by Dinesh on June 19, 2010
What’s the easiest way to make an .htaccess file in Unix/Linux so that a directory is password protected? Suppose that your home directory is /home/dmistry and all your webstuff is in /home/dmistry/www/ . Follow these steps:
- Make an .htpasswd file. The htpasswd command in Unix does this. You should put the password file outside of your web directory. So a command like “htpasswd -bc /home/dmistry/.htpasswd review donotenter” will create a new file using a username of review and a password of donotenter into the file /home/dmistry/.htpasswd . If you were to run the command “cat /home/dmistry/.htpasswd” you might see a line like “review:M1OdtjdGiDn1Y”.
- Make an .htaccess file. In this case, the file would be located at /home/dmistry/www/.htaccess and it would look something like:
AuthUserFile /home/dmistry/.htpasswd
AuthName EnterPassword
AuthType Basic
<Limit GET POST>
require valid-user
</Limit>
by Dinesh on May 24, 2010
Facebook has been having so many security problems lately, the latest one is a bug discovered on Wednesday by a college student. The bug would allow a hacker access to accounts with the power to delete friends and more. Even though this is a serious bug, as of Saturday it was still unpatched.
The college student, Steven Abbagnaro, wrote up proof-of-concept code of an attack that would get all of a users’s publicly available data from their Facebook page and then delete their friends one by one. However, the attack can’t be started until the user clicks on a rigged link while logged into Facebook.
Abbagnaro won’t release the code until a patch is applied but competent hackers could figure it out on their own. The code is based on a previously discovered vulnerability in Facebook that doesn’t check code from user’s browsers properly to make sure they are authorized to make changes on Facebook. Another possible attack that has arisen out of this bug is the ability of hackers to make users “like” things.
This attack and the others that have been cropping up lately stresses the need to educate users about social engineering techniques and to be suspicious of links from people they don’t know or links from friends that seem uncharacteristic.
by Dinesh on March 24, 2010
PC Word has an interesting artical on how to preserve your Laptop Battery Life and debunks some theories it is a very interesting article.
Laptop batteries are like people–eventually and inevitably, they die. And like people, they don’t obey Moore’s Law–You can’t expect next year’s batteries to last twice as long as this year’s. Battery technology may improve a bit over time (after all, there’s plenty of financial incentive for better batteries), but, while interesting possibilities may pop up, don’t expect major battery breakthroughs in the near future.
Read the full article here
