What’s your opinion on including free PHP CMS and forum scripts with ZeuAPP? We are first planning to include big ones like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc. Also if there is interest about php scripts we could make a ZeuPHP, application for downloading various PHP scripts. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Congratulations girls! We want to say happy International Women’s Day to all of you.

Have you probably heard of how much information you transfer with each email you send from your computer? You transfer your IP address, real country and some other email info. Staying anonymous online is impossible – everyone keep track of what you do. But it’s always good to feel comfortable and anonymous, especially when you send sensitive emails and want to fight spam.

You probably know of disposable email services such as GuerrillaMail.com, Mailinator.com and so on. Each one of them will give you a free email with a specific domain, e.g. YourName@mailinator.com. These email addresses are created to receive emails and avoid possible spam that may come from a site. But have you ever thought of the other way round – to have an email address of your own choice, disposable, but for sending emails?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could send emails from any address you think of? On example, you can send an email to your business partner from e.g. office@acme.com even if you don’t really own acme.com. Those email addresses could look great and you would be able to choose anything you like for the domain.

The answer to this question is one website – www.myanonymousmail.co.cc. MyAnonymousMail is a free website where you can send emails from any email address you’d like, with no registration, charges or processes. In the new MyAnonymousMail Reloaded Beta version, you can compose your emails in full HTML and WYSIWYG manner so your emails could look professional in no time! This service hides your real email address, IP address and any personal info you reveal by sending your email from your computer.

There are other similar services so there is a natural question – why MyAnonymousMail and not other services? Well, the answer is the key thing which separates it from others: no headers, footers or ads at the end of your email. Using any other service your email will have a header or a footer resembling “This email was sent from ~”. This is pretty unprofessional and ruins your message, but with MyAnonymousMail you get clean message with nothing at the end or beginning of it.

MyAnonymousMail is the key of your emails’ anonymity online, so remember it when sending email from potentially unsafe email address, or only when you want your mails to look as much professional as you want them to.

Enjoy!

As you probably know, Youtube is owned and operated by Google Inc. Right now, the Web is slowly starting to migrate to HTML5. HTML5 is a new standard of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the official markup language of the WWW. The HTML5 standards propose certain tags to show video and audio content.

So far, Youtube has used Flash to load videos, decode them, and then show them directly to the user.

However, in HTML5, using Flash to display videos is against the standards which propose the <video> tag should be used. However, Youtube uses H.264 codec to encode their videos. With Flash, everything was fine because these videos were decoded by the Flash program and the user couldn’t see the underlying architecture. But now, the browser and the user’s system are responsible for decoding videos. That would not be a problem – but a license for H.264 codec costs millions of dollars on annual basis.

Google is developing Google Chrome and Apple is developing Safari. Both of them have billions of  dollars and Google and Apple could buy a license for decoding H.264 in a browser and that wouldn’t be a real hit to the budget. However, Mozilla is a non-profit organisation. They don’t have sufficient money to buy the license, therefore, Firefox will not be able to decode Youtube videos and people will not be able to view them in Firefox browser (in HTML5). Same goes for Opera Foundation which is also a non-profit organization. At the present moment, that is not much of a problem, but for a couple of years the whole web will migrate to HTML5 and only Firefox and Opera would be still using Youtube’s HTML4.1 standard because they are unable to buy license to decode H.264 videos.

We must face that H.264 is the best codec for this kind of use, but thousands of users will have to migrate from Firefox and Opera in order to see Youtube in HTML5 (it is possible right now, as TestTube). And even if Mozilla would have money to pay H.264, it’s an open-source project, which means that anyone would read the part of Firefox’s code that decodes H.264 videos, which is directly against the MPEG Consortium’s H.264 license.

We want an open web and we request from Youtube to use open media codecs for HTML5 videos, which are free and  open-source. Those are Vorbis and Theora.

And we ask you to join the fight. Many people speculate that it’s Google’s move to popularize Google Chrome – all Windows users will be limited to Chrome for watching Youtube in HTML5. So – if you want to help us  – please sign the petition for the sake of the open web.

