I have been hearing a lot about phishing lately. From an attacker’s point of view, it is quite a concept, and I reckon a very successful one. You can have the best antivirus software, but you cannot be protected from phishing. Only common sense can protect you. And as phisher’s get more sophisticated, it is hard to tell the legitimate from the fake. Of course, there are some common thumb rules to follow, but before all, you, as internet user, has to be aware of what is phishing.

I remember the first time I got a suspicious link. It was not in my inbox, but as an offline in Yahoo messenger. The offline asked me to click on a link and read Yahoo’s updated TOS. I clicked on the link rather unsuspectingly, but was taken to a page that looked a lot like Yahoo’s login page, but not quite authentic. I could make out in an instant that this was some kind of a joke. So as a simple test, I purposely gave a wrong password while logging in. Just out of curiosity. Two interesting things happened. Firstly, as expected, the page did not give me a ‘wrong password’ message. Of course, how would it know, when it isn’t a real Yahoo page? So I beat the phishers. Secondly, after signing in, I was taken to Yahoo’s own TOS page. Now that was a nice touch of authenticity. An unsuspecting user wouldn’t have a clue that s/he has just been tricked! I am sure the phishers obtained a lot of Yahoo logins and passwords this way.

Basically, common sense saved me in this situation. I was suspicious and I tested the system out by trying something out of the ordinary - purposely entering a wrong password. I think this is something which any of you can do, when logging in to a suspicious looking page. Another thing you can do is change your DNS servers to that of OpenDNS. I am not sure how effective they are in stopping phishing attacks, but there’s no harm in using their service. Thirdly, email services these days have become smarter at detecting phished links. So always be attentive and don’t click on every link that comes into your mailbox. And whenever in doubt, don’t forget my little trick

…after 4 years:

 Free 2 Mbps broadband by 2009

NEW DELHI: The government proposes to offer free, high-speed broadband connectivity to all Indians by 2009, through state-owned telecom service providers BSNL and MTNL.

While consumers will cheer it, the move holds the potential to kill the telecom business as we know it. You may have heard of free municipal broadband—many cities in the US have drenched themselves in wireless broadband connectivity, freely accessible to residents. The idea is to boost economic activity in general. The central government plans to achieve free broadband connectivity at a speed of 2 MB per second across the country, with a similar goal.

Read rest of the story here.

Some time ago I had written how my blog saw no spam after moving to a new host. Looks like I spoke too fast. The spambots are back and eating into my blog again. But not at the rate of 15 spam comments/day (yet).

Sigh…

I got to try out the new version of Photoshop - CS3. I have been using PS from version 7 and the UI improvements in CS3 are more than welcome. In fact, it is interesting to note how the guys at Adobe have managed to make UI improvements within the given real estate. Everything is intuitive and I didn’t even need to look at the ‘What’s new’ section. What’s more, Digital Photographers have finally got a lot of what they’ll need in Photoshop - better B&W controls, improved Camera Raw etc. And it is interesting to note that ImageReady no longer ships with Photoshop. Has it been laid to rest?

Here is a snap that I worked on using Lightroom and the new Photoshop CS3. I am not pleased with the outcome (the original file itself was underexposed) but it’s me and not the tools to blame

Updated the snap with a better version

Like I had said in an earlier post, Askimet used to catch at least a hundred spam comments in a month. Since when I installed it in September last, (6 month ago) Akismet has caught 26,08 spam comments. That is roughly 430 comments per month or 15 comments per day. But after changing hosts 2 weeks ago, there has not been even a single spam comment. I also intentionally took my blog offline for a weekend, hoping to de-list my site from the Spam Robots’ list (if such a thing exists at all). I don’t know which one of these two has caused the spam count to hit zero. Maybe someone who knows how these Spam Robots work can explain better?

