Update!

I have been busy-

1) Finally my divorce came through. My advice – dont do it without a pre-nup ! Alimony means all the money.

2) Spending time on Quora after getting bored from LinkedIn, Twitter,Facebook,Google Plus,Tumblr, WordPress

See this answer to-

What are common misconceptions about startups?

1) we will change the world
2) if we get 1% of a billion people market, we will be rich
3) if we have got funding, most of the job is done
4) lets pay ourselves high salaries since we got funded
5) our idea is awesome and cant be copied, improvised, stolen, replicated
6) startups are painless
7) it is a better life than a corporate career
8) long term vision is important than short term cash burn
9) we will never sell out or exit. never
10) its a great idea to make startups with friend

Say hello to me – http://www.quora.com/Ajay-Ohri/answers

3) Writing freelance articles on APIs for Programmable Web

Why write pro? See point 1)

Interview John Myles White , Machine Learning for Hackers

Here is an interview with one of the younger researchers and rock stars of the R Project, John Myles White, co-author of Machine Learning for Hackers.

Ajay- What inspired you guys to write Machine Learning for Hackers. What has been the public response to the book. Are you planning to write a second edition or a next book?

John-We decided to write Machine Learning for Hackers because there were so many people interested in learning more about Machine Learning who found the standard textbooks a little difficult to understand, either because they lacked the mathematical background expected of readers or because it wasn’t clear how to translate the mathematical definitions in those books into usable programs. Most Machine Learning books are written for audiences who will not only be using Machine Learning techniques in their applied work, but also actively inventing new Machine Learning algorithms. The amount of information needed to do both can be daunting, because, as one friend pointed out, it’s similar to insisting that everyone learn how to build a compiler before they can start to program. For most people, it’s better to let them try out programming and get a taste for it before you teach them about the nuts and bolts of compiler design. If they like programming, they can delve into the details later.

We once said that Machine Learning for Hackers is supposed to be a chemistry set for Machine Learning and I still think that’s the right description: it’s meant to get readers excited about Machine Learning and hopefully expose them to enough ideas and tools that they can start to explore on their own more effectively. It’s like a warmup for standard academic books like Bishop’s.

The public response to the book has been phenomenal. It’s been amazing to see how many people have bought the book and how many people have told us they found it helpful. Even friends with substantial expertise in statistics have said they’ve found a few nuggets of new information in the book, especially regarding text analysis and social network analysis — topics that Drew and I spend a lot of time thinking about, but are not thoroughly covered in standard statistics and Machine Learning undergraduate curricula.

I hope we write a second edition. It was our first book and we learned a ton about how to write at length from the experience. I’m about to announce later this week that I’m writing a second book, which will be a very short eBook for O’Reilly. Stay tuned for details.

Ajay- What are the key things that a potential reader can learn from this book?

John- We cover most of the nuts and bolts of introductory statistics in our book: summary statistics, regression and classification using linear and logistic regression, PCA and k-Nearest Neighbors. We also cover topics that are less well known, but are as important: density plots vs. histograms, regularization, cross-validation, MDS, social network analysis and SVM’s. I hope a reader walks away from the book having a feel for what different basic algorithms do and why they work for some problems and not others. I also hope we do just a little to shift a future generation of modeling culture towards regularization and cross-validation.

Ajay- Describe your journey as a science student up till your Phd. What are you current research interests and what initiatives have you done with them?

John-As an undergraduate I studied math and neuroscience. I then took some time off and came back to do a Ph.D. in psychology, focusing on mathematical modeling of both the brain and behavior. There’s a rich tradition of machine learning and statistics in psychology, so I got increasingly interested in ML methods during my years as a grad student. I’m about to finish my Ph.D. this year. My research interests all fall under one heading: decision theory. I want to understand both how people make decisions (which is what psychology teaches us) and how they should make decisions (which is what statistics and ML teach us). My thesis is focused on how people make decisions when there are both short-term and long-term consequences to be considered. For non-psychologists, the classic example is probably the explore-exploit dilemma. I’ve been working to import more of the main ideas from stats and ML into psychology for modeling how real people handle that trade-off. For psychologists, the classic example is the Marshmallow experiment. Most of my research work has focused on the latter: what makes us patient and how can we measure patience?

Ajay- How can academia and private sector solve the shortage of trained data scientists (assuming there is one)?

John- There’s definitely a shortage of trained data scientists: most companies are finding it difficult to hire someone with the real chops needed to do useful work with Big Data. The skill set required to be useful at a company like Facebook or Twitter is much more advanced than many people realize, so I think it will be some time until there are undergraduates coming out with the right stuff. But there’s huge demand, so I’m sure the market will clear sooner or later.

