Effective Test Cases & Introduction to Hexawise

Effective Test Cases & Introduction to Hexawise from Nilenth Selvaraja

Web accessibility & AODA compliance

How to remove ads from KMplayer and how to disable box in KMplayer

Keep the KM Player closed & Go to Internet options you can search it in the search bar 

Now click the Security tab & click on Restricted site 

click the sites button and type the URL  player.kmpmedia.net in that box & click add & Close.

Now open the KMPlayer and you will find no ads or adbox

IMPORTANCE OF MAINTAINING PRIVACY ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS FOR IT PROFESSIONALS

IMPORTANCE OF MAINTAINING PRIVACY ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS FOR IT PROFESSIONALS 

Enabled by powerful, easily accessible and user friendly Information Technology applications Social media have spread across many people and organizations across many industries. (Bernoff & Schadler, 2010) Common Social media includes blogs, microblogs, wikis, social networking sites and video-or content-sharing sites (Piskori & McCall, 2010) which has become a part and parcel of everyone’s life. Especially for IT professionals it plays a major role as they always engage in their profession using computers and Mobile phones which has easy access to these social media and even can say that they lead the charge in the usage of these than other professionals.

Social Media and privacy have become a controversial topic and much publicized topic since the introduction of Social media. Day to day we see in news websites plenty of cases of crime due to social media privacy issues. Due to this large number of events there is a debate among public whether privacy in Social media can be dismissed as a relic in information age because if people are ready to share everything in Social media that means they have abandoned any reasonable expectation of privacy (Madden, 2012). But when we think in another angle there maybe majority people who may involve in these activities without a proper knowledge in Social media Privacy. In the case of IT professionals the society recognize them as people who have a sound knowledge about everything related to computers, internet and social media but in reality even majority of the IT professionals are in the group who share information in Social media without knowing about the privacy issues.

Social media has totally changed the way how people communicate these days and IT professionals are no exception to this. Before the Social media came up the best way for IT professionals to meet up with their peers are professional events and industry related organizations. But now after social media arrived IT professionals not only could keep in touch with peers anytime but also have contact with the extended groups of influencers who interact with those peers (Weglage, 2010) This may be very useful profession wise to get to know people of the same area expertise and share ideas but they tend to forget that they’re just peers not close friends whom you can share your personal life with. Having contacts with such people through social media may expose your family background and other personal details which may affect you in an unexpected way in the future. This is one of the reasons an IT Professional should maintain privacy on Social media and these kind of situations can be prevented in Social Media like Facebook where the user can limit and put privacy to what each person could see and have separate privacy settings for close friends, family members and peers.

The using of social media by employees of organizations such as IT companies have various impacts on their company internally where it is related to organizational work and cultures and externally where what’s the type of image the professionals create to the outer world about the organization through social media (Kane, et al., 2009) These factors will encourage the organization to encourage one aspect and eradicate the other this is one of the factors that justifies the activity of IT companies controlling the social media activities of the IT professionals. (Emmanuelle & Evgeny , 2013) The IT professionals should understand this logic and maintain privacy on social media related to their workplace. There are some organizations who even go to the extent of blocking social media sites inside the organization in order to prevent privacy issues. Not only inside office but also handling social media outside must be taken care safely. Especially posting tweets or status updates about a project you’re working on will may even lead your company to take legal actions against you depending on the seriousness of the issue. In such an instance you’re breaking the confidentiality of your job, therefore sharing work related information on social media should be totally prohibited or must be put privacy to close people on sites like Facebook. Sharing them in sites like twitter isn’t safe at all as it is visible to all your followers and you don’t need a clear identity to follow you on twitter so anyone and everyone can hide their identity and follow your tweets. Even blogging about work you did in your company for your company such as blogging about a program you wrote for your company will lead you to legal issues because the rights of the program is owned by the company and no one has rights to copyright it without permission. So proper privacy should be maintained on professional articles published on blogs.

