tech

There are 188 posts filed in tech (this is page 9 of 19).

Well, what about the jailbreak?

iOS8 is here today and as I always do before an iOS update, it’s time to audit my jailbreak. Of late, I’ve grown distant from the jailbreak idea as such. I still have a jailbroken iPhone 4S and iPad Mini 1, but there’s barely much happening there.

RAM? What’s that?

The first problem with my jailbreak is that it’s on a device that’s now, well, old. The iPhone 4S has 512 MB of RAM and as much as Apple fanboys will tell you that you don’t need RAM because Apple has a) tight integration with their hardware or b) amazing tricks up their sleeves that put apps to ‘sleep’ as soon as you minimize them, the truth is that if you jailbreak, you need RAM. Continue reading →

Word of the day: rubric

According to TheFreeDictionary, rubric means a title, class or category. It’s also used when referring to a subheading or the full title of a file/post or page. Neiman Journalism Lab used it as follows –

The Brief, a tailored summary of business and international news under the rubric of “Your world right now.”

Source: Maybe the homepage is alive after all: Quartz is trying a new twist on the traditional website front door » Nieman Journalism Lab

Continue reading →

Facebook Messenger’s Genius Inputs

Ah, Facebook! You’ve been at the center of so much controversy about privacy, callousness towards users and crappy advertising strategies. But if there’s one thing you do well, it’s the ability to slip in some gems of code into your apps and platforms. The latest one, I discovered recently, is the variety and innovation of inputs in your iOS Messenger app. Chatting is something that comes naturally to people. The quick and painless flow of information (hey, gossip is information) is vital to relationships and of late, we’ve been doing a lot of that on mobile phones. iOS, in it’s standardizing tone, has set up the following method of sending information to others – fire up an app, type something you want to send and hit Enter. If you want to send a photo, press a dedicated button to select a few images or take one and send it. If you want to send emoji, press a dedicated button, select the emoji and it’ll be added to your text input. All of this is fine, except the photo sharing part. Recently, I was looking at how redundant that is. The entire process of selecting photos to send (and many apps only allow one photo at a time) and the process of using a single Camera UI to decide if you want to upload old pics or take a new one, is restrictive and kludgy. In comes Facebook Messenger, with the following UI – Continue reading →

Notes for Week 19 of 2014

The last time I did this, it was week 2 of 2014. But here we are again, with a bunch of nice links to share with you nice folks. Enjoy!

 

Internet –

Which is the most popular IP among network engineers? It’s 8.8.8.8, which is Google’s DNS. But this wasn’t always the first IP to be pinged. Before this was Level 3’s not-really-public DNS on 4.2.2.2. Here’s an excellent roundup of the story behind the company across the hill.

Critical Thinking –

Here’s a very simple, very straightforward approach to critical thinking. Be advised, I love repeating this ‘program’ over and over again. Do bookmark it.

Religion –

Here’s an image explaining why religion can be a bad thing sometimes. Enjoy. 🙂

Writing Tools –

There are some really interesting writing tools on the Internet. Here are two that blew my mind with their approach – Gingko and Lines. Do tell me what you think about them.

Finally –

Speaking of writing tools, here’s one of my favorites. It’s a beautiful idea, embodied by the simple example that the developer created called “I Made Tea”. I’d really like to know what my readers make with something as elegant as Telescopic Text.

 

To the Team behind Threes

Today, I read one of the most awesome blog posts I’ve ever read about the creation of something. The post was by the team behind the popular mobile game Threes (yes, the one that spawned the even more popular 2048 series of games) detailing the 570 emails and 45,000+ words exchanged between them over a period of one and a half years to make a game that has broken away from the entire mobile gaming market and shown us what wonders can be done on a four by four game board.

I must confess, I did not read the whole thing. I read about a quarter into the page before skipping down to look at the artwork and reading the conclusion. I found the developers talking about how Threes has turned out to be a lot more famous than they had imagined and how amazed they are at the growing community around it. They are also highly critical of the fakes, the ‘inspired’ games and the outright rip-offs that are flooding the markets.

But here’s the thing – 2048 became famous because it’s gimmicky. The clones are famous because of the original, not on their own merit. But Threes? Threes is unique. There’s no match for the excellent game, the wonderful team behind it and the level of innovation that’s gone into the making of the game.

Along the way, in the article, you can download early prototypes that can be played on both Mac and Windows and are excellent games in themselves. They are different from the gameplay of the final game, yet are impressive in their own right. Here’s one such game that I downloaded and played and was instantly addicted. It’s a brilliant take on Threes, twisting the game with a new angle of gameplay.

So this is what I have to say to the team behind Threes –

Do not lose heart. Scammers will come and go, but your hard work is what stands before the public today. They will approve.

But do not stand on your laurels either. I believe it was the CEO of Rovio (behind Angry Birds) who said, “Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day.” He’s not wrong. You called out 2048 as a game that’s inherently flawed as it can be finished too easily. That’s true. But it’s popular and it’s a derivative of your work. So go ahead, steal what is already yours and add it as a fun mode to your game.

