How to enable man pages search in Google

 I was messing around with Google this morning, when I realised that you can actually "subscribe" yourself to a custom search for linux manpages. You have to be logged in of course. :-)

 I say "subscribed" in quotes, because it's not really a subscription, but rather a pointless (my opinion) feature. The only good thing about it is the icon that you notice directly what you want to search, giving a simple explanation of what the command does - in other words, the title of the manpage.

 The steps are quite easy! You go to http://www.google.com/search?q=man+nmap and press the "Sign in" link on the top right corner. You log in with your Google account, then you are redirected back to the Google search page.

  Afterwards, you go to Settings ⟶ Search settings.

 Next, scroll down to "Subscribed Links" and click on the Subscribe button next to the "Unix Manpages". Click "Save preferences" and you're redirected back to the "man nmap" search. The search result is listed third here, so the result might be different than yours.



 Finally, let me justify why I consider this pointless. If you use Firefox, you can easily integrate a quick search keyword with your favourite operating system's manpages website. Not all of them have this feature/website, but Debian and Ubuntu have it!
 - Head on to http://manpages.debian.net.
 - Select Man -> All sections -> Debian Sid.
 - Right-click in the white text box next to "Man Page or Keyword Search".
 - Select "Add a keyword for this search".
 - Name: Manpages, Keyword: man
 - Click Save.
 - Head to your location bar text box and type in "man nmap".

Voila! Have fun keyword-ing!

Blogger and Firefox - How to save your password

 Some websites don't allow you to save your password in Firefox built-in password manager, for example Yahoo and Blogger. Really irritating!

 One beautiful day (my irony tends to build up under 35 degrees Celsius), I noticed that the Blogger page actually redirects you to a Google account sign in. Therefore, I've come up with this little link that will allow you to save your password and take you back to Blogger:


https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=blogger&continue=http://www.blogger.com/

Someone might make a good use of it. I also hope someone will find a way or fix the yahoo login page. Enjoy!

P.S. Make sure you install Secure Login add-on - it's a really handy application that allows one-click installs!

People are practically showing off where they got their songs on last.fm

I just stumbled upon the famous http://last.fm/ website - really great website that tracks down your audio preferences. Useful to show off your stats and music to your friends.
It's unfortunate that many people practically show off the origin of their (illegally downloaded?) songs, take a look: http://www.last.fm/search?m=all&q=www.

Makes you think again before posting your audio along with your personal information... ;)

belimantil.info hacked

About 2 days ago, I saw this on belimantil.info:




Astounded my first thought was "What the hell?!". I was looking for a revision text one of my colleagues wrote, and fortunately it was available on another site. medforum2 (a forum created by medical students for general talk, exams and medicine-related discussion) was hosted on that domain, I thought of visiting and saw one of my colleagues complaining about the same thing.

Today I re-visited the site, only to find that it wasn't working! Naturally, my techie side kicked in several minutes afterwards, and I started looking into whether it was their fault (probably) or the web administration (why not?). So the whois command revealed the nameserver, I decided to visit oklopsrbija.com, their hosting provider.

Poštovani klijenti,

 Prekjuce je izvrsen napad velike grupe palestinskih hakera koji su "u borbi protiv Izraelaca" uspeli da zaobidju sve zastite na serveru i ishakuju sve naloge. Juce je ceo dan bila rekonstrukcija fajlova i pojacanje zastite.
 Nocas je uglavnom proradilo sve. Otezan je jos pristup cPanelu. Klijenti kojima je hakovanjem ostecena indeks stranica a nemaju backup tog fajla, neka ostave ticket sa subjectiom: "backup index fajla" i uradice se parcijalni restore podataka za te klijente, pocevsi od petka ujutru, i samo za klijente koji zatraze restore indeks fajla. U nemogucnosti smo da uradimo full restore svih podataka posto je vecina sajtova, pogotovu foruma, vec online i pregazili bi tim full restore njihove sveze podatke.Probijanje zastite nije nista novo na internetu, postala je nazalost svakodnevnica, igrom slucaja smo prekjuce odabrani mi.
 Ako hakeri mogu da provale u NASA ili Pentagon servere, sto ne bi i kod nas. I nismo prvi a na zalost ni poslednji domaci provajder koji je imao komplet ishakovan server.Takodje vas molimo da pratite dalja obavestenja logovanjem na vas oklopov nalog i pregledanje sekcije "Obavestenja".
S poštovanjem,
Vojin Petrović
direktor Oklop Srbija

