Forward mails?

Every now and then I get a mail saying "if you don't forward it to at least 10 people then ...." or "to get your true love forward this mail to at least 10 people" or "Mr Sandip Tiwari is a final year student and has a serious Open Source disease, he is in serious need of money to support his group. Google has agreed to support him. Please forward this mail. For every forward he will receive some amount, please do not neglect this email as it is a matter of life and death" or some other nonsense. And people forward these mails.

I remember threatening one of my friends to subscribing his mail account to a porn site if he continued to send me such emails. (He stopped after that)

Surely there can't be a power in those emails to bless you or to punish you. And I doubt google or yahoo will help for such a cause.

On the second thought they have powers. They have a power to punish you by stealing your details, to bless you with viruses or make money for others.

Ever heard of email trackers?
Like the name says, they are programs that track emails. Whether the mail was read or not? The IP address of the reader, the number of times it was read, forwarded, etc. all such details can be collected.

There may be several types of email trackers, one simple one works by embedding an image into the email. The image is kept on some server and the server collects information of people trying to access the image.

How to do it?

Make a image (mostly blank with very small size), store it on your web server. Now create a script that will collect all the information required and return that image. Put this script on the web server. Now type your mail and embed the link to that script. The script will simply return an image whenever the mail is opened. Before returning the image, it will collect the information like IP address, operating system, etc.

Here is an example. Haven't tried it yet. If you try it, please let me know the result.

Now you read that beautiful mail and forward it to your dear friends. What happens? You are simply spreading that threat to new victims, helping some guy sitting somewhere to trap new victims.

The other thing that forward mails do is: Viral advertising
How often do you see at the bottom of the email a name you know. HCL, Infosys, Microsoft, WIPRO, etc. I am not saying that these big companies are sending these messages. I am actually puzzled about how these names get there.

But Viral advertising is the truth. That is how Hotmail, Yahoomail, Paypal, Orkut, YouTube became popular.

Special Interest Group - defHack

Want to be a real hacker and not a Script Kiddie?

def Hack is a Special Interest Group under Twincling Technology Foundation that is focused on technical discussions related to Ethical Hacking, Network & Systems Security, Certification Exams and tools development.

It has been dormant for sometime. But it has been refueled now. Go ahead and join the group. Click here

What is def Hack?
http://groups.google.com/group/defhack/web/what-is-def-hack

openSUSE 11.1

I recently installed openSUSE 11.1 beta 5. Though it is still in beta stage, it is quite stable. It looks much more cooler than openSUSE 11.0 and any other distro out there. It is one of the best and easiest Linux distro to use. With YAST (something like Windows' Control Panel), it beats any other linux distro in terms of configuration from a GUI.

It is very simple to install, one place where one can mess things up is while partitioning the harddisk. If you have trouble then in your windows, open RUN (in the start menu) and type diskmgmt.msc and click Run. Take a screenshot and mail it to me. blvdeer [AT] gmail [DOT] com. I will find the best configuration for partitioning and write step by step tutorial on how to do it in the installer.

After you have install, just open YAST and add software repositories
Goto to the K-Menu (start menu like thing), select Application, System, Administration Settings.
Enter your password. In that you will see different options in the left pane. In Softwares, you will see Software Repositories. Click it.




Click on Add. And choose Community Repositories. Add Packman, KDE-Backport, VideoLAN, KDE-Community, etc repositories. And select OK.

There you are. Now goto Software Management (in YAST > Software) and install the softwares you love.

Some of the things that I installed are:

1. gcc - GNU Compiler Collection C complier
2. make - Make for the compiler
3. automake - Automatically generate Makefile.in
4. autoconf - Automatically configure source code
5. bison - Parse generator
6. flex - Lexical analyser
7. vlc - VLC player
8. mplayer - Mplayer
9. smplayer - A great frontend for mplayer
10. flash - Adobe Flash Player
11. mplayerplug-in - Browser Plugin for mplayer
12. unrar - Adds rar support to Ark
13. p7zip - 7zip but only commandline, adds 7z support to Ark
14. java-1_6_0-sun - Java
15. java-1_6_0-sun-plugin - Java Plugin for Browser
16. gcc-c++ - C++ compiler
17. krita - Picture editing tool
18. gimp - Picture editing tool like photoshop
19. wine - Allows you to run windows programs on Linux
20. isomaster - Lets you edit iso images
21. isomorphin - Lets you mount iso images
22. peazip - Frontend for p7zip
23. dosbox - Dos emulator

I installed MySQL, Qt 4, squid and a few other things as well. Flex & bison are required only if you are planning to compile and install wine.

Thats all for a normal user. You will love openSuSE, it's a great distribution.

Register today

The registration for Open Source Summit 2008 has started. I have already registered. Have you?
Register now. Click here.

Here's a good flash animation showing the venue and explaining the path you will need to take. Lets all meet there.

You can also tell your friend. Simply click here.

Be there. You are either Open Source or vegetable.
I am a vegetarian, beware.

Internet Governance Forum


The establishment of Internet Governance Forum (IGF) by the United Nation (UN) is seen as an innovative new approach to global policy making. It offers a discussion space for multi-stakeholder and offer unique opportunity for bottom-up policy development related to the Internet by linking togethter Governement, Private Sector, NGO/INGOs, civil society, technical and academic community.

