10 HTML5, CSS3 Tricks That Web Geeks Will Love

The web is a huge playground nowadays and the competition is huge. These tricks could give your website an edge.

HTML5 and CSS3 are the two foremost tools for web geeks nowadays. In case you had a doubt about the same then here's how. These 10 web tricks will show you exactly how powerful these two languages can be. Take a look, you might find something useful for your own websites.

1. Pure CSS3 AT-AT: The animation here has been created without any coding. No programming languages have been used for this. It doesn’t do anything special, but you can use such a trick to make your website more attractive.

2. Keylight: This is a nifty trick. What happens here is you click on the background to create small dots and based on the placement of the dot, a tone is played. Multiple dots make a full track. Further, once you’re done, you can share your track. How? Just copy the URL and send it to whoever you want to share it with. Your track is saved in the URL only.

3. CSS3 Man: This is another animation that doesn’t use Flash or any other similar platform.

4. Sinuious: This one is a simple game that can be addictive for kids. You have to avoid hitting the red dots, while picking up power-ups on the way. The more you can avoid, better will be your score.

5. Cubescape: This is all about cubes. Click on the screen to place the cubes wherever you want them. You can choose different colours for the cubes, move them and edit them. When you’re finished, you can watch an animation of what you just did.

6. Darkroom: This is actually one of the more useful tricks in this list. While the others are for fun, Darkroom actually works as a photo editor and comes with a number of editing tools along with an easy interface. You can edit brightness, contrast, exposure, tin/temperature, saturation, colour blindness simulation, red-eye and other aspects of your picture. You can do this to images that are saved on your hard drive.

7. Apple Gallery Demo: From the makers of the iPhone, this is a photo browser that lets you rotate images across the page, through 3D space etc.

8. The Wildnerness Downtown: You have probably already heard of this experiment. This one asks you for your hometown and then creates a video using three things: Google Maps, CSS3 and HTML5.

9. Water Type: This is another nifty trick. It asks you to type in a message and it appears as if it’s being created out of water.

10. Destructive Video: You see a video in this one, but when you click on the video it blows up. Interestingly, the video is still playing. Stop for a few seconds and the video will automatically reintegrate.

Author : Shivam Kotwalia, CodeKill

Kali Linux 1.0.6 Released

The release is really heavily laden with goodness, claim developers.

Developers have finally released Kali Linux 1.0.6, with the new version of the Debian-derived Linux distribution being richly laden with goodness. It's indeed been a very long time coming, but it's eventually here. The latest release comes with prominent add-on like a new 3.12 kernel, a LUKS nuke feature, new Kali ARM build scripts, Kali AMAZON AMI and Google Compute image generation scripts. The LUKS nuke feature is perhaps one of the more prominent ones to come with the release. A couple of days back before the official release, one of the developers had an idea to add a 'nuke' feature that will destroy all data stored in the Kali system after putting in a boot password. The developers made use of an old cryptsetup patch created back in 2008 by Juergen Pabel adding a nuke password to cryptsetup which when used, deletes all keyslots and makes the data on the drive inaccessible. However, the patch is non-invasive and will not change anything for anyone that does not want to use it. The updated cryptsetup package is present in Kali 1.0.6 by default. Here's what's new in this release: Kali changelog Author : Shivam Kotwalia, CodeKill

As The Era Of Windows XP Comes To End

It’s the end of an era. On 8 April 2014, almost 13 years of official support for the much-loved Windows XP will come to an end. Even as the world prepares to bid adieu to the renowned OS, China has already found a 'viable' alternative to it. China's homegrown version of the Linux Ubuntu OS, aka, Ubuntu Kylin OS is making a milestone of sorts in the country.

Kylin has been developed by Canonical in collaboration with the China Software and Integrated Promotions Centre (CSIP), part of the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Chinese National University of Defense Technology. The remarkable part is Kylin OS has been downloaded more than one million times since its launch last year. In terms of actual figures, there were 400,000 downloads of Ubuntu Kylin after its first release in April 2013, that rose to more than 1.3 million 'new' downloads after its second release in October. However, relative to the Chinese population the number is miniscule.

In China, as elsewhere in the world, PC owners prefer to get their OS pre-installed when they buy a device, therefore the figures are impressive in case of Ubuntu Kylin, claims Canonical. The OS comes with a full Chinese user interface, Chinese applications and integration with domestic services. Further, it also comes with Kingsoft WPS, that is one of China's most popular office suites.

Author : Shivam Kotwalia, CodeKill

17 Free eBooks On Prolog Programming

Its time to build awesome robots by learning Prolog, an open source programming language focused on artificial intelligence and computer linguistics!