In short, they are claiming that "Security breaking is nothing new on the internet, it has become an everyday event unfortunately, by chance we were chosen the day before yesterday" and "If hackers can break into NASA or Pentagon servers, why wouldn't they break into ours?". If understood them correctly, they're claiming it's not their fault they're not secure. Not even a single "We are sorry for not being careful" or "We'll take extra security steps to provide you with a safer hosting in the future" sentence. What an arrogance! I guess they should scratch the word on their website title, "Pouzdan" (=Reliable).

P.S. I hope this doesn't happen to me :)

Firefox: "Secure connection Failed"

Visiting websites with secure connection enabled can sometimes lead to problems in Firefox. Websites just link their https certificate to whatever sub-domain they want or they redirect to another website without registering it properly. Mozilla Firefox 3 detects that "glitch" and adds an extra protection layer by stating the following error:

Page load error
Secure connection Failed

*site* uses an invalid security certificate
The certificate is only valid for *another site*
(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

There's an easy way to resolve this, if you click on "Or you can add an exception" → "Add exception" → "Get certificate" → Read the reason it was invalid and if you're OK with the reason → "Confirm security exception".

Free rice!

Do pay a visit at http://www.freerice.com - It's an amazing concept where the sponsors will donate 20 grains of rice for each right answer you provide! If you can't give financially, give by testing your knowledge.
There are various subjects to choose for answering! I took 10 minutes of my free time and summed 3000 grains of rice :)

Caregiving and ethics

Caring is such a simple word, especially when it comes to people very dear for you. Ever cared for someone so much that you simply don't know how to do it? There are a dozen of pages if you search right at Google for them using some of the google operators I blogged about in earlier posts (*hint* "how to" care *hint*).
Social care shouldn't just be shown for relatives, you have millions of persons waiting and deseve to be loved. I'm not allowed to name such groups of persons, everyone has their own pride and see this matter differently. Be gentle and reasonable, that is always the first step towards finding real solutions.
For example, while browsing the Internet, I stumbled upon a fresh caregiving service called bettercaring, giving people a literal opportunity for a care home. I don't know how reliable their services are, but it looks very promising from my browsing point of view.
On the other hand, some may not deserve it so much. If they see you care, they get very (and I mean VERY) impolite, using you around to get their job done and generally abusing your kindness.
Finally, there are some problems if there are patients that require better caring. As a student of medicine, I'm not allowed ethically to show that I care literally for my patient and that I should always keep a "status quo", but I believe I would be able to show my caring indirectly by running all the appropriate tests and diagnosing them carefully, while I do not express my inner thoughts. Racism is out of question of course. There are certain ways to hedge embarassing moments of racist and fascist criticism, I can give you two: 1) Keep it short when explaining, no need for adjectives of extra beautification. 2) If you do make the mistake and "cross the line" just kindly say "I'm sorry, let me rephrase that". If you follow these two golden rules you'll be able to overpass some misinterpreted situations or not come to them at all!

To sum it up, care for those that really need it, be kind to everybody (including the attention "hunters"), and watch your expressions while chatting or explaining.

