WordPress Wins Hall of Fame CMS Award

WordPress is a really good platform and has made blogging easier for millions of people including us. It has won several accolades in the past, but this year they went one step ahead by winning the Hall of Fame CMS Award at the Open Source Awards 2010.

The hall of Fame CMS award is awarded to a CMS which has won the Open Source CMS award at least once, and WordPress was a winner last year. The first runner up for the Hall of Fame CMS awards was Drupal, followed by Joomla.

This year, CMS Made Simple won the open source CMS award and was followed by SilverStripe and MODx. Here is wishing WordPress and all the other winners a hearty congratulations. Open Source and blogging would not have been the same without you folks.

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Free DOCX and XLSX Viewers from SoftMaker

SoftMaker, the authors of an MS Office compatible office suite, are offering some free document and spreadsheet viewers.

The document viewer is called TextMaker Viewer and is able to open and view the following file types:

.docx, .docm	Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010
.dotx, .dotm	Microsoft Word 2007/2010 templates
.doc	Microsoft Word 6.0 up to Word 2010
.dot	Microsoft Word templates 6.0 up to 2010
.tmd	TextMaker 6.0 up to 2010
.tmv	TextMaker templates 6.0 up to 2010
.odt	OpenDocument Text
.ott	OpenDocument Text templates
.sxw	OpenOffice.org/StarOffice Text
.rtf	Rich Text Format
.psw	Pocket Word (Pocket PC)
.pwd	Pocket Word (Handheld PC)
.htm, .html	HTML documents
.txt	Plain-text files The spreadsheet viewer is called PlanMaker Viewer and it can view the following filetypes: .xlsx, .xlsm Microsoft Excel 2007 and 2010 .xltx, .xltm Microsoft Excel 2007/2010 templates .xls Microsoft Excel 5.0 up to Word 2010 .xlt Microsoft Excel templates 5.0 up to 2010 .pmd PlanMaker 2001 up to 2010 .pmv PlanMaker templates 2001 up to 2010 .pmw PlanMaker 1.0, 2.0, 97 .sdc StarCalc 1.0, 2.0 .slk SYLK files .rtf Rich Text Format .dbf dBASE files .txt, .csv, .prn Plain-text files Both TextMaker Viewer and PlanMaker Viewer will run under Windows 7, Vista, Windows XP, and Windows 2000.  Download SoftMaker Viewers here

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Myspace Announces Mashup With Facebook

Whoever would have thought a few years ago that once the most popular social networking site Myspace would have a tie-up with the current social networking site Facebook. However, it happened today. Myspace and Facebook have announced a collaboration today where MySpace users can import their Facebook likes and interests to Myspace.

In a press release by MySpace, they announced a partnership with Facebook which read:

Today, Myspace announced Mashup with Facebook, a new feature that allows Myspace users to easily create a personalized stream of entertainment content. With a simple one-click set-up, the likes and interests of a user’s Facebook profile are ported over to Myspace, enabling a user’s stream to become immediately populated with the entertainment content they already love. Users also have the ability to program their own streams based on recommendations and trending topics bubbling up on Myspace, while also engaging with other fans that share the same interests and passions in music, celebrities, TV, and movies.

According to the new agreement Myspace users will now have the ability to pull their Facebook likes and interests into Myspace allowing Myspace to fill their stream with entertainment content they like. Mashup with Facebook is an opt-in feature that is quick and easy to set up. Users can visit Myspace.com and click on the Mashup with Facebook button to begin.

Myspace will use a users likes and interests data from Facebook to display relevant Myspace topic pages, profiles and videos among other things. The new recommendations will all work in real-time so that users can discover new content quickly.

Myspace will use the Sync with Facebook feature which allows users to sync their Facebook and Myspace profiles to Mashup their data. As weird as it my sound, it looks like Myspace was in desperate need to piggyback on Facebook’s success to keep themselves up and running.

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List of World Best Top Hackers of All Time

Hackers, a group that consists of skilled computer enthusiasts. A black hat is a person who compromises the security of a computer system without permission from an authorized party, typically with malicious intent. The term white hat is used for a person who is ethically opposed to the abuse of computer systems, but is frequently no less skilled. The term cracker was coined by Richard Stallman to provide an alternative to using the existing word hacker for this meaning.The somewhat similar activity of defeating copy prevention devices in software which may or may not be legal in a country's laws is actually software cracking....[ Wiki Source ]

List of Famous Hackers of All Time:





There are numbers of Hackers in the world till date, Few has become famous by their Black hat work and few of them are famous by their Ethical Hacking. Below is separate list of World's All Time Best Hackers and Crackers. Although I represent them by Hackers only because what every they did, was wrong but one thing is sure they were Brilliant. Hacking is not a work of simple mind, only Intelligent Mind can do that.

Gary McKinnon

 Gary McKinnon, 40, accused of mounting the largest ever hack of United States government computer networks -- including Army, Air Force, Navy and NASA systems The court has recommended that McKinnon be extradited to the United States to face charges of illegally accessing 97 computers, causing US$700,000 (400,000 pounds; euro 588,000) in damage.


