Adobe flaw leads to Trojan attack

Why adobe flash is not good app platform!!!! Attractive things will always have danger within!!!!!!

Adobe is suffering from a two-fer of security flaws at present, with researchers revealing an attack which utilises both Acrobat Reader and Flash Player to infect targeted PCs with a Trojan horse.
According to an article over on CNet, the vulnerability exists in Adobe Reader 9.1.2 and Adobe Flash Player 9 and 10 and has been around since at least December 2008 – although it's only within the last two weeks that security researchers have evidence of it being exploited in the wild.
The attack relies on the target opening a specially crafted SWF file, either as part of a web page or an e-mail, or opening a PDF file containing an embedded SWF. Once opened, the flaw is triggered and 'dropper' code executed which installs the malware – in the case of the current exploit, a Trojan horse package.
also read :
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/07/26/adobe-flaw-leads-to-trojan-attack/1
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/169058/adobe_flash_flaw_exploited_in_web_sites_researcher_warns.html
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2009-07-26-adobe-hackers_N.htm
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3792
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3773

[TECH] Rules Engine - Drool

Implement business logic with the Drools rules engine

Use a declarative programming approach to write your program's business logic

Using a rules engine can lower an application's maintenance and extensibility costs by reducing the complexity of components that implement complex business logic. This updated article shows you how to use the open source Drools rules engine to make a Java™ application more adaptive to changes. The Drools project has introduced a new native rule expression language and an Eclipse plug-in, making Drools easier to use than ever before.

Most of the complexities that requirements impose on today's software products are behavioral and functional, resulting in component implementations with complex business logic. The most common way to implement the business logic in a J2EE or J2SE application is to write Java code that realizes the requirements document's rules and logic. In most cases, this code's intricacy and complexity makes maintaining and updating the application's business logic a daunting task, even for experienced developers. And any change, however simple, incurs recompilation and redeployment costs.

A rules engine helps you resolve (or at least reduce) the issues and difficulties inherent in the development and maintenance of an application's business logic. You can think of a rules engine as a framework for implementing complex business logic. Most rules engines let you use declarative programming to express the consequences that are valid given some information or knowledge. You can concentrate on facts that are known to be true and their associated outcomes — that is, on an application's business logic.

Several rules engines are available, including commercial and open source choices. Commercial rules engines usually let you express rules in a proprietary English-like language. Others let you write rules using scripting languages such as Groovy or Python. This updated article introduces you to the Drools engine and uses a sample program to help you understand how to use Drools as part of your business logic

Drools is an open source rules engine, written in the Java language, that uses the Rete algorithm to evaluate the rules you write (see Resources). Drools lets you express your business logic rules in a declarative way. You can write rules using a non-XML native language that is quite easy to learn and understand. And you can embed Java code directly in a rules file, which makes the experience of learning Drools even more attractive. Drools also has other advantages. It is:

• Supported by an active community
• Easy to use
• Quick to execute
• Gaining popularity among Java developers
• Compliant with the Java Rule Engine API (JSR 94) (see Resources)
• Free

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-drools/

Reference Sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drools

http://java-source.net/open-source/rule-engines/drools

http://java-source.net/open-source/rule-engines

http://www.jboss.org/drools/documentation.html

http://downloads.jboss.com/drools/docs/4.0.7.19894.GA/html_single/index.html#d0e65

http://downloads.jboss.com/drools/docs/4.0.7.19894.GA/html/index.html

http://blog.athico.com/2007/11/how-big-is-too-big.html

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/08/03/drools.html?page=1

Reading/Writing data in MS-Access database using javascript

A simplest way to create a application is making a HTML page interact with the database directly. This is possible with javascript.

Code copied from webdeveloper.com

Adding a Record

function AddRecord() {
var adoConn = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Connection");
var adoRS = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Recordset");

adoConn.Open("Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source='/\dbName.mdb'");
adoRS.Open("Select * From tblName", adoConn, 1, 3);

adoRS.AddNew;
adoRS.Fields("FieldName").value = "Quentin";
adoRS.Update;

adoRS.Close();
adoConn.Close();
}

Removing a Record

function DeleteRecord() {
var adoConn = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Connection");
var adoRS = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Recordset");

adoConn.Open("Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source='\\dbName.mdb'");
adoRS.Open("Select * From tblName Where FieldName = 'Quentin'", adoConn, 1, 3);
adoRS.Delete;
adoRS.Delete;

adoRS.Close();
adoConn.Close();
}

Editing a Record

function EditRecord() {
var adoConn = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Connection");
var adoRS = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Recordset");

adoConn.Open("Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source='\\dbName.mdb'");
adoRS.Open("Select * From tblName Where FieldName = 'Quentin'", adoConn, 1, 3);

adoRS.Edit;
adoRS.Fields("FieldName").value = "New Name";
adoRS.Update;

adoRS.Close();
adoConn.Close();
}

Ajax programming with Struts 2

Very useful and handy steps to create AJAX enabled page

javaworld.com Article : Five steps to dynamic tables using Struts 2, Dojo and JSON

Death of a format - HD DVD

BBC report

Toshiba has dropped out of the high-definition DVD battle, saying that it will stop production of its HD DVD players and recorders.

