OurPicks have an interesting piece of code snippet on their forums. A simple JavaScript code that lets you edit any webpage, static or dynamic on the fly
Let us try this:
Step # 1: Go to any website. Let us go to Slashdot.org
Step # 2: Delete everything in the address bar
Step # 3: Paste the following JavaScript code in the address bar
javascript:document.body.contentEditable=’true’; document.designMode=’on’; void 0
Step # 4: Enjoy
So, I followed up with our London based Nigerian spammer by emailing him that I am indeed interested in proceeding with this “financial transaction”. I pretend to be a Mr. Brandon Hurley based in the UK. So, here is my first email to Mr. Peter Fischer, our friendly neighbourhood spammer
So, within 7 hours, I get an email from Mr.Fischer thanking me for my interest. This is starting to get interesting.
Read the rest of this entry »
DeviantArt has created an awesome concept layout of MySpace incorporating a web 2.0 theme.
Check out the Current Design of MySpace vs
Concept layout of MySpace put forth by DeviantArt
Read the rest of this entry »
The supposedly indestructuctible slot machines, turns out are prone to failure like any other machine. The inquirer reports this Blue Screen of Death on a slot machine at the International Casino Exhibition in Earl’s court, London.
The machine was built by Italian Motherboard maker Zest, demonstrating its latest “high-reliability” computer designs. The machine was built on a 800MHz Celeron M processor and the 852/855 chipset with complicated RAS functionality built in. However the 22 large elctrolytic capacitors on the power circuit might be throwing off the viability of its design.
Mark Sunner, Chief Security Analyst at MessageLabs was among the many security analysts watching one Trojan called “Spam Thru”, a piece of malware designed to send spam from an infected computer, at the turn of last year. Spam Thru represented an expontential jump in the level of sophistication and complexity of these botnets, harnessing a 70,000 strong peer to peer botnet seeded with the Spam Thru Trojan. Spam Thru is also known by the Aliases Backdoor.Win32.Agent.uu, Spam-DComServ and Troj_Agent.Bor.
Spam Thru was unique because it had its own antivirus engine designed to remove any other malicious programs residing in the same infected host machine so that it can get unlimited access to the machine’s processing power as well as bandwidth. It also had the potential to be 10 times more productive than most other botnets while evading detection because of in-built defences.
The thing that worries Mark Sunner the most is that he suspects the major traffic spike towards the end of 2006 was merely a test run for more if not similarly sophisticated botnets to follow. Sunner adds
” With new levels of sophistication this has reached a real milestone. Botnets are getting smaller, more stealthy and more discreet and yet the volumes of spam are going up. Without a hint of scaremongering, will this get a lot worse throughout 2007 in terms of botnet sending? Absolutely, yes.”
The British IT-Sicherheitsfirma Message Lab registered a dramatic increase in Spam Mail traffic from 64.4% to 72.9% late last year, all attributed to Spam Thru.
The most visible form of fee fraud today is the Nigerian Letter or 419 fraud. A typical letter claims to come from a person needing to transfer large sums of money out of the country or from a lottery company. As the Nigerian letter has become well known to potential targets, the gangs operating the scams have developed other variations.
So apparantly, the Nigerian Scammer has shifted base out of Africa and into the Queen’s country, England. Below is a picture of the email.
Related Articles:
Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, spam in blogs is becomming huge these days along with search engine spam and mobile phone messaging spam.
Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge.
Blog Spam or “blam” for short is spamming on webblogs. This type of spam takes advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging sftware by placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer’s commerical web site.
Blogs such as TechCrunch have caught over 1 million spam comments. For most blogs such as this one and AskStudent, the protection from such Blog Spam like TechCrunch is Akismet.
Today, I saw a new method of Blog Spam by these spammers. They are using TinyURL, a very popular web service which provides short aliases to long URLs. TinyURL inspite of its benefits has had to face the criticism that they are opaque, hiding the ultimate destination from a web user. This opaqueness is now being leveraged by spammers, who can use such link in spam and thus bypassing URL blacklists.
UPDATE:
TinyURL has blocked the above site stating that they abused their policy. How does one deal with such spam? Post in comments area.
Related Articles:
1. How to hide your email address from spammers, a thorough guide
2. How a PayPal phishing email looks like and how to detect it
3. Top phishing targets are Ebay and PayPal followed by Banks
4. References: Wikipedia article on spammer
The current state of the free software movement by comparing it with Hackers’ Ethic
1. Always yield the Hands-On Imperative! Access to computers - and anything else which might teach you about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total.
2. All information should be free.
3. Mistrust Authority - Promote Decentralization.
4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
5. You can create art and beauty on a computer.
6. Computers can change your life for the better.
(Levy, 1984)
The Free Software Foundation was founded by Richard Stallman of the MIT AI labs. He was also responsible for the GNU project. The GNU tools liberate people from dependence on proprietary software/development tools.
The picture above, shows the original vision before software went proprietary, a world where Software is by the people, Of the People and For the People. (click for a larger copy of the picture)
The Xbox Live Halo 3 multiplayer public beta, which is a pre-release version is scheduled for availability in spring 2007 exclusively on Xbox 360. This beta also represents an opportunity for gamers to give information that will help in the development of Halo 3. Through the resulting feedback, Bungie will be able to further refine and hone the end result of the game.
Microsoft earlier this month notified that phase 1 of the Halo 3 beta invites have closed. For those who wish to experience the Man Cannon before millions others, Microsoft today has confirmed in its Gamerscore blog and with IGN that every copy of the initial shipment of Crackdown at retail will include access to the Halo 3 beta and that the “initial shipment” is pretty huge, so there will be enough to go around.
For those Halo 3 fans who are STILL losing sleep over this, you can guarantee entrance into the Halo 3 Beta by purchasing a copy of Crackdown when it launches Feb. 20th.
Another way to get hold the elusive Halo 3 beta invite is through the “Rule of Three” program. From February 1-3, gamers in the US who play three hours of Halo 2 over Xbox Live will qualify for entry. The first 13,333 gamers who have played Halo 2 over Xbox Live during the specified time period and who register at the Halo 3 Web site will be entered into the beta program. Gamers outside of the US should stay tuned for details on the “Rule of Three” program in their regions.
Wordpress.com recently released the latest and greatest version of WordPress v 2.1. The much maligned Rich Text Editor in Wordpress has been significantly upgraded with an easy tab option which allows you to switch between a Visual mode and a much more comfortable Code mode.Wordpress uses TinyMCE for text input.
Now, say you switched over to Code mode and after a while, you realize that you want the Visual Mode. You will notice that you do not have the option to switch between Visual and Code modes anymore.
This might happen if you recently upgraded to a newer version of Wordpress. Restoring this option is pretty simple. Go to Users –> Your Profile and select the option “Use the Visual Editor when writing”.