How to report an abusive website?

n the last few days, I got lot of mails from greetingcard.org that I received a greeting card.  But, Gmail has marked them spam and thrown into spam folder.  Usually, I check only few spam messages that I think Gmail has wrongly marked as spam to see whether they are actually spam or not.

 

So, I opened the greetingcard.org mail today and seen that it is actually not coming from greetingcard.org.  From address is looked like this:  greetingcard.org

<webmaster@infinisource.com>.  Someone used loopholes in mailing script of that site or spoofed the mail to send this spam message.

Email read like this:

From above you can see that mail is coming from another site with the user name as greetingcard.org.  It shows the greeting card link as an .exe file, which may contain harmful virus, malware, or adware.

So, how can we report it so that the domain and server can be shutdown and save others from this email attack?

To see the website’s registrar and hosting company details, we need to check the “Who is” of that domain.  “Who is” data contains the domain registrar’s and owner’s details, domain creation date, update date, and expiration details along with name server details, which normally look like ns1.hostingcompany.com and ns2.hostingcompany.com most of the time.

Every domain registrar and hosting company will have a section called “Abuse Department,” which takes care of spam issues from a website and shuts down the domain or hosting when they receive complaints against a domain.

From the above mail, the suspicious website is wings-softbal.com.  Go to the website, IPTools.com or DNSstuff.com from which you can do a whois lookup.  Enter the domain name wings-softbal.com in Domain Whois Lookup section.

It will show the whois information like this.

Whois query shows that the domain registrar is WildWestDomains.com and hosting company is TotalChoiceHosting.com.  Go to WildWestDomains.com and see if there is a link to report a spam site. Fortunately, we can see on the homepage itself a “Report Spam” link in the “Quick Help” section.

Click on that and file a complaint and also forward the spam message you received.

Now, go to TotalChoiceHosting.com and see if there is any link to report Abuse directly.  I was unable to locate a direct link, but there was live online help as well as help through various messengers.  Using any one of it, we can talk to the operator and ask them the way to report the spam.

Luckily, someone has already reported this website and the hosting company is showing a suspended account message.

You may be interested in reading my other tutorials here.

FREE digital magazine subscriptions – Over 200 titles

 

You might have received emails and snail mails from banks to opt for email statements rather than physical printed statements.  Few banks even offered cash prizes and free goodies to the customers who have opted for email statements as part of their echo-friendly initiatives. There are lot of organizations that are working towards echo-friendly things.  GoReadGreen is also a site that is working towards promoting digital magazines by which, they think, can reduce the printed version of the magazines and save the trees.

 

As a part of their “Read Green Initiative”, they are offering free one year subscription to over 200 popular magazines like MIT’s Technology Review, Popular Science, Reader’s Digest, Popular Science, Playboy Mexico, Penthouse, Interior, Yoga, iPhone Life, etc.  All magazines will be available for reading online and offline through Zinio.

They say, “many groups and associations are dedicated to exploring earth-friendly efforts such as recycling programs, reducing newsstand distribution and ensuring printing is done on recycled paper.”

Click this link to see all the magazines available.  Click “More Magazines” at the bottom to see the next set.  You can alternatively browse by category, which are available on the left side.

It currently allows only one magazine subscription per email address.  There is a hack to register for more magazines per email. Subscribe first using the original email address. When your account is created at Zinio and credited with one year free subscription, do not log out.  Go to the magazines list again and register for another book by putting dot somewhere in your Gmail address.  Like, if your original Gmail address looks like yourname@gmail.com, then register the second book with your.name@gmail.com.  By default, Gmail ignores dots in your email address.  So your.name, your.na.me, you.r.name are same as yourname.  But, do not spam this offer, only subscribe to the books that you really need.

Free MS Project alternatives

What is MS Project?

