Invaders Marketing Blog

Its a depressing time when your countries government website has a “beta” label on it and shows a 404 on the homepage – http://www.number10.gov.uk/

I’m absolutely gobsmacked at McAfee SiteAdvisor. I was checking the feedback for one of my sites recently on there and noticed it has a ‘Email tests’ section.

After reading about it, I realised that what they basically do is send a bot to your website and auto fill any form they can fill with email addresses and fake subject/message (hello, chinese spammers!?).

They then base the spam score on the amount of emails they recieve a month from filling out that form and then how spammy their bot thinks the reply was. In this case it’s given a 50% spam score.

I had replied just once and I can see my email address sitting there as the reply. So I’ve wasted my time emailing back this person JUST IN CASE it was a legitmate email and then they have the cheek to call me an email spammer?

WHAT … THE … FUCK!

I actually can’t beleive this! I had to renew some domains in Namecheap so I sign in and choose to use funds already in the account. Should be a 1 minute job I think..

I get an error saying my checkout request was invalid.. so I hit back and click proceed again.. same error. Then I decide I have no choice but to read the error. You must have referral data turned on! WHAT THE HELL!? I have my browser referal data disabled in firefox and I can’t believe there are people out there using referal data for checkout/basket systems.

Get with the times namecheap!

I just found out about a Paypal feature that I never knew existed! I really can’t believe I’d never known about this before..

You can download a plugin for firefox/IE which allows you to generate a temporary mastercard (mastercard gift card). Basically you want to pay for something which cost but the place only takes credit cards, not Paypal.. no problem, this will generate some mastercard credit card details that will use your Paypal balance. Extremely useful!

If however you’re one of the smart people using Mac OS X..

Mac users cannot install the PayPal Plug-In at this time. However, you can still use the Secure Cards feature of the plug-in.
How it works:

* Go to the Secure Cards page.
* Generate a unique MasterCard Secure Card number.
* Note the card number, expiration date, and the CVC2.
* Enter these details at checkout.

If you’re lucky enough to have an iPhone (yes, you’re a lucky guy if you have one) then I hope you’ve jail broken it.

I know there’s a lot of arguments over jail breaking your iPhone. Most are worried that it’s going to affect their warranty if it breaks but after speaking to a few people including chewie, it seems that it’s always possible to recover it by putting it into a special recovery mode and using itunes to install the original firmware… so I don’t consider it a risk. Jail breaking only opens the iPhone up to run unofficial applications, it doesn’t open it up to run on other networks such as vodafone. If putting in for a warranty claim then you simply click ‘restore’ in itunes and it puts the original, un-jailbroken firmware on

If you don’t already know how to jail break the iPhone, well you don’t need to know! Just download the application from Quickpwn, follow the onscreen instructions and you’re done in a matter of minutes… no special hardware of software needed.

Anyway, to the point… Last night I installed the UNIX subsystem using Installer/Cydia (installer comes automatically by jail breaking the phone). This allows you to SSH into the iphone using your standard SSH client (in my case the one bundled with mac os X as standard, via terminal) using the username root and password alpine.

I’ve wanted to code applications for the iPhone but not too worried about pretty interfaces and certainly didn’t wanna learn a new language or way of coding just for that. Once you’re SSH’d into the iPhone you can do all sorts of things and I thought to myself… I wonder if I could install PHP? After all PHP really is my home from home.

I ran this command ‘apt-get install php’ and about 2 minutes later I have php running on the iphone! How cool is that!? So now if I’m out and about and sitting on an unsecured wifi, I can just run a couple of spamming scripts and sit there with the iPhone spamming away in my pocket.

Also you could create some “useful” scripts to backup SMS and phonebook contacts, log your incoming/outgoing call details and whatever else you might like. If you get hold of someones iPhone for 30 mins then you could install a nice backdoor script running on a cron job which sends you data everytime they connect to the internet… you’ll probably goto jail but hey, maybe you’re a spy for mi5

Here’s a step by step guide to install Lighttpd + PHP on the iPhone

I’ve been wanting to play wifi king for a long time. Providing free wireless internet access to a reasonable sized area. Finally I got to have a play.

The basic idea is to have a server which shares the internet from a standard connection (e.g DSL) to anyone who connects wirelessly. “You mean a wireless access point, why can’t I just buy a £30 wireless AP?”

Well..

Benefits of running our server over buying a standard wireless access point (AP):

Many run of the mill wireless APs fail under high traffic – With our server, we can use a better processor and increase RAM as required.

Caching – If you’re serving a lot of users then you can save on bandwidth and speed up users browsing experience by using a caching proxy like squid. Basically, when one user views a video on youtube (depending on your squid cache file size settings), squid makes a copy of it and then serves its copy to any future requests. This is quicker than downloading it from youtube and serving it to the client again. You can configure file sizes and cache file life time.

Filtering – For bandwidth saving or corporate reasons you can setup a filter with squid to block access to certain sites, certain types of site or content-type. For example you could block access to youtube or block all video files completley.

