inside aebrahim's head

SMS.ac are Knavish Spammers

I recently found out (somewhat belatedly, I know) that the SMS.ac service (for which many of you will have already received “invitations”, and a few of you may have already signed up for) is a scam. I advise those who have already signed up to keep a close watch on their mobile phone bill and … Continue reading “SMS.ac are Knavish Spammers”

I recently found out (somewhat belatedly, I know) that the SMS.ac service (for which many of you will have already received “invitations”, and a few of you may have already signed up for) is a scam. I advise those who have already signed up to keep a close watch on their mobile phone bill and their email account (especially if it is a Hotmail email account). I will explain how the scam works below:

During sign up, the user is presented a notice that mentions that they should “Use your Hotmail email for best results!”. If the user enters a Hotmail address at this stage, later they will be explicitly asked for their Hotmail login information. If provided, using this login information, by default, the SMS.ac site will log into your Hotmail account, download your entire addressbook, and begin spamming each of the people listed in your addressbook multiple times, asking them to sign up for this “service”.

A potentially worse effect is that if you provide them with your mobile phone number, they may begin to send you SMS messages which you, as the recipient, will be charged for. This may happen even though you have not provided them credit card information, because during the sign up process you will have (likely unwittingly) agreed to have these messages sent to you and be charged for them by your mobile phone provider.

If you have already signed up for SMS.ac and have provided them with your email password, your first step should be to immediately change that compromised password so that SMS.ac will not continue to have access to your email account.

Second, if you have signed up for their SMS “services”, I recommend that you cancel your account with SMS.ac immediately and scrutinise your mobile phone bill at the end of the month for any unexpected charges.

If you have not yet signed up for SMS.ac, then you can prevent being affected by deleting all emails from SMS.ac without clicking on any links offered in their emails. If your email provider offers a ‘Mark as Junk/Spam’ option, you may wish to use that instead of doing a regular delete.

There is a wealth of information about SMS.ac online (most of which is rather negative), which you will be able to find using most search engines.

As a general reminder, divulging passwords to any third party website is never a good idea. It is good practice to have unique passwords for services for which security is essential, such as online banking and email. Good passwords are never less than 8 characters long, and there are tools online that will help you to create strong passwords.

UPDATE: SMS.ac is not just reading addressbooks from Hotmail accounts, but also from Gmail and Yahoo! accounts as well! Please don’t encourage this kind of repugnant behaviour by signing up for their “service”.

Computer World HK on Linux and Firefox

Computer World Hong Kong (CWHK) recently ran an article about alternatives to the Microsoft platform, focusing on Linux and Firefox. The article mentions the browser wars and quotes the WebSideStory statistics that we’ve all read so many times. When discussing the adoption of other open source software, it points out that the Singapore Ministry of … Continue reading “Computer World HK on Linux and Firefox”

Computer World Hong Kong (CWHK) recently ran an article about alternatives to the Microsoft platform, focusing on Linux and Firefox.

The article mentions the browser wars and quotes the WebSideStory statistics that we’ve all read so many times. When discussing the adoption of other open source software, it points out that the Singapore Ministry of Defence (MinDef) has already installed OpenOffice on 5,000 desktop machines (20,000 by March 2006), running alongside Office 97. MinDef had this to say about it:

“With our limited budget, we are always exploring opportunities to maximize the value for every dollar spent…We also intend to experiment with Linux desktops, but there are no concrete plans to replace the Microsoft Windows OS on the desktops at this point in time.”

Linux vendors are thrilled at the prospect, and MandrakeSoft’s Francois Bancilhon believes that as soon as customers start using OpenOffice and Mozilla, a switch to Linux is a no-brainer. Microsoft naturally maintains that Windows plus Internet Explorer is more compatible [me: okay, I can give them that], more secure, has a lower TCO, and that Internet Explorer remains the choice [me: emphasis mine] of customers and businesses worldwide.

CWHK examines Linux adoption amongst Hong Kong companies, and talks to Yusuf Goolamabbas of Outblaze, who also happens to be an avid Firefox advocate:

“We started our business in 1998,” said Yusuf Goolamabbas, managing architect for Hong Kong-based outsource-messaging provider Outblaze. “And we’ve been using Linux since Day One.” Goolamabbas noted that at that time, Windows 98 wasn’t suitable for his firm’s needs.

At work, Goolamabbas said that his firm’s engineers use Linux exclusively, while the marketing department uses Windows machines to stay in step with the firm’s 35 million users.

But Goolamabbas uses Red Hat Linux on his desktop machine at home. “My five-year-old daughter uses it without any problems,” said the Outblaze IT architect. Goolamabbas remains wary of IE’s reputation for Swiss-cheese-security and bemoaned the productivity lost as users spend time “killing viruses, squashing worms and keeping out Trojan horses.” He also declared that the HKSAR government could do more to promote usage of open-source software among its Netizenry. “The Hong Kong government says, ‘oh, everyone uses IE, but it’s not the case.”

The article is very detailed and covers a lot more topics as well. It’s well worth a read for anyone who is interested in learning about both the challenges of adopting open source software in Asia and the extent of its deployment there.

