Author: Rahul Bansal

News

Block ALL Application Requests with One-Click [Facebook]

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date January 14, 2008
27 Comments on Block ALL Application Requests with One-Click [Facebook]

Few weeks back we came up with Ignore All button script which let you ignore all facebook application invitations in one click.

But Kenshiro, Kiljaeden and few users wanted similar button for blocking all applications.

If you are not familiar with blocking application…

you can visit any applications facebook page to block that application from using your information. This amongst the other things prevent application to send further add request to you.

Some really evil applications forces their existing users to invite other users in order to access or unlock important features they provide. As an example many quiz application let user take quiz directly but forces user to invite friends before he can proceed to results. Thus increasing spam!

Now back to topic!

This script adds two buttons as shown in above screenshot on facebook requests page.

Block ALL Only button: This blocks all application found on request page but does not ignore pending requests. So if you choose to confirm any of pending request, you can still proceed to add that application. Note that adding any blocked application will unblock them automatically.
Block & Ignore ALL button: This blocks all application found on request page and ignores pending requests!

Installation:

If you are in Firefox with GreaseMonkey extension installed you can click here to install Block All Facebook Application Invite Script.

OR

Download firefox if you don’t have it!
Install GreaseMonkey extension for firefox. (SKIP this if you have GreaseMonkey too!)
Close all firefox windows and restart firefox.
Install Block All Facebook Application Invite Script

Quick FAQ:

Q: I just want to Ignore ALL request without blocking applications?

Ans. Use Ignore All button script which adds only ignores the applications.

Q: OMG! I blocked an application I wanted to use. How to unblock it!

Ans: Go to this facebook privacy page and you will see blocked application list. Just click on remove links next to individual applications you want to unblock. Press Save to confirm changes. (see screenshot below)

Credits: Based on Ali Karbassis Auto-Block script & zetxs Auto-Ignore script!

Related Scripts: Ignore All button script

Tags Facebook, Firefox, Software, Windows

News

CNN-IBN Forum for Students – Now Whatever You Write Will Be Read By The World!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date January 10, 2008
15 Comments on CNN-IBN Forum for Students – Now Whatever You Write Will Be Read By The World!

Shortly called CFS (CNN-IBN Forum for Students) is a platform launched by IBNlive for students to Write or Blog on any National or International issue that they feel strongly about.

From official CFS website,

Blogs written by students will be displayed on our official website www.ibnlive.com. This platform aims at guiding students to understand how acceptable their views on various issues are by fellow citizens and readers, across the world. Comments will also be posted by senior journalists and celebrities.
We hereby, invite you to join this exclusive forum, to key your opinions on the key issues of your country.

Key highlights of the forum are…

Best Bloggers will be awarded certificates of recognition from CNN-IBN
Excerpts of blogs and comments on it will be featured in relevant shows / news bulletins
Bloggers will get a chance to participate on CNN-IBN’s interactive shows
Students will also be invited to ‘The Verdict’ a show hosted by Rajdeep Sardesai, Editor in Chief,CNN IBN.

# Who can participate?

As of now CFS is limited for Students from Pune, India.

# Do you need to be a blogger to do this?

NO. You will be blogging at CFS but you no need to be a blogger to register for event.

Link to register: http://cfs.ibnlive.com/

Thanks Prashant & Shilpa for all the info and updates regarding event! 🙂

Tags Blogging, contest, Events, Polls

Tips

View Locked Orkut Album in Orkut Style!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date January 9, 2008
22 Comments on View Locked Orkut Album in Orkut Style!

Important Update: This hack is rectified by orkut. SO IT WILL NOT WORK ANYMORE. If I find a new hack I will definitely post it here!

You may subscribe to my RSS feed or email alert to receive automatic updates regarding this and other hacks in future! (Jan 17, 2008)

This is highly recommended way of exploiting Orkut album hack to unlock (view) pics in the album!

Many users claimed that our old orkut album hack is not working. While we noticed few exception most of the users had trouble in copying and pasting lengthy javascript code. So here comes an automated way – a GreaseMonkey script!

Once you install above script successfully, next time you go to any Orkut locked orkut album, you will see pics from locked orkut album in orkut style alongwith error message which obviously lost its meaning! (See screenshot above)

#How to Install (Need to do this only once!)

Download firefox if you don’t have it! (SKIP this if you have firefox.)
Install GreaseMonkey extension for firefox. (SKIP this if you have GreaseMonkey too!)
Close all firefox windows and restart firefox.
Click here to install the script View Locked Album in Orkut Style

Thats it! All locks will be broken automatically as they never existed! 😀

#Credits:

Thanks Leandro Koiti Sato for creating this script script. Original script is here. We made a small change in our version to give maximum result to our users!

Thanks Bean for notifying about script! 🙂

Important Update: This hack is rectified by orkut. SO IT WILL NOT WORK ANYMORE. If I find a new hack I will definitely post it here!

