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Yahoo IM Phishing Attack

IMLogic, an Instant messaging security firm, warned of a new phishing attack making its way through the Yahoo! Messenger network on Monday.

The attack, IM.Marphish2.Yahoo, attempts to steal personal information by making a user into believing that they are in violation of Yahoo’s Terms of Service.

The user is instructed to contact the “abuse department” through a URL that points to the 2wahms.com domain (a site like snipurl.com). When visited, the page looks similar to a Yahoo login page. However, once a user enters their personal information, the site steals the users username and password.


Blog Searchengines

Here are some popular searchengines to list your blog:


BitComet Banned From Growing Number of Private Trackers

The advent of DHT (Distributed Hash Tables) has been a valuable asset to the BitTorrent community. Most newer BitTorrent clients now support this network layer, which boosts the efficiency of the already capable BitTorrent protocol.

The first BitTorrent client to establish a DHT layer was Azureus, followed by the official BitTorrent client. Although similar, the two DHT networks are not compatible. The DHT layer supported by the official client would be known as Mainline DHT network. Soon after, most BitTorrent clients would release versions with Mainline DHT support, such as the popular BitComet.

The DHT layer works by creating a virtual network on top of the BitTorrent protocol. Each node that participates in the DHT layer indexes a small portion of files on the network and helps with network communications. This works great for public trackers as it puts less of a burden on centralized server resources, helps distribute files more efficiently, and saves bandwidth. It’s an underappreciated quantum leap that has been overshadowed by more visible advances such as BitTorrent or eDonkey2000.

On the other side of this spectrum are private trackers. Private trackers are not looking to widely distribute their files. These communities are designed to only allow sharing within this closed community by assigning each registered member’s IP address with a passkey. In addition, a ‘private’ flag within the torrent file tells the BitTorrent client not to share on the DHT network.

However, BitComet does not honor the flag. Instead, the torrent is shared and those who do not belong to the private tracker can freely leech off the resources of that community. For example, let’s say an individual is banned from a private tracker for leeching. In that period of time, he managed to download 50 torrent files. Since he is also using BitComet, the client ignores the flag and shares the torrent on the public DHT network.

This is highly frowned upon in private communities. To ensure sharing and save bandwidth, many trackers have tight download/upload ratio policies and enforce them strictly. Since the neither the DHT network nor BitComet have any concept of ratios, the torrent is traded freely. This situation has especially been a kick in the µTorrent for those donating to private trackers in return for higher status and more privileges.

The solution? Ban BitComet. Most of the leading private trackers such as ScT Torrent and Midnight Torrents will not accept BitComet clients. Some trackers such as TorrentIt.com have recommended the use of other, private tracker friendly, clients.

“Unfortunately due to tracker security issues with BitComet 0.60 we will be banning this client to protect our users,” an announcement on TorrentIt.com said. “The ban will take effect at 13:00 GMT December 9th and will be effective until such time as the bug is fixed by the BitComet developers. This ban is NOT up for debate, do not make posts in the forums about it, they will be locked. As some of you may be aware several private trackers much like ours are banning the use of BitComet because of an issue with the client enabling DHT despite the existence of the ‘private’ flag.”

The banishment of BitComet has drawn mixed reviews. Some believe the security of private trackers is paramount and must be respected. Others cite that banning BitComet forces some users to loose advantage of its ‘end to end’ encryption. One of BitComet’s newest features, some contend ‘end to end’ encryption conceals BitTorrent traffic on throttled ISP’s like Shaw Cable.

Whether BitComet will upgrade at this time is unclear. The developer of BitComment, “RnySmile”, did not return requests for comment.


Firefox- new target for hackers?

Given that Firefox has already entered double-digit market share territory in just one year, grabbing users from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, is it logical that hackers will increasingly target Firefox with a whole host of exploits?

Read more


Fasterfox

Wow! This really helped me :D

Fasterfox provides performance and network tweaks for Firefox.

It has the following features:

  • Prefetch Links
  • Dynamic speed increases can be obtained with Fasterfox’s unique prefetching mechanism, which recycles idle bandwidth by silently loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing.

  • Tweak Network
  • Fasterfox allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay.

  • Page Load Timer
  • A millisecond accurate page load timer tests the effectiveness of your settings.

