'Outsiders' got IPL's Kochi franchise

   Rendezvous Sports World Ltd (RSWL), the consortium of businessmen which won the Kochi franchise for the 2011 edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament, has yet to decide whether its base would be Kerala or elsewhere.

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According to Vivek Venugopal, co-owner of the team, all these details including the name, logo, etc had to be finalised within a couple of weeks. The five stakeholders were constantly in touch and would finalise the details shortly, he told Business Standard.
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Whether to call the team the Kerala Tuskers or something else was also to be decided and suggestions are welcome, he said.
Although it is the Kochi franchise, only one business group from Kerala was involved in this successful bid, the second largest one for an IPL team, and only indirectly. Venugopal is one of the directors of the Thrissur-based Elite group of companies. The group is into international trade, food processing, distribution, real estate and construction; it makes ready to eat food items under the brand name, Elite. It runs around 20 companies - Yamuna Roller Flour Mills, Elite Foods, Elite Breads, Elite Agro Specialities, Elite Natural and Elite Homes.
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Venugopal is directly involved, however, in a Bangalore-based company called Trading and Infrastructure. The group has presence mainly in the southern states and in Gujarat. He is the son-in-law of A V Anoop, managing director of the Chennai-based Cholayil Pharmaceuticals, active in ayurveda-based consumer products such as Medimix soap. The group is also running the Cholayil Sanjeevanam for ayurvedic treatment and naturopathy restaurants in various parts of the country. The Cholayil group is also actively involved in the film industry, producing a number of Malayalam movies.
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Apart from himself, he said the consortium partners were Pavinee Developers, Anchor Earth, Film Waves and Anand Shah Developers. None are based in Kerala.
He added the team would have at least six players from Kerala. The main hurdle before the Kochi franchise is lack of an exclusive cricket stadium. The Kerala Cricket Association has acquired 23 acres at Edakochi near here for an international cricket stadium, but construction is yet to begin.
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KCA is, however, confident of finishing the work by 2012. Another option before IPL is the Jawaharlal Nehru International stadium at Kaloor. Greater Cochin Development Authority, owner of the stadium, is ready to lend it for this use, for home matches. However, it is not exclusively a cricket stadium.

 Anyawayz, i'm suggesting a new name for cochin team..
best name that suits Cochin IPL team is  "COCHIN MOSQUITOES"

jay COCHIN MOSQUITOES...

Are GSM phone calls secure? answer....: not at all....

Are GSM phone calls secure?

Its 2010 and its time to double check the security of GSM phone calls. GSM (Global System for Mobile communications: originally Groupe Spécial Mobile) is the most widely used standard for mobile communication . The GSM encryption algorithm which was designed 20 years back is of no match to today's computing power or technological advances. GSM's A5/1 function uses a 64 bit encryption key to secure the phone calls which is too insecure considering the cpu power and storage of todays machines.

The algorithm must have seemed a lot more secure twenty years back when cpu cycles were expensive. Nobody cared to replace the A5/1 function when researchers first discusssed practical attacks on GSM.

German security expert Karsten Nohl demonstrated how easy it really is to hack into GSM cell phones,(Read news here) including those used by AT&T and T-Mobile customers in the U.S. He had launched an open-source, distributed computing project designed to crack GSM encryption and have successfully compiled it into a code book that can be used to eavesdrop on gsm phone calls. It is open source and is open to public. This can also mean that your neighbor might be already listening to your calls.

Anyone including you can listen to someone else's phone call. According to the German security expert "All you need is Two USRP radios, a beefy gaming computer, and a handful of USB sticks can already decrypt many calls". Here it goes. You record a call and then decrypt it. Recording requires some radio equipment, which can cost you $1,500[will get cheaper now] . The device is called a Universal Software Radio Peripheral device. One direction of a call can potentially be intercepted from a kilometer away while catching both directions requires you to be in the vicinity of the victim. Decryption is then done using the code book the community produced. The more you spend on the hardware, the faster you can decrypt the call. Commercial interceptors can decrypt within seconds [means less than the time taken by someone to answer an incoming call].

This post is just to make people aware about the insecurities of using a GSM network and is not intended to encourage hacking into it. if more people are aware about this they can force the operators to do something to enhance their security levels. The next generation function : The A5/3 which is used in 3G networks are still considered more secure as they have not been cracked yet.