Do not hide your excellence. You are a runaway success. You may need more money, but get more people, finish those games you have showcased in the blog post and show them to the world. The one I played is nothing short of amazing. It made me fall in love with Threes all over again. It’ll bring people back to you. You are at a similar stage which Angry Birds was at with their games. They innovated only a bit every time but every game they released was an instant hit. Your ideas are already a hit. Bring them forth.

Finally, yes, pursue the Mobile App Stores. Tell them to remove the fakes and the rip-offs. But don’t wait for them to do anything. The thieves don’t have the one thing you do – an original idea. They’ll disappear into ignominy soon, but Threes will live on.

 

For all Threes lovers, I leave you with this artwork that I hope will inspire you to keep playing Threes and keep aiming for the Lion. Cheers!

The Threes Monsters.

The Threes Monsters. Source – http://asherv.com/threes/threemails/

And some other Threes Artwork –

Stacking the Cards

The Pirate

Threes is infinite. No, really.

How I Follow Blogs on the Open Internet

Colin Devroe’s post about Fred Wilson’s post about how hard it is to follow blogs on the Open Internet is interesting to me.

Ok, before we go any further, yes, this is very meta. Yes, I could have written this entire thing as comments on Colin’s blog (no, it doesn’t support comments) or Fred’s blog (has nice disqus comments) but I didn’t because that’s the point of blogging. I can write this ‘commentary’ on my blog. Sort of like Greek philosophers writing entire books just discussing each other’s books. Very meta indeed. Continue reading →

To the hacker trying to log into my WP blog

Please, just stop.

Let’s talk about what you want in the comments section?

 

Update: The hacker has been using an IP – 74.91.20.14 from Kansas City which has been blocked.

Update 2: The hacker has now started using an IP –  94.185.85.42 from Sweden which has now been blocked too. Good luck idiot.

Update 3: My hacker has turned into a spammer. Apart from using the following IPs to try to log into my blog,

91.217.101.247, 78.130.226.69, 109.175.6.137, 94.50.173.99, 95.56.146.170,

95.239.168.196, 217.118.81.13, 217.9.237.26, 176.102.32.47,  200.29.112.243,

92.60.234.183, 189.195.192.33, 77.66.236.145, 189.72.213.165, 203.77.43.96,

94.29.189.206, 60.249.130.169, 46.172.200.79, 178.234.219.188, 182.178.58.119,

88.206.117.39,  85.217.201.124, 95.82.248.125 (and a lot others)

(use geoiptool and whois to see where these IPs are from and who they belong to)

I am also being bombarded by spam comments and link backs on my blog. Boy am I glad to be running Disqus instead of the default comments right now!

In other news, I found out that Cloudflare only allows blocking of 2 IPs for a free account. That means I’m left to my own devices to reduce this threat. Thank Johanee for the wonderful Limit Login Attempts plugin for WordPress.

 

Update 4: Ok, I’m kind of liveblogging this. But it’s turning into an interesting nightmare. The more I heckle this hacker, the more I’m being bombarded with spam and the more IPs he’s using to try to log into my account (to avoid the login attempts limit). Here’s a nice map showing the IPs I’ve logged (Shows the number of machines under his control) –

IPs around the world. Most of these are showing as Windows hosts, but some are registering as Mac. That doesn’t look good!

Attribution: The above map is from http://www.phpace.com/tools/network-tools/ip-to-location/ which seems to be using Google Maps and the MaxMind GeoIP service.

 

Update 5: It seems that the dictionary attack has come to an end for the day. The hacker used an intelligent list of commonly used passwords instead of just bombarding me with all possible words from a-z. Thanks to the ThreeWP Activity Monitor plugin, I’ve been able to compile a list of IPs, browsers associated and passwords used by the hacker. I’ve created a nice Google Map to pinpoint all the locations of the possibly infected computers used by the hacker. That map is more comprehensive than the image above. I’ve also attached a nice python list of all the IPs, if someone wants to do something with them (for example, if someone from CloudFlare wants to include said IPs in their network).

Google Map

Combined Info on passwords, IPs, user agent info of infected computers.

python IP list

Attribution: Google Maps for the map, Maxmind for the GeoIP API, pygmaps for the library. If anyone’s interested, I’ll upload the python code I used to create the map (though it’s pretty simple).

 

Update 6: You would have thought this person would have given up after a week of hitting on my blog, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I receive about 7-8 spam comments a day and 30-50 login attempts a day. I’ve started to hit back. I’m recognizing frequently used IPs and reporting them for abuse to their owner companies. I’ve sent a list of IPs to Cloudflare and asked them to put those IPs in their block lists. I’ve found something called RBLs (Realtime Blackhole Lists) which list IPs used by spammers. Many of these lists already have the IPs that I’m getting hit with listed in their files. Most of these lists do not accept user contribution but some of them do. I’m finding the ones that do and systematically reporting every IP used by the hacker.

Also, I’ve downgraded his level from hacker to spammer and from spammer to script kiddie. From here on out I’ll be referring to this person only as a script kiddie.