HOEI

I was using the 123 Flash Chat service and paying for it with a PayPal preapproved payment.  I needed to cancel the service, but the chat service provider had no instructions on their web site explaining how to cancel service.  I contacted 123 Flash Chat several times via email and their online ticket system to request instructions for canceling the service.  I received no response other than the automated response generated by their help desk ticket system.  Then I thought that there must be a way to stop payment or block payments  via PayPal for a service that I no longer wanted to allow access to my PayPal account. Turns out I was right.  PayPal lists a link to “My Preapproved Accounts” under the “Financial Information” section of My Account/Profile.  This area of PayPal allowed a user to manage payments that they automatically send to merchants.  With this feature of PayPal I was able to cancel the automatic withdrawal that I been allowing for TopCMM Software to pay for the 123 Flash Chat service for nearly three years.  This a great feature and a money saver for PayPal users.

Here are a few tips on how to change your Network Interface card IP address setting from the command line. Why? Well, as a network security engineer there can be a number of reasons that require switching between network segments many time in a day. I might have to move my laptop off into a DMZ to verify connectivity after making Firewall changes. Most of these segments were not running a DHCP server and required that I manually set the IP, Default Gateway, subnet mask, and sometime the DNS settings.  So running a ipconfig release and renew was not going to do it.  Then I might have to switch back to a segment running DHCP.  I was often running from the command line anyway to execute ping and tracert. I also use SSH from the Windows command line to access routers, switches, and firewalls so it just made sense to switch IP settings from the commandline.  Here is how I do it:

1. Create folder a in My Documents called “ip”
2. Inside of that folder create as many batch files as required to meet your needs

Example Batch (.bat) file used to switch from static IP back to DHCP.

netsh interface ip set address name=”Local Area Connection” static 192.168.10.200 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.2 1
netsh interface ip set dns “Local Area Connection” static 192.168.16.102 primary

Note: this file only contains two lines (each beginning with “netsh interface”)

Each of your Ethernet adapters will be listed as “Ether adapter [some name]:” The portion between the [brackets] is what you enter between the “quotes” after name=.

Below is an example of how to set a static IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, and DNS.

netsh interface ip set address name=”Local Area Connection” static 192.168.10.200 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.2 1
netsh interface ip set dns “Local Area Connection” static 192.168.10.102 primary

I create as many of these as needed and name the bat files something that makes sense to me for the job I am on. My bat files might be named;

• DHCP.bat
• homewireless.bat
• siteFWinside.bat
• siteFWoutside.bat
• siteDMZ1.bat
• siteDMZ2.bat

If you put your ip folder in your path then you can execute the bat files from any directory on the command line.  You can also put bat files on your desktop and create keyboard shortcuts as well. I put a copy of my DHCP.bat on my desktop and assign it a Ctrl+Alt+D keyword shortcut.

The MakeUseOf.com domain seems to have been hijacked over the weekend.   The guys over at MakeUseOf.com have set up shop temporarily on a Blogger platform at makeuseof-temporary.blogspot.com. The hosting company (GoDaddy.com) released the domain to someone who was impersonating the owner of the domain.  Here is what Mark from MakeUseOf.com had to say:

“Now it turns out that in order to transfer the domain, Ferank (or someone helping him) called up GoDaddy and impersonated Aibek. At that point he had already access to our account (or at least had enough information to recover the username/pass for the account) and basically said “hi, I’m the owner of MakeUseOf.com, please transfer the domain”. GoDaddy then complied. “

The Real Truth Behind The MakeUseOf.com Domain Crack

The plot has thickened because the hijacker (aka Ali Ferank) has requested a ransom of $2000 for the safe return of the MakeUseOf.com domain name.

What I would do if I woke up in Mark and Aibek’s shoes:

1) I recommend that the MakeUseOf.com team go over and take a swim in the ICANN registrar transfer policies to determine what pressure can be placed on GoDaddy.com to take some responsibility for what happened.

2) I would get Google involved since the  person currently holding the registration is using Goggle as the email host provider.

The following shows the current WhoIs for MakeuseOf.com:

Registrant Contact:
DomainsGame LLC
Ali Ferank

Alhana baghas nara St
Dubai, NA 85445
AE

Administrative Contact:
DomainsGame LLC
Ali Ferank ()
+1.5544415212
Fax: +1.5555555555
Alhana baghas nara St
Dubai, NA 85445
AE

A quick nslookup for the MX record for the email domain listed in the registration information shows that DomainsGame.org is using Goggle as a host for email services.

> domainsgame.org
Server:  vnsc-pri.sys.gtei.net
Address:  4.2.2.1

Non-authoritative answer:
domainsgame.org MX preference = 30, mail exchanger = aspmx3.googlemail.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 30, mail exchanger = aspmx4.googlemail.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 30, mail exchanger = aspmx5.googlemail.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = aspmx.l.google.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 20, mail exchanger = alt1.aspmx.l.google.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 20, mail exchanger = alt2.aspmx.l.google.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 30, mail exchanger = aspmx2.googlemail.com
>

3) I would give these guys at Moniker Privacy Services a call to see who registered DomainsGame.org.

