The Fake currency - Be cautious

Recently received a few of the fake currency notes and felt like a good samaritan to inform everyone and potential ways of how to distinguish the fake from the real.

Following is based on 2 notes of denomination of 10/-, one real and other fake.

Let's take the real first.

Here is how it looks.

That's easy. No surprises there. A regular looking 10 rupee note with the number 68D 705574. I am sure in this era of rising disposable income, you would have seen many such notes and surely would have observed the silver lining in the middle.

Now let's zoom the white blow on the left edge just above where the currency note number is printed and look it through light.

Besides the embossed "Gandhi" picture, you could see a '10' [horizontally embossed] and another '10' right above it, kind of embedded in the floral pattern.

Now let's turn over the note and look at the other side.

Hopefully you can see the year '2012' written right almost at the end of the pattern design and in the middle of the note.

Now I am uploading the 3 similar pictures of a fake note with the number and it's missing these 3 identifiers. I am sure there may be many others too but for now these seem to give a differentiation between the fake and genuine.

The fake note number is 06N 607202.

To begin with, it looks amazingly crisp as if it is freshly minted and the color is a little too bright.

It's so bright that you would find the central 'silver lining' missing, although on closer inspection you might see it.

Let's pull up the translucent white on the left end under light.

Whoa. No embossing. No "10" anywhere. And a meaningless 'floral' pattern instead. Let's turn it over and see if there is any year printed.

Clearly, the 'fake' people have done a lot of effort with all that printing but seems like they couldn't get everything right. There are a few other differences I noted by the time I finished the blog but I will not make them public, primarily out of my laziness and secondarily, let's not give it all away.

Isn't it? (or as the English say 'in'nit'?)

PS: All the pictures in the blog or any other content is free to download, inspect and do whatever as long as you do not mis-represent it.

PPS: A little bit of googlig made me land at the page of RBI around the security features in the currency note (http://www.rbi.org.in/currency/security%20features.html), although that's slightly more technical in nature with words like "Instagilo printing" and "Micro lettering", but still worth a read.

Enjoy and be cautious from these photo-shop wizards trying to make a quick buck.

Cyber Security - Are we headed in the right direction?

2014 is over but it seems to have ended by starting an extremely complex, dangerous and a new chapter in ‘cyber security’.

One of the largest media corporations of the world, Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), faced an extremely dangerous and sophisticated cyber attack. Large corporations facing a cyber attack is nothing new. Target, ebay, yahoo and our good old HAL, they have all faced cyber attacks but with SPE’s attack, for the first time a nation state is so vehemently accusing another nation state of sponsoring (or harboring) cyber terrorists.

While FBI has formally accused North Korea, their assertion is based on the evidence, that at best can be termed as ‘circumstantial’ and it is not clear as to what kind of legal action can the US government initiate.

(http://rt.com/usa/216071-fbi-accuse-north-korea-sony/)

One can’t help but wonder that it is because of lack of any possibilities of a legal action, that US is forced to retort, as accused by North Korea, in alternate manner.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/world/asia/north-korea-sony-hacking-the-interview.html?_r=0)

The US government anyways is known to take matters into their hands to protect their country from perceived terrorist attacks.

While there is legal ambiguity in that space, technologically speaking, the details of the malware that attacked SPE are available and can be found here.

https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA14-353A

However, what is still not clear is how did the malware enter into SPE premises. This particular piece is not specific to SPE attack alone. Even in the earlier famous attacks like Stuxnet (on Iran’s nuclear facility) or Shamoon (on Saudi Aramco), it was never completely clear on how did the infection begin.

In theory, yes, we know that some kind of software or human (or mix of both) vulnerability is exploited but that gets covered by so many layers by the time the attack is detected, that it is virtually impossible to back trace it.

Cyber sleuths are peeling off layers from the attack on SPE while SPE is perhaps facing another legal challenge in the form of many class action law suits from its (former) employees, where the plaintiffs have alleged that SPE did not take adequate measures to safeguard their personal information that got compromised as a result of this hack attack. Also SPE delayed informing about the attack.

