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How to alias bash scripts and execute from terminal?

You wrote a bash script and now you have to run it, but you don't know how.  Well this is an easy task. We can do this with just few terminal commands.

• First you need to make the file as an executable. Use chmod to do so. chmod changes the file mode bits of each fiven file according to the mode , which can be either symbolic or numbr.
  In your terminal type:  chmod +x filename.sh
• Now add an alias in the .bashrc file
  gedit .bashrc
   at the last line of file type this:
  alias filename ='filename.sh'
• Save and close the file 
• Type source ~/.bashrc  to apply the changes you made to this file
• Now open terminal and just type the alias you provided to your application. Now you need not create the directory path and execute again and again to run a specific file. Just use the alias.

Open Street Mapping with MAPS.ME

"Like wallet, your smart phone is also nowadays part of your journey." 

I travel a lot within my country during holidays.  It was my last trek to Namche Bazar where my Friend Ramesh Tiwari suggested me to try MAPS.ME. After that day, I've only one map application installed on my phone i.e. MAPS.ME. This map is so precise that when we were on our trek it would navigate us and show every house and routes.

My friend had downloaded the map of Nepal offline, so we were able to browse the map ofline. This application is so awesome also because it is an open source project. Unlike Google and Bing it doesn't claim it's proprietary ownership to the maps which we contribute. Following reasons made me to contribute to OSM:

• It's OpenSource. So the main advantage will be that all those researchers and developers who need information about my place can get all the information and data for free from this map or the Open Street Mapwebsite
• Nepal is a country with huge scope in tourism. Many tourists come to visit our country, so it's our duty to at least provide information about places like, treking routes, hospitals, busstands, homestays and restaurants, parks forests mountains etc.  This open initiative can also imprint a good impression of a country whole over the world.
• Being offline, also you can get directions, bookmark your places and also the 3D view feature is interesting.  

I wanted to show this contribution panel of MAPS.ME. After last trek to Namche in March, I have added 188 new places to the open street maps. Not only that I sometimes keep the GPS traces of my route which I upload to the website so that other can see it.  At the end of the year 2016 MAPS.ME was successful to map more than a million of object which was all contributed by volunteers like us. Picture below shows the number of schools, bus stop and more categories that we were able to map.Open Street Mapping is interesting, so I would like to invite every travelers to install the app and take benefit of it as well as contribute whenever they explore new places or new tracks during their journey.

To know more about MAPS.ME watch this video below:

How to Browse Internet in Laptop using Smart Phone?

I came up with this idea about using mobile phone's data to explore internet on my laptop. So I explored settings of my laptop and mobile phone and came up with two suitable solutions. Many people are already taking advantage of this feature provided in most of the Android phone(also on Iphone and Windows Phone). But in case you haven't given it a try, let me show you these three ways:

Tathering

Tathering means using a smartphone in order to connect your laptop or any other device to browse internet. Tathering your smartphone lets all the connected devices to browse internet according to the bandwidth provided by your Mobile Network Providers. There are two ways you can tather they are 

• USB Tathering
  
  In order to do USB Tathering it is necessary to connect your device to Smartphone with a USB cable. On your Mobile Phone's Setting 
  GOTO: Connections > More Networks > Tathering and Portable Hotspots > Select USB Tathering
  Note: Prior to these settings enable your mobile data to enable internet access.
  Enable wifin in your Laptop and suddenly after you enable USB Tathering, your device is connected to a network which is actually you mobile network. Now you can browse you internet.
• Bluetooth Tathering
  Bluetooth tathering is also similar to the USB Tathering, Instead of selecting USB Tathering select Bluetooth tathering and you will have to enable your laptop's bluetooth to use the tathering

Portable Hotspot

Portable HotspotIn order to enable portable hotspoot in the same menu  Tathering and Portable Hotspots, Enable the Portable Wi-Fi hotspot option. Normally when you configure your hotspot a wifi appears with its SSID ADYY..... Portable hotspot is better than rest of the alternatives because you can provide a security measure to the hotspot with WPA2PSK Security Protocol. You can connect upto 10 devices with a single hotspot.