The third meeting of IGF is going to be held in Hyderabad from 3-6 December 2008. There are five main subjects of the IGF - access, openness, diversity, security and critical Internet resources - for the management and development of internet.

I think the internet should be left open and away from politics of the different countries, companies trying to change the world in their profit making ways. But that's just my thought.

Need Volunteers

Guys we need volunteers for promoting The OPEN SOURCE SUMMIT 2008 being held on 13th and 14th December 2008 in Hyderabad. Guys come help us. Come forward, show your passion for open source. Lets spread the news around. Tell it to your friends, anyone who would find it interesting. Make a lot of noise.
Guys stop sending SMS of good night and good morning and friendship and start sending messages about the Open Source Week 2008 for this one week.
Join the twincling-volunteers group.

Any questions?? Fire it up. I am available at my chat badge.

Twincling Vijayawada Launched

Finally, open source enthusiasts in and around Vijayawada get a chance to show their enthusiasm and knowledge. Twincling Foundation has launched Twincling-Vijayawada.

We at the Twincling-Vijayawada have started planning on the movements on how to promote open source and to bring more enthusiasts forward, create new technologies that will place us on the global technical map.

Right now, we focus more on the students in the colleges, soon we will start towards schools and businesses. We want open source to be known by everyone.

Twincling Saturday Meet
Install fests
Troubleshooting
Setting up Linux labs in colleges
Installing games like CS, CZ, Fifa on Linux
Troubleshooting problems with AutoCAD on Linux
are some of our focuses.

Log on to http://vijayawada.twincling.org for more detail.

There are some great projects we are starting, we are looking for new members. If you have any type of questions regarding anything remotely related to open source, mail me: sandip AT twincling DOT org

Proxy Server - II

The talk about proxy server cannot end without talking about the Transparent, Non-Transparent proxies. Sometimes incorrectly referred as intercepting proxy, transparent proxy is one that doesn't modify request/response except changing information in order to authenticating itself to the proxy server. While a non-transparent is one which response/request in order to facilitate user agent.

Intercepting proxy also known as transparent proxy is a fusion of a gateway and a proxy server. It is mainly useful as all connections made to this gateway are redirected through the proxy. It is easy to detect by simply checking the http header. Check if your proxy is working properly. Click here.

I prefer elite proxies but there are so few of them and most of the available are rarely available. Anonymous proxies are good if you are planning to click your own Google Ads. :D

MySql Proxy is a simple program that sits between your client and MySQL server(s) that can monitor, analyze or transform their communication.

Finding IP address from eMail

Finding out someone's IP address can be useful in number of ways. Sometimes I check if my friend has a BSNL net (using his IP) and make them download things for me.
How do you find out IP address?
One of the easiest ways is to check the email header.
If you have received an email, the IP address of the computer is embedded in the email header.

In Yahoo mail, click on the "Full Header" at the bottom of the message. In Yahoo Mail Beta, click on the link as shown in the figure and select "Full Header".
Similarly on GMail, beside the reply on the right side of the message, there is an arrow as shown in the picture. Then select "Show Original"

This will give you an output that will be similar to the following

Now you can either simply copy the header and goto http://whatismyipaddress.com/staticpages/index.php/trace-email-source-IP-address and paste the header there to get the IP address. Or you can see closely and see in the above figure in the "Received:" there is an IP address 202.62.89.12, this is the required IP address. Then use this IP address to find more information about it. The main information that you can get are: ISP, location.
You can use http://www.whatismyipaddress.com http://www.whois.net http://www.geoiptool.com to gather more information about that IP.
Sometimes I ask people to mail me, when they do, I tell them "you have .... net na, I know".

Open Source Summit 2008

Here is the first set of updates on Open Source Summit 2008, packaged in a 40 sec presentation.

For the 2-day event, we have got exciting and insightful technical sessions planned on core technologies - BeleniX, KDE 4, LDTP, Git, Hadoop, Gentoo, OpenSuSe. Any guess who the speakers are ? There is a Birds of the same feather (BoF) session titled 'We the Geeks - How can we become No 1 in Open Source Infrastructure software ?"

On the second day we get - Intel Multicore programming workshop that focusses on openMP and TBB (thanks to Preethi and Mukesh). Folks, please start brushing up on C++, templates and pthreads. There is madHACK (mobile application development hackathon) too, in the later part of the day.

Your participation is important. Mark your calendar today !

Proxy Server

We all have heard about proxy. At least in case of attendances.
Proxy server is defined by Wikipedia as a server that services the requests of its clients by forwarding requests to other servers.

Type of proxies

1. Caching proxy
2. Web proxy
3. Content Filtering proxy
4. Anonymizing proxy
5. Hostile proxy
6. Intercepting proxy
7. Forced proxy
8. Transparent and non-transparent
9. Open proxy
10. Reverse proxy

But most of us are really interested in anonymizing, transparent and non-transparent proxy.

Why Proxy?