The changes that are required in academia to prepare students for this kind of work are pretty numerous, but the most obvious required change is that quantitative people need to be learning how to program properly, which is rare in academia, even in many CS departments. Writing one-off programs that no one will ever have to reuse and that only work on toy data sets doesn’t prepare you for working with huge amounts of messy data that exhibit shifting patterns. If you need to learn how to program seriously before you can do useful work, you’re not very valuable to companies who need employees that can hit the ground running. The companies that have done best in building up data teams, like LinkedIn, have learned to train people as they come in since the proper training isn’t typically available outside those companies.

Of course, on the flipside, the people who do know how to program well need to start learning more about theory and need to start to have a better grasp of basic mathematical models like linear and logistic regressions. Lots of CS students seem not to enjoy their theory classes, but theory really does prepare you for thinking about what you can learn from data. You may not use automata theory if you work at Foursquare, but you will need to be able to reason carefully and analytically. Doing math is just like lifting weights: if you’re not good at it right now, you just need to dig in and get yourself in shape.

About-

John Myles White is a Phd Student in Ph.D. student in the Princeton Psychology Department, where he studies human decision-making both theoretically and experimentally. Along with the political scientist Drew Conway, he is the author of a book published by O’Reilly Media entitled “Machine Learning for Hackers”, which is meant to introduce experienced programmers to the machine learning toolkit. He is also working with Mark Hansenon a book for laypeople about exploratory data analysis.John is the lead maintainer for several R packages, including ProjectTemplate and log4r.

(TIL he has played in several rock bands!)

—–

You can read more in his own words at his blog at http://www.johnmyleswhite.com/about/

He can be contacted via social media at Google Plus at https://plus.google.com/109658960610931658914 or twitter at twitter.com/johnmyleswhite/

Interview Alain Chesnais Chief Scientist Trendspottr.com

Here is a brief interview with Alain Chesnais ,Chief Scientist Trendspottr.com. It is a big honor to interview such a legend in computer science, and I am grateful to both him and Mark Zohar for taking time to write these down.

Ajay- Describe your career from your student days to being the President of ACM (Association of Computing Machinery http://www.acm.org/ ). How can we increase the interest of students in STEM education, particularly in view of the shortage of data scientists.

Alain- I’m trying to sum up a career of over 35 years. This may be a bit long winded…

I started my career in CS when I was in high school in the early 70’s. I was accepted in the National Science Foundation’s Science Honors Program in 9th grade and the first course I took was a Fortran programming course at Columbia University. This was on an IBM 360 using punch cards.

The next year my high school got a donation from DEC of a PDP-8E mini computer. I ended up spending a lot of time in the machine room all through high school at a time when access to computers wasn’t all that common. I went to college in Paris and ended up at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan in the newly created Computer Science department.

My first job after finishing my graduate studies was as a research assistant at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique where I focused my efforts on modelling the behaviour of distributed database systems in the presence of locking. When François Mitterand was elected president of France in 1981, he invited Nicholas Negroponte and Seymour Papert to come to France to set up the Centre Mondial Informatique. I was hired as a researcher there and continued on to become director of software development until it was closed down in 1986. I then started up my own company focusing on distributed computer graphics. We sold the company to Abvent in the early 90’s.

After that, I was hired by Thomson Digital Image to lead their rendering team. We were acquired by Wavefront Technologies in 1993 then by SGI in 1995 and merged with Alias Research. In the merged company: Alias|wavefront, I was director of engineering on the Maya project. Our team received an Oscar in 2003 for the creation of the Maya software system.

Since then I’ve worked at various companies, most recently focusing on social media and Big Data issues associated with it. Mark Zohar and I worked together at SceneCaster in 2007 where we developed a Facebook app that allowed users to create their own 3D scenes and share them with friends via Facebook without requiring a proprietary plugin. In December 2007 it was the most popular app in its category on Facebook.

Recently Mark approached me with a concept related to mining the content of public tweets to determine what was trending in real time. Using math similar to what I had developed during my graduate studies to model the performance of distributed databases in the presence of locking, we built up a real time analytics engine that ranks the content of tweets as they stream in. The math is designed to scale linearly in complexity with the volume of data that we analyze. That is the basis for what we have created for TrendSpottr.

