JaypeeOnline

Facebook Password Reset Scam

Jaypee Habaradas — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:04:02 +0000

If you receive a password reset email from Facebook on your inbox, be careful! Facebook users are being warned of a malicious email password reset scam that is making its rounds and quickly spreading across the social network the past couple of days. This massive spam run is the latest version of malicious emails targetting Facebook’s 400 million global users.

The email messages that are believed to be sent from the Cutwail and Rustock botnets, use a spoofed return email address like “help@facebook.com“, making it look real and appear that its really from Facebook. The message indicates that the user’s Facebook password has been reset and that the user should download the email attachment containing the new password. Unbeknownst to most users, that attachment is a Trojan horse program designed to infect a computer. This massive spam run also contains different varieties of malware programs, password stealers, rogue antivirus programs and botnet code.

Unlike most spam and phishing emails, this Facebook password reset scam’s English-language messages contain correct grammar but has a weird sign-off: “Thanks, Your Facebook.”

Here’s a screenshot provided by McAfee from one of those Facebook password reset scam emails.

Users should always keep in mind that companies or social networks like Facebook won’t send unsolicited passwords. The only time a user will get a new password is if that user requested for it. Aside from keeping your AV (antivirus) up-to-date, users should also make it a habit not to click on embedded links on emails and NEVER download attachments. If you have to download an attachment from someone you know, make sure you scan it first with your antivirus software before opening/running it.

Social networking sites will always be a favorite target of scammers, spammers, phishers and other types of cybercriminals because of the huge number of users and the large percentage of “ignorant” users. So its important that users should always be protected (up-to-date antivirus) and be educated about these types of email scams.

Next time you open your inbox and find an email that asks you to reset a password or change login details, be careful. It could “pretend” to come from Facebook, Twitter, Bank of America, PayPal or any other website – don’t click on the embedded links and NEVER download any attachments!

Anyone here or anyone you know recently received a Facebook password reset scam email?

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AT&T ZERO Charger

Jaypee Habaradas — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:25:42 +0000

AT&T has recently released a mobile phone charger that’ll let you save energy, save money and help the environment all at the same time.

Do you know that an average cellphone charger uses up the same amount of power from the AC outlet whether or not the cellphone is using it? Many people aren’t aware of this so they just leave their cellphones plugged in to their charger overnight or leave their charger plugged in the AC outlet even when they’re not using it. Because of this, there’s a lot of wasted energy and wasted money on electric bills.

To address this issue, AT&T has developed the world’s first automatic zero draw charger called the AT&T ZERO charger. Carlton Hill, vice president of Devices and Product Development for AT&T’s wireless operations has this to say about their newest product:

“In an effort to provide environmentally friendly and simpler solutions for our customers, AT&T worked hand in hand with Superior Communications to create the first practical and user-friendly zero-draw charger for mobile phones,” ..“With the size of AT&T’s customer base, providing solutions like these helps our customers make a big difference.”

So what does the ZERO charger do? Unlike other conventional cellphone chargers, it automatically detects whether your phone is connected or not and cuts the power supply from the AC outlet or wall socket, saving energy and money for the user.

The AT&T ZERO charger is designed by Superior Communications and has 5-star efficiency rating. It also features a “block-and-cable” design for maximum interchangeability, allowing customers to use the same charger for future handsets/devices and over time, it will cut the number of cellphone chargers produced and reduce future landfill waste. With USB compatibility, you can use the ZERO charger for many mobile devices, not just cellphones. The ZERO charger will be sold using green packaging (100% recycled paper).

There’s no word yet how much the ZERO charger will cost but it will be available in May at AT&T retail locations here in the US or at www.wireless.att.com.

Check out the official press release or if you want to learn more about the AT&T Zero charger, visit www.att.com/ZERO.

I think this is a brilliant idea/product! Why didn’t anyone think about creating a product like this earlier? Anyways, I’m definitely gonna get myself a ZERO charger as soon as its available not because I’m an AT&T customer but because of what it can do – help save energy, help me save money on electric bills and at the same time help save the environment.

What do you think of AT&T’s ZERO charger? If you had the chance, would you get one? Please share your thoughts.

Weekend Roundup #75

Jaypee Habaradas — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:27:22 +0000

How are you all doing? Hope you all had a good weekend. This weekend was kinda like the same as last weekend, not too busy but was more exciting and had more fun. Although I wasn’t able to watch it, I was glad to find out from the news that the Los Angeles Lakers won over the Phoenix Suns. The suprise of the weekend was the NY Knicks win over the Dallas Mavericks by 30 points, avenging their previous 50-point loss and also ending the Mav’s 13-game winning streak.