Well most of the times we need proxy so that we can view the sites blocked by our institutions.
Another use of proxy server is to share net. Those around Vijayawada should know that the net sharing using NAT doesn't work with DVS Broadband. So how do you share net (its not authorized, but who cares), we install a proxy server and use that to share the net. Proximodo is not a bad proxy server but use Squid instead.
Anyone who has more than one system and wants to illegally share their net but has no clue how to do it. Contact me. I'll be more than happy to help.
I share net on 4 computers using a switch and squid.
But most people use proxy for anonymity. The TOR network is a great example of proxy based anonymizer.

Things you should try:

1. Squid proxy
2. Proxymizer
3. Foxyproxy (Addon for firefox)
4. Proximodo (Easy to configure)

I tried TOR but find it slow, but it is not bad to use.

So where do you get addresses for proxy servers? Just click here. And goto any site listed there.
Proxy server addresses have two parts.
1. Name/address of the server
2. Port number
It works this way:
You type www.google.com. This request is sent to the proxy server at the appointed port number. The proxy server retrieves the site and sends that reply to you.
Be careful while typing passwords when you use proxy, you never know who is listening.

Regrets

I deeply regret for not being available on my chat badge recently. I have been really busy recently. I try my best to be available in the future.

Open Source Summit 2008

Mark your calendar for December 13th and 14th busy. Lets all meet at the Keane Building, IIT Hyderabad for Open Source Summit 2008, organized by Twincling Society (a non-profit society put forward for promoting Open Source)

Open Source Summit 2008 is the annual full-day event for Open source community in Hyderabad, scheduled to be held on 13 and 14 December, 2008.

The theme is "Contributing to Open Source" !

Some of the indicative focus areas are:
. Web 2.0 Frameworks
. Plugins Development
. Operating Systems
. Virtualization and File systems
. Networking
. Multi-core software development with Intel TBB

We have multiple workshops on different fields. Hope to see you all there. Get yourself registered and don't forget to mark your calendar busy.

For more information either call me, chat me on the badge or click here.

Thanks to sponsors, You can win yourself Software CDs, T-shirts and other exciting prizes like Headphones, DVD Player !

Stealing password

Well, truly speaking( :) ), I have no idea on how to crack a Yahoo password but still we keep hearing "Someone hacked my account". Well log on to http://www.pwcrack.com/howtohackaol.shtml and read the stuff, its great.

But if you still want to crack someone's account then the best thing would be
1. Just look when s/he types the password. (Try this with me and I'll poke your eye)
2. Try some regular passwords like 123456, asdfghjkl, chiranjivi, jenelia (Yeah people even at B.Tech CSE are stupid enough to use these). I found one who uses his own college id.
3. Try social networking (tell him, "I am your best friend, but I don't think you take me as a true friend. If you think, I am a true friend tell me your password") Hahaha!
4. Brute Force, with a lot lot lot lot lot of luck you may get it. Try Brutus. It's one of the best brute force software.
5. Listen to the traffic on the network. People on same network can listen to what others are doing. I used this at the hostel (the wifi is not secure, anyone can tell who is chatting with whom and what). If you are lucky enough, that guy will enter his password on some site that sends the password to the server in plain text. (Yeah there are a lot of site that do this.) You can try this password for his account. People never listen when they are told to put different passwords for different sites.
6. Just go to the "Lost your password" and try it. Most of the times, you can answer the secret question. And the Pin code, some people are so stupid that they put 0091 (00977 in Nepal) that is the ISD code not the pincode. Try it anyway.
7. Try some password recovery programs that recover password from Internet Explorer or Firefox saved passwords (of course this will work if you can use their computer and if they have saved the passwords)
8. Coming to BIOS password, if you are administrator of your Windows XP, you can get the BIOS password using this open source software.
9. Cracking windows has another aspect. Go to that machine, search for the .sam file. Copy that file and bring it to your computer. And start the OphCrack. It works they say, I have never tried it personally. You can try this tutorial as well.
10. Try the hint in the log in window. Some people put their password as hint.
11. Most people on windows never reset their administrator password. When you see the login window, press alt+ctrl+del twice and you will see the classic login window. Type username as administrator and password is blank.

Let me know, if anyone of these work.

Leave comments on things I missed or I am wrong with.


Added on 07/11/08

I forgot to point out that many people also put their phone numbers as their passwords. We can only feel sorry and use their accounts.

Microsoft's Global Anti-Piracy Day

Microsoft celebrated October 21st as Global Anti-Piracy day.
Truly telling I love open source because it keeps me away from pirating software. But its the way of life and all of us need it.
To answer the call of Microsoft's Global Anti-Privacy Day, famous bit torrent site thepiratebay.com came up with a new idea. It put Bill Gates picture and wrote "Bill Gates made me do it". And to top it all, they put the torrents of all Microsoft products on their homepage.
thepiratebay.com has been involved in many piracy related cases, lets see how far they can go before they are pulled off.
Read the full story here.

Windows 7, how come??

Well a lot of talk going on about the Windows 7. Nothing new, unlike Google that simply puts up the beta puzzling everybody, Microsoft goes around shouting about what they will do. And then fail in doing that. We saw it with Vista.