Security: Sohanad and win32.VB worms still alive

Sometimes Godaddy and their affiliates, i.e. Servage, make me wonder just how effective their actions are against their own clients that abuse godaddy's ToS (Terms of Service).
One of the things that made me consider this as a blog topic is their apparent inaccessibility to shut down the main domain names. For those who don't know what's going on, the story goes like this:
- thecoolpics.net was ended, after some 6+ months of running the Sohanad.* and win32.VB.* worms
- thecoolpics.com and quicknews.info redirect to a new target as of yesterday, as far as I can tell: http://72.232.123.170/~windy/ auct_photo/temp/ (deliberately put a space between, do NOT visit the website)
- The exploit used here is a VB script exploit, which is actually encoded using Javascript
- The exploit downloads YMworm.exe and worm2007.exe which can be found in the same folder the above mentioned link
- YMworm.exe is actually an AutoIt script and gives a bad name to the good folks of that project. worm2007.exe is just a "backup" program as far as I can tell. It connects to thecoolpics.com and tries to download these two programs from there, probably used when the websites, this lamer (langnghe.net owner) hacked and redirects to, go down.

Final comment: They might be cheap & good in sales, but their abuse team doesn't handle reports very well.

Removal tool: Cwean antimalware package

Update: If you try a Google search for the old hacked website, http://horse.he.net/~dynasty/albums/style/, you'll notice a nice warning message ;) I sure hope they applied that in the Web Forgery system implented in Firefox

I did a google search on the IP of the new one, I found another exploit: http://72.232.123.170/~hotcam /AutoVoLam.html (deliberate space added between) - downloads spider.exe from the same directory.

Websites: Shop with Ashop

There are times I regret that I'm Cypriot/Serbian. Mostly because websites like Amazon and Ebay are all abroad and I have to pay several extra dollars for shipping & handling. If I was in a big first-class country, I'd surely pick up a local e-shop to do my online shopping; speaking of that, Ashop has a lovely presentation on the internet, providing the essential eye-catching shopping cart software for Internet trading businesses. Get your shopping cart ready and we're going in for a review!

Although you might not have an "e-biz" to test it, you definitely have to consider the features provided here:
- Easy shopping cart management
- You don't have to be a programmer to use it
- Free tech support
- Free trial period
- Live presentation (which most companies don't have)

You can choose between 4 pricing plans to suit your online business currently listed as: Light, Ashop 500, Ashop 2000 and Ashop Plus. Each "step" of the plans provides more and more features for e-commerce managers.

To sum it up, I'd say they have what it takes to become one of the few good leading ecommerce software companies. They say they will help their customers with all the steps required for a successful start-up, they gear them up with several easy-to-use editors to customize their websites as much as possible and their tech team is also there to help when things go bad ("oops, low value for load average!").

What was John thinking when Andrew wasn't?

I just had to post this! It looks like someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed... I must admit I've never seen the website John refers to (neither Google Cache nor WayBack provide a link).
He forgot one thing though. With all the ranting going around, John forgot that he is actually providing free traffic and PageRank from a 6/10 website to a minuscule 1999-style blog as he wrote. Bad move #1!

On the other hand, Andrew at andrewtalk.com received free traffic and a mega link from a money making baron. And what did he do? Take the website down for complete re-construction. Bad move #2!

Seems like this person didn't appreciate the "lovely" review from JohnChow. If I were Andrew, I'd make a million dollar homepage instead of a poor "to do" notification. Make bad publicity into good advertising campaign. Come to think of it, he'd definitely gain some Agloco points.

Well my blog isn't that bad I guess, since I dare to post things like this, the only stuff that's not mine on this blog are the images, for which I give a damn good credit with links and quotes.

Websites: Smart Smorty

I've just been approved on Smorty, and I give them a personal big thanks for giving me a chance! Have you ever considered getting paid to blog or even blog advertising? Blogging for money isn't a first thing, there's a dozen of bloggers out there making a living out of simple reviews. It's good to have high ratings on google searches, as smart bloggers can identify what's hot and what's not (we've been through Google Trends).
Smorty is one of many outstanding service networks which actually connect those who want to be advertise and those who, well, like to get paid to review (or advertise if you will). This way, bloggers not only express their personal mind into some products sold or advertised in the Internet, but also they can earn a respected amount of money by doing it.