Jonathan James

 The youth, known as "cOmrade" on the Internet, pleaded guilty to intercepting 3,300 email messages at one of the Defense Department's most sensitive operations and stealing data from 13 NASA computers, including some devoted to the new International Space Station. James gained notoriety when he became the first juvenile to be sent to prison for hacking. He was sentenced at 16 years old. He installed a backdoor into a Defense Threat Reduction Agency server. The DTRA is an agency of the Department of Defense charged with reducing the threat to the U.S. and its allies from nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional and special weapons. The backdoor he created enabled him to view sensitive e-mails and capture employee usernames and passwords.James also cracked into NASA computers, stealing software worth approximately $1.7 million. According to the Department of Justice, “The software supported the International Space Station’s physical environment, including control of the temperature and humidity within the living space.” NASA was forced to shut down its computer systems, ultimately racking up a $41,000 cost.


Adrian Lamo

 Dubbed the “homeless hacker,” he used Internet connections at Kinko’s, coffee shops and libraries to do his intrusions. In a profile article, “He Hacks by Day, Squats by Night,” Lamo reflects, “I have a laptop in Pittsburgh, a change of clothes in D.C. It kind of redefines the term multi-jurisdictional.”Dubbed the “homeless hacker,” he used Internet connections at Kinko’s, coffee shops and libraries to do his intrusions. For his intrusion at The New York Times, Lamo was ordered to pay approximately $65,000 in restitution. He was also sentenced to six months of home confinement and two years of probation, which expired January 16, 2007. Lamo is currently working as an award-winning journalist and public speaker.




Kevin Mitnick 
 The Department of Justice describes him as “the most wanted computer criminal in United States history.” His exploits were detailed in two movies: Freedom Downtime and Takedown. He started out exploiting the Los Angeles bus punch card system to get free rides. Then, like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, dabbled in phone phreaking. Although there were numerous offenses, Mitnick was ultimately convicted for breaking into the Digital Equipment Corporation’s computer network and stealing software.Today, Mitnick has been able to move past his role as a black hat hacker and become a productive member of society. He served five years, about 8 months of it in solitary confinement, and is now a computer security consultant, author and speaker.


Kevin Poulsen 
 Also known as Dark Dante, Poulsen gained recognition for his hack of LA radio’s KIIS-FM phone lines, (taing over all of the station’s phone lines) which earned him a brand new Porsche, among other items. Law enforcement dubbed him “the Hannibal Lecter of computer crime.”Authorities began to pursue Poulsen after he hacked into a federal investigation database. During this pursuit, he further drew the ire of the FBI by hacking into federal computers for wiretap information.His hacking specialty, however, revolved around telephones. Poulsen’s most famous hack, In a related feat, Poulsen also “reactivated old Yellow Page escort telephone numbers for an acquaintance who then ran a virtual escort agency.” Later, when his photo came up on the show Unsolved Mysteries, 1-800 phone lines for the program crashed. Ultimately, Poulsen was captured in a supermarket and served a sentence of five years.Since serving time, Poulsen has worked as a journalist. He is now a senior editor for Wired News. His most prominent article details his work on identifying 744 sex offenders with MySpace profiles.


Robert Tappan Morris

 Morris, son of former National Security Agency scientist Robert Morris, is known as the creator of the Morris Worm, the first computer worm to be unleashed on the Internet. As a result of this crime, he was the first person prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Morris wrote the code for the worm while he was a student at Cornell. He asserts that he intended to use it to see how large the Internet was. The worm, however, replicated itself excessively, slowing computers down so that they were no longer usable. It is not possible to know exactly how many computers were affected, but experts estimate an impact of 6,000 machines. He was sentenced to three years’ probation, 400 hours of community service and a fined $10,500.Morris is currently working as a tenured professor at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He principally researches computer network architectures including distributed hash tables such as Chord and wireless mesh networks such as Roofnet.
Vladimir Levin

Levin accessed the accounts of several large corporate customers of Citibank via their dial-up wire transfer service (Financial Institutions Citibank Cash Manager) and transferred funds to accounts set up by accomplices in Finland, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany and Israel.In 2005 an alleged member of the former St. Petersburg hacker group, claiming to be one of the original Citibank penetrators, published under the name ArkanoiD a memorandum on popular Provider.net.ru website dedicated to telecom market.According to him, Levin was not actually a scientist (mathematician, biologist or the like) but a kind of ordinary system administrator who managed to get hands on the ready data about how to penetrate in Citibank machines and then exploit them.ArkanoiD emphasized all the communications were carried over X.25 network and the Internet was not involved. ArkanoiD’s group in 1994 found out Citibank systems were unprotected and it spent several weeks examining the structure of the bank’s USA-based networks remotely. Members of the group played around with systems’ tools (e.g. were installing and running games) and were unnoticed by the bank’s staff. Penetrators did not plan to conduct a robbery for their personal safety and stopped their activities at some time. Someone of them later handed over the crucial access data to Levin (reportedly for the stated $100).









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David Smith

David Smith, the author of the e-mail virus known as Melissa, which swamped computers around the world, spreading like a malicious chain letter. He was facing nearly 40 years in jail . About 63,000 viruses have rolled through the Internet, causing an estimated $65 billion in damage, but Smith is the only person to go to federal prison in the United States for sending one.