Sad but true Vista was a big failure. Now the new Windows coming is Windows 7. But how come is it 7?? Microsoft thought us how to count. Lets see:

Windows 1, 2, 3.11 were not much, but was great, much innovative.
Windows struck the market with Windows 95. Windows 95 is named to be Windows 4
Then Windows 2000 is said to be the Windows 5
Windows Vista the sorrow of Microsoft is Windows 6
And then Windows 7

But I think Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) forgot a few things : - Windows 98 and Windows XP?
They are the most popular Windows Versions and Ballmer doesn't name them. (Did you see the video of a man throwing eggs at Ballmer? Check it out)

Here is a tutorial on how to fix your Vista.

Alice and Bob

Read the names too many times, didn't we. Just check the wikipedia.

It is just that it was confusing to keep telling person A said to person B that she was sending a letter but person E was listening to the messages from person A and was modifying it before it reached to person B. Understood?
Lets try again
Alice (person A) said to Bob that she was sending a letter but Eve was listening to the messages from Alice and was modifying it before it reached to Bob
That's much better.
Anyway check this strip out. http://www.xkcd.com/177/

Twincling Society

I mostly use open source software . The Open Source community rocks. But the trouble is where do I go when I get a trouble. Is there any local organization that can help me? Well, if you are in Hyderabad, Banglore, Pune or Vijayawada, we can help.

TWINCLING Society is a registered, "not-for-profit" organization. It focuses on open source.
What Twincling does?
. Promote open source by seminars and workshops
. Encourage students and professionals to work on open source
. Develop open source
. Conduct different events

Twincling representatives go to different college to promote open source.
Twincling is developing various open source software that involve students in the core team.
Twincling has contacted many colleges in and around Hyderabad to involve their students in development activities. The best thing is you can put these projects as your B.Tech final year project.

One of the great things is twincling mailing list. You can ask any question related to linux or other open source software and there are 1700+ members listening to you, so you are sure to get an answer.

Check it out: www.twincling.org

Useful sites - 5

For MAC users this time

Here are a few links that I got from different people. Good to learn that there are a few people who read my blog. (I thought I was wasting my time on it) But now I think at least 5 people read it(excluding me, of course :) )
Anyway here are the links:

http://nomercymac.blogspot.com/ - List of really cool applications
http://bestmactricks.blogspot.com/ - Some goods tips they say
http://www.osxfaq.com/tutorials/LearningCenter/ - Start using the console, starts from basics (good for linux users as well)
http://www.macinstruct.com/ - Some really simple tutorial / FAQ
http://refit.sourceforge.net/ - Bored of pressing Options button (I guess, don't remember) while booting to choose the OS you boot? Try refit bootloader, it should work
http://www.macprovideo.com/tutorials/ - A picture's worth a thousand words they say. What about a video?? All tutorials in videos
http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX/Installing - Install WINE (Wine Is Not Emulator) and run your windows applications on Mac. They say Wine is more XP compatible than Vista and that FIFA 08 runs better on WINE than on Vista.

Post your favourite Mac related site in the comments. I wan to learn more about it.

Messengers

One of my all time favourite timepass is to play with software.
After standing against chatting for years, I started chatting at the end of 3rd year (2nd semester). I chatted for nearly 7 days with only 2-3 hours of break. It was a very tiring and new experience. I didn't know the shortcuts, emoticons. But what messenger to use was the golden question.

Well lets list out a few good messengers:
1. Yahoo Messenger
2. MSN Messenger
3. Pidgin
4. Digsby
5. Trillian
6. Adium
7. Miranda
8. www.meebo.com
9. www.ebuddy.com
10. www.iloveim.com
11. Apple iChat
12. Google Talk

the list is very big, but lets stop here.

Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger are two really good messenger with a lot of good features. I hate both of them because of the nonsense features like BUZZ/nudge, audibles, etc.
These things are too disturbing. But the world uses it for the same reasons. :(
The audio and video chats are really great features and really easy to use.

My favourite messenger is Pidgin. It is a wonderful piece of software. It supports Bonjour (the protocol all the KLCE juniors use to chat among themselves), MSN, Yahoo, XMPP, Gtalk and many others. It's a multi-messenger. You can log in to all your accounts from one place.
You may say Yahoo messenger has the ability to allow multiple messenger. But there is a big difference, Yahoo Messenger gives different windows and tray icons for every account but in Pidgin its all in one place. Less windows, less trouble.
Pidgin is clean, simple. It has multiple plugins that make life easier. It doesn't blink or irritate you with popups (if you want you can activate these options).
Pidgin supports text replacement, doodle, file sharing, etc. It doesn't provide webcam or audio facilities and has no plans to implement them.

Kopete is another great messenger but only available for the folks on Linux/Unix. It has audio/video chat support. It is protected by KWallet. It has good interface and its default settings provide minimal disturbance while keep you informed about buddy's status/messages.

In order to make your life wonderful with smileys, you may want to install smiley themes for Yahoo/MSN as the smileys coming with Kopete or Pidgin is not upto the mark.

Trillian is a multi-messenger. I heard about it before I knew what messengers were. It has a free and a premium version. The reason I never tested it despite all the good rating is that it comes with ads and it asks me to install toolbar in Internet Explorer.

Adium is a messenger for Mac OS, it has very good rating. I have never used it.