Of course who doesn’t know about last Saturday’s boxing match between Manny Pacquiao of the Philippines and Ghanain boxer Joshua Clottey? Filipinos and boxing fans around the world have been waiting for it since it was announced. Pacquiao won as most people expected but didn’t expect it to be that lopsided and boring. People were expecting Clottey to give it his best and to be aggressive, to give Pacquiao a run for his money. Instead, Clottey turned into a punching bag, absorbing Pacquiao’s punches all throughout the fight and barely threw punches of his own. Pacquiao threw around 1,200+ punches, while Clottey only had about 300+. In previous Pacquiao fights, I would watch the replay several times and look at the details round by round but this fight was so boring, I didn’t even bother to watch a replay. Pacquiao like always, came out and did his part, stuck with his fight plan/strategy and fought like a champ. Congratulations Manny and more power to you!

Now, we’ll have to wait and see who’ll win in the Floyd Mayweather Jr vs Shane Mosley fight, because whoever wins that fight will most likely fight Pacquiao next.

Anyways, on to the good stuff. Hope you guys enjoy this week’s edition of the Weekend Roundup!

Blogging

WordPress

Technology

Gadgets

Pinoy Blogs

JaypeeOnline Weekly Recap

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or want your article or find an interesting story that you want to be featured in the next Weekend Roundup, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page.

Thank you for your time and hope you guys have a great week!

WordPress Personas for Firefox

Jaypee Habaradas — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:46:42 +0000

Personas is one of the new features that came with the release of Mozilla Firefox 3.6. Personas are easy-to-use themes that allows users to customize and personalize the look of Firefox, they work the same way as Google Chrome themes. If you’re a WordPress user, advocate or fan and Firefox is your web browser of choice, then you’ll love this new set of Firefox Personas.

From the WordPress Blog:

We recommend open source software whenever we can, and the Firefox browser from Mozilla is one of our favorites. Firefox 3.6 recently came out with persona support, allowing users to skin their browsers with favorite designs and brands. WordPress users everywhere seem to love the W symbol (at WordCamps it shows up on everything from t-shirts to iPhone skins), so it was only natural that WordPress personas would come along.

With the help of designer Chad Pugh, WordPress has released two Firefox personas based on the WordPress brand: “Vintage Press” and “Inkwell“. If you love WordPress like I do, this is a great way to show how much you love WordPress and a good way of promoting WordPress to your friends and other people.

Vintage Press

Inkwell

Among the two Firefox personas, I like Vintage Press better and have installed it on Firefox. Here’s a screenshot of my Firefox web browser using the Vintage Press Persona.

Personas are a built-in feature for Firefox 3.6, so all you need to do is visit the Firefox Personas Gallery and find a persona. To preview a Persona, just hover your mouse on it and Firefox will temporarily “wear” it. If you find a Persona that you like, just click on “Wear It” and that persona will be installed on your Firefox browser. Btw, if you’re running an earlier version of Firefox, you’ll have to install the Personas addon first before you can install and use Personas.

For those who use Firefox, do you use Personas? What Persona are you using right now? Which WordPress Persona do you like better – Vintage Press or Inkwell?

Check out the WordPress Personas for Firefox

Technical Difficulties

Jaypee Habaradas — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:07:58 +0000

I’ve been having problems with my blog recently. If you’ve visited and tried to access JaypeeOnline the past few days, it’s most likely that you experienced some problems viewing the blog. Unlike previous events where the downtime were due to my hosting provider’s incompetence, blog migration or a WordPress plugin conflict, this time the problems were caused by a high volume of traffic. Like many bloggers, I work on increasing my blog traffic and here I am, having problems because of it. Ironic isn’t it?

Because of the efforts and a little bit of SEO work that I put on my blog, the volume of traffic jumped in the last few months and went from double to triple the amount of traffic I had in the first few months of last year. The last couple of months didn’t show any signs of slowing down and the volume of traffic has just kept increasing. It got to the point where my blog is using up more resources and running out of the alloted memory. I’m not complaining at all but I didn’t expect that it would cause me these problems. Btw, having WP Super Cache installed on my blog didn’t help or was not enough to handle the situation.

Anyways, I’ve been busy working on this issues the past few days trying to figure out what’s causing the problem, what I could do to fix it and trying to find alternative solutions. I also contacted my hosting provider and asked for some help. I’m very fortunate to have a very good hosting provider – ServInt, who’ve been very helpful and have provided all the assistance I needed the past few days. Right now, my blog is on a 7-day trial upgrade to a higher VPS account with double the amount of resources. I’m also running a new WordPress caching plugin which is supposedly better than WP Super Cache and is used by a lot of big-time, high-traffic blogs like mashable.com, noupe.com, webdesignerdepot.com, freelanceswitch.com and tutsplus.com just to mention a few. I’m still working on it and will have to fix some of the settings to maximize the caching plugin capabilities and optimize blog performance.

