (say yahoo.com) sees all your traffic coming from some Tor server (called an exit node in Tor network) and cannot identify your true IP address. The Tor network is designed in such a way that the Tor servers also cannot see your identity. This makes a great tool for people to access censored content in repressive countries like China, Iran, Saudi etc since the governments cannot control traffic through the Tor network. It is also a great tool for whistle blowers to publish secrets anonymously (Wiki leaks is the biggest example). 


However what makes it most interesting is that Tor not only allows accessing the web anonymously but also allows hosting of websites anonymously. That means a person X can host literally any content inside Tor and still neither person X not the location of the content server can be located by anyone. These websites cannot be accessed from the open network and can only be accessed through Tor network. This is the hidden network where the most dark content are hosted by the most dark people on earth. You can find drug dealers, arms dealers, assassins, hackers, illegal files of all sorts .. and the list goes on..

One will be shocked at the content that one finds in this dark world and also astonished as to how people openly do hardcore illegal stuff behind the veil of anonymity. Many of these sites also could be fake and just a landing page for malicious websites trying to steal anything from your identity to your bank info and again sell that in this same anonymous world.

You can visit https://www.torproject.org/ to learn more about this world. You can install Tor and try around things but I would suggest utmost caution while you do anything on the hidden world. It is better and safer to install a virtual machine software and install any OS inside of the virtual machine and install Tor browser in it. This is to safeguard your primary computer and data in case your machine is compromised through your browser (remember that this is not a network of 'normal' people). Visit https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en#thesolution to understand how Tor works.

The hidden sites do not have conventional urls but have cryptic URLs which end with a .onion domain. For example, there is a hidden wiki with the url kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion which has a a menu of sites in the hidden world.
I have added the below screen shots from the Hidden Wiki that I accessed through the Tor browser installed on my Ubuntu OS running on a virtual machine.

As you can see in the screens, you find websites with most bizarre content and many of these could even be fake.

This hidden world also provides  email facility and needless to say the emails will be untraceable and anonymous. Most of these illegal deals happen over the anonymous email mechanism. The emails use PGP protocol and everything is encrypted.

The most interesting thing is that this secret world uses a separate digital currency called Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not need an intermediate financial institution for transfer of currency from one individual to the other. According to Wikipedia, as of February 2013, the monetary base of bitcoin is valued at over 275 million US dollars. Interestingly,  Bitcoin was created by a pseudonymous developer named Satoshi Nakamoto whose identity has till now not been verified.

This is a fascinating world with all sorts of people trying to do things anonymously for different reasons and motivations. The beautiful tools like Tor, Bitcoin or PGP was never meant to encourage crime but only enabled privacy. The engineering involved in building such tools is mind blowing. But like any other technology, they get misused by dark elements. It is even possible in future that all access to internet by everyone will be through such anonymizer tools. 

Hardware and software

Hardware and software

I thought of comparing hardware and software from a philosophical point of view in order to determine the supremacy of one over the other. Although this has been a longstanding debate, I am adding my contribution by putting across some key points.

To a superficial observer, it might seem that hardware and software are pretty interdependent entities. For instance hardware is pretty useless without any software and software always needs hardware to exist. Also, one finds that software development always makes use of hardware (pc, laptop, punched cards, etc) making it seem that hardware is the fundamental element and software is only a derived element.

To get a deeper understanding, one has to draw parallels with life on earth itself! It then is quickly apparent that hardware represents the body and software being the soul! You can crush the hardware into pieces and render it useless just like the body becomes lifeless if it is physically harmed beyond a threshold. The soul according to philosophers being immortal is literally indestructible. You can burn down a pc or a laptop but how do you destroy the software in it? Software like the soul can move from one hardware to another bringing in life to it. Software is massless, dimensionless like the soul and no one can see or touch it either! Any philosopher will tell you that the body is just a container while the soul reigns supreme.