Why Should Artificial Intelligence Enthusiasts Watch Westworld?

It's all over the internet among the list of Trending. It's trending on Quora, Reddit, Medium and also on 4chan. It has got 9.2/10  IMDB rating. Any social networking site, or Q&A Channel, it's every where. So what is so special about it that it's rated 9.2 in its first season?

Westworld : A series inspired by the 1973 film of the same title written by Michael Crichton about a futuristic theme park populated by artificial beings.-(IMDB). Well the movie is very fascinating and you will appreciate the way Crichton presents his artificial park.

The series indeed itself is a miraculous presentation to the viewers because the series is long with different stories within. Every characters are simple and are giving their best performance. As a viewer I got this awesome experience of feeling the dream of artificial 

intelligence come true. 

One evening while I was switching TV I saw this part of the series on HBO " The keyboard was playing on its own, the music of keyboard was unique, I've never heard such music before. And within a minute of two a girl(Delores) who was somewhere around this cowboy street(The Westworld) , suddenly finds herself inside a room of transparent glass walls everywhere. This guy named Bernard says "Analysis" and at a certain she becomes statue and starts telling truth" I was feeling like " What the hell was that. What did I just watched? So freaking awesome. What is it? A Magician's show or some kind of super natural power ?" I waited till the first break or the name of the series was written on top right of the screen. I Noted down its name on my phone and turned on my laptop. I Searched the movie on torrentz and find out it was the second episode of Season One. With a big sigh I downloaded both of them and started watching it.
It was totally worth it. It also freaked me out because I discuss so many times with so many people about Artificial General Intelligence.  Before moving further I will point out: 

Why Artificial Intelligence Enthusiasts should watch Westworld?

• Artificial Machines passes Turing Test during the first year of its development
  Well to know this particular point from it's creator "FORD" you need to watch 7 episodes. But logically saying, the proposal of Turing Machine " Being unable to distinguish between a man and a machine" I had no idea that all the characters Delores, the whole people inside the bar, those cowboys, horse etc. were all artificial machines, which are controlled by some bunch of people. Every machines also called as agents are self aware, response immediately towards any change or inquiry, speak fluently with feelings, humorous, cry, fall in love care for their loved ones etc. I saw nothing different before I knew they were controlled by humans.
   
• Everything you Dreamed about AI & AGI it is here.
  The technological advancement through the implication of Artificial Intelligence which we dream about are all here working on its optimum level. Machine Learning, Optical Character recognition, Sentiment Analysis, Machine Vision, Robotics, Augmented Reality, etc. You name a technology if it was used here and you see it's being used in some episode.
  A Human looking robot talks to another human looking robot on a day to day basis and both of them talk, interact so efficiently and fluently that an actual human in that environment also cannot distinguish them as machine or human.
  
• Westworld can inspire AI Geeks for new sets of tests and hypothesis
  What we do today to practice Tests in Artificial Intelligence projects is fetch data to the machine and retrain them for numerous hours, then finally we get high efficiency. But here the robots are interacted with real environment. Neither the machines are aware that they are machines not the humans know their exists machines among them. They are doing their day to day stuffs and what the observer/ or their developers are doing is analyzing their emotions, researching why are they acting differently. Many weird things are achieved in this series which are still in the concept papers of AI Researchers.
  
• It's entertaining to watch how agents are drifted towards the anomaly and repeatedly get nowhere nearer towards the maze
  Turing test for this series if unveiling the maze. A maze s developed by Arnold and Ford, if the agents will be able to locate the maze and the secret behind it then Agents will be set free. The mystery box "Maze" is yet to be unveiled but this one test is never passed by any of the agent. So the journey to be nearer to the maze seems challenging and every character use their intelligence to reach nearer to the maze.
  
