rebugged

Jan 21, 2010 |

Comments Off

Google is serious – HTTPS by default for GMail

Once again Google has proved that they are the number one webmail. Almost all the webmail services – GMail, YahooMail,Windows Live Mail…. – are using HTTPS for logging the users in. i.e., if you are using firefox, you will see a bluish glow in the left end of the address bar when you are accessing the sign in page of gmail (and other webmails too). And if you take a closer look, you will see the addtess of the page starts with HTTPS, rather than just HTTP.

Having HTTPS in the sign in page makes it very difficult for hackers to steal your password. But once you are loggged in successfully, the HTTPS access is switched to normal HTTP . And everything you do now with your email account -sending mails, reading mails, viewsing contact book.. – is over the normal HTTP connection. So a hacker or even a high schooler with no programming knowledge can easily see everything you are doing. So, your sensitive information is compromised.

And the solution?

In Gmail’s settings, there was this option to set full time HTTPS access to your mail account. But it was optional. Now Google has made the HTTPS mode enable by default for all mail accounts. (Still you can disable it under the settings if it is itching).

I strongly recommend everyone using the ‘always use HTTPS’ setting.

I will be writing some posts covering HTTPS and internet security soon. Come back soon. Bye now.

Jun 4, 2009 |

1 comment

Bing says no PORN to Indians (How to search porn in Bing)

Two days ago, Microsoft unraveled their new search engine, Bing. I tried it. It is super cool. If you hover mouse beside a result, a short summary of the target page is displayed in a sweet non obtrusive manner (ajax). The search homepage has a new background image every day. So it always looks new and fresh.

Besides web search, Bing also offers image search, map search etc.

I was checking the image search. (It is cool). I just wanted to see if Bing has got any nude pics of Jennifer Lopez, which was scarse (and I doubt their genuineness) in Google Image search.

No porn for Indians, come back after puberty!!

krack. I was stunned by the reply from Bing.

It asked me to change the keyword to get results. What the heck else should I use as keyword other than JenniferLopez nude, if I wanna see Jennifer Lopez nude??

I looked everywhere in the preferences to trun off content filter. Oops.. Then I visited Bing’s US variant. (You can access the US page either using the country changer link in the top of the page or using this URL www.bing.com/?cc=us, or use any country code there, in, uk, de etc).

So the point is Microsoft doesn’t want Indians to see porn. Hail Saint Bill Gates, our saviour.

Bing Microsoft porn Search

Apr 18, 2009 |

3 comments

The most funny police warrant!! For sending email and using Linux

I usually do not post about news events. But this one here made it irresistible for me to keep from blogging on it.

I got this news from the EFF Blog. A Boston University student’s computer, cell phone and other properties were seized by the police as a part of an investigation to find who send an email to the college mailing list saying that another student is a gay.

hacker1

Though there is no indication of any crime he has committed, the police has issued a very stupid and funny warrant. Some of the supposedly suspicious activities listed include: the student being seen with “unknown laptop computers,” which he says he was given by Boston College for field testing or he was “fixing” them for other students; the student uses multiple names to log on to his computer; and the student uses two different operating systems, including one that is not the “regular BC operating system”(I think BC stands for Boston College. And BC operating system is some customized version of Windows) but instead has “a blackscreen with white font (I cannot stop laughing… they should have sepcified the font size too..) which he uses prompt commands on.”

During their search, the police seized (among other things) the student’s computers, storage drives, cell phone, iPod Touch, flash drives, digital camera, and Ubuntu Linux CD ( Oh, I never knew u can send email from iPod Touch or Ubundu CD). None of these items have been returned to him.

To strengthen their arguments, the police also says the (computer science major) student is considered a computer genius by other students (Oh my god, they are hunting down geniuses,.. I must be careful 😀 😀 😀 ).

The student who was employed by college IT department was suspended from job. EFF has filed an emergency motion to quash and for the return of seized property on behalf of a Boston College computer science student Riccardo Calixte.

[poll id=”2″]

cya. bye.

Reference: Computer science student challenges tech seizure – CNET News

EFF Fun Hacking

Apr 16, 2009 |

3 comments

Round corners with CSS3. Super Cool.