Digsby is a flashy/glittering multi-messenger. Its different from others. How? It doesn't save your account details or chat log on your system but instead on its web server. So, if you move to a different computer, you can login using your digsby account(if that system has a digsby installed on it, very unlikely) and find all your accounts and logs there. It supports reading mails and replying to them without opening the mail account. It supports some social networking site like Facebook and MySpace. You can even chat with your facebook buddies without having to open the browser. Many other features.

Apple iChat is inbuilt messenger for Mac OS. It has a few features and because Bonjour is Apple's protocol, it is great with Bonjour.

Google Talk is something I have neither read nor used. It is among very few google services that I haven't used. But I expect it to be just as good as all other services that google provides.

Coming to web based messenger. My all time favourite is www.meebo.com
Its good. Really good, but gives a lot of network problems.

www.ebuddy.com is a great web based messenger. It loads a little slower but poses less network problem than meebo.com

www.iloveim.com is yet another great messenger.
Too bored to write about them :(
Leave comments on why this article is a crap.

P.S. : These are just a few messengers that I know. If your college has blocked them already, ask for more. I have a big database of web-based messengers ;)

Send e-mail via Yahoo! Mail or Gmail by default

Normally, clicking on an e-mail address on a Web page will open up a new e-mail using your default e-mail program. If you'd rather use Yahoo! Mail, open up Options under Firefox's Tools menu, select the Applications tab, and scroll down to the mailto: entry. Select Use Yahoo! Mail and click OK.

Gmail is not included as a built-in option in every installation of Firefox, but if yours doesn't have it, you can add Gmail easily enough. Skip the Options dialogs for now and instead type about:config in Firefox's address bar and hit Enter. In the Filter field, type gecko.handlerServiceAllowRegisterFromDifferentHost. Actually, you can simply type gecko and find the entry in the filtered list. Double-click the gecko.handlerServiceAllowRegisterFromDifferentHost entry to change it to True.

Next, cut-and-paste this line into the address bar and hit Enter: javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto", "https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")

A message will appear at the top of the browser window asking if you want to add Gmail as an application. Now, repeat the process above for choosing Yahoo! Mail, but select the new Use Gmail option instead.

Firefox addons

Here is the list of firefox addons that I like:

1. firebug - Useful if you want to see or edit code of a site on the go. (good tool for hacking interested people)
2. pdf download - Provides an option to download the pdf instead of opening it in the browser
3. flash block - doesn't load flash objects like advertisements. You get a play button, only when you click on that, that flash is loaded. Its better for people with low speed and low bandwidth.
4. google gears - allows you to use google reader and google docs even in the offline mode
5. download them all - its a great downloader addon, provides good features and speed

Other extension that I read but haven't tried is Greasemonkey. I read that it has many useful scripts that make life easier.

PowerMenu

PowerMenu was one application I liked most when I was on windows. It is a very small program that allows you to minimize any program to tray, add transparency to a window or allow you to put a certain windows always on top. The always on top was the thing that I liked most. It allowed me to chat or use notepad while reading or watching movie behind that window. Its a great application.



Best thing is that, you don't even need to install it. Just double click and done.

Download it (with | without installer)

Two good videos

MAC V/S PC V/S LINUX



MAC V/S PC

Oldest domains

Do you know when the first domain was registered and what was it? Do you think it was microsoft.com? Or maybe att.com? ibm.com? Not exactly. The first one was symbolics.com registered at 15-Mar-1985. Below is the list of oldest domains ever:

15-mar-1985 symbolics.com
24-apr-1985 bbn.com
24-may-1985 think.com
11-jul-1985 mcc.com
30-sep-1985 dec.com
07-nov-1985 northrop.com
09-jan-1986 xerox.com
17-jan-1986 sri.com
03-mar-1986 hp.com
05-mar-1986 bellcore.com
19-mar-1986 ibm.com
19-mar-1986 sun.com
25-mar-1986 intel.com
25-mar-1986 ti.com
25-apr-1986 att.com
08-may-1986 gmr.com
08-may-1986 tek.com
10-jul-1986 fmc.com
10-jul-1986 ub.com
05-aug-1986 bell-atl.com

As you can see some notable nowadays ones are missing. So, here are their registration dates:

10-may-1994 linux.org
19-sep-1994 freebsd.org
13-jan-2001 wikipedia.org
15-sep-1997 google.com
18-jan-1995 yahoo.com
10-nov-1994 msn.com
15-jul-1999 paypal.com
02-may-1991 microsoft.com
07-mar-1997 w3c.org
22-nov-1988 dell.com
17-nov-1986 amd.com
22-sep-1993 cnn.com
20-oct-1998 ask.com
15-jul-1989 bbc.com

Useful sites - 4

Here are a few new useful sites I found today:

1. www.teachertube.com Just like YouTube but it is more education related. Check this video out.
2. www.lintube.com Just like YouTube but only Linux Tutorial related videos. Best place to learn how to install software, games and Linux itself.
3. http://www.linuxscrew.com Tips, tricks and tutorials for Linux users.

Well this is not a useful site, but it is worth a look
http://thehottestgadgets.com/ Check this.

