…Clueless

Yesterday, I voiced my concern regarding the website facebook.in which appeared a little suspicious to me. I contacted the folks over at Facebook and got a response from them today. Here’s what they had to say :

Hi Rahul,

We appreciate your concern. “http://www.facebook.in” is a secure Facebook login page. Please let us know if you have further questions or concerns or see anything else that is suspicious on the site. We apologize for any confusion.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Emma
User Operations
Facebook

So, Emma from Facebook basically confirmed that http://www.facebook.in/ is a legit Facebook website and a property of Facebook. Thus, we can safely conclude that facebook.in is Facebook’s entry into India and probably will be the website to which the Indian users will get redirected in the near future. Facebook India is still broken and doesn’t work properly so I guess it is still more of a placeholder than a proper Indian version for Facebook.

A similar step was taken by MySpace (http://in.myspace.com/), Orkut (http://www.orkut.co.in/) and YouTube (http://in.youtube.com/) recently. Facebook will compete with Orkut, which is the leader in the Social Networking segment in India.

There is a kind of rush to get into the Indian market which is still in its nascent stage but has a whole lot of potential keeping in view the fact that majority of the Indian population is young and broadband penetration is increasing as every day passes.

Well, I’m a relieved man, now that it has been confirmed by Facebook that it wasn’t any scam.

I use AirTel as my ISP. Sometimes, I forget to add the domain suffix and prefix and just simply enter the name of the website. The AirTel DNS is intelligent and redirects me to the required website.

But something unusual happened today. I keyed in “facebook” in the address bar of my Opera browser and hit enter. I was redirected to facebook.in. At first, I didn’t notice anything strange and didn’t even look at the URL in the address bar. I simply put in my username and password and proceeded to login. But the login took forever.

I refreshed the page and this time I noticed something different. The username and password fields did not have their usual yellow borders, which show that you have the credentials stored in the Opera Wand password manager. This time I decided to look at the address bar and saw that I was on http://www.facebook.in and not on facebook.com

I did a quick whois for the domain. The information seemed pretty fake to me but the server it points to seems to be a legit facebook server. It shows up results when you search for friends but everything else on the website is broken. The results also seem to have been fetched from Facebook as the original Facebook uses “s.php” for fetching results whereas facebook.in uses “srch.php“.

So, I am not sure if this is a fake website or a legit one which is yet to be launched. As a precaution, I logged into Facebook and changed my password. I’ve emailed Facebook, lets see what they have to say about this. This intelligent feature of my ISP turned out to be a big security risk for me!

So, during my exams, when I really didn’t want to study, I hopped on over to wikimapia. I located my house and my college. The images are pretty dated. I guess the next update would set things straight because lots of things are currently missing.

• My house
• My College

Kinda freaks me out you know. Anybody, anywhere can just log on to the Internet and spy on anyone. Crazy.

A couple of days ago (May 22nd to be precise), I logged into my facebook account. As I was going through the News Feed on the home page, I noticed this :

Look carefully at the news in the red box. It tells me that a guy named Vishal Kharbanda has accepted my invitation to join Facebook. Now this set my alarm bells ringing. Why? Because I don’t know any Vishal Kharbanda and have never invited anybody by this name.

So, just to investigate further, I clicked on the guys name. A box popped up.

Had the dude been my friend, his profile would’ve opened up instead of this box. I saw that we had one friend in common. I clicked on “1 mutual friend” and it revealed the thumbnail of one of my friend. So, my friend had invited Mr. Vishal but Facebook incorrectly shows me that I have invited the guy.

The conclusion: Facebook is already messed up with thousands of useless apps and now they post incorrect information to your news feed. Way to go.

I know I’m a bit late on this but I just found out that Symbian v9.2 has been hacked. Yes… God does exist!!! The hack is available for pre Feature Pack 1 phones (N73) and Feature Pack 1(N95, N82) but does not correctly work on all firmware versions of N93.

I was in two minds recently on whether to buy a Windows Mobile based smartphone or a Symbian based phone. Ever since Symbian Signed forced all users out of their system, it had become a pain to install any application on your Symbian smartphone. I had begun to hate Symbian as it behaved liked a stupid locked system.

While the buzz was around with every second person hacking into the iPhone, it seemed that Symbian had been completely ignored. But along came some dedicated individuals who proved me wrong… and kicked Nokia’s ass!!

Hurray!! Symbian pwned!! Time to start collecting cash for the N82!!

If you wanna know more about the hack, read this post on the Symbian Freak’s forum :

http://www.symbian-freak.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17479

It took me some time sifting through the entire post (84pages) but it was well worth the knowledge I gained.

History has been created… finally!!

It’s been long since I heard a song and instantly liked it. Well no more…

Suddenly, there arrives a song, who with its brilliant musical arrangement and lyrics caught my mind like never before. The song is waste by Seether. I find myself listening to it all day… and as stated in the previous post, it gives me my dose of sadness. The song oozes pain and sadness… the wasy the guitar is played… the way those guys have sung the chorus makes the pain all the more real.

Probably one of the finest compositions I’ve heard in a while with so much emotion and pain put into the song. Amazing.

This is probably one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a while.
If you follow the comments on any popular blog, you’ll easily get the humour.

This week I came across an article on Lifehacker providing a way to hide and lock a folder in Windows XP. The moment I read it, I fond out that they were using the same technique to hide files that I used to use in the start of 2005 to hide porn on my PC.

Although there’s no porn on my machine now, I had still kept the folder structure and the tools that I had used to accomplish this task back then in order to document the procedure sometime later. I never really got the motivation until now. I used to be of the opinion that no one would really be interested in it. I had discovered this process by snooping around to find how a software, by the name of “Folder Lock” that I was using worked.

The process is fairly simple and requires little technical expertise. I would also like to address some of the issues faced by the readers of Lifehacker. This tutorial will cover mostly all of the aspects of creating special system folders and to use them to mask your secret files. Even though this method is not fool-proof, yet it is amazingly easy to implement and fools the other person effectively.
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Na na… that’s not the code name for some terrorist organization. Its just a model number of a battery that comes with a number of Nokia phones - 46 million of them to be precise.

And its defective. It overheats. It gets deformed. Who knows, it might even burst!!

I seriously advise people to check Nokia’s website for more information and to check if their battery if one from the defective
lot.

• http://www.nokia.com/batteryreplacement/en/

The good part is, Nokia will replace the defective pieces. So don’t start panicking and switch off your phones. Wait for Monday to come (Aug 15th is a holiday, Saturday, Sunday too) and get your battery replaced. Don’t wanna discourage you here but the Nokia Care people are even more terrorizing. They returned my phone after two weeks and they just had to tighten a screw. So make sure you put some pressure on them. Good luck and stay safe!!

Twango? Dunno??!! Well its quite a cool media sharing website. Sorta like Flickr but allows you to upload video, audio etc.

Well Nokia has acquired Twango according to an email I received from the Twango guys. Strange move considering nokia is developing a social media sharing network specifically for mobile devices on its own. MOSH is the name of the network that Nokia is developing and is currently in private beta (yeah right!! Click here for a Techcrunch post with info about MOSH and how to access it). Even Twango had a mobile interface, which was quite basic but MOSH look pretty cool to me.

Considering that it has been developed by Nokia, the website must have been optimized to work better with mobile devices. I have registered with the service though I’m yet to play with it.

Here is the email that I received.