Author Archives: Ashik

About Ashik

I am doing Master's of Engineering in Computer Science from Cornell University.

3 Amazing Firefox Hacks

Posted on by
13

What good is a browser unless you can tweak it, hack it and bend it to your will? No good at all. The more you can hack it, the better it is. And that means that Firefox must be a great browser as when ever you feel that you know everything about it you come across a bunch of hidden (and some not-so-secret) tips and tricks available that will crank Firefox up and pimp your browser. Make it faster, cooler, more efficient. So today I have come up with 3 amazing firefox tricks you might not be aware of.

1. Save Session For All Tabs Opened In Multiple Firefox Windows

If you are an ardent user of Firefox then you may be aware that when more than one firefox windows are opened up, in that case when you close a firefox window, it does ask me the option to save the session and exit, rather it ask to close all the tabs in that firefox window, but it wont save the tabs in other windows. So this way you could not save the session for multiple tabs opened in multiple firefox windows.

In such a case, there is only one option left to save the session for all the tabs opened in separate firefox windows by terminating firefox through task manager, here is how you do it.

Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to quickly launch task manager, click the process tab and locate firefox.exe and right click selecting the exe and click End Process Tree.

Next time when you will open firefox it will open all the tabs in all the windows that were previously open.

2. Open & Log In to Multiple Accounts Gmail, Facebook, or Twitter Accounts In FireFox

Firefox extension CookiePie manages Firefox’s cookies—small bits of text stored on your computer that tell a site you’re logged in, for example—in such a way that you can log into the same site multiple times.

How to use it?

Just follow the steps given below:

  • Install CookiePie Firefox Extension.
  • Create a new tab or use an existing one.
  • Open the context menu of the tab (i.e: Press the right mouse button over the tab) and select “Toggle On/Off CookiePie”.
  • A cookiepie icon will appear over the tab.
  • Go to a site (e.g.: http://www.gmail.com) and login into your account.
  • Create another tab.
  • Enable CookiePie on that tab too.
  • Log in with another account on the same site.

3. Bypass Download Waiting Time On Rapidshare, Megaupload, zShare, Mediafire etc

SkipScreen is a really useful firefox  addon for lot of users who download  various types of files from the popular file and media sharing sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload, zShare, Mediafire, and more.

Most of these file sharing web sites have a annoying waiting time limit before a free user can start downloading the requested file. So, SkipScreen can be really useful in saving your time wasted seeing the download waiting time as it removes the screen of download waiting time from these media sharing sites.

SkipScreen monitors the pages where you see the download time and will get the content you want before the download waiting time completes.

18 Tips to Improve your Apple iPhone Battery life

Posted on by
9

The iPhone is a great device for performing a wide variety of functions, like sending email, watching a movie, getting directions to a destination, playing games, surfing the internet, or of course, making a phone call. One thing that hampers the iPhone’s ability to be a worry-free productivity device is its the battery life. It can vary widely depending on how you use your iPhone. So here are few Tips that will definately increase your battery life in your iPhone (They are also applicable to your iPod. Not tested on iPad but you may try it).