MS Project or any Project Management Software will help the project managers to create plans, assign resources to tasks, track the progress of the work, and manage budges and workloads.  The following is the description taken from Wikipedia:

“Project creates budgets based on assignment work and resource rates. As resources are assigned to tasks and assignment work estimated, the program calculates the cost equals the work times the rate, which rolls up to the task level and then to any summary tasks and finally to the project level. Resource definitions (people, equipment and materials) can be shared between projects using a shared resource pool. Each resource can have its own calendar, which defines what days and shifts a resource is available. Resource rates are used to calculate resource assignment costs which are rolled up and summarized at the resource level. Each resource can be assigned to multiple tasks in multiple plans and each task can be assigned multiple resources, and the application schedules task work based on the resource availability as defined in the resource calendars. All resources can be defined in an enterprise-wide resource pool.”

Below are the three alternatives I found.

 

OpenProj: OpenProj is a free open-source project management solution.  This is the first one I found and even I read some blog posts stating that small companies are using this software successfully as an alternative to MS Project.  OpenProj is available in Windows, Mac, and Linux versions.  Site also says that OpenProj has been translated into French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Galician, Persian, Russian, Korean and Chinese.  Even, my brother selected this for his projects.  It is just 6 MB approximately.

 

Open Workbench: It is also an open source free software available for only Windows.  Site states that one lakh project managers are successfully using it in their project managements and it is powerful alternative to Microsoft Project.  Download count on their homepage also showing nearly 2,000,000 downloads.

 

KPlato: It is a Linux alternative for MS Project available as a component in KOffice.  It only works on Linux distributions.  It is still in development and bugs persist.  It takes some time for it to evolve into fully functional project management software.

Free stock photos/images for your website or blog

I often see people copying images from other websites and blogs freely without permission.  They are not aware that copying image from other websites is illegal.  You can be sued and/or your site can be taken down for doing so.

So, when you need an image to put in your blog or website, either you need to purchase one from stock photo selling websites like Getty Images, iStockphoto, etc. or find free ones.  Before going into free resource details, I want you to learn about different licenses like public domain, creative commons, etc.

There are a few good sites where you can get high quality pictures for free.  Below are the three best sources I use for all my needs.

 

Stock.Xchng:  It is my favorite site to get quality images for my work.  There are around 4 lakhs of royalty-free images available on SXC.  Don’t forget to browse through Hall of Fame, Most Commented, and Most Downloaded images from the drop down menu below the SXC logo.

 

Flickr:  It has millions of photos you can use for your site or blog with attribution.  Flickr photos are tagged with Creative Commons licenses.  Use the advanced search to find the image you need.  Don’t forget to select the license at the bottom.  Browse photos by license here.

If you find a photo you really need and there is no license mentioned, you can always mail the owner asking permission to use it on your site.  I was working on a tourism site and I searched for the photos on Flickr.  I found high quality pictures on Flickr, but there were no license details mentioned.  I sent mail to the owners asking for the permission and they happily allowed me to use it in my work.  They just wanted to know where I was using them.

 

Picasa Web Albums:  Picasa is also a good place to search for images with Creative Commons attribution.  Go to Picasa Web and on the top right corner, you will see a search box.  Search for the image you are looking for and then clock the “Show Options” on the top left corner.  At the bottom, you can see a section called “All licenses”  Choose the one of three licenses available according to your needs and you are done.

Now, I think you got an idea where to search for free images for your website.

Free and tiny screen zooming and annotation software

ZoomIt is a free screen zooming and annotation tool, which is very useful tool for the people who give presentations through projectors.  It is a tiny application, only 130 KB and has lot of functions like zooming, drawing, and typing on the zoomed screen.

It is just a single file which you can place anywhere and once you start it, it sits in the system tray and you can access it with hotkeys.  When you use it first time it shows the hotkeys already assigned and gives an option to modify them as per our choice.