These days we hear a lot about security on the World Wide Web. The most often security warnings alert us to take care of where we enter our personal information because of phishing sites. In case you don’t know about them, phishing (pronounced as fishing) websites are the ones who have exactly the same look as legit sites that belong to well-known companies, such as PayPal, Moneybookers, Facebook etc. These sites have an ordinary login form like legit sites do, but they record your username and password. After it’s stored in the phishing site’s database, the site bounces you back to real legit site so you don’t suspect anything. Thousands of people have been phishing victims, so this is a major problem – people who just use sites like PayPal or Facebook not even aware of phishing existence will fall for the trick.

So, let’s get straight to the point. You may have heard that best protection against phishing is to look at the address bar. If the website that the address belongs to is not your website, do not enter. That method should work always. On example, someone would register site such as id123456.com and then set up the server to take care of the subdomain such as facebook.com.photo. So the whole URL would be www.facebook.com.photo.id123456.com. This may look legit, but it isn’t – if you look carefully in the URL, you would see that the domain is really id123456.com and not facebook.com (which are just two nested subdomains).

The real problem is – Windows XP. If you are by now asking what does XP has to do with the Internet – you have a point. The problem lies in XP’s hosts file. Hosts file maps IP addresses that belong to domain names. On example, IP address of one Google’s server is 74.125.39.147. In normal circumstances, your browser would ask XP to connect to your router or modem. Router would look up the DNS records for Google.com and return the desired IP address to XP, which will forward it to your browser. But if the hosts file has a mapping of Google.com to a different IP address, things change. Windows searches the hosts file first and finds Google.com mapped to IP address, let’s say, 123.12.123. Windows would return that IP address to underlying API and browser would connect to 123.12.123 instead of Google’s server.

Not so much of a problem until you think of phishing. For a particular programmer, it’s too easy to create an application and distribute it to many people which would open it. He could write a simple application which would alter the hosts file on Windows and then distribute it as a download manager, for example. An user would install the so-called “Download Manager” and then, when he/she sees that it doesn’t work – they would uninstall it. But the harm is made and the hosts file has been altered.

A malicious programmer could write anything there – on example mapping Facebook.com to malicious phishing site’s address. That is, it’s too easy to redirect traffic from legit site to a phishing one and then capture users’ data. And an average user wouldn’t suspect a single thing because the address bar would say – facebook.com but the underlying IP address will be completely different.

However,  a minor problem is the HTTP Host header. Since one server (one IP address) may hold multiple sites, browser must say to the server which site is it requesting: and that would be the content of the Host header. So when connecting to malicious IP, browser would ask for appropriate website address. However, since the browser thinks it’s connecting to facebook.com, it would say facebook.com in the Host header of the HTTP request. Since the server can’t have facebook.com as it’s adress since it’s already registered, it refuses the request and gives the webserver’s default page.

A workaround for this problem is quite simple, so it’s still easy to phish other people without them suspecting a single thing. So, if you’re using XP, someone maybe looks at your username and password right now. If you want to check your hosts file, follow these fairly easy steps:

1. Open up your Windows folder. Most likely it’s C:\WINDOWS, but may vary.
2. If you get a warning, click Show the contents of this folder.
3. Open folder system32, drivers and then etc.
4. In /etc/, there should be a file named hosts (with no file extension). Double-click it, choose Select a program from the list and click OK.
5. A list of programs should pop out. Choose Notepad and click OK.
6. You should see a file opened in Notepad. It should look like this:
   

   # Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
127.0.0.1 localhost

   You can safely ignore the lines beginning with # i.e. comments and examples; our interest are the ones that start with an IP address followed by at least one whitespace and ending in a website address (a domain). You should have only one line there – 127.0.0.1 mapped to localhost. This is normal and allows you to connect to your own computer using localhost rather than 127.0.0.1.
   If you have anything else in the list or see an IP address mapped to a legit site, immediately delete the line, change that password and if you are using the same password on other sites, change those too.

I have tested it in XP, and it works alright – I can map facebook.com to one of Google’s servers and it works fine. I tested it also by trying to modify it through C++, C#, Visual Basic and Visual Basic.NET programs – and Windows XP (even with Service Pack 3) does nothing to suppress it. Neither do Avira, ESET Smart Security and AVG.