SPE, in their defense (or perhaps offense), has threatened to sue media companies for publishing the data based on the stolen documents. Although the legal merit of such threats is debated amongst the experts.

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/15/can-sony-sue-media-outlets-who-publish-the-stolen-sony-documents/)

Time will tell as to what comes as the outcome of this mishmash of techno-legal battle, but one thing is clear. We are far away from a secured cyber space. Be it the law makers, law enforcers or cyber experts, any one institution can not secure it by itself. In the light of this looming threat, another fear is the tendency of law makers to take regressive steps like curbing internet freedom, which is neither practical to achieve nor any progressive solution.

In reality, only a collective effort that promotes open-ness and a proactive information exchange and adequate skill building is perhaps what will bring out the right solution. 

Pigeon Shit or what ??

 Life has strangest ways of squaring up things. 

The story finds its roots in a time nearly 3 years ago, right after one of the ‘happy new years’ when a not-so-young couple moved into a new apartment with 2 big balconies.

The lady of the house found a prefect outlet for her gardening dreams and decided to load one of the balconies with a variety of plants.

The man, belonging to the usual lazy-good-for-nothing-culturally-challenged category was horticulturally challenged as well so didn’t really have a great deal of opinion on it, and anyways even if he did, it is questionable as to how much would it have mattered.

So the balcony was decorated with a great deal of plant-ware. Efforts were undertaken to water them regularly. Neighbors were requested to keep the plants hydro-plenished during out-of-home vacation days. Other days, the domestic helps had strict orders on plants’ maintenance. The efforts bore results as the new saplings started to bud and flowers and new leaves started to show in the pots.

There was an unfortunate side effect of this bountiful growth of nature, the pigeon-shit, literally and figuratively speaking.

Amidst the concrete jungles that our cities have become, the pigeons found a 50 square feet of region that resembled somewhat of their natural habitat and where they could feed and de-feed themselves, leaving behind a collage of white and green patterns made out of their fecal matter.

Amongst all the different type of living and non-living creatures, the pigeons became the sworn enemies of the human inhabitants of that 50 square feet of the planet (followed by squirrels but the good part of the squirrels was that they did not treat the balcony space as a ‘sulabh-shuachalya’) 

A variety of solutions were put in place with varying degrees of success but it was one of those hard facts of life (e.g. taxes) that you didn’t like but you couldn’t do much about.

Then something happened. Something “happy” and “new” just around the new years.

 A ma-ma pigeon laid a couple of eggs in one of the balconies.

The couple thought that the eggs probably won’t survive but still for some strange reason left the eggs in one of the flower pots and in a place where they could be seen easily.

The ma-ma pigeon came every day and probably did what was necessary to hatch the eggs because after sometime a couple of baby pigeons popped out.

Those tiny birds that came out, a form of life, they were, well, words can’t describe what they were but what was even more touching was how the ma-ma pigeon came to do her function of raising those new borns. She would just sit right next to the new borns, covering them under her body, giving them the necessary body heat, food etc and just wouldn’t budge. I mean, it’s a bird we are talking about. She has wings. She could fly. But no, day after day and night after night she just stayed there letting the new saplings grow.

Life touches you in the strangest ways.

The whole episode touched the human inhabitants of that neighborhood very much. They tried to leave some food for the ma-ma. The domestic help was given special instructions so that the ma-ma doesn’t get scared or bothered too much. And the people just watched the ma-ma day and night from behind the curtains to not let her feel intimidated. Even attempts at taking a picture of her were done with extreme stealth. The determination on how a ma-ma pigeon worked to raise her kids was just too overwhelming. The very sworn enemy species was given a family welcome.

It was indeed a happy new year.

Of course the couple knew that one day, when these birds will grow up, they will come and mess the very balcony that sheltered them and will become the sworn enemies of people there.

But then these are just the birds. The supposedly much evolved human beings show that trait too, that is, to betray the very hand that fed them, the very relations that supported them in the darkest hour, the very society that raised them and bomb the very cities where they were once raised.