My cousin sent the skin I had ordered for my Creative Zen Vision W through a friend and it reached me yesterday. Here are some pics of it (click on the thumbnail)

The package in which it came

The ‘dummy’ player and the skin

My player without the skin (yea, I know its dusty)….note the screen protector looking all shiny (it doesn’t hinder the viewing experience though)

After putting on the skin

The nav keys and such are exposed

Its got the zen logo embossed just like how it is in the player itself

The volume keys and the ON/OFF switch

Overall, the skin is ok. It’s soft, but a dust magnet. There is absolutely no protection for the screen and it actually does not protect the player if you drop it. But we don’t go around dropping hard-drives right? (this player has a Hitachi Travelstar hard-drive inside. Someone actually dismantled and saw!). More than dropping the player, I am paranoid about the screen breaking. It has the largest surface area and so obviously it’s more prone to such a thing. But I am not sure if anything can be done to protect the screen, except for some careful handling.

I paid $19.99 but now the skin sells for $15.00 Anyways, hope my player feels warm and cosy inside its new skin

Never enjoyed music like this before. Bought these phones at Mercy Electronics, near Thiruvanmyur signal in Chennai for 950/-. Highly recommended!

If you want one, head out to Mercy Electronics or checkout TechEnclave forums.

Actually I was searching for this particular model all over Bangalore. Now that I have finally got it, I am unbelievably happy

The last week has been very intense because I spent most of it hacking WP and taking up a crash course on CSS. The best way to do both of this is to reverse engineer whats already available and that's exactly what I have been doing - took up an existing WP theme and reversed engineered it to make it look like how I wanted. Also spent time digging up old WP forum questions to see if I can get a few functionalities incorporated by hacking the PHP files. Guess what - I suceeded! And here is what I observed:

• The code ain't very difficult if you have the time for it. Yes, time and patience is very important and most newbies who post on the WP forums are like me - no knowledge of PHP but not total idiots either. Its nothing but logic and takes a while..
• Setbacks happen when you least expect it. You got to learn to maintain your balance and try your best not to pull your hair. More than once the page I was working on looked really messed up and I had to spend an entire day trying to fix the problem. But in the end, I suceeded, so it all seems worthwhile.
• A forum is like the Bible. You just need to know how to search, how to read only what you want to and how not to get carried away with too many links. Thats exactly what happened to me initially cos I wasn't really sure what I was looking for and I thought see some past queries on the forums will help me get started. On the contrary, this threw me off-track. Its only when I actually got my hands dirty did the queries and replies make sense.

Well, all is not over yet. Now that I got WP to do what I want it to, I have to make it look pretty. And that means more CSS. So here I come….

PS: The result of all this will be seen on my new website

I got myself a pro account last night. Partly due to frustration, partly in haste. According to my quick arithmetic:

The webspace on my site is only 60mb. But I pay $3/pm on a quarterly basis and I don't need more than 60mb unless I plan to upload lot of snaps. If I go for an upgrade, I need to shell out at least $9/pm for up to 1 gig and bandwidth restrictions. Now 1 gig is a LOT of web space, but according  to my estimations, most of the images in my galleries (the older ones) are just sitting there. I don't think they have too many hits. Now why should I be paying $9 just to 'store' images that really don't do much?

Enter Flickr. I get unlimited uploads and bandwidth. I don't have to code anything. It's got some nifty tools too. Only thing I don't like is the layout. So I am hoping to use Flickr as my primary image storage space, and maintain albums on my website by using Simpleviewer for display. I stumbled upon Flickrviewer which seems to be the way to go to achieve this. Need to investigate further to see if this is the right tool for the job. Nevertheless, at $24.95/yr, Flickr Pro is a cheaper proposition than buying more webspace. But I have to learn to live with the lousy interface of Flickr. 

Update: There are a lot of plugins that help integrate WP and Flickr. Unfortunately, I just realized that Flickr is blocked in most offices here in Bangalore. And almost everyone I know use the net at their workplaces for general browsing. Not a good thing. 

Update 2: The discussion happening here is exactly what I am cribbing about Flickr too. 

My 'pooter has been giving me problems again. And this time, it screwed up a partition that contained 40 gigs of music. How am I feeling? Aaargghhh….

Update: I used a software called EasyRecovery™ Professional and recovered all my data. It was able to read all the files and directories from the dirty partition. When all other data recovery software failed, this one triumphed. The trick - it had an option of ignoring the disk's MFT when reading the data. A bad MFT was the very cause of the partition going bad, so this option really helped. I highly recommend this software!