I want to tell them one thing. These days, most of the email services are fairly secure ( *cough* *cough* Not talking about rediff which added ssl login a month before or India times which use to save password in cookie as plain text) But, I’m talking about services like Gmail or Yahoo. But, we need to accept the fact that even though we are intelligent and we’ve some protection on our computers like Antivirus, firewalls for windows folks, or like my friend Hari tells, install Linux, or as Ashok suggests OS X … we are busy most of the time. Some times, we don’t use our brain while doing some small things.

You would be talking to your friend on mobile phone and checking orkut for new scraps. The guy one phone might be telling you about his new project or something like that and you are involved in the chat. There could be some scrap from a girl … Karteek, greeting card for you !!! As usual, we click on the link, and it tells you that you need to login to view the card and you just login while talking on phone.

…

…

…

[Recap]

What happened ? -> You clicked on the link

After that ? -> It asked you to login

Then ? -> You logged in

Then -> It might tell you to login again as your password is wrong

After that ??? -> You logged in or it logged you in automatically or you just left it

…

…

Now, the analysis part. Well, nothing big happened. You were just Phished. You tried to login to a service on a fake login screen. You might lose many things through that username and password (your email might have much info).

Now, coming to the important part, how to escape from it ? Well, be careful is my answer. But, I know that I told you that we might just get carried away sometimes. For that I coded a small greasemonkey script which will protect you from low level phishing attacks. Yes, only low level. If the hacker is intelligent, he can game it easily, but most of the time intelligent hackers have much more useful things to do than to hack you. So, dont worry much about it.

The script is well commented. It doesn’t do wonders but just serves the purpose. Feel free to edit it make it more useful and share with others. I dont care about licenses, so I don’t mind even if you tell your girl friend that you coded it to protect her from being phished

Very important. Never ever install a greasemonkey script unless you read it and damn sure that its secure. Anyway, you can find the script here.

Update : Code made little more logical. Now it won’t annoy much. And by default, I made it support Google, Yahoo, Hotmail and Wordpress. Adding other services is very easy.

For the techie folks who know whats DNS, you might have missed this news. There was a bug. It was just a bug when people din’t know. Few days before , its was a problem as bad people know that it exists. And couple of days before, it became a major problem as bad people got to know how to tame the bug and exploit it. And today, its frigging Pain in the A** as our dumb ISPs are not fixing their DNS servers.

Well, the bug is that bad people can manipulate DNS lookups. Which literally means, when you open Google.com, then can send you to Yahoo.com too. Search engines need not be a problem, but if they manipulate DNS of a bank … the answer is … somebody is gonna get hurt real badddddd

So, I request you to check (@Doxpara) whether your DNS server is vulnerable to such bug or not, and if it is, change it to OpenDNS (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220) and stay secure. As of today, I’ve tested BSNL and Airtel DNS servers (Chennai) and both of them are vulnerable. Guess, we need to take a huge rod and shove it up into someone’s a** and make them fix their DNS servers so that we can stay secure.

For extra-super-terrestial technical folks, I need not tell you about this, but incase you missed it, check (@Securebits) the exploiter released.

Seriously, this is one kick ass feature I’ve been looking for in gmail and they’ve done it with a sweet add-on (I never expected the remote sign-off feature) and for this feature, love you Google.

Don’t ask me why I’ve covered my IP address, I’ve no clue why I did that. May be because, I usually find IP addresses and IDs concealed in screenshots.

But, for the lazy folks who cant/wont/dont have time to watch the show, here are the three pictures.

1. Franchino Gaffurio, The Musician
   
2. Vitruvian Man
   
3. His portrait in red chalk
   

He also stated that the age of the subjects in the photos suit the age of Da Vinci and the time of the photograph. For me, the rather interesting and fascinating thing is that the man in the painting Vitruvian Man was Da Vinci himself. Anyway, this research was presented in an interesting manner and the talk is a small one. So, now stop being lazy and watch it.

