Archive Page 6

Recover your own instant messenger password

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April 17, 2006 in Beginner, Passwords and Windows. 0 Comments

Most instant messaging applications have an option to remember your information (username and password) so you don’t need to input it every time you want to log on. This might be a handy feature, but it’s quite dangerous (as are all systems which remember your password, unless they are specifically designed for security).

If the applications remembers your password it has to store it somewhere, usually in a file in the disk or in the Windows’ registry. Most time it’s encrypted so you can’t look directly at it, but this encryption is useless as the program has to recover it some time, something other applications can also do.

The advantage of this is if you forgot you instant messenger password you can recover it easily. Just download MessenPass and it will find all the stored passwords for your user. Remember, only for your user, not for other users in the same computer.

The disadvantage is someone can get in your account if he has access to your computer when you are logged on, and can also recover the password.

The best option is to choose a good password and not to store it in the computer, inputting it each time we want to logon.

From | Quands.cat.

On holidays

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madelman

April 14, 2006 in Becoming paranoid and Uncategorized. 0 Comments

These days I’m not writing anything because I’m on holidays, so I only wanted to say Hi! and wish you a good Easter week.

See you next monday.

Why Google Video sucks

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madelman

April 11, 2006 in Various. 0 Comments

In the last months online video sites have become really popular and lots of them are popping-up. You know what they are: Metacafe, Google Video, iFilm and, perhaps the most popular of all them YouTube.

Yeah, they are a great way to share your videos and find content from other users and I have used them to embed some videos existing videos in my weblogs. But what’s the use of it if you want to share something and you can’t do it for three days?

I’m not talking about YouTube being down for most of the day but about Google Video, where I haven’t been able to get something published in three days. Do you think it has any value by now?

But, let’s get some perspective. I write in a coletive weblog about gadgets. We like to publish fresh news and sometimes we embed some video in the posts to illustrate the gadget we are talking about. Three days ago (March 8th) I tried to upload a video to Google Video. I had never done that so I didn’t know I had to download and install an additional program to do. Is this the Web2.0 era? Doesn’t everything now work in the browser? It’s so difficult to program a web-based uploader? (It isn’t, the rest of video services do it, quite badly but do it).

OK, anyway I install the uploader and upload the video I wanted to share. I didn’t have explicit consent from the owner to upload this video, but as it was downloable from his homepage I think it isn’t a big problem. Once I uploaded it i checked in the site and saw that it was being verified. So far so good, I thought, they have to check the content of the video is legal and all that, in one or two hours I will be able to see it.

After waiting for a long time the video continued in “verification” state. I got tired of waiting and went to YouTube, searched for it and, with the right keywords, I found it ready to use. Some copy and paste of the code they offer and it was all ready.

Three days later this is the message Google Video still gives me:

So I can’t use it and I don’t have any use for it now. It is using space in their servers and I don’t think anyone will ever see it.

What’s the moral of the story? In first place I should have checked it the video was already in YouTube (probably it is, it was in this case). In second place YouTube should improve their upload service. I tried to upload three times and from different browser and I was unable to do it, all I got was a blank screen and no response from the server (I know it usually works, I have uploaded videos other times and it worked). Third, don’t use Google Video if you don’t want to wait for some days to see the video.

Fourth, YouTube should get a pay-per-view service as Google does. For me the quality and download speed of the videos is enough and if the price is down enough many people would pay to watch them. But don’t get a pay-once view-once service, I want to see the videos I have payed for as much times as I want and from whenever I want.

And the last, these pages try too hard to protect their videos from being downloaded but it doesn’t work, there are video downloaders updated continuosly which allow you to get the video locally. Work harder in improving the user experience and they won’t need to download the videos.

Anybody has had better experiences than me?

A new web site: Sudokumatic

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madelman

April 10, 2006 in Becoming paranoid. 0 Comments

I became an addict to sudokus last year, when the newspaper I usually read began to publish them daily and even gave prizes for solving them.

I suppose everybody already knows what a sudoku is, but just in case. It’s a really simple game where you have to fill a series of columns and rows with numbers, but although it involves numbers you don’t need any mathematic knowledge to solve it.

The most common one consists of a 9 x 9 cell grid, where you have to fill every row and every column with the numbers 1 to 9, without repeating them. There are also nine regions you must fill. Well, as it is easier if you see it look at this example:

02e74f10e0327ad868d138f2b4fdd6f0

So, with the help of logic you must find where to put each number so all the columns, rows and regions have the numbers from 1 to 9 without repetition.

If you like this kind of games, I have been publishing sudokus in another weblog for some time. There you can get three new daily sudokus with different difficulty levels: easy. medium and hard. I also publish some “strange” kinds of sudokus, like samurai sudoku.

If you want to visit it, it’s located at Sudokumatic. Hope you like.

Recover administrator password in Windows

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madelman

April 7, 2006 in Medium, Passwords and Windows. 2 Comments

Although having different users in Windows installation is really good for security, specially if the users have no administrator capabilities, because they won’t be able to modify crucial files and render the system useless. This is a tipical recommendation in all operating systems: don’t use the administrator account as your regular account.

Sometimes, people not using the administrator account for a long time forget the password for that account and can’t login with administrator privileges to install software or update drivers. This is a big problem, which is usually resolved by formatting the disk and reinstalling Windows. By doing this you lose a lot of time and have the possibility of erasing important files if you are not careful enough or don’t have correct and update backups.

Luckily there are other options for recovering the administrator password. The one I like the most is the use of a recovery CD which allows to edit the password without modifying anything else, so you don’t need to risk losing data or settings in your programs.