  Delores, Bernard, Arnold, Hector, The Maze, Ford, First Generation Agents, Maeve, etc. These are some among few characters whose stories are mysterious and worth it to watch the whole season. 

We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.

My understanding about Anonymous was a term quoted for group of  dirty hackers punks who do Black Hat Hacking, steal digital property of an individual, group and organizations and using it for vulnerable causes and make people suffer
. I thought it was always nasty job that they doing and the people. 

Then I watched this video "Anonymous Message to Donald Trupm" and found the message very bold, truthful, supportive on behalf of citizens. It was A  direct message to the President Elect of The United States. The message was like this in their description:

So what are you going to really do for the American people DONALD TRUMP? Because right now, you should see yourself as the apprentice and learn from the mistakes of those before you. Will you protect the American people, protect their food, protect their security, their health, education, their human rights, their privacy, or are you just going to be like many others who could have made a great name for themselves. Remember, your actions will show the people who you truly are deep down, and Anonymous will be only to eager to keep on the watch and expose anything we feel the people should be aware of.

But after watching this video, somehow I thought " Oh no! I was wrong, this group is warning the POTUS to take responsibility of citizen and help them with food, shelter and job". 

Then I started checking all the videos uploaded by Anonymous Official.There were many videos which strictly warned the politicians, businessmen and hypocrites not to seize our freedom of speaking, freedom of press and all human rights. Anonymous not only have supported or say have spoken on behalf of some internet anonymous cyber monks but for the whole world.

Wow this was fascinating. They called Anonymous was not a organized group but Anonymous is a culture. And their tagline is so bold that anybody on a first glimpse will support, like an dare also afraid of: 

We are Anonymous,

We are Legion,

We do not forgive,

We do not forget,

Expect us.

Definitely now I already like this Culture of Speakers of Freedom. I spent a very long time reading internet articles on who they are, how they are Anonymous etc on Wikipedia,  Reddit, answers on Quora etc and find out that Anonymous is a very very interesting path, culture, voice or an attitude (whatever you wanna use) that every citizens should adapt. So wanted to know what it was and if I also could be a part of it. This is what I find out:

Anonymous [1]

It's is a loosely associated international network of activist and hacktivist entities with a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on the ideas rather than the directives.Anonymous are everywhere over the world. They are students, clerks, business man or unemployed, neighbors, your hair dressers, and your network administrators. Anonymous are smart people with smart clothes. Anons have no gender, no religion, nth to discriminate, or anything to preach. Anonymous like to wear  Guy Fawkes mask [2] during demonstrations. This saves their true identity and are safe for being tracked by  the government. With a smart suit and a mask when hundreds of activists and hacktivists join the protests this looks awesome.  Anonymous was originates(not established) in 2003 on a text and image sharing board 4chan. They act anonymously in a coordinated manner with small self-agreed goal mostly focusing on entertainment.

Joining Anonymous ^[3]

It is not an organization or a committee you can be a member of, but a culture which you can follow or adapt being openhearted. This is what the Official video of  Anonymous  tells us about. Check the footnotes to know about being Anonymous.

The achievement and hurdles faced by Anonymous are many and the works done by these groups are way beyond a common man's understanding. But they have always been speaking for the cause of Freedom, on which every global citizen should support. Being a hacktivist is very tough move to make. We may not have enough knowledge about hacking but we can atleast follow ways to be secure so that nobody can steal our rights, data and privacy from us.

We are Anonymous, We are Legion, We do not forgive, We do not forget,

Expect us!

References:

[1] Anonymous Group

[2] Guy Fawkes Mask
[3] How To Join Anonymous

How to Join Anonymous?

