406 Not Acceptable

I’ve found a website I won’t be visiting again, the forums of EMSI software – the developers of ‘a-squared’ an anti malware/spyware/whateverware tool. This is all thanks to their rather draconian forum rules, which make it nigh on impossible for a user to get any real help. As it is not possible for another user — who has experienced the same issues and knows how to fix the problem — to help the original poster without the permission from a moderator (read: staff member.)

Now I find that rather stupid. What is the point of actually asking for help on the forum? All users get in response is the usual ‘Please give Hijackthis log’, etc. from the moderators. Then when someone who knows the solutions posts, that post will be deleted and the user warned.

I only found the site as I had a nasty peice of software which was redirecting DNS requests. This made it impossible to update any tools (mostly security stuff is blocked e.g. Malwarebytes, Superantispyware, microsoft downloads,) or visit the websites of major security software developers. After some random google fun I came across a post on the EMSI software forums. The poster had the same problem. Sadly the post just contained numerous moderator requests for logs and those logs being posted. No working solutions were posted and the moderators/staff members seem stumped.

What a shame I had fixed the issue myself, and knew how to fix it. So I thought: ‘Hey, I’ll quickly register and tell the guy how to fix his problem.’ After my quick good deed I went back to failing some more at Ikea diy and falling over on my rollerblades.

I get up this morning and check to see if the guy had fixed his issue. My post was deleted and I got the usual moderators Private Message (being a moderator elsewhere I know too well what these are like.) I couldn’t believe they thought I was asking for help (I was posting a SOLUTION,) however, after paying more attention I noticed my post was deleted because I didn’t have the authority to post ANYTHING on the topic. I had to ask for permission to do so…

Now maybe I should have read the forum rules, but when you are a forum moderator elsewhere and had visited multitudinous forums over the years you feel your already know them. (Don’t swear, don’t advertise, don’t post links, etc.) I am shocked at the draconian set of rules enforced by EMSI software. Surely with that ruleset barely any problems will get resolved thus the users migrate to other malware forums and go on to use other tools?

I’ve given the poster my post by private message, so by the time this post gets indexed by google he should have read it and fixed his issue.

I won’t be visiting them again.

Just a few minutes ago I registered jamesmorris.org. I never believed I could own a high level domain for my own name, seeing as it’s so popular. There’s just too many of us!

I guess I am an organisation now? Sweet…

All the site will do for now is redirect you here, but I guess it will come in handy for email. I know, it was a spur of the moment thing, but owning your name matters

My crummy ISP decided they’d give me 3 days of downtime, so sorry for the lapse. Shame, as I had a nice little run of posts going…

Another day, another three Firefox extensions ready for you to try out.

Request Access

Whether you’re still in education or stuck at work (I made that sound fun, didn’t I?) It’s highly likely that you have seen the ‘Access Denied: Inappopiate Content’ message, or filtered by ‘x’ webpage crop up on numerous occasions. Well how about a nice extension for you to message whoever decided to block the site in question? With some luck the site may be accessable one day.

We have a bit of a theme here, two extensions used for annotating the web. A really handy set of tools if you’re writing a dissertation, thesis, or just an esssay. I’ll be repeating myself if I describe the benefits of each extension, so I’ll let the authors do the talking. These extensions handle the task of annotating the web in different ways, one with a separate frame, the other in sticky note style.

ReframeIt

ReframeIt adds a collapsible side-margin to your web browser where you can comment on the text of any website. All comments are part of a free online community where you can share your thought and ideas across the web.ReframeIt adds a new layer of meaning to the web by allowing users to provide their own comments along-side any website. The ReframeIt Plug-in creates a collapsible margin in the side of your web browser where the your thoughts and ideas are displayed. All Comments are organized through groups and tags allowing other users to locate interesting web content and see it placed in a new context.

Fleck

Fleck allows you to add Notes and Bullets to websites. You can then share these annotated pages with other people. After installation a small button will appear in your browser. Click that button when you visit a website and you will get a toolbar at the bottom of the page you are visiting. Another small icon will show you if there are Annotated versions of the page you are currently visiting.

I thought I’d spend some time searching the vast range of extensions available for Firefox, looking for some potentially great extensions that you don’t hear much about. There are many extensions out there just waiting to be discovered. Many of which can be extremely beneficial for some, but will never be everyones cup of tea.

Cache Status

Most people complain about Firefox 2’s extreme use of memory, Cache Status provides a handy little fix. Providing cache information and the ability to manually clear the cache. I know this is possible from within the about:config menu, but why bother when Cache Status can free up memory for you?

Video DownloadHelper

There are plenty of good videos on Youtube, Megatube, Dailymotion, and all those other video streaming sites. Now there are three problems with these sites: you have to be online to view them, the servers can get hit pretty badly causing really slow streaming, and finally videos can often get removed from the sites. Why bother with any of these problems again, when you could just download the video. Many sites provide this functionality, but why not just use this handy extension instead?