Microsoft asks us to use Linux for data recovery

I have hated Windows in the past, now I hate Linux. But just like everything else, I stick to things I hate. At least come back to them once in a while.
I had been wondering if it was time to go back to Windows. The crap system where I needed to install and update:
1. Eset Nod32 Antivirus
2. Comodo Firewall
3. Spybot Search & Destroy
4. CCleaner
and various other software for security alone. Plus I need to increase the piracy :(
But I changed my decision. Why?
The http://port25.technet.com/ Microsoft's open source community asks us to use Linux for data recovery if the Windows doesn't boot.
In one of the blogs (I lost the link) they pointed out Linux operating system (Live CD/ USB) could be used in order to recover the data or fix the Windows in most cases. At least the data can be recovered.

Useful sites - 3

Some good video and TV show site

http://www.sidereel.com/_home
http://www.crawlanime.com/
http://www.surfthechannel.com/
http://www.veoh.com/

Mentioning http://www.youtube.com, just to make sure no one thinks I am stupid. Its the best out there.

How to find music using google

http://tyoogle.com
http://index-of.blogspot.com
http://papaiti.com
http://www.g2p.org
http://www.marcandangel.com/turn-google-into-napster-2000-gui/

Do read this article
http://www.marcandangel.com/2006/10/13/turn-google-
into-napster-2000/

Useful Sites - 2

Have been busy lately, plus my net goes down frequently. Here are a few sites that might be interesting:

1. http://www.accountingcoach.com/online-accounting-course/
Teaches you the basics of accounting, balance sheets, etc.
2. http://webaccelerator.google.com/
Have a slow net, check this net optimiser from google, it will surely increase your net speed.
3. http://www.google.com/linux
Search optimised for linux
4. http://www.google.com/options/specialsearches.html
This one is great, why? Because it allows you to search special things. If you are looking for some university to apply or for microsoft related or patents. This is a great place.
5. http://www.google.com/coop/cse/
Want to have your own specialised search, that will search only certain sites, this is the place. It allows you to setup a custom search environment.
6. http://www.stackoverflow.com/
It is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers — regardless of platform or language.
7. http://whatiswrongwiththeworldtoday.com/
News on different topics like hacking, gaming, google, software, etc The hacking news are great.
8. http://300allpctips.blogspot.com/2008/09/top-10-tricks-
to-exploit-sql-server.html
Microsoft SQL Server Exploits explained properly.
9. http://whatiswrongwiththeworldtoday.com/hacking/wireless-
cracking-hacking-tools
Wireless Cracking and hacking tools list (If time permits, I will explain the usage of some of these, try them anyway), a most for each KLCE student, go rip them apart.
10. http://www.workjoke.com/
Great jokes on different profession. (Read mathematicians and enjoyed a lot)

Great news: LHC was cracked before it could destroy the world

Well a shocking but true story has come out. Whether LHC makes black hole in earth or not a Greek hacker found a hole in the LHC network. He successfully entered and fiddled with their network. Great isn't it, guess what will happen if he tries out a few experiments of his own.

According to The Telegraph newspaper, the group, calling itself the “Greek Security Team,” left behind a half a dozen files on the system and damaged one CERN file.

At least we won't need to go to college anymore. :)

Keyloggers

Though I hate to do it. Lets begin the journey to the doomed world of cracking.
First thing: "Privacy is like an intelligent blonde girl, everyone talks about it but no one has seen it".

A keylogger is a computer program that logs each keystroke a user types on a keyboard and saves this data into a file or transfers it via the Internet to a predetermined remote host. The keyloggers represent a serious threat to your computer’s security and personal privacy. It’s a kind of weird development in computer history

Basically there are two types of keyloggers

1) H/W keyloggers and
2) S/W keyloggers

Hardware Keyloggers plug in between a computer keyboard and a computer and log all keyboard activity on an internal memory.They are designed to work with PS/2 keyboards, and more recentlywith USB keyboards.

Hardware keyloggers have an advantage over software keyloggers as they begin logging from the moment a computer is turned on (and are therefore able to collect a BIOS password for instance), and do not require software installation (unlike software solutions).

But the software keyloggers are much more powerful than the hardware keyloggers because now they are integrated with some spywares as well. Also one could find out hardware keyloggers easily but to find an installed software keylogger is a really hard job. It will entirely monitor what you have typed on your computer also processes currenly running on your computer as well as able to send keystrokes, chats, websites, screenshots of you computer desktop and passwords periodically as an email attachment or FTP to unknown parties. All the things are running as a hidden background process and you can’t view that process through the normal task manager.

Also some keylogger software allow you to install it on a remote PC on your network or sent it to someone as an email attachments.

Here are some keyloggers:
http://rapidshare.com/files/30447072/Dark_Elite.exe
http://rapidshare.com/files/23649214/keysteal_1.34.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/17935151/AV-Tester.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/18585289/Ghost_Keylogger.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/3633050/ardamax_metakodix___JR.rar

Don't do too much damage
I run Linux anyway

Useful sites - 1

Here are two good websites:

1. www.g2p.org
Uses the google at its max, you can find all the songs, books and software you are looking for without much hassle. Instead of running behind torrents, limewire, ares, shareaza or going to esnips and rapidshare and trying to find those files, just type the name, select the type ad you will have it. I tried it, it's great. I tried to search a few songs (hindi, english and telegu) and they were there on the first link itself.

