OTPs: Need of the hour

Most of the times I feel uncomfortable to login to any of my mail boxes, reason being possible key loggers. Now key loggers are mandatory in Mumbai cyber cafes .

I always feel that, users should be given the power of creating One time Passwords (OTPs), which expires on login. This feature at least ensures that, credentials doesn't fall into wrong hands.

Though researchers are working on advanced techniques, I prefer to have OTP feature on all my mailboxes at the moment.

Appolo, its cool

Is it what I was looking for? seems to be flexible and powerful paradigm (bridges the gap between desktop and the web).

Demo Video

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Interview with A. Stepanovs (STL)

How do Unix file permissions work?

Don't use atoi( )

If atoi() is used for converting any command line based input, there is a good chance that your program interprets the data incorrectly. atoi(), doesn't detect errors. The following example show what does it means

#add2total -name shyam -score xyz --> eg.1
#add2total -name shyam -score 1xyz --> eg.2
#add2total -name shyam -score 1x2yz -->eg.3

"add2total" takes two arguments; name of the player and runs (or score) of the player. Score is always expected to be >= 0.

atoi() returns 0, if the first character is not an integer value. Else, it reads the valid integer characters till a non valid character is found or till the end of the input. In case of eg.1, atoi() returns 0 for the score "xyz". In case of ex.2 and 3, it reurns a value 1.

Whats the problem?

When a value 0 is received from atoi(), our program cann't determine whether the input was indeed a "0" or an invalid input. Use the following method to overcome this problem.

static bool isValidNum( const char *numStr )
{
    if( numStr == NULL )
    {
        return false;
    }

    unsigned int len = strlen( numStr );

    if( len == 0 )
    {
        return false;
    }

    for( unsigned int i = 0; i < len; i++ )
    {
        if( (numStr[i] < '0') || (numStr[i] > '9') )
        {
            return false;
        }
    }

    return true;
}