Biology in Engineering

A lecture that I heard at our orientation program laid stress on the importance of Biology in Engineering. The importance is explained by an interesting example is as follows.

An employee of the famous and frontier company named OIL (Oil India Limited) once called up his mate (who is currently a professor in Gauhati University) to find a solution to his problem. His problem, a bacterial component poses threat to some of the oil component standing as a challenge to the mass production of oil. The solution as given by the professor was simple. Just introduce a microbe into the bacterial component, the bacterial dies and the problem gets solved. The employee of OIL then calls up his higher notch to know if the microbe is available in OIL laboratory. He then learns that the microbe was bought from a private firm at a cost of 45 lakhs.  

According to the professor, who heads the Biology department in Gauhati University, the microbe could be simply made in a culture for just Rs.15

By the above example the professor makes everything clear, biology can’t be neglected in engineering studies; else an engineer can be cheated.

Some of the engineering colleges in India have introduced Biological Science as a subject in Engineering and others might follow. Student often neglect this subject thinking he/she has nothing to do with it but the example as explained above shows the brighter side of biology.

NPTEL...a light for engineers

Being into first semester of engineering, I was looking for resources online that could facilitate my engineering study. And to my expectations I found many and most helpful among them was the resources provided by the IITs and IISc.  Video lectures and materials on almost all subjects of engineering grouped systematically for specific branches of Engineering. Not only that, theirs even material (mostly video lectures) for semester 1 and semester 2 students. Videos are hoisted over Youtube. For the mobile browser the videos are available in 3GP format. Other format includes MP4 & FLV. Written materials are available in HTML and PDF format. These resources are a fruit of the Project named NPTEL funded by the Government. NPTEL or National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning is a project whose main purpose is to make India an Engineering Knowledge stronghold. Not only that, the site claims to deliver industries and teachers with resources which they can put into use. Since these video lectures and written materials are from the IITs and IIS Bangalore, no doubt that they would deliver the best. One can even download the videos and PDF format of materials.

Know more at www.nptel.iitm.ac.in

Similar to NPTEL project in India, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been delivering free courses on engineering for more a decade now. These MIT materials are available at http://ocw.mit.edu ,why should I continue, simply visit the site and judge yourself. I bet you would find it zakkas

You don’t enroll into any course when you visit these sites. The MIT Courseware includes forum discussion and we can expect NPTEL to follow soon.

Hope to see lot more from NPTEL. Cheers ! !

Are You Aware of Social Engineering??

Hacking and Social Engineering are conterminous. We often believe that a hacker steals our password, credit card information etc through electronic means or by his/her knowledge & skill in computer world, but things may be different too.

Won’t it be easy for a hacker if he finds your password simply by seeing what you typed?

A social Engineer uses social way to find confidential information. He/she would try to gain as much personal information about his/her target. He/she then uses that information gained to try all combination of password. Thus it will be easy for a hacker to crack your password or credit card details incase those sensitive and confidential words come from something related to you, say name of your pet, name of your girlfriend combined with your vehicle number or name of your teacher etc.

Social Engineering is done by following ways.

Phishing:   A person or group can create a fake website or it will be right to say that they impersonate the original website. By links in email or social network the target is tempted to click on those links (the target or victim thinks it is a trustworthy & know website to him/her) and provide confidential details like date of birth card details etc in the page of the impersonated website.

Shoulder Surfing: Let’s understand it by an example. Suppose you are into a cyber café. You log in into any of your account online. What if a person behind you sees what you have just typed? Because cyber café is a public place so theirs a huge probability that the password you typed is being noted well by a particular person. This is shoulder surfing.

Dumpster Driving: We regularly throw garbage in the dustbin. Now some people (those hackers or fraudsters) go through one’s thrown garbage to learn personal details as very few people take care to dispose of sensitive documents properly. As I told earlier personal details can lead a way to crack ones password.

Thus a social engineer will go to extreme of extent to obtain personal information. The ways may include the 3 points mentioned above and beyond.

Avoid Shoulder Surfing: Shoulder surfing can easily be avoided by tweaking your password a little bit. To avoid, make sure your password contains atleast a letter both in upper case and lower case or/and include a particular letter or number or symbol twice consecutively. This would prevent others from noting what you have just typed as typing a character twice (or more times) consecutively won’t be easily visible or noticeable to the fraudster or hacker.