2. www.giveawayoftheday.com
This is a site you should see everyday. Just like the name says, it gives away different costly software for free.
www.giveawayoftheday.com
These links are also present at my delicious

The Poll Result

This is the poll result:

Boring Linux related	3 (23%)
Hot cracking stuff	11 (84%)
Technical NEWS	2 (15%)
Tips and support	6 (46%)

So, hacking stuff wins. I will try to bring something related.
Thanks for voting

Google Chrome

Little late to write this. I am sure by now most of you would have read and heard about the new Google Chrome Browser. But here are a few things that you may not know. Check it out anyway.
It gives away a lot of features. I have copied the context of this from site:

1.New Tab Page: For the first look it looks much like a Opera feature. According to Google, new tab page let's you see a visual sampling of your most visited sites, most used search engines, and recently bookmarked pages and closed tabs.
2.Application Shortcuts: This feature directly loads your favorite online applications. You can create a shortcut as follows:
#Go to Page menu and select Create application shortcuts
#Select the checkboxes where you want shortcuts to be placed on your computer(Desktop,Start Menu, Quick Launch Bar).
3.Dynamic Tabs: This is really an awesome feature. Dynamic Tab feature let's you drag tabs out of the browser to create a new window. You can even gather multiple tabs into one window or arrange your tabs according to your wish.
4.Crash Control: In the Google Chrome each tab run independently in the browser, there by reducing the chances of crash of all the tabs if one application crashes at any time.
5.Incognito Mode: Web pages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito won't be logged in your browsing and download histories; all new cookies are deleted after you close the incognito window.
6.Safe Browsing: By the help of this feature, Chrome warns the user if the user is opening a unsafe website.
7.Task Manager: Google Chrome has it's own Task Manager which lets you kill any non-responsive tabs instantly.

Now the above crap is everywhere else, but read the following:
Just copied from some forum
Chrome is a shameless copy.
The speed dial - Opera
The address bar - IE 8 + FF3
Incognito - Safari & IE 8
Tabs as separate processes - IE 8
The name Chrome - Microsoft's codename for a multimedia browser years back.
Chrome consumes less memory (really very less) as compared to the resource hog - Firefox 3.
Shortcuts, if you like
Control + Shift + N: Opens the famous “incognito” windows. Thanks to it you will be able to surf without leaving any footprint on your PC (cookes, history etc.)
You can also open a website in an “incognito” window by right-clicking on a link and selecting: Open link in incognito window.
Alt + Home: Loads your Google Chrome home page along with thumbnails of your most visited sites.
Control + T: Opens a new Tab.
Control + Shift + T: Opens your most recently closed tab. Press this key combination again to open the tab closed before the one you just opened.
Control + 1, Control + 2, Control + 3, etc. : Lets you jump to different tabs.
Control + Tabs: Lets you open tabs in order.
As in Fireofx 3, you can drag a link onto a tab to it , or drop it between two tabs to open a new tab.
Control +B: Hides or shows the bookmark’s bar.
Control + H: Opens the History page.
Control + J: Opens the download page.
To delete an item from the download page, right-click on the selected item and click Remove.
Right-click the top of the browser window, select Task manager to find out how much memory tabs and plug-ins are taking from your computer to work. Select one of them and click End process to stop it running.
About:plugins (write it in the address bar): Lets you see what plug-in you are using.
About:crash (write it in the address bar): Lets you see what a crashed tab looks like.
To know more information about Google Chrome you can also type in the address bar the following commands:
about:stats, about:network, about:histograms, about:memory, about:cache, about:internets.
To delete all of your data stored into Google Chrome: click the Tools icon and select Clear browsing data…
Shift + Escape: Lets you bring up the Google Chrome Task manager.

The other great thing is it runs well in WINE. So *nix users can use it as well.

A few good things

Here are a few good sites:

1. http://www.paulgraham.com/
2. http://words4mind.blogspot.com/
3. http://www.gnucitizen.org/
4. http://lifehacker.com/software/how-to/hide-files-inside-of-jpeg
-images-282119.php

A lovely article. Anyone who wants to become an entrepreneur most read this.
http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

Here's something interested. May be some of you have heard of it. GIFAR, it is a new type of file, that the creative BlackHats came up with. It's a jar embedded in gif image. What's so special about it? Well, someday you will see me giving the address of my orkut (which doesn't yet exist) and you may happily visit it. You'll see some lovely images jumping around. But all those lovely images jumping (the gif files) will actually be jar files, copying your orkut, yahoo passwords, downloading trojans to your computer and stuff without you knowing. You will smile thinking after so many words, he bent down and started using orkut without realising you just lost all your data.

Can I do this? May be not. I don't know enough to program something to do that. But be careful with the sites you will be visiting. Especially the crack, torrent and ???? sites.

To understand it better, log on to http://blog.internetnews.com/
skerner/2008/08/black-hat-beware-of-gifar.html

I know, some of you have already started thinking how to make a gifar. Here's a video on that:
http://riosec.com/how-to-create-a-gifar
That video uses linux, but a little knowledge of dos commands and the fourth link is all you will need. It also shows how to add the jar file to a docx file, it should work with a doc, odt files as well. I think it will work with any file that is based on zip. Keep trying.
The thing I like about GIFAR is it embeds a Java ARchive, thus it is platform independent.
A lot of votes are coming for Hacking & stuff, but for some reason, I hesitate to write on that topic.

