Facebook notification spam – someone ”likes” your photo

Recently, a lot of people have  been “liking” my photos.

Unfortunately, the notifications are sent out by various versions of a new form of Facebook spam application.

Clicking on “your photo” – in a hope to see which photo this person liked, takes you to a page where you’re asked to allow an application access to various parts  of your profile:

“Allowing Lika access will let it access your Profile information, photos, your friends’ info and other content that it requires to work”

This is the important part of this application – clicking on “allow” will enable the app to get access to all the information on your profile.
It then sends out notifications to ALL your friends, that you “liked” one of their photos.

Presumably, it is also sending all your information to the developer. This could be anything from your profile – work information, contact info, address, photos – anything.

One way to check if a notification you have received is genuine is to hover over “your photo”

Unless the link is something similar to: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=12345 then it’s a fake.

The names are usually something like “Like” or “Lika” or something along those lines, to fool you into thinking they are genuine, Facebook features.

Tags: facebook

How to view Experts Exchange answers

I’m sure anyone that’s searched for solutions in Google, has fallen victim to the search engine reuslt pollution Experts Exchange employs…

They always seem to title their results, with EXACTLY what you are looking for.

When you click on it, you’re told that to view the solution, you need to sign up. Which costs money…
Sure, there is a free trial available… but who really wants that?

Well… the answers are indeed, freely available.

This is a condition of appearing in Google search results.
However, a slight black-hat trick is, that they’re not visible to Joe Public. Only to search engines…

You can fool the site into thinking you are a search engine, by simply copying the full experts-exchange URL from your browser, for example:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Microsoft/Development/MS-SQL-Server/Q_22634999.html

And pasting that into the Google search box:

The first search result, will be a link to that URL, via Google.

Click that, and it will show you the answers! Nothing illegal, just exposing Experts Exchange black hat techniques

Tags: forums, seo

Ass-Kissing Blog Comment Spam

Recently, I have been receiving a large amount of a different kind of comment spam on my Wordpress blog.

In an effort to get around the Akismet spam protection, they have created several variations of the same kind of poor English, brown nosing comments… that effectively mean nothing.

The whole point of them, is to allow their URL to be posted in the “Website” field of the comment.

I recently had one on this post, to which I approved the comment, and later realised it was actually spam – so simply edited the comment, removed the URL, and left a reply underneath.

Here are the kind of comments (complete with spelling errors and bad English)

I’ll edit this post when I come across some more…

Advantageously, the post is really the freshest on this laudable topic. I fit in with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your incoming updates. Just saying thanks will not just be sufficient, for the exceptional lucidity in your writing. I will at once grab your rss feed to stay privy of any updates. Admirable work and much success in your business enterprise!

Considerably, the article is in reality the freshest on this worthw hile topic. I fit in with your conclusions and will eagerly look forward to your next updates. Saying thanks will not just be enough, for the great lucidity in your writing. I will right away grab your rss feed to stay privy of any updates. Fabulous work and much success in your business endeavors!

Comfortably, the post is really the sweetest on this noteworthy topic. I fit in with your conclusions and will eagerly look forward to your approaching updates. Just saying thanks will not just be adequate, for the wonderful lucidity in your writing. I will at once grab your rss feed to stay informed of any updates. De lightful work and much success in your business efforts!

Tags: Blogging spam

Twitter User underdog100 gets 300% increase in followers – in 10 minutes

At 23:00, Jo Combs (twitter.com/underdog100) had just 37 followers
5 minutes later, Graham Norton had featured her tweets on his show, albeit poking fun at them, but, now, her followers had swelled to 110!

Every time I hit F5, her number of followers increases

By 23:10 the count had grown to 130… around a 300% increase in 10 minutes!

I got bored at about 23:20, but by then, the follower count had grown to 140!
Not bad!

Tags: twitter

Google Wave invitations for sale on eBay

Google Wave invitations were sent out yesterday, 30th Septermber 2009.

Bizarely, I didn’t get one, despite being a paying google apps customer.
Anyhow, I wasn’t overly bothered – sure, i would like to try it out, but I wouldn’t part with cold hard cash to do so!

It appears some people will however:

A quick search on eBay (UK) revealed 3 for sale already!

Slight deja vu of circa June 2004 when Google released gMail – people were willing to splash out serious bucks to try that out!

Tags: Ebay, google wave

Problem with Firefox 3.5.2 and Facebook

After upgrading to Firefox 3.5.2, I’ve been having trouble with Facebook – certain pages would take ages to load (if load at all)
The photos page was a particular problem.

At first, I thought the problem could of been with Facebook – some of their AJAX user interface getting carried away or something, however I narrowed down the problem to Firefox by trying the site in IE.

I did some Googling, and found other people were having the same problem, and that they had narrowed down the problem to the Skype add-on for Firefox.

