Hack
Looking For Privacy On The Web?
Sunday, June 13th, 2010 | Hack, Security, Tools, Utilities | No Comments
If you’re like me then you probably spend more time working on your laptop outside of your office than inside. This also includes surfing facebook on your iphone while waiting in line at the coffeshop. By now you probably already know of just how insecure wireless really is, but how can you ensure that no matter where you are, you’re safe?
Simple answer: a VPN service.
It acts as a secure connection between your computer or iphone (or any electronic device for that matter, including your boxee, etc..) and them, sending out requests to websites, email accounts, etc.. all through THEIR secure connection. Stops people from being able to sniff your connection, stops people from stealing your data, most importantly, it can also enable you to use service like spotify which are currently only allowing certain countries to sign up. Don’t worry, VPN services are typically cheap, so what you need to look for when choosing a VPN provider is the options and level of security they provide.
How many different countries do they have VPN accounts available in? What level of security do they use?
I’ve used a few different services through the years, even attempting to run my own via openvpn, but so far the easiest (and well, cheapest without losing security features) one has been overplay.net. They’re widely known for their strong level of anonymous/secure surfing not to mention their ability to access location restrictive TV content. Anyhow, they’re worth at least checking out. The service is only $9.95 a month and you get access to all their vpn servers spanning 20 countries around the world. Not to shabby right? Ohh, and not to leave out – they accept paypal..
Tags: A Twitter Power Users Top Tricks
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 | API, Hack, Tools, Twitter, Unusual, Utilities | No Comments
Here are some twitter tools/tricks that you’ll probably never see in 99% of those ‘twitter lists’ out there. When you have so many applications that do either the same thing but with a different face or don’t really do anything at all, these are some tricks/tools that will actually help you stay productive…especially if you’re a Twitter/data junkie.
TweepML
Before there was twitter lists, there was TweepML. The funny thing is I still use this more than twitter lists because you can easily import/export your lists in csv format. Essentially its simple format designed to help share lists of twitter users. Plus you can auto-follow part or all of TweepML lists directly from within the site. two thumbs up.
TwitPic JSON API
This app was released upon the world by Remy Sharp when he wanted an easier way to pull out all of his uploaded photos from TwitPic (Their API only allows you to upload to the site, not download from your account).Source is available on GitHub.
Twavatar
If you’ve ever developed a twitter app that pulls a users profile picture you’ve undoubtedly run into the problem that occurs every time that they change it, all of a sudden the link doesn’t work and the photo’s gone! Well, fret no more because Damon Cortesi (@dacort) put out an appspot hosted permalink to be able to grab anyone’s updated twitter profile picture. Very useful.
Amy Iris – An AI chat bot for twitter. This one’s a very easily adaptable AI chat bot for twitter. The possibilities are endless for adaption into your projects. Check it out, it’s really a cool framework that they give you.
Now the last one isn’t a tool but rather a Twitter trick:
Want to download ANYONE’s previous 3,200 tweets? Easy! Just fire off the following curl command replacing where it says username with the desired tweeter’s name and you’ll soon have the last 3,200 tweets of theirs all to yourself. This one is also courtesy of @dacort.
curl -O “http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/username.xml?count=100&page=[1-32]“
Launch Your Own Twitter Bot (PHP, Python, Ruby)
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | Hack, Mashup, Open Source, RSS, Tools, Twitter, code | 2 Comments
If you use twitter you’ve undoubtably come across a twitter bot, sadly there’s a very good chance it was because it was spamming you. In this post I’ll provide you with all the tools, source code and know-how to be able to build and launch your own twitter bot, and i’ll even give you resources to do it in the programming language of your choice. Why? Because there are so many positive uses for a twitter bot….including anti-spam! Go take a look at the twitter tag project for some good examples of bots currents on twitter if you’re not able to come up with any on your own.
First, if you’d like to fool around with an automated bot on twitter but lack the technical knowhow, go pay a visit to the Botomatic site. There you can create your own bot using their easy-to-use GUI. It’ll take you two seconds and you will be up and running.
