Me My Guy and I

XML list with User-Agents to use in switcher

Szymon Barczak — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:10:41 +0000

There was no update for randomUserAgent for a long time, so I wasn’t able to use it in Firefox 3.6.*, so I started to look forward for something else. I found an Add-on called User Agent Switcher and decided to use it instead of the first one even knowing that about month ago the author pushed update to the server. The new one can be extended by some XML list with User Agents. There was no proper, so I made one.

I found some XML files with user-agent lists, but they weren’t properly written. As you can see on the picture below, all items on the list were left free, non-categorized. Such a thing really pisses me off. I decided to create my own file with user agents, so here it is. Feel free to install it in your User Agent Switcher. The file includes different variations of:

Internet Explorer
Firefox
Opera
Netscape
Safari
AOL
Epiphany
Konqueror
Links/ELinks/Lynx etc
Search Robots

Also, there is the iPhone’s user-agent inside this package. Awesome! A lot of stuff here, just look at the number of columns

17308? No shit!

Write an anonymous email

Szymon Barczak — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:52:43 +0000

Never have I used it seriously, because I don’t live in the underground world of hacking, but it may be useful for you, maybe even for me in the future. What am I talking about? About a solution to send emails anonymously. There’s German Privacy Foundation which runs a special service to send mails in the right way. Not even outgoing mails from their server are sent anonymously, even data traveling from you to them is secured by SSL connection. Yea-how!

There’s a simple idea behind this project. User inserts his data into the e-mail using either web form or Thunderbird plug-in, then the whole message goes to the remailer network. It is resent a few times by a few different servers and pushed out of this “mixmaster” network to a recipient of a message. To provide better anonymity, servers randomize the time they send the message, so it could take from 2 to even 12 hours to deliver your message to the recipient. I would like to add that user doesn’t have to tell mixmaster his e-mail or name. That’s unnecessary, because delivered message is captioned by… George Orwell :) So, summing up, nobody knows who, where from and when sent that goddamn message.

Feel free to use it, even while sending messages to me. And no, I don’t use byisk.pl@gmail.com account.

Brilliant idea for syncing mails between two Thunderbird clients

Szymon Barczak — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:54:08 +0000

When I bought my netbook, I copied all the data including Thunderbird’s data from desktop to this small one. Since then I used to treat my desktop as a worse kind of computer, because it’s not portable, it used to be out of date, because I haven’t had any synchronization tool. I used it just for watching movies, because there’s 19″ LCD Monitor for that and it has optical drive. One time I realized the big one is not that bad and, in fact, for some things it’s better then the small one, because of performance and other stuff. So, I recently decided to use both of them at once with no favoritism. Then I encountered an issue with Thunderbird’s data syncing. Here’s my solution I want to make in life.

I started googling in case I could find something interesting before I start to think about the problem. I plowed into this article from mozillaZine. They described a few solutions for syncing data between more than one instance of Thunderbird. Yeah, I tried them and I realized that again it is written for those computer users who run Windows. There’s no Portable for Linux (well, they says you can run this on your Linux if you have WINE). There’s no -profile option in command line of Thunderbird under Linux, there’s -P and it actually works (in a different way, because user can’t specify the path of profile in command line), but I’m still in doubt is it really comfortable to swap a pen-drive every time I want to check new mails or write a new one etc. It is safe to use Thunderbird in that way, indeed, but as long as you don’t forget where the hell is your pen-drive. I mean, if you really want to choose this option, because of safety it provides, you have to have at least two pen-drives – one for swapping and second with the backup of the first and you have to backup that data every day. Yeah, it’s really complicated and inconvenient. But it will be my solution for some time until I make my idea in life.

Letting your mails stay on server is not right-minded. Server may be hacked or some administrator may get into your folder and read your mails. So, solution based on leaving mails for a long time to let each instance download your mails just won’t work for us. IMAP bases practically on the same idea – keeping your mail untouched on the server, so theoretically it is not safe, but who says we have to have IMAP server in WAN?

