Re-design the web with Stylish Firefox extension

Bored up looking at same old interface from years, time to give web your colors! Stylish is a Firefox extension which enables you to change the look & feel of a web site. I got to know about this at Barcamp Bangalore from The100rabh a fellow Blog-a-lorean. If you take example of Gmail, it has the same interface from the day one. Though slighter changes were made in adding functionalities like chat inside email, there were no changes made in color scheme & look/feel.

Stylish enables you to define your own stylesheet for a website. But for writing a stylesheet of your own, you should be having knowledge of CSS. Hey, don’t stop reading! there are lot of ready stylesheets for many websites, which you can just load into Stylish. Stylesheets are available at http://userstyles.org

Procedure to install Stylish & load new stylesheet:

• Install Firefox if you don’t have from getfirefox.com
• Install extension Stylish for firefox from addons.firefox.com
• Browse available stylesheets at http://userstyles.org & load stylesheets you want
• That’s it!! start re-designing the web!

To give you an example how stylish can change a web site, I am posting couple of screenshots of Gmail after loading awesome stylesheet Gmail Re-Designed.

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Google has released Google talk labs edition with lot of new features. The most awaited group chat is implemented in this labs edition. Group chat was implemented on gmail web chat app few months ago, but it’s desktop application was lacking this feature. Following are new features found on Google talk labs edition:

• Group chat, have conferences in Gtalk desktop labs edition. I used to log in to Yahoo! for this feature before.
• Notification from other Google services orkut & calendar.
• Tabbed chatting, no hassle of new chat window, chat with different friends in different tabs.

There are also few things which I don’t like in this new client:

• Installation is different from previous client, is pretty similar to Yahoo! messenger. First downloads a 300kb installer, upon executing that will download other required files to install application. This installer may not work at office, because they might be blocking the port through which installer tries to connect to server.
• One more much awaited feature “Invisible Mode” is not yet implemented.
• Copying of text from chat window is not possible! This looks really annoying for me.

You can get Google Talk labs edition here. This is the labs edition, you can click on “Feedback” button present at bottom of application to send your feedback about the application & to improve next Google talk release.

Here is a brief post on how search engines works & also how your email ID starts getting spammed.

Search Bots:

Search bots are network of computers used to index or crawl web pages. Thousands of computers are networked to do this job. So, what exactly crawling means? taking a copy of visited website for future use. Search bots copies all text contents of websites to their particular servers, for ex: googlebot crawls web content to google servers. Many people think that search engines searches on live sites, which is wrong! When a search query is made on search engine, it actually searches on its server which holds the content copied/crawled by search bots. Hence there will be a delay in new pages to come on search results. But Google is superfast, which always tries to give live results. Best example for this is how it indexes Tech Bangalore! Articles on Tech Bangalore gets into Google’s index within 5 minutes of posting!

Google Search also has more functionality than just search. You can use it as currency converter, calculator & many more, complete list of functions are given here http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/help/features.html

Spam Bots:

Spam bots are similar to search bots, but they crawl email IDs rather than complete web pages! Spam bots visits web pages, looks for email IDs over there, crawls them all to a particular server. These email IDs can be used for spamming in future. You might have seen people mentioning their email IDs on forums in discrete format, ex: prashnath AT techbangalore DOT com. This is just to ensure that, spam bots will not recognize it and avoid crawling. You can also put an image or flash containing your email ID, because both search bots & spam bots cannot read text in image or flash file.

Google adsense units on few pages of Tech Bangalore started displaying a scroll bar. I noticed this just few minutes back. I guess this enables adwords users to put more description  about their ads. But may affect negativelyon publisher, as it looks entirely different & not blends with content. But, may also attract visitors with that scroll bar. Let’s wait & see how it affects CTR (Click Through Rate).

Really a great video on web 2.0, a must watch.

My last post, “Anybody can use your email identity to send mails” left you (& me) with lot of un-answered questions in mind. Let’s understand how email delivery system works & how it could be manipulated & mis-used. 

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the technology used worldwide to deliver emails in Internet. Whenever you compose a mail & send, it goes to SMTP server of your email provider (say for gmail it’s smtp.gmail.com). SMTP server then checks for recepient’s email Ids & delivers it to appropriate mail servers. SMTP server could be manipulated to send spams with deifferent email Ids or identity. This is a known issue from years. Whoever has good workarround of SMTP server, can easily manipulate it for spamming. But all these are bit advanced stuff & dummies can’t make use of it so easily. 

