Police Car

Very often I have come across situations where Police vehicles were parked in unauthorized zones but according to law police vehicles, fire fighters and ambulances are allowed to park in restricted zones but I see the Mauritius Police Force abusing more than they should. One police vehicle was parked near Casernes also known as Line Barracks in Mauritius, where the van was obstructing the way. I don’t know why the Mauritian government has granted these privileges to an institution where they abusing and on the same day I saw a policeman giving a ticket to a driver who was in his vehicle but parked in an unauthorized area.

Sincerely, I find this unacceptable!! When you go for the driver’s license test, you get screwed for petty issues which you have not done and when you decide to talk to the commissioner, he will tell you that “Our examiners know how to do their work”. Many times I have seen police vehicles not giving precedence to pedestrians on a busy road. Do you call this “Loyally we serve”??

I remember that I had to be subjected to a “frisk” search in UK as stabbing was getting more acute. The policeman introduced himself in a polite manner and asked me kindly that he needs to search my bag as all lights went red when I got through the metal detector and he even apologized for the inconveniences caused. I am still wondering when will the Mauritius Police Force improve its staff and deliver quality services in Mauritius???

These job opportunities sound cool, just like in Splinter Cell since you need to hide your true identity and use fictitious name. Only your parents shall be aware of your status as a secret agent. Sounds like James Bond!!! Read full article here

Referring to the above image, Google has taken privacy into consideration by editing the live satellite picture by blurring the plate number of the cars.Awesome!!! Back in 2008, I used to take the stairs circled in red in order to reach the bus station.Have a look at the picture below.

Besides, the engineers have also implemented vanishing point in google maps. I can’t believe the unzoomed images acquired are crystal clear

Unfortunately, not all regions in the UK can be “Street viewed” andI have started to miss those moments which I have spent last year in UK.

I am rather impressed since transfer rate which I acquired is 50KB/s on a 512K Line and Windows doesn’t even detect my Livebox’s SSID

The phase one of discovering Dengue drugs is now completed thanks to all the members supporting WCG. This phase would have taken 12, 000 years without sharing of world wide resources and hopefully it completed in 2 years. I’m not trying to impress you but WCG said Thank you yasirmx!

An extract of the mail is given below:

World Community Grid is pleased to announce the completion of the first phase of the “Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together” project. It took only two years to complete, even though the project was halted for 17 weeks due to the destruction of the University of Texas Medical Branch research facilities as a result of Hurricane Ike.

In total, members provided nearly 12,000 years of computer processing time to this project.

Completing this phase of the project is a significant contribution to the research of not only Dengue Fever but also Hepatitis C, West Nile, Yellow Fever and other diseases caused by the Flaviviridea family of viruses.

The full story can be obtained from here. Please contribute by registering and offering your CPU power for the sake of humanitarian needs!!

WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) is a more stronger encryption algorithm than WEP and is being used on a heavy scale by almost everyone since it is more secure and no one could intercept packets in order to decipher the key but japanese computer scientists have been able to crack WPA TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol)in 1 minute. It is high time for us to kiss WPA TKIP goodbye and switch to even more secure encryption algos like WPA-2.

A report is available in PDF format here.

ISPs ( short for Internet Service Providers) have been trying to impress us (Mauritians) by offering some services which are considered to be outdated in Europe/US/Asia. Emtel is working more on acquiring a fibre optics line which is supposed to reduce the monthly cost by some “reasonable” amount while Mauritius Telecom has joined Orange expecting the latter to help him promote outsourcing in Sub-African continents. The reversed happened!!! In fact orange is now promoting itself in African countries and targetted Mauritius as its main “victim”.

Outremer Telecom has sought permission from Mauritian government in view of offering various services which Emtel and Orange did not even think of but these rivals objected to the fact that a new foreign ISP should be present. From my point of view, Outremer would have killed the local ISPs by introducing low-rated monthly fee, high speed internet connection and broadband TV with more than 50 channels.

In UK for instance, more than 4 providers are present and the population is free to choose its preferred ISP. When will the Mauritian government be able to take mature decisions for the benefits of the Mauritians??

ZD net published an article mentioning that malicious codes involving iFrame has been used by crackers which redirects the user to exploit web sites. The latter in turn loads up to 7 different malware domain names.

Google search results in 55k websites containing that piece of code. An extract from scancafe’s journal is given below:

The malware hosting domains were registered on or after August 3, 2009 and include: ahthja.info, gaehh.info, htsrh.info, car741.info, game163.info, car963.info, and game158.info. The most prolific observed by ScanSafe thus far has been ahthja.info.

The path of the exploits/malware is consistent among the domains, as seen in the following examples:

/fox.exe
/jcin02.exe
/mj.exe
/oday/14.js
/oday/14.js?
/oday/15.js
/oday/15.js?
/oday/16.js
/oday/16.js?
/oday/avast.js
/oday/done.swf
/oday/ff.html
/oday/ie.html
/oday/index.html
/oday/index.html?
/oday/mam.exe
/oday/nYnTd14.htm
/oday/nYnTd14.htm?
/oday/NyNtDfll.htm?
/oday/of.htm
/oday/of.htm?
/oday/of.js
/oday/of.js?
/oday/of1.css
/oday/of1.css?
/oday/q.js?
/oday/xp.swf
/oday/yt.jpg
/oday/yt.jpg?
/oday/ytfl.htm
/oday/YTUUCeee.pif
/oday/YTUUCeee.vbs
/oday/YUT.htm
/oday/YUT.htm?
/win.exe
/s5.exe
/za.exe

Post infection, additional malware may also be downloaded from 74.52.164.210/pk/axa0727.exe

Sample WHOIS info:

Domain Name:AHTHJA.INFO
Created On:10-Aug-2009 15:21:48 UTC
Last Updated On:10-Aug-2009 15:25:54 UTC
Expiration Date:10-Aug-2010 15:21:48 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:GoDaddy.com Inc.

Now we badly need to be careful!!Although the codes are malicious, I still acknowledge the programmers as “Genious” because they always find some ways to invade systems

A1H1N1 – Codename for Swine Flu has reached a pandemic level and Mauritius has lost around 15 people. The government had made arrangements for anti-viral pills like TamiFlu which can fight the viruses and help in recovery but doctors have foreseen more disastrous situations by 2010 and they said that in fact 50% of the population will suffer from this ailment but the good news is that Mauritians will develop better anti-bodies.

Fortunately the Mauritian government decided to close all educational institutions for 10 days and classes/lectures will resume as from 31 August. This might help in “not spreading the virus” for 10 days only, which I find useless!! Disposable masks seems NOT to help in not contracting the viruses.

You can read more about the masks here or here.

Besides, GlaxoSmithKline is investing its efforts/resources in finding their own medication and Indian laboratories have acquired a patent to sell a generic version of TamiFlu which is less expensive of course Fortunately, strict rules have been imposed on Tami Flu in hospitals because some stupid people were taking stealing these pills. What a shame!!!!

The Mauritian media is talking about this pandemonium and precautions that need to be taken on a daily basis. It’s a really huge responsibility on the government’s shoulder and THEY SHOULD BE ABLE TO HANDLE THE SITUATION whatever it costs!!

Hopefully, google will take Mauritius to a next level by installing its cache servers at Ebene Cyber City in September 2009.  It seems that National Computer Board will take the responsibility to operate the cache servers. Access to services like Gmail will be faster and those servers will cache local web sites as well.

Playing around with google earth will be more interesting since clicking and dragging will deliver results faster!!