For high fidelity systems like aircraft and industrial controllers, engineers calculate reliability and availability for hardware. Do you know why they dont bother doing it for software? You guessed it right! Software is infinitely reliable and available and never undergoes wear like hardware. It works for a million years as  good as it worked on the day of release. One might then argue that software crashes are an indication of poor reliability. From a philosophical standpoint, software crash is just another form of execution which might not be desirable to some people (like users, ceos etc.). You should see the beam in the eyes of a developer when a particularly difficult to reproduce crash gets reproduced ; sheer ecstacy! If you dont like crashes, its your problem.

Long ago, most things used to get implemented at hardware level itself. Hardware engineers dared to implement multiplication, differentiation etc using opamps. But history has shown that the world lost confidence with such gimmicks and started relying on software for most things. Software being highly malleable like the soul, can be changed and improved upon very quickly. A donkey soul can be quickly changed into human soul since fundamentally it is the same soul. (i am authoritatively saying this after watching a "reality"show on tv that proved that a person had donkey soul in the previous birth!). My hypothesis is that this could be the reason why human population is increasing and animals are going extinct (postulate: the number of souls in this universe is a constant). Coming back to our argument, it is fairly easy to modify and recompile donkey class dumb software into something more intelligent. Try that with hardware and you will spend the rest of your life in such a project and in the end pray that you be reborn as a donkey so that you will not need to work on such projects!

Free phone for everyone!

Internet telephony has changed a lot the way we communicate with our near ones. PC to PC calling has become incredibly simple with applications provided by Skype, Google, Yahoo and others. It is a very exciting thing for users like me to use these applications to make voice calls on the internet for free. But the whole thing I hate with the PC to PC calling is that I have to use a PC to call!

It would be too convenient if there can be a telephone set which just hooks on to the internet and can make voice calls using Skype.If everyone (at least most of everyone!) uses this kind of telephone set, phone calls can be completely free and you get unlimited talk time! No monthly rentals, no paying by the minute for your talk time, no distinction between local, or international calls since everything is free.All that it takes is internet bandwidth.So, If you pay your internet service provider, you are done with it!

This technology easily extends to mobile telephony by just having a WiFi enabled phone with the Skype running over it. So now you also have mobile phone free of charge! This technology also paves way for the video telephony which has remained a luxury with the traditional telephone.In summary, the future telephony will not only be completely free but also offer much much more than what we are are getting now.

Well, this is not at all a good news for all the telephone service providers. They will have to shut down their telephone service unit altogether and only provide broadband connections if this becomes a reality. They will lobby with the governments (read bribe them like crazy) to ensure that this technology does not become widespread.
It will be interesting days that are going to come which we can wait and watch. One day, the internet might become free too!

Future of Windows Piracy

"Install genuine Windows. It costs only 10% of the hardware cost" There goes in an Ad asking people to buy genuine windows. But people here in this part of the world ask a more basic question. Why would I pay that 10% when I am getting it completely free?! Hmmm.. makes sense. And people are not deterred by the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) (Yes it is a genuine advantage for Microsoft!). They simply install SP2 for the XP and disable all auto updates. No home user that I have seen owns a genuine version of windows. There are exceptions who have bought laptops with XP bundled with it.

There will be some interesting developments here when Microsoft takes stricter anti piracy measures. I am very much sure that people here are not going to buy any future version of windows but wait for the pirated, hacked, cracked version of windows to get released. But, If windows becomes 100% hack free,
then it will lead to flourishing of other alternatives like linux.

Linux has already caught up with the people in here because computer usage is mostly by youngsters. These people are willing to learn, experiment and play around with these alternatives. So, that means, stricter anti piracy measures implies growth of OSs like linux.
This was one reason why Microsoft allowed piracy in countries like India and China (For Windows 95,98 2000...). Microsoft feared the emergence of Linux in these countries and allowed people to use Windows illegally. That means, he made the Americans, Europeans and others pay for the Chinese and Indian Windows users (If this were not to be the case, then MS would have gone into losses)!

But the question remains if MS is going to continue on this same strategy of doing charity in India and China!

Why does Windows Vista require so much of hardware?

If you were to be asked what is that one thing you would want in the next release of Windows, what would your reply be? Well, I feel that any enterprise or home user would want one or all of these.

1) Better security from viruses, Trojan horses and million other badwares.
2) Better in terms of performance. Quicker response times, less resource hogs.
3) Better usability. More intuitive (not necessarily more colourful)
4) Stability. I don't want to update a "service pack" every week.