If you are into computer linguistics or artificial intelligence, the general purpose logic programming language Prolog is the one for you. Here we bring 17 free ebooks to help you understand the language better!

1. Prolog Programming in Depth
by Michael A. Covington, Donald Nute, Andre Vellino - Prentice-Hall, 1997
Full coverage of the Prolog programming language including the latest ISO standard. Includes ready-to-run code for expert system shells, other intelligent problem-solvers, and algorithms to read foreign file formats, even Lotus spreadsheets.

2. Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example
by Peter Flach - John Wiley, 1994
An introduction to Prolog programming for artificial intelligence covering both basic and advanced AI material. A unique advantage to this work is the combination of AI, Prolog and Logic. Each technique is accompanied by a program implementing it.

3. Natural Language Processing Techniques in Prolog
by Patrick Blackburn, Kristina Striegnitz - Union College, 2002
Contents: Finite State Automata; Finite State Parsers and Transducers; Finite State Methods in Natural Language Processing; Recursive Transition Networks (RTNs); RTN transducers and ATNs; Definite Clause Grammars; Bottom Up, Top Down Parsing; etc.

4. Prolog Programming
by Roman Bartak, 1998
Prolog is a programming language with precise operational meaning that borrows its basic concepts from logic programming. This text is an introduction to logic programming and Prolog for beginners but it also covers some advanced topics.

5. Artificial Intelligence through Prolog
by Neil C. Rowe - Prentice-Hall, 1988
Artificial intelligence is a hard subject to learn. The author have written a book to make it easier. He explains difficult concepts in a simple, concrete way. This book is intended for all first courses in artificial intelligence.

6. Applications of Prolog
by Attila Csenki - BookBoon, 2009
In this volume the author discusses some areas where Prolog can be fruitfully employed. The book comprises four chapters: Enigma 1225: Rows are Columns; Blind Search; Informed Search; Text Processing. There are 54 exercises in this book.

7. Prolog Techniques
by Attila Csenki - BookBoon, 2009
This is the first of two volumes by the author on the programming language Prolog and its applications. In the first volume you can read about the accumulator technique, difference lists, program manipulations and exploratory code development.

8. Natural Language Processing in Prolog
by Gerald Gazdar, Chris Mellish - Addison-Wesley, 1989
The major focus of this book is on the processing of the orthographic forms of natural language utterances and text. Most of the book deals with the parsing and understanding of natural language, much less on the production of it.

9. An Introduction to Logic Programming through Prolog
by Michael Spivey - Prentice Hall, 2008
Using theory as a foundation for practical programming, this text presents the theory of logic programming with clear proofs and implementation techniques. It covers logical theory, programming, and the structure of a simple Prolog implementation.

10. Learn Prolog Now!
by Patrick Blackburn, Johan Bos, Kristina Striegnitz - College Publications, 2006
One of the most popular introductions to Prolog, an introduction prized for its clarity and down-to-earth approach. It is widely used as a textbook at university departments around the world, and even more widely used for self study.

11. Building Expert Systems in Prolog
by Dennis Merritt - Amzi! inc., 2000
This book is designed to teach you how to build expert systems from the inside out. The author presents the various features used in expert systems, shows how to implement them in Prolog, and how to use them to solve problems.

12. Adventure in Prolog
by Dennis Merritt - Springer, 1990
This book takes a pragmatic, rather than theoretical, approach to the language and is designed for programmers interested in adding this powerful language to their bag of tools. Much of the book is built around the writing of a short adventure game.

13. The First 10 Prolog Programming Contests
by Bart Demoen, Phuong-Lan Nguyen, Tom Schrijvers, Remko Troncon, 2005
This book shows solutions to problems that were in the first 10 Prolog Programming Contests. The solutions could have been constructed during the contest under time pressure, and so you will find many solutions using the generate and test strategy.

14. Prolog Programming: A First Course
by Paul Brna, 1999
These notes are designed for undergraduate students who have some programming experience. The function of the text is to provide students studying Artificial Intelligence with an intensive introduction to Prolog, there is a slight bias towards AI.

15. Prolog Experiments in Discrete Mathematics, Logic, and Computability
by James Hein - Portland State University, 2009
Programming experiments designed to help learning of discrete mathematics, logic, and computability. Most of the experiments are short and to the point, just like traditional homework problems, so that they reflect the daily classroom work.

16. Logic, Programming and Prolog
by Ulf Nilsson, Jan Mauszynski - John Wiley & Sons Inc, 1995
This textbook provides a uniform account of both the foundations of logic programming and simple programming techniques in the programming language Prolog. The authors limited their attention to the most important areas of logic programming.