  1. Power-cycling the iPhone:  A good place to start out is by power-cycling the iPhone. You can do this by holding down the power button on the top of the iPhone until you see the “Slide to Power Off” screen. Once the iPhone is off, go ahead and push the power button again to turn it on. Use the iPhone as you normally would and see how the battery life is lasting.
  2. Drain the battery fully: Go to Settings -> General -> Auto-Lock and set it to Never. This is to wear the battery down. After the battery discharged and it was shut down for a few minutes push the home button to ‘revive’ it. Once the battery sits a moment it can pull some reserve power. Do this repeatedly until the screen displayed an empty battery image and it wouldn’t stay on for more than a second. Now charge it completely. Now your battery is as good as new.
  3. Avoiding the Extremes: If you want to enhance your iPhone battery lifespan remember to avoid temperature extremes. Avoid using your iPhone at temperatures higher than 95° F (or 35° C) and in very cold environments. Using the iPhone in very hot conditions can inflict permanent battery damage whereas cold temp usage causes temporary battery performance degradation.
  4. Regular Updates: Keep your iPhone software constantly updated to ensure your phone has the latest battery performance maximisation technology.
  5. Optimise the Settings: Some apps are battery draining like viewing videos, gaming, email and so on. Just remember the following battery tips to maximise its life.
    • Minimize use of Location Services by using it only when needed or disabling the location services option.
    • Set your Fetch New Data options to hourly or fetch data manually. Frequent use of mail client only drains the battery faster.
    • Disable your Push Mail client when not needed to avoid receiving mail as they arrive.
  6. Limit Third-party Application Usage: 3 rd party apps like games prevent auto power saving options like screen dimming or switching off hence the battery is constantly at peak performance.
  7. Turn off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G: When not in use switch off these apps to conserve battery. Also note using Wi-Fi to access the net instead of the cellular network service requires less power.
  8. Use your iPhone regularly: It may sound weird but its true that not using the iPhone for long time at a stretch decreases the battery life. Use it regularly and charge the battery at least once every six months even if you don’t use your iPhone regularly.
  9. Turn off keyboard clicks: If you frequently use your iPhone’s keyboard, navigate to the Sounds pane of Settings  and turn the option for Keyboard clicks off.
  10. Connect iPhone directly to computer to charge: If you are connecting your iPhone to a computer instead of a wall socket to charge it, don’t connect iPhone to your keyboard or another USB hub/bridge. Make sure it is plugged directly into one of your computer’s USB 2.0 ports.
  11. Turn off 3G: If you’re really low on battery, and are willing to do whatever it takes to keep the phone alive for emergency situations, then go and turn off 3G. Hey, EDGE sucks, but it still works.
  12. Turn off EQ: Applying EQ settings to your iPhone apparently drains extra battery. If you’re planning on keeping your phone alive all day, turn the EQ settings off.
  13. Turn Off Vibrate in Games: A lot of games have very frequent vibrations, which drain battery life. If you can, turn them off in the game’s settings.
  14. Don’t download from iTunes or App Store wirelessly: Downloading apps and media is hard on the battery. Just wait until you get home and use your computer.
  15. Turn SSH Off: SSH runs is background and drains battery, this can be turned off from the application BossPrefs OR from default SSH service icon. This runs in the background to detect any network activity and this is the main cause of poor battery time for all jailbreak iPhones.
  16. Turn off Auto-Brightness: Auto brightness changes the iPhone’s screen brightness on the basis of surrounding light which consumes battery through auto brightness process and changing from low brightness to high brightness level. Turing off this process will stop a back end process and constant brightness level will not consume more battery due to change in brightness level.
  17. Lower the Brightness: More screen brightness requires more battery. A reasonable brightness level is between, 25% to 30% which will brighten up the iPhone screen display good for both day and night.
  18. Use your discretion: You understand what’s bad for battery life – doing things that look like they would take a lot of battery life. Just be reasonable. Plan ahead. When you know you won’t charge your phone for hours, don’t go playing games. Resist. Don’t pass your phone around to your friends who say “Oohhh iPhone lemme play.” Don’t take the smart out of smart phone.
Turn off EQ
Applying EQ settings to your iPod apparently drains extra battery. If you’re planning on keeping your phone alive all day, turn the EQ settings off.

Adobe fixes the Flash Bug with a Massive Update

Posted on by
2

Adobe has released a Flash Player update that fixes a flurry of vulnerabilities including a critical zero-day flaw (CVE-2010-1297) that has been actively exploited in attacks since last week. In addition to the numerous security patches, the new Flash player 10.1.53.64 version brings major functionality and performance improvements.

A lot of eyes have been on Adobe since last week, when yet another remote code execution vulnerability affecting Flash Player, as well as Adobe Reader and Acrobat, was announced. Worse yet, the bug was discovered in the wild, meaning it posed an immediate threat to users.

Earlier this week, the company revealed plans to release a patch by June 10, a promise it met yesterday by shipping the first stable version of Flash Player 10.1. This release marks the end of the 10.0.x branch, as well as the end of support for PowerPC G3, 10.1.53.64 being the last version to work on this architecture.

The Security Bulletin accompanying the release names no less than 32 security issues that the new Adobe Flash Player 10.1.53.64 addresses. The vast majority of these vulnerabilities can facilitate arbitrary code execution and affect Adobe AIR as well – for which a new version (2.0.2.12610) was also released.

The Adobe Flash Player update is only available for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems, with the Solaris version being still in the beta stage of development. A new version for the 9.0.x branch, namely 9.0.277.0, has also been released, to accommodate scenarios where upgrading to 10.1 will break functionality.