  • Block Popups
  • A popup blocker for popups initiated by Flash plug-ins is also included.

Download now!


More new Gmail features

It’s only been about a week since Google introduced Anti-Virus capabilities into Gmail, and now the Googlers are now ready to start offering a few more interesting features that may raise a few eyebrows. Their page has changed once again and outlines a few extra features that aren’t yet available.

One of the new features is “Web Clips”. They will enable you to view your favourite RSS feeds right in Gmail just above the archive and report spam area. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like it will be integrated with Google Reader.

Viewing some types of attachments is also getting easier. For Microsoft Office, Open Office or PDF attachments you will be able to view them as “HTML” by clicking the link similar to the one you find on search engine result pages. This will save time by allowing people to view their attachments without downloading anything.

Google will now also scan your emails and display relevant information about things it finds in your email, such as driving directions and package tracking. This mashup information will be displayed on the right hand side of the screen — probably above the Google ads.

Update:
The web clips feature seems as though they are attempting to mimic the relatively new RSS feature in Yahoo! Mail’s beta test. From what I can tell, the Web Clips feature won’t be accessible like a folder, but more like a simple news ticker which makes it slightly different.


Extra Tweaking for your OS

Here are some programs to tweak your OS:

  • XP antispy - block all the worthless services
  • System Mechanic Professional 5 - get rid of system junk, eliminate duplicate entries, clean up your tracks, stop web popups, fix registry problems, fix broken shortcuts, recover deleted data, manage Windows startup, tweak Windows settings, eliminate spyware, etc.
  • Tweak XP - optimize cache and hardware
  • Cable nut - increase internet speed
  • Hare - optimize your GFX card options, prefetching
  • Zoom - decrease boot up time
  • TuneUp Utilities 2004 - defragment registry
  • RegCleaner - clean registry
  • SmartBuster - remove junk files

Happy Tweaking :D


Speed up Windows XP

Windows XP has a lot of services, some of which are not needed for normal use. To speed up Windows XP you can disable these services.

Go to Start > Run, type in ’services.msc’.

To turn off a service, double-click on it and select Disabled under Startup type.

Disable the following services:

  • Alerter
  • Background Intelligent Transfer Service
  • ClipBook
  • Computer Browser
  • Error Reporting Service
  • Help and Support
  • Indexing Service
  • IPSEC Services
  • Messenger
  • NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
  • Network DDE
  • Network DDE DSDM
  • Performance Logs and Alerts
  • Portable Media Serial Number
  • QOS RSVP
  • Remote Desktop Help Session Manager
  • Remote Registry
  • Secondary Logon
  • Server
  • Smart Card
  • Smart Card Helper
  • SSDP Discovery Service
  • System restore Service
  • TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
  • Uninterruptible Power Supply
  • Universal Plug and Play Device Host
  • WebClient
  • Windows time
  • Wireless Zero Configuration
  • WMI Performance Adapter

Search Engine Optimization

There are a number of things you can do to boost your site’s rating with search engines. Large companies can afford to pay for sponsored links and advertising with sites like Google or Yahoo, but most of us don’t have the necessary funds to splash out on that kind of luxury. Instead, we have to use other, more subtle techniques, to naturally inch our way up the ranks.

How a Search Engine Works
The best place to begin before optimizing your site is to try and understand a little of how a search engine spider works. At a very basic level, it will crawl through your page, and give it ‘points’ for certain things. Some it places more importance on than others, but put simply, the more of these things that you have, the more points you get and the higher your rating will be.

Before going into more detail on these areas, something you’ll need to take into consideration is frames. Web developers are generally split into two camps on this issue, and it’s reasonably safe to say that most people either love them or hate them. Frames undoubtedly do have their advantages, but if you’re trying to build a site that’s optimized for spiders, then they can only cause trouble.

If you make a site without frames, you allow the search engines to reference your page quickly and easily. But if you do decide to build inside a frameset, then you’ll have to make use of the noframes tag. However, for the sake of this tutorial lets assume that you’ve chosen not to use frames.

Onto the Important Stuff: Meta Tags and More
By now, just about everyone is aware of the meta tags that are available to developers, so it’s helpful to get these right from the beginning. Tedious as it may sound, always write individual meta code for each page of your site, as that way it has a greater chance of coming up through a search. By trying to condense the whole content of your site into a few keywords for one page, you’re ruining your chances.