17. Prolog and Natural-Language Analysis
by F. C. N. Pereira, S. M. Shieber - Center for the Study of Language, 2002
A concise introduction to logic programming and the logic-programming language Prolog both as vehicles for understanding elementary computational linguistics and as tools for implementing the basic components of natural-language-processing systems.

Author : Shivam Kotwalia, CodeKill

11 Most Notorious And Infamous Black Hat Hackers Ever

Did you know that Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg were black hat hackers? Here we bring to you 11 most notorious black hat hackers ever! 

Hacking is undoubtedly one of the most adventurous, enticing and mysterious parts of the tech world and we thought it could be even more fun to know and learn about the top tier notorious black hat hackers and the legendary hacks that earned them such a title. So we bring to you the top 11 black hat hackers ever!

If you are wondering what black hat is, then a black hat hacker is a computing slang for a person who is engaged in illegal or malicious hacking. And similarly a white hat hacker is someone who intends to improve internet security.


11. Kevin Mitnick

Kevin David Mitnick (born on August 6, 1963) is an American computer security consultant, author, and hacker. In the late 20th century, he was convicted of various computer- and communications-related crimes. At the time of his arrest, he was the most-wanted computer criminal in the United States. Mitnick gained unauthorized access to his first computer network in 1979, at 16, when a friend gave him the phone number for the Ark, the computer system Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) used for developing their RSTS/E operating system software. He broke into DEC’s computer network and copied their software, a crime he was charged with and convicted of in 1988.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Mitnick gained unauthorized access to dozens of computer networks while he was a fugitive. He used cloned cellular phones to hide his location and, among other things, copied valuable proprietary software from some of the country’s largest cellular telephone and computer companies. Mitnick also intercepted and stole computer passwords, altered computer networks, and broke into and read private e-mail.

10. Kevin Poulsen a.k.a. Dark Dante

The notorious 80s black hat hacker, Kevin Poulsen, gained recognition for his hacking of the telephone lines for LA radio station KIIS-FM, securing himself a place as the 102nd caller and winning a brand new Porsche 944, among other prizes. Law enforcement dubbed Poulsen the “Hannibal Lecter of computer crime.” Poulsen went underground as a fugitive when the FBI began its search for him, but in 1991, he was finally captured.

He pleaded guilty to seven counts of mail, wire and computer fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and for obtaining information on covert businesses run by the FBI. Kevin Poulsen was sentenced to 51 months in prison (4 years and 3 months), which was the longest sentence ever given for hacking at the time. However, since serving time, Poulsen has worked as a journalist and is now a senior editor for Wired News. Poulsen’s most note-worthy article details his work on identifying 744 sex offenders with MySpace profiles.

9. Albert Gonzalez

Cyber-criminal Albert Gonzalez has been accused of masterminding the biggest ATM and credit card theft in history; from 2005 to 2007, he and his cybergroup had allegedly sold more than 170 million card and ATM numbers. Gonzalez’s team used SQL injection techniques to create malware backdoors on several corporate systems in order to launch packet-sniffing (specifically, ARP Spoofing) attacks, allowing him to steal computer data from internal corporate networks. When he was arrested, authorities seized $1.6 million in cash including $1.1 million found in plastic bags placed in a three-foot drum which had been buried in his parents’ backyard. In 2010, Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

8. Vladimir Levin

It’s almost like the opening of a James Bond movie: in 1994, while working from his laptop from his Russian apartment in St. Petersburg, Vladimir Levin transferred $10 million from the accounts of Citibank clients to his own accounts around the world.

However, Levin’s career as a hacker was only short lived, with a capture, imprisonment and recovery of all but $400,000 of the original $10 million. During Levin’s 1997 trial in the United States, he was said to have coordinated the first ever internet bank raid. The truth is Levin’s ability to transfer Citibank client funds to his own accounts was possible through stolen account numbers and PINs. Levin’s scam was a simple interception of clients’ calls while recording the punched in account numbers.

7. Robert Tappan Morris

On November 2, 1988, Robert Morris released a worm that took down one-tenth of the Internet, crippling 6,000 plus computer systems. It didn’t take long for the police to track him down. Morris made the fault of chatting about his worm for months before its release on the Internet. Morris claimed it was just a stunt, and added that he truly regretted causing $15 million worth of damage: the estimated amount of carnage his worm left behind.

