Author Archives: Laz

Who’s Been Viewing My Facebook Page?

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Facebook UnfriendI thought I would put up a quick post on this topic because I keep seeing it make the rounds on Question/Answer sites like Askeville, Yahoo and the like. It’s interesting to see the answers that some people provide, from it cannot be done to it can just do this or buy my special software tool and see everything! I am not sure why people are all that tied up about who is looking at their Facebook page, but, it seems to be important to a lot of folk. Here is what I have been able to find out.

According to Facebook technical folks, the truth is, no one can see who’s been on your Facebook page. There are no features buried in the Facebook settings with that data, and there are no apps that can unearth that information for you. Facebook says that this is one of the most common scam tactics that is used to defraud users of the site. Don’t fall for it; you cannot see who is or has been looking at your profile, and no one can see if you have been looking at theirs.

LOLCat UnfriendIn other news, there are apps and tools to see who’s un-friended you. Facebook tries to minimize these apps, but they can be found. There is one that you download to your computer called UnFriend Finder and another for Android called Friends Checker. Sign in, and they store a list of your friends.  Then, every time you check back, it tells you who’s no longer on the list.  UnFriend Finder also reminds you of friend requests you’ve made that haven’t been answered. For Twitter, Qwitter does the same thing, telling you who’s un-followed you each week. Naturally, the earlier you employ these tools, the more effective they will be.

Please note that mentioning any tools in this post is not an endorsement of those tools, no one here at Solarum has seen or used them in any way and therefore are not recommending them. They are listed for informational purposes only. Hope that helps!!

Updated Firefox Must Have Extensions

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Just a quick note to let visitors know that I have updated the Must Have Firefox Extensions page in the Library, so feel free to check it out and see what we have down as the Firefox extensions that you have to have. Sure there are lots of others to get too, but you pretty much gotta get these to even get started! 😛 Thanks

New Nav System In Effect

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This blog is my baby, and even though I don’t get to post every day, I am always on the lookout for good information to put here. I firmly believe in quality over quantity. So far, this site has been around for over five years. It gets hundreds of thousands of visits per month, and holds a couple hundred thousand words of information meant to help people with various subjects and topics. I have created guides and reference sheets for various things, there are tool downloads, links and more. The point I am getting at is that I have a lot of stuff here, posts and pages, especially posts. So, I setup a new navigation menu at the bottom of the page so instead of just being able to go one page at a time through the forty pages or more of posts, you can now navigate through it much faster and easier. I like it a lot, it makes moving around a breeze, and seems to be working well. I hope you like it too, and if you have any trouble with it, or have a suggestion or something, be sure to hit the Contact page and let me know! Enjoy 🙂

For anyone that is interested, the new nav system is a modified install of the WP-PageNavi plugin. Check it out if you need or want something similar it is very well made!

More Hacking Without The Slashing

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Blizzard Ninja ProtectionIt seems that earlier this week (8/5/2012 –  8/11/2012) the network and I am sure some servers at Blizzard, the game company behind most notably World of Warcraft got hacked. A list of games that are either played or are accessible online are at the end of this post for your reference in order to help determine if this company is behind a game that you play/like.

At this time, Blizzard “security experts”, and law enforcement are investigating what happened. They are working to find out how someone managed to get into parts of Blizzard’s network where they didn’t belong, but also what information might have been lifted before the nefarious access could be cut off Go Here. So far, Blizzard claims that at this time there is no evidence that any financial information such as credit cards, billing addresses, or real names were compromised. Their work is far from over, but they have found nothing to suggest that these pieces of information have been accessed.

The only information that they can confirm was illegally accessed include a list of email addresses for global Battle.net users, outside of China. Players on North American servers (which include players from North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia) had information regarding the answers to personal security questions accessed, and even information about Dial-in and Mobile Authenticators was gotten too. However, based on what Blizzard currently knows, this information alone is not enough for anyone to gain access to players Battle.net accounts.

It appears too that some encrypted passwords were taken as well, however, Blizzard is confident that their encryption methods and use of SRP (Secure Remote Password protocol) to protect these passwords, will make it extremely difficult to extract the actual passwords themselves. They do recommend that all Battle.net users change their passwords for good measure, and take care if the password used here is or was used anywhere else, for any other services, and recommend changing that password also.

All in all, this is a bad way to end the week for Blizzard. I expect that a great effort will go into finding whoever did this, catching them, and using them as a bright and shiny example of not messing around with Blizzard. Just my 2cp worth.

