What the novels teach you - everything

Soon after I finished The Second Lady, a stunning novel by Irving Wallace, impressed by his style of writing I started off with The Golden Room. Though the plot raced on a somewhat slower pace than The Second Lady it was certainly way better than The Sea of Poppies[you know,I stopped reading it when I was 25% through]. For that matter any male - hmmm the females too[just giving them their due rights lest I should be reproved by the LGBT community] would enjoy reading both The Second Lady and The Golden Room because of the author's generous citing of on-bed events in a stimulating fashion. I used to deeply condemn Sidney's way of introducing episodes of physical union because I felt they were forced into the story without any actual need. But Irving has every reason to boast about his writing - perfectly fitting. While The Second Lady speaks about the cold war that existed between Russia and the USA and an immaculate impersonation of Billie Bradford to win over this crisis situation, The Golden Room explores the internal affairs of Chicago with The Everleigh Club as its epicentre. Well after you get to know what The Everleigh Club is[sorry, you have to google it and know for yourself because I don't wish to lose the chastity of my blog], you would appreciate the phrase - 'perfectly fitting.' But, only one thing about The Golden Room remains abstruse to me and it is the name of the novel - The Golden Room itself. There has hardly been any great detail about the significance of the name in the story except that the club housed a golden room with a golden grand piano. Chuck it!! I am no panelist in the Booker Prize judging panel to scrutinise this. I read just for the pleasure in reading. But, if any of you know the interpretation of the name of the novel with the plot or if it transpires to any of you after reading it do drop a note in my comment box. 

I have just one last thing to say - I am sorry for having displayed a tinge of perversity in this post. And for those who are planning to read one of the two novels or both of them, please shed a reasonable part of your ideals and morality or else you might end up saying - Cheap!! Cheap!!Cheap!!

Mummy Mummy I've grown a tummy

The longest semester holidays, probably the first and last of my entire course, is going to end. And what have I been doing all these days????? I have grown a tummy!!! See, I have to take credit for such involuntary improvements on my body because I don't have any other voluntary activity[to state] that I have been doing all these days. A pile of ghee dhosas in the morning for breakfast, a short nap for brunch, thayir saadam for lunch followed by an afternoon siesta, any crunchy snack to munch in the crepuscule and of course anything for dinner. Now tell me, what would anyone expect out of such a creature???? 

And you know, my life is full of realisations. Recently did I read a quote. 'Middle age is when the age shows up at ur middle.' So off I go to work-out, to rescue myself from this ever-growing lump of fat that has accumulated on my middle.

P.S: I intended to make this post humourous but I wonder if it has fallen flat. And hey, for those who might be seeing me after this vacation, I'd look perfectly proper because it is just the onset of a corporation that is common among us Indians. And for those who are never going to see me, just dont bother.

How secret is your secret?

“Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possesses one.”

Life has become so unreliable and so are the people. The curiosity to illegally peep into others’ possession has grown. I was appalled when I received an sms from a friend of mine who[just relieved from a state of shock] mocked me with a tone of both satire and surprise on seeing a sensual display picture on my orkut profile. The other information on my profile had also been monkeyed and modified to suit the display picture. No sooner did I start cursing the hacker than I realised the fact that my password was untouched. I uttered a great sigh of relief and said to my self ‘Thank God!! for the bad (wo)man had been good enough to leave the password undisturbed.’

But not all are fortuitous enough as I had been because Brian Green's experience with not-so-secret questions began when he logged on to his World of Warcraft account in March of this year and found all of his characters in their underwear. LOL!!! Someone had stolen the account and sold off all of his virtual equipment. He then involved himself in a great amount of research and finally came to a conclusion. "My 'secret question' has an all-too-common answer . . . This wasn't something I considered when I filled it out."

The incident bears similarities to the high-profile case involving Alaska governor and former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. In September 2008, hackers used the name of the location where Palin and her husband met to gain access to her Yahoo e-mail account via the "secret question" password-recovery mechanism.

It has been shown by the researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University that the secret questions used to secure the password-reset functions of a variety of websites are woefully insecure. In a study involving 130 people, the researchers found that 28 percent of the people who knew and were trusted by the study's participants could guess the correct answers to the participant's secret questions. Even people not trusted by the participant still had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answer to a secret question.

"Secret questions alone are not as secure as we would like our backup authentication to be," says Stuart Schechter, a researcher with software giant Microsoft and one of the authors of the paper. "Nor are they reliable enough that their use alone is sufficient to ensure users can recover their accounts when they forget their passwords."

The least-secure questions are simple ones whose answers can be guessed with no existing knowledge of the subject, the researchers say. For example, the answers to the questions "What is your favorite town?" and "What is your favorite sports team?" were relatively easy for participants to guess. All told, 30 percent and 57 percent of the correct answers, respectively, appeared in the top-five list of guesses.

But answers that require only a little personal knowledge to guess should also be considered unsafe, the researchers warn. Of people that participants would not trust with their password, 45 percent could still answer a question about where they were born, and 40 percent could correctly give their pet's name, the researchers found.

Schechter agreed that researchers will have to find a completely different mechanism for backup authentication--secret questions just don't cut it. "We would eventually like to see these questions go away," he says. "Unfortunately, since we didn't find many questions that were conclusively good, it's hard to recommend simply changing questions."

So what is the way out????????

I might blindly[because the feasibility is a haunting issue] suggest that the desktops and laptops henceforth produced should all be installed with some form of biometric recognition system that can be suitably linked with the networks over the internet so that any site that requires back-up authentication can provide biometric sensing as another option apart from the endangered password authentication. This, according to me is a foolproof mechanism until the attackers/hackers turn out to be as rude as the ones in Angels and Demons.