Spam attacks aimed at email systems where the text is replaced with images are rapidly gaining popularity. Spammers continue to increasingly adopt image spam despite the variety of anti-spam filters that analyze the message content to weed out unsolicited emails. Businesses, organizations and everyday computer users might have noted an increase of image-based spam, text e-mails that arrive in your inbox as image files. Image spam can contain a picture of words, a screenshot, a photographic image, or a combination of these. By sending emails that contain no text, only pictures, spammers found that they can even fool the anti-spam softwares.

Most anti-spam softwares detect text-based spam very well, but are unable to detect when a spam message has no text to analyze which has boosted the rapid rise of the image spams. These spam messages often include image files that have a screen shot offering the same type of information advertised in the traditional text spam. Image spam can also include unique trackers which work when a recipient opens the message and let the sender know it’s a valid email address for future mailings. Image spam is probably the best technique that spammers have adopted today to get through the anti-spam filters. Together with the image spam that uses one attached image to deliver its message, the spammers are known to send spam that contains multiple images that act like pieces in a puzzle. The recipients email client then reassembles the pieces in the right order and displays them as one image again. In addition to the usual annoyance, image-based spam eats up more bandwidth than regular spam because each image spam message is more than seven times larger than regular spam email.

The majority of image spam is used in stock scam messages, in which the senders encourage the victims to buy a certain stock to raise its value, then quickly turn around and sell the stock themselves to make a profit.

Nevertheless, anti-spam software and service providers are now able to cut down image spam, as well as HTML-based and text spam. The organizations and individual computer users having sophisticated anti-spam filters that focus on both the content and origin of the messages. They can then analyze and create rules in their software to block it. Many anti-spam software use combinations of techniques, including keywords, blacklists and something called “honey pots,” in which they have traps set up on the Internet to collect spam messages. There are a number of approaches to protect against image spam. In current versions of Outlook, for example, images are not automatically downloaded into messages unless the user has specified that messages from the source can be trusted.

Hello Friends,

Basics of TCP/IP

TCP/IP: is nothing but Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, Both of these protocols used for communications and to connect hosts on the Internet. TCP/IP uses several other protocols, Outof that the TCP and IP are main. TCP/IP is built into the UNIX operating system and is used by the Internet, making it the De facto standard for transmition of data over networks.

TCP - This protocol is responsible for verifying the correct delivery of data from client to server. Data can be lost in the intermediate network. TCP adds support to detect errors or lost data and to trigger retransmission until the data is correctly and completely received.

IP - Internet protocol is responsible for moving packet of data from node to node. IP forwards each packet based on a four byte destination address (the IP number). The Internet authorities assign ranges of numbers to different organizations. The organizations assign groups of their numbers to departments. IP operates on gateway machines that move data from department to organization to region and then around the world.

Sockets - It is a name given to the package of subroutines that provide access to TCP/IP on all systems.

When an important data is lost, we need Backups. There are many reasons for data loss. Hardware failure or accidentally deleting file is the main reason for data loss. Backups help to preserve the data & can help in the above situation.

Planning a backup is very important. A well planned backup saves time & money. Which files are irreplaceable without a back up. Irreplaceable files probably include those in users’ home directories (including /root), and configuration files, such as those in the /etc/ directory.
Which files are on removable drives, such as cd s or floppies. Since you probably do not need to back up removable drives, you might unmount them before doing a complete system backup.
Which files can be easily replaced by installing a package or doing a selective install or upgrade of the operating system. You can save time and storage space by not including these files in a backup.Which files are unnecessary or dangerous to backup. For example, files in /tmp are probably unnecessary, while restoring some files that are in the /proc directory could crash the system.Whether to compress files using gzip or bzip2 . Compressing saves space, but adds another step to the backup. Also, while compression is generally reliable, it creates another stage at which the process can fail.Whether users are responsible for backing up their own files. Since only the root user has full permissions for all files on the system, usually backups are best done by the root user. One should give top priority to backups as you never know when you will loose data that would be worth a Million Pounds. Hosting UK gives top priority to backup service and Hosting UK is the only company that offers web Hosting in UK with rsync backup. Hosting UK makes weekly as well as monthly incremental backups of all its shared hosting servers as well as dedicated hosting servers.

Greetings friends,

Use these hacks to change the appearance of Firefox by hiding menus, hiding the separator bars, removing menus or even move the tabbar to the bottom.

This file does not exist by default, so you will have to create it yourself the first time. If you can’t find the location in the chart I give you, make sure you are able to view your hidden folders/files, since I know XP for sure hides them.

To create the userChrome.css file in windows: Open a text editor (notepad or wordpad) and save the file as “userChrome.css” into a directory listed below according to the OS your using. To edit userChrome.css after it’s created just right click on the file and select ‘Edit’, then edit the file using wordpad or notepad.