Mark Abene

Abene (born 1972), better known by his pseudonym Phiber Optik, is a computer security hacker from New York City. Phiber Optik was once a member of the Hacker Groups Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception. In 1994, he served a one-year prison sentence for conspiracy and unauthorized access to computer and telephone systems.

Phiber Optik was a high-profile hacker in the early 1990s, appearing in The New York Times, Harper’s, Esquire, in debates and on television. Phiber Optik is an important figure in the 1995 non-fiction book Masters of Deception — The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace

Onel A. de Guzman

 el A. de Guzman, a Filipino computer student, Greatest Hacker of all time. He was creator of "Love Bug" virus that crippled computer e-mail systems worldwide.

Chen Ing-hau

 He was the creator of one of the deadly virus of all time "Chernobyl computer virus " which had melted down many computers worldwide.





Mudge


 "Mudge" along with fellow hackers told the committee that computer security is so lax, they could disable the entire Internet in a half-hour.



Tsutomu Shimomura

 One of the world's top computer security experts. Shimomura helped Federal officials track down and arrest computer hacker Kevin Mitnickin Raleigh Feb. 15, 1995 in connection with a break-in on Shimomura's computer.





Jon Lech Johansen

 Johansen, who became a hero to computer hackers and was deemed a villain by Hollywood, is on trial for writing and distributing a program called DeCSS, software which makes it possible to copy protected DVD films. Prosecutors have asked to have his computers confiscated and called for him to pay $1,400 in court costs.



Dmitry Sklyarov

 Russian computer programmer who was charged with violating copyrights, Sklyarov was jailed after developing software that allows the user to circumvent the copyright protections in Adobe Systems eBook reader program.


Dennis Moran

 Moran, known on the Web as "Coolio," pleaded guilty to hacking into national computer sites last year belonging to the Army, the Air Force and the anti-drug Dare.com.

Famous Three Master Hackers






Some Grand Famous Hackers of Life Time:




Richard Stallman

 He was the founder of GNU Projects. Stallman, who prefers to be called rms, got his start hacking at MIT. He worked as a "staff hacker" on the Emacs project and others. He was a critic of restricted computer access in the lab. When a password system was installed, Stallman broke it down, resetting passwords to null strings, then sent users messages informing them of the removal of the password system.


Linus Torvalds

 Father of Linux is a good hacker of all time.












Stephen Wozniak
 "Woz" is famous for being the "other Steve" of Apple. Wozniak, along with current Apple CEO Steve Jobs, co-founded Apple Computer. Woz got his start in hacking making blue boxes, devices that bypass telephone-switching mechanisms to make free long-distance calls. After reading an article about phone phreaking in Esquire, Wozniak called up his buddy Jobs. The pair did research on frequencies, then built and sold blue boxes to their classmates in college. Wozniak even used a blue box to call the Pope while pretending to be Henry Kissinger.

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Wikipedia: We Need $16 Million To Stay Free

Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation managed to raise more than $8 million in its yearly fundraiser. On Monday morning, the non-profit behindWikipedia is announcing that it aims to raise $16 million this year "so that Wikipedia and its sister projects can remain freely available to people around the world."

Keeping Wikipedia free is no small feat, however, and the foundation has released a few stats about the world's fifth most popular Web property that help illustrate the challenges it faces.

Wikipedia was the 12th most popular Web property in the U.S. in September, with comScore reporting nearlly 80 million unique visitors for the month. By comparison, Google had 180 million, while Facebook had just under 150 million. But Wikipedia's English language content accounts for only a fifth of the collaborative encyclopedia's content. Looking at global traffic to Wikipedia, the site has doubled its monthly unique visitors since 2007, with just under 400 million in September. As opposed to its 12th place ranking in the U.S., these 400 million unique visitors make it the fifth most popular Web property in the world.

According to the Wikimedia Foundation, operating costs for 2010-2011 will come in at $20.4 million. Last year, the foundation received nearly a quarter million individual donations from more than 100 countries to reach its $8 million goal. This year, in addition to monetary donations the foundation is calling for readers to join in and become editors. The fundraiser itself, which the Wikimedia fundraising team has dubbed the "Fundraiser that anyone can edit", was created in collaboration with about 1,000 volunteers.

Of course, donating is important and good, too, in order to keep Wikipedia ad-free and organizationally unbiased.

"Over the past 10 years, Wikipedia has become a vital public resource for hundreds of millions of people. We've come to depend on it being there for us - free to use, without any bias or interference, and without advertising," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation executive director, echoed Wales' statement.

"Wikipedia is the people's encyclopedia: it's written by ordinary people, and it makes sense that ordinary people would pay to support it," said Gardner. "Having a broad base of many donors from everywhere around the world is important to us: it means the encyclopedia is free to evolve to meet the needs of its readers, rather than being distorted or thrown off course by special interests. I'm glad so many people appreciate Wikipedia, and I'm delighted when they choose to support it financially."

The fundraising campaign will run through January 2011. Users can donate here or by clicking on the notice on top of each page on Wikipedia.

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