You cannot join Anonymous [1]

Anonymous is not an organization, club or a movement, there are no manifest of charters or membership fees.  For a short period of time Anons have common goal, purpose or dislike. So they simply communicate through their alias names in any secure medium possible(whether it be IRC, encrypted mails, etc.). If they find threat or vulnerability they disappear like ghost and find another medium for communicating. They never stick together as a family, but whenever any laws tries to move their claws in their freedom, Anons are united and take the hell out of the sinner.

Neither you can join nor you can quit. Nobody can say you are in or you are out. 

If you wanna know how to contact other anonymous yet again that is also not possible. Because Anonymous does not have a centralized database for Communication.

How to be save your Digital Identity? 

But you need to follow some smart and safe measures to be Anonymous. You need to protect your identity in the internet, otherwise you are always being watched by the known as well as unknowns.

Following are few ways to  use during a anonymous browsing:

• Choose an Alias
  Choose an alias which is unique and which is not related to you at all. Make sure that it is noway traceable backwards  to your identity. Don't keep this alias related with your important events or your best persons name or any dates important to you in your life time. Make it different.
• Join an email account with your alias.
  With this alias name you thought of, create an email from any email provider. You can find free email providers which won't give your encrypted message sending facilities. Or there are also some of the free email providers which provide you secure email services.
• Join Social Networking site with a Guy Fawkes Mask
  This is one way that separates you in the social networking sites as anonymous. As all of us communicate in social networking site as anonymous with our alias, you are welcome too.
• Use Secure Browsers
  Incognito mode which you use in any browser  and think safe is also not private as your ISPs can trace your HTTP request and henceforth your IP. So we highly recommend you to use Browsers that provide Anonymity Online. Tor Browser  is one of such promising  browser which is open source project and can be configured as per your knowledge . 
• User Secure Search Engines
  Search engines like Google, Bing stores information about your hardware and your IP in cookies which is a vulnerable approach of searching. Also these browsers set a search tag cloud for you based upon which they run their ad providing business. Also they know many information about us, what we search what place we choose for holidays, what foods we like, etc. Therefore we highly recommend you to use duckduckgo. This browser doesn't sae any information about you and your searches. 

Few things to be sure about:

Do not forget to clear your history, cookies while you set up these for the first time and every other time you begin to browse anonymously or end from a anonymous conversation. There are also more tools like Telegram, IRCs, Gitter, protonmail etc. which can promise your identity and privacy sage.

References:

[1] Anonymous-You Cannot Join Anonymous

What is AI Winter?

Research in "Artificial Intelligence" a unique and curious field of Computer Science has begun to existence even before John McCarthy proposed term "Artificial Intelligence"  at DartMouth Conference in year 1956. But the one month long Conference united a scattered group of individual researchers who were playing with their individual ideas inside their private labs.

This was the Founding Statement Quoted by McCarthy

"We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer."

This conference was actually fruitful for a various society of AI enthusiasts. If we drill down back to the origin of  achievement in AI , we will find someone quoted similar idea back then. in 60's. 

So how did the term AI Winter  appeared?

Back in 80's  Researchers faced a series of  surreal situation in their research. Funding were not available anymore and neither any of the investors of  Think Tank were interested in Artificial Intelligence Research. Researchers of this field faced  several criticism and disappointments.  AI Winter was named with resemblance of Nuclear Winter  .

Lacking the efficient tools to coin their Theory into a practical application and prove it, they needed to face mean critic and disappointments. As a outcome many of the researchers step back to their private labs and kept working on it on their own investments as much as they can. 

I've listed some Researchers who faced a hard time during the AI Winter here. They have great contributions in Artificial Neural Networks and are also knows as the backbone behind the Google's Deep Dream

Canadian Mafias Who made AI Dream alive with their contribution in Artificial Neural Network

An Artile was published on July 2015 at RECODE [1] which introcuded some of the AI Pioneers of Silicon Valley. The article called them as the “Canadian Mafias “ of Silicon Valley, which was fascinating. 

