Category — Internet

Take a look at the registration page for the online edition of Pakistan’s weekly newspaper, The Friday Times…

and then take a look at the registration page for the web edition of The New York Times.

Notice anything similar?! ;-)

How difficult, I mean how difficult is it for a webpage to recognize the browser that is referring to it!!

And yet… we have websites that do a half-baked job of recognizing the browser and worse still… deny access to that page citing browser incompatibility!

Half knowledge, they say, is dangerous!

For your information, I was using Firefox 0.9.3

The folks over at Micro$oft recently started an IE blog now that Bill Gates has expressed his desire to start a weblog. That is a good thing per se. It is really entertaining to read what they have to say on the blog. They talk about taking IE towards better standards support while having a blog that does not validate even HTML 4.0 transitional. But some of the content (non-technical though) comes off as refreshing given the hard-nosed image that Micro$oft has.

One of the things that is readily apparent from IEblog is that everybody seems to be trying to say that they are unable to disclose detailed information about the vulnerabilites faced by IE. The reasons given for this range from security policies at Micro$oft to not letting ‘folks who want to find security holes and hurt Windows customers’ (their words, not mine!!) know about those vulnerabilites.

Hmmm…

I think someone should point them towards mozillaZine where the folks do not think in such terms while releasing updates to their browsers to rectify/patch the various security vulnerabilities that threaten them.

But then… thats just one of the differences between the best open source browser and Micro$oft!

I owe the existence of this blog to:

• WordPress (The great open-source blogging software I use here)
• Hosting Matters (The excellent hosting service that I avail of)

And a special mention goes out for the support forums at WordPress and HostingMatters. Their professionalism amazes me!

I highly recommend both these services.

In these days of e-mail scams, hoaxes and spoofs, its very difficult to trust emails from anyone who wishes to part with a lot of money. Remember the Nigerian e-mail scam and how it fooled a lot of gullible people or the hoax mails from banks or PayPal.

These hoaxes played on…

• People’s fears by cautioning them about a security policy update that required them to send personal information.
• or people’s greed by offering them vast amounts of money in exchange for a small initial investment on their part.

What people do not know is that they can avoid getting fooled in this manner by carrying a few elementary checks on the Internet.

• The simplest way is to cut ‘n paste the subejct of the email they’ve received in the search box of our favourite search engine. More often than not you’ll come across a search result that leads you to a page which has more information on whether that email you received was a hoax or genuine (These emails are, almost always, discussed on online forums.)
• Another method is to go to the official website of the organization that the email has purportedly come from. Once there, find out a contact email address and forward the e-mail you’ve received to that address asking them to confirm if the e-mail is genuine.
• The best way is to go to the Urban Legends Reference Page and search if there is any information available there. Usually, you’ll find reliable information there stating if the e-mail is genuine or a hoax.

This morning, when I checked my inbox, I found an e-mail from PayPal. It was titled, “Notice of Pendency of Class Action and Proposed Settlement”. It referred to a class action suit against PayPal (Case No. 02 1227 JF PVT, pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose) which alleged that PayPal had violated the federal Electronic Fund Transfer Act (EFTA) by not disclosing to its customers, dispute resolution procedures. As a result, any PayPal members who had joined the service between Oct 1999 and Jan 2004 were entitled to Injunctive and Monetary Relief and should go to https://www.paypal.com/settlement/ (which is redirected to http://www.settlement4onlinepayments.com/).

I was naturally suspicious about this e-mail. So I ‘Googled‘ for it and found vague references to it on various online forums. Most of these forums indicated that this was a genuine case and I also got a link to a news item about the PayPal class action suit. To be doubly sure that this was not a case of someone using the class action suit to scam PayPal customers, I went to the PayPal site (which is https://www.paypal.com … please note the https) and found a helpful e-mail address (spoof@paypal.com). I forwarded the e-mail, I had received,  to this address asking them to advise if it was genuine. To my surprise, in just about a couple of minutes, I received a reply from them (obviously an autoresponder)… the contents of which read…

Dear Sameer,

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

Thank you for bringing the “Notice of Pendency of Class Action and Proposed Settlement¨ email to our attention. We can confirm that PayPal sent this email. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

…

Straight from the horse’s mouth! Now that settled the matter for me. :-)

In case you’re not still convinced and want to be triply sure… have a look at this.