Advertising – You can incporporate your own advertising into sites that you’re serving. If you wanted to get into the nitty gritty then you could monitor traffic and serve ads based on user behavour (like phorm, I guess)

What do I need?

The great thing is, to do something like this, you don’t need any pricey hardware.

What you need:

1. A computer and operating system (In my case, Ubuntu 9.04)
2. A network card that uses our connection from the ISP
3. A wireless card that supports ‘master mode’ in linux.

1) The box I’m using in this example was originally used as my desktop system and is far more powerful than what you realistically need. I prefer using laptops (especially when going to and from work) so I’ve converted it for this project.

The specs are:

Processor – Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4ghz 8mb L2 cache
Motherboard – Intel BLKDG35EC
RAM – 8gb (4 x 2GB Kingston DDR2 PC800)
HD – Western Digital 320GB 7200RPM SATA
Graphics – Nvidia Inno3d 8600GT PCIE 512mb S-video/DVI/VGA
Network – Onboard gigabit ethernet, TP-LINK TL-WN651g
Case – Basic case
Power – ACBEL INTELLIGENT POWER 610W ACTIVE PFC

I’m running Ubuntu 9.04. For this example, I’ll be assuming that everyone is running Ubuntu 9.04 but it shouldn’t vary that much between different linux distros.

2) I’m using my onboard network card connected to a DSL modem. I actually want to replace this step with an internal PCI modem but I’m having trouble finding a suitable card right now.

3) This one took me a long time! I originally hoped I could use USB wifi adapters since this would make it easier to use many to service a big wireless area. I have tested many usb wifi adapters and had no problem getting them to act as access points/’master mode’ in Windows XP but not in Ubuntu! (For those interested, I had best success with adapters using the r8187 chipset).

It was a bit easier finding a PCI wifi card that would work in master mode. The easiest thing to do is find any card which uses an Atheros chipset and use madwifi drivers (explained later). I loaded a few local computer shop websites and then checked their stock against the madwifi compatibility list. I eventually ended up with a TP-LINK TL-WN651g.
Configuring the server

The first thing to do is install Ubuntu. Download the ISO, burn to DVD and install. I won’t go into detail on this because there’s nothing to do really.

Configure the network card to take connection from our ISP

Open a terminal and edit /etc/network/interfaces by adding the following:

#isp
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

This assumes that you’re plugging this network card into a source that’s running a DHCP server such as a standard router/DSL modem. If you run ‘/etc/init.d/networking restart’ you should now be online, great!

Configure DNS

Since we’re going to act as an access point, we need to enter the DNS servers we’re going to use. You can enter your ISPs DNS servers or free ones like those provided by OpenDNS. In this example, I’ll assume you’re going to use OpenDNS.

Open a terminal and edit /etc/resolv.conf so that it reads as the following:
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

Configuring the wireless card with madwifi drivers

To get the wireless card to act as an access point we need special drivers known as madwifi. To set this up I simply plugged my pci wireless card into the server and then (in gnome session) I clicked ’system>administration>hardware drivers’ where it automatically searched for drivers and offered me ‘Alternate Atheros “madwifi” driver. I simply selected and enabled this driver.

After this, I run the following command in a terminal:

apt-get install madwifi-tools

This installs a package of tools we need to configure the card as an access point.

To force the card to always go into AP mode, we’re going to edit file ‘/etc/modprobe.d/madwifi' by adding the following to it:

options ath_pci autocreate=ap

After adding the above, we’ll run ‘modprobe ath_pci'

Configure wireless card to setup access point

Again we’re going to open a terminal and edit our /etc/network/interfaces file by adding the following:

#wifi ap
auto ath0
iface ath0 inet static
wireless-mode master
wireless-essid linksys
address 192.168.1.1
network 192.168.1.0
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255

If you run ‘/etc/init.d/networking restart’ and scan for wireless access points from another computer, you should now see an access point called ‘linksys’. We’re not done yet though! If you connect, nothing’s going to happen.

Configure the server to route the traffic from the wirless through our ISP connection (eth0)

In terminal run ‘echo boxer > /etc/hostname’

Edit ‘/etc/hosts’ to look the same as:

127.0.0.1       boxer   localhost.localdomain   localhost
192.168.0.100   boxer     server

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

Make a new file ‘/etc/init.d/iptables’ and copy the following into it:

#! /bin/sh
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -F
iptables -X
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -t nat -X
iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -t mangle -X
iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ath0 -j MASQUERADE

To make our new file executable, run ‘chmod +x /etc/init.d/iptables’ and then to make it run on startup run ‘update-rc.d iptables defaults ‘

Install DHCP server

We need to install a DHCP server so that when clients connect, they’re given an IP address. To do this, run

apt-get install dhcp3-server

After this is installed, edit ‘/etc/default/dhcp3-server’ so that INTERFACES=”ath0″

Next, add the following to the bottom of file ‘/etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf’

authoritative;
subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range                           192.168.1.100 192.168.1.200;
option domain-name-servers      208.67.222.222,208.67.220.220;
option routers                  192.168.1.1;
default-lease-time              600;
max-lease-time                  7200;
}

Reboot

Everything should now be installed and setup. Now we reboot, cross our fingers and hope everything worked.