Morris was one of the first to be tried and convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act but only had community service and a fine as his penalty. The defense for such a light sentence was that Morris’ worm didn’t destroy the actual contents of affected computers. Morris now works in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

6. Michael Calce a.k.a. MafiaBoy

In February of 2000, Michael Calce launched a series of widely known denial-of-service attacks against large commercial websites, including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Dell, eBay, and CNN. He hacked Yahoo! when it was still the web’s leading search engine and caused it to shutdown for about an hour. Like many hackers, Calce exploited websites primarily for pride and establishing dominance for himself and his cybergroup, TNT. In 2001, the Montreal Youth Court sentenced Calce to eight months of open custody, one year of probation, restricted use of the Internet, and a minimal fine.

5. David Smith

Smith’s fame can be credited to the infamous e-mail virus, Melissa that he gave birth to. Smith claims that the Melissa virus was never intended to cause harm, but its simple means of propagation (each infected computer sent out multiple infected emails) overloaded computer systems and servers around the world. Smith’s virus takes an unusual turn in that it was originally hidden in a file that contained passwords to 80 well-known pornography websites. The name Melissa was derived from a lap dancer Smith met while on a trip in Florida. Even though over 60,000 email viruses have been discovered, Smith is the only person to go to federal prison in the United States for sending one.

4. Adrian Lamo

Nicknamed “the homeless hacker,” Adrian Lamo used coffee shops, libraries and internet cafés as his locations for hacking. Apart from being the homeless hacker, Lamo is widely-known for breaking into a series of high-profile computer networks, which include The New York Times, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and MCI WorldCom. In 2002, he added his name to the The New York Times’ internal database of expert sources and utilized LexisNexis account to conduct research on high-profile subjects. The Times filed a complaint, and a warrant for Lamo’s arrest was issued, followed by a 15-month investigation by federal prosecutors in New York.

After several days in hiding, he finally surrendered to the US Marshals, and then to the FBI. Lamo was ordered to pay approximately $65,000 in damages and was sentenced to six months house arrest at his parents’ home, with an additional two years of probation. In June 2010, Lamo disclosed the name of Bradley Manning to U.S. Army authorities as the source of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike video leak to Wikileaks. Lamo is presently working as a threat analyst and donates his time and skills to a Sacramento-based nonprofit organization.

3. George Hotz

The name of the acclaimed jailbreak artist, George Hotz, will forever be associated with the April 2011 PlayStation breach. Being one of the first hackers ever to jailbreak the Sony PlayStation 3, Hotz found himself in the midst of a very relentless, public and messy court battle with Sony – perhaps worsened by Hotz’s public release of his jail breaking methods. In a stated retaliation to Sony’s gap of the unstated rules of jail breaking – never prosecute – the hacker group Anonymous attacked Sony in what would be the dubbed as the most costly security break of all time to date.

Hackers broke into the PlayStation Network and stole personal information of some 77 million users. However, Hotz denied any responsibility for the attack, and added “Running homebrew and exploring security on your devices is cool; hacking into someone else’s server and stealing databases of user info. is not cool.”

2. Jonathan James a.k.a. c0mrade

Jonathan James, 16-year-old black hat hacker, became the first juvenile imprisoned for cybercrime in the United States. James gained his notoriety by implementing a series of successful intrusions into various systems. At an amazingly young age of 15, James specialized in hacking high-profile government systems such as NASA and the Department of Defense. He was reported to have stolen software worth over $1.7 million. He also hacked into the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and intercepted over 3,000 highly secretive messages passing to and from the DTRA employees, while collecting many usernames and passwords.

On May 18, 2008, at the age of 25, James committed suicide using a gun. The words in his suicide note provide some insight into this obviously brilliant but troubled youth who thought he would be a scapegoat and blamed for cyber crimes he did not commit: “I have no faith in the ‘justice’ system. Perhaps my actions today, and this letter, will send a stronger message to the public. Either way, I have lost control over this situation, and this is my only way to regain control.”

1. Gary McKinnon

In 2002, an exceptionally odd message appeared on a US Army computer screen: “Your security system is crap,” it read. “I am Solo. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.” It was later identified as the work of Scottish systems administrator, Gary McKinnon.

McKinnon suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, which is the least severe form of autism. The symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome certainly match Gary’s actions: that is, highly intelligent with an exceptional understanding of complex systems. Though sufferers often have difficulty reading social cues and acknowledging the impact of their often-obsessive behavior, they tend to be geniuses in one particular subject. For Gary, it was computers.

Gary has been accused of executing the largest ever hack of United States government computer networks — including Army, Air Force, Navy and NASA systems. The court had recommended that McKinnon be apprehended to the United States to face charges of illegally accessing 97 computers, causing a total of $700,000 in damage. Even more interesting are McKinnon’s motives for the large scale hackings, which he claims were in search of information on UFOs. He believed the US government was hiding such information in its military computers.

Author : Shivam Kotwalia, CodeKill