It has the features like (default hotkeys are listed along with in brackets):

• Zoom (Ctrl+1)
• Draw (Mouse Left Click)/Cancel Drawing (Mouse Right Click)
• Changing Pen Color (Type “r” for Red, “g” for green, “b” for blue, “o” for orange, “y” for yellow, and “p” for pink)
• Pen Width (Mouse Wheel or Up and Down Arrow Keys)
• Straight Line (Hold down the Shift Key while drawing)
• Rectangle (Hold down the Ctrl Key while drawing)
• Ellipse (Hold down the Tab Key while drawing)
• Copy Zoomed Screens (Ctrl+C)
• Save Zoomed Screens (Ctrl+S)
• Draw Without Zoom (Ctrl+2)
• Typing (Press “t” from keyboard)
• Arrow Key (Ctrl+Shift+Right/Left move with mouse)

This is a free product and you can get it from Microsoft’s website here.

Free mp3 tag editor – batch embed album art and lyrics – Tiny tool

I am a fan of tiny tools.  I wrote about few feature-rich tiny tools including tiny screen zooming software, tiny browser, tiny ISO mounting software, etc.

Today, I was searching for a tool to edit mp3 tags and embed album art into the files and found this tiny tool with amazing features.  “Mp3 Tag Tools” with a project name of “massid3lib” on SourceForge, is a tiny tool, just 281 KB, to batch edit mp3 files and embed the album art and lyrics directly into the mp3 file.

Features:

• You can edit ID3V1.1 and V2.x, copy from one to another, and sync them.
• Embed album art (album picture) and lyrics into the files.
• Batch edit the tags and embed album picture.
  


• At just a click of button, you can correct the case automatically.
  


• “Clean Filenames” option will remove excess whitespace, capitalizes after symbols & prefixes.
• Batch rename the files using a custom format.
• Sort all the mp3 files into artist, album, genre or in combination formats.  Very useful option to sort the songs according to artist or genre.


• A lot more other features.  Visit the project page to discover all the features.

Free open-source folder locking/encryption software

When my system crashed in the last month, I sent it to the servicing center for repair and when I returned the next day to collect the system, servicing people were watching the movie, which was stored on my hard drive.  It also contained all my bank account details, e-books I purchased, lot of important documents, and approximately 50 usernames and passwords stored in Firefox using “Remember Password” option.  I was lucky that it was a small service center with less-educated technicians who are just interested in copying music and movies, rather than looking at what others files the system has.  But, just imagine, if it has gone into the hands of a smart tech guy who can just copy all the information and use for illegal things.

These are the steps I have taken to protect the data:

• I have been saving all the software, e-books, and important documents on an external hard drive, so that if something happens to my system, I can just disconnect the external hard drive and send the system for repair.
• Using “Use Master Password” in Firefox options.  Without entering the master password while starting the Firefox, it will not show the usernames and passwords automatically. Also, taking regular backups of Firefox using FEBE.

But what about the important files that I use regularly.  I cannot keep the external hard drive connected all the day.  So, just wanted to create a folder that is password protected so that when I need, I just enter password and use. There are number of commercial softwares available to lock folders using passwords.

As an open-source lover, I just searched the net and found this interesting application, which does exactly the commercial folder locking or encrypting softwares do.

TrueCrypt, free open-source application for encrypting the folders or drives available for Windows, Linux, and Mac flavors.  Using TrueCrypt, you can have a virtual folder or drive created using complex encryption algorithms, which is almost hack-free.  Without knowing the password, no one can decrypt it and open the files.

TrueCrypt Main Menu

The virtually created folders are of cross platform and can be accessed on any operating system. You can use this software to encrypt the entire USB too.

Install the software and open it.  Click the “Create Volume” button.  Select the drive name to assign, choose volume type, hidden or normal, volume location, algorithm, volume size, and password.  That’s all, a secured folder is ready.  Whenever you need to open that folder, just open the file using “Select File” option from TrueCrypt and click “Mount.”  You will see a new drive appears with the drive letter you selected while creating the volume.  Do your work and when you work is complete, just close the application by right clicking and choosing “Exit” on the TrueCrypt button in system tray.  You can also set the option of dismounting the folder automatically at a given time in “Preferences.”