The only thing bloggers must be aware of is that they pick the right reviews for their websites, merge it somehow in their content. Smorty is actually a new service, I expect to see it grow as my website grows as well :) It has a well-organized website, easy to use as far as I've seen, no extra images, not bloated with 3rd party advertising content, just pure text and links and of course some pending advertisers that would love to be reviewed.

Give it a shot, you'll probably have to wait a couple of months if you own a new website, but it's worth the wait! While you're waiting, you could impress them (any reviewing service can be impressed) with some free reviews of products you personally adore.

P.S. You can browse through my reviews so far by clicking on the reviews label below

Websites: Blog to get blogulate.com'ed!

Well I was reviewed for a change, and I requested negative or positive review. The outcome was a quite lovely (and positive!) review by thinkdj. His "thing" is internet an technology, as I can see from his posts. Short interesting posts, always to the point and of course accurate to the public standard requests (what people like to read). As a part of the website's promotion, if you'd like to get a free linkback and increase your PageRank in Google search engine, you'd have to pay him a visit.
Some of blogulate.com's most recent posts:
Bye Bye desktops
‘Genuine Windows’ on Ubuntu (you just have to read this!)

Internet: Get your own FeedBurner stickers

Well.. the Chicago office FeedBurner personnel is transferred to is great (gotta love the ping pong table). They took with them the remaining stickers/buttons and logically they want to get "rid" of them by sending them out by post. All you have to do is "send a self-addressed stamped envelope (or international reply coupon) to [their] new mailing address":

Google
c/o I Want A FeedBurner Sticker!
20 West Kinzie Street
9th floor
Chicago, IL 60610
USA

Google: Cookies will last less.

Stop thinking of food! A cookie internet-wise is a small file storing information about a website. Determined to improve their privacy practices, the Google team (sounds like the "A team" heh) have decided to cut down on the information storing time. The lifetime is set as 2 years long (whaa?) - In other words, users who do not return to Google will have their cookies auto-expire after 2 years.

Websites: Auctionads gets a thumb down

10 days now (if not more) AuctionAds have been facing a downtime several times per day.
They state in their blog:

One of the unfortunate downsides to explosive growth is that you find yourself running into new and unexpected limitations. As a result, AuctionAds has experienced some unplanned downtime as we have grown past our most optimistic projections. We know that downtime is unacceptable, and we’re working hard to prevent any outages in the future.

10 days would be enough even for me to either shut down the server completely or move to an other host. If they don't, well I will change to some other reliable ad server. I'm using a wide skyscraper which results in loss of some good advertising space.

I leave you with two quotes:
"If you cannot accurately predict the future then you must flexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures." --Edward de Bono
"Those who have knowledge, don't predict. Those who predict, don't have knowledge." --Lao Tzu

Personal rate: 7/10
(The 7 is just for their lovely idea of presenting auctions as ad material)

Threadless.com: The smiley makes it better!

I never expected to see a smiley on a website, a serious website! And threadless is all about making you smile (and vote for the best on the way).
It's just as Google says: A collection of shirts submitted and rated by the public. To be honest, when humans put their minds down, they create some really amusing stuff. This imagination for creating comes handy when it comes to designing websites. Threadless is a website that keeps some shirt designs. I have to say I loved the "Deadline" design (right).
To sum up, this website has everything: a lovely community, very interesting critiques, some "?!" characters here and there (which are more than welcome to raise up the "happiness" of the website)

Personal rate: 9/10 (Hey, it made even me join!)