Although I’ve been able to address the issues and have been able to minimize the server load, it’s still a work in progress. Me and my hosting provider will continue to monitor the performance of JaypeeOnline and try to make it work better. If you experience any problems or notice some errors on the blog or any part of the blog, please do notify me via the contact page or send me an email at jphabaradas [at] gmail [dot] com.

I apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced during the past few days and I hope that you won’t get tired of supporting JaypeeOnline. Thank you and hope you all have a nice day!

WP Theme Review: Notepad

Jaypee Habaradas — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 07:06:15 +0000

It’s been a while since Nick La of N Design Studio released a free WordPress theme. His last release was the iTheme – a Mac inspired free WordPress theme, released in early 2007 and a very popular WordPress theme at that time.

Nick’s latest release is also Apple-inspired. The Notepad WordPress theme is inspired by the iPhone’s Notes.app. Here’s a short introduction from the theme page:

Inspired by the iPhone’s Notes.app, the Notepad is a modern WordPress theme with a subtle touch of the sketchy effect. Key features include: multi-level dropdown menus, social media buttons, threaded & paged comments, and widget support. It has been tested on WordPress 2.9 with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE7+.

Basic features:

Widget-ready
2 column
Theme options page
Threaded comments support
Paged comments support
Social media buttons
Multi-level dropdown menus
Tested on Firefox, Chrome, Safari & IE7+
Tested on: WordPress 2.9+

Screenshots:
Homepage

Post page

Theme Options

Style Guide

Notes:

Before you upload the theme, open socialmedia.php file and change the social network links to your profile. If you need to add more buttons, additional social media icons are provided in the [img > socialmedia] folder. Just copy & paste the tag and change the file name accordingly.
The main content area is 520px and sidebar is 270px.
Users with a CSS3 compatible browser will see the visual enhancement such as rounded corners and drop shadow.

My Take:
The Notepad WordPress theme is a simple yet very elegant looking theme. The design, style and craftsmanship are top-notch. Like its predecessor, the iTheme – it seems that there’s nothing you can’t like about it. It’s a very simple looking theme and yet it has all the elements (design, typography, etc) that make it an awesome freemium (free + premium) WordPress theme.

The Notepad theme has a lot of potential and possibilities not only because it has a simple design and layout that allows the user to customize the background, fonts, header, logo, etc. by tweaking the stylesheet but also because you can customize the design with Adobe Photoshop via the PSD file provided by the author. So if you have some design and graphic editing skills, you can create a unique/different or even a better version of the theme for your blog. You can use the style guide (screenshot above) to help/guide you with customizing the design. (Notepad PSD download link)

A theme options page has been recently added to the Notepad theme (coded by Jon Raasch). The theme options page allows the user to change the color scheme, upload a custom favicon, exclude page(s), disable dropdown menus, edit or disable the social media icons/buttons and install a footer tracking code.

I was excited when I found out that Nick La released another free WordPress theme. Based on his work and previous releases, I knew that this new theme was gonna be good. I was right. The Notepad theme even surpassed my expectations. The WordPress community is fortunate to have very talented and generous designers like Nick La who create and release excellent quality free WordPress themes to the community. With themes like these, I’m sure everyone is looking forward to Nick’s next free WordPress theme release.

Preview or Download

The Notepad theme is also available for other blogging platforms:
Textpattern: http://kukac7.hu/notepad/
Blogger: http://blog.btemplates.com/notepad-blogger-template

Cubicl: Social Network for Groups

Jaypee Habaradas — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:50:19 +0000

If you think that there’s already too much or too many social networks in existence, think again. There’s another social network in town, which was created especially for “groups”. This new social network is called Cubicl.

Each one of us have and interact with different groups of people each day – our family, friends, coworkers, classmates, etc. With Cubicl, you can have organized and real-time conversations with your groups. On Cubicl, you can create private cubes for each of your groups – a cube for your family, one for your classmates and another for your coworkers. You can create as many cubes as you want, depending on your preference. Aside from having private cubes, you can also choose to join public cubes created by other people as a place to share and talk about certain interests or hobbies – movies, music, sports, cars, etc.

Conversations stream 24/7 so you receive them in real-time, all day and night on your computer or your mobile device. Users can also share almost anything on their cubes – pictures, music, documents and more.

Features:

Invite people – via cubicl, email, and facebook connect
Discover Cubes – browse groups related to your interests
Share files – share and store any type of file

Screenshots:
Cubicl Welcome Page

Cubicl Private Cube

Cubicl Members Management

As of now, I don’t have any use for something like Cubicl, but for the sake of checking it out and for this review, I’ve created an account so I can see for myself how this new and “unique”, social network works. I’ve created a public cube for WordPress users, advocates and fans here – http://www.cubicl.com/g/wordpress. If you decide to join or try Cubicl, you can join the WordPress public cube if you want.