Based on the story I am highlighting the players in Today’s AI a.k.a CANADIAN MAFIA'S. They may be already listed in some answers but this answer happens to be a profile sharing in curiosity.

1. Tomi Poutanen [2] 
   CoFounder and CTO of Milq.Inc, Tomi Graduated did his Dissertation on Neural Network from University of Toronto.
2. Geoffrey Hinton [3]Insctuctor of Tomi Poutanen and also known as the Godfather of neural network is one of the first researchers who demonstrated the use of generalized backpropagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural nets. He is an important figure in the deep learning community.
3. Yann LeCun [4] and Yoshua Bengio [5] and Hinton were three visionary Researchers who continiued their research on Netral Netowrks in their own labs even in the demoralizing AI WINTER was going on.
4. Rob Fergus [6] Associate Professor at NYU former LeCun colleague is working as Research Scientis at Facebook AI Research.
5. Juergen Schmidhuber [7], a Swiss AI researcher also know as vocal critic of the Canadian Mafias has generated many Researchers in the field of AI.

The effects and advancement in the field of AI will soon be realized all over the world

Footnotes

[1] Welcome to the AI Conspiracy: The 'Canadian Mafia' Behind Tech's Latest Craze

[2] Tomi Poutanen | LinkedIn

[3] Geoffrey Hinton

[4] Yann LeCun's Home Page

[5] Yoshua Bengio

[6] PmWiki - HomePage

[7] Juergen Schmidhuber's home page

TOP 5 BIGGEST CHALLENGES ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

 As of 2016, what are the top 5 biggest challenges on the cutting-edge of AI?

Sanjog Sigdel, Somewhere between Skepticism and Optimism

I don’t have enough experience in Artificial Intelligence to provide you sufficient and promising answer buy as per my understanding:

• An Artificially Intelligent Machine has achieved some level of accuracy in Image Processing, machine learning is already 97% accurate in comparison to Human, sound recognizition is also on its hipe, Deep Learning has increased the performance of many tech giants, Internet of Things today is all about being of service with some intelligence.
  
  But:
  Artificially Intelligent Machine can watch a music video process each image frame and at the same time can recognize the voice and the stanzas. But it fails to perceive the sensation of the music and also lacks the knowledge about what message is the song trying to give.
  
  Computer Science still needs much work in combining the existing achievement and make them a composite intelligence first before moving further.
• Defining AI: May be there is still not a concrete vision about AI and what sort of Intelligence are we expecting from a machine. Everyone seems to be applying intelligence in their machine. But I would love to call most of such machine are just solving problems by fetching the solutions(patters) stored in their memory by their programmer).
• We also fail to feed the knowledge about cognitive science in a machine.
• Human Brain is a mystery box to lean into and dig deep for understanding how it performs the computation in fraction of second. And having understood in detail about human brain scientists replicate neural networks. It works very efficiently than anything better, but still solving the mystery of human brain could lead the breakthrough in AI
• The architectural design of the microprocessor limits the computation speed when it comes to the billions of information processing to answer a basic query.
  (Read this point here somewhere in Quora)

Will advances in Artificial Intelligence lead to technological unemployment?

Some weekends are well spent exploring new ideas and news about something you love. This weekend I again read some of my bookmarked answers on +Quora all of them were about Artificial Intelligence, Artificial general intelligence , Cognitive thinking, human psychology etc. Link provided below is my answer on quora about "If Artificially Intelligent technologies will lead to technological Unemployment". Also there are some more interesting answers by rest of the enthusiasts. Do provide your feedback.

Read Sanjog Sigdel's answer to "Will advances in Artificial Intelligence lead to technological unemployment?" on Quora

PS:

1. Sharing the link about my own answer might seem unlikely. But I wanna mention that this sharing is done just in Curiosity to add new node to my Network of like minded people who like to share their comments about Artificial Intelligence. 
2. If sharing the links violates any legal terms of Quora, I will immediately delete this article.

