I swim with Marcos Diaz Posted by Adel Mubarak , Sunday, May 30, 2010 at 7:50 PM, in Labels: MDGs

In the Summer of 2010, Marcos Diaz will swim across the continents to raise the voices of the world and show that we are not that far apart after all. His purpose is to bring global attention to the Millenium Development Goals and urge people to act and demand that the leaders deliver their promises by 2015.

Today I had the chance to meet Marcos Diaz Good Will Ambassador of the Dominican Republic, he is swimming across the continents, as part of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals Campaign.
I'm so glad having the chance to meet him :))

Join Marcos @ http://iswimwithmarcos.com/app/en/frontpage.aspx

GNU C Library vulnerabilities Posted by Adel Mubarak , Saturday, May 29, 2010 at 5:24 PM, in Labels: Linux Kernel

Referenced CVEs:

CVE-2008-1391, CVE-2010-0296, CVE-2010-0830

Description:

===========================================================
Ubuntu Security Notice USN-944-1 May 25, 2010 glibc, eglibc vulnerabilities
CVE-2008-1391, CVE-2010-0296, CVE-2010-0830
===========================================================
A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Ubuntu 9.04 Ubuntu 9.10 Ubuntu 10.04 LTS This advisory also applies to the corresponding versions of Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu. The problem can be corrected by upgrading your system to the following package versions: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS: libc6 2.3.6-0ubuntu20.6 Ubuntu 8.04 LTS: libc6 2.7-10ubuntu6 Ubuntu 9.04: libc6 2.9-4ubuntu6.2 Ubuntu 9.10: libc6 2.10.1-0ubuntu17 Ubuntu 10.04 LTS: libc6 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.1 After a standard system update you need to restart all services to make the necessary changes. Details follow: Maksymilian Arciemowicz discovered that the GNU C library did not correctly handle integer overflows in the strfmon function. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a specially crafted format string, a remote attacker could crash applications, leading to a denial of service. (Ubuntu 10.04 was not affected.) (CVE-2008-1391) Jeff Layton and Dan Rosenberg discovered that the GNU C library did not correctly handle newlines in the mntent family of functions. If a local attacker were able to inject newlines into a mount entry through other vulnerable mount helpers, they could disrupt the system or possibly gain root privileges. (CVE-2010-0296) Dan Rosenberg discovered that the GNU C library did not correctly validate certain ELF program headers. If a user or automated system were tricked into verifying a specially crafted ELF program, a remote attacker could execute arbitrary code with user privileges. (CVE-2010-0830)

Installing libc6-2.11.1 on Ubuntu Posted by Adel Mubarak , at 12:57 PM, in Labels: Linux Kernel

Ubuntu security updates are officially distributed only via security.ubuntu.com.

More information on libc6_2.11.1-0ubuntu7.1_i386.deb:
Exact Size 3779220 Byte (3.6 MByte)
MD5 checksum 05f769d40e681c86bf6769a1f125f205
SHA1 checksum 49083ed7258090677e39ea431b37864c6685dafd
SHA256 checksum 707ac992b3438f9a3b5a84f1ea920662e1abf73f0cd747247856a857a3458a41

You should be able to use any of the listed mirrors by adding a line to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian experimental main

If you are running Debian, it is strongly suggested to use a package manager
like aptitude or synaptic to download and install packages, instead of doing so manually via
http://packages.debian.org/experimental/i386/libc6/download

Oracle's Support for Open Source and Open Standards Posted by Adel Mubarak , Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 12:13 AM, in Labels: Oracle

1GOAL, Education for All. Posted by Adel Mubarak , Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 12:16 PM, in Labels: ICT4D

1DAY for 1GOAL

11 May 2010

Save the Children is encouraging supporters to sign up to 1GOAL and call on world leaders to make education a reality for all children. They are holding a series of 1GOAL events with children across the world.

Join up to 1GOAL by emailing your photo putting your hand up for 1GOAL: Education for All.

Take your photo and email it having your full name in the subject line to you@join1goal.org and it will appear here http://www.join1goal.org/you.php

http://www.facebook.com/1GOAL

http://twitter.com/join1goal

The First Arabic Country Code Top Level Domain of Egypt “.مصر” Posted by Adel Mubarak , at 11:38 AM, in Labels: DotMasr

http://وزارة-الاتصالات.مصر

Three Egyptian companies have been selected, to be granted a domain name registration license, namely: TE Data, InTouch (owner of Link) and Vodafone Data. This step will enable all users to register domain names in Arabic through any of the selected companies.

Moreover, NTRA will be also granting the Egyptian Universities Network (EUN) a license to provide governmental, academic and educational entities Arabic domain name registration services under the Arabic ccTLD of Egypt.

These steps are expected to boost Arabic content on the Internet and create new market opportunities. It is also expected that this will allow new user segments to overcome the current language barrier and maximize their benefit from Internet services.

Google BigTable !! Posted by Adel Mubarak , Wednesday, May 5, 2010 at 12:42 AM, in Labels: Google

BigTable is a compressed, high performance, and proprietary database system built on Google File System (GFS), Chubby Lock Service, and a few other Google programs; it is currently not distributed or used outside of Google, although Google offers access to it as part of their Google App Engine.

BigTable development began in 2004 and is now used by a number of Google applications, such as MapReduce, which is often used for generating and modifying data stored in BigTable,Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Book Search, "My Search History", Google Earth, Blogger.com, Google Code hosting, Orkut, YouTube, and Gmail. Google's reasons for developing its own database include scalability, and better control of performance characteristics.

BigTable is a fast and extremely large-scale DBMS. However, it departs from the typical convention of a fixed number of columns, instead described by the authors as "a sparse, distributed multi-dimensional sorted map", sharing characteristics of both row-oriented and column-oriented databases. BigTable is designed to scale into the petabyte range across "hundreds or thousands of machines, and to make it easy to add more machines [to] the system and automatically start taking advantage of those resources without any reconfiguration".

Each table has multiple dimensions (one of which is a field for time, allowing for versioning and garbage collection). Tables are optimized for GFS by being split into multiple tablets - segments of the table as split along a row chosen such that the tablet will be ~200 megabytes in size. When sizes threaten to grow beyond a specified limit, the tablets are compressed using the algorithm BMDiff (referenced in ) and the secret algorithm Zippy, which is described as a less space-optimal variation of LZO but more efficient in terms of computing time. The locations in the GFS of tablets are recorded as database entries in multiple special tablets, which are called "META1" tablets. META1 tablets are found by querying the single "META0" tablet, which typically resides on a server of its own since it is often queried by clients as to the location of the "META1" tablet which itself has the answer to the question of where the actual data is located. Like GFS's master server, the META0 server is not generally a bottleneck since the processor time and bandwidth necessary to discover and transmit META1 locations is minimal and clients aggressively cache locations to minimize queries.