In parallel to my professional career, I have been a very active volunteer at ACM. I started out as a member of the Paris ACM SIGGRAPH chapter in 1985 and volunteered to help do our mailings (snail mail at the time). After taking on more responsibilities with the chapter, I was elected chair of the chapter in 1991. I was first appointed to the SIGGRAPH Local Groups Steering Committee, then became ACM Director for Chapters. Later I was successively elected SIGGRAPH Vice Chair, ACM SIG Governing Board (SGB) Vice Chair for Operations, SGB Chair, ACM SIGGRAPH President, ACM Secretary/Treasurer, ACM Vice President, and finally, in 2010, I was elected ACM President. My term as ACM President has just ended on July 1st. Vint Cerf is our new President. I continue to serve on the ACM Executive Committee in my role as immediate Past President.

(Note- About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery www.acm.org, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. )

Ajay- What sets Trendspotter apart from other startups out there in terms of vision in trying to achieve a more coherent experience on the web.

Alain- The Basic difference with other approaches that we are aware of is that we have developed an incremental solution that calculates the results on the fly as the data streams in. Our evaluators are based on solid mathematical foundations that have proven their usefulness over time. One way to describe what we do is to think of it as signal processing where the tweets are the signal and our evaluators are like triggers that tell you what elements of the signal have the characteristics that we are filtering for (velocity and acceleration). One key result of using this approach is that our unit cost per tweet analyzed does not go up with increased volume. Using more traditional data analysis approaches involving an implicit sort would imply a complexity of N*log(N), where N is the volume of tweets being analyzed. That would imply that the cost per tweet analyzed would go up with the volume of tweets. Our approach was designed to avoid that, so that we can maintain a cap on our unit costs of analysis, no matter what volume of data we analyze.

Ajay- What do you think is the future of big data visualization going to look like? What are some of the technologies that you are currently bullish on?

Alain- I see several trends that would have deep impact on Big Data visualization. I firmly believe that with large amounts of data, visualization is key tool for understanding both the structure and the relationships that exist between data elements. Let’s focus on some of the key things that are pushing in this direction:

the volume of data that is available is growing at a rate we have never seen before. Cisco has measured an 8 fold increase in the volume of IP traffic over the last 5 years and predicts that we will reach the zettabyte of data over IP in 2016
more of the data is becoming publicly available. This isn’t only on social networks such as Facebook and twitter, but joins a more general trend involving open research initiatives and open government programs
the desired time to get meaningful results is going down dramatically. In the past 5 years we have seen the half life of data on Facebook, defined as the amount of time that half of the public reactions to any given post (likes, shares., comments) take place, go from about 12 hours to under 3 hours currently
our access to the net is always on via mobile device. You are always connected.
the CPU and GPU capabilities of mobile devices is huge (an iPhone has 10 times the compute power of a Cray-1 and more graphics capabilities than early SGI workstations)

Put all of these observations together and you quickly come up with a massive opportunity to analyze data visually on the go as it happens no matter where you are. We can’t afford to have to wait for results. When something of interest occurs we need to be aware of it immediately.

Ajay- What are some of the applications we could use Trendspottr. Could we predict events like Arab Spring, or even the next viral thing.

Alain- TrendSpottr won’t predict what will happen next. What it *will* do is alert you immediately when it happens. You can think of it like a smoke detector. It doesn’t tell that a fire will take place, but it will save your life when a fire does break out.

Typical uses for TrendSpottr are

thought leadership by tracking content that your readership is interested in via TrendSpottr you can be seen as a thought leader on the subject by being one of the first to share trending content on a given subject. I personally do this on my Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/alain.chesnais) and have seen my klout score go up dramatically as a result
brand marketing to be able to know when something is trending about your brand and take advantage of it as it happens.
competitive analysis to see what is being said about two competing elements. For instance, searching TrendSpottr for “Obama OR Romney” gives you a very good understanding about how social networks are reacting to each politician. You can also do searches like “$aapl OR $msft OR $goog” to get a sense of what is the current buzz for certain hi tech stocks.
understanding your impact in real time to be able to see which of the content that you are posting is trending the most on social media so that you can highlight it on your main page. So if all of your content is hosted on common domain name (ourbrand.com), searching for ourbrand.com will show you the most active of your site’s content. That can easily be set up by putting a TrendSpottr widget on your front page

Ajay- What are some of the privacy guidelines that you keep in mind- given the fact that you collect individual information but also have government agencies as potential users.

Alain- We take privacy very seriously and anonymize all of the data that we collect. We don’t keep explicit records of the data we collected through the various incoming streams and only store the aggregate results of our analysis.