How to Clone Ethernet Card MAC Address in Windows 10 OS

Vlog is all about sharing and creating video blogs of my own or from other contributors. 

Sharing tips and tricks about technologies has always been my passion. As I keep my interest in sharing tips and ideas about Open Source Philosophies, My Friend Rabindra Lamsal  keeps interest in both Open Source Technologies as well as Proprietary. He has been a Microsoft Student Partner last year. Therefore having enough experience about Products from Microsoft and as a Network Enthusiast Rabindra has prepared a video blog about  How to Clone Ethernet Card MAC Address in Windows 10 OS.
Description about the video is mentioned below:"In Windows, you don't need to install any sorts of third party applications or software to clone our Ethernet Card MAC address. Within few steps, using inbuilt options, you can change (it's better to say clone) the MAC address.Hope this will be of some help to all Networking Enthusiast."

PS: Rabindra also said"Sharing ideas about high tech tools and technologies doesn't necessarily mean that we are contributing to the online community. Not every one is intelligent and knows about the world about. Sometimes you need to roll back and think how happy you were when for the first time you created your yahoo id, or downloaded a movie via netscape, etc. Those are true learning as well. So whatever may be the complexity level of any technology, my contribution will be to share it in an easy way over internet.

Set Default and Startup Applications in Ubuntu

This blog will cover two basic things which can be done in Ubuntu. We don't even need to use terminal, this can be done with user interface only:

• How to change the default applications of your system ?
• How to add any application in startup ?

Change Default Applications

In order to change the default application, we can set change the default applications for Web Browser, Mail Calendar, Music player, Video Player and Photo Viewer. Applications to open these six types of applications can be set from the settings. To change the settings: 

• Goto System Settings
• Details
• Default Appliation
  Here, on your right you can set the default applications and manipulate them as you want to.

Startup Appliations Preferences

Suppose you want your terminal application to open on startup(as your system
is on). Or you may want to enable you server right from the beginning ,or you may want to open the web browser. All those applications which run from the beginning are startup applications.You can set your desired application as a startup application. To do show:

• On your dash screen type startup
  
• Click Startup Applications
  This will lead you to the Startup Applications Preferences
  
• Click Add
  Here we will add the application we want to run as startup
  
• In Add Startup Program
  
• Enter a name: say Guake Terminal
  Guake Terminal is also a terminal but customised. First you need to install this application. To install type sudo apt-get install guake in terminal.
  
• Command Section
  In this section you will need to set the path of your application which you want to run. So you must know where the application is located. Either you can browse it(Generally most of the executables are stored in /usr/bin) or in terminal you can find the location of your application with which command. In terminal type which guake you will get the ouptut: /usr/bin/guake which is the path for executing your application. paste it in the command section.
  
• Keep any description if you want and press enter
  
• Next time you start your system your startup application is all set.

Best Mirror Server Selection for Ubuntu

In Ubuntu every packages are installed on-line only. Installing packages off-line needs more exercise but installing packages off-line is also possible. As the community of Ubuntu is strong, there are its mirror servers in 83 countries. And all together there are hundreds of mirror servers from where we can download packages anytime.
In this blog, two general tips will be illustrated:

1. How to change the server from main server to country  image server.
2. How to select the best server for your region.

Generally the best mirror server for us will be the server available in our own country. In my country, Nepal its hosted by Nepal Telecommunications. So right after the installation I'll have to change the server from to Nepal. To do so:

1. In System Settings
2.  Software and Updates
3.  Ubuntu Software : Download From
   Initially the download server is set to the main server. Here we will need to select our country server. To do so:
   
   Select Download from Other Now you can see all the 83 country servers(Mirror Servers). Select one server from your country. This will change the server and from now onwards your download speed will be fast.