It means victory for Sony's Blu-ray format but will leave questions for all those who bought into the failed format as well as raising issues about whether anyone can benefit from a format war.

Bid farewell to Mouse (device)!!!

Yes, its high time to bid farewell to that pointing device, as touch screens are going to rule the User Interface world in future. After the sucess of iPhone's touch interface, everyone in business have started looking it BIG.

BBC reports that even microsoft have plans to support the touch screen interface in their up coming Windows 7. Microsoft's windows is the commonly used desktop platform across the world, so if 'Windows 7' doesn't need a mouse, new desktop wouldn't be having them. Anyway those desktops should have, much costlier touch screens for interface instead of this cheap device.

If Microsoft is doing this, sure that apple and even Linux touch screen support would come one by one. Then touch screen would be the cat eating our mouse device!

[Copy Cat] 6 Firefox Extensions for Web Workers

http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/07/20/6-firefox-extensions-for-web-workers/

I can’t help it. Even though Safari has a nicer looking UI, and the most recent Windows update is leaking memory like a sieve, I keep running Firefox as my primary Web browser. Why? Because no other browser has managed to give me anything like the extensibility story that Firefox extensions bring to my daily web working experience. With thousands of extensions out there, your list may vary, but here’s my own selection of half a dozen essentials:

Faviconize Tab - If you’re like me, you run with a lot of browser tabs open (I try to make time for a cleanup session when I get to 40 or 50 open tabs) and the first eight or ten are always the same. Why waste real estate on titles for those tabs? Faviconize shrinks those tabs down to just the width of the favicon.

Firebug - I feel silly even recommending this one. I don’t see how you could do modern web development without it. I turn to the JavaScript and CSS debugging tools here every time I’m working on a web page. Perhaps it’s less essential to people who write better JavaScript and CSS code than I do.

FoxClocks - This one makes it much easier to work with distributed teams. FoxClocks understands time zones, and can put as many little clocks as you like in your browser status bar, so you can see at a glance what time it is for team members in Bangkok, Bolivia, and Berlin. A great aid to scheduling and figuring out who’s likely to be online.

MenuX - If you’re a fan of maximizing your actual web site real estate, take a look at this one; it gives you toolbar buttons for a raft of things. It’s sort of like running Firefox in fullscreen mode but with access to your toolbars. You can also just grab individual buttons from it to have on your main toolbar; I use it to give me one-click access to “View Source” because I’m too lazy to memorize keyboard shortcuts.

Nightly Tester Tools - Don’t let the name scare you. There’s one good reason to grab this even if you don’t test alpha and beta versions of Firefox. Too many other extensions are coded to assume a maximum version number even though they don’t break on higher versions of Firefox. The Nightly Tester Tools adds a “Make all compatible” button to the Add-Ons dialog box that will tell all of your extensions to ignore version checks. If you’ve ever lost a much-loved extension due to a Firefox upgrade, this may get it back for you.

View Source Chart - A great little extension for understanding the structure of a complex web page through a nested, collapsible chart using color and graphics. If you use a framework that generates complex HTML (and who doesn’t, these days?) this is another indispensable debugging aid.

Understanding Service Oriented Architecture

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) promises to provide us with the ability to assemble complex, distributed systems by selecting and creating compatible parts called services. So far, SOA has delivered a lot of hyperbole to the Web. Gartner recognized it as one of the five hottest IT trends in 2005, claiming that "By 2008, SOA will provide the basis for 80 percent of development projects." At JavaOne 2005, 82 of the 168 technical session PDFs contained "SOA." In July of 2005, there were 1.4 million Google hits for "service oriented architecture." By February, 2006, there were 72 million. SOA is riding a rising tide as the next big thing for enterprise developers.

Unfortunately, most developers find it hard to cut through this tide of hype to learn just what service oriented architecture is about. Forests of three-letter acronym (TLA) standards sprout, bloom, and are overgrown before any of us can learn enough about them to decide if they are appropriate for our own projects. The standards compete for our attention and allegiance. Further, most articles and presentations focus on a specific TLA, and how to make some legacy system fit within someone else's favorite web service plumbing. "Legacy" seems to mean "the software that has to keep working to keep the system alive and useful to the business."

I started working with distributed messaging systems in 1995 and can understand most of the articles, but I find the volume of hype daunting and largely irrelevant. This article focuses on what you can get out of SOA to make developing and maintaining software easy, and help your businesses run better. Here's what you can get out of service oriented architecture:

• Better understanding of the system being developed.
• Better-organized, better-focused incremental development.
• Easier integration with each others' systems.
• Well-defined boundaries for tests.
• More big-block reuse of code by reusing services.
• Scaling up by creating systems of systems.
• More reliability via restartable services.
• Development focused on executable business plans.

