Of Viruses and Corrupted Memory Cards

Went to Cubao to check on something and to print a few pictures required for a business permit application

with my super point-and-shoot cam, i rushed to the photo printer and handed my memory card to the attendant. I only needed to print 4 pictures so i had to select another 7 ones to print to as not shell out P50 to defray the media handling fee.

during that time a group of three persons were arguing with the owner over a corrupted memory card and feeling sorry for the lost pictures (and memories that came with it). The attendant kept on reminding the group, already irate, to backup their pictures and that memory cards can be corrupted and that there's nothing she can do to bring back their pictures.

Not that I regularly snoop around but I find it so hard not to due to their loud voices filled with frustration with the thought that I can help them by trying to recover their files. I successfully recovered files I saved from a USB drive corrupted by Windows 2000 and memory cards are no different if I have a card reader. The only problem is that I don't have a card reader for their card type since I can only accommodate CF, SD and MS. I hesitated to speak and offer my service to them since I don't want to be occupied with another distraction even if at the back of my mind I seriously consider making it another money making "raket" to support my uber-expensive hobby.

When I got home, I downloaded the pictures to my notebook when my AV warned me of a worm that copied itself to all folders of my memory card-- the PC of the photo printer infected my card with W32.Rontokbro.X@mm worm. I simply deleted the file as I know it's not a big deal but wary of the danger to others not so informed about computer security.

Torpark: anonymity on the go

If you're looking for the best in anonymity without the hassle of installation perhaps even in publicly accesible computers, give Torpark a try. Just download the compressed files here, unzipped in your PC or thumbdrive then fire up the executable with an onion icon.

It will first try to establish a network in the TOR network for anonymization much like proxy-chaining then start it's own Firefox. All private data is deleted after exiting the program.



Torpark is a portable combination of Firefox browser and TOR using onion routing i.e. your identity is cloaked by passing traffic through various nodes. Trying to trace your true IP address is like peeling away skins of an onion-- thus the name.

Caveat though are no scripting allowed for security and anonymity again (javascript from certain websites can capture your true IP address if you're not careful) and you somehow can't use the services of file uploaders like yousendit.

This is for you my anonymous blogging friends like R.O. and for those who want to post anonymously in public forums :)

Creating Spam Filters in Gmail

I got irritated with the increasing number of spam messages sent to my gmail address incidentally where I use to moderate various Yahoo! Groups

Spammers found a way to send email to group owners by sending tons of spam to addresses in this format: groupname-owner@yahoogroups.com

Yahoo's SpamGuard tags those spam messages correctly but alway get past Gmail's Junk Mail filters so I decided to create a filter to automagically delete those annoying junk mails

Note those messages tagged by SpamGuard has the following heading with them:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups SpamGuard has detected that the attached message to the
owner of the Yahoo! Group is likely to be spam.
For more information about SpamGuard, please visit our help pages:
http://groups.yahoo.com/local/spamguard.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------

All we have to do is create a Gmail filter that looks for the first few words of the SpamGuard message then delete any message that matches the criteria.

Here's how:

Login to your gmail account
Click the Create a filter link shown below


Copy part of the message that always comes with spam then paste into the Has the words form field (here I pasted these words "Yahoo! Groups SpamGuard has detected that the attached message to the owner of the Yahoo! Group")
Click Next Step button
Click Delete it checkbox
Click Create Filter button


Note with SpamGuard is that it's not perfect so sometimes you may catch and delete a legitimate message :(

Send text messages to Globe/Smart/Sun using Googletalk

i know this is quite old but you can send SMS to your friends (and enemies) in the Philippines using Googletalk (or the gmail web interface that i'm using) simply by adding a contact using the format 6391xxxxxxxx@chikkatalk.com

it works!

replies from mobile phones are charged P2.50/message