The Certified Ethical Hacker (C|EH) is a professional certification provided by the International Council of E-Commerce Consultants (EC-Council). A hacker is a term used for someone who breaks into computer systems in order to steal or change or destroy information as a form of cyber-terrorism. To beat a hacker, one needs to think like one! This is exactly what the CE|H certification teaches you. CE|H is the the world’s most advanced ethical hacking course with 26 in class modules out of a total 63 modules on everything any ethical hacker will ever want to know when they are planning to beef up the information security posture of their organization.

The goal of this course is to help one master an ethical hacking methodology that can be used in a penetration testing or ethical hacking situation. One will walk out the door with hacking skills that are highly in demand, as well as with a internationally recognized Certified Ethical Hacker certification!

To apply countermeasures, one needs to understand the anatomy of an attack. Once an attack is detected, it is necessary to comprehend the steps to counter an attack. In general there are a five phases in which an intruder advances an attack:

- Reconnaissance
- Scanning
- Gaining Access
- Maintaining Access
- Covering tracks

Watch out for this space as I would be talking about some the specific hacking methods from these phases.

Mobile phones have come a long way. So far in fact, that the inventor of the mobile phone, Mr. Martin Cooper feels that they’re getting too complicated for their own good. But somehow, this doesn’t seem to be a feeling reciprocated by the general populace. Every new technology that has appeared in a mobile device has been embraced by customers with open arms. We’re talking features like built-in cameras, media playing capabilities, rich, desktop like internet experience, 3D gaming, GPS and so on…  Some folks may have been sceptical when our esteemed client Nokia marketed their ground breaking N95 handset a few years back as a “Computer in your pocket”, but that is indeed what phones have transformed into. Modern day mobile phones are more powerful than full blown computers from just a few years ago and although the smaller form factors pose obvious limitations on them in terms of content creation, they are fast becoming the most popular avenue for content consumption.

Obviously, this is an interesting aspect for us as an agency and to our clients, by extension. Where there is content, there is advertisement. Advertisements keep the ecosystem alive and a well crafted ad campaign can get the end users’ genuine attention without ruining their core experience and putting them off. Now obviously, banner ads on a web page and sponsored search links are not the ideal solution for this on the mobile platform.  In a world where people seem to gravitate more towards customized “App-based” solutions rather than generic web pages, these desktop oriented tools prove to be fairly limited in terms of reach, potential and execution. The good news is that mobile phone platform developers have realized this and have come up with next-gen solutions for the same. Apple’s iAds (For iOS) is one example. Google’s admob (Multiple platforms) is another. Of course, there is the tried and tested Adobe Flash. One could also not discount a possible foray from Microsoft into this arena, given the renewed vigour they are showing with Bing and the upcoming Windows Phone 7 platform.

With these powerful  tools, an agency is poised to craft exciting ad campaigns for their clientele that does not hamper the customers’ user experience. No longer would one have to be subjected to an online Casino ad while using a free stock monitoring application. Content, location and usage pattern awareness holds the key here. By using this data, the right ads are pushed to the right people and only them: The ones that may genuinely be interested in the product/ service. Add to this the ability to utilize additional hardware on the device such as the camera and a whole new set of possibilities pop up.  Microsoft Tag is one obvious implementation of this, but the future beholds a lot more. Whatever technologies that are being used or platforms that they are being implemented on, mobile phone advertisements are taking a leap to the future; just like how the devices themselves did in the past few years.

Of course, the ultimate challenge is to utilize these tools so as to craft an effective campaign and not just use technology for technology’s sake. This is where our award winning team comes in. So what exactly can one expect from The Upper Storey on this front in the coming days? All we can say is, stay tuned…

Our designer Mel sent this out to the office recently. Pretty exciting stuff, Google’s just launched a service to add web fonts to any web page. All fonts in the directory are available for use on websites under an open source license and served by Google servers.

They’re also working with developers to create a series of high quality fonts that are going to be available through this directory. It works in most browsers and is pretty easy to use. Dynamic content just got dynamic

Straight from the horse’s mouth -

“For a long time, the web has lagged print and even other electronic media in typographic sophistication. To enjoy the visual richness of diverse fonts, webmasters have resorted to workarounds such as baking text into images. Thanks to browser support for web fonts, this is rapidly changing. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed.”

Links:

Google Code blog for more of the article.

See it in action here (you might need to use Chrome to see this)

Google Font API

Another great tip floating around the office mail.

The Fix

Step 1: Color Profiles

Step 2: Proof Setup

Step 3:

And that’s it! Your green pear will now stop looking like a muddy pear every time you save for web.