I was not very fond of CSS, until recently. I just used html elements to style my pages. But then once I happened to use some simple CSS elements, coz I had basic CSS in my college syllabus. Ever since I’m a great fan and admirer of this simple, kewl technique.. CSS.

CSS Round Corner Menu

I have been fascinated by round cornered elements in web pages. I tried to learn the ‘secret art of round corners!!’. Most of my searches returned tutorials for rounding corners using images, Including this one. It uses 4 corner images and is pretty simple to implement.

A few days ago, I was browsing through some script from DynamicDrive CSS Library, I found an unfamiliar css element: -moz-border-radius. I did a lil research and eventually I got to CSS3. Checkout www.css3.info. CSS3 is still in draft and all browsers have not started to support it. Yet some like Firefox, Safari etc has already started to adopt CSS3.

border-radius (reference) is an element which is included in the forthcoming CSS3. It can be used in the following forms.

If you use border-radius: 4em; , then all the four corners will be rounded by 4em. Or you can use border-radius: 5px 5px 0px 10px;, so you can use individual radii for all the four corners. Or the single attribute can be broken down as follows.

border-top-left-radius: 4em;
border-top-right-radius: 4em;
border-bottom-right-radius: 4em;
border-bottom-left-radius: 4em;

The Gecko Layout Engine which is the basis of Mozilla Firefox uses some equivalent attributes instead of border-radius. The border-radius equivalent in Gecko is -moz-border-radius (reference). It can also take 4 arguments as in -moz-border-radius:15px 0px 15px 0px;. If only 1 attribute is specified as in -moz-border-radius:15px;, the same will be applied for all 4 corners. -moz-border-radius can also be written as 4 different elements as follows.

-moz-border-radius-bottomleft:15px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomright:15px;
-moz-border-radius-topright:15px;
-moz-border-radius-topleft:15px;

Here is a few examples I made which uses the -moz-border-radius element for rounding corners. See the code of the page and see how simple it is. But remember -moz-border-radius works only in Gecko based browsers, which includes Firefox, NetScape, Camino, SeaMonkey K-Meleon etc (Google’s picture-organization software Picasa is based on Gecko).

That was Kewl, ain’t it? cya, babye.

CSS Mozilla Round Corner Web Designing

Mar 13, 2009 |

1 comment

How to find what language it is written in..

Update: This post is a bit old. For one thing, Google Translate now automatically detects language. Also better technologies for the same might have come up since I published this first.

I recently got a scrap in my orkut profile. It looked like total rubbish coz the language it was written in was totally unknown to me.

Google’s Translation service is very good and I thought of decrypting the scrap through Google Translate. Once I reached Google Translate, I pasted the entire scrap in the box provided there… Then there was another problem.. I couldn’t specify the source language (ie, from which language to english) Aah.. then I got an idea(!!). I just pasted the whole scrap message in Google Search and searched it. Then I examined the URL’s in the search results. Amazingle, most of the search results came from sites with cc TLD (Country Code Top Leve Domain, like .in, .us etc) .br. That means thar most of the search reults are from Brazilian sites..

Yay!! So the language I got the scrap was the ‘Brazilian language’
. So which is the language of brasil, the easiest way to find such facts is google, as always. I just searched ‘language of brazil is‘ in google and it was written in the topm of the results page that ‘Portuguese’.

Now this were easy. I went to google translate and gave the source language as portuguese and destination language as english. Then Google translated it for me. Cool na?? 🙂

Mar 1, 2009 |

7 comments

How to redirect voice from your microphone to your speakers.. It’s cool

rock-singer

You ever wanted to sing on a mic?? I did, but I was (am!!) too reluctant to do so in a public stage. Aah, so in fact I never did it.. until..

So now we are going to redirect the voice from your microphone to your speakers. Sounds cool na? And no additional software is required.

Right click on the speaker icon in your system tray.
Select ‘playback devices’ >> ‘Speakers’
Choose ‘properties’ >> ‘Levels’
And then unmute the mic symbol (if there are two mic symbols, unmute ‘front mic’) and increase the volume

Now plug in your mic (or the mic jack of your headphone) and turn up the speaker volume….

… and rock the walls.

[ The configuration instructions are based on windows vista, hope it will be easy to find them in xp too, if you encounter any problem, let me know.. ]

Music Tips Tricks

Feb 28, 2009 |

Comments Off

Two unknown Gmail tricks.