You have several tags to choose from: meta name = ”keywords” and meta name = “description” being the most important two. Always put your most important words and phrases at the front. As a rule, you should also keep the tags short and sweet. A spider will attach more importance to five words than to fifty, so make those five words count. Pick out words that you think people will be searching for to get to your site.

Once you’ve picked your keywords and phrases for a page, you’ll want to ensure that they appear as often as possible within the text. Repetition of the words re-enforces their relevance to a search engine, so if your site is dedicated to anime, put “anime” in the copy as often as you can without it losing clarity.

There are plenty of ways to include your keywords multiple times on a page. Things like drop-down menus use them, as do breadcrumb trails. If your site design incorporates them, all to the good.

It’s also worth noting that a search engine will rate a keyword higher than normal if it is formatted in some way. As an example, lets see the anime page again. You’d like a title in the main text to say ‘Anime Characters’. Putting the phrase into an h1 tag will give it maximum importance to a spider. You can use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the format of that h1 tag so that it fits in with your overall design. So whilst it may not look like the traditional h1 tag on screen, the search engine only sees the all important heading tag, and rates it accordingly.

You can take this tactic even further, to make your keywords stand out. Place bold tags around your keywords as they crop up in the text and spiders will pick them out. You don’t necessarily want a user to see them in bold though, so override the look with your CSS. Again, the spider doesn’t see the end result, just the vital formatting.

Links are also something that spiders rate highly, in several ways. Continuing the formatting theme, spiders like to see links, and if a keyword is also a link, then that’s even better. Some things, like menus, will probably automatically use your keywords. But you can slip in some hidden links inside your copy if you’re clever. Put a keyword inside an alt tag, and link it either to a relevant page or itself. Now, use JavaScript to keep the cursor to a default on rollover. Instead of a hand indicating a link, the user will see a normal cursor. Should they happen to click on the text, the link will work for them.

You can add titles to links too, similar to an alt tag. They operate in a very similar way to the alt tag, displaying a hover caption when the link is rolled over. Duplicate your keywords in here to boost the number of times it appears in your page. This isn’t ideal though, as it does tend to interfere with the layout of the screen. If you don’t mind the caption though, it’s another possibility for you to use.

In addition to all of this, spiders will take note of all the outbound links on the page, and check out where they go. If the destination page is also packed full of similar keywords and phrases, then the link rates even higher. This is another reason why it’s worthwhile tailoring each page individually.

It’s not just outbound links either, search engines will also see how many external sites link to your own. Generally, the more the better, and again, if the link is from a source with similar keywords and a good rating, your own standing is increased.

Another thing to remember is that a search engine places higher importance on the start of the page’s code than on the end. So ideally, you want all your newly optimized text with keywords to come right under the body tag. But we all know that if you’re building a site, there’s generally a lot of code written before you ever get to the main content. So how can you get round this?

If you remove all your JavaScript (providing you have any of course) to an external .js file and link to it, that will save you a lot of space to bump up the important pieces of text.

You can also employ layers to shift the order of the code round a little without screwing up your design. By dividing the page up into layers, you can place layers with keywords right up the top and layers with less important design elements underneath, whilst still employing things like tables on the main page.

Of course this isn’t always ideal. Sometimes your design won’t allow you to work this way. But as with all of the points given above, you need to reach a compromise between the looks of the site and getting it rated with engines. Hopefully though, you should now have an even better idea of how to make your site top of Google.


Microsoft Anti-Virus Public Beta

Microsoft came out with a brand new beta product named Windows Live Safety Center. The application can be installed and executed online, which could cause some problems with the removal of certain viruses.

Here is a Quote from their website:

Windows Live Safety Center is a new, free service designed to help ensure the health of your PC.

  • Check for and remove viruses (Anti-virus)
  • Learn about threats (Information about security threats)
  • Improve your PC’s performance (Defragmentation)
  • Get rid of junk on your hard disk (Disk Cleanup)

Basically, they just released a Norton systemworks lookalike. This is nothing new, but it is free! I think most IT people will prefer to keep their original tools to do their work. This application was meant to be used by people who do not know much about computers and who wants to keep maintenance of their operating system as simple as possible.



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