Another work related privacy mistake in Social media many IT professionals make is adding their senior officers as friends in social media such as Facebook and Myspace. In a situation where you can’t ignore him and is forced to add them special attention should be made to put privacy settings in a way that won’t bring a bad opinion or suspicion on you. In a research made recently among employees of fortune 100 companies it’s been found that nearly 15% are guilty of sharing work related content and sharing unprofessional photographs taken inside their workplace been shared in social media. If these kind of material is seen by higher officials in the workplace it may even become a threat for his job and may even face further severe actions. Therefore when adding a higher officer adds you in his social media network privacy controls become handy to make sure they don’t see such content. Maybe sharing content such as CFR projects done by the company and other achievements may give a good opinion and make believe others that he enjoys his job and is dedicated for the growth of that entity.

 IT companies are work places where you find various types of people from various background, religion, race and political ideas work. Studies made by Global teams on IT companies show that cultural differences affect work ethic, method of communication, revering hierarchy and other factors which may have negative influences on team members. (Edwards & Sridhar, 2002) When an IT professional shares something on Facebook or twitter that is attacking a particular race, party or religion and colleagues or  higher officials who belong to that group sees it in social media it will make a bad opinion about him. Not only a bad opinion but it may even lead to an argument and other workers may feel awkward to work together with him and higher officers may consider it as a black mark on him which can affect his promotions and appraisals considering him as a person who cannot work with a team or lead a team with different types of people. So IT professional should be aware about what they’re sharing and privacy can be set in a way that it won’t be visible to them.

In the present day, Social media profiles are being used to judge a person’s character. Recruiters checking people’s social media profiles before recruiting a person to their company is a good example for this. This make you wonder how a person’s online social life can be a factor in future professional life, There are situations when finding difficulty to find the correct person among two ended up after checking their content in social media. Currently there are no regulations to protect job applicants from this harassment (Nicole & Matt, 2007). The best and only way to prevent this situation for an IT professional is to cleanup all unwanted details in his social media content as soon as he/she sends a job application and put privacy to content which may give a wrong idea about that person. Especially profile pictures, cover photos should be decent content unlike pictures of drinking and partying will create a negative opinion. LinkedIn is a very important social media that recruiters have most interest on and it should be up to date where they can get a good impression and correct understanding about that person. It’s one social media that should be with less privacy and more professional so that employers can know more about you.

It is the information era and people should learn and get used to the different opinions on social media and privacy related issues. Also world is too fast and busy to care for others so your privacy should be taken care by yourself and you cannot expect others to care for your privacy in social media. As IT professionals our approach towards Social media privacy should be exemplary for others being people who are more involved with computers, internet and other communication technology.

North London Rivalry- Arsenal vs Tottenham Rivalry

Arsenal Vs Tottenham Rivalry (North London Rivalry)

The rivalry didn't really begin until 1913 when Arsenal moved from Plumstead to a new stadium in Highbury which was only five miles away from Spurs' ground. It meant the two teams became local rivals, and there is always animosity between local rivals in football. 

Arsenal were a second division club at the time and Spurs were in the top flight, but that didn't last very long. World War One interrupted the world of football from 1914 until 1918, and when the war was over things took a turn in Arsenal's favour. There were plans to expand the first division from 20 teams to 22 teams, and Spurs hoped to stay up despite finishing 20th in the last season prior to the war.

Somehow or other Arsenal managed to take the last spot in the top flight despite the fact that they had only finished sixth in the second division in that last season before the war. There were rumours and allegations that Arsenal chairman Sir Henry Norris had used underhand dealings to obtain their promotion, but nothing was ever proven. Needless to say Spurs were far from happy with the outcome, but they soon won promotion back to the first division to set up the rivalry.

The first league encounter between the sides was in early 1921, and Spurs won 2-1 at home. After that the games between the sides became rather heated, and after a particularly vicious game in 1922 the FA threatened to make both teams play behind closed doors. 

The rivalry might have become even more intense after that, but Spurs spent most of the time between 1928 and 1950 in the second division. During that time Arsenal rose to prominence in English football with six league titles to their name, while their local rivals still had none to their name. Spurs only spent two seasons in the top league in that time, and Arsenal won the title on both occasions.