Like I said, I don’t have any use for this yet but from what I’ve seen and tried, Cubicl is a good place for collaborating with your groups – your family, friends, classmates, coworkers just to name a few. Creating a private or public cube is very easy and so is inviting other people to join your cubes – you can invite other Cubicl users, send email invitations or even invite your Facebook friends. If you’re someone who does a lot of collaborative work and is looking for a way/place to do it in an organized way, you might want to give Cubicl a try.

I’ve browsed around for public cubes and there are already a lot of cubes that have been created by Cubicl users. The Education category has a lot of cubes in it, where users have created cubes for their school/alma matter, specific classes, clubs and other organizations.

Anyone else on Cubicl? If you are, what are you using it for? Personal stuff? Work? Interests and Hobbies?

Check out Cubicl

First Apple iPad Commercial

Jaypee Habaradas — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:55:23 +0000

While watching the 82nd Annual Academy Awards earlier this evening, I saw the first Apple iPad TV commercial. It was aired during a commercial break of the 82nd Annual Academy Awards or the 2010 Oscar Awards. When I first saw it, I didn’t really pay attention to it but then I remembered that I haven’t seen or heard about an Apple iPad commercial before so I checked and confirmed that this ad was the first Apple iPad commercial aired on national television.

A few minutes after it was shown on TV, the Apple iPad commercial/TV ad was immediately uploaded and made available in the iPad gallery section of the Apple website. Here’s a copy of the Apple iPad commercial.

The commercial is cool but talking about the hardware – the Apple iPad itself, its nothing more than an oversized version of the iPod Touch/iPhone. I totally agree with what my fellow Pinoy tech blogger and online friend – Mike Abundo posted on his Facebook status:

Until the iPad has the capabilities of an actual tablet computer and not a giant voiceless smartphone, it’s simply overpriced and underpowered.

I know there are some people who’d still buy the iPad but if you’re looking for a “real” tablet pc, I suggest you save your money and wait for something better to come out or wait until Apple makes improvements on the iPad and maybe release a iPad Pro version. Anyways for those who are interested, the Apple iPad will start shipping and go on sale starting next month. The WiFi-only model will be available on April 3 while the WiFi + 3G model will be available late April. You can preorder any iPad model starting March 12th. The Apple iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.

What do you guys think of the Apple iPad commercial? Does it convince you to buy it even though it lacks in hardware features? Would you spend money to buy an oversized iPod Touch/iPhone?

Weekend Roundup #74

Jaypee Habaradas — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:45:34 +0000

Hello everyone! How are you all doing? Hope you all had a good weekend. Mine was okay. It wasn’t that busy and it wasn’t boring as well. Had a few parts in the church program and had a church building committee meeting so I had to stay a while at church til late afternoon. Today, Sunday was spent mostly at home with my family. Watched the Lakers vs Magic game and was disappointed that the Lakers lost by 2 pts. It’s all good though, I believe they can still win this year’s championship. They just have to work harder and get/find their groove back. Also watched the 82nd Annual Academy Awards or the 2010 Oscar Awards on TV. Was expecting Avatar to win most of the awards but surprisingly, The Hurt Locker came out winning 6 Oscars out of the 9 nominations it got, including the most coveted one – Best Picture.

Have fun and enjoy reading this week’s edition of the Weekend Roundup.

Blogging

WordPress

Technology

Gadgets

Pinoy Blogs

JaypeeOnline Weekly Recap

Thank you for your time and hope you guys have a great week!

The State of The Internet

Jaypee Habaradas — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:52:48 +0000

Ever wonder how many people are using the Internet? Or how many emails are sent across the Internet each day/year? How many websites and/or blogs are there in the Internet? How many tweets are sent per day on Twitter? How many people use and view Facebook each day? How many videos an average user views on YouTube or Hulu each day? If you’re interested with statistics, technology and the Internet in general or you simply want to know the current state of the Internet these days, you’ll surely like the video and infographic that I’m sharing with you today.

I came across the video a couple days ago while I was browsing the web. The video is entitled The State of The Internet created by Jesse Thomas of JESS3.com.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

After watching the above video, I was inspired to find out more about Internet statistics and stuff so I did a Google search of “state of the internet” and came across this interesting infographic created by Focus.com. This infographic features a detailed demographic of Internet users today – who is using the Internet, how they are using it, the amount of Internet usage, their gender, age, educational background and level of income just to mention a few.

The State of The Internet by Focus.com

via Focus.com

Pretty interesting huh? I really like the video and its presentation. Its very catchy and entertaining. However, the infographic is also very useful and provides a lot of information in todays state of the Internet. How I wish the average broadband speed here in the US would be at least half of what Japan and Korea have or even what most European countries have right now.