Using your laptop in public could be risky, especially when you type passwords, check your bank, credit card account or type any sensitive information.

I read about a study from a security research that shows keyboards were not safe when transmitting information.

The study was conducted in Switzerland (School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL ) on keyboards connecting via USB as well keyboards embedded in laptops.

Every keyboard type showed vulnerability. One was even vulnerable from a distance of over 60 feet.

The theory:
Data is sniffed by an antenna placed in the vicinity of the victim, that picks electromagnetic signals radiated from any keyboard key when pressed.

Lessons learned:
Don’t type any sensitive information ( passwords, credit cards, .. ) using your laptop in public.

To read more about the study, click here.

Regards.

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These days we each have multiple email accounts, some we use frequently and others not.

Managing your email involves 2 parts, managing incoming and managing outgoing email.

Let’s take a look at each.

Incoming email:

In my opinion, the easiest way to manage multiple email accounts, is to forward all email you receive to one account.

This way you can manage all your incoming emails in one place. Just make sure you organize your incoming emails in a way to easily find them.

cPanel makes it easy to create many accounts for any domain you own. cPanel even offers a way to manage you email account without having to log into your cpanel hosting account itself.

If you have cPanel, you can just use port  2095 to access tools to manage your email. Just enter http://yourdomain.com:2095 from your browser. Login by entering your email in the input text for user name and password. This will take you right to your email main page, where you have the option to: forward you email, set auto responder, read incoming email …

Here I would forward all my emails to one email that I would use all the time.

Outgoing email:

Let’s assume you forward all your incoming email, to your gmail account.
In gmail you can set filters and label each incoming email in your inbox.

Once you are logged into your gmail account, click on the settings link. Then click on the Accounts tab.
You will see a link to “Add another email address”
Click it to add any other email address you like.
Google will ask you to verify that the email you want to add is indeed your own  email.

After email verification, your new email will automatically be added to you gmail account.Now, everytime you compose an new email message, gmail will let you choose which email you are sending from.

I think this is the simplest way to manage incoming and outgoing emails from one location. Of course, there are other ways you can use to manage email instead of using gmail. You can do the same with Netscape, Outlook, or Mozilla’s Thunderbird.

What is your favorite way in managing your email accounts?

Regards.

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Unexpectedley Wordpress released 2.6.3 today to fix a small vulnerability in a library that is used by the dashboard.

If you don’t want to download the whole software package, you can just upgrade by downloading the 2 affected file from the wordpress site. ( click here for detail )

I personally don’t recommend downloading this in favor of the next release 2.7 that is scheduled soon. ( November 2008 )

Regards.

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I am pleased to announce DomainAlley.net is up and running.
Actually it didn’t take me a lot of effort to set it up. It uses a template to offer domain name registration and other  related products through godaddy.com.
I have been offering domain name registration though my billing account and set it up manually though godaddy.com.
This made me able to offer the service at a very low cost, however there was manual work involved and my hosting customers were not able to manage their domain accounts themselves.
I decided to go this way, because I think godaddy offers great support and their software makes managing domain names easy and straightforward.
Unforetunately, I can not offer lower prices this way for now, but I can offer free hosting when you purchase your domain name from DomainAlley.net.

Here is the deal:
You buy one domain name from domainalley.net.
I will give you 2 months of free hosting ( blog plan at tdothost.com )

If you decide to buy a domain name, here is what you need to do:
- Sign up to register a domain name at domainalley.net
- Sign up at tdothost.com for a blog plan hosting account.
I will give you 2 months free hosting, which includes all the features that are pretty unique at tdothost.
- Unlimited addon domains, subdomains, email accounts…
- Email support through a ticket system.

Regards.

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New WordPress version, 2.6.2, was released yesterday to mitigate a new attack called SQL Column Truncation. If you allow users to register, then you need to upgrade to 2.6.2.

You might have heard of SQL injection, which is widely used by hackers. SQL Column Truncation is not widely used however. A malicious user can create a new account using a known user id: admin and gain access to your site through resetting the password.

To learn more about SQL Column truncation, read Stefan Esser’s post “SQL Column Truncation“. He gives a detailed example of how a user id could be cloned, if you allow others to register to your site.

Therefore it is a good idea in general to change the admin id and rename it to an unknown userid, that has the same privileges as admin.

Regards.

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