If you’re a beginner, have no fear there’s a pre-configured setup for you as well. Go download and install the Twitterbotscript from Tyler Colwell. It’s 100% free and was coded to include a helpful GUI to control the bot functionality. It’s actually a pretty cool package that uses the API. I’ve taken a lot of his code and re-used it in various test bots of my own so i’d definitely recommend anyone looking to script their own bot in PHP to download his app.
Now for the PHP programmers out there, the first example of a great PHP5 twitter bot framework is from the folks over at ohloh.net (Jason Allen and Scott Collison). This one is setup to allow you to search and retweet what you’ve found.
If you’d like to incorporate Jabber/XMPP into the bot (that way you can access it via gchat), then there’s a great tutorial over on jazzychad.com. Tenderapp.com has on their blog a PHP tutorial with full source-code for a twitter bot that will look up the traffic conditions and tweet them when messaged. This one also has a walk-through for getting it up on xmpp/jabber. Here’s the source for a similar bot that looks up the weather and retweets it on command.
If you’d like to setup a twitter bot using Python, Halotis.com has a great tutorial that uses a sqlite backend to keep track of what it’s messaged. For a more elaborate version of an automated bot using python, there’s a script over on the flowingdata.com blog that also incorporates a local mail server to send and receive messages to the bot.
Last but not least, all of you Ruby folks….here’s a Twitter Ruby Gem to go along with the Twitter4R and Twitter Ruby Gems already found in the library. The site also takes you through a few different commands available with this new gem. For complete source-code of a twitter bot written in Ruby, head on over to this snippet of a Ruby RSS Twitter Bot.
Easy as pie and now you’ve got your very own automated twitter bot!
Twitter Exploit – User Was Able To Register @hOME
Monday, July 6th, 2009 | Hack, Twitter, Unusual | No Comments
I did a google search for ‘twitter’ the other day and the strangest result showed up as #2. Look at the way home was spelled = hOME….
That was odd for a number of reasons, the biggest being that the URL alias for your profile page (if you’re logged in to your twitter account) is www.twitter.com/home. Twitter has never (to the best of my knowledge) been caps sensitive, meaning that if you registered your username as @tonythetiger, you could capitalize it in any way, shape or form and it will still always take you to the same page.
BUT! If you go visit that url ( twitter.com/hOME), you’ll find that it’s a dormant account that just so happens to have 28k+ followers! Now just for comparison go and try to visit twitter.com/home. See what I’m talking about! It takes you to either your profile page or the main twitter.com homepage!
Here’s another oddity about this account – 95% of @hOME’s followers joined twitter.com on one of two days. Strange coincidence don’t you think?
So what I’m guessing happened was a potential spammer discovered that twitter allowed him to register @hOME so he loaded up 28k of new twitter accounts to make it look like it was a popular user. What happened after that is anybody’s guess, the twitter account has 0 tweets and isn’t following anyone back. If you know anything about this account, please tell us more!
New Twittercut Worm Targets The Desperate
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 | Hack, News, Twitter | No Comments
A new twitter worm is running rampant through the microblogging community infecting those who are easily enticed with the idea of gaining more followers. It’s actually very simple, all it does it tweet out to the infected hosts followers, “OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from http://twittercut.com.” Anyone who visits the site will be prompted to enter their twitter login credentials in order to “access the twittercut tool” however upon submitting the info it then just goes and mass-tweets to all of your followers and the cycle continues. Playing of the desperation many seem to have when it comes to becoming ‘popular’ on the network, A twitter search pulled up thousands of folks who fell victim to this trap.
If you see one of your friends twittering “OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from http://twittercut.com”, you might want to tell them to change their password ASAP before it’s changed for them.
So the source of twittercut apparently is a Twitter user named JordanEmbry. It’s also the same name used on the whois records for the twittercut.com domain. Twitter has already disabled his account but using the Google cache you can still see the profile + recent tweets. You’d have to be a moron to use your real info on a scam like this, so I can’t imagine this is really the culprit.
He’s hosting it on free-webhost 110MB.com, so I just sent them a message letting them know about the TOS/Abuse Violation… hopefully they’ll take the site down soon.
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