Category: Work/Technical

  • iBallz Product Testing – Lobbing the S3 around the room

    Broken Tech :(I recently witnessed a friend of mine giving one of their kids their iPhone to play with… Minutes later he dropped it and broke the screen. They then proceeded to give him the iPad so he could carry on playing his game – to keep him from causing mischief!

    Minutes later…. iPad dropped – screen cracked!

    I really felt for them, they just wanted their son to stay out of trouble and they were left with £100’s of repairs…

    This got us thinking… Surely there is a solution for this?

    And low and behold, we found one!

    Presenting… iBallz!

    We bought some from iBallz.co.uk and tested them with my work phone before we tested on a more expensive tablet…

    They work so well – its untrue! Don’t get me wrong, they are not the most pretty of things to be sticking on the corners of your iPad or tablet, but do you want to protect the screen or not? LOL

    At £16 with free delivery, they are a steal too!

    NB: The average iPad screen repair starts at £100!

  • Easy Timthumb Solution – Fix it once and for all!

    We’ve been plagued with issues due to using timthumb, which is a image resizing script used by millions of people all over the world.

    Despite updating the version we were using many moons ago, we found that certain sites were still being exploited, and it seems that no matter how many updates we did to the script, people keep finding ways to screw it over.d

    So DJB being the wizard that he is, during his morning energy drink we realised that we could quite simply solve this issue, by dropping this in the .htaccess file in the timthumb cache directory and temp folder

    php_flag engine off

    It just stops PHP file from being run in the directories its been put in – meaning that timthumb can never be used to screw peoples websites over, ever again.

    He actually got the idea from one of the people who screwed us over exploiting timthumb!

    Thanks, haxx0rs!

  • Sneaky old school virus making its way round emails

    Hello virus fans – i have been forwarded an email from a friend of mine over at GSM Performance, as he thought something looked dodgy – and he was right!

    LInks to https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/maks45/Document_948274878.e/\e exscept i took the X out the EXE parts so it cant be accidently clicked on

    The email was totally blank until you clicked “show images from this sender” and then what appeared to be an attached file appeared – this may fool some people, but i could tell it wasn’t part of gmail – it linked to something, and it wasn’t an attachment to the email!

    It linked to;

    https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/maks45/Document_948274878.e/\e (took the X out and put /\ in instead)

    What is surprising about this email is where the bad files are hosted – Amazon AWS!

    It was also from himself too – which is normally not the case with these kinda things, as they want you to click on the “attachment” and if its from your own email address then the alarm bells will start ringing immediately!

    If you get an email that looks like this, then report it as SPAM immediately so that you can help stop it reaching other peoples inboxes!

    Power to the people… n stuff.

    Email subject was: Subject: 8/8/2013 12:06:12 PM Document (fo’t searchin’)

    Original attachment name: Document_948274878.exe

  • How to report spam in Gmail

    Ok, here is how to report emails as spam in Gmail;

    report-spam-1

    Method 1 – Drop down menu

    You can choose “Report Spam” from the little dropdown arrow next to the reply button – this is also where “Report Phishing” is too, which is what you MUST do if you get an email from someone pretending to be someone else!

    I do think Google need to make more of a big deal of the Phishing button, as that is often more of a problem than spam in my opinion!

     

    Method 2 – Spam Button

    There is also a global button to press to report spam to gmail – its clear, easy to find and should be your best friend if any dodgy emails slip the net and end up in your inbox.

    sma2

    Gmail have great spam filters due to Matt Cutts’ team who work tirelessly to combat spam – but every now and then one slips their algorithms and ends up annoying us.

    ——

    I think Google need to spend more time stopping annoying Indian sales emails coming through – they are not traditional spam but they are all 100% unsolicited and by that very fact are 100% spam.

    HTH 🙂