Sri Lanka has become a great place for investments in IT industry

Sri Lanka, after getting rid of a civil war of thirty years entire island is placed on a new growth model and the peace dividend is already visible. Country has become stable politically, socially and economically as well. Therefore, it has become a great attraction of investors worldwide. With the current peaceful and stable environment investment opportunities in several industries have emerged.

IT is one of the leading industries that attracts investments. Sri Lanka has all the required attributes for successful investment in the IT industry. Sri Lanka has a very talented, skillful and adaptable IT workforce that has good English literacy as well. Investors could gain advantage over relatively low labor cost and and other low cost infrastructure required. Sri Lankans are noticeably friendly, highly productive, creative, and adapt very fast to different cultures and environments. This results in easy integration to operating units of other counties. The primary business language in Colombo (Capital of the island) is English with a high level of fluency which makes it very easy for investors to work with the employees. Sri Lanka have number of well reputed set of government universities that provides skillful IT professionals with computer science and IT degrees. Also there are number of private and foreign universities operating in the island to produce software developers to meet increasing demand.

Government of Sri Lanka has named this year as year of English and ICT and carried out number of programs to provide IT infrastructure through out the country to increase the computer literacy of the general public, particularly the youth. Still the government has to do more to get a great boost for the Sri Lankan economy through IT industry by attracting more investors.

Recently London Stock Exchange(LSE) invested 30M USD to take over one of the leading IT company in the island called MillenniumIT. This is a good sign of confidence of investors to invest in IT industry of Sri Lanka. Investing in SriLankan IT industry will create a win-win situation for both the investors and the country as investors get lots of benifits and they could generate more profit and meanwhile country will get lots of foreign money coming in and could give a boost to the economy. At the moment, study of any investor would give the result that Sri Lanka is one of the leading attraction for investments in IT industry.

Clickbots and click frauds

Clickbots are kind of bots being used to earn money by clicking online advertisements automatically. Since bot master can have clickbots connected to his botnet from various IP addresses, probably located in different regions or countries, botmaster can easily use them to perform click fraud. To make it more clear suppose you have number of sites or blogs that have advertisements for which your are get paid as advertisements are clicked by users. So if you have a botnet with, let’s say 1000 click bots located in different IP Addresses, you can command them to visit particular advertisement url through your site. So that you will get thousand clicks for the advertisement which make you money. Search engine giants such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have put their concern regarding this matter recently and try to employee new techniques to avoid click frauds. Such a botnet which has been used effectively for click frauds has been detected recently and researches said those bots use a rather sophisticated technique fir click frauds.

Expanding size of Ubuntu partition in a Ubuntu/Vista dual boot system

I installed Ubuntu hardy in my HP dv6000 laptop which already had Vista home premium installed by HP. I allocated only 20GB for the Ubuntu file system at the beginning. But later I used to do almost all my work in Ubuntu and 20GB is no longer enough. Therefore, I searched for mechanisms to expand the partition size for Ubuntu file system as I had enough free space in the Vista partition. There I came across few ways of doing it.

One such method is shrinking the windows partition and get unallocated space and expand the ext3 partition. You can right click on My Computer and go to Manager->Storage and right click on the windows partition and select shrink. It will show you how much of space you can make free by performing shrink operation. Problem with this approach is shrink will not allow to make unallocated space as much as you want.

Shrink dialog

It allows a smaller portion of the free space to be free. In my case I had around 47GB free in windows partition and I wanted to allocate 20GB of it to the ubuntu. But for me it didn’t allow me to shrink the windows partitions. I think this is because windows has its system files stored at the very end of the partition. You can perform defragmentation and then try to shrink. But it didn’t work for me.

The next method I found is to resize the partitions using GParted (Gnome Partition Editor). To do this you need to boot the machine using a ubuntu bootable CD. When booted go to Sytem->Admministration->Partition Editor. There right click on the windows partition and select ‘Resize/Move’. There you can reduce the size of the windows partition and it will make unallocated space. Then you can increase the size of the linux partition in the same manner. Then apply changes. This will take some time depending on the amount of space you are reallocating. After this you can reboot the system. If you are very lucky Windows will boot as normal. But most of the time it will start repairing and Disk Checking. You might need to have your Vista backup partition working or the backup DVDs. It is also advisable to backup any sensitive data you have stored in the hard drive. This method worked well for me and I could expand the linux partition as I wanted.

