Shubham Hacker

Window Vista has been around for more than 2 years now and many users have got a little tired about it’s look and feel. If you are one of them, the good news is you can completely customize Windows Vista appearance buy changing wallpaper, theme, sounds, mouse pointer, logon screen and much much more. Here I am going to show you a nice Vista Drive Icon Pack, which can replace your boring-looking computer drive icons and spice up your system.

Replacing icons is a job that requires a little experience so if you are not familiar with this procedure  you may want to rather use this special tool which can do the job for you.  Now all you have to do is to download these beautiful and free Vista drive icons and enjoy the new look of your computer folder.

Enjoy!

Windows operating system hides many useful tools and features that we sometimes may not be even aware of and we simply take them as granted. One of these  useful features is a so called Windows “auto-run” utility which pops up a small window notifying us of every removable media we insert into computer such as CD, DVD or USB key. Thanks to Windows auto-run, we get convenient way of playing movies or listening to our favorite songs with just one mouse click. Unfortunately we are not the only one who like Windows auto-run feature. Malware writers like it too.

One of the first examples of trojan that was designed to take advantage of auto-run feature was notorious Switchblade Trojan, which was able (if installed on USB key) to steal all important data, password and other personal information from Windows operating system without you ever knowing about it. These days Switchblade is not so dangerous as before but instead one even more dangerous virus stepped into its place. This is so called Conficker or Downadup virus which also takes advantage of Windows auto-run to sneak into one’s computers.

Because Conficker is a very nasty virus and by nature difficult to remove we  suggest you to stop Conficker and similar trojans by disabling Windows auto-run feature once and for all.

Now there are numerous ways of disabling auto-run utility but one of the most convenient ways of doing it is to download small and free Autorun Blocker and let it do the job instead of you.

The procedure is short and simple. All you have to do is to install Autorun Blocker, run it and when prompted to choose  “disable autorun on all drives”. This will permanently disable Windows auto-run feature and secure you from any malware designed to automatically infect computer via USB.

Requirements:

Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 2000, Windows XP

Download Autorun Blocker

I access internet in my university campus. Like most of the concerned institutions they have banned us from accessing networking sites, video sites, downloading sites and also porn sites. They have installed a program “Arithme” that even recognizes file formats so it restricts all media formats viz. mp3, aac, mpg, avi, rmvb etc. Even files in rar and exe formats are restricted. The only files supported are flv and zip.

Very bad nah!

Since there are proxies for networking sites, I needed a proxy for Rapidshare. I am an avid Mozilla Firefox user, so, while searching for proxy addons in Mozilla site, I hit upon this addon - “rapidshare @ office“. After installing this addon, I was able to download a lots of stuff from Rapidshare and no one in this university knows that. Ha Ha..

This addon converts all RS’s mirror links (rs*.rapidshare.com) to IP then downloads using those IPs. If you are not in restricted internet LAN, you can also use this addon to automate whole RS links download process.

To know more visit: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9779

I am more inclined towards website development rather than coding. Of course I will be practicing coding in a few days. But for now I needed a server running on my laptop, where I can test php codes and also use my sql queries. By the way I am running my laptop on Ubuntu.

So the first thing was installing a HTTP server. Obvious solution will be installing apache.

sudo apt-get install apache2

Done. Check if your /var/www/ folder has been created. Now open firefox and type out http://localhost. It should show “It works!”. Cool.

And for starting, stopping and restarting the command is

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start|stop|restart

Note: there are many more commands, not just these three.

That should be enough for apache. Now for PHP.

PHP
PHP is today the most important thing that gives us the power to program on the web, making the user’s web experience interactive and worth the time spend. PHP is a recursive acronym for PHP : Hypertext Preprocessor. For PHP code to run the server needs to run this preprocessor. You cannot have php code of a website displayed to you if the server supports php (You may be able to if you can lay your hands on the php file illegally )
We will now install PHP 5.

sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5

next restart the server by executing this line in the terminal

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now to confirm that PHP5 has been installed and running, check if the folder www has been created in /var/
You can also check by opening up your browser and type localhost. It showed a page that said “It works!”, for me.

Cool. Apache on and running, PHP on and running. Next we focus on the data storage facilities. Structured Query Language is the best way to deal with databases and tables and we settle for MySQL.

MySQL
In the terminal type

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

to install MySQL. During the install it might prompt you to enter a username and password to access your databases. REMEMBER THEM. Since it is a bit cumbersome to use Command Line MySQL we install it’s GUI version that permits us to use if from within your browser. This is called phpmyadmin.
To install phpmyadmin type

sudo apt-get install libapaceh2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql phpmyadmin

to install phpmyadmin. Now MySQL is ready to work with PHP, but not PHP. To enable PHP to work with MySQL, we need to edit a file called php.ini
Type

gksudo gedit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

and click enter. Enter the root password if prompted and edit the line that goes like this

;extension=mysql.so

to

extension=mysql.so

Yes, simply remove the semicolon(;) to uncomment the line.

Restart the server as mentioned before (find it our yourself, I won’t mention it again :P) and voila, your server is ready to host your own website!

P.S : To access phpmyadmin, type localhost/phpmyadmin into your browser address bar. Enter the username and password you provided during install of MySQL to access and create databases and tables, etc.

New linux users must have noticed this. There are antivirus available in the repos. You might question, “But wasn’t I promised that linux is virus free? That was an important reason for me to switch from Windows to Linux.” Well the hard truth is Linux does have it’s own category of viruses. But, the part that will make you happy is that, unless you are *dumb*, a linux virus cannot survive in the hostile environment it is provided with.

Hostile Environment?

You must have noticed that linux expects you to use Super User privileges with care and it is better not to log in using root access. This is to avoid virus spread. Without your permission the virus cannot survive and I bet you are not dumb to let virus survive! There are similarities between the computer virus and the biological virus. Both viruses are tagged successful or dangerous, if it’s multiplication rate is greater than it’s depletion rate. In Windows, achieving this is easy, but Linux thanks to it’s security, is not. So the virus has a hostile environment in Linux, and hence doesn’t survive!

But then why Antiviruses?

There is a virus in linux, and it is clever. It is called Bliss and we can talk about it later. It is experimental and has no harmful intentions I believe. The need for antiviruses is to ensure that you don’t end up infecting your friends computers that are running Windows. Hence you need to make sure that files you have downloaded and those you receive or send to friends are not infected. Of course you are safe, but you need to ensure the safety of your friends still stuck with Windows. Hence Antivirus. Moreover you may be dual booting. So if your Windows gets infected, you can boot into Linux and scan your Windows partitions to easily remove the troubling code!

You can also help friends with having their USB repaired. A virus I encountered few days make disables the USB, hence making it unable to use. It is not recognized by Windows. So plug into Linux (it will be detected! Presto!), scan, clean and save your friend!

What do I use?

I use Avast! Home Linux. You can download it from here. Also since the registration key is needed for it to work. You may get it from here. Do note that the registration key is available for free.

For Ubuntu amd64 architecture users

Since there is no link for downloading a .deb package for amd64 architecture, hence download the i386 architecture package and force install it. Use this code to install.

sudo dpkg –force-architecture -i avast4workstation_1.2.0-2_i386.deb

And to run the installed avast antivirus run this

linux32 avastgui &

Enter the registration key for first time use. And start removing those hiding inactive virus files.

Many thanks to the HOW-TO I found in the Ubuntu Forums for the force installation irrespective of the architecture. I am unable to retrace the link at the moment.

Hope this post was helpful to you.