Locations to create the userChrome.css file:

Now that thats out of the way it’s time to customize Firefox behind the scenes. All you have to do is copy and paste these settings on a new line in the userChrome.css file and save the file. Next time you open up Firefox the settings will be applied until you delete the setting out of the userChrome.css file.

#search-container {
margin: 0 1px 0 0 !important;
padding: 0 0 0 5px!important;
}
#search-container .searchbar-textbox,
#search-container .textbox-input-box {
margin: 0 !important;
padding: 0 !important;
}
#search-container .searchbar-dropmarker {
margin: 1px 0 0 1px !important;
padding: 0 !important;
}
#search-container * {
width: auto !important;
}
#search-container .textbox-input-box {
width: 0 !important;
}
#search-container:hover .textbox-input-box {

width: 200px !important;
padding: 0 0 0 5px !important;
}
#search-container .searchbar-textbox {
-moz-appearance: none !important;
border: 0 !important;
background-color: -moz-dialog !important;
}
#search-container:hover .searchbar-textbox {
-moz-appearance: textfield !important;
-moz-border-radius: 5px !important;
background-color: -moz-field !important; }

#FindToolbar {
border: 0 !important;
border-top: 0px solid !important;
}
window:not([windowtype="navigator:view-source"]) #FindToolbar {
border-bottom: 0px solid !important;
}
#FindToolbar #find-closebutton:hover {
border-color: transparent !important;
background-image: none !important;
}
#FindToolbar label[value="Find:"] {
margin: 0 !important;
padding: 2px 2px 3px 5px !important;
border-left: 2px solid !important;
-moz-border-left-colors: ThreeDShadow ThreeDHighlight !important;
}
#FindToolbar #find-field-container {
margin: 0 2px !important;
padding: 0 !important;
}
#FindToolbar #find-field {
margin: 0 !important;
padding: 0 0 0 2px !important;
width: 200px !important;
}
#FindToolbar #find-field[status="notfound"] {
color: rgb(0, 0, 0) !important;
background-color: rgb(255, 240, 224) !important;
}
#FindToolbar checkbox {
margin: 0 2px !important;
padding: 2px 0 1px 4px !important;
border: 0 !important;
border-left: 2px solid !important;
-moz-border-left-colors: ThreeDShadow ThreeDHighlight !important;
}
#FindToolbar checkbox .checkbox-label-box {
margin: 0 !important;
padding: 0 0 0 3px !important;
}
#FindToolbar #find-status-icon[status] {
margin: 0 0 0 2px !important;
padding: 1px 0 1px 4px !important;
width: 22px !important;
height: 18px !important;
border: 0 !important;
border-left: 2px solid !important;
-moz-border-left-colors: ThreeDShadow ThreeDHighlight !important;
}
#FindToolbar #find-status {
font-weight: bold !important; }

Enjoy..

Generally firewall is used to protect a server from other servers & networks. But many times protecting a server within a network, by using a TCP wrapper, is also needed.

Most of the Linux distributions comes with xinetd server. This xinetd server includes a built in TCP wrapper. It can be used to define network services to accept incoming connections from specified servers and networks. The TCP wrappers uses two files, /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny through which it implements access control.

# Deny everything by default, add the following line to /etc/hosts.deny:

ALL: ALL

# Accept incoming SSH connections from e.g. nodes bamdns1, bamdns2 and bamdns3, add the following line to /etc/hosts.allow:

sshd: bamdns1 bamdns2 bamdns3

# Accept incoming SSH connections from all servers from a specific network, add the name of the subnet to /etc/hosts.allow

sshd: bamdns1 bamdns2 bamdns3 .subnet.server1.com

# Accept connections from all servers on subnet .subnet.server1.com but not from server bamdns4.subnet.server1.com, you could add the following line to /etc/hosts.allow:

ALL: .subnet.server1.com EXCEPT bamdns4.subnet.server1.com

# Accept incoming portmap connections from IP address 10.10.10.1 and subnet 255.255.5, add the following line to /etc/hosts.allow:

portmap: 10.10.10.1 255.255.5.

ADSL - Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line is a type of DSL. It works by splitting your existing telephone line signal into two, one for voice and the other for data. ADSL technology can work at up to 8Mbps download. The most popular services in the UK at the moment are running at speeds of 512Kbps (approx. 9 times faster than a modem), although speeds of up to 2Mbps can be obtained. Upload speeds are 256Kbps on all products and hence this is why it is “asymmetric”, because the download speed is different to the upload speed.

ADSL allows transmission of more & faster data over existing copper telephone lines. ADSL is an effective way for providing of Internet access in various situation, without the complications of configuring and operating a modem. ADSL is quick to connect, it is faster, its shares a phone line, there is no need of second phone line & it is far more cost effective.