GDS with Firefox support coming Today

CNet reports that Google Desktop Search is coming out of beta today with new features including the ability to search Firefox history and Thunderbird mail. This is great news for Mozilla, though other desktop search engines such as Copernic have supported Firefox and Thunderbird for months already. Better late than never, eh?

Better late than never, eh?

CNN Censored in Beijing reporting on Taiwan

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised since I’ve heard others mention it happening before, but it was the first time I saw it for myself. Tonight CNN was covering the annual session of the National Peoples’ Congress, and was describing the efforts of the NPC to pass a law forbidding the secession of Taiwan, its renegade province. The story started out uncensored with video footage of the NPC. The CNN anchor talked about the topics discussed during the conference, and talked about China’s efforts to pass the anti-secession legislation. The anchor then went on to say that “critics are dubbing it a war preparation bill…” at which point the audio and video cut out for a few seconds and resumed when CNN had moved on to talking about measures aimed at Chinese farmers.

Featured Extension: Coral Distribution Network

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Coral NYU Distribution Network, here is a short introduction: Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price … Continue reading “Featured Extension: Coral Distribution Network”

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Coral NYU Distribution Network, here is a short introduction:

Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem.

Publishing through Coral is as simple as appending a short string to the hostname of objects’ URLs; a peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects browsers to participating caching proxies, which in turn cooperate to minimize load on the source web server. These volunteer sites that run Coral automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it, improving its availability. Using modern peer-to-peer indexing techniques, Coral will efficiently find a cached object if it exists anywhere in the network, requiring that it use the origin server only to initially fetch the object once.

Since I’m currently located in Beijing, I find the Coral Network very useful for accessing sites that have been censored by the Chinese Government. By simply adding .nyud.net:8090 onto the end of a hostname, it will fetch any page and deliver it to you via its cache. There are many other uses for it, such as accessing Slashdotted sites, but I use it primarily for accessing banned sites (for example, anything on Blogspot, TypePad or LiveJournal, amongst a lot of others).

In order to make things easy for us Firefox/Mozilla users, they’ve written a search engine plugin using which you can easily ‘Coralize’ any page, an extension with which you can ‘Coralize’ any links on the current page, and a ‘Coralize’ bookmarklet that Coralizes the currently viewed page.

I’m sure someone out there will find Coral as useful as I do.

Back to Real Life

It’s been around 50 days since I’ve posted anything to my blog. Certainly my longest hiatus yet. I’m very much out of touch with most things that have happened on the web since 7th January, and certainly am out of touch with happenings in the Mozilla world. What have I been up to? I did … Continue reading “Back to Real Life”

What have I been up to? I did some travelling over my Chinese New Year break, and then as soon as I got back and was ready to pick up again, my laptop’s hard drive died, so I lost another few days before Dell replaced it.

Where have I been? I finished my final exams in Beijing on 7th January in the morning, and then the trek began:

07th January:  Beijing, China to Hong Kong (by air)
08th January:  Hong Kong to Singapore (by air)
17th January:  Singapore to Mumbai, India (by air)
22nd January:  Mumbai, India to Kolkata, India (by air)
30th January:  Kolkata, India to Mumbai, India (by air)
01st February: Mumbai, India to Singapore (by air)
03rd February: Singapore to Hong Kong (by air)
12th February: Hong Kong to Mumbai, India (by air)
13th February: Mumbai, India to Surat, India (by train)
19th February: Surat, India to Mumbai, India (by train)
20th February: Mumbai, India to Hong Kong (by air)
21st February: Hong Kong to Beijing, China (by air)

I just got back online from my laptop last night, because on the 20th, my hard drive failed, so I had to bring my broken laptop to China and get it fixed here. Dell was actually very good about it, they replaced my old 60GB/2MB cache drive with a new 80GB/8MB cache drive. They also replaced my motherboard because I told them my fan was making wheezing noises. Apparently the easiest way to remedy this was to replace the mobo, since the fan is attached to it. In any case, I’m not complaining.

I hope to get back in touch with Firefox happenings, so I can start triaging bugs again as soon as possible.

Gates brands IPR opponents Communists

CNET’s News.com was able to interview Bill Gates at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It’s a pretty interesting read, if for no other reason than it gives a window into the software industry’s most well known individual. However, in a not so subtle way, Gates likens IPR opponents to communists. I think this … Continue reading “Gates brands IPR opponents Communists”

However, in a not so subtle way, Gates likens IPR opponents to communists. I think this is very much a misnomer. Here it is in his own words:

Q: In recent years, there’s been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, “We’ve got to look at patents, we’ve got to look at copyrights.” What’s driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?

A: No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist.

Make of that what you will, but I think his usage of the word communist here is pretty misleading, and is just trying to play upon the general public’s ignorance of what communism actually is and their misconception that communism is inherently evil.

There’s also the obligatory quote marginalising Firefox, but we’ve heard all that stuff before, so I’m not going to reproduce it.

