Having talked about spamming, in this post, I would like to shortly discuss about phishing, a technique for identity theft, which in my personal experience, has become more rampant these days.
If it is the first time for you to read this fancy term, phishing is an attempt to steal somebody else’s sensitive information such as username, password, credit card details, and other personal credentials usually done by sending an email containing a false claim to the target. The content can be a threat, warning, and other form of falsified truth carefully crafted to encourage the target to submit his personal credentials. As you may have predicted, phishing was derived from “fishing”. The “fisher” is the person who wants to steal the information and the target is the “fish”. The false claim is obviously the “bait” used to attract and hook the “fish”.
Identity theft is disadvantageous and can sometimes become disastrous to the victim. Let us take a case of a phishing attempt from a sender who falsely claims as your email account provider. The message contains warning to verify your email account by supplying your user account id and password. If you inadvertently submitted the requested information to this site, you might have never imagined how creative the phisher is in exploiting this private information they stole from you.
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On Friday, September 10th, I attended VMWare Customer Day 2010 Korea, which was held at COEX Intercontinental Hotel, Seoul. Even though it has been a while past the event, I would like to share some notes worth sharing, combined with my personal thought about substantial content found in the talks I listened to during the event.
As the event title suggests, the talks mostly covered introductory concept about cloud computing and virtualization as well as some promotional materials about VMWare products. This is coherent with the majority of the audience who came from the enterprises: IT staffs, ISV representatives, and company delegates. Three sessions were arranged for the whole event. The first session was a talk from Mike Sumner, the VMWare Asia Pacific SE Director. He talked about customer journey to IT as a service by riding the cloud and harnessing virtualization. Second talk about VMWare case studies was presented by Lee Mun-hyong, the Director of Channel and Alliance, VMWare Korea. The last session was delivered by Lee-Hyo, the head of VMWare Korea. He explained about vSphere 4.1 especially the new features in the release. The second and third session were presented in Korean so I only grabbed the general understanding and did not really grasp the details.
In his presentation, Mike talked about cloud computing as an emerging trend in the enterprise. He also explained key drivers and phases toward its adoption in the enterprises and an era of IT as a service powered by the cloud. He started with listing several IT challenges in the enterprise environment. The challenges he mentioned include the necessity to deliver more business value, the ability to move faster and stay ahead of the competitors, the competency to maintain secure and compliant environment, and the capability of maintaining a stable system. Legacy IT business model relies on infrastructure ownership and dedicated IT force. With the introduction of the cloud in the enterprise, CIO may consider the transformation from a pay-in-advanced system into a cloud-based, pay-as-you-go system.
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If you are running Fedora Linux as a server, one issue you frequently encounter is strange permission denied error message triggered when you are accessing one of the available network services run on the server. There are a lot of network services to mention, but HTTP and FTP are two good examples of such services. Assume you are trying to access FTP server on your Fedora box. You type the IP address of the server and then supply the username and password. Voila!!! You thought you would be immediately logged in. But instead of seeing the files in your home folder, you are shown an error message. The error message may vary, from something like “Login incorrect for user blah” displayed by Midnight Commander, “500 OOPS: cannot change directory: /home/blah” from Total Commander, to other error messages shown by different FTP client programs.
If you are 100% sure that you supply the correct user and password information, why couldn’t you get in? Let us assume that you have root access to the server so that you can remotely troubleshoot from the console. This post will give some guide on how you can solve this problem based on common configurations of a Fedora server.
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I have been experimenting with comment settings in this blog to observe how willing spammers leave undesirable footprints aka spam comments on the blogs. Someone might have said that spamming is as pervasive as the web itself and it grows as the web evolves and reaches more audience. Still, having a hindsight experience in analyzing spam comment trending and behavior will be beneficial for me and also other website owners and bloggers especially when they are considering a loose commenting policy on their website.
Interaction in social web sites
As the web evolves to be more social, we can also observe higher level of interactivity on the web. Not only quicker page load, better content presentation, and improved system interface is interactivity characterized with, it also includes a simplified way of interaction among the website or web application users. In a bigger picture, interactivity encompasses user-application interaction and user-user interaction. If we talk about user-user interaction, we may think about creating such a user friendly platform for them to interact and communicate. Specific to blogging, user-user interaction can take form as commenting on the posts and also other user’s comment.
Now, here the question comes. If we can provide our users a friendly interface for interaction even for first-timers, can we expect for more quality interaction? And my personal answer to this is it depends on how good we are in implementing the website growth strategy. The first thing on which attention should be put thoroughly is the content. “Content is the king” is an undisclosed truth that tops the strategies towards website growth. I have been analyzing the growth of this technology blog by comparing number of posts in a certain month with the incoming traffic (user visits) for the corresponding month. I found two cases where traffic was higher than the average. The first case is the month with quality post(s) that drew users’ attention regardless of the total number of posts in that month. For the second case, it is the month with more posts, regardless of the quality, compared to the average monthly number of posts.
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As I heard that Zend Framework 2.0 is on the way to the public release, I became curious to know how the framework had been evolving during the recent releases. I started to fiddle with Zend Framework again but also realized that I should update my comprehension and knowledge about the framework. It has been a while since I wrote a complex ZF-based application for the last time. I feel it is necessary to collect more information about framework; manual, technical notes, tutorials, case studies, people, communities, and so forth so that I can upgrade my knowledge and get back on the track again. I found a good compilation by Robert Basic that actually covers almost all things in my list. Still, I consider that providing an alternative list is far from being counterproductive. Instead, the information redundancy can be good especially when the lists complement each other.
Below, I categorize useful resources one can use to learn about Zend Framework. If you have suggestions about other resources to add, feel free to drop a comment and I will add it into the list.
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