You might give away your e-mail password in a platter!! How?

Man, Man, Man, Dude, Dude, Dude... I just missed out giving away my password to some stupid hackers. And those hackers are so so stupid and I will tell you how they have set up the entire game!! I am so busy that most of the times I am not much attentive and like to do things fast, but this time around a little attention saved me. Next time onwards I will be a lot more attentive.

E-mail is such an important thing and people have so much important information stored in an e-mail address. Numerous other login information, bank information, personal information and even credit card information. Moreover people use e-mails for password recovery. If anyone hacks your e-mail he can get your facebook password and all other passwords just by clicking on the small forgot password link!!

Now, lets have a look at the plot!!!

I get an e-mail from an E-mail Address noreply-alert@yahoo.com which seems like a Yahoo! e-mail address. Below is what the e-mail is about:-

So here you may notice that they are using a yahoo.com e-mail not yahoo-inc.com e-mail which are officially used by Yahoo! I worked in Yahoo! for sometime and I had one of those e-mails. Generally the e-mails which you receive from Yahoo! are customercare-en@cc.yahoo-inc.com and do-not-reply@yahoo-inc.com. But yet it is possible to send you e-mails from these e-mail addresses or even your own e-mail address!!! You don't know how? Its very easy. They will just use the PHP mail() function and use any e-mail which they want to send from in the sender's field. If you do not know any programming and don't believe that, just contact me and I will send an e-mail from your e-mail address to your e-mail address, just to show you how it works. So never trust the information which you get through an e-mail or I would say trust with caution and do not reply and give away any sensitive data through those e-mails.

Once you click on the Click here link you are redirected to a page which looks Much like the Yahoo! login page!! Yes not completely like. Below is how it looks, but 70% of intelligent people would not notice the small things I have pointed out in the image below:-

After I filled in the form with some false username and password, and clicked on the sign in button, I was redirected to the Yahoo! e-mail page as expected. Most of the people know that you need not sign in again if you are already signed in, but in a hurry they might put in their correct username and password just to see what is in it for them. And then they do not even realize that their username and password has been saved in the database of these buggers.

You might wonder how they made a page like this. But I assure you don't need great skills to copy the front end of a web page. You just copy and html and css and upload it in your website. These guys did the same and just linked the form to their database. This means whatever you enter in those fields gets stored in their database after which they smoothly redirect you to the Yahoo! e-mail page which you are already logged into!!

So how to be safe??

• Always look for suspicious things like this e-mail. Yahoo! never sends you a stupid e-mail like that saying that you have incoming e-mails. If you have incoming e-mails they would come to your mailbox.
• Moreover never login or give any information into a page which in a different domain than the one in which you had opened your account.

This is the website which has played this silly game - http://www.appdroplet.com/. We do not expect people who know programming to use their brains in a wrong way, but these buggers did. They seem like a good startup, but do you know consequences these kind of stupid adventures have to their business. They might be blocked by all ISPs. They might be blacklisted by search engines. They might even end up in a lockup and will never get any sort of funding or even bank loan if people come to know about what kind of practices they follow. These are far consequences. All their customers will cancel contracts with them and they will not get any new customers.

Biking, my passion since a decade.

I have been biking since I was in college. It was a passion which started with cycling and then biking. My first bike was a Pulsar 150 which was well maintained although it was well exploited!

Speed was so thrilling and pulled up the adrenaline level so much, that we headed to the highway every now and then, when the speedometer seldom went below speeds of 100km per hour. At some points of time the pointer kept flickering near the 120 kmph mark, as pulsar 150 does not go more than that. At such speeds, it feels like you are going to fly off the bike, and yes you would if you leave the handle for a second. And in the turns, its so exciting when bike bends to such a level that your knees almost touch the ground.

Its not only about speed, there are also those hilly roads and difficult terrain where you cannot fly fast. Even riding in those places has their own joy. The round swirling and narrow roads, the mountains on one side and the ditch extending down to the valley on other. The chilled temperature and the breeze, along with the scenic beauty give you the ultimate experience. All you need to do is just move at speeds of 40 to 50 kmph, enjoy the views and breath the fresh air.

Also one in a while, we have those endurance trips where we ride 600 to 800 kms a day and go huge distances in the bike. This is all about pushing yourselves to the limits, be awake and keep driving. You really enjoy the drive till a certain point but then it becomes a bit monotonous, your body starts paining (especially neck, back and eyes. But then when you reach the destination and then again come back it is a great satisfaction which remains for a long time and also gives you a lot of bragging rights.

It the wonderful combination of the man and the machine and the passion the man has which makes the ride really enjoyable. Biking means a lot to me as I enjoy each moment of riding and have a deep friendship with the machine!

This post is an entry to the Indiblogger Castrol Contenst. I always use Castrol Engine Oil in my bike, and its the best. If you are a biking fan like me, Like Castrol in Facebook at this link - www.facebook.com/CastrolBiking

Chinese Masala Dosa – A really unusual but awesome Gastronomy

I do not use my kitchen at home. Many reasons, lack of time and interest being some of them. But the most important reason is I am not the best cook in the world, and I want to explore the gastronomy of others who are much better than me.

