Archive for Networking
The Annoying Search For That Lost Song Is Over!
To many it may sound like a gimmick, but the launch of a music search engine called Midomi (Midomi.com) has the potential to break into new areas of voice recognition. Recently released in beta form by Melodis (Melodis.com), Midomi is a voice activated recognition system geared towards the music market.
The website allows you to either sing, hum or whistle your favourite song, and the search engine will analyse the tune, words, etc and search its vast database of songs to find a match. While you may believe that it is impossible to search on the above criteria, the system is built around a very powerful recognition system called the Multimodal Adaptive Recognition System (MARS).
The high tech MARS system actually strips down the sound input to words, pitch, tempo, etc. The system is then capable of ignoring the speech element if the user hums or sings the song, allowing for a more defined search criteria.
The site is part of a social network which allows users to tag and store their favourite songs, which are then automatically added to the search engine database. As the database of songs is ever growing, the array of songs will always be changing with the times.
The algorithms and filtering system behind this venture can be used in a variety of areas of business in the future. This is no gimmick and could literally change the way we search for information on the internet.
Dealing with Halted Firewalls
Good article by Mike Murray…
As systems administrators, it’s often funny how new and interesting information ends up in our hands. Sometimes, it’s through an intentional course of study; other times, it seems to arrive by accident. That’s exactly how the concept of using a halted Linux computer as a firewall occurred to me. I was at work, perusing an internal corporate mailing list and saw a message about something that was once present in Linux.
Read the rest of this entry » »Waht is Netfilter
Authors: Scott A Crosby and Dan S Wallach
netfilter is a framework for packet mangling, outside the normal Berkeley socket interface. It has four parts. Firstly, each protocol defines “hooks” (IPv4 defines 5) which are well-defined points in a packet’s traversal of that protocol stack. At each of these points, the protocol will call the netfilter framework with the packet and the hook number.
Secondly, parts of the kernel can register to listen to the different hooks for each protocol. So when a packet is passed to the netfilter framework, it checks to see if anyone has registered for that protocol and hook; if so, they each get a chance to examine (and possibly alter) the packet in order, then discard the packet (NF_DROP), allow it to pass (NF_ACCEPT), tell netfilter to forget about the packet (NF_STOLEN), or ask netfilter to queue the packet for userspace (NF_QUEUE).
This document is a journey; some parts are well-traveled, and in other areas you will find yourself almost alone. The best advice I can give you is to grab a large, cozy mug of coffee or hot chocolate, get into a comfortable chair, and absorb the contents before venturing out into the sometimes dangerous world of network hacking.
For more understanding of the use of the infrastructure on top of the netfilter framework, I recommend reading the Packet Filtering HOWTO and the NAT HOWTO. For information on kernel programming I suggest Rusty’s Unreliable Guide to Kernel Hacking and Rusty’s Unreliable Guide to Kernel Locking.
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Network auditing and penetration testing
dsniff is a collection of tools for network auditing and penetration testing. dsniff, filesnarf, mailsnarf, msgsnarf, urlsnarf, and webspy passively monitor a network for interesting data (passwords, e-mail, files, etc.). arpspoof, dnsspoof, and macof facilitate the interception of network traffic normally unavailable to an attacker (e.g, due to layer-2 switching). sshmitm and webmitm implement active monkey-in-the-middle attacks against redirected SSH and HTTPS sessions by exploiting weak bindings in ad-hoc PKI.