About–

Alain Chesnais is immediate Past President of ACM, elected for the two-year term beginning July 1, 2010.Chesnais studied at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de l’Enseignement Technique and l’Université de Paris where he earned a Maîtrise de Mathematiques, a Maitrise de Structure Mathématique de l’Informatique, and a Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies in Compuer Science. He was a high school student at the United Nations International School in New York, where, along with preparing his International Baccalaureate with a focus on Math, Physics and Chemistry, he also studied Mandarin Chinese.Chesnais recently founded Visual Transitions, which specializes in helping companies move to HTML 5, the newest standard for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. He was the CTO of SceneCaster.com from June 2007 until April 2010, and was Vice President of Product Development at Tucows Inc. from July 2005 – May 2007. He also served as director of engineering at Alias|Wavefront on the team that received an Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for developing the Maya 3D software package.

Prior to his election as ACM president, Chesnais was vice president from July 2008 – June 2010 as well as secretary/treasurer from July 2006 – June 2008. He also served as president of ACM SIGGRAPH from July 2002 – June 2005 and as SIG Governing Board Chair from July 2000 – June 2002.

As a French citizen now residing in Canada, he has more than 20 years of management experience in the software industry. He joined the local SIGGRAPH Chapter in Paris some 20 years ago as a volunteer and has continued his involvement with ACM in a variety of leadership capacities since then.

About Trendspottr.com

http://trendspottr.com/aboutus.php

TrendSpottr is a real-time viral search and predictive analytics service that identifies the most timely and trending information for any topic or keyword. Our core technology analyzes real-time data streams and spots emerging trends at their earliest acceleration point — hours or days before they have become “popular” and reached mainstream awareness.

TrendSpottr serves as a predictive early warning system for news and media organizations, brands, government agencies and Fortune 500 companies and helps them to identify emerging news, events and issues that have high viral potential and market impact. TrendSpottr has partnered with HootSuite, DataSift and other leading social and big data companies.

Anonymous grows up and matures…Anonanalytics.com

I liked the design, user interfaces and the conceptual ideas behind the latest Anonymous hactivist websites (much better than the shabby graphic design of Wikileaks, or Friends of Wikileaks, though I guess they have been busy what with Julian’s escapades and Syrian emails)

I disagree (and let us agree to disagree some of the time)

with the complete lack of respect for Graphical User Interfaces for tools. If dDOS really took off due to LOIC, why not build a GUI for SQL Injection (or atleats the top 25 vulnerability testing as by this list http://www.sans.org/top25-software-errors/

Shouldnt Tor be embedded within the next generation of Loic.

Automated testing tools are used by companies like Adobe (and others)… so why not create simple GUI for the existing tools.., I may be completely offtrack here.. but I think hacker education has been a critical misstep[ that has undermined Western Democracies preparedness for Cyber tactics by hostile regimes)…. how to create the next generation of hackers by easy tutorials (see codeacademy and build appropriate modules)

-A slick website to be funded by Bitcoins (Money can buy everything including Mastercard and Visa, but Bitcoins are an innovative step towards an internet economy currency)

-A collobrative wiki

http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Main_Page

Seriously dude, why not make this a part of Wikipedia- (i know Jimmy Wales got shifty eyes, but can you trust some1 )

-Analytics for Anonymous (sighs! I should have thought about this earlier)

http://anonanalytics.com/ (can be used to play and bill both sides of corporate espionage and be cyber private investigators)

What We Do

We provide the public with investigative reports exposing corrupt companies. Our team includes analysts, forensic accountants, statisticians, computer experts, and lawyers from various jurisdictions and backgrounds. All information presented in our reports is acquired through legal channels, fact-checked, and vetted thoroughly before release. This is both for the protection of our associates as well as groups/individuals who rely on our work.

_and lastly creative content for Pinterest.com and Public Relations ( what next-? Tom Cruise to play Julian Assange in the new Movie ?)

http://www.par-anoia.net/ />Potentially Alarming Research: Anonymous Intelligence AgencyInformation is and will be free. Expect it. ~ Anonymous

Links of interest

Latest Scientology Mails (Austria)
Full FBI call transcript
Arrest Tracker
HBGary Email Viewer
The Pirate Bay Proxy
We Are Anonymous – Book
To be announced…

Facebook and R

Part 1 How do people at Facebook use R?

tamar Rosenn, Facebook

Itamar conveyed how Facebook’s Data Team used R in 2007 to answer two questions about new users: (i) which data points predict whether a user will stay? and (ii) if they stay, which data points predict how active they’ll be after three months?