Opening Encrypted Folder

TrueCrypt System Tray Options

Get the TrueCrypt here: http://www.truecrypt.org/

TrueCrypt FAQ: http://www.truecrypt.org/faq.php

TrueCrypt Documentation: http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/

Making fun out of Annoying Telemarketing Calls

If you are carrying a mobile, you might have already experienced the annoying calls from the telemarketers. If you are a credit card user or if you have taken a loan, then the number of calls you receive will increase and sometimes you will become mad. Some of the telemarketers even don’t ask if it is the correct time to call and go on explaining about the product they are selling. If you say “not interested,” still they ask you to listen what they are telling, which is really annoying. Sometimes, we even get repeated calls though we asked them not to call again.

I have two friends who are really good at making fun out of these calls. They enjoy those calls with funny answers to their questions and at the end of the call, the telemarketer will feel that their sales pitching is a waste of time.

One of my colleagues, Ashok, is one of those two guys. We cry out of laugh listening to the conversation he will have with these telemarketers. Recently, a guy called offering personal loan and Ashok put him into conversation for half an hour asking for 1 lakh loan. The guy explained everything without asking about the Ashok’s profession, salary, and savings. He explained all the document requirements, monthly EMI, etc. and at the end he asked how much salary Ashok is drawing. Ashok told him that he is drawing around Rs. 4000 after all cuttings (just to make himself not eligible to apply for the 1 lakh loan). The loan guy hanged up the phone and eventually disconnected listening to the salary figure. He occasionally records the conversation in his Nokia mobile, which has the call recording facility

For your information, Ashok is a young guy who is just recently married and is a medical transcriptionist.

Recently, a lady called Ashok from Country Club pitching for membership sale, which is priced at Rs. 1.5 lac, which only high-income people can afford. I don’t know how these people gather the mobile numbers. They should get the phone number of high-income group and not every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Telemarketers should politely ask about the profession first to make sure that they are pitching the right person to whom they can sell the product. If they find that the customer is not worth of pitching, they should delete the number, so that another associate would not waste calling the same customer again. The same lady called him two times and the conversation was hilarious. Below are those two conversations. Listen and enjoy!

Call #1: Ashok tells the telemarketing lady that he owns a rice mill and has two grown children. He even tries to sell rice to the lady. At the end, he asks the lady to call when he is not busy in the shop and when the lady asks how she will know that he is not busy, Ashok tells her to call to know if he is busy or not. She says okay.  Listen to the hilarious conversation.

Call #2: The same lady calls again. This times the lady offers a discount and asks in which profession Ashok is. He tells her that he runs cycle puncture shop. The lady asks whether he can afford to buy a membership at Rs. 36,000. He says that he is interested and he can sell the land he owns to buy the membership. At the end, he tell the lady that he will ask his wife and let her know because if he is not taking her permission, she will yell at him. Enjoy the funny definitions he has given to club, family entertainment, massage parlor, and restaurant & bar.

Call #3 & #4: This is a telemarketer call pitching for insurance product.  He tells the lady that he is a roadside balloon vendor.  As soon as he tells that he sells balloons, the lady says “Thank you…have a nice day” and tries to cut the phone.  He tries to continue the call…but she tells that she will call again with full details.  Her senior calls and carries on the conversation.  Again, he tells that he sells balloons and asks about the benefits of taking an LIC policy.  He tells her that he is investing the money in Chits and asks her to tell the benefits he gets if he invests in LIC.  She thinks that he is really a balloon vendor, so tells him to invest in chits and cuts the phone deciding that she can’t sell the product to him at any cost.  Enjoy the conversation in two clips.

7 Ways to Make a Good Impression

Impressions are important: They leave an initial taste in people's mouths that can remain prevalent for the entire relationship. If you are paranoid about what kind of impression you make, run through these seven list items and see if you are consistent with them; if you are, then you will probably expose the best of yourself. If not, then work to meet these standards.