I have used many times Offline NT Password & Registry Editor and it works like a charm, allowing me to change the administrator password without a problem. I’m going to explain how to do it.

Continue reading ‘Recover administrator password in Windows’

E-mail security: detecting spam (V)

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madelman

April 5, 2006 in Email, Medium, Security and Spam. 0 Comments

We saw some techniques spammers use to try to evade Bayesian spam filters and how the use of this techniques is making spam a bit less effective and, sometimes, even more easy to detect.

But spammers know this and they wont’ allow their business to go down so easily. So what is the future of filter evasion? I have been thinking about some techniques which would probably evade most of current filters and perhaps it’s time to prepare against them before it’s too late.

The idea for this list came from a post by Vivek Jishtu where he explains how a spammer is using the Yahoo greeting cards to send his messages without being detected by filters. This service allows anyone to send a card to someone, who will be notified by e-mail and will receive a link to go to a site to view the card. In this card, the spammer can include arbitrary content so he can put his spam message there and as this will not pass through any filter it won’t be detected. So, if the user receiving the card visits the link he will see this (translated from Chinese by Google Translator):

Continue reading ‘E-mail security: detecting spam (V)’

E-mail security: detecting spam (IV)

Published by

madelman

April 3, 2006 in Beginner, Email, Security and Spam. 0 Comments

Knowing how Bayesian filtering works we will try to find some programs which use it and see which is the most useful one for us. I’ll give a list and you should choose the most appropiate for you.

We can split the filtering programs depending on where they work: on the server or on the client. The programs working on the server have some advantages, as they look at more mail messages (they see mail from all users in a system) it is easier and faster to train them. Furthermore, there is only one place to administer it, making the administrator task easier. At the same time, the users don’t need to receive the spam so they don’t spend additional bandwith and time. On the other hand, they are not so customizable by the user, which might prefer his own techniques to detect spam and false postivesand, if the user doesn’t have access to the server he will not be able to install it.

One of the most known server-side filtering software is SpamAssassin, which uses different checks to test for spam, one of them being Bayesian filtering. Each one of this tests adds or substracts a score from the mail and at the end of the runs this score will determine if the mail is spam or not. Amongst other these test include mail-header tests, text-content rules, white-lists and black-lists and collaborative databases, making this program one of the most accurate. This can also be used as client-side filtering, although the installation will not be as easy as others.
Continue reading ‘E-mail security: detecting spam (IV)’

New version of Google Talk with avatars

Published by

madelman

March 31, 2006 in Various. 1 Comment

Hey, it’s Friday afternoon for me, almost weekend so time to relax and write about something not related to computer security. Well, it might be related because a program in my computer updated all by itself without asking me for consent but I’ll talk about it another day.

I always have Google Talk connected in my computer, so people can reach and talk with me and I never turn it off. But today, after returning from lunch I got a big surprise, the Google Talk window was open in the middle of the desktop and it wasn’t looking as usual, some additional pictures were in the side of each of my contacts, so I had to imagine that a new version of the program had been released and the auto-update functionality had downloaded and installed it.

Surprise, surprise, seems like the promised Google Talk avatars have already been implemented. In January some screenshots had already shown how it worked, but I thought that it wasn’t public yet. Well, as we’ll see at the end of the post it looks like it’s not really public but it was in my computer

Here’s a capture of the main window (names have been deleted to protect the innocent):

Googletalk1

Continue reading ‘New version of Google Talk with avatars’

E-mail security: detecting spam (III)

Published by

madelman

March 30, 2006 in Advanced, Email, Security and Spam. 1 Comment

Before talking about other methods for detecting spam, let’s have a closer look to Bayesian filters and programs using this technique to classify mail. This will be a technical post, so it might not interest to all of you. In next posts we’ll see some software which uses these filters.

I’m not a mathematician, so I might make a few errors when trying to explain the theory behind the filters. Please forgive me. The article in Wikipedia explains it better than I can do it.

The main formula where Bayesian filtering stands is:

Bayes1

which says that the probability of an e-mail being spam given the words contained in it is equal to the probability of these words appearing in a spam message, multiplied by the probability of a message being spam divided by the probability of the words appearing in any message.

Wow, it looks quite complicated. One of the most known papers about this kind of filtering is A plan for spam from Paul Graham. We’ll see some code from it.

Continue reading ‘E-mail security: detecting spam (III)’

E-mail security: detecting spam (II)

Published by

madelman

March 29, 2006 in Beginner, Email, Security and Spam. 19 Comments

As spam filters get more advanced, less spam is allowed to enter into user’s inbox so the business model of spammers gets hurt. Instead of thinking that people don’t really like to receive spam and they would prefer less intrusive ways to get publicity, they try to workaround these filters in, sometimes, really clever ways. So, spam filters have to be continually modified and adapted to not fall into these new tricks.

As Bayesian filtering is the most common used technique, this is what spammers try to escape more frequently. We told that Bayesian works by calculating the probability that a word is from spam or from legitimate mail, so what spammers do is modify the messages so they get more probability of being legitimate mail.

One of the ways to do this is insert random but common words in spam, so the spam words contribute less to the score and the message goes under the filter. We can see an example of a real spam:

Spam1

The real content of the spam is contained at the bottom but at the beginning of the e-mail there are some lines with text which come from the novel The Master and Margarita and try to hide the fact that this is an spam.

Continue reading ‘E-mail security: detecting spam (II)’

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Archive Page 6

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