You may subscribe to my RSS feed or email alert to receive automatic updates regarding this and other hacks in future! (Jan 17, 2008)

Tags Bing, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Javascript, Security, Software, Windows

News

Organize Photos into Album on Orkut – New Feature!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date January 4, 2008
6 Comments on Organize Photos into Album on Orkut – New Feature!

After revising photo upload limits to 100 next thing everyone wanted is a way to manage photos nicely! Orkut answered your call and now you can group your photos into different albums like my vacation album, new year party pics, birthday snaps, …

So when you click photos link now you will see following…

Just choose a title and description, your album will be ready. Next you will be taken to screen where you can upload pics into it! Uploading is the same old process. I was expecting a java applet like facebook provides.

Final album will look like this…

After creating a album things you can customize anytime are

Album cover
Name of album i.e. title
Album description
Of course photos inside album!

One feature orkut should have given is to move photos between album. As of now if you have uploaded lots of photos on orkut on different topics, you can not move them just into different albums. You have to download them first to hard drive, then upload them again different album!

Anyway something nice from orkut after their scrapbook and album hacks!

Related: Official Orkut Blog Post

Tags Apple, Bing, Orkut

Tips

Orkut Viewing Locked Scrapbook Hack is Back!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date January 2, 2008
29 Comments on Orkut Viewing Locked Scrapbook Hack is Back!

Important Update: This hack is rectified by orkut. SO IT WILL NOT WORK ANYMORE. If I find a new hack I will definitely post it here!

You may subscribe to my RSS feed or email alert to receive automatic updates regarding this and other hacks in future! (Jan 3, 2008)

Yep! For those who missed old orkut hack to view locked scrapbook, a new hack to do the same is here!

#Steps to use this hack…

Navigate to the profile with locked scrapbook or locked scrapbook itself.
Now You will see Profile ID in address / navigation bar. Ex. In http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=10226448830416481862 , 10226448830416481862 is Profile ID. Note down this Profile ID.
Now replace Profiled in following URL with Profile ID you have noted above.
http://x13.110mb.com/scraps.php?uid=ProfileID

Finally paste new link in address bar. Hit ENTER and you will get scraps.

#Alternate way… (Javascript)

Navigate to the profile with locked scrapbook or locked scrapbook itself.
Paste Following javascript in address bar and hit ENTER.

javascript:var dw = document.location.href; dw = dw.split('=');document.location='http://x13.110mb.com/scraps.php?uid='+dw[1];

#Alternate way… (For Firefox Only)

You can drag-n-drop following bookmarklet on your browsers bookmark toolbar. That will create a bookmark named “UNLOCK SCRAPBOOK”. Just click on it whenever you encounter any locked scrapbook and you will be redirected to unlocked scrapbook automatically…

Looks like a bad start for orkut in 2008. Thanks Gaurav!

Important Update: This hack is rectified by orkut. SO IT WILL NOT WORK ANYMORE. If I find a new hack I will definitely post it here!

You may subscribe to my RSS feed or email alert to receive automatic updates regarding this and other hacks in future! (Jan 3, 2008)

Tags Bing, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Javascript, Outdated, Security

Editorial

[Summary] Devils Workshop in 2007

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date January 2, 2008

This should have been last post in 2007 but instead this is going to be first post of 2008. Anyway here is summary of 2007…

The biggest thing we have done is moved to WordPress from blogger(blogspot) in June 2007. Because of few mistakes it took some time to catch up with this new domain. Still with all your support we are happy with progress of Devils Workshop!

#Stats:

Unique Hits ~ 159000
Page Views ~ 405400
Posts ~ 155
Comments ~ 1100

#Earning (Annual):

Google Adsense – 4 Digit Fig (in USD)
Other Source – 3 Digit Fig (in USD)

Now lets turn to best posts. We are picking up 2 sets of top 10 posts. First set is for Orkut only and other set for rest.

#Top 10 Post (Orkut)

#Top 10 Post (Firefox, Adsense, SEO, YouTube, Blogger, etc)

Finally let us know if anything is missing from above lists which you think should be part of it!

Thank you all for a wonderful year… 🙂

Our Sincere Request: Spare a minute to let us know about your favorite post of the year 2007 and what are you expecting from this Devils workshop! Thanks in advance for your time 🙂

Tags Adsense, Bing, Blogging, Editorial, Firefox, Google, Summary, Windows, Wordpress, YouTube

Editorial

[Event] New Year Party in Pune!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date December 27, 2007

[Note: This is a year old post and meant for party on Dec 31, 2007. So please ignore this.]

Hey Guys, We got a nice offer for all our Devils Workshops’ members!

If you are looking for new year party in Pune then we have a nice party in town whose details are here!

Now MOST IMPORTANT THING:

The party is for couples only but for our members few stag (single) entries will be entertained.

Also we will be getting flat 10% discount on all passes!