Prevention from trojans

We all are always troubled by the Trojans. Put a pendrive in, and the misery starts. So here are a few things you could do in order to be safe from the trojans.

Lets first identify the ways trojans spread:
1. By allowing pendrives to autorun
2. By receiving trojans from infected computer on the same network
3. By being stupid

The third point is the most important one. Most people get fooled by the trojans. The best example for this is the NewFolder.exe trojan. It shows a folder icon named the same as its parent directory. Its one of my favourites.

Lets solve the above problems one by one:

1. Goto http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/Downloads/power toys/Xppowertoys.mspx and download TweakUI. Install it. To run it go to start -> run, in there type tweakui. You will see the tweakui window, in there is an option to disable autorun for usb devices.
Some people say if you press the left SHIFT key when inserting the pendrive, it stops the autorun (Never worked for me though)
2. Download the Flash Disinfector. It creates an undeleteable folder named autorun.inf in all drives thus blocks trojans from spreading.
3. Better don't open pendrives by double clicking the drive. Go to Start -> Run and open the drive. Suppose it's the f: then type f: and run.

You may also see, some restrictions like unable to see Folder Option, Task Manager, Control Panel,etc. You can use the Restriction Removal Tool (RRT) to remove these restrictions. First install an antivirus, update it, remove all your viruses then run it. Also install Spybot Search & Destroy. Update it, check your system for problems. Another great tool is Noob.Killer, it allows you to remove some common trojans.

Which antivirus is a big question. I would recommend Nod32, Kaspersky, BitDefender 10. Nod32 had always worked for me. To get the username and password needed to update Nod32(new versions), goto this site: http://nod32.areone.cn

You can buy Kaspersky Internet Security for Rs. 999 at any store or you can get it for free from other sources.

Coming to the point of being fooled by the trojan. Go to the Folder Option, and uncheck the "Hide the extension of known filetypes." And think twice before running anything that has a .exe extension if the icon is something else.

Wish you luck with this.
There is one other way of being safe from the trojans and other viruses.
Come to the free and open world of Linux.

Did I miss something? Add a comment.

Operating System

Hi guys,

Well, I heard the Ms Windows guys are giving away their Windows Vista dvds for free. Well I don't think many people would take it even for free. Despite all promises from the Big Guy about improvements in the service pack 1. We fail to see anything. It is a big flop but what can we do, its the future.

Some people think Linux is the answer, Mac still wants a piece but we should not forget the BSD. PC-BSD was bought and is going to be transformed from a boring security oriented operating system to the challenging new desktop environment. Hope the best. I am totally bored and sick of using the Linux.

But still, if you are remotely interested in Linux. I can help. I have cds and dvds of many distributions of GNU/linux.
And a little know how on how to use them.

Choose openSuSe or Mandriva if you know nothing about linux. openSuSe 11 is a great distribution but it is slightly slower than it was before. :(
Mandriva is the best you can get, simple and easy to use. Mandriva Control Center (mcc) rocks the linux world, though not as good as openSuSe's yast, it is powerful and easy to use.

Most people have trouble using net in linux. If you can get your net working in linux, you will love it.
Mandriva and openSuSe both have good number of applications that you may need. Starting from pidgin messenger to pdfedit.

Though jokingly Linus Torvalds goes around calling the BSD guys Mas......ing Monkeys, you should try the PC-BSD, its way better than Linux, more stable and it has the double click and install option just like Ms Windows.

Do whatever, don't use Mac. It's a beautiful system. But you will never learn anything about the computer. It has so much of abstraction that most Mac users don't know where the terminal/console/X11 (Mac version of cmd) is. At least the Windows guys know what the cmd does.

** Nokia is sick. Just because Motorola was using qt for its linux based mobile phones, Nokia went and bought Trolltech, the company that owned qt.

We all know linux is just the kernel. Is there a need to say GNU/Linux operating system? I don't think so.

Open for comments

I am back

Hi everybody

After a long time, thanks to a friend, I am back to what I was.
Lets start a movement towards the knowledge incentive sharing of all our intelligent thoughts. I want to make this blog just as good as my newsletters. ( :(( Sad to have stopped it)
Similar contents -
1. the new ideas I got
2. the new things I read about
3. the new websites I think are worth visiting
4. anything worth sharing

Well, if you see there are a lot of 'I' above, and its not a good thing to do so.
Therefore do give your valuable suggestions, advices and comments.
I will need a lot of help to bring a charm to this blog. I need a help from all the readers.
I promise weekly updates. So do come back.

Just to start, keep an eye on the following

1. My esnips (Check both the folders)
2. My delicious (the place I put my bookmarks {sad Yahoo! bought del.icio.us})
3. Bishal Pantha's delicious (This one has a lot of cracking and hacking stuff)

Here's a good piece of non-sense worth your free time
http://www.cracked.com/blog/2008/08/07/5-scientific-theories-head-explode/