OK and now what is Microsoft planning to give its customers with Vista?
1) An OS which consumes as much hardware resources as you supply and still ask for more.
2) Fancy features like the "3D desktop" which is meant to be just eye candy.
3) Enhanced security features. But, You sill have to pay your antivirus vendor.

And why is MS doing this?
Well as I can see, MS has tied up with PC makers like Dell and HP and asked them to make "Windows Vista Capable" PCs. MS might have told its system architects "Implement whatever you feel like implementing. But let it consume lot of memory, require a dual core processor to run and refuse to run with even slightly old graphic cards(The ones manufactured 2 years ago)!!

This will automatically make even PCs that were bought 2 years back completely obsolete. Enterprise and home users invariably have to change their PCs to run the new fancy OS designed by MS. This results in a surge in PC sales and PC makers will make lot of money!

As a matter of fact major antivirus makers might also be paying royalties to MS for keeping enough security holes in the system!

The Google grid

Ever wondered if Google requires all that space that it promises the Gmail users? I mean does Google need 2 GB * (Number of Gmail users) amount of space on the disk? Well this discussion will prove that he does not need all that space and can still promise his users the 2 GB quota. But this is also an attempt to figure out how much roughly could be the minimum storage capacity required by Google for its Gmail users.

Assume that 'L' is the storage limit imposed by Google for its mail users.
Let S = Rate at which Google's storage increases per month
Let Ri = Initial average rate at which email volume increases in a mailbox
Let r = average rate at which email volume increases in a mailbox at any given time.

As the limit to mail per person is limited by L, it can be assumed that the average mail volume increases exponentially. It starts with an initial rate Ri and the mailbox finally reaches the volume limit.
Thus Consumption C per person = C = L(1-exp(-Ri*t/L)) --- (1)

The rate of mailbox size increase = r is the differentiation of (1) wrt t
r= Ri*exp(-Ri*t/L)

At any given point, the rate of Google's storage space increase should be greater than or equal to r.
Assuming equality, S=r,
S=Ri*exp(-Ri*t/L)

The current value of L is 2816 MB
Ri can be assumed to be 40 MB/Month/Person
At t = 24 months, S turns out to be 28.4 MB/Month/Person

Assume that there are roughly 40000000 Gmail users.
The the average storage capacity added to Google every month should be
40000000*28.4 = 1.1 Peta Bytes per month! (Peta = 10^15)

For the past 2 years, Google should have then amassed 24*1.1 = 26.4 Peta Bytes of storage space! As Google's storage is triple redundant, it should have around 80 Peta bytes of Hard disk space!!

Well there are too many approximations and assumptions in here. But it gives the magnitude of space that you should have/add to promise a free storage space of 2.8 GB.

This shows that if all Gmail users would use up all Google's space today, each user would end up getting only about 660 MB of space!

Evolution of the Digital Organisms

Millions of years into the future...... There is an alien invasion on earth. But don't worry
you don't have to sell your shares because the human species has gone extinct! The earth-landed aliens start exploring the earth for signs of life. But everything has gone completely dry and dead. Some amount of digging and they come across different kinds of fossils. Fossils of computing machines, robots, more and more intelligent machines....

Observing closer, they also see remnants of some other kind of "tools" that they presumed that would shape the intelligent machines. They conclude that the machines are the living organisms which evolved over a period of time. The aliens also reason out that the machines used the "tools" to actually make themselves better. They see the humans as the tools that the machines used to evolve themselves into better organisms!

We are already seeing the evolution of these machines and the important point is that the evolution has never been this fast. It took roughly 3 Billion years for the man to evolve
Whereas, it has not even taken 50 years for the intelligent machines that we are seeing today. Going by the natural process of evolution, it would have taken millions of years for such evolution to have happened. And now we see that people are making this evolution happen by working day in and out in front of computers, making them more intelligent, more integrated and filling them with more information. As i am publishing this blog, I am adding a small piece of information into this gigantic information warehouse which one day might act like a conscious, intelligent supermachine.

As I understand, it is nature's own way of speeding up the evolution process using humans as
a platform