So, my idea is to run IMAP server inside LAN. This server would be downloading mails from mail accounts from other mail servers outside LAN as fast as it could, so nobody would touch my mails in the cloud. Mails would always be in the LAN, so I would have pretty quick access to them. And because of IMAP, I would have the same messages on all my present and future computers, the whole stuff would be syncronized. (Unless I give up this idea) will that all things happen! The idea is showed on the picture below:

That’s pretty nice, isn’t it? ;)

Speeding up an application of Liferea

Szymon Barczak — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 13:53:09 +0000

Liferea uses sqlite3, but, as a database, it becomes fragmented each time user puts new data inside of it. There’s no option to left it unused, giving up adding information, because it’s a RSS reader which we use everyday or even a few times a day. So, Liferea may slow down a lil’ bit because of database. There’s solution for this.

There’s a VACUUM command for sqlite database. It causes defragmentation, so the data is put to database byte-by-byte buoying the speed of an application using sqlite. So, the proper command for Liferea looks like this:

sqlite3 ~/.liferea_1.4/liferea.db "VACUUM;"

If you want to use it, should you turn off Liferea first.

Check this out!

Frantic with fear of Google

Szymon Barczak — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 23:24:11 +0000

I found out some kick-ass picture showing the power of Google spy robots. You should see it thoroughly, so you will understand why the hell I am talking about endangered privacy on the Internet. I’m going to write another article about enhancing privacy (I’ve written this one so far), this time it will be just about getting rid of Google’s spies.

So there’s this picture:

Seeing this

I realized that PayPal uses the same method to spy. When I was creating a button, in the code which they want me to put on my blog, they attached this one-by-one pixel image. Interesting. Of course, you don’t see this here, on Me Mu Guy and I, because I removed it from the code.

Gmail’s new look

Szymon Barczak — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 13:18:08 +0000

As I read on one of blogs at blogspot, Google redesigned contact cards in Gmail. That’s a small window you can see when you mouse over the sender of a message. So, hot or not? What do you think, how could I react to this?

I can say that Gmail hasn’t been redesigned for a long time. Everything is the same and nothing changes. I stopped using Gmail, I left it for Thunderbird. So, do I think Gmail’s really that awesome? No, of course not. I have the great Address Book in Thunderbird. Just take a look:

I have a feeling that there’s no spies watching my mails to know what advertisements AdSense should show me on the Net. Also, I can access to my mails everywhere, because I almost always carry my netbook with me. I don’t have to be connected to the Internet, because each mail is stored on my own hard disk drive. I don’t have to install some shit called Gears to access my mails in off-line mode. Trust me, there’s a lot of pros to have your mails on your local machine. And Gmail’s not that awesome as everyone says.

Shitty iPhone

Szymon Barczak — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 17:46:08 +0000

Never I have been a fan of Apple products, because of limitations that company creates. I use to recommend iMac as a computer for a casual user, because it’s really easy to use and I’m trying to get rid of yammering Windows users. But what is a good choice for non-technical user, may be not properly enjoyable for me, and, in fact, rarely it is. And iPhone is not good for me for sure.

So what about that shitty phone from Apple? I heard some interesting facts about that last time. The first thing is that, they didn’t invent anything new, just brought it in the awesomeness-of-Apple package. I mean things such as video conferencing. But today I read about iPhone 4 losing range. And that’s not a problem of a single man. A lot of people on the Internet told they are fighting with the same issue! So, maybe you’ll start with this topic watching this movie.

Here’s an example of what Jobs said to the users of new iPhone (there’s more):

Just avoid holding it that way.

Were something like that happen with Android smartphone, everyone would give it a hammer. Should such a thing happens with an Apple product, it turns out that everyone expected some issue with new iPhone, so everything is OK. Sad.

Really embarrassing thing for Apple is a set of commercials showing people holding an iPhone the way Jobs wants users to avoid. Wow, that’s not only commercials! Even the man in the person of Steve Jobs holds his iPhone 4 that way. Just take a look:

I have nothing more to say about that toy. But if you want something more, you can also go to the ifixit to see new iPhone torn down.