ST. TOTTERINGHAM'S DAY

It is a concept thought up by Julian Shulam is given to the day each season when Tottenham no longer finish above Arsenal.

Only three times has an Arsenal Spurs game been the match that caused St Totteringham's. Two were wins, and one was a draw. They are...

1. Spurs 0 - 4 Arsenal, 7th May 1927
2. Arsenal 1 - 0 Spurs, 26 April 1975
3. Spurs 2 - 2 Arsenal, 21 April 2007

It has happened at least once in reverse (1992/3)

ST. HOTSPUR DAY

  Arsenal were humbled as Gazza returned from injury to score and inspire Spurs to a fantastic 3-1 victory on 14th april 1991 in the FA Cup semi finals game to deny Arsenal the Double. Paul Gascoigne opened the scoring with an amazing free kick, before Gary Lineker made it 2-0 shortly afterwards. Arsenal pulled one back, but in the second half Gary Lineker hit a tame shot, that was strong enough to fly through David Seaman’s hands and into the net. 3-1

Sources:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~mikepitt/tothistory.html

http://visual.ly/arsenal-v-tottenham-north-london-rivalry-illustrated

Permissions and Access Control Lists of OpenSUSE 12.2

OpenSUSE 12.2

1.1 Introduction to OpenSUSE 12.2

OpenSUSE is an open source Linux OS distribution developed and supported by the openSUSE Project. It is sponsored by SUSE which had been owned by Novell since 2003, but SUSE currently operates as a standalone business unit following The Attachmate Group's acquisition of Novell in 2011. According to distrowatch.org it is one of the top 5 most downloaded Linux OS.

The main difference of OpenSUSE from other Linux OS is that it is completely locked down and the developers of openSUSE is more interested in security and because of that nothing happens within the operating system without the express permission of the end user. OpenSUSE requires the end user to submit a root password for almost every single task.

OpenSUSE 12.2 is one of the stable releases of openSUSE released in September 2012 with the use of Linux 3.4 kernel & features like KDE 4.8, GNOME 3.4, GRUB 2 and XFCE 4.10.

1.2 Permissions of OpenSUSE

OpenSUSE are built on top of Linux kernels & Linux systems traditionally come with 3 permission sets defined for each file object. These permissions allow or prevent others from viewing, modifying or executing different type of files for 3 user groups file owner, group & other.

All files and directories in a Linux system are owned by a specific user or a group so the permissions are defined separately for users, groups and others.

User- The username of the owner of the file mostly by default the person who creates the file will become the owner.

Group- Group of users that own the file. All users in that group will have the same access permissions to the file while others can’t access it.

Other- User who isn’t the owner of the file or belong to a group which owns the file. If you set the permission for ‘other’ category it will apply for everyone who uses that system.

Each of the user types mentioned above are defined separately three types of access permissions

Read Permission- Files can be opened and read under this permission and in the case of a directory you can list the contents of the directory.

Write Permission- Files can be modified by adding new data to it and in the case of a directory you can add, remove and rename files in the contents.

Execute Permission- Files can be executed as a program or a shell script and in the case of a directory you can access the files in it and enter it with the cd command.

The letters r , w, x are used to represent this user permissions where
r- read    w- write   x- Execute
The image shown below represents how permissions are given to each user type in a particular system.    

Image source:     http://www.comentum.com/images/permissions.jpg

According to the permissions allowed shown in the above image.
1. The owner of the file is given permission to read, write & execute.
2. Members of the group owning the file are allowed to only to read and write.
3. All other users are only allowed to read the files.

These permissions can also be set using their respective octal values. The table shown below represents the octal value given for each permissions.

Image source: http://e-university.wisdomjobs.com/shell-scripting/chapter-534-174/understanding-linux-file-permissions_decoding-file-permissions_3082.html

These permissions can also be set using the ‘chmodcommand’ in the command line as shown below.

