Technology

You know that feeling when you pick up your phone to check the time, and suddenly it’s two hours later? You’ve been mindlessly scrolling through Instagram reels, TikTok videos, and endless memes. Your eyes feel strained, your thumb is practically on autopilot, and you can’t even remember half of what you just watched. Welcome to zombie scrolling—the mindless, compulsive consumption of social media content that leaves you feeling mentally drained and oddly empty. It’s that autopilot mode where your brain shuts off and your thumb keeps moving, endlessly swiping through an infinite feed of short videos, photos, and posts. You’re physically present but mentally checked out, like a social media zombie. ...

In a world where having an Instagram account seems as essential as having a phone number, I’ve made a choice to stay off that wonderful platform. While friends and family regularly ask me to join, I’ve found that my reasons for avoiding Instagram have only grown stronger over time. Instagram No Longer Serves My Life When I evaluate any tool or platform, I ask myself a simple question: “Does this add genuine value to my life?” For Instagram, the answer is a resounding no. The platform doesn’t align with how I want to spend my time or energy. I prefer meaningful conversations, real-world experiences, and activities that contribute to my personal growth rather than curating a digital persona. ...

This post is mainly for users who use MFA authenticator apps on their smartphones. Earlier the process was to click either “Yes (Approve)” or “No (Deny)” and that would allow to login. Why is now one more step required to enter a value shown on the login page? Background We have been using passwords since years to secure our digital accounts. Since people need to have passwords for several different services and it becomes tough to remember them, they started to either (a) reuse the same password, (b) use an easy password, (c) write down the different passwords. ...

Hello! One more post for the day. Until now, I have been using the 3G internet by Tata Docomo. They were generous and gave me IP addresses without any kind of conversion. Means whatever IP I get on my ppp0 interface with ipconfig, is the same IP I get by the Google search ‘whats my ip’. Though they were dynamic IPs, they reached me without any translations. Last week I switched to a new provider, Vodafone 3G. I don’t know what kind of addressing scheme they are using, but definitely they gave me something more with the IP. Here on my laptop, on the ppp0 interface I have private IP address of 10.119.69.xx, which is further translated by NAT at their side and converted to 1.38.29.123. Mostly we (here ‘we’ refers to the whole group of people whose NAT address is converted to the specified IP, and you can consider the number of people in a class-A scheme) are given that IP address on the outside, while the inside address keeps changing. ...

Phishtank is a project by OpenDNS community. OpenDNS is a company which provides its services for safe and fast browsing to the Internet. While Phishtank is a community where anyone can share or check phishing data. Phishtank is not a technology to filter phishing/spam or to protect against phishing attacks, but a platform to submit, verify, check or share phishing details so it provides as a repository of phishing data. How to support Phishtank? You can support Phishtank in either ways: ...

There are great moments – we have birthday parties, weddings, or any memorable moment on a normal day. To cherish these moments, we capture them visually as photographs and videos. Even after years, these moments excite us, bringing back the memories and feelings. Now, even some aromas have the same effect. Some scents make us nostalgic. The smell of a particular food, miles away from our home can bring the memories of mom’s food. While some smells stimulate us in other ways. I always had a feeling that if we can store these scents with us in any form and retrieve them back when we want to smell them, that would be great. Once I had a soap, which had a very nice aroma but I had only one piece of the soap. So I wished that the soap never gets finished (because of the aroma). ...

Apparatus: Distributed botnet, around tens of thousands of bots with their respective IP addresses A pass file of around 1000 entries with some normal passwords Default username: ‘admin’ Steps: WordPress 3.0 release before 3 years, users going on with ‘admin’ as their default username, and some usual password A brute-force with username: ‘admin’ and password from the above mentioned file The botnet, tries this attack on each and every wordpress portal available over Internet Objective: A well-planned distributed attack (just like itsoknoproblembro shook the banking world) against some hot-spot over the Internet. ...

Last month, it was asked on quora – What does [-4^(1/4)"] mean and why is it connected to porn? Still today, if you search for that equation on Google, it returns results with xxx titles. Some more contradictory search equations which return same type of results are " " 1 1 2 2 " " - - 1 2 The explanation of the equation -4^(1/4)" is given as – we are asking Google to return pages containing a 1 next to a 4, but which do not contain a 4. ...

Back here, writing after a long time! Let me point down some of the major incidents during that time – Attended the High Performance Computing workshop by CDAC-ACTS The workshop on High Performance Computing was really a nice arrangement by CDAC for the students to learn and be familiar with the parallel processing. They offered the supercomputer access to perform the OpenMP and MPI programs, along with nice practical teaching from the HPC experts. ...

Apart from the normal reasons for keeping our email accounts secure, there are many more which we try to ignore, or are not aware of the possibilities. Take this scenario – why to keep the work-related and social email accounts seperate and confidential (if possible): If someone knows the basic information about you, your social networking account can be hacked. The main ingredient is – your email id. Its better to keep the id secure which you are using for networking. If the work and social email ids are the same, there are more chances of people guessing-knowing your basic informations, providing more chance for your account to get compromised. ...