For the first question, Itamar’s team used recursive partitioning (via the rpartpackage) to infer that just two data points are significantly predictive of whether a user remains on Facebook: (i) having more than one session as a new user, and (ii) entering basic profile information.

For the second question, they fit the data to a logistic model using a least angle regression approach (via the lars package), and found that activity at three months was predicted by variables related to three classes of behavior: (i) how often a user was reached out to by others, (ii) frequency of third party application use, and (iii) what Itamar termed “receptiveness” — related to how forthcoming a user was on the site.

source-http://www.dataspora.com/2009/02/predictive-analytics-using-r/

and cute graphs like the famous

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/visualizing-friendships/469716398919

and

studying baseball on facebook

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-team/baseball-on-facebook/10150142265858859

by counting the number of posts that occurred the day after a team lost divided by the total number of wins, since losses for great teams are remarkable and since winning teams’ fans just post more.

But mostly at

https://www.facebook.com/data?sk=notes and https://www.facebook.com/data?v=app_4949752878

and creating new packages

1. jjplot (not much action here!)

https://r-forge.r-project.org/scm/viewvc.php/?root=jjplot

though

I liked the promise of JJplot at

http://pleasescoopme.com/2010/03/31/using-jjplot-to-explore-tipping-behavior/

2. ising models

https://github.com/slycoder/Rflim

https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150359708746212

3. R pipe

https://github.com/slycoder/Rpipe

even the FB interns are cool

http://brenocon.com/blog/2009/02/comparison-of-data-analysis-packages-r-matlab-scipy-excel-sas-spss-stata/

Part 2 How do people with R use Facebook?

Using the API at https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer

and code mashes from

http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr/index.php?post/2012/01/15/Crawling-facebook-with-R

http://applyr.blogspot.in/2012/01/mining-facebook-data-most-liked-status.html

but the wonderful troubleshooting code from http://www.brocktibert.com/blog/2012/01/19/358/

which needs to be added to the code first

and using network package

>access_token=”XXXXXXXXXXXX”

Annoyingly the Facebook token can expire after some time, this can lead to huge wait and NULL results with Oauth errors

If that happens you need to regenerate the token

What we need
> require(RCurl)
> require(rjson)
> download.file(url=”http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem”, destfile=”cacert.pem”)

Roman’s Famous Facebook Function (altered)

> facebook <- function( path = “me”, access_token , options){
+ if( !missing(options) ){
+ options <- sprintf( “?%s”, paste( names(options), “=”, unlist(options), collapse = “&”, sep = “” ) )
+ } else {
+ options <- “”
+ }
+ data <- getURL( sprintf( “https://graph.facebook.com/%s%s&access_token=%s”, path, options, access_token ), cainfo=”cacert.pem” )
+ fromJSON( data )
+ }

Now getting the friends list
> friends <- facebook( path=”me/friends” , access_token=access_token)
> # extract Facebook IDs
> friends.id <- sapply(friends$data, function(x) x$id)
> # extract names
> friends.name <- sapply(friends$data, function(x) iconv(x$name,”UTF-8″,”ASCII//TRANSLIT”))
> # short names to initials
> initials <- function(x) paste(substr(x,1,1), collapse=””)
> friends.initial <- sapply(strsplit(friends.name,” “), initials)

This matrix can take a long time to build, so you can change the value of N to say 40 to test your network. I needed to press the escape button to cut short the plotting of all 400 friends of mine.
> # friendship relation matrix
> N <- length(friends.id)
> friendship.matrix <- matrix(0,N,N)
> for (i in 1:N) {
+ tmp <- facebook( path=paste(“me/mutualfriends”, friends.id[i], sep=”/”) , access_token=access_token)
+ mutualfriends <- sapply(tmp$data, function(x) x$id)
+ friendship.matrix[i,friends.id %in% mutualfriends] <- 1
+ }

Plotting using Network package in R (with help from the comments at http://applyr.blogspot.in/2012/01/mining-facebook-data-most-liked-status.html)

> require(network)

>net1<- as.network(friendship.matrix)

> plot(net1, label=friends.initial, arrowhead.cex=0)

(Rgraphviz is tough if you are on Windows 7 like me)

but there is an alternative igraph solution at https://github.com/sciruela/facebookFriends/blob/master/facebook.r

After all that-..talk.. a graph..of my Facebook Network with friends initials as labels..