Conclusion

I want to update this post with how to install and configure squid as a transparent caching proxy (no need to configure the clients). Right now this just feeds traffic straight through.

I also want to keep working on getting USB wifi adapters working in ‘master/AP’ mode since this would greatly help servicing a large area. Imagine, you can use multiple cheap USB wifi adapters with a different range of antennas connected.

I’m not a linux guru and a lot of this information I’ve learnt/collated from different forums, sites and such like. I can’t see that I’ve missed anything out but let me know if you run into any problems.

For the last 6 months or so, I’ve run into the same problem across a range of different mac computers. I go to change an application or open a finder window and it just wont work.

I have a second window changer installed which is called witch. I highly recommend using this if you don’t already since it lets you change to a specific window rather than just an application.

I originally thought the issue was with Finder but after a bit of searching, it turns out to be a problem with the Dock. I looked around for apple scripts which could restart Dock but the only one I could find was a bit hit and miss in its success. So I put together my own very simple script.

Simply create a new apple script and put in this:

do shell script "kill -HUP `ps -aux | grep Dock | grep -v grep | awk '{print }'`"

Save it to your desktop and next time your system stops letting you change windows and such like, simply run this script and it will restart your dock.

I used to reboot every time this happened so I’m glad I finally got around to putting a proper solution together.

Windows uses 20% of your bandwidth Here’s how to Get it back

A nice little tweak for XP. Microsoft reserve 20% of your available bandwidth for their own purposes (suspect for updates and interrogating your machine etc..)

Here’s how to get it back:

Click Start–>Run–>type “gpedit.msc” without the ”

This opens the group policy editor. Then go to:

Local Computer Policy–>Computer Configuration–>Administrative Templates–>Network–>QOS Packet Scheduler–>Limit Reservable Bandwidth

Double click on Limit Reservable bandwidth. It will say it is not configured, but the truth is under the ‘Explain’ tab :

“By default, the Packet Scheduler limits the system to 20 percent of the bandwidth of a connection, but you can use this setting to override the default.”

So the trick is to ENABLE reserve able bandwidth, then set it to ZERO.

This will allow the system to reserve nothing, rather than the default 20%.

Please give me feedback about your results

So you want to get into link exchanging, but no one wants to trade with you because your pagerank sucks? You can now use a technique known as 302 Google Jacking to spoof a google pagerank 10.

1. Buy a domain.
2. 301 Redirect the domain either in your .htaccess, PHP header (anything server side) to a page with the desired page rank (If you want a pagerank of 10 then redirect it to google.com). It’s better to redirect to something relevant. For example, if you are doing a mortgage site, redirect to a mortgage site. The PHP code for this is:

/*
Code from:
HttpSeo.com - SEO Tips & Techniques

http://www.httpseo.com/

*/
< ?php
header(’HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);
header(’location:http://www.YourPR10Domain.com’);
exit;
?>

3. Link to the page with the redirect from another of your sites that gets regularly spidered by Google.
4. Wait for a Google Pagerank Update. Pagerank updates usually happen about every three months (nowadays it is fairly erratic).
5. Now you use any type of cloaking software:

/*
Code from:
HttpSeo.com - SEO Tips & Techniques

http://www.httpseo.com/

*/
< ?php
if(ip is in list) (list of google IPs){
header(’HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);
header(’location:http://www.YourPR10Domain.com’);
exit;}
else
{
header(’Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1?);
//Show your site
};
?>

The main drawback is that your site will not actually be indexed by Google as long as you are redirecting the Googlebots to other sites, so it?s really only good for link selling/trading. Having said that I wouldn’t claim to have a pagerank 10 site when you’re selling as that’s fraud.
This further illustrates how useless Google Pagerank has become in measuring a sites importance.
*UPDATE* – If you just want to have a pagerank 10 domain, you can just use this code:

/*
Code from:
HttpSeo.com - SEO Tips & Techniques

http://www.httpseo.com/

*/
< ?php
if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], “Googlebot”)) {
header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
header(”Location: http://www.google.com/”);
exit;
}
else {
header(’Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1′);
};
?>
< html>
< head>
< title>PR 10 page by httpseo.com< /title>
< /head>
< body>
<p>This page will have a PR of 10, but of course it won’t
actually rank for anything, so it’s only useful for selling
domains. </p>
< /body>
< /html>

N.B This information is provided for educational purposes only. Black hat SEO tricks can get you banned by google.

My friend forwarded me this article and I thought it would be a good information source to share!

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Here are some of the topics Vince Tan highlights in his e-book.

• What techniques Google perceives as blackhat
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• Methods of attaining strong backlinks quickly
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Get your copy today: http://www.ziddu.com/download/1644832/AdSense-BlackHat-Edition.rar.html