*Notes: Other games that Blizzard is known for and currently active with include World of Warcraft, Diablo II, Diablo III, StarCraft II and more. However, these are the most relevant and Internet connected of them.

A little history for all us starnix guys (and gals) out there

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<a href="http://www.solarum weight reduction pills.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ken-and-den-1024.jpg” target=”_blank”>Ken Thompson (seated) and Dennis RitchieIf you spend any amount of time working with or administering UNIX and/or Linux servers, especially UNIX, you should be familiar with the text editor ‘vi’ and some commands like ‘sed’ and ‘awk’. If you have been around a while, or had the good(?) fortune of working on some old(er) systems, you might even remember the line editor ‘ed’. I’ll show my age here and recall fond memories of using ‘ed’ to write code many years back.

OK, on to the point, I was looking through Wikipedia for something entirely un-related, but ran across a tidbit of information that I thought was really cool, and that I knew I had to share with Solarum’s readers. It gives a bit of history about some of the tools that we use and love today.

From Wikipedia:

“ed is a line editor for the Unix operating system. It was one of the first end-user programs hosted on the system and has been standard in Unix-based systems ever since. ed was originally written in PDP-11/20 assembler by Ken Thompson in 1971. Ken Thompson was very familiar with an earlier editor known as qed from University of California at Berkeley, Ken Thompson’s alma mater; he reimplemented qed on the CTSS and Multics systems, so it is natural that he carried many features of qed forward into ed. Ken Thompson’s versions of qed were the first to implement regular expressions, an idea that had previously been formalized in a mathematical paper, which Ken Thompson had read. The implementation of regular expressions in ed is considerably less general than the implementation in qed.

ed went on to influence ex, which in turn spawned vi. The non-interactive Unix command grep was inspired by a common special use of qed and later ed, where the command g/re/p means globally search for the regular expression re and print the lines containing it. The Unix stream editor, sed implemented many of the scripting features of qed that were not supported by ed on Unix; sed, in turn, influenced the design of the programming language AWK, which in turn inspired aspects of Perl.”

It’s pretty cool how stuff flows and comes together. Who knew or would have thought that a couple simple commands or programs would turn into what we have today.

*Note: starnix refers to the combination of UNIX, Linux and any other ix/ux OS that we work with.

SPAM ALERT!

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Like everyone else I get a ton of SPAM in my inbox, even with all of the SPAM fighting tools I can find and use.  Usually, as a last line of defense I use a product called Mailwasher to catch anything that gets past server filters, but we’ll talk about Mailwasher later.  This post is the first of many I am sure where I thought I would alert folks to some pieces of mail that are especially crafty that get through and look legit but carry dangerous payloads.  These messages carry viruses, or are Phishing attacks (where people try to trick you into giving them information like usernames and passwords) so I thought I would start posting about the ones that I see.  I get people and customers asking me about these emails and what they are and if they are real or not, etc., so I thought some of my readers might have the same questions.

So, here we go with the first two:

  1. Look out for emails that appear to be from PayPal.  They will look like they came from a valid PayPal address and will have a subject saying something like “You sent a payment” and in the body of the message they will tell you that you sent a payment of X number of dollars (it varies between emails but is usually anywhere from a hundred to thousands of dollars).  It will then have links to click on to supposedly get information about the payment.  This is where they spring the trap, when you click on the links.  Most likely you will be sent to a fake PayPal login page, and when you log in you will get some kind of error or redirect, but most importantly, they now have your PayPal username and password, think about that!  So be on the lookout, if you haven’t sent any payments, or don’t use PayPal even, don’t fall for these emails.  Just delete them, and if you feel the need to check your PayPal account, you go to PayPal directly by typing in the address yourself so you know you are going to the right place.
  2. Next, we have an email carrying a virus payload called DROPPER.  Your anti-virus software (you ARE using AV aren’t you???) should catch it, but just in case I’ll post the common headers below.  Keep in mind that they might look slightly different, such as a different case number, but it should be similar.  Keep in mind too, when have you had any contact with the Better Business Bureau?  If you haven’t, which is likely, then that ought to be the first red flag with these emails!  Here are the subject and from address as I have seen them:
    1. From: Better Business Bureau (info@bbb.org)
    2. Subject: BBB assistance Re: Case # 27368244

Remember, the case number may vary, and as always, keep a keen eye on your email and remember that if it looks suspicious, it probably is!