Opinion piece-

I hope plans to make the Facebook R package get fulfilled (just as the twitteR package led to many interesting analysis)

and also Linkedin has an API at http://developer.linkedin.com/apis

I think it would be interesting to plot professional relationships across social networks as well. But I hope to see a LinkedIn package (or blog code) soon.

As for jjplot, I had hoped ggplot and jjplot merged or atleast had some kind of inclusion in the Deducer GUI. Maybe a Google Summer of Code project if people are busy!!

Also the geeks at Facebook.com can think of giving something back to the R community, as Google generously does with funding packages like RUnit, Deducer and Summer of Code, besides sponsoring meet ups etc.

(note – this is part of the research for the upcoming book ” R for Business Analytics”)

ps-

but didnt get time to download all my posts using R code at

https://gist.github.com/1634662#

or do specific Facebook Page analysis using R at

http://tonybreyal.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/r-web-scraping-r-bloggers-facebook-page-to-gain-further-information-about-an-authors-r-blog-posts-e-g-number-of-likes-comments-shares-etc/

Updated-

 #access token from https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer
access_token="AAuFgaOcVaUZAssCvL9dPbZCjghTEwwhNxZAwpLdZCbw6xw7gARYoWnPHxihO1DcJgSSahd67LgZDZD"
require(RCurl)
 require(rjson)
# download the file needed for authentication http://www.brocktibert.com/blog/2012/01/19/358/
download.file(url="http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem", destfile="cacert.pem")
# http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr/index.php?post/2012/01/15/Crawling-facebook-with-R
facebook <- function( path = "me", access_token = token, options){
if( !missing(options) ){
options <- sprintf( "?%s", paste( names(options), "=", unlist(options), collapse = "&", sep = "" ) )
} else {
options <- ""
}
data <- getURL( sprintf( "https://graph.facebook.com/%s%s&access_token=%s", path, options, access_token ), cainfo="cacert.pem" )
fromJSON( data )
}

 # see http://applyr.blogspot.in/2012/01/mining-facebook-data-most-liked-status.html

# scrape the list of friends
friends <- facebook( path="me/friends" , access_token=access_token)
# extract Facebook IDs
friends.id <- sapply(friends$data, function(x) x$id)
# extract names 
friends.name <- sapply(friends$data, function(x)  iconv(x$name,"UTF-8","ASCII//TRANSLIT"))
# short names to initials 
initials <- function(x) paste(substr(x,1,1), collapse="")
friends.initial <- sapply(strsplit(friends.name," "), initials)

# friendship relation matrix
#N <- length(friends.id)
N <- 200
friendship.matrix <- matrix(0,N,N)
for (i in 1:N) {
  tmp <- facebook( path=paste("me/mutualfriends", friends.id[i], sep="/") , access_token=access_token)
  mutualfriends <- sapply(tmp$data, function(x) x$id)
  friendship.matrix[i,friends.id %in% mutualfriends] <- 1
}
require(network)
net1<- as.network(friendship.matrix)
plot(net1, label=friends.initial, arrowhead.cex=0)

Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org

Understanding Indian Govt attitude to Iran and Iraq wars

This is a collection of links for a geo-strategic analysis, and the economics of wars and allies. The author neither condones nor condemns current global dynamics in the balance of power.

nations don’t have friends or enemies…nations only have interests

In 2003

The war in Iraq had a unique Indian angle right at the beginning. Some members of the US administration felt they needed more troops in Iraq, and they started negotiating with India. Those negotiations broke down because the Indians wanted to fight under the UN flag and on MONEY!!

India wanted-

More money per soldier deployed,
more share in post War Oil Contracts,
better diplomatic subtlety

Govt changed in India due to elections in2003 (Muslim voters are critical in any govt forming majority party), and the Iraq war ran its tragic course without any Indian explicit support.

In 26 Nov 2008, Islamic Terrorists killed US, Indian and Israeli citizens in terror strikes in Mumbai Sieze- thus proving that appeasing terrorist nations is just riding a tiger.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2003-06-13/india/27203305_1_stabilisation-force-indian-troops-pentagon-delegation

NEW DELHI: There will be a lot a Iraq on the menu over the weekend before the Pentagon team arrives here on Monday to talk India into sending troops to the war-torn nation.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2003-07-28/india/27176989_1_troops-issue-stabilisation-force-defence-policy-group

Jul 28, 2003, 01.28pm IST

NEW DELHI: Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Richard B Myers, who is arriving here on Monday evening on a two-day visit, will request India to reconsider its decision on sending troops to Iraq.

and

Jul 29, 2003, 07.00pm IST

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2003-07-29/india/27205918_1_stabilisation-force-iraqi-situation-north-and-south-iraq

NEW DELHI: Though Gen Myers flatly denied his visit had anything to do with persuading India to send troops to Iraq, it is evident that the US desperately wants Delhi to contribute a division-level force of over 15,000 combat soldiers.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2003-09-10/india/27176101_1_stabilisation-force-force-under-american-control-regional-dialogue

Sep 10, 2003, 05.34pm IST

NEW DELHI: Even as the US-drafted resolution on Iraq is being heatedly debated in many countries, American Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Christina Rocca held a series of meetings with External Affairs Ministry officials on Wednesday.