We all agree that Gmail is the coolest mail service out here. I recently read from the Official Gmail Blog two more cool features of Gmail. To be honest, I never knew about those before.

Suppose your gmail id is [email protected], then you can aswell receive mails addressed to [email protected], or k.ing.ja.cc@gmail.com or so. This is because the Gmail system just ignores any periods(.) in between your userid.
And here is another nice one. Again suppose your gmail id is [email protected]. Suppose you are using this id for some official use such as ‘customer feedback’or somehing. So now you can append any other word after your gmail id after a ‘+’ sign. So you can use the mail id ‘[email protected]‘ or ‘[email protected]‘ or so. And if you want to forward to forward your mails addressed to ‘[email protected]‘ to another email id, if you need. You can configure this in the gmail settings > filters >

Is n’t it cool, checkout now.

Gmail Google Tips Tricks

Feb 28, 2009 |

1 comment

Retrieve flv videos (and other files) from firefox cache.

Yesterday my friend sent me a link to a video in his site. I saw the video as streaming and I liked it. I just wanted to keep a copy of it in my collection. So as usual I went to keepvid, my favourite YouTube grabber site. But I couldn’t download the video because the site was not supported. Well these grabber sites do not support the majority of the streaming video sites, coz they are so many of them using different encoding methods. It was then I thought of it – prior to playing the file, firefox (or any other browser) keeps a copy of the video in its local cache. So I googled to see if there is an option to save cached files, and came up with these..

Tool: Go to http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/video_cache_view.html, there you can download ‘Download VideoCacheView’. This tool will allow you to see all flv videos in your cache..Remember again – you can browse only flv videos using this tool. It is a freeware.

Screenshot

Or click here to download the file directly.

Trick: Ok here is a neat trick to save any file from your cache. If you are using firefox, in the address type about:cache and hit enter. The resultant page will display various information about your cache. On that page click on the link List Cache Entries, and you will get a detailed list of all files that are currently in firefox cache. If you want to save any of those files just browse to the cache folder – it is given at the bottom of the first page (about:cache). It looks something like this 'C:\Documents and Settings\copzz\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\j1l44nro.default\OfflineCache'. Now browse to this folder and copy and save the file you need into another location and change its extention to whatever it is, like .jpg .flv etc.

And you are done. Happy caching.

Firefox Youtube

Feb 28, 2009 |

3 comments

Manage multiple email ids from your Gmail id.

Most of us keep more than one email id. We may be keeping one for personal communication, one for business communication etc. But it is really difficult to keep up with multiple email ids. You have to check all these ids for any incoming message or to send any mail from those.

But now with gmail, you can completely manage your other email ids with a single id. For the case of incoming messages, you can set to forward all the messages coming to that id to your gmail id.(ie, if you configure to forward your emails, you can read emails sent to [email protected] from [email protected]). So the problem of incoming mail is saved for now. You can find the mail forwarding option in gmail >> settings >>forwarding >>

And if you want to send a mail from another account, that is also possible with gmail. In Gmail >> Settings >> Accounts >> , you can configure other email ids. Gmail will send a confirmation message and once you confirm the ownership of the other email id, you can start sending emails from those ids from your accounts.That is., if you set [email protected] to be your additional email id, then after confirmation you can send emails ‘from [email protected]’, right from the gmail id- [email protected]. Nice isn’t it?

Feb 28, 2009 |

Comments Off

How to block websites without additional software

Stop

There is a simple way by which you can block any site from being accessible from your computer. There is a file called “hosts” located at C:WINDOWSsystem32driversetc. Now open that file in Notepad. This file is used to map domain names with IP addresses, locally within your computer. So whenever you type a domain name (say google.com) in your browser, the browsr first checks if the domain entry is in this “hosts” file. If not present (in most cases), the browser will lookup external servers.

Now the trick, if you want to block google.com, assign the domain name google.com to the ip 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1 is the address of your own computer, commonly known as ‘localhost’) or assign it to any other value such as 127.0.x.x.

Now every time you enters google.com, it goes to 127.0.0.1, ie your own computer. So virtually you have blocked it.

Pages:‹1 234 ›