The software I downloaded has inbuilt SMTP relay. Which means you need not to configure anything & no any technical stuff. Anyone who knows composing a mail can mis-use it. You will need to just enter “From” field while sending mail. If you send mails manipulating SMTP server, still server name gets displayed in email headers. For ex: If I send mails using SMTP server provided my hosting provider (am hosted on bluehost.com), email header will contain something like “mailed-by: box22.bluehost.com”. But when you send mails using this software, there will be no info about SMTP server in email headers! So there is no piece of evidence to find out from where that mail came from.

This is just an example; spammers use more hundred ways to manipulate SMTP servers. They use bulk email senders, automated scripts…etc. Finding a solution to this problem is a huge task. SMTP cannot be replaced by other standard or system, because it is extensively used worldwide. Millions of SMTP servers are running worldwide. Even making huge modification to SMTP cannot be done.

But since there is no other way, we have to keep our hope alive. Anti Spam Research Group (ASRG) of Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) is working on tools & technique to fight spamming. Here is what its home page says:

The Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) investigates tools and techniques to mitigate the effects of spam. The focus of the ASRG is on technology solutions, although it may consider tools and techniques to aid the implementation of legal and other non-technical anti-spam measures. It also provides input for standardization efforts within the IETF

I was searching for a email newsletters software to send bulk emails. Searching few minutes on Google I found an appropriate software. The software was good & did what exactly I wanted to. As I do normally, I started checking each & every option of the software.

In Preferences of that software, there was “Sender Options”, where you will give sender’s email ID & name. When I used this first time I used my actual email ID. Just got bit curious about that option, I entered a non real email ID (anything that came to mind) & sent a mail to my gmail. Shocked! in a second I received that mail in gmail with from email ID exactly as entered in “Sender Options” of the software. Here I will show you how exactly it worked with screenshots:

1. As you see in below screenshot, I have given email ID as admin@google.com & name as Google.

Click to Enlarge

2. I composed a mail & sent it to my gmail & Yahoo IDs

Click to Enlarge

3. The mail got into my inbox in seconds:

Gmail:

Yahoo:

I got this email in my gmail inbox & Yahoo! identified it as Spam. But in this email, no way you can find out it is sent by someone else & not Google. This means you can enter whatever you want in “Sender Options” of the software & send mails. You can enter your boss’s ID, your cousin’s, a bank’s…..whatever. I think you already realized how dangerous this could be. Without hacking anything, any password of email accounts you can use other’s email IDs (identity) for whatever kind of emails. But in gmail still there is a way to find out that is a fake email. When you open a mail in gmail, click “Show Details”. You can find “mailed by & “signed by” information there.

Click to Enlarge

These two info is missing in emails which I sent using that software. But a very less people will look into these options. I am not a hacker & don’t know what’s happening in the background. But I think major email providers should have any algorithm to find out these kind of mails & should block them. Yahoo! even found it as spam, if recipient looks into spam folder & finds sender is known to him, he/she will definitely mark it as “Not a spam”.

Update:

Few more Screenshots

Since many of readers got confused with post, am posting more two screenshots. This time I enter my cousin’s email ID as sender & I will send a mail asking credit card details.

But my cousin is not aware of this email & sent using a software by anyone (here it’s me) And it can also be made such that reply to this mail could go to some other email ID. Gmail is also showing online/offline status of sender & his profile picture on mouse over!

Here my cousin could never know somebody sent a mail like this using his identity.

Aw! This post has become too lengthy.

Name & information of the software I used is not disclosed in article for security reasons.

Group chat was a major feature got missed in Gmail Chat compare to Yahoo!. Now Google brings this feature up, checkout following screen shots:

1) Start conversation with anyone of your buddies & then click               Options–>Group Chat to invite more people into this chat:

2) Invite others to your chat:

3) All done you can add more people into this chat any time:

This feature is only available on integrated chat box inside Gmail & not available on Gtalk desktop IM. We may soon expect this from Google.

Youtube finally intros copyright to protect copyrighted videos. The automatic Video ID recognizing system will automatically check video while it’s being uploaded. It matches the video with existing database of visual representations of videos provided by respective content owners. To use this tool content owners need to apply for “Content Verification Program” by filling a form available here & faxing it to Youtube. Content owners will have options to block their content, allow their content to be posted or allow posting of content in which all the revenue generated from that content will be shared with owner.

This will affect youtube visitors a lot, because more videos that are currently playing in Youtube are not posted by it’s owners. If they remove all those videos, then Youtube might loss it’s current popularity.