Snap Shots

Snap shots of websites is one of the features Ask.com is toting as one of their main features that Google does not have. Well why bother with Ask anymore, when you could go back to good old Google and use this extension to get the Snap Shots for you?

That’s it for now, expect another 3 good extensions in the future.

It seems to be a widely known face that the real strength behind Mozilla’s Firefox browser is in the wide range of extensions available. Whilst Opera might have more core functionality, Firefox has the potential to be the superior browser, especially now the memory issue is fixed.

But if I could only choose four Firefox extensions, what would I choose? Here are my choices in the usual reverse order:

4. DownThemAll

I find this extension so useful when on a fast line. My internet connection seems to be around the 12Mb area (I don’t know the actual speed, as I get the thing for free) and when your downloading you often find that you get nowhere near your connections actual speed. Using any download manager will do the trick and bring those speeds back into line, but why bother with an external manager when you can have one specially built for your favorite browser?

3. Adblock Plus

Whilst Adblock seems to still be the more popular extension, Adblock Plus is by far the superior option for removing adverts from your internet experience. Whilst Adblock requires manual blocking of advertisements, Adblock Plus uses a set of continually updated set of filters to do the blocking automatically. In addition, the extension can — not by default — attempt to regain the space that would have been taken up by the advertisement.

2. Nightly Tester Tools

Now although this extension is designed to help testers when using the nightly ‘Minefield’ releases of Firefox, this tool has one major feature that all users of Firefox would find useful — force Firefox to believe an extension is compatible with the current version and enable it. Now why would you want to do this? Well unlike Internet Explorer, which seems to get large updates every now and again; Firefox is updated with bug and security fixes pretty regularly. When this happens all of your extensions will be disabled, as they are signed as being compatible up to the last version released; although many extensions are updated within hours of this occurring, many extensions are not. In addition, users may still be able to use extensions that were abandoned by their creator. Please be careful whilst using this extension, as it could cause problems with your browser.

1. NoScript

Everyone hates pop-ups and there are even worse things than pop-ups on the web these days. Thankfully Firefox’s built in pop-up blocker does a good job in removing pop-ups, so do Internet Explorer and Opera, but browsers with blockers just happened to be a double-edged sword. Since a large portion of their pop-ups were annoying anyone anymore, whoever it is that likes to make the damn things decided to work out how to get round all these blockers. Instead the internet (which is serious business by the way) is infested with Javascript based advertisements. These damn things can either block 99.9999% of the bloody screen, follow your scrolling of the page, follow your mouse (by now you start to wonder why they haven’t got the message,) jump out of no-where when you click a link, and steal your first wallet. Ok they might not steal your wallet, but they frustrate me more than pop-ups ever did.

So you could just turn off Javascript, for sure that would kill the little fuckers, but you wouldn’t be able to surf half the web either. So that’s where NoScript comes in and saves the day. NoScript turns off Javascript for every site and lets you whitelist the sites that you do want to allow to use Javascript. Thus you no longer have to view the annoying advertisements, plus you can still do your internet banking. Between NoScript and Adblock Plus you can truely reclaim the web.

What would your choices be?

Yes, that does sound confusing, but you can hide a .rar achive ‘inside’ a jpeg picture file. You can use this to stash away some files you don’t want other users on your computer from seeing. Alternatively you could just use encryption, but this is a quick and easy way to do things, that lets you hide files effectively from normal users. Be warned that it is possible to find the files with tools such as enCase… Thanks to Helpero for this nice tip.

I’d love to toss in some demonstration pictures, but my computer is currently running Ubuntu and I would need to install Windows to do so!

Basically, with this method you can open the file as either a picture or a rar archive. So a normal user will just double click the file and it will open as a picture, whilst you can drag it into Winrar (or any alternative) and it will open as an archive.

Here we go:

1. Find your .rar archive and put it in the same directory as a jpeg picture (I will use C:\ as it is easy to work from there. You can then just copy and paste the file to a better directory.)
2. Open a command prompt by clicking Start, then clicking Run, and typing ‘cmd’  in the Run box and click ok.
3. In the Command window (CMD window) that has appeared, type your directory should already be in the C drive other wise you will need to navigate their. If your CMD window starts in a different directory you can either direct the window their using DOS style commands, or just use that directory for the process (simply move the picture and jpeg to that folder.)
4. Enter ‘copy /b input.jpg + secret.rar ouput.jpg’ without quotes in the CMD window and press Enter.

Remember input.jpg is the picture you are cloning and secret.rar is the file you are hiding. Output.jpg will be the file that has the winrar archive hidden inside.

Open the archive in Winrar to make sure you got everything working correctly.