Sometimes your country servers can have problems in downloading packages.  You will be facing unable to fetch some archives... error as shown below:

root@techjhola:/home/techjhola# apt-get install guake
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libglade2-0 libvte-common libvte9 python-glade2 python-vte
Suggested packages:
python-gtk2-doc
The following NEW packages will be installed:
guake libglade2-0 libvte-common libvte9 python-glade2 python-vte
0 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 0 to remove and 137 not upgraded.
Need to get 472 kB/643 kB of archives.
After this operation, 3,118 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Err http://np.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main libglade2-0 amd64 1:2.6.4-2
  403  Forbidden
Err http://np.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main libvte-common all 1:0.28.2-5ubuntu1
  403  Forbidden
Err http://np.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main libvte9 amd64 1:0.28.2-5ubuntu1
  403  Forbidden
Err http://np.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main python-vte amd64 1:0.28.2-5ubuntu1
  403  Forbidden
Err http://np.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main python-glade2 amd64 2.24.0-3ubuntu3
  403  Forbidden
E: Failed to fetch http://np.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/libg/libglade2/libglade2-0_2.6.4-2_amd64.deb  403  Forbidden

E: Failed to fetch http://np.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/v/vte/libvte-common_0.28.2-5ubuntu1_all.deb  403  Forbidden

E: Failed to fetch http://np.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/v/vte/libvte9_0.28.2-5ubuntu1_amd64.deb  403  Forbidden

E: Failed to fetch http://np.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/v/vte/python-vte_0.28.2-5ubuntu1_amd64.deb  403  Forbidden

E: Failed to fetch http://np.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/p/pygtk/python-glade2_2.24.0-3ubuntu3_amd64.deb  403  Forbidden

E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?  

In such case you need to either try the last option displayed in the error panel:
E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?

If this doesn't work as well, you will need to select the best server for you. To do so, after you see the list of mirror server with country names . On its right top corner you can see:

• Select Best Server This will run a short diagnostics and within a short time will find the best mirror server for you.
• Select that server and keep downloading from that server.

You country server will again come to operation in a few days. In my case I had same error displayed above. I changed the server from country server to Best Server assigned by my system. And again after two days the downloading was okey. 

Linux Mint Website Hacked. ISO Compromised

LINUX MINT WAS HACKED

Well you can trust no one, as everything is vulnerable although it seems safe from the outside. One of the best Linux Based Distribution Linux Mint was hacked, as mentioned by the Linux Mint Blog.

How was it hacked?

Blog mentions that hackers built a customized ISO of Linux Mint which had a bug within it and managed to hack Linux Mint Official Website through the backdoor they prepared.

What was affected?

The Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon was affected so far. Server of Linux Mint is recently down, for monitoring. SO all other ISO are still safe.

Does that harm you?

If you have downloaded any ISO except Cinnamon version, then you are not affected. You are not affected even you have downloaded them from torrents or from HTTP link.

Who did the atack ?

Those ISOs which got hacked were hosted on  5.104.175.212 and the hosted ISO leads to this website absentvodka,com through the backdoor. This connectd from country Bulgaria.Name of three people were available in the webiste. The motivation behind the hack is still unknown.

How to be safe?

To check if you are harmed check the valid MD5 signatures  of unaffected Cinnamon version below:

6e7f7e03500747c6c3bfece2c9c8394f linuxmint-17.3-cinnamon-32bit.iso
e71a2aad8b58605e906dbea444dc4983 linuxmint-17.3-cinnamon-64bit.iso
30fef1aa1134c5f3778c77c4417f7238 linuxmint-17.3-cinnamon-nocodecs-32bit.iso
3406350a87c201cdca0927b1bc7c2ccd linuxmint-17.3-cinnamon-nocodecs-64bit.iso
df38af96e99726bb0a1ef3e5cd47563d linuxmint-17.3-cinnamon-oem-64bit.iso

If your signature is different, Delete the ISO and use another one. This makes you safe.

The information of this attack was received from Official Blog Linux Mint. For further information and inquiry follow the RSS link available in the Linux Mint Blog