                                              chmodu+rwx, g+rwx, o+rwx  filename.txt

or

chmod 777 filename.txt

 According to the above 2 codes the permission is given to all users to read write and execute.

Apart from these traditional file permissions additionally there are more advanced features such as setuid, setgid and sticky bit in openSUSE 12.2 for special cases where the traditional systems seems too restrictive. The difference between traditional file permissions and the other advanced system is that traditional file permissions apply for each class of people but the setuid, setgid and sticky bits apply for a file or directory overall.

·         The setuid bit- setuid or set user id is a specific file attribute that instructs the system to execute programs marked accordingly under a specific user ID. This system will help even a normal user to use this ID and act as root or another user temporarily.

   -rwsr-xr-x  1 root shadow 80036 2004-10-02 11:08 /usr/bin/passwd

     

     In the above code the letter ’s’ is inserted in the owner permission which means        the user who has the ID can work as the root / owner of the file

·         The setgid bit- setgid or set group id is a file attribute where a program for which this bit is set runs under the group ID under which it was saved, no matter which user starts it. By default when a new file or directory is created under that directory it will inherit the features of that group.  

   drwxrws--- 2 tux archive 48 Nov 19 17:12  backup

In the above code the letter ‘s’ is inserted in the group permission which means owner of the directory and members of the group may access it. Users that are not members of the group are mapped to the respective group.

·         The sticky bit- If this attribute belongs to a program, a file marked in this way is loaded to RAM to avoid needing to get it from the hard disk each time it is used. This is used rarely now as modern hard disks are fast enough. If this attribute belongs to a directory it prevents users from deleting, renaming or moving each other’s files except by owner of the file.

   drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 1160 2002-11-19 17:15 /tmp

Sample set of permissions given to files and directories

Image Source: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19683-01/806-7612/images/Files.fig153.epsi.gif

1.3 Access control lists of openSUSE 12.2

 ACLs can be divided into 2 parts

·      Minimum ACL- It comprises entries for the owner, owning group and other which correspond to the conventional permission bits for files and directories.

·       Extended ACL- This exceeds the minimum ACL concept. It must contain a mask entry and may contain several entries for the named user and named group types.

Image source:


http://users.suse.com/~agruen/acl/chapter/fs_acl-en.pdf

Default ACL and effects of them

Directories can have a default ACL where the subdirectories and files in the directory inherit when they are created. There are 2 ways in which the permission of a default ACL in a directory is passed to files and subdirectories

        A subdirectory inherits the default ACL of the parent directory both as its default ACL and as an ACL.

·            A file inherits the default ACL as its default ACL

ACL Support in Applications

ACLs can be also used to implement complex permissions in modern day applications but unfortunately many of those applications such as editors and file managers’ lack ACL support. Except for the star archiver, there are currently no backup applications that preserve ACLs 

1.4 YaST module Security Center & Hardening for openSUSE 12.2

The YaST module Security center and Hardening offers a centralized security setting for openSUSE 12.2. It is used to configure security aspects such as login procedure, password creation, configure boot permissions and user creation along with file permissions.

Image source: http://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/html/openSUSE_122/opensuse-security/cha.security.yast_security.html

The Security Overview shown in the above image displays a comprehensive list of the most important security settings for your system. The security status of each entry in the list is clearly visible.

The option ‘User Addition’ helps to set minimum or maximum number of users or group IDs. This setting will be always default and doesn’t need to be changed frequently.

File Permissions in YaST security center

OpenSUSE 12.2 comes with 3 predefined set of file permissions for system files.

·       Easy File Permission- These are suitable for standalone machines and it allows regular          users to read the files.

·       Secure File Permission- These are suitable for multi user machines with network access.

·       Paranoid settings- These are the most restrictive of all and should be handled carefully.

User Launching UpdatedB

The UpdatedB program scans the system and creates a database of all file locations. When UpdatedB is run as user nobody, only files that are for public users to be readable will be added to the database. When its run as user root all files except the ones not allowed to read for the admin will be added.