Month: August 2007

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M$ WindowsXP just got a newer version of Update with new Components!

I am not sure if anyone is aware of it or not, so kindly spare me if it’s not NEW in the sense I wish to convey. (Or may b, you didn’t discover it the way I did) 😛
For no particular reason, I visited the windows update page today (using IE7) and got this message:

WindowsUpdateComponent

As you can see, the *latest version* of Windows Update requires a few components to be installed on your system. There’re also some details regarding the components, which are hidden using a javascript function.

I’d encourage you to read all the benefits that are provided by the latest version. Once you are done reading them (and figuring which of them are new and which makes sense), proceed to discover the *special component*.

WindowsUpdateComponentDetails

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Yahoo! gone Insane!

No Yahoo! hasn’t changed it’s name to Insane!. It’s just their behavior that has gone insane.

If you’ve been a member of some online group for quite some time, chances are that the group is on Yahoo! Groups. Same with me. This story is concerned with my college batch online egroup. Yahoo! groups has a very useful feature which let’s you specify ANY email address for your mails to be delivered (and receive mails from, obviously). I had configured it to my company mail id.

Now like a lot of people, I have two Yahoo! ids, NB and AS. The group is configured with NB. Today, I decided to change it to one of my other Yahoo! id AS, mostly because I use it as the primary id.

….but it won’t get changed. The error

  • Your email address “[email protected]” is in an invalid format.
  • Invalid Email Address.Your Email address of [email protected] belongs to yahoo.co.in which is restricted from use in Yahoo! registrations. Please choose a different email address.

yahoogoneinsane.jpg

I thought, they might be allowing only “yahoo.com” addresses. So I changed my input to “[email protected], hoping for an error message that the specified email address doesn’t exist… but what I get is:

  • Invalid Email Address.Your Email address of [email protected] belongs to yahoo.com which is restricted from use in Yahoo! registrations. Please choose a different email address.

yahoogoneinsane2.jpg

Now WHAT IN THE HELL are the Yahoo! developers thinking? They don’t think that it’ll stop people from creating more than one id… or do they?

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Apache Headache: “no listening sockets available”

Update 1: I was unable to configure MySQL. Reason: It was installed in C:\(blah-blah) and , probably, do not have write rights in the directory. Installing it to D:\(bigBlah) solved the issue. Duh!

Update 2: I see a fairly good traffic coming here searching for the same problem. So, in case you are in a hurry, this is mostly a summary to inform you that in all probability, YOU HAVE SOME SERVICE RUNNING ON PORT 80. Check out using TCPView (if you are on windows). Hope that helps. 🙂

I am currently working on an official XSS (Cross Site Scripting) presentation. I needed some screenshots of alert boxes and defaced site. So I installed Apache, configured it to work with PHP. (If you need help in installing and configuring MySQL, Apache and PHP, look here).

But this was day before yesterday. Yesterday, I needed to make a quick manipulation to the script, but… Apache won’t start. The error I was getting (using eventvwr) was:

>>> (OS 10048)Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted. : make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80 .

It’s pretty apparent that some other jerk was sitting and listening at port 80. Yesterday, however, was too hectic to discover the rat. Today, I ran TCPView (thanks to Shruthi for suggesting) to discover that inetinfo.exe was the ra**al. TCPView is one of the nicest tools created by the guys at SysInternals, which was later acquired by Microsoft. Rats!

Anyways, the fun part was stopping the service. I couldn’t kill it. Neither using TCPView, nor Task Manager. It would again span back to life 🙂

So, finally I opened services.msc to stop the IIS server and change the automatic start mode to manual mode. Heck! I should have disabled… or even better, deleted the scoundrel. 😀

So, if you have the same problem, you are in all probability in office right now and hence may not be aware what services are running. Use TCPView to discover all those unnecessary network services. It’s a great tool. Further, you might also want to switch some stupid services from automatic start mode to manual (or disable :P). Use Services.msc.

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Fake Steve Jobs Revealed

Arpit had a joint post on the probable revealation of FSJ (Fake Steve Jobs), along with the info on Exif Data revealations of the Harry Potter book images.

Anyways, the new news is that FSJ has been busted for real. It’s work of a New York Times reporter Brad Stone. The FSJ is Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes Magazine.

rsj.jpgfsj.jpg

Although Daniel says that he’s surprised that it took so long for people to reveal his real identity, yet it doesn’t really seem that he’s happy about it… or even okay. He looks pretty upset with Brad though 🙂

Link: http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/08/damn-i-am-so-busted-yo.html