Botnet Tracker

Botnet Tracker is my final year project which is now progreesing in the third month of the project plan. In this post I would like to give an introduction to botnets, background and motivation for Botnet Tracker.

Today there are number of security threats that compromise security of thousands of computers connected to the internet. One such major security threat is Botnets. A botnet is a collection of internet computers which are infected by a software robot called “Bot”, without knowing to the owner of the computer and perform different malicious tasks according to the commands issued by a controlling person referred as “Botnet Master” or “Botmaster”. Botmasters normally use Command and Contril (C&C) channels to communicate with the bots. One such popular C&C infrastructure use by majority of the botnets is IRC.

Once a bot got into a computer it will patch all the security vulnerabilities of the machine such that another bot cannot enter the machine and also the computer will appear to be perfectly secure. Using the C&C channel botmaster can issue commands to the bots in the botnet to perform various malicious tasks such as flooding spams, DDoS attacks etc. A more dangerous thing is that the botmaster could obtain sensitive information of the computer owner such as passwords, credit card information etc.

Some researches has found botnets with more than hundred thousand zombi machiens. Hence, botnets have become a major threat in the internet today and unfortunatly most of the ordinery computer users do not aware abot bots. The conventional virus guards and IDSs are not that effective in detecting botnets. There are researches going on to invent means to detect bots and botnets. On the otherhand more intelligent bots are being developed and also they use other C&C mechanisms such as HTTP and P2P. In Botnet Tracker I’m looking into means of detecting botnets by analysing network traffic anomalies generate by botnet C&C communication and various bot operations.

Building m-Communities

Social networking has become extremely popular and e-communities have grown ever popular over the decade. Web sites such as Facebook, Flickr, hi5, LinkedIn, and MySpace have captured people irrespective of their ages to use these sites extensively. These sites facilitate to exchange their ideas among the community and keep in touch with others. As an example facebook has been a popular community network where you can meet your distant loved ones and keep in touch with them. Apart from these social communities there are many other community networks such as business communities, professional communities etc. There are many internet based community sites or portals to facilitate those respective communities. More or less, each internet user is a member of at least one of the available community portals. Number of members of those portals indicates how powerful, useful and popular community portals are among the internet users.

On the other hand the mobile phone has come a long way from being a mere communication device to a portable application device with added features such as cameras, video/voice recorders, e-mail, word processors, spread sheets, etc and added technologies such as GPRS, 3G, EDGE etc. Therefore, nowadays mobile phones/ PDAs provides almost all the basic functionalities an ordinary user may expect from a PC plus internet access. Then, it is necessary to have community portals that can be accessed through mobile devices such as mobile phones. Currently there are no community portals that can be considered as a mobile-community (m-Community) portal that provide all the functionalities to the user through mobile devices. Though some social community portals such as facebook has some WAP interfaces for mobile phones to interact with, it provide limited functionalities and it is not that attractive compared to the facebook web interface.

Identifying this requirement and after doing a research myself and another four university colleagues of mine start to develop a mobile-community portal which we named as ‘mCom’, as our third year final project. It is a social community portal that provide functionalities such as instance messaging, managing community friends, micro blogging, file sharing and backup, phonebook synchronizing, mails, reading books online, etc and all these functionalities are provided through the mobile phone attractively. It has a mobile client application developed based on J2ME platform that can be easily downloaded and install in the mobile phone. This runs as just another application running in the phone providing rich and attractive user interfaces so that user finds it very attractive and simple to use. This client application will connect to the server using GPRS, EDGE or 3G technologies as it available in the mobile device. As per the rapidly growing functionalities of these small mobile devices such as mobile phones m-Communities will be the next generation of community portals.