[edited by Admin]

Tags Announcements, Bing, Blogger, Editorial

News

Now You Can Have Your Orkut Profile in Google Search!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date December 21, 2007
10 Comments on Now You Can Have Your Orkut Profile in Google Search!

Yep. Soon Google crawlers will be indexing orkut profiles and everyone on orkut will be googlable. In simple terms you can use google search to find your friends’ orkut profile and your friends can do same to find you!

Although there is no official post regarding this on any Google or Orkut official blog, a new privacy setting – "orkut in google search results", indicates just this.

By default this setting is configured to show your orkut information in search results! That’s why you don’t need to do anything to appear in google search.

Those who are concern about privacy can choose "hide information" option. There is no fine grained control like facebook provides. So better opt for hiding if you have doubt on how this feature will be used (or abused).

Three months back facebook opened their user database for search engines and considering facebooks that move this should not surprise anyone.

Also can orkut do this as sensibly as facebook did?

Related: Read how facebook did that!

Tags Bing, Google, Orkut

Tips

Orkut Scrapbook XSS Bug is Still Active!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date December 21, 2007
2 Comments on Orkut Scrapbook XSS Bug is Still Active!

After two days we posted about scrapbook bug and demonstration of its destructiveness by Rodrigo Lacerda (Portuguese link) and Gaurav, it looks like orkut team haven’t got enough of it!

So on request of some of the members and also to force orkut to take this more seriously we are partially revealing the bug…

The bug is in embed tag’s src attribute! Orkut doesn’t validate if src is pointing to valid flash media file URL and thus any URL submitted as value of src attribute just get executed when user opens scrapbook! This is different than most infection where user have to generate some event like clicking on a particular region, link, etc.

Proof of Concept 1:

Here is harmless but highly annoying code which you can put in your friends orkut scrapbook. This is the reason why some people were getting logged out of orkut just by visiting their scrapbook!

Code:

Proof of Concept 2:

More serious but harmless exploitation is a worm created by Rodrigo Lacerda (Portuguese link) which is performing following routine.

You read the scrap with code (infact just open the scrapbook with code)
Code injects javascript in your browser
Javascript code makes you join the community
Then code collect your list of friends
Send the scrap with the code for them!

The community which is being joined is Infectados pelo Vírus do Orkut! Just check out the community page and reload it. Look how fast the number of members increases. 🙂

Solution:

Solution is in the form of flash block extension we talked about in earlier posts!

What should orkut do:

They should first activate CAPTCHA (i.e. image verification) for all URLs including their own. That way worm will stop spreading itself!
For future they should validate user input properly. XSS is most of the time result of improper validation of input. Like here they haven’t checked URL for filetype!

Update: Orkut in a official blog post claim to fix the bug! But this embed tag’s bug is still open! They might have fixed other bug which Rodrigo used!

Link: Post by Rodrigo Lacerda (in Portuguese ) | Flash Block Solution | Gaurav post | Orkut’s official blog post

Tags Bing, Internet Explorer, Javascript, Security

News

Bloggers Dominated Forbes 2007 List of "25 Top Web Celebrity"!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date December 20, 2007
1 Comment on Bloggers Dominated Forbes 2007 List of "25 Top Web Celebrity"!

First if you are hearing phrase "web celebrity" for the first time, then “Web Celebrity” is a person famous primarily for creating or appearing in Internet-based content, and for being highly recognizable to a Web-based audience. That definition excludes people who were significantly famous before they hit the Web. [source: quickonlinetips]

Now coming back to the topic, Forbes released the second of its kind – list of top 25 web celebrity for year 2007. Celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton (real name: Mario Lavandeira) topped the list. What I like most about the list is dominance of bloggers and also name of my favorite blogger Darren Rowse on the list!

Below is filtered list of bloggers who made it to the top 25. Not all of these are full-time professional blogger but they blog and thats what makes them blogger! 😉

Note: Numbers in brackets indicates their rank in the list. And bloggers with bold description are from my RSS reader!

Perez Hilton – Celebrity gossip blogger (1)
Michael Arrington – TechCrunch (2)
Mark Frauenfelder – BoingBoing (3)
Cory Doctorow – Author and blogger (5)
Gina Trapani – LifeHacker (7)
Robert Scoble – Tech Blogger (10)
Frank Warren – Online artist (11)
Om Malik – Tech Blogger (12)
Will Leitch – Sports blogger (13)
Kathy Sierra – Programming instructor, blogger (16)
Dan Lyons – Fake Steve Jobs (17)
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga – Political blogger (18)
Xeni Jardin – Journalist, blogger (19)
Ryan Block – engadget (20)
Glenn Reynolds – Political blogger (21)
Pete Cashmore – Mashable (22)
Steve Rubel – micropersuasion (23)
Heather Armstrong – Blogger (24)
Darren Rowse – Problogger (25)

You may be wondering what I have filtered as list is almost complete with 19 names out of 25! :O

This just shows how blogger are dominating the websphere! 🙂

Links: Forbes Article | List in Slideshow format

Tags Blogging