That list is a huge promise. No wonder there's so much hype. Unfortunately, the list doesn't hold anything we can code. Aside from being able to restart a service, it's not specific at all. Service oriented architectures bring together specific good ideas from the 1980s and 1990s to create a complex system from simple parts. Service oriented architectures have these characteristics:

• Services have strong software contracts.
• Services are encapsulated.
• Messages are documents.
• Services share a message bus.
• Services are loosely coupled.
• Services have a life cycle.
• Systems of services are assembled at runtime.
• Services can be discovered.
• Systems of services can grow into systems of systems.

read more

DVD Formats Explained

When DVD technology first appeared in households, users were simply popping DVD discs into their DVD players to watch movies — an attractive option to the then-conventional VCR. But just as compact disc technology evolved so that users could record and erase and re-record data onto compact discs, the same is now true of DVDs.

With so many different formats — DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-ROM — how do users know which DVD format is compatible with their existing systems, and why are there so many different formats for DVDs? The following information sheds some light on DVD's different flavors, the differences between them and the incompatibility issues that the differing technologies have sprouted.

The crucial difference among the standards is based on which standards each manufacturer adheres to. Similar to the old VHS/Beta tape wars when VCRs first hit the markets, different manufacturers support different standards.

DVD+R and DVD+RW
DVD+R and DVD+RW formats are supported by Philips, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Ricoh, Yamaha and others.

DVD+R is a recordable DVD format similar to CD-R. A DVD+R can record data only once and then the data becomes permanent on the disc. The disc can not be recorded onto a second time.

DVD+RW is a re-recordable format similar to CD-RW. The data on a DVD+RW disc can be erased and recorded over numerous times without damaging the medium.

DVDs created by a +R/+RW device can be read by most commercial DVD-ROM players.

DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD-RAM
These formats are supported by Panasonic, Toshiba, Apple Computer, Hitachi, NEC, Pioneer, Samsung and Sharp. These formats are also supported by the DVD Forum.

DVD-R is a recordable DVD format similar to CD-R and DVD+R. A DVD-R can record data only once and then the data becomes permanent on the disc. The disc cannot be recorded onto a second time. There also are two additional standards for DVD-R disks: DVD-RG for general use, and DVD-RA for authoring, which is used for mastering DVD video or data and is not typically available to the general public.

DVD-RW is a re-recordable format similar to CD-RW or DVD+RW. The data on a DVD-RW disc can be erased and recorded over numerous times without damaging the medium.

DVDs created by a -R/-RW device can be read by most commercial DVD-ROM players.

DVD-RAM discs can be recorded and erased repeatedly but are compatible only with devices manufactured by the companies that support the DVD-RAM format. DVD-RAM discs are typically housed in cartridges.

DVD+R DL and DVD-R DL
Dual layer technology is supported by a range of manufacturers including Dell, HP, Verbatim, Philips, Sony, Yamaha and others. As the name suggests, dual layer technology provides two individual recordable layers on a single-sided DVD disc. Dual Layer is more commonly called Double Layer in the consumer market, and can be seen written as DVD+R DL or DVD-R DL.

DVD+R DL (also called DVD+R9) is a Dual Layer writeable DVD+R.
DVD-R DL (also called DVD-R9) is a Dual Layer writeable DVD-R. The dual layered discs can hold 7.95GB

The dual layered discs (DVD+R9 and DVD-R9) can hold 7.95GB and double sided dual layer (called dvd-18) can hold 15.9GB.

HD-DVD
Short for high definition-DVD, a generic term for the technology of recording high-definition video on a DVD. In general, HD-DVD is capable of storing between two and four times as much data as standard DVD. The two most prominent competing technologies are Blu-ray and AOD.

Blu-ray Disc (BD) - uses a 405nm-wavelength blue-violet laser technology, in contrast to the 650nm-wavelength red laser technology used in traditional DVD formats. The rewritable Blu-ray disc, with a data transfer rate of 36Mbps (1x speed) can hold up to 25GB of data on a single-layer disc and 50GB on a dual-layer disc. On a 50GB disc, this translates into 9 hours of high-definition (HD) video or approximately 23 hours of standard-definition (SD) video. The Blu-ray format was developed jointly by Sony, Samsung, Sharp, Thomson, Hitachi, Matsushita, Pioneer and Philips, Mistubishi and LG Electronics.

Advanced Optical Disc (AOD) - AOD and Blu-ray are similar in that they both use 405nm-wavelength blue-violet laser technology. while Blu-ray has a storage capacity of 25GB on a single-layer disc, AOD has a storage capacity of 20GB on a single-layer disc. and the capacity to hold 30GB on a dual-layer disc. AOD was developed jointly by Toshiba and NEC.

DVD-ROM
DVD-ROM was the first DVD standard to hit the market and is a read-only format. The video or game content is burned onto the DVD once and the DVD will run on any DVD-ROM-equipped device.

A Note on DVD Burners
Until 2003 consumers would have to choose a preferred DVD format and purchase the DVD media that was compatible with the specific DVD burner. In 2003 Sony introduced a multi-format DVD burner (also called a combo drive or DVD-Multi) and today many manufacturers offer multi-format DVD burners which are compatible with multiple DVD formats.

refer