Flash Player 10.1 has been a long-awaited release, mainly because it introduces GPU hardware acceleration, a feature that takes the load off CPUs during HD SWF playback, finally allowing for such content to be properly watched on netbooks and other low-performance devices. The video-streaming experience has also been improved, the player automatically adapting the stream quality in real time according to network conditions.

The latest version of Adobe Flash Player 10.1.53.64 can be downloaded from here.

The older version of Adobe Flash Player 9.0.277.0 can be downloaded from here.

The latest version Adobe AIR 2.0.2.12610 for Windows can be downloaded from here.

New Flash Bug Exploited By Hackers : How to avoid it?

Posted on by
8

New Flash Bug

A new attack on a Flash bug has surfaced that would give attackers control of a victim’s computer after crashing it, reports PC World. Adobe put out a Security Advisory about this on June 4. It is categorized as a critical issue and all operating systems with Flash are vulnerable including Windows, Linux, and Apple and it is also found in the recent versions of Reader and Acrobat.

Affected Versions

The affected versions are Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2, 9.0.262, and earlier 10.0.x and 9.0.x versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris. Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.3.2 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX. The versions that avoided being affected are Flash Player 10.1 release candidate, link available in the Adobe security advisory, and Acrobat/Reader version 8.x.

Current Situation

The attack isn’t widespread in the wild yet, Adobe has only received two reports of online attacks. Of course the attack is new and may just be starting to ramp up. Adobe will update the advisory when a schedule has been determined for creating a fix.

How to avoid it?

Until the fix is ready, Adobe has advised the Flash users that they should use the 10.1 release candidate to avoid attack where as Acrobat and Reader 9.x users can downgrade to version 8 or deleting, renaming, or removing access to the authplay.dll file that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x mitigates the threat for those products, but users will experience a non-exploitable crash or error message when opening a PDF file that contains SWF content. The authplay.dll that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x for Windows is typically located at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\authplay.dll for Adobe Reader or C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat\authplay.dll for Acrobat.

How to view Removed Videos on Youtube

Posted on by
2

Hello Friends,

Have you ever found an Interesting Video on Youtube but when you try to view that video you find out that the video has been removed by Youtube due to terms of Use Violation. According to the policy of Youtube, it has a right  to remove any video from public viewing if it is found to be violating the terms and conditions of Youtube. But now I will show you how to view that video.

Just follow the steps given bellow and watch your favorite videos:

  • Go to the page where you got the error message that this video has been removed.
  • Next click on the Video’s Publisher, that is- the Uploader of that video.
  • It should show you the uploader’s video uploads in the right.
  • Find the Video which he uploaded and is now removed
  • Click on it
  • Hurray! You have got access to watch the removed Video
  • Now Sometimes you can open the video in New Tab and it wont show the message that the video is removed due to violating the terms.. Sometimes it may show..

Hope this worked for you :)

Why are you Scared of Linux?

Posted on by
35

Note: Before you read this Article I want to tell you that I am a big Linux fan and Linux being an open source Operating System is doing a Great Job.

Most of the people I know think Linux is very difficult for a layman to understand. They fear that after installing Linux they will not be able to do the normal tasks they do with Windows and thus they prefer paying money to Microsoft instead of even trying Linux.

There are lot of reasons behind this. Few reasons that I could figure out are:

1. Lack of Advertising about Linux compared to Windows. I understand that Linux is an open source product while Windows is Commercial but still I feel that there is lot of scope for advertising.

2. Lack of Awareness among the Retailers of Computers who advise the buyers to go for Windows instead of Linux. Some times its not just lack of awareness but also to gain more commission on the part of the retailer.

3. A very odd but a legitimate reason is that most of the time when people hear about linux is when a Geek is bragging about what he did on Linux last night and that layman will think “Man I don’t think Linux is for Guys like me!!”.

4. Most of the schools (atleast in India) teach their students Windows instead of Linux and thus the children when they grow up feel that windows is easy and safe to go with.

5. One reason for the Windows users not switching to Linux from Windows is that they are used to the working environment of Windows and So they are scared how they are going to do those regular task with Linux. Moreover there are many discouraging people around you who will be telling you stories of people who had to format their PC after installing Linux.