The Skype add-on detects phone numbers within a web page, and renders them as a Skype call button – so that you can easily call numbers from a web page.

The amount I actually use this feature is far far less than that of Facebook, so I decided to disable the add-on (at least until they fix the issues with it)

Here’s how:

1) Click the Tools –> Add-ons menu in Firefox

2) Click the Uninstall button next to the “Skype extension for Firefox” in the resulting dialog.

3) Restart Firefox.

That should fix the issues with Facebook (and any other website that is showing similar problems)

Tags: facebook, firefox

NTLM / Windows Authentication with Firefox

Firefox, my browser of choice, doesn’t support NTLM “out of the box”

What that means is, if you visit a site on your domain (for example http://intranet) that you should have access to, you’re presented with a username and password box.
Visit the same site in IE, and it lets you straight through, based on your credentials.

What you need to do, is explicitly set the allowed URIs that Firefox is allowed to pass your credentials to.
Since I only use this on a couple of sites, it’s not really a problem.

Here’s how to do it:

Step One

Load about:config in Firefox (more information on about:config)
Click “I’ll be careful, I promise!” (and make sure you are careful, you did promise….)

 

Step Two

Locate network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris
The easiest way to do this is to type “network.automatic” into the filter box. Then, only two entries show up.
Double click network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris

Step Three

Enter your url into the box.
In my case, it’s http://intranet

That’s it! Firefox will now allow NTLM on that url!

Tags: authentication, firefox, NTLM

Using JoeBlogs -metaWeblog API Wrapper

Step 1

Download the latest release of JoeBlogs from Codeplex
(Click the Downloads tab, and select the latest download)

Step 2

Unzip the contents of the downloaded zip file.
(I usually copy DLLs I am going to use into a “lib” folder at the root of my solution)

Step 3

Add a reference to BOTH CookComputing.XmlRpcV2.dll AND JoeBlogs.dll

Include AlexJamesBrown.JoeBlogs in your class, with using / Imports:

C#

using AlexJamesBrown.JoeBlogs;

VB

Imports AlexJamesBrown.JoeBlogs

Step 4:

Instantiate a new Wrapper object.

So far, the available wrappers are:

MetaWeblogWrapper

WordPressWrapper

C#

WordPressWrapper wrapper = new WordPressWrapper(Url, Username, Password);

VB

Dim wrapper As New WordPressWrapper(Url, Username, Password)

Please note -

The above example has the Url, Username and Password strings omitted. Simply replace them with the relevant information.

Step 5

You can now take full advantage of all the methods on your instantiated wrapper.

C#

string Url = "www.alexjamesbrown.com";
string User = "MyUser"; //enter your username
string Password = "MyPassword"; //enter your password

var wp = new WordPressWrapper(Url, User, Password);

//a few test functions...
var userBlogs = wp.GetUserBlogs();
var tags = wp.GetTags();
var categories = wp.GetCategories();

var authors = wp.GetAuthors();

Tags: .net, Blogging, c#, JoeBlogs

Auto Tag Generator Plug-In for Windows Live Writer

Auto Tag Generator is a plug in for Windows Live Writer that enables tags to be generated from a block of text (or the whole of the post)

Download:

Project can be downloaded from Codeplex here

Usage:

To generate tags, simply highlight all of the text (or a relevant section) and press “Inert Auto Generated Tags” in the Insert menu on the right hand side.
The tags are then displayed in a list (shown below)

You can delete any tags generated by pressing the Del key, or right clicking, and clicking delete (the list is sometimes a bit random… but this is due to the Term Extractor API)

Hit Ok, and the tags are copied (comma separated) into the clipboard, for you to paste in to the Tags section in Windows Live Writer.

The tags generated for this post were:

auto tag
relevant section
wlw
tag generator
target
single day
clipboard
comma
codeplex
source code
open source
ip
address
yahoo

 

Limitations:

• Currently, the post text has to be selected before selecting “Insert Auto Generated Tags”
• Due to the limitations on the Yahoo Term Extractor API, only 5000 requests can be made in a single day from each IP address. I can’t see anyone reaching that limit… but I just thought I’d mention it!
• You need to manually paste them into the tags section on WLW… this is something I’m working on. (feel free to help… it is open source!)

Source Code

I’ll be posting full details, and a little tutorial of how what and why etc…. shortly.
Until then, the project is on Codeplex, with no documentation.

 

Tags: auto tag, clipboard, codeplex, comma, ip address, open source, relevant section, single day, source code, tag generator, target, wlw, yahoo

Open Source Social Network

I’ve just stumbled across this Open Source Social Network, that runs on Ruby On Rails

http://lovdbyless.com/

I’ll be sure to download this and have a play with it sometime soon!

Tags: open source, Social Networking