Website: When inspiration meets reality

Looks like I've inspired some of my friends to start blogging about something they really like! I must say it's a good start with a solid topic: Films.
I wish I had a steady topic, all these medical mumbo-jumbo with technology... seems like that's driving some readers away :( Well, the blog is entitled "my life's journey", therefore the topics are endless for me. Aaanyway, back to the website review.

They've added several stuff, changed the layout, so I guess it's still under construction. This blog is under constant construction as well, so are the rest of the blogs in the world, until they get tired of changing layouts and keep one (I might keep this blue-ish or a green-ish one, we shall see). Their archive is gathered in a nice calendar, that's a great addition at the point of writing.
The black is not for me, but it does rest the internet readers' eye. Just by reading the "intro" post, it looks like it's going to be a nice blast of film reviews. We will be waiting!

LifeBlue: "I need a new design" contest!

OK, maybe it's not the worst website, but it does have a lot of bad sides. Let's face it, I'm not a programmer :P All I need is a bit of a push, and that would be nice to be done by professional - for FREE. Enter your websites to the contest (click and you'll vote for me) if you believe you have the ugliest of all.

answers.yahoo.com - fastest or best reply contest?

Sometimes people like contests, guiness book of records would be a good example: who's the fastest runner, who has the biggest toes in the world, who has the weirdest profession etc. But who has the quickest reply in an answer? Resentful.

Yahoo answers is a great place to find your answer, or at least it was. It's now filled with annoying brats that just start flaming you or using irony as a reply. Irony is not an answer, brats. Also people that ask questions are sometimes arrogant, which causes some parties of the world to break down a endless dialogue with no answers.

Now, if someone likes speed and doesn't care whether the answer is true or not, he'll mark the first user as 'the best answer'. There are dozens of examples there to prove that, I won't even bother to post a link. It was a neat place until some started to use their 'abbreviations' ('tru', ya, ay, cp, td, the list is endless), which does not give a complete and thoroughly readable answer.

In spite of all the bad sides, Yahoo answers is a good place to reach someone to answer your question, whether that is your homework and you're lazy (*hint hint*) or if you truly have a life/death situation to be answered. There are a lot of crazy questions going around, but I love the Biology and the Medicine topics. I'm a level 2 contributor at the point of writing this article, I really have no idea why I answer them for free, I guess it's the excitement and intrigue of answering to a fellow human that requires my assistance on a subject; I should be called an all-around doctor when I get the medical diploma in 4 years (hopefully). Keep the questions coming!

Security: How to bypass antivirus detection

Megasecurity.org is a MEGA archive of malware information. Click here to find out the possible ways of bypassing an antivirus detection. I hope that this an old post and not applicable anymore, but to some new antivirus programmers "in town" this would be a great way to increase their program's protection level.

I'll quote just the contents:

I. Bypassing attachment detection or invalid detection of attachment
type.

1. Encoded filename or boundary in Content-Type/Content-Disposition
2. Multiple filename or boundary fields in Content-Type /
Content-Disposition
3. Exploitation of poisoned NULL byte
4. Exploitation of unsafe fgets() problem
5. MIME part inside MIME part
6. UUENCODE problems
7. Additional space symbol
8. CR without LF
9. Prohibited characters in the filename
10.Skipped file name
11.Endless UUEncoded messages
12.Different filenames for Content-Type and Content-Disposition
13.Case sensitivity of Content-Type and Content-Disposition

II. Bypassing detection of potentially dangerous content

1. Inability to check Unicode (UCT-2) content
2. Inability to check UTF-7 content
3. Inability to check file marked as UTF-7 Content
4. Inability to check content with short Content-Length

III. What should be done?

1. What client software vendor should do.
2. What server software vendors should do.
3. What system administrators should do.

It contains a lot of info of how users as well as software vendors should act against these incidents.

My suggestion? Gmail; it can be used to forward emails to another email address, hence used as a spam-blocking layer. Spam detection in Gmail is mostly user-guided, so if users set something as spam, it's done for others as well!