Sunny Sheffield

A month's visit to UK Midland, Sheffield gave me an opportunity to explore UK's country side. Though Sheffield is considered as one of the UK city, I would rather call it a well developed village. It is surrounded by mountains, and roads within the city sway up and down. Whole city seems to have been built above a table of mountains.

Don't really know why is it called SUNNY Sheffield ? Like any other UK city except London, it too has a City Centre right in the middle of the town. There I was fortunate to experience Britain's biggest Halloween party called Fright Night. On the night, locals get together on the street fancying ghostly characters. There are traders who come around to sell articles of speciality and for kids, there are loads of games in action. I could not stop myself from clicking continuous rounds of photographs. They will soon appear on buzzy_biz. To view them you will require a yahoo id.

Meadowhall is another magnificent shopping place to visit. It is considered to be one of the biggest malls of UK. Tram service from City Centre gets you over there. Other major attractions around the city are York, Alton Towers - biggest amusement park of UK and Castle town.

While returning from Sheffield to London, until halfway I had Ford Galaxy to my availability while remaining half was covered by Mercedes. Timing were almost similar to what it takes to reach Bombay from Pune. We touched London in less than 3 hours, while it took another 2 hours to reach home. It seems same traffic situation applies to all major world cities.

If you are visiting UK, Sheffield is worth visiting, even it means for a shorter duration.

New wave of spammers

A couple of days back Guardian reported the new ways adopted by spammers. Here is a summary of the article:

Why spam is out of control ? There is no single cause, say experts, but rather a confluence of unfortunate events. One of the biggest problems is that the main vehicle for spam - vast networks of home computers infected with malware, known as "botnets" - have been growing in size.

These botnets have existed for about five years. They are created when worms or Trojan horse programs are used to infect a PC, taking control of it and forcing it to accept commands sent by a central controller. The commands, traditionally sent via a real-time online chat protocol called Internet Relay Chat (IRC), were initially used to force large numbers of bots to attack a target web site, flooding it with traffic in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

DDoS attacks still happen, but bots are increasingly used to send spam emails, in effect acting as their own mail servers. In the 1990s, spam was mostly channelled via unprotected email servers online, used to send thousands of unsolicited emails anonymously. But then network administrators began locking them down.

Now, spammers send email directly from home machines thanks to botnet operators who program them to become email servers and then sell their processing power and bandwidth.

How can botnet operators maintain the overall volume of email while reducing the number of emails per bot? By increasing the number on the network. According to Dean Turner, senior manager of Symantec's Security Response team in the US, the company saw almost 4.7m new active bot network machines in the first half of this year. And Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer at the SANS internet Storm Center, which monitors online threats, saw the number of attacking client machines rocket from 770,000 on October 15 to 1,845,000 six days later.

The trade-off for more focused spam will be the effort involved in gathering information about their targets, explains Heron. But just as legitimate markets evolve, so do illegitimate ones, concludes Watson. "One of the common opinions in the botnet tracking community is that in this particular arms race, the black hats currently have the upper hand."

Virtual Local Guide

Gone are the days when you hire a local guide to see historical places! While standing in a queue outside Buckingham Palace, I was wondering about how and who would explain me the significance of the corners of Her Majesty's Queen Elizabeth's official residence.

Once we entered the palace the first thing that was handed over to us was the mobile phone-like device with a pair of headphones. This was an interactive device which behaves exactly like your local guide and explains each of the state rooms in full details. Each of the rooms has a number clearly visible. If you want to repeat any of the details for that room, you just need to dial that number on the keypad.

I was overwhelmed by this fantastic device. All the instructions were being accurately vocalized and went on synchronously, as we walked throughout the palace.

Technology is taking it's leap to surmount incorrect human acts. May be we in India we can implement such devices at historical monuments like Red Fort, Taj Mahal, Mysore palace, etc. This will give organised employment to the unemployed, who will take care of such systems and at the same time save tourists from being duped by the local unorganised guides.