• Mofuro (a division of The Upper Storey) develops large touch screen display
• The work showcases CapitaLand assets across the globe to investors and corporate clients
• The work is a combination of a bespoke backend CMS for display systems and front end design and graphics

The Upper Storey (TUS) and Mofuro (a division of The Upper Storey) has combined the best of touch screen technology with easy to use content management system (CMS) to help develop a long term application to communicate all of CapitaLand’s property and financial assets across the globe. This forward looking technology driven form of storytelling enables CapitaLand to showcase their global footprint through rich media assets. This is in line with their overall attitude to business and business opportunities.

CapitaLand is one of Asia’s largest real estate companies, with operations spanning more than 110 cities in over 20 countries across Asia Pacific and Europe.

The system comprised three of the latest LG 65” LED TV’s fitted with the newest infrared touch technology from TouchKit. Each TV is controlled with an individual PC and can operate as standalone demonstration on one screen or as a united presentation mode using all 3 combined screens.

Touch screen systems such as this are part of a wide range of technologies which are expanding the content delivery and engagement opportunities for businesses with an audience. These technologies are continually blurring the line between online and offline digital platforms for a variety of applications now being widely adopted for marketing and communications.

Prakash Kamdar, Managing Director of The Upper Storey & Mofuro said: “The Upper Storey and Mofuro have a long history of jointly developing high quality engaging content, and in 2009 has expanded into delivery of that content on different platforms. This is part of the history of pushing boundaries at TUS, and it is paying off for our clients”.

About Mofuro

Founded in 2005, Mofuro is a specialist agency focused on Motion Graphics, 3D and Experience Design. Mofuro has a strong track record in creating award-winning motion graphics and realtime 3D virtual destinations for product visualisation/demonstration, interactive, digital entertainment, computer aided training and VR applications. The unit is currently researching and creating machine sensing techniques to benefit artistic, commercial and educational applications. This includes include areas such as augmented reality, voice/handwriting and gesture recognition, touch computing, computer vision, and information visualization.  Its clients include Nokia, Sony, Intel & Dell.

See the 2009 show reel.

Last night we were doing some touch screen development testing for a new client. It is a great new project aimed at telling the corporate story to investors. For now it is under wraps, but all will be revealed in February. Most of the animations and graphics done by Mofuro, with a web based CMS system developed by the TUS tech team.

New Touch Screen project developed by TUS

Today you should see the all sorts of promotion of the new 2010 Intel^® Core^TM Processor Family. But not only that, Intel has done a great job integrating with their OEM partners to ensure that consumer demand for the processor has the right support at online point of purchase. Of course the most visible version of that is the work with Dell in Asia. Look out for a whole new range of PC’s to hit the market using this great new processor technology.

The New Intel Core Processor family on Dell.com

See the full site on on Dell.com: http://bit.ly/6wCUBa

“Being at the cutting edge of new technologies, especially in a web 2.0 world, is critical for a great digitally savvy agency.”

I couldn’t agree more (well I did say it). The Upper Storey wasn’t ‘one of the first’ – but the first agency in Singapore to use Google Street View in a clients work. We implemented it to show people interested in the OCBC Cycle race, what the riders course is like at street level. And this was wrapped up with a nice promotion for KLM on the very popular Route Maps section of the OCBC Cycle site.

This wasn’t a major campaign. But it is great to bring exciting new opportunities and ideas to clients. And having it tied to the offical Google launch means we generated some nice buzz on the social aggregator via the Blogs and Twitters.

Our “Tomorrow’s Stars, Today ” site for Intel gets mentioned on Adobe’s October 2009 newsletter as an example of sites that “… should inspire and trigger some creative areas of your brain …” , courtesy of Rob Ford, founder of The FWA. Thanks Rob!

It’s this time of the year in Singapore again. Time when people working with Flash platform gather and spend few great days together. Last year it was first TAC, and it was great. This year, in it’s 2nd edition speaker list got impressive, conference expanded from one day to two days so it’s guaranteed there will be double fun.

The Upper Storey like last year decided to be a Bronze sponsor. We love Flash and we like supporting the community. Let’s meet at the conference and talk about things that keep us going further, like wonderful web technologies.

List of speakers should get you interested to come, even if you need to travel to Singapore specially for this occasion:  Ryan Stewart, Andre Michelle,  Mark Barcinski, Peter Elst, Marco Casario, Leif Wells, Stefan Wessels, Michael Plank, Mohammed Khan and local talents Alvin Zhang, Stefano Virgilli and Hu Shunjie. Topic covered are wide ranging from Audio processing in Flash, Papervision 3D, AIR, Flash Platform, Flex integration to even Multi-touch in Flash.

The Upper Storey will be presenting too. A ten minute walk through one of our latest projects.

See you all at The Actionscript Conference.