Though it was officially called “a regional dialogue”, the US request to contribute a division-level force of over 15,000 combat soldiers to the “stabilisation force” in Iraq is learnt to have figured in the discussions.

The penny wise -pound foolish attitude of then Def Secretary Rumsfield led to break down in negotiations.

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Sir Winston Churchill

In 2012

Indian govt again faces elections and we have 150 million Muslim voters just like other countries have influential lobbies.

and while Israelis are being targeted again in attacks in India-

India is still seeking money-

India has struck a defiant tone over new financial sanctions imposed by the United States and European Union to punish Iran for its nuclear programme, coming up with elaborate trade and barter arrangements to pay for oil supplies.

However, the president of the All India Rice Exporters’ Association, said Monday’s attack on the wife of an Israeli diplomat in the Indian capital will damage trade with Iran and may complicate efforts to resolve an impasse over Iranian defaults on payments for rice imports worth around $150 million.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Unfazed-by-US-sanctions-India-to-step-up-ties-with-Iran/articleshow/11887691.cms

India buys $ 5 billion worth of oil from Iran. Annually. Clearly it is a critical financial trading partner to Iran.

It has now gotten extra sops from Iran to continue trading-and is now waiting for a sweeter monetary offer from US and/or Israel to even consider thinking about going through the pain of unchanging the inertia of ties with Iran.

There are some aspects of political corruption as well, as Indian political establishment is notoriously prone to corruption by lobbyists (apparently there is a global war on lobbyists that needs to happen)

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Unfazed-by-US-sanctions-India-to-step-up-ties-with-Iran/articleshow/11887691.cms

Feb 14, 2012, 05.54PM IST

India is set to ramp up its energy and business ties with Iran. (AFP Photo)

NEW DELHI: Unfazed by US sanctions and Israel linking Tehran to the attack on an Israeli embassy car here, India is set to ramp up its energy and business ties with Iran, with a commerce ministry team heading to Tehran to explore fresh business opportunities.

The team is expected to go to Tehran later this month to discuss steps to expand India’s trade with Iran, part of a larger strategy to pay for Iranian oil, said highly-placed sources.

Despite the US and European Union sanctions on Iran, India recently sealed a payment mechanism under which Indian companies will pay for 45 percent of their crude oil imports from Iran in rupees.

So diplomats with argue over money in Israel, Indian and US while terrorists will kill.

Against Stupidity- The Gods Themselves -Contend in Vain

Cyber Cold War

I try to write on cyber conflict without getting into the politics of why someone is hacking someone else. I always get beaten by someone in the comments thread when I write on politics.

But recent events have forced me to update my usual “how-to” cyber conflict to “why” cyber conflict. This is because of a terrorist attack in my hometown Delhi.

(updated-

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/world/middleeast/israeli-embassy-officials-attacked-in-india-and-georgia.html?_r=1&hp

Iran allegedly tried (as per Israel) to assassinate the wife of Israeli Defence Attache in Delhi using a magnetic bomb, India as she went to school to pick up her kids, somebody else put a grenade in Israeli embassy car in Georgia which was found in time.

Based on reports , initial work suggests the bomb was much more sophisticated than local terrorists, but the terrorists seemed to have some local recce work done.

India has 0 history of antisemitism but this is the second time Israelis have been targeted since 26/11 Mumbai attacks. India buys 12 % of oil annually from Iran (and refuses to join the oil embargo called by US and Europe)

Cyber Conflict is less painful than conflict, which is inevitable as long as mankind exists. Also the Western hemisphere needs a moon shot (cyber conflict could be the Sputnik like moment) and with declining and aging populations but better technology, Western Hemisphere govts need cyber conflict as they are running out of humans to fight their wars. Eastern govt. are even more obnoxious in using children for conflict propaganda, and corruption.

Last week CIA.gov website went down

This week Iranian govt is allegedly blocking https traffic on eve of Annual Revolution Day (what a coincidence!)

