sonnestrahlen

I have some doubts regarding the outcry for a new state of Telangana. These are not biased questions, just random thoughts from someone who wanted to study in ISB and settle down in Hyderabad!


Q1. Whose gonna pay for the substantial transportation costs and state taxes involved in moving goods to & fro from a land locked state?

a.?  People? - aren't we already paying too much for our rice and cereals?
b.? Goverment subsidy? - if all the state's money goes into subsidy, what about the money that's supposed to go to developement of infrastructre in the state?


Q2. How and when would my intermediate(11th & 12th) records be moved from the existing captial to a new capital? I lost my originals, I really need to apply for my duplicates!


Q3. What about a case in the High Court that my grandpa has been fighting for the last 20 years? Would they delay it for another 10 years, since they had to move the paper work to a new High Court in the new capital?

Q4. Are people whose birth certificate says they aren't born in a place in telangana districts be kicked out? If yes, would the muncipal corporations be all reduced to muncipalities or panchayats? If the politicians are hell bent on sending away people not belonging to the regions, can they take the pillars of the buildings they built, with them?

Q5. If they are really going to rename Andhra Bank to Telangana Bank, how would they split the shares for the shareholders? Would the Andhra Bank board of directors approve such a thing or just close down their branches?

Q6. Wht would the vehicle license plates change to? - TL or TG or TA ?

Q7. Students whose geography lessons got stalled in-between the academic year, would they have to learn the india map all over again, since the state boundries would change?

Q8. In the future, if the problems don't get solved with a separate state and if the politicians start demanding for a separate country hoping it would bring more money and infrastructure, would my grandchildren need to get visas or would the passport suffice?

And yet the politicians think they would get to have their own seats by next year. #morons !

Reading this - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/19/the-anatomy-of-the-twitter-attack/, reminded me of Kevin Mitnick and Social Engineering.

I watched the movie Takedown(2000), based on the book written by Tsutomu_Shimomura on how Kevin Mitnick was caught. That's all irrelevant. What's more important is - 'How vulnerable people are?". All your passwords float around waiting for someone to read the pattern.



Each and everything is a pattern, it eventually boils down to how one interprets them.

For example : (something similar to what I had done ;) )


There's always the meta-data of every person that always creates the passwords -

• birth-date, month and year
• birthplace
• college
• AIEEE/state entrance rank
• father/mother/sister/brother's name or name typed in reverse
• pet's name
• mobile no/house no

This is not an exhaustive list, everyone again has a finite list from where the meta-data for passwords comes from.

There are some people who are so madly in love with each other and so committed that they exchange their 'meta-data' of passwords, and sometimes the passwords itself. ;)

Some phases in college life are so burdensome that a lady decides to put down all her passwords for online applications in file and in a folder will all her data on the universities. Then she shares the folder with her friends so that they too can benefit from her research on universities, rankings etc.

Most of us in our campus hostels had a network scanner which listed out all the shared folders from where we got our weekly share of new movies, songs, videos etc... Bored souls like me used to go through every folder shared on every computer and occasionally look for information that might lead to passwords ;)

And, I come across this particular file. This file filled the blanks with the patterns I had to use with all the meta-data I knew of her. She was clever enough not to use the same passwords for her mail accounts. But again, they are all of the same pattern.

Q. Why did I have data on her?
A. For the obvious reasons :P

The first account - GMail came apart and the mails, chats, conversations, photos, videos, attachments and the most embarrassing things - everything flowed out . Bless the Google team, they just aggregated all your life into a single place.

And there were the clues errr.. the exact pathways to rest of the accounts, including that of her intimate friends, grades, college mail etc...
You can amazed how much a web search history of a person can reveal about the personality and life.

[ I was so into revenge and grins all over my face. It was a gold mine,a diamond jackpot. I didn't think about the feelings, embarrassment, sentiments etc... my bad!]

The timing to login into the accounts had to coincide with her absence and automatic sign-in of GTalk had to be taken care at every login, and the mailbox state had to be restored back, as it was when it was I logged in. I maintained of log, what I had read and what I have to read.

Slowly, my conscience took over and I had to break the break-in news to her. And then followed the threats to eliminate me from the face from earth and blah n blah n blah...

The whole thing of being ethical or unethical takes a backseat when your judgement is impaired by heavy dark clouds of emotion, past and revenge. To me it was a achievement, something that opened doors to a dark room with secrets.

The 'forgot password' functionality for most of the sites is not foolproof. Access to a vulnerable site leads the hacker to rest of your accounts.





Google has created an awesome framework to store your life.
If I could do it, what Google can do with all the data by itself ?
Are you willing to entrust your life's parallel backup with a company/institution solely because you trust their privacy policies and disclaimers.


PS: And if you are thinking about the complex 12-30 digit or more digits randomly generated passwords, but that's like 1 in a 1000 people who have an online presence. Rest of the 999 people are still vulnerable. Oh! yeah if you are important enough, there are people with supercomputers who can break into your account.