First half is in 2008 where the movie sucked, even then I could withstand. It started to suck more when the hero reaches 2050 and where I could see buildings, cars, robots copied from some hollywood flicks but shown in a very intolerable way. One Darthvader type of a guy who does Shivaji’s Motte Boss type of sound on his head and uses force to do some kind of blasts through his hands after a dance and his guys with Laser Guns and Tube Lights in their hands (Well, tube lights are supposed to look like Light Sabers) A Robot which tries to be part of iRobot, and one annoying teddy bear. Even if you manage to withstand all of them, the hero is a big problem as he tries to be a copy of Hrithik.

After that movie, I wanted to try my vision of future and it ended up very bad. I guess that flop movie had better future than my thoughts. Anyway, later I renamed it from my future to a present alien planet or how about an ant colony ? If the background doesn’t suit, how about Colony of IT ants which work on computers ? Ah nvm, I’m freezing the name to Alien Planet. I know that its very crude, but come on, its an alien planet and none of us know how it would look as of now

Yes, I was as surprised as you guys are when I came to know this truth. But, I ‘was’ happy to know that he was doing something what he loved from his childhood. He followed his force and became what he wanted to become.

But, being a guy who sits next to him through out the day at work, I wanted to see his light saber skills. I was astonished by his skills when I saw them. Later I had to accept that he is far better in coding skills than his saber skills. Well, you need to know the shocking reason.

This is ME after the exhibition of his skills.

I request you all to sign this post as a petition for him to stop being a Jedi. Yoda, if  you are reading this post. Please, leave the Jedi council, ask him, you must.

If any of you guys have seen Southpark, and loved/hated the character Eric Cartman in it, yeah, trust me, You will love comments on rediff. About Cartman, You’ve to read this at Wikipedia. For the lazy folks, here are the tags for you from the content - fat, mean, immature, brat, aggressive, cunning, sociopathy, theorizing, sadistic. Each of these tags can be used to tag most (atleast 80-90%) of the comments at Rediff. Here are few examples of the comments.

• “Power of Bhudhism! Its time India give up following Rama and follow the reformist Budha!”

Guess the context of the above comment. Take a minute and try to come up with some thoughts about it. Try to go beyond your wildest imagination. Uhmm, Dalai lama, or Tibet issue or Chinese ? Ah, no. You are completely wrong. This is a comment on India Vs Srilanka Asia Cup Final match, where India has lost. This great guy came up with theory that in match between Buddha and Rama, Buddha won.

Well, other that the above intelligent comment, the other comments include, Sachin is God. Dada is God, Dhoni is a dhobi, Uthapa Sux, Bring back Dravid, Sehwag cant become Sachin, and Karma. Yeah, you read it correct, karma. One guy thinks that Indian govt supports Srilankan govt to kill innocent people so, we lost Asia Cup final.

• “Rajanikanth has a deep and abiding respect for human life… unless it gets in his way. There is no such thing as global warming. Rajanikanth was cold, so he turned the sun up. Rajanikanth can set ants on fire with a magnifying glass. At night. “

Now, another comment. Guess the context of this great comment. Sivaji movie ? Tamil movie ? South Indian Movie ? South Indian Movie stars ? Hehe, Na. It was a comment on a post where Amitabh praised Smita Patil’s son for his performance in “Jaane tu .. ya jaane na”.

Few other comments on this post include, “BJP Should have supported the deal”. No wonder why he was talking about Nuclear deal on this post. And another guy thinks that Rediff dint receive money from Aamir Khan, so they are praising Smita Patil’s son here. Ultimate Genius.

I found these comments in last one hour. Now, expect the fun you can have when you read rediff comments regularly. But, do remember, over dosage of anything is not good for health. You might even lose your sense of humour because of the immature nature of the comments. So, whenever you are bored, or whenever you feel like you are dumb or stupid, you know where to go.

• Well, for the final touch, here is a great topic in Get Ahead of Rediff titled “I love my maid - should I leave my wife ?”

And for your information, this topic made to the front page of Rediff. Dont forget to read comments on it, especially this one to know the nature of guys posting comments there. After reading few ultra-stupid comments on rediff and few ultra-ultra non-sense articles like this, now I feel like doing something like Cartman. “Screw you rediff, I’m going home !”