A WhoIs on the DomainsGame.org domain shows it registered to:

Admin ID:MONIKER1571241
Admin Name:Moniker Privacy Services
Admin Organization:Moniker Privacy Services
Admin Street1:20 SW 27th Ave.
Admin Street2:Suite 201
Admin City:Pompano Beach
Admin State/Province:FL
Admin Postal Code:33069
Admin Country:US
Admin Phone:+1.9549848445
Admin FAX:+1.9549699155
Admin Email:

4) I would not assume this to be an international issue just because the person gave a Dubai snailmail address.

Conclusion

In the meantime GoDaddy has told the MakeUseOf team to realax in a bowl of legal stew.  GoDaddy is obviously trying to determine their liability in this matter before taking too much action.  Lets hope that GoDaddy is not one of the registrars described in the Wikipedia explanation of Domain Hijacking and Domain Theft.

“However, it is well documented that some registrars will admit no fault in accepting the forged credentials and will refuse to correct the record until forced by legal action. In many of these cases, justice is not done and the hijacker retains control of the domain. The victims of such theft often do not have the resources or willingness to invest the effort necessary to regain control of their domain, which may require a lawsuit or a lengthy and time-consuming arbitration process, especially if the hijacker and victim are in different countries.”

GoDaddy.com has a chance to avoid more of the “GoGaddy Sucks” articcles if they handle this correctly.

The first questions to ask before buying a laptop is, “what will the laptop be used for and what are your accessory needs?”  I will give a couple of examples of decisions I have faced when searching for a laptop in the past.

User 1 – For a stay home mom who will be surfing, checking email, and saving a ton of digital photos (accessory via USB) Oh, and we doesn’t really like touchpad mouse option:

Answer: Look for cheap, wireless, DVD Player, and pointing stick option.  You may need to look for a huge hard drive, but maybe not.  I’ll come back to that.  You can find a good fit for this solution on auction sites or when employers cycle out and replace old machines. The last one is how I scored a $100 laptop (2 Ghz, 1 GB Ram, 40G HD).  I had to add a PCMICA wireless card since the smoke’n deal did not include integrated wireless.  As for storage, you may be able to make use of a networked server/workstation shared drive to Backup and store excess photos.  This is what we do sine we have a fairly small hard drive.  This latptop at your house can be a Mac, Linux or Windows machine.

User 2 – Road warrior network security engineer running virtual machines on the laptop and doing extensive data gathering (packet captures and vulnerability assessments) in addition to email, browsing, and document creation/editing (including detailed network diagrams and data manipulation using spreadsheets and databases).

Answer: Get a fast machine, with a good amount of memory and storage space. It must be fairly light weight and it MUST run Windows XP or Server 03 (MAC is a bad choice). You must run a dual boot feature with Linux or at least have a copy of Linux running in a virtual machine that executed from your hard drive.  Other virtual machines are often useful, but they can be stored on removable media.

That leads me to my final point.  Don’t get to wrapped around the axle on hard drive space on this machine but rather go with the largest drive that is available at the fastest generally accepted speed category available on the market.  For instance, I would go with a 200GB – 7200rpm/16MB Cache over a 320GB – 5400rpm/8MB cache.  Hard drive performance (i.e., spindle and read/write speed, cache, etc) is one of the most overlooked performance features on PCs and laptops. As for additional space, you will likely need some removable media anyway.  Removable storage is dirt cheap at less than $150 per TB.  As for solid state drives, they still have some maturing to do before a serious road warrior should trust them.

Rachel over at Christians in Good Company has a post titled Google Reader: Friend or Foe? and it made me consider how feeds may be adversely affecting blog traffic.  I am not talking about your blog’s feed hurting your traffic even though that could be true since you don’t get hits on those readers if you are providing full post content in your feed, but rather I am talking about the feeds we read via tools like my Google Readers on my iGoogle page.  Much like Rachel, I often skip the process of visiting and commenting on posts I view in my reader even though I traditionally would have left a comment on many of the posts I read.  In my opinion that can and has led to the decline in traffic on my blog(s) since I am not leaving those little link crumbs pointing back to my blogs since I am not commenting nearly as much as I used to.

I have been furiously testing Twitter gadgets just like a slew of other folks. Live happened and I did not blog or tweet much for a couple of days. However, this blog and my Twitter home page did not get the memo to stop the presses until I returned. Below is what happens when you tell Twitter Tools to “Create a daily digest blog post from your tweets?” and at the same time telling Twitterfeed to post tweets for all new posts.

And here is the Twitter end:

The way I stopped the loop was to disable the feed for this one domain in Twitterfeed.  I have activated the “Create a tweet when you post” option in the Twitter Tools options.  We will see how that works out.