(In)secure Magazine no. 26

Szymon Barczak — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 21:33:59 +0000

I received an information about new issue of (In)secure Magazine. I have never read this magazine, but I’m going to. As I achieved training course in the topic of IT security, I do care much more about security than I used to, so checking out this magazine is a really good idea.

Using a Copy-Paste’s method, I can tell that inside of new issue there are topics such as:

PCI: Security’s lowest common denominator
Analyzing Flash-based RIA components and discovering vulnerabilities
Logs: Can we finally tame the beast?
Launch arbitrary code from Excel in a restricted environment
Placing the burden on the bot
Data breach risks and privacy compliance
Authenticating Linux users against Microsoft Active Directory
Hacking under the radar
iPhone backup, encryption and forensics
AND MORE!

Anyway, number 26 is ready to download here.

Privacy enhaced: SSH tunneling

Szymon Barczak — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 20:53:05 +0000

The Internet is being monitored all the time by robots of Google, Facebook and other big companies. The whole data is stored on their databases and used from time to time for things such as personalised advertisements. Robots catch a lot of data, so it’s much easier to locate someone than it was in the past. You should take care of your Internet privacy, just because there’s no option to go back, to get your data removed from some site – even if you ask an administrator to delete your data, it is left in backups. In other words, what has been sent to the Internet, cannot be unsent. The first method to be more anonymous in the Internet is to use SSH tunneling. There’s a HOW-TO in this post.

What is a ssh tunnel? I’ll start from showing you a picture from Wikipedia:

As you can see, a ssh tunnel is used to change your IP to IP of the server you use for tunneling (just like a proxy server does) and also to provide you an encrypted connection from you to a remote host. So, nobody knows who the hell you are, because only the remote host knows your IP. Also your ISP or some sniffers from your local network can’t tell what the hell you send over the Internet, because your outgoing and incoming traffic is encrypted. Hell yeah!

First, you have to own a ssh account on some server. You can ask a friend who runs his own server to make you an account. You can buy a VPS and split it into a few accounts for friends if you want to save some money. Some hosting providers give a ssh account even for non-private (standard) virtual server accounts.

If you have a ssh access to some server, you have to create a tunnel. It can be done by using a command of ssh -p [port of ssh service on remote server] -fND localhost:[port on localhost] [user]@[remote-server], for example ssh -p 59184 -fND localhost:6808 byisk@byisk.info. For this example, 6808 is a port on my computer used as a socket. It can be any port which is not used by other process on your computer. Also, the port of the socket can’t be below 1024, because those ports are reserved for a root user (or you will have to run ssh command with sudo).

So, when you create a socket, you should also configure applications to connect to the Internet via tunnel. The easiest way to do this is to change configuration in Network Proxy Preferences. If you do this, will all applications using this Gnome feature (such as Pidgin, Chrome/Chromium and so on; also Firefox and Thunderbird if you choose “Use system proxy settings”) connect via tunnel. For other applications you have to do it by hand. It is really probable that some of your applications don’t support SOCKS (e.g. Liferea). Then you can use standard proxy.

That’s all. Easy, right?

So, it’s high time to check if everything is ok. Go to tracemyip.org to see if your IP is changed. My Polish IP changes to German IP.

As you probably noticed, I use Firefox on Linux Mint, but Trace My IP says I use Safari on Macintosh. That’s randoming User Agent, which topic will be described soon.

How to deal with Liferea

Szymon Barczak — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 17:17:55 +0000

I used to be pissed off because of unresponsive Liferea. I mean, it tries to download comments for each feed user reads. Some of those feeds have a lot of comments, counted in hundreds, so Liferea’s windows turns grey (Compiz changes the saturation) and it is irresponsible for a few seconds. I find a solution for this.

What a fool I was that I hadn’t come up with that idea earlier. All user has to do is to switch Liferea to off-line mode after updating feeds.