Such file exists in both Windows Vista and Windows 7 – but with restricted permissions, which is a little bit better. I don’t have a copy of those operating systems at my home, but I bet there is a workaround for this – as it exists for every single security barrier on Windows anyway.

So by this point you are asking why did Microsoft made such a security hole and a problem to people around the world with Windows XP? Well, the answer lies in the very deep roots of Windows XP: it is based on Windows NT and copies all of its APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and just introduces minor updates and security adjustments. The Windows kernel, API, including the network connection system haven’t changed since Windows NT. The hosts file was made back then, in the time where World Wide Web was such an innocent place, where there were no phishing or hacking attempts, an early W3. But now things changed and Windows still uses the same outdated API.

However, when you take a look at free operating systems – there are no such exploits. Everything is built based on modern kernel and APIs. Fundamentals are different and leave no places for such attempts. Everything is clearer and better organised. However, Windows and Microsoft have been, and they will be for quite a long time, big gigants in software industry, and majority of applications will be built for the Windows architecture. That’s the reality we must face.

We hope that Microsoft will redesign Windows’ fundamentals and write it in a completely different manner. That will make Windows an operating system which is easy to use and safe. But even with that, Linux is free and open-source and Windows is quite expensive – we must not forget that.

Until that moment, we have to be really sure about our security. There is a method that will never fail – use HTTPS (a secure protocol). If you fail to find a secure protocol or secure connection option on the site you are visiting (unless it’s a smaller site such as forum) there is a high chance that you’re facing a phishing site. All world-wide known websites have a security certificate that can be seen as a padlock in the corner of the screen. At this point in time,  no phisher can mimic security certificates or HTTPS protocol. But if you are visiting a less-known website (various forums, blogs etc.) which cannot have a certificate or HTTPS, you can never be sure. Besides security certificates and secure protocol, major methods are checking the hosts file and checking the URL.

As a conclusion, Internet is not safe and we must be aware of that. Take care of suspicious emails, sites, messages and immediately report them to real and legit sites through the Phishing Report or Contact form. We must be very careful about our security – nowadays identity theft is an often issue, which is not a thing to underestimate.

Yeah, net problems. You aren’t seeing anything new or any new posts, because i have problem with internet connection. The problem started when the leader company (“Telekom”) started overselling the the link , plus there was the surge of new users getting the ports. My provider which buys link from them, as well the other providers, started having problems with speed, after the Telekom oversold the link. Currently the speeds are going from 20kbps to 27kbps. I hope they will fix this issue soon because this is worse than Dial Up connection.

When we started the Zeusoft, we opened both forum and website. The website for the presentation and the forum for the product support. However recently we had problem with those two. The problem? If forum is active then website(blog) is dead. And vice versa. Because we can’t let that happening we agreed to integrate forum and website.That’s why we’ve choose MyBB forum software. Im once again sorry for all the forum ,,up and down” experience, but i want this solved so we can focus on other things.

Google has started another service called Google Buzz which is integrated in Gmail. Here is the small video preview of this services:

Every game comes to an end after some time. Even the MMORPG type of game. WoW Wrath of the Lich King , has just been finished. Watch the video to get the point. Warning: Contains game spoilers.

Managing  your own space on the Internet requires a high-quality software. However, there are many  free FTP clients, and you should choose the right one that will do the job better, faster and safer.

FileZilla is one of the best and free FTP client that is possible on run all platforms. The simple interface makes the program can be used by those less experienced. Users like FilleZilla because it is a fast client with a lot of useful options that can make the work more easier in all fields. It is possible to find a portable version, so you can run FileZilla from your USB memory. FilleZilla is also our recommendation as one of the best free FTP clients.

FireFTP is a client that can be easily and quickly infiltrate the browser Firefox. This isn’t client who is a handful of options, such as FileZilla, but FireFTP offers all the options to perform basic functions such as downloading or uploading files. If you use a portable version of Firefox web browser, FireFTP can be run anywhere, just with your USB memory.