6. I also feel that the method of bring new versions every 6 months of different Linux distributions has many loopholes. First of all when a new release comes you are scared whether it is stable or not and whether his current apps will be compatible or not. So you wait for 1-2 months till you hear good reviews about it and just when you were about to feel that you got the one you can happily live with you hear about a new release which is better than that. Another reasons specially for Indian Users is that every time a new release comes out the user has to download it from net which is very time consuming considering the low internet speed in India.

7. The Last but the most important reason I feel why people don’t go for Linux is that the developers of Linux try to target more towards the technical guys instead of a normal user who is never going to code in his life. Linux only tries to compete with Windows in terms of a Better Development platform but it lags far behind from Windows in other areas. Though you may feel this reason to be invalid but this is what I feel.

I know a lot of Linux lovers will get hurt after reading this post and will be very angry at me but this is what is the harsh reality about Linux which can be changed if proper steps are taken by Linux.

Can you guys think of any other reasons? If so, I’d love it if you shared.

Note: The above written text are the author’s own views and they are not written to hurt the feelings of anybody.

How to Hack Rapidshare.com

Posted on by
39

Since I started blogging the question that has been asked by maximum number of users via Comments, Web Forms or via Communities is “How to hack Rapidshare.com?”. Rapidshare is one of the best file hosting service in the world. You can upload, Download files that you want very easily. But if you are not a premium user of Rapidshare then while downloading any file from the rapidshare, you will get annoying download time before getting the download link.

Today I am posting the answer to your most asked question via a very simple trick which will help you to reset the download waiting time to zero. So you can download your files very quickly.

Follow the steps given below and hack Rapidshare.com yourself:

1. Goto the Rapidshare URL of the file you want to Download.

2. Now click on the Free User button. Your waiting time will be start.

3. Now remove the current URL and copy the follwing code in the Browser’s address bar;

4. Hit Enter.

5. This code will set your download timer as zero and download link will be appear immediately.

6. Click Download. If it gives some error message, refresh the page once and download will start.

You could also add the following link to bookmarklets and use it whenever you want to circumvent Rapidshare Wait Time.

Hack Rapidshare

How to Recover Important Data after your System is Crashed

Posted on by
12

Suppose your computer commits suicide by inviting the latest virus and you are not able to get it back up and running. As a last resort you decide to backup your important documents, photos that you took of your girl friend and the ASCII text file containing your passwords. Today I will show how to do this very easily.

Create a System Rescue CD

Use an uninfected computer and download the System Rescue CD ISO file (latest version) from sysresccd.org. Now burn this ISO to a blank CD.

Start the rescue

After the ISO is written to CD, take it out, pop the CD into the drive of the computer that’s busted. Set the BIOS to boot through the CD first, hard disk next. And allow it to reboot.

You should see this beautiful System Rescue startup screen. Type these options after the boot: prompt and press ENTER.

rescuecd docache dostartx dodhcp

The docache option allows you to remove the System Rescue CD after it boots up, so you can enter another blank CD/DVD and take backups.

The dostartx option starts GUI automatically.

The dodhcp opiton automatically configures the network and connects you automatically to the Internet after booting.

Load the appropriate keymap when prompted (or just select the default US keymap).

It should start GUI automatically. In case it doesn’t, type startx at the command line and press ENTER.

Your desktop should have a terminal with a yellow background. We need to mount the partition and then do the backup.

Your Windows partition will most likely be located in /mnt/sda1 or /mnt/sda2. To check the partitions, run this:

fdisk -l /dev/sda

It should show you the partition names.

Then, to mount partition 1, run this:

ntfs-3g /mnt/sda1 /mnt/windows

If it mounts correctly, you should be able to see the files in your C:\ directory when you type:

ls -al /mnt/windows

Backing up your data to a CD/DVD

Now, to begin backing up your data, type this:

xfburn

The Xfburn program will show you a list of your partitions. Browse to the Windows partition(s) using the Filesystem menu option on the top-left and select all the files you need. Click on New Data Composition. Insert a blank CD or DVD and allow to burn all your data to the CD/DVD.

Backing up your data to a remote location

This is easier if you love using the command line. First, make sure the network is up by pinging to google.com

ping google.com

If it throws up an error, you have to run this to configure your network interface:

net-setup eth0

If you want to transfer the files in the directory C:\work to your remote server myremoteserver.com as user hungryhackers

The directory C:\work would be located in /mnt/windows/work. This command will transfer the directory:

scp -r /mnt/windows/work hungryhackers@myremoteserver.com

Enter the password for user hungryhackers and the file transfer will begin.