Some resources to help Internet users in Iran (or maybe this could be a dummy test for the big one – hacking the great firewall of China)

News from Hacker News-

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3575029

I’m writing this to report the serious troubles we have regarding accessing Internet in Iran at the moment. Since Thursday Iranian government has shutted down the https protocol which has caused almost all google services (gmail, and google.com itself) to become inaccessible. Almost all websites that reply on Google APIs (like wolfram alpha) won’t work. Accessing to any website that replies on https (just imaging how many websites use this protocol, from Arch Wiki to bank websites). Also accessing many proxies is also impossible. There are almost no official reports on this and with many websites and my email accounts restricted I can just confirm this based on my own and friends experience. I have just found one report here:

Iran Shut Down Gmail , Google , Yahoo and sites using “Https” Protocol

The reason for this horrible shutdown is that the Iranian regime celebrates 1979 Islamic revolution tomorrow.

I just wanted to let you guys know about this. If you have any solution regarding bypassing this restriction please help!

The boys at Tor think they can help-

~~but its not so elegant, as I prefer creating a batch file rather than explain coding to newbies.~~

this is still getting to better and easier interfaces

https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy-instructions.html.en

Obfsproxy Instructions

client torrc

Step 1: Install dependencies, obfsproxy, and Tor

You will need a C compiler (gcc), the autoconf and autotools build system, the git revision control system, pkg-config andlibtool, libevent-2 and its headers, and the development headers of OpenSSL.

On Debian testing or Ubuntu oneiric, you could do:
# apt-get install autoconf autotools-dev gcc git pkg-config libtool libevent-2.0-5 libevent-dev libevent-openssl-2.0-5 libssl-dev

If you’re on a more stable Linux, you can either try our experimental backport libevent2 debs or build libevent2 from source.

Clone obfsproxy from its git repository:
$ git clone https://git.torproject.org/obfsproxy.git
The above command should create and populate a directory named ‘obfsproxy’ in your current directory.

Compile obfsproxy:
$ cd obfsproxy
$ ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make

Optionally, as root install obfsproxy in your system:
# make install

If you prefer not to install obfsproxy as root, you can instead just modify the Transport lines in your torrc file (explained below) to point to your obfsproxy binary.

You will need Tor 0.2.3.11-alpha or later.

Step 2a: If you’re the client…

First, you need to learn the address of a bridge that supports obfsproxy. If you don’t know any, try asking a friend to set one up for you. Then the appropriate lines to your tor configuration file:

UseBridges 1
Bridge obfs2 128.31.0.34:1051
ClientTransportPlugin obfs2 exec /usr/local/bin/obfsproxy --managed

Don’t forget to replace 128.31.0.34:1051 with the IP address and port that the bridge’s obfsproxy is listening on.
Congratulations! Your traffic should now be obfuscated by obfsproxy. You are done! You can now start using Tor.

For old fashioned tunnel creation under Seas of English Channel-

http://dag.wieers.com/howto/ssh-http-tunneling/

Tunneling SSH over HTTP(S)

This document explains how to set up an Apache server and SSH client to allow tunneling SSH over HTTP(S). This can be useful on restricted networks that either firewall everything except HTTP traffic (tcp/80,tcp/443) or require users to use a local (HTTP) proxy.

A lot of people asked why doing it like this if you can just make sshd listen on port 443. Well, that might work if your environment is not hardened like I have seen at several companies, but this setup has a few advantages.

You can proxy to anywhere (see the Proxy directive in Apache) based on names
You can proxy to any port you like (see the AllowCONNECT directive in Apache)
It works even when there is a layer-7 protocol firewall
If you enable proxytunnel ssl support, it is indistinguishable from real SSL traffic
You can come up with nice hostnames like ‘downloads.yourdomain.com’ and ‘pictures.yourdomain.com’ and for normal users these will look like normal websites when visited.
There are many possibilities for doing authentication further along the path
You can do proxy-bouncing to the n-th degree to mask where you’re coming from or going to (however this requires more changes to proxytunnel, currently I only added support for one remote proxy)
You do not have to dedicate an IP-address for sshd, you can still run an HTTPS site

and some crypto for young people

http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/onetimepad.htm

Me- What am I doing about it? I am just writing poems on hacking at http://poemsforkush.com

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nations don’t have friends or enemies…nations only have interests

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Sir Winston Churchill

Against Stupidity- The Gods Themselves -Contend in Vain

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Obfsproxy Instructions

Step 1: Install dependencies, obfsproxy, and Tor

Step 2a: If you’re the client…

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