Mac Firefox Install Problems

I recently set up an OS X machine, installing 10.3 to start with (base install plus BSD subsystem), and then upgrading to 10.3.7 and installing the required security updates. Having a completely clean system, I decided to install Firefox. I tried to do the install from an end user perspective, seeing what kind of experience … Continue reading “Mac Firefox Install Problems”

I recently set up an OS X machine, installing 10.3 to start with (base install plus BSD subsystem), and then upgrading to 10.3.7 and installing the required security updates. Having a completely clean system, I decided to install Firefox. I tried to do the install from an end user perspective, seeing what kind of experience they could expect. I figured I was in a position to do this, since I know little about OS X. Here is that tale:

I fired up Safari (great browser, clean interface) and head over to GetFirefox.com to download Firefox 1.0. In true end user style, I decided to forgo reading any documentation whatsoever and just hit the large “Free Download” link.

A few minutes later, I had a Firefox 1.0.dmg.gz file on my desktop, which I double clicked on. I was greeted with the following dialog:

I chose the ‘Choose Application…’ option and tried to find something that could reasonably be expected to open .gz files, but I wasn’t able to find anything that matched that description.

Having now reached the point at which most end users give up, I decided to be a more savvy end user, and go and read up on some docs. So, off I go and I end up at the Firefox 1.0 release notes, which have install instructions:

Double click the Firefox 1.0.dmg.dz Disk Image to uncompress and mount it. Your browser may have already done this for you. Double click the Firefox Disk Image to open it in Finder and drag the Firefox application onto your hard disk. Do not double click the icon in the disk image! Be sure to drag the Firefox application out of the disk image and onto your Hard Disk before running it. Drag the icon to your Dock if you want it to appear there.

Wait a second, didn’t I just do this? Safari had no earthly idea what to do with the .dmg.gz, so it didn’t open it, and obviously MacOS X had no idea either. Dead end.

The Camino download page had some instructions that looked potentially useful:

Once you’ve downloaded the .dmg.gz file, drag it onto Stuffit Expander to decompress it. If the disk image doesn’t mount automatically, double-click on the .dmg file to mount it. If that fails, and the file does not look like a disk image file, do a “Show Info” on the file, and, in the “Open with application” category, choose Disk Copy. In Mac OS 10.2, you can use “Open with” from the context menu.

But, my install of OS X didn’t have Stuffit Expander, nor did it have the Disk Copy application. After a little further research, I found out that starting in OS X 10.3, the functionality of Disk Copy was integrated into Disk Utility, but I was unable to get Disk Utility to do anything useful with the .dmg.gz file. Another dead end. This is way more than the amount of work we can expect 99% of end users to do, and I still hadn’t got Firefox installed.

Now, I realise that OS X has a BSD base, and has command line utilities to un-gzip files. But really, do we expect an end user to have to do that? I hope not. This install routine assumes too much about users’ systems and the tools they have at their disposal. This is not good.

There is an easy solution, which is to make Firefox available as a .dmg file rather than a .dmg.gz. We should be doing this anyway, because the standard way of distributing Mac software is via .dmg files. Presenting the user with a familiar install process will result in a much better user experience, with more completed installs. It’s rather unreasonable to expect end users to have to troubleshoot getting the installer disk image mounted.

UPDATE: The relevant bugs are as follows:

Bug 169602: [Camino] Use compressed disk image instead of gzip’d dmg for installer
Bug 242845: Firefox disk image should use .dmg internal zlib-compression, not .dmg.gz
Bug 268074: [Suite] Mozilla DMGs are redundantly compressed with gzip
Bug 276571: Thunderbird disk image should use .dmg internal zlib-compression, not .dmg.gz

UPDATE 2: Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla are all now distributed in compressed DMG format!

UPDATE 3 (11 May 2005): Camino nightlies are now distributed in compressed DMG format! Also, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) no longer ships with Stuffit Expander installed by default, thus making this change even more important.

MovableType hit hard by Comment Spam

In the last few months, comment spam has become a huge issue, recently culminating in many hosts taking their customers’ MT blogs offline. In related news, Six Apart has hired Jay Allen of MT-Blacklist fame to help them combat comment spam. I’m hoping that with Jay Allen on board, MT will get some real comment … Continue reading “MovableType hit hard by Comment Spam”

I’m hoping that with Jay Allen on board, MT will get some real comment spam fighting tools, including the following:

Integration of supported MT-Blacklist into default MT install.
Addition of a toggle for disabling/enabling comments/trackback in the power entry editing interface, so we can do this in batches.

HP recommending testing webapps in Firefox

In a monthly web standards newsgram, HP recommends testing webapps in Firefox. They note that after IE6, Mozilla based browsers are the second most popular UAs that hit HP.com. That’s very interesting, since that means we must be beating out even older revisions of IE. They put it pretty well: “Make sure your Web Section … Continue reading “HP recommending testing webapps in Firefox”

They put it pretty well: “Make sure your Web Section is as smooth and polished in Firefox as it is in IE. Don’t let your customers find your bugs first!”

It’s great to see this kind of enterprise adoption catching on.