1. Dress: The absolute first impression you will make on someone will be through your clothing, because that is what is seen from a distance, and cannot change throughout your meeting. Make sure to dress according to the situation-don't over or under dress-and maintain within the limits of good taste. If you aren't sure if what you're wearing looks good, ask people for an honest opinion. One last thought: always, and I mean always, pull up your pants.

2. Hygiene: Take a shower! Shave! Brush your teeth! You must be fully bathed and groomed before you meet with someone for the first time, because scruffy looking people generally don't seem as neat and mature. Pay attention to the little elements like breath: keep a pack of mint gum with you wherever you go, and periodically check to make sure you aren't killing bugs every time you breathe out. If you sweat heavily, keep a small stick of deodorant/anti-perspirant close, and if you notice you're stinking you can freshen up. People notice the minutiae!

3. Manners: At the table and with other people be civilized, polite and respectful: keep your elbows off of the table, open doors for people and address everyone-initially, at least-by their formal title. This will make an especially good impression on senior citizens, because you will prove that you aren't one of those "new fangled punks."

4. Speech: Have clean, clear diction and speak sans "like" or "you know." It is important to be articulate because that inspires a feeling of intelligence and education in the person you are meeting with. Always leave out profanity, and whatever you do, make sure to speak loud enough for all to hear, because conversationalists are easily agitated if you force them say "excuse me?" more than a few times.

5. Discretion: Choose what to share about yourself: forget to tell everyone about that time you went camping and ruptured your appendix, then fell face first into a pile of bug infested leaves-it is rude and will alienate you from the group. Try to withhold from conversations on personal subjects like religion or more disgusting topics like personal medical care. Before you speak, think about the possible impact of what you might say, then imagine its implications in the long run.

6. Humor: Humor can be your most powerful tool or your doom, because everyone has a slightly different sense of humor. What might be hilarious to you might seem disgusting to another, or vice versa. Try to withhold from any jokes that aren't family or dinner table friendly; you can tell those later.

7. Start and End with a Bang: I am a classical musician, and in my orchestra, among other messages, the conductor tells us that the "audience remembers mostly the first and last notes of a symphony." This is the same in a personal encounter: whoever you are meeting with will remember how you greet them, and then in what manner you left them. If you feel you have trouble with this, practice a few different phrases in the mirror, and introduce elements like: "pleased to meet you," or "honored to make your acquaintance." Ignore the antiquity of these phrases; it often makes them more memorable.

Making a good impression will set any relationship off on a good foot. If you are in a situation where you need to be judged at face value-such as a job interview or date-then make sure to go through this list and make sure you are within bounds of reason and good taste on all of your decisions.

Divorce after 35 yrs

An elderly man in Mumbai calls his son in New York and says,
'I hate to ruin your day son, but I have to tell you that your mother and I are getting a divorce; 35 years of marriage... and that much misery is enough!'

'Dad, what are you talking about?' the son screams.

'We can't stand the sight of each other any longer,' the old man says.

'We're sick of each other, and I'm sick of talking about this, so you call your sister in Hong Kong and tell her!'

Frantic, the son calls his sister, who explodes on the phone.

'Like heck they're getting divorced,' she shouts, 'I'll take care of this.'

She calls Mumbai immediately, and screams at the old man, 'You are not getting divorced. Don't do a single thing until I get there. I'm calling my brother back, and we'll both be there tomorrow. Until then , don't do a thing, DO YOU HEAR??' and she hangs up.

The old man hangs up his phone and turns to his wife. 'Okay', he says, 'It's all set. They're both coming for our anniversary and paying their own airfare!!'

MORAL:
No man / woman is busy in this world all 365 days.

The sky is not going to fall down if you take few days LEAVE and meet your dear ones.

OFFICE WORK IS NOT EVERYTHING IN LIFE and MONEY MAKING IS NOT EVERYTHING IN LIFE.