Being an ardent lover of food, I never stop experimenting. Everytime I move into a restaurant, I try to order something which I did not order before in that restaurant. And yes most of the times I enter into restaurants where I have not entered before. And if the restaurant has a good, long and fancy menu, I am a regular visitor for the next few days to get a taste of more or less everything in the menu.

One night, I was late from work and was in search of a descent restaurant near the Outer Ring Road of Bangalore but I could not find one. I wanted to have something light and was slowly strolling in the service road with my bike in search of a food joint. Suddenly I saw a small stall with 3 small round tawas where a lot of people were crowded. I saw that place a number of times but never bothered to stop. I thought of giving it a try that night.

There was no signboards, no menus, no tables and even no chairs. It looked like a big pan stall near any footpath. So I asked the guy – what do you have today? He started chanting the menu in a fast pace and after he had almost taken around 20 names I asked him to stop. The few names which I can recall are Muglai Dosa, Paneer Dosa, Chicken Dosa, which had cheese and butter versions as well. The name which struck me the most was Chinese Dosa.  Chinese and Dosa, does those words seem any similar by any chance? I thought  - This is what I need to try out tonight.

I asked the chef – “What is this Chinese Dosa all about?” He answered – “Sir, have it and see, you will come to know.” I asked him – “What is it made of?” He answered – “I recommend you to have this, you wont repent..” Having said so, he started preparing the dosa. In the meantime I asked him, “How many varieties do you have in your menu?” To my utter surprise he answered – “200 different types of dosa, Sir”.

I kept quiet and just observed him preparing the dosa in the small, flat and round tawa. He spread out the batter first in the tawa, like any other dosa. And then he started putting the ingredients inside the dosa, he started with noodes, 3 different kinds of ketchups, some chicken pieces, some vegetables, lot of cheese, some butter and some other ingredients which I did not recognize or do not remember. However I took the dosa and had it, it was an awesome gastronomy, a strange but tasty outcome. It was a good treat for just Rs. 50.

If any of you(my readers) want to have Chinese or any other variety of dosa from this shop in the outer ring road, the treat is on me, if you comment here and vote for my post in Indiblogger. J

Get a Google Plus Account just in 3 steps.

I have seen many people bragging around with a Google plus account asking people if they need invites. So many people out there also are looking for an invite to stay in tune with the most recent social networking site which got much hype - The Google Plus. It may be quite irritating for those who really want to check this out but this is the known marketing policy or you may say prank of Google to create a scarcity initially. We had seen the same in case of Gmail as well.

Now, there is a really easy way to join Google plus even without getting an invite from anyone. Follow the below procedure and you will be the master of yourself and gain unlimited bragging:-

1. Go to Google and search Google Plus and then open the link. Or just click here. On clicking this link you will see something like below:-

After clicking the Sign In button you will be redirected to the following page where you can login using your Google Account. If you don't have a Google Account, just get one immediately.

After signing in you will be surprised to see that you already have a Google Plus Account. Wondering if there are more steps. Sorry to disappoint you, there are no more steps. Just wander around the interface create your circles, import your contacts etc and check out how you like it. And yes, no need to beg for invites any more, you may yourself brag of having a Google Plus account.

The Great Facebook Fiasco

I have worked in startup web development and internet marketing teams, and whenever we used to make some content live, it used to go through several approvals. If a wrong content live in the internet that’s alright, until you do a massive advertisement, if it is live in the Social Networks, you are in a trouble. Because it gets shared and again shared, and the viewer ship multiplies over time. By the time you correct it, it would be too late and millions of people would have damned it.

Every small company wants to be perfect. I remember my manager calling me up in the weekends, nervous and worried, because some spelling mistakes were there in the website. I used to correct it immediately. And there used to be a few mistakes, which mostly went un noticed because the audience we were serving was smaller, compared to facebook.

What about the Big Companies? I have seen facebook, google, yahoo, amazon, ebay go weird at times, name any other site, it has at least some mistakes in its content, coding and everything else. This time facebook has crossed the limit, and a huge mistake committed by it caused trouble to thousands of people worldwide. Below is the plot.

I registered for the Hacker’s Cup Qualification Event on Facebook. Like me thousands of other people registered for the event. The event page clearly says – 4 PM on 8th to 4 PM on 11th. It never mentioned the time zone there. The time zone was mentioned in the Description which most of the people did not notice. Now here goes the fiasco – Facebook sent event invitations through its own inbuilt application to the 90K odd participants where the time appears at 4 PM of the respective time zones of the participants.

Actually the time zone is 4 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST) which is 5:30 AM(9th Jan) IST and different other times across the world. People from over 180 countries had joined the event and were logging into the event page when their respective times showed 4 PM on Friday. Today is Friday and I did the same at 4 PM and saw nothing was happening although my event alert in my profile page was showing that the event was happening now!

I had a chat with a few co-participant developers and come to know that 1 guy had cancelled his evening plans with plans to participate in the event. Another guy had taken leave from his work to participate in this event. But the event did not happen at all.

And people are hating Facebook for this:-

Facebook could have checked out a time conversion mechanism in its events application which could have saved them from this silly mistake which created a trouble and wasted time of thousands of developers. So the conclusion is that, even Facebook guys are made of blood and bones and can do mistakes. So all other managers in the world, never compare your guys to Facebook or Google guys, because even they commit mistakes just like your guys do.