Archive for General
16th April, 2008 at 12:35 PM PDT · Filed under Design, General, Security
I just noticed that RapidShare had implemented a CAPTCHA with cats and dogs (I haven’t been to RapidShare.COM for a while). Their original one wasn’t that hard to break. The new is interesting because it requires a human to recognize the animal that is shown. Computers can’t do that.
But it looks to be still weak. It appears that Rapidshare uses the same image for the cat and dog for every CAPTCHA. It would be easy for a program to find the cat and dog images on the CAPTCHA, extract them, identify them, and remove them from the image so that the text can be very easily OCRed. Maybe if RapidShare distorted the image, used different fonts, added random lines, and used different images for the animals, then they would have a real chance against those automated download programs. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it already has been broken.
Edit: Well, (unfortunately…) it appears they have now added distortion and blurring… >.>
30th October, 2007 at 12:45 AM PDT · Filed under General
It’s nice and dandy that Facebook became a MySpace clone with its 3rd-party applications, earning Zuckerberg a little more for his pockets, but the volume of application invitations has become akin to the spam I get in my inbox. Presently, Facebook has no function to block these invitations, but some of you begging for some sanity in this mess don’t have to rely on Zuckerberg to get the wheels going. Grab the Greasemonkey extension for Mozilla Firefox and install Ali’s Auto-Block Facebook Apps script. When you visit your Facebook homepage (upon logging in, for example), new invites will be blocked automatically. Enjoy.
Update: Check out this funny video about the excess of Facebook apps. Echos my own opinion.
4th October, 2007 at 09:04 AM PDT · Filed under General
GrandCentral gives you a phone number that will be yours “for life.” Service began in 2005, but I only became aware of it when Google acquired the company back in July. When you get a call through your GrandCentral number, all the phones of your choosing will ring, and you are free to pick up on any of them. In case you don’t want to answer, you can send it to voicemail, and access it online or by phone. In addition, you can customize your ringback tones, your greetings—per group or person, or activate spam filtering.
My invite came only last week, but I’m already updating all my friends with my new number. For now, it doesn’t have SMS messaging (not that my cell plan paid for it anyway) or an easy way to make an outgoing call, but it’s saving me minutes, and that’s all I care. I have eight invites left, so if you want one, drop me a line. Available while supplies last.
3rd October, 2007 at 09:04 PM PDT · Filed under General
Now the black expanse has left behind its black, but now it’s asking for some color, or some image, or at least something. At least this is much better than the one that was up for a few months. It’s simple, and plain, yes, but I think I’m going to stick with it. (By the way, the CSS specifies the font size in pixels, which, I know, is a no-no, but I didn’t make the [original] theme. Can’t blame me!)
23rd July, 2007 at 06:24 PM PDT · Filed under General
In an effort to make this site easier to maintain, I’ve deleted all the original pages and returned my blog back to the root directory. And, in the interest of saving some time, I installed a pre-made skin called “Ninja Monkeys!” I hope you enjoy the black expanse that envelopes this neglected blog.
30th October, 2006 at 12:25 AM PST · Filed under General
BlueTOC is an object oriented approach to AOL Instant Messenger for PHP-based applications. It utilizes AIM’s TOC protocol (v2/v3). A new version of BlueTOC (2.3.000) is available.
Version 2.2.000, released today, was horrible. There were bugs everyone. 2.3.000, released today too, solved that. The newest version is a huge improvement (over 2.1.x at least) with “TOC3″ (not officially named TOC3 I don’t think) features such as client activity notification, encoded messages, among other things. Documentation is back and is useful as ever. Check it out. Build your own bot today! Additionally, I also wrote this neat “AIM IM mailing list” example.
I also found this interesting presentation on BlueTOC (albeit on an old version).