I am sure everyone and their dog  knows about Firefox 2’s severe memory issues. Version 2.0 was meant to use more memory than previous versions, as it was designed to cache pages in ram dependent on the amount of ram in the machine. Now this was all well and good, but something went wrong and Firefox 2 decided it didn’t like to give memory back — thus, our friendly browser turned into a memory hog.

It’s good to see that Mozilla have targeted the memory issue with Firefox 3, and beta 3 fixed over 350 memory issues:

Memory usage: Over 350 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 3 includes more than 50 improvements to memory use over the previous beta.

I’ve done a little test, by running both Firefox 2.0.0.12 alongside Firefox 3.0b3 for about 20 minutes to see how each handled memory under Ubuntu Gutsy. I think this image shows some quite conclusive results:

That’s around half the memory usage for Firefox 3.0b3! Quite remarkable, I am sure you may have different results, after all Firefox is designed to use more memory if you have it — secondly, you will be browsing different sites and using different extensions to me. In this test both browsers had Adblock Plus! and NoScript installed, but turned off.

I’ve noticed Firefox 3 is much more responsive and I do like the extension searching function (sorry Mozilla, I’ve been around since 0.6 so I’ll keep on calling them extensions.) The only problem I have with the browser is the new UI, the Linux look is sub-par — Firefox 2 has a much nicer interface. Whilst the Windows ‘keyhole’ button looks horrendous and so does the attempt at a keyhole on the Mac. Mozilla should provide the old interface with the browser, as the new one fails to deliver. The idea behind the keyhole based button is all well and good, but it needs to be implemented much, much better to be effective; I can see many users simply downloading a Firefox 2 based theme to get rid of the ugly button!

The Dreamhost support wiki seems to be lacking in information on general connectivity with Linux (especially for Evolution!) I would guess this is due to the lack of Dreamhost users that use a Linux variant such as Ubuntu, plus those that do will know what they are doing. I’ll be demonstrating the IMAP settings needed for email to work in Evolution, Ubuntu’s default email client, if you are using Thunderbird the settings are exactly the same as those in Windows.

Setting up the SSH FTP on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon couldn’t be easier; however, you need to know a small amount on the setup of Unix servers. Otherwise you’ll end up in the root of the filesystem and on the Dreamhost server, for security reasons, you can’t seem to access the ‘home’ directory from root as a normal user. I am sure it won’t take you long to understand why.

Basically all you need to do is go to ‘Places’ then ‘Connect to Server’ in the main menu thingy. From here you can follow this picture:

You need to replace domainname and username with the domain you want to access and the ‘user’ that has access to the domain, not your panel login! Ubuntu will then ask you for the password for this folder, you will have to enter that users password. Once done the folder should open and you will be in your users home folder, there will be a folder for your domain which contains everything accessible from the web.

Setting up Evolution is somewhat more tricky, as their is a little more to do. For the basics you can use the Wizard and follow the guide for either Thunderbird or Outlook, using this picture to help you with the IMAP settings:

Obviously the protocol you want to use is IMAP, your user name will be user@domain.com, and the password will be the password you have set.

That was the ‘easier’ bit, it gets a little more difficult when setting up the SMTP settings.This part stumped me for some time, as I was able to receive emails but I could not them (I had to use the webmail to send email!) I thought that I had set up Firestarter (a firewall client for Linux that is not installed bu default) incorrectly and it was blocking my settings, but no I was just setting Evolution up wrong!

As Dreamhost use a non-standard port for SMTP (the default port is 25, but many ISPs have blocked port 25 to stop spammers.) So if you look at the picture, you can see how I set the port to use the one Dreamhost use. When it comes to the authentication type, just use the ‘check authentication types’ button, if you get an error message here you will not be able to send email as your settings for the SMTP server are incorrect. Remember it should be mail.domain.com just like your IMAP setting, expect you need to add :587 to set the port.

You can also set up the client to use encryption and more secure protocols for sending/recieving emails; however, I think that would be going just a bit to far. For now you should just enjoy the experience of sending and recieving emails through your own mail server (well Dreamhost’s, but with your own cool domain name.)

I’ve just found that my old AOL email account, from when I used AOL for dial-up internet, still works! Don’t point and laugh at the fact I had AOL internet, they were the first in the UK to offer a fixed monthly rate dial-up browsing, so I didn’t have to pay every minute for laggy Quake and hours to download a demo. Although, I did still block the phone line!

Anyway, my AOL email account states I have 806 new email, and a glorious 6 spam! My gmail account (my junk mail box that I use for all forums, sites, and anything that wants an email address,) is now up to 651 unread messages and 264 spam messages! So that’s around 1600 unread email that I’ve managed to collect. I am pretty sure you don’t want to see any titles though, you know what spams like!